Beautiful Ruins (99)

“This whole apartment is furnished with found art,” says Keith, the theater doorman, who arrives right behind them. He has spiky, thin hair and painful-looking studs in his lips, neck, upper ears, and nose, as well as pirate hoops in his ears. He has acted in TAGNI productions himself, he tells them, but he’s also a poet, painter, and video artist. (That’s all? Claire wonders. Interpretive dancer? Sand sculptor?) “A video artist?” Michael is intrigued. “And is your camera nearby?”

“I always have my camera,” Keith says, and he produces a small, simple digital from his pocket. “My life is my documentary.”

Pasquale scans the party, but there’s no sign of Dee. He leans over to ask Shane for help, but his translator is staring helplessly at Saundra’s return text: You just NOW realized you’re an ass? Leave me alone.

Keith sees Pasquale and Michael looking around, mistakes this for curiosity, and steps in to explain. The apartment’s designer, he says, is a former Vietnam vet, featured last month in Dwell magazine. “His general concept is that every design form has an innate maturity alongside its youthful nature, that too often we cast aside the more interesting forms just when they’re starting to grow into this older, more interesting second nature. Two old hockey sticks—who cares. But hockey sticks made into a chair? Now, that’s something.”

“It’s all wonderful,” Michael says earnestly, gazing around at the room.

The cast and crew aren’t at the party yet; so far it’s just fifteen or twenty black-glasses-and-hippie-sandaled audience members, with their low talk, little squalls of laughter, all of them taking turns inspecting the strange travelers of the lost Deane Party. The crowd is familiar, Claire thinks: smaller, a little rougher around the edges, but not much different from an after-party anywhere. Wine and snacks are lined up on a metallic table made from the door of an old freight elevator; a small backhoe bucket is filled with ice and beer. Claire is relieved, when she goes to the bathroom, to find that the toilet is an actual toilet, and not an old boat motor.

Finally, the cast and crew begin arriving. Word of the great Michael Deane’s presence seems to be spreading throughout the crowd, and the ambitious make their way over, casually mentioning their appearance in the straight-to-video movies shot in Spokane, appearing alongside Cuba Gooding Jr., Antonio Banderas, John Travolta’s sister. Everyone Claire meets seems to be an artist of some kind—actors and musicians and painters and graphic artists and ballet instructors and writers and sculptors and more potters than a town this size could possibly support. Even the teachers and attorneys also act, or play in bands, or sculpt blocks of ice—Michael fascinated by all of them. Claire is amazed at his energy and genuine curiosity. He’s also on his third glass of wine—more than she’s ever seen him drink.

An attractive older woman in a sundress, her deep sun-worshipping wrinkles the opposite of Michael’s smooth skin, leans in close and actually touches his forehead. “Jesus,” she says, “I love your face,” as if it’s a piece of art he’s created.

“Thank you,” Michael says, because it is—his work of art.

The woman introduces herself as Fantom “with an F,” and explains that she makes tiny sculptures out of soap, which she sells at craft shows and barter fairs.

“I’d love to see them,” Michael says. “Is everyone here an artist?”

“I know,” Fantom says as she digs through her bag. “It gets old, huh?”

While Michael looks at tiny soap art, the rest of the Deane Party is growing anxious. Pasquale watches the door nervously as his lovesick translator, still stinging over Saundra’s texted rejection, pours a tall glass from a bottle of Canadian whiskey and Claire asks Keith about the play.

“Some intense shit, huh?” says Keith. “Debra mostly puts on kiddie plays, musicals, holiday farces—whatever gets the skiers off the mountain for a couple hours. But once a year she and Lydia do something original like this. She gets crap from the board sometimes, from the cranky Christians especially, but that was the tradeoff for her. Come keep the tourists happy, and once a year you can bust out something like that.”

By this time, all of the cast and crew have made it to the party—except for Pat and Lydia. Claire finds herself in conversation with Shannon, the actress who played the girl in bed with Pat at the start of the play. “I understand you’re from”—Shannon swallows, can barely say the word—“Hollywood?” She blinks quickly, twice. “What’s that like?”

Two glasses of wine in, Claire feels the strain of the last forty-eight hours, and smiles, stops to think about the question. Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that’s okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn’t—and perhaps loses track of just where she is. She takes a moment to look around—at this apartment built of garbage on some crazy island of artists in the mountains, where Michael is happily giving out business cards to soap-makers and actors, telling them he “might have something” for them, where Pasquale is nervously watching the door for a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly fifty years, where a quickly drunk Shane has rolled up his sleeve to explain the origin of his tattoo to an impressed Keith—and that’s when Claire realizes that Pat Bender and his mother and his girlfriend are not coming to this after-party.