Beautiful Ruins (36 page)

Exhausted, Pasquale went to the train station to check on Dee Moray’s luggage. It was waiting for her. Pasquale paid the agent and told him she would be coming for her bags the next day. Then he arranged for a water taxi to collect Dee Moray and Alvis Bender. And he bought himself a train ticket to Florence.

Pasquale settled into his seat and went right to sleep, jerking awake as the train pulled into the Florence station. He got a room three blocks from the piazza Massimo d’Azeglio, took a bath, and dressed again in his suit. In the dusky last light of that endless day, Pasquale stood smoking in the shade of the trees across the courtyard until he saw Amedea’s family return from their evening walk, strung out like a family of quail.

And when beautiful Amedea lifted Bruno from the stroller, Pasquale thought again of his mother on the beach that day—her fear that, when she was gone, Pasquale wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap between what he wanted and what was right. He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

Pasquale waited until the Montelupos disappeared inside their house. Then he ground his cigarette into the gravel, crossed the piazza, and stepped up to the huge black door. He rang the bell.

There were footfalls on the other side and then Amedea’s father answered, his thick, bald head tilted back, fierce eyes taking in Pasquale as if he were surveying an unacceptable meal in a café. Behind her father, Amedea’s sister Donata saw Pasquale, and covered her mouth with her hand. She turned and squealed up the stairs: “Amedea!” Bruno looked back at his daughter and then sternly again at Pasquale, who carefully removed his hat.

“Yes?” asked Bruno Montelupo. “What is it?”

Behind her father, on the stairs, lithe, lovely Amedea appeared, shaking her head slightly, as if still trying to dissuade him . . . but Pasquale also thought he saw, beneath the hand that covered her mouth, a smile.

“Sir,” he said, “I am Pasquale Tursi of Porto Vergogna. I am here to ask for the hand of your daughter, Amedea.” He cleared his throat. “I am here for my son.”

20

The Infinite Blaze

Recently

Sandpoint, Idaho

D
ebra wakes in the dark, on the back deck of her cabin, on the tree side, where she likes to watch the stars. The air is cool, sky clear, pinpricks of light fierce tonight. Insistent. They don’t twinkle, they burn. The front deck of the cabin overlooks the mountain-rimmed glacial lake, and this is the view that causes most visitors to gasp. But she doesn’t like the front deck as much at night, when light from the docks, the boats, and the other cabins compete for attention. She prefers it back here, in the shade of the house, in a tight, round clearing of pine and fir trees, where it’s just her and the sky, where she can see for fifty trillion miles, for a billion years. She’d never really been a sky-watcher until she married Alvis, who liked to drive into the Cascades and look for clear spots away from the light pollution. He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite—a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

She hears the crunch of gravel; that must have been what woke her—Pat’s Jeep coming down the long driveway. They’re home from the play. How long was she asleep? She reaches out for her cold teacup. A while. She feels toasty-warm, except for one of her feet, which has slipped out of the blanket. Pat has rigged up two fireplace-shaped space heaters on either side of her favorite chaise, so that she can sleep out here. She balked at first at the waste of electricity; she could just wait until summer. But Pat promised to turn off every light every time he left a room “for the rest of my life,” if she would only indulge him this one thing. And she has to admit, it is lovely sleeping out here; it’s her favorite thing, waking outside in the cold, nestled in the little incubator her son built for her. She turns off the heaters, checks the horrible pad she sleeps on now—it’s dry, thank God—pulls her big cardigan around herself, and starts for the house, a little wobbly still. Inside, she hears the garage door close below.

The cabin sits on a jutting point, two hundred feet above a bay on this deep mountain lake. The house is mostly vertical, designed by her and built with the money she got from selling their home in Seattle: four stories, with an open floor plan and a two-car garage below. Pat and Lydia have the second floor to themselves, the third is common living space—an open living room/kitchen/dining area—and the top floor belongs to Dee: bedroom, bathroom with Jacuzzi tub, and her sitting room. When she was having it built, of course, she had no idea she would spend virtually her entire time here as a cancer patient, and then—after the treatments had all been exhausted and she decided to let the disease run its course—in this weakened end-time. If she had, she might have gone with a rancher, with fewer stairs.

“Mom? We’re home!”

He yells up the stairs every time he comes in the house and she pretends she doesn’t know why. “Still alive,” she’s tempted to say, but it would sound harsh. She doesn’t feel bitter that way, but it’s funny to her, the way people treat the dying—like aliens.

She starts down the staircase. “How’d it go tonight? Good crowd?”

“Small but happy,” Lydia calls up the stairs. “The ending worked better tonight.”

“Are you hungry?” Debra asks. Pat is always hungry after a performance, and he’s been especially famished while doing this play. As soon as Lydia finished writing it, she showed it to Debra, who was torn. It was the best thing Lydia had ever written, a perfect capstone to the cycle of autobiographical pieces Lydia started years earlier with a play about her parents’ divorce. And Debra fully believed that she couldn’t finish the cycle without writing about Pat. The real problem with
Front Man
was that there was only one person she could imagine playing Pat—and that was Pat. She and Lydia both worried that he might backslide if he had to relive those days—but Debra told Lydia she should let him read it. He took the pages downstairs and came back up three hours later, kissed Lydia, and insisted they do it—and that he play himself. It would be harder, he thought, to watch someone else play him at the peak of his self-absorption than it would to play it all out again himself. He’s been acting with the TAGNI group for more than a year now; it gives him a healthy outlet for performing—not in the narcissistic way he used to with his bands, but in a tighter, disciplined, collaborative spirit. And he’s a natural, of course.

Debra is beating eggs when Pat swings around the kitchen pillar and kisses her cheek. Kid still fills a room. “Ted and Isola said to say hi.”

“Yeah?” She pours the eggs in the pan. “And how are they?”

“Crazy right-wing nut jobs.”

She slices cheese for his omelet, Pat eating every other piece. “I hope you told them that,” she says, “because I’m getting awfully tired of them constantly writing checks to support the theater.”

“They want us to do
Thoroughly Modern Millie
. Ted wants to be in it. Said I’d be great in it, too. Can you imagine? Me and Ted in a play together.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure you have the chops to act with Ted.”

“That’s because I had such a bad teacher,” he says. Then: “How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” she says.

“Did you take a Dilaudid?”

“No.” She hates pain medication, doesn’t want to miss a thing. “I feel fine.”

Pat puts his hand on her forehead. “You’re warm.”

“I’m fine. You just came from outside.”

“So did you.”

“I was in that oven you built me. I’m probably cooked.”

He reaches for the cutting board. “Let me finish. I can make an omelet.”

“Since when?”

“I’ll have Lydia do it. She’s good at that woman’s work.”

Debra stops cutting onions and slashes in his direction with the knife.

“Unkindest cut of all,” he says.

It’s like a little gift, the way he surprises her sometimes with the things he remembers. “I used to teach that play,” she says. Without thinking, she quotes her own favorite line: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Pat sits at the counter. “That hurts more than the knife.”

Lydia comes up the stairs then, towel-drying her hair after her shower. She tells Debra all over again that Ted and Isola were at the play, and that they asked after her.

Debra knows by heart the inflection of their concern,
How IS she?

Still alive
. Oh, the things she would say if she could—but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. She’s constantly being offered homeopathic remedies by the funky people up here: magnets and herbs and horse liniments. Some people give her books—self-help books, tomes on grieving, pamphlets on dying.
I’m beyond help, self- or otherwise,
she wants to say, and
Aren’t the grieving books more for the survivors?
and
Thanks for the book on dying, but that’s the one part I have covered.
They’ll ask Pat,
How IS she?
and they’ll ask her,
How ARE you?
But they don’t want to hear that she’s tired all the time, that her bladder is leaky, that she’s on the watch for her systems shutting down. They want to hear that she’s at peace, that she’s led a great life, that she’s happy her son has returned—and so that’s what she gives them. And the truth is, most of the time, she IS at peace, HAS led a great life, IS happy her son has returned. She knows which drawer the phone number for hospice is in; and the company with the hospital bed; and the provider of the morphine drip dispenser. Some days she wakes slowly from her nap and thinks it would be okay to just go on sleeping—that it would not be scary at all. Pat and Lydia are as solid as she could hope, and the board has agreed to let Lydia take over the theater. The cabin is paid for, with enough left in the bank for taxes and other expenses, so Pat can spend the rest of his life puttering around outside in the early mornings, which he loves—gardening, painting and staining, pruning trees, working on the driveway and the retaining walls, anything to keep his hands moving. Sometimes, now, when she sees how content Pat and Lydia are, she feels like a spent salmon: her work here is done. But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

Sometimes, during her various rounds of chemo, she had wanted the pain and discomfort to be over so badly that she could imagine being comforted by her own death. That was one of the reasons she’d decided—after all of the chemicals and radiations and surgeries, after the double mastectomy, after the doctors tried every measure of conventional and nuclear weaponry against her diminishing frame, and after they still found traces of cancer in her pelvic bones—to just let the thing run its course. Let it have her. The doctors said there might still be something to be done, depending on whether it was a primary or secondary cancer, but she told them it didn’t matter anymore. Pat had come home, and she preferred six months of peace to another three years of needles and nausea. And she’s gotten lucky: she’s made it almost two years, and has felt good throughout most of it, although it still stuns her to catch a glimpse in the mirror:
Who is this relic, this tall, thin, flat-chested old woman with her white porcupine hair?

Debra pulls her sweater around herself, warms her tea. She leans against the sink and smiles as she watches her son eat his second helping of eggs, Lydia reaching over to take a cheesy mushroom from the top. Pat looks up at his mother, to see if she’s caught the blatant thievery. “You’re not going to stab
her
?”

And that’s when a car announces itself on the gravel outside. Pat hears it, too, and checks his watch. He shrugs. “No idea.”

Pat goes to the window, puts his hand to the glass, and peers down toward the driveway, the faint glow of headlights down there. “That’s Keith’s Bronco.” He steps away from the window. “The after-party. He’s probably wasted. I’ll go take care of it.”

He skips down the stairs like a boy.

“How was he tonight?” Debra asks quietly when he’s gone.

Lydia picks at the leftover onions and mushrooms on Pat’s plate. “Great. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. God, I’ll be glad when this play is over, though. Some nights, he just sits there afterward and stares out, with . . . these distant eyes. For fifteen minutes, he’s just done. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I finished this goddamned play.”

“You’ve been holding your breath a lot longer than that,” Debra says, and they both smile. “It’s a wonderful play, Lydia. You should just let go and enjoy it.”

Lydia drinks from Pat’s orange juice. “I don’t know.”

Debra reaches across the table for Lydia’s hand. “You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I’m just so grateful I got to see it.”

Lydia cocks her head and her brow wrinkles, fighting off tears. “Goddamn it, Dee. Why do you do that?”

Then, through three layers of floor, they hear voices on the stairs, Pat and Keith, and someone else, and then a rumbling up the steps, five, maybe six sets of feet.

Pat comes up first, shrugging. “I guess there were some old friends of yours at the show tonight, Mom. Keith brought them—I hope it’s all right . . .”

Pat is followed by Keith. He doesn’t seem drunk, but he is carrying his little video camera, which he sometimes uses to chronicle—hell, Debra isn’t sure what Keith chronicles, exactly. “Hey, Dee. Sorry to bother you so late, but these people really wanted to see you . . .”

“It’s okay, Keith,” she says, and then the other people come up the stairs, one at a time: an attractive young woman with curly red hair, and then a thin, mop-headed young man who
does
look drunk—neither of whom Debra recognizes—and then a strange creature, a slightly hunched older man in a suit coat, as skinny as she is, at once vaguely familiar and not; he has the strangest, lineless face, like one of those computer renderings of a face aging, only done in reverse, a boy’s face grafted onto the neck of an old man—and finally, another old gentleman, in a charcoal-gray suit. This last man catches her attention as he steps away from the others, to the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. He removes his fedora and looks at her with a set of eyes so pale blue they seem nearly transparent—eyes that take her in with a mixture of warmth and pity, eyes that sweep Dee Moray back fifty years, to another life—

He says, “Hello, Dee.”

Debra’s teacup drops to the counter. “Pasquale?”

There were times, of course, years ago, when she thought she might see him again. That last day in Italy, as she watched him motor away from the hotel, she couldn’t have imagined
not
seeing him again. Not that there was any spoken agreement between them, but there was something implicit, the hum of attraction and anticipation. When Alvis told her that Pasquale’s mother had died, that he was going to the funeral and might not come back, Dee was stunned; why hadn’t Pasquale told her? And when a boat arrived with her luggage, and Alvis said Pasquale wanted him to get her back to the States safely, she thought that Pasquale must have needed some time alone. So she went home to have the baby. She’d sent him a postcard, thinking,
maybe
. . . but there was no answer. After that, she thought about Pasquale sometimes, although not as often as the years passed; she and Alvis did talk about going to Italy on vacation, going back to Porto Vergogna, but they never made it. Then, after Alvis died and she got her degree in teaching, with a minor in Italian, she’d thought about taking Pat; she even called a travel agent, who said that not only was there “no listing for a Hotel Adequate View,” but that she couldn’t even find this town, Porto Vergogna. Did she perhaps mean Portovenere?