Beautiful Ruins Read Free Page B

stone pathway. “She can’t be too sick,” he said. “She’s beautiful.”
    “But not like Sophia Loren,” Orenzio said. “Or the Marilyn Monroe.” It had been their other pastime the winter before, going to the cinema and rating the women they saw.
    “No, I think she has a more intelligent beauty . . . like Anouk Aimée.”
    “She is so skinny,” Orenzio said. “And she’s no Claudia Cardinale.”
    “No,” Pasquale had to agree. Claudia Cardinale was perfection. “I think it is not so common, though, her face.”
    The point had become too fine for Orenzio. “I could bring a three-legged dog into this town, Pasqo, and you would fall in love with it.”
    That’s when Pasquale became worried. “Orenzio, did she intend to come here?”
    Orenzio smacked the page in Pasquale’s hand. “This American, Deane, who drove her to La Spezia? I explained to him that no one comes here. I asked if he meant Portofino or Portovenere. He asked what Porto Vergogna was like, and I said there was nothing here but a hotel. He asked if the town was quiet. I said to him only death is quieter, and he said, ‘Then that is the place.’ ”
    Pasquale smiled at his friend. “Thank you, Orenzio.”
    “Fellater of goats,” Orenzio said quietly.
    “You already said that one,” Pasquale said.
    Orenzio mimed finishing a beer.
    Then they both looked toward the cliff side, forty meters uphill, where the first American guest since the death of his father stood regarding the front door of his hotel. Here is the future , thought Pasquale.
    Dee Moray stopped and looked back down at them. She shook out her ponytail and her sun-bleached hair snapped and danced around her face as she took in the sea from the village square. Then she looked at the sign and cocked her head, as if trying to understand the words:
THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW
     
    And then the future tucked her floppy hat under her arm, pushed open the door, ducked, and went in.
    After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he’d somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he’d created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude. He glanced over at Orenzio, who was carrying someone’s bags, and the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He’d never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom—it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body—and it thrilled him in a way that he could never have explained.
    “Dee Moray,” Pasquale Tursi said, suddenly, aloud, breaking the spell of his thoughts. Orenzio looked over. Then Pasquale turned his back and said the name again, to himself this time, in something less than a whisper, embarrassed by the hopeful breath that formed those words. Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

2
    The Last Pitch
     
Recently
Hollywood, California
     
    B efore sunrise—before Guatemalan gardeners in dirty dinged lawn trucks, before Caribbeans come to cook, clean, and clothe, before Montessori, Pilates, and Coffee Bean, before Benzes and BMWs nose onto palmed streets and the blue-toothed sharks resume their endless business— the gentrification of the American mind —there are the sprinklers: rising from the ground to spit-spray the northwest corner of Greater Los Angeles, airport to the hills, downtown to the beaches, the slumbering rubble of the entertainment regime.
    In Santa Monica, they call to Claire Silver in the predawn quiet of her condo— psst hey —her curly red hair splayed out on the pillow like a suicide. They whisper again— psst hey —and Claire’s eyelids flutter; she inhales, orients, glances over at the marbled shoulder of her boyfriend, sprawled asleep on his 70 percent of the king-size. Daryl often cracks the bedroom