Beautiful Ruins

There you go.

“Oh Maria . . .” I cried. “I’m sorry.” And I was clearly not the first brute to cry in her presence, either, because she knew just what was needed, unbuttoning the top of her blue dress and putting my head between her breasts, whispering, “Shh, Wisconsin, shh,” her skin so soft and butter-sweet, so wet with my tears that I cried harder and she said, “Shh, Wisconsin,” and I buried my face between those breasts as if her skin were my home, as if Wisconsin lay there, and to this day, it is the greatest place I have ever been, that narrow ribbed valley between those lovely hills. After a moment I stopped crying and managed to regain a bit of dignity, and five minutes later, after I had given her all of my money and cigarettes and pledged my undying love and sworn that I would return, I hobbled shamefully back to my sentry post, insisting to my disappointed, soon-to-be-dead best friend, Richards, that I did nothing more than walk her home.

God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it’s all there is. That night I settled into my mummy bag, no longer myself but a played-out husk, a shell.

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn’t the same thing as living.

There you go.

A year later, after I delivered the Luger to Richards’s son, I stopped at a little bar in Cedar Falls and had one of the six million drinks I’ve had since that day. The barmaid asked what I was doing in town and I told her, “Visiting my boy.” Then she asked about my son, that good imaginary boy whose biggest failing was that he didn’t exist. I told her that he was a fine kid, and that I was delivering a war souvenir to him. She was intrigued. What was it? she asked. What thing of significance had I brought home from the war for my boy? Socks, I answered.

But in the end, this is what I brought home from my war, this single sad story about how I lived while a better man died. How, beneath a scraggly lemon branch on a little dirt track outside the village of R—, I received a glorious twenty-second hand job from a girl who was desperately trying to avoid being raped by me.

5

A Michael Deane Production

Recently

Hollywood Hills, California

The Deane of Hollywood reclines in silk pajamas on a chaise on his lanai, sipping a Fresca-with-ginseng and looking out over the trees to the glittering lights of Beverly Hills. Open in his lap is a script, the sequel to Night Ravagers (EXT. LOS ANGELES—NIGHT: A black Trans Am speeds past a burning Getty Museum). His assistant, Claire, has pronounced the script “not even good by crap standards,” and while Claire’s critical limbo stick is set too high, in this case—given the shrinking margin in movies and the shit business the first Night Ravagers did—Michael has to agree.

This is a view he’s looked at for twenty years, and yet somehow it seems new to him this late afternoon—the sun sliding over the green-and-glassed hills. Michael sighs with the contentedness of a man back on top. It’s remarkable, the difference a year can make. Not long ago, he’d stopped seeing the beauty in this view, in everything. He’d begun to fear that the end had come—not death (Deane men never succumbed before ninety), but something worse: obsolescence. He was in a terrible slump, with nothing resembling a hit in almost a decade, his only recent credit of any kind the first Night Ravagers, which was really more of a discredit. He’d also suffered through the debacle surrounding his memoir, when his publisher’s lawyers decided the book he wanted to write was “libelous,” “self-serving,” and “impossible to fact-check,” and his editor sent a ghostwriter to turn it into some strange hybrid of autobiography and self-help book.

His run seemingly over, Michael was on his way to being one of those ancients who haunt the dining room at the Riviera Country Club, spooning soup and dithering on about Doris Day and Darryl Zanuck. But it turned out the old Deane magic wasn’t quite finished. It’s what he loves about this town, and this business: one simple idea, one good pitch, and you’re back in. He didn’t even entirely understand the pitch that brought him back, this Hookbook (he only pretends to grasp all the computer-bloggy-twitty gewgaw business), but he could tell by the reactions of his producing partner, Da

And now Michael Deane is back on every call sheet in town, on every master list for every spec script and sizzle reel. In fact, his biggest problem now is the restrictive life-raft arrangement he made with the studio, giving it a first look at (and a big cut of) whatever he does. Thankfully, his lawyers believe they have a way out of this, too, and Michael has already started looking for office space elsewhere. Just thinking about being out on his own makes him feel thirty again—a tingling excitement in his lap.

Or wait . . . is that the pill he took an hour ago? Ah yes, there it is, kicking in right on schedule: beneath the script, decrepit nerve terminals and endothelial cells release nitric oxide into the corpus cavernosum, which stimulates the synthesis of cyclic GMP, stiffening the well-used smooth muscle cells and flooding the old spongy tissue with blood.

The script rises in his lap like the flag at Iwo Jima.

“Hello there.” Michael sets the script on the garden table next to his Fresca, pushes himself up, and starts toward the house for Kathy.

His silk pajama pants straining, Michael shuffles past the gravity pool, the life-size chess board, the koi pond, Kathy’s exercise ball and yoga mat, the wrought-iron outdoor Tuscan brunch table. He spots Wife No. 4 through the open kitchen door, in yoga pants and tight T-shirt. He gets the full protuberant effect of his recent investment in her, the top-of-the-line viscous silicone gel sacs implanted in her retromammary cavities, for minimal capsular contracture and scarring, between breast tissue and pectoralis muscle, replacing the old, slightly drooping silicone sacs.

It’s hot.

Kathy’s always telling him not to shuffle—It makes you look a hundred—and Michael reminds himself to pick up his feet. She’s just turned her back to him when he steps through the open slider into the kitchen. “Excuse me, miss,” he says to his wife, positioning himself so she can see his pajama tent-pole. “You order the wood pizza?”

But she has those infernal earbuds in and hasn’t seen or heard him—or maybe she’s just pretending she hasn’t. When things were at their worst the last two years, Michael sensed a whiff of condescension from her, a nurse’s on-duty patience in her tone. Kathy has reached the magical “half his age” mark—thirty-six to his seventy-two—Michael making a late career of thirtysomething women. It’s scandalous when a man his age dips into the twenties, but no one flinches when the woman is in her thirties; here, you could be a hundred, date a thirty-year-old, and still seem respectable. Unfortunately, Kathy is also five inches taller than him, and this is the truly unbridgeable gap; he sometimes gets an unpleasant picture in his mind of their lovemaking, of him scurrying across her hilly landscape like a randy elf.

He comes around the counter and positions himself so she can see the disturbance in his pajama pants. She looks up, then down, then up again. She removes her earbuds. “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

Before he can say the obvious, Michael’s cell phone vibrates, jumping on the counter between them. Kathy slides the buzzing phone to him, and if not for the chemical help, her lack of interest might endanger Michael’s condition.