Beautiful Ruins

“Portland,” said pale Umi upon meeting him, “like the Decemberists.” Pat had experienced the same thing in the nineties when he told New Yorkers he was from Seattle: they’d mutter Nirvana or Pearl Jam, and Pat would grit his teeth and pretend some camaraderie with those ass-smelling latecomer poseur fla

The plan in London was for Pat to open in this basement club, Troupe, where Kurtis worked as a bouncer. Once Pat got to London, though, Joe decided that Edinburgh would be a better place to start, that Pat could refine his show there and use the reviews from the Fringe Festival to build momentum in advance of London. So Pat worked up a shorter, fu

He performed the show for Joe and his friends in the flat. He pla

The London flat had exposed pipes and old rotting carpet, and for the week they stayed there, Pat never felt at home—certainly not the way Joe did, sitting around all day with Kurtis in their dirty gray boxer briefs, getting high. Joe, it turned out, had been a bit broad in describing himself as a club promoter; he was more of a hanger-on/hash dealer, people occasionally stopping by the flat to buy from him. After a few days with these kids, the twenty-year age difference steepened for Pat: the musical references, the sloppy track suits, the way they slept in and never showered and didn’t seem to notice it was eleven thirty and they were all still in their underwear.

Pat couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, so each morning he cleared out while the others slept. He walked the city, trying to imprint it on his foggy mind—but he was always getting lost on its curving, narrow streets and lanes, with their abruptly changing names, arterials ending in alleys. Pat felt more disoriented each day, not so much by London as by his own inability to absorb it, by his crusty old man’s list of complaints: Why can’t I figure out where I am, or which way to look when crossing a street? Why are the coins so counterintuitive? Are all of the sidewalks this crowded? Why is everything so expensive? Broke, all Pat could do was walk around and look—at free museums, mostly, which gradually overwhelmed him—room after room of paintings at the National Gallery, relics at the British Museum, everything at the Victoria and Albert. He was OD’ing on culture.

Then, on their last day in London, Pat wandered into the Tate Modern, into the vast empty hall, and was floored by the audacity of the art, and the sheer scale of the museum; it was like trying to take in the ocean, or the sky. Maybe it was a lack of sleep, but he felt physically shaken, almost nauseated. Upstairs, he wandered among a collection of surrealist paintings and felt undone by the nervy, opaque genius of their expression: Bacon, Magritte, and especially Picabia, who, according to the gallery notes, had divided the world into two simple categories: failures and unknowns. He was a bug beneath a magnifying glass, the art focused to a blinding hot point on his sleepless skull.

By the time he left the museum, Pat was nearly hyperventilating. Outside was no better. The space-age Mille

At the other end of the bridge, Pat came across a little quartet—cello, two violins, electric piano—kids playing Bach over the Thames for change. He sat and listened, trying to catch his breath but awestruck by their casual proficiency, by their simple brilliance. Christ, if street musicians could do that? What was he doing here? He’d always felt insecure about his own musicianship; he could chunk along with anyone on the guitar and be dynamic onstage, but Be

Then Pat did something he hadn’t done in years. Walking back to Kurtis’s flat, he saw a funky music store, a big red storefront called Reckless Records, and after pretending to browse awhile, Pat asked the clerk if they had anything by the Reticents.

“Ah right, yeah,” the clerk said, his pocked face sliding into recognition. “Late eighties, early nineties . . . sort of a soft-pop punk thing—”

“I wouldn’t say soft—”

“Yeah, one of them grunge outfits.”

“No, they were before that—”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t have anything by them,” the clerk said. “We do more—you know—relevant stuff.”

Pat thanked him and left the store.

This was probably why Pat slept with Umi when he got back to the flat. Or maybe it was just her being alone in her underwear, Joe and Kurtis having gone to watch a football match at a pub. “Okay if I sit?” Pat asked, and she swung her legs around on the couch and he stared at the little triangle of her panties, and soon they were fumbling, lurching, as awkward as London traffic (Umi: We mightn’t let Kurty know about this), until they found a rhythm, and eventually, as he’d done so many times before, Pat Bender fucked himself back into existence.

Afterward, with only their legs touching, Umi peppered him with personal questions the way someone might inquire about the fuel economy of a car she’s just test-driven. Pat answered honestly, without being forthcoming. Had he ever been married? No. Not even close? Not really. But what about that song “Lydia”? Wasn’t she the love of his life? It amazed him, what people heard in that song. Love of his life? There was a time when he thought so; he remembered the apartment they’d shared in Alphabet City, barbecuing on the little balcony and doing the crossword puzzle on Sunday mornings. But what had Lydia said after she caught him with another woman? If you really do love me, then it’s even worse, the way you act. It means you’re cruel.

No, Pat told Umi, Lydia wasn’t the love of his life. Just another girl.

They moved backward this way, from intimacy to small talk. Where was he from? Seattle, though he’d lived in New York for a few years and most recently in Portland. Siblings? Nope. Just him and his mother. What about his father? Never really knew the man. Owned a car dealership. Wanted to be a writer. Died when Pat was four.

“I’m sorry. You must be awfully close to your mum, then.”

“Actually, I haven’t talked to her in more than a year.”