Beautiful Ruins

Look, it’s your life and I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. But this story really needs closure—some idea of what happened to the girl, some sense that you at least tried to do the right thing.]

16

After the Fall

September 1967

Seattle, Washington

A DARK STAGE. The sound of waves. Then appears:

MAGGIE in a rumpled wrap, bottle in her hand, her hair in snags over her face, staggering out to the edge of the pier and standing in the sound of the surf. Now she starts to topple over the edge of the pier, when QUENTIN rushes out of the cottage and takes her in his arms. She slowly turns around and they embrace. Soft jazz is heard from within the cottage.

MAGGIE: You were loved, Quentin; no man was ever loved like you.

QUENTIN: [releasing her] My plane couldn’t take off all day—

MAGGIE: [drunk, but aware] I was going to kill myself just now. Or don’t you believe that either?

“Wait, wait, wait.”

Onstage, Debra Bender’s shoulders slumped as the director rose from the first row, black-rimmed glasses at the end of his nose, pencil behind his ear, script in hand. “Dee, sweetheart, what happened?”

She looked down into the front row. “What’s the matter now, Ron?”

“I thought we agreed you were going to take it further. Make it bigger.”

She made quick eye contact with the other actor onstage, Aaron, who sighed and cleared his throat. “I like the way she’s doing it, Ron.” He put his hands out to Debra: There. That’s all I can do.

But Ron ignored the other actor as he strode to the end of the stage and climbed the stairs. He stalked purposefully between the actors and put his hand in the small of Debra’s back, as if leading her in dancing. “Dee, we’ve only got ten days before we open. I don’t want your performance to get lost because it’s too subtle.”

“Yeah, I don’t think subtlety’s the problem, Ron.” She twisted gently away from his hand. “If Maggie starts out as a lunatic, there’s no place for the scene to go.”

“She’s trying to kill herself, Dee. She is a lunatic.”

“Right, it’s just—”

“She’s a drunk, a pill-popper, a user of men—”

“No, I know, but—”

Ron’s hand worked slowly down her back. The man was nothing if not consistent. “This is a flashback in which we see that Quentin did everything he could do to keep her from killing herself.”

“Yeah—” Debra shot another look over Ron’s shoulder, at Aaron, who was miming masturbation.

Ron stepped even closer, in a cloud of aftershave. “Maggie has sucked the life out of Quentin, Dee. She’s killing both of them—”

Over Ron’s shoulder, Aaron air-humped a pretend partner.

“Uh-huh,” Debra said. “Maybe we could talk in private for a second, Ron.”

His hand pressed even farther down. “I think that’s a great idea.”

They stepped offstage and walked up the aisle, Debra sliding into a wood-backed theater seat. Rather than sitting next to her, Ron wedged in between her and the seat-back in front of her, so that their legs were touching. Christ, did this man secrete Aqua Velva? “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

What’s the matter? She almost laughed. Where to start? Maybe it was agreeing to be in a play about Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, directed by the married man she’d stupidly slept with six years ago and then bumped into at a Seattle Rep fund-raiser. Or maybe, now that she thought about it, that was her first mistake, going to an event she should’ve known better than to attend. In her first few years back in Seattle, she had avoided the old theater crowd—not wanting to explain either her child or how her “film career” had died. Then she saw an ad for the fund-raiser in the P-I, and she admitted to herself how much she missed it. She walked into the party feeling that warm glow of familiarity, like walking the halls of your old high school. And then she saw Ron, fondue fork in his hand, like a tiny devil. Ron had flourished in the local theater scene in the years since she’d been gone and she was genuinely glad to see him, but he looked at Debra and then at the older man with her—she introduced them: Ron, this is my husband, Alvis—and he immediately went pale and left the party.

“It just seems like you’re taking this play sort of . . . personally,” Debra said.

“This play is personal,” Ron said seriously. He removed his glasses and chewed on the arm. “All plays are personal, Dee. All art is personal. Otherwise, what’s the point? This is the most personal thing I’ve ever done.”

Ron had called two weeks after the fund-raiser and apologized for leaving; he said he just hadn’t been prepared to see her. He asked what she was doing now. She was a housewife, she said. Her husband owned a Chevrolet dealership in Seattle, and she was at home raising their little boy. Ron asked if she missed acting, and she muttered some inanity about how it was nice to take some time off, but Debra thought to herself, I miss it the way I miss love. I’m half a person without it.

A few weeks later, Ron called to say that the Rep was doing an Arthur Miller play and that he was directing it. Would she be interested in reading for one of the leads? She felt breathless, dizzy, twenty again. But, honestly, she probably would have said no if not for the movie she’d just seen: Dick and Liz’s latest film. The Taming of the Shrew, of all things. It was their fifth movie together, and while Debra hadn’t been able to bring herself to see the earlier ones, last year both Burton and Taylor had been nominated for Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and she’d started to wonder if she’d been wrong about Dick throwing away his talent. Then she saw an advertisement for The Taming of the Shrew in a magazine—“The world’s most celebrated movie couple . . . in the film they were made for!”—and she got a babysitter, said she had a doctor’s appointment, and went to a matinee without telling Alvis. And, as much as she hated to admit it, the film was marvelous. Dick was wonderful in it, artful and honest, playing drunk Petruchio in the wedding scene as if he were born for the part—which, of course, he was. All of it—Shakespeare, Liz, Dick, Italy—fell on her like an early death, and she mourned the loss of her younger self, of her dreams, and in the movie theater that day she wept. You gave all that up, a voice said. No, she thought, they took it from me. She sat there until the credits were done and the lights came up, and still she sat there, alone.

Two weeks later, Ron called to offer her the play. Debra hung up the phone and found herself weeping again—Pat setting down his Tinker Toys to ask, Whassamatter, Mama? And that night, when Alvis got home from work and they had their predi