Beautiful Ruins

But then the thing starts and Claire is shocked. Shane, too: “Wow,” he whispers. Claire sneaks a glance at Pasquale Tursi, and he appears rapt, although it’s hard to read the look on his face—whether it’s admiration for the play or simple confusion about what that naked man is doing onstage.

Claire glances to her right, at Michael, and his waxen face seems somehow stricken, his hand on his chest. “My God, Claire. Did you see that? Did you see him?”

Yes. There is that, too. It’s undeniable. Pat Bender is some kind of force onstage. She’s not sure if it’s because she knows who his father is, or perhaps because he’s playing himself—but for one quick, delusional moment, she wonders if this might be the greatest actor she’s ever seen.

Then the lights come up again.

It’s a simple play. From that opening scene, the story follows Pat and Lydia out on their parallel journeys. In his, Pat spends three drunken years in the wilderness, trying to tame his demons. He performs a musical-comedy monologue about the bands he used to be in, and about failing Lydia—a show that eventually gets him dragged to London and Scotland by an exuberant young Irish music producer. For Pat the trip smacks of desperation, a misguided final attempt at becoming famous. And it all blows up when Pat betrays Joe by sleeping with Umi, the girl his young friend loves. Joe runs off with Pat’s money and he ends up stranded in London.

In Lydia’s parallel story, her mother dies suddenly and Lydia finds herself stuck caring for her senile stepfather, Lyle, a man she’s never gotten along with. Lyle provides daft comic relief, constantly forgetting that his wife has died, asking the thirty-five-year-old Lydia why she isn’t at school. Lydia wants to move him into a nursing home, but Lyle fights to stay with her, and Lydia can’t quite do it. In a storytelling device that works better than Claire expects, Lydia fills in the gaps and marks the passage of time by talking on the phone to Pat’s mother, Debra, in Idaho. She never appears onstage but is an unseen, unheard presence on the other end of the phone. “Lyle wet the bed today,” Lydia says, pausing for a response from the unseen Debra (or Dee, as she sometimes calls her). “Yes, Dee, it would be natural . . . except it was my bed! I looked up and he was standing on my bed, pissing a hot streak and shouting, ‘Where are the hand towels?’ ”

Finally, Lyle burns himself on the oven while Lydia is at work, and she has no choice but to move him into a nursing home. Lyle cries when she tells him about it. “You’ll be fine,” she insists. “I promise.”

“I’m not worried about me,” Lyle says. “It’s just . . . I promised your mother. I don’t know who will take care of you now.”

In the wake of that realization—that Lyle believes he has been caring for her—Lydia understands that she’s most alive when she’s caring for someone else, and goes to Idaho to take care of Pat’s ailing mother. Then, one night, she’s asleep in Debra’s living room when the phone rings. The lights come up on the other side of the stage—revealing Pat, standing in a red phone booth, calling his mother for help. At first Lydia is excited to hear from him. But all Pat seems to care about is that he’s run out of money and needs help to get home from London. He doesn’t even ask about his mother.

Lydia goes quiet on the other end of the call. “Wait. What time is it there?” he asks. “Three,” Lydia says quietly. And Pat’s head falls to his chest exactly as it did in the first scene.

“Who is it, dear?” comes a voice from offstage—the first words Pat’s mother has spoken in the entire play. In his London phone booth, Pat whispers, “Do it, Lydia.” Lydia takes a deep breath, says, “Nobody,” and hangs up, the light going out in the phone booth.

Pat is reduced to being a vagrant in London—ragged, sitting drunk on a street corner playing his guitar cross-legged. He’s busking, panhandling to make enough money to get home. A passing Londoner stops and offers Pat a twenty-euro note if he’ll play a love song. Pat starts to play the song “Lydia,” but he stops. He can’t do it.

Back in Idaho, with snow on the cabin window marking the passage of time, Lydia gets another phone call. Her stepfather has died in the nursing home. She thanks the caller and goes back to making tea for Pat’s mother, but she can’t. She just stares at her hands. She seems entirely alone in the scene, in the world. And that’s when a knock comes at the door. She answers. It is Pat Bender, framed in the same doorway Lydia stood in at the begi

Lydia shakes her head no: his mother is alive still. Pat’s shoulders slump, in relief and exhaustion and humility, and he holds out his hands—an act of surrender. Dee’s voice comes again from offstage: “Who is it, dear?” Lydia glances over her shoulder and somehow the moment stretches even longer. “Nobody,” Pat replies, his voice a broken husk. Then Lydia reaches out for his hand, and in the instant their hands touch, the lights go down. The play is over.

Claire gasps, releasing what feels like ninety minutes of air. All the travelers feel it—some kind of completion—and in the rush of applause they feel, too, the explorer’s serendipity: the accidental, cathartic discovery of oneself. In the midst of this release, Michael leans over to Claire and whispers again, “Did you see that?”

On her other side, Pasquale Tursi holds his hand to his heart as if suffering an attack. “Bravo,” he says, and then, “È troppo tardi?” Claire has to guess at his meaning, for their erstwhile Italian translator seems unreachable, his head in his hands. “Fuck me,” Shane says. “I think I’ve wasted my whole life.”

Claire, too, finds herself drawn inward by what she’s just seen. Earlier, she told Shane that her relationship with Daryl was “hopeless.” Now she realizes that throughout the play she was thinking of Daryl, hopeless, irredeemable Daryl, the boyfriend she can’t seem to let go of. Maybe all love is hopeless. Maybe Michael Deane’s rule is wiser than he knows: We want what we want—we love who we love. Claire pulls her phone out and turns it on. She sees the latest text from Daryl: Pls just let me know U R OK.

She types back: I’m okay.

Next to her, Michael Deane puts his hand on her arm. “I’m buying it,” he says.

Claire glances up from her phone, thinking for a moment that Michael is talking about Daryl. Then she understands. She wonders if her deal with Fate is still in play. Is Front Man the great movie that will allow her to stay in the business? “You want to buy the play?” she asks.

“I want to buy everything,” Michael Deane says. “The play, his songs—all of it.” He stands up and looks around the little theater. “I’m buying the whole goddamn thing.”

By flashing her business card (Hollywood? No shit?) Claire gets an enthusiastic invitation to the after-party from a goateed and liberally pierced doorman named Keith. On his directions, they walk a block from the theater toward a brick storefront, which opens to a wide set of stairs, the building intentionally unfinished, all exposed pipes and half-exposed brick. It reminds Claire of climbing to countless parties in college. But there’s something off in the scale, in the width of hallways and the heights of ceilings—all the extravagant, wasted space in these old Western towns.