Beautiful Ruins

It’s gotten so bad she’s started to actually look forward to Wild Pitch Fridays, the one day she still might listen in on a random pitch for a film. Unfortunately, most of these Friday pitches come from Michael’s past: people he’s met in AA, people he owes favors to, or who owe him favors, people he sees at the club, old golf partners, old coke dealers, women he slept with in the sixties and seventies, men he slept with in the eighties, friends of ex-wives and of his three legitimate children or of his three older, less-than-legitimate ones, his doctor’s kid, his gardener’s kid, his pool boy’s kid, his kid’s pool boy.

Take, for instance, Claire’s nine thirty: a liver-spotted TV writer who played squash with Michael during the Reagan years and now wants to make a reality show about his grandkids (proudly displaying their pictures on the conference table). “Cute,” Claire says, and “Aw,” and “How sweet,” and “Yes, they do seem to be over-diagnosing autism now.”

But Claire can’t complain about meetings like this unless she’s ready to hear the Michael Deane Loyalty Lecture: how, in this cold town, Michael Deane is a man who never forgets his friends, holding them in tight clench and staring into their eyes: You know I’ve always loved your work, (NAME HERE). Come down next Friday and see my girl Claire. Then Michael takes a business card, signs it, and presses it into the person’s hand, and just like that, they’re in. People with a signed Michael Deane business card might want tickets to a premiere, or the number of a certain actor, or a signed movie poster, but usually what they want is the same thing everyone here wants—to pitch.

To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can’t afford, and when they’re caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success . . . car dealerships pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest . . . It’s endless, the pitching—endless, exhilarating, soul-sucking, and as unrelenting as death. As ordinary as morning sprinklers.

A signed Michael Deane business card is a form of currency on this lot—the older the better, in her estimation. When Claire’s ten fifteen flashes a card from Michael’s days as a studio exec, she hopes for a movie pitch, but the man launches into a reality pitch so awful it might just be brilliant: “Paranoid Palace: we take mental patients off their meds, put them in a house with hidden cameras, and fuck with their minds; turn on a light and music comes on, open the refrigerator and the toilet flushes . . .”

And speaking of meds, her eleven thirty seems to have gone off his: Michael Deane’s neighbor’s son striding in wearing a cape and a chinstrap beard, never making eye contact as he pitches a television miniseries about a fantasy world he’s created all in his head (“If I write it down someone will steal it”), called The Veraglim Quatrology—Veraglim being an alternate universe in the eighth-string dimension, Quatrology being “like a trilogy, except with four stories instead of three.” As he drones on about the physics of this fantasy world (in Veraglim, there’s an invisible king, an ongoing centaur rebellion, and male penises are erect for one week every year), Claire glances down at the buzzing phone in her lap. If she were still in the market for signs, this would be a good one: her career-challenged, strip-clubbing lunk of a boyfriend has just gotten up—at twenty minutes to noon—and texted her this one-word unpunctuated question: milk. She pictures Daryl in front of the refrigerator in his underwear, seeing no milk and texting this inane question. Where does he think this extra milk might be? She types back washing machine, and while the Veraglim guy drones on about his schizoid fantasy, Claire can’t help but wonder if Fate isn’t fucking with her now, mocking the deal she made by giving her the worst Wild Pitch Friday in history—maybe the worst day of any kind since eighth grade, when an alarmingly gushy period arrived during a coed PE kickball game and dreamy Marshall Aiken pointed at the blossom on her gym shorts and screamed to the teacher, Claire’s hemorrhaging—because it’s her brain hemorrhaging now, bleeding out all over the conference table as this wing-nut launches into book two of The Veraglim Quatrology (Flandor unsheathes his shadow-saber!) and another text arrives from Daryl, flashing on the BlackBerry in her lap: cereal.

Jet tires chirp, grab the runway, and Shane Wheeler jerks awake and checks his watch. Still good. Yeah, his plane’s an hour late, but he’s got three hours until his meeting, and he’s a mere fourteen miles away now. How long can it take to drive fourteen miles? At the gate he uncoils, deplanes, and makes his way in a dream down the long, tiled airport tu

“Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?”

“Redemption,” Shane says.

“Insurance?”

Coverage declined, upgrade shaken off, pricey GPS and refueling options rejected, Shane heads off with a rental agreement, a set of keys, and a map that looks like it was drawn by a ten-year-old on meth. Ensconced in a rented red Kia, Shane slides the driver’s seat into the same zip code as the steering wheel, takes a breath, starts the car, and rehearses the first words of his first-ever pitch: So there’s this guy . . .

An hour later, he’s somehow farther from his appointment. Shane’s Kia is gridlocked and, he thinks, might even be pointed in the wrong direction (the GPS now seeming like a screaming deal). Shane tosses aside the worthless rental-car map and tries Gene Pergo’s cell: voice mail. He tries the agent who set up the meeting, but the agent’s assistant says, “Sorry, I don’t have Andrew,” whatever that means. He begrudgingly tries his mom’s cell, then his dad’s, and finally, the home number: Shit, where are they? The next number that pops into his head is his ex-wife’s. Saundra is the last person he wants to call right now—but that’s just how desperate he feels.

His name must pop up on her phone still, because her first words are: “Tell me you’re calling because you have the rest of the money you owe me.”

This is what he hoped to avoid—the whole who-ruined-whose-credit and who-stole-whose-car business that has colored their every conversation for a year. He sighs. “As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of getting your money right now, Saundra.”

“You’re not giving plasma again?”

“No. I’m in LA, pitching a movie.”

She laughs and then realizes he’s serious. “Wait. You’re writing a movie now?”

“No. I’m pitching a movie. First you pitch it, then you write it.”

“No wonder movies suck,” she says. This is classic Saundra: a waitress with a poet’s pretensions. They met in Tucson, where she worked at Cup of Heaven, the coffee shop where Shane went to write every morning. He fell for, in order: her legs, her laugh, and the way she idealized writers and was willing to support his work.

For her part—she said at the end—she fell mostly for his bullshit.

“Look,” Shane says, “could you just hold the cultural criticism and MapQuest Universal City for me?”