Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Donner Party?”

  “Yes.” He narrows his eyes. “What about it, Claire?”

  “The Donner Party?”

  He stares at her.

  “Michael, are you telling me you liked that pitch?”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t?”

  Claire blushes. In fact, Shane’s pitch had all the elements: it was compelling, moving, suspenseful. Yeah, it might have even been a great pitch—for a film that could never be made: a Western epic with no gunfights and no romance, a three-hour sobfest that ends with the villain eating the hero’s child.

  Claire cocks her head. “So you’re going into the studio Monday morning and pitching a fifty-million-dollar period movie about frontier cannibalism?”

  “No,” Michael says, and his lips slide over his teeth again in that facsimile of a smile. “I’m going into the studio Monday morning and pitching an eighty-million-dollar movie about frontier cannibalism.” He turns and starts walking again.

  Claire calls after her boss. “And the actress’s kid. It was yours, wasn’t it?”

  Michael turns slowly, measuring her. “You have something rare, you know that, Claire? True insight.” He smiles. “Tell me. How did the interview go?”

  She’s startled. Just when she starts to see Michael as a kind of caricature, a relic, he’ll show his old power this way.

  She glances down at her heels, looks at the skirt she wore today—interview clothes. “They offered me the job. Curator of a film museum.”

  “And are you taking it?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  He nods. “Look, I really need your help this weekend. Next week, if you still want to leave, I’ll understand. I’ll even help. But this weekend I need you to keep an eye on the Italian and his translator. Get me through this pitch Monday morning and help me find the actress and her kid. Can you do that for me, Claire?”

  She nods. “Of course, Michael.” Then, quietly: “So . . . is it? Your kid?”

  Michael Deane laughs, looks to the ground and then back up again. “Do you know the old saying, about success having a thousand fathers and failure only one?”

  She nods again.

  He wraps the coat around himself again. “In that sense, this little fucker . . . might be the only child I ever had.”

  10

  The UK Tour

  August 2008

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  Some skinny Irish kid knocking into Pat Bender’s shoulder in a Portland bar—that’s what started it.

  Pat turned and saw pale, saw gapped front teeth and Superman hair, saw black glasses, Dandy Warhols T-shirt. “Three weeks in America, know what I hate most?” the kid asked. “Your bloody sparts.” He nodded toward the muted Mariners game on the bar TV. “Fact, maybe you can explain something about bess-bowl that I don’t quite get.”

  Before Pat could speak, the kid yelled, “Averthing!” and slid into Pat’s booth. “I’m Joe,” he said. “Admit it, Americans suck at every spart you didn’t invent.”

  “Actually,” Pat said, “I suck at American sports, too.”

  This seemed to amuse and satisfy Joe, and he pointed to Pat’s guitar case, perched next to him in the booth like a bored date. “And do you play that Larrivée?”

  “Across the street,” Pat said, “in an hour.”

  “Seriously? I’m a bit of a club promoter,” Joe said. “What kind of stuff you play?”

  “Failed mostly,” Pat said. “I used to front this band, the Reticents?” No response, and Pat felt pathetic for trying. And how to describe what he did now, which had begun as a talky acoustic set—like that old show Storytellers—but after a year had evolved into a comic-music monologue, Spalding Gray with guitar. “Well,” he told Joe, “I sit on a stool and I sing a little. I tell some funny stories, confess to a lot of bullshit; and, once every few months, after the show, I do some amateur gynecology.”

  And that was how it all started—the whole notion of a UK tour. Like every highlight of Pasquale “Pat” Bender’s grubby little career, it wasn’t even his idea. It was this Joe, who sat midway back in a half-full club, laughing at “Showerpalooza,” Pat’s song about the way jam bands stink; howling at Pat’s riff about his band’s stoned liner notes reading like a Chinese food menu; singing along with the crowd at the chorus on “Why Are Drummers So Ducking Fumb?”

  There was something magnetic about this Joe. Any other night, Pat would’ve focused on this little stab at a front table, white panties strobe-flashing beneath her skirt, but he kept hearing Joe’s horselaugh, which was bigger than the kid himself, and by the time Pat pivoted into the dark, confessional part of the show—the drugs and breakups—Joe was deeply affected, removing his glasses and dabbing his eyes to the chorus of Pat’s most heartfelt song, “Lydia.”

  It’s an old line: you’re too good for me

  Yeah, it’s not you it’s me

  But Lydia, baby . . . what if that’s the one true thing

  You ever got from me—

  Afterward, the kid was crazy with praise. He said it was unlike anything he’d ever seen: funny and honest and smart, the music and comic observations complementing each other perfectly. “And that song ‘Lydia’—Jaysus, Pat!”

  Just as Pat figured, “Lydia” had made Joe wistful about some girl he’d never gotten over—and he was compelled to tell the whole story, most of which Pat ignored. No matter how much they laughed during the rest of the show, young men were always moved by that song, and its description of the end of a relationship, Pat endlessly surprised at the way they mistook its cold, bitter refutation of romantic negation (Did I ever even exist/Before your brown eyes) for a love song.

  Joe started talking right off about Pat performing in London. It was silly talk at midnight, intriguing at one, plausible at two, and by four thirty—smoking Joe’s weed and listening to old Reticents songs in Pat’s apartment in Northeast Portland (“This is fuck-me brilliant, Pat! How’ve I never heard this?”)—the idea had clicked into a plan: a whole range of Pat’s money-girl-career troubles solved by that simple phrase: UK Tour.

  Joe said that London and Edinburgh were perfect for Pat’s edgy, smart musical comedy—a circuit of intimate clubs and comedy festivals farmed by eager booking agents and TV scouts. Five A.M. in Portland was one P.M. in Edinburgh, so Joe stepped outside to make a call and came back giddy: an organizer at the Fringe Festival there remembered the Reticents and said there was an opening for a last-minute fill-in. It was all set. Pat just had to get from Oregon to London and Joe would take care of the rest: lodging, food, transportation, six weeks of guaranteed paid gigs, with the potential for more. Hands were shaken, backs clapped, and by morning Pat was contacting his students and canceling lessons for the month. Pat hadn’t felt so excited since his twenties; here he was, heading back out on the road, some twenty-five years after he started. Of course, old fans were sometimes disappointed to see him now—not just that the old front man of the Reticents was doing musical comedy (ignoring Pat’s fine distinction: he was a comic-musical monologist), but that Pat Bender was even alive, that he hadn’t gone the gorgeous-corpse route. Strange how a musician’s very survival made him suspect—as if all the crazy shit of his heyday had been just a pose. Pat had tried writing a song about this strange feeling—“So Sorry to Be Here,” he called it—but the song got bogged down in that junkie braggadocio and he never performed it.

  But now he wondered if there hadn’t been a purpose to all that surviving: the second chance to do something . . . BIG. And yet, as excited as he was, even as he typed e-mails to the few friends he could still ask for money (“amazing opportunity” . . . “break I’ve been waiting for”) Pat couldn’t block out a sobering voice: You’re forty-five, running off like some twenty-year-old with a fantasy of getting famous in Europe?

  Pat used to imagine such cold-water warnings in the voice of his mother, Dee, who had tried to be an actress in her youth and who
se every impulse was to tamp down her son’s ambition with her own disillusionment. Just ask yourself, she’d say when he wanted to join a band or quit a band or kick a guy out of a band or move to New York or leave New York, Is this about the art . . . or is it really about something else?

  What a stupid question, he finally said to her. Everything is about something else. The art is about something else! That fucking question is about something else!

  But this time it wasn’t his mom’s cautionary voice that Pat heard. It was Lydia—the last time he saw her, a few weeks after their fourth breakup. That day he’d gone to her apartment, apologized yet again, and promised to get sober. For the first time in his life, he told her, he was seeing things clearly; he’d already managed to quit doing almost everything she objected to, and he’d finish the job if that’s what it took to get her back.

  Lydia was unlike anyone he’d ever known—smart, funny, self-aware, and shy. Beautiful, too, although she didn’t see it—which was the key to her attraction, that she looked the way she did with no self-consciousness, no embellishment. Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping, but Lydia was like this secret—so lovely beneath her baggy dresses and low-brimmed Lenin cap. On the last day he saw her, Pat had gently removed that hat. He’d looked into those whiskey-brown eyes: Baby, he said. More than music, booze, anything, it’s you that I need.

  That day Lydia stared at him, her eyes wet with regret. She gently took her cap back. Jesus, Pat, she said quietly. Listen to you. You’re like some kind of epiphany addict.

  Irish Joe had a buddy in London named Kurtis, a big, bald hip-hop hooligan, and they stayed in the cramped Southwark flat that Kurtis shared with his pale girlfriend, Umi. Pat had never been to London before—had been to Europe only once, in fact, on a high school exchange trip his mom arranged because she wanted him to see Italy. He never made it: a girl in Berlin and a pinch of coke got him sent home early for various violations of tour protocol and human decency. There was always talk of a Japanese tour with the Reticents—so much that it became a band joke, Pat and Benny balking at their one real chance, refusing to open for the “Stone Temple Douchebags.” So this would be the first time Pat performed outside of North America.

  “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 flannel bands. Funny how Portland, Seattle’s goofy little brother, had achieved similar alt-cool coin.

  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, funnier version of the show—a thirty-minute monologue interspersed with six songs. (“Hi, I’m Pat Bender, and if I look familiar it’s because I used to be the singer for one of those bands your pretentious friends talked about to show what obscure musical taste they had. That or we fucked in the bathroom of a club somewhere. Either way, I’m sorry you never heard from me again.”)

  He performed the show for Joe and his friends in the flat. He planned to go easy on the darker stuff, and to cut the one serious song, “Lydia,” from this shortened show, but Joe insisted he include it. He said it was the “emotional pivot of the whole bloody thing,” so Pat kept it, and performed it in the flat—Joe once again removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. After the rehearsal, Umi was as enthusiastic as Joe about the show’s prospects. Even quiet, brooding Kurtis admitted it was “quite good.”

  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 Millennium Bridge fed like a spoon into the mouth of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London crashing its tones, eras, and genres recklessly, disorienting Pat even more with these massive, fearless juxtapositions: modernist against neoclassic against Tudor against skyscraper.

  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 Benny was the real musician. They’d written hundreds of songs together, but standing on the street, listening to these four kids matter-of-factly play the canon, Pat suddenly saw his best songs as ironic trifles, smart-ass commentaries on real music, mere jokes. Jesus, had Pat ever made anything . . . beautiful? The music these kids played was like a centuries-old cathedral; Pat’s lifework had all the lasting power and grace of a trailer. For him, music had always been a pose, a kid’s pissed-off reaction to aesthetic grace; he’d spent his whole life giving beauty the finger. Now he felt empty, shrill—a failure and an unknown. Nothing.

  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 fla
t. 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.”

  “Why?”

  And suddenly he was back at that bullshit intervention: Lydia and his mom across the room (We’re worried, Pat and This has to stop), refusing to meet his eyes. Lydia had known Pat’s mom first, had met her through community theater in Seattle, and unlike most of his girlfriends, whose disappointment was all about the way his behavior affected them, Lydia complained on Pat’s mother’s behalf: how he ignored her for months at a time (until he needed money), how he broke promises to her, how he still hadn’t repaid the money he’d taken. You can’t keep doing this, Lydia would say, it’s killing her—her, in Pat’s mind, really meaning both of them. To make them happy, Pat quit everything but booze and pot, and he and Lydia lurched along for another year, until his mother got sick. In hindsight, though, their relationship was probably done at that intervention, the minute she stood on his mother’s side of the room.