It's over. What a stupid deal: one day to find a great idea for a film? How many times has Michael told her, We're not in the film business, we're in the buzz business. And yes, the day's not quite over, but her two forty-five is picking at an open scab on his forehead while pitching a TV procedural (So there's this cop-pick-a zombie cop) and Claire feels the loss of something vital in her, the death of some optimism. Her four P.M. looks like a no-show (somebody named Shawn Weller . . . ) and when Claire checks her watch-four ten-it is through bleary, sleepy eyes. So that's it. She's done. She won't say anything to Michael about her disillusionment; what would be the point? She'll quietly give two weeks, box up her things, and slink out of this office into a job warehousing souvenirs for the Scientologists.

And what about Daryl? Does she dump him today, too? Can she? She's tried breaking up with him recently, but it never takes. It's like cutting soup-nothing to push against. She'll say, Daryl, we need to talk, and he just smiles in that way of his, and they end up having sex. She even suspects it turns him on a little. She'll say, I'm not sure this is working, and he'll start taking off his shirt. She'll complain about the strip clubs and he'll just look amused. (Her: Promise me you won't go again? Him: I promise I won't make you go.) He doesn't fight, doesn't lie, doesn't care; the man eats, breathes, screws. How do you disengage from someone who's already so profoundly disengaged?

She met him on what is now looking like the only movie she'll ever work on-Night Ravagers. Claire has always been weak for ink, and Daryl, who had a walk-on (lurch-on? stagger-on?) as Zombie #14, had these great ropy, tattooed arms. She'd dated mostly smart, sensitive types (who made her smart sensitivity seem redundant) and a couple of slick industry types (whose ambition was like a second dick). She hadn't yet tried the unemployed-actor type. And wasn't this what she had in mind when she left the cocoon of film school in the first place, tasting the visceral, the worldly? And at first, visceral-worldly was as good as advertised (she recalls wondering: Was I ever even touched before this?). Thirty-six hours later, as she lay postcoital in bed with the best-looking guy she's ever slept with (sometimes she just likes to look at him), Daryl matter-of-factly admitted that he'd just been tossed out by his girlfriend and had no place to live. Almost three years later, Night Ravagers remains Daryl's best acting credit, and Zombie #14 remains a gorgeous lump in her bed.

No, she won't break up with Daryl. Not today. Not after the Scientologists and the proud grandpas, the lunatics, zombie cops, and skin-pickers. She'll give Daryl one more chance, go home, bring him a beer, nestle into his broad, tatted shoulder; together they'll watch the TeeVee (he likes those trucks that drive across the ice on the Discovery Channel) and she'll have that tenuous connection to life, at least. No, it's not the stuff of dreams, but it's a perfectly American thing to do, a whole nation of Night Ravager zombies racing across the horizon, burning through peak oil to get home and sit dull-eyed, watching Ice Road Truckers and Hookbook on the fifty-five-inch flat (the Double Nickel, as Daryl calls it, the Sammy Hagar).

Claire grabs her coat and starts for the door. She pauses, glances back over her shoulder at the office where she thought she might get to make something great-silly Holly Golightly dream-and once more checks her watch: 4:17 and counting. Outside, she locks the door behind her, takes a breath, and goes.

The clock in Shane's rented Kia also reads 4:17-he's more than a quarter-hour late, and he's dying. "Shit shit shit!" He pounds the steering wheel. Even after finally getting turned around, he got caught in several traffic snarls and took the wrong exit. By the time he rolls up to the studio gate and the security guard shrugs and informs him that his destiny is at the other gate, he is twenty-four minutes late, sweating through his carefully chosen whatever-clothing. When he arrives at the proper gate, he's twenty-eight minutes late-thirty when he finally gets his ID back from the second security guard, shakily slaps a parking pass on his dash, and pulls into the lot.

Shane is only two hundred feet away now from Michael Deane's bungalow, but he stumbles out of his car the wrong way, wanders among the big soundstages-it is the cleanest warehouse district in the world-and finally walks in a circle, toward a nest of bungalows and a tram filled with fanny-packed tourists on a studio tour, holding up cameras and cell phones, listening to a microphone-aided guide tell apocryphal stories of bygone magic. The camera-people listen breathlessly, waiting for some connection to their own pasts (I loved that show!), and when Shane staggers up to their tram, the star-alert tourists run his disheveled hair, broad sideburns, and thin, frantic features through the thousands of celebrity faces they keep on file-Is that a Sheen? A Baldwin? A celebrity rehabber?-and while they can't quite match Shane's oddly appealing features with anyone famous, they take pictures anyway, just in case.

The tour guide chutters into his headset, telling the tram-people in something like English how a certain famous breakup scene from a certain famous television show was famously filmed "right over there," and as Shane approaches, the driver holds up a finger so he can finish his story. Sweating, near tears, in full overheated self-loathing, fighting every urge to call his parents-his ACT resolve now a distant memory-Shane finds himself staring at the tour guide's name tag: ANGEL.

"Excuse me?" Shane says.

Angel covers the headset microphone and says, heavily accented, "Fuck jou want?" Angel is roughly his age, so Shane tries for late-twenties camaraderie. "Dude, I'm totally late. Can you help me find Michael Deane's office?"

Something about this question causes another tourist to take Shane's picture. But Angel merely jerks his thumb and drives the tram away, revealing a sign that he was blocking, pointing to a bungalow: MICHAEL DEANE PRODUCTIONS.

Shane looks at his watch. Thirty-six minutes late now. Shit shit shit. He runs around the corner and there it is-but blocking the door to the bungalow is an old man with a cane. For a second, Shane thinks it might be Michael Deane himself, even though the agent said Deane wouldn't be at the meeting, that it would just be his development assistant, Claire Something. Anyway, it's not Michael Deane. It's just some old guy, seventy maybe, in a dark gray suit and charcoal fedora, cane draped over his arm, holding a business card. As Shane's feet clack on the pavement, the old man turns and removes his fedora, revealing a shock of slate hair and eyes that are a strange, coral blue.

Shane clears his throat. "Are you going in? 'Cause I . . . I'm very late."

The man holds out a business card: ancient, wrinkled and stained, the type faded. It's from another studio, 20th Century Fox, but the name is right: Michael Deane.

"You're in the right place," Shane says. He presents his own Michael Deane business card-the newer model. "See? He's at this studio now."

"Yes, I go this one," says the man, heavily accented, Italian-Shane recognizes it from the year he studied in Florence. He points at the 20th Century Fox card. "They say, go this one." He points to the bungalow. "But . . . is locked."

Shane can't believe it. He steps past the man and tries the door. Yes, locked. Then it's over.

"Pasquale Tursi," says the man, holding out his hand.

Shane shakes it. "Big Loser," he says.

Claire has texted Daryl to ask what he wants for dinner. His answer, kfc, is followed by another text: unrated hookbook-she's told Daryl that her company is about to stream out an unrated, raunchier version of that show, full of all the nudity and sodden stupidity they couldn't air on regular TV. Fine, she thinks. She'll go back for her company's apocalyptic TV show, then swing through the KFC drive-through, and she'll curl up with Daryl and deal with her life on Monday. She turns her car around, is waved back through security, and parks back in the lot above Michael's bungalow office. She starts back to the office to get the raw DVDs, but when she rounds the path, Claire Silver sees, standing at the door to the bungalow, not one Wild Pitch Friday lost cause . . . but two. She stops, imagines turning around and leaving.

Sometimes she makes a guess about Wild Friday Pitchers, and she does this now: mop-haired sideburns in factory-torn blue jeans and faux Western shirt? Michael's old coke dealer's son. And old silver-haired, blue-eyed charcoal suit? This one's tougher. Some guy Michael met in 1965 while getting rimmed at an orgy at Tony Curtis's house?

The frantic younger guy sees her approaching. "Are you Claire Silver?"

No, she thinks. "Yes," she says.

"I'm Shane Wheeler, and I am so sorry. There was traffic and I got lost and . . . Is there any chance we could still have our meeting?"

She looks helplessly at the older guy, who removes his hat and extends the business card. "Pasquale Tursi," he says. "I am look . . . for . . . Mr. Deane."

Great: two lost causes. A kid who can't find his way around LA, and a time-traveling Italian. Both men stare at her, hold out Michael Deane business cards. She takes the cards. The young guy's card is, predictably, newer. She turns it over. Below Michael's signature is a note from the agent Andrew Dunne. She recently screwed Andrew, not in that she had sex with him-that would be forgivable-but she asked him to hold off circulating a sizzle reel for his client's unscripted fashion show, If the Shoe Fits, while Michael considered it; instead, he optioned a competing show, Shoe Fetish, which effectively killed Andrew's client's idea. The agent's note reads: "Hope you enjoy!" A payback pitch: Oh, this must be horrible.

The other card is a mystery, the oldest Michael Deane business card she's ever seen, faded and wrinkled, from Michael's first studio, 20th Century Fox. It's the job that catches her-publicity? Michael started in publicity? How old is this card?

Honestly, after the day she's had, if Daryl had texted anything other than kfc and unrated hookbook, she might just have told these two guys the game was up-they'd missed today's charity wagon. But she thinks again about Fate and the deal she made. Who knows? Maybe one of these guys . . . right. She unlocks the door and asks their names again. Sloppy sideburns = Shane. Popping eyes = Pasquale.

"Why don't you both come on back to the conference room," she says.

In the office, they sit beneath posters for Michael's classic movies (Mind Blow; The Love Burglar). No time for pleasantries; it's the first pitch meeting in history in which no water is proffered. "Mr. Tursi, would you like to go first?"

He looks around, confused. "Mr. Deane . . . is not here?" His accent is heavy, as if he's chewing on each word.

"I'm afraid he's not here today. Are you an old friend of his?"

"I meet him . . ." He stares at the ceiling. "Eh, nel sessantadue."

"Nineteen sixty-two," says the young guy. When Claire looks curiously at him, Shane shrugs. "I spent a year studying in Italy."

Claire imagines Michael and this old guy, back in the day, tooling around Rome in a convertible, screwing Italian actresses, drinking grappa. Now Pasquale Tursi looks disoriented. "He say . . . you . . . ever need anything."

"Sure," Claire says. "I promise I'll tell Michael all about your pitch. Why don't you just start at the beginning?"

Pasquale squints as if he doesn't understand. "My English . . . is long time . . ."

"The beginning," Shane tells Pasquale. "L'inizio."

"There's this guy . . ." Claire urges.

"A woman," Pasquale Tursi says. "She come to my village, Porto Vergogna . . . in . . ." He looks over at Shane for help.

"Nineteen sixty-two?" Shane says again.

"Yes. She is . . . beautiful. And I am build . . . eh . . . a beach, yes? And tennis?" He rubs his brow, the story already getting away from him. "She is . . . in the cinema?"

"An actress?" Shane Wheeler asks.

"Yes." Pasquale Tursi nods and stares off into space.

Claire checks her watch and does her best to jumpstart his pitch: "So . . . an actress comes to this town and she falls for this guy who's building a beach?"

Pasquale looks back at Claire. "No. For me . . . maybe, yes. E- l'attimo, yes?" He looks at Shane for help. "L'attimo che dura per sempre."

"The moment that lasts forever," Shane says quietly.

"Yes," Pasquale says, and nods. "Forever."

Claire feels pinched by those words in such close proximity, moment and forever. Not exactly KFC and Hookbook. She suddenly feels angry-at her silly ambition and romanticism, at her taste in men, at the loopy Scientologists, at her father for watching that stupid movie and then leaving, at herself for coming back to the office-at herself because she keeps hoping for better. And Michael: Goddamn Michael and his goddamn job and his goddamn business cards and his goddamn old buzzard friends and the goddamn favors he owes the goddamn people he screwed back when he screwed everything that screwed.

Pasquale Tursi sighs. "She was sick."

Claire flushes with impatience: "With what? Lupus? Psoriasis? Cancer?"

At the word cancer, Pasquale looks up suddenly and mutters in Italian, "S. Ma non e cos semplice-"

And that's when the kid Shane interrupts. "Uh, Ms. Silver? I don't think this guy's pitching." And he says to the man, in slow Italian, "Questo e realmente accaduto? Non in un film?"

Pasquale nods. "S. Sono qui per trovarla."

"Yeah, this really happened," Shane tells Claire. He turns back to Pasquale. "Non l'ha piu vista da allora?" Pasquale shakes his head no, and Shane turns back to Claire again. "He hasn't seen this actress in almost fifty years. He came to find her."

"Come si chiama?" Shane Wheeler asks.

The Italian looks from Claire to Shane and back again. "Dee Moray," he says.

And Claire feels a tug in her chest, some deeper shift, a cracking of her hard-earned cynicism, of this anxious tension she's been fighting. The actress's name means nothing to her, but the old guy seems utterly changed by saying it aloud, as if he hasn't said the name in years. Something about the name affects her, too-a crush of romantic recognition, those words, moment and forever-as if she can feel fifty years of longing in that one name, fifty years of an ache that lies dormant in her, too, maybe lies dormant in everyone until it's cracked open like this-and so weighted is this moment she has to look to the ground or else feel the tears burn her own eyes, and at that moment Claire glances at Shane, and sees that he must feel it, too, the name hanging in the air for just a moment . . . among the three of them . . . and then floating to the floor like a falling leaf, the Italian watching it settle, Claire guessing, hoping, praying the old Italian will say the name once again, more quietly this time-to underline its importance, the way it's so often done in scripts-but he doesn't do this. He just stares at the floor, where the name has fallen, and it occurs to Claire Silver that she's seen too goddamn many movies.

3.

The Hotel Adequate View April 1962 Porto Vergogna, Italy All day he waited for her to come downstairs, but she spent that first afternoon and evening alone in her room on the third floor. And so Pasquale went about his business, which seemed not like business at all but the random behavior of a lunatic. Still, he didn't know what else to do, so he threw rocks at the breakwater in the cove and he chipped away at his tennis court and he glanced up occasionally at the whitewashed shutters over the windows in her room. In the late afternoon, when the feral cats were sunning themselves on the rocks, a cool spring wind chopped the surface of the sea and Pasquale retreated to the piazza to smoke alone, before the fishermen came to drink. At the Adequate View, there was no noise from upstairs, no sign at all that the beautiful American was even up there, and Pasquale worried again that he had imagined the whole thing-Orenzio's boat lurching into the cove, the tall, slender American walking up the narrow staircase to the best room in the hotel, on the third floor, pushing open the window shutters, breathing in the salty air, pronouncing it "Lovely," Pasquale saying she should let him know if there was anything "upon you are happy to having," and her saying, "Thank you," and pushing the door closed, leaving him to descend the tight, dark staircase alone.

Pasquale was horrified to find that, for dinner, his aunt Valeria was making her signature ciuppin, a soup of rockfish, tomatoes, white wine, and olive oil. "You expect me to take your rotten fish-head stew to an American cinema star?"

"She can leave if she doesn't like it," Valeria said. So, at dusk, with the fishermen pulling their boats up into the cove below, Pasquale clicked up the narrow staircase built into the rock wall. He knocked lightly on the third-floor door.

"Yes?" the American called through the door. He heard the bedsprings creak.

Pasquale cleared his throat. "I am sorry for you disturb. You eat antipasti and a soap, yes?"

"Soap?"

Pasquale felt angry that he hadn't talked his aunt out of making the ciuppin. "Yes. Is a soap. With fish and vino. A fish soap?"

"Oh, soup. No. No, thank you. I don't think I can eat anything just yet," she said, her voice muffled through the door. "I don't feel well enough."

"Yes," he said. "I see."

He descended the stairs, saying the word soup over and over in his mind. He ate the American's dinner in his own room on the second floor. The ciuppin was pretty good. He still got his father's newspapers by mail-boat once a week, and although he didn't study them the way his father had, Pasquale flipped through them, looking for news about the American production of Cleopatra. But he found nothing.

Later, he heard clumping around in the trattoria and came out, but he knew it wouldn't be Dee Moray; she did not appear to be a clumper. Instead, both tables were full of local fishermen hoping to get a look at the glorious American, their hats on the tables, dirty hair plastered and combed tight to their skulls. Valeria was serving them soup, but the fishermen were really just waiting to talk to Pasquale, since they'd been out in their boats when the American arrived.

"I hear she is two and a half meters tall," said Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero, famous for the dubious claim that he had killed at least one soldier from every major participant in the European theater of World War II. "She is a giant."

"Don't be stupid," Pasquale said as he filled their glasses with wine.

"What is the shape of her breasts?" asked Lugo seriously. "Are they round giants or alert peaks?"

"Let me tell you about American women," said Tomasso the Elder, whose cousin had married an American, making him an expert on American women, along with everything else. "American women cook only one meal a week, but before they marry they perform fellatio. So, as with all life, there is good and there is bad."

"You should eat from a trough like pigs!" Valeria spat from the kitchen.

"Marry me, Valeria!" Tomasso the Elder called back. "I am too old for sex and my hearing will soon be gone. We are made for each other."

The fisherman that Pasquale liked best, thoughtful Tomasso the Communist, was chewing on his pipe. He removed it now to weigh in on the subject. He considered himself something of a film buff and was a fan of Italian neorealism and therefore dismissive of American movies, which he blamed for sparking the dreadful commedia all'italiana movement, the antic farces that had replaced the serious existential cinema of the late 1950s. "Listen, Lugo," he said, "if she is an American actress, it means she wears a corset in cowboy films and has talent only for screaming."

"Fine. Let's see those big breasts fill with air when she screams," Lugo said.

"Maybe she will lie naked on Pasquale's beach tomorrow," said Tomasso the Elder, "and we can see for ourselves her giant breasts."

For three hundred years, the fishermen in town had come from a small pool of young men who'd grown up here, fathers handing over their skiffs and eventually their houses to favored sons, usually the eldest, who married the daughters of other fishermen up and down the coast, sometimes bringing them back to Porto Vergogna. Children moved away, but the villaggio always maintained a kind of equilibrium and the twenty or so houses stayed full. But after the war, when fishing, like everything else, had become an industry, the family fishermen couldn't compete with the big seiners motoring out of Genoa every week. The restaurants would still buy from a few old fishermen, because tourists liked to see the old men bring in their catches, but this was like working in an amusement park: it wasn't real fishing, and there was no future in it. An entire generation of Porto Vergogna boys had to leave to find work, to La Spezia and Genoa and even farther for jobs in factories and canneries and in the trades. No longer did the favored son want the fishing boat; already six of the houses were empty, boarded, or brought down; more were sure to follow. In February, Tomasso the Communist's last daughter, the unfortunately cross-eyed Illena, had married a young teacher and moved away to La Spezia, Tomasso sulking for days afterward. And on one of those cool spring mornings, as Pasquale watched the old fishermen scuff and grumble to their boats, it dawned on him: he was the only person under forty left in the whole town.

Pasquale left the fishermen in the trattoria to go see his mother, who was in one of her dark periods and had refused to leave her bed for two weeks. When he opened the door, he could see her staring at the ceiling, her wiry gray hair stuck to the pillow behind her, arms crossed over her chest, mouth in the placid death face that she liked to rehearse. "You should get up, Mamma. Come out and eat with us."

"Not today, Pasqo," she rasped. "Today I hope to die." She took a deep breath and opened one eye. "Valeria tells me there is an American in the hotel."

"Yes, Mamma." He checked her bedsores but his aunt had already powdered them.

"A woman?"

"Yes, Mamma."

"Then your father's Americans have finally arrived." She glanced over at the dark window. "He said they would come and here they are. You should marry this woman and go to America to make a proper tennis field."

"No, Mamma. You know I wouldn't-"

"Leave before this place kills you like it killed your father."

"I would never leave you."

"Don't worry about me. I will die soon enough and go to be with your father and with your poor brothers."

"You're not dying," Pasquale said.

"I am already dead inside," she said. "You should push me out into the sea and drown me like that old sick cat of yours."

Pasquale straightened. "You said my cat ran away. While I was at university."

She shot him a glance from the corner of her eye. "It is a saying."

"No. It's not a saying. There is no saying such as that. Did you and Papa drown my cat while I was in Florence?"

"I'm sick, Pasqo! Why do you torment me?"