She slices cheese for his omelet, Pat eating every other piece. "I hope you told them that," she says, "because I'm getting awfully tired of them constantly writing checks to support the theater."

"They want us to do Thoroughly Modern Millie. Ted wants to be in it. Said I'd be great in it, too. Can you imagine? Me and Ted in a play together."

"Yeah, I'm not sure you have the chops to act with Ted."

"That's because I had such a bad teacher," he says. Then: "How are you feeling?"

"I'm good," she says.

"Did you take a Dilaudid?"

"No." She hates pain medication, doesn't want to miss a thing. "I feel fine."

Pat puts his hand on her forehead. "You're warm."

"I'm fine. You just came from outside."

"So did you."

"I was in that oven you built me. I'm probably cooked."

He reaches for the cutting board. "Let me finish. I can make an omelet."

"Since when?"

"I'll have Lydia do it. She's good at that woman's work."

Debra stops cutting onions and slashes in his direction with the knife.

"Unkindest cut of all," he says.

It's like a little gift, the way he surprises her sometimes with the things he remembers. "I used to teach that play," she says. Without thinking, she quotes her own favorite line: "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once."

Pat sits at the counter. "That hurts more than the knife."

Lydia comes up the stairs then, towel-drying her hair after her shower. She tells Debra all over again that Ted and Isola were at the play, and that they asked after her.

Debra knows by heart the inflection of their concern, How IS she?

Still alive. Oh, the things she would say if she could-but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. She's constantly being offered homeopathic remedies by the funky people up here: magnets and herbs and horse liniments. Some people give her books-self-help books, tomes on grieving, pamphlets on dying. I'm beyond help, self- or otherwise, she wants to say, and Aren't the grieving books more for the survivors? and Thanks for the book on dying, but that's the one part I have covered. They'll ask Pat, How IS she? and they'll ask her, How ARE you? But they don't want to hear that she's tired all the time, that her bladder is leaky, that she's on the watch for her systems shutting down. They want to hear that she's at peace, that she's led a great life, that she's happy her son has returned-and so that's what she gives them. And the truth is, most of the time, she IS at peace, HAS led a great life, IS happy her son has returned. She knows which drawer the phone number for hospice is in; and the company with the hospital bed; and the provider of the morphine drip dispenser. Some days she wakes slowly from her nap and thinks it would be okay to just go on sleeping-that it would not be scary at all. Pat and Lydia are as solid as she could hope, and the board has agreed to let Lydia take over the theater. The cabin is paid for, with enough left in the bank for taxes and other expenses, so Pat can spend the rest of his life puttering around outside in the early mornings, which he loves-gardening, painting and staining, pruning trees, working on the driveway and the retaining walls, anything to keep his hands moving. Sometimes, now, when she sees how content Pat and Lydia are, she feels like a spent salmon: her work here is done. But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

Sometimes, during her various rounds of chemo, she had wanted the pain and discomfort to be over so badly that she could imagine being comforted by her own death. That was one of the reasons she'd decided-after all of the chemicals and radiations and surgeries, after the double mastectomy, after the doctors tried every measure of conventional and nuclear weaponry against her diminishing frame, and after they still found traces of cancer in her pelvic bones-to just let the thing run its course. Let it have her. The doctors said there might still be something to be done, depending on whether it was a primary or secondary cancer, but she told them it didn't matter anymore. Pat had come home, and she preferred six months of peace to another three years of needles and nausea. And she's gotten lucky: she's made it almost two years, and has felt good throughout most of it, although it still stuns her to catch a glimpse in the mirror: Who is this relic, this tall, thin, flat-chested old woman with her white porcupine hair?

Debra pulls her sweater around herself, warms her tea. She leans against the sink and smiles as she watches her son eat his second helping of eggs, Lydia reaching over to take a cheesy mushroom from the top. Pat looks up at his mother, to see if she's caught the blatant thievery. "You're not going to stab her?"

And that's when a car announces itself on the gravel outside. Pat hears it, too, and checks his watch. He shrugs. "No idea."

Pat goes to the window, puts his hand to the glass, and peers down toward the driveway, the faint glow of headlights down there. "That's Keith's Bronco." He steps away from the window. "The after-party. He's probably wasted. I'll go take care of it."

He skips down the stairs like a boy.

"How was he tonight?" Debra asks quietly when he's gone.

Lydia picks at the leftover onions and mushrooms on Pat's plate. "Great. You couldn't take your eyes off him. God, I'll be glad when this play is over, though. Some nights, he just sits there afterward and stares out, with . . . these distant eyes. For fifteen minutes, he's just done. I feel like I've been holding my breath since I finished this goddamned play."

"You've been holding your breath a lot longer than that," Debra says, and they both smile. "It's a wonderful play, Lydia. You should just let go and enjoy it."

Lydia drinks from Pat's orange juice. "I don't know."

Debra reaches across the table for Lydia's hand. "You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it."

Lydia cocks her head and her brow wrinkles, fighting off tears. "Goddamn it, Dee. Why do you do that?"

Then, through three layers of floor, they hear voices on the stairs, Pat and Keith, and someone else, and then a rumbling up the steps, five, maybe six sets of feet.

Pat comes up first, shrugging. "I guess there were some old friends of yours at the show tonight, Mom. Keith brought them-I hope it's all right . . ."

Pat is followed by Keith. He doesn't seem drunk, but he is carrying his little video camera, which he sometimes uses to chronicle-hell, Debra isn't sure what Keith chronicles, exactly. "Hey, Dee. Sorry to bother you so late, but these people really wanted to see you . . ."

"It's okay, Keith," she says, and then the other people come up the stairs, one at a time: an attractive young woman with curly red hair, and then a thin, mop-headed young man who does look drunk-neither of whom Debra recognizes-and then a strange creature, a slightly hunched older man in a suit coat, as skinny as she is, at once vaguely familiar and not; he has the strangest, lineless face, like one of those computer renderings of a face aging, only done in reverse, a boy's face grafted onto the neck of an old man-and finally, another old gentleman, in a charcoal-gray suit. This last man catches her attention as he steps away from the others, to the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. He removes his fedora and looks at her with a set of eyes so pale blue they seem nearly transparent-eyes that take her in with a mixture of warmth and pity, eyes that sweep Dee Moray back fifty years, to another life- He says, "Hello, Dee."

Debra's teacup drops to the counter. "Pasquale?"

There were times, of course, years ago, when she thought she might see him again. That last day in Italy, as she watched him motor away from the hotel, she couldn't have imagined not seeing him again. Not that there was any spoken agreement between them, but there was something implicit, the hum of attraction and anticipation. When Alvis told her that Pasquale's mother had died, that he was going to the funeral and might not come back, Dee was stunned; why hadn't Pasquale told her? And when a boat arrived with her luggage, and Alvis said Pasquale wanted him to get her back to the States safely, she thought that Pasquale must have needed some time alone. So she went home to have the baby. She'd sent him a postcard, thinking, maybe . . . but there was no answer. After that, she thought about Pasquale sometimes, although not as often as the years passed; she and Alvis did talk about going to Italy on vacation, going back to Porto Vergogna, but they never made it. Then, after Alvis died and she got her degree in teaching, with a minor in Italian, she'd thought about taking Pat; she even called a travel agent, who said that not only was there "no listing for a Hotel Adequate View," but that she couldn't even find this town, Porto Vergogna. Did she perhaps mean Portovenere?

By then, Debra could almost wonder if the whole thing-Pasquale, the fishermen, the paintings in the bunker, the little village on the cliffs-hadn't been some trick of the mind, another of her fantasies, a scene from some movie she'd watched.

But no-here he is, Pasquale Tursi, older, of course, his black hair gone slate-gray, those deep lines in his face, his jaw falling into a slight jowl, but with the eyes, still the eyes. It is him. And he edges forward a step, until the only thing separating them is the kitchen counter.

She feels a flash of self-consciousness and her twenty-two-year-old's vanity rises: God, what a fright she must look. For several seconds, they stand there, a gimpy old man and a sick old woman, just four feet apart now, but separated by a thick granite counter, by fifty years and two fully lived lives. No one speaks. No one breathes.

Finally, it is Dee Moray who breaks the silence, smiling at her old friend: "Perche hai perso cos tanto tempo?" What took you so long?

That smile is still too large for her lovely face. But what really gets to him is this: she has learned Italian. Pasquale smiles back and says, quietly, "Mi dispiace. Avevo fare qualcosa di importante." I'm sorry. There was something important I had to do.

Of the six other people fanned out around them in this room, only one understands what they've said: Shane Wheeler, who, even after four quick, desperate glasses of whiskey, is still moved by the bond translators often develop with their subjects. It's been quite a day for him, waking up with Claire, finding out his movie pitch was nothing but a distraction, trying unsuccessfully to negotiate better terms during the long trip, then the catharsis of that play, identifying with the ruined life of Pat Bender, reaching out to and getting shut down by his ex; after all of that, and the whiskeys, the emotion of Pasquale's reunion with Dee is almost more than Shane can bear. He sighs deeply, a little whoosh of air that brings the others back into the room . . .

They all watch Pasquale and Dee intently. Michael Deane grips Claire's arm; she covers her mouth with her other hand; Lydia glances over at Pat (even now, she can't help worrying). Pat looks from his mother to this kindly old man-Did she call him Pasquale?-and then his vision swings over to Keith, standing at the top of the stairs, moving to the side with that goddamned camera he carries everywhere, framing the scene, inexplicably filming this moment. "What are you doing?" he asks. "Put that camera away." Keith shrugs and nods his head toward Michael Deane, the man paying him to do this.

Debra becomes aware, too, of the other people in the room. She looks around at the expectant faces until her eyes fall on the other old man, the one with the strange plastic, impish face. Jesus. She knows him, too- "Michael Deane."

He draws his lips back over his brash, white teeth. "Hello, Dee."

Even now, she feels dread just saying his name, and hearing him say hers; Deane senses this, because he looks away. She's read stories about him over the years, of course. She knows about his long trail of success. For a time she even stopped watching credits for fear of simply seeing his name: A Michael Deane Production.

"Mom?" Pat takes another step toward her. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she says. But she stares at Michael, every eye following hers.

Michael Deane feels their stares and he knows: this is his room now. And The Room is everything. When you are in The Room, nothing exists outside. The people hearing your pitch could no more leave The Room than- Michael begins, turning to Lydia first, and smiling, all charm. "And you must be the author of the masterpiece we just saw." He holds out his hand. "Truly. It was a wonderful play. So moving."

"Thank you," Lydia says, shaking his hand.

Now Deane turns back to Debra: Always speak first to the toughest person in The Room. "Dee, as I told your son downstairs, his performance was remarkable. A chip off the old block, as they say."

Pat shrinks from the praise, looks down, and scratches his head uncomfortably, like a kid who has just broken a lamp with a football.

A chip off the old block-Debra shudders at the description, at the threat she senses but can't quite make out yet (What exactly does he want?), and at the way Michael Deane is taking over this room, watching her son with that old dead-gazed purposefulness, that hunger, a half-smirk on his surgically implacable face.

Pasquale senses her discomfort. "Mi dispiace," he says, and he reaches a hand over the counter between them. "Era il modo unico." It was the only way to find her.

Debra feels herself tense, like a bear protecting a cub. She concentrates on Michael Deane, addressing him as evenly as she can, trying to take the edge out of her voice, not entirely successfully. "Why are you here, Michael?"

Michael Deane treats this as if it were an honest question about his intentions, an invitation to unpack his traveling salesman bag. "Yes, I should get right to that, after disturbing you so late in the evening. Thank you, Dee." Having transformed Dee's accusation into an invitation, he turns now to Lydia and Pat. "I don't know if your mother's ever mentioned me, but I am a film producer"-he smiles with humble understatement-"of some repute, I suppose."

Claire reaches out to take his arm-"Michael . . ." (Not now, don't ruin this good thing you're doing by trying to produce it)-but Michael can no more be stopped than a tornado now. He uses Claire's gesture to pull her in, patting her hand as if she's just reminded him of his manners. "Of course. Forgive me. This is Claire Silver, my chief development executive."

Development executive? He can't possibly mean that. Still, she's speechless-long enough to look up silently, to see them all staring at her, Lydia especially, sitting on the edge of the counter. Claire has no choice but to echo what Michael said: "It really was a great play."

"Thank you," Lydia says again, blushing with gratitude.

"Yes," Michael Deane says, "great," and The Room is all his now, this rustic cabin no different than any conference room he's ever pitched. "Which is why Claire and I were wondering . . . if you might be interested in selling the film rights-"

Lydia laughs nervously, almost giddily. She shoots a quick glance to Pat, then back to Michael Deane. "You want to buy my play?"

"The play, maybe the whole cycle, perhaps everything-" Michael Deane lets this hang a moment. "I'd like to option all of it," working hard to sound casual, "your whole story," subtly turning to include Pat, "both of you," avoiding Dee's gaze. "I'd like to buy your . . ." and he trails off, as if what comes next is mere afterthought, "life rights."

We want what we want.

"Life rights?" Pat asks. He's happy for his girlfriend, but he's suspicious of this old man. "What's that mean?"

Claire knows. Book, movie, reality show, whatever they can sell about Richard Burton's train wreck of a son. Dee knows, too. She covers her mouth and manages just a single word, "Wait-" before her knees give and she has to grab the counter for support.

"Mom?" Pat runs around the counter, arriving just as Pasquale gets to her, too. They reach for her at the same time, as she buckles, each taking an arm. "Give her some space!" Pat yells.

Pasquale doesn't understand this phrase (Give her space?), and he looks across the counter at his translator, but Shane is a little drunk and a little desperate and he chooses instead to translate Michael Deane's offer for Lydia. "Be careful," he leans forward and says quietly. "Sometimes he only pretends to like your shit."

Still shocked by her recent promotion, Claire takes her boss by the arm and pulls him toward the living room. "Michael, what are you doing?" she asks under her breath.

He looks past her, to Dee and the boy. "I'm doing what I came to do."

"I thought you came to make amends."

"Amends?" Michael Deane looks at Claire without understanding. "For what?"

"Jesus, Michael. You completely fucked with these people's lives. Why did you come here if it wasn't to apologize?"

"Apologize?" Again, Michael doesn't quite understand what she's saying. "I came here for the story, Claire. For my story."

Behind the counter, Dee has regained her balance. She looks across the living room at Michael Deane and his assistant; they seem to be arguing about something. Pat has come around the counter, and is supporting her weight. She squeezes his hand. "I'm okay now," she says. Pasquale is holding her other hand. She smiles at him again.

There are only three people in the world who know the secret she's carried for the last forty-eight years, a secret that has defined her since she left Italy, this thing that grew each year until now it fills the room-a room that contains the other two people who know. There were so many reasons for the secret back then-Dick and Liz, and her family's judgment, and the fear of a tabloid scandal, and most of all (she can admit it now) her own pride, her desire to not let a prick like Michael Deane win-but those reasons fell away over the years, and the only reason she has continued to keep the secret is . . . Pat. She thought it would simply be too much for him. What movie star's kid ever stood a chance? Especially one with Pat's appetites? When he was using he was so breakable, and when he was clean his salvation seemed so fragile. She was protecting him, and now she knows what she was protecting him from: this man she has loathed for almost fifty years, who has come into her house and threatened all of it by trying to buy their very lives.

Yet she knows she won't be around to protect Pat forever. And there is the very real guilt of having kept from him something so important, and her fear that he will now hate her for it. Dee looks at Lydia. This affects her, too. Then she looks at Pasquale, and finally at her son, who stares at her with such deep concern that she knows she has no choice anymore. "Pat, I should- You need to- There's something-"

And then, even on the cusp of telling him, she feels the first rush of freedom, hope, the weight of this thing already beginning to fall away- "About your father-"

Pat's eyes slide from her to Pasquale, but Dee shakes her head. "No," she says simply. She looks at Michael Deane in the living room and wishes to exert one more, tiny bit of rebellion. She will not let the old vulture see this. "Can we go upstairs?"

"Sure," Pat says.

Debra looks at Lydia. "You should come, too."

And so, the doomed Deane Party will not get to see the completion of their journey; they can only watch as Lydia, Dee, and Pat make their way slowly toward the kitchen staircase. Michael Deane gives a small nod to Keith, who starts to follow with his little camera. The leaps in technology and miniaturization are confounding-this little device, the size of a cigarette pack, can do more than the eighty-pound cameras Dee Moray once acted for-and in the camera's tiny screen Lydia is helping Debra toward the stairs. At first Pat walks behind them-but then he stops and turns, sensing people staring at him-as if waiting for him to do something crazy-and all at once a familiar sensation comes over him, like he used to feel onstage. Pat burns from it, and he spins on Keith.

"I told you to put the fucking camera away," Pat says, and he grabs it-the screen now recording the last little digital film it will ever make, the deep lines of a man's palm as Pat stalks through the living room, past the creepy old producer and the red-haired girl, and the drunk dude with the hair. He opens the slider, steps out onto the front porch, and throws the camera as far as he can-grunting as it leaves his hand, toppling over itself-Pat waiting, waiting, until they hear a distant splash in the lake below. He walks back through the room satisfied-"You are my fucking hero," says the kid with the hair as he passes-and Pat shrugs a slight apology to Keith, then makes his way upstairs to find out that his whole life to this point has been a sweet lie.

21.

Beautiful Ruins.

There would be nothing more obvious, more tangible, than the present moment.

And yet it eludes us completely.

All the sadness of life lies in that fact.

-Milan Kundera.

This is a love story, Michael Deane says.

But, really, what isn't? Doesn't the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk, just as the Housewives live for catching glimpses of their own Botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors, and the rocked-out dude on 'roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on Hookbook, and because this is reality, they are all in love-madly, truly-with the body mic clipped to their back buckle, and the producer casually suggesting just one more angle, one more Jell-O shot. And the robot loves his master, alien loves his saucer, Superman loves Lois, Lex, and Lana, Luke loves Leia (till he finds out she's his sister), and the exorcist loves the demon even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace, as Leo loves Kate and they both love the sinking ship, and the shark-God, the shark loves to eat, which is what the mafioso loves, too-eating and money and Paulie and omerta-the way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar, and sometimes loves the other cowboy, as the vampire loves night and neck, and the zombie-don't even start with the zombie, sentimental fool; has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? This, too, is a love story.

And in the room, the Dutch financiers with the forty mil to kill wait for Michael Deane to elaborate, but he just sits with his index fingers steepled in front of his mouth. A love story. He'll speak when he's ready. This is his room, after all; he's only sorry he won't be able to attend his own funeral, because he'd leave that fucking room with a deal for a network pilot and a reality show set in hell. After the Donner! pitch (for thirty grand, that kid really sold it), Michael got out of his constraining deal with the studio. Now he's producing on his own again-six unscripted shows already in some stage of production-surviving the post-studio world just fine, thank you, raking in more money than he ever thought possible. Now the money guys come to him. He feels thirty again. So the Dutch financiers wait, and they wait, until finally the index fingers fall away from Michael Deane's preternaturally smooth mouth and he speaks: "This is a secondary cable immersion reality show called Rich MILF/Poor MILF. And as I say, it is, above all, a love story-"

Sure it is. And in Genoa, Italy, an old prostitute waits for the door to close and then grabs the money the American has left on the gray sheets-half afraid it will disappear. She looks around, holds her breath, and listens for his footsteps to recede down the hallway. She leans back against the wrought-iron bed frame and counts it-fifty times the price she normally gets for slopping dong; she can't believe her good goddamn fortune. She folds the bills and puts them under her garter so that Enzo won't ask for his cut, walks to the window and looks down, and there he is, standing on the sidewalk, looking lost: Wisconsin. Wanted to write a book. And in that flash, the two moments they've shared are perfect, and she loves him more than any man she's ever known-which is maybe why she pretended not to know him, to not ruin it, to save him the embarrassment of having cried. But no-there was something else, something she hasn't got a name for, and when he glances up from the street below, whatever it is causes Maria to touch the place on her chest where he laid his head that night. Then she steps back from the window- In California, William Eddy stands on the porch of his little clapboard house, luxuriating in the smoke from his pipe and the weight of breakfast in his gut. It's such a decadent, guilty meal. William Eddy likes every meal, but he goddamn loves breakfast. For a year, he kicks around Yerba Buena, gets plenty of work, but then he makes the mistake of telling his story to the broadsheet journalists and the dime-book authors-all of whom embellish in both language and deed, vultures picking through the bones of his life for scandal. When some of the others accuse him of exaggerating to make himself look better, Eddy says to hell with them all and moves south, to Gilroy. Look better-Christ in heaven, who looks better after such a thing? With the Rush of '49 there's no shortage of work for a carriage builder, and William does well for a while, remarries and has three kids, but soon he's adrift again, alone, and he leaves his second family and runs off to Petaluma; he feels sometimes like a shirt blown off a drying line. His second wife says there's something wrong with him, "something I fear is both unwell and unreachable in you"; his third wife, a schoolteacher from St. Louis, is just now discovering the same thing. He hears occasional word on the fate of the others: surviving Donners and Reeds, the kids he rescued; his old foe and friend Foster runs a saloon somewhere. He wonders if they are unmoored, too. Maybe only Keseburg would understand-Keseburg, who, he's heard, accepted his infamy and has opened a restaurant in Sacramento City. This morning, Eddy feels a bit feverish and weak, and while he won't know it for a few more days, he is dying, at just forty-three, and only thirteen years after his hard passage through the mountains. Of course, such a passage is only temporary. On his porch, William coughs, and the porch boards beneath him creak as he looks east, as he does each morning, feels an ache for the bruised sun on the horizon and his family, ever up there in the cold- All night, the painter walks north through dark foothills, toward rumors of the Swiss border. He avoids main roads, scouring the rubble of another Italian village for the remnants of his old unit, or for some Americans to surrender to-anything. He thinks of abandoning his uniform, but he still fears being shot as a deserter. At dawn, with the deep pup-pup of distant shelling at his back, he takes refuge in the husk of an old burned-out printer's office, leans pack and rifle on the sturdiest wall, and curls up beneath an old drafting table with some grain bags for a pillow. Before he drifts off, the painter goes through his nightly ritual, picturing the man he loves back in Stuttgart, his old piano instructor. Come home safely, the pianist begs, and the painter assures him that he will. Nothing more than that, as chaste a friendship as two men can have, but the very possibility has kept him alive-the imagined moment when he does return safely-and so the painter thinks of the piano instructor every night before sleep, as he does now, drifting off in the glow before sunrise, and sleeping peacefully until a couple of partisans come across him and bash in his skull with a shovel. After the first swing, it is done: the painter will not make it home to Germany, to his piano instructor or his sister-killed anyway, a week ago, in a fire at the munitions plant where she worked, his spoiled sister whose photograph he carried to war and whose portrait he painted twice on the wall of a pillbox bunker on the Italian coast. One of the partisans laughs as the German painter lurches and burbles about like some kind of walking dead, but the more decent of the two steps in to finish him off- Joe and Umi move to West Cork and get married; childless, they divorce four years later, blaming each other for their sad, aging selves. After a few years apart, they see each other at a concert and are more understanding; they share a glass of wine, laugh at the perspective they lacked, and fall back into bed together. This reconciliation only lasts a few months before they go their own ways, happy at least to be forgiven in the other's eyes. It's the same with Dick and Liz: a turbulent ten-year marriage and one truly great film together, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (she gets the Oscar, ironically), then a divorce and a short reprise (more disastrous than Joe and Umi's) before they drift their own ways, Liz into more marriages, Dick into more cocktails, until, at fifty-eight, he can't be awakened in his hotel and he dies that day of cerebral hemorrhage, a line from The Tempest apocryphally left on his bed-stand: "Our Revels now are ended-" Orenzio gets drunk one winter and drowns, and Valeria spends the last years of her life living happily with Tomasso the Widower, and the brute Pelle recovers from his gunshot foot, but, having lost his taste for the goon business, works at his brother's butcher shop and marries a mute girl, and Gualfredo gets a just case of syphilis that blinds him, and the son of Alvis's friend Richards is wounded in Vietnam, returns home to work as a benefits advocate for veterans, and is eventually elected to the Iowa State Senate, and young Bruno Tursi graduates with degrees in art history and restoration, works for a private firm in Rome cataloguing artifacts and finds a perfect medication to balance his quiet, low-level depression, and P.E. Steve remarries-the sweet, pretty mother of one of his daughter's softball teammates-and on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of the now- -all those lovely wrecked lives- -and in Universal City, California, Claire Silver threatens to quit unless Michael Deane leaves Debra "Dee" Moore and her son alone, and agrees to produce just one project from their trip to Sandpoint: a film based solely on Lydia Parker's play Front Man, the poignant story of a drug-addicted musician who wanders off into the wilderness and eventually returns to his long-suffering mother and girlfriend. The budget is just $4 million, and after every financier and studio in Hollywood passes, it is funded entirely by Michael Deane himself, although he doesn't tell Claire that. The film is directed by a young Serbian comic-book artist and auteur, who writes the script himself, based loosely on Lydia's play, or at least the part of the play he read. The auteur makes the musician younger and, generally, more likeable. And, rather than having issues with his mother, in this version the musician has issues with his dad-so the young director can explore his own feelings for his distant, disapproving father. And, rather than having his girlfriend be a playwright in the Northwest, who takes care of her stepfather, the girlfriend in the film becomes an art teacher who works with poor black kids in Detroit, so that they can get some better music on the sound track and also take advantage of the big "Film in Michigan" tax break. In the final script, the Pat character-whose name is changed to Slade-doesn't steal from his mother or cheat repeatedly on his girlfriend, but harms only himself with his addiction, itself changed from cocaine to alcohol. (He's got to be relatable and likeable, Michael and the director agree.) These changes come slowly, one at a time, like adding hot water to a bath, and with each step Claire convinces herself that they're sticking to the important parts of the story-"to its essence"-and in the end she's proud of the film, and of her first coproducer credit. Her dad says, "It made me cry." But the person most moved by Front Man is Daryl, who is still on relationship-probation when Claire brings him to an early screening. Late in the film (after Slade's girlfriend Penny has confronted the gangbangers threatening the school where she teaches) Slade sends Penny a text message from London: Just let me know you're okay. Daryl gasps and leans over to Claire, tells her, "I sent you that message." Claire nods: she'd suggested it to the director. The film ends with Slade being rediscovered by a record executive vacationing in the UK, and headed for success-but on his terms. As Slade's unpacking his guitar after a show he hears a woman's voice. "I am okay," she says, and Slade turns to see Penny, finally answering his text. In the theater, Daryl begins crying, for the film is clearly a harsh love letter from his girlfriend about his porn addiction, for which he agrees to seek treatment. And, in fact, Daryl's treatment is an unqualified success; his not waking every day at noon to surf Internet porn and sneaking out to strip clubs at night has given him newfound energy and passion for life-which he channels into his relationship with Claire, and into a shop he opens in Brentwood with another former set designer, making custom furniture for industry people. Front Man plays at several festivals, wins the audience award in Toronto, and is generously reviewed. With the foreign box office, it even ends up earning Michael a decent profit-"Sometimes it's like I shit money," he tells a profiler for The New Yorker. Claire knows the movie is far from perfect, but with its success, Michael allows her to buy two other scripts for development, Claire happy to no longer expect the dead perfection of museum art, but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. After some initial buzz, Front Man is passed over by the Academy Awards, but it does garner three Independent Spirit nominations. Michael can't go to the ceremony (he's off in Mexico recovering from his divorce and receiving a controversial human-growth hormone treatment), but Claire is happy to represent the film's producers, Daryl accompanying her in an eggplant-colored tuxedo she finds for him in a thrift store. He looks great, of course. Unfortunately, Front Man doesn't win any Indie Spirit awards, either, but afterward Claire feels buoyant with achievement (and with the two bottles of '88 Dom Perignon that Michael generously reserved for her table) and she and Daryl have sex in the limo, after which she convinces the driver to veer through a KFC drive-through for a bucket of Extra Crispy, Daryl nervously fingering the engagement ring in his purple pants pocket- Shane Wheeler uses the option money from Donner! to rent a small apartment in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Michael Deane gets him a job on a reality show he sells to the Biography Channel based on Shane's suggestion, called Hunger, about a houseful of bulimics and anorexics. But the show is too sad for even Shane, let alone viewers, and he gets a job as a writer for another show, called Battle Royale, in which famous battles are re-created through computer graphics, so that history is like watching Call of Duty, all accompanied by a fast-moving narration by William Shatner, the scripts written by Shane and two other writers in modern vernacular ("Restricted by their own code of honor, the Spartans were about to get totally stomped . . ."). He continues to work on Donner! in his spare time, until a competing Donner Party project makes it to the screen first-William Eddy portrayed as a lying coward-and this is when Shane finally gives up on cannibals. He also tries once more with Claire, but she seems pretty happy with her boyfriend, and once Shane meets the guy he understands: the dude is way better-looking than Shane. He pays Saundra back for the car, and throws in a little more for her ruined credit, but she remains cool to him. One night after work, though, he hooks up with a production assistant named Wylie, who is twenty-two and thinks he's brilliant and eventually wins his heart by getting an ACT tattoo on her lower back- In Sandpoint, Idaho, Pat Bender wakes at four, makes the first of three pots of coffee, and fills the predawn hours with chores around the cabin. He likes starting work before he's had a chance to really wake up; it gives the day some momentum, keeps him moving forward. As long as he has something to do, he feels good, so he clears brush or he splits wood or he strips, sands, and stains the front deck, or the back deck, or the outbuildings, or he starts the whole process again on the front deck: strip, sand, stain. Ten years ago, he would've thought this some kind of Sisyphean torture, but now he can't wait to slide into his work boots, make coffee, and step into the dark morning; he likes the world best when he's alone in it, that dark, predawn quiet. Later, he goes into town with Lydia to work on sets for the theater's summer-stock children's production. Dee passed on to Lydia the community-theater fund-raising trick: cast as many cute kids as you can and watch their rich ski parents and the flip-flopped lake-folk buy up all the tickets, then use the proceeds to pay for the arty stuff. Capitalism aside, the plays are what another person might call "adorable," and Pat secretly likes them better than the too-serious adult fare. He takes one big role a year, usually in something Lydia picks for him; he and Keith are doing True West next. He's never seen Lydia happier. After he tells the crazy zombie producer that he isn't interested in selling his "life rights," and-as politely as he can-to "leave us the fuck alone," the guy still steps up and buys the rights to Lydia's play. When Front Man comes out, Pat has no interest in seeing it, but when people tell him that the story was drastically changed, that it bears almost no resemblance to his own life, he is profoundly grateful. He'll take unknown over failure at this point. With some of the option money, Lydia wants to take a trip-and maybe they will, but Pat can also imagine never leaving North Idaho again. He's got his coffee and he's got his ritual, his work around the cabin, and with the new satellite dish Lydia buys him for his birthday, he's got nine hundred channels and he's got Netflix, which he uses to work his way chronologically through his father's movies-he's in 1967 now, The Comedians-and he gets a perverse thrill out of seeing bits of himself in his father, although he's not looking forward to the inevitable decline. Lydia likes watching these movies, too-she teases him about having his father's build (Last time I saw legs like that, there was a message tied to them)-sweet Lydia who makes all of the rest of the odd bits come together as a life. And on those days when Lydia, the lake, his coffee, his woodworking, and the Richard Burton film library aren't nearly enough, on those evenings when he craves-fucking craves-the old noise and a girl on his lap and a line on the table, when he recalls the way the barista smiled at him in the coffee shop across from the theater, or even thinks of Michael Deane's business card in that drawer in the kitchen, of calling and asking, "How would this work exactly?"-on those days when he imagines getting just a wee bit higher (See: every day), Pat Bender concentrates on the steps. He recalls his mother's faith in him, and what she told him that night he found out about his father (Don't let this change anything), the night he forgave her and thanked her-and Pat works: he strips, he sands, he stains-strips, sands, and stains, strip-sand-stains, as if his life depended on it, which, of course, it does. And in the dark morning he always rises clear again, resolute; the only thing he really misses is- -Dee Moray, who sits with one leg crossed over the other on the back bench seat of a water taxi, the sun warming her forearms as her boat shadows the rough Ligurian coastline of the Riviera di Levante. She wears a cream-colored dress, and when the wind gusts she reaches up and presses her matching hat against her head. This causes Pasquale Tursi, next to her, in his usual suit jacket despite the heat (after all, they have dinner reservations later), to nearly double over with nostalgic longing. He has one of his wistful, fanciful thoughts-that he's somehow summoned from his mind not a fifty-year-old memory of the moment in which he first saw this woman but the actual moment itself. After all, isn't it the same sea, same sun, same cliffs, same them? And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them. Dee sees Pasquale lost in this reverie and she touches his arm, asks, "Che cos'e?," and while her years of teaching Italian have allowed them to communicate fairly well, the sentiment he feels is, once again, beyond language, so Pasquale says nothing, just smiles at her, rises, and moves to the front of the boat. He points out the cove to the pilot, who looks dubious but nonetheless negotiates the waves and rounds a rocky point into an abandoned inlet, the single pier long gone, just a few rubbled bits of foundation left, like humps of bone in the grass, all that remains of an unlikely village that once sat in a crease in these cliffs. Pasquale explains to her how he closed the Adequate View and moved to Florence, how the last fisherman died in 1973, how the old village was abandoned and absorbed by the Cinque Terre National Park, the families given a small settlement for their little specks of land. Over dinner in Portovenere, on a patio overlooking the sea, Pasquale explains other things, too, the gentle pull of events after he leaves her that day in his hotel, the sweet contented rhythm of his life after that. No, it is not the foreign excitement of his imagined life with her; instead, Pasquale leads what feels like his life: he marries lovely Amedea, and she is a wonderful wife to him, playful and adoring, as good a friend as he could ever have wanted. They raise sweet little Bruno, and soon after, their daughters Francesca and Anna, and Pasquale takes a good job with his father-in-law's holding company, managing and renovating old Bruno's apartment buildings, and he eventually takes over as the patriarch to the Montelupo clan and business, doling out jobs, inheritance, and advice for his children and an army of nieces and nephews, never imagining that one man could ever feel so needed, so full. And it's a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death. And you were happy? Dee asks, and he answers, Oh, yes, without hesitation, then thinks about it and adds, Not always, of course, but I think more than most people. He truly loved his wife, and if he sometimes daydreams other lives, and other women-her, mostly-he also never doubts that he made the right decision. His biggest regret is that they never got to travel together once the children were gone, before Amedea got sick, before her behavior turned erratic-fits of temper and disorientation that led to a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. Even then, they have some good years, but her last decade is lost, disappearing out from under them both like sand giving way beneath their feet.

At first Amedea simply forgets to shop, or to lock the door, then she loses their car, and then she starts forgetting numbers and names and the uses for common things. He comes inside to see her holding the telephone-with no idea whom she meant to call, or, later, how the thing even works. He locks her in for a while, and then they simply stop leaving the house-and the worst is how he feels himself slipping away in her eyes, and he feels lost in the shimmery mist of identity (would he cease to exist when his wife stops knowing him?). Her last year is nearly unbearable. Caring for someone who has no idea who you are is a ripe hell-the weight of responsibility, bathing and feeding and . . . everything, that weight growing as her cognition fades, until she is like a thing he cares for, a heavy thing he pulls through the last uphill part of their life together; and when his children finally talk him into moving her into a nursing facility near their home, Pasquale weeps with sorrow and guilt, but also with relief, and guilt for his relief, sorrow for his guilt, and when the nurse asks what measures they should take to sustain his wife's life, Pasquale can't even speak. So it is Bruno, lovely Bruno, who takes his father's hand and says to the nurse, We are ready to let her go now. And she does, go, Pasquale visiting every day and talking to that blank face until one day a nurse calls the house as Pasquale is preparing for a visit and says that his wife has passed. He is more distraught by this than he imagined he would be, her final absence like a cruel trick, as if, somehow after she died, the old Amedea would be allowed to return; instead, there is only the hole in him. A year passes and Pasquale finally understands his mother's sorrow after Carlo died-so long has he existed in the perception of his wife and his family that now he feels like nothing. And it is brave Bruno who recognizes in his father his own battles with depression, and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing-and Pasquale answers without hesitation, Dee Moray, and Bruno asks Who?, the son having never heard the story, of course. Pasquale tells his son everything, then, and it is Bruno again who insists that his father go to Hollywood and find out what happened to the woman in the old photograph, and to thank her- Thank me? Debra Bender asks, and in his answer, Pasquale chooses his words carefully, mulling them over for some time, hoping she will understand: I was living in dreams when I met you. And when I met the man you loved, I saw my own weakness in him. Such irony, how could I be a man worthy of your love when I had walked away from my own child? That is why I went back. And it was the best thing I ever did.

She understands: she began teaching as a kind of self-sacrifice, subverting her own desires and ambitions for the ambitions of her students. But then you find there's actually more joy and that it really does lessen the loneliness, and this is why her last years, running the theater in Idaho, have felt so rich to her. And what she loved about Lydia's play: that it gets at this idea that true sacrifice is painless.

They linger and talk this way for three more hours after dinner, until she feels weak and they walk back to the hotel. They sleep in separate rooms, neither of them sure yet what this is-if it's anything, or if such a thing is even possible at this hour of their lives-and in the morning they have coffee and talk about Alvis (Pasquale: He was right that tourists would ruin this place; Dee: He was like this island where I lived for a while). And on the deck in Portovenere they decide to go on a hike, but first they plan the rest of Dee's three-week vacation: next they'll go south, to Rome, then to Naples and Calabria, then north again to Venice and Lake Como, as long as her strength holds-before returning at the end to Florence, where Pasquale shows her his big house and introduces her to his children and his grandchildren and his nieces and nephews. Dee is envious at first, but as they keep coming in the door, she is overtaken with joy-there are so many-and she accepts a warm blush of responsibility for all of this, if Pasquale is to be believed, holds a baby and blinks away tears as she watches Pasquale pull a coin from the ear of his grandson (He's the beautiful one now) and perhaps it's another day, or maybe two-what business does memory have with time?-before she feels the dark dizziness come and another before she is too weak to rise, another before the sharp tug in her stomach is more than Dilaudid can handle, and then- They finish their breakfast in Portovenere, go back to the hotel, and put on hiking boots. Dee assures Pasquale that she's up for this, and they take a taxi to the end of the road, crowded now with cars and walkers and the bicycles of tourists. At a turnaround, he helps her out of the cab, pays the driver, and they set off once more on a trail along a vineyard leading into the park, up into the striated foothills that serve as backdrop to the sea-scraped cliffs. They have no idea if the paintings have faded away, or have been spray-painted with graffiti, or if the bunker still exists-or, for that matter, if it ever existed at all-but they are young and the trail is wide and easily traveled. And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?