An attractive older woman in a sundress, her deep sun-worshipping wrinkles the opposite of Michael’s smooth skin, leans in close and actually touches his forehead. “Jesus,” she says, “I love your face,” as if it’s a piece of art he’s created.
“Thank you,” Michael says, because it is—his work of art.
The woman introduces herself as Fantom “with an F,” and explains that she makes tiny sculptures out of soap, which she sells at craft shows and barter fairs.
“I’d love to see them,” Michael says. “Is everyone here an artist?”
“I know,” Fantom says as she digs through her bag. “It gets old, huh?”
While Michael looks at tiny soap art, the rest of the Deane Party is growing anxious. Pasquale watches the door nervously as his lovesick translator, still stinging over Saundra’s texted rejection, pours a tall glass from a bottle of Canadian whiskey and Claire asks Keith about the play.
“Some intense shit, huh?” says Keith. “Debra mostly puts on kiddie plays, musicals, holiday farces—whatever gets the skiers off the mountain for a couple hours. But once a year she and Lydia do something original like this. She gets crap from the board sometimes, from the cranky Christians especially, but that was the tradeoff for her. Come keep the tourists happy, and once a year you can bust out something like that.”
By this time, all of the cast and crew have made it to the party—except for Pat and Lydia. Claire finds herself in conversation with Shannon, the actress who played the girl in bed with Pat at the start of the play. “I understand you’re from”—Shannon swallows, can barely say the word—“Hollywood?” She blinks quickly, twice. “What’s that like?”
Two glasses of wine in, Claire feels the strain of the last forty-eight hours, and smiles, stops to think about the question. Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that’s okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn’t—and perhaps loses track of just where she is. She takes a moment to look around—at this apartment built of garbage on some crazy island of artists in the mountains, where Michael is happily giving out business cards to soap-makers and actors, telling them he “might have something” for them, where Pasquale is nervously watching the door for a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly fifty years, where a quickly drunk Shane has rolled up his sleeve to explain the origin of his tattoo to an impressed Keith—and that’s when Claire realizes that Pat Bender and his mother and his girlfriend are not coming to this after-party.
“What? Oh yeah,” Keith says, confirming her suspicion. “They never come to the after-party. It’d kill Pat to be around all this booze and weed.”
“Where are they?” Michael asks.
“Probably up at the cabin,” Keith says. “Chilling with Dee.”
Michael Deane grabs Keith by the arm. “Will you take us there?”
Claire jumps in. “Maybe we should wait until morning, Michael.”
“No,” says the leader of the hope-drunk Deane Party. He glances over at old, patient Pasquale and makes one last fateful decision: “It’s been almost fifty years. No more waiting.”
19
The Requiem
April 1962
Porto Vergogna, Italy
Pasquale woke in darkness. He sat up and reached for his watch. Four thirty. He heard the fishermen’s low voices and the sound of boats skidding down to the shore. He rose, dressed quickly, and hurried down through the dusky predawn to the shore, where Tomasso the Communist was fixing his gear in his boat.
“What are you doing here?” Tomasso asked.
Pasquale asked Tomasso if he would motor him to La Spezia later for his mother’s requiem mass.
Tomasso touched his chest. “Of course,” he said. He would fish for a few hours and then come back to take Pasquale before lunch. Would that work?
“Yes, perfect,” Pasquale said. “Thank you.”
His old friend tipped his cap, climbed back in the boat, and pulled the starter rope, the motor clearing its throat. Pasquale watched Tomasso join the other fishermen, their shells bobbing on the soft-rocking sea.
Pasquale went back to the hotel and went to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. He lay on his back and thought of Dee Moray in bed just above him.
In the summers sometimes, his parents used to take him to the beach at Chiavari. Once he was digging in the sand when he saw a beautiful woman sunning herself on a blanket. Her skin glistened. Pasquale couldn’t stop staring. When she finally packed up her blanket and left, she’d waved at him, but young Pasquale was far too mesmerized to wave back. Then he saw something fall from her bag. He ran over and picked it from the sand. It was a ring, set with some kind of reddish stone. Pasquale held it in his hand for a moment as the woman walked away. Then he looked up to see that his mother was watching him, waiting to see what he would do. “Signora!” he called after the woman, and chased her down the beach. The woman stopped, took the ring back, thanked him, patted him on the head, and gave him a fifty-lira coin. When he returned, Pasquale’s mother said, “I hope that is what you would have done even if I wasn’t watching you.” Pasquale wasn’t sure what she meant. “Sometimes,” she said, “what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”