Michael thanks him, and then asks Shane, “Will you ask if he wants money?”
Pasquale jerks at the word money. He looks mildly disgusted. “No. I come . . . to find . . . Dee Moray.”
Michael Deane nods, a bit pained. “I have no idea where she is,” Michael says. “I’m sorry.” Then he looks at Claire, as if for help.
“I Googled her,” Claire says. “I tried different spellings, looked at the IMDb listing for Cleopatra. There’s nothing.”
“No,” Michael says, chewing his lip. “There wouldn’t be. It wasn’t her real name.” He rubs his lineless face again, considers Pasquale, and turns to Shane. “Please, translate for me. Tell him that I am sorry for the way I behaved back then.”
“Lui è dispiaciuto,” Shane says.
Pasquale nods slightly, acknowledging the words if not accepting them. Whatever is between these two men, Shane thinks, it runs deep. Then there is a buzzing and Claire brings her cell phone to her ear. She answers it, and says calmly into the device: “You’re gonna have to go get your own chicken.”
All three men stare at her. She clicks off the call. “Sorry,” she says, then opens her mouth to explain but thinks better of it.
Michael looks back to Pasquale and Shane again. “Tell him I’ll find her. That it’s the least I can do.”
“Egli vi aiuterà a . . . um . . . trovarla.”
Pasquale simply nods again.
“Tell him that I plan to do this right away, that I consider it an honor to be able to help, and a chance for redemption, to complete the circle of this thing that I started so many years ago. And please tell him that I never had any intention of hurting anyone.”
Shane rubs his brow, looks from Michael to Claire. “I’m not sure how to . . . I mean . . . Um . . . Lui vuole fare il bene.”
“That’s it?” Claire says. “He said fifty words. You said, like, four.”
Shane feels stung by the criticism. “I told you, I’m not a translator. I don’t know how to say all of that; I just said, He wants to do good now.”
“No, that’s right,” Michael says. He looks with admiration at Shane, and for a moment, Shane imagines parlaying this translation job into a screenwriting deal. “That’s exactly what I want to do,” Michael says. “I want to do good. Yes.” Then Michael turns to Claire. “This is our number one priority now, Claire.”
Shane watches all of this with fascination and disbelief. This morning he was sitting in his parents’ basement; now he’s in Michael Deane’s office （the Michael Deane’s office!） while the legendary producer barks orders to his development assistant. In the words of the prophet Mamet, Act as if . . . Go with it. Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.
Michael Deane pulls an old Rolodex from a desk drawer and begins spinning it while he talks to Claire. “I’m going to get Emmett Byers to work on this right away. Can you get Mr. Tursi and the translator settled in a hotel?”
“Look,” Shane Wheeler says, surprising even himself, “I told you. I’m not a translator. I’m a writer.”
They all turn to look at him, and for a moment Shane questions his resolve, recalls the dark period he’s just come through. Before that, Shane Wheeler always knew he was headed for great things. Everyone told him so—not just his parents, but strangers, too—and while he didn’t exactly tear it up in college and Europe and grad school （all on his parents’ dime, as Saundra liked to point out）， he never doubted he’d be a success.
But during the collapse of his brief marriage, Saundra （and the crabby marriage counselor who clearly took her side） described a very different pattern: a boy whose parents never said no, who never required him to do chores or to get a job, who stepped in whenever he got into trouble （Exhibit A: the spring-break thing with the police in Mexico）， who supported him financially long after they should have. Here he was, almost thirty, and he’d never had a real job. Here he was, seven years out of college, two years out of his master’s program, married—and his mother still sent him a monthly clothing allowance? （She likes buying my clothes, Shane argued. Isn’t it cruel to make her stop?）
In that doomed final month of the marriage—in what felt like a live autopsy of his manhood—Saundra tried to make him feel “better” by insisting it wasn’t entirely his fault; he was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents—by their mothers especially—raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.