Pasquale smiled at his friend. “Thank you, Orenzio.”
“Fellater of goats,” Orenzio said quietly.
“You already said that one,” Pasquale said.
Orenzio mimed finishing a beer.
Then they both looked toward the cliff side, forty meters uphill, where the first American guest since the death of his father stood regarding the front door of his hotel. Here is the future, thought Pasquale.
Dee Moray stopped and looked back down at them. She shook out her ponytail and her sun-bleached hair snapped and danced around her face as she took in the sea from the village square. Then she looked at the sign and cocked her head, as if trying to understand the words:
THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW
And then the future tucked her floppy hat under her arm, pushed open the door, ducked, and went in.
After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he’d somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he’d created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude. He glanced over at Orenzio, who was carrying someone’s bags, and the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He’d never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom—it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body—and it thrilled him in a way that he could never have explained.
“Dee Moray,” Pasquale Tursi said, suddenly, aloud, breaking the spell of his thoughts. Orenzio looked over. Then Pasquale turned his back and said the name again, to himself this time, in something less than a whisper, embarrassed by the hopeful breath that formed those words. Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
2
The Last Pitch
Recently
Hollywood, California
Before sunrise—before Guatemalan gardeners in dirty dinged lawn trucks, before Caribbeans come to cook, clean, and clothe, before Montessori, Pilates, and Coffee Bean, before Benzes and BMWs nose onto palmed streets and the blue-toothed sharks resume their endless business—the gentrification of the American mind—there are the sprinklers: rising from the ground to spit-spray the northwest corner of Greater Los Angeles, airport to the hills, downtown to the beaches, the slumbering rubble of the entertainment regime.
In Santa Monica, they call to Claire Silver in the predawn quiet of her condo—psst hey—her curly red hair splayed out on the pillow like a suicide. They whisper again—psst hey—and Claire’s eyelids flutter; she inhales, orients, glances over at the marbled shoulder of her boyfriend, sprawled asleep on his 70 percent of the king-size. Daryl often cracks the bedroom window behind their bed when he comes in late, and Claire wakes like this—psst hey—to water spritzing the rock garden outside. She’s asked the condo manager why it’s necessary to water a bed of rocks every day at five A.M. （or at all, for that matter）， but of course sprinklers are not the real issue.
Claire wakes jonesing for data; she fumbles on the crowded bedside table for her BlackBerry, takes a digital hit. Fourteen e-mails, six tweets, five friend requests, three texts, and her calendar—life in a palm. General stuff, too: Friday, sixty-six degrees on the way to seventy-four. Five phone calls scheduled today. Six pitch meetings. Then, amid the info dump she sees a life-changing e-mail, from [email protected]. She opens it.
Dear Claire,
Thanks again for your patience during this long process. Both Bryan and I were very impressed by your credentials and your interview and we’d like to meet you to talk more. Would you be available for coffee this morning?
Sincerely,
James Pierce
Museum of American Screen Culture
Claire sits up. Holy shit. They’re going to offer her the job. Or are they? Talk more? They’ve already interviewed her twice; what can they possibly need to talk about? Is this it? Is today the day she gets to quit her dream job?
Claire is chief development assistant for the legendary film producer Michael Deane. The title’s phony—her job’s all assisting, no developing, and she’s nobody’s chief. She tends Michael’s whims. Answers his calls and e-mails, goes for his sandwiches and coffee. And mostly she reads for him: great herds of scripts and synopses, one-sheets and treatments—a stampede of material going nowhere.
She’d hoped for so much more when she quit her doctoral film studies program and went to work for the man who was known in the seventies and eighties as the “Deane of Hollywood.” She’d wanted to make movies—smart, moving films. But when she arrived three years ago, Michael Deane was in the worst slump of his career, with no recent credits save the indie zombie bomb Night Ravagers. In Claire’s three years, Deane Productions has made no other movies; in fact, its only production has been a single television program: the hit reality show and dating Web site Hookbook （Hookbook.net）。