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?
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks: to Natasha De Bernardi and Olga Gardner Galvin for help with my brutto Italiano; to Sam Ligon, Jim Lynch, Mary Windishar, Anne Walter, and Dan Butterworth for giving the book reads at various stages; to Anne and Dan for enduring hikes in the Cinque Terre; to Jonathan Burnham, Michael Morrison, and everyone at HarperCollins; and most of all, to my editor, Cal Morgan, and my agent, Warren Frazier, for their generous work, support, and guidance.
About the Author
Jess Walter is the author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award–winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, and the New York Times Notable Book Over Tumbled Graves. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.
www.jesswalter.com
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Also by Jess Walter
FICTION
The Financial Lives of the Poets
The Zero
Citizen Vince
Land of the Blind
Over Tumbled Graves
NONFICTION
Ruby Ridge
Credits
Cover photograph © Blonde Marson/Alamy
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
Map illustrated by Shawn E. Davis
Copyright
Beautiful Ruins is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, and any real names or locales used in the book are used fictitiously. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. . . .
BEAUTIFUL RUINS. Copyright © 2012 by Jess Walter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780062098085
Version 07132012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-192812-3
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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