Free Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter Page A

away.
    Pasquale thought she was laughing at his cigarettes.
    “They are expensive,” he said defensively. “Spanish.”
    She tossed her hair back. “Oh, no. I’ve been thinking about how people sit around for years waiting for their lives to begin, right? Like a movie. You know what I mean?”
    “Yes,” said Pasquale, who had lost the sense of what she was saying after people sit but was so taken by the toss of her liquid blond hair and her confidential tone that he would have agreed to having his own fingernails pulled out and fed to him.
    She smiled. “I think so, too. I know I felt that way. For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?”
    He did know what she meant! It was just how he felt—like someone sitting in the cinema waiting for the film to start. “Yes!” he said.
    “Right?” she asked, and she laughed. “And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exciting part, the action? It’s all so fast.” Her eyes ran across his face and he flushed. “Maybe you can’t even believe it . . . maybe you find yourself on the outside looking in, like watching strangers eat in a nice restaurant?”
    Now she’d lost him again. “Yes, yes,” he said anyway.
    She laughed easily. “I’m so glad you know what I mean. Imagine, for instance, being a small-town actress going out to look for film work and having your first role be in Cleopatra ? Could you possibly even believe that?”
    “Yes,” Pasquale answered more assuredly, picking out the word Cleopatra .
    “Really?” She laughed. “Well, I sure couldn’t.”
    Pasquale grimaced. He’d answered incorrectly. “No,” he tried.
    “I’m from this small town in Washington.” She gestured around with the cigarette again. “Not this small, obviously. But small enough that I was a big deal there. It’s embarrassing now. Cheerleader. County Fair Princess.” She laughed at herself. “I moved to Seattle after high school to act. Life seemed inevitable, like rising out of water. All I had to do was hold my breath and rise all the way to the surface. To some kind of fame or happiness or . . . I don’t know . . .” She looked down. “Something.”
    But Pasquale was stuck on one word he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly: princess ? He thought Americans didn’t have royalty, but if they did . . . what would that mean to his hotel, to have a princess stay here?
    “Everyone was always telling me, ‘Go to Hollywood . . . you should be in pictures.’ I was acting in community theater and they raised money for me to go. Can you beat that?” She took another drag. “Maybe they wanted to get rid of me.” She leaned in, confiding. “I’d had this . . . fling with another actor. He was married. It was stupid.”
    She stared off, and then laughed. “I’ve never told anyone this, but I’m two years older than they think I am. The casting guy for Cleopatra ? I told him I was twenty. But I’m really twenty-two.” She thumbed through the typed carbon pages of Alvis Bender’s little novel as if the story of her own life were contained in its pages. “I was using a new name anyway, so I thought, Why not pick a new age, too? If you give them your real age, they sit in front of you doing this horrible math, figuring out how long you have left in the business. I couldn’t bear it.” She shrugged and set the book down again. “Do you think that was wrong?”
    He had a fifty-fifty chance of getting this one right. “Yes?”
    She seemed disappointed at his answer. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Something like that always catches up with you. It’s the thing I hate most about myself. My vanity. Maybe that’s why . . .” She didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she took a last drag of her