“Who doesn’t?”
In the near interior of Beau’s office there was an overstuffed white couch, a glass table with a large bowl of cinnamon jelly beans, a pitcher of ice water, and two cylindrical glasses. Today’s Daily Variety reported on the weekend gross for The Idolmaker, the ratings for “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the season premiere of Dallas.
“Davis DeLong!”
“Call back.”
Milt Schildkraut slipped the expense report, with which there was nothing wrong, back into its folder.
“You still married?”
“Yeah. You took the under?”
The two men chuckled.
“You gonna get her some work?”
“Nah.” Roland Mardigian had done that, gotten his restaurant girlfriend a spot in a series. It hadn’t worked out: they were separated already. “Not my style.”
“So whatcha gonna do?”
Morning light fell through the window at the far end, onto Beau’s desk and the leather-backed chair and the various trophies, on the spittoon and an autographed ball from Dusty Baker and Rick Rhoden and Ron Cey resting on a stand. Posters for Midnight Express, Being There. These offices could not have been more different from the old Talented Artists Group ones, being neither cloistered nor clubby; their plate-glass windows faced smog-tinged sky.
“We’re going to have a baby,” Beau said. “I’m going to knock her up.”
VI
“BITCH! FUCKING WHORE! CUNT!”
Beau Rosenwald stood, bare-chested, in his elegant kitchen at night. He was yelling those things at his wife, who was soon to be an ex-wife. You came to a certain point in life, you just knew how these things went.
“Fuck you! Beau, don’t.”
Star was teary. She was sitting down. She wore one of the original American Dream Machine shirts, a white baseball T with red sleeves, the company logo on the front, on the back a vaudevillian cartoon dog talking to his agent. What I really want to do is direct. Whatever she was contrite for, and she was, it overwhelmed her. She sat and wept while her husband prowled the crimson-tiled room, banging its steely fixtures with his hand.
“I don’t want to have a baby! I’m sorry, it’s too soon.”
“So you aborted one?”
“I did. I’m sorry.”
“How could you do that to me?”
“To you?” She shook her hair out of her face. Teary, angry, her expression sharpened also into something resolute as an adult’s. “How typical of you to imagine this is about yourself.”
“What d’you know from typical?” He waved her off, dismissive. “What do you know about anything, you shiksa whore?”
This was late autumn of ’81. They’d been married barely a year. I don’t know where Sev was during this, but if I were to hazard a guess I’d say in his room with his ’phones on, either masturbating or listening to The Wall.
“Fuck you, Beau. My father used to beat me!”
“He should’ve beat some sense into you.”
She glared. “How can you say that? You give money to Planned Parenthood, the Venice Family Clinic.”
He stared back, flexing his fingers. He could feel the impulse to really let fly, just as Herman Rosenwald’s voice roared in his ears. Fat shit! He was ugly, unattractive as he’d ever been with his bitch tits and his sloping belly, the top of it rolling over a pair of pale flannel trousers.
“I’d like to have another kid.”
“I know! Why can’t we wait a few years? We just got married!”
Why couldn’t they wait? The refrigerator hummed, the radio, which was almost always on in here, sat quiet. The track lights were moody. He went over to the fridge and got himself a Perrier. He offered her one too.
“I can’t wait,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“How come?” Did he know something, was he ill? “I just want to work, Beau, I want to accomplish things, my career!” Her career. “I’m so close, Beau. I could wait a year, two years, three years, five and I wouldn’t even be thirty! What’s the hurry?”
She did love him. She didn’t care that he was fat and rich, or that her stepson was a supercilious little prick who insulted her at every turn, lifting his eyebrows whenever he saw her with a massive paperback in her hand as if to ask, You enjoying that? The Other Side of the Mountain?
“I care. I care,” he said. But he didn’t in that moment and felt he might never again. “Oh, fuck it.”
She blinked back, soupy with tears. Her sincerity bugged him, the way she actually meant everything. Hadn’t Olivier told him, once, that the secret to being an actor was being untruthful?
“Get out of my house,” he roared, while she sniffled and wept. “I’m serious. Get the fuck out!”
How stupid she was! How stupid he was, ever to fall for her. How stupid, all of it, the way he forced a gorgeous girl who truly loved him—the first one, ever—to leave, to pick up her purse and shuffle out of the kitchen, clutching the long strap of the Bottega Veneta bag he’d bought her. He could hear her banging around the stairwell and weeping, her voice carrying and echoing off the tiles in the hall. Such histrionics! He felt nothing.
“Dad.”
Severin came in, later. Beau’d been sitting there for who knew how long, over at the table now with his forehead propped on his balled fists.
“What are you doing?”
Star was gone, the house was silent, Beau sat and willed himself toward a regret he could not feel, save for that lingering taste of failure. Was failure ever stronger, really, than when it was in remission? Did it ever actually go away?
“Your stepmother and I had a fight.”
“I heard.”
“You did? Sorry.”
Why couldn’t he be like Williams, in this respect, too? Why couldn’t he control his temper, why did he need a different woman every twenty minutes?
“It’s all right. Why aren’t you dressed?”
Severin was high, really high for one of the first times. Antigravitationally, skin-meltingly, face-crushingly stoned.
“I dunno.” Beau stood up, looked around the room without interest. He’d been sitting here forever, since midafternoon, reading scripts. Exactly as he’d been when Star dropped the bomb. “I had a shirt, somewhere.”
“Are you an athathin?” Sev mimicked Brando in Apocalypse.
“Not quite.” Beau laughed.
He loved his son. More than anything, he loved his son. The first spread of regret, the inkling he may have made a mistake, washed through him. Star was beautiful, stupid but magnificent. She was far better than he deserved.
“Hungry?”
Severin was scrambling eggs, cracking them now into the pan. One thing Sev could always do was cook, since who else was gonna do it? Beau couldn’t.
“I’m fucking starving, son.”
He watched Sev closely. Beau was aware of the marijuana in his son’s life, but what was he supposed to say about it? Don’t? He stood up.
“I’m going to put a shirt on.”
He went upstairs and got one, a salmon-colored bespoke he’d had made on Jermyn Street. The bedroom was a mess, Star’s shoes and jewelry flung everywhere and his tent-like clothes strewn across the floor. Who cared? This master suite was more like a hotel room, the gargantuan bed, the bottled water all over the place. A dildo stood upright on the nightstand. He’d lived like this always, the prisoner of his own sloth. He came back down, found Severin already sitting with a six-egg omelet.
“You want some of this? I’ll make you some. Dad.”
Sev’s face was frozen, bent into some weird rictus of befuddlement and hilarity.
“You OK, son?”
“Nah. Yes. I mean yes.” He was staring at his fork, at the scrap of egg at the end of it, like it contained some key to the cosmos. “I’m all right.”
He yelped and dropped his fork with a spastic little laugh. Beau went over to the counter and poured himself an enormous glass of Mount Gay rum over ice. Time to start drinking agai
n after months of eating like an insect, this actress with her actressy food. He sat down opposite his son, at the metal-framed breakfast table he’d owned since 1965. Practically everything else in the house was new.
“I’m sorry about your stepmother.”
“It’s OK.”
“It’s not OK.” Beau spoke slowly, the way he did when he had to make a tender point. He sipped his rum beneath the sickly light of the kitchen, the sullen yellow that never felt particularly like home. Except now, when he sat with his boy and tried to explain the unexplainable. “I know you miss your mother. Your real mother. Star and I tried to—”
“I don’t like her.”
“Sev!”
“I don’t. I think Star is fucking awful.”
“Awful?”
“Yes!” Severin laughed. “I think she’s a moron.”
Beau searched his son again. Awful wasn’t the same as stupid, actually, but the two things had some relation.
“Are you stoned?”
“Yes.”
Beau looked at his son in amazement. “I don’t want you to get high.”
“But you’re not going to punish me?”
“I can’t do that. No. But I don’t want you to do it, Severin, I don’t want you to smoke pot.”
“I will.”
“I know, but I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to want to.”
“Do you? Want to?”
Beau studied his kid. Stared at Sev’s checkered Vans that were graffitied along the rims with all sorts of obscure hieroglyphs, his skinny-legged jeans and a faded Hang Ten T-shirt that was a last vestige of his younger, proto-Californian self.
“Yes.”
Father and son got high, then. They smoked Severin’s pipe and then Beau ran upstairs to get his bong, which was better. He hid it in the back of his closet, though there’d no longer be any need, he supposed.
“This is some fantastic shit, Sev.”
“Thanks.”
“Where are you buying your drugs?” For a moment, he’d play the concerned father again. “I want you to tell me where you got this.”
“Can’t.”
It rankled him, also, that his son scored better pot than he could. By accident, whereas he was in touch with people whose contacts trucked it in from Humboldt themselves. In a minute it would all start up again—his car alarm would go off and he’d run outside to find Star beating on the hood of his turd-brown 911—but just now he looked at his kid and began roaring with laughter.
Beau never understood my brother. I think this is true. He never understood me either, but with Severin he at least had a chance. He loved him, and they resembled one another in ways that couldn’t fully be explained. In their self-estrangement, he sometimes thought. Sev didn’t know where he came from, either. What was it like, being someone whom everybody else—really—wondered about? Beau Rosenwald’s legitimate son and heir, or later, Severin Roth, the novelist. What was it like? Late at night Beau came into that kitchen and found Severin writing in a spiral-bound notebook, just covering page after page with his agitated scrawl in black ballpoint pen.
“Whatcha writing?”
“Stuff.”
The tail end of seventh grade. Severin hardly slept and neither did Beau, through that terminal and strange year. They were back to living as they once had, as an older brother and a weird, younger charge: some bizarre relationship that wasn’t exactly father-and-son, though it certainly wasn’t anything else either.
“What stuff? You did your algebra?”
“Yep.”
“So what stuff?”
Beau drank milk, for his stomach. Sev drank juice, OJ that looked fluorescent—like Tang—in the late-night kitchen. Crickets trilled outside. The radio was turned down to a mumble.
“Just stuff. Papers.”
“Papers?”
“Yep. Stuff.”
He held the notebook on his knees so no one could see any closer. Beau wasn’t all that curious, really. Boys wrote things, and no matter how closed Severin was—like a bivalve, an oyster before his father—he’d already admitted his worst sins. Don’t think Beau hadn’t searched the house for heavier drugs, and wouldn’t have recognized the signs, given what he did all day, the people he worked with.
“You still writing those letters?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”
“Are you high?”
“No.”
“You wanna be?”
“No thanks.”
Severin had been writing and receiving letters, to and from someone in Oregon. In sixth grade his class had been required to do this, they’d been paired with a sister school—Episcopal hippies, again—up there. Yet Severin continued to write to a person, a girl, Beau gathered, from up north.
“She still sending you letters?”
It was like that book, the Saul Bellow one Nicholson was crazy about. Herzog, not that he’d read it. A guy who writes a lot of letters. Some movie that would make!
“Yep.”
He’d seen hers, actually: they came to the house at regular intervals. Sometimes she sent packages, records or books. Beau never opened them, but he knew what they were from their shape.
“That’s sweet, Sev. I’m glad you have a girlfriend.”
“Screw off, Dad.”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Right. I never had one, when I was your age.”
Severin looked him up and down. “You’ve made up for it, haven’t you?”
This was their candor, Beau thought, and for this it was all worthwhile. He was a great father and a shitty one, a terrible husband and a fabulous agent and a hateful, loveable human being who seemed to inspire affection in others. He could be all these things at once, and if he was an imperfect guardian he was still better than he might’ve been otherwise. He could’ve been a bully, say, like his own dad.
“I’m going to sleep, Severin. Turn off the lights when you’re done?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And don’t do anything stupid.” This was close to hypocrisy, also. “Don’t let Star in if she comes back around this time.”
“Yuh.”
“Seriously. Last time she hit me with her shoe while I was sleeping. She beat me in the eye with a spiked heel to wake me up.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes. I didn’t just tell you that.”
Beau stretched. He lifted his hands over his head. Severin just kept writing, writing and writing and writing and writing. We were already those people, locked into our fates, just like our dad.
“G’night, Sev.”
“G’night.”
And the sound of his pen continued, scratching away in the near-dark. It wasn’t mightier than anything, in Beau’s experience: the sword, the cock. It was the weakest gesture a human could make, insofar as it acquiesced before experience. Whatever will be. Severin made this sound, while Beau climbed upstairs. Not knowing that as he did, my brother had already overthrown him.
VII
“REN, REN, REN, REN-”
Beau Rosenwald wanted another child? It turned out he was going to get one. Teddy and my mother were fighting, late at night. From my room I listened. Teddy’s voice was urgent and confidential, as he tried to calm my mother down.
“I’m trying to make this easy.”
“Easy?” my mother yipped. There was the sound of something toppling, a bottle or shaker, in the kitchen below. It was 1:00 AM. “Tell me exactly how easy this is. Tell me how easy it is for you.”
“Ren, be reasonable.”
“I won’t!” My mother’s voice rose to a peak. Chair legs scraped against the floor as she shoved away from the butcher-block table. “I won’t!”
I lay in headphones, with a pillow smothering my face. I couldn’t drown their shouting out, though, no matter how I tried.
“Ren—”
“Shut up! You cocksucking fairy!”
“No, just calm down.” This was T
eddy’s mode, the smooth-talking, rationalist salesman. Just as my mother was an emotional drunk. “I made a mistake.”
“You—”
“I made a mistake. Just like you did, once. Remember?”
“Don’t say it.”
“I will. Ren.” Teddy sighed. I could hear his weary resignation from upstairs. I took off my ’phones. What were they saying? The green lines of my alarm clock made a matchstick rebus in the dark. “Don’t you think we should come clean about this?”
“Clean? You fuck some actress and now you wanna talk to me about ‘clean’?”
“This isn’t about me,” Teddy said. “I’m talking about Nathaniel.”
The next sound was the brittle clap of my mother’s hand across his cheek. And then a silence so comprehensive it froze me in my bed. I waited and waited, but no one said anything. I could picture them down there, stunned. Just staring at one another in amazement, faces blazing and uncertain. Eventually, I heard a door open, and Teddy’s footsteps go tramping into the backyard.
Teddy picked me up from school, two days later. This wasn’t unusual. He sometimes did, when he had to leave work early to get ready for a premiere, say. But this time he pulled up in front of the house and just sat there. One hand on the wheel of his convertible.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I said.
He kept his eyes on the street. The tape deck had a cassette in it, which played West Coast jazz, very softly. Teddy was never hip; he was a few years older than the others and had slightly antiquated tastes. He turned slowly to face me now. His rimless glasses pinned me inside their reflection.
“Your mother has something to say to you.”
“Yeah?”
“We’ve been having . . . some difficulties.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Look, Nate.” He lifted his hand off the wheel. I could tell he wanted to put it on my arm, but ultimately he just set it back down. His knuckles were thick, and the backs of his hands had age spots. His blond hair was ashy in the afternoon light. The car bonnet too was a creamy, attenuated white. “I’ll always think of you a certain way. I always have.”
“Which way is that?”
I look back on this moment and feel mostly pity for him. I think I do, although it’s difficult to know.
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