American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “You need to talk to your mother.”

  Teddy Sanders was forty-eight. I, then, was thirteen. What was it like to belong to your family, the way Little Will and Severin both did? My stepfather stared through the windshield a moment, as it spangled with small drops of tropic rain.

  “She and I are going to take some time apart,” he said.

  I suppose I could’ve asked him why. But even if he knew, if the actress was the catalyst, there were other causes. I understood that also.

  “I see.”

  “No, Nate.” He turned to me. But what could he say? I met your mother when she was pregnant? It was her job to explain it to me now. “Go see your mom.”

  It was a dreary afternoon in November. The street was littered with palm roots, the brown pieces of trees that had snapped off and been blown through rains. The grass in front of my house glistened. Above the Pacific, clouds opened to show a shank of sun.

  “Right.” I got out of the car, laid my hand on the damp ragtop. “I’ll see you.”

  Teddy gripped the wheel. The sultry crawl of a jazz standard, all pinging vibes, drifted out. Rain trickled in the gutter. “I’ll see you, Nate.”

  I went up the front steps and across the walk. The car idled behind, like he was a teenager wanting to see his date in safely. Beneath the Greek Revival portico I rang my own doorbell and waited for my mom to let me in. I waited and waited. Did I live here anymore? Cold water dripped off the porch eave and ran down the nape of my neck.

  Finally, my mother answered. She opened the door and looked at me. Almost like I was a stranger, some bit of detritus that had blown onto the lawn.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Behind me, Teddy’s Mercedes revved, the engine roaring as he gunned off into the afternoon.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I had to ask. My mother and I sat in the dining room, that formal prison in which we’d eaten and maintained such energetic pretense, night after night and morning after morning. That day, it was a wreck of ashtrays, wineglasses, napkins, dregs, as if in the aftermath of a party.

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes drooped. Their green was lusterless. I felt like I’d never looked at her, like I was seeing her, too, for the first time “It was a long time ago.”

  “How does that excuse anything?”

  “It doesn’t.” Her speech was a little thick, but she was lucid. “Beau and I were never together. I was his . . . secretary.” Tiny wrinkles, proto-crow’s-feet, gathered at the corners of her eyes. “You have to understand what kind of person he was.”

  “What kind of person was he?”

  Outside, it had gone gray again. My mother lit a cigarette. I couldn’t really imagine her as a secretary either. I couldn’t imagine her as anything but my mom.

  “He didn’t always have the clearest perspective on things.” She blew smoke.

  “Do you?”

  She could’ve smacked me, but she didn’t. “Don’t be an ass, Nathaniel.”

  “Does Beau know?”

  She nodded. “Now he does.”

  “You told him?”

  Outside, I could hear the drone of an airplane, its low-flying complaint. Before me, a wineglass held a dark stain, a silty little thumbprint of Chianti.

  “Last night.”

  I listened to the plane. I tried to imagine that phone call, or encounter. I couldn’t do that either. Severin’s dad—our dad—was so much a figure of fun to my friends and me. Huge, blustering, loud. Why couldn’t it have been Williams? There was a moment in which I tried to salvage my dignity by imagining a father whose alienation, maybe, I could’ve understood. My mother seemed to read my mind.

  “Teddy’s your father,” she said. “He’s always acted as such.”

  Her heart wasn’t in it. Or maybe it was. I’ll never know. I got up and went to the kitchen and came back with a Coke.

  “Severin and I are brothers.”

  She shrugged. As if, quite fairly, she’d never really given it a lot of thought.

  “How do you know it wasn’t Williams?” I said. I wanted it to be him, just then. Or maybe I just wanted it to be anyone but the big man. “How do you know it was Beau?”

  “Fuck you,” she said, as she had every right to do. “You’re my son, but don’t ever talk to me that way.”

  My mother had gotten skinny. Her beauty was gaunt, a little desolate, now. I could see her bones.

  “I’m gonna go see him,” I said. “I’m going over to Severin’s.”

  “Suit yourself.” She stubbed out her cigarette. It was a 100, barely narrower than her own finger. “You don’t know, Nate. You don’t know what he’s like.”

  I didn’t. And I didn’t know if this was a warning, or just an observation. I got up and went to the door, waving away smoke.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”

  I walked to Severin’s house. He too lived in Santa Monica, only a few blocks away from me. I crossed Carlyle, angled up Ninth. I felt no urgency, no real impulse to speak. Not to Beau, and barely to Severin. Beau was still, in a way, peripheral: my stepdad was his colleague, and I was his son’s best friend. This made him the Law, someone Severin and I were dedicated to avoiding. I was newly curious, and newly repulsed. I wandered over through the darkening humidity and drank my soda. What would he do?

  “Hey.” Severin answered the door. He just stood there, looking at me a long minute.

  “Hey.” In my hand was the crinkled aluminum column, the empty Coke can. “You heard?”

  He nodded. In a way, it didn’t make any difference; we couldn’t be any closer than we were already. We couldn’t be any more opaque to each other, either.

  “What did your dad say?”

  Severin smiled. Beneath the glasses, his face had sharpened. His eyes were deep and cagey like an adult’s. “He’s your dad too.”

  “I suppose.”

  We were thirteen, going on thirty, or twelve. The world was weird, but we weren’t going to let that fact dominate us. He summoned me in.

  “What did he say?”

  I brushed past him into the vestibule. Beau’s house was vast, cool and Spanish, and it was much bigger than my mom’s. The downstairs was dark as we picked our way through a formal—untouched—living room larded with art books, expensive paintings, maps. An Ed Moses abstraction hung over the fireplace.

  “He’s going through some stuff right now,” Sev murmured. “He’s a little freaked out.”

  We clipped the tasseled edge of a byzantine rug; crossed the cool tiles of an unused second dining room. None of these things, so suggestive of culture and curiosity, felt like Beau. Then again, what did I know of Beau’s life? Now that it suddenly occurred to me to wonder about it. A script lay on the table, a Montblanc pen. Mine, I thought.

  We ducked into Severin’s bedroom finally, that shadowy blue sanctum in the house’s northwest corner. As far from his father’s room, upstairs, as could be. His dad. My dad. Quite frankly, I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to gain a son, or a sibling, in either of their positions. I felt a spike of—yes—envy, stepping into Severin’s room.

  “What?” Severin looked at me.

  “Nothing.” I brought the Coke can up, a weirdly automatic gesture. “You wanna smoke out?”

  We did. Punching a hole in the Coke can, hunkering down at the base of Sev’s bed, next to his turntable. It had never occurred to me to envy Severin before. How could it? But my resentment wasn’t rooted in materialism—it wasn’t about the size of his room, with its nooks and walk-in closet, nor all the toys scattered around it, a Fender Stratocaster he could barely play—nor was it about any closeness he could share with our father. It was simply authenticity, the very fact his life was what it appeared to be.

  “Y’all right?”

  I lay on my back now, smoke clouding into the air above me. His walls were swimming-pool blue, the carpet the color of seawater. My fingers tingled with that hot, illegal feeling where I’d singed th
em on the aluminum.

  “Yeah.” I felt like I’d been gone a long time, even though I’d probably left my mother’s house barely ten minutes ago. “What did you mean . . . ” I groped through a fog. “Freaked out?”

  “Who?”

  “My—your—dad.”

  I sat up. I wasn’t sure whether I could ever call him “mine,” but I folded my arms around my knees and hugged them, looked at Severin with a desperation so fierce I was sure he’d feel it.

  “Divorce stuff,” Severin mumbled. I was tearing up, but he just glowered into space in front of him. “Work.”

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  Severin shrugged. The Coke can smoldered at his feet.

  “He said, ‘I barely even knew Ren had a kid.’”

  “What?”

  Severin shook his head. “He’s going through things, Nate. Don’t worry.”

  I took a breath. That Beau could be out to lunch on this scale, that Severin’s best friend—I was—could register so little in his agitated and ego-mad brain. I’d known him now for seven years! My stepdad was his business partner. He’d fucked my mom, and of course he knew my name, greeted me by it whenever he saw me at school or around his house, which was often. I barely even knew Ren had a kid. I don’t know why, but this restored a kind of reality to the situation. I started to laugh.

  “That’s funny?”

  “Yeah.” Severin and I were related! The more surreal things got, the more they turned out to be true. “It’s hilarious, in fact.”

  The smoke was dense, slow, roiling between us. I turned down the volume on the turntable. Severin nodded finally, his lips twisting into a wry smile.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m really, really glad.”

  That was the last we would speak of it for a long while. We were related already, in fact. We always had been.

  “Let’s get some munchies,” I said, and stood up.

  We trooped back toward the kitchen, just like we had a thousand times in the past. I don’t know why I was so happy, except for Severin being glad too. We entered the kitchen and found Beau sitting alone at the far table. Just leaning there with his back against the wall and his belly slumped low in his chair.

  “Nate,” he said when we came in.

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes were dull, and I suspected for a moment he was high also, but I don’t think he was. I think he was just tripping on his life’s strangeness, and suffering kinds of pain and regret I could not possibly have understood. He was home early for a work night. His tie was unknotted, and his cuffs were folded back twice.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What?” I said. Severin had disappeared into the pantry. I was alone with my father for the first time ever, and I was surprised by his casualness. “What do I think . . . ?”

  Severin came out. He lobbed a bag of prawn crisps—fucking crisps, because the man had his junk food trucked in from England—at Beau, who caught it.

  “Yeah.” A faint smile crossed his face under the mustache, the beard. He tore open the package. “You know.”

  It was more than I could handle, and less than I wanted. My tongue went dry. “I think . . . ”

  It must’ve amused him, seeing me so puzzled. It might have delighted him, insofar as he’d wanted another child, and it probably tore him to pieces, for reasons I can only guess.

  He stood up. He crossed the room on legs that were too quick, little trotters, and cuffed my cheek. Just that, mopping my face with a salty paw, a greasy thumb. I don’t see it, he seemed to say. His eyes were veiny, a little cloudy.

  “How’s your mother?” He stared down.

  “You talked to her.”

  He nodded. His shirt had fine gray lines, or wales, on it. I didn’t know for sure. I was so weirded out to see him, I honestly didn’t know what to say. Severin tore open his own bag in the corner. It gave a loud, rupturing sound. PAF!

  “I’ve had some weird shit,” Beau murmured, and he shook his head. But he didn’t finish. I think he appreciated the strangeness, more than I did. “Make yourself at home.”

  I could smell his breath, reconstituted prawn dust. I didn’t see it either. The greasy spot on my cheek was like a wound. I don’t think I’ve ever felt an ordinary touch for as long as I did that one.

  He went back to the table, and I went to the fridge to get a glass of milk. For a moment, the three of us ate or drank in silence. Again, I wanted to laugh. Were we a family? We couldn’t have resembled one another less. We ate and drank, and by the time I guzzled my milk and set the glass down in the sink, I turned and saw Severin had gone back to his room.

  God knows what Beau was thinking. My father. How on earth would I ever understand this, or him?

  He snacked away. Oblivious to my presence, as he had always been, apparently. I stood with my back to the sink while he mowed down that bag of prawn crisps, then shook himself out of a stupor. When he did, finally, his eyes crossed mine.

  “Nate . . . ?”

  Either one of us might have said something then. We might have said anything at all. He knew more—much more—than he’d let on, I realized. I barely knew Ren had a kid. Bullshit. There was something in the sly vulnerability of his expression, its accidental quality, that let me in. He coughed. You need something, Nate? Anything?

  Because I was young, and terrified and high, I just turned and left the room.

  It changed my life. Not as much as other things would, but it did. This consciousness that I was made from the same stuff as that man, that I might contain as much appetite and energy, or as much craziness. I found myself studying Will’s father too, trying to track what connected Beau to his partner. If Beau was my dad, then what about the man my father was not? Like matter and antimatter, I understood them to be mirrors of one another. So what moved Williams? What might he be hiding?

  “Dudes!” Little Will’s voice echoed across a crater. If this changed everything, it also altered nothing at all. “Yo, check this out!”

  We’d found a pool, an abandoned concrete hole behind an unfinished condominium complex in the Marina. Severin’s sneakers clanged into the links of a chain-wire fence while he hoisted himself over it to follow our friend.

  “Check this out!” Little Will called again.

  We were brothers. OK, half brothers, but if Sev and I were both Beau’s, that didn’t leave a lot of room for anybody else. His mother had been missing for years, and mine was radioactive. Teddy came back to her, then left again. There was late-night drinking, solitary benders in our kitchen. Once she wept so loudly the neighbors called the police. I scaled the fence behind Severin, then dropped down to land on the terrace.

  “Yo.” Williams’s skateboard clattered against asphalt, and I heard the soft rush and whir of his wheels, the friction of his body in wind. “Whooo—”

  Severin and I watched him glide up a wall of the empty pool and pop out, effortlessly, into the air. He wasn’t afraid of anything, not eleven feet of gravity and concrete that would crush his skull. Nothing. This was what it took to carve ecstasy out of doubt.

  Severin whistled under his breath. I was acutely aware that his blood and mine were the same, that if you cut either one of us, you’d find the same subcutaneous truth. But did it change our relation, really? Did it make Beau my dad?

  Williams’s hair helicoptered around his head. His knees, which were white from ceaseless battering, came up tight to his chest as he grabbed his skate and flashed back into the air. This was more eloquent than anything any one of us could say: the clop and clatter of the skateboard, as stately in its way as a horse’s hooves.

  Finally he fell. Severin and I stood shoulder to shoulder; we leaned into one another as Williams scrambled off his board at the bottom of the pool. He climbed out.

  “You.” He jabbed the skate at Severin, smacking its flat side into his chest. “You’re next.”

  Severin barely skated, but what could he do? Translucent yellow wrappers blew acros
s the patio, fast food scraps. He took the board from Williams and descended into the pool.

  “Fuck,” Will muttered. “I can’t believe you dudes are related.”

  It seemed to amuse him. I suppose it made him, too, more special. He’d found this place, this half-built condo complex up on a hilltop not far from the airport. It took us two bus rides and a hike to reach it. Now we could see the ocean below, the pale mirror of the Pacific visible through gray haze.

  Severin puttered crabwise, conservative around the bottom of the pool. He was tragic on a skateboard. Still, he attempted a drop-in from the midpoint of the shallow end. He went down hard, banging his elbow on the drain.

  “Ow! Fuck!”

  He writhed onto his back, not badly hurt, just stamping his tennies on the pool’s concrete. Ow ow ow ow ow!

  Severin came up the steps, finally, and handed me the skateboard. Around us was all kinds of detritus. There were overturned deck chairs, a pair of painter’s gloves, old newspapers. A flier protesting Prop 13 was up in one of the windows of the empty units behind us.

  I took the board and descended into the pool. The sun burned fiercely, almost white, and the wind stirred the long grasses on the hillside beneath us. My nose filled with the brackish smell of sea air. Finally I stumbled off the skate—I was nowhere near as good as Williams, but I could hold my own—and climbed back out over the coping. I’d banged my knee, aggravated my ankle.

  “What are you looking at?” I limped around now to join them, where they sat astride the diving platform that hung over the deep end.

  Between them was an old issue of Daily Variety. God knew where it had come from. Its pages were water-warped and wind-creased.

  Severin shrugged, a little twitch of languid resignation. He and Williams sat hunched over it like chess players, facing one another. Sev’s back was to the pool.

  He handed it to me. Our fathers were on the front page, above the fold. The article was six weeks old, but it noted their agency had grossed $49 million last year, more than the other top two agencies combined.

  “They’re everywhere,” young Williams said.