American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Yep.” Sev took the paper back. It drifted out of his fingers and fell to the bottom of the pool. “No escape.”

  Nineteen-eighty-two. That was the difference between us. My friends couldn’t escape, whereas I was at a loss. Beau was in both of their lives. Even young Williams had more of his attention—the Partner’s Son—than I did. That’s how it felt, and in many ways this painful fact would direct the course of my adulthood.

  “Hsssss.” Williams reached into his pocket and pulled out a pipe, then packed it densely with weed. He lit it, and I listened to that small, ominous crackling sound. We passed it between us, gasping and coughing softly.

  A plane roared overhead, its vapor trail drowning us out as it descended into the airport. We stood up and scampered for the fences. My palms were raw, and Severin was limping. Williams heaved his skate over the fence and climbed first, kicking a NO TRESPASSING sign with the toe of his Vans, snagging his OP corduroys. We tumbled down into the long grass below—Severin a half step ahead of us as we left, cattails whispering against my legs, behind us only silence, emptiness, voracity, a void.

  VIII

  WILLIAMS FARQUARSEN III had an idea. The senior statesman of American Dream Machine, its architect and president—my other, secret father—thought Hollywood ought to belong to its artists. It wasn’t a new idea—Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford had once felt the same—but in the early 1970s its time seemed to have come again. Williams’s earliest plans for ADM centered on how the new agency could wrest power from the studios. This was their pitch: You think Sam Smiligan has your interests at heart? Sam’s old enough to have sucked Louis Mayer’s cock. He takes his vacations with Wasserman. How in God’s name do you expect him to protect you from the studio when he is the studio? It went something like that. Rub enough sand in an actor’s eyes and he’ll come crying. Williams knew what to do. It was easy enough in the beginning to square nurturing a client’s career with servicing her creative vision. But as you grew, as a corporation and as a man, it became harder to see where you stood. Was American Dream Machine a solution, or was it a problem? Did enriching your clients, earning more money for Jack Nicholson or Alan Pakula, increase everyone’s power or diminish your own soul?

  “Beau!” The big man was on his way past his partner’s office when Will called out. “Come in for a second.”

  Beau stepped in. He was just back from New York, where he’d been for a few days, visiting Belushi. Williams stood behind his desk. He never sat anymore. He was small and agile, still dressed in his faded jeans and radiant white shirts, still long-haired at the beginning of ’82.

  “Where ya been?” Will said. “Sit.”

  Beau grunted and remained standing at the foot of Williams’s desk. Like everyone else in the company who wasn’t Will, Beau wore a suit by then. American Dream Machine was a corporation, it behaved like one; on the floor beneath them a phalanx of accountants now worked day and night.

  “Whaddya need?”

  “How was New York? You saw Bob?”

  “I saw John. And Marty.”

  Beau narrowed his eyes. You see, things were becoming complicated. Williams had been best man at Beau’s wedding; they’d carried each other, in different ways, for years. Yet all this balancing of business, the striving to be equal, had its consequences. Once, they’d been such friends. Now they were mainly partners and sharers of information.

  “How’s Marty?”

  Beau equivocated with his hands. Still Italian, still needy, still brilliant (read: nuts).

  “And John?”

  “Hungry. Fuck.”

  Williams laughed. They both did.

  “Just so long as people stay hungry for him,” Williams said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  With or without intimacy, Beau still had a certain ability to read his partner’s mind. He went over to the fridge along the far wall of Williams’s office and twisted the cap off a Ramlösa.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Their corner offices were identical. Will’s glass dish was full of Hershey’s Kisses instead. Beau slugged the fizzy water and shrugged. “We’re not painting the Sistine Chapel here. Not everything should be Raging Bull.”

  Beau wore Italian loafers along with his blue suit. He ran his thumb absently along the margin of his silk tie.

  “What’s bugging you, Will?”

  “I’m restless.”

  “How come?”

  Didn’t Beau understand? He’d spent the last Saturday night with Belushi, sucking down rails of cocaine until 4:00 AM. At which point, a trio of hookers came in and ate strawberries off their balls.

  “Are you bored, Will?”

  “Not quite.”

  “We put together crap movies back at Talented Artists. They were worse, not that anybody remembers.”

  “We had an excuse to make bad movies then. We were hungry enough to make anything.”

  “So?”

  Beau sat, finally. Over the couch were signed one-sheets for Rollover, Brubaker, Cannery Row. He sipped his water.

  “I think you should go to New York,” Williams said.

  “I was just in New York.”

  “No,” Williams said. “I think you should go . . . for a while.”

  Behind him the Century City morning was mild. Sunlight laminated the oil derrick that sat on the edge of the Beverly Hills High campus. Wouldn’t there always be enough to share? Williams fished a tangerine out of a small Chinese bowl.

  “We decided when we formed this place,” Beau said. “No New York office.”

  “I know.” Williams peeled the tangerine.

  “So are you pushing me out?” Beau smiled. “You know I’ll screw you harder, you son of a bitch.”

  Williams smiled back. They weren’t quite serious; there was tenderness inside the aggression.

  “This morning I did a deal for Dabney Coleman,” Williams said. He set the peeled tangerine on his desk, which was otherwise empty except for a Cross pen and a phone. “I was pushing his quote, just arguing away with the studio, and I thought . . . what am I doing?”

  Beau grunted. Dabney Coleman! The skinless tangerine looked small, gelatinous, and vulnerable. Beau understood those moments when you were negotiating and the object suddenly became not to win but to save face with yourself.

  “Then I thought, what would Beau do about this?”

  “I’d close the deal and complain to Horowitz.”

  “What else?” Williams looked at him, almost pleading.

  “I am not moving back to New York.” Yet Beau cocked his head. I’m listening.

  “Just for a year. Half your clients are there. Bob. John. Marty. I’ll let you have Marty all by yourself.”

  Beau laughed. “Thanks for that. And what about my people here? Davis.”

  “Fuck Davis. Davis isn’t working.” This was true, Davis DeLong’s last picture had been a flop. Eight million total gross for a film in which he played an alcoholic firefighter. “This is about conscience. This is about our soul.”

  “Our soul? Are you getting Pentecostal again?”

  Now it was Williams’s turn to laugh. These men had one essential thing in common: when they first met at TAG they had recognized each other as kin. Will was a gentleman, and if Beau could never quite be that, they still aspired to a shared condition. Nature had taught this particular beast to know his friends, and if Williams—still—read Keats and preached negative capability, and Beau continued to pronounce the name of the Shakespeare play Waxmorton once gave him with a weird emphasis on the last two syllables, they were bound yet by love.

  “In the beginning we were artists,” Will said. “There were cave paintings.”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t remember any of Dabney Coleman.” He leaned forward now, his palms on his desk. “It’s not for keeps. We just need a New York presence for a while.”

  “A presence.” The fat man fixed him with a leaden stare.

&n
bsp; “Yes.” Williams paused. “I know there are reasons you might not want to go. Other reasons.”

  “Mmm,” Beau said.

  “How’s that going?”

  He and Will had never discussed me. In fact, I’m not sure Beau ever discussed me with anyone, except Horowitz. In Will’s eyes, I was Teddy’s boy. Except . . . he knew.

  “OK,” Beau muttered, shaking his head, brushing away the cobwebs. “All right.”

  Williams watched him. Was he probing his old friend for weakness, or was he trying to protect him from the same? I know it was strange for Beau to gain a kid. I’m sure it was painful, as it could not have been otherwise. But he didn’t say a word to his partner, in any case.

  “All right,” Beau repeated. “Fine. I’ll do it, I’ll go.”

  “You will?” Williams sounded almost surprised.

  “Yep.” Maybe he wanted to get away. “Just for one year.”

  “Great. You don’t have to worry, you know.”

  “Why would I do that?” Beau roared back. He narrowed his eyes. “What exactly would I have to worry about, Will?”

  Williams waved his hand, as if to set him at ease. “We’ll take care of everything here, you know. You can wait until the summer. Severin can go to any school you want.”

  Unspoken, perhaps, were the words I’d have wanted to hear, myself. I’ll look after Nate and his mother, in your absence and Teddy’s. I think that is what Williams meant, but I’ll never know.

  “I’ll be back,” Beau said.

  “You’re not even leaving. Your office, Linda: these things stay.” Will turned for a moment to look out his window. “We just need to serve notice of the fact that we’re not prisoners of this place. We’re not just hostages of market forces.”

  “We are market forces. How can we be hostages?”

  Williams sighed. This was the problem, at its root.

  “You’re the only guy who can do this for me, Beau. The only one here I trust.”

  Beau stood up and strode over to Will’s desk. He set his palms there, against the black onyx slab that gleamed in the morning sun.

  “Only me, huh?” He chortled. “I’ve heard that song before.”

  Will’s desk was so clean you could eat off it; so clean it gave back the reflection of his tangerine whole, the orange-bright orb and its shining double, almost more tantalizing than the fruit itself. Will picked it up now and halved it, then handed a portion to his partner.

  “What’s this?” Beau said.

  “It’s a tithe.”

  “A tithe? It’s my fucking company too.”

  “I know.” Will smiled. He removed a section from his own and set it down on the table. “See that there? That’s God’s. That’s half the ten percent he takes at birth.”

  “And those?” Beau nodded to the ones in Williams’s palm.

  “These? These are my own children.” Williams laughed. “I always take less than I give.”

  A long look passed between them, one of those mutual searchings that had become more frequent, even as Will had never—not once—given his partner reason to doubt. Even as their bond seemed more complex, more inextricable than ever. Beau ate his tangerine. When Will tossed an extra quarter across the desk, he ate that too. Then he left. The elephant, exiting the room.

  IX

  I DON’T WANT to say I didn’t miss him. What fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t miss his father, even if that father is also a stranger? But I missed Severin more. Ninth grade was the year Williams and I retired our skateboards, our grubby, preadolescent customs. The two of us remained at Untaken, a funky private high school built by refugees from St. Jerome, while Sev was beamed up and abducted to another planet, became the Man Who Fell to Earth.

  “Yo, dude.” Williams called Sev from the wall phone in my mother’s kitchen.

  “Dudes!” Now it was Severin mocking us when we called. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re at Nate’s house hot-knifing hash.”

  “Hot-knifing?”

  Another Friday night. I guess Williams wanted to prove to Sev we were getting something he wasn’t. But this, my mother’s radical permissiveness, was the best he could come up with. Teddy had left her again, this time for good. And in the absence of any sort of authority—my mother was nodding out in the living room over her fourth vodka tonic—we crouched by the oven, warming knives on which we’d spread hash before vaporizing the substance into a funnel.

  “It’s our new thing,” Will snickered, before I came over and wrestled the phone away from him.

  “Whatcha doin’, brother?”

  “Oh, Nate!” How he soared above me now. Those six months older could’ve been six years, from the sound of it. “Nothing, watching O Lucky Man! Just sitting here in the hotel.”

  “How’s pops?” I rolled the word around to make it mocking.

  “Phah.” He exhaled, as if this topic were beneath his contempt. “The same.”

  He cupped the receiver with his hand. I heard him say something inaudible, a girl’s voice answering him. It would’ve been one o’clock in the morning, there.

  “Who are you with?”

  “Some chick.”

  God. He sounded like an actor himself, in his jet-lagged and exaggerated boredom. It was hard to miss someone like that, but I’d come to believe Sev was my only witness, the only one—in a sense—who could explain me to myself. And yet he barely deigned to do so, then as ever.

  “Put Will back on for just a sec, I want to tell him something.”

  Bastard. He went to Dalton. He lived at the St. Regis with Beau, just like that girl in the children’s stories. He had his own suite. Williams snorted, at whatever it was Severin told him after I handed back the phone. Fuck them both, really.

  “Nate?”

  “Huh?”

  Good God, it was Monday morning. My high school was its own form of nightmare, this oasis of hippie progressivism down on the southernmost edge of Santa Monica, where the city bleeds into Ocean Park. A maze of dingy warehouse buildings, a cinder-block gymnasium. Richard Diebenkorn was the art teacher; the head of the film studies department locked us all—fifteen-year-olds—in a classroom one Saturday morning and made us watch Godard’s Weekend three times in a row. Now my English teacher was glaring at me.

  “Been somewhere, Nate?”

  He stared out of his furred, blond and handsome face, a twenty-four-year-old Amherst grad who’d wound up teaching here. Laughter rippled around the room as I fought to recover myself. I didn’t need hot-knifed hash, honey slides, and Popov vodka. Forgetting was already my métier.

  “This your paper on Catcher in the Rye?” He pinched it by a corner.

  “Ye—uh, yeah,” I said.

  “It might help if you put your name on it.”

  I shambled to the front of the class, approaching the bench in Flaubert—all the rooms at Untaken were named for writers—so I might sign my handiwork. I tossed my pen on his desk.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “Huh?” I turned around to look at him. “With what?”

  Everything was wrong. This place was too, named obliquely after a Frost poem: roads less traveled, paths not taken. I wore flannel, my hair was still long, even as most of my classmates had figured out you shouldn’t look like a stoner.

  “Your signature’s a little shaky, here.”

  He held the paper up for display. I’d signed it with a big crooked X. “Something wrong with your name?”

  More laughter, pinging off the concrete ceiling. The room had a blue floor, an industrial runner like the baize of a pool table. Acoustical ceilings and no windows, just eighteen desks arranged in the semicircle of my humiliation.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  No one else knew either, no one but Williams and Sev. I was a bastard, tearing up as we read King Lear. I returned to the front of the room.

  “Very good,” Mr. Linton murmured as I signed my regular signature, amid more tittering. I shook hair out of my fac
e and scanned the room, the long bodies propped, angled, and folded into desk chairs, the girls all a little too tall, their chests swollen.

  “Verry goood, Nate,” someone drawled, echoing. The room erupted. I slunk back to my desk, my face burning.

  That year, I was Beau Rosenwald’s son. I understood what it was to be ridiculous. But he was far away, and I was alone. I don’t think he ever thought of me. Indeed, if Severin was to be believed, he had much more pressing problems of his own.

  X

  BEAU WAS STANDING in an airport bar when the bolt of mortality struck him. In the spring of 1982 he’d flown out to look at schools for Severin, and was waiting to catch a return flight to LAX from La-Guardia when he looked up and saw a familiar form being carted out of the Chateau Marmont on a gurney, the image captioned on a small screen. Even without words, and despite the white sheet, he would’ve recognized his friend’s body, like the world’s roliest, poliest ghost.

  “Fuck!” He scrambled to a pay phone, called Linda immediately. “What the hell happened?”

  “You heard?”

  “I heard.” He scrubbed his beard with his fist and blinked away tears. Gazing down the barren airport corridor. “Where was I?”

  “You were there.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “I know. You were there. John had problems, Beau.”

  He’d pounded the phone box with his palm. “I talked to him yesterday afternoon!”

  “Come home.” Linda’s voice purred in his ear. “Just come home.”

  Imagine Beau, more affected by the loss of a friend than he’d been by the revelation of a son. But he was. He slammed the receiver down, wondering which home, besides? New York, his place of origin, felt strange to him now, while the adopted city he was soon to leave behind seemed native. First he missed Kate, then he missed John. More than anything, he missed that dopey, tousled, unshaven face. The stubbled marshmallow who was, in a sense, his own doppelgänger.

  Beau sat down in the terminal. Outside, the afternoon was blustery, and men stood on the tarmac and waved their batons with extra force. His squat little presence—the sight of a heavyset fellow in a tan suit and a windowpane-checked shirt, open at the neck with the dark tie loosened as he wept—couldn’t have aroused much interest in anyone. But he was that other person, the dead one on TV. He pressed his forehead to his knuckles. How could you be in two places at once? Living and dead, Los Angeles and New York. Two questions. But you couldn’t answer one without knowing how to handle the other.