“Does Williams have a soul?” I said.
“Williams? No.”
Severin was leaning back in his chair, his hair once more grown out and classically mussed, his jaw stubbled and his eyes alert behind his horn-rims. He looked like himself, like the self that would multiply over the years—in the newspapers, on YouTube—until he achieved whatever degree of celebrity was attainable for an American writer in the twenty-first century. Just then he was still my brother the bullshit screenwriter and failing novelist, whose future successes were as unimaginable as his current despairs.
“Williams is going to make it,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because you don’t die when you’re not ready. Because Williams is too much of a doofus to go out like this. He hasn’t learned enough.”
“We have?”
Severin flapped his newspaper. This world-as-vale-of-soul-making stuff was probably sophistical also—the idea that Williams mightn’t die because he was insufficiently wise—but in truth, I didn’t think our friend was going to die either. There was no neo-Keatsian idea behind that; I just didn’t think so.
“We’re a little better off than he is,” Sev said.
I doubted it. But then, I was ready to doubt so many things. We’d been young and born to such privilege there had never been a reason for any of us to suspect we weren’t going to prosper. Until now. I got up and went to the window to deal with paperwork, offering up a patchwork of credit cards and Williams’s basic information until all this got straightened out. No one said, The son of the agent? No one said anything.
“Are you family?” At last, the dreadlocked orderly came back.
“Close enough,” I said. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“I’m only supposed to release information to family.” This guy had an impressive baritone. His hair massed, snakelike, around his collarbone.
“They’re not here,” Severin said. “His dad is dead, and his mom lives out in the desert somewhere, up north.”
We hadn’t called Marnie yet. We’d put her name on the forms, and I roughly remembered her municipality—she lived up in Madera County somewhere, a rural isolation that suited her rugged temperament—so they could track her down, but I wasn’t going to call her at five in the morning. Not for this.
“All right,” the orderly said after a moment. “Shouldn’t do this, but come with me.”
“Is he alive?” I said. “Is he conscious?”
The orderly nodded. But was there a difference? I felt there was. I think, therefore I am. It takes more than thought to ratify being. Or less, much less. We passed through security doors and Severin folded his hands across his Peckinpah T to hide its gory scene. The orderly just swung his arms by his sides, kept the easy rolling gait of a sailor on shore leave.
“This way,” he said. “He’s awake.”
Will was in bed, adrift in a sea of medicinal greens and blues. The back was cranked up so he reclined at forty-five degrees. His eyes were open, but he wore a dull, stunned expression, his lips bent in an empty kiss.
“Will,” Severin said. “Hey, man.”
His head swiveled toward us without recognition.
“Will?”
It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The strict nullity of his gaze, the sheer vacancy with which he watched us.
“What did you do to him?” I looked at the dreadlocked orderly. He shook his head.
“We just woke him up.”
A doctor came into the room now, a woman in cat’s-eye glasses. A brunette, with her hair pulled up in a bun. She would’ve been sexy if she weren’t so efficient. The room was sultry, dark except for the flickering tubes behind Williams’s bed.
“We gave him a very mild stimulant,” the doctor said. “He should sleep.”
Will was breathing. I suppose I ought to have been grateful he was able to sit upright, that his eyes were open and he was not, instead, heaving and choking upon throatfuls of vomit.
“He needs to recover. We don’t know yet what that’ll look like.”
“How so?”
She approached. Up close she was Jewish and freckled and less conventionally pretty than I wanted her to be, than the movies, at least, would’ve made her. Her eyes were brown and her nose was narrow, her hair was ratty and pinned up carelessly, with little wisps straying down along her cheeks. I wanted to fuck her desperately.
“He might have memory problems,” she said. “That sometimes happens when the brain’s been deprived of oxygen.”
“His brain’s been deprived?”
“He shot a tremendous amount of heroin. It’s amazing he’s alive.”
“Alive?” I thought. “Amazing?” He’d never looked so stupid, and quite frankly, Williams had been looking pretty stupid to me for some time. His hair dangled, limp and cruddy around that blunt and supercilious face.
“What kind of memory problems?” Sev stepped forward.
“Short-term,” she said. Remember, Sev? Remember? “Sometimes long-term, sometimes not at all. Sometimes people have trouble moving things from short-term memory to long-term for a while, so they experience a kind of recurring loop. I’ve seen that too, but it varies. Your friend needs to recover.”
A kind of recurring loop. I’d seen that myself. I’d lived it. Still, I yearned for her in a way that was disproportionate: the presence of death made sex come first, gave urgency to my most idle dreaming. I went down the hall and washed my hands. The doctor was gone when I came back in, and Sev was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Williams just said something.”
“Yeah? What?”
Little Will followed Sev’s gaze to where I stood. Some dumb flicker of recognition seemed to wash through him.
“Duuude.”
His voice sounded strange. This wasn’t our friend, not any version of him that I knew.
“Will, man, are you all right? Are you here?”
He just smiled weirdly. Not his usual smug, bullying smile, but something strange, twisted. The various smells of urine, trace vomit, and sterilizing alcohol clutched me and seemed to make pretense impossible. Cautiously, I approached the bed. I thought I might vomit, myself.
“Will.”
“Nate,” he said. Still smiling. “Naaate.”
But then he lay back, slowly, and shut his eyes like someone performing a ritual.
“What the hell, man! Stay with us! Stay up!”
Only the faint and lingering smile let us know he was not dead, just sleeping. The doctor returned. She looked at Severin and then at me, blankly. She took off her glasses.
“Your friend needs to rest,” she said. “Why don’t you let him?”
II
THE SUMMER SEVERIN and I graduated from high school, Beau bought a ranch in Calabasas. My father and I were on better terms then—I’d come out and spend a day with them, sometimes an entire weekend under his chubby wing—but we still weren’t what you’d call close. From time to time he’d let a big knuckle fall on my shoulder as we roamed around in the dust, as he pointed out with pride an abandoned apiary, the stables he planned to repopulate; with my mom and Teddy, he’d agreed to pay for a part of my college education. He may have paid for all of it, in fact. I don’t know. She was never a reliable witness, and Beau never told me what their arrangements were.
After Williams’s death, things had become deeply strange for Beau. The police had questioned him three times. Some people actually believed he was guilty, and by the time Will’s disappearance was explained, he’d had enough. He moved as far away from town as he was ever going to get. And though I never thought he had anything to do with his partner’s demise, he treated me with the same bemused detachment he seemed to direct at the rest of the world, the same wounded opacity. That ranch had acreage, and all together we’d ramble its desert distances for hours with his dogs—he’d requisitioned a pair of Jack Russell terriers, to complete the image—but Beau Rosenwald wouldn’t say much. Th
e three of us would have dinner, and sometimes he’d look at Severin and me, a little ironically I thought, and sigh. My boys. Maybe we were the only two people left in the world he could trust, or who trusted him completely. But of course I didn’t have the same rapport with him that Sev did, didn’t have any way through his ample defenses. I went off to Amherst College, and Sev went to Yale. Young Will went to Vassar but eventually came back to Santa Cruz, where he finished with a degree in communications. The three of us stayed close, but we were busy, each trying to carve out some semblance of private identity, something beyond a relation to our renowned fathers, and to one another. While I was away, and after her divorce from Teddy became final, my mother moved to Washington State. Her sister lived there, and she’d had enough of the movie business and the men who ran it. She planned to write a novel, although things never turned out that way. But this meant, for a few years, I was rarely in Los Angeles. My friends and I saw each other over certain holidays, or on long weekends in New York, but for a brief while it was almost as if our special closeness barely existed. And then, incredibly, while Severin and I were gone, Beau rose from hibernation. It happened during our sophomore year. A messenger mistook his driveway for that of an actor who lived next door. The actor, strangely enough, was represented by my stepfather. Teddy was the one who’d originated the package. So Beau signed for it and then, seeing who it had come from, immediately picked up the phone.
“Ted? It’s Beau Rosenwald!”
“Beau?” None of his ex-colleagues had spoken to him in the last few years. But I don’t think Teddy ever thought Beau had anything to do with Williams’s disappearance, either: the police had questioned everyone. It was simply a matter of association. “To what do I owe the occasion?”
“To the fact you just sent me an offer. I’m afraid I can’t accept. I don’t do TV, and the schedule looks rough.”
Teddy laughed. “What are you talking about?”
“I just got a script for Peter Strauss. I’d walk it over to him myself, but it’s so damn hot out here!”
Like everyone, my stepfather just couldn’t resist him. No matter how cloudy the circumstances of Beau’s departure, or how complex the history between them, there was a time these men had been friends. Together they had built something that remained a colossal presence on the Hollywood scene: the agency as a whole was more powerful than ever.
“I forgot you were living out by Peter,” Teddy said, disingenuously. He’d represented Strauss since the seventies, from that brief shining moment the actor was supposed to be a huge star, though of course it hadn’t turned out that way. “I’d like to find Peter a job.”
“He can be my pool boy,” Beau said. Who knows what moved him to pick up and dial? Maybe he was just tired of being alone. He was out there on his porch, with the fat gray cordless. “I’ll hire him for that.”
Beau hadn’t changed much, after all. He still had the brashness, the flair. Teddy said, “So how are things out in Calabasas?”
“Same as they are everywhere you can’t get a decent corned beef sandwich. Hot, dusty. A little quiet.”
Teddy laughed. “You looking for a way back in, Beau?”
Or maybe, just maybe, he wanted the thing that all Hollywood seems to want: a second chance, or in his case—why stop at two?—a third. In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption, said Raymond Chandler. All this time he’d been living the life of a retired gentleman landowner, like Noah Cross in Chinatown, eating grilled pheasant on the terrace of his desert estate, swanning around in duck pants and a Jeep. He had enough money; he wasn’t going to have to worry about that for the rest of his life. It was crazy what you could make in this business, the killings you could accumulate in a very short time. He’d moved to the deep Valley because it suited some curious idea he had of himself, because the notion of a postconvalescent life of self-sufficiency—albeit one in which he could still zip into town to hit Spago, grab a little soup at Nate ’n Al—appealed to him. His sons were grown, his daughter was buried, and the business could go screw itself on a hilltop. It wasn’t like he hadn’t left it before. His life might’ve been a folktale, he himself like one of those clever merchants or fishermen who get tempted repeatedly by excess. This time, he ought to have been strong enough to say no. Then again, what was he doing all day? Reading wasn’t his style, he played no sports, his favorite pastime—making persuasive phone calls—was against the law if applied in a slightly different context. So I suppose he did nothing, but to Teddy, sitting in his own gleaming and refurbished office in the company’s new Frank Gehry–designed building, Beau sounded surprisingly hale and hearty.
“Maybe,” Beau said. “Maybe I am indeed looking for a way in.”
Teddy cut off this line of thinking, for now. “It’s great to hear from you.”
“Thanks. I’ll get this package over to Peter this afternoon.”
Teddy jumped off the call before Beau could say more.
The Valley was such a peculiar place. It wasn’t just an “exile” Beau found himself in, it was an alternative universe. One in which he was just a big guy with a lot of dough and no identity. Out here, the light was brighter, and there was no wind, except for those occasions when the Santa Anas blew and fanned embers into wildfires, scorching blazes that ate up the Santa Monica Mountains and swatches of the surrounding land so that, twice, he’d had to be evacuated from his home. The fires had never touched him, though, and the truth was he adored them. He loved living so close to destruction you could wait for it; you expected it, even. Really, his life in Calabasas was provisional and was never supposed to be otherwise, but ruin never came. How could Beau be frightened, besides? He’d been annihilated twice already.
“Teddy?” He rang a few weeks later, this time with more deliberate intent. “I’m going to be in Beverly Hills on Tuesday for an appointment. Wanna have lunch?”
Teddy coughed. I suppose it was pity that moved him, or else his slight hesitation meant he couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough. “Sure.” I mean after all this time, why not? Half the pups who shared his office now barely remembered Beau Rosenwald. Some of them didn’t even know there was one. “Let’s do it.”
Maybe Teddy agreed to meet him for me, too. Maybe Beau’s regeneration is in part my own fault. I admit, I’ve worried about that myself over the years. Did Teddy think he owed Beau something? Whatever the case, the following Tuesday afternoon, just after the fat man’s standard 11:45 with his psychiatrist, the two of them met at Hymie’s Fish Market. This was a low-ceilinged room like a cross between a chophouse and an old sawdust saloon.
“Beau.” The man who approached Teddy was still powerful. Big—around 225, which was more or less where he would stay for the rest of his life—and also swaggering, strong. “It’s good to see ya.”
“Ted.” Beau clasped my stepfather’s hand, softly. A gaggle of younger executives around the room noticed, but didn’t recognize him. “Thanks for agreeing to meet.”
The person Teddy had last seen was humiliated. This one was humble, which is such a rare property in Hollywood. Beau may have been strong—he looked like he’d been working out—but his manners were gentle. His handshake, his voice, even the amount of space he consumed around him: he seemed to exude more air than he took up, for once.
“You look terrific,” Teddy said, the pleasantry with which every exchange in this place starts, whether or not it’s stated. “You seem younger.”
“I am younger. Stop racing around to scoop up Marty’s turds and look what happens!”
He turned his palms upward. Beau always did have nice teeth: gleaming, white. No one is all ugly. But it wasn’t just that he was thinner, or that his hair was well-trimmed and his beard was neat and they were both still a rich, coppery brown. It was who he became, away from the business. He wore a blue blazer and a white shirt and bucks.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Teddy said, although this is a lesson he never learned himself. “Maybe someday I
’ll retire.”
“I’m not retired.”
“Oh no?”
The two men looked at leather-backed menus, although this was a bluff. Who needed to be told what to eat?
“I’m resting.”
“Resting? Beau, no one in this town rests. There’s an old Chinese proverb, I’m sure, to tell you why not.”
“Oh? What’s going to happen now, Ted? Someone will steal my clients?”
Teddy laughed. He wasn’t an especially petty man, but the sight of a person without anxiety can whip anyone into a frenzy.
“So.” Teddy crunched an oyster cracker. “You’re taking it easy.”
“Yep.”
“They reserve a plot for you yet at Forest Lawn?”
They ordered. Fans turned overhead. They sat in one of the long booths against the eastern wall, technically a table for four. Around them were the raw wood floors, the brassy fixtures, the white-aproned waiters scuttling to describe what was fresh. If Teddy wanted to hold his advantage they ought to have gone someplace less Jewish, more nouveau, less East Coast–feeling than this.
“So what brings you to town,” Teddy said, after their food arrived.
“You still seeing Horowitz?”
“Yep.”
In a sense, these two men were deeply estranged; in another, still intimately connected. They’d shared a child, as well as a psychiatrist, so it wasn’t any big whoop to ask. Most guys in this town shared doctors the way soldiers shared whores—come to think of it, they shared those too.
“How’s that going?”
Beau equivocated with his hands. Mezzo mezzo. A piece of arctic char lay half-eaten on his plate, glistening and white. “I think my therapist is crazier than I am.”
“How so?”
“He says . . . ” Beau lowered his voice and leaned over to speak between the salt and pepper shakers. “He says he’s treating Jim Morrison.”
Teddy just stared at him. Was he being serious? There was that spinning instant in which Teddy wondered what was worse, if Beau was insane or if his own former psychiatrist was, before they both burst into laughter.
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