American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I’m so excited about this picture,” he said, “I can hardly sleep at night.”

  “Which picture?”

  “A Hall of Mirrors.”

  “Ah.” Markhamson dabbed his lips with a napkin. He did this reflexively: Beau had white sugar mussing the corner of his mouth. “Right.”

  He turned back to his companions. Beau shambled over to his own table, where Patricia was waiting. He hadn’t really expected Markhamson to know the script. It was almost, not quite, in preproduction yet, listed on Emily’s development memos as Untitled Helen Mirren Project. Solid enough. But this was the first Markhamson had heard of any Hall of Mirrors.

  “How’d that go?” Patricia smiled as Beau sat, turning her wineglass between her palms. He plopped down in front of his langoustines and nebbiolo and grunted.

  “Great,” he said. Exactly like an animal peeing on a tree: just a little reminder, so David would know the movie was out there. “Perfect, in fact.”

  Of course, sometimes it’s much better for the other guy to forget. David called Emily White up the next morning.

  “What the hell is A Hall of Mirrors?”

  “It’s Helen Mirren and Johnny Depp,” Emily said. It was 9:15 AM, and she was just getting in. Since when did he call this early? “Probably Johnny Depp—”

  “I mean where did it come from?”

  She took a deep breath and told him. Fingers splaying along the glassy black edge of her desk.

  “I’d like to read it,” he said. “Send it up.”

  She did. The script wasn’t an embarrassment—a bad movie could be, but a good script, however handicapped by its own highbrow intelligence, humiliated no one. Hampton’s new draft might be a little abstruse, but with that cast? It was at the very least defensible, she told herself.

  “I hate it.”

  “What?” She was back on the phone with Markhamson so soon she had to remember, in fact, what he was talking about. She’d just messengered it upstairs three hours ago. He’d never read anything this fast. “You hate what?”

  “A Hall of Mirrors, Em. It’s impenetrable.”

  “It’s—”

  The script might’ve been defensible, but it was funny how a powerful man’s hatred of Beau Rosenwald could trump everything. Maybe he reminded them too much of who they were, that they could be everything except beautiful. It was funny, also, how “impenetrable” the movie business could be, Emily reckoned. You were always on the phone, always dealing in your head with people who weren’t there, whose force was often illusory. David Markhamson was two floors, and absolute worlds, away from her. He operated according to a different system of morality and intention, answered to an alternate hierarchy of need.

  “—it’s complicated, sure,” Emily said, “but so are, um, lots of things. Chinatown, or Blade Runner, or, uh—”

  Your own reality remained doubtful also. Emily White kept that feeling, that strange chimerical feeling that deep down—deep down—she might not even really exist, that she might be just a figment of a larger human dream.

  “We’re not making fucking Chinatown, Em. We’re not making this either.”

  He slammed down the phone, too analog and old to use a headset, himself. This was the only time she’d ever heard David lose his temper, all because Beau Rosenwald annoyed him more than the script itself. The project was dead. There wasn’t any recourse.

  It almost surprised her, to feel no regret. She slipped off her shoes and twisted slowly in her chair, rocking in her office’s slash of silence.

  “Call Beau,” she yelled to her assistant. “If you can’t get him now, just keep trying!”

  XV

  SO MUCH FOR a night’s sleep. Espresso that late didn’t agree with Beau: nothing did, at seventy-two years old, although the amazing thing was how robust he was still. He’d live to be eighty, he’d live to be ninety, the way he felt. His mind was crisp, and he remembered everything—everyone—while his stout body remained as unexpectedly quick as it was ten years ago. The restaurant owner’s face kept him up, because that man who’d brought Markhamson his cookies was Abe Waxmorton. He had the same convex eyes, the same prow-like nose and brownish complexion. You lived long enough and they just started coming back, all those people. Beau was older now than Waxmorton had ever been while working, older by far than Abe had been when Beau came into his office, long ago, and thought the great man was ancient. “Long ago”? It was yesterday; no time had elapsed. Everything that had happened in between made that day seem no farther away than anything else.

  “Hello?” He was outside, still groggy as he took the puppy for her afternoon walk. Beau missed his mother, he missed his father. If only he’d had the sense to do that while the old bastard was alive. “Who’s this?”

  “Beau? It’s Emily White.”

  “Emily! Sweet girl!” Cell phone pressed to his ear, he picked up his stride. “How’s our baby?”

  “Our baby’s not good, Beau.”

  He strolled down Fifteenth Street behind the dog, watching her chocolate form frisk along new-seeded lawns that were an almost toxic green. Sunlight warmed his hands, cutting through the gray branches of the coral trees above.

  “Yeah? I saw Markhamson last night and he seemed fine.”

  “He read the script.”

  “What?” The puppy squatted. Beau rolled a plastic bag onto his hand.

  “He read it this morning. He asked me to messenger it to him.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He hates it.” A faint sibilance trailed her voice, she was in her car and there were little cuts and chops as she spoke. “He hates the fucking script, Beau.”

  He stopped, bending down to receive the dog’s large and fragrant offering, turning the bag inside out and holding his breath. “Um, OK—”

  “The project’s done,” she said. “Even you understand that, right? It’s done.”

  “I could take it elsewhere.”

  “You could. Assuming you could pay all the turnaround costs.”

  “So? That’s not a problem for me.”

  Standing in the sun, clutching a bag filled with soft turds and a leash, Beau summoned himself again. What did he have, besides money and nonsense? What does anyone ever have? Time? Not much of it.

  “That’s not a problem,” Emily said. Sun baked his face; the air smelled of fertilizer but also of sea breeze, lemon trees, and a little bit of exhaust. He loved it here. Amazing he’d ever lived anywhere else. “But David will have to let it go.”

  “Why wouldn’t he? He hates the project.”

  “He hates you, Beau.”

  “Lots of people hate me. When did that ever get in the way of doing business?”

  “Beau.” Emily took a deep breath. “He wants your failure. Your pain makes him glad. If you want to play tug-of-war with Sony, go ahead. But I ought never to have encouraged you. I should never have bought this idiotic project in the first place.”

  She hung up, without an additional word. She left him standing where he’d lived now for fifteen years, on those blocks north of Montana Avenue where every other building belonged to somebody: to Steve Jobs’s sister, to the head of television at Endeavor, to the lawyer at Jones Day who had just successfully defended ADM against a discrimination suit. People who—Beau felt it now—attained to a greater relevance than he did. They were more current, if not more enduring. Beau felt as if he’d just been slopped off the face of the earth.

  It was quiet just now, quieter than he’d supposed. The screaming would start later, both within himself and outside. A breeze picked up. A little bit of traffic hissed along Montana, three blocks away. He watched the dog, who’d gotten tangled, wind her way clockwise around a tree until her leash came free. She padded over and looked up at him. He stared at her, stricken.

  “Come,” he said. Dog. He snapped his fingers. “C’mon!”

  “Em—”

  “Huh?” She was dashing past her assistant, in whatever hurry she was always in these days. The one
that kept her from recognizing the inevitable, as it applied to her too.

  “Your five o’clock called. The agent said he was going to be a little late.”

  “Fine. Did Beau call?”

  The assistant, who reminded Emily of herself if she’d been redheaded and unpretty, looked up from her desk. “Didn’t you just have him in the car?”

  Emily shivered. She’d looked forward, all this time, to getting rid of him, and now that he was gone, did she actually miss him?

  “Never mind.”

  Cam bent to answer the phone. This homely, freckled girl who’d been to Yale, who was so smart—they were all smart, these people behind such stupid movies—and so afraid of her, though Emily had never so much as raised her voice in Cam’s direction.

  Emily went inside, took off her dark jacket, and waited for her next appointment. The lot was calm now, the sudden emptiness of late afternoon. She sat in her chair, dodged a few calls, and mostly waited, waited and waited for Beau to call her back. He never did.

  “Em?” Cam’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Your appointment’s here.”

  She’d forgotten who this was, some writer Byron Lawrence had been starting to sell her last week when she’d needed to leap off and take another call. Have your office set a meeting, she’d told him, trusting the agent’s taste. She’d never even learned the writer’s name, even when Byron had said, You might know him already. He’s—

  Never mind. How many writers did she have to know these days anyway, besides the ones who were A-listers? That’s what your executives were for. She rocked back in her chair and then looked up, startled, when the appointment came in.

  “Hello, Em,” I said. For indeed, the writer was me. “Long time no see.”

  “Nate?” Her face went slack with astonishment, as if I were the figment, and not she. “My God, of all people. You’re the last person on earth I would ever have expected to see!”

  PART FIVE: MARLOW/E

  I

  OH, THAT I had the indictment written by my adversary! These words, from the Book of Job, popped absurdly into my head. I would approach her like a prince.

  “Hi, Em.” I smiled. “It’s great to see you too.”

  If ever I had an enemy, or a friend or a mirror, it was Emily White. But as I approached her, in the spring of 2005, I was glowing. No longer an executive, I was on top of the world myself.

  “You look fantastic.” She shook her head, as if to dispel the apparition I might’ve been. She pushed up out of her chair.

  “Thanks.”

  She crossed over to me, and we sat down. It was difficult to tell how much of the ritualized flattery we were engaged in was insincere. None of it, possibly.

  “I talked to your father earlier.” She took the power seat, while I curled up in the far corner of her couch, twisted the top off my bottled water.

  “How’s he?”

  “He’s fine.” She blinked. “Irrepressible.”

  This might’ve been true, for all I knew. Just then, Beau and I didn’t talk much. There were reasons for this. One was that he was still mad at me over something I’d failed to mention to him in a timely fashion. Another was my relative success. Incredible as it sounds, there was a time, however brief, when I finally eclipsed him in Hollywood, a moment when I was hot and he was old. Because I hadn’t spoken to him lately I knew there was a movie that he’d been trying to get off the ground, but this was all.

  “How’s your brother?”

  I leaned back. This was me at thirty-seven, well paid and expensive, in my Prada shoes and my black cashmere blazer. I could see my face reflected in her glass tabletop: hair thinning, but still handsome—a long, blond, Scandinavian oval. But even after all this time, I lingered a bit in Severin’s shadow.

  “He’s . . . OK.”

  “OK?” Emily laughed. “Everything I read about him makes it sound a lot better than that.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled tautly. “It does sound better than that.”

  Severin had won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, yes. Ben Stiller had optioned Peckerhead, and after his last book, Thirsty People, my brother had received a MacArthur Fellowship. I suppose it was difficult for some people to imagine things were not so easy as they appeared. It was certainly difficult for me.

  “What is it?” she said.

  I’d come here to pitch at my agent’s behest. I wasn’t here for Beau, and I wasn’t here to talk about my brother either: I had my own business to attend to. Right after I left Fox, my Chandler script had been resurrected, optioned by Malpaso. I’d done a quick adaptation of Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Bay of Noon for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, then sold a pitch to Warner for half a million dollars. I wasn’t here for my family.

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  Maybe Emily White was my family. She was almost my father’s daughter, as I was almost his son. I watched her there, as pale and cool and corporate and powerful as I was bohemian and burning. We were the inheritors of this city, and somehow, overnight, I’d managed to become an adult. But as I watched her, those subtle flaws that still clung to her body—the hollows of sleeplessness under her eyes, the ounces of baby fat that strained her blouse as she bent forward to grab her bottle of Fiji—made me believe in her. I had to confess.

  II

  “WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with him?”

  “What d’you mean?” Little Will turned to me, as we crawled along the BQE. “D’you mean philosophically?”

  “Philosophically, psychologically,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  Will shook his head. That same blocky, handsome, opaque face I’d known all my life, thirty years and change, only now middleaged. You could see it in the way his features had clustered together a bit, like those of a fighter who’d been hit one too many times. There was an intimation of crow’s-feet along the temples.

  “I don’t know, man.” He swept his gaze back toward the Jackson Heights traffic and twilight. I’d just come off a plane. It was early in 2003, and everything—the branches, the buildings and birds—seemed sharp, crisp, and articulate in the cold golden sun. He drove, and I watched his profile: the hair cut short, the tortoiseshell glasses he now wore. All of us had aged, both slowly and suddenly it seemed. When exactly did Will become the responsible one? “You never thought about doing it yourself?”

  “No.” I suppose this wasn’t true, but it had been awhile. “Maybe when I was a teenager.”

  “No?”

  Behind the wheel, he relaxed, drove with his palm. The backseat was empty, but you could see the apparatus of his life back there: booster seat, juice box, a faint, diaperish whiff of something, excrement and putty.

  “You don’t think of it,” I said. “You have a kid.”

  Williams just smiled, turned up the radio a bit. Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” rumbled.

  (You know what I told Emily? Everything. Because I had to tell her, and because a certain level of detail was my coin, all I had. So I told her about my visit to Brooklyn, some eighteen months earlier, and I told her about Severin, the things I hadn’t even been able to tell Beau.)

  “Having a kid doesn’t change that much,” Will said. “But certain things come off the table.”

  “Certain things,” I said. “Like suicide.”

  How long had I known Severin and Little Will? Long enough for us to have lived through everything, the countless emergencies that had already defined us. Will’s dad’s disappearance, his own overdose. How many things had to happen?

  “Explain it to me again,” I said. I felt like I was always asking this. “What—”

  “Nate,” Williams exhaled. “I don’t know, y’know? I don’t know.”

  I studied him. This wasn’t amnesia: it was ignorance.

  “He took pills,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  He shrugged, and exhaled again. His soft breath suggested there might even hav
e been some sort of pleasure in it, that merely surviving long enough to turn thirty-five meant that Sev deserved pretend dying, all the love and appreciation it would bring.

  “Enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough. Enough that he was unconscious when I got there.”

  It’s not like I’d never wondered before about my brother, how he carried all that weight without ever seeming to show it. Like Little Will, he had his demons, and he’d had even less opportunity to master them, perhaps. It was why the two of them were so close. But at the same time, I knew. Severin’s wife had left him. And so he’d swallowed just enough pills to feel appreciated. This wasn’t a real attempt, I could feel it, as we chugged along the BQE on our way to get me situated before we could visit Sev at the hospital. Unless I was wrong. For what’s realer, in the mind of an aspiring suicide, than to make the effort and live?

  Little Will brought me to Severin’s apartment in Boerum Hill, where I would stay. I hadn’t talked to Severin since he landed in the hospital. I hadn’t talked to anyone. Twenty-four hours before, Little Will had called me and I’d hopped on a plane. When Sev and I spoke last, less than a week ago, he’d seemed fine. Better than fine. I was sitting in our father’s study after Beau had had me to lunch. While my brother and I talked I’d found, on Beau’s desk, an old business card that read David J. Byrne, Private Investigator, listing an 818 telephone number. Why would our father need a PI? And why would he choose one with that ridiculously familiar name? The card was ancient, torn and yellow. Severin thought it was pretty amusing too, recalling a night when Beau had given the two of us passes to see Talking Heads at the Pantages Theater, where Jonathan Demme was filming them. Only then (and it would’ve been right after I spoke with him, more or less, after we’d shared our laughter on the phone) he took a handful of Vicodin. That’s all I knew. He was still in the hospital, and of course, since Little Will had called, I’d told no one. Sometimes I felt we were all still living through that original nightmare we’d shared at Cedars-Sinai, where Will kept repeating the same words after his OD. Did things ever change, or did history just run in a loop, ad infinitum?