American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Did he seem distraught?”

  “Distraught?” Williams turned from Sev’s dresser, where he was handling one of my brother’s old baseball cards, which lay out by itself, free of its polypropylene sleeve. “Not really. No.”

  His voice echoed, carried its own repetition within the shell of my brother’s apartment. The place felt alarmingly empty, like a house that had been burgled or at which the movers never arrived. The house of a squatting intellectual. But it had always been that way. Severin was never much for “stuff.”

  “Not really,” Will repeated. We were in the guest room, which had once been an office—either Severin’s or Lexy’s—but now held a rickety twin bed and a dresser and a narrow bookshelf stocked with only his own books in various translations and hers: she’d published two.

  “I didn’t think so either. He seemed the same.”

  I set my duffel bag down at the foot of the bed. And then, to calm myself, I rambled the rest of the apartment. It was two stories and big, of a size you could apparently afford to buy even in Cobble Hill when you’d won a major award and had a little help with the down payment. The rooms were cavernous and filled, when at all, mostly with books, the odd DVD. There were no tables or rugs, just filtered twilight. The bedroom had a bed in it. Severin’s battered black Chuck Taylors lay toppled in a corner; a laptop sat upon the desk, its cursor still blinking on an empty document, I saw when I swiped the track pad. I stared at the blank page. Finally, I strolled back to the guest room.

  “It doesn’t seem like anything’s wrong.”

  “What d’you mean?” Will was still standing next to the dresser where he’d put the baseball card down. Like a docent in a museum or a palace guard, he waited.

  “I mean,” I swept my arm toward the room, the shelves, the incredibly light furnishings with which my brother chose to live. “It’s all the same.”

  “Yeah.” Will might’ve humored me, the way he and Severin both had so often done, but instead he shrugged. “It’s always the same.”

  He knew what I meant. I meant that whatever we did, whatever we lived through, it was the same. Severin, the success. Or Sev, suicide. They weren’t any different, the signifiers clustered maybe five degrees apart, until it was almost impossible to tell ecstasy from despair. I came over to where Will was standing, next to a picture of Lexy in a polka-dot sundress. Blonde and sloe-eyed, the same image that showed on the back of her first book, Disappearer. I’d envied my brother so many things, not least this. I stared at her lithe and inscrutable form, and at the baseball card, some goony seventies Met with heavy eyebrows and long sideburns. Wondering just what I was missing, myself, what might have driven Severin to act out his unhappiness.

  III

  “HEY, FELLAS.” Incredibly, Severin was chipper when he greeted me the next day. Little Will and Will’s wife, Hermione, and their son and I all went to see him. Hermione and the boy, who was four, waited outside while Little Will and I went in to find my brother slippered and relaxed, dressed in street clothes. “What it is?”

  “What it is?” I crossed the room to where he was standing at the window, gazing idly at the glass that was reinforced with chicken wire, but I couldn’t stay mad. I put my arms around him and I kissed the top of his head. “What did you do?”

  He shrugged, like it was no big deal. Perhaps it wasn’t a big deal. I held him for as long as I could and then I let him go. He stayed there with his hands in his pockets. There was a narrow regulation bed behind him, and here we were at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, but there was no sense of strict confinement or emergency. Severin wore jeans and a rumpled canary yellow shirt. The old hornrimmed glasses, his knowing and wise look. The same cool, roosterish manner he’d always had.

  “You ever break up with a girl, Nate?”

  “Sure.” The question was rhetorical: I’d been through a divorce of my own, as he well knew, and yet I’d never swallowed pills to chase the experience. But neither had he, he seemed to be telling me. “Why?”

  Little Will went outside, to join his wife and son and to leave us to it.

  “Williams and I had a fight,” he said, not answering my question.

  “What does that have to do with your being here?”

  I couldn’t help but watch him closely, studying the sharp, almost avian lines of his face. We perched at the window, in the bleached, grayish light of the waning winter. Outside, it was in the fifties, feinting at spring.

  “You don’t know anything,” Severin said. “Do you?”

  “No.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, surely. “I don’t.”

  His eyes gleamed and his pupils widened just a bit, the way they used to when we were young and high and he was about to speak and blow my mind. He opened his mouth, but then seemed to think better of it. He sighed. “Does Dad know?”

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “That’s good. I guess he’ll have to find out eventually, maybe.”

  “Maybe.” I looked him up and down. “Do they keep you?”

  “No.” He slipped his hands back into his pockets. “I’ve been here three days. I can go.”

  “That’s it?”

  Little Will and his son and wife were in the hall, which teemed with visitors, and I could hear Will say to his son, No, Danny, don’t touch that!

  “They gave me the name of a psychiatrist. But I don’t need one.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re in a hospital ward, dude.”

  “I already have one. Nate, it wasn’t very many pills.”

  “Define ‘not very many.’”

  “Fewer than it would take to stun a rhinoceros. Or Dad.”

  I laughed. How could I not? Once more, I didn’t have enough information. I didn’t know what he was reacting to, or against: the loss of a wife or of a mother or of a sister—or if this was simply another exercise in egotism, as also seemed possible. He was, after all, our father’s son. Like Beau, he had his own way of turning suffering into theater.

  “Hey!” Little Will barged in, giving chase to his son, who came flailing recklessly toward Severin. “Sorry about that!”

  I just didn’t know. Not for the first time, I wanted to beg my brother to let me in. But Sev only looked down as Danny caromed off the bed and into his leg.

  “It’s OK.” He bent and picked up Little Will’s son, hoisted him with a gesture that looked perfectly natural, for all the world like he was born to be a dad, and this was merely another tender family outing. “Hey, buddy. Hey!”

  Hermione came in. She was a redhead, freckled and big-boned and pretty but also the littlest bit mannish. Her eyes were blue, and it was only the size of her frame that made her anything but ravishing. She’d been Will’s rescuer, pacing him through hour after hour of memory games, cognitive exercises. Daniel, their son, was a ringer for the elder Will even at this age: he had his grandfather’s ginger coloring, his foxy features.

  “I’m sorry, Severin.” She had a posh English accent, thick enough that it was startling. I couldn’t help thinking of the war between our fathers, Williams’s and mine. Albert Finney in a hotel bar.

  “It’s all right.” Sev braced his head against Danny’s, lay his forehead against the little boy’s so the two looked at each other through his glasses. He bounced Will’s son almost imperceptibly in his arms. “No problem.”

  We waited a moment like that. Someday, maybe, I’d understand my brother’s tenderness, where it came from. Finally, he put Danny down.

  “I can go,” he said, indicating his hospital room. “They told me today I can go if I want.”

  Later, Severin and I were alone.

  “I’m OK,” he said, as we picked through his apartment together. “Really.”

  “Really? You act like everything is hunky-dory, Sev. This morning you were in a psych ward.”

  It wasn’t as simple as all that, of course. There’d been an exit interview, and then the doctors wanted to talk to me, as Severin’s brother, to ascertain my opin
ion of his mental health. (As they did, I couldn’t help but picture Beau. Was he crazy? Was I?) But they let Severin sign himself out, even so, and I would’ve done the same. I was haunted by the image of him holding Little Will’s son.

  “You never tell me anything,” I said. “You’re a fucking Swiss vault of secrecy.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “You don’t listen. You don’t take the cues.”

  “What cues are those?”

  We moved through the gloom of the apartment, flicking on various lights. At Severin’s insistence I would leave the day after tomorrow.

  “Anything, everything.” He spoke with an agitation that seemed more directed at me than at anything else, as if the biggest problem were me, harrying him. “You just don’t know what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like? Being divorced? I know what that’s like. Being Dad’s spawn? What the hell’s bothering you?”

  He just snorted, like a horse, like our father, as if I should understand by osmosis what the trouble was.

  “What were you and Little Will fighting about?” I said.

  “What?” He turned now to face me. Maybe I did take the cues, after all. Maybe I knew something of our shared burden, what had eluded me so far.

  “You said you and Little Will were fighting. What about?”

  We’d stopped in the room where I was staying, the little one down the hall that had been Lexy’s office, and would’ve been a child’s room had they managed to have one. Just another heartbreak in a life that was as full of them as any other.

  “It was about something I was writing. Trying to write.”

  “Oh?”

  We stood by the dresser, not quite touching but next to each other. For a moment I thought about all the rooms we’d been in, the different relations we’d shared inside them: friends, siblings, competitors. How through all these times we’d lived under one sign, even before we knew it. The curtains were drawn, and so we stood in an artificial darkness. I looked down at the baseball card. DUFFY DYER.

  “Hey, remember Milt Schildkraut?” I scrutinized Dyer’s anemic stat line.

  “What?” Severin glanced down, too. “Course I do. Why?”

  “The Mets card reminded me.”

  Right. As did many things, really. So much time had passed, you’d think American Dream Machine might’ve been a distant memory, not even a very interesting one, necessarily. Yet somehow it kept a nearly occult grip on all of us, an unaccountable power.

  “D-Duffy Dyer.” Severin imitated Milt’s stutter precisely. “Number of total bases in ’73? Severin!”

  I laughed. That was him, the numbers guy. He used to quiz us both on such things. Severin stared, his eyes narrowing behind the glasses. There was a mirror above the dresser, and both of us were caught in it, but he was somewhere else, I could see.

  “What on earth made you think of him?” Sev muttered again.

  IV

  I DIDN’T FIND out precisely what was haunting us for a while. Just as I didn’t yet discover what Severin might’ve been writing before he went into the hospital. I flew back to LA, and I didn’t worry about him. That sounds callous, perhaps, but I didn’t have to worry: I knew Sev well enough to be sure he’d pick himself up and put it all back together. I’d seen him do it before, and like many writers, he seemed to thrive on chaos. Like me, maybe. I had my own life, a career and its tangles, to attend to. But maybe all that competition that had festered during the early years—he, the real son; I, the pretender—had spilled finally into our adult lives, and so I turned my back on him. Maybe I was tired of trying to jimmy the lock on his skull. Or maybe the experience with Little Will and his overdose had broken us, long ago. I wouldn’t say I loved Severin any less since then—of course I didn’t. But. But, but, but.

  “Nate!” (Maybe he and I were like my father and Williams, too, blinded by a rivalrous love.) “Hey, you little fucker!”

  My phone rang, a good while after I returned to Los Angeles, and there was only one person on earth who could wring so much tone from that epithet, who could fill it with such stunning portions of both affection and rage.

  “Beau.” I never could quite call him “Dad.” “What’s going on?”

  This was six weeks after I came home. I’d already forgotten, or at least compartmentalized, Severin’s accident. I listened for a moment to the raspy stew of our father’s breathing.

  “What is it?” I said.

  I waited, but he just kept me listening to his accusatory silence, let me marinate in shame. I was in my home office, which was like Severin’s but glitzier: it had a bigger Mac screen to stare at, bigger shelves on my walls that were stacked higher with different kinds of books. Ones on film, mostly, or novels I could adapt. Lots of Chandler arcana and Black Lizard spines. I’d found my niche. Not quite what I’d expected, but with it I’d been able to buy a house in West Adams.

  “Aren’t you gonna say something?”

  I could feel Beau’s fury on the other side, the full force of his rage. Now I knew what he was like when he wasn’t on your side in business, how he could bleed concession straight out of you.

  “Uh,” I said. I brought my fingers to the bridge of my nose and squeezed. I blinked and stared through French doors at a sun-dappled patch of yard. “I was going to tell—”

  “Bull. Shit,” he said. Two words. “Bullshit, Nathaniel. D’you know who I am? Do you know why it would be important to me to know if my son was in trouble?”

  He spoke with such venom, such purity of disgust. I wasn’t a son to know about, in this respect.

  “I do.” I closed my eyes and thought of Kate. “Of course I do.”

  “Then why, Nate?” All of a sudden I heard his voice crack. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

  What a bully! He could come at me with his anger, and then manipulate me with tears. I was in a perfect place, this small Craftsman house I had purchased just south and east of the Sony lot where the last fifteen years of his life had played themselves out.

  “I don’t know.”

  I could read the spines of the David Goodis novels on my own shelves. Outside, there was a dazzling sky. I had a lawn, a hedge of purple pitcher sage. I watched a young couple walk a pit bull on a leash. Sunlight sheared across their broad, handsome faces, and only the exposure of the street, its openness and the flatness of the neighborhood around it, reminded me this place had recently been a ghetto.

  “Nate,” Beau murmured. “I’m not mad.”

  Only people who were mad ever said that. But I know why he modulated his temper now.

  “It’s OK.” After Sev, after Kate, who was left? “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Beau. I’m sorry.”

  Just me, to spare him in his infinite loneliness: I’d be all that remained to extend his line.

  It got weirder. A lot weirder. Because after Beau and I made up, and after I discovered it was Little Will who’d told him what happened (Will, I think, felt obligated: in many respects our dad had looked after him, growing up, and even after the elder Williams’s death, although the two partners were sundered, Beau kept an eye on him, went to see him in rehab and so on), Severin came out for a visit. This was almost a year later, in the spring of 2004. It wasn’t specifically to see me: he was scheduled to give a reading at the Hammer Museum.

  “Hey.” I picked him up at LAX, reached over to unlock the passenger-side door so he could climb in. “No Beau? No limo?”

  “Nope.” He folded himself into my passenger seat. “He’s coming to the reading.”

  I pulled away from the curb, drifting across four lanes of traffic. “I would’ve thought he’d be eager to see you.”

  “He is. He thinks I’m coming tomorrow.”

  “Ah.” I gunned it, out from below the overpass into sunlight, toward the lane that would lead us out to Century Boulevard. “Why’d you fly early?”

  What happened next startled me. In fact it shook me in a way few things—maybe a couple of others, maybe only one, since—ever
have. We drove to his hotel. He wouldn’t say why.

  “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  He wouldn’t tell me, as we glided along the 405 to the 101 into Hollywood, into the same neighborhood we’d lived in all those years ago, with our crappy apartments and video store jobs, the sweltering depths of the city away from the beach.

  “I want you to meet somebody.”

  “Who? You’ve got a new honey?”

  We rode down Franklin, past his old place. My own, the old Hobart Arms, was farther east, behind us.

  “Nope. It’s more important than that.”

  God knows, I think I presumed it would be someone odd, esoteric, interesting: Philip K. Dick’s widow, Hal Ashby’s sister, Thomas Mann’s niece. One of those people who were in touch with my brother’s tastes and specialties.

  “You have to promise me.” He reached over and tapped my shoulder. “This is just for you, Nate. You can never tell Dad.”

  “What is it? Worse than a fistful of Vicodin?” My engine roared. I was driving a noisy car, a BMW M3, a real asshole machine. I suppose I was exaggerating my characteristics, being more Hollywood than Severin could ever dream, to compensate. “I won’t tell him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “What’s he ever going to care about Fitzgerald’s mistress’s kid?” I said. “Dad doesn’t know who any of the real people on this planet actually are.”

  We pulled up, at last, at the Roosevelt. It was a typical place for my brother to stay: unfashionable, august, a little decrepit, but also full of history. D. W. Griffith’s ghost rode the elevators, they said. Montgomery Clift lived in one of the rooms upstairs, while he was filming From Here to Eternity.