American Dream Machine (11 page)

“What do you think it is,” my mother murmured when he left the table to hit the head. “What’s Beau’s problem?”

“You worked for him.” Teddy gave her a sly glance. “Wasn’t he always like this?”

“Not like this,” Will drawled. “This is different.”

My mother nodded. “He seems . . . desperate. I think there’s something wrong.”

I stood in the shadow of the sideboard in my pajamas, one of my earliest memories. I gnawed a toothpick, prosciutto and melon from Greenblatt’s Delicatessen. This was in the old house on Warnall Avenue in Westwood. Walnut floorboards and crystal chandeliers.

“This is the movie business.” Teddy was at the dining table, deflated in his chair. He wore his off-hours uniform of scuffed Gucci loafers and pale denim shirt. His long hair was already thinning, his blond mustache pale at the tips. “Nothing gets done without desperation.”

“That’s the flaw,” Williams said. He studied the glass of ice water in his hands like it was a diamond. “It’s what’s wrong with the business, and it’s our friend’s tragic flaw.”

Leave it to Williams to put it in Aristotelian terms. He set his water down, spotted me, and winked.

“Nathaniel, c’mere.”

I walked over to him. I could hear Beau’s heavy tread beginning at the far end of the long hallway that ran past my room.

“D’you like school?”

I nodded. Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t: it was too soon to know which of these men, which father, I’d come in time to resemble. The educated or the more instinctual one. Will took me in. I felt it, what Beau must have felt when they met too. The strength of his whole attention, neither gentle nor harsh, a caress without any love in it. Already, I was friends with his son. Little Will and I had been paired off by something besides being the two youngest boys in our class. Call it fate.

“Go to bed, sweetie.” My mother could hear Beau coming down the hall also. “Go on.”

Williams winked at me. There was alarm in my mother’s voice, the way there’d been when she’d spoken up earlier.
I think there’s something wrong
. It seemed to carry some balance of affection and horror. But I was far too young to interpret that. She stood in her regal turn-of-the-decade beauty, black turtleneck and flower-print
skirt. Long-faced, ash-blonde, and somber. She waved her True cigarette at me.
Go
.

I love remembering my mother this way. Twenty-nine, not yet consumed by alcohol and disappointment. She took a sip of wine, her profile whittled, elegant. The convivial Hollywood wife. Williams turned away, but I could feel him still, the enigma of his strange concentration. Few men are truly fathomless, yet he seemed so.

“Who’s this?”

A booming voice sounded above me as I collided with Beau in the doorway. I couldn’t help it, I walked right into his elephantine leg. I looked up and saw him staring down at me.

“You’re Nate,” he added, and smiled. And absently stroked the back of my head and shoulder, once. It was like being pawed by a clawless dog.

I bounced off him. Without anything to say, and a little bit intimidated by his fatness, by his slothful and easy bonhomie.

“G’night, kid,” he murmured, as I slithered around and off to my bedroom. I was six years old and of course didn’t mark any of this out as unusual. But I remembered it all the same. My bare feet kicked across the polished brown floors; our terrier, Suzie, followed; Teddy’s voice carried after me.

“Sweet dreams, Nathaniel.”

Thus, I met my father, and with him the man who was his necessary concomitant, Williams Farquarsen, whose future would haunt us all. Understanding none of it, just letting their laughter blend into typical adult chatter, while I left them behind, in dream.

Now Beau sat and ate a plate of curdled, kelp-colored eggs with windows on two sides of him overlooking the sea. Thinking about the only two kids he knew he had and protecting his plate as though someone might take this, too, away from him.

Rachel, be reasonable!

Reasonable?
He could still hear her sneering.
Reasonable people have jobs!

These past few years, it had gotten worse and worse between them. She’d left Waxmorton and set up shop on her own, yet having her independence made her controlling. She’d grown secretive, paranoid.
Maybe she was crazier than he was. Maybe she was jealous. Once a month he came and visited, crawling around on the floor of her brownstone apartment like a wildebeest, exotic and particular and large. The children adored him. Severin attacked with his tummy, just charged and screamed and started smacking Beau’s head with his own belly the moment his father knelt down to greet him. Was this why Rachel was pissed? Because Beau’s son resembled him after all? He’d walk around the Village with one twin over each arm, both of them black-haired, green-eyed, and lovely. These were the moments the world belonged to him, and he to it. Even as a child, Sev had the purest whiff of teenage disarray, his untucked Mickey Mouse T-shirt torn and slovenly; Kate fanned out into alien beauty, her hair cut straight along her jaw like her mother’s. They’d just turned four. With their father they sat in a booth and drank milkshakes, all three inclining their heads in a way that told everyone they were a family.

It’s healthy for them
.

Healthy? I don’t want them eating sugar
.

The last time he was out, he and Rachel really went at it.
You’re a fitness freak now?

That’s not what I meant
—

I know what you meant
. Standing there in the vestibule, because more and more she didn’t want him in the house.
Are you taking your drugs?

My—he’d begun laughing inappropriately.
I haven’t had anything happen in a year and a half. They’re just anxiety. My
. . .

What should he call them? Episodes? Fits? But the sight of a man in his late twenties, some bearded Christ-y type who looked like a tranquilized Manson looming into view behind her only made him laugh harder.
That’s your boyfriend, Rach?
Jesus, no wonder all this macrobiotic blather and stuff about her “karma,” questioning whether she even wanted to sell books.

“Where do you go, Rosers?”

“Huh?”

Beau stared, as Bryce interrupted him. The look of a man whose real life, as vivid as it was, stayed trapped in the confines of his head. “I’m right here.” He scratched his cheek. “Just thinking things over.”

“Right. Think on this. We get a green light, this movie will change our lives.”

“This movie is 183 pages long. It’s written on a bunch of paper place mats, and it doesn’t have an ending.”

“This movie is forward-thinking. Progressive.”

“Or a beginning. Now that you mention it—”

“It will win us Academy Awards.”

“—this movie is a fucking boil, an open sore on the ass of humanity.”

Bryce looked at him. That cliff-like stare that was never quite handsome enough, those yellowy eyes. His face was too upper-crust, too haughty, too volatile, too something. The gun sat over on the counter.

“Like that ever stopped anyone before, Rosers. Come on.”

He laughed. They both did. Their lives were like this gun in a way, adjusted to harmlessness no matter how voluble.

“We gotta do something. I’m running out of fuckin’ money.”

“Me too,” Bryce said. “I get it. Melody sweats me the same way.”

Melody, his ex-wife. They’d met years ago, when Bryce did an episode of
F Troop
. Their son was the same age as the twins, himself a rare visitor.

“So what do we do?”

“We do what we’ve always planned to do.” Bryce stood up and stretched, his concave runner’s torso arching forward. “We make this fucking film.”

“You gonna take a meeting like that?” Beau nodded at his naked friend’s crotch. “Enough of the noble savage bullshit.”

“It isn’t bullshit. It isn’t the savagery in people that’s noble, either, it’s the nobility that’s savage. That’s an important distinction.”

Beau watched his friend’s eyes widen as the actor began to get high off the hash oil that was in his eggs. “All right, fine. We still need to hire a writer.”

“We don’t need a writer. We can
be
the writer. We can
be
the movie if we just let it happen.”

Poor Bryce, with his faith in these things. He sounded like fucking Rachel. “No one in Hollywood is crazy enough to make this.”

“We are.”

“Fair enough.” Beau was tired of thinking about it. He got up and stalked toward the cupboard, with its yellow paint blistering off the door. “I’m gonna have some of that mary-jew-wanna, myself. I need to feel
invulnerable
again.”

“SO WHAT AILS?”
Williams leaned across the table toward my dad. “What do you need, Beau?”

“Money.” It was hard for him to ask, but he did it. “I’m broke, Will.”

The two men were at Duke’s Coffee Shop, attached to the Tropicana Motel. “Seedy” barely began to describe it. Yet just up the street was Dan Tana’s. Barely a mile separated them from
TAG
and the bustling places in Beverly Hills where Sam’s henchmen did their business, the Bistro and La Scala.

“So?” Williams removed his sunglasses. “There’s no shame in that, partner.”

“Isn’t there?”

“No. The business tells you that there is, but there isn’t.”

The air smelled of chlorine, from the motel pool. Grease. Beau ate pancakes and Will ate nothing, just sat, clean and dapper, at breakfast with his old friend.

“How’s Sam?”

“Fucker.” Behind Williams a man, really just a pile of hippiebeatnik mannerisms, twitched in a booth, slurping his coffee. Will snorted his contempt. “He’s ancient, Beau. You can’t worry about him.”

“I can’t work.”
We can’t eat in a normal restaurant, where you’d be seen in my company
. “I can’t get anyone to sign on to this picture.”

“For now. Beau.” Will turned his palms up on the table. “How much?”

“What?” For the rest of his days, he would remember this. “What d’you mean?”

“Just tell me how much you need. You said you needed money. So?”

Beau had never before asked overtly. Once a week he drove Bryce’s old Chevy into town to have breakfast and to scream at his psychiatrist. Afterward, he met his old friend, who might leave a hundred-dollar “tip” on the table that would enable Beau to meet certain obligations, but Williams had never opened up this way either.

“Five grand. Would that help, Beau?”

It would save his life, at least for a while. Beau was hardly more disciplined with money than he was with anything else. But this would allow him to see his kids, buy his medication. It would keep his little dinghy afloat a bit longer.

“I can’t accept that.”

“You can. You will.” He’d remember this. “I’ll get you a check.”

“Will . . . ”

The two men sat. Beau, near tears, and Will with an untouched elegance. He could walk into rooms as greasy as this one and still retain his dignity, in booths dampened by whores’ pussies and junkies’ necks.

“It’s more than I need.”

“No.” It fucked with you, this town, besides. So-called “needs,” luxuries. They ran together like a soft-boiled egg. “You need to see your kids, Beau. You need to stay alive until the worm turns.”

“It’s not gonna turn.” Williams just nodded at Beau’s pessimism.
Stop
. “
OK
, but I don’t even know anymore,” Beau went on, “if it does, what’ll happen? This picture with Bryce, it’s important or it’s just a goddamn pipe dream. How do you know? When is it ever enough?”

“When you stop suffering.” Will lolled, with one arm up on the back of the booth, imperious. “That’s when.”

Sunlight swam in the air above Santa Monica Boulevard; the door with its bell tinkled and swished behind Beau as the scenesters came and went. A gang of grubby musicians shuffled in and collapsed in a pile of buckskin in an adjacent booth. There was the click of a Zippo.

When did you stop suffering, ever?

“All right.” Beau inhaled. Tobacco smoke, lighter fluid, syrup. His hands were shaking, he noticed. “Thanks, Will. Thanks.”

This was a kind of heroism. Five grand was a lot of money for both of them, then. And Williams just came out and gave it to him, more than Beau would have ever thought to ask. It was something the fat man would never forget. But what really struck him wasn’t the money (it was never the money, for Beau, if you can believe that). It was Williams, and his cool sense of proportion.
When you stop suffering
. It was simply that Williams knew how much was enough.

Then again, what was “enough”?

“Scream, Beau. Let it out.”

“Excuse me?”

Twice a week, Beau drove into Beverly Hills to see Dr. Horowitz, who urged upon him meditation, marijuana, and who wrote him a prescription for lithium.

“Let’s do something about your anger.” Horowitz was a dainty little fellow with a blond horseshoe mustache and elbow patches. He wore white trousers and swanned around his office barefoot because he believed we should all be closer to the dead. “Let’s take care of Beau.”

It was hard not to laugh. This man was insane. But he saw all sorts of people, Roland Mardigian, Jeremy Vana. He was the go-to guy for every anxious Jew in Hollywood. He had a tiny hourglass on the edge of his desk and op art on two of his four walls.

“Come on.” He insisted they do their sessions standing up, and toe-to-toe. “Scream.”

“Aaaahhhhhh!”

It was like visiting the fucking zoo, with those animal stripes and spots splayed across the walls. This was supposed to help him? With what? But he went, since for a while he could afford it. And yet nothing ever seemed to change . . .

“Hey, Rosers!” Bryce hammered on the bathroom door with his fists. Now it was December, the days at the beach short and cool and bright. “Get dressed, we got somewhere to be!”

“What?” Beau spoke over the thin trickle of the shower, its hiss and steam.

“Meeting! Let’s go!”

Beau twisted the rusty tap. The jade green tiles were blotted with mildew; the showerhead was oxidized brown.

“Who we meeting?”

“Davis DeLong.”