American Dream Machine (30 page)

“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.

Beau was no fool. He knew that Williams had exiled him, that no matter what else had occurred on that particular day, his partner’s gesture was a putsch.
Go
. Beau went, not because he was afraid to fight—since when, even dating back to childhood when the conclusions were forgone, was he ever afraid of that?—but for a whole host of reasons that began to dawn on him that day Belushi died. He wanted to go home, wanted to spend time in New York City with Severin; he wanted autonomy even if there was no way to tell it, really, from irrelevance. In Los Angeles, the earth seemed to shudder where he walked: his car gleamed at the curb in front of Morton’s and women whispered in the corners of the room. A tedious illusion, but who can blame an ugly man for relying upon it, for wanting to be a symbol instead of a human being? In portions of New York, too, he was
the
Beau Rosenwald, spark-plug fixture in Rockefeller Plaza’s Green Room, seen downtown eating on Carmine Street and then written up on Page Six the next day. Yet outside his comfort zone he became just a shoe salesman, a hack without a license.

“Hah!” This was what he wanted to show Sev. The perils—or were they the joys?—of failure. He slipped on an Adidas tracksuit—he was always late to these things, the last man at American Dream Machine to catch up with the fitness craze—and forced my brother to join him on a run around the Central Park reservoir. “Keep up, son.”

“Keep up?” Severin was suddenly lanky enough that he barely had to accelerate his walk to match Beau’s gallop. “You look totally ridiculous.”

“You don’t talk to me that way.”

Sev had cropped his hair, wore two-tone shoes when he wasn’t running. He had pegged slacks, vintage coats that might’ve come—in Los Angeles—from Flip, from Aardvark or NaNa. The button on his lapel read
SPECIALS
.

“Seriously, you look like a loser accountant who’s decided to go down the disco.” Severin had picked up English phrasing from import magazines. He was infinite, for the moment, in his pretensions. “Where are your rope chains?”

Beau folded over, panting. They’d gone a mile and a half and his son wasn’t even breaking a sweat.

“I don’t care if you don’t have a mother. Severin, I can’t make you respect me, but you can’t
talk
in that way.”

“Do you respect me? Do you respect my mother?”

This lanky little fucker had a comeback for everything. Beau was like that too; the difference was that his own father had just slugged him.

“Why should I respect your mom, Sev? She left you. She left the minute Katie died.” They stood under a branch dense with greenery, on the dirt path that circled the reservoir. “You don’t owe your mother any respect.”

“I do.”

“Fine. Then you owe me the same courtesy.”

The air was unseasonably crisp, and this Beau liked. A plane traced its pale path overhead, the sky an opaque gray-blue. September. It was like discovering the world was solid again, like he’d lived all these years in a bathtub.

“I don’t hear you extending a lot of courtesy anywhere, on the phone with your
fucking
this and that, your
I’m gonna tear Sid Ganis a new one
.”

Beau’s own father would’ve said,
I’ll potch you
. That Yiddishism that always carried, for Beau, a certain Three Stooges tang.

“I brought you here to make you a man.”

“I am a man.”

“Not quite.” They’d skipped a bar mitzvah, again to spite the elder Rosenwald, but here, again—again, again, again—the sins of
his father were visited upon Beau. No matter how he struggled to avoid them, it seemed he would never be free. “You are not quite—”

“You smoked me out when I was twelve years old.”

“Oh, Christ!”
Oh Christ, Christ, Christ
.

“Dad?”

Beau was bent over, suddenly, with his hands upon his knees. His whole body shook, his limbs and elbows buckling like they were made out of rubber. He almost collapsed, folding in on himself like a pill bug, but Sev ducked under and caught him.

“Jesus, Dad, what is it?” Somehow, he eased Beau down to the ground.

Beau’s face was lacquered with sweat, even the deep green of his tracksuit—Severin was right, he really did look like a fuckin’ leprechaun—patched with damp, as if his whole body had suddenly given way to the flood.

“Just lay me down. Just . . . ” His chest felt like it was cracking too, yet he was lucid somehow. The air, touched with diesel fumes, woke him. “Over there. Right . . . here. God, Sev—”

“Are you having a heart attack? Dad, are you having a heart attack?”

Severin rested him down on a patch of wet grass beside a rock.
Not yet. Not now
. Maybe New York City wasn’t so great if in Los Angeles, when these things happened, you were attended by ballet dancers and mineral water spritzed from the ceilings. Beau’s gaze landed on the rock. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one of those. Traffic whished, distant and transportive.

“Dad?”

His own father was still alive. Barely. Out there in Queens, the old bastard—Beau could feel it—still breathed. The last time they spoke was four years ago.
My watch cost more than you ever made in the better part of a year
, he’d kept thinking.
My socks would’ve fed us all for a week
. Herman Rosenwald didn’t seem impressed.
Because my son’s in the motion picture business, he’s too good for anything else?

“I’m all right.” Beau lay on his back. He wasn’t going to let myopia and egotism, his own or his dad’s, be the last note of his life. He fixed on Sev’s face—that cleft chin and those horn-rims, that cropped-but-mangy hair. Those dark and soulful eyes that told
Beau his son loved him, no matter what kinds of bullshit he spouted. His nape was wet, but it was just because the grass was. His body felt cool. “I’m fine . . . ”

The doctors told him what they always did.
Stress
. He went back on Librium, which was some heavy shit, but now that he’d quit everything else—the day after John died he’d cold-turkeyed every chemical in his car’s glove box—he’d never felt better. He’d never felt more awake, or more sane.

“Beau, we need you to go to London to see Albert Finney.”

Forty-nine years old, the one problem was mortality. That’s what it was. Anyone who didn’t have a problem with that—who claimed not to—was lying.

“I don’t represent Albert.”

“I know, but he’ll listen to you. Everybody listens to you.”

“Am I your errand boy now, Will?”

He spoke into a squawk box, the speakerphone on his hotel room desk. The others were all in Los Angeles, on this conference call that occurred every Wednesday morning. Beau was in his slippers and half-moon glasses. Nestled amid the gilt trimmings of the St. Regis, with the King Cole room downstairs. He looked like Scrooge at his ledgers, like Scrooge without greed.

“Of course not. For God’s sake, we’re all dying to go to London for some theater.”

“Then do it.” He sipped a glass of tap water. “Albert’s Teddy’s client.”

“Teddy’s got meningitis. He can’t fly.”

“Teddy’s got—what?” Who had that? “My God, is he in the hospital?”

In the distance beyond Will there were other voices. Beau no longer knew everyone, the ranks who swelled in the conference room. A
TV
agent named Terrence Peterson, a woman named Willa Danks in the book department; there were kids under Skoblow in music, sharp little fuckers who’d give Severin a run for his money with that stuff. He’d met every one of them repeatedly, yet whenever he got them on the speakerphone, he could never remember their names.
Out of the loop
. It had always seemed a strange phrase, but now he understood it.

“What does Albert want?”

A fire crackled at the far end of his suite, and the brass spittoon, the one piece of furniture that always came with him, glowed solid beside the mantel.

“What does every actor want?” Williams said. “Albert’s straight, so don’t worry about the other stuff.”

Laughter rippled through the conference room. Rain sizzled against the window and Beau had to remind himself where he was, that the other people to whom he was speaking wouldn’t have seen precipitation for weeks.

“Albert’s worried that after
Shoot the Moon
he should do something sexier.” Williams launched into a litany of the actor’s anxieties, which were uninteresting, those same petty grievances and concerns we all feel, in a way. “He doesn’t want to be typecast. He’s worried that if he does this picture with Attenborough—”

“We’re all typecast.”

“Excuse me?”

“Albert Finney’s not a pretty boy anymore. It’s not 1965. He should take what he can get.”

“I’ve told him that, Beau. Teddy’s tried to get through, but it’s not working.”

Was
this
working? Soon the meeting would degenerate the way it always did, with people clamoring for gossip, information about plays and restaurants (“What am I eating? Rollie, lemme tell you, I went to Il Mulino the other night . . .”), these things designed to make Beau feel important, as everybody started barking into the phone at once. Maybe they all loved him, and he was just out of his mind. Maybe, just maybe, Beau was only being paranoid.

“Albert.”

“Beau.”

How Beau loved the handshakes of Englishmen, the plumb way their palms lined up with his and the mellow, recessive way they met his gaze. It was as if even
hello
was a necessary embarrassment.

“Been awhile.”

“Fifteen years. How’s Sally?”

They sat in the afternoon darkness of the bar at the Connaught. Beau asked not after Albert’s wife, but after the man’s long-standing
assistant. Then they settled down to discuss anxiety, which was something the two men—like all men—had in common.

“D’you know what I’m talking about here? Teddy doesn’t get it.”

“Of course. Teddy understands too, he’s just calmer than you and me.”

“Well I don’t want calm,” Finney sputtered. “I want an animal in my corner.”

You would hardly have known Beau from the ease he displayed with his clients. This was why they loved him. By himself, in the shower or in his automobile, he was a fanatic. But in these conditions, he was the still point of the turning world. He leaned forward in his leather chair, forearms on his knees.

“We all get older, Albert. Look at me, I’m half as pretty as when we met.”

They drank cowboy martinis, minty gin with muddled lime. It took him awhile to talk Teddy’s client off the ledge. Being an agent was just like minding a girl: a long-form seduction in which all the players, for a time at least, kept their clothes on.

“I should go with you,” Finney slurred.

“Albert, we work in teams at
ADM
. We don’t poach one another’s clients.”

“I want you on mine, then.”

“Fine. I’ll talk to Teddy and see if we can work it out.”

“Fuck Teddy.”

How he loved England. Everything about it, Albert Finney—and he could remember when Albert was a true star, a client of Sam’s who wouldn’t give Beau the time of day—sitting opposite him in a chalk-gray suit. Albert, drunk and malleable. It was midafternoon, and the bar was empty except for two women with their belted overcoats and furled umbrellas, English roses you wanted to marry the moment you closed your eyes.

“Whatever you want, Albert.” Beau picked up his glass and drained the last of his gin, which dripped off the tattered mint sprig at the bottom.

“I want to come with you.”

Of course it didn’t matter who your agent was. Beau could’ve told him that too. You were who you were, and the industry wanted you or didn’t. Most of the time, the industry wanted you
and
didn’t.

“All right,” Beau reached for the check. The room was beginning to spin. “Whatever you want, Albert, if it’ll make you happy. I’ll talk to Teddy.”

That was that. But my father never could have guessed how this simple, egalitarian gesture—made with the company and its brotherhood in mind—would touch off all kinds of disaster.

Severin was on that London trip too. Beau wanted to have a suit made for him, to teach his son the fruits and flavors of civilization. Sev was the first of us to set foot upon the mother ship, to cross the Atlantic and so discover the Old World. Young Will and I were still as ignorant as the days were short, unaware that his father and mine weren’t getting along.

“Beau, what the hell are you doing?” The elder Williams chewed the fat man out, not three days after the latter returned to New York.

“What do you mean?”