American Dream Machine (40 page)

“I don’t afford any of it,” she said. “Am I buying
you
breakfast?”

“Of course not.” He dragged the check over now. “No way.”

“Well, then. My mother was a schoolteacher. Dead, now. My father worked for Lockheed Martin, but he’s in a wheelchair. He was in a car accident a few years ago, so he’s on
SSI
.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his hands together. “My mother died young too. My dad had a shoe shop. In Queens.”

From outside came the sound of people splashing in a swimming pool. Sugar sparkled on the tabletop, like diamond dust; at such an hour, the room’s green and plant-scattered stillness seemed a form of perversion.

“Do you want a job?” Beau said, as the waiter came over and whisked the check from his hand. Emily White, I think, reminded him of what it was to be genuine. “A real one?”

WHAT WAS THE
bee in Beau’s bonnet? When had the man become such a pain? Those little fits like the one he had back when Emily first came into his office were typical these days, and if he could still turn around and act like a pussycat . . . he really
had
become an ass. What had changed? Was it that he no longer had a partner who cooled him out, offered a more rational model of human behavior? Did he need another psychiatrist?

In 1991, he’d gotten married and was now divorcing again—blink and you missed her, that third Mrs. Ro—and lately his kids had gotten into some sort of a jam with Little Will. Oh sure, he knew all about it, the overdose and the memory loss and the whole foolish shebang. Heroin? Who did that shit? Only
schvartzes
and gangsters did when he was younger, hardcore Italians and weirdo beatniks. He’d met one of those once, in New York. Herbert Huncke. Now he was so shaken he visited Little Will in the hospital. Can you believe it? Digging deep to look after his old vanquisher’s son, who seemed to be just as tough as his dad: there’d been some scare about his memory, but evidently the kid was progressing just fine. It really upset Beau, though, and the first thing he did upon finding out what had happened was drag Severin by the ear and throw him into rehab. Me he wasn’t worried about—I told him I was clean and he believed me—but Sev? He hustled my brother out to Malibu for one of those thirty-thousand-dollar drug-free “vacations.”
I don’t want to hear about it, Severin. You’re my son, and smack isn’t marijuana
.

The funny thing was, it wasn’t necessary. All by himself Sev kicked everything except pot and began working like a maniac to revise his second novel. Even as I kept struggling, he began taking meetings around town on his own. And you want to know what I think? I think this pissed Beau off: the fact that his son was writing, and in fact, writing well. Isn’t that nuts? His son was talented, and this bugged the shit out of him.

He’d never admit it, but I know it bothered him. Even when he was finalizing his divorce that summer—the third Mrs. Ro was his dog walker, a twenty-four-year-old
UCLA
grad who vacillated between wanting to become a hygienist and wanting to run an animal shelter; she talked about these two things alone, so incessantly he finally had no choice but to divorce her—even that didn’t wig Beau out as much as this did.

“God.” He was talking to himself, now. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“What?” Emily was on the couch in his office. “Do what?”

“Write.”

They’d just wrapped up a meeting. Six months had passed since that breakfast at the Peninsula, and Emily was now his creative executive. She and Severin had been dating for a little while, and though Beau wasn’t aware of their involvement, this he would’ve been proud of if he’d known. Severin showing good judgment for once.

“Would it be so bad?” Emily laughed. She bent and picked up the notes she’d taken on a yellow pad, during the pitch that had just ended. “We meet with writers all day.”

“Exactly.” Beau nodded at the door, toward the kid they’d just dismissed. “That poor schmuck is going to do this nine times in the next forty-eight hours. And it’s just gonna leave him with a lot of hard work festering in a drawer.”

“
OK
,” Emily said. Perhaps unconsciously, she took Severin’s side. “But he can come up with another idea after this. He controls the future. We just sit here and wait for people to bring us the gold.”

“Or the shit.” Beau yawned. The girl had a lot to learn. “Not that there’s necessarily a difference.”

Ten thirty
AM
. The meeting had ended on the dot. The coffees weren’t cold, the phone had interrupted them three times. Emily was the one who could handle the writers. That was why my father
trusted her. She might’ve been full of airy-fairy ideas, but this was why he liked her. There was an openness to her, a seeming simplicity and sweetness he’d all but forgotten was possible. She smelled of distant Malibu afternoons. Is it too much to suggest she might’ve reminded him of someone from long, long ago?

“How come you never bring Dill into these meetings?” Emily said. “He’s great at story.”

Someone closer to him than anyone, maybe. More beloved than anyone had ever been.

“He’s too much like his pops. His father was the most undisciplined writer I’ve ever met. He was so busy being a genius, he never buckled down to work. Dill doesn’t ask the right questions. Someone comes in here and wants to remake
Vivre sa Vie
, he doesn’t say, Who’s going to
see
that fucking movie, since nobody saw it the first time? He says,
Ooh
, Shoot the Piano Player,
fucking Bresson
. He doesn’t understand the—”

“We should remake that.”

Emily White looked the same just then as she had in the beginning. She was perhaps a little better dressed. Gray pinstripe jacket, sunglasses propped up on her head, bottled water tucked under her arm. She’d figured out a few things, and Darcy was on vacation, so she was in Beau’s office alone.

“We should remake—” Beau hiccupped. Muffin crumbs dusted his beard. “We should remake
Shoot the Piano Player?”

“Not the Truffaut movie, we can’t improve upon that.” How cool Emily was, how level. She was fantastic in a room, writers loved her precisely because she wasn’t just a naked cauldron of seething ambition. It was her innocence everyone loved, along with her intelligence. “But the David Goodis novel it’s based on.
Down There.”

She sat on the couch now, under that idiotic poster for his Michael Keaton movie Beau was suddenly tempted to take down. A Louisville slugger, a pair of baseballs. Its tastelessness indicted him.

“Where did you come up with that?” Beau asked.

She shrugged again. So blithe. Beau wondered at times whether she actually loved movies, whether she wasn’t also a creature of simple expediency. She was nothing like the young hustlers he’d come up with once. She was more about math than passion.

“I read it recently. It’s good.”

“Down There.”
Beau snorted. “
OK
. I’ll check it out.”

“You will?”

My father stood, windmilled his arms. He probably hadn’t finished a book in twenty years. Scripts, sure, but that wasn’t reading. Now this girl was actually giving him something to do. She smiled up at him from the couch. Perhaps it wasn’t innocence she had, exactly, but she was clean and tender. She lacked the Hollywood taint.

“Sure.” Beau nodded. “I’ll read it over the weekend, and we’ll talk.”

“Goddamn it, Severin!” Late at night, Emily pounded on the door of my brother’s apartment. “Let me
in
!”

Was Severin ever her boyfriend? I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, since he was never that attached to her. But he viewed her with a certain clarity his father never managed. It was January ’94, and they’d been dating off and on for some months.

“Let me in,
please.”

She was drunk. It was 1:00
AM
, and she’d done half a hit of Ecstasy earlier that night, at Jabberjaw. Even when she was out of control, she was surprisingly calm. Her modest upsets had a quality of subtle performance. In the sickly yellow light of his hallway, the old Spanish-style complex that might someday have a plaque to tell the world who’d lived in it, she beat the door gently with her palms.

“Sev—”

My brother opened the door, finally. “What is it, Em?”

“Why don’t you return my calls?”

Severin snorted. Ever since rehab, he’d become the littlest bit of a prick, himself. He’d grown colder, more remote. “You work in the movie business. You must be used to unreturned calls by now.”

“I just came to get my clothes.”

He waved her in. She stepped into his crappy, dingy studio. It smelled of burnt noodles, and Emily could feel the clammy residue of the door’s old paint on her palms.
Nashville
flickered on a small
TV
in the corner with the sound low, and a heavy Selectric typewriter, the same one Severin had owned since college, sat on the dining room table with a glass of water beside it.

“Why are you blowing me off?”

It wasn’t her: he was blowing everybody off. Me included. I barely saw him in those days. I was living a little deeper in Hollywood anyway, at Franklin and Kenmore. Little Will had left town for a while, gone to New York to visit his college girlfriend. She’d come out to nurse him while he was undergoing cognitive therapy.

“I don’t know, Em. I’ve been busy.”

Busy writing, busy brooding, busy beating up on himself. Who knew what he’d been doing, really, on his own time? I didn’t. She went into the bedroom and retrieved a shirt, a pair of pants, a sweater. The things she’d left there, in that brief window they’d been together. She came back out holding them clumsily over her arm, while Severin stood and waited by the plaid couch where he and I and Williams had launched our share of nights with a bong hit, shoving off into our shiftless carousing. Not now. He was in seclusion. A plate of takeout from Zankou Chicken sat cold on the coffee table, along with a dish of pinkish, pickled Armenian beets.

“How’s my dad?”

She shook her head. Emily didn’t want to talk about Beau, whom she loved, with his asshole son. They faced each other.

“You want to know why, Em?”

She nodded. My brother’s sudden bluntness, his decision to tell her the truth meant she didn’t want to know, maybe. She stood there, pale under the bare ceiling bulb above. Severin was taller, leaner. His hair glistened, Valentino black.

“You’re too much like him,” he said.

Emily laughed out loud.

“You don’t see it,” he said. “You’re like the business. You
are
the business. Not the way it used to be, but the way it is now.”

She gave him a weird green stare. Her eyes were cloudy in the room’s feeble light.

“What does that even mean, Sev? Are you calling me ambitious?”

Severin just shrugged. Emily told me once that she worried about him, that the stresses of being Beau’s legitimate son and surviving heir must’ve really worn on him. I see that now. At the time it seemed like he was being a dick, but he just saw what the rest of us weren’t ready to. In the corner, the letterboxed
Nashville
flickered on—you could just hear Haven Hamilton singing his stately, waltz-time ballad about how America was doing something right, to last two hundred years.

“What am I like?” Emily said, sarcastically now. Traffic hissed, serpentine, along Franklin. “Why don’t you tell me?”

My brother took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. He gazed vaguely into the air above her. She could hear the hum of his typewriter. Outside his window, the moon rose above Italian cypresses, illuminating the grayish, humid sky.

“You’re someone who doesn’t have a clue what she’s like.”

WHAT DID SEVERIN KNOW?
That’s what Emily White thought, and in this she was perfectly on point. What the fuck did Severin Roth know, this kid who was brought up by—let’s face it—a man with issues. She loved Beau, but his quirks were obvious. And so were his son’s.

Ambitious, Severin had called her. Careerist was what he’d meant, but really, was that so damning? I would’ve given everything I had to be so practical, to make a simple business decision instead of drifting and waiting for the “inspiration” it seemed to take for me just to bend down and tie my shoes. Beau loved
Down There
, loved it, and in fact when she finally told him where she first came across it (
You know who gave me that book? Your son! I met him one night at the Kibitz Room and we started talking
), the producer didn’t seem surprised.
You’ve met Severin? Small world
. Well it was, and it was a smaller town. The studio loved
Down There
too. So did Ethan Hawke. And Emily began to gain a reputation around town for being bright, being approachable, being funny. For knowing what to say, at just the right moment.

“What if he doesn’t die?”

“Excuse me?”

For example, when she leaned forward in a meeting with Richard LaGravenese—it was not long after Darcy had left the company—and proposed something for that difficult script,
Mr. Bones
.

“What if he doesn’t die,” she said calmly, while LaGravenese stroked his goatee, fiddled with his glasses. “What if it’s like a
Harold and Maude
thing, where he keeps trying to off himself and it never takes?”

Just like that, she fixed it, a movie that had been on my father’s slate for three years. It was Darcy’s pet project originally, loosely based on a real person—Beau could never remember his name, some poet who’d leapt off a bridge in Minnesota—but with a casual flash of inspiration, Emily solved it. It was thanks to her he could even be in business with someone like LaGravenese, a writer’s writer whose credits included
The Fisher King
. Emily’s brain allowed the producer newfound respectability.

“You’re too much!” he roared after the meeting, after Richard had left and she’d managed to reframe this ponderous arty biopic as an absurdist comedy. Which choice would be the difference between a line on a memo and eighty million bucks. “Where do you come up with these things?”