American Dream Machine (44 page)

I pushed Severin’s hand away. “Rupert Murdoch’ll do it,” I said. “My corporation’s rock beats your
HP
printer’s paper.”

Soon, I’d quit my job at Fox and be writing again. Soon, I’d finalize my divorce and move home to
LA
, but just then we were all together in New York, swirling around in our primitive adult fortune and dismay.

“Remember Emily White?” I said.

“Sure.” Severin shrugged. “What about her?”

“She’s this close to running a studio now.”

“Really?”

Severin blinked, behind his glasses. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or just indifferent. Little Will murmured.
Huh
. He probably didn’t remember Emily; he’d left town before her time really began.

“Yeah.” I signed for the check, and together we tumbled out of our booth and into the street. Our thickening bodies roiled close to one another’s. We still moved like a small pack, like the teenage wolves we’d once been.

“Look.” Williams stopped to ogle some Zeppelin bootleg in the window of a basement record store, bending over a metal railing to look down. “Cool.”

“You’ve already got that one, Will.” Severin stood behind him, smiling faintly. Will’s mind may have been functioning almost normally again, sure, but occasionally he was hazy around the details.

“I do?” Williams squinted, and Sev nudged me. “Fuck you, I don’t.”

Severin burst out laughing.

For a moment, our fuckups were something to laugh about. Severin’s fourth novel,
Peckerhead
—the one about a New York orphan’s search for his missing mother—had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. What could be wrong?

“I remember better than you do,” Will muttered, as he spotted a cab on Avenue of the Americas and strode forward to hail it.

Our voices were dead on the empty street, caroming flatly off the faces of the brick row houses and brownstones, our steps echoing a little as we scuttled up to the cab. Will was in a hurry to get home to his wife and six-month-old son; Severin, I guess, to whatever he was writing now, or else to Lexy, his own wife, who was also a novelist. I had no particular place to go, but I ambled after them.

“You
OK
, Nate?” Sev grabbed my bicep after Williams ducked into the backseat.

I nodded. What was there to say? I’d gotten married, and it had lasted all of three years. The marriage was scuppered by all the things you’d expect on my side: selfishness, spaciness, and inattention. You know my flaws by now. I wasn’t heartbroken so much as I was, simply, lost. I was my mother’s son and first I’d been Teddy’s, then Beau’s. How was I supposed to know what made adults capable of living together?

“You hear from Lizzie?”

I shook my head. I’d married a Waspy girl from Connecticut, a business-school blonde. Disaster. Sev squeezed my arm, and we dodged into the cab, his lime green shirt flashing in front of me as
he took the middle. My brother the famous novelist, protective of me to the end.

Or perhaps not. I flopped into the back beside him, on an unseasonably hot night in October. The cabbie shot up toward Eighth, where he’d loop around to Bowery, the direction we all needed to go. I might have envied Sev, but he was still as dark to me as he’d ever been.

He stared straight ahead. Little Will did the same. The latter didn’t look like his dad, for whom I was also still searching all the time. Who knew why? The more I discovered myself in business, the more I feared I could be like him, the chilly executive; the more I felt myself and the elder Williams align.

“You talked to Beau lately?” I muttered, but Severin didn’t hear. Or else he just ignored me. I thought he was on to his own apotheosis, was all: just as Beau had risen beyond his father, Severin had made it, and moved away.

The cab accelerated, plunging east and then downtown. The night was a heavy, cloud-clotted gray. Will lived in Park Slope, Sev in Cobble Hill. I shook my wrist against my heavy gold Omega and watched the city flash by, thinking of the places only a few blocks away that carried, for us, a certain scent. Café Limbo, Two Boots. No matter how successful I was, I’d never match them. Both of my friends seemed more at home in the world than I was.

“
MY GOD, IS
that Beau Rosenwald?”

It was more than two years before Emily ran into her old boss again. She and he had talked on the phone, occasionally made hopeful noises about having lunch, but it never happened. And when Beau’s deal expired, and wasn’t renewed, she’d simply lost track of him. Until Lucinda leaned over and tugged her sleeve.
Look
.

“Where?” Emily said. “My God, I think . . . it is!”

They were, in fact, at the “Markhamson Thing,” this time in 2003. Across the dining room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel she spotted him, in a paisley waistcoat and accompanied by a very tall, very slender blonde some twenty years his junior. Something about this woman’s body language—erect, uninterested in the Hollywood honchos swirling around—made it clear she was not in the business.

“What’s he wearing?” Lucinda snickered. “That waistcoat is bats.”

Beau Rosenwald was seventy years old. He hadn’t seen Emily yet, and a part of me will forever wish he never did. He kept his eyes on the stage, where Sheryl Crow was currently running through a mini-acoustic set of toe-tappers. The woman who sat with him was statuesque, sphinxlike, dignified in a way that made her presence at Beau’s side a little puzzling. She looked, just barely, like Donatella Versace, if the latter weren’t such a terrible frightwig.

Emily sat through the remainder of Crow’s set, shrinking down in her seat as she did. Her first impulse was to escape. Can you blame her? She was bored, she was pregnant for the second time, and she wanted to get home, to two-and-a-half-year-old Matilda
and the not altogether unpleasantly boring husband who’d already be sound asleep at 9:30
PM
.

“Look, David.” Natalya Markhamson pointed vaguely in my father’s direction. “Isn’t that the horrible man?”

David didn’t look up. Natalya could’ve been pointing anywhere. “Yes.”

“You’re not watching.”

“Yes, yes.” David allowed himself a courtesy glance. In fact he locked in on somebody else. “I’m sure that’s him.”

Light sparked off Natalya’s bracelet; that was what drew Beau Rosenwald’s eye. In this dimly lit dining room thick with the mood of self-congratulation, and with people
this
close to going home, he spotted expensive jewelry and then Emily White. Pity.

“You’re still not looking.” Natalya’s drawl was cartoonishly Slavic.

“Well,” David said, as Emily waved back at Beau reluctantly. “They’re all horrible men, aren’t they?”

He was dry, punctilious, Oxonian, and close to retirement age. She was an asp-like brunette in her thirties. What drew them together, besides money, Emily couldn’t imagine. She happened to know Natalya was sleeping with Lucinda and had been for some time. Not that David had a clue. With his coppery skin and goldframed glasses, receding hair and careful manners, he looked more like an accountant than the head of all three feature divisions of the biggest entertainment entity on the planet next to Disney.

Still, Emily almost made it out. She went for the door as soon as the lights came up, mumbling something about a babysitter. David didn’t mind, he liked Emily, and she’d already done her part to support the pet cause, donating an extra ten grand.

“Em!” The fat man cornered her at last, just as she was striding out of the lobby to the valet stand.

“Beau?” She turned and saw he was standing there with the tall woman. Even now, when she saw my dad she half expected him to whip a script—or Joe Pesci himself—out of his pocket and start clobbering her with it. “My God, it’s been ages.”

“Yeah.” He beamed. “Emily, I want to introduce you to my wife.”

Wife!
Was he always so short, or was this fourth Mrs. Ro just excruciatingly tall? She angled her hand down at Emily and they shook.

“He talks about you,” she said. “I’m Patricia.”

“I’m glad,” Emily said. Whatever could Beau have to say about her at this point? Mostly she was just baffled, by this woman’s air of academic seriousness, by her rare—flawed, unadjusted—beauty, and by old Beau’s apparent mellow contentment. He seemed positively jolly, there in his patent leather shoes.

“Me too,” he said. With his arms spread apart like the star of a musical, as if he were set to burst into song. “I’m happy for all your success, Em.”

That was it. The conversation collapsed around Beau’s failure to accost her with a bad movie. At seventy he deserved a little peace, didn’t he? He deserved his marriage to a fifty-two-year-old doctor (!), and he deserved a happy dotage. Not even a little incident Severin had stumbled into earlier this year—a father’s heartaches never ended, and he would never have guessed his son was unhappy—would ruin that for him. Behind him, in the lobby, Lucinda and Natalya Markhamson stood and pretended to ignore each other. As if half the town didn’t know they were fucking!

“Well,” Em said, as her car pulled up.
Phew
. Bad enough that Beau still talked about her. “I’ll see you.”

She pulled off. Beau and his fourth—fifth, Emily thought, but she could be forgiven for failing to keep track—wife stood behind, there in the golden light that rained over the valet stand. People milled around in tuxedos and evening gowns, chewing gum to efface the taste of mediocre salmon. Beau watched Emily’s car, a sleek and expensive green Bentley, turn left at the end of the drive. Her taillights disappeared.

“You know I bought her a DeLorean once?”

Patricia nodded. What Beau did not know was that Emily had sold the car, two years ago. Sentimentality, at last, had its limit.

Driving home, Emily’s mind was on her boredom. It was not on Beau Rosenwald at all. Even as she turned left on Wilshire Boulevard, headed west toward Santa Monica—she and Beau now lived mere blocks apart, for all that they never saw each other—she was thinking of her exhaustion, of the sheer lack of inspiration you had to draw upon to work at a studio today. Everything had already happened. You couldn’t make movies out of need, or even out of interest. Whereas in Beau’s era the business was governed by id,
this one was all superego, adjusted by some portion of the brain that hadn’t been named yet: pure terror wrapped in floss.

Tiffany fluttered by, Barney’s. What was once the Brown Derby, where Beau—he was only a few car lengths behind her now, pointing the landmark out to his wife as he always did—used to take Severin for lunch every Christmas Eve. Whatever reverence Emily had for the past—it wasn’t much, but when she went to work for Beau she’d certainly had some feeling for what he’d accomplished, and what the industry had been—was supplanted by this feeling of being a posthumous human being. If the life of the movies was ended, what was left? Did anything exist if you no longer had hope for it? If it was no longer the object of dreams? At this hour, Wilshire Boulevard was quiet, all those low-slung, brown-and-tan buildings shuttered up behind silver grates, the mannequins glowing boldly in the windows. Emily White was as inviolable as these alarm-strung storefronts, as armored against intrusion, her eyelids drooping as she cruised through yellow lights.
I’m bored
.

Beau was only twenty-five feet behind her, yet worlds away in spirit. Driving with his wife, sipping bottled water behind the wheel of
her
BMW
, he luxuriated in not caring very much, in connubial adoration, in being, finally, free. Unlike Emily White, he was
beyond
boredom, whereas Emily was boredom incarnate. Wasn’t that true? Wasn’t it?

“Hmm,” he murmured. Feeling not even the least whisper of trouble. They were just passing Bedford Drive, the old
TAG
offices there on his left. His elbow jutted into the breeze. “You know what?”

“Nope.” Patricia covered his hand with her own, delicate, slender, and soft. Her voice was bright and ironic. “I can’t yet read your mind, sweetheart.”

“I think I’m going to,” my father said. He spoke as if they were having an argument, as if she were trying to talk him out of whatever intention he hadn’t even yet announced. “I’m going to call Emily and ask her to lunch.”

“I think that’s terrific, if it’s what you want to do.”

Ahead he could see the old Beverly Hilton, Robinsons-May, the fountain at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica, which shot lavender blue spray into the air. Bryce Beller had once passed out in that fountain.

“Yep,” Beau hummed. “Yep, indeed.”

Just so, he did it. He made the last great mistake of his life.

EMILY WHITE WAS
onto something with her first impression of her old boss then. Because Beau Rosenwald had his problems, but also, at long last, he was happy. He was—inconceivable!—in love. I’d never seen him so purely cheerful as he was in those days, and Severin, whose memory reached back a lot farther, said exactly the same thing.
He’s so happy
. Like an infant, a swaddled, jolly, cooing little beast, he could not have been more so.

So why did he have to fuck it up?

The truth was, around the time Beau lost his deal, he’d been sick of just about everything. He was sick of the business, sick of kissing up to the studio and its executives, Lucinda and all the rest. He was sick of his own mind, even. And so old Rosenwald, no stranger to the more drastic forms of mental-health maintenance, took the unprecedented step, for him, of entering psychoanalysis. This wasn’t about going and complaining to some unorthodox transactional hippie once a week—poor Horowitz, who’d finally come down on the side of or-not-to-be: he’d hung himself in front of Paul Revere Middle School in the late nineties—this was about discovering who he was. Beau Rosenwald must’ve been desperate.

“I don’t believe in this shit,” he barked at the woman who admitted him to her office on Fairburn Avenue, near Beverly Glen. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“What’s not to believe?” The woman was a willowy redhead. He hated redheads, ever since Susan Sarandon ditched him in the late days at
ADM
. “I haven’t asked you to believe anything.”