American Dream Machine (45 page)

Beau looked at her, dubiously. This was in October 2001, and I suppose his confusion was the most American thing about him. It wasn’t as if everyone’s beliefs weren’t up for question, just then.

“Sit.” The doctor indicated her couch. Her hair fell across her face so he couldn’t really see it that well. The hair was wavy and thick, and her hands had the brittle delicacy of tree branches. Something about the way her fingers spread, the radical articulation of her knuckles and wrists, struck him. Their parchment color. “Why do you think you’re here?”

It had been so long since Beau had talked to an actual woman. I think she scared him a little, this person who was not an executive, an actress, or a trophy, who wasn’t going to respond to any of his tantrums. He did not find her attractive.

“Dr. Trabulus gave me your number.”

“So I gather.” She smiled. “But why are
you
here?”

How do you answer a question like that, when you have no vocabulary to describe your self-state? Beau had spent his life
being
a mood; it didn’t really occur to him that human beings had motives, that all that boring stuff that got talked up in story meetings actually applied.

“I don’t know.” He sat. “I think that’s why I’m here.”

He sat like a passenger on a bus, hands folded in his lap. He looked at her shelves, which were piled high with books. He stared out her window, at the open air above the intersection of Santa Monica and Beverly Glen Boulevards. There was the sound of angry honking, a rush-hour altercation.

“My last shrink was a complete lunatic,” he said. Still, looking around him, craning his neck as if there might be somebody else here. “He thought he was treating Jim Morrison.”

“Oh?” She folded her hands in her lap, crossed her legs, and listened.

Beau was stranded. Without a job, without a production deal or a film or a marriage—even a bad wife would’ve given him something to do—and yet he found himself, gradually, able to recognize this. Talking to this doctor, he admitted his despair.

“Everything happens to
me
,” he said, on a subsequent visit. “It’s like the old song.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . ” My father hesitated, over some anguished sense of victimhood he was too terrified to explain, that had never even crossed his consciousness before this. “My life—”

“Your life, what?” Her voice was golden, calm. He’d taken to lying down on the couch, not looking at her. “You have a successful son. You have a second son you worry about a little, but you think he’ll be
OK
, once he gets it together. Yet you feel like certain things are your fault.”

“I do.”

Three times a week, they met. They talked about Severin (to his astonishment, she knew who his son was, owned all four of his books), about his feelings of failure, about Kate, and about me. About other things I’ll never know.

“I’ve made a fortune. I’ve fucked movie stars.”

“And yet you actually feel like none of it happens to you,” this woman—Dr. Goldmond was her name—said, presciently. “I think you feel like it’s all happening to somebody else.”

Psychobabble, to him. But she went over to her shelf and pulled something down.

“Read this.” It was
The Great Short Novels of Henry James
. “Read
The Beast in the Jungle.”

“I know
The Beast in the Jungle.”
After all, he’d developed it unsuccessfully at Columbia. “I almost did this movie.”

“You did? So you’ve already read it.”

My father hesitated. He’d read Emily White’s coverage of an adapted script. Yet now he read the novella. It was hell, of course, but he went line by painstaking line through that, and
The Ambassadors
too. Not since
Coriolanus
had he delved as deeply into a text, needed to wring as much meaning from just a set of words.

“How can that be?” This woman divined him just right. As with John Marcher, as with Lambert Strether, those Jamesian archetypes, his life seemed to have passed him right by. “I’ve been married three times. I’ve been in an asylum. I’ve—”

He twisted up off the couch, to amplify his aggravation, then broke off. “You changed your hair,” he said.

“Three weeks ago.”

It was February 2002. Through almost a dozen meetings, he simply hadn’t seen it. She was blonde now.

“Why didn’t I notice?” he muttered. Suddenly, he was angry. “Why did you dye your hair?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” She tossed it, just so. With an unconsciously girlish defiance. “Why shouldn’t I dye my hair?”

Beau Rosenwald was so Pavlovian. All she needed to do was become a fucking blonde?

“I like it,” he said. Demurely, as his anger withered and he just stared.

“Thank you.”

Just like that, he saw beauty. Grunting, wheezing, aging Beau. How had he missed it all before? Her eyes were green and her lips were pillowy and if she happened to be a little older than the women he usually went for—if she happened not to be twenty-five—she was authentic.

“You were saying?”

But Beau couldn’t speak. This elegant, articulate woman, she looked over and saw nothing but another patient, of course. If she had seen the man, can you imagine how that would’ve gone? He was always yammering on about Spielberg, David Geffen, the need for a comeback, whom could he call? Patricia Goldmond had less attractive patients—Beau was funny, and his hideousness was mostly skin-deep—but this white-haired, froggy little fellow wasn’t exactly her private ideal.

“I was saying . . . ”

He fell hard. He couldn’t help it. He knew what a cliché it was to fall in love with your therapist, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. Sharon Stone herself wouldn’t have stood a chance against this woman, as Beau saw her.

“This must happen all the time.” He couldn’t help telling her about it either. Within a week he was spilling his guts.

“No.”

“Yes.” He insisted; God, it was fucking humiliating.
Please uncross your legs
. “You’re irresistible.”

“I don’t think so.” She couldn’t help laughing, and touching her hair, which now drove him absolutely bananas. “I think people resist me fine.”

“I don’t.” He levered himself up off the couch and looked at her straight on. “I quit. I can’t come here anymore.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“You’re fired. Now date me.”

“No.”

In her gray suit, with her long curtain of blonde hair—she’d straightened it, too—she looked grave. Her face without sutures, her melancholy stare. There were lines around her mouth, creases at the corners of her eyes.

“Why not?” Who knew you could be turned on by flaws? “I date prettier women than you all the time.”

“That has nothing to do with it. And it’s against the ethical rules of the profession, you know that.”

“I don’t care.”

“And I’m not attracted to you.”

“That never stopped anyone before.”

Old Beau was off to the races. He wanted this more than he could remember wanting anything at all. Even the movie business was secondary, tertiary: he called and left messages on her answering service, sat outside her office in his car. His hands actually shook when he considered her, just sitting there hoping to catch a glimpse. (“Stalking?” Well, that would depend on whom you asked. He wanted to see her, was that such a crime?) He felt better than he had, really, in years. There was nothing like wanting the unobtainable, and Beau had obtained enough over the years to know it. Usually, you stopped wanting at consummation, but this was different. Had his life passed him by?

“Oh . . . ” He ran into her one afternoon at Bristol Farms, literally plowed his cart into hers at the end of the frozen food aisle. “Imagine running into you.”

She laughed. As if it was an authentic surprise for her, where Beau had gone so far as to memorize her schedule. (It wasn’t stalking, it was . . . managed coincidence.)

“You do your own shopping,” she said. Gesturing toward his cart, which was full of nothing but vitamin water and a carton of power bars. “I’d have assumed you had someone to take care of you.”

“Yep.” He nodded toward hers, which was full. “You have a family.”

“Two children,” she said. “I’m divorced.”

It struck them both, how little they knew. Beau, that he’d been running around in love with a ghost—it hadn’t occurred to him
there were actual people in her life—and she, that she’d been pitying this man as if he were an invalid. He still almost seemed so. But standing there in the frozen food aisle—gelato, edamame; this was the sort of market that wouldn’t stoop to sell mere peas—she fell in love with him too. Crazy as it sounds, she did.

“Did you ever think”—Beau couldn’t resist teasing her, much later—“you’d end up with someone like me?”

“No!” Lying beside him in bed. “God, no.”

“Once more,” he laughed. “For emphasis.”

They’d come a long way, and quickly, since that coffee in Westwood. Less than a year had passed, and they were now married. But you know Beau: why wait for anything? One second she was carrying her groceries out to her car, half regretting having just said “yes” to the relentless fat man; the next, almost the moment her younger son took off for college, she was shacked up on Fifteenth Street in Santa Monica, lying beneath his two-hundred-odd pounds of heavenly joy.

“Is it really so unlikely?” Beau said. Not quite indignant, as they lingered in bed on a Saturday morning. He would’ve taken
her
name, were it permissible.

“Yes,” she said. “You don’t read. You aren’t interested in the world around you.” She planked her long fingers atop his chest. “You’re heavy.”

He laughed. It was like she could turn these things into positives just by naming them. She stood up and began to dress. Moving with slightly exaggerated grace, a pleasure in knowing these movements were appreciated.

“Never thought I’d end up with you either,” he said. As he watched her from the massive Duxiana mattress, propped up on one elbow. On peach-colored sheets, with the rest of the room all dark browns and expensive tans, opulent desert colors. “Never thought I’d love a girl with one tit.”

Ah, yes. One more discovery for Beau, once Patricia unsheathed herself from her profession and her blouse: Mrs. Ro IV was a cancer survivor who’d had a mastectomy before they met. Her wisdom, and strength, were what allowed him to survive things now, like that episode with Severin this past spring, his son’s acting upon a crushing depression. He loved how
real
she was, whether out at a fund-raiser or seminaked in their room.

She adjusted an earring, there at the foot of the bed. She was redhaired again, one more way she kept her new husband on his toes.

“Where are you going?”

“I have a patient.”

“Just to make you happy,” he said, “I’m going to read something while you’re out.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“I’m going to.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, or—
OK
, I’ll start small. A racing form, but I’ll work my way up.”

She laughed. And came over and kissed him, briskly, before she walked out without a word. Yellow skirt, white blouse: she wore bright colors today. Disappearing inside a self he could no longer quite imagine, the professional he’d first met. Being married to a psychiatrist was exciting. Like with a spy, or a whore: there were things you could never know.

This was where Beau was, in those days before his fateful collision with Emily. I suppose you can lay some of the blame on Patricia, as that dig about his reading would have its effect. But he stretched and sauntered downstairs, after a while, after he’d listened to her car pull away and could luxuriate—even him now, yes—in silence. This house felt lived-in today. The same massive spread he’d bought after he cashed out of the ranch in Calabasas: it had four bedrooms and five bathrooms and two kitchens and a gym, things that were stupidly extravagant through all those years he’d lived by himself. Now it was home. It smelled like olive oil and caramelized garlic and flowers and her perfume. A little corner of a rug was turned up where she’d accidentally kicked it on her way out the door.

He crossed the hall and entered the living room. All those books Patricia had piled up on his shelves were a bit intimidating. It was onerous, too, being married to someone so smart, so unknowable. Though knowing her would’ve been a problem also; like knowing himself. To discover that under that massive skin lay just a timid set of insecurities like anyone else’s? No wonder actors do what they do.

“Hmm,” he murmured, just to keep himself company. “What now?”

He took two steps up a ladder, which was set on rollers, to reach the first book that caught his eye: it was Robert Stone’s
A Hall of
Mirrors
. Why that book? He liked the title, and he remembered that Teddy Sanders had something to do with packaging
Dog Soldiers
, as
Who’ll Stop the Rain
, back in the old
ADM
days. Past that, I’ll always wonder. But Beau, he took the book and went over to the couch and read it cover to cover.

“Honey?” By the time his wife came home, he was positively flattened, sprawled on the couch in his usual white shirt and tan pants, oblivious to her call. “Honey?” she repeated.

Behind him was the wall covered with photographs by Dennis Hopper; above the fireplace hung a single Jasper Johns.

“This book is great,” he said finally, when she entered and broke the spell.

His bare feet were unexpectedly kempt and clean and shapely. A young man’s feet, like a dancer’s.

“Do I know you?” she said. Spotting the title as she bent to kiss him. “Yes, that is a fantastic book.”

“It’s a movie.”

“Stop. It already was a movie, anyway, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.”

“Really?” How rare, for her to know a film and him not, unless it was Asian or Eastern European. “I don’t remember that.”

“
WUSA
, it was called. I saw it when I was in college. Not very good.”

“It should be remade.”

“No.”

Patricia was right. It wasn’t even a good idea. Beau couldn’t help thinking like a producer, though. Nominally he still was one, and of course, bad ideas had long been his specialty.