American Dream Machine (49 page)

“Aren’t you gonna say something?”

I could feel Beau’s fury on the other side, the full force of his rage. Now I knew what he was like when he wasn’t on your side in business, how he could bleed concession straight out of you.

“Uh,” I said. I brought my fingers to the bridge of my nose and squeezed. I blinked and stared through French doors at a sun-dappled patch of yard. “I was going to tell—”

“Bull. Shit,” he said. Two words. “Bullshit, Nathaniel. D’you know who I am? Do you know
why
it would be important to me to know if my son was in trouble?”

He spoke with such venom, such purity of disgust.
I
wasn’t a son to know about, in this respect.

“I do.” I closed my eyes and thought of Kate. “Of course I do.”

“Then why, Nate?” All of a sudden I heard his voice crack. “Why wouldn’t you
tell
me?”

What a bully! He could come at me with his anger, and then manipulate me with tears. I was in a perfect place, this small Craftsman house I had purchased just south and east of the Sony lot where the last fifteen years of his life had played themselves out.

“I don’t know.”

I could read the spines of the David Goodis novels on my own shelves. Outside, there was a dazzling sky. I had a lawn, a hedge of purple pitcher sage. I watched a young couple walk a pit bull on a leash. Sunlight sheared across their broad, handsome faces, and only the exposure of the street, its openness and the flatness of the neighborhood around it, reminded me this place had recently been a ghetto.

“Nate,” Beau murmured. “I’m not mad.”

Only people who were mad ever said that. But I know why he modulated his temper now.

“It’s
OK
.” After Sev, after Kate, who was left? “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Beau. I’m sorry.”

Just me, to spare him in his infinite loneliness: I’d be all that remained to extend his line.

It got weirder. A lot weirder. Because after Beau and I made up, and after I discovered it was Little Will who’d told him what happened (Will, I think, felt obligated: in many respects our dad had looked after
him
, growing up, and even after the elder Williams’s death, although the two partners were sundered, Beau kept an eye on him, went to see him in rehab and so on), Severin came out for a visit. This was almost a year later, in the spring of 2004. It wasn’t specifically to see me: he was scheduled to give a reading at the Hammer Museum.

“Hey.” I picked him up at
LAX
, reached over to unlock the passenger-side door so he could climb in. “No Beau? No limo?”

“Nope.” He folded himself into my passenger seat. “He’s coming to the reading.”

I pulled away from the curb, drifting across four lanes of traffic. “I would’ve thought he’d be eager to see you.”

“He is. He thinks I’m coming tomorrow.”

“Ah.” I gunned it, out from below the overpass into sunlight, toward the lane that would lead us out to Century Boulevard. “Why’d you fly early?”

What happened next startled me. In fact it shook me in a way few things—maybe a couple of others, maybe only one, since—ever have. We drove to his hotel. He wouldn’t say why.

“I want to show you something.”

“What?”

He wouldn’t tell me, as we glided along the 405 to the 101 into Hollywood, into the same neighborhood we’d lived in all those years ago, with our crappy apartments and video store jobs, the sweltering depths of the city away from the beach.

“I want you to meet somebody.”

“Who? You’ve got a new honey?”

We rode down Franklin, past his old place. My own, the old Hobart Arms, was farther east, behind us.

“Nope. It’s more important than that.”

God knows, I think I presumed it would be someone odd, esoteric, interesting: Philip K. Dick’s widow, Hal Ashby’s sister, Thomas Mann’s niece. One of those people who were in touch with my brother’s tastes and specialties.

“You have to promise me.” He reached over and tapped my shoulder. “This is just for you, Nate. You can never tell Dad.”

“What is it? Worse than a fistful of Vicodin?” My engine roared. I was driving a noisy car, a
BMW M3
, a real asshole machine. I suppose I was exaggerating my characteristics, being more Hollywood than Severin could ever dream, to compensate. “I won’t tell him.”

“You can’t.”

“What’s he ever going to care about Fitzgerald’s mistress’s kid?” I said. “Dad doesn’t know who any of the real people on this planet actually are.”

We pulled up, at last, at the Roosevelt. It was a typical place for my brother to stay: unfashionable, august, a little decrepit, but also full of history. D. W. Griffith’s ghost rode the elevators, they said. Montgomery Clift lived in one of the rooms upstairs, while he was filming
From Here to Eternity
.

I reeled after Severin, chasing him across the lobby. Whatever he was going to show me had its urgency:
It’s because I love you, Nate
. He didn’t even bother to check in as a guest. The moment I tossed my keys to the valet he just turned and started trotting straight up the stairs toward the bar.

“Aren’t you gonna bring your bag to your room?”

He didn’t say anything. Sev traveled light, the way he lived, with just a laptop and a carry-on. He remained, in those days, so purely identifiable as his younger self, but this was the last time I’d ever recognize him as the person I’d thought I’d known. A distinct trace of early silver shimmered at his temples. But otherwise? The same nerdy kid turned hipster novelist. He was the latter even when he was still just the former.

We charged across the open floor of the upstairs bar, which seemed completely empty at one o’clock in the afternoon. A tall woman occupied one of the far couches, so slender in profile I
almost didn’t see her. In the room’s ill-lit, Gothic coolness, she was just a Brancusi bird, a long and pale mote with copper-colored hair, absorbed in her book. Only when we approached did I realize she was our target, as she looked up and recognized Severin.

“Hello, darling.”

“Mom!”

It took me a minute to know what to think. It took me several, in fact, while she stood up and kissed him, on both cheeks, I noticed, and then turned to me.

“You must be Nate.”

“I . . . yes, I suppose I must be. Severin.” I looked at my brother. “Who is this person?”

Rachel burst out laughing. “He has his father’s obtuseness,” she said to Sev. “But
he
doesn’t look like Beau either.”

The laughter. That was part of what convinced me, part of what rendered this entire ghostly encounter persuasive. The Roosevelt, with its blood-colored tile and its doomy sconces, its crypt-light in midafternoon, only enhanced its uncanniness.

“I wanted you to know,” Severin said. “I needed you to.”

You needed me to know what?
I almost said, because I was struck once more by how life was most real when it was least plausible, when it was more like the movies than it was like itself.

“You thought I was dead,” Rachel said.

“No.” That was what made it so strange. I’d thought nothing: that she was gone, but also alive. Now that she was in front of me, somehow, it was like she’d been there the whole time. “Does, uh, our father . . . ”

She shook her head. Severin said, “No, Nate. That’s what I meant. You can’t
ever
tell him.”

“
OK
.” We sat next to each other, I in an armchair while the two of them collapsed on a leather couch. “
OK
.”

They really did look alike, although she was pushing seventy. The bevels and angles of her face were still elegant, recognizably Severin’s, and she was warmer than I had imagined: something about the Scurve of her body as she pulled up on the couch and opened her posture toward her son. Her hair was red, dyed that vivid, electrical color
it had held when she was younger, which I’d seen in photographs. Only when you got up close could you see the reticulations of age, the crinkling of her fair skin. In a room like this, she did pretty well.

“You’re wondering.” She sat next to Severin, and I could tell they’d been in touch a long time. This wasn’t anything new. “You’re wanting to know where I’ve been.”

The strangeness really wasn’t in her reappearance. It was in how easily Severin accepted her absence, how comfortable he seemed when she told me. Yes, she explained, she’d disappeared from his life—and from Beau’s—around the time of Kate’s death. She couldn’t stand our father, which I understood—she blamed him for everything—and so she unplugged completely, left her business and moved west. She’d been wanting to get out of the agency business anyway. For a while she had a bookstore in Boulder, then she worked at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. Then Portland, where she was, still.

“I hated everything.”

“Everything?”

It was Severin’s laughter, the casual way he teased her from his place on the couch, I couldn’t figure out.

“No, not everything.”
Not you
. “Of course not.”

Well, what did I know? I’d spent my life resenting people who were close to me (Severin, Beau) or not close enough (Beau, Severin). What did I
know?

“Why now?” I asked Rachel, as soon as Sev had gotten up to use the bathroom, because I knew he’d never tell me. “If you guys have been in touch since he was a teenager, why would Severin introduce us now?”

Beau had never known. He probably still thought Rachel was dead, even as Severin had visited his mother right under his father’s nose all the way through high school. (
You still writing those letters, Sev? Still in touch with that girl up north?
) It didn’t make sense, given how secretive my brother always was with me, that he would reveal it unprompted. At the same time, I understood how important it was that Beau never discover. It would’ve compromised everything, had he known.

“Severin loves you.”

“Really? He has a funny way of showing it, sometimes.”

But maybe I shouldn’t have taken it personally. Maybe I should never even have doubted. We were drinking martinis in the early afternoon. I was on my second, Rachel nursing her third. It didn’t seem to faze her. Slender as she was, she could really hold her liquor.

“This is his way.”

I felt light-headed. Drunk, I suppose, on the power of having my ignorance rescinded.

“I’m happy to meet you,” I said. Foolishly. As if this were all my brother was trying to show me. Like he didn’t have one more play up his sleeve.

The next night, Severin read at the Hammer. Afterward, he and I went out.

“Where to?”

We were trawling aimlessly toward Hollywood, not ready to go back to his hotel, basking in the intimacy we’d located that afternoon. Good times had descended between us the only way they ever seemed to in our adult lives, seemingly by accident. Beau had been at the reading, but Rachel had not.

“Dresden?”
Too far. Too ancient, again, in 2004
. We were too old to be cruising for yesterday’s thrills, especially when yesterday’s thrills were themselves an effort to catch up with ones that were already gone almost before we were born.

“Hamlet,” Severin said. “Let’s go to the Hamlet on Sunset.”

That’s how long it had been. The long-ago new had become nouveau-old once more. I tilted the Beamer up toward the Strip.

“Think we’ll get Cloonage?”

“Wrong night,” Severin said. “Wrong era.”

Indeed. But I didn’t want to ruin anything: this was a rare moment when I felt close to my brother, close in the way we used to be, without any drug overdoses or sibling arguments in play. He’d shown me something wholly private (Little Will didn’t know about Sev’s mother either), and I was touched by that. So?

We pulled over on Fountain. We smoked a little weed in the shadow of a coniferous tree, traffic whizzing past as we handed a joint back and forth in the car. It wasn’t like us anymore, and I had
a few misgivings about sharing dope with my brother this late in our existence, given how our most catastrophic adventures seemed to involve altered states, but so what? We were free for the moment. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock.

“Yeah,” I croaked, as I turned the key in the ignition finally and we banked up toward Sunset at Crescent Heights.
Why not be baked?
“It’s not like today could get weirder.”

But as we floated along the Strip, it did. Laugh Factory. Greenblatt’s. All the old places were there, even if they’d changed identities, even if their doormen were bigger or the sandwiches they served were smaller than they had once been. The casual ballooning of perspective, too, the way some things shrivel with age, the way the palaces of childhood prove themselves to be shacks. Yet they were the same, the very rooms in which we’d wasted so many nights in our twenties, and where Beau and his rat pack had done as much for themselves.

Memories. I couldn’t help it if my life was guided by them, or if I obsessed, still, over their errancy and variation. Most problems in adulthood are simply ones of relation, or scale. As we cruised down the Strip these familiar façades—the hellish neon semaphore of Sky-Bar, the soon-to-be-shuttered shell of Tower Records—blinked and winked and endured. But when we drove up in front of the Hamburger Hamlet, on that angled stretch of Doheny Road that juts up above Sunset, handed the keys to the valet, and stumbled inside, the place looked exactly the way it should’ve: like an old-fashioned piano bar, with that same velvety-rich palette I’d dreamed of my entire life.

“Nice,” Severin said.
Welcome to 1962
.

“Yeah. Let’s get something to drink.”

We flailed our way to the bar, waving our arms like swimmers, like we were doing an unpopular dance step from this bygone era. The joint was jumping, which was odd given that it was Monday and most of the patrons were over sixty.

“Gin martini,” I said to the bartender.

“Manhattan.”

He wandered off, then brought drinks back to us, Severin’s maraschino cherries gleaming like vital organs in the dark.

“Cheers.” I slurped carefully off the top of my drink, felt the gin tincture my hydroponic high. It was wonderful.

“Love you.” Severin hooked his arm around me.