American Dream Machine (54 page)

“Oho we did, Bobby!” Teddy gave it up for the interloper.

My God! “Skoblow?” I clapped his bony shoulder. “How’s it hangin’, papa?”

He checked me out. So transformed, he was. Beady black eyes, khaki pants, and an argyle sweater-vest. He looked like a senile crow.

“Dark days.” He scowled, lip quivering. “Some mornings I can’t even put my pants on without pain.”

“That’s not just a problem of age,” I said.

I gave him a wry smile and turned to join my friends, to find out what I was missing. Behind me, Teddy asked Bob how things were going in Phoenix, what was his handicap?

“About a seven,” Skoblow said. “Pretty good for a kid from Arthur Avenue.”

“Hey-yo!” Williams tackled me, blocked into me softly with his shoulder when I got close. “How’s it going, man?”

He was pushing me backward, moving like a bulldozer while I was striving toward Severin, as if to keep me out of their conversation. Both of them had come in late last night; I’d seen them but briefly, at the cemetery this morning.

“Not great,” I said. “Closed casket, y’know?”

“I do know.” He grimaced. “I think I do.”

I studied him. He, too, had changed very little. His hair was short and had gone the color of gunmetal. But he was still a punk. He retained the old swagger, the same pronated stride. The boxy cut of his tan suit made me feel like we might’ve been hanging at some kid’s bar mitzvah, setting up to play Truth or Dare with the honeys.

“Something else bothering you, Nate?”

I’d asked him once what really happened to his father, and he’d just deflected the question. I never did have much tact. I don’t know why I imagined that’s what he and Sev were discussing just then, and that they were leaving me out of it, but I did. And I had to know, for the same reason I had always needed to know: because Little Will’s dad
was
my dad, almost as much as Beau was, and because I’d been brooding over what actually happened even before Severin told me what he knew. The story of the mugging was never credible, even when we were teenagers.

“Yeah.” I hesitated. “What really happened to your father?”

“Christ, man. You never quit, do you?”

“Should I?”

Here we were at Beau’s funeral. Suspicion had even rested upon him, once. If not now, when would I ever know?

“Is it really any of your business?”

“Is it
not
my business?” I said. “It was my childhood too.”

He just stared at me. A wary, passive, middle-aged stare. He and I had known each other now for thirty years. Once upon a time I’d scraped him out of a vomit-filled bathroom stall with a needle in his arm: you’d have thought I might ask him anything. We were the custodians of each other’s catastrophes, after all.

“Just leave it,” he said. “You don’t really want to know.”

Later, I lost my cool. I’m not proud of it, but I sucker punched Little Will. He didn’t see it coming.

“What the hell?” He, Severin, and I were just on our way outside. We’d left the house through the same door Beau had used to make his final exit, passing through the laundry room and the garage. I jumped on Will the moment we stepped out into the wide stone drive. He doubled over.

“Fuck you,” I snapped. Severin held me back as I lunged at Will, who was down on his knee. “Fuck you guys! You never tell me anything.”

“Nate, what was that?” Severin said. He had his arms laced across my chest and over my shoulders. “What the hell are you doing?”

Will knelt, rubbing his temple. I didn’t get him very hard, and he seemed more bemused, for once, than angry.

“What the fuck, dude?” He stood up. “Seriously?”

It was late. The three of us were the last to leave, and the moon floated high over the driveway. Green hedges rose to my right, grown tall for privacy. Beau’s second car, the one he hadn’t taken that night, still rested right in front of us. Starlight slicked its silver chassis.

“What’s wrong with you people?” I said, once Severin let me go. “You never tell me anything.”

“What do you imagine we’re not telling you?” Sev said.

Needless to say, I wasn’t at my clearest. I’d had a few glasses of wine, was fogged—as was my way—about so many things, really. Williams stood up. He came over and planted his palm against my chest, not with violence, but as a kind of steadying gesture.

“He thinks we were talking about my dad.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Severin muttered.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t. But you guys don’t talk to me.”

This was an exaggeration, but what wasn’t? In the end, what isn’t?

“Jesus, Nate.” Little Will’s voice dripped disgust, or impatience. He let his hand slip off me. “It’s so important to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him just then what it was, that in that moment knowing what had happened was everything, as he and Severin—the collective facts of our lives—were pretty much all I had left.

“I’m your friend,” I said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

The three of us prowled around the driveway in circles, pacing like cats. Like the teenagers we still were, and perhaps might always be, together.

“I don’t know that it is enough, Nate. A person’s entitled to his privacy.”

“That’s true.” Though as I contemplated the open, closed book that was Beau Rosenwald’s life, its infinite variety and fathomless weirdness, I wasn’t positive I agreed. Weren’t we obligated, as friends this close, to try to understand each other, and to occupy each other’s shoes? Wasn’t it my own experience, too? “But we were all there.”

“None of us were
there
, Nate.” Little Will shook his head. “That’s the problem. None of us are ever really going to know.”

Sev had stepped away. He was sitting on the low iron fence that ran beneath the hedge; he was staying out of it, it seemed. Only I knew he wasn’t, really. I knew my brother had as much at stake in this as I did.

“We still have a right to the facts,” I said. “To what’s true.”

I kept my eyes on Sev. Who sat with his tie loosened, a fevered-yet-cool expression that made him look like some cerebrating hipster of the early sixties. He could’ve been one of the original crew at Talented Artists, all pumped up on Benzedrine and the Beatles. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt.

“Just tell him, Will.” Finally he spoke. “Tell him what you told me.”

Little Will shook his head. Maybe he was right. Who were we to ask him to sound his own suffering yet again? But Severin already knew what had happened, and given the history between our families, the pain our fathers had inflicted upon one another, and upon us, I had every right to know also. Given that none of us were islands, that we were all a part of the main.

“
OK
.” Little Will pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Obviously, it tore him up still to remember. At last, he said, “All right.”

The street was silent. The wooden door to the garage was open, but there was no puppy who might escape: Patricia had given Daisy away that morning. For a moment there wasn’t any sound except the wind moving through the leaves of the coral trees and the magnolias, the rustling fronds above.

WILLIAMS FARQUARSEN TURNED
away from the car. He’d just said goodbye, just rested his palms on the metal strip below the driver’s side window and bid farewell to his wife and child.

“Bye, Will.” He gave his son a pale smile. “Take care.”

He watched the Peugeot go gurgling up the street and then turn right, out of view. Any one of us might’ve looked over our shoulders and watched him watching, seen him standing in the middle of a wide residential street on Saturday morning, barefoot and in blue jeans. Severin, Little Will, and I were there. His small frame receded, bracketed by crooked Craftsmen. He looked less like a captain of the film industry and more like an itinerant sailor, a blotch of navy and white. Only the longish red hair distinguished him, made him look—from a distance—a little like the figure on a Cracker Jack box. He turned and prowled, lithe, into the house, his feet slapping at the brick steps. His frame like a burglar’s in the hazy Marina Beach afternoon.

He took a cool shower. This was his first act, once we were gone, a simple and domestic gesture most people make just once in a day, but Williams usually did twice. He washed his body, five seven, 151 pounds. He had very little hair between his head and his groin. His pale nipples were tiny. In this, too, he might’ve been taken for a boy only slightly younger than we were.

He washed his hair and he combed it fine. He went downstairs and he read a script and he drank an espresso. The air outside his office held that blasted beach light: almost white. He loved the
Marina for this, the way it reminded him of when Marnie and he were young and their son was an infant. Before American Dream Machine, before he was anything himself but a soldier, and this place, the Venice Boardwalk especially, was still dangerous. Asked why he never left the neighborhood—
Why don’t you take a place in Malibu, Will?
—he prevaricated, but the truth was, he just preferred it. He came here when it was still feral, when there were iron bars on all the windows and the crumbling, low-slung houses belonged to hippies, junkies, and painters, squatters and fags. Looking out the window, he could feel these pressures still. Walking along the boardwalk at night, or riding his bicycle there—those things he still sometimes did—was an invitation to be killed. That hardly stopped him. Some nights he’d wheel the bike home slowly, sauntering along with his expensive watch. Nothing had ever happened.

Once, he’d stopped and sucked a man’s cock. Twice. The first time had been a kind of awakening, even if he never intended it to happen again. They were in an arcade, right there on the boardwalk. Neither of them had said a word. Will was on his way back from a ride he’d taken late at night, just to clear his head, and he’d spotted someone, a solitary form leaning against one of the columns holding up the portico that ran down portions of the boardwalk. Walking slowly, alongside his bike, Will wasn’t afraid. He knew how to kill a person with his hands.

The man wore a uniform: blue jeans, leather jacket, T-shirt—that hypermasculine style that, in 1968, only queens wore at the beach. He was tall, muscular, and kept his eyes leveled on the horizon. Will’s flesh pimpled as he approached, but it was just the cold. The air reeked of peanut oil and urine, the dereliction of the area—both the boardwalk and the Santa Monica Pier were harbors for needle traffic—felt in the stinging wind. The man just nodded. A single motion of his head as Will approached. He was clean—Williams could see the pale, masculine sheen of his skin, and even taste the hint of soap in the breeze. But the man simply reached down and began unbuttoning his fly with one hand. There was no eye contact. Williams, entranced, knelt down.

When he recounted this event to himself later, Williams understood, correctly, that it wasn’t just about sex. He liked transference of power, and information: he loved to dominate a man from
below. He liked the secrecy. No one in Hollywood could imagine him here, sucking a hustler’s dick at 2:00
AM
. The man made little moaning noises. Will spat semen onto his jeans. Then Will stood up and slapped him. Not hard, but enough to let him know that he—the rugged-looking stud who waited out here for traffic—was the loser in this transaction, the soft one. Not the small man who’d just buckled to his knees.

Williams wheeled his bicycle home, past T-shirt shops and incense stands, those same, crumbling buildings that are there today: bohemian apartments and hotels renting by the week, coffee parlors and bookshops that sold insurrectionary pamphlets.
Aspen, Dreamweapon, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
. No one touched him. It wasn’t that his desire was entirely a secret from Marnie. How could it be? Yet Williams kept this part of his personality locked down. It wasn’t strictly a compulsion, that’s what other people wouldn’t have understood. It was a deliberate and rational act. You could indulge your impulses and still be in control of them. This was the biggest rush of all.

“Will, it’s Teddy.” His Saturday reverie was interrupted by a phone call. He looked up from a script that happened to be about a war. Blinking away cobwebs, he cradled the receiver to his ear. “Sherry Lansing just called me.”

“How’s our friend?” Will chuckled, looked out at the street: the day had mellowed into a hazy, lazy, June afternoon.

“She wants John.”

“John’s not available. Not at her price.” He fingered his empty demitasse cup, studied the dregs. “He’s doing
Perfect
in the fall, anyway.”

“She made an offer.”

Each of these men had his own style. Teddy over the phone was as encouraging as matzoh-ball soup: there was a convalescent warmth; to do business with him was to be made whole.

“Tell ’er to fuck herself.” Whereas Will’s style forked anger and campy affection; you were quartered until you lost. “Tell her I love her.”

Teddy sighed. “Four million dollars. It’s on the table till Monday noon.”

“I’ll talk to her Monday morning,” Will drawled. All sweetness now, he studied the street. “Let her twist a little over the weekend.”

Poor Beau! He was always too real, not good enough at masking his feelings. Williams loved his former partner, he did, but you could never trust a man who was that easily overwhelmed.

“John?” Williams picked up the phone and made another call. “Honey, it’s Will. Listen, Sherry Lansing just called . . . ”

Gossip. Rumors. These things were always there, most often around sexuality, and sometimes Will felt this was really the axis on which not just Hollywood, but all of American life, turned. You managed information, not assets. You never had to tell anyone those things that couldn’t be repeated.

“So what do you think I should do?” John said.

You never even had to tell yourself.

“I think you should take a long walk, and we should talk about it Monday morning. Take the plane up, if you like. Four million dollars will buy you lots of gasoline.”

For someone who always seemed to know where the pressure points were, Williams was not always aware of his own. The script he’d been reading was about a pair of generals squabbling over control of the Seventh Infantry Regiment in Saigon. For a while, he worked on in silence. But the script had planted an itch. It was always, really, about power. And the apertures left by privacy. Given time on his own, Will’s restlessness expanded. Temptation went to work.