American Dream Machine (7 page)

Beau shook his head. His face was gray, one arm dead by his side.

“What’s wrong?”

Beau coughed. He didn’t feel right. In the bathroom he’d almost passed out, from something worse than a hangover or nerves. His tongue was a brass clapper, his skin a gelatin suit. How could he explain to Will, this deliberate and responsible man, how he’d seemed for a few moments to float outside his body, how his torso felt even now like it had no weight?

“Just nerves.”

“Nerves, huh?” Williams nodded. “You’ll muddle through.”

Williams and his wife had been married seven years. There were so many things, really, my father admired in his new friend: the patience, the loyalty, the discipline. The Roman numeral alone suggested a pedigree that Beau, the shoemaker’s son from Queens, couldn’t imagine. Williams was faithful to Marnie, never flinched at the starlets who crawled across his lap. Even the night before, when they’d been out, Will drank only water.

“What if I can’t stop fucking other women?”

“Can’t?” Williams cocked his head. “Or won’t?”

“I dunno.” Beau shivered. “Is there a difference?”

Bob stalked down the hall to smoke. Beau and Will stood alone in the aqueous brilliance outside the clerk’s office, the window shades drawn against a painful winter light. Lower Manhattan now seemed abandoned, on a Saturday afternoon. The brown floors were waxy; the men’s patent loafers shone. Williams fiddled with Beau’s boutonniere.

“It’s not that hard to control yourself, partner.”

“Maybe. But why would you want to?”

Perhaps it’s easy to see how the two men were matched, like mad horse and pale rider. My father wasn’t being specific with Will. He’d kept fucking his secretary, Ren, more feverishly than ever. Almost as if he wanted to knock her up too, as if he wanted to populate their entire world. He loved Rachel, but this had nothing to do with it.

“You’ll learn,” Will said. Such recklessness was something he could never understand. “What aren’t you telling me?”

From the beginning, my dad was half in love with his future partner. He joked about it.
I should be more like you, Will
. They stood together now like they were dancing.

“Is that what makes a successful marriage? Self-control?”

“Nah,” Williams smiled. “It’s forgiveness, friend. All strong partnerships are based on forgiveness.”

The elevator doors opened. Rachel stepped out alone. She dazzled in a dark gray dress—gray like smoke, like opals, like cloud cover at night—and her red hair swung free. Her beauty struck him at odd moments, but none seemed odder than this inevitable one of their own wedding. He strode down the hall and seized her shoulders.

“Are you sure?”

As if he might shake sense into her, at the last minute. The hall smelled of solvent. The tips of his loafers curled up slightly, unexpectedly elfin. He wore a signet ring he’d borrowed from Williams, but she wore no ring at all.

“How sure do you need me to be?”

She smiled up at him. Of all possible mercies, this was the kindest: that she could turn her uncertainty into a joke.

“Come on.” She pivoted toward the clerk’s office, monstrously pregnant yet cool as a nurse. “Let’s go.”

There was a moment during the ceremony Beau was never to mention. As they stumbled along, racing and tripping over the words, he looked down. Stared for a long instant at his shoes, the patent leather and linoleum.

“Do you, Beau—”

He looked back up and saw not the officiant, but his father, complete in every detail.

“Beau?”

Coldness spread through him, moving up through his calves, his haunches, his balls. For a second, he thought he’d vomit. Those furred, fearsome eyebrows converging toward the bridge of the nose, the lank, silver hair and the myopic squint. This was his father precisely.

“Beau?” Williams touched his arm, the two men side by side in their morning coats. “Beau?”

“Huuuuhhhh—”

Beau lifted his hands. Stared at those raw and swollen palms. It would never have occurred to him to invite Herman Rosenwald to this event: the two men were completely estranged. Will’s voice roared in and out, the light detonated around his head. Somehow he kept a singular focus, on his hands, on the tips of his shoes, on the dark-eyed glare of the justice and of President Johnson—that matte formality of his portrait—hanging on the wall behind him.
O, Mr. President
! Beady eyes and a looming schnozz,
that sick fucking peckerwood! Can’t breathe
—

Beau’s legs gave out, and he pitched toward the floor. Its freckled brown surface raced up to meet him before Williams dodged beneath and broke his fall.

The next thing Beau was aware of was his friend slapping him gently.

“Hey. Hey.” Williams swatted each cheek twice. He prodded my father’s fleshy face with his fingertips. “Beau?”

“Huh?”

He came to, after a glass of water and some ammonium carbonate were applied. Tears sprang from his eyes, his heart palpitated. Beau found himself on the floor, and then—his friend was so much stronger than he looked—Williams helped him over to one of the benches.

“What the hell was that?”

“Dunno,” Beau said. “I fainted. Am I married?”

Williams nodded. “You made it that far. What happened?”

Beau stared down. Forearms resting on his thighs. The two men were alone now, as Rachel had run to call a doctor and Bob had followed.

“Nothing.” He hesitated. What he did not say was,
I thought I saw my father’s ghost. I hallucinated
. “Just nerves.”

“That’s natural.”

Williams would’ve turned it into a joke. He would’ve quoted all of
Hamlet
.

“I was just thinking . . . about my dad. My goddamn old man.”

The blond featurelessness of that room, with its twin flags, the United States and New York State, slack in the corner, made Beau think of school. The officiant was long gone. He sat with his arms by his sides, chastened by these narrow little benches.

“That’s natural too,” Williams drawled.

Will stood up. With one arm clasping Beau’s shoulder, he twisted around toward the door. There’s a photograph of this moment, though I don’t know who took it. The bright spray of Williams’s white carnation, his easy smile as his bantam body turns. That congratulatory posture of an attorney who has just seen his client exonerated of all crimes.

“That’s what happens when you get married.” Williams slapped his friend’s back. “The whole family crowds into the act.”

“Now what?”

They’d planned it badly. Neither could relocate. Rachel’s business meant she had to stay in New York, while Beau would go home to
LA
. Once the children were born they’d figure out what to do.

“What now?” In the limousine he turned to her as they rode uptown. Street lamps slid by, massive and blurry. He batted among them like a moth, but it was all in his head. “I don’t feel any different.”

“What made you think you would?”

“I always thought the day would come when I felt like an adult,” he murmured. “You get older, but you never really age.”

Typical. But it hadn’t happened at Beau’s bar mitzvah, or since. He lay his palm on her belly.

“They’re going to depend on us,” Beau said.

“Your clients depend on you.”

“That’s different.”

Was it? In any case, Rachel was his match here too, in private ambivalence as in gathering professional power. She looked like a little girl, gazing out the window: wonder-struck, confounded. The darkening streets flashed past.

“I’m not ready for it either,” she said. “When I was younger, I wanted anything but this.”

“So you’ve said. What did you think you wanted instead?”

“Escape.”

Later, he would remember this. Scan this conversation for clues. Just then he thought it was something else they had in common, as if—as if!—they had anything at all. Beau’s alliance with my own mother was more likely than this. Rachel was a literary agent,
representing Charles Portis and Thomas Berger. Beau had barely read a book since
Coriolanus
.

“Let’s go to the Bahamas tomorrow.”

In the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, he stood and windmilled his arms. She looked at him.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?” They hadn’t even planned this, would take their honeymoon off the cuff. “Abe will let you go, and as for Sam,” Beau waved his palm. “Fuck him.”

“I can’t fly.” She smiled. “Not in this condition.”

He looked at her as if even flight were something he could suddenly achieve, without machines. The two of them were alone now. They’d had dinner at Tavern on the Green and their scattering of friends had left them.

“Let’s do something else. Drive to Miami.”

“We’ll drive?”

“I’ll drive. You can climb on my back and I’ll carry you.”

“Really?” She stared; he sounded so serious.

“Yes. Hell yes. We’ll make Will carry the luggage.”

There at the Plaza, she climbed on his back, and he charged around the lobby like a bull. What could you do with a man like this, whose boorishness was inseparable thus from exuberance, and whose ugliness so shaded, almost, into charm? Even the way he squatted, like a little boy playing leapfrog, his tux-black hindquarters shiny as he bent to accommodate her. She couldn’t help rattling with laughter.

“Oh God, I’m heavy, careful—”

“No—
whuf!
It’s all right. Not you. The kids, the kids are heavy.”

She whooped as he bore her into the air, past a bellhop, the telephone operator, some ladies taking four o’clock tea. A man, a silver-haired troglodyte with an incongruous Beatle haircut, looked up from his
New York World Journal Tribune
. Finally Beau set her down in the shadow of a potted palm.

“I can’t wait to make love to a pregnant woman.”

“What makes you think I’ll let you?” she said.

“Isn’t it my right?” Huffing and puffing, he recovered his breath.

“I wouldn’t say it’s your right.”

“Really?” He leaned against a pilaster. “According to Jewish law?”

“Nope.”

“Muslim law?”

She laughed. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

“Do that again,” he said.

“What?”

“Laugh.” He didn’t move. “I like to hear you laugh.”

He opened his eyes. His face was long, jowly. He was still young. His eyes were a dry and placid green. He gave her a heavy-lidded glance and she smiled back. She lay three spidery fingers and a thumb against his wrist.

“I like hearing someone laugh
with
me,” he said. And closed his eyes again.

She held his hand, standing beneath him there on the stairs. If he’d opened his eyes, he might have seen her smile, might have seen more than just the absence of ridicule that was all he ever hoped to encounter. She brushed her hair back, and leveled her jaw up as if willing him to kiss her. But he didn’t.

WHAT MUST IT
have been like, raising those children alone? My father always talked about the pressure—
the pressure, the pressure
, that mania of the business even before the acceleration brought on by car phones, faxes, Blackberries—but what about the pressure on her? Rachel Roth never complained. When the kids were born, at Lennox Hill Hospital in April of ’67, she was alone. Beau flew in the next morning.

“Yours,” she said, dazed, out of it, as he staggered into the maternity ward feeling a little whiplashed himself, clutching some wilting tulips that were, like him, too late. Severin was born with a sister. “See?”

The little girl slept. The twin infants weren’t identical, but in their squashed, pudgy frames he recognized himself. Severin had a full head of black hair even then. Kate was exquisite, named after the mother Beau himself had never known, who’d died when he was two. She had Rachel’s arctic eyes, and her alabaster complexion.

“Not too much mine,” he offered, as he sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. Rachel was so slender, pregnancy had made her almost the size of a regular woman. “Thank God.”

She looked back at him, her eyes half-shut. Reclining, while Severin squirmed on a pillow on her lap. The baby looked uncomfortable. Maybe
Beau
was uncomfortable.

“The things they give you,” she murmured, and fell asleep. He couldn’t tell if she meant the nurses, the drugs, or the children at her breast. He peeked into Kate’s bassinet and then picked up Severin, who wailed and writhed in his arms. A nurse clacked past,
checking on her patient, then scowled at Beau. He didn’t care, staring down at his son, who was blind as a mole, his little mouth flexed awfully with hunger.

They could cleave you in two, he thought. And they did.

“What are we going to do?” Rachel asked him.

This was later, after he’d brought her home, installed the twins and a nanny in her cramped place in the West Village.

“Should I come to California?”

“Do you want to?”

She shook her head. And he felt the shame of his own uselessness, was wracked by the comparative ease with which she handled their children. Whose need for
her
was obvious.

“Pick him up.”

Suddenly, he couldn’t. He was afraid of these kids, of the purely instinctual way she took up maternity’s burden where he had the sense of his own absolute superfluity. When Beau bent over Kate, she immediately started suckling, mistaking his nose for a nipple.

“You’re going to have to get used to it,” she said.

“I know.”

Her apartment had been a mystery zone, and it still was: bricked in with books, smelling of sandalwood and the faint edge of something burning. Diapers, domestic smells now, too. There were three rooms, a twin bed. She could’ve had more but evidently didn’t want it. It was as if the asceticism of her person, her body, extended into her environment. One room was painted robin’s egg blue. An ironing board stood in the corner, next to an empty fridge. Yet he could feel in all this, inside the spareness that rejected a television set, or even a radio, a preparedness. For what, he wasn’t sure.

“What will you do,” she said, “if something happens?”

“To what? To me?”