American Dream Machine (8 page)

“To me,” she said. It wasn’t selfishness that tipped him into thinking first about himself; a 280-pound man was at risk for all sorts of things. “You have to be ready.”

“What could happen?”

She shrugged. Preoccupied with feeding Kate, too. The washed-out gray of her eyes, of a piece with the hazy sky outside, met his.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“No, I mean.” She equivocated. Tilted her head just slightly.

“Oh. Nothing, lately.”
Untrue
. “I’m fine.”

She meant the fainting, the fits and fugues which had begun at their wedding and had troubled him ever since. These moments were rare, but there had been dizziness while shaving, one or two times in his office when he’d leaned back in his chair and felt the earth rotate with him. It wasn’t physical, he checked out improbably well, but the sight of his own blood, or his red-rimmed eye in the mirror, was sometimes enough to drop him into a trance.

“I worry,” she said.

But again, she never told him about what. Exactly what was the matter with Beau Rosenwald? I’ve always wondered, myself. But Rachel only bent now to look at suckling Kate, the sky a grimy white through the window behind her head. And it would take more than a simple visit to make him a competent husband, or father. Nothing could do that, yet.

“
REN
-”

“Oh stop, Beau.” The woman on the edge of his couch rolled her eyes, which were wet. “I don’t want to hear your excuses.”

“I’m married,” Beau snapped. “What exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Nothing.” She sniffed, and blew her nose. “I just want you to be honest, for once.”

“Honest.” He sighed. “Why is it that people think being honest is the same as being faithful?”

“I don’t think that.”

My mother, for indeed, this was she, was naked from the waist down. She stood up and began to dress, striding over to where she’d dropped her skirt in the middle of her boss’s office.

“I just wish you’d admit what you
need
.”

“What do I need?”

She straightened up. This woman was fantastic, Beau thought: Ren Myer had worked for him now for six months, and they’d been sleeping together for five. He admired her strength, her ferocious patrician intelligence. Unlike his wife’s: she was an autodidact. Ren Myer had been a theater major at
UCLA
, but she’d dropped out. She read everything, walked around the office with Edward Albee tucked in her purse, took cigarette breaks with a paperback Yeats. Beau had stolen her from Yul Brynner.

“Someone who won’t put up with it.”

“You think Rachel puts up with it?”

“I think she doesn’t know, or care.”

Cornflower blonde, willowy, serious. Was it
his
fault Beau couldn’t resist her? What did she actually want, since it was unlikely to be the fat man himself? She buttoned her blouse now, looking like someone on the bridge of a ship: you could read defiance in her body language, a certain braving of the elements—the densely masculine atmosphere of those
TAG
offices—other secretaries couldn’t handle. He watched the brittle knobs of her wrists flashing below her cuffs.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

She did, maybe. Or maybe Ren, too, was prey to the same confusion, what madness seemed to run through the halls at that point. On Beau’s wall, next to the old-fangled image of Paul Scofield, Orson Welles and Robert Shaw—
A Man for All Seasons
—there were posters for
Twisted Nerve
, for
Candy
. Everything seemed to go now. What
wasn’t
permitted? My mother, who was all of twenty-five when she worked for Beau, had no idea what she wanted from life. What she didn’t want—ex-model, ex-actress, soon-to-be-ex-secretary at
TAG
—was to be pregnant with Beau’s baby, herself. Having just missed her period, she feared she might be.

“
I’m
sorry,” she said. “It’s not my place.”

“It is,” he said. “I shouldn’t be married.”

She tugged the hem of her blouse. And almost spoke. She parted her long, silken, canyon girl’s hair away from her face and fixed him with a steady look.
Beau, I forgive you, but please, straighten up and fly right. Also
. . .

“What is it?” he said.

She shook her head. Recognizing, I suppose, that to say anything would be a mistake. What good might come of telling him I existed, if indeed I did?

“Nothing.” She turned on her heel and went back into the hall. Settled down at her desk, cool as could be. Beau could hear the friction of a match, and her inhalation on a cigarette, before the phone rang and she spoke.

“Beau Rosenwald’s office. Hold please.”

Beau had a lot to think about already. Even without his children—even without yet knowing I would exist—he had to deal with Sam, who was giving him hell.

“What have you brought in?” That punctilious old fucker was always ducking into his doorway, prodding. “What are you working on, Beau?”

“Something for Stanley.”

“Stanley.” Sam’s hand described a circle of contempt. “Stanley doesn’t need you. He made
Singin’ in the Rain
.”

That’s why he needs me
, Beau wanted to say.
No more musicals, you sad queen. He needs something stylish, like
Bedazzled
again
.

“Why don’t you get a job for one of those circus geeks you represent?”

Because they don’t need me
, Beau wanted to say.
Because that’s the way the business is turning. It’s men like Stanley, your clients, who are in danger of extinction
.

“I need to go to New York,” Beau said.

“Why? To slack off? See those ugly kids of yours?”

“No.”
Temper, Beau. Temper
. “I’m trying to sign someone. A kid from Yale drama.”

“No,” Sam said. “No travel.”

“I have to—”

“Do your job,” Sam snapped. “Or drive a cab, I don’t care. But you work for me. And putting together Corman movies ain’t cutting it.”

No, it wasn’t. But the smug satisfaction on Sam’s face, the animal disgust with which he treated Beau—he wouldn’t even set foot in his underling’s office, made a point of drawing back into the hall, as if the very air repelled him—was the most anguishing.

Day after day after day. How did you love, if the world forever insisted you were appalling? If even the women you slept with cringed?

“Do your job.” Sam strode away, stiff-legged, military. “You worthless puddle of whale crap.”

Yeah. Beau rocked back in his chair, took a deep breath, then another. His heart was hammering, his palms were wet. It took everything he had not to charge down the hall and smack Sam. But he couldn’t. This job, besides being the one thing he could imagine now, the sole alternative to ignominy in Queens, also kept his kids. He sent Rachel money every week. What would he do if he couldn’t?

“Why don’t you come see me?” she pleaded.

“I can’t.”

“Your children miss you.
I
miss you.”

“I know. I can’t. Sam’s killing me.”

“Is there another reason?”

Was there? He closed his eyes, rolled his palm against his forehead. His face felt hot.

“I think you’re afraid, Beau.” She spoke softly, gently. Who would have known that under that cold woman he’d met in a taxi lay someone who’d understand him? “Afraid of what home might do to you.”

Did she? Sometimes it seemed she really did.

“What about you?” he said. “What about
your
future?”

“It isn’t the future I’m worried about.”

Times like this, he felt like a different man. All around him there was the mania of Hollywood in 1968: elfin little hustlers, goatish Jews and bullies. Somewhere in the world were his children, and somewhere, in his ear and yet nowhere to be seen, there was this woman he’d married, whose very absence felt like love.

“Are you all right?” she asked, after he’d been silent awhile.

“Yeah.” He
was
afraid, of her, and his children, what softness they made him feel. “I’m fine.”

But there was more to it than this, of course. An open insurrection, closer each day to all-out warfare, had broken out in the motion picture department. Jeremy Vana, who occupied the corner office, popped off one afternoon to Waxmorton over the phone.
Listen old man, don’t tell me how to close a deal. Your tactics might work for Bobo the Chimpanzee, but this is Peter Sellers we’re talking about, here
. He was gone so fast his chair was still hot while they whitewashed his parking space in the garage. But he landed on his feet, instantly, as a producer. Ren quit and went over to Teddy Sanders’s desk before she left the agency altogether. Beau didn’t care. There was the wonderful license he felt, the expansiveness that was in the air. You did what you wanted, whatever the cost.

Fatherhood was part of this too, surprisingly. Severin and Kate gave him greater license, even when they were just mute little beanbags. They gave him some freedom to be himself.

“What are they eating?”

At all hours of the day, twice in one afternoon he might call Rachel to ask this innocuous question.

“Mashed bananas. Rice. Sev likes green beans.”

“Really? I like green beans. Had some today, amandine.” This was the best of it, somehow. He might charge around all night with his fly unzipped and his shirt unbuttoned, but at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the mellow cave of his office, his son liked green beans. “That’s fantastic.”

“You really do need to see them.”

“I know.”

“Then come.”

He’d lost weight, grown almost gentle in the temporary softness of his first marriage. He stood there, a sleek 270, behind his desk with his shirt hanging loose and a cigarette burning. He drained the warm dregs of a can of Tab.

“I dunno, Rach.” The can made a tinny clank as he set it down. This woman actually liked him. Incredibly, she did. Now that he’d laid his hands upon the one thing he truly wanted, he found himself in flight from it. “I’ll try.”

“Is it the responsibility? I understand that.”

“That’s part of it.”

The afternoon was mild, sun burning beyond the blinds to paint the whole room peach. The plastic cubes on the telephone’s console blinked mutely. His brand-new secretary came in. Her hair was long and her clothes exploded in riotous color. But it wasn’t philandering, either: it was just fear. He watched as the girl bent to straighten a pile of scripts on his couch, the pastel skirt riding up to show the buttercream backs of her legs.

“I gotta go,” he murmured. “I’ll call you later.”

Oh, there would be time for him to regret it. For him to wonder what he’d missed, how he’d misread the signals. But when Rachel called in late autumn and told him what she wanted, Beau was almost thankful.

“Let’s stop this,” she said. “I want a divorce.”

“Really?”

“What good is a husband who’s never there?”

Her voice was unexpectedly tender. Beau spun in his chair. It was a good day, work-wise—he was
this
close to making a deal for Stanley Donen—but a bad one for his mood.

“I’m sorry, Rach. I’m not cut out for this. I don’t know how to be married.”

“I know.”

Even now there was an affection he’d miss. He’d become a more vigorous father, in fact had made several trips back to New York over the summer without Sam catching him at it, out of his own pocket. Now that the kids were more interactive, he found how deeply he cared. Their silver-framed pictures were on the edge of his desk: puttyish, six-month-old faces, so faintly resembling his own.

“I’ll always be glad we did it, Rach.”

“Me too.”

She spoke lightly, but in the silence that followed, there was the pressure of something unsaid.

“I’ll try and be a better father than I was a husband.”

She murmured something indeterminate. He sat up and guzzled a glass of water, then poured another from the carafe on his desk.

“What does that mean?” he said. “‘Muh.’ I can still come and see them, right?”

“I think so.”

“What does that mean? ‘I think so’?”

He slugged water again. He thought to ask Williams’s counsel—after all, his colleague had a legal background—but just then his secretary rapped his doorframe sharply with her knuckles. She strode in holding a green folder.

“We’ll have to see,” Rachel said.

The secretary had his attention. She raised her eyebrows and held the folder toward him.
Now, Beau
. He listened into the phone a long moment. To this day, he couldn’t really imagine his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s existence, didn’t know what she did beyond care for their children, even though they had nearly identical jobs. This, too, was his failing.

“I’ll call you back.” He looked at the girl. A redhead, this one. Faint freckles like rust-tinted raindrops. “What is it?”

She handed him the folder. “It’s from Sam.”

Beau flipped it open and squinted. “The hell is this?”

He peered down at the deal memo, committing his client—technically, still shared with the senior agent upstairs—to do
Staircase
. Beau hated that script.

“What the fuck?” Beau had other plans for Stanley Donen. Stanley was supposed to do a hip comedy with Bryce Beller called
Mellow Yellow
, about a mountaintop guru. Instead, Sam had prevailed upon him to take this . . . feeble chamber piece.

“Are you all right?” Cloudy-browed, the girl watched him.

“Yeah.” He dripped sweat, excess water. He drank another glass. “That was my wife on the phone.” He gulped. “Ex-wife.”

“Oh.” She stood with her hand on the back of his chair. “I’m sorry.”

“She wants to file.” He shook his head. “It’s all right.”

She stood above him, smiling down with her hair swaying faintly.
Something I can do for you, Beau?
A smell of mimosa. He pushed up out of his chair, instead.

“I’m gonna go upstairs.”

“Don’t do that.” Girls mothered him, too. It was never really about sex for Beau. His loneliness was too acute. “Maybe you should calm down a little, first?”

“I am calm!”