American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I can’t make myself better looking.” Beau nodded. “I can’t make you a star. All I can do is buy you breakfast.”

  She watched him. Nodding herself now, slowly. It wasn’t even voluntary! “OK.”

  They went out through the bar. She towered over him by a good four inches. Nicholson snickered as they passed, and Beau whirled. He pressed the point of his umbrella to his friend’s throat.

  “Fuck off, Jack.” He winked. “This one’s nice.”

  They careened along the strip in his battered white ’63 Jaguar. Beau drove like a man who’d just been introduced to the wheel. Not Greenblatt’s tonight. Canter’s. Egg salad and the 2:00 AM confession. There too he kept the focus off himself, even as his fingers dented the thick-cut yellow challah and he talked with his mouth full.

  “Eat,” he said.

  She watched him like someone coming down to earth, wondering what everyone in the room had to be asking. What was she doing there, and with him? The radio piped jazz from another decade. Tony Bennett was like a sudden restoration of sanity.

  “Everybody’s hungry,” Beau said. “Everybody wants something.”

  “How did you . . . get to be this way?”

  “Which way?” He burped, gently. “What are you talking about?”

  She nodded up and down, but it wasn’t just his body. Even the way he parked his car was spasmodic, strange, violent, and elegant. Jerking it into a space where it wouldn’t quite fit and then banging his palms on the wheel. Hah!

  “My mom,” he said finally. “It’s all her fault.”

  “Really?”

  As if this wasn’t, too, something he’d spent his entire life thinking about. As if this question wasn’t the whole of his being!

  “Sure.” Still chewing, he smiled. “Ask a Jewish man, we’ll always blame our mothers. Cause if we don’t we’ll catch hell for criticizing our fathers.”

  They sat in the orange booth, the candid light of the delicatessen, the pebbled floor like an obscure beach, tan and coarse. The waitresses wobbled on orthopedic shoes; the ceiling tiles’ stained-glass patterns shone in the surface of their coffees.

  “You know, you’re not that ugly.” She tilted her head. “You don’t have to be.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  “No.” She took a cigarette from his red pack, with its white crest and Latin motto. “I mean it.” Her hands flew, but his were quicker as he lifted his lighter across the table to spark it. “You’re almost appealing.”

  “Thank you.” He watched her. “Marry me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  He couldn’t possibly be serious. But he was. She burst out laughing.

  “Not if you were the last person on earth.” She hissed smoke. “Sorry.”

  “Oh.” Having heard this all his life, he could scarcely even suffer hurt feelings. “Thought I’d ask.”

  “Keep trying.”

  “I will. Why don’t you sleep with me?”

  She laughed again. “Keep trying, elsewhere.”

  They faced each other. A bit of egg salad clung to his mouth. There was something unsavory about him, yet also something relentlessly honest. His shirttails had come untucked. He slouched against the Naugahyde.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Listen, I’m wise to that, your little questioning thing, so stop it.”

  “All right.” He dug out his money clip. He peeled off a twenty and laid it on the table. “Sorry if I offended you.”

  “OK.”

  “But I’m going to ask you one more time.”

  “I just said no.”

  “I know. I don’t expect you to change your mind.”

  “Then how come?”

  He turned his palms up, slowly. And just watched. At 3:00 AM, this place was crowded with lupine hipsters, kids with pudding-bowl haircuts and the self-absorbed faces of martyrs. Their pants were tapered and their shirts brightly checked. Any one of them would have stood a better chance with this girl. But when Beau finally stood, she did too.

  “Why?” In her own amazement, she asked aloud. “Why am I doing this?”

  He could’ve told her. When you’d been denied so many times, refused those things you wanted, you took everything else. The world gave itself to you like an apology.

  She followed him out to the parking lot, bowing her head as he held the car door open for her, her gold hair flashing under a street lamp, her body shivering with cold, with submission.

  V

  BEAU WAS STANDING on the corner outside the TAG offices in New York, scanning the horizon for a cab.

  “I beg your pardon.” A man sidled up to him, all silken Southern accent. “Would you have a light?”

  My father tapped his pockets. He’d just left a meeting with Stanley Donen. And recognized the man, a well-dressed, wiry, ginger-haired figure he’d spotted in these very offices behind them. He drew out a lighter and the man cupped his palm, drew Beau’s hand toward his mouth to light the cigarette.

  “Thank you.” His speech was delicate; his manner, beautiful. He didn’t look like any of the other agents. He wore a pocket square and John Lobb shoes. His hair was the color of copper filament, worn long in the early spring of 1966.

  “I know you,” he said, finally letting go of my father’s hand. “I’ve seen you upstairs.”

  “I’m Beau Rosenwald.”

  The man nodded. Another long moment, in which Beau felt sized up, examined: he felt recognized, in some way. By this dapper, aristocratic figure whose stare was piercing and green.

  “I’m Williams Farquarsen,” he said, finally. Even his pauses felt strategic, like he was teasing out of you an authentic need to know. “I work with the old man.”

  Smoke drifted from the Lucky Strike that rested, unworried, between his lips. His voice made you feel like you were swaddled in velvet pillows. They stood with their backs to the building, sheltering against a rain that was still more threatening than real, a vague and scattered mist. And with this simple introduction, its gentle nudge of apostasy (“old man” Waxmorton; the phrase as Williams spoke it balanced between respect and subtle contempt), something ignited in Beau. They stood for a moment in silence.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Beau said.

  “Only good?” The way Williams smiled, the uptick at the end of the sentence, though it wasn’t really a question, said everything. What Beau had heard was that he was a killer, the converted attorney who was Waxmorton’s new right hand.

  “They say you’re the best.”

  This was true. He was rumored to be a hardballer, but people loved him. Skoblow in LA, Teddy Sanders, the colleagues who’d already done deals or shared clients with him. Williams grinned. And the skies opened up, leaving Beau to charge for a cab, ducking against thickening rain. He’d come to New York for one meeting, and now there’d been two. He was about to have a third: fate forked and forked again. Williams called something after him, but Beau didn’t hear. He was racing for his cab when a tall, angular woman cut right in front of him.

  “Lady, that’s mine.”

  It was. His hand was on top of the roof and he was folding his big body into the backseat when she dove past him. He lurched down and slid in after her.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  The cabbie pulled away onto Fifty-Seventh Street, indifferent. She’d come from inside the same building, but unlike Williams Farquarsen III, wasn’t familiar. She gave an address far uptown—151st Street and Riverside—just as Beau told the cabbie he needed to go to the West Village.

  “What? No.” The cab lumbered up Fifty-Seventh and then shot around Columbus Circle, north, following a feminine imperative. “I have to get downtown!”

  “For what?” The woman spoke. She was cricket-like, thin enough for there to be space between her body and my father’s even as he took up the bulk of the cab.

  “Lunch.”

  “Ah.” She smiled. Her eyes were wide-set, her face weird: almost r
eptilian in its triangularity, yet still beautiful. Her skin was the whitest he’d ever seen. “Surely you can do without that for once.”

  He sputtered. There in his dove-gray overcoat, with rude flecks of rain staining its brushed surface. There was a wheezing complaint of fabric, springs, and limbs as he shifted his weight to be comfortable.

  “My client,” he said. “I represent an actor who’s doing a play. But I need to tell him I just got him a picture with Natalie Wood.”

  She smiled again. He’d never seen anything like it, the chill that came off this woman. Her body had an aspect of brutal erasure, like something sculpted of wire.

  “Good for you.”

  The cab jounced along Broadway. Outside the air was gray, a cocktail of cloud cover, rain, and steam.

  “It’s good for him. He’s doing Rhinoceros right now, but this could make him a star.” He leaned back, took a good look at her, the fractured Z of her limbs, lap, and torso. “You work for the agency?”

  She tutted. It sounded more like yes than no.

  “Then you should know why this is good. Are you Abe’s girl?”

  “His ‘girl’?” She spoke disdainfully. He’d meant assistant, or mistress, though the latter seemed improbable. “I’m an agent.”

  “Motion picture? Theatrical?”

  “Literary. I represent writers.”

  “Ah.” This did explain a lot, why he didn’t recognize her, hadn’t seen her around the offices. Hers was a different species. Her hair was red, cut sharply across her jaw. Compared with California women, her calm asperity came as a relief: it made her real. “Is that where we’re going?” He nodded uptown. “To meet one of your clients up there on the moon?”

  “You’re not coming with me.”

  “Why not? I’m a good agent.”

  Up front, the cabbie hunched like a jockey, flannel taut across his shoulders. Beau sat like a despot, both hands resting on his umbrella’s sceptrous handle.

  “I represent Stanley Donen, perhaps you’ve heard of him. I represent Bryce Beller, who’s going to be the next man to kiss Natalie Wood on-screen. For that alone, he should up my commission.”

  “You really are . . . quite something,” she snorted. “It’s just like people say.”

  “So you know who I am.”

  “Everyone at the agency knows who you are. Your reputation precedes you.”

  Outside the city’s signage thickened—CHOCK FULL O’ NUTS; MAN TO MAN SMOKE A ROI-TAN!—then dissolved as the cab banked over to Riverside. The rain was already passing, the sun streaming weakly now through feeble greenery.

  “So you’ll have dinner with me, after we have lunch.”

  “Never. I’m never going to have dinner with you.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  God, Beau. The man to whom no was never anything but the predecessor to yes, to a pure and unqualified surrender. But even he could feel this woman’s resistance was different, that it stemmed from a private, perhaps even an existential, well of refusal.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “It’s Rachel.” She stared straight ahead. He could feel that steel in her, a raw negation that was the exact opposite of his level, pestering joy. “Rachel Roth.”

  “You’re Jewish.”

  “Yes, why?”

  “You don’t look Jewish.” It was true, she had that lunar, goyische coldness that he could never seem to get away from.

  “I am.”

  “Great.” He dug into his pocket for a handkerchief, which he produced and used, rather mysteriously, to wipe his mouth. “It’s what I prefer.”

  She gasped. “You’re terrible.”

  She didn’t mean this teasingly. She seemed to say it as if she recognized something in him that was truly awful, the real monstrosity which she, somehow, could match.

  “OK,” he said. “What about that?”

  “Nothing about that.” Her eyes were gray, like a whitecapped sea. “I don’t want to speak to you.”

  “You got into my cab.” He looked at her, wry, amused. She fixed her level gaze on the horizon, clutching the plastic loop above the door while he was impervious to the vehicle’s lurching. “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere. You said you were going downtown, so I gave an address uptown. To get away from you.”

  He burst out laughing. She was so like him, in a way, this Rachel Roth: she shared his obduracy. They flashed through Harlem in a jaundice-colored fog. He watched the brown faces of the houses, their powerful solidity; watched the pink and gray street life that swirled in front of them, a weird mixture of porkpie hats—the older men—and loose-limbed cats with processes, girls in short skirts.

  “I’m going back to LA tomorrow. But I’ll be here again in a few weeks, and after that.”

  She said nothing.

  “I will keep coming back.”

  She shifted on the seat next to him. A delicate movement, vague as a pulse. She didn’t say a word.

  “I’ll take that as a yes to dinner.”

  Wind fluttered through her window, cracked open at the top. Beau’d never really been tested, but was about to be. By this woman whose strength and oddity, and whose palpable loneliness, seemed to offer a rare invitation. He watched her, watched and watched. But Rachel gave him nothing, just gazed into the distance of the afternoon.

  VI

  RACHEL ROTH GREW up in Brooklyn. She was from Gravesend. Beau never would meet her parents, and she scarcely spoke of them. Her dad sold sewing machines, or else was a bookie. He might have made a killing betting against the pre-diaspora Dodgers, for all he knew. But he’d never met a more austere, or less dependent, woman. She was pensive, wistful—such things as my father would’ve had to look up in the dictionary, had he owned one, to define. She lived alone, worked alone. At home she had no telephone, no name on the mailbox outside her fourth-floor walk-up.

  “How do you get along without a phone?” Beau asked her. “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “I’m lonelier at work.”

  “How can that be?” He shook his head, and she turned to lock the door, revolving her key twice. “And how come you won’t let me come up?”

  She smiled. Half smiled. “A girl has to have her secrets.”

  A humid night in June. Bugs battered Beau’s hands as he stood beneath a street lamp on Waverly Place, where he’d been waiting fifteen minutes for her to come down. Unsure if her buzzer worked, he’d remained there haplessly pitching pebbles at her window. This was the fifth time he’d seen her, and she seemed to evaporate when they were apart: to disappear from the world at large and return just so, to establish her sudden reality.

  “How d’you get your Chinese food?” he muttered. “How do you survive?”

  But he liked her. He liked not understanding her, the way—in her business, too—she receded from him into the purest privacy. She worked without an assistant, running the literary department from her perch at the end of a long hallway. Sometimes he called the office and her phone just rang and rang. Maybe her business in New York was conducted in strict silence, a matter of nods and whispers.

  “I feel like I’m drowning,” she said, but brightly. He couldn’t tell what she was referring to. With him? Her work? He liked this too.

  “Come on.”

  “Don’t you ever feel that way?”

  He shook his head. But of course he did, and could imagine, too, the surface of the world closing over her head, small bubbles drifting up and then—nothing.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” he said. And led her away from where she lived, that delicious tesseract where the street intersects itself, Waverly folding into an impossible knot.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  It was all there, right from the start. Later, he’d remember things she said: how exhausting her work was, how her clients were like babies. Don’t you like babies? he’d asked. No, she’d said. I’m not interested in children. But just then he too
k it all as part of her elegant resistance. After five dates, she still hadn’t slept with him.

  He led her to Carmine Street, a tiny place like a ship’s galley with four tables, red-checkered cloths. It was tucked back, with no sign. You’d have to know it existed.

  “Are you trying to impress me?”

  “I never try to impress women. It’s sort of a lost cause.” He leaned forward, blew on his spoon. “The food’s good.”

  He ate like an Italian, long before Hollywood embraced the fashion. Clams, scungilli, brodo di pesce. Jewish, yes. Observant? Not in a million years. Rachel stared, watching him with an appalled fascination.

  “D’you think we met for a reason?”

  Empty clam shells clattered into a wooden bowl in front of him. Beau snorted. “Not so long as you’re not sleeping with me.”

  “Would it make a difference if I did?” Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. “You’re like a stray dog! You just keep coming back!”

  “Persistence.” He smiled. “I learned that from Abe.”

  “I believe things happen for a reason. There are no mistakes.”

  “You mean like God?”

  She shook her head. His mouth, his bristly beard glistened with broth. She wore an odd smile, like her despair might blossom into hilarity. Behind them, a wizened woman slaved over a cast-iron stove in the corner, ignoring them for her smoking pan of quartered tomatoes.

  “Aren’t there prettier women in Los Angeles?”

  “It isn’t about pretty.”

  “Then what is it?”

  There was something broken in her, he knew that. He knew that even at the beginning. There was the desperation of someone—the beautiful could have this as easily as the deformed—who’d been shunned or misunderstood.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just like you.”

  She smiled. Perhaps, being striking, she was unused to being “liked.” Perhaps she just bowed before the fat man’s relentless energy at last, appreciating the humility of the sentiment.

  “I like you too,” she said.

  The room was empty, except for the wizened woman in the corner, who gave no sign of having heard. But Beau felt like he was onstage, the moment weirdly public. He put down his fork, and his crust of bread.