American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

  It could’ve been the most sincere thing he’d ever said. But she pealed with laughter.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Isn’t that what you do for a living? Take advantage?”

  “I don’t know.” Beau blushed. Taking her banter seriously, as he mirrored her own thoughtfulness. He pawed the table, staring back with a guarded and bearish vulnerability. “What kind of advantage could I possibly have?”

  Rachel and Beau went back to his hotel. I’ve tried to imagine what this was like for her, too, submitting to Beau’s blustery assault. Even if she loved him, and I believe she had begun to, it must’ve been difficult. Repulsion’s not so easily overcome.

  In those days, Beau stayed in a shabby place on Sixth Avenue. His room had a rickety window staring onto an air shaft, yellow pillows malodorous with sweat. He liked this place for its noise, the kitchen echoes and elevator hums that traveled up the air shaft all night. They mitigated his loneliness. It was like sleeping with one’s ear to a conch shell.

  She began to undress the moment they entered.

  The room was dark. By the scant light of the moon and the borrowed lumina of Manhattan, Beau watched her take off her clothes. She folded them carefully, graceful as a heron while she set them on the bed. He sat on the couch and lifted his short legs to remove his shoes. He and she were the same height, although he was twice as wide and three times as thick. His breasts were fuller, more generous than hers. His watch clanked like a shackle as he removed it and set it on the wooden table, next to his money clip and billfold. The cramped room held just this couch and the low table and a bed, which pulled out of the wall. In the corner a television set poked its broken antennae skyward. They looked mangled in the semidark, the splayed V that signals cuckoldry in other cultures.

  “Don’t hurt me.” She flinched the moment he touched her.

  “What makes you think I would?”

  He lay a gentle hand across her flank.

  Up the air shaft came the hydraulic whine of the elevator, the Cuban-accented patter of the busboys. He turned her, slowly, in that space between the couch and the window. She lay her palms against the sill.

  “Do you have a rubber?”

  “I can’t get you pregnant,” he said. Using a line he thought was true, since the doctor had told him so a few months earlier, when he went to get checked out for the possibility of the clap. “I have a varicocele.”

  Her back was angled up, her ass plummeting sheerly down and her cheek pressed hard against the glass. It took him a moment to find the angle, to let the head of his prick find its way inside.

  She moved little, pressing back rhythmically to meet him. A squeaking sound, like bedsprings, came from her. He wasn’t immediately sure it was human, that she in fact was making this noise. Pain or pleasure, it sounded far away.

  “Hah!”

  Beau’s knees buckled; he plummeted into that loneliness that, given his nature, may have been greater for him than it was even for other men. Her body slackened, swooning against the glass as he fell away behind her. His arms slipped off her hips and dropped to his sides. He fought the impulse to say sorry.

  “Umm . . . ”

  In the darkness, she trembled. Perhaps she was weeping again. The event seemed unrepeatable. He was sure she’d never sleep with him twice.

  “Are you all right?”

  No answer. He reached to the coffee table and fumbled for his cigarettes. She stayed where she was, in the staggered, vertical posture of a drunk hugging a street lamp. Moonlight slicked her knuckles, her cheek, the small curve of her right breast. The wales of her ribs, dented like an accordion’s. Finally she turned, and, without a word, began gathering up her clothes from the bed.

  VII

  “YOU’RE KIDDING.” A few months later, Beau and Rachel were on the phone. He was in his office on a hot afternoon. He’d seen her just once since the night they slept together. Sam was really killing him about travel. “That’s impossible.”

  “Call it a miracle.”

  “I’d call it a nightmare.” He scratched his cheek. “Sorry.”

  November. The air-conditioning in his office was out. He was thinking about all the other women he’d been screwing too, trotting out the same excuse to avoid using protection. It’s all right. The doctor told me I have a leaky vein. His new assistant, for example, had also fallen for that one. Her name was Ren Myer.

  “It’s not,” she said. “I think it’s wonderful.”

  His blinds were drawn and his jacket was off. His sleeves were rolled and his Patek Philippe, which chafed, sat on his desk. He mopped his face with his free hand.

  “Don’t go away,” he said.

  He got up and closed his door. He didn’t want Ren to hear, but also, a new tenant had moved into the adjacent office. Williams Farquarsen had come to the coast. That Princeton-educated Southerner he’d met the same day he’d met Rachel, and whose good opinion meant the world to him. He could hardly say why. He came back to his chair and lowered his voice.

  “You know I see other people,” he said.

  What was it about Williams that conjured this sense of honor? He never knew. This sense that he needed, and wanted, to be his better self accordingly. The two were becoming fast friends.

  “I don’t,” Rachel said, then sighed at his confession. “I don’t care. It’s twins.”

  “Twins!” The word exploded from his mouth, Williams be damned. “What the hell are we going to do with twins?”

  “Raise them.”

  “Raise them?” She might as well have suggested sending them to the moon. “How do you propose we do that?”

  “Very carefully.” She paused. “Beau . . . ”

  Even at this distance, he could hear the warmth, a tenderness of which he had not, till now, believed her capable. Whether it was directed at him or at their unborn children, he couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He brought the phone, with its long black cord, to his couch. He sat beneath a framed poster that had just arrived for Stanley Donen’s next movie: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in Two for the Road.

  “You really want to have it?” he said.

  “They’re not an ‘it.’” She was calm, behind the pneumatic crackling of their bad connection. “They’re two people.”

  “I know.” Things had been going so well, too. That poster was for his movie, put together with Sam’s star clients. They shared Donen, though Beau was increasingly the point person there. “I’m just a little surprised. I wasn’t ready.”

  “Man proposes, God disposes.”

  He was up now, pacing. Religion, again. By the foot of his desk was a square brass spittoon. This was Sam’s prize possession, brought for him from Claridge’s by Laurence Olivier himself. People were always stealing it and planting it, whisking it around the offices like a hot potato. Sam would explode whenever he discovered it missing.

  “I’m not ready,” Beau murmured.

  But then he stared at his desk. Stared and stared, at a glass of orange juice and a bottle of vitamins; a half-eaten apple that oxidized alongside a silver Tiffany paperweight. He could hear the loose, gravel-like patter of rain, now, outside. Where did it all come from, or go? He was thirty-four years old.

  “My God,” he said.

  “What?”

  It was as if he had just rotated into the position of his own post-humousness, could see his life, for a moment, from outside. The empty desk. The spittoon, which he’d have to rush upstairs before lunch was over, set back in those tiny divots it had worn in Sam’s rug. A man was superfluous, unless he was ready. Unless he was utile, like these things.

  “Twins.” He rubbed his sweaty scalp. “Fantastic.”

  “It is fantastic.” The connection crackled. “It’s wonderful.”

  He set the phone down. He was going to be a father! He perched there with one palm braced against the leather edge of his desk blotter.

  “Rach, honey, let me
call you right back.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. It’s all right. This is great.” He hung up, stormed over to the door and flung it open. He whooped.

  “You OK?” someone called from down the hall. “Beau?”

  But it was Williams who came in from next door, strolled over and stuck his head inside.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Twins! Rachel’s pregnant with them.”

  So many things were unknown. He and Rachel weren’t even on the same coast, and like she’d told him, she didn’t want kids. So what was this?

  “Congratulations,” Williams said. He sauntered in. “Congratulations, my friend.”

  “So what am I going to do?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  Sleek, paternal Williams Farquarsen III, who was two years younger than Beau and married with a two-month-old son. He came over and sat on the edge of his friend’s desk. Already he was my father’s confidant.

  “You’re going to let it happen.” He smiled. “It’s the best thing that could.”

  Perhaps he was right about this, although it’s different for every man. Williams was a closed circuit. Unlike Beau’s other colleagues, he wasn’t out there swinging from the rafters, partying till dawn. He and his wife, Marnie, lived quietly, rarely even entertaining at home. Oddly, this was what made Will dangerous. Every other agent in those offices was on the make. Even Sam. Will was just a foot soldier, yet he lived like he’d already won and consolidated his power. He had the controlled swagger of a natural-born king.

  “I suppose.” This was why Beau trusted him all the way. His other friends might betray him over some scrap. Will never would; he felt it. “It is, right?”

  Williams beamed. He represented something new in those offices, too: you could see it in the longer hair, the crushed velvet jackets and the pocket squares. He may have hailed from New Orleans but he dressed like an English flower child, one of those Carnaby Street groovies who owned the acts they managed.

  “It’s fantastic, Beau. It’s going to make you a happy man.”

  “I don’t belong with this girl.”

  “Who does, though?” Williams chortled. “People are always a strange fit.”

  Indeed. And he clasped my father’s shoulder and shook him warmly, with love.

  “Whaddya think, Will? Isn’t this romantic?” Bob Skoblow pressed his fingers against glass and squinted down at the shadowed canyon of a Manhattan street. A trail of antiwar demonstrators was snaking north from deep downtown. “Didja bring your shotgun to lead the happy couple to the altar?”

  “Shut up.” Williams smacked Bob’s shoulder with his knuckle. “It’s Beau we’re talking about here.”

  A wind-whipped afternoon in February. The two men stood in the third-floor corridor at City Hall while Beau splashed his face with cold water in the men’s room.

  “You gonna kick my ass, Will?”

  Williams narrowed his eyes. “Would you like me to?”

  Williams weighed all of 155 pounds. His voice rarely lifted above that honeyed and persuasive murmur that was like something you heard in your dreams. But everyone was afraid of him, everyone except for my dad, who loved Will with all his heart. In an office full of streetwise, coastal Jews, this man was certainly an anomaly. He stared Skoblow down.

  “I’m just kidding, man.”

  “Cool.” Green eyes and creamy skin, smooth like a girl’s. He cuffed Bob’s cheek, almost hard. “Be nice.”

  They could hear Beau retching, violently, down the hall. A moment later he emerged.

  “Did we show you too much of a time last night?”

  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.