American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “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.

  VIII

  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?”

  “To me,” she said. It wasn’t selfish
ness 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.

  IX

  “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 softnes
s 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.”