American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

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!”

  He wasn’t. One thing calmed him, only one. Kate. The rest of the world, even his infant son, just drove him to different forms of distraction. His daughter at six months, though: that buttery skin scent when he buried his nose in the folds between her neck and shoulder!

  “Beau, think.”

  “Uh-uh.” He stormed across the office. “I’m gonna go give that son of a bitch what for.”

  He stepped into his loafers, which were parked by the couch. She just watched him. Of course he was fucking her: just because you didn’t like sex didn’t mean you didn’t have to have it. He stalked into the hall and made his way toward the stairs.

  This storm had been brewing forever. Sam had hated Beau from the moment he arrived, but in a way this collision had been set up long before he even got here. This was a tectonic moment in Hollywood.

  Outside, Williams’s door was closed. Roland Mardigian’s lanky, cowboy frame was propped back in his chair as he listened on the phone. There were Milt Schildkraut, Teddy Sanders. These men held a bigger share of Beau’s future than I ever would. He stopped at the water cooler, glancing back at the one-sheet Williams had hung in his secretary’s nook, the famous image of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway laughing behind a pane of bullet-pierced glass. Williams knew the score. He saw where all this was going. He knew the future, perhaps, long before my father did. Beau took a cinnamon candy from an assistant’s dish and then trotted upstairs, cellophane crinkling between his fingers as he breezed past Sam’s male assistant.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Sam looked up. He was having his nails done. His office was elevated over the rest of the motion picture department; the second story was otherwise just television and payroll. The room cantilevered away from the street, around the building’s side, jutting like a humped back. Sam liked the view it gave him, with windows on three sides.

  “What does it look like?”

  “It looks like you double-booked our client for the spring. He’s doing Mellow Yellow.”

  “He isn’t.” Sam stared, behind his desk. “Staircase is a better picture for Stanley.”

  Beau glared back, surrounded by the various appurtenances of Sam’s power. Along with Olivier’s spittoon, which sat at the foot of the horseshoe-shaped desk, there was a framed poster for Lawrence of Arabia, inscribed to Sam from David Lean. There was a handwritten note from Elizabeth Taylor. There was a sectioned purple couch and a white alpaca rug, drifting carelessly on the parquet floor. The manicurist’s black hair shook as she buffed vigorously.

  “I respectfully disagree.”

  “Do you? Tough.”

  “Stanley told me yesterday he was in.”

  “Yep.” That scritching sound of the emery board. “I convinced him otherwise.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  Even in these few years, this walnut-colored man had withered. Sam was sixty-three, back when that was old, and his complexion had the spotted, browning quality of oxidizing fruit.

  “Because In the Woods or whatever it’s called”—Sam couldn’t even remember Mellow Yellow’s original title (it was Does the Pope?)—“isn’t commercial.”

  “It’s a lot like The Party. Which was very successful.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Sam barked. “I hate it.”

  Figured. Beau shifted his weight from one foot to the other, hands cupping his crotch. He’d been so thirsty. Now he needed to pee.

  “Look.” He squirmed. “Why don’t we try and make him available to do both? Mellow Yellow doesn’t have a start date. I’ll see if the studio can push it.” Beau omitted the fact that Abe Waxmorton’s old abuser, Jeremy Vana, was the executive in this case. “Why doesn’t Stanley do Staircase first? It’s a chamber piece, it won’t take that long—”

  “He’s not doing your bullshit movie at all.”

  “My bullshit movie? Stanley loves that script!” />
  “He needs a hit.”

  Scritch scritch scritch. The Asian girl didn’t look up. Her face was shuttered, symmetrical: eyelids and lashes drawn down. Sam’s hand hung, inanimate, platformed in the air.

  “A hit,” Beau sneered. “Stanley needs a hit.”

  “You look like shit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, seriously.” Sam’s abuse had intensified over the years, and Beau just stood there and took it and took it. “Even by your sad standards. What Abe saw in you, I have no idea.”

  Beau shifted his weight again. He cracked the hard candy between his teeth, sucked vigorously.

  “I’d fire you, if I could. If Abe wouldn’t raise a stink about it.”

  Beau cocked his head. The sound of the candy, between his teeth, was a form of insubordination.

  “Get out of my sight.” Sam yanked his hand back from the manicurist now. She bent and began packing up her things, but Sam said, “Not you.”

  Beau turned. He really did need to pee. But then he looked back over his shoulder at Sam.

  “Forgot to mention, I have to go to New York next week. It’s an emergency.”

  Sam sighed, a low whistle between those pursed, ever-consternated lips. He studied the surface of his desk, its piles of papers arrayed like pieces on a game board.

  “What kind of emergency?”

  Beau turned again and stepped back toward the desk. “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “You can do that from here.”

  “Why do this?” Beau said. “You don’t like me, fine. I don’t like me either, but I produce. I’m a good agent. So why shit on my plate?”

  The manicurist had moved around to Sam’s opposite side and was now working on his other hand, dipping a small towel into a basin filled with warm water.

  “You go, and I’ll fire your ass so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

  Beau loomed over the desk. His toes nudged the precious spittoon. Sam wore a turquoise shirt, the color of an antacid. He looked like a mummified gangster.

  “Have a heart, Sam.” There was irony in this, too, in the sly ridiculousness of this appeal. Have a heart? Aw, gee willikers. “My kids need me in all this.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “I suppose it is. But I’d still like to see them.”

  “Nope. Your problem.” Sam sighed again. “Though I understand how it could also be theirs.”

  The manicurist jumped up. She folded her kit and pocketed her clippers and left, leaving the little plastic basin and the warm towelette still on Sam’s desk.

  “I feel terrible for your kids,” Sam said. “It must be difficult having a fat tub of shit like you for a father.”

  He had no idea. And yet Beau stood his ground. Cinnamon curled his tongue. Behind Sam’s head, through the window, the green fans of palms swayed in the afternoon breeze; the Spanish brick roofs lay atilt in sunlight. A landscape with less tension was difficult to imagine.

  “Listen, you miserable little cocksucker, just because you’ll never have children doesn’t mean you can take it out on me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me. You can cornhole your secretary all you want, you can pick on me—I don’t give a shit—but leave my kids out of it.”

  Sam stared. His homosexuality was an open secret. It was never, ever acknowledged. He peered through square-framed glasses that only made his expression more bilious somehow: they were like tiny twin television sets for the eyes.

  “You’re fired,” Sam snapped. “Pack up your things and go.”

  “I’ll call Abe.”

  “What do you think he’s going to say? You just called me a cock-sucker. What do you think Mr. Waxmorton will make of that?”

  The pressure from Beau’s kidneys was killing him. But he grabbed his prick, which was suddenly half-hard—as it always was when he argued—and strode toward the older man’s desk.

  “You know what I think? You’ve had it in for me from the beginning, but the truth is, you disgust me.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you’re a fucking fraud.”

  Sam blinked. The look on his face, too, was ironic. “You picked a funny place to come looking for authenticity.”

  “Maybe. But there’s room in this business for people to be themselves. I don’t expect a relic like you to understand that, but it’s true.”

  Who spoke to Sam this way, who slung as much truth at power? He represented Billy Wilder, Fred Astaire. Sam may have been an antique, but he was the real deal.

  “Get out.”

  “Fuck you.” Beau laughed. It felt so good, didn’t it, to be him? When it wasn’t a living nightmare. “Go fuck yourself, Sammy.”

  Even to this point, he might have done something to save his job. People acted like assholes all the time, and there was nothing, even now, a little groveling couldn’t have fixed. So why didn’t he?

  “I’m going to steal your clients, Sambo! Stanley Donen, he’s coming with me.”

  “You’re fucking delusional.”

  “Who isn’t?” Beau cantered in place like a triumphant horse. “I’m gonna take all the business you’ve got.”

  I don’t believe he knew what he was saying. Agents didn’t poach from one another back then: there was a code. Waxmorton had lectured him about how you could steal a man’s wife before you went after his clients. The former was always replaceable.

  “Go on.”

  He felt great, in that moment. Even if he would be miserable in twenty minutes, his head was clear, he was so lucid when he did the thing that would follow him the rest of his career. He cupped the front of his trousers again, rubbing the brushed, custard-colored cotton. Then he unbuttoned his fly.

  “Betcha haven’t seen one of these in a while.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Not without paying.”

  His foot nudged the spittoon. And then he aimed his penis toward the ground and let go.

  He could have peed on the carpet, or on the desk. Either would have been sufficient, but of course he aimed it straight for that gift from Olivier: twelve inches by twelve inches, a rectangular box whose sloping sides were meant to catch cigarettes and gum wrappers but instead facilitated Beau’s accuracy. He peed and peed and peed and peed. How many glasses of water had he had in the last hour, six? You could hear the plash of liquid on metal, the satisfying clank of that thick, heavy stream.

  Finally, Beau finished. He tucked his penis back into his boxers, did up the tortoiseshell buttons of his fly. Then he walked around to Sam’s side of the desk, dipped his fingertips in the manicurist’s basin, and dried them carefully with the towel.

  The two men looked at each other. There wasn’t anything to say. Beau backed away with his hands on his hips. A drop of urine gleamed on the tip of his shoe. He wore the same Church’s brogues he’d come in with four years earlier. In the hall the phones burped and purred, and Sam’s posh British assistant murmured, Sam Smiligan’s office. Please hold.

  Then Beau turned and walked away, striding downstairs and out of Talented Artists Group’s offices, crossing the palmy green street for the last time. By the time he reached the garage, Sam had demanded his assistant get a mop, and this story was raging through the halls. Beau Rosenwald was already a legend.

  PART TWO: THE DOG’S TAIL

  I

  “HEY, WAIT,” Little Will said. For the moment he was sober. “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Sober-ish. “Let’s . . . let’s stop and get a slice.”

  “Yeah.” I was also sober, believe it or not. In the spring of ’93, as the three of us cruised down Fairfax Avenue at 10:00 PM on a weekend—or during the week, it hardly mattered—this almost represented some form of achievement. “Pull over.”

  Severin did. He jerked his crappy little hatchback over to the side of the road, then angled it around the corner into the lot on Rosewood. My God, he was a terrible driver! He bumped up the little hill into the lot and we abandoned the car across two spaces. It was kind of a s
leepy night, I remember. We’d been out late the night before, and Fairfax was oddly depopulated for a Saturday. Up and down that little strip, the diamond merchants and kosher markets, the galleries and pawn shops all looked more shuttered than usual, bars and grates crisscrossing their darkened windows. The three of us had spent the day doing what we did back then, watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and then The Big Sleep before Severin went off to his video store job and I pecked at a terrible script on his IBM Selectric. Eventually I fell asleep at my brother’s apartment on Franklin while Williams went out for a while. I didn’t think much of it. Little Will’s disappearances didn’t mean anything to me yet. Everyone was back by nine o’clock, and now here we were, shambling along Fairfax toward dinner, or breakfast, whichever it was.

  “Where’d you go?”

  Williams shrugged. Severin wandered at a slight distance from us both. It was like—perhaps this is only hindsight—he’d decided to become someone, finally, whereas Little Will and I would have to have our individuality pummeled into us. We would.

  “Out.”

  He wasn’t feeling talkative. Neither was I. The orange beacon of Canter’s was across the street, but we were headed for Damiano, that strange and dreamy little pizza joint directly opposite. Back in those days, everybody went there, dull-eyed twentysomething faces drooping over lukewarm Pacifico and scalding slices. Old Hollywood—our fathers’ Hollywood, as well as Sam’s—had ended, and we were left to pick through its ruins and prowl after hours at places like this one, rooms dark enough they might’ve belonged to any era. Warren Beatty had dated Madonna; Marlon Brando was fat and staring down the barrel of Don Juan DeMarco, rolling around on top of Faye Dunaway in his pajamas. We liked places that literalized our blindness, that made it possible still for us to romanticize the present as well as the past.

  “I have to take a leak,” Little Will said. It was packed in here: Damiano was as crowded as ever, no matter how it looked from outside. We’d jammed into a booth and now were waiting for our food.

  “Don’t get lost.”

  He rolled his eyes at Sev. “At least I know how to use the can.” That story about Beau just kept on giving.