American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “How’s business?” he said.

  She wore a floral-print skirt and a leather jacket, looked like some sort of acid-punk hybrid, one part downtown while the other might’ve been milking cows in the Berkshires.

  “All right,” she sighed. “But I’m sick of it.”

  “You’re still selling health books?”

  Her head swung up and down. He thought her narrow neck might snap.

  “What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “It’s a living.”

  “I’m tired of selling. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

  Beau wondered what her clients thought of her, the ones she’d kept from the days when she was quietly ruthless, with the neutral aggression that was the one thing they’d shared, before children.

  “I don’t know that this is what I’m meant to be doing with my life.”

  “‘Meant to be’? Isn’t that a little fanciful?” He wanted to say, I don’t know that I’m meant to be living in a senior citizens’ apartment complex, pumped full of anxiety medication and drowning in debt. “You do what’s in front of you.”

  “That’s such a retrograde idea.”

  “Retrograde?” He smiled. “Isn’t that another one of your planet things?”

  Severin sat beside them engrossed in his Inhumans. Kate was walking around now with her hot chocolate, orbiting them at a medium distance. They were both such dreamy children.

  “You can make fun of it all you want—”

  “I’m not making fun of it, Rach.”

  “There’s talk of the stars in Shakespeare.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “There is, there’s plenty of superstition in Shakespeare.”

  “OK.” He didn’t want the kids to see their parents fighting. “I was just teasing. I know you meant it differently. I don’t believe in fate, is all.”

  “Fate?” For a moment she seemed the old Rachel, ironic and sharp. “What do you think brought us together?”

  She stood up. He met the pale gray difficulty of her gaze.

  “Two weeks,” he said. Then kissed Sev and Kate goodbye. “I’ll see you.”

  He watched them go. This trip had pretty much decimated him. Next stop, debtors’ prison. Except these kids belonged to him now. He would never be free, and never want to be. Now he knew, at last, what it was to be a man.

  Beau borrowed some more money from Williams, who wouldn’t dream of asking his friend to repay what he’d already borrowed. They’re your children, Beau. Whatever it takes. He didn’t say it, but Beau felt almost that his kids were in Will’s care, too, that his friend would do anything for him, for them. He never forgot it. From Davis, he chiseled two thousand dollars; from Bryce, something similar. I believe Teddy Sanders loaned him a few bucks, too. Being an adult didn’t require nobility. Being a man was an emanation of love.

  Every other weekend in the autumn of ’74, he flew to New York. Every fourth, he brought the kids back to Los Angeles. It cost a fortune, but so what? Soon, he would raise the idea that was gnawing at him, the notion that they should—might—come to LA to live for a bit. Maybe just for a year. Maybe Rachel would let them reverse their terms, allow Beau primary custody for a while. Things she said seemed to point in that direction. They always come home happy after they see you. Maybe it’s good for them to spend more time there. She seemed preoccupied, more remote all the time.

  “Hey Rosers, whatcha thinking?”

  Beau sat with his feet in the surf, chair pulled close to the edge of the water, out at Beller’s house in Malibu. A stack of scripts in his lap, a pile behind him in the sand. A soft yellow hat shaded his eyes, and sunglasses sat low on his zinc-spotted nose.

  “Hey?”

  “I’ve never seen you read like this before. What’s crawled up your ass?”

  Bryce stood on the wooden steps behind him, the ones that led up the terraced garden. There was that whiff of rotting seaweed, the oystery freshness of ocean air.

  “We need something,” Beau said. “This picture’s coming out in two months—”

  “So why worry?”

  “I don’t have anything on deck. And this Kraut cocksucker won’t even show me the movie.”

  “You’re worried.” Bryce tossed a small pink Spalding up into the air and caught it. “Things work out.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “It is. Because it’s true.”

  Bryce leaned against the rickety rail that ran along the stairs. He’d been meditating in his shed. His torso was glossed with sweat while he stared off at the Pacific. That shed was like a sauna. From where he sat on the sand Beau could sometimes hear him playing music in there, cassettes he’d made of Gregorian chants or else one that he had from his nearby neighbor, Brian Wilson himself, of a song that had something to do with the child being father of the man.

  “You sound like my ex-wife,” Beau said.

  “I am your ex-wife,” Bryce snickered. “You know you’ve always been the only one.”

  He aimed his stallion body up the stairs, naked except for a pair of running shorts. “We gotta get your mind off this.”

  He vanished into the garden, past the ice plants and tiny cacti that grew on the bottom level. A chill wind kicked up off the water, ruffling the script in Beau’s lap. Ambition was the bug that had bitten him. When he was younger there had been an impulse to do things, to spend money and impress girls. He’d wanted to lay hands on the trappings of success, because he’d imagined these would make him happy. This was different. It was a need to become something, to increase not just his holdings but his name.

  Bryce had just done another Western, with Keith Carradine and Peter Fonda. Whereas Beau hadn’t found a single thing in the months he’d spent reading and being distracted by his kids, not one solitary script. The more he read, the less he liked.

  “Hey!” Bryce was coming down the stairs, carrying a small stack of Frisbees. “Wanna shoot?”

  Beau stretched. “Now?”

  “Why not? It’s Tuesday.”

  “All right.” Beau heaved himself out of his chair, bending backward, almost, while he gripped the aluminum rests and pushed. “It’s better than this lasagna.”

  Bryce lobbed him the Frisbees, one by one at his feet. The script, this “lasagna,” fell onto the sand. Beau picked up a Frisbee and waited while Bryce loaded his pistol, that Smith & Wesson he loved so much he all but slept with it. He kissed the barrel.

  “Ready Rosers?” Beau nodded. “All right, PULL!”

  Beau torqued and flung the Frisbee up and out over the ocean. Bryce shot at it and missed.

  “Ah, fudgsicles.”

  They’d taken to cursing this way because of their children. Bryce’s son was here more often too, and the few times Beau had brought Severin and Kate over he’d been careful to lecture the actor about staying clothed, cleaning the weed off the table.

  “PULL!”

  Bryce clipped the edge off a Frisbee this time.

  “PULL!”

  Bryce drilled it.

  “PULL!”

  They lived exactly as they wanted. Beau twisted and threw disc after disc over the ocean. They ordered Frisbees by the boxful, and by the time the cops came usually the gun was buried safely under the house. Don’t know what you’re talking about, officer. We didn’t hear anything.

  “PULL!”

  After a pause Beau spoke again. “Brycie, we’re out.”

  Their voices carried out over the water, above the whitening lull of the surf.

  “Wait, hang on a second.” Beau scurried over to his chair and returned. “OK, now this.”

  “What? That?”

  “Yeah. It’s no good anyway!”

  Their laughter wheeled up and out above the waves, like gulls. Nothing would kill it, or them. He turned and flung the script up, twisting around and letting go like a discus thrower, while Bryce Beller aimed and fired low and shot a bullet straight through the plain brown regulation agency cover, right into the hear
t of the heart of the story.

  VI

  “ROSIE, WAKE UP! We gotta get to the airport!”

  Beau lifted his head. Bryce was standing at the foot of the couch in the living room, while Beau was prone on his palms like a lizard. Everything ached. There was pain in his skull, a rawness in his cheek as if someone had punched it.

  “What the hell time is it?”

  “Three thirty.”

  He moved his jaw, which felt dislocated. Fucking tequila and sleeping pills. “When are we due at the studio?”

  “Seven thirty. Your kids get in at four fifteen.”

  Beau rolled off the pull-out, rubbing his bristly jaw. He dragged the sheet around his waist like a toga, found himself decorated with red greasepaint of some kind. He saw it on the backs of his hands.

  “The hell is this?”

  He bent to pick up his socks and underwear. Once more, he couldn’t go home, was being hassled there by creditors. A repo guy had tried to take his car.

  “We thought it’d be fun to make you up as an Injun.”

  “We?” Beau coughed. He couldn’t even remember who had been here last night, what wastrels—men in their early thirties at least—had cut open a pillow and doused him with fluff, little fragments of feathers that fluttered now as he brushed himself off. “Goddamn Skobs, with his chicken jokes.”

  He padded around the glass coffee table, trotted into the next room to brush his teeth and wash his face before—fuck it. The kids would take it for sunburn, for just another dash of normal insanity. He dried his hands and strode across the living room.

  “You understand women, Brycie?”

  His children were coming, for an indefinite visit this time. They were going to switch schools, starting next week, and then they’d simply see what happened. He’d have them at least through the school year. Rachel had caved!

  “Do I look like a guy who understands women?” Bryce shook his head. “You’re the one wearing makeup.”

  But here they were. Rachel’s voice rang in his ears. I suppose they could do with some more of you, Beau, and I suppose I could use a little time to myself, too. Enigmatic as ever. Time to herself, how? Agenting wasn’t for introverts. And Bryce had his own problems with his ex, anyway. No matter: in less than an hour, they were picking up Beau’s kids at the airport. Then, as a group they would head to the studio, where Morrison Groom was finally willing to screen The Dog’s Tail. The adults would watch and the kids would have a sitter and some ice cream. Beau stepped into a pair of slacks, broad as a sloughed shower curtain.

  “I’m the one wearing the pants,” Beau said. “I’m king of all I survey.”

  “Who do we blame if it’s a turkey?”

  Bryce laughed. “Everyone except ourselves.”

  “The studio. Blame fucking Vana.”

  They were sliding into Beau’s ’65 Cadillac, the enormous white boat with a ragged drop top that was the only vehicle big enough to accommodate them and the kids.

  “Fucking Vana. He has a piece of this. Morrison.”

  “Morrison!” Beau turned the key in the ignition. “Why did we hire that guy?”

  “We would’ve hired anyone. I think he was the only director left in the shed.”

  They pulled out of the garage and onto the street, the dusty access road that connected the beach to the Pacific Coast Highway above it. Beau had streaks of red across his face. His thin dark beard had golden highlights. There was no gray in his hair yet, and he looked exactly as he was: barely middle-aged and secretly prosperous, dripping with time. He still wore the expensive watch, and his laugh rang clean and untormented.

  “We’ll have to blame it on somebody.” He drove with one hand, feeding them onto the PCH. “Not you, of course. You’re blameless as a newborn, Brycie.”

  “Give us a kiss.”

  “Seriously. A movie is a system, and you have to blame someone when it breaks down. Just like a mechanic, who tells you it’s the carburetor. So who do you blame?”

  “Yourself?”

  “Fuck it,” Beau muttered. “Udo. Let’s blame him.”

  Their speech fluttered above the highway, their laughter ending in hysteric coughing this time. Udo! The one person who was truly without fault here, as his performance was exactly what they’d contracted it to be—if “performance” it truly was, if he wasn’t in fact simply being German. They hit every light before they reached the 405, Bryce’s cassette tape of hillbilly gospel—the Stanley Brothers, the Louvins—blaring. There was no blame. Any real failure was still in front of them. The tape flipped, off a ragged track called “How Many Times Have You Bypassed Salvation?” and began playing the soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. They found Kate and Sev standing at the terminal’s curb.

  “Daddy!” How Kate had flowered! She crawled over Bryce to get to him, piled into the front seat while Severin tumbled into the back. “Are we staying at your apartment?”

  “Nah. In Malibu.”

  Sev mussed his father’s hair from the backseat. Kate nestled between Beau and Bryce. He stuck the car back into gear. There were no plans, no contingencies in place. They’d merely affix to him, as part of an ongoing slumber party.

  “What’s happening, Sev? Face front, true believer!”

  The car jerked forward. Bryce had grown a mustache, slicked his hair short in preparation to play a gentleman oil prospector. Brilliantine gleamed in twilight. His posture, too, had a nineteenth-century strangeness and charm.

  “Where am I going to school?”

  “You’re worried about school? Take it easy, kid, and give your dad a hug first.”

  Sev clasped Beau’s neck with his forearm. Figures this would be his first concern, before even “hello.”

  “Public, this fall. I’m gonna see about getting you into St. Jerome.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Private. Episcopal,” Beau said. His friends’ kids went there: Williams’s, Teddy’s. One of those funky Santa Monica enclaves where tradition met progressive ideology. “You’ll love it.”

  “Sounds great, Dad.” Even then, Beau never knew when Severin was being sarcastic.

  “Hey, Sev, you know who owned this car? It belonged to Montgomery Clift, the actor.”

  “Who?”

  The tape deck played Bob Dylan, a song that was just a sloppy, repetitive shanty. Rock me mama, like a wagon wheel.

  “Hey Severin, you know what this car really is?” Bryce turned so he could be in on the game. “It’s Rocinante, Don Quixote’s nag.”

  “Don Quixote?” Severin was skeptical. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “He knows Don Quixote, not Monty Clift?” Beau roared. “Severin, you are your mother’s!”

  But he wasn’t, not then. Nor was Kate, leaning in the crook of her father’s arm, hair smelling of lemongrass or wheatstraw as she gripped his body with hers, adhering. The sky was lilac, the soft-brushed color of six o’clock. By the time they reached the lot it was proper twilight, all of them stumbling out of the car in a daze of wind and travel. Down the lot’s alleys, past the hangar-like soundstages and warehouses.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” Bryce’s voice echoed as he called for the kids to follow.

  “Why?” Severin said. “It’s not like we’re going to be allowed to watch.”

  They sounded innocent, felt innocent, as if they were merely witnesses and not the film’s perpetrators. Outside the screening room they ate chicken piccata and lobster salad off paper plates, drank Chablis from paper cups. Morrison was late, and he arrived dragging the film’s second reel in a canister.

  “Morrison.” Jeremy stuck out his palm, and Beau was reminded why he liked Vana, the fact that he never held a grudge in a town filled with Sicilian temperament. But the director just brushed by him.

  “Let’s get this thing started, eh? Let’s see what you people make of my fucking masterpiece.”

  He was drunk, maybe. Why were directors, to a man, such cowboys? Little Morrison, tottering ther
e in his boots.

  “Wanna get tight with a dictator, kid?” Beau leaned over and whispered to his son. “Mo there’s your man.”

  He folded his paper plate and tossed the last of his lobster salad into the garbage.

  “Please, Dad?” Sev said. “Can I watch?”

  “No.”

  If only he could hold other lines as firmly as he held this one. The teenage sitter he’d hired led Severin away.

  “Come on, let’s get some dessert.”

  The rest of the cast had already filed into the screening room, except for Udo the no-show. He’d cut bait the last day of shooting. Sam was absent too, not even bothering to guard the hen house in this case, perhaps attending to some other client’s catastrophe. Beau took a seat up front beside Vana. Li slid in on the studio exec’s other side.

  “Hey, Jer,” Beau whispered. He eyed the actress, as girlishly inscrutable as ever while she worked on a red lollipop. “Why don’t you ask Sue Lyon there to move into your lap?”

  The executive shifted uncomfortably. Beau chortled. There were barely a dozen of them, in a room that could’ve sat forty. Bryce sat in the back with Davis, whose eight-year-old son, Rufus, dozed across his lap. Jeremy’s boss sat by the star also. The studio chief and the star would always be buddies, never mind that the president was thirty years older and they had nothing in common. If it failed, these two men would walk away without a scratch.

  The projector whirred, and light hit the screen. The studio boss, who reminded Beau of Waxmorton, moneyed and gray and doughy and intelligent, coughed. The movie unreeled in front of them.

  “It isn’t that bad,” Beau whispered.

  “It isn’t about bad.” Jeremy wouldn’t look at him. “We can’t make movies like this and survive.”

  Li had her hand on his leg, Beau noticed. But Jeremy had a point. This was a plotless road epic, a few years past the prime of such things in this country. Beau saw plainly: the movie wasn’t bad. The violence was a little gratuitous—beyond Penn and Peckinpah—but these moments only punctuated the film’s melancholy stasis. It made sense to Beau. Life, or at least his life, was like this. Stillness, torn by pornography.