“You’re quitting?”
Of course, Irv was a screenwriter, not a very good one, and Beau had shown him the courtesy of reading his work.
“I’m gone, Irv. In fact, if anyone asks, it’s safe to say I was never here.”
This was all it took to transform a life. Beau drove home from the store and picked up his kids and, later that night, took them both to Ma Maison for dinner. Hungry, guys? If Kate wanted to eat fresh berries and pastry cream until she was blue in the face, she could, always.
He bought a car, even before he placed a call to open negotiation. He was that confident.
“Jer, it’s Rosers.”
“Beau!” Jeremy sounded transformed, weightless with power, himself. “Good God, man, it’s great to hear from you.”
“Yeah. Listen, Davis is going to do this movie and you’re going to pay him more than you’ve ever paid an actor in your life.”
“That’s an interesting gambit, Beau. You’re supposed to play hard to get.”
“Fuck hard to get.” Through the sliding–glass window of his two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica he could see the grass square of a park on Lincoln, his new silver Jag gleaming in the sun. It still had the tags on it. “You’ll pay through the nose.”
“I dunno, buddy. Davis’s new movie isn’t doing too well. The last one, you’ll recall, wasn’t even released by this studio.”
“So what?” He looked out at the park, its semiderelict benches and statuary. This apartment was like the one on Sherbourne, too: humid with the sour smells of incontinence and chicken broth, the sound of hissing pipes. He’d take one of those houses on the other side of Montana soon, too.
“So what?” Jeremy snorted. “What else is an actor’s value based upon but past performance?”
Beau leaned back in his chair. The wrecked bedroom was also his “office.” “The future.”
“Hey? I don’t get you, buddy. You can’t possibly pay an actor based on what his agent thinks he will be worth. That’s suicide.”
“How come? You think you can get him on the cheap the way you used to?”
How he loved negotiating. Hated business, but loved negotiating. It wasn’t closing the deal but creating it. This was the thing he loved.
“No, no. But there’s a middle ground here. You don’t even have a second client.”
“A million bucks.”
“WHAT?”
“Yep.” Beau snickered. “That’s what you’re going to pay, Jer.”
“That’s nuts.”
“It’s fair. Think of what our movie did for you.”
“It nearly ended my career.”
“It didn’t. It kicked you upstairs. I’ve been selling shoes.”
“Is that where you’ve been?”
“Yes. Your wife bought a nice pair of Rossignols there, a few weeks ago.”
“Ex-wife.”
“Oh, Jer, I’m sorry. When did that happen?”
“Not long. Listen, there’s no way I’m giving Davis a million dollars. Melissa’s breaking my balls. Don’t you do it too.”
“Do I have to?” Beau smiled, and as always his expansiveness surged down the line, his warmth and desperation making themselves felt as surely as if he were in the room with Jeremy. “Sounds like they’re already broken.”
Beau didn’t have to mention how he’d once spared the executive blame before his boss. Davis DeLong would get his million dollars. In bicentennial America, this was still a fortune. Ex-wives, ski trips (“Maybe if you hadn’t fucked Davis’s girlfriend, you wouldn’t be in this kind of mess,” was Beau’s next retort), these things were chump change compared to what Beau saw. You could buy a house, cold cash, with just his ten percent. Imagine what the rest of it, the gloating alone, was worth.
“You coming back to me, Brycie? You gonna be my client again instead of Teddy’s?”
I remember my father, from this period. I remember tennis whites, a sort of country club affectation that fell upon him for a while. I met him again just before I met Severin, before our paths crossed at St. Jerome in the fall. He’d come around to see Teddy that spring, and he brought champagne, dressed in a V-neck pullover and shorts, like some sad aristocratic refugee from the Jazz Age. So you’re Teddy’s son, huh? Nathaniel? He certainly didn’t seem to remember me. Good-lookin’ kid you got here, Ren. I recall his hand falling, awkwardly, on my scalp. With no suspicion at all on his part. There was only that bluff, half-assed curiosity these men always showed, that amped-up enthusiasm pretending to charm. Hey Teddy, you heard I’m back in the game? What’s Sam saying, now that I stole his golden calf? I’ll bet that really gets him, huh? Huh? For a brief while, he was intolerable to his friends. Even Bryce had difficulty.
“Are you gonna come crawling?”
“Give it a rest, Rosers.”
At a party in the Malibu Hills—Richard Jordan’s place, a stone castle at the end of a long dirt trail—he’d cornered his ex-client by the crudité table. Their kids were playing outside. They were up in the canyon wilderness, the air silty with russet dust, drunken adults spinning around the access roads in their host’s jeep. A courtyard filled with languid retrievers and bored chickens.
“Aw, c’mon Brycie!” Beau wheedled. Teddy had stepped in to represent Bryce out of necessity. After the fiasco with The Dog’s Tail, the actor had to defect. “Who am I without my first and favorite client?”
The kids’ feet slapped against stone, their shrieks rising. An open window, without glass, was at Beau’s elbow. The actress Bryce was schtupping came over. Her pink, flat-chested body looked concave in a bikini, its string taut across her hip bones.
“Look at this.” She held a clip in her hand, torn from a magazine. “Look.”
“Morrison Groom’s The Dog’s Tail may not be the most interesting movie of the year, and it certainly isn’t the best, but it warrants your attention anyway.” Beau read the beginning of the review, from New York magazine, with stentorian pretension.
“Excellent,” Bryce said. “Anything that lets that maniac make another movie.”
They laughed. The kids passed out of the courtyard’s gateway and came tramping around toward the front of the house.
“But see, look, look.” The actress pointed at the bottom of the clip. “Right there.”
Beau squinted. A carrot stick larded with spinach dip was in his hand. A shaft of sunlight passed through the window by his side, lit a bright red carpet runner on fire.
“This guy’s crazier than Sarris.” In the Village Voice, the house critic had seen some nonexistent connection between Morrison and Max Ophüls. “Here, my God, look—in Li Chang’s performance, Morrison Groom locates not just emptiness but The Void, she is Bardot in Contempt, or—I can’t go on.” Beau dropped the clip. “I should sign Li, just to make Vana pay through the nose again.”
He laughed. But he would soon do exactly that. This was how easy it became for him, all his failures looping back to reward him at last. Even the shoe store, where he sold one of Irv’s wobbly little cop dramas to TV. The ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week! He couldn’t lose. The kids came in, Sev with a sunburn and a peeling nose, zinc daubing his cheeks and chin. He was never a Californian, was more like a tiny lifeguard, a midget Jew from Miami.
“You OK, sport?”
“Yeah. Rufus was throwing rocks at us.”
“Rocks?” Beau asked, as Severin wasn’t a tattletale. “What kind of rocks?”
Kate arrived now, drinking fizzy water from a plastic cup. “Just rocks.”
There was something wrong with both DeLongs, Beau thought. The axis of human feeling sat askew, and where in Davis this manifested typically as an actor’s sociopathic charm, his son had the cold mask of a political consultant. Maybe he had that syndrome, whatever you called it, where you couldn’t stomach touch or anything other than numbers. Rufus sulked by himself, while Severin and Kate and Bryce’s son Sergei went out to wash the dirt off their feet and Davis chatted up another starlet. Rufus had his fa
ther’s golden-boy looks, but on him they seemed strange, almost simian. He’d just turned nine.
“Whatcha drinking?” Beau sniffed his daughter’s glass when she came back in.
“Quinine.”
“Quinine? Are you afraid you’re gonna catch malaria?”
“I like the taste.” Kate shrugged. And with this shrug articulated his own puzzlement, the wonder he felt confronted with his children. Why does anybody like anything?
“Let’s go, grab your shoes.”
“Is it time?”
“Yeah.” Mostly, he just liked watching her be responsible, scurrying off on little errands. How delicious it was, to watch them grow. “Time.”
“Can we go to Neptune’s Net, Dad?”
“You wanna see the motorcycles, Sev? All right.”
Sunday afternoon, lazy weekend days in which he felt sluggish even if he hadn’t had any wine, no Soave Bolla or strawberry margaritas, whatever the hell these people were drinking while James Taylor sang “Shower the People,” then Lindsay Buckingham did “World Turning.” Twin feelings of permissiveness and oppression seemed to compete. Davis was getting his dick sucked in an upstairs closet, while fifty feet and an unlocked door away his son played with a magnifying glass, focusing the sun’s rays to see if he could burn his own knee. Beau just led his kids out to the car. Not his problem. Rachel was right to trust him. He might get another year with them, if he was lucky. He passed the courtyard gate and strapped them into the backseat of the Jag. Behind him the mother hens clucked, approvingly.
IX
“WHERE’S DAVIS?”
Still one more party. Why would you ever stop? It was the Fourth of July weekend at Bryce’s house. A sense of bicentennial dissolution, of gaudy extremity, hung in the air. Stale cigarette smoke, the stinging sweetness of blender drinks might make you weep. The crowd included many of the old faces. Bob Skoblow, Roland Mardigian, Teddy Sanders.
“Davis has gotta be with that broad,” Bryce said.
“No, no.” Beau was drinking cold Pacifico in his old friend’s kitchen. Pale linoleum felt sticky beneath his tar-darkened soles. “Warren’s here, so there’ll be competition.”
“Fuck. Davis or Warren? They’ll take turns. Two biggest gash hounds in Hollywood.”
Beau snorted. How far they’d fallen from Waxmorton, all those more courtly and better-regulated men in New York, who’d at least had the decency to conceal their indiscretions. Now, though, what was to hide? Beau missed his old boss’s elegance, even if a world like this one was more his speed.
“I saw him before,” Beau said. “He was chasing after Vana with that pop gun of yours.”
“Was he?”
“He said it was loaded, too. He was just fucking around.”
Did Davis fuck around? Was there a sense of humor in there somewhere? He was so stupid it was impossible to know. Doing deals with him was a trip since you called and laid out the terms and after a cud-chewing silence he said either yup or nope. If only Bryce were half as easy to represent, let alone work with.
“I put it back in your shed.”
“Cool.”
Beau’d reclaimed the gun from Davis and taken it outside. He’d snapped the safety back on—it wouldn’t have been loaded, he figured: they hadn’t skeeted any Frisbees for nearly a year—and tucked it back under Bryce’s pillow.
“Stinks in there.” You paranoid nutball! “You really oughtta wash those sheets.”
“I have no fear of my own body’s excretions.”
“No wonder you don’t work much.”
A garden party. Kids were running around with sparklers; glowworms blossomed on the bricks. There were nearly a hundred people there. Teddy and my mother were, though I was home with a sitter. Usually, Bryce’s parties had folks puking under the house, old and new girlfriends colliding in licentious rage, some reckless, hair-pulling disaster. Today, though, Kate and Sev sat on the sand, eating hot dogs, and Sergei was playing with Wonton, his father’s German shepherd, down by the water. The tide was out, and the day was hot and calm.
Beau stood near the windows of the main house, looking out at Severin and Kate where they sat side by side. Even when they were engaged in separate activities they seemed complicit. Sev was reading a mass-market paperback copy of Dandelion Wine. Kate was sunning herself, rubbing her legs down with Coppertone.
“We made it, eh Brycie?” A wind picked up outside, stirred Kate’s hair.
“You did.”
“No, we did.” Words did not describe the happiness Beau felt at this moment. “Together, we did.”
Words. What is the matter, my lord? Long ago, Bryce Beller had played the Prince of Denmark badly. Now they could both afford to be nostalgic about failure, about mornings waking up with a skinful of tequila and the breath of old cigarettes.
“I’m going to find Davis,” Beau said. His palm print streaked the glass where he’d just been leaning and then faded slowly away. “I need to tell him something about the Warners’ thing.”
He could mention to one client an offer for another, without inciting jealousy. He could balance all his responsibilities. Even he was envious of himself, the man he had seemingly become.
“Hey, Rosers, you want a drink?”
Nicholson clasped him as he made his way out past the narrow bar, the high wooden ledge that had launched innumerable debauches.
“We just whipped up a batch of Naked Assholes.” He extended the blender’s mug toward Beau. It smelled like ethanol. “Won’t tell you what’s in ’em, but you’ll be out till Tuesday.”
“I’ll pass.”
Once upon a time, Nicholson and Beller were so close, they were occasionally mistaken for one another. They didn’t even look alike. Every once in a while Hollywood did this, like with the two Bills, Paxton and Pullman, a decade and change later. It liked to remind you stars were not only replaceable, they were scarcely unique. One man could easily be another. Beau swam through the crowd, pressing against the bikini-clad people with their spritzers and rum drinks, swaying in stances of sexual aggression or surrender.
“Hey, Rosers!”
Half of them hadn’t even spoken to him for years. He turned to see Bob Skoblow tilting toward him, Roland Mardigian towering by his side.
“Where you been, man?” Bob hugged him. “We were just discussing you.”
“Just now?”
“Last week, or last month—where were we, Rollie, whose house was that?”
“Vana’s? I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, Vana’s. We hear good things. You’re representing Davis now?”
“That’s what he tells me.”
“Listen.” Roland lay a heavy arm on Beau’s shoulder. “We have a proposal.”
These men were Sam’s minions, even if Sam’s power was fading—he had one foot on the banana peel, perched above the grave—and still, they did his bidding. What could they want?
“A proposal, huh? You got a ring?”
“Gotta talk to Will first.” Roland swayed above him. His pitted skin was an eczema red, and his hair was entirely silver. “There’s a little something we’re putting together.”
Beau nodded. It could wait. He tapped Roland’s bicep and moved on. Soon. He went outside to check on the kids.
“Hey, Sev, you guys OK?”
Severin didn’t look up from his book. Kate was napping, her wrists crossed as she lay on her stomach atop a towel. All’s well. He wondered for a second why he hadn’t heard from Rachel. She’d been incommunicado all week. He hustled back into the house, sand scalding his toes.
For an instant, his vision flickered. His tongue curled. There was nothing like calm to set a man off. Watching his kids sleep drove Beau crazy. He needed the chaos of the movie business to match that madness inside him.
“Teddy!”
“Barrett.” This was Beau’s real name, strangely enough: Beau was just the nickname he’d earned when he was too little to pronounce it. “What can I do for you?”
> “A little Panamanian improvement? I’m having a rough day.”
“I see that.” Teddy took his elbow. “Let’s grab some air.”
The thing about these episodes was that they also felt great. Just as he had in Sam’s office, he stood within an eye of serenity. His tongue tingled and bent, as if he had just licked a battery.
“I saw you talking to some girl about poetry, Beau? Have you turned over a new leaf?”
“No.” Beau inhaled. “I prefer the old leaf.”
Teddy wore a linen suit, a Panama hat. He looked like a plantation owner, ruddy and bewhiskered, with straw-colored hair and a subtle, conspirative expression. He chewed his mustache.
“Good shit, huh?”
Beau nodded. “The best.”
Marijuana always cooled him out. It made the world feel spacious enough to accommodate even him. They stood on the terraced garden’s second level. Long shadows fell across the grass, beneath the acacias and bonsais and lemon trees. Torches smoked in the breeze.
“Has Will been in touch with you?”
“Skobs and Rollie just asked me the same thing.” Beau studied him. “What’s going on, Teddy?”
It was late, of a sudden. The red sun doused in the Pacific. Where did the time go, where was it ever? Seven o’clock or seven thirty. Soon they’d be starting up the fireworks, shooting them from a barge out on the water.
“You’ll need to talk to Will,” Teddy hissed. The tiny flame of his lighter repeated itself in the lens of his round, rimless glasses.
He held the joint out to a girl as she passed, an actress Beau almost recognized. From where he stood he could see Kate and Sev, at last standing and shaking themselves off, brushing sand from their legs in the final golden crescent of day.
“Will’s not here,” Beau said. True, Will never went to parties. But what could Will be up to, that he wouldn’t tell his friend? Then again, even he had to be careful, now that Beau was twice Sam’s enemy for stealing the golden goose. “You people are planning something.”
American Dream Machine Page 14
