American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

“And?”

  She jangled her foot against the edge of the table. Tennis-shoe clad, she was like a truant teenager herself. Drunk, but not stupid, she turned over the possibilities for a moment.

  “I think Beau did it to himself,” she said finally. “Williams is a nice man.”

  “Nice?”

  “Decent,” she said. “Fair.”

  I sipped my drink. Mine was not the most conventional upbringing, but I studied my mother very carefully in that moment, seeing her teeter between one potentiality and the next. To assess Beau as crazy would’ve excused her own decision to keep me in the dark for so long, and perhaps would’ve perjured something she once felt. I suspect she didn’t want to be that easy on herself.

  “Decent isn’t the same thing as nice,” I said.

  My mom looked at me then and smiled. Her face crinkled with pride. I had her intelligence.

  “Your father . . . ”

  But she didn’t finish the thought. I saw that she loved him, too, or had, that whatever she saw in me she’d seen in him too, once. Outside, the afternoon was glassy, with the flat light of primitive spring. My mother stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Go on,” she said. Reassuming the role she seldom took anymore: that of parent, protector. “Go upstairs and do your homework. Let your fathers worry about their end of the business.”

  XIII

  PERHAPS MY MOM was right. Maybe Williams Farquarsen had nothing to hide and Beau’s mania was all there was to it. I never saw anything directly that said otherwise. Williams Farquarsen the elder was what he proposed to be: a family man who kept his cards close to the vest, at least when it came to the industry. Polite to me as he was to everyone, dedicated to his son the way he was to the business, he traveled around Hollywood by himself, and when he squired Jessica Lange to the 1983 Academy Awards, everyone knew she and Sam Shepard were together, and Williams never laid a finger on her. True. I knew from young Will his parents’ marriage was solid, and from Marnie herself that she just hated going to these events. Why should I buy a new dress, Will? I’ll just wait and see it in the theater. Of course he was going to travel stag. And after my father was ousted from American Dream Machine, Marnie and the elder Williams treated me the same, just as they did Severin. You little runts. We were extended family, and Williams the father gave no indication of holding Beau’s apostasy against either one of us. He smiled down with an Olympic courtesy.

  “Are you staying for dinner, Nathaniel?”

  “Sure.” I no longer even studied him for clues. I’d internalized him. His habits were ingrained in me, the rhythms of the only household I knew that had anything like a regular dad, who came home many nights by 7:15, a stack of scripts and deal memos under his arm. “If that’s all right.”

  “Of course it’s all right.” I watched him stroll across the living room, still furnished with a Spartan plainness, with Marnie’s LPs and only a few paintings and expensive sculptures to let anyone know the place belonged to a king. “You don’t have to ask.”

  If he was under strain, as of course he must’ve been—it wasn’t just Beau who’d had to hold up under legal fire—it didn’t show. He tossed his papers on the couch and called upstairs.

  “Hey, Little Will!”

  I was slumped in an armchair with a Huxley paperback, as integrated as the family cat, a hypoallergenic Javanese who twisted around my legs.

  “Come on down!”

  My friend’s footsteps thundered on the narrow stairs. By 8:30, Williams would be in his study, reading and reading and reading, while his son and I did dishes. This was what nights were for, not fighting with your wife or going apeshit in a hotel suite.

  “You ever think about becoming an agent, Nate?”

  He asked me that once, on one of those nights when I was still in high school and probably had no other place to go, Beau’s house being radioactive and my mom’s almost equally so.

  “You’re a smart kid. You’d be good at it.”

  I didn’t know what he wanted from me. Once more I had that sense that I was being monitored with something beyond ordinary care, but maybe this was just what a father’s love felt like.

  “Maybe. I like books more than I like movies.”

  He nodded. In the dimly lit living room his pale delicacy seemed a little worn, what once was a fishy whiteness tuned down to regular pallor. He pushed his hair back, those reddish strands glistening in the lamplight; he removed his reading glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket.

  “Like I said. You’re a smart kid.”

  But I don’t think Williams ever regretted his profession. He wasn’t like my father, who in some primordial part of himself still harbored—I think—a belief that if he’d been a doctor or a lawyer, he might’ve pleased his own dad. No, Williams was an agent, he was the industry itself: born outside, he nevertheless shaped it to his own needs, until he was no more divisible from it than marine life is from the sea. My suspicions had no basis. Even the way he handled Beau’s departure—placing Beau’s share of the company in a complicated trust, eventually to revert to the original partners, and also, in small part, to Severin—was seen by everyone as fair. I believe he would still be dominant in the industry if he were alive today.

  If. For in 1984, the man who seemed to make no mistakes finally made a doozy. A miscalculation we would feel for the rest of our lives.

  That spring, Severin turned sixteen. The Age of Mechanical Consent. Beau bought him a car for his birthday, a black Porsche 911 that was certainly in conflict with my brother’s punk rock ethos, although the way he drove it wasn’t. Sev banged it into palm trees, parked it with one wheel up on the curb, left the keys inside and the doors wide open. I’d look outside and see it nosing onto my lawn like an importunate dog. It’s a wonder he didn’t drive it straight into my living room. Once that car entered our lives, the three of us were friends again. After all, Williams and I needed transportation too. It was our chariot, our shared fate, ferrying us over to Rae’s diner on Pico where we sat in clouds of cigarette smoke and broke the school’s record for truancy. But that summer, Marnie Farquarsen decided to put an end to it. You kids.

  “Will!” She spoke to her son now, not her husband. “What the hell is this?”

  She held his report card, or rather what was called an “academic advisory” at Untaken, a yellow form that mapped your attendance and progress for every course. From the foot of the stairs she shook it at him.

  “Do you even go to that school we pay seven grand a year for?”

  Williams shrugged. “I went to drama.”

  “Drama, my ass. You skipped chemistry seventeen times last month.” Marnie strode up the bottom two steps toward Will, who froze on the landing. “I’m taking you kids away.”

  “Away how?”

  The floor under Marnie’s feet and the newel in her hand were original walnut. She’d refinished them herself.

  “I’m taking you to Saguaro National Park. All three of you rats.”

  “What makes you think Beau would let Severin go anywhere with you?”

  “Beau’s problem isn’t with me, it’s with your father.” Marnie stood with her hand on her denim-clad hip. “I’ve already discussed it with Beau, anyway.”

  “You have?”

  Marnie nodded. “Already discussed it” sounded like already disgusted, but she had. It was difficult to imagine Beau and Marnie talking, but no matter how opposite they seemed, the two of them had always liked each other.

  “What are we gonna do at Saguaro, Mom?”

  “We’re going to climb Wasson Peak. And then we’re gonna camp a few days at Juniper Basin.”

  “Mom!”

  “You might want to quit smoking before trying it with fifty pounds on your back. And Severin’s car won’t make it. The trail’s a little narrow.”

  Sometimes I think there were few people in my childhood more worth loving, if you imagine love has anything to do with merit, than Marnie Farquarsen. Standing at the base of the stair
s with her hands on her hips and that same long-backed sixties bowl cut she’d worn since time immemorial, that spark–plug body and nononsense manner, she was the one who said enough.

  “You kids will like it, I think. I really do.”

  The Arizona desert would be good for her—the dry air helped her breathing—but the idea, surprisingly, appealed to Sev too. His style was quasi-military in that moment, and the idea of a fifteen-mile hike in 110 degree heat seemed about right. I’m sure he wanted to get away, also. Having a parent, anyone’s parent, say, I’ll take you somewhere and make you toe the line must have been welcome. Young Will was less enchanted, but even he was impatient on the morning we took off. A Saturday in early June.

  “Williams?” His father leaned in the car door. “Are your socks thick enough? D’you have mosquito repellent?”

  “Relax! Dad.” Outside the office, Williams Farquarsen III really did become a different, much softer, man. My friend sat rigid, squirming with embarrassment in the backseat of the boxy beige Peugeot wagon. “Don’t be so uptight.”

  “It isn’t uptight.” The elder licked his lips, peering in from the driver’s side with one hand on the roof. His wife was behind the wheel, while Sev rode shotgun. “I just worry that you’re not prepared.”

  “We’re prepared.”

  “OK, then.” He leaned in and kissed his wife, then tapped our packs, which were lashed to the roof. “Have a good time. I’ll miss you, Mar.”

  Williams watched us, the adolescents in the backseat. He was still a young man, himself. Forty-nine, maybe, but he looked young, felt young, practiced his tae kwon do and was a strict vegetarian. In an industry riven with its taste for flesh, he ought to have lasted forever.

  “Bye, Dad.”

  “Bye, son.” He leaned in and kissed his wife again, right by her eye. “Be safe.”

  His face was inches from mine. Close enough that I could read the little crow’s-feet in his tallowy skin, watch the sun spark off the copper-wire brightness of his hair. His eyes were depthless, a bleached green.

  “See you, Nate.”

  Did he wink? I’ve pictured that look a thousand times.

  The car shuddered, its little tan body trembling like a geriatric’s as a carbon monoxide smell filled the interior. Williams straightened and lifted a peaceable palm, like a cigar store Indian’s. My friend stared dead ahead. Then Marnie put the car in gear, and we moved off into the bright and muggy morning

  Everything that happened next is colored by what I now know. Everything. If I tell you we had a wonderful time, if I dig up the postcards I wrote, but never sent, to my mom, I can see that we did. These were ten days of heaven, the last of a childhood that died hard in stages. They were beautiful. So how can something so true turn out to be such a pack of shit?

  We detoured through Vegas and then headed dead south, as if this glitzy machine city were a cliff you could fall right off. We rocketed into the desert, not far from where Beau had filmed The Dog’s Tail. All of us felt close to something—God, visions, origin, the sky—we recognized but couldn’t name. I saw it in Severin’s face, which softened as he removed his glasses and looked out the window. I saw it in Williams, who grew supple and laughed with his mom, sounding for one final time like a boy. All of us were young again. The front window was cracked open, admitting heat and wind.

  “Tie that up, now.” That first night in the park, Marnie directed us. I had a rope slung over a pinyon pine’s branch, the long end tied to my backpack. “Right, hoist it higher. Now tie it off.”

  “Are there really bears?”

  She looked at me. The campground was uncrowded at twilight, with just a few other pilgrims moving around their tents. “Is that difficult to believe? You’re a lot weirder than a bear.”

  “Am I? I don’t go into bears’ lairs and mess with their stuff.”

  “Nope, Nate, you’ve got worse problems. But you still should know what to do with a backpack when you’re camping.”

  Could I have loved her any better? She encouraged self-sufficiency without just ignoring us, without simply saying Go off and do it yourself. Beau had bought Severin a wide array of Valley-ish things: a plastic pith helmet, a sonic mosquito repeller, an electronic gizmo that was supposed to purify water. We snapped off the helmet’s crown and then used the brim as a Frisbee. We drank from long-handled tin cups and cooked over Marnie’s tiny black hibachi. It was as far from our Hollywood upbringing as we’d ever been, however that indicts our youth. Driving among Conoco stations, drinking Nehi soda. The earth, imperishable earth, was closer than we had supposed. And the American desert, where it all began. We hiked the Hugh Norris Trail all the way to the top, where we were dwarfed by cristate cacti. We unlaced our boots and picnicked at the saddle, then reencased our scorched feet and walked back to the bottom and collapsed, panting, in the rare shade of a palo verde tree. We cracked ourselves up imagining Beau Rosenwald camping. Sev, is it a little hot down here? Why don’t we go back to the hotel for a massage? I felt closer to my brother than I ever had, closer to some feeling of family that I lacked. And then the last night, we were hunkered around a fire when Marnie stood up.

  “I have to call Will,” she said.

  We were at a KOA not far from Kingman, a scrubby little corridor of motels and coffee shops, a town whose stillness was inseparable from stasis.

  “I’m going to the pay phones over by the offices,” she said. “You kids do these dishes.”

  We did, rinsing our tin plates with bottled water and then scouring them with bandannas. We’d been taking our time driving home, exploring the desert, but now Marnie hadn’t spoken to her husband for five days. The setting sun was infernal, the horizon line a carnelian seam.

  “He’s not picking up.” Marnie returned, finally. It was nine o’clock on a Sunday, a night Will ought to have been home.

  “No?” Williams looked at his mom without worry. “Where do you think he is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We sat back down by the firelight. Shadows played across her face. Her arms were propped upon her knees and her brow was clouded; her face looked like a bronze mask, inscrutable and permanent.

  “You guys wanna go to Joshua Tree still?”

  I watched her face furrow, its blunt uncertainty, as she stared straight ahead. We all felt it. Something was wrong.

  “I don’t think so, Mom. I think we should just go home.”

  All of us were barely sixteen. But we understood Marnie’s needs, I think. Our planned stopover in Joshua Tree suddenly seemed a bad idea. I hardly remember the rest of that night. Severin played a little more guitar and eventually we crawled into our tents and sleeping bags, then lay down on the hard ground and tried to sleep. I found myself imagining the scorpion tucked inside my hiking boot, the embers catching a dry twig, the subtle advance of a snake. That campground, with its high pines and dusty air of abandonment alongside a comfortable RV park, became a charmed circle. It was the last place our childhood would ever be seen alive. We drove home the next morning, and if that had been an era of PDAs and cell phones, we would’ve had our information long before we reached Los Angeles. Marnie’s phone would’ve rung off the hook, and if we had been in Williams’s other, more Italian, automobile—the one that had such a device in it—we’d have found out too. But the old Peugeot had only a broken cigarette lighter and a Blaupunkt, which didn’t give us anything until we were well within LA County.

  —KABC news time 7:48. Talent agent Williams Farquarsen is still missing after a two-day search.

  “Wait, what?” All of us were jumbled around now in the car. Severin drove, Williams was in the passenger seat, and Marnie was in back with me, her head cushioned with a wadded flannel shirt as she slept. “WHAT?”

  Severin reached over to turn the volume up. Williams, astonishingly, stopped him.

  —last seen Thursday afternoon in Burbank. Farquarsen’s absence has been reported by—

  “What are you doing?”

  —c
olleagues—

  Williams IV snapped the radio off.

  “What the fuck, man?” Sev glared.

  Will looked at Severin. And said nothing. My head spun—Williams was “missing”? What the hell could that mean?—but those two understood one another. Marnie slept on. I think in that moment they grasped what I never would, a certain kind of loss that was beyond even me. Where was Sev’s mom, say? Whatever happened to her? In that brief moment, conditioned as we’d all been, I think Williams didn’t need to hear any more. He knew exactly what was happening.

  “What the fuck?” Severin repeated, without intensity. But Williams only stared straight ahead.

  “Just drive.”

  We’d dropped down via I-15 through Riverside and San Bernardino, recently transited places like Rancho Cucamonga and Ontario, those godforsaken fringes of the Inland Empire. Temecula. Redtipped radio towers and billboards. Indian casinos and wind.

  “Hey, Severin.” Marnie woke up now, stretching. “You want me to drive?”

  Bellflower, Carson, West Covina. Williams could’ve been hiding in any of these places. Missing. I doubt he was recognizable outside LA metro. Within the city limits, he was the Story.

  “Dad’s missing,” Williams said.

  “What?” Marnie shot up toward the front seat.

  “The radio says—”

  Marnie lunged for the radio to turn it on, but Severin obliged her quicker.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she snapped at Williams. “Really, I wonder.”

  “Mom,” he said. Like there was still the possibility “missing” could mean something benign.

  “Will, he’s your father,” she said softly. “You know as well as I do he doesn’t go on furlough.”

  I’d never seen an adult cry, not in anything other than an alcoholic frenzy, and so I stared at Marnie while she sat with her hands in her lap and wept, a mucusy storm like a child’s. I handed her my bandanna and she blew her nose. Severin searched the dial through all kinds of irrelevance, the plodding tonalities of FM rock, before he found another news station that might tell us.