American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “We should remake—” Beau hiccupped. Muffin crumbs dusted his beard. “We should remake Shoot the Piano Player?”

  “Not the Truffaut movie, we can’t improve upon that.” How cool Emily was, how level. She was fantastic in a room, writers loved her precisely because she wasn’t just a naked cauldron of seething ambition. It was her innocence everyone loved, along with her intelligence. “But the David Goodis novel it’s based on. Down There.”

  She sat on the couch now, under that idiotic poster for his Michael Keaton movie Beau was suddenly tempted to take down. A Louisville slugger, a pair of baseballs. Its tastelessness indicted him.

  “Where did you come up with that?” Beau asked.

  She shrugged again. So blithe. Beau wondered at times whether she actually loved movies, whether she wasn’t also a creature of simple expediency. She was nothing like the young hustlers he’d come up with once. She was more about math than passion.

  “I read it recently. It’s good.”

  “Down There.” Beau snorted. “OK. I’ll check it out.”

  “You will?”

  My father stood, windmilled his arms. He probably hadn’t finished a book in twenty years. Scripts, sure, but that wasn’t reading. Now this girl was actually giving him something to do. She smiled up at him from the couch. Perhaps it wasn’t innocence she had, exactly, but she was clean and tender. She lacked the Hollywood taint.

  “Sure.” Beau nodded. “I’ll read it over the weekend, and we’ll talk.”

  “Goddamn it, Severin!” Late at night, Emily pounded on the door of my brother’s apartment. “Let me in!”

  Was Severin ever her boyfriend? I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, since he was never that attached to her. But he viewed her with a certain clarity his father never managed. It was January ’94, and they’d been dating off and on for some months.

  “Let me in, please.”

  She was drunk. It was 1:00 AM, and she’d done half a hit of Ecstasy earlier that night, at Jabberjaw. Even when she was out of control, she was surprisingly calm. Her modest upsets had a quality of subtle performance. In the sickly yellow light of his hallway, the old Spanish-style complex that might someday have a plaque to tell the world who’d lived in it, she beat the door gently with her palms.

  “Sev—”

  My brother opened the door, finally. “What is it, Em?”

  “Why don’t you return my calls?”

  Severin snorted. Ever since rehab, he’d become the littlest bit of a prick, himself. He’d grown colder, more remote. “You work in the movie business. You must be used to unreturned calls by now.”

  “I just came to get my clothes.”

  He waved her in. She stepped into his crappy, dingy studio. It smelled of burnt noodles, and Emily could feel the clammy residue of the door’s old paint on her palms. Nashville flickered on a small TV in the corner with the sound low, and a heavy Selectric typewriter, the same one Severin had owned since college, sat on the dining room table with a glass of water beside it.

  “Why are you blowing me off?”

  It wasn’t her: he was blowing everybody off. Me included. I barely saw him in those days. I was living a little deeper in Hollywood anyway, at Franklin and Kenmore. Little Will had left town for a while, gone to New York to visit his college girlfriend. She’d come out to nurse him while he was undergoing cognitive therapy.

  “I don’t know, Em. I’ve been busy.”

  Busy writing, busy brooding, busy beating up on himself. Who knew what he’d been doing, really, on his own time? I didn’t. She went into the bedroom and retrieved a shirt, a pair of pants, a sweater. The things she’d left there, in that brief window they’d been together. She came back out holding them clumsily over her arm, while Severin stood and waited by the plaid couch where he and I and Williams had launched our share of nights with a bong hit, shoving off into our shiftless carousing. Not now. He was in seclusion. A plate of takeout from Zankou Chicken sat cold on the coffee table, along with a dish of pinkish, pickled Armenian beets.

  “How’s my dad?”

  She shook her head. Emily didn’t want to talk about Beau, whom she loved, with his asshole son. They faced each other.

  “You want to know why, Em?”

  She nodded. My brother’s sudden bluntness, his decision to tell her the truth meant she didn’t want to know, maybe. She stood there, pale under the bare ceiling bulb above. Severin was taller, leaner. His hair glistened, Valentino black.

  “You’re too much like him,” he said.

  Emily laughed out loud.

  “You don’t see it,” he said. “You’re like the business. You are the business. Not the way it used to be, but the way it is now.”

  She gave him a weird green stare. Her eyes were cloudy in the room’s feeble light.

  “What does that even mean, Sev? Are you calling me ambitious?”

  Severin just shrugged. Emily told me once that she worried about him, that the stresses of being Beau’s legitimate son and surviving heir must’ve really worn on him. I see that now. At the time it seemed like he was being a dick, but he just saw what the rest of us weren’t ready to. In the corner, the letterboxed Nashville flickered on—you could just hear Haven Hamilton singing his stately, waltz-time ballad about how America was doing something right, to last two hundred years.

  “What am I like?” Emily said, sarcastically now. Traffic hissed, serpentine, along Franklin. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  My brother took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. He gazed vaguely into the air above her. She could hear the hum of his typewriter. Outside his window, the moon rose above Italian cypresses, illuminating the grayish, humid sky.

  “You’re someone who doesn’t have a clue what she’s like.”

  VIII

  WHAT DID SEVERIN KNOW? That’s what Emily White thought, and in this she was perfectly on point. What the fuck did Severin Roth know, this kid who was brought up by—let’s face it—a man with issues. She loved Beau, but his quirks were obvious. And so were his son’s.

  Ambitious, Severin had called her. Careerist was what he’d meant, but really, was that so damning? I would’ve given everything I had to be so practical, to make a simple business decision instead of drifting and waiting for the “inspiration” it seemed to take for me just to bend down and tie my shoes. Beau loved Down There, loved it, and in fact when she finally told him where she first came across it (You know who gave me that book? Your son! I met him one night at the Kibitz Room and we started talking), the producer didn’t seem surprised. You’ve met Severin? Small world. Well it was, and it was a smaller town. The studio loved Down There too. So did Ethan Hawke. And Emily began to gain a reputation around town for being bright, being approachable, being funny. For knowing what to say, at just the right moment.

  “What if he doesn’t die?”

  “Excuse me?”

  For example, when she leaned forward in a meeting with Richard LaGravenese—it was not long after Darcy had left the company—and proposed something for that difficult script, Mr. Bones.

  “What if he doesn’t die,” she said calmly, while LaGravenese stroked his goatee, fiddled with his glasses. “What if it’s like a Harold and Maude thing, where he keeps trying to off himself and it never takes?”

  Just like that, she fixed it, a movie that had been on my father’s slate for three years. It was Darcy’s pet project originally, loosely based on a real person—Beau could never remember his name, some poet who’d leapt off a bridge in Minnesota—but with a casual flash of inspiration, Emily solved it. It was thanks to her he could even be in business with someone like LaGravenese, a writer’s writer whose credits included The Fisher King. Emily’s brain allowed the producer newfound respectability.

  “You’re too much!” he roared after the meeting, after Richard had left and she’d managed to reframe this ponderous arty biopic as an absurdist comedy. Which choice would be the difference between a line on a memo and eighty millio
n bucks. “Where do you come up with these things?”

  “I learn from the best.”

  “No you don’t,” Beau said. “You’re much smarter than I am.”

  No disingenuousness, here. He meant it, and so did she.

  “Not smarter.” She sucked in her cheeks a moment, face flexing hollow. “I’ve just read a few books.”

  He promoted her. Down There was a modest hit. Mr. Bones was a big one. Beau gave her an associate producer credit on the latter, and while it wasn’t entirely her doing—Jack Lemmon and Sandra Bullock were both fantastic—he chalked the picture’s success up to her. (“Deep down, you don’t belong here,” he told her. “You’re too good for this business.” Deep down. It was a phrase that resonated with her, with its intimations of depth, plenitude: such things as this city was always said to lack.)

  “Come with me,” he said one afternoon. “I want to show you something.”

  In May of 1995, they were celebrating the triumph of Mr. Bones. The studio had just re-upped his deal for two years, and Beau was beaming ear to ear as he materialized in the door of her office, jangling his keys in his hand.

  “I have a lunch with Costigan,” she said, referring to their executive at the studio.

  “Cancel it.” He shook his head. “This is more important.”

  What could be more important? By now Emily had Darcy’s old office, like Beau’s but smaller and with fewer toys. It had the same slate-colored carpets and mint green walls; there were piles of scripts everywhere, stacks of promo CDs atop expensive Sony components. Everything except evidence of a private life.

  “Where are we going?” She followed him down the hall.

  “You’ll see.” Beau was radiantly tan, just back from the Hôtel du Cap. “It’s a surprise.”

  I don’t think I recall my father ever being as happy as he was then. He wore success lightly, now. He treated Severin and me both with a sweetness. I credit Emily for that.

  “Beau.” She smiled as they stepped out into sunlight, that corridor of gorgeously mocked-up businesses—a “florist,” a “bowling alley”—that made up the lot’s main artery. A fountain shot towers of spray into the air. It looked like an outdoor mall. “What are you up to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Jolly old Beau. She followed him out to the parking lot, past all these radiant fakes that created a backdrop for daily terror. She didn’t mind. She actually liked the fear that dominated the lot. This place reminded her of home, for it shared with Hermosa a towny unreality; only the aggression, the venom that drove the people marked it apart.

  “I told you to take time off,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m too afraid you’ll make another animal movie if I turn my back.”

  “One more animal movie won’t kill anybody.”

  They laughed. The fountain shot its diamond droplets into the air behind them, and she could feel them on the breeze, cooling her skin. By now she reported only to Beau, had inherited Darcy’s old job. Beau sometimes maintained a fiction that he was going to bring in somebody more senior than Emily, but they both knew it was a lie.

  “You should do something besides read and see movies,” Beau said, as they ducked into his black Lamborghini. A midlife crisis car. Or whatever it was—too late for midlife, yet too soon for anything else—when you were making money hand over fist and just couldn’t spend it fast enough. “You can’t only work.”

  “You should talk.”

  They drove off the lot. Wind fluttered through the windows. “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

  Emily shook her head. It had been a long time now since Severin. She didn’t miss him, she didn’t even really think about him anymore, not even as his second novel appeared in the world and garnered some small notice, or when the first one, Kangaroo Music, was optioned by Gus Van Sant. She’d dated people—writers, directors, agents—since then, but nothing really stuck.

  “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” she shot back.

  Nothing stuck. Emily’s conscience, her reputation, her spirit—to what extent she credited the existence of such a thing—were clean.

  “I had dinner last night with Sharon Stone,” Beau said, while they idled at a light.

  “Did you? What was that like?”

  Emily shifted on the hot leather, accepted a stick of cinnamon gum. Severin’s words might’ve traced their distant echo. Someone who doesn’t know what she’s like.

  “Her teeth are incredible,” Beau sighed. “Though I suppose you really are in trouble when that’s the first thing you notice.”

  Say what you will about Beau Rosenwald, he always did retain a little perspective, too. A date was a date, whether with Sharon Stone or some Jewish acupuncturist from the Valley. His friends were always trying to set him up, the ones who’d been married forever: Jon and Barbara Avnet, Joe and Donna Roth. It never took for him either. Maybe he and Emily were alike, or maybe it was just the tiresome courtliness, the ritualization that made dating in later life so boring. First call, first meal, first screening, first fuck. Usually, it was the last fuck too. What did you call this sort of thing? Rearranged marriage? Deranged marriage?

  “Whatcha thinking?”

  Beau shook his head. Emily could ask him these things even when he couldn’t answer. Sharon Stone was pretty good, for a fat kid from Queens, but he couldn’t live off that. He needed more reality. He hung a left on La Cienega, roared beneath the freeway overpass.

  “Wanna hear a joke?” he said. “What are the five stages of an actor’s career?”

  They pulled up, shortly, in front of a one-story brick building with an iron grate pulled over its face.

  “We’re not going to lunch?”

  There was nothing here, just empty lots and warehouses, yards charted with razor wire. There were auto detailers and rug steamers, signs in Chinese and Korean. Across the street was a derelict gas station, its signs still marked at $1.06 for unleaded.

  “Nope.” My father took off his Mr. Bones baseball cap and mopped his face. For a second, he looked sad: this sixty-two-year-old man with ruddy, craggy, sunburned skin, in khakis, untucked white shirt, and unlaced Nikes, his car stereo blasting hip-hop. “Not today.”

  He shut the engine off. “Come on.”

  Under his breath he hummed the Eric B. & Rakim song that had just been playing on the radio, or at least he hummed the one it sampled. Yersosmoothandtheworldssorough. She’d asked him once if he really liked this stuff, the Fu-Schnickens and A Tribe Called Quest tapes that were left in his car courtesy of Severin. People like it, he’d said. And I’m people. She followed him now to a door, where he pressed a buzzer. The entrance was so discreet you almost didn’t see it: it was just a handle-less iron square in the middle of the graffiti-scabbed brick.

  “Beau!” A man opened it finally, just as Emily spotted a tiny security camera peering down from the edge of the roof. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Emily.” Beau ushered her toward the man, who was African American, very dark, and effortlessly good-looking.

  “Emily!” He wore expensive buttercream-colored clothes, the uniform of a country gentleman. He turned an athletic, electrified smile upon her. “I’m Lance.”

  He was six foot six, all muscle, bald, his clean-shaven face split by the wattage of his teeth. So handsome. The room beyond was a showroom, a waxen gallery of automobiles. There were only three cars, spread like felines around a room much bigger than the building’s exterior suggested. The ceilings were twenty feet, the floors a worn, matte rubber.

  “So, Beau, is this a girlfriend?”

  “She works for me.”

  “Oh you work for him.” He grinned as they slid past him, inside. “Nice.”

  What was this place? It wasn’t a dealership, there was nobody here. The room was frigid, artificially cool. And even before Emily examined the cars, she knew they weren’t for sale. These were animals kept in captivity. They were too rare for the street.

  “What exactly do you do fo
r my man, Emily?”

  “I’m his—”

  She was about to say “vice president” but faltered over the pretend grandeur of the term, here where real money—real power, of a sort—presided. The room was like a wine cellar or a humidor: both light and climate were held at a perfect pitch.

  “Conscience,” my father broke in. “She’s the brains of my operation.”

  “Conscience? Brains?” Lance laughed. “I didn’t know you had those things, Beau.”

  Emily’s shadow glossed the bonnet of a DeLorean as she crossed the room to approach a low, long-hooded car the same color as Lance’s clothes, a yellow that was as close to white as possible, like a lightbulb’s candescence made solid.

  “Like that?” Lance boomed. “It’s one of the first five hundred.”

  She bent to examine the car’s particulars. A 1961 E-Type Jag. It looked as if it had never been driven; in fact, as if it could never be.

  “Still has the flat floor and the bonnet latches.” Lance came over and stood behind her. Her nipples stiffened. It was so cold.

  “Can I sit in it?”

  “Sure.”

  She didn’t care about cars, drove the same black 3 Series Beamer half the town did, linty interior strewn with water bottles and script-fasteners, dropped In-n-Out Burger fries staling under the seats. But the cold-cream smell of this one, the feel of its leather as she slid inside it: these things were hardly resistible.

  “Right?” Lance said. He saw it on her face. “It’s cherry.”

  “How can its odometer read zero?” She tested the gas pedal hesitantly with her heel. It was stiff.

  “Guy who sent it to us owned the factory, in England. It’s never been driven.”

  Mysteries proliferated: What did Lance do, exactly? These were prop cars. Besides the silver DeLorean, the third was something Emily didn’t recognize, like a European Mustang crossed with a tank.

  “Pretty nice, huh?”

  “I don’t even like cars.”

  “These aren’t cars. They’re dreams.”