American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  The cab accelerated, plunging east and then downtown. The night was a heavy, cloud-clotted gray. Will lived in Park Slope, Sev in Cobble Hill. I shook my wrist against my heavy gold Omega and watched the city flash by, thinking of the places only a few blocks away that carried, for us, a certain scent. Café Limbo, Two Boots. No matter how successful I was, I’d never match them. Both of my friends seemed more at home in the world than I was.

  XII

  “MY GOD, IS that Beau Rosenwald?”

  It was more than two years before Emily ran into her old boss again. She and he had talked on the phone, occasionally made hopeful noises about having lunch, but it never happened. And when Beau’s deal expired, and wasn’t renewed, she’d simply lost track of him. Until Lucinda leaned over and tugged her sleeve. Look.

  “Where?” Emily said. “My God, I think . . . it is!”

  They were, in fact, at the “Markhamson Thing,” this time in 2003. Across the dining room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel she spotted him, in a paisley waistcoat and accompanied by a very tall, very slender blonde some twenty years his junior. Something about this woman’s body language—erect, uninterested in the Hollywood honchos swirling around—made it clear she was not in the business.

  “What’s he wearing?” Lucinda snickered. “That waistcoat is bats.”

  Beau Rosenwald was seventy years old. He hadn’t seen Emily yet, and a part of me will forever wish he never did. He kept his eyes on the stage, where Sheryl Crow was currently running through a mini-acoustic set of toe-tappers. The woman who sat with him was statuesque, sphinxlike, dignified in a way that made her presence at Beau’s side a little puzzling. She looked, just barely, like Donatella Versace, if the latter weren’t such a terrible frightwig.

  Emily sat through the remainder of Crow’s set, shrinking down in her seat as she did. Her first impulse was to escape. Can you blame her? She was bored, she was pregnant for the second time, and she wanted to get home, to two-and-a-half-year-old Matilda and the not altogether unpleasantly boring husband who’d already be sound asleep at 9:30 PM.

  “Look, David.” Natalya Markhamson pointed vaguely in my father’s direction. “Isn’t that the horrible man?”

  David didn’t look up. Natalya could’ve been pointing anywhere. “Yes.”

  “You’re not watching.”

  “Yes, yes.” David allowed himself a courtesy glance. In fact he locked in on somebody else. “I’m sure that’s him.”

  Light sparked off Natalya’s bracelet; that was what drew Beau Rosenwald’s eye. In this dimly lit dining room thick with the mood of self-congratulation, and with people this close to going home, he spotted expensive jewelry and then Emily White. Pity.

  “You’re still not looking.” Natalya’s drawl was cartoonishly Slavic.

  “Well,” David said, as Emily waved back at Beau reluctantly. “They’re all horrible men, aren’t they?”

  He was dry, punctilious, Oxonian, and close to retirement age. She was an asp-like brunette in her thirties. What drew them together, besides money, Emily couldn’t imagine. She happened to know Natalya was sleeping with Lucinda and had been for some time. Not that David had a clue. With his coppery skin and goldframed glasses, receding hair and careful manners, he looked more like an accountant than the head of all three feature divisions of the biggest entertainment entity on the planet next to Disney.

  Still, Emily almost made it out. She went for the door as soon as the lights came up, mumbling something about a babysitter. David didn’t mind, he liked Emily, and she’d already done her part to support the pet cause, donating an extra ten grand.

  “Em!” The fat man cornered her at last, just as she was striding out of the lobby to the valet stand.

  “Beau?” She turned and saw he was standing there with the tall woman. Even now, when she saw my dad she half expected him to whip a script—or Joe Pesci himself—out of his pocket and start clobbering her with it. “My God, it’s been ages.”

  “Yeah.” He beamed. “Emily, I want to introduce you to my wife.”

  Wife! Was he always so short, or was this fourth Mrs. Ro just excruciatingly tall? She angled her hand down at Emily and they shook.

  “He talks about you,” she said. “I’m Patricia.”

  “I’m glad,” Emily said. Whatever could Beau have to say about her at this point? Mostly she was just baffled, by this woman’s air of academic seriousness, by her rare—flawed, unadjusted—beauty, and by old Beau’s apparent mellow contentment. He seemed positively jolly, there in his patent leather shoes.

  “Me too,” he said. With his arms spread apart like the star of a musical, as if he were set to burst into song. “I’m happy for all your success, Em.”

  That was it. The conversation collapsed around Beau’s failure to accost her with a bad movie. At seventy he deserved a little peace, didn’t he? He deserved his marriage to a fifty-two-year-old doctor (!), and he deserved a happy dotage. Not even a little incident Severin had stumbled into earlier this year—a father’s heartaches never ended, and he would never have guessed his son was unhappy—would ruin that for him. Behind him, in the lobby, Lucinda and Natalya Markhamson stood and pretended to ignore each other. As if half the town didn’t know they were fucking!

  “Well,” Em said, as her car pulled up. Phew. Bad enough that Beau still talked about her. “I’ll see you.”

  She pulled off. Beau and his fourth—fifth, Emily thought, but she could be forgiven for failing to keep track—wife stood behind, there in the golden light that rained over the valet stand. People milled around in tuxedos and evening gowns, chewing gum to efface the taste of mediocre salmon. Beau watched Emily’s car, a sleek and expensive green Bentley, turn left at the end of the drive. Her taillights disappeared.

  “You know I bought her a DeLorean once?”

  Patricia nodded. What Beau did not know was that Emily had sold the car, two years ago. Sentimentality, at last, had its limit.

  Driving home, Emily’s mind was on her boredom. It was not on Beau Rosenwald at all. Even as she turned left on Wilshire Boulevard, headed west toward Santa Monica—she and Beau now lived mere blocks apart, for all that they never saw each other—she was thinking of her exhaustion, of the sheer lack of inspiration you had to draw upon to work at a studio today. Everything had already happened. You couldn’t make movies out of need, or even out of interest. Whereas in Beau’s era the business was governed by id, this one was all superego, adjusted by some portion of the brain that hadn’t been named yet: pure terror wrapped in floss.

  Tiffany fluttered by, Barney’s. What was once the Brown Derby, where Beau—he was only a few car lengths behind her now, pointing the landmark out to his wife as he always did—used to take Severin for lunch every Christmas Eve. Whatever reverence Emily had for the past—it wasn’t much, but when she went to work for Beau she’d certainly had some feeling for what he’d accomplished, and what the industry had been—was supplanted by this feeling of being a posthumous human being. If the life of the movies was ended, what was left? Did anything exist if you no longer had hope for it? If it was no longer the object of dreams? At this hour, Wilshire Boulevard was quiet, all those low-slung, brown-and-tan buildings shuttered up behind silver grates, the mannequins glowing boldly in the windows. Emily White was as inviolable as these alarm-strung storefronts, as armored against intrusion, her eyelids drooping as she cruised through yellow lights. I’m bored.

  Beau was only twenty-five feet behind her, yet worlds away in spirit. Driving with his wife, sipping bottled water behind the wheel of her BMW, he luxuriated in not caring very much, in connubial adoration, in being, finally, free. Unlike Emily White, he was beyond boredom, whereas Emily was boredom incarnate. Wasn’t that true? Wasn’t it?

  “Hmm,” he murmured. Feeling not even the least whisper of trouble. They were just passing Bedford Drive, the old TAG offices there on his left. His elbow jutted into the breeze. “You know what?”

  “Nope.” Patricia covered his hand with
her own, delicate, slender, and soft. Her voice was bright and ironic. “I can’t yet read your mind, sweetheart.”

  “I think I’m going to,” my father said. He spoke as if they were having an argument, as if she were trying to talk him out of whatever intention he hadn’t even yet announced. “I’m going to call Emily and ask her to lunch.”

  “I think that’s terrific, if it’s what you want to do.”

  Ahead he could see the old Beverly Hilton, Robinsons-May, the fountain at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica, which shot lavender blue spray into the air. Bryce Beller had once passed out in that fountain.

  “Yep,” Beau hummed. “Yep, indeed.”

  Just so, he did it. He made the last great mistake of his life.

  XIII

  EMILY WHITE WAS onto something with her first impression of her old boss then. Because Beau Rosenwald had his problems, but also, at long last, he was happy. He was—inconceivable!—in love. I’d never seen him so purely cheerful as he was in those days, and Severin, whose memory reached back a lot farther, said exactly the same thing. He’s so happy. Like an infant, a swaddled, jolly, cooing little beast, he could not have been more so.

  So why did he have to fuck it up?

  The truth was, around the time Beau lost his deal, he’d been sick of just about everything. He was sick of the business, sick of kissing up to the studio and its executives, Lucinda and all the rest. He was sick of his own mind, even. And so old Rosenwald, no stranger to the more drastic forms of mental-health maintenance, took the unprecedented step, for him, of entering psychoanalysis. This wasn’t about going and complaining to some unorthodox transactional hippie once a week—poor Horowitz, who’d finally come down on the side of or-not-to-be: he’d hung himself in front of Paul Revere Middle School in the late nineties—this was about discovering who he was. Beau Rosenwald must’ve been desperate.

  “I don’t believe in this shit,” he barked at the woman who admitted him to her office on Fairburn Avenue, near Beverly Glen. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “What’s not to believe?” The woman was a willowy redhead. He hated redheads, ever since Susan Sarandon ditched him in the late days at ADM. “I haven’t asked you to believe anything.”

  Beau looked at her, dubiously. This was in October 2001, and I suppose his confusion was the most American thing about him. It wasn’t as if everyone’s beliefs weren’t up for question, just then.

  “Sit.” The doctor indicated her couch. Her hair fell across her face so he couldn’t really see it that well. The hair was wavy and thick, and her hands had the brittle delicacy of tree branches. Something about the way her fingers spread, the radical articulation of her knuckles and wrists, struck him. Their parchment color. “Why do you think you’re here?”

  It had been so long since Beau had talked to an actual woman. I think she scared him a little, this person who was not an executive, an actress, or a trophy, who wasn’t going to respond to any of his tantrums. He did not find her attractive.

  “Dr. Trabulus gave me your number.”

  “So I gather.” She smiled. “But why are you here?”

  How do you answer a question like that, when you have no vocabulary to describe your self-state? Beau had spent his life being a mood; it didn’t really occur to him that human beings had motives, that all that boring stuff that got talked up in story meetings actually applied.

  “I don’t know.” He sat. “I think that’s why I’m here.”

  He sat like a passenger on a bus, hands folded in his lap. He looked at her shelves, which were piled high with books. He stared out her window, at the open air above the intersection of Santa Monica and Beverly Glen Boulevards. There was the sound of angry honking, a rush-hour altercation.

  “My last shrink was a complete lunatic,” he said. Still, looking around him, craning his neck as if there might be somebody else here. “He thought he was treating Jim Morrison.”

  “Oh?” She folded her hands in her lap, crossed her legs, and listened.

  Beau was stranded. Without a job, without a production deal or a film or a marriage—even a bad wife would’ve given him something to do—and yet he found himself, gradually, able to recognize this. Talking to this doctor, he admitted his despair.

  “Everything happens to me,” he said, on a subsequent visit. “It’s like the old song.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . ” My father hesitated, over some anguished sense of victimhood he was too terrified to explain, that had never even crossed his consciousness before this. “My life—”

  “Your life, what?” Her voice was golden, calm. He’d taken to lying down on the couch, not looking at her. “You have a successful son. You have a second son you worry about a little, but you think he’ll be OK, once he gets it together. Yet you feel like certain things are your fault.”

  “I do.”

  Three times a week, they met. They talked about Severin (to his astonishment, she knew who his son was, owned all four of his books), about his feelings of failure, about Kate, and about me. About other things I’ll never know.

  “I’ve made a fortune. I’ve fucked movie stars.”

  “And yet you actually feel like none of it happens to you,” this woman—Dr. Goldmond was her name—said, presciently. “I think you feel like it’s all happening to somebody else.”

  Psychobabble, to him. But she went over to her shelf and pulled something down.

  “Read this.” It was The Great Short Novels of Henry James. “Read The Beast in the Jungle.”

  “I know The Beast in the Jungle.” After all, he’d developed it unsuccessfully at Columbia. “I almost did this movie.”

  “You did? So you’ve already read it.”

  My father hesitated. He’d read Emily White’s coverage of an adapted script. Yet now he read the novella. It was hell, of course, but he went line by painstaking line through that, and The Ambassadors too. Not since Coriolanus had he delved as deeply into a text, needed to wring as much meaning from just a set of words.

  “How can that be?” This woman divined him just right. As with John Marcher, as with Lambert Strether, those Jamesian archetypes, his life seemed to have passed him right by. “I’ve been married three times. I’ve been in an asylum. I’ve—”

  He twisted up off the couch, to amplify his aggravation, then broke off. “You changed your hair,” he said.

  “Three weeks ago.”

  It was February 2002. Through almost a dozen meetings, he simply hadn’t seen it. She was blonde now.

  “Why didn’t I notice?” he muttered. Suddenly, he was angry. “Why did you dye your hair?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” She tossed it, just so. With an unconsciously girlish defiance. “Why shouldn’t I dye my hair?”

  Beau Rosenwald was so Pavlovian. All she needed to do was become a fucking blonde?

  “I like it,” he said. Demurely, as his anger withered and he just stared.

  “Thank you.”

  Just like that, he saw beauty. Grunting, wheezing, aging Beau. How had he missed it all before? Her eyes were green and her lips were pillowy and if she happened to be a little older than the women he usually went for—if she happened not to be twenty-five—she was authentic.

  “You were saying?”

  But Beau couldn’t speak. This elegant, articulate woman, she looked over and saw nothing but another patient, of course. If she had seen the man, can you imagine how that would’ve gone? He was always yammering on about Spielberg, David Geffen, the need for a comeback, whom could he call? Patricia Goldmond had less attractive patients—Beau was funny, and his hideousness was mostly skin-deep—but this white-haired, froggy little fellow wasn’t exactly her private ideal.

  “I was saying . . . ”

  He fell hard. He couldn’t help it. He knew what a cliché it was to fall in love with your therapist, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. Sharon Stone herself wouldn’t have stood a chance against this woman, as Be
au saw her.

  “This must happen all the time.” He couldn’t help telling her about it either. Within a week he was spilling his guts.

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He insisted; God, it was fucking humiliating. Please uncross your legs. “You’re irresistible.”

  “I don’t think so.” She couldn’t help laughing, and touching her hair, which now drove him absolutely bananas. “I think people resist me fine.”

  “I don’t.” He levered himself up off the couch and looked at her straight on. “I quit. I can’t come here anymore.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “You’re fired. Now date me.”

  “No.”

  In her gray suit, with her long curtain of blonde hair—she’d straightened it, too—she looked grave. Her face without sutures, her melancholy stare. There were lines around her mouth, creases at the corners of her eyes.

  “Why not?” Who knew you could be turned on by flaws? “I date prettier women than you all the time.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. And it’s against the ethical rules of the profession, you know that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And I’m not attracted to you.”

  “That never stopped anyone before.”

  Old Beau was off to the races. He wanted this more than he could remember wanting anything at all. Even the movie business was secondary, tertiary: he called and left messages on her answering service, sat outside her office in his car. His hands actually shook when he considered her, just sitting there hoping to catch a glimpse. (“Stalking?” Well, that would depend on whom you asked. He wanted to see her, was that such a crime?) He felt better than he had, really, in years. There was nothing like wanting the unobtainable, and Beau had obtained enough over the years to know it. Usually, you stopped wanting at consummation, but this was different. Had his life passed him by?

  “Oh . . . ” He ran into her one afternoon at Bristol Farms, literally plowed his cart into hers at the end of the frozen food aisle. “Imagine running into you.”