I reeled after Severin, chasing him across the lobby. Whatever he was going to show me had its urgency: It’s because I love you, Nate. He didn’t even bother to check in as a guest. The moment I tossed my keys to the valet he just turned and started trotting straight up the stairs toward the bar.
“Aren’t you gonna bring your bag to your room?”
He didn’t say anything. Sev traveled light, the way he lived, with just a laptop and a carry-on. He remained, in those days, so purely identifiable as his younger self, but this was the last time I’d ever recognize him as the person I’d thought I’d known. A distinct trace of early silver shimmered at his temples. But otherwise? The same nerdy kid turned hipster novelist. He was the latter even when he was still just the former.
We charged across the open floor of the upstairs bar, which seemed completely empty at one o’clock in the afternoon. A tall woman occupied one of the far couches, so slender in profile I almost didn’t see her. In the room’s ill-lit, Gothic coolness, she was just a Brancusi bird, a long and pale mote with copper-colored hair, absorbed in her book. Only when we approached did I realize she was our target, as she looked up and recognized Severin.
“Hello, darling.”
“Mom!”
It took me a minute to know what to think. It took me several, in fact, while she stood up and kissed him, on both cheeks, I noticed, and then turned to me.
“You must be Nate.”
“I . . . yes, I suppose I must be. Severin.” I looked at my brother. “Who is this person?”
Rachel burst out laughing. “He has his father’s obtuseness,” she said to Sev. “But he doesn’t look like Beau either.”
The laughter. That was part of what convinced me, part of what rendered this entire ghostly encounter persuasive. The Roosevelt, with its blood-colored tile and its doomy sconces, its crypt-light in midafternoon, only enhanced its uncanniness.
“I wanted you to know,” Severin said. “I needed you to.”
You needed me to know what? I almost said, because I was struck once more by how life was most real when it was least plausible, when it was more like the movies than it was like itself.
“You thought I was dead,” Rachel said.
“No.” That was what made it so strange. I’d thought nothing: that she was gone, but also alive. Now that she was in front of me, somehow, it was like she’d been there the whole time. “Does, uh, our father . . . ”
She shook her head. Severin said, “No, Nate. That’s what I meant. You can’t ever tell him.”
“OK.” We sat next to each other, I in an armchair while the two of them collapsed on a leather couch. “OK.”
They really did look alike, although she was pushing seventy. The bevels and angles of her face were still elegant, recognizably Severin’s, and she was warmer than I had imagined: something about the Scurve of her body as she pulled up on the couch and opened her posture toward her son. Her hair was red, dyed that vivid, electrical color it had held when she was younger, which I’d seen in photographs. Only when you got up close could you see the reticulations of age, the crinkling of her fair skin. In a room like this, she did pretty well.
“You’re wondering.” She sat next to Severin, and I could tell they’d been in touch a long time. This wasn’t anything new. “You’re wanting to know where I’ve been.”
The strangeness really wasn’t in her reappearance. It was in how easily Severin accepted her absence, how comfortable he seemed when she told me. Yes, she explained, she’d disappeared from his life—and from Beau’s—around the time of Kate’s death. She couldn’t stand our father, which I understood—she blamed him for everything—and so she unplugged completely, left her business and moved west. She’d been wanting to get out of the agency business anyway. For a while she had a bookstore in Boulder, then she worked at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. Then Portland, where she was, still.
“I hated everything.”
“Everything?”
It was Severin’s laughter, the casual way he teased her from his place on the couch, I couldn’t figure out.
“No, not everything.” Not you. “Of course not.”
Well, what did I know? I’d spent my life resenting people who were close to me (Severin, Beau) or not close enough (Beau, Severin). What did I know?
“Why now?” I asked Rachel, as soon as Sev had gotten up to use the bathroom, because I knew he’d never tell me. “If you guys have been in touch since he was a teenager, why would Severin introduce us now?”
Beau had never known. He probably still thought Rachel was dead, even as Severin had visited his mother right under his father’s nose all the way through high school. (You still writing those letters, Sev? Still in touch with that girl up north?) It didn’t make sense, given how secretive my brother always was with me, that he would reveal it unprompted. At the same time, I understood how important it was that Beau never discover. It would’ve compromised everything, had he known.
“Severin loves you.”
“Really? He has a funny way of showing it, sometimes.”
But maybe I shouldn’t have taken it personally. Maybe I should never even have doubted. We were drinking martinis in the early afternoon. I was on my second, Rachel nursing her third. It didn’t seem to faze her. Slender as she was, she could really hold her liquor.
“This is his way.”
I felt light-headed. Drunk, I suppose, on the power of having my ignorance rescinded.
“I’m happy to meet you,” I said. Foolishly. As if this were all my brother was trying to show me. Like he didn’t have one more play up his sleeve.
The next night, Severin read at the Hammer. Afterward, he and I went out.
“Where to?”
We were trawling aimlessly toward Hollywood, not ready to go back to his hotel, basking in the intimacy we’d located that afternoon. Good times had descended between us the only way they ever seemed to in our adult lives, seemingly by accident. Beau had been at the reading, but Rachel had not.
“Dresden?” Too far. Too ancient, again, in 2004. We were too old to be cruising for yesterday’s thrills, especially when yesterday’s thrills were themselves an effort to catch up with ones that were already gone almost before we were born.
“Hamlet,” Severin said. “Let’s go to the Hamlet on Sunset.”
That’s how long it had been. The long-ago new had become nouveau-old once more. I tilted the Beamer up toward the Strip.
“Think we’ll get Cloonage?”
“Wrong night,” Severin said. “Wrong era.”
Indeed. But I didn’t want to ruin anything: this was a rare moment when I felt close to my brother, close in the way we used to be, without any drug overdoses or sibling arguments in play. He’d shown me something wholly private (Little Will didn’t know about Sev’s mother either), and I was touched by that. So?
We pulled over on Fountain. We smoked a little weed in the shadow of a coniferous tree, traffic whizzing past as we handed a joint back and forth in the car. It wasn’t like us anymore, and I had a few misgivings about sharing dope with my brother this late in our existence, given how our most catastrophic adventures seemed to involve altered states, but so what? We were free for the moment. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock.
“Yeah,” I croaked, as I turned the key in the ignition finally and we banked up toward Sunset at Crescent Heights. Why not be baked? “It’s not like today could get weirder.”
But as we floated along the Strip, it did. Laugh Factory. Greenblatt’s. All the old places were there, even if they’d changed identities, even if their doormen were bigger or the sandwiches they served were smaller than they had once been. The casual ballooning of perspective, too, the way some things shrivel with age, the way the palaces of childhood prove themselves to be shacks. Yet they were the same, the very rooms in which we’d wasted so many nights in our twenties, and where Beau and his rat pack had done as much for themselves.
Memories. I couldn�
��t help it if my life was guided by them, or if I obsessed, still, over their errancy and variation. Most problems in adulthood are simply ones of relation, or scale. As we cruised down the Strip these familiar façades—the hellish neon semaphore of Sky-Bar, the soon-to-be-shuttered shell of Tower Records—blinked and winked and endured. But when we drove up in front of the Hamburger Hamlet, on that angled stretch of Doheny Road that juts up above Sunset, handed the keys to the valet, and stumbled inside, the place looked exactly the way it should’ve: like an old-fashioned piano bar, with that same velvety-rich palette I’d dreamed of my entire life.
“Nice,” Severin said. Welcome to 1962.
“Yeah. Let’s get something to drink.”
We flailed our way to the bar, waving our arms like swimmers, like we were doing an unpopular dance step from this bygone era. The joint was jumping, which was odd given that it was Monday and most of the patrons were over sixty.
“Gin martini,” I said to the bartender.
“Manhattan.”
He wandered off, then brought drinks back to us, Severin’s maraschino cherries gleaming like vital organs in the dark.
“Cheers.” I slurped carefully off the top of my drink, felt the gin tincture my hydroponic high. It was wonderful.
“Love you.” Severin hooked his arm around me.
“Holy shit!” I nodded across the bar. “Don Rickles!”
“He’s lost a lot of weight.” Severin, who was just as high as I was, squinted into the darkness, trying to ascertain the great man’s reality.
“What is it?” We were in legend, I thought, crossing some rubicon where the present ceased to exist. This room was just as blurry in its present tense as memory itself.
“That’s not Rickles.” Severin coughed. “That’s Milt!”
Fuckin’ A. Bald guys, they all look alike.
“You’re right,” I said. Schildkraut had gotten old, had aged even more quickly than we had. “Let’s go check him out.”
We pushed away from the bar, as tremulous now as if we were approaching a woman. Milt wore a black jacket and a crisp white shirt, with cuff links. Even without a tie he looked appropriately Ian Fleming. His brittle elegance intimidated us, with our marijuana breath and our untied shoes, our wrinkly hipster shirts.
“Milt.” I spoke first. “I’m Nate Myer.”
“Severin.” Sev just stuck his palm out and blurted, “Ed Kranepool played in sixty-six games in 1978.”
Milt fixed him with a bovine stare. “Hit .210,” he said finally. “A little better on the road.”
“God, what a terrible year.” Sev clapped him on the shoulder.
“Are you still working?”
“I go into the office a few days a week,” he said. “Just often enough to be sure I’m not dead.”
At that time, Milt was seventy-six, only a few years older than Beau. His voice had that phlegmy depth old people’s sometimes do, yet his frame was sinewy, robust. He picked up his ginny, cloudy drink, crystalline with ice.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Severin said. “It’s good to know the phone’s still ringing.”
“That’s all you can hope for,” Milt said. Checking the room, urbanely, boxing at it loosely with his glass. “That and a premenopausal woman.”
As I watched him, I couldn’t help thinking of other famous bald folks from the movies. Are you an athathin? I am Oz, the great and powerful!
“What are you doing out?” I said. “It’s late.”
“Speak for yourself, kid.” Milt wet his crooked beak in the martini. “This place is hip again.”
“It always was,” I said, although this wasn’t true. There would’ve been a time in the late eighties—the Tom Conti period, the paleo-Reynolds or the neo-Schwarzenegger—when it wasn’t at all. “We’ve been coming here since we were teenagers.”
“I’ve been coming here since before you were born.” He looked us up and down. “The crowd used to be a little younger.”
We fell into a silence. For a moment each of us was in a world of his own. Milt didn’t care about us. We were the fleas to his former glory, and our father, Beau, was someone he’d probably felt had sold him out: after all, he’d stayed with Will. He’d chosen his side. But then, before we could mumble our excuses and go back to our side of the bar, he clapped Severin on the shoulder.
“I miss your pop,” he said. “I really do.”
“You should call him,” I began to say, but I didn’t get that far. I could see already that Milt was making a mistake.
“I was always so sorry about what happened,” he murmured. “I wish I’d spent more time with him.”
He wasn’t talking about Beau, I realized. He thought Sev was Little Will. I could see it in his gestures, hear it in his lugubrious tone.
“It’s all right.”
Drunkenly, or perhaps because he just didn’t care—didn’t imagine anyone else would, at this point—he went on.
“I mean, we all knew. I did, at least. I suppose some people didn’t. But maybe if he’d been a little more open.” He shook his head. “I loved your father.”
Who Milt thought I was, I have no idea. No one, probably. But how much more “open”’ could Beau have been? He was lost in contemplating Williams, his ex-colleague.
“You turned out OK, though.” To Severin, who didn’t seem to have the heart to correct him.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad. I always thought that for something like that to happen . . . ”
He let the thought peter out, dropping his arm off Severin’s shoulder. The room hummed with chatter, an ironic bossa nova played in the background. Knew what? Milt’s whole aging lounge lizard act was touched with a pathos, now that it was clear he could barely remember who we were. Severin shivered. A current seemed to pass through him, some extracurricular revulsion that had nothing to do with Milt, exactly.
“Nice to see you,” he said.
We shuffled away, feeling dispirited and ancient: Severin and I were caught up in the collapse of Milt’s memory, in the way he could mistake us even though the moment we turned away he suddenly looked sharp again, scanning the bar, eagleishly, for women. Still. How easily the whole historical record could reduce itself to mush. Even if, like Milt, you’d lived your life combing the details.
“Come on.” I wasn’t high anymore. We went back to our side of the bar and I had two more drinks, then a third. I couldn’t seem to put a dent in my sobriety no matter how I tried. “One more.”
“That’s enough, Nate.”
“You’re telling me it’s enough? Mr. Sleeping Pill? Mr. Heroin?”
“It is.” He hooked his arm around my shoulder. “Take it easy.”
It was amazing how alcohol could compromise my mood without doing a thing about my clarity. But he dragged me outside, eventually. I let him lug me by the elbow into the 1:00 AM coolness, where we stood, finally, in silence. The Hamlet had emptied out, and we were alone beneath the trees, the skein of laurels and cypresses that wound into the hills above Sunset. There was nothing. Just the intermittent wash of a solitary automobile along the boulevard below.
“What,” I said. My tongue was thick and my mind was clear. “What was he talking about?”
Severin shook his head. “Don’t.”
“Schildkraut said ‘like that.’” The valet arrived with my car. Severin went around to take the wheel, and I didn’t argue. “He said, ‘must be awful for something like that to happen.’”
“He didn’t.”
“He did. He wasn’t talking about Dad, he was talking about Big Will.”
“Yes.” Severin had always been a lousy driver, and his time in New York had only made it worse: he revved the engine of my gorgeous German machine, ground the gears needlessly as we crossed Sunset, and shot down Doheny. “So?”
I suppose all he’d ever wanted to do was protect me. I know that now. Sev’s relationship with Beau was complex and fraught enough. It had driven him to do and become things, both, that were
n’t necessarily enviable, no matter how they could seem. I believe his secrecy was also a way of taking a bullet on my behalf, of sparing me things that had exacted their toll. Why implicate me in these messes, the troubled wreck that was the life of a Hollywood son.
“So,” I said. Then again, I’d been gathering my inklings of this for years. It wasn’t Severin’s fault I was about to put everything together. “Will died.”
“Right.”
“What did Milt mean, ‘everybody knew’?”
Sev looked at me. He didn’t share my obsession with Williams’s death, of course, but it mattered to him also. He knew our fathers were linked, forever.
“He wasn’t killed by a mugger, was he?” I said.
We sliced down Doheny. Alcohol, marijuana, and other things—disgust, a premonition—made my stomach jump, as we rode too fast downhill. Severin was looking at me as he drove, his face in three-quarter profile.
“You ever think much about Williams, Nate?”
The moon floated overhead, scudding through high clouds. The traffic lights flashed yellow. We bottomed out at Santa Monica, kept heading south.
“All the time. You know I do.”
So did he, of course. Williams Farquarsen was our best friend’s dad, and he’d shaped the course of Sev’s own adolescence far more than he had mine. As we whisked past the supermarket that had once been Chasen’s, home of the legendary ADM Christmas parties back in the day, I could see Williams once more, ambling tieless among the red leather banquettes, glad-handing his most treasured clients. A visitation to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
“What do you suppose drove him?”
“Money.”
“Besides that. You know there are other things, besides that, even in Hollywood.”
“Sex.” I’d never thought of the older Williams as driven by anything of the kind. “Ambition, maybe. Art.”
“Yeah, all of those things,” Severin said. “But also secrecy.”
The word rippled through the humming shell of the car. Severin wasn’t driving in high enough gear, but I didn’t care. Secrecy. This was Williams all over.
“What d’you think Williams liked?” Sev asked coaxingly.
American Dream Machine Page 39
