American Dream Machine (2 page)

“You want breakfast?”

I couldn’t even tell who was talking. It was either my half brother, Severin, or it was our friend Williams. The three of us were so close, it almost didn’t matter.

“Yeah,” I yelled. “I’ll be right in.”

Severin, Williams, and I. We’d known each other all our lives, and until this particular morning we were just young Hollywood princes, wastrels who’d never stood anything to lose. None of us were yet twenty-five.

“Coming,” I mumbled. But then I stopped and knelt down for a minute by the swimming pool. This one was full. I dipped my hand into the water.
Unheated
. What I wouldn’t have given for a siphon and a skateboard. From one of the windows upstairs came the sound of people fucking. Whose place was this? Another night in the Hollywood Hills, another evening of people living both way above and beneath their slender yet infinite means: young actors between gigs, bastard children of wealthy executives like myself. I waited for the erotic clamor to pass, listened to the Santa Ana too as it battered the treetops and rattled the foliage all the way down to Sunset. I thought I heard my father, his voice buffeted around in all that crazy wind.
Nate! You skinny little shit! Why aren’t you home writing? You wanna make something of yourself, you should be working, working, working!
He was always harder on me than he was on Severin, though hard enough on us both. Eventually, after the sex stopped, I got up and went inside. I collided with Williams as I strode through the sliding glass doors into the living room.

“Hey, bub.” He hugged me. We pawed each other like boxers, forehead to forehead, mauling each other’s ears. “Did you eat? I was calling.”

“No,” I said. We wouldn’t let each other go. There was a barely suppressed violence to our embrace, as if at any moment one of us would throw the other to the ground. “I didn’t want to interrupt anybody.”

The room smelled like bad dope, cheap marijuana seeds and stems. There was a white couch, and a pair of high-top sneakers lay shucked off beside it. The place had that characterless mood of a ski condominium, everything pale and impersonal.

“Who lives here?” I let Williams go. He wasn’t dressed, except for his shorts.

“Tudor.” The head of his dick protruded, a little, through his fly, but he didn’t seem to know or care. “He’s out of town.”

I didn’t know who Tudor was. Williams had scumbag friends in those days, twentysomething punks who swaggered around like
Robert Altman was their best pal, who hung out at the Viper Room and Dominic’s after hours, sharking the pool table and powdering their noses. Guys like that could get a freewheeler like Will into trouble.

“Cool.” I forgave Williams everything, because we were like brothers, too—we’d known each other since kindergarten—and because his dad was killed when we were fifteen. What else did he have to hang on to, besides any old bit of driftwood that came his way? “I’m gonna get some chow.”

How handsome he was: tan and lithe and flawed only by the little scars a lifetime of skateboarding had left him with, a chipped tooth and the crooked stride of someone who’d sprained an ankle often enough to favor the other one permanently. I was pretty good-looking myself, fortunate enough to take after my mother, one of those glossy blonde sylphs, neither actress nor agent, who haunted the corridors of power in the sixties. But almost inevitably when there were women around, they were Will’s. He had a magnetism neither my brother nor I could match. This time, though, it was Severin who’d gotten lucky. I heard feminine footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Bye.” The girl peeked in. She was like this place: pale, Nordic, pretty. Her face was pure, almost featureless, like sunlight on a white curtain.

“Later,” Williams said. I waved. I recognized her, too. After she slipped back down the hall Williams chuckled.

“Dude, that’s your dad’s intern.”

Sure. Emily White was her name. I heard her calling out to my brother.
Severin, have you seen my keys?
Our dad used to be business partners with Little Will’s. The two men founded the most powerful agency in Hollywood. They were like mismatched halves of the same being. We grew up under their shadows, the three children of twin fathers.

“Are you cold?” I said. Because Williams was shivering a little, rubbing his biceps. He was high, but that wasn’t unusual. We were teenagers, basically, who saw nothing wrong with hitting the bong at eight in the morning. His oval eyes shone, those dark apertures that only underscored his supercilious beauty, his sunstruck good looks.

He shook his head. “I gotta go find my shit.”

He went upstairs. I watched him amble away and then followed the sound of banging and clattering to the kitchen.

“Hey, man.” Severin was bustling between the fridge and the stove. “You want eggs?”

“Yep. Lox ‘n’ onions.”

I looked around. The girl was already gone, having left through the patio door.

“No lox. Wait!” He opened the fridge. Even then, long before he moved back east and got famous, he had a New Yorker’s haste and energy. “Yes! Lox, from Canter’s.” He sniffed. “I dunno how good it is.”

Shorter than I was—and barely six months older; he and I had different mothers—he came over and ruffled my hair. I was the accident, the product of an affair, where he was Beau Rosenwald’s legitimate son. That made all the difference.

“Sit.” His headlock was a lot gentler than Will’s. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

I flopped at the table and watched him, playing absently with a Zippo lighter while I did. He
was
our father’s son, though he certainly didn’t look it. He was wiry and small, with pitch-black hair and a boundless intellectual confidence.

“What’s wrong?” He plunked a plate of eggs down in front of me. “You look sad, Nate.”

I shrugged. “I’m nostalgic.”

“Dude.” He laughed, collapsed into the chair opposite mine and began to attack his breakfast with wolfish energy. He ate like our father, at least. “It’s a little soon for that, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.” The air hung still with the smell of browned butter. Outside the day was clear and palmy. And we had nothing to fill it with except our twenty-three-year-olds’ dreams. “Maybe it is.”

He shrugged. He always seemed to carry his burdens a little more easily than I did. Even then he wore a certainty neither Little Will nor I could match. Long before he became a famous novelist—if that’s fame, because as our father went on to joke,
If you’re so famous, Severin, how come I’ve never heard of you?
—even before he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in ’99 and a MacArthur grant after that, he seemed to have it all together. But he wasn’t anything special back then, just another punk with Hollywood in his veins, another struggling screenwriter who worked all day in a video store. In his smoggy horn-rimmed glasses, shorts and horizontally striped
T-shirt, one of those thrift shop Hang Ten Muppet numbers, he looked like he’d barely made it out of junior high.

“Yo.” Williams swaggered in, still shirtless, slapping his chest.

“Dude, put that thing away.” Sev shoved his plate back, slurped his coffee. “I don’t need to see it any more than I already have.”

Will shoved his hand into his boxers and adjusted, then laughed. His gaze was a little veiny, now that he’d baked himself properly. He grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge and guzzled.

“You should talk,” he gasped, finally. “You were the one making all that noise.”

He mopped his mouth with his forearm, then stepped to the stove and plated up. We had no shame, it seems to me now. Or we were
all
shame, the way boys are. Humiliation was our currency. Williams sat down next to Severin. He looked at me, chewing, eggs flecking the corners of his mouth.

“What’s with you?”

What
was
with me? I was the dreamy one, where they were the Hollywood heirs. Already I was full of regret. I had my mother’s last name, Myer. I’d been through my entire childhood without knowing my dad at all, but Sev grew up in his house. I found I missed him. God knows why.
You really wanna be Beau’s kid, Nate?
Severin used to ask me, straight up.
D’you really know what he’s like?

Perhaps I didn’t, but I could imagine. I could imagine him even now, in that gruff, almost Tourettic way of his, throwing his arm around my shoulder, barking in my ear as he did all the time now that I had the mixed fortune of being acknowledged.
It’s all shit, it’s all bullshit, this business. Nobody knows anything
. This last phrase was William Goldman’s famous folk wisdom about Hollywood. No one knows anything. Only Beau could embody that knowledge and surpass it at the same time.

“Aw shit, man.” Little Will was laughing now. My two friends, brothers, whatever they were, were having an argument. “Don’t start in on Richard Burton.”

“Go ahead.” Sev tilted his chin forward, gave Will a haughty, goading look. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Funny that none of us were actors. Especially Williams, who had not just the looks but the tragic penumbra, the half-doomed quality, of one. Like Burton.

“
Julius Limbani is alive!
” He shook his lustrous brown hair back. It fell below his collarbone. I could smell the bong on his breath.

“Not quite.” Sev snorted. “Lock your teeth, and pretend you’re holding a cat turd on your tongue.”

They were mimicking, quoting
The Wild Geese
, a crappy action movie from 1978. It seemed we were always quoting something, memorizing our lines from
The Long Goodbye
or
California Split
.

“Let’s go watch it again,” Sev said. “We’ll swing by the store and grab it.”

“No, no,” I said. “Let’s watch
The Big Sleep
.”

“Again?”

This was us, before the shit hit the fan. And after all the massive losses and small gains that preceded us, long after our fathers, Beau Rosenwald and Williams Farquarsen III, had built and demolished their partnership. The elder Will was dead, under circumstances that were still a little hard to explain, and Beau had reinvented himself as a producer, again. There was no end to their story yet. Nor to ours.

“Come on. Nate’ll drive.” Sev yanked me up by the collar. Things were about to get crazy. “He’s clean.”

“Yeah, I’m clean.” I whiffed Will’s resinous neck. “But we might have to stuff stoner boy here in the trunk.”

“I can’t find my pants!”

“Where’d Emily go?”

“She left.”

“Nah, she came back in and fell asleep, upstairs. She couldn’t find her keys.”

Back then it didn’t even matter which of us spoke. We weren’t completing each other’s thoughts so much as having them together.

“Leave ’er.” Severin said, in his best hard-boiled voice.

“Leave ’er,” Williams repeated, with a shrill, mimicking laugh, the hysterical bray of a psychotic henchman in a movie. Everything is everything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything is everything.

“Let’s go!” We grabbed pants and socks and tennis shoes, wallets and belts and glasses. Will took his bong off the glass table in that strangely denuded living room. We left something too, because you always do, some residue of ourselves brooding over that girl, Emily White, upstairs in a stranger’s bed. The room held no sense
of habitation: there were no photographs or paintings or books. Just the hungover haze of our energetic debauch. Through the windows I could see the blue towers of Century City, Beverly Hills’ putty-colored plazas, those places where men with millions came to waste their money, and where our fathers’ story, too, began.

“Nate, dude, come on!” Sev’s voice drifted from outside. “Let’s bail!”

Outside, Williams’s opal-green Fiat exploded to life. Its ailing engine had no muffler, and the stereo played Black Flag, grainy
LA
hardcore like the puny violence of bees.

“Come on, man! Vidiots opens at ten!”

I reeled into the driveway, shoved slack, stoned Will into the passenger seat, then toppled into the back. We were making a getaway, under all those laurels and cypresses, the otherwise-quiet of this house in the hills. I threw the car into gear. And we roared off, laughing, leaving this house with its doors still flung open, wafting its scents of eggs and stale fish and sex, as if from this place—this pale chamber—we had all just been born.

“
ROSENWALD
”!

“Excuse me?” The receptionist blinked up, staring. Staring and staring. “May I help you?”

In 1962, our father walked into an office on Bedford Drive. He was so young then. He didn’t even know his favorite show business joke yet, the one about the five stages of an actor’s career. He knew nothing.

“Sir?” The receptionist looked at him, her black hair swept into a truncated beehive, eyelashes too long. She looked like a brunette Tippi Hedren.

“I’m Beau Rosenwald.” He swung his arms, in a suit that was too warm and too tight. As any suit might’ve been, for a man who weighed 285 pounds. “I’m here to see Sam Smiligan.”

“He’s not in.” A chilly smile. “Might I know what this is regarding?”

“Abe sent me.”

“Abe?”

“Yes. Abe Waxmorton. From New York.”

“I see.” Another tight smile, which he was green enough to take for hospitality. “I’ll let Mr. Smiligan know when he returns.”

He must’ve seemed like such a rube! She would never have behaved this way otherwise. He went over to the far end of the reception area and sat down. These were the West Coast offices of what had been minted in 1897 as the American Amusement Corporation and grown into a vaudeville empire. In the teens, Abe Waxmorton’s father had led the industry-wide fight against a controlling monopoly of theater barons.

“Talented Artists, how may I direct your call?” The receptionist sat with her Kewpie-blue eyes, her stiff hair and unaltering expression, the muted black-and-white check of her skirt and jacket making her subtle, like op art. In the dark marble tomb of the reception area, she was the only thing that moved on this Monday morning. Her hands flew as she routed calls through an old-fashioned switchboard. “One moment please.”

Beau could hear the labored weight of his own breathing. He sat on a black leather stool beside a glass coffee table laden with newspapers and pristine ashtrays. To his left a smoke-tinted window disclosed the green and palmy panorama of a street whose stillness unnerved him.