American Dream Machine (41 page)

“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
CD
s 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?
De
ranged 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 for 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.”

Emily stepped out of the car at last. Goose bumps lifted along her arms and shoulders.

“So why are we here, Beau?” Still, she couldn’t keep the teasing out of her voice. “What exactly did you have to show me?”

Beau held his hands behind his back, like a visitor at a museum. This
was
a museum of sorts. Emily couldn’t imagine what the sticker was on the car she’d just sat in. A million dollars? Zero?

“Pick one of these cars.”

“What?”

“You heard.” He drew his hands out front again; he was holding, it turned out, a checkbook. “Pick one.”

Poor Beau! How lonely he seemed, too. You get to that place where people are setting you up with Sharon Stone, you’re less a man than an institution, with barely a claim to a private life of your own.

“You like the Jag, take the Jag.”

A radio in the next room, Lance’s office, played an oldies station. You could just hear it over the hum of the room’s climate-control system, the great poet’s eternal question:
How did it feel?

The curator broke in. “Brother, these aren’t for sale, you know that.”

“Nothing isn’t for sale,” Beau snapped. “Nothing on this earth.”

Such a weird mulch of emotions clouded his face at that moment. Emily couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but his lips were pursed and his skin was so red. He seemed enraged.

“Beau.” All her life, Emily had been the voice of reason—of something, at any rate, that wasn’t unchecked passion. She wasn’t about to stop now. “I can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I helped you make a movie that’s not about chimpanzees, you can thank me in some other way. You can buy me a rare book. You can give me a raise.”

They stared each other down, in the showroom. Beyond the radio, Emily was aware of that secondary hum, a mechanical drone like a refrigerator’s.

“Beau.” Emily exhaled. “This is embarrassing.”

“This isn’t embarrassing,” he said. “Embarrassment is pitching zoo movies to kids half your age. You saved me from embarrassment, which I didn’t even know I was feeling.”

He took a step toward her. Beau was utterly sincere. But this whole I-am-just-a-humble-schmuck-with-no-taste-but-yours thing was, also, an act. She could feel it.

“Pick one.” He expanded his arms. Beamed at her. “Whichever you’d like.”

It was for just this that she loved him. For being so authentic in his theatricality and vice versa. It taught her something about life she might never master, herself, and it absolved her of the responsibility to say no.

“All right.” Finally, she spoke, breathing in that heady Freon and carnauba smell. “All right, I will.”

“
HE BOUGHT YOU
a fucking DeLorean?”

“He did.”

Emily stood at the base of a woman’s desk, in another office on the same lot. She was five hundred feet and an entire world away from her employer. It was two years later.

“That story’s true?” The woman’s name was Lucinda Vogel, and she threw her head back and laughed. “My God, who the fuck does he think he is? Christopher Lloyd? What an asshole.” She drummed her black-tipped fingernails against the desk’s gleaming glass surface. “What did you do with it?”

“It’s in a garage.” Emily had told this story so many times—though never to an executive
VP
at the studio, the person who now oversaw Beau’s deal—she was tired of it, right down to the bitter end. “Not like I could drive it.”

“Why not?” Lucinda snorted. “It might take you right back to the eighties, when Beau Rosenfuck was relevant.”

Poor Emily. There were so many things she couldn’t possibly explain, not least how her boss had slipped just a little from favor, how he was no longer quite the studio’s golden goose.

“How is it you’ve put up with him for so long?” Lucinda said. She was whippet-thin, dark-haired and narrow-eyed and lesbian and expensive. “The guy’s so cheesy he probably sends fruit baskets to everybody for Christmas.”

This room was cold too, and empty. In the upper reaches of the Thalberg Building, there were no toys or tchotchkes as in Beau’s
office. No mini-fridge holding three kinds of popsicle. This was pure abstraction. Decisions got made
here
.