American Dream Machine (47 page)

“—it’s complicated, sure,” Emily said, “but so are, um, lots of things.
Chinatown
, or
Blade Runner
, or, uh—”

Your own reality remained doubtful also. Emily White kept that feeling, that strange chimerical feeling that deep down—
deep down
—she might not even really exist, that she might be just a figment of a larger human dream.

“We’re not making fucking
Chinatown
, Em. We’re not making this either.”

He slammed down the phone, too analog and old to use a headset, himself. This was the only time she’d ever heard David lose his temper, all because Beau Rosenwald annoyed him more than the script itself. The project was dead. There wasn’t any recourse.

It almost surprised her, to feel no regret. She slipped off her shoes and twisted slowly in her chair, rocking in her office’s slash of silence.

“Call Beau,” she yelled to her assistant. “If you can’t get him now, just keep trying!”

SO MUCH FOR
a night’s sleep. Espresso that late didn’t agree with Beau: nothing did, at seventy-two years old, although the amazing thing was how robust he was still. He’d live to be eighty, he’d live to be
ninety
, the way he felt. His mind was crisp, and he remembered everything—everyone—while his stout body remained as unexpectedly quick as it was ten years ago. The restaurant owner’s face kept him up, because that man who’d brought Markhamson his cookies
was
Abe Waxmorton. He had the same convex eyes, the same prow-like nose and brownish complexion. You lived long enough and they just started coming back, all those people. Beau was older now than Waxmorton had ever been while working, older by far than Abe had been when Beau came into his office, long ago, and thought the great man was ancient. “Long ago”? It was yesterday; no time had elapsed. Everything that had happened in between made that day seem no farther away than anything else.

“Hello?” He was outside, still groggy as he took the puppy for her afternoon walk. Beau missed his mother, he missed his father. If only he’d had the sense to do that while the old bastard was alive. “Who’s this?”

“Beau? It’s Emily White.”

“Emily! Sweet girl!” Cell phone pressed to his ear, he picked up his stride. “How’s our baby?”

“Our baby’s not good, Beau.”

He strolled down Fifteenth Street behind the dog, watching her chocolate form frisk along new-seeded lawns that were an almost
toxic green. Sunlight warmed his hands, cutting through the gray branches of the coral trees above.

“Yeah? I saw Markhamson last night and he seemed fine.”

“He read the script.”

“What?” The puppy squatted. Beau rolled a plastic bag onto his hand.

“He read it this morning. He asked me to messenger it to him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He hates it.” A faint sibilance trailed her voice, she was in her car and there were little cuts and chops as she spoke. “He hates the fucking script, Beau.”

He stopped, bending down to receive the dog’s large and fragrant offering, turning the bag inside out and holding his breath. “Um,
OK
—”

“The project’s done,” she said. “Even you understand that, right? It’s done.”

“I could take it elsewhere.”

“You could. Assuming you could pay all the turnaround costs.”

“So? That’s not a problem for me.”

Standing in the sun, clutching a bag filled with soft turds and a leash, Beau summoned himself again. What did he have, besides money and nonsense? What does anyone ever have? Time? Not much of it.

“That’s not a problem,” Emily said. Sun baked his face; the air smelled of fertilizer but also of sea breeze, lemon trees, and a little bit of exhaust. He loved it here. Amazing he’d ever lived anywhere else. “But David will have to let it go.”

“Why wouldn’t he? He hates the project.”

“He hates
you
, Beau.”

“Lots of people hate me. When did that ever get in the way of doing business?”

“Beau.” Emily took a deep breath. “He wants your failure. Your pain makes him glad. If you want to play tug-of-war with Sony, go ahead. But I ought never to have encouraged you. I should never have bought this idiotic project in the first place.”

She hung up, without an additional word. She left him standing where he’d lived now for fifteen years, on those blocks north of Montana Avenue where every other building belonged to
somebody: to Steve Jobs’s sister, to the head of television at Endeavor, to the lawyer at Jones Day who had just successfully defended
ADM
against a discrimination suit. People who—Beau felt it now—attained to a greater relevance than he did. They were more current, if not more enduring. Beau felt as if he’d just been slopped off the face of the earth.

It was quiet just now, quieter than he’d supposed. The screaming would start later, both within himself and outside. A breeze picked up. A little bit of traffic hissed along Montana, three blocks away. He watched the dog, who’d gotten tangled, wind her way clockwise around a tree until her leash came free. She padded over and looked up at him. He stared at her, stricken.

“Come,” he said.
Dog
. He snapped his fingers. “C’mon!”

“Em—”

“Huh?” She was dashing past her assistant, in whatever hurry she was always in these days. The one that kept her from recognizing the inevitable, as it applied to her too.

“Your five o’clock called. The agent said he was going to be a little late.”

“Fine. Did Beau call?”

The assistant, who reminded Emily of herself if she’d been redheaded and unpretty, looked up from her desk. “Didn’t you just have him in the car?”

Emily shivered. She’d looked forward, all this time, to getting rid of him, and now that he was gone, did she actually miss him?

“Never mind.”

Cam bent to answer the phone. This homely, freckled girl who’d been to Yale, who was so smart—they were all smart, these people behind such stupid movies—and so afraid of her, though Emily had never so much as raised her voice in Cam’s direction.

Emily went inside, took off her dark jacket, and waited for her next appointment. The lot was calm now, the sudden emptiness of late afternoon. She sat in her chair, dodged a few calls, and mostly waited, waited and waited for Beau to call her back. He never did.

“Em?” Cam’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Your appointment’s here.”

She’d forgotten who this was, some writer Byron Lawrence had been starting to sell her last week when she’d needed to leap off and take another call.
Have your office set a meeting
, she’d told him, trusting the agent’s taste. She’d never even learned the writer’s name, even when Byron had said,
You might know him already. He’s—

Never mind. How many writers did she have to know these days anyway, besides the ones who were A-listers? That’s what your executives were for. She rocked back in her chair and then looked up, startled, when the appointment came in.

“Hello, Em,” I said. For indeed, the writer was me. “Long time no see.”

“Nate?” Her face went slack with astonishment, as if
I
were the figment, and not she. “My God, of all people. You’re the last person on earth I would ever have expected to see!”

PART FIVE:
MARLOW/E

OH, THAT I
had the indictment written by my adversary!
These words, from the Book of Job, popped absurdly into my head.
I would approach her like a prince
.

“Hi, Em.” I smiled. “It’s great to see you too.”

If ever I had an enemy, or a friend or a mirror, it was Emily White. But as I approached her, in the spring of 2005, I was glowing. No longer an executive, I was on top of the world myself.

“You look fantastic.” She shook her head, as if to dispel the apparition I might’ve been. She pushed up out of her chair.

“Thanks.”

She crossed over to me, and we sat down. It was difficult to tell how much of the ritualized flattery we were engaged in was insincere. None of it, possibly.

“I talked to your father earlier.” She took the power seat, while I curled up in the far corner of her couch, twisted the top off my bottled water.

“How’s he?”

“He’s fine.” She blinked. “Irrepressible.”

This might’ve been true, for all I knew. Just then, Beau and I didn’t talk much. There were reasons for this. One was that he was still mad at me over something I’d failed to mention to him in a timely fashion. Another was my relative success. Incredible as it sounds, there was a time, however brief, when I finally eclipsed him in Hollywood, a moment when I was hot and he was old. Because I hadn’t spoken to him lately I knew there was a movie that he’d been trying to get off the ground, but this was all.

“How’s your brother?”

I leaned back. This was me at thirty-seven, well paid and expensive, in my Prada shoes and my black cashmere blazer. I could see my face reflected in her glass tabletop: hair thinning, but still handsome—a long, blond, Scandinavian oval. But even after all this time, I lingered a bit in Severin’s shadow.

“He’s . . .
OK
.”

“OK?”
Emily laughed. “Everything I read about him makes it sound a lot better than that.”

“Yeah.” I smiled tautly. “It does sound better than that.”

Severin had won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, yes. Ben Stiller had optioned
Peckerhead
, and after his last book,
Thirsty People
, my brother had received a MacArthur Fellowship. I suppose it was difficult for some people to imagine things were not so easy as they appeared. It was certainly difficult for me.

“What is it?” she said.

I’d come here to pitch at my agent’s behest. I wasn’t here for Beau, and I wasn’t here to talk about my brother either: I had my own business to attend to. Right after I left Fox, my Chandler script had been resurrected, optioned by Malpaso. I’d done a quick adaptation of Shirley Hazzard’s novel
The Bay of Noon
for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, then sold a pitch to Warner for half a million dollars. I wasn’t here for my family.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Why not?”

Maybe Emily White
was
my family. She was almost my father’s daughter, as I was almost his son. I watched her there, as pale and cool and corporate and powerful as I was bohemian and burning. We were the inheritors of this city, and somehow, overnight, I’d managed to become an adult. But as I watched her, those subtle flaws that still clung to her body—the hollows of sleeplessness under her eyes, the ounces of baby fat that strained her blouse as she bent forward to grab her bottle of Fiji—made me believe in her. I had to confess.

“
WHAT THE FUCK
is wrong with him?”

“What d’you mean?” Little Will turned to me, as we crawled along the
BQE
. “D’you mean philosophically?”

“Philosophically, psychologically,” I said. “What’s
wrong?”

Will shook his head. That same blocky, handsome, opaque face I’d known all my life, thirty years and change, only now middleaged. You could see it in the way his features had clustered together a bit, like those of a fighter who’d been hit one too many times. There was an intimation of crow’s-feet along the temples.

“I don’t know, man.” He swept his gaze back toward the Jackson Heights traffic and twilight. I’d just come off a plane. It was early in 2003, and everything—the branches, the buildings and birds—seemed sharp, crisp, and articulate in the cold golden sun. He drove, and I watched his profile: the hair cut short, the tortoiseshell glasses he now wore. All of us had aged, both slowly and suddenly it seemed. When exactly did
Will
become the responsible one? “You never thought about doing it yourself?”

“No.” I suppose this wasn’t true, but it had been awhile. “Maybe when I was a teenager.”

“No?”

Behind the wheel, he relaxed, drove with his palm. The backseat was empty, but you could see the apparatus of his life back there: booster seat, juice box, a faint, diaperish whiff of something, excrement and putty.

“You
don’t think of it,” I said. “You have a kid.”

Williams just smiled, turned up the radio a bit. Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” rumbled.

(You know what I told Emily? Everything. Because I had to tell her, and because a certain level of detail was my coin, all I had. So I told her about my visit to Brooklyn, some eighteen months earlier, and I told her about Severin, the things I hadn’t even been able to tell Beau.)

“Having a kid doesn’t change that much,” Will said. “But certain things come off the table.”

“Certain things,” I said. “Like suicide.”

How long had I known Severin and Little Will? Long enough for us to have lived through everything, the countless emergencies that had already defined us. Will’s dad’s disappearance, his own overdose. How many things had to happen?

“Explain it to me again,” I said. I felt like I was always asking this. “What—”

“Nate,” Williams exhaled. “I don’t
know
, y’know? I don’t know.”

I studied him. This wasn’t amnesia: it was ignorance.

“He took pills,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

He shrugged, and exhaled again. His soft breath suggested there might even have been some sort of pleasure in it, that merely surviving long enough to turn thirty-five meant that Sev deserved pretend dying, all the love and appreciation it would bring.

“Enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough. Enough that he was unconscious when I got there.”

It’s not like I’d never wondered before about my brother, how he carried all that weight without ever seeming to show it. Like Little Will, he had his demons, and he’d had even less opportunity to master them, perhaps. It was why the two of them were so close. But at the same time, I knew. Severin’s wife had left him. And so he’d swallowed just enough pills to feel appreciated. This wasn’t a real attempt, I could feel it, as we chugged along the
BQE
on our way to get me situated before we could visit Sev at the hospital.
Unless I was wrong. For what’s realer, in the mind of an aspiring suicide, than to make the effort and live?