American Dream Machine (50 page)

“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 weren’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.

Again, I’d never thought of him as “liking” much of anything. Conquest, maybe. I thought of him as cold and cruel, no matter how affectionate within his own family; no matter how affectionate he’d been even with me. I imagined him living on water and caffeine, his blood touched with mathematics and greed. He’d seemed to have no wants, only impulses.

“I dunno.”

Doheny stretched before us, infinite, palmy. A few blocks west of this corridor, our father and Williams had forged their friendship; a few blocks east, they’d decided to form
ADM
. We rode this meridian between history and destiny. The monotony of the street at night was hypnotic. The Beach Boys droned at low volume, the song “Our Prayer.”
Aaahhhh
.

“Williams was gay,” Severin said. “He liked domination.”

Did this surprise me? Not really. For a second I was just a conduit, only a shell for various harmonies: the ones on the car stereo, the thrum of the engine, and the hiss of the tires. I didn’t
know
anything, just then.

“He was murdered.” Severin turned his eyes, finally, back to the road, like he’d finally seen it sink in. The Beach Boys hummed.
AAAHHHHH
. “It wasn’t by a mugger.”

“I see,” I said. “He had a boyfriend.”

Severin shook his head. “He wasn’t that incautious.”

“A stranger?”

Severin shrugged. “That’s what I don’t know. Little Will might. But he’s not saying.”

I kept my own mouth shut a moment. “Where did you get all this?” I said at last.

“Rachel told me some. But I knew,” he said. I didn’t raise an eye when he mentioned his mother, called her by her first name; it just got weirder, this question of all our parenting. “My mom used to work with Williams in New York, remember, so she had some access. But.”

“But what?”

We were all the way down past Washington now, as far south as my neighborhood. Sev turned left and we cruised through Culver City.

“Little Will told me one or two things. I don’t know the whole story, but I know enough.”

“You were going to write about it,” I said.

“Yeah. Little Will asked me not to.”

We rode on in silence, down the whole jumbled ruin of Jefferson Boulevard at night, past twenty-four-hour drugstores, empty coffee shops, isolated pedestrians fighting against the wind. Once more I felt the horror of my brother’s life, the lonely stretches he’d suffered through with Beau, without anyone there to buffer him against the man’s infinite need. How terrible it could be, really, to know things, and how curiosity terminates, only and always, in death. We whisked past the hopeless beacon of a hospital, yellow and forlorn; a big orange
RTD
bus sat stranded out front of it, beached like a whale.

If Williams Farquarsen was murdered
, I thought.
Not mugged, but

killed
.

What then?

“IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY
have an ending,” Emily said. She leaned forward, after I’d pitched her. After I’d told her that story about Severin and then—why not?—invented a movie on the spot, loosely based on the same facts and yet elaborated into something else: a tale of two rivalrous brothers trying to solve a family murder.

“No ending yet.” I smiled tightly.
“Chinatown
didn’t have one either, for a while.”

“You need to have an ending. Come up with one, and I’d consider it.”

Indeed. It’s tough to build a noir around an invisible body, a crime that stays unsolved. I’d asked Will what happened, of course, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Understandable, really.

“I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry to hear all that about Severin.”

“It’s all right. He’s improved.”

I stood up. Outside, it was already beginning to get dark. Street lamps were on across the lot; people trundled toward their cars. The patches of orange poppies had faded and drowned. How long had I been talking?

“That stuff with Sev was a few years ago,” I added, watching Emily’s strangely ageless face, with its milk-pale complexion. “A lot can change.”

“Yeah.” A lot could change in five seconds, after all. “It’s good to see you, Nate. I’ll call you, and I’ll let Byron know,” she said.

“Great.” I gave her a hug, and right before I left, as I was turning for the door, she grabbed my arm.

“Tell Beau I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’d love to work with him again.”

“I’ll tell him,” I nodded. And walked into the hall, past the poster for that movie about the trapped Texans, the one that netted Emily her first Academy Award. (
Mine
, it was called. The tagline read,
Their Story Was Everyone’s Story.
) I strode out, through those gray corridors of power, out of the corporate warren where everyone seemed driven by something less personal than ambition yet more aggressive than fear. You could smell it almost, a cold, acrid smoke that bled through the air vents.

I stepped outside and crossed through the gate to my car. I drove off the lot, following Overland back to the 10. Wondering, as I passed liquor outlets and video stores that were going out of business, if, even without an ending, I hadn’t found my way clear. If the real question wasn’t “to be or not to be,” but rather, who controls the dream? Who organizes the past in order to clarify the future?

My phone rang, over on the seat where I’d left it. Where it had been misplaced since yesterday, in fact. I was stuck in freeway traffic, bumper to bumper heading east toward downtown.