American Dream Machine (27 page)

“Do you? Want to?”

Beau studied his kid. Stared at Sev’s checkered Vans that were graffitied along the rims with all sorts of obscure hieroglyphs, his skinny-legged jeans and a faded Hang Ten T-shirt that was a last vestige of his younger, proto-Californian self.

“Yes.”

Father and son got high, then. They smoked Severin’s pipe and then Beau ran upstairs to get his bong, which was better. He hid it in the back of his closet, though there’d no longer be any need, he supposed.

“This is some fantastic shit, Sev.”

“Thanks.”

“Where are you buying your drugs?” For a moment, he’d play the concerned father again. “I want you to tell me where you got this.”

“Can’t.”

It rankled him, also, that his son scored better pot than he could. By accident, whereas he was in touch with people whose contacts trucked it in from Humboldt themselves. In a minute it would all start up again—his car alarm would go off and he’d run outside to find Star beating on the hood of his turd-brown 911—but just now he looked at his kid and began roaring with laughter.

Beau never understood my brother. I think this is true. He never understood me either, but with Severin he at least had a chance. He loved him, and they resembled one another in ways that couldn’t fully be explained. In their self-estrangement, he sometimes thought. Sev didn’t know where he came from, either. What was it like, being someone whom everybody else—really—wondered about?
Beau Rosenwald’s legitimate son and heir
, or later,
Severin Roth, the novelist
. What was it like? Late at night Beau came into that kitchen and found Severin writing in a spiral-bound notebook, just covering page after page with his agitated scrawl in black ballpoint pen.

“Whatcha writing?”

“Stuff.”

The tail end of seventh grade. Severin hardly slept and neither did Beau, through that terminal and strange year. They were back to living as they once had, as an older brother and a weird, younger charge: some bizarre relationship that wasn’t exactly father-and-son, though it certainly wasn’t anything else either.

“What stuff? You did your algebra?”

“Yep.”

“So what stuff?”

Beau drank milk, for his stomach. Sev drank juice, OJ that looked fluorescent—like Tang—in the late-night kitchen. Crickets trilled outside. The radio was turned down to a mumble.

“Just stuff. Papers.”

“Papers?”

“Yep. Stuff.”

He held the notebook on his knees so no one could see any closer. Beau wasn’t all that curious, really. Boys wrote things, and no matter how closed Severin was—like a bivalve, an oyster before his father—he’d already admitted his worst sins. Don’t think Beau hadn’t searched the house for heavier drugs, and wouldn’t have recognized the signs, given what he did all day, the people he worked with.

“You still writing those letters?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”

“Are you high?”

“No.”

“You wanna be?”

“No thanks.”

Severin had been writing and receiving letters, to and from someone in Oregon. In sixth grade his class had been required to do this, they’d been paired with a sister school—Episcopal hippies, again—up there. Yet Severin continued to write to a person, a girl, Beau gathered, from up north.

“She still sending you letters?”

It was like that book, the Saul Bellow one Nicholson was crazy about.
Herzog
, not that he’d read it. A guy who writes a lot of letters. Some movie that would make!

“Yep.”

He’d seen hers, actually: they came to the house at regular intervals. Sometimes she sent packages, records or books. Beau never opened them, but he knew what they were from their shape.

“That’s sweet, Sev. I’m glad you have a girlfriend.”

“Screw off, Dad.”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Right. I never had one, when I was your age.”

Severin looked him up and down. “You’ve made up for it, haven’t you?”

This was their candor, Beau thought, and for this it was all worthwhile. He was a great father and a shitty one, a terrible husband and a fabulous agent and a hateful, loveable human being who seemed to inspire affection in others. He could be all these things at once, and if he was an imperfect guardian he was still better than he might’ve been otherwise. He could’ve been a bully, say, like his own dad.

“I’m going to sleep, Severin. Turn off the lights when you’re done?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And don’t do anything stupid.” This was close to hypocrisy, also. “Don’t let Star in if she comes back around this time.”

“Yuh.”

“Seriously. Last time she hit me with her shoe while I was sleeping. She beat me in the eye with a spiked heel to wake me up.”

“Ouch.”

“Yes. I didn’t just tell you that.”

Beau stretched. He lifted his hands over his head. Severin just kept writing, writing and writing and writing and writing. We were already those people, locked into our fates, just like our dad.

“G’night, Sev.”

“G’night.”

And the sound of his pen continued, scratching away in the near-dark. It wasn’t mightier than anything, in Beau’s experience: the sword, the cock. It was the weakest gesture a human could make, insofar as it acquiesced before experience.
Whatever will be
. Severin made this sound, while Beau climbed upstairs. Not knowing that as he did, my brother had already overthrown him.

“REN, REN, REN, REN-”

Beau Rosenwald wanted another child? It turned out he was going to get one. Teddy and my mother were fighting, late at night. From my room I listened. Teddy’s voice was urgent and confidential, as he tried to calm my mother down.

“I’m trying to make this easy.”

“Easy?” my mother yipped. There was the sound of something toppling, a bottle or shaker, in the kitchen below. It was 1:00
AM
. “Tell me exactly how easy this is. Tell me how easy it is for
you
.”

“Ren, be reasonable.”

“I won’t!” My mother’s voice rose to a peak. Chair legs scraped against the floor as she shoved away from the butcher-block table. “I won’t!”

I lay in headphones, with a pillow smothering my face. I couldn’t drown their shouting out, though, no matter how I tried.

“Ren—”

“Shut up! You cocksucking fairy!”

“No, just calm down.” This was Teddy’s mode, the smooth-talking, rationalist salesman. Just as my mother was an emotional drunk. “I made a mistake.”

“You—”

“I made a mistake. Just like you did, once. Remember?”

“Don’t say it.”

“I will. Ren.” Teddy sighed. I could hear his weary resignation from upstairs. I took off my ’phones. What were they saying? The green lines of my alarm clock made a matchstick rebus in the dark. “Don’t you think we should come clean about this?”

“Clean? You fuck some actress and now you wanna talk to me about ‘clean’?”

“This isn’t about me,” Teddy said. “I’m talking about Nathaniel.”

The next sound was the brittle clap of my mother’s hand across his cheek. And then a silence so comprehensive it froze me in my bed. I waited and waited, but no one said anything. I could picture them down there, stunned. Just staring at one another in amazement, faces blazing and uncertain. Eventually, I heard a door open, and Teddy’s footsteps go tramping into the backyard.

Teddy picked me up from school, two days later. This wasn’t unusual. He sometimes did, when he had to leave work early to get ready for a premiere, say. But this time he pulled up in front of the house and just sat there. One hand on the wheel of his convertible.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I said.

He kept his eyes on the street. The tape deck had a cassette in it, which played West Coast jazz, very softly. Teddy was never hip; he was a few years older than the others and had slightly antiquated tastes. He turned slowly to face me now. His rimless glasses pinned me inside their reflection.

“Your mother has something to say to you.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve been having . . . some difficulties.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Look, Nate.” He lifted his hand off the wheel. I could tell he wanted to put it on my arm, but ultimately he just set it back down. His knuckles were thick, and the backs of his hands had age spots. His blond hair was ashy in the afternoon light. The car bonnet too was a creamy, attenuated white. “I’ll always think of you a certain way. I always have.”

“Which way is that?”

I look back on this moment and feel mostly pity for him. I think I do, although it’s difficult to know.

“You need to talk to your mother.”

Teddy Sanders was forty-eight. I, then, was thirteen. What was it like to belong to your family, the way Little Will and Severin both did? My stepfather stared through the windshield a moment, as it spangled with small drops of tropic rain.

“She and I are going to take some time apart,” he said.

I suppose I could’ve asked him why. But even if he knew, if the actress was the catalyst, there were other causes. I understood that also.

“I see.”

“No, Nate.” He turned to me. But what could he say?
I met your mother when she was pregnant?
It was her job to explain it to me now. “Go see your mom.”

It was a dreary afternoon in November. The street was littered with palm roots, the brown pieces of trees that had snapped off and been blown through rains. The grass in front of my house glistened. Above the Pacific, clouds opened to show a shank of sun.

“Right.” I got out of the car, laid my hand on the damp ragtop. “I’ll see you.”

Teddy gripped the wheel. The sultry crawl of a jazz standard, all pinging vibes, drifted out. Rain trickled in the gutter. “I’ll see you, Nate.”

I went up the front steps and across the walk. The car idled behind, like he was a teenager wanting to see his date in safely. Beneath the Greek Revival portico I rang my own doorbell and waited for my mom to let me in. I waited and waited. Did
I
live here anymore? Cold water dripped off the porch eave and ran down the nape of my neck.

Finally, my mother answered. She opened the door and looked at me. Almost like I was a stranger, some bit of detritus that had blown onto the lawn.

“Come in,” she said.

Behind me, Teddy’s Mercedes revved, the engine roaring as he gunned off into the afternoon.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I had to ask. My mother and I sat in the dining room, that formal prison in which we’d eaten and maintained such energetic pretense, night after night and morning after morning. That day, it was a wreck of ashtrays, wineglasses, napkins, dregs, as if in the aftermath of a party.

“I don’t know.” Her eyes drooped. Their green was lusterless. I felt like I’d never looked at her, like I was seeing her, too, for the first time “It was a long time ago.”

“How does that excuse anything?”

“It doesn’t.” Her speech was a little thick, but she was lucid. “Beau and I were never together. I was his . . . secretary.” Tiny wrinkles, proto-crow’s-feet, gathered at the corners of her eyes. “You have to understand what kind of person he was.”

“What kind of person was he?”

Outside, it had gone gray again. My mother lit a cigarette. I couldn’t really imagine her as a secretary either. I couldn’t imagine her as anything but my mom.

“He didn’t always have the clearest perspective on things.” She blew smoke.

“Do you?”

She could’ve smacked me, but she didn’t. “Don’t be an ass, Nathaniel.”

“Does Beau know?”

She nodded. “Now he does.”

“You told him?”

Outside, I could hear the drone of an airplane, its low-flying complaint. Before me, a wineglass held a dark stain, a silty little thumbprint of Chianti.

“Last night.”

I listened to the plane. I tried to imagine that phone call, or encounter. I couldn’t do that either. Severin’s dad—
our
dad—was so much a figure of fun to my friends and me. Huge, blustering, loud. Why couldn’t it have been Williams? There was a moment in which I tried to salvage my dignity by imagining a father whose alienation, maybe, I could’ve understood. My mother seemed to read my mind.

“Teddy’s your father,” she said. “He’s always acted as such.”

Her heart wasn’t in it. Or maybe it was. I’ll never know. I got up and went to the kitchen and came back with a Coke.

“Severin and I are brothers.”

She shrugged. As if, quite fairly, she’d never really given it a lot of thought.

“How do you know it wasn’t Williams?” I said. I wanted it to be him, just then. Or maybe I just wanted it to be anyone but the big man. “How do you know it was Beau?”

“Fuck you,” she said, as she had every right to do. “You’re my son, but don’t ever talk to me that way.”

My mother had gotten skinny. Her beauty was gaunt, a little desolate, now. I could see her bones.

“I’m gonna go see him,” I said. “I’m going over to Severin’s.”

“Suit yourself.” She stubbed out her cigarette. It was a 100, barely narrower than her own finger. “You don’t know, Nate. You don’t know what he’s like.”

I didn’t. And I didn’t know if this was a warning, or just an observation. I got up and went to the door, waving away smoke.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”

I walked to Severin’s house. He too lived in Santa Monica, only a few blocks away from me. I crossed Carlyle, angled up Ninth. I felt no urgency, no real impulse to speak. Not to Beau, and barely to Severin. Beau was still, in a way, peripheral: my stepdad was his colleague, and I was his son’s best friend. This made him the Law, someone Severin and I were dedicated to avoiding. I was newly curious, and newly repulsed. I wandered over through the darkening humidity and drank my soda. What would he do?

“Hey.” Severin answered the door. He just stood there, looking at me a long minute.

“Hey.” In my hand was the crinkled aluminum column, the empty Coke can. “You heard?”

He nodded. In a way, it didn’t make any difference; we couldn’t be any closer than we were already. We couldn’t be any more opaque to each other, either.

“What did your dad say?”