American Dream Machine Read Online Free Page A

inhaled his citrus-kissed nails. Through his window the sky was a lithographic, late-afternoon gray.
    “What does your father do?”
    “He makes shoes.”
    “Shoes!” Waxmorton shook his head. “Ask him to make you a better pair.”
    What was it? Was it the hardness, the hatred in Beau’s eyes when he spoke of his father? Herman Rosenwald was a world-class son of a bitch, to hear Beau tell it: an angry widower with a heart as tight as a clamshell. But maybe Abe Waxmorton just liked my father’s energy. Maybe he just needed a buffoon.
    “Come tomorrow. You’ll start in the mailroom, like everybody else.”
    “I’ll start today.”
    “Not in those clothes.”
    Not in those clothes . Abe taught him to think like an agent, act like one, dress, like an undertaker or a G-man, too, in dark, solid colors. Abe’s office walls showed photographs with Greta Garbo, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland; in the corner was a bat— the bat—Ted Williams had used to bring his batting average to .406 on the last day of the 1941 season. Beau worked in the mailroom, then was promoted to handle the great man’s desk. Then, for slightly longer than was good for him, he became something else. Abe’s driver, or his attaché. Technically, the job didn’t have a name. He was Waxmorton’s shadow, his advisor: he did everything short of wipe the man’s ass. Walked his dogs, measured his golf handicap, squired his wife, sitting in Flora Waxmorton’s kitchen in North Fork, where she made him inedible tuna sandwiches. For three years he did this. This was the education he’d had, and it was enough. One day he came in and his own office, the little nook adjacent to his master’s, stood empty.
    “Go.”
    “What?” Beau turned. Waxmorton hunched in the doorway, staring with eyes gone bulbous, accusatory.
    “You need to go to Los Angeles.”
    “Los Angeles?” Beau was close enough now to be peevish. “What the hell for?”
    Beyond tan carpets and walnut trim, the only things left in the room were books. Shelves of them, belonging to Waxmorton. Beau’s boss was an enthusiastic autodidact, and many of these leathery volumes were written by people the agent actually knew. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams.
    “There’s nothing in Los Angeles. You said so yourself, it’s all desert and horse piss and guys with sixth-grade educations.”
    Waxmorton turned his palms up. “You want to keep shuttling me out to North Fork every day?”
    “You’re firing me?”
    “Your clients will fire you. Your friends will stab you in the back. The sooner you get used to that the better.”
    Beau was twenty-eight, an indifferent student all his life; he’d needed to repeat second grade. Waxmorton was all the finishing school he’d had.
    “Will you back me?”
    “Am I your mother?”
    He’d waited for this moment all his life, and still it had the force of a betrayal. Beau’s boss appeared to understand this as he shuffled over to one of the shelves and took down a leather-bound volume.
    “What’s this?” Beau turned it in his hands. Coriolanus .
    “It’s a play.”
    “I know that. Is it for a client?”
    Waxmorton shook his head. Those half-moon eyes peering over the tops of his glasses.
    “You read much history, Beau?”
    “Not much,” Beau smiled. “No.”
    “The story of one bloodbath can prepare you for the next.”
    Often enough, Beau had sat in this office and stared at the spines of Waxmorton’s books. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Who read such a thing? Edward Gibbon’s name merged in his mind with an adjective he didn’t know the meaning of either, gibbous . A pet word. Good morning, Darlene . He’d sway over the receptionist’s desk. You’re looking gibbous today . Odd that Severin and I turned out the way we did; Beau’s own verbal gifts were strictly for patter.
    “Control the talent.” Waxmorton shuffled forward to shake his hand. “You want to know how to get ahead? Control the