Read Online American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor - Free Book Online

of an attorney who has just seen his client exonerated of all crimes.
    “That’s what happens when you get married.” Williams slapped his friend’s back. “The whole family crowds into the act.”
    “Now what?”
    They’d planned it badly. Neither could relocate. Rachel’s business meant she had to stay in New York, while Beau would go home to LA . Once the children were born they’d figure out what to do.
    “What now?” In the limousine he turned to her as they rode uptown. Street lamps slid by, massive and blurry. He batted among them like a moth, but it was all in his head. “I don’t feel any different.”
    “What made you think you would?”
    “I always thought the day would come when I felt like an adult,” he murmured. “You get older, but you never really age.”
    Typical. But it hadn’t happened at Beau’s bar mitzvah, or since. He lay his palm on her belly.
    “They’re going to depend on us,” Beau said.
    “Your clients depend on you.”
    “That’s different.”
    Was it? In any case, Rachel was his match here too, in private ambivalence as in gathering professional power. She looked like a little girl, gazing out the window: wonder-struck, confounded. The darkening streets flashed past.
    “I’m not ready for it either,” she said. “When I was younger, I wanted anything but this.”
    “So you’ve said. What did you think you wanted instead?”
    “Escape.”
    Later, he would remember this. Scan this conversation for clues. Just then he thought it was something else they had in common, as if—as if!—they had anything at all. Beau’s alliance with my own mother was more likely than this. Rachel was a literary agent,representing Charles Portis and Thomas Berger. Beau had barely read a book since Coriolanus .
    “Let’s go to the Bahamas tomorrow.”
    In the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, he stood and windmilled his arms. She looked at him.
    “We can’t.”
    “Why not?” They hadn’t even planned this, would take their honeymoon off the cuff. “Abe will let you go, and as for Sam,” Beau waved his palm. “Fuck him.”
    “I can’t fly.” She smiled. “Not in this condition.”
    He looked at her as if even flight were something he could suddenly achieve, without machines. The two of them were alone now. They’d had dinner at Tavern on the Green and their scattering of friends had left them.
    “Let’s do something else. Drive to Miami.”
    “We’ll drive?”
    “I’ll drive. You can climb on my back and I’ll carry you.”
    “Really?” She stared; he sounded so serious.
    “Yes. Hell yes. We’ll make Will carry the luggage.”
    There at the Plaza, she climbed on his back, and he charged around the lobby like a bull. What could you do with a man like this, whose boorishness was inseparable thus from exuberance, and whose ugliness so shaded, almost, into charm? Even the way he squatted, like a little boy playing leapfrog, his tux-black hindquarters shiny as he bent to accommodate her. She couldn’t help rattling with laughter.
    “Oh God, I’m heavy, careful—”
    “No— whuf! It’s all right. Not you. The kids, the kids are heavy.”
    She whooped as he bore her into the air, past a bellhop, the telephone operator, some ladies taking four o’clock tea. A man, a silver-haired troglodyte with an incongruous Beatle haircut, looked up from his New York World Journal Tribune . Finally Beau set her down in the shadow of a potted palm.
    “I can’t wait to make love to a pregnant woman.”
    “What makes you think I’ll let you?” she said.
    “Isn’t it my right?” Huffing and puffing, he recovered his breath.
    “I wouldn’t say it’s your right.”
    “Really?” He leaned against a pilaster. “According to Jewish law?”
    “Nope.”
    “Muslim law?”
    She laughed. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.
    “Do that again,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Laugh.” He didn’t move. “I like to hear you laugh.”
    He opened his eyes. His face was