Go Ask Ali

by Ali Wentworth

  I was immediately drawn to him, as I am with most strong men; it’s not a daddy issue, I just prefer them to weak men. We shared our life stories on set, meals off set, and we became instant friends. We also bonded because the other actors and crew members were either bipolar and/or alcoholics. It was a good day when one of them got out a whole sentence without having Joe yell cut, or if they emerged from hair and makeup in under three hours.

  Over the years we kept in close touch. He lived in Chicago, so any time I was passing through I made a point of visiting him. I mean, when Oprah was busy, natch. And based on how often I was fogged or snowed in at O’Hare, that was a lot. We grew to know each other’s children, marriages, sexual hang-ups, favorite desserts. The important stuff. There was always a Christmas gift exchange. He thought I was thinner than I was, hence the size 2 sweaters and tops, and I’m sure I didn’t nail the pajama patterns or sandalwood aftershave, but it was the sentiment and the annual routine that counted. Plus the fact that I actually got a Christmas gift from someone who was not a relative.

  When I suddenly found myself in the position to provide my friends with a boost, I swiftly offered Joe a job on my show. No sending tape, interviews, jumping over hurdles, a gift. He hadn’t directed in a long time and I always felt he was such an undiscovered gem. Hollywood is known for the climbers who when they claw to the top, they kick the ladder to the ground so that no one below them can ascend; I wanted to share my good fortune, and I was living in New York, not L.A. I also hired our babysitter, who was a struggling actress, and although she’s now making a living as a budding TV ingenue, I am out an indispensable caregiver. Who makes the best gouda/avocado/tomato/lettuce/pickles/mustard/cucumber/balsamic vinegar sandwiches on toasted potato bread in the whole world.

  We began shooting in late fall in Manhattan. It was frigid outside, but due to an erratic heating system on our set, stifling inside. I did the opposite of what most sane people would do if they were about to shoot a TV show, like dieting and working out; I drank milkshakes and scarfed down midnight pizza. My anxiety was so out of control, I found myself gnawing on my own arm. But it’s not like I make a living as a sex symbol (pause for laughter or broaden your mind and look at me in a different light). I’m relatable, which means mildly fetching. Nobody calls Angelina Jolie relatable. In any case, I would cruise the hallways saying no to certain props, no to paint colors, no to certain set designs, and yes to kettle corn.

  On Joe’s first day he arrived bursting with chummy embraces for the cast and crew. After a brief coffee he was whisked into a production meeting. He was chock-full of cool camera angles, dolly shots, and lipstick camera ideas. The DP and production crew adored him and I knew we were in capable and potentially award-winning hands. Understandably, Joe was chomping at the bit to do something bold and artsy. As any artist would after a long absence of being able to express. He’d been changing diapers for the last ten years. Joe knew it was a test shooting this episode.

  On the third day, the network suits were visiting the set. Meaning, the people who granted us the money to produce my cockamamie idea were observing us like laboratory rats to make sure we scrambled around the maze professionally and under budget. They ate doughnuts and drank coffee and apprehensively nodded at juicers (electricians). It was nerve-racking, stressful, and I chewed my nails to the bone (when there were no more doughnuts). Once we commenced shooting, the suits peered over my shoulder at the monitors like they were scrutinizing the world’s first brain transplant. And occasionally offered me helpful hints like, “Can you retake it and make it funnier?”

  Joe was beaming, but I could tell beneath his strut there was an undercurrent of unease. It had been a long time since he was behind the camera, a few feet away from a bunch of farting crew members checking their Snapchat. That said, I figured Joe knew what he was doing; he didn’t need me to give him any direction.

  After a few takes, the suits, my partners, and I realized Joe was giving the actors somewhat bizarre notes. They were playing it like an avant-garde Cocteau play. Very staccato and austere. We cut. In an upbeat way I bounced over to the set.

  “Hey Joe!”

  “Hey Sweets!”

  “Listen, I think you’re maybe putting too much depth into this. It’s just a comedy! These characters are pretty cookie cutter and the jokes are pretty blatant . . . so just roll the camera and don’t make it so difficult on yourself. You’ll make it amazing no matter what.”

  I stepped back behind the monitors, which were no longer filled with chitchat and snacks. It was somber and the suits looked stressed out. Even my partners stared at me like dogs on the last day at a kill shelter.

  And action! Again, we were watching some macabre Off-Broadway play. The jokes landed like lines from a Sylvia Plath novel. This was not the show I created! Dear God, this wasn’t even a comedy! And that’s pretty much all I’m capable of! The suits started mumbling about finding another director and eyeing me like I might have stolen their wallets. Or voted Republican. I was in trouble.

  At its core, my marriage is a rocklike partnership. And I trust my husband’s judgment more than my own most of the time. Not about road rules or my ideal fighting weight, but the biggies—moral and ethical stuff. He is a church-goer and possesses a sound moral foundation, particularly around the areas I find gray—like what’s wrong with murder if he cheated? Or if the cash register’s open, doesn’t it make the money free? And so I did what I’ve done a million times before when in need of crisis management. I emailed my husband. And, as he is my spouse, we have a shorthand. In other words, we’re beyond diplomacy. My email was simple: “Help. Joe sucks. I’m going to have to fire him.” Send. I figured he would reply with the same suggestion I was already arriving at, to talk through the show and get on the same page (or the same book in the same language). Because we were friends, I had mistakenly assumed Joe “got” the show. And assuming makes an ass out of only me.

  I found myself wishing that I was back in some shitty trailer next to the crew’s men’s room reading InStyle magazine. When you’re the boss every problem is your problem. You can’t point the finger at sweet Gary, whose job it is to pass enchiladas around at break. I turned to one of the writers, hoping he had an idea of how to pull us out of the mess. He was finishing an economy-size bag of Swedish Fish. “I’m just a writer.” I felt my phone vibrate from my back pocket. Ah, sage words from my husband. He would fill the hole I had dug—with what, I didn’t care. I glanced down. A reply from Joe. I HAD ACCIDENTALLY SENT THE EMAIL TO HIM.

  My instinct was to hide under a card table in the corner. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I kept repeating. My mind raced: How could I have done that? How could I have been so stupid? And how could I make it all go away? I needed that zapper from the film Men in Black that could erase a person’s recent memory. I had never in my life sent an email to the wrong person. I had heard stories—the guy who sent his wife the sexy email instead of his mistress, a friend who replied all to a group of women, one of whom she was bad-mouthing. . . . I threw my phone on the floor like it was covered in blood. Maybe if I destroyed the source, the last five minutes of my life would simply reboot? Then I had the imbecilic idea that if I could find his phone I could delete the message. That wouldn’t work, Sherlock, because HE HAD ALREADY READ IT!

  I took a deep breath. He was my friend. I had to face the storm.

  Now, on the spectrum between protecting feelings over the cold truth, my tendency is to protect feelings. If friends ask me if they look too old, too fat, or if their powder room is gaudy, I find it easier to say no. I don’t ever want to upset anyone. I’m very nonconfrontational. Unless it involves my children, and then I’ll cut you.

  I rushed to the set. There was only a key grip lying on the floor listening to Coldplay. I scrambled to find Joe, sticking my head into random opened doors until I found him alone in the editing bay. Door closed. I paused. I had felt this way once before, when I jumped out of a plane into the California desert. At
least then I thought there was a chance I might die.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey,” he said lightly.

  “Listen, sorry about the email mixup. I was typing so quickly, I meant to say ‘Joe, HE the actor, sucks and we may have to fire HIM.’”

  “Ahhh, I thought it was strange you would email me that.”

  A rush of heat overtook my body. A deceitful hot flash.

  When I left the editing room, I told myself that my spin doctoring had actually worked. It was illogical and implausible, but I bought that he bought it. Had I really just piloted myself out of a raging shit storm? No matter what, all I wanted was to shield him from hurt feelings and preserve the friendship.

  I was still left with the problem of the scenes. Now if I commented on his directing he would know that the email was, in fact, about him. My hands were tied. So I said nothing. I had no choice but to let him continue shooting in the aforementioned bizarre way until we wrapped the episode. And he never let on that there was an issue.

  A few weeks later, however, I received an email. As it was a private exchange, I will say only this. He did know I was referring to him. He was hurt and humiliated. And he ended the email with the words “So long.”

  Those words spun me out for weeks. The quote “The worst thing about being lied to is knowing you weren’t worthy of the truth” echoed in an endless loop in my head. Why hadn’t I just told him from the start that what he was shooting was striking the wrong tone? He would have changed it and everybody would have been happy! I had completely dropped the reins. I had been unduly concerned about the balance of power, how he would react to me within the hierarchy of the set. Yes, it’s challenging to work with friends, but I made it impossible.

  The difficult lesson was that in trying to protect his feelings, I chose to lie (a pathetic lie) to preserve his dignity when, in fact, it accomplished the opposite. Always choose the truth. As my mother used to say, “A truth may hurt for a little while, but a lie will hurt forever.” Dammit, she was right again.

  To this day, he has refused to speak or see me. And although I empathize with the pain I caused him, I’m sad. Sad that a twenty-five-year friendship perished from one accidental email.

  Don’t lie—and if you must, always triple-check your emails before hitting send. And listen: If you live in the Chicago area and bump into a director named Joe, tell him I miss him. Very much.

  Chapter 16

  Tiny Life

  If you never have sex with your partner then you have a huge problem. And this is coming from a girl who hails from a long line of WASPs who choose gin and tonics over carnal delights and probably haven’t felt anything from the waist down since the 1880s. You must have sex with your partner. It doesn’t have to be done with a light show, a feather boa, and a can of coconut milk. Nobody needs to swing from a leather harness into a vat of dark chocolate. But there is something to the one intimate act that you share exclusively with that person. It defines your relationship as sacred. I’m not preaching from a religious pedestal here, this is basic human optimism. Now, if you have some sort of mutual agreement that allows other arrangements that includes twins, strangers, and your neighbors, I am intrigued to know how that actually works. You must be exhausted.

  Let me regale you with a cautionary tale. Sadly, you may have heard similar ones before. I have a friend named Tyne, who lives in Philadelphia. She is a kindhearted, charitable, warm woman who is beloved by everyone who knows her. Tyne had a tumultuous childhood punctuated by a series of divorces due to a bipolar mother resulting from fraud, alcoholism, and infidelity. Consequently, Tyne went to live with her uncle, who was barely present in her life. And she ran away from home when she was sixteen, with a pothead who believed that one day marijuana would be legal and when it was he was going to exploit it and become a billionaire. Silly boy. They lived in a Volkswagen bus in Big Sur for a few years before he fell in love with a local surfer whose father owned the tattoo parlor in town. Tyne ended up in San Francisco waitressing in a coffee bar. (The boy eventually became the billionaire owner of some of the largest medical marijuana companies in the world. But he still has the name “Tyne” inked on his ankle. Next to the one of Jesus catching a wave.)

  After getting her heart broken, Tyne vowed she would not re-create her past with her chosen family and future children. She would grab stability and predictability by the wilting balls. And all the practical, undramatic things that accompany them.

  On a hot summer evening near the wharf in San Francisco, at a clambake littered with plastic wineglasses and J.Crew madras shorts, Tyne met Leopold. He was a young lawyer working for a reputable firm that specialized in trusts and estates. He was also a gentleman, refreshing her spritzer and introducing her to his friends in a way that was socially adept and also a smidge territorial. Tyne felt safe. And he was handsome, with thick wavy blond hair and light blue eyes.

  Their dates were pretty ordinary—a dinner in Chinatown, a movie, and lots of lattes. If their courtship had been billed as a romantic comedy, you would have thrown down your uneaten Twizzlers and demanded your money back. That’s if you made it past the first five minutes.

  It wasn’t a particularly passionate union. The first time she slept over, they got the job done (who knew who was faking), but both were more interested in trying to figure out how to work his TiVo. It became one of those “You know what? This is fine” kind of unions.

  After a year, they got engaged. Decorum stated it was time. Not too fast, but not overly protracted. Tyne sighed with relief that she had found a respectable husband. And he was a lawyer! She couldn’t wait to pass around carrot sticks and dip on her new Gump’s white porcelain with gray trim wedding china. This was payback for her erratic and depressing childhood. She had won.

  Soon Leopold was offered a job at a more prestigious law firm that specialized in tax evasion and shelter. They bought an ivy-covered brick mansion in the historic and affluent Main Line area of western Philadelphia. Leopold complained about the expensive mortgage, which became an obsession and discussion at every soiree. “My wife just had to have it,” he would say. This being his sexist salute to giving the woman who bleaches his underwear something to show off about, when really the humble brag was meant to trumpet his own financial worth. Anyone who truly cannot afford something keeps it to himself. Tyne’s concerns were what botanical club to join and where to buy the Yves Delorme sheets she had seen in other fancy homes.

  Tyne completed her fairy-tale family by having a baby boy. (To be childless on a holiday card is to advertise a wrinkle, an issue, a prick in the bubble.) She pushed her British pram through the park for all to see—she was a mother and her baby was perfectly tucked into a blue cashmere blanket. As she looked up at the cloudless September sky, Tyne finally felt she had it all. The dark shadows of a splintered, bipolar-plagued past were far behind her.

  I met Tyne when she was in the full bloom of her new life. Her son, Grayson, was at the most prestigious preschool, and she had committed herself to transporting him to school, horseback, and Mandarin lessons. She joined superfluous clubs that sponsored historical organizations and society galas and trunk shows where she would drink wine and overpay for costume jewelry.

  Tyne and I had mutual friends and because Leopold had court cases in New York we met at a Manhattan dinner party and became fast friends. I never really connected to Leopold. I was put off by his blowhard personality and the way he undermined her. Tyne may have learned her mannerisms and etiquette from some outdated Palm Beach magazines, but I was attracted to her vulnerability around the edges. She got the joke. Even the dirty ones. And she was game.

  It was eight years later. I could barely make out the words, let alone who was screaming them into my iPhone that afternoon. After a few more wails and some panicked breaths, I realized it was Tyne. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she kept repeating.

  Tyne had gotten up at 6:00 a.m., as she always did, to make her son breakfast before he got on the bus to s
chool, something she had done for the past thirteen years. Frozen waffles, watered-down orange juice, and three strawberries. Repeat. That particular morning, Tyne had been suffering from a bout of insomnia. She knew that if she watched The Fugitive, she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but she loves Harrison Ford. So she poured herself a strong cup of instant coffee.

  Grayson made his way to the kitchen, his face intent on his cell phone, his eyes never drifted from the screen glow even as he devoured a bite of waffle drenched in syrup.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t know. He might have had an early case today.”

  “He left his computer.”

  Tyne looked over to the living room and saw Leopold’s computer lying on the carpet. How Grayson could even see that in his peripheral vision, she couldn’t understand. He grabbed his knapsack and a banana and bid his mother good-bye, never taking his eyes off his own screen. She heard the front door slam and smiled to herself. What a terrific kid she had: smart, handsome, a whiz at physics, and an exemplary lacrosse player. He was like a Kennedy.

  Tyne quietly picked up her husband’s laptop and placed it on the mahogany dining room table. A table that bore testament to their life as a family through its scratches from Thanksgiving mishaps and steaming pots of bolognese scorching the surface. Leopold works so damn hard, she thought to herself, and decided she was going to buy something butterscotchy for dessert that night. Leopold loved butterscotch.

  Before she closed the laptop, she caught a glimpse of something pink and fleshy. She clicked on the image. It was a man. A naked man. Holding his . . . manhood. Above the photo was a message: “Miss you Boo!” in pink script. Tyne froze for at least two minutes. All kinds of wires sparked as her brain tried helplessly to reboot. Mechanically, she sat down on one of the dining room chairs. And did what every woman would do in this situation. She went cyberhunting. And she went deep. Tyne wasn’t very tech savvy, but she knew how to hit the history tab.