“Two minutes, Daddy,” he calls back.
“Sorry,” I say. “We were knee-deep in Madden on the Xbox.” Back over my shoulder, I shout: “You’d better not be cheating, kiddo!”
Tatum presses her mouth into a thin line, then removes her sunglasses and squeezes the bridge of her nose. This is her exasperated face. The one I usually see now. Even when it’s simply because Joey is playing Madden for an extra two minutes.
“I’ll get him,” I say. Mostly as an escape from the unbearable discomfort between us, not because I want him to leave me a second sooner than he has to. I’m alone so often now, too often.
“All set.” I reemerge with Joey and his bag that is filled with his dirty laundry from the past two nights. Shit. Am I going to get a passive-aggressive text about how I should have washed it?
I hold my breath, and I can feel Tatum holding hers too; we’re both waiting for an explosion of Joey’s tears or a kick to my shin or a fist to my side. Yelled protests that he doesn’t want to go or he doesn’t want us to divorce or just that he doesn’t want something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be specific these days with him. Instead, he stands on his tiptoes and pecks my check, then wraps his arms around my neck. I loft him off his feet, and he giggles. I feel myself soften and glance at Tatum, who seems to uncoil too.
“Be good for your mom, kiddo,” I say before I set him down, and he reaches for Tatum’s hand.
“I’m always good for Mommy,” he laughs, giggling like he used to, like he wasn’t now being split in two.
I watch them go and know that I can’t say the same.
With Joey gone, the apartment is so quiet, so empty, I’m not sure what to do with myself. I play Madden to kill some time, but it’s just pathetic to get worked up over fake football without your seven-year-old son there. I should work. I know that. Eric and I are back on set, managing the writers’ room, breaking the story arcs for the next season of Code Emergency. But what I should really do is write. Like I used to, like I know I can. Not managing a staff of exhausted thirtysomethings, not crafting some bullshit hospital drama that I could outline while I sit on the can.
I mill about my apartment, running my hands over the empty walls, pausing in corners, turning, starting again. Seeing her today, here, has rattled me. It’s easier to pretend she doesn’t still inhabit part of me when we go days or even weeks now without stepping close enough to touch. I might see her face on a magazine cover or flip past one of her movies on late-night cable, but it’s not the same as breathing in the same air, smelling her faint perfume, the same custom scent from Barneys she’s worn for years, wanting to reach out and brush her arm when I think of something clever to say.
I can hear her in my ear, telling me, like she always used to say: “If you can dream it, you can be it,” but I’ve been in hibernation for so long, screwed things up so deeply, that I’m not even sure what I dream. But slowly I’m awakening; slowly I feel myself melting into something like my old self, someone who once dreamed the same things as she did. Who promised to write something for her but then lost himself to other people’s visions of what they wanted from him.
I should write it now, today, even if she doesn’t need me any longer. Maybe that’s the best time—when she doesn’t need me. Prove to her that I understood why she asked me all those years ago—because we were better together.
But instead I keep walking from room to room in the apartment and staring at the vacancy—not that it’s all that big, certainly nothing compared to the house in Brentwood with its high fences and higher ceilings where Tatum now lives alone with Joey, the house that was meant to be our enclave, to protect her from the outside world, protect us from . . . everything else. I let Joey pick out all the new furniture, decorate his room any which way he pleased, so his walls are a jarring bright green and his rug a shocking electric blue, but still, even with his bed unmade from the weekend, it feels barren.
I haven’t lived alone in fifteen, almost sixteen years.
I shut Joey’s door without a sound, as if I might disturb anyone, though it will just be me until Joe heads back to me on Wednesday, when Tatum flies to London to scout for her next film, which, incidentally, she’s also directing.
I grab the scotch, my dad’s old drink, from the kitchen counter, where I’d abandoned it earlier after my round of Madden, and refresh it.
I down the glass in a single gulp. That helps. Helps numb me to all this shit and how fucked we are and how furious I still am even though we split up months ago. The rage isn’t just about us. It’s about so many other things too. Things I need to let go of but instead find myself venting about over beers with Eric. I know that makes me childish; I know I need to grow up. But at this moment, growing up feels overrated, especially when the scotch helps so very much. I tried grown-up with Leo. Look how well that worked.
I pour myself another because seeing her today has shaken me, and one more will ease me into forgetting how my pulse accelerated at the sight of her, how I wanted to reach out and grab her cheeks and press her against the wall and kiss her, but also how much I wanted to shake her shoulders and say: You wronged me. She could just as easily do the same to me. I know. I know all of this.
I suck down the shot, then run my finger around the lip of my glass, licking off the residue of the alcohol. I weave back into Joey’s room, fall into his bed, where I’ve been sleeping during the nights he spends at Tatum’s. He sometimes asks when I’m going to come home. Tatum thinks it’s best that we just explain that we’re not getting back together, that he have concise parameters of what to expect so he can mourn his old family unit and embrace a new one. She’s probably right—she’s always right!—but I’ve been in this place for only four months. Four months is nothing; four months is a sliver of time when perhaps, like Joey, I can still make believe that we can be put back together. Which I do want some days. So I try to reassure him with vague platitudes, as if that reassures me too. Maybe, even though we almost hate each other, we’ll find our way back together? My promises sound as false to my own mind as they do when I try to offer reassurances aloud to Joey.
“Ben,” my mom said the other night when she called, as she does daily now, like she still worries about me even at forty. “Marriage is a series of small forgivenesses.” I could hear Ron in the background, talking to one of their houseguests. They’d bought a place in Sagaponack, mostly retired there now. “If you get caught up with one forgiveness, all the others you may need move out of reach.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think you do.”
“Mom,” I snapped.
“Your dad wasn’t perfect.”
“I never assumed as much.” God knows that I’d never even considered that he was perfect. I thought of his rigidness, of his push to mold Leo into something Leo never wanted to be. I blinked quickly to abate a rush of tears when I considered my own push to mold Leo into something he never was.
“She’s not perfect either,” my mom offered.
“It’s me,” I said, my voice breaking. “I’m the one who’s turned everything to shit.”
“Well,” my mom said. “If you thought that you were a perfect specimen of man, you should have just come and asked me. I could have told you otherwise. Also, Ben love, it goes both ways. You both probably turned things to shit.”
I laughed because my mom never swears. At least she never used to.
“Perfection’s not the point, honey,” she said before she returned to her weekend guests. “Forgiveness is. Acceptance is.” Then: “Maybe you can write about this?”
I told her that I was trying to, God am I finally trying to, and then she said she loved me and hung up. She had her whole life now too, and after Leo I stopped begrudging that and instead tried to find comfort in her happiness.
I rise from Joey’s bed, my knees cracking, my empty stomach roiling from too much scotch. I shut his door tightly. Now all the doors are closed in the apartment, and though it’s just as quiet a
s it was when they were open, I feel more settled, like maybe the space is smaller, like maybe I have less space to occupy. I root around the half-filled pantry for something for dinner. Joey’s in a big soup phase, so I have a varied assortment: corn chowder, split pea, tomato bisque. A far cry from the catered and gourmet meals that Tatum had sent to our house each morning to adhere to her diet. I settle on three bean. I pop open the lid, which promptly gets stuck between the gelatinous soup and the side of the can, and I slice my thumb open as I try to pry it out. The blood rushes out quickly, faster than the pain hits my nervous system, and I’m momentarily stunned, wondering where this wound came from, wondering why it doesn’t hurt more acutely. Then the pain comes: a sharp pinch radiating all the way up my arm.
I suck on the cut and use my good hand to dump the soup into a bowl.
I press the Start button on the microwave and bend over, peering inside the oven as my soup goes round and round. The buzzer beeps when it finishes, but I stay there for a few seconds after, crouched, staring, still pressing my thumb against my tongue, unable to recognize that the time has passed, unable to recognize that the time is up before I’m even fully aware that it started.
4
TATUM
DECEMBER 2000
Ben sneaks a small bottle of vodka from the inner pocket of his down coat, which is too puffy and threatens to swallow his chin.
“You saved my life; you know that, right?” He leans in close, shouting in my ear.
“You barely know me,” I shout back. “And you’re already giving me credit for saving your life?”
He grins and shakes his head. Around us, the crowds’ cheers rise in swells that envelop us and carry us up with them.
“It’s a small miracle you got me here on New Year’s Eve,” he yells. “This is a native New Yorker’s worst nightmare.”
“Well, you said you’d do anything I wanted in return for doing your film for free.” I gaze up toward the flashing billboards, the neon lights. “This is what I wanted.”
Also: him, this is what I wanted to do with him. Times Square at midnight. With a boy I might want to kiss for the rest of the year by my side. I didn’t really think he’d come; I didn’t really think I’d ask. But when I’d called Piper, my little sister, who was still back in Ohio and who would be spending her New Year’s Eve in Bud Jones’s basement—the same Bud Jones who got his nickname from the amount of pot he smoked in high school and who threw the same depressing New Year’s Eve party, with a flat keg and blinking multicolored lights looped in the shape of breasts—I realized I had to: I had to dance in Times Square at midnight; I had to celebrate that I was no longer relegated to Bud Jones’s metaphorical basement. I had to celebrate how far I’d come.
Ben had called a few weeks ago. We hadn’t really spoken since that night at the bar. Sometimes I’d see him around the Village and wave, a little stutter of the hand, but we always kept walking with a bob of our chins. But then Daisy got the chicken pox, and he needed an actress for his graduate film, and that was how he ended up being indebted to me and by my side in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Also: I really wanted to kiss him.
He was single now. Daisy told me as much when I stopped over at her place with an oatmeal bath from Duane Reade and some trashy magazines. I’d gotten the chicken pox when I was six, when the entire first grade went down for the count over a particularly brutal Ohio winter. My mom let me sit in front of the TV all day, and then three days later Piper was covered in spots and joined me, and I was mostly miserable but also happy that my mom had canceled her shifts at the hospital and snuggled next to us while we watched Kids Incorporated or she tried to explain the drama on Days of Our Lives.
“He dumped his girlfriend,” Daisy said, picking at a particularly gruesome blister on her left forearm. “A while ago now. So, totally single. Totally eligible.”
“What happened?”
“Something about how she applied to residencies only outside of New York. He broke it off before she moved out of the state and left him behind. He got drunk one night and rambled on about loyalty and how it was all he really wanted.”
“Ouch,” I said, because it wasn’t as if I couldn’t relate. I may have been the one to move out of state, but mostly it was because I was fleeing the life I wanted to leave behind. Leave behind the shame of Aaron Johnson, the football player I lost my virginity to in high school, who I believed had loved me, but who ditched me a month later for Julie Seymour, a girl on the field hockey team, and utterly detonated my teenage confidence by refusing to return my calls, refusing to acknowledge me in the hallway or after school when he picked up an item at the pharmacy where I worked (under horrifying lighting and wearing a poop-colored apron); or with others like Brandon and Mark and Eddie in college, all of whom managed to strip me—piece by piece, slowly enough that the damage was almost undetectable—of whatever self-confidence with boys I had left after Aaron and all the chaos of my home life. All of whom somehow convinced me that the current version of myself wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. That maybe if I were just a bit smarter or just a bit skinnier or just a bit prettier, they wouldn’t have grown bored or listless or looked elsewhere.
“He’s a good guy,” Daisy said, wincing, scratching with more fervor.
“You shouldn’t be doing that; it leaves scars.”
“We’re actors,” she replied. “Scars are what make us interesting.”
Tonight, Ben’s younger brother, Leo, elbows his way through the New Year’s Eve swarm and lands next to us, dragging a girl I don’t know but have been told is named Caroline, who is a freshman at Barnard; Leo’s a sophomore at Columbia. (“My parents’ second wind,” Ben said. “The baby of the family in every way.”) Tonight Leo is just the right amount of tipsy, and it’s impossible not to giggle when he stumbles and flattens himself against Ben to stop himself from falling, and then kisses his cheeks when he is steady.
“My big brother.” He grins. “You’re always looking out for me. Get him to tell you sometime about how he took the blame for my stash of pot freshman year in high school.”
Ben shakes his head. “Mom and Dad threatened to stop my tuition payments for college.”
Leo laughs. “Dad is always busting our balls.”
“Just trying to bring out our potential,” Ben says, and though I don’t know him well, I can see he’s deflecting. “And mostly, he’s busting mine.”
“Well, that’s what makes you the best big brother in the world,” Leo crows. He looks toward me. “I assume you are the lovely lady who somehow got my uptight brother into Times Square right now?”
“Tatum,” I say, extending a gloved hand, which he ignores as he pulls me into a hug as if I’m family.
“This is the sickest thing I have ever done.”
Ben laughs. “And that’s a high threshold.”
“No, dude, seriously, don’t be a downer. We’re gonna remember this forever. Times Square in New York!” He cups his gloves around his mouth and tilts his head toward the night sky. “Hello, 2001! Let’s see what you got!”
Caroline passes around an open bottle of champagne concealed in a paper bag, and we all drink generously, the bubbly matching our effervescent spirits, the alcohol warming us in the frigid Manhattan air.
The wind kicks up, and the snow starts to fall: thick, pregnant flakes that feel like they’ll stick almost immediately. Leo and Caroline huddle together, him wrapping his scarf around her and tugging her closer as if their lips are magnetic, each unable to be without the other. In seconds, Ben’s wavy dark hair is frosted in white, and he reaches out and brushes a few errant flakes off my eyelashes. There must be ten thousand people in Times Square, and I peer up at the Jumbotron, wondering where we are in the sea of faces and bodies that are mashed together, a pulsing wave ready to flush out the previous year, harken in a new one.
Ben and I gape at Leo and Caroline for a beat, self-conscious, awkward in that new way when you’re waiting for the other one to kis
s you, when you’re too new to each other, too unsure to do anything more than bite your lip or stare at your shoes.
“Leo’s always been like this,” he says. “All the girls in my grade thought he was the cutest. Imagine losing girls to your younger brother. And he was, like, eleven!”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m too nice a guy.” He shakes his head. “That was never Leo’s problem.”
“Ah, the curse of the nice guy.” I don’t mention that Daisy told me she thought that breaking up with the medical school girlfriend gutted him through the summer, that Daisy told him to go out and screw a few randoms, but he chuckled and said that wasn’t his style. And she had said: “Not a guy’s style? Casual sex is every guy’s style!” Which had made him blush a little deeper, laugh a little harder.
“Well,” I say now, “I don’t think you’re that nice. I mean, you were a bit of a tyrant on the shoot.”
“I was the director; that’s my job. I was trying to make the day, get the light. Also, since we’re here and I’m being honest, I can admit to asking for an extra take or two because I thought you were so spectacular.”
Now it’s my turn to deflect, because I’ve never been great at accepting compliments unless I’m playing a part. “Well, I hope you write that into your Oscar speech. ‘I apologize to Tatum Connelly for being a tyrant. And for making her do extra takes just for the hell of it. It was part of my job!’”
I can see his eyes wrinkle into a grin underneath his muffler. “It was just some stupid short to fulfill my thesis. Romanticah isn’t winning any Oscars.”
“Well, not with that attitude it’s not.”
“All I want is some funding, maybe expand it into a feature, maybe get an agent with it. Oscars aren’t exactly on my radar.”
“I thought you told me once that you promised your dad an Oscar—that was part of the deal.”
He shrugs his puffy shoulders. “Did you not hear what Leo just said about my dad? Kind of impossible standards.”
Between Me and You Page 6