Today, in Park City, I roll toward him in the crevasse in the snow my body has made. His cell phone had rung thirty minutes ago. Because Ben didn’t yet have an agent, one of the chairmen of the festival had called: Ben had won Best Newcomer at Sundance. It was beyond either of our wildest expectations.
“You are going to be the next big thing,” I say, reaching a mittened hand over to clasp his gloved one, like I had when the snow started coming down on New Year’s Eve a year and a few months ago, when we first realized that maybe this could be something real. “Award-winning filmmaker Ben Livingston. God, that sounds amazing.” The swell of pride courses through me, as if his success is mine and mine is his, and together we’re a double-helix, DNA.
His wind-chapped cheeks burn even redder.
“I feel like this was a mistake, like they’re going to retract it.”
“Nope.” I squeeze his hand. “Not a mistake, no retraction. You gotta own this, right? How long have I been saying that?”
“Since we first met,” he says, then inches forward to kiss my nose. “Since the very first day we met.”
He kisses my nose again, and we right ourselves, sitting anchored in the snowdrift, absorbing how everything is about to change.
“I wish he were here,” Ben says. His dad.
“I know,” I reply.
“I think he’d be proud of me,” he says, though it’s a bit of a question too.
“I’m certain he would be.”
He lets out his breath and mutters: “Fuck.”
“Fuck what?”
“Fuck everything,” he says, though there is so much to celebrate. “Fuck that he’s not here; fuck that I want him to see my success; fuck that I care about his approval when now, I can’t have it anyway.”
“He would have been proud, Ben. He would have.”
He shrugs, blinks quickly.
“Don’t be angry today, B. Not when today is a celebration.” I’ve seen this recently: the start of his dark spiral. He tries to keep me out of it, steer me away from his moodiness, but I am trained—literally trained at Tisch—to read people, to know them. I have my own dark spirals, of course—my mom’s childhood nickname for me, “Deflatum Tatum,” granted because she claimed she could see the air sucked out of me along with my mood, nipping on all parts of me.
Today he seems to hear me, which he doesn’t always.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just a lot.”
“I know,” I say, because I do. “Hey, I got you.”
He blinks faster, then stares up at the sky and yells: “FUUUUUUUCK!” Then shakes his head and manages a smile.
I brush the snow off my pants, rise, and stretch out my hand, pulling him up, though he is weightier than I. But I am stronger in some ways, the ways that have proven important recently. We stumble back to the ski condo that his mom has paid for, because Ben’s day job as a literary agent’s assistant pays only enough to cover his rent, and my job at the bar pays even less. We peel our damp, freezing clothes off each other and step into the steaming shower until we are skin to skin with nothing in between. Afterward, Ben puts on a tie, and I slide into my customary black tight jeans and black fitted top, and he tells me that he couldn’t have done this without me.
“Really,” he says. “This film, this award, it’s because of you.”
“I can’t take all the credit.” I bat my eyelashes demurely.
He laughs. “Now, Tatum Connelly, don’t you go and deflect when someone gives you praise.”
I puff up my chest and slip into my role, the spitfire actress, the confident companion, and take a bow. “You’re right. I’d like to thank the Academy, I’d like to thank my director Ben, but mostly, I’d like to thank myself because I’m really such a fucking genius.”
He laughs harder, and so do I, both of us relieved to find a sliver of normalcy in a world that feels so upended.
Then quieter, more shyly, I say: “Don’t forget to thank me up there. Please?” I elbow him, hoping I can play it off as a joke, that I’m not needy, that I don’t really care. Though I do.
We’d watched the Oscars together last weekend and shrieked (in horror) when Suzanna Memphis (her real name) forgot to thank her husband. We then spent the next thirty minutes wondering if they were about to split, if the rumors were true.
It wasn’t that it really mattered if Ben thanked me publicly, but what if it did? What if you had to proclaim your love aloud, onstage, to make it real?
“You’ll be the first name I say.” Ben kisses my neck, seeing through me.
When we get to the theater on Main Street, Ben is swarmed with executives and agents and important people who want to sign him as a client, who want to set up meetings in Los Angeles and New York about future projects. He grips my hand and holds on tight, but eventually, like we’re caught in the undertow of the ocean, he’s tugged away from me, even when we try our best to hold on.
I’ll find you, he mouths over his shoulder as he goes.
I nod and think: I hope so. Please don’t forget me.
The lights flicker at the awards ceremony, so I find a seat in the middle of the theater with a pulse of anxiety coursing through me, that minutes-earlier bravado already fading. I gaze at these unfamiliar faces, strangers who had suddenly seen the genius in my boyfriend, and something twitches deep inside, and I wonder if he’ll want me as much as he always has, now that maybe he’ll recognize how special he is, and that maybe I don’t deserve to stand alongside his brightness. Just as I felt back when we buried my mother, just as I feel on my worst days when I can’t beat back the throb of ever-present insecurity by disguising myself as someone else. Please don’t see me for what I really am. And if you do, please love me anyway.
I glance around, wondering where he is in the auditorium, wishing I could see his face, find him, and beckon him to sit beside me. But it’s just a swarm of Hollywood types and a few others like me: fazed, stunned, trying to pretend otherwise. I curl my fingers into a fist and press my nails into my palms, an old habit from middle school after my mom was first diagnosed, before her remission, when I’d feel myself start to cry and wouldn’t want to come undone in the middle of Algebra or PE or the cafeteria at lunch. I remind myself that I’m an actress, a good one, and I can put on any face that I want to.
Someone is waving from the side of the aisle, and I turn to see Ben, flagging me over.
I excuse myself as I press past tilted knees and annoyed faces until I reach him.
“What are you doing? You have to be up there any second!”
“I know, I know. But I realized something . . .” he whispers.
“What?”
He leans closer, so only I can hear.
“Marry me.”
“What?”
He is right by my ear now, his heat electrifying. “Marry me. I don’t want to do any of this without you.”
“What?” I can’t have heard correctly, and yet my stomach leaps to my throat, my heartbeat detonating within my chest cavity. That he wants me, that he is choosing me.
He pulls back and stares at me with a hint of a smile, wordlessly, like I can read his mind. We’d discussed marriage in tangential terms, like maybe one day, like let’s put it out there at some point, but nothing concrete, nothing that ever felt like it could be real.
“Marry me. Tomorrow. Next year. Whenever. Just say yes.”
“OK,” I say, because my mouth hasn’t yet caught up with my brain, with its frenetic euphoria that wants to burst with a YES.
He raises his eyebrows. “OK?”
“OK, yes!” I giggle loudly enough that a few people hiss for me to pipe down. I clamp my hand over my mouth, but my smile is wider than the whole of it.
He removes his father’s tarnished wedding band, which they miraculously recovered in the rubble, and which he’s been wearing on his right index finger, and slides it over my thumb, the only finger it fits. “Can this do for now? We’ll get you a real one when we’re back.”
“It’s more than OK,” I say. “It’s perfect.”
Later, when his name is called and he rises to accept his award, true to his word, the first person he thanks is me.
9
BEN
MAY 2012
I sink beneath the bubbles in the hot tub and wonder: If I stay under long enough, can I force myself to drown? Not that I want to drown, necessarily, but it’s not that I don’t either. I float my hands toward my face: my fingers and gold wedding band weave in front of me like an apparition. I count to twenty, holding my breath, swooshing my arms at my sides to keep me under the too-hot water, but as my lungs grow tighter I find that I don’t have it in me to sink, to not stretch for a gasp of air. The flats of my feet find the bottom of the Jacuzzi, and I shoot upward, toward the open sky, toward the California sunshine.
Tatum appears on our back deck now, on the phone, pacing in a circle, her forehead knotted into something that signals a crisis. But what constitutes a crisis anyway? That the test screeners to Army Women: 2.0 aren’t positive? That her publicist has overbooked her interviews? Bad press for forgetting to thank me in speeches? I buckle my knees and head beneath the surface again. Even from my perch below the bubbles, I can see her scanning the pool for me, and I know I should reach out a hand, hold up a foot, to let her know that I am here and alive and breathing, but I don’t. Instead, I count to thirty this time, until my lungs burn, and when I think that I absolutely can’t take it for another second, I hold on, and I do.
Tatum’s ankles draw me upward. She’s standing on the ledge of the hot tub, and then she is crouched over, waving me north.
“It’s Joey,” she shouts, her face and voice and body language sharp like a blade’s edge. “Get out. He’s at Cedars. Broke his arm, hit his head.” She stands abruptly. “Hurry up. I won’t wait for you.”
What she means is: You spend half your time trying to drown yourself now, literally, metaphorically, whatever. I can’t rescue someone who ties bricks to his ankles, who doesn’t even attempt to swim. She’s not wrong—Tatum is rarely wrong. Since Leo, I sleep too long, though fitfully; I work too little, and not well; I pick fights with her and with Eric, who finally said, “Dude, maybe it’s time you quit,” and I did; I flip off drivers on the freeway for innocuous lane changes; I snap at the woman in Starbucks for taking forever to decide what to put in her stupid latte. Does it really matter? How much of this shit really matters?
I heave myself out of the hot tub, throw on my jeans, slide into my flip-flops. I feel myself moving through quicksand as everything else meteors past.
Tatum drives because she is better at outpacing the paparazzi who sit outside our house now, waiting for a wave or a glimpse or some interesting nugget about what makes this day any different from all the other days that they trail her, Oscar winner Tatum Connelly. I am an asterisk, an afterthought: her husband of nine years who used to be something great, but now, just look at his IMDB to see what he’s done because no one could really tell you. One season of Code Emergency, that shitty NBC procedural which does OK in the ratings but isn’t exactly mentally taxing, before he had some sort of breakdown in the writers’ room one afternoon, in which he heaved the In and Out burgers (the writing staff’s dinner) against the giant whiteboard that was littered with crappy plotlines, and then after the burgers, the milkshakes and some fries too, until the whiteboard was nothing but a smashed canvas of inedible garbage. At which Ben proclaimed: “Well, at least now the plotlines match the quality of the show.” And Eric, his producing partner, said: “Dude, let’s go to a bar and talk.”
That’s the sort of anecdote you might find on his IMDB page.
Joey is with his teacher, Ms. Ashley, when we arrive at the hospital. My hair is still damp, the water still floating through my ears. I handle the paperwork while Tatum rushes into the exam room. By the time I’ve filled out the insurance forms, Tatum has soothed him into a quiet whimper, and Ms. Ashley, after explaining he fell off the monkey bars at the playground and landed with his arm pinned beneath him, has returned to Windstream, the preschool of the Hollywood elite, amid multiple apologies and promises to call later this afternoon.
The nurses have checked his vitals, which seem stable, but they need to get him down to X-ray to check on the break, and they want to monitor him for a possible concussion since he’s got a welt the size of the hard-boiled egg Tatum ate for breakfast on the back of his head. (She’s eating only protein for two meals a day now.)
“We’re going to wheel you down to Radiology, sweetie,” the nurse says. “We’re going to take a picture of your insides!”
“OK,” Joey whispers. “Can I see them too?”
“You betcha.” She smiles, then to us: “The doctor will be in to see you after she reviews everything.”
“Can I go with him?” Tatum asks. “To the X-rays?”
“One parent can tag along,” the nurse replies. “Though I promise he’s in good hands.”
“I know. My mom was a nurse.” She loses herself to a memory that she doesn’t share, which should make me bristle, but does not: I haven’t earned her confidence recently. I don’t deserve her secrets now. Shame rises through me at how unavailable I’ve been for her, but then drains just as quickly. Though she’s been there, literally been there, for my harder moments, she hasn’t been entirely present either. So maybe we deserve the half effort we get from one another in this pocket of time. Maybe this is the best we have.
“ER nurse?”
“Obstetrics,” Tatum says. “I know the hospital runs on you guys. But . . . I’m his mom.” I watch her, unable to read her in the way that I used to, unable to see exactly what she is thinking, where her actress persona ends and Tatum, my wife, begins.
“Mom always helps,” the nurse says, smiling. “But no phones in that ward.”
Tatum hands me her cell phone.
“I was supposed to do a call with everyone. If Luann texts, tell her I don’t know when I’ll be free.”
“OK,” I say. Luann is her publicist; her team is everyone. Tatum doesn’t have to remind me that she plays the part of supermom well. That even if she is traveling for weeks on end—a press junket from London to Paris to Rome to Berlin—or even if she embodies people she is not, loses herself to accents and tics and character traits that unintentionally ebb into her own personality, she will show up and be accountable for Joey, be his backbone when he needs her. I will too. He’s the one thing that we both do easily, equally, though to be fair to both of us, for the past six months, since Leo and the Oscars, I’ve spent a decent portion of my days wondering how much it will hurt if I drown myself.
The nurse and Tatum ease Joey into a wheelchair, and Tatum, not the nurse, steers him out of the room toward Radiology.
“Hang in there, kiddo,” I say, before the door closes behind them. “You’re going to be good as new.”
I drop my head into my hands, sink my elbows atop my knees. Tears come almost immediately, which is no surprise. I’m stripped bare now, a walking open wound. How long does it take to mourn the person you swore you’d protect? Forever. It feels like I will mourn Leo forever. It’s different from the grief with my dad, and it’s different from the grief with Tatum’s mom. She concedes this, even as she tries to be helpful: Let’s find a therapist, why won’t you talk to me about it? I should have done something to stop it, seen something to help my baby brother. I should have known. But I didn’t, and now he’s gone, and my son has a silly accident like slipping off the monkey bars and breaks his arm, and I am reduced to sobbing in a halogen-lit hospital room because I carry around my grief like a boulder, unable to ever find a resting place. Unable to forgive myself for not being a better, more present, more forgiving big brother.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, startling me. Spencer. Wondering when I’d like to start working again. I delete the e-mail, wipe my cheeks, try to compose myself. I close my eyes, drop my head back against the wall, and wait.
I’m nearly asleep when a kn
ock rattles the door.
The doctor, with her red hair high in a ponytail and studious black glasses, is examining Joey’s chart with a furrowed brow; then her eyes move up to mine.
“Oh my God,” she says. “I thought the name . . .”
“Oh my God,” I say. I knew the red hair looked too familiar, that her dancer’s posture was like a shadow of an old friend. Something electric runs through me for the first time in so long. I don’t pay close enough attention to examine it, what this feeling is, what it means, if I should lean in and touch the live wire, if I should instead run.
She laughs and shakes her head in disbelief.
“Ben, Jesus. I haven’t seen you since—”
“The Plaza Athénée,” we say in unison.
Then: “Amanda.” It’s recklessness, that feeling. Now it comes alive. “God, it’s been forever.”
“Joey’s still getting his X-rays,” I say, after we’ve stumbled over our hellos.
“Sorry about that: he was supposed to be back by now,” she says, tilting her glasses to rest atop her head, so she looks no older than when we loved each other a million years ago. But we split, and now here I am, married with a kid. In a gasp of a moment, a prolonged heartbeat. “Today is a mess here. I’m covering for two other pediatricians who couldn’t make it in. The timing’s off all over the place.”
Between Me and You Page 10