I haven’t slept well, and the left side of my neck aches. I woke at three thirty, as I do most nights now worrying about Alcatraz’s dismal ratings—how Eric and I had spent the better part of two years committed to this TV project, how after a hot start it’s become creatively wretched—you can only have so many shankings before the audience yells jumped the shark!—and how I didn’t even want to do network TV in the first place, and now even that is going south.
My dad used to say that if you aim for the middle, you shouldn’t expect to come out on top: when I came home with a B in English sophomore year, when I told him I was content on the JV squash squad, when I announced that I didn’t care if I were named editor of the school paper, as long as I got to write.
He’d push his glasses up on his nose, sip his scotch in his library amid biographies of great men throughout history—Washington and Churchill and Babe Ruth (and eventually plenty of Reagan biographies too; Reagan was only a few years out of office when I was in high school)—and remind me that I’d get lost in the middle, that my potential would seep out of me like water through a drain.
Shortly after our trip to Paris for his fortieth, my dad was hospitalized for what they thought was an early heart attack. He’d been in court that day and seized, then fainted. Leo and I were pulled early from school by our nanny, and a waiting town car raced us to Mount Sinai Hospital, a straight shot up Madison Avenue. My mother was there, hysterical, though the nurses were trying to calm her. I remember trying to make myself as still as possible in the waiting room; our nanny had taken Leo to the cafeteria for a snack, and my mom was still weeping, and there was nothing to be done other than wait. And to still myself. Like a superstition: if I could hold myself as if I weren’t breathing, prove to God that I could do it, maybe He would save my dad. I never lasted very long—I’d count to forty in my head, maybe forty-five, and then I’d fidget or get distracted by the nurses’ station. Finally, I heard my dad in my brain telling me that if I was going to do something, I’d better do it right. So I did: I stared at the floor and held myself still until I reached six hundred and thirty-seven, and just as I was at six hundred and thirty-eight, a doctor emerged and said:
“It was a cardiac incident, not a full-blown attack. He’s going to be OK.”
And I exhaled and felt something come unpinned inside of me, something crazy, something that thought: Maybe I just had to prove to him that I could do it right, and he felt that and came back to us.
Now, so many years later, I can see this as literal wishful thinking, but at fifteen, it felt almost prophetic. That I could be named editor of the paper and be granted a seat at the chessboard with my dad. That I could win an Oscar and, like a piece on a chessboard, move closer to my father, the king. And even if I resented it back then, even if it rankled me, I understood it as I got older. I admire it now, in fact. That if you aspire for mediocrity, that’s what you will get. But if you hold your breath for the world record, you’ll get your name written up in a book.
Alcatraz is mediocrity, and not even good mediocrity at that.
So I lie awake every night, staring at the ceiling, wrapped in my embarrassment and disappointment. That Tatum is coasting toward the stars doesn’t help alleviate my shame of knowing that I have settled. That’s not her fault. Of course it’s not. But it does shine a mirror on my own inadequacy when what I’d like to do is look away.
The doorbell clangs.
I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and pad down the hall in my underwear. I stick my head into Joey’s room, watch his chest rise and fall for a beat. Tatum’s been doing breakfast so I can sleep late, before she heads to the set. Joe murmurs something in his sleep, then falls quiet, a small victory.
“I’m coming,” I whisper to the door. “I’m coming.”
The doorbell chimes again.
“Jesus! I’m coming,” I call louder.
“It’s me,” I hear from the outside.
I click the latch, swing the door open wide.
“Jesus Christ,” I say, my hand covering my mouth instinctively. He is wan and disheveled and appears to have puke on his dirty jeans.
It’s Leo. He sees me, and he starts to cry.
He tells me the drugs started out just for fun.
“Those lines in Toronto, remember?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“When I met you at the film festival. That was the first time: that coke—that party the first night?”
I remember then. I flew him up to meet me. I wanted to watch out for him, said I would watch out for him. I’d do better, be better, with my dad gone.
Leo drops his head into his hands, then folds himself atop the kitchen table. I brew some black coffee, pour us both too much, and it spills on the counter, where I leave the mess and hand him a mug.
I do the math. “I don’t understand . . . this has been going on, you’ve been using for six years?”
Where have I been? How did I miss this?
“I called you once,” he says, his eyes filling again. “A few years back . . . I think . . . you were in Dallas? On a shoot? That Kennedy thing? I don’t know. Anyway. I called you to tell you that I thought I needed . . . help. But then I lost my nerve. Thought I could do it on my own. Then, I mean, obviously, this nightclub investment thing was not the best move.”
“Nightclub thing?”
“I invested, remember?”
I shake my head. It sounds familiar, but I often only hear Leo through a tunnel: I pay close enough attention to ensure that he’s checking off the boxes, then tune out the rest of the clatter because there is so much clatter. Everywhere he goes, there is noise. Tatum would probably say I do much the same with her.
He sighs. “I went in with some buddies on a place in Miami. Disposable income isn’t my problem, thought I could invest it and have fun at the same time.”
I nod. I have no recollection of a nightclub in Miami. I chastise myself. “So you’ve tried to stop?”
He shrugs, something small and pathetic, which is to say no, he really hasn’t tried all that hard to stop. Even though one look at him—dirty, disheveled, bruises beneath his eyes, cracks along the edges of his lips—informs us both that he is teetering on the edge, close enough to stumble off it and maybe never come back. He tells me that he hasn’t slept in three nights, that he was downtown partying and a girl he was with OD’d, that he knew if he didn’t get on a plane and tell me now in person, ask for help, he’d be next.
“So you haven’t tried to stop?” I hear my voice, the judgment. I hate myself for it but it’s there all the same. Tatum hears this all the time with Walter; this is the first time I’ve really heard it for myself.
“It could have been me, Ben. Shit. It could have been me.”
“Have you told the people at work? Because if you haven’t, then you shouldn’t. They can fire you.”
He slaps both palms against the table. “This isn’t fucking about work, Ben!”
“It’s not, I know.” I sit beside him, rest both of my hands on his knees. I have to do better at this. If Tatum were here, she’d be better. I try to intuit what she’d say. “I just meant . . . Look, we’ve been through this with Walter, Tatum’s dad. We’ll get through it, but you’ll need the month. Thirty days to get straight.”
He nods. “I’m their best trader. They’ll give it to me.” He pauses. “Ironic, isn’t it? How good I am at something I hate?”
He loathes me when he says this. I know it; I can feel it cutting through my soul. As if the words are fingers pointing at me saying: You made me stick with it; you tried to be my father when I just needed a brother.
“I just tried to do what I thought was right,” I say, sliding my hands back into my own lap. “I thought it was time for you to be a grown-up.”
“Whoever gave you the right to tell me how to be a grown-up?”
“Dad did,” I say, and regret it immediately.
“You’re not Dad,” he says, intuiting my thoughts. He rises and head
s toward the bathroom. I hear him vomiting for a good five minutes. And I know I should go in there, rub his back, offer some comfort, but I find that I’m unable to, unable to stand and do what’s best for him, when what’s best for me is to stay here, stuck in my chair, without having to confront the reality of all the ways I have failed him.
Tatum handles all the things that I cannot. Her tank top is still sweat-pocked, her cheeks still pink by the time she has called Commitments, spoken to the staff as if they are old friends, secured Leo a bed. She phones her agent, tells her she’ll make it to set that day—she’s a pro, after all—but will be leaving immediately after the crew breaks for the union-mandated lunch. She often lingers around to shadow the director, to play scenes with her costars off camera, a benevolence the pros afford their peers when they all get along.
“Family emergency,” she says to Jocelyn, her agent. “I’ll tell them when I get there, but FYI. This comes first for me today. In case you get any gripes. Or, whatever, in case anyone calls me a bitch to TMZ.”
Only recently has the tabloid industry started to take interest in Tatum. Every once in a while I’ll be in the checkout line at CVS and catch a small snippet about a usually made-up bit in Us Weekly, or I’ll lose myself to the Internet by googling her name when I should be writing, only to find a handful of stories about on-set behavior (or romances) which surely aren’t true. Tatum pays them little mind. Sometimes they’ll print a quick bit about her rivalry with Lily Marple, and she’ll scan the copy and mutter something like: “God, she’s such a bitch.”
That one they get right.
“I’m only doing one shot today,” she says fifteen minutes after hanging up with Jocelyn, bounding down the steps, wrapping her just-showered hair into a bun. She’s gotten more beautiful as she’s gotten more famous. And it’s not that her beauty is tied to her fame; rather, she’s grown more confident, more comfortable in her skin, like she’s finally living her best life (I was watching Oprah recently and heard that phrase, in case you’re wondering). “I’ll be home just after noon. We’ll head down then. I called my dad to come by in the meantime.”
I steel my jaw. She notices.
“Don’t even start with me,” she says, throwing her script and phone into her bag. “He’s been through it. He’ll help.”
Joey starts to wail from his room.
“Shit,” she says. “Jocelyn is asking them to push everything up for me today. Can you handle breakfast?”
I nod.
“It’s not like I want to miss his breakfast,” she snaps. “It’s my favorite part of my day.”
“I didn’t say that you wanted to.”
She sighs. “Constance will be here in thirty minutes. If you don’t want to do breakfast, she’ll handle it.”
The truth is that Joey doesn’t like me feeding him. He greedily laps up whatever Tatum and Constance, our nanny, put in front of him, but with me, no, it’s on the floor or against the wall or sometimes in his mouth, then dribbled right out. Tatum says it’s because he can sense that he’s pushing my buttons, so he keeps going. I suspect that she knows a thing or two about this because she does the same thing. It’s not that we want to fight or snip at each other. But we find ourselves doing so more often now: she’s working too much; I’m working on something I have no interest in (Alcatraz!)—and which is doing poorly anyway. Neither of us is sleeping in the way that you need to not to take a small injustice and spiral it into something that suddenly feels like you’d stake your life on it.
Also, of course, there’s her father. How forgiving she has been of him; how unforgiving I have been. That he is alive and has abused so many of his years here is too much for me to ignore, even if he has rehabilitated himself, even if he is now clear-headed and present. I recognize that this is petty and also small-minded. Addiction is not a character flaw you hold against someone forever. And yet, I do. Fair or not, rational or not. He is here and has been given so many second chances, and my father had been given none.
“I’ll do breakfast,” I say. “It’s not a problem. Maybe he’ll finally agree to eat on my watch.” I make a face that signals, No way in hell will that happen—and it’s meant to make her laugh, but she misses it as her phone buzzes in her bag, and then she runs to the town car the studio sends each morning.
“Yes, yes, thanks, Dad. I’ll be back in a few hours. He’s here. I’m sure that would be great.”
She is sending Walter, knowing how much it will annoy me, knowing that she didn’t even ask me if I’ll mind. She’s been doing that more often now: making executive decisions, both big and small, without asking. Usually I don’t mind. Today I do.
The door shuts behind her, and the house is quiet once more—Leo is sleeping out back in the guesthouse—so I plod up the stairs to retrieve my crying son, who will fight me over his oatmeal because he can sense that I’m weak. Survival of the fittest. Human instinct.
Walter rings the doorbell right as I open my laptop.
Of course I can’t work today, can’t focus, and besides, Eric is overseeing this week’s script, which may be our last, as we await our inevitable cancellation. But I’d promised myself that I’d revisit Reagan, figure out what exactly I could tweak to lure Spencer back in to shopping it around, to reengage the studios, get me back into the good graces of the film world, not this shitty network TV world.
In the doorway, Walter shakes my hand because we’re not the type to hug.
“We’ll get him through this,” he says, as if I’ve asked or said anything contrary.
I check my watch; Tatum will still be gone for a few hours. “I just have to make a quick call,” I say before ducking into my office. There’s no phone call to make, but Walter probably knows this; it’s easier than standing around making small talk. “Thanks for coming. Leo’s sleeping for now. There’s coffee.”
“No problem, no problem. I’ll wait until he’s up, and then I’ll talk to him.” Then, “Joey?”
“Oh, out with the nanny, you just missed him.”
I slip into my office, shut the door, then lock it.
Walter has done everything a reasonable person could ask to rehabilitate himself. He’s been clean since we brought him to Commitments. Yet I lock my door anyway, a quiet Fuck you for being here when my father is not. Fuck you for being fine with mediocrity, for not wanting more. Yes, his sobriety is perhaps “more”; yes, he is trying. But I find that I am my father’s son, unwilling to make accommodations for a lifetime of mistakes, even when Walter’s mistakes weren’t my own, weren’t even Tatum’s.
There’s a knock from outside of my office, and I steel myself.
“Ben?”
I startle and race to unlock it. Leo.
“I’m up,” he says, the back of his hair matted upward, the exact way it used to when we were younger and he’d wake after falling asleep in my bed even though I’d try to kick him out. I was a teenager by then and wanted my privacy, and he, just seven or eight, tried to cling on for as long as he could.
He flops on the loveseat across from my desk. Tatum’s awards (SAG, Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice, all of them) line my top shelf, my Sundance newcomer award front and center on my desk, a reminder of the potential of what once was. Is. What still is.
“Please don’t tell Mom.” It’s more of a sob.
“She doesn’t know?”
“It would kill her. So please.”
“We won’t say a word,” Walter says from the hallway before I can even think to offer my reassurance. “The only thing you worry about now is getting better. Your sobriety comes first.”
Leo nods, meets his eyes. “Thank you.”
I want to say to Walter: Don’t speak for me, don’t go around making promises on my behalf. But Leo looks both so broken and so grateful in this moment for Walter and his comfort that instead I fold my hands in my lap, wait for Tatum to come clean this up, and I say nothing at all.
16
TATUM
OCTOBER 2006
The fact is this: nothing is done for you in this life if you don’t do it for yourself. I don’t care how many people claim they are “on your team”; the only person who can helm your team is you. We talk a lot about “teams” in our family therapy sessions, which I now do every month with my dad. It’s part of the outplacement of Commitments. “We are committed to a life of recovery,” they say in their brochures and in their e-mails and in real life. Also, when we checked my father out after his thirty days, and every single time we have revisited since. Not that my father has needed to revisit for drinking. Rather, we drive down once a month for family therapy. Well, for father-daughter therapy. Or: Dad-and-me therapy.
Piper is back in Ohio, back to her life of nursing and living in our childhood home and back to dating Scooter Smith, who, she has confided, might propose soon.
We brought my dad home after his month at Commitments, and he hasn’t left, which was not my choice, but I couldn’t just stuff him on the first plane back. The counselors told us that he needed to be away from his triggers, and that he needed a stable, supportive environment. What was I going to do? Prove that I was no better than he had been for his erratic, unreliable years and kick him out? He was trying, and so he stayed.
Ben was doing well with no signs of slowing down—there was early awards buzz on One Day in Dallas, and he was turning down offers by the bucketload. So we boxed up the Santa Monica bungalow, which was our first home together, and took out a mortgage on a house in Holmby Hills. There was a small guesthouse in the back, nothing fancy, just a one-bedroom with a kitchenette and a bathroom with cotton candy tiles that needed updating. But my dad moved in without complaint—not that he had much to complain about: the guesthouse, with its dated decor, more closely resembled our childhood home than the main house, which had soaring beamed ceilings and a kitchen larger than my entire New York apartment. It took me weeks to get used to not being able to shout to Ben and have him hear me from anywhere in the house. Daisy swung by and said, “Yup, this’ll do,” and I didn’t say a word about how Ben had covered the entire down payment because I was earning a little more than zero, but nothing substantial.
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