So now he’s not writing; he’s not doing much of anything that I’m aware of.
“Are you thinking of sending Reagan back out again?” I asked one night a few weeks ago while we were in bed, each reading our own material. Him: yet another book recounting the Reagan-Bush years; me: the Roe v. Wade script I was highlighting and annotating for prep work.
“No one wants it.” He shrugged, his eyes not leaving the page. “Spencer said that: ‘It’s dead, for fuck’s sake, Ben, it’s fucking dead.’”
“Maybe this new bio will give you fresh material, a new angle?”
He stopped then and looked at me. “It’s dead, Tatum, OK? Let it go.”
I wanted to say: I have, but what about you?
But we don’t have these discussions anymore, not when my suggestions seem like an affront to him, not when my success has outpaced his to the point where neither one of us can ignore it. I’ve never thought that Ben has begrudged my ambition, but maybe he’s begrudged how I have gotten lucky when he hasn’t, when each of us worked as hard as the other, and yet I was the one who got the accolades in the end; I was the one who has been anointed with the Oscar. I don’t say this to minimize my acclaim, but luck is some of it, to be sure, and in that respect, surprisingly, after so many years of a bad streak, mine broke the other way. Ben’s did not.
But rather than spiral into another argument, I eased out from under the duvet to check on Joey, then to e-mail my assistant about my schedule for the next day: whom I had to meet for lunch, whom I had to e-mail and in what order of importance, where I could steal time to shop online for new school clothes for Joey. I still liked to maintain some sense of normalcy, be a mom like every other mom preparing for her child to start pre-K.
And then, because we can all be our own worst enemies, I’d google my name and remind myself of all the things that people hated about me and all the rumors that were nothing more than fiction but flamed my cheeks and accelerated my pulse all the same. You’d think I’d have more armor now, less insecurity. Sometimes I do. Sometimes, though, because my vulnerability is a requirement for my craft, I’m exactly who I was at sixteen, with my drunk father and sick mother and lonely nights working the register at the pharmacy.
On the web, there were rumors of me engaged in a texting romance with Colin Farrell (whom I viscerally loathed when we worked together on Pride and Prejudice), rumors of Ben canoodling with an ex-girlfriend. I lingered on that one for more than a beat, but though Ben may have been discontent over the past year—his middling career, the catastrophe with Leo—he wasn’t disloyal. Also, it wasn’t like he had the energy or the will to canoodle anyway. I clicked the X on the tab and forgot about it: another made-up story about a life that had nothing to do with mine.
I sat in the darkness of my office, illuminated by the glow of my desktop, and told myself to go talk to him. Go tell him that I understood that Reagan was really a love letter to his dad; I understood that Reagan had been Paul’s hero. That Paul had a signed, framed letter from the president expressing admiration of a case that he had won, and that the signed, framed letter was now collecting dust in Ben’s own office. I understood that Ben couldn’t move past this script until he moved past the fact that he wasn’t going to bring the film to life and that his dad really had no ownership over him, especially a decade after he died.
But none of this felt kind to say to Ben now. Maybe before Leo I’d have spoken up, told him that he wasn’t any type of failure, not to his dad, not to me. But now I simply slipped out of bed to hide in my own office. My own secret built a wall between us, and only in my honesty—telling him that he couldn’t have known about Leo because Leo worked so hard to deceive him—would I free him. But then I also knew that my honesty would undo us; he wouldn’t forgive me just as he hadn’t forgiven himself.
Today in the car in the canyons of Arizona, Joey is still whimpering, so I pass him a coloring book and crayons, urging him to hold the crayon as I’ve taught him, as Constance has shown him. He grabs at it with his full fist and scribbles.
“The school isn’t going to be happy.” I sigh, turning back to Ben. “He’s still going to need OT.”
He snorts, shakes his head. “Our not-even-five-year-old is in therapy because he doesn’t hold his crayon properly. Welcome to LA, man.”
“Well, I mean, breaking that arm didn’t help. Set him back, those muscles all regressing.” I stare ahead at the wide expanse of rock ahead. “I’ll just tell them that. Say he was in a cast for two months.”
“Tatum,” Ben says. “Seriously, who gives a fuck?”
I glance to Joey, who is rapt in his coloring and hasn’t picked up on Ben’s use of “fuck,” which I have repeatedly implored him to tamp down on in front of the baby, as Joey is prone to repeating it at the top of his voice in the most public of places. Which lends to excellent tabloid fodder. What Sort of Mom Is Tatum Connelly? Her Son Yells “F*ck” in Gelson’s!
But Ben has said it intentionally, to pick a fight, and though I feel myself bristle at his churlishness, I don’t want to take his bait. I want to cruise around the winding corners of the Arizona landscape and remember how we tucked ourselves under the blankets in the back seat of our SUV and watched all the stars light up the blackened sky. And that he promised, one day, he’d write about it for me.
I look at Ben, and he sighs remorsefully. We’re not so disconnected, he and I. Not yet, not ever.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I know,” I say. I reach over and squeeze his shoulder, let my hand linger there, as if I can heal him with my touch. He doesn’t pull back this time, rather angles his head closer to me. I smile and breathe that in.
“That was a nice night,” he says. “When you were so stubborn that we ran out of gas.”
I laugh, and it feels good in my belly, feels like it echoes and reverberates all the way to my soul.
“Jojo,” Ben says, looking in the rearview mirror. “Let’s go find a McDonald’s. You want a Happy Meal?”
“Daddy!” he exclaims. “I always want a Happy Meal!”
“Me too,” I say to Joey. “I always want a Happy Meal too.”
I wait for Ben to reply, to join in on the momentary joy. He is lost again somewhere, gone for the moment, tucked into his head where he scurries more often now, where I have to reach further in to pull him back to me.
“Ben,” I say. “You want a Happy Meal too, right?”
“What?” His eyes find mine. “Oh, of course, buddy. Happy Meals for happy campers.”
Then he turns the radio back up, and we lose ourselves under the shadow of the red rock mountains.
29
BEN
JUNE 2002
Leo is his best self at his college graduation. Sober, shining, electric. After my dad, Leo’s had his good days, and his less good days, but he was a senior and allowed to get wasted and wake up with a wicked, gut-churning hangover, so I didn’t hover, and my mom was busy with her new charity, dedicated to raising funds for the families of 9/11 victims, so neither of us judged his bad days. Or, maybe more accurately, neither of us was present enough to judge them. You could see them in bruises under his eyes, in his half smile when recounting a memory of some stupid story or antic that he wasn’t sure he was getting quite right because he couldn’t remember it fully, or the way that he sometimes really needed a shower. But Leo was Leo, born with an impish streak, and he showed up at Sunday family dinners—a tradition Tatum had suggested in January when it was clear we all needed a bit of glue—cogent, present, hilarious. He could make my mom drop her head back and cackle, and we didn’t get that too often these days, so we let him go on being whoever he was.
Today, he is the brightest star in a sea of blue gowns washing over the Columbia campus. It’s an overcast June day, sticky with threatening clouds, which is just as well. Every crisp spring and summer day reminds me of that crisp day in September—the air smells the same, the sun shines the
same, and I’m happy for the gray skies whenever they present themselves. My leg is jittery, more out of habit than because I feel on edge. It started after that day: a tic, I guess, like my body is out of my mind’s control. Tatum rests her palm on my thigh, as if she can absorb some of its fire.
“Well, this is a lot of pomp and circumstance,” she whispers into my ear.
“To be fair, no one really knew if he was going to graduate,” I reply, and she laughs, and my mom glances over and smiles like she is glad we are laughing but not quite sure of the joke. She looks that way often these days.
“No one made this much of a fuss for me last week,” Tatum says.
“I did,” I whisper back and kiss her forehead.
She nods because she knows I did, in my own way.
Tatum had her own graduation from Tisch just eight days ago. She hadn’t wanted a to-do, didn’t invite her dad, didn’t want Piper to spend the money on a plane ticket. I wondered if it wasn’t about her mom not being there to celebrate, but she said, “I have to get used to celebrating a lot of things without her, Ben. I just want to get this over with, move to LA, start our new lives.”
She wasn’t being a martyr or anything. She was just being practical, pragmatic. An oxymoron for an actress, but that was Tatum all the same. Able to compartmentalize her grief while also recognizing how much it shaped her, shifted her insides. So Leo and I sat through the graduation ceremony and whooped when her name was called, and afterward we went to the Corner Bistro and ate hamburgers, and then we boxed up her kitchenware and a few more items from her student apartment, and Leo jetted uptown. We were dusty and achy by the time we climbed into bed, and Tatum said: “This was perfect. I just want to get busy living life.” But she was jittery in the way that my leg was, figuratively staring at the horizon, awaiting whatever comes next, tucking our respective blights behind us.
Now Leo is called onstage to collect his diploma, and my mom weeps, though she would have wept with or without my dad here, so I ease my arm around her and squeeze her shoulder.
“He would have been so proud of Leo,” she says, wiping her nose with a tissue.
“Yes,” I say, because that’s all I can manage.
Leo has a job lined up after graduation as a trader at Merrill Lynch, exactly as my dad wanted. He starts in July, so he wants to come bum around California with us before his training, though I haven’t acquiesced. It will be chaos, for one thing: the move, the unpacking, the settling down. I don’t need my tornado of a brother there stirring up the winds. He tells me he’ll be on his best behavior, but I’d cleaned up enough of Leo’s messes over the years—the pot in high school, phone calls to me at college to ask how to cajole money out of my mom or appease my dad’s temper when Leo had been busted again for drinking at some kid’s house, the summer camp he got kicked out of after my parents tired of him starting figurative and literal fires at the house in Vermont—to know that while Leo might promise the moon, he’ll often never even glance up at the sky. And my dad wouldn’t want me to let him off the hook with all his shit, wouldn’t want him to come out to LA and sleep with beautiful women and drink too many vodka shots and act like he could be careless and not face consequences. I was never careless, because it was clear to me that carelessness was unacceptable. Leo nearly always was because he didn’t care how angry it made my dad.
Also, I’ll be busy, too busy, to entertain him. Actually to mind him, since Leo always manages to plant his nose in trouble. He’s grown now, and it’s not my job to keep him out of it, but I also don’t need him sleeping on my couch while stirring it up either. Romanticah propelled me into studio meetings, executive handshakes. I’ve already finished the working draft of my next script, All the Men, and it’s been green-lit in a hurry to capitalize on the hottest, latest thing bursting on the Hollywood scene. We shoot in September, which means there is a frantic rush for rewrites, tweaks, notes from the studio that aren’t smart or particularly savvy but which I have learned to say yes to because arguing only sucks up time and energy that I don’t have, between Tatum and Leo and my dad.
It’s exhilarating, this validation. It’s moving so furiously that I can barely process it. And all the trappings of Hollywood’s approval are not unwelcome. My father had long told me that being the best was the only goal to reach for, and now that I’m here, anointed and on top, I can understand exactly what he meant, why he pushed me. The success feels addictive, like a high of a drug I’ve never taken, so I work harder, longer, more, chasing it even as it chases me.
Also, we are getting married. There is a wedding to plan.
I explain all of this to Tatum, that Leo in California will be one more thing I’ll have to monitor, and I simply can’t. My insides are dry and barren and a bit of a wasteland.
“I don’t mind,” she says. “He can keep me company.”
“I don’t think you get it—Leo is a handful.”
“He’s not a toddler,” she laughs.
“Worse. He’s an adult with toddler instincts.”
“Like he’s not potty-trained?”
“Like, hide the matches because he might burn the house down,” I say. “Besides, you’ll be busy on your own, setting the town on fire.”
“True,” she says. “True. I guess we’ll just have to wear fire-retardant clothes at all times.”
Today Leo wants to walk home from Columbia, though it’s at least two and a half miles to my mom’s, and the clouds are drizzling thick, pregnant drops. A plane roars over us, too close, and I jolt, and he does too, but then it coasts past, and we shake our heads and keep going.
“You do that too,” he says. “I don’t know how to get used to it.”
“I think with time.”
“I hate this city,” he says.
“Leo . . .” We’ve had this discussion a million times. He has to work, he has a job, he needs to show up and be accountable. College is over; it’s time to embrace real life.
“I know,” he says, batting a hand. “Don’t start in with me. I know, OK? I can’t quit on Merrill before I’ve even started. I get it. I’m a big kid now, time to cut the purse chains.”
We amble in silence for a while after that, then stop in a bar, Westside Tavern, on Amsterdam Avenue.
Leo primarily wants to get drunk, and that sounds like as good a plan as any.
The place is mostly empty. A European soccer game is muted on the TV above the bar, and we pull up stools, then I order two beers, then Leo says: “Also, four shots of tequila.”
“Leo, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“And your point is?”
I don’t really have a point, so I do both shots and chase it with the beer.
“Maybe I’ll just stay in California,” he says, as he motions to the bartender for two more. I wave to the bartender to stop, to please cut me off, but he shrugs and slides the shot glasses our way. “I can still be a grown-up in California.” But he wants to surf in the mornings and sleep on our couch in the afternoons. He explains this when he’s actually being honest, which we are about two shots away from.
“Don’t you have a graduation party later?” I shift the subject.
“Yeah, and?”
“You’re going to show up wasted?”
“Yeah, and?” He laughs. “God, when did you become Dad?”
He stops laughing abruptly, and both of us reach for the shots, since the alternative is weeping or picking a fight or pounding our fists into the wall, which feels like it would help with the rage, but mostly also seems like it would just fill one form of pain with another. Drinking is the right solution.
“You can’t skip out on your job, Leo,” I say, as the tequila burns the back of my throat, the pulp of the lime fleshy on my tongue.
“Why not? Who gives a fuck?”
“I guess I do?” I say it as a question because it is, and also because I’m drunk, but mostly because I’ve never had to care one way or the other about my brother’s irresponsibility. But n
ow, with my dad gone, it occurs to me that I do.
“Ugh,” he says. “So you’re the new Leo police.”
“Come on, Dad never busted your ass the way he busted mine.”
He snorts. “You were the prodigal son, give me a break. Bust your ass! Like he ever did that a day in your life.”
I pick up the rind of the lime and chew on it. I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, and I’m newly aware that I’m as hungry as I am inebriated.
“It’s funny,” I say. “I think we both thought that. I always thought the same about you. That he was easier on you because you didn’t give a shit.”
Leo gulps in too much air.
“I fucking miss him.” He drops his forehead to the bar, and his shoulders start shaking, and it takes my woozy mind a moment to catch up and realize that he is crying. No no, let’s go punch a wall. Let’s not feel this pain as we need to feel it. It’s too acute. It will gut us, spill too much blood for us to recover. My dried-up insides can’t bleed another ounce.
I put a hand on his back until his jagged breathing becomes more steady, and then he wipes his nose on the sleeve of his gown, which is exactly what he’d do when he was little and my parents would make me babysit for him, and we’d watch TV while he wiped boogers on himself. Not so much has changed in the span of a decade or so, I realize. Leo still needs someone to look out for him: rub his back, wipe his nose.
I ask for the check and resolve right then that it will be me.
30
TATUM
JULY 2013
From: Ben Livingston
To: Amanda Paulson
Re: things
Date: April 10, 2013
A—listen, god, this is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever written. But, well, you know that I’ve been struggling lately, I just, ok, here goes: I think we should probably take a break. I’m typing that and it doesn’t seem right or maybe none of this seems real. I don’t know. I’m so fucked up now, and I want you. You know how much I want you. But there are all these stories in the press now, and if Tatum finds out . . .
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