I sip a lukewarm beer abandoned on the kitchen counter. Leo must have opened it as part of his pre-party celebration.
Three minutes, I tell myself. Then you hang up and are gone.
Leo wanders in, his coat zippered, his gloves already on, and swipes the beer from my hands and chugs it. Then notices I’m on the phone and shoots me a quizzical look.
A-man-da, I mouth.
He rolls his eyes and slits his throat with his gloved finger.
I flip him off, then shoo him out of the room.
He turns and whispers: “Hurry up, dude, we gotta stop and get Caroline.”
He says this as if I have any idea who Caroline is, one of the ever-revolving lithe young women from high school or now, his dorm or fraternity house up at Columbia.
“I just . . .” Amanda starts on the other end of the line, three thousand miles away; then she falls silent. We haven’t spoken since she left for California in June. Technically, we broke up—I broke up with her—in February, but I did it solely to get out in front of it: the fact that she was leaving, the fact that she chose a residency over me. It didn’t feel real back then—we still occasionally slept together, still sometimes found ourselves crying to each other in the dark hours of the night when one of us couldn’t sleep, and the permanence of her move or my decision (or hers) would set in.
“I just wanted to call to wish you a Happy New Year,” she says finally.
“Thanks. You too.”
Leo circles back and whispers, “Hang up, dude. This isn’t just some casual call, like girls don’t call on New Year’s Eve to say ‘hey.’”
I press my finger into my other ear to ignore him, listen to Amanda’s quiet crying through the line. I think she’s crying, anyway, but I don’t want to ask because now I have two minutes before I’m pulled toward someone new, toward Tatum, and I’m not sure I want to get sidetracked.
But we’d dated for three years, a lifetime in your early twenties. We’d made plans for this millennium; we were supposed to be in Cancún right now, not on separate coasts making lonely phone calls that wouldn’t change anything. I was going to be the next Scorsese: write from New York, tell New York stories, build a family here, invite Leo over on the weekends to play the part of overly indulgent uncle to our 2.5 children. She was going to work at NYU or Mount Sinai, eventually shifting to private pediatrics so she’d have more time for all things that mattered.
But then she applied exclusively to schools out west and it became clear, then clearer, that maybe the story I’d spun about the two of us wasn’t much more than something akin to the scripts that I’d dreamed up too.
She said she just needed some time to live on her own.
I broke up with her and gave her that.
Though it didn’t make it easier, of course. Didn’t mean that you stop loving someone just because you’ve split and said good-bye. She left in June, and I refocused on my work: drafting, then redrafting Romanticah, writing it for her, no, writing it about her. Those were two different things. About all the ways that love goes wrong, then all the ways that it corrects itself. When I really thought about it, maybe I was writing it about me. About how love disappoints you but also finds its way back to you.
“I keep thinking about Cancún,” Amanda says, gathering her breath and composure. “That would have been fun.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s freezing here.”
One minute on the clock. Then I have to get to Tatum.
“You going out? Big plans? A wild party?” She laughs, though it rings hollow.
“Times Square.”
“Shut up.” She laughs for real now.
“I swear. Don’t ask.”
“You’d never be caught dead in Times Square. You always wanted to stay in, fall asleep on the couch.”
“I guess things change.” You and me. Times Square. Cancún. Everything.
“Wow,” she says. “It must be for something special.”
I want to correct her—someone special who might want to kiss me and who announces such things like she’s surprising herself for doing so, which surprises me—and I’m learning I like that in a partner. But I don’t correct her, don’t say anything because it’s Amanda, and my stomach is churning and my brain is jumbled and my adrenaline is sending me uncertain signs.
“I miss you,” she says. “I guess that’s what I was really calling to say.”
I chew on my lip. I miss her too, but now there is Tatum. And if Amanda had called a few weeks ago, before Tatum starred in Romanticah and before I stopped by the bar to thank her, and before . . . whatever else, I don’t know. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe I’d be willing to forgive her or move to San Francisco or just have flown out for the holidays and slept with her again just because. But she didn’t call a few weeks ago, and now Tatum is waiting for me to take her to Times Square and kiss her.
“I should go,” I say.
“OK.”
“Happy New Year, Amanda.”
She’s silent, and so am I. It’s been six months, and my foot is out the door to Tatum. But that doesn’t change the swell of sickly nostalgia for what you once had, how easy it is to revisit those softer spots in your heart for someone who once occupied it.
“I wish we were in Cancún, Ben,” she says after my final minute has expired.
“But we’re not,” I say.
“That doesn’t make me not wish it anyway.”
“I know.”
Leo reappears in the kitchen and signals for me to hang the fuck up.
“I guess our timing was wrong,” she says.
“Something like that,” I reply, just before I click off for real.
34
TATUM
DECEMBER 2015
How do you divide a lifetime?
Where do you begin? With the items that don’t matter to each of you or the ones that matter most? If we can agree on the tangential things—the lamps in the bedroom, the treadmill in the gym, will we agree on the bigger stuff—the painting we bought from that artist in Austin on the road trip, the necklace you got me after Pride and Prejudice, the watch I bought you for your fortieth birthday, Joey’s schedule, our sanity?
The moving trucks came on a dreary day in February. I was scheduled to be in the edit bay that day but canceled at the last minute. For Joey’s sake, though he was at school, and for the sake of not making us hate each other more than we already did, I stayed home, then shuffled around the house, trying to remain out of the way of the movers (and Ben), but there all the same.
It felt like I had to show up for that, for Ben, for us.
He was moving to an apartment only two miles away, but it might as well have been across the ocean.
When the truck pulled away, Ben stood in the doorway, his hands tucked into his pockets, the lines on his face pointing downward. The rain fell behind him, clattering off the roof of his Prius. He started to say something but then stopped, so I started to say something and also stopped.
Neither of us met the other’s eyes, and he stared at the doormat, and then, wordlessly, spun around and left. I watched him go, and once he had, I crawled into bed with Monster and wept like I hadn’t since my mom died. It was bad enough we were broken; it was even worse that we couldn’t look at each other, could no longer see anything about the other that we understood or thought was worth preserving.
Now, ten months later, Susan McMahon, my lawyer, insists that I be unemotional. Or, if I can’t, to let her handle the details. But how can a divorce be anything other than emotional? I ask her that, clutching the Perrier her assistant has brought, and she shakes her head and says: “Actors are particularly terrible at divorce. There’s an irony there.”
“What’s the irony?” I ask.
“That all the reasons your marriage was great are also all the reasons it goes to shit.” She says this with a little shrug, like it’s just business, which to her it is—she handles dozens of these high-profile catastrophes a year. The Ho
llywood Reporter just ran a piece on her: she owns a home in Cabo, an apartment in St. Moritz. It’s good to be Susan McMahon. It’s less good to be sitting across the desk from her.
“Ben and I were different.”
She raises her eyebrows as if to say: That’s what everyone thinks; that’s the lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Piper, Scooter, and Emily, their daughter, fly out to stay with me for the holiday. Helen, Ben’s mom, and Ron are also in town to see Ben and Joey. Because Ben and I are trying to be civil, even kind, I invite them over to the house for Christmas dinner. Joey had been with Ben the few days prior; then Constance retrieved him from Ben’s apartment and returned him to me for Christmas Eve before she and her kids left for the week to visit her own extended family, a three-hour drive north.
U don’t have to send nanny. I’ll drop him, he’d texted me.
Please don’t. I’d typed it quickly and realized, only after I hit Send, that he’d misinterpret my intention. It wasn’t that I couldn’t bear to see him. It was just easier this way. With the paparazzi’s long lenses hovering in trees to spy over our wall, with the mixed messages it sent my emotional system when he loitered in the foyer, attempting small talk.
OK, he replied.
My dad, Scooter, and Joey watch football in the screening room upstairs, which I almost never use, and Piper sits on the living room floor with Emily, reminding her to be gentle with Monster, who is old now and worries me constantly: how long he has left, how I’ll ever make the decision to say good-bye. The good-bye with Ben took all the stoicism out of me; I already know that I won’t have it in me to sit with Monster, rubbing his ears, while he is lulled into a permanent sleep. Maybe I will ask Ben to come with me, but that is part of my old life, when I felt like I could lean into him, and I try not to remember much of that old life anymore. I’m too busy mourning it to allow much of it back in.
I find that I have forgiven him for Amanda, which surprises me. When he insisted, back when I was electrified with the discovery, that she’d texted him but he hadn’t reciprocated, I’d spurned his apologies. But over time I replay his words, and I believe them, and they’ve appeased me. But he was equally angry with me: for not having faith in him to do right by Leo, for thinking that I knew better because of my dad and all that we’d been through. I suppose that he has forgiven me my own mistakes now too—I see it in the way he sometimes starts to make overtures but then falters—and since neither one of us has built a bridge back to the other, I meet with Susan McMahon, I contemplate how you divide a lifetime, I worry about taking Monster to the vet on my own. Someone from my team would come, surely, but those are not the people I want to call family, even if I’m forced to by default now.
The doorbell rings today, and I jump, worried that it is Ben, worried that though I invited him, I’m unprepared as always to face him with our newly redrawn lines. But it’s only Daisy, with a poinsettia in one arm, a Bundt cake in another.
“I told you not to bring anything,” I say, kissing her hello. I’ve seen more of her since Ben and I split. She, Mariana, my old friend from P. F. Chang’s, and I will elude the photographers and, at sunset, sneak into a quiet restaurant with a view of the horizon; or she and I will power walk into the hills of Malibu or Bel Air or wherever we can go unrecognized. We’ll pretend that things were like they used to be back when we did these things all the time because we didn’t have other obligations, because we didn’t have broken hearts. (Mariana had eloped in Vegas last year, and the marriage spiraled south six months afterward.)
“I never show up for a party empty-handed.” She glances up the staircase. “Is Ben here yet?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Breathe,” she says, her hand lingering on my shoulder. I nod, blinking back a surprising burst of tears.
The caterer I’ve hired is in the kitchen, so Piper delivers Emily to my dad in the screening room, and she, Daisy, and I pour ourselves too-full glasses of mulled (and spiked) cider and wind our way to the patio. It’s Christmas, but in Los Angeles it’s seventy-three and clear, like any other day, like every other day. I’ve had the gardeners braid white lights around the trees in the back and the frame of the entire house, and as the sun sinks lower, they begin to glow like a parade of fireflies throughout the yard.
“It’s like it’s not real here,” Piper says. “This is so far removed from any aspect of real life.”
Daisy shrugs. “That’s the irony of this town: you come for the glitter, you really get the gritty underbelly.”
“It doesn’t look like there’s much grit around here,” Piper laughs, waving an arm toward our massive backyard, the tennis court, the heated pool, the guesthouse.
“You don’t see the sacrifice,” Daisy says. “You don’t see that we open up our guts to get where we are. The lecherous directors, the constant rejection—”
“I’m sorry,” I say to Piper, interrupting her because I’m suddenly embarrassed for all this excess and for Daisy making it appear as if this is a hardship.
“Don’t apologize,” Piper says. “I love it here, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it feels like something from a movie set, that’s all. But if you asked me to move in, I wouldn’t say no.” She leans over and squeezes my knee. “You’ve just come a long way from Canton, Tate.”
“I guess I always wanted to get as far away as I could.”
She makes a face like I’ve hurt her.
“Not from you, Pipes, from there.”
“If you can dream it, you can be it,” she says in a faraway voice that reminds me of home. She laughs, shakes her head. “Mom.”
I gaze up to the white lights and wonder if maybe I hadn’t been clear on what I dreamed.
Ben lets himself in and finds us on the patio. It was part of our mediation, the custody: he can have a key, though he can’t come and go as he pleases as if he still lives here. But it’s a sign of good faith, and it’s intended to be a symbolic gesture so Joey doesn’t feel like his parents are at war.
“Hey,” he says, and we all tilt our heads toward him as if he is a familiar stranger. “I’m . . . just here. Just . . . letting you know.”
“Joey’s with my dad in the screening room.”
He nods. “My mom went to find them.”
He plunges his hands into his pockets, as Piper stands too quickly and kisses his cheek hello, reaches for an awkward hug. She’s forgiven Ben for Amanda too, and now she’s encouraged me to take a breath, to slow down the divorce papers, but Piper relies on Scooter in ways that I never did with Ben, and I tell myself that this makes her more vulnerable, more romantic in her worldview. Piper excuses herself to the kitchen, and Daisy scampers out behind her.
“You OK?” Ben asks when we’re alone.
“I’m worried about Monster,” I say. “His back legs aren’t doing well; he can’t do the stairs . . .” I don’t tell him about how he pees on the rug involuntarily; how I sometimes have to bring his food to him because he’s too listless to rise.
“Have you spoken with the vet?”
“Of course I’ve spoken with the vet,” I say, then chide myself. I’m not trying to be shrill, it’s just the easiest way, the default between us now. “Yes,” I say more gently. “I mean, he’s fine for now, but . . .”
“Listen.” Ben steps closer. “I’ll come with you, we’ll do it together.”
“It’s OK,” I say. “I mean, I’m fine.”
“Tate, he’s ours.”
I want to say, I’ve spent so much time dividing our life together that I don’t know what that means anymore.
Instead, I head toward the kitchen. I head toward safety.
35
BEN
OCTOBER 1999
Daisy put me up to it. I’d run into her at Ray’s Pizza earlier in the night, and she told me she was working a shift that night at a bar off Fourth—Dive Inn—and told me to swing by for a beer. Amanda was at the hospital until eleven o’clock, so I figured what the hel
l. I buzzed Amanda, who said she’d stop over when she got off, then we could go crash at her place, which wasn’t too far, just a couple blocks over on Astor. Easier than me shooting uptown to my parents’ on the subway, which was unreliable at night, and besides, it was my parents’. Not exactly living the dream. But that had been part of the deal with my dad: he’d wanted me to be a banker or a lawyer or head to business school after Williams. Like the writing was on the wall with my liberal arts education, my major in English: that I wasn’t going to amount to much, at least by my father’s definition. My mom convinced him: pay for grad school, at least most of it, but don’t subsidize my lifestyle. I took out a small loan and landed at my parents’ doorstep, the ink on my diploma barely dry.
Leo still lived at home back then too, so it was like old times, only now he reeked of weed and had beer on his breath, but my mom pretended not to notice because he got by at Dalton and played on the football team, and also, he was the baby, and we loved him for it. That’s just Leo, we’d grown used to saying with a shrug. My dad indulged him because Leo did well enough to likely matriculate to Columbia, where my dad was occasionally a guest lecturer and had connections, and because Leo had a slight inkling of maybe becoming the banker my father had hoped I’d become, or maybe a lawyer at my dad’s firm.
“God help us if Leo’s ever the one to have to bail someone out,” I said to my mom one night last year, after Leo had swung down from campus to have her do his laundry.
“Benjamin, stop it,” she’d replied, folding his T-shirts. “Your brother has so much untapped potential . . .” She shook her head, pressed her hands on the cotton to smooth out the wrinkles. “He can do anything one day.” Then she added: “You too, Benny. You too.”
Daisy’s shift is ending, and my beer is getting warm, and Amanda hasn’t shown. There’s a pay phone in the back of the bar, and I debate trying the hospital but I know what she’ll say: Something came up. They needed me. I couldn’t help it. I’ll say, OK, I get it. I try not to take it personally, like my mom’s backhanded compliments.
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