I slam the car door and jog to the spot Ben just vacated, only a block or two away from our first place together, where we lived when he was something brilliant with Romanticah, and I was something less so. I squint against the glare that permeates through the heavy veil of clouds, looking for him. No, it wasn’t that I was less than he, it was just that this town told me as much, valued me as lesser. Now I’m the most valuable player. Like anything as ephemeral as fame should define you. Like it says anything real about who you are, whom you love, what you have to offer.
I thought about this more these days, called Piper—who had a new baby at home—sometimes drove down to Commitments with my dad for refresher therapy sessions, sometimes booked a therapy session just for me. But I thought about all the things we choose to let into our lives and how much of a choice that really is, how much ownership we need to take, how much responsibility. Ben made his choice with Amanda; I made mine with my loyalty to Leo, with my unwillingness to assume Ben could forgive him, like he had stubbornly refused to forgive my dad.
I think we’d both choose differently if we could do it all over, and I tell my therapist this, I talk about my regret, I talk about my responsibility. That it was easier to dive into my work than come home and confront him about his affair; that it was easier to lose myself in a role than ask Ben why he lost himself with Amanda. That over the years, life got so very, very difficult, with my mom and his dad and my dad and Leo, and we lost so much, and that when we could have chosen to duck down in a foxhole together, we chose otherwise. It didn’t happen with one fell swoop, and it was so gradual that neither of us realized it had happened until we found ourselves here, dividing a lifetime. Maybe it would be easier to pinpoint a moment and say: If only we could go back there and choose differently. But it’s like a plane crash: a series of critical but small things all went wrong, and suddenly you’re in a million pieces on the ground.
I have never been one not to do the work, not to roll up my sleeves, but I suppose now I can see that the one place that it mattered most—with Ben—we simply didn’t.
I chose this.
I just didn’t realize I was choosing it at the time.
I love Ben in ways that are still unexpected, still surprising. It wasn’t what I felt on New Year’s Eve, and it wasn’t what I felt when we fell asleep under the vast Arizona sky in the back of our Jeep because I’d been stubborn and run out of gas, and he’d forgiven me. It’s hard-earned, it’s complicated, it’s also probably indelible.
Though I am fraught with nerves and also the terror of heartbreak, I have told myself that I would show up today and tell him. Lay myself bare; let it all ride on this.
I still love you. I am showing up for you. Please, I don’t want to sign the divorce papers. Please, can we try again?
I head halfway down the stairway, scanning the dull sands of the beach until I see him. He is staring out at the horizon, just as I’m staring at him. Lost. I found him here, and yet we’re just as lost as ever. He removes something from his pocket—cigarettes—and taps the pack against the butt of his hand, then pulls one to his mouth.
Ben’s smoking? When did Ben start smoking? I knew he dabbled after Leo died, but as a habit, no, I had no idea.
I narrow my eyes into slits. How have we gotten so far apart that I don’t know that my husband has taken up smoking?
I know how, of course, but that doesn’t mean I want to remember.
“Write something for me,” I used to say, like it was all I ever wanted in the world.
He never did.
He checks his phone with his free hand, then shoves the phone back in his pocket. Is he hoping it’s me? I reach for my own phone and consider, fleetingly, typing . . . I don’t know what.
I put my phone back into my own pocket. I don’t want to text him, I don’t want to communicate in parsed words like that anymore. I want to go to him, down the rest of the steps, tell him that I’m here, that we should start over. But I find that I can’t move. Not yet. What if he doesn’t want me? What if he says no? What if he doesn’t see in me what I see in him now?
A blond surfer washes up next to him, then tucks her board beneath her arm and turns left down the beach toward the empty lifeguard station. It’s dangerous out there in the surf with no one watching. Doesn’t she know this? I want to run down there and tell her to be careful, to protect herself. I wouldn’t, not just because it would seem paranoid, pushy. But because I’ve stopped enjoying the casual company of strangers, of small talk or chitchat with the Gelson’s cashier, because everyone watches me now, and nothing can truly ever be casual. It’s all documented and photographed, and even if someone isn’t holding his phone aloft with the camera app open, someone is tweeting about it.
All a choice, my therapist reminds me. Move to Montana, she’ll say. You could. I could, but I choose not to. Instead, I’ve constructed this protective bubble around me and allowed that to convince me that I am safe.
Ben turns, heads back toward me, and I duck, like this stair railing can conceal me. I right myself. No. I’m here, I’m here because I wanted him to see me, to know that I showed up to honor him and Leo and us. I inhale, exhale, steady myself and start down the remaining steps, still watching him, still wondering if maybe he’ll see me first.
He slides on his flip-flops, then freezes, peering at a runner pointed toward him.
I recognize the swoosh of her red hair—I’d spent enough time googling her—even from here.
She stops right in front of him, the surprise on his face morphing to happiness.
Amanda.
Heat rushes to my cheeks at the embarrassment of witnessing this. He’d told me it was over between them; I’d chosen to believe him.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
I spin and race up the steps, race back to the Escalade, fat tears startling me in the reflection in the window before I pull the door open and slink inside. I thought I’d prepared myself for heartbreak. Yet even after everything, I hadn’t realized that Ben and I would really split in two.
37
BEN
NOVEMBER
Amanda stretches out in her sleep, rustling the duvet, shaking the mattress. I’d forgotten how she did this, even back in New York all those years ago—a lifetime, really—when we’d mostly stay at her place—a one-bedroom off Astor Place, because I was living with my parents. How she’d hog the bed as if she were the only one who should be in it. I watch her sleeping, then her toes scrape against my shin, and she sighs—eyes still shut, red hair spilling over my pillow—and drifts back to wherever her dreams have taken her.
I ease out of bed and then peel off my shirt, then boxers, and step into the shower, trying to wash off the saltwater and the sand. Also to rinse off a film of something else: that I had been waiting for Tatum, yet I left with Amanda, as if they were interchangeable.
We’d barely made it back to my apartment. She’d jogged to the beach, so we’d taken my car, driven back to my place in some sort of frenzy, like dogs in heat. She’d told me that she didn’t really expect to see me there, mourning Leo, but then when she did, she couldn’t not stop, she couldn’t not say something, because seeing me was the entire point of coming.
“Like, I’d gone that far,” she laughed, then moved her hand across the headrest of the seat and rubbed my neck. “I guess I figured what the hell, what did I have to lose? You’d already ended it with me two and a half years before. So, like, why not?”
She knew about my marriage, of course. Most of the planet did. I hadn’t called her when Tatum and I split, hadn’t even thought of her much other than in the context of her being the last woman I fucked other than my wife, before I learned how to navigate the one-night stands that weren’t too frequent anyway.
But she had shown up, and Tatum hadn’t, and I figured Maybe that means something, maybe I misread what Tatum had wanted recently—to try to sort things out, to quit with the lawyers, and maybe I underestimated Amanda, so we drove home like
a tornado was chasing us, abandoned our clothes by the door, and fell into bed like star-crossed lovers in a movie where they’d been kept apart too long, like they were foiled by every obstacle in their past and could finally now, desperately, be together.
The spray of the hot water hits my face. I know it is nothing like this; I know ours is not the stuff that inspires fairy tales. Fairy tales do not start and end with your ex-mistress showing up and rescuing you when you were waiting for a sign from your wife, whom you miss desperately and whose trust you have detonated perhaps beyond repair. I wonder what Leo would say about all of this. Probably that I am being an idiot—I can hear him say this: Dude, you are being such a fucking moron. Tater-tot is the best, why aren’t you just telling her?
He would have been thirty-six today. His face, beautiful and unlined, plays over and over again in my memory. Who would he be now? Would he be happy?
I lean over, try to touch my toes, stretch out my hamstrings and back. It’s harder than it once was, though I am also taking better care of myself, now that I have free time to go running, hit the gym, lay off the scotch that had helped nurse my wounds for the first year or so. I consider that happiness is a moving target: how can I possibly know if Leo would be happy when I don’t even know how to define this for myself? With Amanda. With Tate.
I’d held it against her—that she knew about his relapse and kept it from me—for a long time, the better part of that first year when I had this new apartment, and I fell asleep with my empty tumbler in my hand. I wore it plainly on my sleeve, like it was a bruise that shouldn’t heal, that couldn’t heal, and that she’d pelted me and caused permanent damage. I pulled out old photos of Leo, reread e-mails he’d once sent. It was as if this revelation of his relapse reopened the grieving process for me, as if I could trip down endless what-ifs that I had mostly put to bed after we buried him. I replayed all the what-ifs now: how I’d have sent him back to rehab, how I’d have ensured that he stayed the course.
I flew back to New York for a weekend when Tatum had Joey, stayed with my mom and Ron, found myself sleeping in Leo’s bed, milling about his room, which was unchanged from when he lived there, from when he was in high school and filled with possibility.
It was a perfect spring weekend in the city. The trees were blossoming, the air had just rounded the corner from the winter chill, the sun was bright and optimistic. My mom and I walked the loop in Central Park, which we hadn’t done since I was probably eleven, when I needed to burn off energy and Leo was too old for a stroller but would fall asleep in it all the same as we walked.
“You have to forgive yourself for this, Ben,” my mom said. “You have to let it go.”
I didn’t realize she knew.
She read the surprise on my face.
“I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I stuck my head in the sand and didn’t know about what he was doing.”
“I . . . he’d wanted to protect you from it; hadn’t wanted you to know.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep it a secret.”
“Yes, you did,” she corrected me. “And that’s OK too.”
I blinked too quickly, tears mounting, and it occurred to me that what I’d done to my mom wasn’t so different from what Tatum had done to me. Different motivations, perhaps, but tacit secret keeping all the same.
“I’m his mother, Ben,” she said. She still did that: spoke about him in present tense, like he was still among us, which in some ways he still was. “And I tried to help in the best way I could.”
We stopped at a crosswalk as the park traffic whizzed by. Fallen petals from the newly sprung trees littered the pavement and swirled in the air around us.
“I didn’t know,” I said. I reached out and tried to grab a white petal that was circling in front of me, held aloft by the wind. “I guess I didn’t have any idea.”
“About me? Or about Leo?” The light clicked, and we moved ahead.
“About both,” I said. Though what I really think I meant, when I thought about it later, lying in his old bed, my elbows splayed behind my head, my eyes staring at the trophies he’d accrued at Dalton, the Bruce Springsteen posters he’d pinned up, is that I really didn’t have any idea about me. About what I was made of, about who I’d become. About how I’d stopped aspiring for greatness because the less risky, less ambitious middle ground was all that I’d been offered lately, about how I’d lost sight of Tatum because it was easier to focus on all that I’d thought she’d taken from me—Leo, time, trust—than what she’d given back, which was actually just about everything. I’d even started to blame her for taking Amanda from me—all those years back on New Year’s Eve, when, in a different version of my life, Amanda called, and I wouldn’t have been with Tatum, and Amanda and I would have found our way back to each other. Which was dumb because I didn’t love Amanda like I loved Tatum; that deep, resonant love that isn’t exactly passion anymore but is so much a part of you that you don’t know where it ends and begins, where to turn it off, even if you wanted to.
My mom knocked on Leo’s door.
“One last thing I should have said earlier.” She pressed her lips together and seemed to consider what came next. I heaved myself to my elbows and waited. Finally, she offered: “Your dad pushed you toward success. Relentlessly at times, I know.”
I waited.
“But what he didn’t tell you—though I think he tried to show you, and I can see now may have failed at, is that there is more than one way to define success.” She sighed. “He brought me flowers every Friday, Ben. Do you remember that?”
“I do.”
“He was a real pain in the ass,” she said. “But he loved me unequivocally. And if he were here, he would say that loving someone wholly is success too. Frankly, it’s probably the one that matters most.”
I didn’t know what to say, so she nodded and retreated from Leo’s old room, closing the door so quietly, I never heard the latch click.
I flew back to LA and started writing again. For Tatum. Also for me. It came to me suddenly, like a tsunami of awakening that almost makes it hard to breathe. I’d spent years avoiding it because I couldn’t see any of it clearly; I couldn’t see her clearly, and I couldn’t see myself either. That’s the funny thing about memory, hindsight, nostalgia, and self-perception: sometimes, many times, it gets in the way of knowing how to tell the truth.
I replayed all our years together. I wrote them down. I started in the present, how far we’d gotten from each other, and tore through the years and tore through our past. I tried to be fair, and I tried to be honest, and I tried to honor the love and the mistakes and the mess and the beauty that we’d created. I wrote about the road trip through Arizona, not the one with Joey when we’d already started to splinter, but the one with just the two of us, which I thought was a catastrophe but turned out to be perfect. I wrote about her Oscar, and I wrote about my jealousy, and I wrote about the first time I viewed her through my directorial lens in Romanticah and knew she was a star outside my galaxy. I wrote about her dad, and I wrote about mine too. I wrote about how you build a life together and how you let that life together crumble into dust.
I called it Between Me and You, because that was all that used to matter once, what was between us. And because maybe it should be Between You and Me, but we hadn’t quite added up to perfect, so being a little off made me smile every time I read the title page. And I promised myself—because I thought I could still read her, but I was no longer sure, not since she started concealing parts of herself in ways that she hadn’t in years—that if she showed up today at the beach, on Leo’s birthday, I would finally tell her what I’d written, tell her that it wasn’t too late, tell her that the weight of regret I bore on my shoulders was sinking me, but that I was ready to heave it into that gray ocean where I’d rebaptized myself this morning and many mornings prior.
But Tatum hadn’t shown. It turned out that I read her wrong. I couldn’t see her like I thought I could, like I used to.
/> Instead, it was Amanda.
I spin the handle of the shower, turning the temperature up until it is nearly scalding. I want to feel it, I need to feel it. It’s been so long since I’ve felt much of anything. Now it’s good to feel the burn.
38
TATUM
DECEMBER
Work keeps me busy, of course. Work, work, work, work, work. That’s what I tell myself, what I’ve done since I was barely old enough to be employed. I have been working for almost thirty years, and I will work through this too. Work can’t be everything, though. Luann thinks it’s important that I start dating again or at least that I give the appearance that I’ve started dating again, even though the divorce isn’t final, even though neither of us has been able to sign the papers.
“He’s dating again,” she said a couple of months ago, even before I saw him on the beach with Amanda. “A friend saw him leave a bar the other night with someone who was way too young for him.”
“It’s sex,” I said. “It’s fine.” Now, I wonder when he had time for casual sex if he is back with Amanda. If their relationship is something casual, or if theirs is now something that has morphed into more. I can’t bring myself to ask; I can’t even bring myself to say her name to him.
“Well, you need to be having some sex too,” she replied. “Or at least make people think that you are. If he gets the upper hand here with the media, poof, there goes your sex appeal.”
“He’s not trying to get the upper hand, Luann. He’s a head writer on Code Emergency. I really don’t think he gives two shits about what Us Weekly is reporting about him.”
“Well I give two shits,” she said, ending the discussion. “That’s why you hired me.”
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