“OK,” I breathe. “OK.”
It turns out I don’t have to call Ben, or Damon, or anyone who can penetrate my bubble. The vet will send a van. I kiss Monster’s snout and tell myself that I won’t fall apart when I say good-bye to him alone.
The vet assures me that I have time. If I’d like, he says, I can take Monster home, make him comfortable with pain meds, but he has a tumor that is untreatable, and it will one day, literally, explode his heart. It’s cancer. Fast-moving and vicious. But he can live for a few months until it ultimately eats him from the inside out. They’ve sedated him for now so they could do all the proper scans, take a closer view of the tumor on his heart.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Connelly, this is difficult news,” Dr. Britton says, resting his hand on my shoulder. I jump, and he pulls back. “I apologize, I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”
“No, I just . . .” What can I say? That other than my son or when faking love with costars, no one touches me anymore, Damon’s two kisses notwithstanding? I miss those lazy days in bed with Ben from so many moons ago; the way he held me even in his sleep, the way he’d massage my ankles after the long shifts at P. F. Chang’s. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just falling apart a bit.”
“Everyone does,” the kind man says. “This is the impossible part of loving a dog.”
“How do I bring him home, knowing that his heart will explode?” My voice breaks, and the tears come quickly.
“Can you call someone? That will help. This decision doesn’t have to be on you.”
I shake my head no.
“Are you sure? Going through this alone can be very tough.”
I wonder if he’s read about me: surely, he knows I have a (semi-ex-) husband, a son, an entourage. There is no anonymity for me any longer, even in my dying dog’s vet’s office. He doesn’t mean to pry, and he doesn’t even mean to allude to all the details he knows about me without actually knowing anything. That’s just how it is now. When Damon takes me to a jazz club for our second date and heads turn, when I show up for Joey’s birthday celebration at school and eyes widen, when I bring my cancer-laden dog to the hospital.
“He was the best dog I ever could have asked for,” I say.
“If we could find a way to make them live forever, we would,” he concurs. “Let me give you a minute. I’ll check back and you let me know what you decide.”
He closes the door behind him, and I’m alone again.
My shaking hands find my phone in my purse. I don’t want to call Ben, I don’t want to call Ben, I don’t want to call Ben. He’s moved on, and I need to get that, that calling him is needy, emotional, is something you do with your partner, which he’s not now. But who else is there? Daisy is in New York, and Luann is on my payroll, not a friend for the sake of pure friendship. I haven’t spoken to Mariana in weeks. Lily Marple? Has it come to me calling Lily Marple when my dog is dying?
I remember how I brought Monster home, back to our Ocean Avenue bungalow, how I thought a dog would be a great idea to prepare for kids, how Ben was skeptical and not on board, so I promised to do all the work. I didn’t, of course. He rose early to walk him and feed him because of my late shifts at P. F. Chang’s, and he’d take him to the beach to burn off his endless energy, and he caved and let him sleep in our bed after the first month, when I’d already ignored that rule anyway.
I’d promised that Monster would be mine alone, but I’d broken that promise to Ben—probably knew that I would from the start—and he graciously, openheartedly accepted it.
And now our beloved dog has a tumor on his own heart.
I consider this, and how maybe I feel like I have a tumor on my heart too.
But I don’t. I’m lucky enough that I don’t.
My poor, poor boy. I love him so very much, love him as if I’ve birthed him.
I realize that so does Ben. And if I ever have a moment to excise this tumor that Ben and I have grown for each other from my own heart, it’s now.
I press his number into my phone, and pray that Amanda doesn’t answer, and pray that Ben can hear that the pain in my heart is nearly suffocating me. And that he might be the only one who can heal me.
43
BEN
DECEMBER
I’d answered on the first ring. I was rereading the script and second-guessing everything: if writing it for her had been a mistake, if she’d read it and say: Ben, we’re done with us, I thought that was obvious, if that would finally be our death knell.
But then my phone rang, and caller ID said TATUM, and I answered it, and she was wailing.
“Ben,” she said. “Please. Please come, it’s Monster. I didn’t have anyone else to call.”
And I said: “You should have called me. I’m glad you did. I’m still your person.”
And I raced to the vet, and we agreed that Monster deserved better than waiting around for his heart to explode, so we sat with him, each of us cradling his face, each of us spilling an unending waterfall of tears, until he went to sleep.
Back home, in our old (new) home, she curls herself into a ball on the white sectional her designer picked out, despite its impracticality for a home with an enormous dog who jumps on all the furniture, and a nearly nine-year-old boy with a fondness for spilling anything that can be spilled.
“Thank you for coming,” she says for the hundredth time. Like I wouldn’t have. Does she think that I wouldn’t have? That we’re so far removed from who we used to be that I wouldn’t have shown up to help with Monster? She wipes her nose with her sweater, tries to slow her tears.
“Tate, I would never not have come.” I shift closer, rest my hand on her leg. She startles but then places her own hand atop of mine.
“I know, I know.” She inhales sharply. “It’s just . . . I know you’re with her now, I know you’re over all this drama with me.”
I slide my hand back to my own lap. I haven’t said a word about Amanda to her, partially because I have no idea what I’m doing, partially because it’s Amanda, and she is not a badge of honor I wear proudly. Also, partially, because I know if Tatum had her pick, she’d be OK with just about any other woman besides the one I’m sleeping with.
“I . . . I didn’t realize . . . how’d you know?”
“I saw you guys.” She floats her snot-covered sweatered arm aloft, then flops it down. “On the beach. On Leo’s birthday.”
“What?”
“On the beach last month, OK? I saw you guys, and I mean, I get why you didn’t say anything, but—”
“You were there?” My heart accelerates. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was there. Why would it? I waited, and Amanda showed, and that was the end of that and the start of something else.
“I wish it weren’t her, Ben. I know I have no control over whom you date, but I wish it weren’t her.”
My brain freezes, and my tongue does too. I was waiting for Tatum on the beach. I was waiting for her and promised myself that if she showed up, I’d tell her how much I missed her, how wrong I’d gotten so many things. And she had. She had shown up, but like a million other moments that I’d missed in these past few years, I’d overlooked this too. Jesus, I’d been so chickenshit. Waiting for her. Why didn’t you just do it, go to her and say, Please, I love you, can we try again? I wanted everything to be different, yet I hadn’t changed as much as I’d told myself.
The script, though. That is putting it all out there. That will be the point of no return, when I prove how far I’ve come, or perhaps how much I’m like the old self I used to be. When I made promises I still kept; when I didn’t have to wait for her to say I love you. I said it first so long ago when her mom died, as I watched her pack to go bury her.
But words have run their course. We’ve avowed ourselves, and we’ve told each other everything, and still, we landed on this dead-end route.
Now, the only way to really say it is through what I do.
I say, “Tate, I’ll always take your call, pick up the p
hone if you need me.”
This makes her cry harder.
“Monster is the one consistent thing I’ve had for a decade.”
I start to reply, You’ve had me, but this isn’t true in so many ways. Not just when we separated, but years before then too.
“How about if I stay here with you until Joey gets home? We’ll order in a pizza, watch a bad movie.”
She sniffles and nods.
“I hear Lily’s new one is terrible, a real shitbomb,” I say.
She laughs at this, so hard that mucus projects from her nose.
“Sorry,” she says. “God, I’m gross.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I should probably stop crapping on Lily. We’re friends now,” she manages.
“With friends like those . . . ,” I start.
“I don’t have all that many,” she says. “Daisy is in New York half the time. Mariana is filming in Asia.” She picks at her thumbnail. “I take them where I can find them.”
I lean in closer to her, wrap an arm around one shoulder, ease her next to me.
“He was such a good dog,” Tate says, her head resting on my chest.
“He really was kind of a pain in the ass,” I laugh. “Remember how for the first few years he tore up every garbage can we had?”
I feel her grin against me. “Fuck, he was irritating.”
“And how his gas was so bad we had to constantly leave the room?” Her shoulders shake, and I let out my own chuckle. “But we loved him anyway.”
“In spite of everything,” she sighs. “We loved him anyway.”
I let her sleep and go to straighten up around the house. She has a housekeeper come in three times a week, so I mostly just try to busy myself, because this is no longer really my house, and I don’t want to sit and watch her sleep. I clean up Monster’s urine in the kitchen, put his bowl away in the cabinet, tuck his toys into a bin by the back door. I hope she doesn’t mind, hope she doesn’t think that I’m already trying to erase the imprint of our imperfect dog. I’m only trying to make it easier. I find that I’m enjoying this, not the grief of losing our dog, but the comfort in taking care of her, and I further find that I don’t want to leave. Not just for the evening, but forever. That, after everything, I want to take care of her forever. Let her take care of me forever too.
In her office, I find an old photo of the three of us—Leo, her, me—from when he came out to visit us shortly after we’d landed here. She’s framed it and displayed it alongside so many other happy family memories: Piper’s wedding, Joey’s birth, her dad’s five-year sobriety ceremony, us on the Oscar red carpet when she won—before we got the call about Leo, of course. In that one, I’m smiling beside her, but I can tell that my heart isn’t in it; that I’m panicking on the inside, as if I somehow believed that she’d outgrown me just by being anointed. I stare at the picture of the three of us on the beach, with the blue waves behind us and the golden sky wide open above us and Leo’s smile that made him seem invincible. I wish, as I do more often now, and certainly as I have most viscerally tonight, that we had done it all differently.
I don’t hear her come up behind me.
“He was so beautiful, Ben.”
I rest the photo back on her bookshelf.
“Why didn’t you tell me back then?” I ask. “I know it’s because I was absolutely horrible about your dad, and that it seemed like I couldn’t understand—no, I couldn’t forgive what I thought was a weakness.” I drop my head. “I mean, I know that. But . . . he was my brother, Tate. Did you not think I’d look past that to try to help him?”
She considers this, and I nearly reach for her hand until I catch my impulse and thwart myself. “I should have told you. It’s on my list of regrets, if that means anything. I just . . . Well, there was my dad, how unwilling you were to give him a chance. But also . . .” She trails off.
“It’s OK,” I say. “I can’t imagine that you could say anything now that could hurt me in any way that we haven’t already done to each other.”
She nods, understanding. “I guess I wanted something you didn’t have.”
I frown. “You had a ton of things I didn’t have. I feel like your whole life was made up of things I didn’t have.”
“I didn’t . . .” She waves a hand. “I was wrong, you were wrong. About a lot of it. But I guess I wanted to do it my way, God knows I’ve gotten stuck in that habit, and I take responsibility for it.” She meets my eyes. “I do. But I guess I thought that your way with him, I mean, with some things, was so rigid, so unforgiving. You were mad at a lot of things back then—and I don’t mean that blamefully. But you and I had started keeping score by then, right? I mean, hadn’t we?” I nod, and she inhales, then exhales. “I guess this was me keeping score, like I wanted to keep something from you to put in my arsenal, on my scorecard. Like, I knew something that you didn’t, and I knew, or I thought I knew, that I’d be proven right. And you’d never know the difference. But I’d know. That he could be rehabilitated, just like my dad, and knowing that I was right, and you weren’t . . .” She glances to the floor. “I guess that made me feel smug, in a good way. Self-satisfied.”
“Funny, I always thought you were plenty smug.” I grin, and she grins too.
“Well, only after the Oscar, right? Before that, you took the cake there,” she says.
“If we’re getting specific, I think it started when you became a big-shot director.”
“Well, I learned from the best. You were downright insufferable on Romanticah.” We both laugh easily, then harder.
“Guilty as charged,” I say between hiccups. “Guilty. As. Charged.”
I exhale, find my breath. Then lean back against her desk.
“We’ve really fucked things up haven’t we?”
She looks at me now, her eyes already misty again.
“We really were happy once.”
“I remember,” I say, thinking of my script, considering saying more, but knowing that words aren’t enough now, promises aren’t enough when we’d broken so many before. “I remember all of that too.”
44
TATUM
DECEMBER
We order a pizza and watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Joey’s favorite, even if it’s not totally appropriate for an almost nine-year-old. He sobs when we tell him about Monster, and I realize this is the first real death he’ll remember. He was too little to recall the day we buried Leo, even though he was there, holding my hand. And my mom and Ben’s dad will always just be faces in photographs for him, stories we’ll tell.
I promise him we’ll get another puppy soon. Go to the shelter after Hawaii and bring home whichever dog he chooses. I can already hear Luann in my ear, excited about the notion of a photo op, all the ways my unselfish act for Joey can be marketed.
Joey falls asleep right when Ferris is serenading the city of Chicago. His head lolls into Ben’s lap, his arm splayed off the couch. Ben rests his palm over Joey’s chest, as if he can intuit the beats of his heart, and then laughs out loud at the screen. This was always his favorite part: the parade. The pure ridiculousness of it, the total joy and inanity of Ferris’s antics.
“Let me wake him, take him up to bed,” I whisper. “He has school tomorrow.”
“I’ll carry him,” he says. “In a few.”
I nod. Neither of us is in a rush to disrupt the bubble, false as it may be, that surrounds us.
I think of Damon, how on our first date he told me that was what I needed—to live outside of my bubble, that getting out of my comfort zone could be the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s right, of course. But challenging yourself to be uncomfortable, especially when so many people think they know you, think they see you, is complicated. It means that you disrupt their perception of who you are to them, and that means you disrupt your perception of who you are to yourself too.
“Hey,” I whisper again. “When we were happy, happier, do you think I had walls up? Like, do you think that a
s things got bigger for me, that I shut you out?”
He considers this. I watch his hand rise and fall on Joey’s chest.
“When we first met—remember in the bar?”
“Dive Inn,” I interrupt.
“At Dive Inn, I guess I thought you were the most fearless person I’d ever met. And then with Romanticah, I thought you were the best actress I’d ever seen . . .”
“So the answer to my question is yes.”
“Tate, you know you do, have walls. I mean, you had to. You’re you, the great Tatum Connelly. Of course you had to put up barriers.”
“I never cared about being famous.”
“I know.” He reaches out, touches my knee.
Joey stirs, and Ben’s hand returns to him. He gently hoists him up, wrapping our son’s limbs around him to carry him upstairs.
Ben guides Joey’s head onto his pillow, and I pull the duvet up to his chest. We watch him wordlessly for a minute, maybe two. I’m surprised to find my cheeks wet again, missing Monster, missing all of this: how easy it could be, how deeply I once loved Ben, how difficult it was to destroy it, and yet we did.
Ben sees my tears. “Do you want me to stay?”
His question catches us both off guard. I can see it in the quiet alarm behind his eyes; I can feel it in my quickened pulse as I reach for an answer. Then I remember: Amanda.
“You have a girlfriend now. You should go home to her.” I hate that I’ve said it so coldly; I hate that I mentioned her at all.
“You guys come before her,” he says.
I want to say, Of course you should stay, but his nonanswer, that we come before Amanda, is not exactly a proclamation of unrequited devotion. I don’t want to be the first one to say it, to say, Stay. Also, I have no clue whether Ben’s implying anything more than sleeping on the couch, eating a cold piece of pizza.
I say, “I have to be up early anyway. I skipped all those scripts today.” I sigh. “Shit, I have so much work to get done before Piper gets here.”
“OK,” Ben says. “I have work too.”
Between Me and You Page 33