17
BEN
JUNE 2008
It’s raining in Los Angeles, and no one knows what to do about it. People are scattering around, hovering in Whole Foods, tweeting with panicked abandon: It’s raining! It might be the apocalypse!
I’m set to meet Spencer for lunch to discuss my next steps in my career: One Day in Dallas hadn’t blown up like we’d all thought, and for the first time I have to consider strategy; I have to “take a meeting” with my agent to ensure that I don’t, as my dad would say, slide into a wasteland of mediocrity. It’s happened to plenty of other golden boys. It can’t happen to me.
Tatum is in majestic Hawaii while I am here on daddy duty for the next ten days. It’s longer than she wanted to be away from the baby, but she’d been back at work since he was four weeks old, the necessary requirements of capitalizing on Oscar-nomination heat, and thus when production on Shipwreck called for nearly two weeks in Hawaii, she packed her breast pump and was flown first class to the Big Island. She calls on her breaks, asks for me to put Joey on the phone, though he doesn’t seem to understand that his mom’s voice is being beamed in across an ocean, and he usually just wiggles around in his crib. Eventually I put the phone back to my ear and assure her that we’re doing fine. That I am defrosting her frozen breast milk, that the night nurse is cutting his fingernails and minding his diaper rash, that we can survive a week and change without her.
I can. We can. We can survive ten days without her. I don’t want to think of myself as one of those guys whose wife does everything better than he does simply because she has a uterus. That guy was my dad. That guy was my grandfather, who showed up from time to time in a three-piece suit to hand us a hundred-dollar bill and then shooed us out of the room because he didn’t like to hear children playing. I’m fucking capable.
But . . . I’m also completely inadequate. The house is a disaster; I badly need a shower; I’ve eaten stale Cheerios for more than a handful of meals. And also, though I would never say this to Tatum, I’d rather be working. I’m envious that she gets to jet to Hawaii and sleep in a quiet hotel room with a view of the ocean, while I rise to quell whatever Joey is screaming about in his crib and then stare at my laptop for the afternoon, trying to muster inspiration but mostly dawdling back to lackluster plotlines for Alcatraz’s next season—the writers’ room starts back up at summer’s end.
Neither one of us was quite ready for the baby—we’d figured Monster was our biggest responsibility for the foreseeable future—and Joey was an accident (“a happy accident,” we’ve gotten used to saying). I was more panicked than she: I had never quite hit my stride in toeing the line between being brotherly and fatherly to Leo now—sometimes I was too stern, sometimes I was too distracted, sometimes I just didn’t want the responsibility of picking up where our dad had left off. And there were plenty of nights while Tatum was pregnant when I’d wake up damp from sweat, pulse racing, the fragments of a frantic dream reverberating in my consciousness until dawn broke. I’ve been surprised, to be honest, that I’m not worse at parenthood now that he’s here.
Joey, named for Tatum’s mom—Josephine—and I were supposed to go with her to Hawaii. But then he got an ear infection two days before we were set to fly, and it wasn’t like we could ask production to delay on our account. So Tatum asked our night nurse to stay around for a few hours during the day to lend a hand (Tatum had been interviewing nannies endlessly but had not yet found someone she thought was suitable, even though Joey is nearly six months by now, and even though I thought they were all mostly suitable) and left for LAX. I called my mom to see if she could fly out and pitch in, but she and Ron were headed for a cruise around Turkey and Greece. I picked up the phone to call Leo, but he’d have been no help. I’d seen him back in New York shortly before the mayhem of the baby and the Oscars, and he was working too hard, juggling crazy banking hours. He was looking too ragged and thin, and I implored him, for once, to ease up just a bit.
He laughed and said it wasn’t work that kept him out so late.
“You’re twenty-seven, Lee,” I said. “Aren’t you over that shit?”
“Over beautiful women?” he howled. “God, I hope the answer to that is never.”
“Settling down can be a good thing.” I thought of our impending arrival, how the baby would solidify Tatum and me after months of feeling like we were slipping away from each other in the whirlwind of the awards season, as the snowball of her career picked up speed, and I stood at the top of the hill and watched. “Don’t you want kids?”
“I have time,” he said. “Who’s in a rush? Besides”—he swatted my leg, then rose with a groan to pour himself a beer—“I’m gonna live forever.”
So mostly, with Tatum in Hawaii, it was Joey and me. And Kendra, the night nurse, while I slept. Walter and Cheryl, his girlfriend, promised to stop in and relieve me, but Cheryl’s real estate business was booming, and even three years sober, Walter wasn’t someone I was entirely comfortable leaving alone with the baby. It wasn’t fair, it was a weird grudge of distrust that I couldn’t move past, and Tatum and I argued about it whenever I was stupid enough to let my biases slip into a conversation.
Today, I wrestle with Joey’s car seat and buckle him in. I’m due at Barneys in thirty minutes, where lithe fortysomething women resemble lithe thirtysomething women, and men in suits huddle around tables, forking their salads, discussing box office returns, summer blockbusters, under-twenty-one actresses they’d like to screw. I told Spencer I have the baby, that Kendra had another client she couldn’t cancel (I suspect she really just wanted to go home and sleep, and I didn’t blame her), and I asked to reschedule. He insisted I bring the baby because his lunches were booked for the next month. Surely he could have pushed another client, but he doesn’t. If One Day in Dallas had made the Oscar cuts, then he’d have cleared his day. If Reagan had a start date, hadn’t been delayed first by the director dropping out then by the studio hedging over the budget, then he’d have brought me breakfast in bed.
Instead, I sling Joey’s diaper bag over my shoulder, push the stroller onto the elevator at Barneys, and pray that he doesn’t shit himself in the middle of lunch.
Spencer greets me at the hostess station with a slap on the back and feigns delight at the baby.
“The cutest,” he says. “That is the cutest fucking baby I have ever seen. No surprise given how hot your wife is, am I right?”
He laughs, so I laugh, as if half of my conversations these days, after her Oscar nomination, don’t revolve around Tatum. (A percentage that surely would have skyrocketed even higher if she had won rather than Lily Marple, a victory that left Tatum nearly apoplectic and certainly contributed to her unending willpower to get back to pre-baby weight within three weeks of delivery. “I will absolutely demolish it in Shipwreck,” she announced before going out for a run that the doctors had not yet cleared her for. “I will absolutely look like a goddamn goddess on film, and Lily Marple is going to weep and wish she had my abs.”)
“We’re going to walk the room right now,” Spencer says. “We’re going to introduce you to everyone you need to know to get this little project of yours off the ground.”
I pushed the stroller and trailed him. “Reagan isn’t a little project. It’s my best work yet.”
“I know, I know,” he says, like he doesn’t really know at all, doesn’t know how much it fucking means to me.
He glides me through the tables like a prize pony, stopping every now and then to shake hands, introduce me, show me off.
“You’ve met Ben Livingston, right?” he’ll say, slapping me on the back.
Or:
“If you don’t know Ben Livingston yet, you gotta know him now,” slapping the other person on the back. “Remember All the Men? Did you ever see that little indie that could, Romanticah?”
Most times, they rise enthusiastically, their chairs shooting behind them, their napkins dropping to the floor, and they grasp my hand, gripping tight. They’ll congratulate me on Tatum’s nomination or mention that they’ve heard great things about Shipwreck. Some of them tell me how much they’re enjoying Alcatraz, Fox’s new midseason show with decent ratings; some of them raise an eyebrow at Joey and offer a bland compliment about his chubby cheeks.
We sit and Spencer orders a Diet Coke, tells the waiter not to bring us any bread.
“Ben, let’s relight your fire.”
“My fire is pretty well lit, at least on my end,” I say. “Talk to the studio about green-lighting Reagan; then we won’t have to have this conversation.”
“I’m talking to the studio every day. Every fucking day. We’re close. We’re very, very close. But you gotta do something else too, take more meetings, give me some pitches to work with if you want to stay in film. The TV gig is great, fucking fantastic, but it’s not film. And we wanted HBO. We got Fox.”
I cut him off. “I haven’t been sleeping, Spencer.”
This isn’t true. We have Kendra. I’ve been sleeping as well as I ever did, at least as far as Joey is concerned. Occasionally I’ll wake and watch the alarm clock tick down until it blares, wondering how to tweak Reagan, wondering when I got such a grown-up life, with a mortgage and a child. Joey is an easy baby: he gurgles and grins and though he prefers Tatum to me, he is healthy and cherubic, and my anxious, sleepless nights from Tatum’s pregnancy are gone. But mostly I sleep just fine.
“Do you need a nanny?” He punches something into his phone. “There, I e-mailed Diana, she’ll have you seven nannies by the time I pay the bill.”
“I can’t hire a nanny without Tatum. Why do you think the baby is with me today?”
Joey gurgles in his stroller and starts to fidget and fuss. I gave him a bottle before we got here, so I can’t imagine what he wants. Tatum can tell these things on instinct. Like, she’ll be in our garage (newly converted to a gym) on the Pilates reformer, hear his cry, and run out and say: Diaper! Or be nose-deep in one of the half-dozen scripts she has piled high on our kitchen counter, listen to a wail over the baby monitor, and pull out her boob on the way to his room. Today, I pop a pacifier into his mouth and hope it holds.
Spencer leans closer. “I hope your balls haven’t been cut off now that your wife is a big shot.”
I laugh because I don’t know what else to do.
“I assure you, I still very much have my balls, Spencer. Big balls. Huge balls.”
I’ve been with Spencer since Romanticah, but he is oily, in his expensive suit, with his whitened teeth, with his slicked-back hair, with his pores practically oozing ambition. It occurs to me, as the waiter brings us Diet Cokes and forgets about Spencer’s no-bread missive until Spencer nearly snaps his hand off when he offers it, that I don’t particularly like the man in charge of the trajectory of my career.
“I want Reagan to go, Spencer. I believe in it. It’s the project of a lifetime.”
He ignores me. “Alcatraz is a hit or at least enough of one. They’re gonna give you two more seasons at least. You can count on that. For sure.”
Joey’s pacifier has fallen on the floor, and a waitress with ample cleavage stoops to grab it, then cleans it with a napkin.
“He’s adorable,” she says.
When she heads back to the kitchen, Spencer whispers, “You should totally tap that ass.”
“OK, I’ll get right on that.”
“Hey,” he says louder. “This is Hollywood. What do you think your wife is doing right now?”
“I’m pretty sure she’s not screwing the waitress.”
This makes Spencer honest-to-God cackle, and, as if I’ve earned his respect, he says: “Fine, Ben, I’ll cut you a deal: you sign the two years to Alcatraz, and I’ll squeeze the shit out of the studio to get Reagan back on the table.”
“I think it could win me my Oscar,” I say.
“Got a taste of it with the wife’s nomination?”
“No,” I say. “I mean, yes. I am proud of her, and she deserves it. She should have won.”
“I know. I saw you there that night,” he says. “You were basically weeping with pride. I almost wondered if you still had a ball sack.”
“Fuck you, Spencer.”
He laughs. “I’m just messing with you, dickhead. Please? Like my wife doesn’t have me wrapped around all ten of her fingers. Good for you, seriously. Being on her arm, telling everyone how proud you were. Takes a real man.”
“I was proud, am proud.”
“But you want an Oscar nomination of your own.”
“Not just a nomination. A win. I just really think Reagan can be incredible, the best thing I’ve ever done.”
“Ambition,” Spencer says, easing back his lips into his smarmy Cheshire smile. “I can smell that from a mile away.”
I start to apologize, just as Joey starts to cry, but Spencer waves a hand, which is covered in a ring too many. “Don’t say you’re sorry for that, man, don’t ever apologize for going after what you want. That’s the mark of winners; that’s what separates you from the rest of the pack.”
I blink a few times to clear the thought: he sounds so much like my dad, I forget for a moment that he’s no longer here.