18
TATUM
MAY 2007
I can put it off no longer: I have to go home to Ohio for Piper’s wedding. David Frears has given me loads of advice on “going home again.” All through the media push for Pride and Prejudice leading up to the June release, he’s assured me that you just put on a face like you’re putting on a role.
“Darling, if a gay can survive a weekend visit to bumblefuck Nebraska, where, when I was in high school, a city councilman tried to tell my parents that I could get electroshock therapy to deal with my homo-ness, you can endure your little sister’s wedding.”
David’s taken me under his wing, told me I’m the best Elizabeth Bennet in the history of Elizabeth Bennets, of which there have been many. He’s protected me through the slow but ever-present bleat of tabloid coverage (rumors of sleeping with Colin Farrell on the set), the mounting tide of whispers of an Academy Award, the connection with a stylist so I’m not caught looking like a general garbage dump when I’m out in public. “Darling, I’m sorry, but this?” David once said, waving his hand at my brunch getup of Nike running pants and an Ohio University hoodie. “This will not do, not for a future star.”
Ben calls David my “gay husband,” and Daisy tells me that anyone whom he deems the next big thing really is the next big thing. Of course, I dedicated myself to the shoot: British accent at all times, delicate mannerisms, headstrong attitude. Ben flew over for a month of the two-month ordeal while he was on a break between his own projects, and he said it was like dating a total stranger.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s for the part. Full method.”
“Don’t apologize,” he said before grabbing my waistband and pulling me into the bedroom of the suite I’d been put up in. “I like it.”
“So you get to cheat on me without really cheating on me?” I laughed.
“Bingo,” he said, kissing me and shutting the door with his foot.
Still, all the method preparation, all of David’s advice, hasn’t calmed my nerves, settled my butterflies about heading back for Piper’s wedding.
Now, in my childhood home, Ben flops on my childhood bed. “So this is where the magic happened.”
“Ha,” I say, thinking of Aaron Johnson, the football player, and how I’d lost my virginity to him in the back seat of his car in the deserted parking lot of the grocery store where I worked on the weekends. Then we did it exclusively in his car for a few weeks until he dumped me. “There was no magic happening here.”
I haven’t been back since my mother’s funeral, and I run my fingers over my dresser, which is covered in stickers. When I was ten, my parents were fighting about something, so I locked Piper in my room with me, and we pasted our sticker collection all over my furniture. I remember hearing my dad’s truck engine start, then my mom knocking on my door, and her exhausted face absorbing the stuck-on damage.
“Well.” She shrugged. “I hope you like it, it’s not like I can buy you new furniture. Enjoy.” Then she closed the door quietly and retreated to her room for the rest of the night. Piper and I tried to peel off our favorites, put them back in our sticker books for trading in the future, but most of them were too stubborn. Now, twenty years later, my faded Boynton collection stares back at me, a half-ripped-up memory of another life.
Ben bounces off my bed. “Want to go grab something to eat? What is there around here?”
I shrug. Denny’s. IHOP. Probably an Outback Steakhouse, which I remember seeing the last time I was here. Nothing that I’d want to take Ben to, nothing that has anything to do with who I’ve become since I left the Canton outskirts, tackled New York, wooed David Frears, and slayed Elizabeth Bennet and anointed myself the next big thing. That he is even here with me is a leap forward, an acknowledgment that I’ve let him see my insides, that he knows everything about me. But still. You can peel back an onion only so far before your eyes start to sting.
“There’s not much to eat here in the way of fine dining.”
“I don’t need fine dining,” he says. “I just need sustenance.” He grabs the keys to the rental car. “Come on, we’ll find something.”
Downstairs, my dad is circling the kitchen while Piper brews a pot of coffee.
“It feels strange,” he says. “Being back here without her. I mean, being sober back here without her.”
He steps closer to me and wraps me in a tight embrace, close enough so I can feel his stubble and his wiry gray hair against my neck. I stiffen but then remember Dr. Wallis, whom we still see from time to time at Commitments, just for check-ins, and also to celebrate two years of sobriety, and how he urged my dad (and me) to bridge the physical divide. Not to violate personal space, not to tilt anyone toward discomfort, rather to move past words and, well, reach out and touch someone. My dad has thus become a hugger. I soften and my arms link around his back, which has lost its doughiness, as he took up hiking when he met Cheryl, an age-appropriate real estate broker, who has a one-bedroom condo in Westwood, which is now more or less his second home.
“It’s strange being back here in general,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
He wipes his damp eyes, and I see Piper drying off her own cheeks with a dishrag.
“I was such a terrible father to you.”
“Dad, we’ve been over this—”
“I know, I know. You forgive me. It’s just . . . being here.” He shakes his head.
I swipe my wallet from the counter. “Well, Ben and I are not going to be here. We’re heading to IHOP.”
“She’s giving me the grand tour!” Ben pipes in, averting his eyes from my dad. He is still jumpy around him, edgier than when my dad is out of the picture. I ask him about it, and he tells me it’s a work in progress, and because I trust him, I believe him.
“Ooh, take him by the high school,” Piper says. “They’ve totally redone it.”
“Why would I want to relive the worst years of my life?” I say.
My dad sighs audibly.
“Dad.” My hand finds his shoulder—reach out and touch someone!—and I let it linger there for a beat. “I wasn’t referring to you. I was referring to all those dickwads I dated and all the asshole girls who thought I was a piece of trash for working at Albertsons.”
“If they could see you now!” Piper calls after me, as we head through the foyer and out to the rented Ford Explorer.
I drive through the streets of my childhood city, my hands tight around the steering wheel, my knuckles pale. Ben’s head is turned, his eyes out the passenger window, and I can almost hear his thoughts, calculating how vast the divide is between who he thinks I am and where I once came from.
“I know,” I say. “It’s depressing.”
“What?” He looks toward me. “What’s depressing?”
I slow to a stop at a red light, next to a strip of stores where two of the letters droop in the mall sign, where a liquor store abuts a ninety-nine-cent store.
“This place. This town. It’s not like I’m exactly proud of it.”
He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s depressing. It’s just . . . part of you. So what?”
The light flips to green, and the car in front of us loiters, so I press the horn too firmly, and the car jolts, the driver flipping me off, and Ben jumps in his seat.
“Jesus, calm down, Tate. Come on, we’re here for a good thing, your sister.”
“Marrying her high school boyfriend. Straight out of a clichéd script. Nothing you’d ever write.”
“I like Scooter. I like this place. It’s where you came from, and if you want to talk scripts, you should know that background matters.”
I want to say: Of course background matters! That’s why I morph into whatever role I need to be for however long I need to be it. That’s why I’m only purely myself with Ben, no one else. That’s why I was the best at Tisch. That’s why there is Oscar buzz building around Elizabeth Bennet. You don’t so desperately try to escape your childhood without becoming an expert at pretending you’re someone else, someplace else.
Instead I say: “I just miss my mom. She’d like to be here for Piper, help with the wedding. And, I mean, you know, to see my success.”
He rests his hand on my leg. I reach down to grasp it. It’s not like I don’t know that he doesn’t feel the same about his father; it’s not like we’re each not operating with a phantom limb. But Ben loses himself in his writing, where he can exorcise his pain. Not that Ben writes about his father, but even in the new Reagan script, there is messy family interaction, there is catharsis between fathers and children, and there is room for grief at the end. These aren’t Ben’s stories but in some ways they are.
But Elizabeth Bennet is Elizabeth Bennet. I find ways to relate, I find ways to turn her into a bit of my own, but it’s not the same: creating and inhabiting. It’s why, despite not wanting to take advantage, despite never resting on my laurels, I ask him to write something for me, just me. Not any actress, not any hot young thing. Ben knows my story. Ben knows my soul. I want him to write for that, to that, to me. Because when he taps into me, and I braid myself to him, we are a galaxy unto and of ourselves.
He tells me he will, as soon as he’s done polishing Reagan. Or maybe the next one after that. He’s promised, and though he promised two years ago, I believe him. Still.
I turn into IHOP, which is across the street from Albertsons.
“I used to come here after my shifts,” I say to Ben. “They had an all-you-could-eat thing after nine p.m., so it was like I could tackle dinner and breakfast all in one sitting.”
He laughs. “I find that hard to believe, knowing what I know now. Fifteen hundred calories and not a bit more.”
“Not funny,” I say, though I’m blushing because he’s not wrong. I’ve become rigidly inflexible with my diet, weighing my chicken breasts, dicing my broccoli, measuring my protein powder for my morning smoothie. I’m never skinny enough, never lithe enough. There is always another pound to lose for the camera, always a side note that Jocelyn, my agent, passes on: “Be sure that she doesn’t gain anything,” or “She works for the time being, but anything more, and we’ll hire a trainer.” Sometimes they just say: “Too heavy. Pass.” So I weigh and I dice and I measure, and I put a supersensitive digital scale in our bathroom, and I pee each morning and tiptoe onto it, and if I’m good and it’s steady, I grant myself three Hershey’s kisses for the day, and if I’m less good and it’s less steady, I do not.
The IHOP is mostly empty, since it’s four p.m., and not quite dinner, not quite lunch, so we seat ourselves. It hasn’t been updated since I left: orange and brown and Formica, with a ’90s station playing overhead and oversized foldable plastic menus.
Ben flips the menu from front to back to front again. “Well, I am getting the never-ending stack of silver dollars. This I have to see.”
I roll my eyes, feel the blush rise to my cheeks again. “There’s nothing better around here. Sorry.”
“I’m being serious!” he says. “Stop apologizing. God, Tate, you know I don’t care about this stuff.”
I flop a hand, but he grabs it and steadies it.
“Listen,” he says. “You don’t think that when I was being dragged out for, like, raw sushi to impress one of my dad’s clients as a kid that I wouldn’t have done anything just to plop down in an IHOP?”
Before I can answer, a shrill “Oh. My. God!” bleats out from the hostess station. We turn and my pink cheeks turn magenta.
Julie Seymour, the field hockey player Aaron Johnson dumped me for, is barreling over, arms outstretched, face contorted with a look I normally see on rabid Lily Marple fans.
“Tatum Connelly!! Oh. My. God!” Her hot pink lipstick is smudged against her front teeth, her thick mascara flaking on the side of her left cheek. “I cannot believe that I am seeing you! You are, like, the biggest thing to happen to this town in, like, forever!” She folds herself atop of me in the booth.
I’ve never been recognized before. No autograph seekers at LAX, no drinks on the house at swanky restaurants in West Hollywood. (Admittedly, I don’t go to many swanky restaurants in West Hollywood.) But no one double-takes when I hike in Runyon Canyon, no photographers trail me when I grocery-shop at Gelson’s. Not that Julie Seymour counts as true recognition, since my face is already familiar, but she has already spoken more words to me now in IHOP, at which she is apparently the hostess, than in the entirety of our high school careers.
I start to talk but she cuts me off. “Oh. My. God! I mean, I knew your sister was getting married; she helped with the delivery of both my babies.” She pauses and slides a photo out of her front shirt pocket and shoves it toward me. Two cherubic boys. “But I didn’t imagine that you would come back! And come into our little restaurant in our little corner of the world!” Now she turns to Ben, who is beaming, loving every second of this. “Oh, gosh, excuse me, where are my manners? I’m Julie, and oh my gosh, this is so exciting! You must be so excited to be here with Tatum!”
Ben’s grin grows wider, and he shakes Julie’s hand vigorously.
“We always knew she’d be something big in high school!” she practically shrieks. I roll my eyes, but then she turns back to me. “Oh God, what if I got everyone back together? Like, so many of us are still here! We could throw you a party! I don’t have my kids tomorrow night—”
I wave a hand. “Oh, that’s really great of you, Julie. But we’re just here for the wedding. And we have the rehearsal dinner tomorrow—”
Now she interrupts me. “Oh, right, right. You must be so busy. Being a big-time star and all of that.” She looks genuinely forlorn.
“Could I trouble you for a coffee?” Ben asks. “Tatum keeps me up all hours, working, reading scripts, fielding her media calls. I’m the hardest-working assistant in Hollywood.”
Julie’s eyes grow to the size of IHOP’s silver-dollar pancakes. “Oh, right away!” She scampers off, and Ben bites his bottom lip to abate his machine-gun laughter.
I watch her disappear behind the kitchen door.
“In case it wasn’t obvious, I hated her in high school.”
“In case it wasn’t obvious, you’re a pretty big deal here,” he says.
My eyes nearly disappear to the back of their sockets.
“So after you binged on IHOP, what did you do? Where did the high school Tatum Connelly spend her evenings? Gallivanting about town? Getting wasted and passing out in alleyways, giving herself to men left and right?”
This makes me honest-to-God belly laugh. “No. Usually, I just went home and minded my mom, when she was sick, or helped Piper with her homework or cleaned up the kitchen.”
Ben’s look of solemnity breaks my heart.
“I mean, sometimes, I did screw Aaron Johnson in the grocery store parking lot.”
His face lights up. “Well,” he says, “you’ll have to give me that part of the tour next.”