24
TATUM
OCTOBER 2010
I’m in New York only for the weekend and a day. A quick in and out to do a junket for As You Like It, which is on all the awards lists, though no one has actually seen anything other than rough-cut footage, some scenes here and there. But the industry is abuzz with a David Frears–Tatum Connelly reunion, after all the awards heat with Pride and Prejudice, and buzz in Hollywood is just about all you need to convince people that something is real.
Daisy convinces me to meet her for a drink downtown at Harbor, the hottest, newest nightclub with a rotation of celebrity guest DJs. She’s back in the city for the month—New York Cops is shooting on location to attempt to capture the grit that they have lost over the years by filming on a soundstage in Burbank, and she texts me relentlessly until I agree to venture south of Bowery to meet her.
I call Ben before I pull myself from the bedding at the Four Seasons. It sounds like I’ve woken him, though he’s three hours earlier.
“Asleep?” I ask when he picks up on the third ring.
“Mmmmm,” he replies. “Whiskey at dinner.” I hear him rustle and rise.
“I thought this was a working weekend.” I say it lightly, though I worry it comes out too brittle, too judgmental.
Ben had holed up at a writer’s retreat for the weekend, trying to finesse the pilot of a hospital drama—Code Emergency—that he and Eric are bringing to the networks. I think he’s better than that, better than an average hospital drama that he could write on his worst days, much less on his best ones. But I don’t want to have that argument again, the one in which he tells me that I don’t need to remind him of his own mediocrity, which is never my intention, but we’ve been out of sync lately, and so he takes my suggestions as criticisms, and now I just try to avoid suggestions entirely.
“Whiskey goes perfectly well with working,” he says.
“OK.”
“Oh God, Tatum,” he groans. “Give me a break.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said everything.”
“Ben, I asked if you were working, that was the whole point of this retreat!”
“And I did—I worked for eight hours, OK? Not on my earth-shattering masterpiece, OK? On Code Emergency, which I know you think is beneath me.”
“I don’t think that.” I do, but there is no point in getting into it now, when I already know how this discussion is going to go. This TV stint is fine, it’s fine. But Ben’s potential is stratospheric; it’s so far beyond this that it almost literally pains me. But to say that to him—which I have mistakenly from time to time—is condescending, patronizing. And I know that. I do. But sometimes I can’t help myself anyway. He is brilliant, and I only want him to know that he doesn’t have to sell himself short. When I say this, he replies that I sound more and more like his father every day. So I try to censor myself now, something that I never thought I’d have to do with him.
“Well, I worked all day. My shoulder hurts from hunching over my laptop. And then, at dinner, a couple of guys and I had some whiskey. So what?”
“So nothing. I’m glad. It sounds great.”
It’s too late to backtrack from my passive-aggressiveness, and we both know it.
“OK,” he says.
“I just—”
“Here we go,” he says.
I stop myself. It’s easier to say these things—You can do better—over the phone when I don’t have to look him in the eye and see how much my disappointment guts him. It’s a cheap betrayal, saying the hard things when you don’t have to witness their recourse. So I don’t tonight. Besides, Hollywood is mercurial, and plenty of Ben’s stumbles have been no fault of his own. It’s not like he’s not out there trying.
“Home tomorrow to see Joey?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Give him a kiss for me.”
“I will. I promised him ice cream. We’ll go to the beach,” he says.
“Give him an extra scoop, tell him it’s from me.”
“I will,” he says.
“Love you,” I say.
“You too,” he answers.
But each of us sounds empty, as if the words can’t transcend the divide of the three thousand miles between us.
Daisy texts me as soon as I hang up. GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE.
“Aren’t we too old for this? Clubbing somewhere after midnight on the Lower East Side?” I say to her, after the bouncer has slipped me past the velvet rope without even glancing at the guest list, after the hostess has fawned and ushered me back to the VIP room, after the owner has said personal hellos and sent over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
“You’re never too old to be clubbing at midnight somewhere on the Lower East Side.” She refills her flute with the Veuve Clicquot. “Besides, look at all the beautiful men.” She fans her arms wide, her champagne spilling over the lip of her glass. “There are so, so many beautiful men.”
“I have a beautiful man.”
“I know.” She pats my leg. “I meant for me. Also: you can look but not touch, you know.”
“If I even look in the wrong direction, it will be on Twitter in five seconds.”
This is true. It’s also a new adjustment for me, being endlessly scrutinized in public. I can’t wait on line with Joey for ice cream without noticing stares; I can’t grab apples at Gelson’s without someone posting a photo on Twitter. Now I’ll just send my assistant out for those mundane errands: tampons, tomato sauce, toilet paper, which isn’t how I want to live my life—Ben rolls his eyes in mock horror that I actually say things like Just ask my assistant to do it—but that’s my new reality, that’s the price of my fame. It’s not by choice, certainly not by my choice. I love getting lost in the wide aisles of a grocery store, filtering through bruised fruit to find the perfect peach, gazing at my endless options in the cereal aisle. I started doing this when my mom was sick and our pantry went barren because my dad was no use. I’d hop a ride with a neighbor to the store, fill the cart until it was towering so high that I couldn’t see past it, and lose myself in the simple utopia of the cereal aisle.
At Harbor, Daisy rises to greet an impossibly handsome man whom I vaguely recognize from a show I’ve flipped past. My phone vibrates, and Piper’s text illuminates the screen in the otherwise mostly shadowy club lighting, which flares every few seconds in time with the pulsing beat.
Piper and her husband are babysitting for the weekend—my dad and Cheryl had already planned a golf trip, and Constance had given up enough of her weekends to need a break to see her own family. Not that Ben would have wanted my dad to watch Joe; he’d have just canceled his retreat instead. But I bought Piper and Scooter first-class plane tickets and promised them a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a night when I returned. They would have come anyway; they were trying for a baby of their own, and they considered this excellent practice, though Piper was already exasperated that Scooter mostly wanted to watch the World Series rather than lend a hand at bath time. I laughed when she told me this, but it wasn’t like I could join in on the complaints.
Ben had plenty of faults, but he pulled his parenting weight, more even than I did, not because I didn’t want to, but because my time was no longer my own. My heart was probably in it more than Ben’s. Joey still fought with him over meals, as if challenging his dad was a sport in and of itself (“God, this kid is like Leo,” he said to me one night after a bath where more water had ended up on the floor than down the drain); and Joey was in this interminable phase when he never wanted to wear clothing, especially when Ben tried to dress him. But still, Ben had more hours with Joey, simply because he had more time. With Alcatraz canceled, Ben had open days, empty nights. There is Code Emergency, but a pilot script isn’t a full-time job. I did breakfast and took him to an occasional birthday party and sometimes gym class too, when my stardom didn’t make me too self-conscious, but still, if you were to graph who put in more hours, it was Ben.
Piper texts me a picture of Joey sleeping in his toddler bed, and something comes untangled in me. What am I doing here? At Leonardo DiCaprio’s favorite new club, in a throbbing scene of lithe limbs, skinny models, vaguely recognizable faces of people I saw once on a TV rerun in the late-night hours when I couldn’t sleep? Daisy has moved to another couch, pressed close to the guy she knows from somewhere, and I rise to go. I’m bone weary from the flight and from the day of press, and I have another round tomorrow. Also, this has never interested me, this scene of too-beautiful strangers who pretend to enjoy each other’s company for the evening. Not when I was putting myself through Tisch by working at the bar, not in my early days in LA when this type of evening would have been so easy to stumble into.
I spin my wedding band on my finger, glance again at the picture of my sleeping child, and stand to leave.
It’s then that I see him.
Not clearly at first because of the lights and the bass from the song, which is nearly literally warping the walls and the dance floor.
I see him in staccato beats, in and out of the glare, in and out of my brain, like I’m not quite sure he’s in front of me. I push past the VIP hostess until I’m right in front of him, right by his side. His eyes are closed as he skitters to the beat of this song, which has suddenly become unbearable to my early-thirties ears. I jab his chest, jab it again, and his eyes fly open, and I know right away. He is not clean, not in any way sober.
“Leo,” I shout.
“Heeyyyyyy!” he shouts back, wrapping his arms over my shoulders, still bouncing to the music, like I’m now part of his groove.
I push him off me, lean closer into his ear. “Leo, what the hell?”
He slows the pulse of his legs, his arms dropping to his sides. I yank his elbow and wade through the crowd toward the bathrooms, where it is only marginally quieter, so I stick my head into the women’s room, which is empty, and pull him in, locking the door behind us.
“Talk to me,” I say. “What happened?”
He meets my eyes, and his pupils are wide and dilated. His hands jigger by his sides, so I take them in mine, hold them together, and say, “Breathe.”
He does. He inhales and exhales, and inhales once more, then says, “I fucked up. Three weeks ago. I don’t know what happened.”
“Have you been going to meetings? Lee, you were clean for over a year.” And he had been. After his sixty days at Commitments, he’d been a model of sobriety, at least as far as I could tell. And I’d gotten to be a pretty good judge with my father.
He shrugs. “Work has been crazy, and then I got invited to this weekend in Key West, so I thought . . . blow off steam . . .” His shoulders flop again. “Relapsing happens, you know? So fucking what? I’m not that bad, I can stop.”
“Leo . . .” I release his hands but he can’t still himself. He paces back and forth in front of the vanity, just as someone knocks on the door and yells: “What the fuck? I have to pee. Open up!”
“Don’t tell Ben, OK? Please just don’t tell Ben.” His eyes are wild and terrified.
“Let me call my dad; he’ll know how to help.”
“I’ll start going to meetings again, one every day.” He is taking the floor in two steps now, spinning around, two steps more, spinning again, two steps more.
“Come back to LA with me; we’ll get you back into Commitments. My dad is there every weekend as a sponsor.”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I can do this, I’m not so bad. Just . . .” He stops finally. Stares at me, pleading. “Please don’t say anything to Ben. I can’t take his disappointment, I don’t want to hear his judgment of my failure.”
“He won’t judge you,” I say quietly.
“He will,” he says back, and I know that he’s right. Ben will give you a second chance, but a third? It’s part of his hang-up with my dad: how many times he hurt me, how many ways I had to forgive him. He does this to protect me, I know, but mostly it comes off as a rigidity that makes him seem unkind, even when he is not.
“Shit, Leo. That’s a big ask. A big thing to keep from him.”
“I’ll get clean,” he begs. “But please. It makes it so much harder if I have to do it to please him.”
“You’re not doing it to please him.”
His eyes are so frantic, so desperate. “Please, Tate.”
I don’t know what to do other than to promise him, because if I don’t he won’t come with me. Not because it’s the right thing, though maybe it is. But I consider how tightly wound Ben has become—how he has been unwilling to embrace Ron, how he has been slow to warm to my father, how I’ve gradually grown aware that my success outpacing his own has become a weed that has planted roots and is rising between us. For reasons that I can’t explain, I remember that drive through Arizona and Texas, the one where I pushed the gas tank to zero, and Ben was so angry, if only for a few moments. But the rage was there, the irritation that I should have done things his way, even if we spent a nice night underneath the stars. He’s angry like this more often now; he’s drinking whiskey to chase that anger too. I consider all of this as Leo’s eyes pool and he pleads with me. He’s not wrong, I realize: Ben won’t easily forgive this, and God, their family—our family—has been through enough. Isn’t it easier to tuck this away, get Leo healthy, and move on as if I weren’t at Harbor, as if Leo hadn’t relapsed?
Maybe I tell myself that this is a kindness I offer my husband, to relieve him of more anger, to relieve him of more pain. But maybe I also know, even as I make my decision, that it’s a betrayal too.
“OK,” I concede. “But you’ll go to meetings, you’ll leave with me right now, and you’ll sleep in my hotel suite—and first thing tomorrow, you will go to a meeting.”
“All right,” he says. “Thank you.”
I unlock the bathroom, and we file out past three irritated girls whose dresses barely cover their breasts. Tomorrow, the Post will run a story about how Tatum Connelly locked herself in a bathroom with an unnamed but very attractive man, and Ben will see it, and I’ll laugh and tell him that, as always, they have it wrong. And he’ll believe me, because we tell each other the truth. Most times. Not always. Like tonight on the phone, or in plenty of our arguments about his potential and my schedule or simply in how we fill our time when the other isn’t there: he drinks whiskey rather than write; I go to Harbor rather than sleep. Besides, I lie for a living now. This one isn’t any easier; this isn’t any harder either.