26
TATUM
MARCH 2011
Leo dies four days after I win the Academy Award.
We linger by his hospital bed, where he is unable to be revived, and then finally Helen agrees to remove the ventilator, and his chest rises almost undetectably until it rises no more. I’m supposed to be in Panama; I was scheduled to start principal photography on Army Women: 2.0 just after the awards season ended, but they rejigger the schedule and give me an extra week to allow me another handful of days off for the funeral. A handful of days feels unbearably unjust, though I understand the overtime and the budget and the payroll and the crew; this movie isn’t just about me, though I’m its star. A handful of days to grieve with my husband feels like a bomb that could explode between us—among everything else, I’d forgotten to thank him in my acceptance speech.
It was a humiliating oversight. I literally blanked out; I was so stunned to be onstage that I forgot my speech nearly entirely. But it shouldn’t have been hard to remember to thank the one person who mattered the most. The gossip blogs have been all over it, the tabloids too. Rumors about what it means, rumors that we are coming undone. I don’t want to think that it means anything, though if I pay close enough attention, maybe it does: maybe it was my way of letting Ben know that I’ve felt him pull away, that we no longer see each other, that he could be more supportive, even when dealing with his own shit. None of this was conscious that night, at least not that I contemplated anyway, and I’d give just about anything to go back and do it over.
I’ve apologized to Ben relentlessly, but he waves me off. Not because he doesn’t forgive me but because, with Leo in the ICU, it feels inconsequential. That I am so caught up in my Academy Awards mistake feels even more shameful; that I worry about my Panama scheduling too only piles on. I could drop out. They’d recast and move on without me, but Ben insists that I don’t. He practically pushes me to stick with it, as if sticking with it will ensure normalcy, and normalcy might mean that Leo hasn’t died.
It was an overdose. Of course it was. I’d tried to keep tabs since I’d run into him at Harbor five months back; I’d check in once a week, at least through the new year, and he always assured me, promised me, that he was going to meetings, walking the straight line. He’d say, “Tater-tot, don’t worry. I’m as clean as a whistle. And . . . nothing’s been said to Ben, right?”
“Nothing,” I’d say, half-listening for the intonation in his voice, a sign of a lie. But I was admittedly distracted, with the awards rush, with Joey’s occupational therapy (evidently he did not hold a pencil correctly for a three-year-old, and this set off all sorts of alarm bells with his preschool teachers), with training for Army Women: 2.0.
Of course I thought about telling Ben. Of course I didn’t want to bear the weight of a secret between us. But Ben was finally finding new footing: he and Eric were moving into preproduction on Code Emergency, which had been picked up for the fall season, and he seemed encouraged about its potential. Why drag him down with Leo’s drama when Leo was assuring me he was fine? At least, that was what I told myself; that’s how I rationalized it. Now, though, those are the what-ifs you live with. What if I’d told Ben, and he’d kept better track of Leo’s sobriety? What if I’d told Ben and he’d found a way to keep him alive?
I fidget with my dress, readjust Joey’s tie in the town car on the way to the funeral, consider telling Ben today.
“Hey,” I say and rest my hand atop his. He doesn’t move, doesn’t intertwine his fingers with mine. If he turns to look at me, I will tell him. If I can make him see me, make him understand that my mountain of regret is enormous, I will tell him.
“Ben,” I say again. He blinks quickly, his gaze out to the dreary grayness of the Long Island Expressway.
“Daddy,” Joey says, and finally Ben refocuses, sliding his hand from under mine, and tousles Joe’s hair. Look at me, Ben, look at me!
“Sorry, Joe. Dad’s just having a tough one today.”
Joey nods, his face solemn. “Sometimes when I have bad days, a nap helps.”
Ben manages a smile, though it is pained and drawn. He turns back to the window.
“Ben,” I say. “What can I do?”
Look at me so I can tell you the truth, so I don’t have to wade around the what-ifs, so I can deal with your justifiable anger, and you can forgive me.
His shoulders flop, and he says, eyes still toward the bleak freeway landscape: “Nothing, there’s nothing you can do, Tate.”
I watch him for a moment and then glance away, kissing the top of Joey’s head, clutching him tighter to me. I will tell him one day but not now.
Not yet.
We bury Leo in a cemetery outside the city, next to Paul, his father. There are hundreds of mourners: beautiful, lanky women who likely once loved him, clean-cut men in well-fitting suits who were coworkers or teammates from Dalton or old college buddies who heard about this on Facebook. I think of my mother’s own quiet service, of us in the garden of my childhood home, where Piper now lives, where she and Scooter are trying for a baby and trying to build their own family under the roof that had plenty of sad memories, but some happy ones too. I think of my dad knocking on the door that day we spread her ashes, how unforgiving I was, how much he hurt me for so long, and that, over time, I’d forgotten all of this because he’d earned my forgiveness. Somehow I’d blurred the lines between the work my dad put in and the work Leo had. I’d assumed that because my dad had found a way to rehabilitate himself, that Leo could—or would—too. Blood rushes to my cheeks, just as Ben rises to speak at the service. At my shame for not being more watchful over Leo, at my shame for blurring the two of them together, thinking that Leo’s wounds would heal as completely as my dad’s.
I should have told Ben when I knew, after that night at Harbor. I should have told him, and maybe everything would be different.
Shit, I think now, when it’s all so clear and yet also all too late. Maybe Ben could have saved him. Part of me knows this isn’t true. No more so than the ways I used to play what if with my mom: What if she’d been diagnosed earlier? What if she hadn’t had to take care of the two of us and had paid better attention to her health? What if she’d had better doctors? Would it have changed anything? Everything? How am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to live with that?
My dad drank because he couldn’t live with it. Or kept drinking because of this, I suppose. It would be unfair to blame my mom’s cancer for his devotion to booze. It started before she got sick, and it spiraled from there. I dealt with it by losing myself to people who aren’t me, people who are written on a page, people who put a wide swath of emotional space between my reality and who I was for those minutes onstage. Eventually, just like my dad, the habit stuck.
If you can dream it, you can be it, she used to say, shaking one of her beloved snow globes or tucking me into bed at night when she was still healthy. I suppose I took this further than she imagined, in ways both big and small.
I watch Ben stumble to the pulpit, and I wonder if she would be proud of me, how she’d define success. An Oscar, sure, well, yes, though she wrote poetry quietly and only for herself, and found that perfectly satisfying. This secret looming in my marriage? Maybe not that. But then again, she and my dad weren’t a fairy tale, so maybe she wouldn’t judge. Maybe she’d just say, You tried the best with what you had. How was I expected to know that Leo was lying to me on our phone calls, in the e-mails I deleted as soon as they hit my in-box so Ben wouldn’t see them and ask questions? Maybe my mom would wonder why my loyalty was to Leo, not to Ben on this, and maybe I’d question that too. I know that it’s about my father, about my absolution of him, how far he had come since that day my mother’s ashes blew from her garden into the cloudless June sky, and that I wanted absolution for Leo too. I thought I was doing Leo a kindness, and maybe doing Ben one too: letting him off the hook from being the father figure after Paul died. But yes, it’s possible, maybe I wanted Leo to rehabilitate himself in the ways that my father did—not just get sober but genuinely reinvent himself—to prove to Ben that I was right about my dad, right about reinvention.
Ben clears his throat and clutches the podium next to the coffin at the cemetery on this dreary day in March.
He hasn’t shared what he plans to say. He hasn’t shared much since he ran up the aisle at the Academy Awards, out of the Dolby, just as the lights were dimming on my category. I reached for him as he bolted, but then production rushed a seat filler into place next to me, and I sat obediently (and expectantly), because how was I in any way to know of the news he was receiving on the line? He still wasn’t back by the time they called my name, and as I traveled up the steps to claim my gilded honor, part of me cursed him for missing it. And maybe omitting his name wasn’t as unintentional as I’ve told him it was, through all of my apologies. Maybe I thought I was settling a score. I don’t know. I wept up there, wept for my mom, wept for me, wept for my triumph and determination and for the fact that a girl from outside Canton can work hard enough, roll up her sleeves and dig deep enough, to make something from nothing.
I was whisked backstage for press immediately following—that was when they peppered me with questions about forgetting to thank him. I cried apologetic and honest tears, and I spoke of how grateful I was to him, how he saw the best of me when I wasn’t famous and has lived with the worst of me now that I was. All of it was true, even if there were things I omitted too.
We weren’t reunited until after the ceremony: he staggered toward me in the valet line, with a cigarette in hand. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Ben smoke, and I began to panic, thinking he’d heard my gaffe, thinking he was disgusted that I’d become that self-involved star who forgets to thank the people who matter most. His pallor was the exact opposite of my own glow, as if the universe has only so much goodwill to dole out, and sucked it all from him and dumped it out onto me. I started to apologize for my mistake, but he cocked his head and squinted, and it was clear he had no idea what I was talking about, the way that I’d publicly cut him down, if only by omission. Selfishly, I wondered how long I could play that out, how long it could be before he realized that I’d become the type of celebrity we used to mock.
And then he told me: overdose, coma, no brain activity, and the universe sucked everything from each of us, and there was nothing to celebrate at all.
At the funeral, Ben begins to speak now, so quietly that I shift forward, willing him to lean closer to the microphone too. As if he can intuit me the way that people say twins can, or spouses who are so connected that they can read the other’s thoughts from across the room, from across an ocean. But Ben does not lean forward. He pinches his nose and starts again, however, this time, a little louder, though no stronger in tenor than before.
“To know my brother was to love my brother,” he says, then stops. He winces, shakes his head. I know he is criticizing himself, telling himself that if there were ever a time for him to display his command of words, of language, it is now. Or at least I think he is doing this. He looks so different from the man I’ve grown older with that it’s hard to even say what is running through his mind. If I could reach him, speak to him, though, I’d tell him that his words could start to heal us, heal him; his words, like many of the brilliant ones he’s penned before this, can help someone see something in a whole new light. Not that Leo’s death should be seen in a whole new light. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But Ben will have to try to see it in a different light, or else the weight of his grief will bog him down forever.
“Come on, baby,” I whisper under my breath, and Joey looks at me and says, loudly, “What, Mama?”
Ben’s eyes move from the dirt at our feet toward me, then toward Joey, and something steadies in him. I think something steadies in him at least, but then his gaze is back at our feet, then toward the deep hole in which Leo will be lowered, where he’ll rest next to Paul, his father, forever.
“I should have saved him,” Ben says to the mourners. “I always worried that in the end, we could save only ourselves. But that’s not true. Because I could have saved him. I didn’t. And I don’t know how you ever let go of something like that.”
I want to race to Ben, I want to tell him that he’s not alone up there, that we can save each other, that this is the entire point of everything we’ve done, everything we’ll do. But I find that I’m unable to move, weighed down by what—my shame? my guilt? the crevasse that is growing between us?—and instead, I lower my head to my chest, and I weep.