29
BEN
JUNE 2002
Leo is his best self at his college graduation. Sober, shining, electric. After my dad, Leo’s had his good days, and his less good days, but he was a senior and allowed to get wasted and wake up with a wicked, gut-churning hangover, so I didn’t hover, and my mom was busy with her new charity, dedicated to raising funds for the families of 9/11 victims, so neither of us judged his bad days. Or, maybe more accurately, neither of us was present enough to judge them. You could see them in bruises under his eyes, in his half smile when recounting a memory of some stupid story or antic that he wasn’t sure he was getting quite right because he couldn’t remember it fully, or the way that he sometimes really needed a shower. But Leo was Leo, born with an impish streak, and he showed up at Sunday family dinners—a tradition Tatum had suggested in January when it was clear we all needed a bit of glue—cogent, present, hilarious. He could make my mom drop her head back and cackle, and we didn’t get that too often these days, so we let him go on being whoever he was.
Today, he is the brightest star in a sea of blue gowns washing over the Columbia campus. It’s an overcast June day, sticky with threatening clouds, which is just as well. Every crisp spring and summer day reminds me of that crisp day in September—the air smells the same, the sun shines the same, and I’m happy for the gray skies whenever they present themselves. My leg is jittery, more out of habit than because I feel on edge. It started after that day: a tic, I guess, like my body is out of my mind’s control. Tatum rests her palm on my thigh, as if she can absorb some of its fire.
“Well, this is a lot of pomp and circumstance,” she whispers into my ear.
“To be fair, no one really knew if he was going to graduate,” I reply, and she laughs, and my mom glances over and smiles like she is glad we are laughing but not quite sure of the joke. She looks that way often these days.
“No one made this much of a fuss for me last week,” Tatum says.
“I did,” I whisper back and kiss her forehead.
She nods because she knows I did, in my own way.
Tatum had her own graduation from Tisch just eight days ago. She hadn’t wanted a to-do, didn’t invite her dad, didn’t want Piper to spend the money on a plane ticket. I wondered if it wasn’t about her mom not being there to celebrate, but she said, “I have to get used to celebrating a lot of things without her, Ben. I just want to get this over with, move to LA, start our new lives.”
She wasn’t being a martyr or anything. She was just being practical, pragmatic. An oxymoron for an actress, but that was Tatum all the same. Able to compartmentalize her grief while also recognizing how much it shaped her, shifted her insides. So Leo and I sat through the graduation ceremony and whooped when her name was called, and afterward we went to the Corner Bistro and ate hamburgers, and then we boxed up her kitchenware and a few more items from her student apartment, and Leo jetted uptown. We were dusty and achy by the time we climbed into bed, and Tatum said: “This was perfect. I just want to get busy living life.” But she was jittery in the way that my leg was, figuratively staring at the horizon, awaiting whatever comes next, tucking our respective blights behind us.
Now Leo is called onstage to collect his diploma, and my mom weeps, though she would have wept with or without my dad here, so I ease my arm around her and squeeze her shoulder.
“He would have been so proud of Leo,” she says, wiping her nose with a tissue.
“Yes,” I say, because that’s all I can manage.
Leo has a job lined up after graduation as a trader at Merrill Lynch, exactly as my dad wanted. He starts in July, so he wants to come bum around California with us before his training, though I haven’t acquiesced. It will be chaos, for one thing: the move, the unpacking, the settling down. I don’t need my tornado of a brother there stirring up the winds. He tells me he’ll be on his best behavior, but I’d cleaned up enough of Leo’s messes over the years—the pot in high school, phone calls to me at college to ask how to cajole money out of my mom or appease my dad’s temper when Leo had been busted again for drinking at some kid’s house, the summer camp he got kicked out of after my parents tired of him starting figurative and literal fires at the house in Vermont—to know that while Leo might promise the moon, he’ll often never even glance up at the sky. And my dad wouldn’t want me to let him off the hook with all his shit, wouldn’t want him to come out to LA and sleep with beautiful women and drink too many vodka shots and act like he could be careless and not face consequences. I was never careless, because it was clear to me that carelessness was unacceptable. Leo nearly always was because he didn’t care how angry it made my dad.
Also, I’ll be busy, too busy, to entertain him. Actually to mind him, since Leo always manages to plant his nose in trouble. He’s grown now, and it’s not my job to keep him out of it, but I also don’t need him sleeping on my couch while stirring it up either. Romanticah propelled me into studio meetings, executive handshakes. I’ve already finished the working draft of my next script, All the Men, and it’s been green-lit in a hurry to capitalize on the hottest, latest thing bursting on the Hollywood scene. We shoot in September, which means there is a frantic rush for rewrites, tweaks, notes from the studio that aren’t smart or particularly savvy but which I have learned to say yes to because arguing only sucks up time and energy that I don’t have, between Tatum and Leo and my dad.
It’s exhilarating, this validation. It’s moving so furiously that I can barely process it. And all the trappings of Hollywood’s approval are not unwelcome. My father had long told me that being the best was the only goal to reach for, and now that I’m here, anointed and on top, I can understand exactly what he meant, why he pushed me. The success feels addictive, like a high of a drug I’ve never taken, so I work harder, longer, more, chasing it even as it chases me.
Also, we are getting married. There is a wedding to plan.
I explain all of this to Tatum, that Leo in California will be one more thing I’ll have to monitor, and I simply can’t. My insides are dry and barren and a bit of a wasteland.
“I don’t mind,” she says. “He can keep me company.”
“I don’t think you get it—Leo is a handful.”
“He’s not a toddler,” she laughs.
“Worse. He’s an adult with toddler instincts.”
“Like he’s not potty-trained?”
“Like, hide the matches because he might burn the house down,” I say. “Besides, you’ll be busy on your own, setting the town on fire.”
“True,” she says. “True. I guess we’ll just have to wear fire-retardant clothes at all times.”
Today Leo wants to walk home from Columbia, though it’s at least two and a half miles to my mom’s, and the clouds are drizzling thick, pregnant drops. A plane roars over us, too close, and I jolt, and he does too, but then it coasts past, and we shake our heads and keep going.
“You do that too,” he says. “I don’t know how to get used to it.”
“I think with time.”
“I hate this city,” he says.
“Leo . . .” We’ve had this discussion a million times. He has to work, he has a job, he needs to show up and be accountable. College is over; it’s time to embrace real life.
“I know,” he says, batting a hand. “Don’t start in with me. I know, OK? I can’t quit on Merrill before I’ve even started. I get it. I’m a big kid now, time to cut the purse chains.”
We amble in silence for a while after that, then stop in a bar, Westside Tavern, on Amsterdam Avenue.
Leo primarily wants to get drunk, and that sounds like as good a plan as any.
The place is mostly empty. A European soccer game is muted on the TV above the bar, and we pull up stools, then I order two beers, then Leo says: “Also, four shots of tequila.”
“Leo, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“And your point is?”
I don’t really have a point, so I do both shots and chase it with the beer.
“Maybe I’ll just stay in California,” he says, as he motions to the bartender for two more. I wave to the bartender to stop, to please cut me off, but he shrugs and slides the shot glasses our way. “I can still be a grown-up in California.” But he wants to surf in the mornings and sleep on our couch in the afternoons. He explains this when he’s actually being honest, which we are about two shots away from.
“Don’t you have a graduation party later?” I shift the subject.
“Yeah, and?”
“You’re going to show up wasted?”
“Yeah, and?” He laughs. “God, when did you become Dad?”
He stops laughing abruptly, and both of us reach for the shots, since the alternative is weeping or picking a fight or pounding our fists into the wall, which feels like it would help with the rage, but mostly also seems like it would just fill one form of pain with another. Drinking is the right solution.
“You can’t skip out on your job, Leo,” I say, as the tequila burns the back of my throat, the pulp of the lime fleshy on my tongue.
“Why not? Who gives a fuck?”
“I guess I do?” I say it as a question because it is, and also because I’m drunk, but mostly because I’ve never had to care one way or the other about my brother’s irresponsibility. But now, with my dad gone, it occurs to me that I do.
“Ugh,” he says. “So you’re the new Leo police.”
“Come on, Dad never busted your ass the way he busted mine.”
He snorts. “You were the prodigal son, give me a break. Bust your ass! Like he ever did that a day in your life.”
I pick up the rind of the lime and chew on it. I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, and I’m newly aware that I’m as hungry as I am inebriated.
“It’s funny,” I say. “I think we both thought that. I always thought the same about you. That he was easier on you because you didn’t give a shit.”
Leo gulps in too much air.
“I fucking miss him.” He drops his forehead to the bar, and his shoulders start shaking, and it takes my woozy mind a moment to catch up and realize that he is crying. No no, let’s go punch a wall. Let’s not feel this pain as we need to feel it. It’s too acute. It will gut us, spill too much blood for us to recover. My dried-up insides can’t bleed another ounce.
I put a hand on his back until his jagged breathing becomes more steady, and then he wipes his nose on the sleeve of his gown, which is exactly what he’d do when he was little and my parents would make me babysit for him, and we’d watch TV while he wiped boogers on himself. Not so much has changed in the span of a decade or so, I realize. Leo still needs someone to look out for him: rub his back, wipe his nose.
I ask for the check and resolve right then that it will be me.