4
TATUM
DECEMBER 2000
Ben sneaks a small bottle of vodka from the inner pocket of his down coat, which is too puffy and threatens to swallow his chin.
“You saved my life; you know that, right?” He leans in close, shouting in my ear.
“You barely know me,” I shout back. “And you’re already giving me credit for saving your life?”
He grins and shakes his head. Around us, the crowds’ cheers rise in swells that envelop us and carry us up with them.
“It’s a small miracle you got me here on New Year’s Eve,” he yells. “This is a native New Yorker’s worst nightmare.”
“Well, you said you’d do anything I wanted in return for doing your film for free.” I gaze up toward the flashing billboards, the neon lights. “This is what I wanted.”
Also: him, this is what I wanted to do with him. Times Square at midnight. With a boy I might want to kiss for the rest of the year by my side. I didn’t really think he’d come; I didn’t really think I’d ask. But when I’d called Piper, my little sister, who was still back in Ohio and who would be spending her New Year’s Eve in Bud Jones’s basement—the same Bud Jones who got his nickname from the amount of pot he smoked in high school and who threw the same depressing New Year’s Eve party, with a flat keg and blinking multicolored lights looped in the shape of breasts—I realized I had to: I had to dance in Times Square at midnight; I had to celebrate that I was no longer relegated to Bud Jones’s metaphorical basement. I had to celebrate how far I’d come.
Ben had called a few weeks ago. We hadn’t really spoken since that night at the bar. Sometimes I’d see him around the Village and wave, a little stutter of the hand, but we always kept walking with a bob of our chins. But then Daisy got the chicken pox, and he needed an actress for his graduate film, and that was how he ended up being indebted to me and by my side in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Also: I really wanted to kiss him.
He was single now. Daisy told me as much when I stopped over at her place with an oatmeal bath from Duane Reade and some trashy magazines. I’d gotten the chicken pox when I was six, when the entire first grade went down for the count over a particularly brutal Ohio winter. My mom let me sit in front of the TV all day, and then three days later Piper was covered in spots and joined me, and I was mostly miserable but also happy that my mom had canceled her shifts at the hospital and snuggled next to us while we watched Kids Incorporated or she tried to explain the drama on Days of Our Lives.
“He dumped his girlfriend,” Daisy said, picking at a particularly gruesome blister on her left forearm. “A while ago now. So, totally single. Totally eligible.”
“What happened?”
“Something about how she applied to residencies only outside of New York. He broke it off before she moved out of the state and left him behind. He got drunk one night and rambled on about loyalty and how it was all he really wanted.”
“Ouch,” I said, because it wasn’t as if I couldn’t relate. I may have been the one to move out of state, but mostly it was because I was fleeing the life I wanted to leave behind. Leave behind the shame of Aaron Johnson, the football player I lost my virginity to in high school, who I believed had loved me, but who ditched me a month later for Julie Seymour, a girl on the field hockey team, and utterly detonated my teenage confidence by refusing to return my calls, refusing to acknowledge me in the hallway or after school when he picked up an item at the pharmacy where I worked (under horrifying lighting and wearing a poop-colored apron); or with others like Brandon and Mark and Eddie in college, all of whom managed to strip me—piece by piece, slowly enough that the damage was almost undetectable—of whatever self-confidence with boys I had left after Aaron and all the chaos of my home life. All of whom somehow convinced me that the current version of myself wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. That maybe if I were just a bit smarter or just a bit skinnier or just a bit prettier, they wouldn’t have grown bored or listless or looked elsewhere.
“He’s a good guy,” Daisy said, wincing, scratching with more fervor.
“You shouldn’t be doing that; it leaves scars.”
“We’re actors,” she replied. “Scars are what make us interesting.”
Tonight, Ben’s younger brother, Leo, elbows his way through the New Year’s Eve swarm and lands next to us, dragging a girl I don’t know but have been told is named Caroline, who is a freshman at Barnard; Leo’s a sophomore at Columbia. (“My parents’ second wind,” Ben said. “The baby of the family in every way.”) Tonight Leo is just the right amount of tipsy, and it’s impossible not to giggle when he stumbles and flattens himself against Ben to stop himself from falling, and then kisses his cheeks when he is steady.
“My big brother.” He grins. “You’re always looking out for me. Get him to tell you sometime about how he took the blame for my stash of pot freshman year in high school.”
Ben shakes his head. “Mom and Dad threatened to stop my tuition payments for college.”
Leo laughs. “Dad is always busting our balls.”
“Just trying to bring out our potential,” Ben says, and though I don’t know him well, I can see he’s deflecting. “And mostly, he’s busting mine.”
“Well, that’s what makes you the best big brother in the world,” Leo crows. He looks toward me. “I assume you are the lovely lady who somehow got my uptight brother into Times Square right now?”
“Tatum,” I say, extending a gloved hand, which he ignores as he pulls me into a hug as if I’m family.
“This is the sickest thing I have ever done.”
Ben laughs. “And that’s a high threshold.”
“No, dude, seriously, don’t be a downer. We’re gonna remember this forever. Times Square in New York!” He cups his gloves around his mouth and tilts his head toward the night sky. “Hello, 2001! Let’s see what you got!”
Caroline passes around an open bottle of champagne concealed in a paper bag, and we all drink generously, the bubbly matching our effervescent spirits, the alcohol warming us in the frigid Manhattan air.
The wind kicks up, and the snow starts to fall: thick, pregnant flakes that feel like they’ll stick almost immediately. Leo and Caroline huddle together, him wrapping his scarf around her and tugging her closer as if their lips are magnetic, each unable to be without the other. In seconds, Ben’s wavy dark hair is frosted in white, and he reaches out and brushes a few errant flakes off my eyelashes. There must be ten thousand people in Times Square, and I peer up at the Jumbotron, wondering where we are in the sea of faces and bodies that are mashed together, a pulsing wave ready to flush out the previous year, harken in a new one.
Ben and I gape at Leo and Caroline for a beat, self-conscious, awkward in that new way when you’re waiting for the other one to kiss you, when you’re too new to each other, too unsure to do anything more than bite your lip or stare at your shoes.
“Leo’s always been like this,” he says. “All the girls in my grade thought he was the cutest. Imagine losing girls to your younger brother. And he was, like, eleven!”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m too nice a guy.” He shakes his head. “That was never Leo’s problem.”
“Ah, the curse of the nice guy.” I don’t mention that Daisy told me she thought that breaking up with the medical school girlfriend gutted him through the summer, that Daisy told him to go out and screw a few randoms, but he chuckled and said that wasn’t his style. And she had said: “Not a guy’s style? Casual sex is every guy’s style!” Which had made him blush a little deeper, laugh a little harder.
“Well,” I say now, “I don’t think you’re that nice. I mean, you were a bit of a tyrant on the shoot.”
“I was the director; that’s my job. I was trying to make the day, get the light. Also, since we’re here and I’m being honest, I can admit to asking for an extra take or two because I thought you were so spectacular.”
Now it’s my turn to deflect, because I’ve never been great at accepting compliments unless I’m playing a part. “Well, I hope you write that into your Oscar speech. ‘I apologize to Tatum Connelly for being a tyrant. And for making her do extra takes just for the hell of it. It was part of my job!’”
I can see his eyes wrinkle into a grin underneath his muffler. “It was just some stupid short to fulfill my thesis. Romanticah isn’t winning any Oscars.”
“Well, not with that attitude it’s not.”
“All I want is some funding, maybe expand it into a feature, maybe get an agent with it. Oscars aren’t exactly on my radar.”
“I thought you told me once that you promised your dad an Oscar—that was part of the deal.”
He shrugs his puffy shoulders. “Did you not hear what Leo just said about my dad? Kind of impossible standards.”
“Well my mom always says, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it,’” I say. “So why not dream it?”
I don’t add: She’s sick again. She called a few days ago and broke the news because she didn’t want to tell me when I was home for Christmas, but she told me not to worry, that it doesn’t look so bad, that they caught it again before it spread too far. She hadn’t betrayed a hint of it for the three days I’d been back; that was all the vacation time I could afford when I could pick up overtime work at the bar and jump-start my bank account for the new year. She looked tired, sure, but she almost always looked tired from her shifts at the hospital, and on Christmas Eve, she and Piper and I curled up on the couch, like we did when Piper and I were little, and watched It’s a Wonderful Life.
And it never once occurred to me that the insidious seeds of cancer had returned.
Tonight, on the last night of the year in the span of the millennium, I try to forget that my mom is sick again, that after her call I thought the walls of my tiny student apartment might crater on top of me. But I am an actress: I can pretend to do anything, be anyone. So I compartmentalize my fear and reach for Ben’s hand. I will tell him tomorrow because I know on instinct that I can tell him, and he will find a way to make it a little better. For now, my glove finds his, and it feels right, it feels sturdy, like I’m holding on to something grounding.
He says: “You’ve always wanted to do this?”
“Times Square? Oh, my gosh, I grew up watching it with my sister every year!”
“No.” He laughs. “Acting. Movies, theater, all of that.”
“Oh, it’s the only thing I really ever felt like I was good at.”
“Besides bartending.”
“Besides that, yes, of course.”
“Because you’re terrible at making bets.”
“Ugh.” I groan loudly enough to be heard over Caroline and Leo, who are cheering at Boyz II Men, who have just wrapped their set, beamed in on the large screens from Hollywood. “I’m sorry, but that was fixed! Stupid Daisy.”
He squeezes my hand through our gloves, and I squeeze back, like we have a secret code, like there is an electric pulse running through him into me and back again.
And now there are only a few minutes until midnight, and the snow is both furious and beautiful, eye-opening and blinding, and we have given in to the excitement of the other thousands of people here, of Dick Clark’s voice over the enormous speakers that surround the block, of the twinkling ball that’s projected across the screens a hundred feet above us.
“I’m glad you made me come here,” he says, his breath billowing in a plume of white steam. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’d never have done this without you.”
“I’m glad that Daisy got the chicken pox,” I reply, and his blue eyes widen then crease into happiness.
“I’m glad that I didn’t give you my number last year,” he says. “My heart couldn’t have taken it at the time.”
“I’m glad that I didn’t ransack your heart, and so you’re not dead and that dumb ex-girlfriend didn’t have to revive you with her fancy medical knowledge, and then, either way—dead or alive—you wouldn’t be here with me now.”
He nods. “I’m glad that I’m here with you now.” He peers toward the sky. “God, it’s like I’m seeing this city for the very first time.” He finds my eyes again: “It’s like I’m seeing a lot of things for the very first time.”
The crowd has started cheering, counting down, jumping and throbbing and clamoring for midnight, the start of something new, the promise of beginnings.
“Me too,” I say.
“I see you,” he says.
“I see you too,” I say, and I do, and he does, and it’s as if he has a microscope inside of me.
And then we are at three, and then we are at two, and then we are at one, and he is kissing me or maybe I am kissing him, but it doesn’t matter because the old year is behind us and a new one lies in wait, and I don’t worry about my mom and I don’t worry about my next part or my next paycheck or my mom’s next scan. Thousands of pieces of sparkling confetti rain down, mixing with the snow, and I feel like I’m caught in time, caught in a perfect moment inside a snow globe that maybe I’d beg my mom for at a gas station, and I can’t find my breath, and my knees feel a little wobbly, and I try to remind myself to remember this moment, to hold on to it forever, to seal it up like we really are in that snow globe and to never let anything shatter the bubble that envelops us, that protects us from everything else around us in the outside world.