7
BEN
APRIL 2013
I’m dreaming again, as I do so often now, have for the past year since everything turned bleak.
This time I know I am dreaming and yet I can’t pull myself out of it. This time, as it has been recently, it’s Leo. Always Leo, though it used to be my dad. Now it’s a distorted version of something out of real life: that night on April Fool’s Day when he ran away in seventh grade, when I was a senior in high school. He was pissed at my dad for something—in real life, it was that my dad threatened to pull him from the football team because his grades were so mediocre (for my dad, Cs and Bs), but in the dream, it’s because my father drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off East Hampton Beach, and Leo was there, watching, unable to save him.
So Leo ran, and unlike how it really happened—where we thought it was a prank until one a.m. rolled around and my mom started crying and my dad started cursing, and I finally found him at his friend Nate’s apartment, smoking cigarettes and skimming bourbon—in the dream I’m unable to trace him. I run down the emptied, littered streets of Manhattan, at night, at day, at dawn, at sunset, and Leo is simply gone. I shout down alleys; I scream around corners; and it starts raining, then hailing, and I am stuck in the middle of Times Square, unable to find any trace of my brother at all.
I startle awake, blinking too quickly, discombobulated in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room.
A hand is laid across my chest, and a voice says: “I’m here,” and my brain loops for a moment until I realize it’s Amanda, not Tatum, and that we have spent the night at a room at the Standard after I’d e-mailed her, claiming we needed to end things, but agreeing to drinks all the same. One drink led to two drinks and then to a full bottle, and soon enough we were checking into a room, peeling our clothes off, doing the things to each other that I swore I would no longer do. My guilt was too heavy; the fear of being caught was consuming me—a tabloid had a small headline about Tatum’s “unhappy marriage” and my “wandering eye” last week. Tatum never paid that stuff any mind, barring the scathing rumors after the Oscars, which I couldn’t even begin to contemplate because of Leo. In another universe, another time, maybe it would have cut more deeply, but it was all I could do to breathe back then, much less contemplate what her behavior represented. It represented something, I knew, though. That much wasn’t lost on me, even in my haze of grief and confusion. And maybe, yes, it served as a subconscious excuse for what I did next, with Amanda, with my self-destruction. I don’t know.
But the headline about me, my affair, that one permeated. I’d been in the checkout line buying cereal at Gelson’s and nearly had a panic attack worrying whether I’d closed out of my e-mail on my laptop, and if Tatum, who was sleeping in, would rise and see my glaring infidelity in my e-mails to Amanda over her breakfast of a hard-boiled egg and cappuccino.
I hadn’t even meant for it to get this far, to go on for so long, but now we were eleven months, almost a year, deep. When I called her after the hospital, after Joey’s broken arm, I’d only meant, theoretically, to meet for a catch-up coffee. But coffee led to drinks and drinks sometimes led to dinner. Dinner led to e-mails and texts and late-night phone calls when Joey was asleep. Tatum was working nights: she’d started (theoretically) getting choosier about the projects that wreaked havoc on our life. But America, a gritty drama about the LA riots and the ensuing fallout (the script was spectacular—Spencer, my agent, tried to get my name in for a polish, but this was before Tatum signed on, and it went to Landon Marks, Hollywood’s new It boy, who got all the good polishes right now), kept us on opposite schedules. She’d come home in time to sit with Joey at breakfast, then collapse for the day before rising to sit with him again for an early dinner before her driver arrived for another day (and night) when we merely passed each other by. Coffee and dinners (and then much more) with Amanda really weren’t all that hard to pull off, really weren’t particularly sneaky, because Tatum wasn’t logistically present for me to have to even sneak around.
“I’m here,” Amanda says again, rustling the Standard bedding.
I inhale, and my undershirt, sticky with sweat, rises against her palm.
At home, when I burst from my nightmares, the bed is most often empty. In fact, just last night Tatum had taken Joey to Legoland as part of a thank-you to the America cast and crew: it had been a long, grueling shoot; she wanted to show her appreciation. I didn’t want to go anyway, but she didn’t offer. It was exclusively for the staff, the teamsters, the actors, who deserved some R and R with their kids, she’d said.
So instead I e-mailed Amanda to ostensibly break up—and then because she was there and loyal and sexy as fuck and made me feel valued, we ended up in six-hundred-thread-count sheets in a room at the Standard. I don’t love her. She isn’t my wife. But when our legs are intertwined at the bottom of the bed, and her hand is across my chest, and I am not alone as I so often am now, and Amanda needs me in ways that Tatum used to but no longer does, I tell myself that I just might. Maybe I love her? Maybe I could?
Being valued, being needed, being seen is an easy thing to underestimate. Like air. Like you don’t realize that it’s necessary to sustain you until it’s suddenly gone.
Amanda feels like air. Not love. But somehow necessary all the same. Tatum used to say, and I used to believe, that I was the only one who could see her, and I could. I did. I felt the same: she inspired my directorial debut with Romanticah, she inspired everything in those early years. Now, who knows what we see? It’s happened so gradually that I can’t even say when things got so blurry: maybe as she found others who saw her as I did when it used to be only me; maybe as I chased success instead of chasing happiness. I don’t know. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be screwing my ex-girlfriend who plugs the hole in my heart but probably doesn’t fill it.
“You OK?” Amanda says, her wide green eyes finding mine.
“Yes. No.” I roll over, stare at the ceiling, then push myself up to my elbows. “I should go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Not because of you.” Yes, because of you! my conscience corrects, but I lean over and peck her nose all the same, move down to graze her lips. “I want to work today. The house is quiet. I don’t have to be in the writers’ room. It’s Eric’s day there.”
“I saw last week’s episode,” she says. “I think it was my favorite!”
I’m not working on Code Emergency today, but I don’t tell her that. I just want to enjoy her adoration. Tatum tries to catch the show from time to time, and God, it’s not a requirement to watch a network hospital drama that isn’t even all that great, but it would be nice. It would be nice every once in a while to hear her say: “Last night’s episode was my favorite.”
I stare at Amanda for a beat, then another. I consider saying something cheesy like: What have I done to deserve you? or Where have you been all my life? But at the heart of it, neither of those things is true or worth asking. I’m cheating on my beloved wife, so I deserve nothing good, and Amanda hasn’t been by my side all my life because our timing wasn’t compatible in the way that you need it to be when you’re looking for your soul mate. A few weeks ago, in another hotel room, in another hotel bed, I’d asked Amanda once why she chose a residency program over me back in 2000, back when I thought she’d be mine forever. She considered it for a long time, then said:
“I don’t think I did it on purpose.”
“But you had to know that it looked that way, felt that way to me.”
She nodded. “I suppose, deep down, I wanted someone . . . stronger.” She winced. “That sounds terrible. I don’t know what the word is. I guess you were too nice.”
I laughed at the irony. That I was now the least nice guy you could think of, screwing another woman instead of his wife, screwing another woman who he is pretending might be his soul mate, even though he doesn’t believe in soul mates. I don’t believe in that romantic crap that you pay twelve bucks to see on date night. Life is fucking hard, and life is fucking brutal—and maybe the most we can ask for is someone to get through it with us.
So for now, rather than soul mate, I accept her platitudes and ego stoking, and I let myself wonder about all of the what-ifs—what if I hadn’t dumped her when she moved to Palo Alto; what if I’d stayed on the phone with her on New Year’s Eve rather than run off to meet Tatum; what if my career had exploded and Tatum’s hadn’t . . . would I be happier, would I be more faithful? I do this partially because, at the heart of it, I miss my wife and partially because I’m angry with Tatum too. Angry that Amanda was the one who suggested I mend fences with Eric, whom last year I’d told to go fuck himself for insisting that I spend another year pounding out the drivel of a network hospital show, which felt so beneath me.
“Dude, don’t do this,” he’d said. “We’ve been best friends since freshman year. Don’t detonate like this.”
“College was a long time ago,” I’d replied. If you lit a match near my mouth, my liquored breath would have caught fire. “Fuck this shit. I hate this show.”
“I think you mean that you hate that Leo’s gone.” He’d said it kindly, but it was a bruise that shouldn’t have been pressed.
“Fuck you, Eric, you don’t know shit about me, about what I want, about what I hate.” We’d met at a whiskey bar downtown, so I stumbled out to the valet, who refused to hand me my keys and instead stuffed me into a cab, where I nearly blew the contents of my stomach before making it home.
Eric and I didn’t speak for seven months after that. But he’d accepted my recent apologies in the way that a best friend does when he knows you were self-destructing and now you’re trying to piece together the wreckage. After Eric, I’d asked Spencer to coffee, and told him, with Amanda’s praise still massaging my ego, that I was ready to work. Tatum had the luxury of soul nurturing; I just needed to work. Amanda kept saying that to me: “You need something that’s your own, not hers.”
Spencer nodded, called the network, and just like that I was back on Code Emergency, like the blight of the last seven months hadn’t happened. Spencer made me pay the coffee bill, though, like a warning shot for being such an asshole.
“So what are you running off to work on in your quiet house?” Amanda asks while I dress. She stretches in bed, the duvet resting atop her taut stomach, her breasts exposed and calling me back beside her.
“Reagan.”
“Still? I thought you’d put that aside.”
“It’s going to be my one great thing, the script, the film, that will be my legacy or at least my new calling card.” I heard Tatum’s voice, not mine.
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?” My voice is immediately too brittle.
“Don’t be irritated with me,” she says. “I’m not her.”
“Habit,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
It is. Too often now, Tatum and I argue over misunderstandings and nuance: when she says she’s being supportive of Code Emergency, and I take it as patronizing; when I tell her that I’m trying to trust Walter, despite his history of relapses and poor judgment, and she accuses me of being disingenuous.
“I only meant hmmm because I thought that Reagan was your dad’s thing. God, I remember that his office or . . . library? Is that what you guys called his room?”
I nod. “His library. All alphabetized by author and then title. Leo once got so mad at him that he pulled every single book down into a huge heap in the middle of the rug.” I laugh. “I think he blamed it on our dog, Bitsy.”
Amanda smiles but I’m surprised that she doesn’t laugh in the way that Tatum would at the memory of Leo and his impishness. Tatum would howl at the notion that my dad actually pretended to believe it was Bitsy, a thirty-pound poodle, his way of acknowledging that he could be a bit of a hard-ass on Leo, on me too. He was tough, my father, but he was also soft in unexpected ways, unexpected moments.
“Well, I remember that your dad had, like, two shelves of books on Reagan, biographies, presidential, historical stuff . . . I don’t know.” She cocks her head. “Maybe Reagan is his thing. Maybe it doesn’t have to be yours?”
I inhale sharply when she says this: that it is so obvious, this script, this thing I’ve been chasing for half, no, more of my career. That it was nothing other than textbook psychology, some kid who was running around trying to impress his dad, whom he could no longer impress. I blink too quickly, wondering if I’m about to have some sort of emotional collapse right here in a Standard luxury room with a view of the pool.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to upset you.” She rises, naked, and moves to hug me.
“No, no.” I wipe my cheeks. “You’re right. I mean, you’re probably right. I don’t know how I didn’t see this.” I unwrap her arms from my neck, push her away too quickly, find that I can’t meet her eyes.
“Ben.”
“I should go, really. If it’s not going to be Reagan, it should be something else. I have a quiet day. I shouldn’t waste it.”
“I wasn’t being critical.”
“I know.” I exhale. “I know.” I kiss her. “But Tatum will be home soon. I need to be there.”
“Oh,” she says flatly, and tries to wiggle her hands down my pants. “But what if you weren’t?”
“I’ll call you later,” I say, stepping back and out the door.
I don’t know if I will—call her—I keep meaning to end it, after all—but I promise that I will anyway.
Later, when Joey is asleep by six o’clock because they went to bed at midnight down at Legoland, and Tatum is reading a script on the couch, and I’m scrolling through my Twitter feed (and ostensibly rubbing her feet, but she keeps wiggling her toes to remind me to keep going), I say:
“Do you think I should keep trying on the Reagan script?”
It’s a test, I know. It’s actually more of a trap.
She rests the script in her lap, wrinkles her brow. “What brings this on?”
“I’m just thinking that maybe if it hasn’t come together after all these years, maybe I should give it a rest.”
She narrows her eyes, assesses, really takes me in. “I think you underestimate yourself.”
I snort. “Well, then this town is right there with me.”
“Ben . . .” It comes out as more of a sigh.
“Why didn’t you tell me after so many years that this was really my dad’s thing? That it was all some Freudian shit that I was chasing, like some textbook Psych 101 bullshit, and that no matter how good the script was, it wouldn’t be good enough?”
She yanks her head back. “I . . . I never said that because I never saw it that way.”
“Give me a break, Tatum.”
“And even if I had, would you have listened to me? Maybe a while ago, but now? You would have just been pissed, told me I didn’t believe in you enough, that I was underestimating you.”
I start to say something snide, but stop myself. She’s right, of course. I’d have blamed her for not being supportive enough.
I remove her feet from my lap, rise, and pad to the kitchen before she can read my body language, which is tense, taut, ready for a fight.
“Do I think you should write Reagan, even if, yeah, maybe it was at first something you wanted to do for your dad?” she calls to me.
I open the fridge door, find nothing of interest, close it too loudly. I turn and find her standing right behind me.
“Jesus!”
She rests her script and her bright pink highlighter atop the counter.
“I have a headache. I’m wiped from Legoland, and I don’t want to turn this into something it’s not.”
“Like what?”
“Like a fight, because that’s usually where this type of thing goes.”
I try to relax my hunched shoulders. I don’t want to fight either, and yet I’m on my heels, defensive.
Tatum sighs, rubs her eyes. Then: “But you asked me: do I think you should quit, and you already know my answer.”
“You think I shouldn’t quit,” I say, a little too flatly. “I already know that the great Tatum Connelly never quits anything.”
She stares at me in a way that makes me feel both transparent and invisible. Like she used to back in the early days; like I used to gaze at her too. Now, rather than making me feel supported, I feel exposed.
“I’m not here to tell you what to do. I just thought I was here to stand beside you. So quit. And see if that makes you happy.”