8
TATUM
FEBRUARY 2002
The snow is piling up in Park City, but Ben and I are oblivious. I push him to the ground in the heap outside our hotel and fall on top of him.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I say, before I press my lips to his.
He laughs so hard he can’t keep kissing me, so I roll to his side, sinking into the eight inches of powder that fell overnight, and flap my arms and legs to create an angel. When he stops laughing, we each tilt our heads together and stare up at the gray sky, the flakes falling on top of our batting eyelashes.
It’s been months since either of us has been able to entirely forget everything else: the horrors of New York on September 11; the grief we wear like our own shadows. I’m able to lose myself in my performances: since my mom died, my work has never been stronger. One professor pulled me aside just before Christmas and told me he’d be happy to recommend me personally to the best agency in the city if I pursue theater. “I don’t know what happened between last year and this one, but you are truly extraordinary,” he said, examining me like he wondered if I’d been possessed by someone else. “Off the record, you are the shining star of this year’s class.” I blushed because I still wasn’t great at taking compliments, not as me, not Tatum the Great, and then thanked him and told him I’d take him up on that come graduation in June. I didn’t say, My mom died, and that shifted something in me, unmoored new depths, allowed me to tap into new pain and emotion that might make me a wonderful actress but made me an open sore of a person.
Ben had his own grief, of course. With his dad. He focused on Romanticah, channeled his anguish into turning his once-small short film into the best little indie movie that he could, which is why we’re in Sundance, why we’re finally buoyant with joy, swooshing our limbs into snow angels as if our respective worlds hadn’t fallen apart this past year. Sometimes I think that our grief bound us together tighter than if we hadn’t faced loss within months of one another. Like he could know my insides how I knew his insides, and without that, maybe we’d have stumbled when we had stupid fights (usually when he was tired or I was feeling ungenerous). Or when I had days when I went to call my mom and wound up purging my guts over a toilet. Or he had moments when he disappeared so far into himself that he couldn’t hear me, see me, listen to me, even if I was right there by his side on the couch: just staring at his hands without blinking, or staring at the ceiling without shifting his gaze, or grunting uh-huh when I know that he’s not really listening to my chatter. We mourned differently: I wore it externally, grieved openly, then through my acting. He pushed deeper into himself, like a black hole swirled inside his guts.
But still, we were mourning together, and that was something. It was something we shared, something we saw in each other, like my scars were his and his were mine. Plenty of nights we found ourselves curled in bed, our heads intuitively touching, listening to the noise from the city and the sound of our breath and nothing else. We knew each other, we had each other, we saw each other, as if together we were whole, even if we weren’t, of course.
He’d moved out of his parents’ place in December. Well, his mom’s place now. She insisted. He felt more than ever that he should stay, but instead Helen, his mom, nearly shoved him out the door, ensuring that he didn’t have to take care of her forever. And besides, Leo was more shell-shocked than even Ben and was spending more nights at home with Helen, nursing a beer (or three) because he’d just turned twenty-one in November and could do that sort of thing legally now. Even if he hadn’t been legal, at this point no one was going to stop him.
So Ben leased a one-bedroom in the Village with a big window overlooking the treetops of Horatio Street, and most nights we ordered in Chinese food or heated up macaroni and cheese, and I rehearsed lines for whatever scene I had due or hovered over his shoulder while he pieced together a rough cut of Romanticah. We talked about my mom; we talked about his dad. We knew neither of us would ever be the same, and that was OK. We learned that grief could be like glue, sticking us together, like veterans of war who understood only each other. Sometimes I’d read my scenes and linger in the accent, the mood of the character, long after we finished. And Ben would say some version of: “Tate, I don’t want anyone other than you,” and I’d rejigger my brain to bring me back to him. Without the pretense, without the act. Even though, way back at the bar—Dive Inn—that was exactly what I showed him. Tatum the actress. Now, he just wants me.
Today, in Park City, I roll toward him in the crevasse in the snow my body has made. His cell phone had rung thirty minutes ago. Because Ben didn’t yet have an agent, one of the chairmen of the festival had called: Ben had won Best Newcomer at Sundance. It was beyond either of our wildest expectations.
“You are going to be the next big thing,” I say, reaching a mittened hand over to clasp his gloved one, like I had when the snow started coming down on New Year’s Eve a year and a few months ago, when we first realized that maybe this could be something real. “Award-winning filmmaker Ben Livingston. God, that sounds amazing.” The swell of pride courses through me, as if his success is mine and mine is his, and together we’re a double-helix, DNA.
His wind-chapped cheeks burn even redder.
“I feel like this was a mistake, like they’re going to retract it.”
“Nope.” I squeeze his hand. “Not a mistake, no retraction. You gotta own this, right? How long have I been saying that?”
“Since we first met,” he says, then inches forward to kiss my nose. “Since the very first day we met.”
He kisses my nose again, and we right ourselves, sitting anchored in the snowdrift, absorbing how everything is about to change.
“I wish he were here,” Ben says. His dad.
“I know,” I reply.
“I think he’d be proud of me,” he says, though it’s a bit of a question too.
“I’m certain he would be.”
He lets out his breath and mutters: “Fuck.”
“Fuck what?”
“Fuck everything,” he says, though there is so much to celebrate. “Fuck that he’s not here; fuck that I want him to see my success; fuck that I care about his approval when now, I can’t have it anyway.”
“He would have been proud, Ben. He would have.”
He shrugs, blinks quickly.
“Don’t be angry today, B. Not when today is a celebration.” I’ve seen this recently: the start of his dark spiral. He tries to keep me out of it, steer me away from his moodiness, but I am trained—literally trained at Tisch—to read people, to know them. I have my own dark spirals, of course—my mom’s childhood nickname for me, “Deflatum Tatum,” granted because she claimed she could see the air sucked out of me along with my mood, nipping on all parts of me.
Today he seems to hear me, which he doesn’t always.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just a lot.”
“I know,” I say, because I do. “Hey, I got you.”
He blinks faster, then stares up at the sky and yells: “FUUUUUUUCK!” Then shakes his head and manages a smile.
I brush the snow off my pants, rise, and stretch out my hand, pulling him up, though he is weightier than I. But I am stronger in some ways, the ways that have proven important recently. We stumble back to the ski condo that his mom has paid for, because Ben’s day job as a literary agent’s assistant pays only enough to cover his rent, and my job at the bar pays even less. We peel our damp, freezing clothes off each other and step into the steaming shower until we are skin to skin with nothing in between. Afterward, Ben puts on a tie, and I slide into my customary black tight jeans and black fitted top, and he tells me that he couldn’t have done this without me.
“Really,” he says. “This film, this award, it’s because of you.”
“I can’t take all the credit.” I bat my eyelashes demurely.
He laughs. “Now, Tatum Connelly, don’t you go and deflect when someone gives you praise.”
I puff up my chest and slip into my role, the spitfire actress, the confident companion, and take a bow. “You’re right. I’d like to thank the Academy, I’d like to thank my director Ben, but mostly, I’d like to thank myself because I’m really such a fucking genius.”
He laughs harder, and so do I, both of us relieved to find a sliver of normalcy in a world that feels so upended.
Then quieter, more shyly, I say: “Don’t forget to thank me up there. Please?” I elbow him, hoping I can play it off as a joke, that I’m not needy, that I don’t really care. Though I do.
We’d watched the Oscars together last weekend and shrieked (in horror) when Suzanna Memphis (her real name) forgot to thank her husband. We then spent the next thirty minutes wondering if they were about to split, if the rumors were true.
It wasn’t that it really mattered if Ben thanked me publicly, but what if it did? What if you had to proclaim your love aloud, onstage, to make it real?
“You’ll be the first name I say.” Ben kisses my neck, seeing through me.
When we get to the theater on Main Street, Ben is swarmed with executives and agents and important people who want to sign him as a client, who want to set up meetings in Los Angeles and New York about future projects. He grips my hand and holds on tight, but eventually, like we’re caught in the undertow of the ocean, he’s tugged away from me, even when we try our best to hold on.
I’ll find you, he mouths over his shoulder as he goes.
I nod and think: I hope so. Please don’t forget me.
The lights flicker at the awards ceremony, so I find a seat in the middle of the theater with a pulse of anxiety coursing through me, that minutes-earlier bravado already fading. I gaze at these unfamiliar faces, strangers who had suddenly seen the genius in my boyfriend, and something twitches deep inside, and I wonder if he’ll want me as much as he always has, now that maybe he’ll recognize how special he is, and that maybe I don’t deserve to stand alongside his brightness. Just as I felt back when we buried my mother, just as I feel on my worst days when I can’t beat back the throb of ever-present insecurity by disguising myself as someone else. Please don’t see me for what I really am. And if you do, please love me anyway.
I glance around, wondering where he is in the auditorium, wishing I could see his face, find him, and beckon him to sit beside me. But it’s just a swarm of Hollywood types and a few others like me: fazed, stunned, trying to pretend otherwise. I curl my fingers into a fist and press my nails into my palms, an old habit from middle school after my mom was first diagnosed, before her remission, when I’d feel myself start to cry and wouldn’t want to come undone in the middle of Algebra or PE or the cafeteria at lunch. I remind myself that I’m an actress, a good one, and I can put on any face that I want to.
Someone is waving from the side of the aisle, and I turn to see Ben, flagging me over.
I excuse myself as I press past tilted knees and annoyed faces until I reach him.
“What are you doing? You have to be up there any second!”
“I know, I know. But I realized something . . .” he whispers.
“What?”
He leans closer, so only I can hear.
“Marry me.”
“What?”
He is right by my ear now, his heat electrifying. “Marry me. I don’t want to do any of this without you.”
“What?” I can’t have heard correctly, and yet my stomach leaps to my throat, my heartbeat detonating within my chest cavity. That he wants me, that he is choosing me.
He pulls back and stares at me with a hint of a smile, wordlessly, like I can read his mind. We’d discussed marriage in tangential terms, like maybe one day, like let’s put it out there at some point, but nothing concrete, nothing that ever felt like it could be real.
“Marry me. Tomorrow. Next year. Whenever. Just say yes.”
“OK,” I say, because my mouth hasn’t yet caught up with my brain, with its frenetic euphoria that wants to burst with a YES.
He raises his eyebrows. “OK?”
“OK, yes!” I giggle loudly enough that a few people hiss for me to pipe down. I clamp my hand over my mouth, but my smile is wider than the whole of it.
He removes his father’s tarnished wedding band, which they miraculously recovered in the rubble, and which he’s been wearing on his right index finger, and slides it over my thumb, the only finger it fits. “Can this do for now? We’ll get you a real one when we’re back.”
“It’s more than OK,” I say. “It’s perfect.”
Later, when his name is called and he rises to accept his award, true to his word, the first person he thanks is me.