13
BEN
MAY 2010
My mom has asked me to give a toast, which should be easy, which should be cake. I’m a writer, after all.
Tatum leans over, kisses my cheek, adjusts my tie, and says, “Breathe.” I rise with a flute of champagne held aloft, though if anyone were to look closely enough, they’d see a tiny tremor, a small betrayal of my feelings. I want to be happy for her, for her new life, but I’m trapped in this bubble of melancholy, of what-ifs. What if he hadn’t been on the plane that day? What if he’d been around to see my success? What if he’d been around to see that success falter? How would I be changed? How would I be unchanged too?
We’ve spent the month in New York for Tatum’s shoot, so I’ve gotten to know Ron a bit better, broken down some of my walls. We’ve gone to the movies, drunk wine, taken in a Yankees game; he even joined me for Joey’s music class, which was filled with mothers and nannies, and made a pretty funny wisecrack about our levels of estrogen rising just by crossing the threshold. He asked me about my work: if I’m relieved to be moving on from Alcatraz, the TV stint that Eric and I embarked on but that never really caught fire in the ratings; if I have anything new in the hopper. Ron told me how much he loved the new Reagan biography, and that he knows my dad revered him, and recounted a story of how he once met him at a Hollywood party in the ’70s. “I was so far out of my element,” Ron laughed. “Not made for it like you and Tatum.”
This isn’t true—that I’m made for it—and this assertion rankles me, even though, ostensibly, he’s taking an interest, getting to know me. I’m not at all made for Hollywood the way that Tatum seems to be now: her A-list mommy-and-me group; her trainer and chef who appear in our kitchen at seven a.m.; her newly hired assistant, Stephanie, to oversee all the details that she no longer has time for. I’m part of all of this, true, but it’s as if I’m standing on the outside of a glass door looking in. I can hear the clatter, but I’m one degree removed. We used to tell each other all the time that we could each see the other; it was our code, our something private.
But now I see her less and less. Not just literally, because she is gone on set or on location, but metaphorically too. And not in how she is ambitious—I understand ambition—but in how she doesn’t let me in like she once did. Or maybe it’s that I don’t try as hard to gain entry, because there is so much other stuff—her career, mine, Joey, miscommunications, exhaustion, grief, Walter—standing between us. What I have always loved the most about Tatum, her transparency, is slowly fading. I don’t know how to get that back; I don’t know what sort of work I have to put in to get that back, when she is the one who is always leaving. How do you tell your wife that you want her more to yourself, that you wished she worked less, without sounding like a jealous, emasculated asshole?
“I still want you to write something for me,” she says from time to time, just like she used to say before she had more offers piling in than she can handle, before she could be choosy about awards bait and commercial success, before beauty companies dangled lucrative contracts, before People and Us Weekly and TMZ took an interest. I usually nod and say, “I know,” and yet I never start that script, the one just for her. Not because she wouldn’t be luminous (to be clear, Tatum is luminous in everything—just read her reviews), but because I wonder if maybe I can no longer match her brilliance. Alcatraz getting canceled stings. Your wife recognizing that your talent isn’t what she always believed it to be would go way past that—it would be decimating.
Breathe, Tatum mouths to me at my mother’s wedding to her new husband, our eyes locking as I weave to the front of the garden. Tatum called in a favor and reserved the private townhouse of Mitch Sterling, the producer on her new project, Fallen Manhattan, in which she saves Manhattan (and the world) from alien invasion. (It’s penned by Alan Frank, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, so her team thought it was a smart play: turn on the teenage and young twentysomething guys while still reaping critical acclaim.) Mitch’s townhouse is largely unoccupied while he spends his time in LA, so he happily opened it up to us for the occasion. My mom hadn’t wanted much of a to-do, but she’d wanted something.
“That we found each other through this tragedy is really something to be celebrated,” she’d said. And it was, it is. I bristle at Ron but not because he is Ron. I bristle, as Tatum points out when we argue about my distaste for her own father, because I have “issues” with paternal figures. That I have unresolved feelings toward my dad. “It’s textbook,” Tatum says, and I’m sure it is. But that doesn’t change the bitterness I swallow, mostly about Walter, but sometimes about Ron too.
Leo is sitting at the table with my new stepdad and his daughter, Veronica. Leo winks at me as I pass by, reaches out and squeezes my leg. “Yo, bro. Love ya.”
“Daddy!” Joey shouts from his perch on Tatum’s lap. “That’s my daddy!”
Everyone laughs and turns to gaze at him, in his tiny Brooks Brothers suit, with his curly blond hair that resembles neither mine nor Tatum’s.
“That’s your daddy!” Tatum says, and everyone laughs again, not really because it’s nearly as cute or funny as when Joey said it but because people laugh and fawn when Tatum says just about anything these days. It’s not her fault; I know this. It’s simply inevitable, the way that fame shifts everyone else’s perception of you while you’ve done nothing to ask for it. Been in a few good movies, locked in a few excellent performances. That’s not nothing, but it’s not everything, either, in the way that fame can masquerade that it is.
Tatum would say this too. But she’d tell you that the fame part of it, that’s just someone else’s expectations and has nothing to do with her or the work or our day-to-day lives. Still, it’s an amorphous mass, a cancerous blob that has taken root, and though she tries to ignore it, tries to pretend that nothing has changed—that her being asked for autographs in the airport on our way here, that her being comped a ridiculous bottle of wine when we snuck out to a small Italian joint around the corner is all status quo—in truth, her fame has shifted nearly everything.
Maybe everything is me being ungenerous. I hate this side of me, but like that cancerous blob, I don’t know how to simply cut my pettiness out of me. Its toxicity is everywhere. Also, Tatum is so often not present that she hasn’t felt the mass, hasn’t noticed what’s festering. Maybe that’s what keeps it alive in me: that like a child, I want her to give me attention, stand up and say, I still see you. Sometimes she does. I don’t mean that she doesn’t. And I know that I am thirty-five and no longer able to excuse juvenile behavior away.
It’s textbook.
So why isn’t there an easier fix? For me to find? For her to suggest? Therapy, sure. But I don’t want to be one of those LA types who sits on a couch and moans about the inadequacies of his cushy life. I want my wife. I want to see my wife. I want her to see me. Then maybe I won’t be so brittle, maybe I won’t be so easily broken.
Tatum sees me today, though, meeting my eyes again. Wishing me on. I clear my throat, gaze at my mom and Ron, who seems to wholly love her, and whom she appears to love wholly in return. I’m not eight or ten or twelve years old; I know that he is not taking my dad’s place; I know that my mom should be happy. My eyes move to Leo, and I wonder if this isn’t a bit how he felt over this past decade, how I tried to be his father without him asking for it. It’s different, of course. I’m his blood; I promised my dad I’d look out for him. But this notion that someone can be taken from you, disappear into a void in a matter of literal seconds, and then you have to live in the vacuum of that void? It hasn’t gotten easier. So maybe that was why I tried to put my foot down with Leo, tried to guide him in the way that I thought my father would think best. Maybe that’s why I’m pricklier with Ron, even when I know better.
I raise my flute toward the open sky in the back of Mitch Sterling’s garden, which has been lavished in yellow roses, my mother’s favorites. “Lub you!” Joey calls to me before I can start speaking.
“Love you, buddy,” I say back.
Love you, Tatum mouths to me.
Love you, I mouth back.
“Love you,” Leo shouts, which makes everyone giggle again.
“Love you,” I say sincerely back to him.
Leo rises and wraps me in a hug, slapping my back, holding me for a beat longer than the pre-rehab Leo would have. He’s been clean for almost a year now. He calls me on Sundays to check in, he is rededicated to his job, he left the nightclub business, and he never told my mom about any of it. His skin is shiny, his eyes well rested, his muscles strong when my hands press against his shoulder blades on the other end of the embrace. It wasn’t a seamless process, my tough love, my insistence that he finally grow up and grow a backbone and accept responsibility for the roads he’d put himself on. Tatum wanted to do it differently, and Walter, her dad, told me I was mistaken, that I needed to offer support, not just firmness. But here we are, and he is thriving, and Leo and I proved them wrong.
“I know I’m a writer,” I begin. “But that doesn’t make me an expert in the ways of love.”
“Bullshit!” Leo calls out. “You married Tatum Connelly, so you must be doing something right!”
“That’s true!” Tatum shouts from a couple of tables behind him.
“Well, marrying my wife was the one smart thing I’ve done in the name of love my whole life. Though that just makes me lucky; that doesn’t really make me smart.” I don’t know why I’m announcing this, my most neurotic insecurity, to the crowd of my mother’s and new stepdad’s friends, and I don’t know when I started to think that this might be true. But it comes off as self-deprecating, and everyone grins, then turns to gaze at my wife in the back of the room.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Tatum calls out, playing to the audience, and everyone laughs. She says this a lot to me now—Don’t sell yourself short, dream it, be it!—and I know she’s not trying to be patronizing, but it is. It’s fucking patronizing and demeaning, and even now I feel a red flare of anger rush through me. Like if she still saw me, she’d know that I don’t need uplifting quips to get me back on track; she’d know that I’m already trying to right my train.
“OK, well, with that established,” I say, “I just want to say that I’m not necessarily wise in the ways of love. I don’t know why our dad was taken from us, and Ron, I can’t say why your wife was either. But I can only say life sometimes grants us second chances, and if they should fall upon you, if you should be lucky enough to be offered another chance at happiness, then you’d be a fool not to seize it.”
I look at Leo, with his own second chance, and he nods, grateful. I look at my mom and Ron, who are genuinely overcome with emotion: her with tears on her cheeks, him wiping them away.
“And so, I’ll ask all of you today to raise your glass to second chances. May we all be lucky enough in our lives to be granted the opportunity for love and joy and family, and when that opportunity presents itself, may we all be as smart as my mom and Ron, who refused to let life slay them when life sure as hell tried.”
Everyone raises their glasses.
“To second chances,” they all say, as Ron leans close to my mom and kisses her. Tatum meets my eyes and blinks, our old code, our old signal. She still sees me now, like she used to, like we both used to.
“To second chances,” I say again, telling myself I won’t squander my own, whenever the opportunity arises.