19
BEN
DECEMBER 2007
I am being polite to Ron; I can feel myself being polite, trying too hard. He is perfectly nice, perfectly innocuous. I realize that I’m thirty-three years old, and stewing over my mother’s new relationship puts me at the emotional maturity of about, say, a nine-year-old. Also, it has been six years since my dad died. She’s had her time to mourn. So have I.
“He’s so nice,” Tatum said in the car last night after we met for dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where they were staying for the visit. “And your mom seems really smitten.”
I cornered too sharply around a turn on Sunset.
“Hey, Jesus, Ben!” Tatum’s hand flew to her belly, the way that a mother’s arm would fly toward the back seat if the car stopped too abruptly.
“Sorry, sorry.” I slowed and put my own palm atop her stomach, which has the perfect curvature of a beach ball. The baby wasn’t exactly planned, and its inception wasn’t exactly the stuff of true romance, maybe a romantic comedy if I were to write that type of thing. While back in Ohio for Piper’s wedding, and after a stop at IHOP for a pancake special, Tatum and I got busy in the back seat of our rental Ford Explorer (sorry, Hertz) like we were high schoolers. Afterward, she said: “Yeah, I think we’ve pretty much re-created my stellar high school sexual experience.” And then, as I climbed into the front, she said: “Oh shit,” upon realizing she had left her pills at home. Then a few weeks later, from behind our bathroom door, she said, “Oh shit” again. I sat at the foot of the bed and shouted back, “Really? Oh my God, really?” and hoped that I sounded at least 50 percent less terrified than I was. When she emerged from the bathroom, I swept her into a hug so high her feet left the ground, and I wondered if she could feel my hands shaking as I did.
God knows I haven’t yet found the right tenor for fatherhood with Leo: I’ve been too steely and too hard-nosed, much like my own dad had been, and though I want to let down my guard, just be his brother, I know that boundaries are there for a reason. My dad was never my friend (I can envision him cringing at the notion), and now, with Leo, I can’t quite find the balance either. Who knows what sort of dad I’ll be? How I’ll manage?
“Daddy issues,” Tatum says from time to time. When I fall silent in Walter’s presence, when I grimace in Ron’s. But is it so wrong to mourn the man my dad could have been—he was only fifty-two when he died—the relationship we could have had, the ways I could have proven myself to be the son he knew I was capable of, and not wanting to open myself up to the men who could replace him? Not Walter. He doesn’t try to replace him. He just inserts himself into our lives, into our business, without ever really asking. So him I resent for plenty of other reasons too.
Tonight, Ron finds me in the kitchen, where I am attempting to carve a turkey for Christmas dinner because Tatum is off other forms of meat/protein, partially because the scent makes her queasy from the hormones, partially because she is on some new “diet” (though she assures me it is not a “diet” because she is pregnant) that promises less heartburn, better skin, and sinewy muscles. Or something. “You try being a whale during awards season,” she’d snapped at me a few days ago. “Really. Just try it. Then tell me that you wouldn’t go on a diet too.”
“You’re beautiful,” I’d said. Because she was, as she always was, had been.
“Tell that to the designers who might have to make a dress to fit a blue whale.”
“Need some help with that?” Ron asks. “I know a thing or two about carving. Though I try not to carve out a heart on the OR table.”
Ron is a cardiac surgeon at New York Presbyterian, and he is obviously joking, so I force a smile but doubt it comes off as particularly genuine. I wish I could like him more, but I don’t. Probably, Tatum once said, because he’s not your dad. Also, probably, both literally and metaphorically, because he can carve a turkey way better than I can.
“All good,” I say, waving a knife. “Almost there.”
I am nowhere near almost there. In fact, the turkey looks like it’s been run through a paper shredder.
I wait for Ron to point out how far from “almost there” I am, as my dad would have. Instead, he reaches for a wineglass.
“Oh, there you are, Ron,” my mom says, her heels echoing on the tile kitchen floor. As if our house is so cavernous that he’d be anywhere else, as if she were utterly lost without him.
“I’m starving,” Leo says, coming up behind her. “Can you hurry the fuck up with that thing?” He steps closer and surveys my damage. “Dude, let Ron take it from here. He chops up people’s hearts for a living. You type on a keyboard.”
“He was doing all right,” Ron says, and this is a kindness that I accept but also cringe at. That he’s ignoring my mediocrity, that he accepts it. I sigh and pass the tools to Ron, who wields them while my mother rolls up his sleeves, then drops an apron around his neck and ties it around his waist, while Piper loops into the kitchen and out to the dining table to place the rest of the meal. Scooter, her new husband, follows dutifully, his hands steadying platter after platter that Tatum had catered and delivered, since, as she said: “I’m way too huge to cook.” Also, cooking isn’t her forte, but I’m not about to point that out with her current moodiness and temperament. (And, in fact, I never point that out even when she serves a dinner of burned roasted chicken or eggplant parmesan that’s chewy enough to make your jaw cramp. I grab my fork and knife, and dig in with more enthusiasm than is required.)
I find Tatum moored on the living room couch, with Cheryl, her dad’s girlfriend of nearly a year, massaging her feet. Tatum has had no quandaries about Cheryl, no qualms with her dad moving on and falling in love with someone who is not her mom. Which I find wholly ironic, since she’s had qualms with her dad her whole life until now, a change brought on by their therapy sessions and his sobriety. I watch them for a beat from the corner: Cheryl, with whom Walter now lives in a one-bedroom condo in Westwood, my pregnant wife with her eyes squeezed shut in utter delight, and her sober dad reading the new issue of Variety, which features a roundtable of this season’s most buzzed-about actresses on the cover, including Tatum.
Three people whose lives have utterly diverged in the past few years, who have taken totally unexpected paths to lead them to here. And yet, they’re all relaxing, accepting, enjoying the comforts of my living room, while I linger in the doorway like an observer to someone else’s life. Not that it’s not my life, not that I’m unhappy. But the way it has veered left when I thought it would turn right, the way I haven’t adapted to the roadblocks as adeptly as I always assumed I would. That’s on me, I know: with my surprise at how quickly this town knocked me off my pedestal when a few projects like One Day in Dallas or All the Men didn’t hit as we thought they would; with how I’ve watched Tatum ascend the Hollywood ladder as if I’m standing below her; even with how I have seen my mom fall in love again and change with that love—she’s more open, more flexible, more honest, and vulnerable too. And yet I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap her out of it. Maybe I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap me out of it as well, remind me that I’m floating in the middle, that I should be shooting for the top. If he weren’t dead, if he were to walk through the door and tell me that, I’d probably resent him for it, though I’d heed him all the same. But because he can’t walk in and chide me, I chide myself. Plenty, too much, always.
Success alone doesn’t make you happy, he once said. But it sure does help.
No shit.
Tatum opens her eyes. “Hey, come sit,” she says, when she sees me.
“Ron relieved me of my carving duties.”
Cheryl stands and grants me the couch, then hovers behind Walter and massages his shoulders.
“Babe, relax, please,” Tatum says, plopping her feet atop my lap. “Also, please rub.”
Walter rests the Variety on the coffee table, his eyes misting.
“I can’t believe that my baby is going to win an Oscar.”
“I’m not going to win an Oscar, Dad. Please don’t say that. You’re cursing me.”
“Yes, shhh, Walt!” Cheryl coos. “We’ll have to cleanse this room from your juju if you keep it up.”
He stands, his knees creaking, though he’s lost twenty pounds since drying out, and now, as a regular hiker (he and Cheryl are contemplating two weeks away in the Argentinian mountains), he is in better shape than I am.
“Let’s help in the kitchen,” he says. “Let Tatum get a little rest.”
“I’m fine, Dad!”
“You have big things on your plate,” he says.
“Just as long as the plate is under fifteen hundred calories,” I joke, but no one finds this very funny.
“You can put the Variety at the bottom of the pile,” Tatum says once they’re gone. “We don’t have to have my face peering up at us from the coffee table.”
“Why would I do that? I’m proud of you.”
She wiggles her foot in my lap, as if to say, More please. Then she says aloud, “Next year you’re going to rack up the Emmys.”
“Maybe.” I smile. “An Oscar for you, an Emmy for me. I’ll take it.”
Eric and I had a buzzy show launching in March: Alcatraz. It’s true that we’d landed the deal because Eric’s uncle ran JH Films, one of the biggest production companies in town, but he and I were the ones who had put in the elbow grease, taken a standard prison drama and elevated it with smart, sharp writing. We wanted HBO. I’d balked at network TV, but Fox had promised us the moon, made it impossible to believe that it wouldn’t be a monster hit. It wasn’t film, true, but it was going to be great television. It was going to be my ticket back to film as well. I was banking on it.
“Tate, you know how much I love you, even when I’m being an asshole, right?”
She grins. “I do.”
Ron emerges from the kitchen. “Dinner is served!”
“Moo,” Tatum moans from the couch, which is something she’s started doing, first as a joke, then, as she grew, more seriously.
“You are not a cow.” I smile and offer a hand to haul her up. Then, to her belly: “Hey kid, your mom is the sexiest bovine I’ve ever seen.”
Tatum swats my butt, and I skitter.
“Can we go out later?” Leo pops his head into the living room.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Leo. Chill.”
“Dude, I have to check out the competition. See what’s hot here that can translate to the city.”
“Competition for what?” I shake my head.
“The nightclub he invested in, babe,” Tatum says as she hoists herself to her feet. “His outlet from that dreary job at Merrill Lynch.” She winks at him.
I vaguely remember the details he’d shared last night as I was drifting to sleep on the couch, and as he whisked out the door to a waiting cab. Something about a club in Florida—Miami, maybe?—that he and his friends had gone in on.
“Nothing’s open tonight,” I say to him, as Piper emerges from the kitchen with her hands in oven mitts and a steaming plate of green beans between them. Scooter tails her with a final casserole dish.
“We used to always watch a movie Christmas Eve, remember that, Piper?” Tatum calls to her sister. “Remember how Mom would let us choose?”
“You always got to pick,” Piper says. Then, to Scooter: “She was always Mom’s favorite.”
“Well, how could I not be?” Tatum says. “I mean, look at me.” She moos again.
“Stop, Tate. You’re beautiful,” I say, and I wink. I see you.
“OK.” She nods as if she knows that if I believe it, then it must be true.
I raise my glass. “To my beautiful wife. To . . . family. To all of us being together here to celebrate.”
I put aside my baggage, and I stare at Tatum, my glowing wife ascending a meteoric star, and for the moment, I mean it.