21
BEN
SEPTEMBER 2006
The sky is robin’s-egg blue, just as it was five years ago.
I stare upward for a beat too long and am blinded for a moment, hazy yellow orbs obscuring my vision, despite my sunglasses. Leo stands ramrod straight next to me, his shoulders pinned as if literally stapled back, but his toes jigger up and down, his fingers twitch in nonstop motion. My mom is weeping silently to my other side, staring out at the vast wasteland of a construction pit at Ground Zero, staring farther to the two reflection pools she says will bring her a bit of solace, but I can’t see how. Tatum had planned to come, but then the roof to the new house in Holmby Hills cratered in, and I told her she should stay behind to deal with it. She assured me that her dad could manage on his own—he was living in the guesthouse and taking classes at UCLA for accounting—but I didn’t mind. Really. I wasn’t interested in delving too deeply back into my grief, and if Tatum had been along, she’d have poked and prodded and asked me over and over and over again if I’m OK, if I shouldn’t see a therapist—when really, I just wanted to be done with it.
I don’t need a therapist when I have learned how to soothe myself on my own: I avoid New York unless mandated here for work (or family, but it’s easy to lure them out west instead); I flip the channel when newsreels and talking heads pontificate about the horrors of the day, one dimension removed from those of us who live it, dream it, breathe it, in order to (almost) forget about it. Sometimes I start to call my dad to share some tidbit about my career—the acclaim for One Day in Dallas or the Reagan biopic I’m drafting that he would have been so proud of because Reagan was his hero. Or even something ridiculous, like the fact that I taught Monster to wake Tatum up by licking her face. Of course those moments sting; of course they raise it all up for me again.
But mostly I just want to ignore it. Mostly, I don’t want to be standing here, listening to Mayor Bloomberg speak at the site of my father’s death. It shouldn’t seem like that much to ask.
A town car retrieves us after the ceremony, and I uncoil as we head uptown.
“Brunch now,” my mom announces.
“I’m not hungry,” Leo says.
“You’re never hungry these days,” she says, squeezing his leg, staring out the window at the rush of Eighth Avenue traffic.
“Occupational hazard.”
“Work makes you lose your appetite?” I ask.
“I made associate,” he says flatly. “All I do is work.”
My mom laughs at this. “Leo, sweetheart, I’m sure the women of New York would disagree.”
The town car deposits us outside the Plaza Athénée, where my mom has evidently arranged for a grief brunch with friends she has met through fundraising, which is how she has channeled her own pain. We all have our outlets. I bury mine. Leo works through his. And my mom raises money for the widows of firefighters. It’s admirable how she has forged on, her chin up, her cause determined. I consider, as we shake hands and make introductions in the marble lobby of the hotel, how I would cope if I lost Tatum. My mother introduces me to a man, Ron, whom she looks at with affection and who, she tells me, also lost his wife—this is simply how they introduce themselves here, in this committee of battle-wounded survivors—and I barely hear her, barely pay attention, because I’m absorbed in the question of what I would do without Tatum.
I simply don’t know. It is an unimaginable question with no answer.
I duck to the bathroom to call her, to tell her I miss her, which I don’t do often enough. In fact, I’d promised I’d call last night, but Leo and I had gone out for beers (too many beers), and I’d passed out before I could remember that I’d forgotten. That she’d be sitting by the phone, waiting to hear from me. It wasn’t intentional, my neglect. Tatum was just needier than I was; she needed more reassurance, more connection, more of us.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Is everything OK?” She is talking in a British accent.
“Tate?”
“Are you OK?” she says again, still in the accent. I sigh. I’d forgotten that she’d caught wind that they were beginning to cast for Pride and Prejudice, and she was honing her accent in the hopes of wedging herself into an audition.
“Is my wife around?”
“I’m here.” She drops the pretense.
I don’t normally mind—the masks that she wears. Sometimes it’s exhilarating, like when I flew out to Scotland and visited her on On the Highlands, and we pretended we weren’t married and didn’t already know each other’s secrets. But today, when we mourned my dad all over again, I can’t stand it for a second; I don’t want to have to expend any more emotional effort than I’ve already put forth, talking to a woman who doesn’t feel like my wife.
“Hey,” I say. “Thanks.”
“So you’re OK?”
“Yeah, I mean. The day has been shit, but yeah.”
“I didn’t hear from you last night. I stayed up until two, worried.”
The words are concerned but her tone is sharp. So what she means is: Why didn’t you call because I hate it when you don’t call and I feel forgotten. We argue about this sometimes now: that I grow absentminded when I’m in the middle of a project, that the world I’m inhabiting on set or in my mind takes me from the world in which I’m actually living. I’ll unlatch the door late at night, and she’ll be sitting on the couch with folded arms, or I’ll get three voicemails, each with increasing annoyance. Hey, where are you? Hey, can you call me so I know if you’re home for dinner? Hey, did you die on the 405 on the way to work, and if not can you please call me back to reassure me that you haven’t?
“I’m sorry,” I say, a little bit because I am, a little bit because we’ve had this conversation before, and there’s no point in doing anything other than smoothing the waters. Tatum is independent to a fault until she’s not, until she’s territorial and a little bit clingy, which is part of the bass note of who she is, and I don’t mind all that much unless she escalates it into something it doesn’t need to be. “Leo and I went out drinking . . . I lost track of time.”
“It’s OK,” she says, because she knows I mean it sincerely. “I was just worried. How was today?”
“Horrible.” I tug the knot of my tie looser. “But over.”
“Your mom?”
“We’re brunching,” I say. “So I guess as well as I’d expect, better, maybe?”
“And Leo?” She asks right before she shouts: “Monster, get down! Shit, hang on, Ben. Monster, get off the counter.” There’s a clatter behind her, and she yelps. “Goddamn it! Ben, can I call you back in a second?”
She clicks off before I can tell her that I wish she were here, that I don’t know what I would do without her, which is why I was calling in the first place. I should have led with that, I think. I need to lead with that more often.
I splash water on my face, pat it dry, then readjust my tie. I meet my eyes in the mirror and remind myself to tell Tatum this as soon as she calls back. My stomach growls, and I spin back toward the dining room. As I turn the corner from the restroom, I collide with a woman emerging from the ladies’ room.
My brain does this thing where it takes a minute to catch up with my breath, with my adrenaline, which is flying through my limbs.
She gapes. “Oh my gosh!”
“Oh my God,” I say. Then manage: “Hey.”
“I didn’t . . . what are you doing here? I mean, this is so random.” She blinks quickly, which she always used to do when she was frazzled.
Her red hair falls atop her shoulders like it always did; her cheeks are pink and spotted with freckles, like they always were. She looks exactly the same as the last time I saw her seven years ago. I broke up with her in the kitchenette of her Greenwich Village apartment when she was leaving for San Francisco, when she made it clear that she could dive into her new reality without me.
I lean in and kiss Amanda’s cheek. She smells like that honey perfume that she wore way back when too.
“I’m in for a conference,” she says, swatting her bangs, which are new, from her eyes. “I didn’t . . . I mean . . .” She laughs, then exhales deeply. “Let’s start over. Hey.”
“Hey. You look great,” I say. Because she does. My phone buzzes in my palm. Tatum calling me back. I start to raise it to my ear, but then, without thinking, drop it into my pocket. I’ll call her back in a minute.
“You need to get that?” she asks. I shake my head. “Well you look great too. God, it’s been forever. You’re married now.”
I nod, wave my ring finger. “Off the market for good.”
I say it in this deep superhero voice, which I don’t think I’ve ever used before. I don’t know why I do. Maybe because I’m standing in front of the last woman I loved before Tatum, and even though I’d never betray Tate, I still want Amanda to find me fuckable; I still want her to consider what she could have had if she hadn’t accepted her residency in Palo Alto and left me behind. It’s not that I want Amanda—I don’t. But it’s not as if I don’t want her to want me. Those are two separate things, after all. Like my dad said when I was applying to college: you want them to offer; that doesn’t mean that you have to accept. (He was, however, deeply disappointed in me when I got waitlisted at Yale.)
“Married to an actress, right?” Amanda says. “I mean, I’m not keeping tabs.” She laughs self-consciously. “Maybe a little.”
“Yep,” I affirm and feel my shoulders relax back, my chin raise higher. She keeps tabs. She might kind of want me. I make a note to mentally record this to tell Leo as soon as I get back to the table. “She’s about to audition for Jane Austen. She’s amazing.” Tell Tatum this more often, I remind myself.
“I get that. You always needed someone who could keep up with you creatively.”
My forehead furrows. “I don’t know about that. I think I just needed someone who didn’t ditch me for a residency in San Francisco.”
She laughs again, this time with genuine humor. “Touché. Well.” She shrugs. “You know you broke my heart.”
“I find that impossible to believe.” And I do, though the signals she is sending—and the words she is using—tell me otherwise.
“I work too much now to meet someone.” She blinks again rapid-fire. Then, as if just realizing: “Oh my God, your dad. Today . . .” She trails off, her hand covering her mouth. “I e-mailed you a few years ago . . .” She stares at her feet.
“It’s OK,” I say. “I’m actually here with my mom and Leo. Just came from the memorial.”
“I should get out of your hair,” she says, though she doesn’t move, doesn’t look like she wants to get out of my hair at all. I remember this about her: that she’d frequently say the opposite of what she meant, that she was often a code in need of breaking. The opposite of Tatum in some ways. Tatum, whose emotions and vulnerabilities are always ripe and available and fully in view. It’s not that Tatum is any less complicated, just complicated in different ways, complicated in ways that allow me to read her, allow me to know her.
I size Amanda up and realize that she is wrong in her comment from just a moment ago: it’s not that I needed an actress or someone who could keep up with me “creatively”; it’s that I needed someone who let me in. Even when Tatum is needy and irritated because I’ve misplaced my priorities—work first, her second—she lets me in; she tells me; she speaks plainly, and I see her.
My phone vibrates again against my hip.
“I should be getting back,” I say. “My mom is with her foundation co-chairs. They’ll want to say some words. I should be there.”
She nods, drops her chin. “You always were the good guy. The nice one who got away.” She tilts forward, kisses my cheek.
“Good to see you, Amanda.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, then shakes her head. “Forget it. I don’t even know what I meant by that.”
I grin, and she grins, and then she kisses me again and offers a little wave and is gone. I watch her all the way until she spins through the revolving glass door, out into the street, out under the perfect blue sky which is little more than an illusion of happiness.
My phone is still buzzing, and I reach for it on the last ring before it would shoot to voicemail. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” Tatum says. “Sorry about before. Your dog just ransacked the bread bin.”
I inhale and smell the scent of Amanda’s honey perfume, which is still thick in the air. It’s familiar and alluring but dissipating quickly, like if I stand there for another few seconds, I won’t be able to recollect the smell at all. But rather than linger and let it fade on me, I stride through the lobby and leave it behind.
“That dog,” I say. “He is such an asshole.”
Tatum cackles on the other end of the line. “Well, he’s your son.”
“Takes one to know one,” I say. I think of my own dad, whom I wouldn’t call an asshole, at least not today, but who was prickly in ways that I’d never now grow to understand, not with him gone.
She laughs harder.
“Guess it sucks to be on cleanup duty, right?” I say. Tatum had promised that she’d do all the work with Monster when she brought him home. Mostly, I walk him, clean up, pick up the figurative shit. I don’t mind, but I don’t not mind that she’s getting a taste of it today.
“I don’t even want to know what’s going to come out of him later.”
“I can tell you exactly what will come out of him,” I say. “Do you want all the disgusting details, such as what happened when he ate the whole lasagna off the table or when he dug up the garbage and ate the remains of our burritos, and I had to take him out all night, every hour on the hour?”
“Ugh,” she groans. “I don’t want any of the details.”
“Works of art,” I laugh. “Those craps were works of art.”
“Monster!” she says to him. “Why are you such a little asshole? I love you! I love you so much, but you are such an asshole!”
Leo waves to me from inside the dining room, and I’m beckoned back to my current responsibilities. Tatum can handle the dog’s digestive system for one day.
“Tell my asshole son to behave himself,” I say. “Tell him his dad will be home soon.”