3
BEN
JULY 2015
“Constance is sick,” Tatum says. “Or else I’d have sent her to get him.” It was part of our separation agreement: that Constance, our nanny, would do most of the handoffs, though we’d gotten more casual about it in the four months since I moved out. Tatum shrugs and stares at my pathetic doormat, which is gray and muddy and in need of a wash. But how do I wash a doormat? I don’t even know. We both let our eyes linger on it for a beat too long.
“I’m throwing that out,” I say, and point downward. “I’m getting a new one later today.” I don’t know why I care about impressing her; I’m angry with her; I am untangling myself from her. These are the words I use with Eric when he takes me out after work to nurse my wounds. He tells me to consider a real therapist, not my best friend from college who is now my producing partner and is not really good at advice for shit, especially since he is still single at forty-one and trolling Tinder.
“OK,” Tatum replies. “Though you could just wash it.”
This irritates me for no reason at all. Rather, it irritates me because of course she is right. I could simply wash it, which I’d just told myself five seconds earlier. But coming from her, it feels like proselytizing, not wise counsel, like she’s saying it just to be right. For fuck’s sake, why is Tatum always right? Of course I can wash the stupid doormat.
“You don’t have to point out my shitty doormat,” I say. My eyes twitch when I realize that, in fact, I was the one who pointed out my shitty doormat in the first place. God, when am I going to stop being such an asshole just for the sake of it?
“I wasn’t . . . I just . . .” She stops, shakes her head. “I don’t want to do this, Ben.” She checks the time on her phone. “Is he ready? I have a meeting in an hour.”
Of course she has a meeting in an hour. Tatum’s time is no longer her own, hasn’t been for years now.
“So let him stay longer; I’ll watch him.”
“It’s my day.”
I soften. “But you have a meeting, and Constance is out sick. Come on, Tate. We’re having fun.”
“Ben.” She uses that impatient voice that I sometimes heard her use on set (when I used to visit) when someone would have the misfortune of suggesting a creative tidbit that was totally beneath her. For the most part, Tatum was accommodating, as far as A-listers go. No temper tantrums, no outrageous diva demands. But it wasn’t as if she couldn’t skewer you with a raised eyebrow, couldn’t decimate your ego with one word. Ben.
Also, it wasn’t as if she didn’t make plans without considering anyone else’s schedule, wasn’t as if she hadn’t grown used to everyone around her saying yes. Except for me. (But I now live in a two-bedroom apartment two miles away from the new house in Brentwood, so it’s not working out so well on my end either.)
“Tate, come on.”
“The therapist said that consistency was key,” she says. And it’s true, the therapist we found for Joey to help him through the divorce had said that constancy—a united front—from us was imperative. Joey had been moodier since we told him the news: explosive mood swings from a previously docile child, crying jags that felt unending, whereas he barely cried before, even back when he’d broken his arm. Consistency, Dr. Cohn kept reiterating.
“OK,” I say as she waits expectantly for a fight.
“OK.” She nods.
I start to ask her who will be watching Joey—he’s only seven and can’t stay by himself—but I realize the answer will only spark another fight: Tatum’s father. To whom I have been unkind, shamefully unkind, until it grew too late. Until Tatum and I each held our own scorecards, and he was one of the chits she was able to hold against me. Rightfully so. I chew my lip. I could apologize now, I could say: God, I was such a stubborn dick for reasons that were all about me, but she has never apologized for her own sins, so I’m not about to fall on my sword. Besides, attorneys have been consulted, retainers have been paid. Apologies are too long in coming and won’t amount to much anyway.
“Joe!” I call over my shoulder. “Hurry up, Mom’s here!”
“Two minutes, Daddy,” he calls back.
“Sorry,” I say. “We were knee-deep in Madden on the Xbox.” Back over my shoulder, I shout: “You’d better not be cheating, kiddo!”
Tatum presses her mouth into a thin line, then removes her sunglasses and squeezes the bridge of her nose. This is her exasperated face. The one I usually see now. Even when it’s simply because Joey is playing Madden for an extra two minutes.
“I’ll get him,” I say. Mostly as an escape from the unbearable discomfort between us, not because I want him to leave me a second sooner than he has to. I’m alone so often now, too often.
“All set.” I reemerge with Joey and his bag that is filled with his dirty laundry from the past two nights. Shit. Am I going to get a passive-aggressive text about how I should have washed it?
I hold my breath, and I can feel Tatum holding hers too; we’re both waiting for an explosion of Joey’s tears or a kick to my shin or a fist to my side. Yelled protests that he doesn’t want to go or he doesn’t want us to divorce or just that he doesn’t want something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be specific these days with him. Instead, he stands on his tiptoes and pecks my check, then wraps his arms around my neck. I loft him off his feet, and he giggles. I feel myself soften and glance at Tatum, who seems to uncoil too.
“Be good for your mom, kiddo,” I say before I set him down, and he reaches for Tatum’s hand.
“I’m always good for Mommy,” he laughs, giggling like he used to, like he wasn’t now being split in two.
I watch them go and know that I can’t say the same.
With Joey gone, the apartment is so quiet, so empty, I’m not sure what to do with myself. I play Madden to kill some time, but it’s just pathetic to get worked up over fake football without your seven-year-old son there. I should work. I know that. Eric and I are back on set, managing the writers’ room, breaking the story arcs for the next season of Code Emergency. But what I should really do is write. Like I used to, like I know I can. Not managing a staff of exhausted thirtysomethings, not crafting some bullshit hospital drama that I could outline while I sit on the can.
I mill about my apartment, running my hands over the empty walls, pausing in corners, turning, starting again. Seeing her today, here, has rattled me. It’s easier to pretend she doesn’t still inhabit part of me when we go days or even weeks now without stepping close enough to touch. I might see her face on a magazine cover or flip past one of her movies on late-night cable, but it’s not the same as breathing in the same air, smelling her faint perfume, the same custom scent from Barneys she’s worn for years, wanting to reach out and brush her arm when I think of something clever to say.
I can hear her in my ear, telling me, like she always used to say: “If you can dream it, you can be it,” but I’ve been in hibernation for so long, screwed things up so deeply, that I’m not even sure what I dream. But slowly I’m awakening; slowly I feel myself melting into something like my old self, someone who once dreamed the same things as she did. Who promised to write something for her but then lost himself to other people’s visions of what they wanted from him.
I should write it now, today, even if she doesn’t need me any longer. Maybe that’s the best time—when she doesn’t need me. Prove to her that I understood why she asked me all those years ago—because we were better together.
But instead I keep walking from room to room in the apartment and staring at the vacancy—not that it’s all that big, certainly nothing compared to the house in Brentwood with its high fences and higher ceilings where Tatum now lives alone with Joey, the house that was meant to be our enclave, to protect her from the outside world, protect us from . . . everything else. I let Joey pick out all the new furniture, decorate his room any which way he pleased, so his walls are a jarring bright green and his rug a shocking electric blue, but still, even with his bed unmade from the weekend, it feels barren.
I haven’t lived alone in fifteen, almost sixteen years.
I shut Joey’s door without a sound, as if I might disturb anyone, though it will just be me until Joe heads back to me on Wednesday, when Tatum flies to London to scout for her next film, which, incidentally, she’s also directing.
I grab the scotch, my dad’s old drink, from the kitchen counter, where I’d abandoned it earlier after my round of Madden, and refresh it.
I down the glass in a single gulp. That helps. Helps numb me to all this shit and how fucked we are and how furious I still am even though we split up months ago. The rage isn’t just about us. It’s about so many other things too. Things I need to let go of but instead find myself venting about over beers with Eric. I know that makes me childish; I know I need to grow up. But at this moment, growing up feels overrated, especially when the scotch helps so very much. I tried grown-up with Leo. Look how well that worked.
I pour myself another because seeing her today has shaken me, and one more will ease me into forgetting how my pulse accelerated at the sight of her, how I wanted to reach out and grab her cheeks and press her against the wall and kiss her, but also how much I wanted to shake her shoulders and say: You wronged me. She could just as easily do the same to me. I know. I know all of this.
I suck down the shot, then run my finger around the lip of my glass, licking off the residue of the alcohol. I weave back into Joey’s room, fall into his bed, where I’ve been sleeping during the nights he spends at Tatum’s. He sometimes asks when I’m going to come home. Tatum thinks it’s best that we just explain that we’re not getting back together, that he have concise parameters of what to expect so he can mourn his old family unit and embrace a new one. She’s probably right—she’s always right!—but I’ve been in this place for only four months. Four months is nothing; four months is a sliver of time when perhaps, like Joey, I can still make believe that we can be put back together. Which I do want some days. So I try to reassure him with vague platitudes, as if that reassures me too. Maybe, even though we almost hate each other, we’ll find our way back together? My promises sound as false to my own mind as they do when I try to offer reassurances aloud to Joey.
“Ben,” my mom said the other night when she called, as she does daily now, like she still worries about me even at forty. “Marriage is a series of small forgivenesses.” I could hear Ron in the background, talking to one of their houseguests. They’d bought a place in Sagaponack, mostly retired there now. “If you get caught up with one forgiveness, all the others you may need move out of reach.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think you do.”
“Mom,” I snapped.
“Your dad wasn’t perfect.”
“I never assumed as much.” God knows that I’d never even considered that he was perfect. I thought of his rigidness, of his push to mold Leo into something Leo never wanted to be. I blinked quickly to abate a rush of tears when I considered my own push to mold Leo into something he never was.
“She’s not perfect either,” my mom offered.
“It’s me,” I said, my voice breaking. “I’m the one who’s turned everything to shit.”
“Well,” my mom said. “If you thought that you were a perfect specimen of man, you should have just come and asked me. I could have told you otherwise. Also, Ben love, it goes both ways. You both probably turned things to shit.”
I laughed because my mom never swears. At least she never used to.
“Perfection’s not the point, honey,” she said before she returned to her weekend guests. “Forgiveness is. Acceptance is.” Then: “Maybe you can write about this?”
I told her that I was trying to, God am I finally trying to, and then she said she loved me and hung up. She had her whole life now too, and after Leo I stopped begrudging that and instead tried to find comfort in her happiness.
I rise from Joey’s bed, my knees cracking, my empty stomach roiling from too much scotch. I shut his door tightly. Now all the doors are closed in the apartment, and though it’s just as quiet as it was when they were open, I feel more settled, like maybe the space is smaller, like maybe I have less space to occupy. I root around the half-filled pantry for something for dinner. Joey’s in a big soup phase, so I have a varied assortment: corn chowder, split pea, tomato bisque. A far cry from the catered and gourmet meals that Tatum had sent to our house each morning to adhere to her diet. I settle on three bean. I pop open the lid, which promptly gets stuck between the gelatinous soup and the side of the can, and I slice my thumb open as I try to pry it out. The blood rushes out quickly, faster than the pain hits my nervous system, and I’m momentarily stunned, wondering where this wound came from, wondering why it doesn’t hurt more acutely. Then the pain comes: a sharp pinch radiating all the way up my arm.
I suck on the cut and use my good hand to dump the soup into a bowl.
I press the Start button on the microwave and bend over, peering inside the oven as my soup goes round and round. The buzzer beeps when it finishes, but I stay there for a few seconds after, crouched, staring, still pressing my thumb against my tongue, unable to recognize that the time has passed, unable to recognize that the time is up before I’m even fully aware that it started.