41
BEN
DECEMBER
“Come back east with me,” Amanda says, forking her eggs. We’d slept late and walked to a late breakfast at a bistro with a garden a few blocks from my apartment. “I have that whole week off between Christmas and New Year’s.”
I push around my own omelet, pick out the onions. Amanda had ordered for me while I took a call from Eric—our lead actress, Cassidy Rivers, was threatening not to return to the set after the holidays if we didn’t fire the lead actor, Paxton Fisher, with whom she’d been sleeping until last week—and Amanda had forgotten (or didn’t know) how much I loathed onions.
“I don’t know if I can get away.” I use my knife to point to my phone. “Cassidy is threatening mutiny.”
“Screw her. Call her bluff. Isn’t she contracted for the next decade? I think I read that in People.”
“It doesn’t really work that way,” I say. “Besides, I’m not really sure that calling people’s bluffs is the best way to cultivate a relationship that indeed needs to last the better part of the decade. Honesty might be better.” I say this but what I am really thinking is: Tatum. Why weren’t we more honest with each other when we had the chance? I recalculate. Why wasn’t I more honest with her when I had the chance? How I was threatened by her success, how I resented her blind trust in her dad, how I found a new spark with Amanda because it was easier than struggling to relight whatever had faded between us? It all seems so stupid now, trivial even, that I let these dishonesties pile up until they were too high to surmount, and now, I don’t know what she wants, what she sees, what she feels.
Amanda misses all of this. She takes another bite. “Oh, you know whom you should hire?”
I find a square on my omelet that is onion free. “Who?”
“Lily Marple. I am obsessed with her right now.”
“She doesn’t do TV. Much less a show that’s been around for years.”
“But if she did . . .” She sips her coffee too enthusiastically, and it spills on her chin. “I’m just saying. Do you know her? Can I meet her?”
“Years ago,” I say. “I worked with her years ago.” One Day in Dallas, when she shoved her hands down my pants and made it clear she was up for anything. A lifetime ago when I wouldn’t have dreamed of being unfaithful.
“I’m completely obsessed with everything she’s doing. Like, I literally googled her boots the other day.”
“This coming from a highly lauded doctor,” I say.
“I know,” she laughs. “I’m only telling you. Don’t breathe a word to any of my patients.”
“I think Tatum is friendly with her now. I can ask her if you really want.”
Amanda freezes for a flick of a beat, then catches herself and pretends that she hasn’t. I know this is a sore spot with her, that I am newly close with Tatum again, that I sometimes stop by for dinner unannounced or that I still wear the watch she gave me for my fortieth or that the lock screen on my phone is a photo of the three of us. I tell Amanda it’s because of Joey: Tatum and I are committed to providing a united front for him, and even if it’s an excuse, it’s also true. I am trying not to skirt the lines of untruths now knowing, with hindsight, how badly they can unmoor me.
“No,” Amanda says, her jaw firming. “It’s OK. I didn’t really think I could meet her or anything. It’s not like Lily Marple and I were going to be best friends. God.”
I pick out a few more onions with my fingers.
“Do you not like them?” she asks. “Since when?”
“I don’t think I ever did. It’s fine. I’m just eating around them.”
“Shit, sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t remember that at all.”
What she could actually be saying is: We don’t remember a lot of things about each other.
Though we’ve been back together only for about six weeks, Amanda practically lives at my apartment now. At first, like many firsts with her, it was exhilarating. We screwed constantly; we stayed up late eating Chinese food in bed like we had when I was twenty-five; we went to the gym together, we showered together, we did, well, everything—other than when she was at work, or when I was with Joey—together. But then the tug of the manuscript, Between Me and You, and the promises I made with that manuscript, called me back, and with that, the tug of why I was writing it—for Tatum.
Then I remembered that I was firmly not twenty-five anymore, and there were concrete reasons why part of me preferred adulthood. That Chinese food at midnight leaves you with heartburn, and screwing constantly distracts you from real life. Amanda is needier now than she used to be, or at least how I remember her to have been. She’ll straddle my lap when I’m writing or she’ll pout when I tell her I’m checking in with Tatum. She’s older too—almost forty, and I know she wants kids of her own, so I get it. I get that she wants me to be all-in, but it’s impossible to be all-in when I’m not even sure if I’m all-out with Tatum. Of course there are the divorce papers, and we’ve finalized all the decisions, neatly sliced our life in half—This is yours, this is mine, thank you very much. But it doesn’t feel as final as it seems, though maybe this is just another lie I’ve convinced myself of rather than facing the stark truth: Tatum doesn’t love me anymore. This is at least half the reason I haven’t finished the script yet: I rewound our collective history and wove it into the fabric of the pages, but I have no idea where we’ll go from here, no idea how to finish it. If the characters will end up happy; if in turn, Tatum and I can end up happy.
“Listen,” I say today at breakfast. “Even without this crisis with Cassidy, I can’t come back east with you. It’s Christmas, and I have to be with Joey.”
“And Tatum,” Amanda replies flatly. “I thought they were going away? To Hawaii?” She says Hawaii like it is Siberia, an absolute punishment of a vacation.
“Not until after Christmas. Her dad comes, and her sister . . .” Be honest, be more honest, I tell myself. “It’s not just that. I want to be here. Not that I have to, but I want to.”
“Fine.”
“He’s my son, Amanda.”
“And she’s still your wife, after all.” She wipes her lips with her napkin, pours some of her coffee over her food so she won’t eat the rest, then covers the mess with her napkin. She does this whenever she thinks she’s had enough but doesn’t trust herself to stop; I remember it from back then too. Old habits can be tough to change. “God knows I can’t compete with that.”
I wish I could pour coffee over us, throw a napkin atop the two of us to stop whatever is about to come next. I don’t want to hurt her; I don’t want Tatum to hurt me. There is so much damage in this world already. Wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped bruising each other and could untangle our messes without leaving more marks?
“Amanda,” I say, but have nothing else to soothe her.
“I’m sorry about the onions,” she says. “I guess I should have known.”