43
BEN
DECEMBER
I’d answered on the first ring. I was rereading the script and second-guessing everything: if writing it for her had been a mistake, if she’d read it and say: Ben, we’re done with us, I thought that was obvious, if that would finally be our death knell.
But then my phone rang, and caller ID said TATUM, and I answered it, and she was wailing.
“Ben,” she said. “Please. Please come, it’s Monster. I didn’t have anyone else to call.”
And I said: “You should have called me. I’m glad you did. I’m still your person.”
And I raced to the vet, and we agreed that Monster deserved better than waiting around for his heart to explode, so we sat with him, each of us cradling his face, each of us spilling an unending waterfall of tears, until he went to sleep.
Back home, in our old (new) home, she curls herself into a ball on the white sectional her designer picked out, despite its impracticality for a home with an enormous dog who jumps on all the furniture, and a nearly nine-year-old boy with a fondness for spilling anything that can be spilled.
“Thank you for coming,” she says for the hundredth time. Like I wouldn’t have. Does she think that I wouldn’t have? That we’re so far removed from who we used to be that I wouldn’t have shown up to help with Monster? She wipes her nose with her sweater, tries to slow her tears.
“Tate, I would never not have come.” I shift closer, rest my hand on her leg. She startles but then places her own hand atop of mine.
“I know, I know.” She inhales sharply. “It’s just . . . I know you’re with her now, I know you’re over all this drama with me.”
I slide my hand back to my own lap. I haven’t said a word about Amanda to her, partially because I have no idea what I’m doing, partially because it’s Amanda, and she is not a badge of honor I wear proudly. Also, partially, because I know if Tatum had her pick, she’d be OK with just about any other woman besides the one I’m sleeping with.
“I . . . I didn’t realize . . . how’d you know?”
“I saw you guys.” She floats her snot-covered sweatered arm aloft, then flops it down. “On the beach. On Leo’s birthday.”
“What?”
“On the beach last month, OK? I saw you guys, and I mean, I get why you didn’t say anything, but—”
“You were there?” My heart accelerates. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she was there. Why would it? I waited, and Amanda showed, and that was the end of that and the start of something else.
“I wish it weren’t her, Ben. I know I have no control over whom you date, but I wish it weren’t her.”
My brain freezes, and my tongue does too. I was waiting for Tatum on the beach. I was waiting for her and promised myself that if she showed up, I’d tell her how much I missed her, how wrong I’d gotten so many things. And she had. She had shown up, but like a million other moments that I’d missed in these past few years, I’d overlooked this too. Jesus, I’d been so chickenshit. Waiting for her. Why didn’t you just do it, go to her and say, Please, I love you, can we try again? I wanted everything to be different, yet I hadn’t changed as much as I’d told myself.
The script, though. That is putting it all out there. That will be the point of no return, when I prove how far I’ve come, or perhaps how much I’m like the old self I used to be. When I made promises I still kept; when I didn’t have to wait for her to say I love you. I said it first so long ago when her mom died, as I watched her pack to go bury her.
But words have run their course. We’ve avowed ourselves, and we’ve told each other everything, and still, we landed on this dead-end route.
Now, the only way to really say it is through what I do.
I say, “Tate, I’ll always take your call, pick up the phone if you need me.”
This makes her cry harder.
“Monster is the one consistent thing I’ve had for a decade.”
I start to reply, You’ve had me, but this isn’t true in so many ways. Not just when we separated, but years before then too.
“How about if I stay here with you until Joey gets home? We’ll order in a pizza, watch a bad movie.”
She sniffles and nods.
“I hear Lily’s new one is terrible, a real shitbomb,” I say.
She laughs at this, so hard that mucus projects from her nose.
“Sorry,” she says. “God, I’m gross.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I should probably stop crapping on Lily. We’re friends now,” she manages.
“With friends like those . . . ,” I start.
“I don’t have all that many,” she says. “Daisy is in New York half the time. Mariana is filming in Asia.” She picks at her thumbnail. “I take them where I can find them.”
I lean in closer to her, wrap an arm around one shoulder, ease her next to me.
“He was such a good dog,” Tate says, her head resting on my chest.
“He really was kind of a pain in the ass,” I laugh. “Remember how for the first few years he tore up every garbage can we had?”
I feel her grin against me. “Fuck, he was irritating.”
“And how his gas was so bad we had to constantly leave the room?” Her shoulders shake, and I let out my own chuckle. “But we loved him anyway.”
“In spite of everything,” she sighs. “We loved him anyway.”
I let her sleep and go to straighten up around the house. She has a housekeeper come in three times a week, so I mostly just try to busy myself, because this is no longer really my house, and I don’t want to sit and watch her sleep. I clean up Monster’s urine in the kitchen, put his bowl away in the cabinet, tuck his toys into a bin by the back door. I hope she doesn’t mind, hope she doesn’t think that I’m already trying to erase the imprint of our imperfect dog. I’m only trying to make it easier. I find that I’m enjoying this, not the grief of losing our dog, but the comfort in taking care of her, and I further find that I don’t want to leave. Not just for the evening, but forever. That, after everything, I want to take care of her forever. Let her take care of me forever too.
In her office, I find an old photo of the three of us—Leo, her, me—from when he came out to visit us shortly after we’d landed here. She’s framed it and displayed it alongside so many other happy family memories: Piper’s wedding, Joey’s birth, her dad’s five-year sobriety ceremony, us on the Oscar red carpet when she won—before we got the call about Leo, of course. In that one, I’m smiling beside her, but I can tell that my heart isn’t in it; that I’m panicking on the inside, as if I somehow believed that she’d outgrown me just by being anointed. I stare at the picture of the three of us on the beach, with the blue waves behind us and the golden sky wide open above us and Leo’s smile that made him seem invincible. I wish, as I do more often now, and certainly as I have most viscerally tonight, that we had done it all differently.
I don’t hear her come up behind me.
“He was so beautiful, Ben.”
I rest the photo back on her bookshelf.
“Why didn’t you tell me back then?” I ask. “I know it’s because I was absolutely horrible about your dad, and that it seemed like I couldn’t understand—no, I couldn’t forgive what I thought was a weakness.” I drop my head. “I mean, I know that. But . . . he was my brother, Tate. Did you not think I’d look past that to try to help him?”
She considers this, and I nearly reach for her hand until I catch my impulse and thwart myself. “I should have told you. It’s on my list of regrets, if that means anything. I just . . . Well, there was my dad, how unwilling you were to give him a chance. But also . . .” She trails off.
“It’s OK,” I say. “I can’t imagine that you could say anything now that could hurt me in any way that we haven’t already done to each other.”
She nods, understanding. “I guess I wanted something you didn’t have.”
I frown. “You had a ton of things I didn’t have. I feel like your whole life was made up of things I didn’t have.”
“I didn’t . . .” She waves a hand. “I was wrong, you were wrong. About a lot of it. But I guess I wanted to do it my way, God knows I’ve gotten stuck in that habit, and I take responsibility for it.” She meets my eyes. “I do. But I guess I thought that your way with him, I mean, with some things, was so rigid, so unforgiving. You were mad at a lot of things back then—and I don’t mean that blamefully. But you and I had started keeping score by then, right? I mean, hadn’t we?” I nod, and she inhales, then exhales. “I guess this was me keeping score, like I wanted to keep something from you to put in my arsenal, on my scorecard. Like, I knew something that you didn’t, and I knew, or I thought I knew, that I’d be proven right. And you’d never know the difference. But I’d know. That he could be rehabilitated, just like my dad, and knowing that I was right, and you weren’t . . .” She glances to the floor. “I guess that made me feel smug, in a good way. Self-satisfied.”
“Funny, I always thought you were plenty smug.” I grin, and she grins too.
“Well, only after the Oscar, right? Before that, you took the cake there,” she says.
“If we’re getting specific, I think it started when you became a big-shot director.”
“Well, I learned from the best. You were downright insufferable on Romanticah.” We both laugh easily, then harder.
“Guilty as charged,” I say between hiccups. “Guilty. As. Charged.”
I exhale, find my breath. Then lean back against her desk.
“We’ve really fucked things up haven’t we?”
She looks at me now, her eyes already misty again.
“We really were happy once.”
“I remember,” I say, thinking of my script, considering saying more, but knowing that words aren’t enough now, promises aren’t enough when we’d broken so many before. “I remember all of that too.”