The ER nurses looked a little stunned. They listened to Dean, then called up to the fourth floor to check his story. After hanging up, the head nurse said, “Everyone’s a little worked up on the fourth floor. Nobody’s ever unhooked an IV and removed a patient.” Finally they readmitted me to the fifth floor, where apparently the pain medication policies were different from the fourth-floor pain medication policies, though we still had the same doctor, who never said anything about Dean’s dramatic protest march. In the TV movie he would have been a hunk who tried to steal me from Dean. Oh well.
Two days passed in a blur. On Wednesday, the doctor came in and said, “By the way, we finally got the results back from the flu swab. You tested positive. You do have H1N1, but we have you on Tamiflu. You look better; your chest sounds clear to me. I’m going to release you.”
I said, “I really don’t feel so good,” but he wasn’t listening. He dismissed me from the hospital, saying, “You’ll feel better in your own bed.”
Dean went to get the car while the nurse brought me down to the street. I was white as a ghost. I was hot and sweaty. I couldn’t stand up. My headache was through the roof. Something was clearly wrong with me. The nurse said, “If you don’t feel well, you’ll need to go back in through the ER.” I might as well have had parvo, for all that doctor did for me.
Dean said, “Forget it. We’re going to Cedars.” If this were my death-by-swine-parvo TV movie, I guess this was take two. Dean drove me straight to Cedars-Sinai, the West Hollywood hospital where Liam and Stella were born.
As soon as Cedars found out I was an H1N1-positive patient, I was immediately rushed to an isolation floor. Now it wasn’t just my room that was cordoned off for the protection of the public. It was a whole floor of this hospital, where fellow H1N1 cases suffered in silence behind tightly shut doors like plague victims. After a nurse settled me in a room and left, I thought, This is the beginning of the end. It’s straight out of a movie. Nobody’s coming back. They’ve left us here to die. Sure, it was an isolation floor now. Clearly it would soon be a makeshift morgue. One of the nurses told me, “This is usually the cardiology floor, but now it’s full of people with it. I’ve never seen so many young people on this floor.”
An image of a bunch of young, cool people hanging out in the lobby listening to music with IVs in their arms popped into my head. But instead I was stuck in my room entertaining a parade of specialists. The lung specialist and the infectious disease specialist came to see me every day. I’m sure there are many wonderful doctors at the local hospital where we’d gone first, but now the diagnoses came rushing in. I was dehydrated. I had a raging sinus infection that the doctor at the local hospital should have seen on the CT scan. I was having a bad reaction to the spinal tap. They gave me fluids, antibiotics, breathing treatments, and pain medication.
Dean slept on the chair beside me. In the beginning. But after a couple of days I started to improve. And as I started to get better, it turned out that the pain medication I was on made me horny. Dean was happy to take advantage of this new side effect. After the nurses gave me my pain medication, they would leave for the night. Dean would climb into the hospital bed. Dean is six three. The bed was so tiny, he was like a Dr. Seuss character whose feet popped out of one end of the bed or his head stuck out the other. We had covert sex in that hospital bed. The more I worried that we’d get caught, the more Dean was into it. Dean kept thanking the drug manufacturers and praising their product. And I have to say I think the sex aided my recovery. At home with the kids we always had to find time to have sex. For once there was nothing but time. Yep. I had sex at Cedars. I was a very naughty girl. They may never admit me again.
• • •
I spent five days at Cedars after five days at the local hospital. The flu eventually went away, though the headache lingered, but at last it was time for me to go home.
The whole time I was in the hospital and Dean kept me company, the Guncles stayed at our house to take care of the kids. When I finally walked into the house—back home at last—Stella and Liam were upstairs playing in Stella’s room. I’d never been away from them for so long. Stella turned, saw me, and gasped, “Mama!” her small mouth forming a little O. Liam heard her, put down a new transformer toy that had appeared while I was gone, and ran into my arms. He was wearing a little skull cardigan that Bill and Scout had bought him at H&M. Maybe they’d had too much fun without me. Liam held my face between his little hands and said, “You sick! You at doctor?” To them ten days is a lifetime. I was afraid they’d forget me or think, We had a mom once. Liam suggested that we all go to Mama’s bed. The four of us crawled in to watch Scooby-Doo.
I was home, depleted and fragile, but home. Uncle Danny was gone and I hadn’t really gotten to say good-bye. But something good had come of it. I had thought of Uncle Danny as the last connection I had to my family. My mother and I had a complicated-enough history that at that point I thought whatever relationship we had going forward would be about and through the children. But when Uncle Danny died, my brother came back into the picture. He was a nice, loving person. He didn’t have to be perfect. I certainly wasn’t. I had my brother. There was no reason for me not to have any family at all. I had chosen that path, chosen to cut off contact, but I could change that decision. I knew Uncle Danny would be happy about me and Randy. His death closed a door, but it opened a new one. A door that had been there all along.
An Imperfect Marriage
People watch Tori & Dean and think that we have a perfect marriage. They tell us so—in person or in comments or on Twitter—all the time. It’s true that we’re a loving couple, but we’re human and definitely not perfect.
The show keeps us busy, and we both have side projects. I’ve taken on several other businesses and projects, and Dean had made his interest in motorcycle racing into more than a hobby. Our careers were in a different place when we met: we were both jockeying hard for auditions. Now work is stable and we’ve responded to that stability differently. I’ve become a workaholic and Dean has become a motorcycleholic. That’s the simple way of putting it, but it’s more complicated than that. For instance, one thing I’ve noticed is that the more I advance professionally, the more I retreat in my personal life. I apologize to Dean constantly. We both reach for the milk at the same time: “Sorry!” Stella raises her hands for me to pick her up instead of Dean: “Sorry!” I wake up with a headache: “Sorry!” I have to take a phone call: “Sorry!” I said “sorry” too many times this morning: “Sorry!” If somebody bumps into me and nearly knocks me over, I’m the first one to apologize.
All this apologizing drives Dean crazy, and rightfully so. But I can’t stop saying it. It’s like a tic. I’m not genuinely sorrowful about any of those things, but I compulsively apologize. I want everyone to feel attended to, nobody to be angry, everything to be okay. It’s as if my constant apologies can make up for some greater sin that I can’t properly address, like I’m saying, “Look, I don’t have power! Nothing goes to my head! Don’t worry! I promise I’m just a weak little girl!” So my busy mini mogul days, days where I’m making decisions with confidence, are punctuated by this weird self-undermining.
There’s no reason for me to act weak for Dean. My success doesn’t bother him in the least. The truth is that even if my power did make him uncomfortable, Dean isn’t around to witness most of my efforts to build my businesses. What is Dean doing while I’m doing all the nonacting work that doesn’t interest him? He’s riding motorcycles. Or maintaining motorcycles. Or buying motorcycle gear. Or talking about motorcycles with his friends who race motorcycles.
The motorcycle issue is my fault. I started it. Or at least revved an engine that was idling. Dean rode motorcycles in his first marriage; his wife wasn’t cool with it; he quit. Then I came along. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be all-accepting. I wanted to make him happy. So for Father’s Day I rented him a motorcycle. Nice move, Tori. I did this knowing full well how swept up Dean gets in his h
obbies. I’d already almost lost him to scuba diving. And I knew how dangerous motorcycles are. So why did I get him started? Am I an enabler? Was I sabotaging us? I should have known better.
I never asked Dean to stop, but when he saw how upset I was by the motorcycles, he quit. He had all of his motorcycles taken away to be sold. But then we had a conversation in which I told him I didn’t want him to sell them. I wanted him to finish what he started. I just wanted him to make more time for us. And to be safe. He had them brought back.
Dean knows the danger, and he does everything he can to ride safely, but how can you be safe and responsible when you’re doing something that’s fundamentally dangerous? Dean is careful, but part of him just believes that when your time is up, your time is up. When he brought the bikes back, he said, “I strongly believe I’m going to live to a ripe old age. I just know it. My grandma lived to ninety-nine. She was healthy as a horse. She walked to the racetrack every day and had her wee nip of brandy. I’m not going to stop racing or scuba diving. What a wasted life if I got hit by a bus and found myself sitting up in heaven having to admit that I didn’t do anything because I was afraid I’d die. I want to live my life.”
This is the exact opposite of how I think. I live life as though death is waiting just around the corner, and therefore I should do everything humanly possible to protect myself while turning that corner, including, but not limited to, wearing mystical bracelets, performing superstitious rituals, consulting spiritual guides, enduring voodoo cleansings, sweating, crying, shaking, convulsing in fear, and, sometimes, just turning around and going in the opposite direction, regardless of whether I can still get where I need to go.
Dean likes the camaraderie of the pit, but he says that when he’s out on the track, it’s an individual sport. He says, “In the middle of a race I’m a rock star. I’m Ben Spies. I’m Mat Mladin. I’m Valentino Rossi.”
To which I say, “The name Valentino rings a bell.”
And he also says that when he’s racing there is nothing in his head. He is free from the weight of the world. He feels like he is flying.
Yeah, maybe this is part of the problem. My husband loves to feel like he’s flying? To me that’s like saying you love to feel like you’re getting a tooth pulled. But okay. Different strokes and all that. Dean gets from racing some of what I get out of running my businesses—the feeling of power and knowing exactly what you want and need to do. And I see that it also gets him out of his head, which I could certainly use. But when he says he feels like he’s escaping the weight of the world, I can’t help feeling like that world that he’s escaping is us, his family.
If Dean has a day off, he’s off to the racetrack. I crave more time with Liam and Stella. If I have a day off, it is automatically theirs. There are things I miss about being single. Before I had kids, I loved to get into bed at three in the afternoon and spend hours watching mindless chick flicks, stupid movies, reality TV, and E! True Hollywood Stories. Now I can’t imagine doing that. I can’t imagine what a day to myself would be like. I’m not even sure I would be able to relax and enjoy it.
But maybe that’s my problem, not his. Dean has taken on producing jobs, but he still finds a way to race and scuba dive, and he says that if he didn’t, he’d go insane. He says it’s not a happy life if you work hard but can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Just because I’m a workaholic doesn’t mean Dean has to be one too. It’s not a good thing to be. I’m the one who feels a need for a certain kind of life. Dean would choose a simpler way of being. Hadn’t he been trying to tell me that all summer? My workaholic life was making me sick. He is the one who has found a healthier balance. Except that motorcycles are so dangerous, so that isn’t healthy. And then I’m back in the cycle of resentment.
Dean does spend time with the children. He is a devoted father. But he also gives time to his other interests. He finds enough free time to do both. He wishes I could do the same—and wishes I were less fearful. When I rented him the motorcycle for Father’s Day, he wanted nothing more than for me to hop on the back.
Clearly I need to make my peace with Dean’s motorcycle habit, but I haven’t done it. Instead, my fear has turned to anger. I decided that if he died riding a motorcycle, I would not mourn him. He knows I don’t like it. He knows it’s dangerous. Yet he continues to do it. I refuse to mourn a death I tried to prevent. Jenny says, “It doesn’t matter: you’d be destroyed if you lost Dean. It doesn’t matter how.” Of course. I mean, we all know that I’d grieve, but I don’t know how else to make my point.
So I say, “Nope, I will not grieve.”
Dean knows not to take me at face value. But he always protests anyway. He says, “You’ve always said you couldn’t picture life without me. Now you’re saying you won’t grieve for me if I die?”
I say, “I’ve said my piece.” The first time I said it, I threw my head back, turned on my heel, and made my exit. Now that I’ve said it so many times, I don’t bother with the dramatic flourishes anymore.
Jenny insists that if her husband wanted to ride motorcycles, she would just say no. She would demand that he give it up, and if I know Norm, he would. For better or worse, I refuse to make rules for Dean. Instead I just roil in resentment. He’s off doing his life-threatening gear-head man hobby while I’m working my ass off.
Any work-life balance can work in a relationship if both people accept it, but I go back and forth. I’m a workaholic. I want to control everything. I want to do it all, but then I resent it. I get mad about working so hard when Dean doesn’t have to. There was a moment in Tori & Dean that showed me working like a dog while Dean went to the motorcycle track to ride. He knows that he’s hanging out while I’m working and he admits to the camera, “I’m a douche bag.” When I saw that moment on tape, the resentment drained right out of me. Having him acknowledge the difference in our daily lives meant everything to me. Ah, the therapeutic benefits of reality television.
• • •
Our conflict around the motorcycles symbolized some other issues that were coming up—the chronic imbalance of work, time, and gender that come into play in most marriages. I couldn’t help wondering if part of what appealed to Dean about the motorcycles was the power he has in that world. It’s not just the tough leather duds. Among his motorcycle buddies, Dean is the big shot. He’s the star.
Recently Dean went to New York by himself to promote a movie that he was in. The morning after he got home, he told me that he was going to a motorcycle and car event that night, with his motorcycle buddy Santiago. I was taken aback. He’d just gotten home the night before. I said, “Oh. I thought we could all spend time together.” Dean relented immediately. No big deal. He wouldn’t go. But I stayed mad all morning. Why did he want to go? Why didn’t he want to be with us, with me? I couldn’t understand why he wanted to go to the motorcycle event without us. It seemed like a big deal. It was meaningful. Dean didn’t see the complexity of the matter.
He said, “I was invited. They have retro cars.”
But I said, “You were going to take Santiago instead of me. When I was married to Charlie, I used to take Mehran to events.” Now I was doing something I’d told Dean not to do—jumping to compare our relationship to mine with my ex. But in this case I thought he was behaving like I did when I was trying to escape.
Dean said, “You feel like it’s your relationship with Charlie because of one night?” I reminded him that when we first got together, we never wanted to be apart, not for a minute. For me, losing that was more significant than the changes to our sex life which were so frustrating to Dean. He kept saying, “But it’s motorcycles and cars. You don’t like that stuff. If you were taking Mehran to a jewelry event, I wouldn’t care.”
I said, “But I’d want to take you. We’re soul mates. We want to be by each other’s side. I like that we do everything together. I don’t want us to diverge.”
Then we got to what I thought was the heart of the matter. He said, “You do
n’t like to go to events anymore because you’re tired of it, but it’s still kind of new for me. I get invitations and it’s pretty cool.” It’s true that before Dean and I had kids, we went to a lot of events. We went to at least one every week. Restaurant openings, store launches, art gallery events, screenings, magazine parties, L.A. Fashion Week. It was fun. But I’d had enough, and I wanted him to feel the same way. As far as I was concerned, once we had kids, we moved on to the next chapter of our lives, but Dean never really had that chapter. He still wanted to enjoy the attention and perks of fame.
In some ways our lives are moving faster than Dean would like. He often says, “Remember when . . .” And when he says that, what I hear is “Remember when you were fun.” Before we got so busy with work and I got pregnant, I stayed out late, drank, had sex on demand. Now he says, “I miss us alone.” We’d been married for only two months when I got pregnant with Liam.
For me, the us that was me and Dean evolved into the us that is me, Dean, Liam, and Stella. I didn’t miss the us we used to be. Whatever had changed, whatever we’d lost, that was part of being a grown-up. Life was give-and-take. What we’d gotten in return, as parents, was much bigger than whatever we’d sacrificed.
I think some people miss the attention that they got from their spouses before the kids came along. And the freedom. I don’t miss it. If I take time for myself, I just feel guilty anyway. I used to get pedicures every week, but the idea of my kids sitting at home with a sitter while someone fiddles with my feet just seems out of whack. When I do drag myself to a pedicure, I spend the whole time on my BlackBerry, trying to be productive.
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