I don’t know what I want yet, and if this explodes before I’ve figured it out . . .
Jesus, this is the most inarticulate thing I’ve ever written, and that’s saying a lot.
I want you. I need you. I just don’t know what to do about it.
What do you think?
—B
From: Amanda Paulson
To: Ben Livingston
Re: re: things
Date: April 10, 2013
B—I understand. You know I do. But I do have to be honest and say that being with you again, well, it made me realize what an idiot I was back in New York, and if there’s any way that I can keep you in my life, selfishly, I want that. I need that. I don’t know how to undo this past year. I don’t know how to turn this off. Does that sound overdramatic? I don’t mean it to be. I only mean that you’re so easy to love, and I can’t help but feel like the only thing we’ve had wrong is our timing, our chronology.
—A
From: Ben Livingston
To: Amanda Paulson
Re: re: re: things
Date: April 10, 2013
A—want to meet for a drink tonight at Sunset Tower and discuss? Maybe it will feel better if we do it in person.
—B
I am only on Ben’s laptop because I forgot my charger in LA, and Ben’s is fully juiced and open and available, and Stephanie, my assistant, can’t FedEx me the charger until tomorrow because FedEx doesn’t make Sunday deliveries, and there is not an Apple store anywhere near Canton, and the electronics store at the mall is out of stock. So, all of this to say that I’m not even supposed to be on Ben’s laptop.
We’re back home for Piper’s baby shower, and I was looking forward to a weekend of just being Piper’s big sister, not Tatum the movie star, not Tatum the Great. Everything was so much more complicated now, with this big life up for public consumption. Ben has left his computer atop our bed when he went for a run, and it doesn’t even occur to me that I shouldn’t log on, that there is anything illicit to be found, that Ben might have a secret just as I do. Though a different one, of course. He has been writing again (sprawled all morning on the bed, pecking away, occasionally glancing toward me when I pop my head in and say, “How’s it going?” and giving me a thumbs-up); he’s been exercising again. We’ve been making love from time to time. He’s even willing to read a script or two for me when I’m deciding what to tackle for my winter projects.
I’m in the thick of an HBO miniseries right now—a modern take on Agatha Christie (TV is suddenly hot, even for an Oscar winner), and then perhaps another directorial project, Love Runs Through It, to follow up Roe v. Wade, which I haven’t even officially put to bed. I’ve been offered Broadway, but with Joey in school, I can’t uproot him to New York, and who wants to be in New York for the winter anyway? Maybe over the summer. I’d proposed that to Ben: New York over the summer, and we can revisit all the old haunts? Do you think that Dive Inn is even still there? What about that cream puff store we used to love? He hesitated, said it depended on his own work, and I nodded and said, Of course, and then chastised myself because I was trying to remind myself, or at least remind Ben, that my work didn’t trump his, even when part of me thought that it did. Even when, intentionally or not, I did put my work first; I did forget him in my Oscar speech. Daisy had suggested that maybe he just felt emasculated, maybe that was the reason for his funk, and I’d figured if I danced around my own successes, downplayed them enough, massaged his brilliance enough, I could reverse that.
“You shouldn’t have to apologize for your success,” she’d said. “I mean, you haven’t been perfect about all of it, but success, nope, you can’t begrudge yourself that.”
We were out power walking in the hills behind our house, my hat pulled low so no one would recognize me, her huge black sunglasses imploring someone to recognize her. My weight these days was a constant battle; you’d think that industry acclaim meant that five or ten pounds was forgivable, but if anything it only got worse. There was constant scrutiny, not just with the gossip on my life and the candids in the tabloids, but nearly everywhere I went now. Going out to dinner was a chore: there were eyeballs and stares, and inevitably, someone stopped by the table for an autograph. There’d been a stalker concern recently, a lanky oddball in his twenties who loitered outside the house and yelled lewd things at my car window every time I came and went. Finally, I hired security, who had him arrested. Dropping Joey at school was a dance with the other mothers, who pretended they hadn’t just seen my face on some blog like Dlisted, and I pretended that they weren’t pretending. I was sized up in the line at Starbucks, sized up in wardrobe on sets. Even Luann, my publicist, would look me up and down and raise her eyebrows and say, “Darling, I love you, but no one loves a chubby girl.” I almost fired her right then, but she’d just booked me the Vogue cover, which I needed to starve myself for anyway.
“I’m not apologizing for my success,” I said to Daisy between breaths. “I just think . . . Ben’s had a shitty time, you know? With Leo, with his dad, all of that.”
“I don’t mean to sound like a bitch, but his dad was a decade ago. And the Oscar thing? Two years ago.”
“I didn’t say anything about the Oscar thing. Ben never even mentioned it.”
“Listen, I get it, it’s terrible. Terrible things happen all the time. When does he stop carrying that around?”
“He’s been so much better recently.” I stopped and flopped over, touched my toes. “He’s back on Code Emergency . . . he even went birdwatching with my dad last weekend.”
Daisy considers this. “Well, I gotta give anyone points who is willing to go birdwatching with anyone.”
I right myself, aim my arms toward the sky, arch my back, and groan. Then softly: “I never told him about that night at Harbor. I mean . . . I never told him that Leo had relapsed.”
“So that’s what this is about. This guilt, your apologies.”
“Leo asked me not to, and Ben had been so unkind toward my dad, and I just . . . I just wanted to prove Ben wrong, that people can get better and change. If Ben had known . . . I just felt like he would somehow be vindicated. Not that he wanted Leo to relapse. But just that . . . I don’t know . . .” I sigh, turn my face toward the breeze blowing in from the west. “I guess I was certain Leo would clean up, and then what harm did it do, not telling Ben?”
“You couldn’t get Leo better any more than you can heal Ben,” she says. “That’s not your responsibility. You’ve gotten used to doing things your way, Tate. But this isn’t one of those things. This was Leo’s thing.”
But what if it were my thing, what if it were Ben’s too? I wanted to say, but she had already loped ahead of me.
Today, in my old bedroom in my old home, where I entertained plenty of what-ifs when my childhood took turn after turn, I wonder if Daisy wasn’t right, and I wonder how I can possibly change, let go, if she is. In fact, I’d opened Ben’s laptop to search his e-mail for Dr. Paulson’s follow-up report on how long Joey might have residual arm pain: he’d stumbled on a rock and fallen in my mom’s garden and was whining about his wrist now. Piper had assured me that he was fine—she’s a nurse, after all—but I couldn’t take her advice; I had to solve it for myself.
But I don’t find that e-mail. What I find is something so unexpected that it’s literally as if my heart is seizing. I read and reread the e-mail, then all of the e-mails with the name “Paulson” that litter his deleted files folder. They date back to last May. And that’s when I fit the puzzle pieces together: Ben didn’t even tell me she was that Amanda. Not at the hospital, not after.
I check and recheck the dates of the exchange when he says he wants to end it: three months ago. Where was I three months ago? I scroll through the calendar on my phone because I need a calendar on my phone to keep track of my life now. At Legoland. At goddamn Legoland for the evening with the crew of America, a reward for those grueling night shoots, for enduring the lecherous looks of the director,
Ronnie Slater, who liked to finish a take by yelling something like: That was so good that my dick got hard just watching, or Tatum, you’re so fucking hot that it’s all I can do not to beat off right here behind the monitor. I’d told Ben that the event was just for cast and crew, spouses weren’t coming. But that wasn’t true. A handful of wives and husbands caravanned down with us to San Diego for the festivities. But I had lied to Ben because it was the easier thing to do. Tote him along, watch him fumble with small talk, worry if he was having fun, worry if I were giving him enough attention. I just wanted this to be mine, as small and as insignificant as one stupid night at Legoland was.
It occurs to me that I probably just could have said that: Do you mind if I do this last thing with the crew without you? You can come, but would it be OK if I went on my own?
Ben has never begrudged me my independence, because he knew I’d show up when he needed me, and he probably would have just shrugged and said, Sure. He hated theme parks anyway. And yet I lied, maybe to be a little spiteful, maybe because he’d been distant enough that it was a test—to see if he’d notice, to see if he was paying close enough attention.
I close his e-mail quickly, and then I race to the bathroom where I spent hours examining my face as a teenager, trying to line my eyes just so to make them alluring, trying to scrub my skin so it shined like those Noxzema ads I saw. I heave over the toilet, purging what little I’d allowed myself for breakfast. A wisp of a memory makes its way in, as I ease down to the floor, trying to catch my breath.
IHOP. The endless silver dollar pancakes and the look of surprise on Julie Seymour’s face when she recognized me.
Back here, so many years ago. God, we’d been so happy then. How do you go from there to here? How does one moment in a lifetime of moments completely detonate the foundation you’d rested your existence on? Not that we hadn’t been better recently. We had been. He was writing more; I was around more often. We had dinners with Joey and sometimes evening walks too. We weren’t all sharp edges about my dad or misinterpreted words about his career or my time commitments or whatever it was that we found to argue about.
I hear Ben in the bedroom and shut the bathroom door quickly with my foot.
“Tate?” he calls. “Back from my run.”
“OK.”
“I was gonna shower, you almost done in there?”
“Almost,” I say. If this had been years back, if this had been IHOP, when we were so hot for each other that we screwed in the rental car’s back seat in the grocery store parking lot, like I had in high school, a random moment in time that had granted us Joey, I’d have ushered him into the bathroom with me, slipped into the shower with him to feel his skin pressed against mine.
Now, I try to slow my racing heart and say, “Give me another minute. Then I’ll be done.”
I pull myself up, meet my own eyes in the mirror that has reflected my face back a million times, and tell myself that I already harbor one secret. Maybe if I keep this to myself, I can make it right, I can fix it on my own. We were doing better now; who we used to be half a decade ago at that IHOP didn’t feel so far, too far, in the distance that we couldn’t get it back. Ben was coming back to me, or maybe I was moving back to him, but we were starting to see each other again in ways that were ephemeral but tangible too.
Or maybe that was me misreading the script.
Still, I’m not willing to abandon us yet, not when I can envision how we can get it all back. So yes, I will tuck this away, right the ship, bring Ben back to me, bring me back to Ben. This is just one more secret between us. One more role I will myself to play.
31
BEN
SEPTEMBER 2001
The only reason I’m awake is because Tatum had an early class and set off the fire alarm when she tried to fry bacon before leaving.
“Shit, shit, sorry,” she said, scrambling around her tiny studio, flopping an oven mitt toward the smoke, batting down the alarm with a broom handle. The plastic cover popped off and crashed to the floor, where it promptly split in two. Tatum jumped like she hadn’t expected that, for gravity to work, and then her apartment was silent again, other than the sizzle of the torched bacon.
“Shit,” she said again. “Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I’d been up too late in the edit bay, splicing together the final cut of Romanticah before I sent it out into the festival world, praying someone will take notice and give me my shot.
“It’s fine,” I said, rubbing my eyes, waving her closer. “I promised Tom I’d read two manuscripts today anyway.”
“You’re seriously the best assistant agent he could hope for. Two books in a day?” She shook her head and kissed me, hovering over the bed so her tank top fell low and offered me a view.
“Now how am I supposed to concentrate with that on my mind?”
She straightened and laughed, low and husky, and I leaned back against her headboard, my arms folded behind my head, and matched her grin. The first two months since her mom died were a spiral of gray, everything muted, everything numb. She kissed me because she loved me, and she sometimes (not as often as before) slept with me because that’s what you do, but she wasn’t here here. She didn’t eat enough, and she nearly got fired from the bar because she kept mouthing off to customers, but slowly she’d come back. I didn’t know if she would, though I never dared say that. Those words were never worth the damage they would have inflicted. I’d give her space, and she’d tell me I didn’t care. I’d try to talk to her, and she’d tell me I was hovering. Then she’d cry and say it wasn’t me, it was her fucking grief, and that I was the best thing about her life, and to please forgive her for being such a bitch. And of course I was going to forgive her for that.
I didn’t understand it, though, her moodiness, her push/pull. Daisy explained that all actresses (herself included) are basically nuts, so get used to it. But that was too easy, too pat an explanation. So Daisy said that Tatum must trust me in order to show me all her ugliness, to not try to dress up her grief into something rosier or shinier or easier, and then I understood: she was letting me inside her, and for me to stand by her, to sit with her, was enough.
But now she is coming back to me. Her classes help, I know. The structure of having a planned day, the lightness of becoming someone else for a few hours. Someone whose mom hadn’t died. Someone whose dad wasn’t a fucking mess. And time too, though it had been only three months.
This morning she’d said, “If you keep this in mind long enough, I’ll be back from class, and then—”
“Then what?” I laughed.
“Then it will just be your lucky day, I guess,” she said, her hand on the front door. Then she was gone.
By the time I shower and scrub the burned pot she’d abandoned on the stove, it’s nearly nine a.m. Her coffeemaker is broken, like many other things in the apartment, so I slide on my flip-flops, thump down the building’s concrete stairwell to the cart on the corner. It’s a perfect, cloudless September day. Crisp breezes. Powder blue skies. As if this is our reward for suffering through the sweltering days of August. It does kind of feel like my lucky day, actually. My editing session had gone well; I’m getting paid by a top literary agent to read early manuscripts. My girlfriend is smiling again and wants to screw me tonight.
I pay for the coffee, slide my headphones into my ears, and decide to take a walk. Stretch my legs. Enjoy the fall air. The caffeine electrifies my blood, and I resolve to do this every day. Self, I say, do this every day! Rise early. Kiss your sexy girlfriend good-bye. Start the day with some exercise to pump some energy into your veins! You are young! You are virile! It is going to be your goddamn lucky day!
Three police cars race by me so quickly that I can literally feel the wind off their wake. Two fire engines roar to life behind me, flying around the corner, startling a woman next to me such that she jumps and slaps her hand to her heart. I fiddle with my Walkman radio where the DJs are talking about a small plane that ha
s hit the World Trade Center. I halt quickly at that, peer around to see if anyone else is hearing what I’m hearing, but the morning rush hour keeps passing by. A Cessna, they’re saying. Must have been a total fluke.
I adjust my headphones and start up again. My dad works in the World Trade Center, but what are the odds? These guys probably don’t even have it right. A small plane hitting a building?
I shake my head. That can’t be.
Through the foam of my earbuds, I can hear sirens suddenly burst from all corners of the city, and this time people around me do stop, their faces registering alarm, like we were all listening to these same radio stations and all thinking bullshit but now perhaps realizing that this is not a joke. Not at all funny. The DJs shout in my ear, “There’s another plane! Another plane has hit the Towers. Folks, this appears not to be an accident. We can only speculate, of course . . .”
A woman stops next to me, her headphones plugged into her own radio, and grabs my arm.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“Oh my God,” I reply. Then: “My dad!”
I turn and start running back to Tatum’s apartment, my flip-flops not able to match my pace, and I stumble when all I want to do is move faster than I’ve ever moved in my life. I take the steps two by two, jiggle the shaking key in her lock, and flip on her TV, which, thank God, is working today (it isn’t always). I grab the phone and dial my mom.
“Benjamin,” she says, out of breath. “He’s not there. It’s OK. He’s on a flight today. Going to San Francisco for a deposition.”
I can feel myself uncurl, like the cells in my body had been magnetically bonded together and have been granted release.
“Jesus, Mom, thank God.”
“I know, I know, but those poor people,” she says, as I find CNN on the dial, the reality of the images worse than I could have imagined even when the DJs were shouting in their mics. “Oh, Ben, call waiting. Let me take this.”
Between Me and You Page 26
