Between Me and You Read online

  “Timing never was our forte,” I say, more boldly than I meant to, but then maybe exactly the amount of boldness that I intended. I haven’t felt something like this in too long. A spark, a fire, so while I might tell myself that I don’t mean to flirt with my old girlfriend who left me for a residency in San Francisco, I know that plenty of things we tell ourselves are untrue. Like that I’m not responsible for Leo’s death. Like I haven’t intentionally cratered my career because nothing felt important after Leo. Like Tatum might be growing weary of me. Like I have stopped trying to read her—in small ways, like if her smile for the nurse today was genuine, and in larger ways too—and I haven’t done anything to change it. I tell myself all sorts of lies every day, so this one—that I don’t mean to overstep with Amanda—is just another on my list, another way I betray myself. Another way that I test Tatum too: Would she notice that I spent the afternoon flirting with my old girlfriend? Would she sense it on me, like a dog smells fetid garbage, like she once would have?

  Amanda grins. “I always wondered if I’d run into you here. Not here here. At Cedars. But LA.” She shrugs. “I guess it’s a big city. And you’re married now. To Tatum Connelly. My God. I never had a chance.”

  “Hey,” I say. “You’re the one who broke my heart.”

  “If I recall, you broke up with me.”

  “Oh, you know. Beating you to the punch and all of that. It’s not like I didn’t sit and cry myself to sleep that whole first summer. Also: lots of alcohol was involved.”

  “But then you got over me.” She smiles.

  “Only because my endless weeping was seriously crimping my rebound sex.”

  She laughs, and I do too. A dormant staccato rising up from my chest, bouncing off the beige exam room walls.

  “How about you?” I ask. “Where are you on the scale of single to rebound to commitment?” Jesus, a loaded question if there ever was one. I’m shocked at my brazenness, more shocked at how easily it comes.

  “Oh, well, still single. Engaged once but that didn’t stick.” She glances to the floor. “I don’t know. I guess being a doctor pretty much takes up most of my life. And I have all these kids . . . my patients.”

  “Oh,” I reply because I’m suddenly nervous. Not that I’ve exposed too much or that she has, but that just as quickly, there is an unexpected tension—the tension of possibility—between us.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me. There are little frozen Amandas sitting in a laboratory not far from here, ready and waiting for that perfect specimen of sperm!” She blushes and holds a hand to her face. “Shit, sorry. I always overshare when I’m uncomfortable.”

  “I remember.” I smile. “And I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. God, not at all. Sorry, that’s on me. I’ve been a bit of an emotional sieve recently.” I flop my arm. “I apologize.”

  “You were always such a fucking nice guy.” She sighs. “I thought that would bore me, but it turns out that nice guys are harder to find than I thought. More valuable, I mean.”

  “I’m really not that nice.” I should say: Just ask my wife. I turn the light out before she can come to bed; I ignore her requests to write a script just for her; I leave the room when my mom calls and Tatum holds the receiver out to me because I am petty and childish now that my mom has a new husband, Ron, and a new life where they take cruises in the Mediterranean, and have a membership to the tennis club near the summer home they’re renting in Connecticut. I’m still here. I’m still stuck.

  Leo is gone, and I have lost myself with him.

  “Well, Tatum’s lucky. That’s all I mean. I’m sure she knows that.” Amanda exhales and seems to consider something.

  I fiddle with my wedding band and worry what else she’ll say, what else she has heard, what will break me from this foreign bubble of happiness. As if she can read my cues as well as Tatum can (or used to), she says: “Well, this is a happy accident. I mean, not that I wanted your son to break his arm! Just . . . you know . . . anyway, I think he’s going to be OK. I’ll check his X-rays, of course, but these things on kids manage to heal faster than you’d think.” She slows her rambling. Inhales, smiles. “Wow, your son. That kind of blows my mind.”

  “Trust me, me too.” I smile back, working muscles that have nearly atrophied.

  “Anyway, they’ll bring him back from Radiology, and I’ll let you know. We may need to keep him here overnight to rule out a concussion.”

  “OK,” I say. “I’ll stay as long as it takes.”

  She grabs the door handle to leave, then hesitates. “Look, I don’t know.” She pulls a card from the front pocket of her lab coat. “Take this. If you ever want to, like, catch up, give me a call.”

  I stare at the card for a second too long. It feels like a dare; it feels like an alarm that I should run from.

  “Or don’t,” she says, blood rising to her cheeks again. “God, this is unprofessional. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I say.

  “OK,” she replies. “Then I’m not.”

  10

  TATUM

  MARCH 2003

  We marry in Santa Barbara in March. Neither of us wanted much of a to-do; I’d have been happy at City Hall, and Ben is so busy now that he is Hollywood’s It boy that, through no fault of his own, he couldn’t involve himself in more than showing up. “I will show up very enthusiastically,” he says, before throwing me atop the duvet and kissing my neck. “But the flowers, the cake? I don’t care. Only care about the woman waiting for me at the end of the aisle.”

  But after the wreckage of the previous year—his dad, my mom—it felt like we owed something more to our families, well, to his mom, Helen, and to Leo and to Piper, my sister, and if giving them a wedding also gave them something to be happy about, it was a small concession. Not a concession. It was a celebration. But the typical trappings of a formal wedding weren’t for me. Not without my mom here, anyway, and maybe even if she’d been here, not then either.

  I take a week off work: I’m the Tuesday–Saturday bartender at P. F. Chang’s on Wilshire, and Ben shutters his laptop and his trips back and forth to the studio where they are finalizing the reshoots for All the Men, with the hopes of having it prepped for the Toronto Film Festival this fall. Since landing in LA nine months ago, our lives, well, Ben’s life, has spun into a whirlwind—mine mostly consists of pouring cosmos for tourists and snacking on bar nuts with Mariana, my bartending cohort and also an aspiring actress. Ben and I promise ourselves that we can press Pause for a five-day sliver of time to marry. Though P. F. Chang’s is my paycheck, I am stuffed with classes, workshops, mailings to agents and managers and anyone who will have me. I went to goddamn Tisch, but no one out here seems to notice all that much. Maybe if my breasts were bigger or my vibe more available. I don’t know. Mariana says the only people who make it in their first year are the rich kids with connections, “like the Spielberg kids or whatever,” so I don’t tell her that my fiancé is making it in his first year, because I’m not sure that I want her to point out that he’s “a rich kid with connections,” or maybe I’m not sure that I want to believe that Ben wouldn’t have made it regardless.

  “It’s not that I don’t dream of becoming P. F. Chang’s employee of the month,” I said to her a few weeks ago.

  “Oh babe, I hear you. I was Ms. January, and let me tell you, it’s the stuff dreams are made of.” She laughed.

  Daisy, my best friend from Tisch, flies in from New York for the wedding, packing in a few auditions for the week (rich kid with connections), and a hodgepodge of Ben’s high school friends jet out too, landing in LA, but then driving to Santa Barbara to stay at the Biltmore or the swanky boutique hotels tucked into the sides of mountains where celebrities unwind for the weekend. In the nine months since we left New York, Ben and I have planted roots in a rental bungalow on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, and Piper heads out three days before the wedding to stay in the guest room (Ben’s office) and help me prepare, though there isn’t too much to
do. Helen found a woman in Santa Barbara who coordinates beach weddings for a living, and I’ve merely had to reply to e-mails with things like “full bar,” “lilies not roses,” “salmon sounds fine,” and that’s that.

  “You seem so unexcited,” Piper said the morning before we were set to drive north for the event. We were walking along the beach, just a stone’s throw from the condo complex. From my bedroom window I could see the horizon, the towering palm trees, the stairway leading downward to the path on which we now walked. “You’re happy, right?”

  “Of course I’m happy,” I said, sliding off my flip-flops, stepping from the concrete boardwalk onto the cold sand. It was a gloomy morning, the skies overcast and low.

  “Like, if it were my wedding, I’d be way more into it.”

  “I just feel like the wedding stuff is stupid. I just want to get going, live my life.”

  She plopped onto the sand, reminding me of how gangly she was as a toddler, always tumbling down, scraping her knees, skinning her palms. Maybe it’s no surprise that she’s a nurse now, just like my mom was.

  “Do you think Mom and Dad were happy?” She craned her neck toward me.

  I was startled by the question, felt a hiccup in my heart.

  “Dad was a drunk,” I said. “I don’t know how you live with that.”

  She shook her head. “Before that. Like, now, when they were just about to get married, like you. She must have loved him as much as you love Ben, right?”

  I scanned the ocean, the waves riotous and angry. I didn’t want to think about how my marriage could be like my parents’ or how Ben could be like my dad. Not that he was. Not that they were anything close.

  “I don’t know, Pipes. I guess. Maybe.”

  “I think every marriage must start off hopeful, right? You know she forgave him for everything at the end.” Her voice caught. “You know he was back home with her, I mean, with us, by then.”

  What she meant was: We all forgave him, can’t you? Or maybe what she meant was: Everyone screws up, in marriage too.

  It felt important to Piper that I believed my parents were happy, so I said: “They must have loved each other as much as they thought they could. I guess that’s all you can know, right? I can’t measure my love for Ben against Mom’s love for Dad because it’s not like you can quantify these things. It’s not like I can pour them into a cup and see which one measures more.”

  “Remember all those snow globes you and Mom collected?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It feels like marriage should be like that: trapped inside but in a good way. With sparkles raining down and protecting you.”

  “I don’t think that marriage is really anything like that.”

  She sighed. “It would be nice if it could be, though. Just all that time together, knowing each other inside and out.”

  I wanted to say: I don’t know that you can ever know somebody inside and out, and I certainly don’t want Ben to know all of my ugly insides. Nearly all of them, yes, but every last ugliness? Probably not. Would he love me enough then? Would I love him? He tells me: You don’t have to be a role or Stop pretending when he catches me slipping into someone who I’m not, and I do. Or at least I try to. Because Ben wants to see me, the whole of me, and when he does, he still loves me. But it’s not like there isn’t still wiggle room to fall into a cloudier place wearing my masks, not like old habits can be shed in a single moment.

  I said to Piper: “Sure, that does sound nice.”

  I’m quiet on the drive up to Santa Barbara. Ben and Piper play I Spy, even though no one has played it since we were children, but they are silly and bored, and we hit a bad patch of traffic that grates on my nerves but doesn’t faze Ben, because he’s not mired in the question Does he love me enough? I know I do him. And inherently, I know that he does me too: he doesn’t string me along like Eddie from college, who constantly dumped me for his girlfriend back home and then offered vague platitudes that made me forgive him; doesn’t invalidate my sexuality or feelings like Aaron in high school, who stripped me of my virginity. He is respectful, he is kind, he is loving, he is smart, he is everything I could have envisioned for myself and more. But what if, like my own parents, something changes, we change? Then, will he still love me enough?

  The car creeps forward in the traffic, and Piper’s voice grates on me, as if I am physically bristling at her for even planting this notion, this seed of insecurity in me. Will he love me forever? Love me like he does now, when he thinks he sees everything about me, but maybe he hasn’t?

  I see you, he says to me all the time. What he means is: I love you. But what happens when it gets uglier? Will I still look the same, my insides, my outsides?

  “I spy with my little eye a fiancée who is looking like she sucked on a lemon,” I hear Ben say, and Piper’s piercing laughter rings out from the back seat. He brings me to, brings me back, like only he can.

  I turn and roll my eyes at him.

  “Sometimes my mom used to call her ‘Deflatum Tatum,’” Piper laughs. “Because her mood would just go . . . poof.”

  “‘Deflatum Tatum!’” Ben howls.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “It is this ability to tap into all sorts of emotions that will one day win me an Oscar.”

  “Now, that I believe,” Ben says, still grinning. He eases his hand off the wheel and squeezes my thigh. “But no bad moods allowed in this car.”

  “It’s the traffic.”

  “You live in LA now, baby!” He says this in his slickest, slimiest producer voice, and I descend into my own fit of laughter. He glances from the road toward me and winks. I see you. I exhale. Of course we love each other enough. How could I even doubt that for a moment? We are not my parents. There isn’t a measuring cup for our love.

  Helen has rented us a suite at the Biltmore and, though I asked her not to, paid for Piper and my father as well. I told Ben how uncomfortable this made me, and he said, “Babe, I know, you’ve worked since you were twelve. But it’s just a weekend, and it’s just to make it go smoother for all of us, so let’s let it go for now, and this will be the last time we accept such a thing, OK?”

  And because he is pragmatic and kind, I, of course, let it go. He likes taking care of me, being my alpha. I’m the one who isn’t used to being taken care of.

  My dad is shuffling around the lobby when we pull up in Ben’s Toyota, and Piper says: “Be nice, Tate. Please, just be nice.”

  So I kiss his cheek and try to pretend that when I get close, I’m not sniffing for alcohol. He looks sober, though, clean. He reaches for me and pulls me tighter than I’d like, and says: “I wish so much she were here. She’d want to be here so badly.”

  He is crying already, so I press myself back from him. “Dad, please, come on. No tears today.”

  And he nods and sniffles, and then Piper is at his elbow, asking brightly if he’s already checked in, and maybe he wants to take a walk?

  Ben rolls our bags to our suite, which is covered in rose petals and makes us both sigh, because I hate roses (as did my mom), and then giggle because Helen has tried so hard, and it’s a little funny that our bed has been showered in something I loathe so deeply. Ben whisks them off the bed with a sweep of his arms, then tugs his clothes off nearly as quickly, jumps on top stark naked, and says: “Now, this is a better view, am I right?”

  I sleep fitfully that night until he presses himself next to me, nearly swallowing me against him, and then, when I can hear his heartbeat in my ear, I tumble toward sleep, as if his pulse is soothing mine, as if his heart is also assuring mine. We don’t need to measure our love, not when our hearts can beat in rhythm, not when they can beat in tandem, as if they are one and the same.

  It is unusually sunny the next day. You never know what you will get by the ocean in March, but for us, it is cloudless. Sky-blue.

  I take this as a sign.

  I wear my mother’s veil.

  My dad behaves himself, though I opt to walk down t
he aisle alone.

  Piper, as my maid of honor, holds my bouquet of lilies (Mom’s favorite) and passes me a tissue when I find myself weeping when Ben says his vows.

  Leo, as Ben’s best man, winks at me when I try to gather myself together, which makes me choke, then laugh, then cry harder, and so then Leo starts laughing, and Ben turns toward him, and Ben starts laughing, and soon all of us together have broken down into uncontrollable gales that echo over the beach waves just yards away.

  Though it is not the wedding I planned—Helen took care of all the details—it is perfect. We are perfect. Ben’s cheeks are sun-kissed and his eyes aglow, and he cries when he kisses me, and lofts our hands joyfully when the officiant declares us husband and wife, and I gaze at my husband and this menagerie of people who have stood up to celebrate us, and I realize that if we did measure our happiness, our love for each other, we would be full.

  Daisy finds me by the bar after the ceremony.

  “Please tell me you’re at least taking a few days for a honeymoon.”

  I stir my martini. “Ben has to work. They’re aiming for Toronto.”

  “He should just cast you. Like you’re not the best actress he could find.”

  I shake my head. “I want to do this on my own merits, not because I’m Ben Livingston’s wife.”

  “Everyone in this town uses their connections. Christ, look at me.”

  “It would be different if he wrote something just for me or whatever. I don’t want him wedging me into a project just because. I’ll pass.”

  “Your call,” she says. “But there are easier paths to becoming a star.”

  I shrug as if to say: Let’s talk about something else. Not that there is much to discuss anyway. Though we’ve been in Los Angeles for only nine months, I can barely muster commercial auditions, and even those haven’t gone well. (I am never pretty, only “cute,” or I am too pretty but they want “cuter,” or I am too tall or too short or too flat-chested or too brunette. I am “too” much of everything but what they want, it seems.) But I meant it: It wasn’t Ben’s job to find me work. It was mine. Had been since I was twelve, and it isn’t any different now.