Between Me and You Page 12

  “Jesus, Tate, come on, what happened to that fire from back in the bar, the girl who wouldn’t turn down a bet?” Daisy says.

  I poke at an olive and pop it in my mouth.

  “That girl was a role, Daisy—give me a break, like you don’t know that. Also, LA is fucking hard. Everyone out there is beautiful and aspiring.”

  “But you have more talent in your pinky than they do.”

  I shrug again.

  “Tatum, you were the best one in our graduating class. You were the one who won raves in Romanticah. None of the rest of us.”

  “Only because you got sick.”

  She shakes her head. “No. No. Professor Sherman always gave you the harder work, always handed you the trickier parts.”

  “Because he was a hard-ass.”

  “No,” she says, squeezing my shoulders. “Because you were the best. How did you not know that?”

  “Easy for you to say.” Praise was never my strong suit, perhaps because my dad gave me so little of it, perhaps because my mom was so overly effusive that her endless compliments came to mean nothing, were just jumbles of words. “You’re already, like, taking Broadway by storm.”

  “Off-Broadway,” she says. “And by the way, it’s basically for minimum wage.”

  “It’s gotta beat the tip jar at P. F. Chang’s,” I say.

  “Well, I still think he owes you a honeymoon. It’s the least he could do for making you lose that bet.” She winks, then dips her fingers into my drink and pulls out the remaining olive. “Also, to bring this back to yours truly, I think you have me to thank for this: (a) the bet, (b) getting the chicken pox.”

  “I’ll be sure to thank you in my acceptance speech,” I say with a grin.

  “Assholes who don’t give credit to the people who get them there are the worst.” Daisy sticks out her tongue. “Blech.” She makes a retching noise. “Ooh, so you’ll also have to thank that ex-girlfriend. If she had stuck around New York, who knows what would have happened?”

  “Amanda.” I make my own retching sound. “But no talk of ex-girlfriends tonight.”

  “You’re right.” She nods and pulls me closer for a hug. “You guys were meant for each other. No one is more meant for each other than you and Ben.”

  “My cup runneth over,” I say.

  Daisy motions for the bartender, and we toast to my good fortune.

  11

  BEN

  FEBRUARY 2011

  My face hurts from smiling, and I hate that I’m aware of this. I’m happy for Tatum. But the press line on the red carpet is endless, and her publicity team keeps shuttling me to the side for each interview, escorting me to the back when the photographers call out for a “single.” Single meaning just her. Single meaning all the ways she outshines me.

  I’m not throwing a pity party; it’s simply true. Tatum has ascended above me in all the ways that matter to this town.

  “I’m sorry,” she’ll say each time as she’s swept off into that photographer sea. “It doesn’t mean anything other than they want a shot of my dress”—but it’s hard not to feel like she’s splintering off from me, leaving me behind.

  I wave to Eric, who is on the arm of a producer he’s been dating, as I wait for her to wrap another interview. Ryan Seacrest now, fawning, making her spin in a circle. The racket on the carpet is too loud to hear the two of them, but I see Tatum throw her head back into a completely realistic cackle, and I wonder if I’m the only person out here who knows that she’s faking it. I still know her, still love her, still see her, which I think she both values and demands.

  “This is nuts,” Eric says as he weaves his way toward me. He’s grown a goatee in the two weeks since I’ve seen him; I’ve had no time for my own friends or my own work since I’ve been out with Tatum at industry events each night.

  “Nice goatee,” I say.

  “All the A-listers are doing it.” He grins.

  “Which makes us A-list adjacent, I guess?”

  “On our best days.” He laughs. “On our best days, dude.”

  I shrug. “No room for the plebian TV folks here.”

  “(A) we’re not plebian TV folks: Code Emergency is going to kill it, and (b) you’re with the night’s only sure thing, so take up a little more space.”

  Tatum’s publicist waves me onward.

  “Gotta hop, duty calls. Find me at a party later. Save me, more like.”

  “I expect you to be working the room,” he says. “Selling the shit out of Code.”

  “Noted.” I nod, losing him as the crowd folds behind me.

  Of course, I have no intention of talking up our new network deal at Fox, the one that guarantees us a full season of Code Emergency (set to air this coming March!). TV is not film, even when Tatum says that she’s proud of me, even when the paycheck is lucrative. Code Emergency is formulaic hospital stuff, not what I had envisioned when I was hailed as Hollywood’s It boy, not the stuff I had imagined when I pieced together Romanticah or when I was wooed to LA, riding on my carpet of fairy dust, and penned All the Men or One Day in Dallas. Some days, when I’m feeling even less generous with myself, I wonder what my father would say. Not that I’m not a grown-up, not that I should still heave around daddy issues, much less dead-daddy issues. But still, yes, sometimes I hear his voice rattling around, wondering why I’m marooned in the middle instead of scrambling toward the top. Other than Tatum, my ambition has been the only thing I’ve held steady since film school. To abandon that means, essentially, that I have failed. Tatum would tell me this is crazy, that I am echoing my father, but Tatum is ambitious in her own ways, so to tell me to quell my own lust for success is senseless, hypocritical.

  I’ve tried to get back into film; it’s not as if I haven’t. But you can only have so many flops in this town, or so many scripts put into turnaround before you’re relegated elsewhere. TV. Network TV if you’re really hurting. “If you can dream it, you can be it,” Tatum tells me, which, years ago, she used as her own mantra, and it used to be kind of cute, the kind of thing that I’d tease her about and then throw her over my shoulder and cart her to the bedroom, but now it just makes me bristle.

  “It’s not as if I don’t want it,” I say. “It’s not like I’m not trying.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she’ll say. “You’re misinterpreting.”

  On the carpet, Tatum wraps the interview and glides toward me, blowing out her cheeks, widening her eyes. “God, I have twenty more of these, and I’ve already run out of ways to be charming. Save me.”

  “You’re much more charming than I am, so I wouldn’t know how if I could.” I kiss her forehead. A photographer will snap us in this pose, and we’ll appear to be the picture of happiness. Sometimes we are.

  Lily Marple taps her shoulder before we can be herded to the next talking head.

  “Darling,” Lily says, tilting forward to air-kiss both of Tatum’s cheeks. “Ben.” She raises her eyebrows, which I know Tatum sees, and which I also know will irk her the evening through, even though her life is about to change times infinity. “I just wanted to wish you luck,” Lily says.

  “Thank you.” Every one of Tatum’s muscles is frozen except for the ones squeezing my hand. She hasn’t forgotten, all these years later, how Lily shoved her hands down my pants on One Day in Dallas, how Lily thought she could take what she wanted because she was a star, and how what Lily wanted was me. I didn’t bite, of course. Which is why it was easy to laugh about it when I told Tatum, until I realized she wasn’t laughing.

  “I mean it,” Lily says, lowering her eyes. “I know we’re not friendly, and I know that our rivalry sells a lot of magazines, but I wish you luck. I wish you success. I wish you only good things.”

  “Thank you,” Tatum says again.

  “We should put this behind us,” Lily offers, and she strikes me as genuine, like a once-young upstart who learned that being an asshole gets you nowhere. Or at least makes you no friends. Since Lily and I worked together
, she has gone just about everywhere a career can go, trailed only by Tatum. I watch Lily now, debating how honest she’s being with her truce offering: she is also an excellent actress, and with excellent actresses you never can tell. It occurs to me that perhaps I should start to wonder as much about Tatum.

  “OK,” Tatum says, not at all genuine, like someone who can hold a grudge forever. My gut relaxes just a bit: I can still read her; she is not as foreign to me as Lily.

  Lily grasps her free hand. “I voted for you, doll.”

  The photographers sniff out their union from behind their press barricade and start shouting their names. “Lily and Tatum, give us a smile! Show us some leg! Just you two, ladies, just you two!” The publicity team yanks me out of the shots, tucks me back into the corners where the plus-ones belong.

  I admire Tatum from my perch to the side. Tonight she is almost too beautiful to look at, even though I’ve looked at her for years now. She is in a beaded, strapless gold gown that somehow turns her green eyes almost violet and her skin iridescent. Still, she is too skinny, as she always is now (“skinny photographs better,” she says), her collarbone protruding, her back a string of knife edges, but I’ve also grown used to the way that her hip bones jut out when I reach for them, how the curve of her belly is nearly concave such that you’d never know it was once swollen with Joey and beautiful. Tonight, even beside Lily, who is alluring and sensuous in her own way (though I am certain to never breathe a word of this aloud), Tatum is a star in every context of the word: glittering, golden, ethereal.

  Finally, her publicist barks, “Enough,” and whisks her to the next interview, then the one after that, and then after an endless ocean of sycophantic reporters and executives and hangers-on, we wade toward the lobby of the theater.

  “You ready?” I whisper in her ear. Her lips find mine in reply, lingering for a beat as she calms herself. I linger for a beat too. My wife isn’t Lily Marple: she is still transparent to me, regardless of the masks she puts on for her roles, for the lavishing press, for her adoring fans.

  “I’m so fucking nervous,” she says, pulling back. “You would think I could get a grip.”

  “I see you,” I say, like I used to all the time. “I’m here.” Which surprises me as much as it may surprise her. I know that I have dragged my feet to some of these parties, that I have let my ego too easily be bruised when an exec brushes past me for someone more important. That this is her moment, and while most of me has championed her, perhaps the whole of me hasn’t because I’ve been too stupid and too insecure not to be a small bit competitive. I know that she can see me calculating—Why her, not me—as if there is only so much success to go around. I tell myself it’s not about her, I’m not that guy who cares that his wife lives larger than he does. It’s about my missed potential, about half-realized dreams that remind me of all the ways my cup can still be filled; it’s about watching Tatum live up to all of her potential while realizing how much of mine I’ve wasted. About landing in LA as Hollywood’s next great thing and now penning a shitty network hospital drama.

  Some of that wasn’t my fault: scripts were put in turnaround; finished cuts weren’t as well received as we’d hoped they’d be. Some of it was on me, though: how personally I took the rejection and the poor reviews; how much my work suffered after my dad died, as if I kept trying harder and harder to please him, and it was only backfiring with all the effort; how I was still the kid showing off his French at the Louvre to get his dad’s approval, only now that was impossible. How I never could get Reagan right, though not for lack of trying.

  I didn’t used to be this way, at least I don’t think so. Or maybe it’s just that as a rich kid out of Dalton and then Williams for college, everything was realized for me, because that’s the sort of path that’s paved for you when you’re a rich kid out of Dalton and Williams. Sometimes I’ll find myself watching Tatum at one of these endless industry parties where she kisses cheeks and laughs in that way that only I know is fake and hugs acquaintances like they’re best friends, and I’ll resent her for all of it, and then I’ll rewind and try to pinpoint when I became so cynical, when I became such a dick. It’s not like I don’t know what I am.

  But I’ll forgive myself for that too. Because how can I not still be a little angry over the way he died, what the nineteen men on those planes took from me, the way it left us? How it wrecked Leo, how it unmoored me, how my mom found someone new and moved on as if this weren’t the ultimate blight on my hope of normalcy? How I’d never write a script that was good enough for him or win me the Oscar like I promised him because he wouldn’t be around anyway? How I’d never have the chance to forgive him for the way he pushed me, for the way he goaded me, and yes, for the way he inspired me too? To be the best, to expect the best. Now I was simply left with a void of that: of the best. And in this void, all of my best had suffered. It was years back now, and not something I dwell on, but the wreckage of his death ruined me maybe more than it should have and ruined my work along with it.

  None of that is Tatum’s fault. That dark seed inside of me has nothing to do with her. But still, when I watch her glide through a room as if she’s lit by a spotlight and wonder, Why her, not me—just like I’ve wondered a million times in the shadowy corners of my grief about my dad, and how these seeds flare up with Ron and Walter now too: Why my dad, not someone else?—it’s hard not to be resentful all the same.

  Tonight, I try harder. I kiss her again and say: “You’re going to be great. You have your speech?”

  She nods, and then exhales and reaches for my hand, and we sail through the lobby toward Tatum’s destiny, and I remind myself to enjoy it, to savor it, to champion it, because this is the stuff that dreams are made of, if we open up wide enough to let those dreams in.

  My phone starts vibrating on the commercial break before Tatum’s category. I check it: my mom. I drop it back in my tux pocket.

  While others are flitting about the theater, clutching hands, making deals, Tatum is sitting stone still, trying to compose herself.

  “Almost there,” I say. “Try to enjoy it.”

  Tatum had won every major award leading up to this; there would be no upset, no surprise. In exactly three minutes she’ll float up to the stage and accept her Oscar. My phone buzzes again, then quiets, then buzzes again.

  “Shit, my mom won’t stop calling.”

  “It’s OK, you have a minute, you can take it.”

  “I’m sure she wants to wish you luck.”

  Tatum turns to me and offers a lopsided smile, which reminds me of why she slayed me way back during the Romanticah shoot and then made it official when she kissed me (or I kissed her?) on New Year’s Eve.

  “I’m about to puke, so just thank her for me, and I’ll call her later,” she says.

  I stand, press the phone to my ear.

  “Mom, I have about thirty seconds. What’s up?”

  I expect her to say: Oh, just wanted to be the first to congratulate Tatum, or Kiss your fabulous wife for me before she wins.

  Instead she shrieks like I have heard her only once before in her life.

  And in an instant, it’s ten years ago; it’s horror and death and the fallout that is destined to come.

  “It’s Leo,” she yells. “My God, Ben, it’s Leo.”

  I run up the aisle and out to the lobby, just as the lights flicker to return us to our seats.

  I miss Tatum’s category, but then nothing that happens after this moment matters. And I miss Tatum’s speech too, but later I’ll learn that she forgot to thank me anyway.

  12

  TATUM

  JULY 2004

  My “big” break comes fifteen months of slinging cosmos and sex on the beaches and chardonnays for tourists at P. F. Chang’s. I don’t mind the work so much. It keeps me busy, though the children are often ill-behaved and whiny, and the tourists are loud and don’t tip well. But Mariana, who logs most shifts with me, has become a good friend, and with Ben still working
unending hours, this time prepping for One Day in Dallas, a Kennedy biopic set to shoot next spring, the stint gives me structure, fills my days with something other than scanning the trades for shitty auditions, staring at my cell phone in case my (relatively dodgy) agent calls, running on the beach to lose a few pounds which will take me from girl-next-door to girl-someone-wants-to-fuck. (In Hollywood terms.) I’m contemplating adopting a dog for the companionship, but Ben isn’t home often enough for me to get an affirmative. “I might just do it without you,” I said to him one night while he was nose-deep in a revision. “You’ll just come home to a strange animal in the kitchen!”

  “I prefer strange animals in the bedroom,” he said, and I laughed, so he pushed his luck and teased: “See, I’m listening to you, even when you think I’m not.”

  So a dog is a possibility, a positive on the potential horizon.

  Still, in the months that have passed between landing in LA and now, my ambition has gone from hopeful to desperate; my attitude has devolved from optimistic to jaded. There’s a reason you see aspiring starlets hopping off the bus in movies full of sunshine that turn pale and gray as the scenes roll past. How many doors can one knock on before the rejection starts to sting? Ben tells me to keep my chin up, but Ben is working on his third feature, which I am happy for (of course). It fills our bank account, offers us stability. His success makes him happier than ever, as if each chit, each accolade, brings him closer to God. A self-anointed Hollywood God, but God all the same. He tells me sometimes that he’s chasing the ghost of his dad, and I tell him that he now has to satisfy only himself, and he nods and sometimes seems to believe this and sometimes he doesn’t. I don’t try to talk him out of it too much, though; I understand the weight of parental baggage. It’s not as if I’m not heaving my own shit around too. It’s not as if I’m not wandering about, trying to find my own way too.

  What I’m trying to find is what I embraced at Tisch, and what I discovered as a senior in high school after my rocky earlier years, and after my dad was absent and my mom was present but also on one of her holistic jags where she was more focused on the soothing nature of lavender or why we should ban dairy from our home than noticing that her teenage daughter was flailing about with a broken heart (and a lost virginity), and with no one around to guide her. At the time, I was taking drama because it fulfilled my arts requirement, and we were staging a modern rendition of Romeo and Juliet. Our teacher allowed us to adapt it for the modern era—think more Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes than Shakespeare—and when he cast me as the lead, I had to read the call sheet three times because I was sure he’d gotten it wrong. He hadn’t, and to my surprise, I held the audience rapt, silent, almost reverent. The school newspaper had given the production a mixed review but handed me a rave. My mom, an amateur poet who never had loftier aspirations, attended the performance and wept afterward.