Between Me and You Read online

  “Marrying her high school boyfriend. Straight out of a clichéd script. Nothing you’d ever write.”

  “I like Scooter. I like this place. It’s where you came from, and if you want to talk scripts, you should know that background matters.”

  I want to say: Of course background matters! That’s why I morph into whatever role I need to be for however long I need to be it. That’s why I’m only purely myself with Ben, no one else. That’s why I was the best at Tisch. That’s why there is Oscar buzz building around Elizabeth Bennet. You don’t so desperately try to escape your childhood without becoming an expert at pretending you’re someone else, someplace else.

  Instead I say: “I just miss my mom. She’d like to be here for Piper, help with the wedding. And, I mean, you know, to see my success.”

  He rests his hand on my leg. I reach down to grasp it. It’s not like I don’t know that he doesn’t feel the same about his father; it’s not like we’re each not operating with a phantom limb. But Ben loses himself in his writing, where he can exorcise his pain. Not that Ben writes about his father, but even in the new Reagan script, there is messy family interaction, there is catharsis between fathers and children, and there is room for grief at the end. These aren’t Ben’s stories but in some ways they are.

  But Elizabeth Bennet is Elizabeth Bennet. I find ways to relate, I find ways to turn her into a bit of my own, but it’s not the same: creating and inhabiting. It’s why, despite not wanting to take advantage, despite never resting on my laurels, I ask him to write something for me, just me. Not any actress, not any hot young thing. Ben knows my story. Ben knows my soul. I want him to write for that, to that, to me. Because when he taps into me, and I braid myself to him, we are a galaxy unto and of ourselves.

  He tells me he will, as soon as he’s done polishing Reagan. Or maybe the next one after that. He’s promised, and though he promised two years ago, I believe him. Still.

  I turn into IHOP, which is across the street from Albertsons.

  “I used to come here after my shifts,” I say to Ben. “They had an all-you-could-eat thing after nine p.m., so it was like I could tackle dinner and breakfast all in one sitting.”

  He laughs. “I find that hard to believe, knowing what I know now. Fifteen hundred calories and not a bit more.”

  “Not funny,” I say, though I’m blushing because he’s not wrong. I’ve become rigidly inflexible with my diet, weighing my chicken breasts, dicing my broccoli, measuring my protein powder for my morning smoothie. I’m never skinny enough, never lithe enough. There is always another pound to lose for the camera, always a side note that Jocelyn, my agent, passes on: “Be sure that she doesn’t gain anything,” or “She works for the time being, but anything more, and we’ll hire a trainer.” Sometimes they just say: “Too heavy. Pass.” So I weigh and I dice and I measure, and I put a supersensitive digital scale in our bathroom, and I pee each morning and tiptoe onto it, and if I’m good and it’s steady, I grant myself three Hershey’s kisses for the day, and if I’m less good and it’s less steady, I do not.

  The IHOP is mostly empty, since it’s four p.m., and not quite dinner, not quite lunch, so we seat ourselves. It hasn’t been updated since I left: orange and brown and Formica, with a ’90s station playing overhead and oversized foldable plastic menus.

  Ben flips the menu from front to back to front again. “Well, I am getting the never-ending stack of silver dollars. This I have to see.”

  I roll my eyes, feel the blush rise to my cheeks again. “There’s nothing better around here. Sorry.”

  “I’m being serious!” he says. “Stop apologizing. God, Tate, you know I don’t care about this stuff.”

  I flop a hand, but he grabs it and steadies it.

  “Listen,” he says. “You don’t think that when I was being dragged out for, like, raw sushi to impress one of my dad’s clients as a kid that I wouldn’t have done anything just to plop down in an IHOP?”

  Before I can answer, a shrill “Oh. My. God!” bleats out from the hostess station. We turn and my pink cheeks turn magenta.

  Julie Seymour, the field hockey player Aaron Johnson dumped me for, is barreling over, arms outstretched, face contorted with a look I normally see on rabid Lily Marple fans.

  “Tatum Connelly!! Oh. My. God!” Her hot pink lipstick is smudged against her front teeth, her thick mascara flaking on the side of her left cheek. “I cannot believe that I am seeing you! You are, like, the biggest thing to happen to this town in, like, forever!” She folds herself atop of me in the booth.

  I’ve never been recognized before. No autograph seekers at LAX, no drinks on the house at swanky restaurants in West Hollywood. (Admittedly, I don’t go to many swanky restaurants in West Hollywood.) But no one double-takes when I hike in Runyon Canyon, no photographers trail me when I grocery-shop at Gelson’s. Not that Julie Seymour counts as true recognition, since my face is already familiar, but she has already spoken more words to me now in IHOP, at which she is apparently the hostess, than in the entirety of our high school careers.

  I start to talk but she cuts me off. “Oh. My. God! I mean, I knew your sister was getting married; she helped with the delivery of both my babies.” She pauses and slides a photo out of her front shirt pocket and shoves it toward me. Two cherubic boys. “But I didn’t imagine that you would come back! And come into our little restaurant in our little corner of the world!” Now she turns to Ben, who is beaming, loving every second of this. “Oh, gosh, excuse me, where are my manners? I’m Julie, and oh my gosh, this is so exciting! You must be so excited to be here with Tatum!”

  Ben’s grin grows wider, and he shakes Julie’s hand vigorously.

  “We always knew she’d be something big in high school!” she practically shrieks. I roll my eyes, but then she turns back to me. “Oh God, what if I got everyone back together? Like, so many of us are still here! We could throw you a party! I don’t have my kids tomorrow night—”

  I wave a hand. “Oh, that’s really great of you, Julie. But we’re just here for the wedding. And we have the rehearsal dinner tomorrow—”

  Now she interrupts me. “Oh, right, right. You must be so busy. Being a big-time star and all of that.” She looks genuinely forlorn.

  “Could I trouble you for a coffee?” Ben asks. “Tatum keeps me up all hours, working, reading scripts, fielding her media calls. I’m the hardest-working assistant in Hollywood.”

  Julie’s eyes grow to the size of IHOP’s silver-dollar pancakes. “Oh, right away!” She scampers off, and Ben bites his bottom lip to abate his machine-gun laughter.

  I watch her disappear behind the kitchen door.

  “In case it wasn’t obvious, I hated her in high school.”

  “In case it wasn’t obvious, you’re a pretty big deal here,” he says.

  My eyes nearly disappear to the back of their sockets.

  “So after you binged on IHOP, what did you do? Where did the high school Tatum Connelly spend her evenings? Gallivanting about town? Getting wasted and passing out in alleyways, giving herself to men left and right?”

  This makes me honest-to-God belly laugh. “No. Usually, I just went home and minded my mom, when she was sick, or helped Piper with her homework or cleaned up the kitchen.”

  Ben’s look of solemnity breaks my heart.

  “I mean, sometimes, I did screw Aaron Johnson in the grocery store parking lot.”

  His face lights up. “Well,” he says, “you’ll have to give me that part of the tour next.”

  19

  BEN

  DECEMBER 2007

  I am being polite to Ron; I can feel myself being polite, trying too hard. He is perfectly nice, perfectly innocuous. I realize that I’m thirty-three years old, and stewing over my mother’s new relationship puts me at the emotional maturity of about, say, a nine-year-old. Also, it has been six years since my dad died. She’s had her time to mourn. So have I.

  “He’s so nice,” Tatum said in the car last night after
we met for dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where they were staying for the visit. “And your mom seems really smitten.”

  I cornered too sharply around a turn on Sunset.

  “Hey, Jesus, Ben!” Tatum’s hand flew to her belly, the way that a mother’s arm would fly toward the back seat if the car stopped too abruptly.

  “Sorry, sorry.” I slowed and put my own palm atop her stomach, which has the perfect curvature of a beach ball. The baby wasn’t exactly planned, and its inception wasn’t exactly the stuff of true romance, maybe a romantic comedy if I were to write that type of thing. While back in Ohio for Piper’s wedding, and after a stop at IHOP for a pancake special, Tatum and I got busy in the back seat of our rental Ford Explorer (sorry, Hertz) like we were high schoolers. Afterward, she said: “Yeah, I think we’ve pretty much re-created my stellar high school sexual experience.” And then, as I climbed into the front, she said: “Oh shit,” upon realizing she had left her pills at home. Then a few weeks later, from behind our bathroom door, she said, “Oh shit” again. I sat at the foot of the bed and shouted back, “Really? Oh my God, really?” and hoped that I sounded at least 50 percent less terrified than I was. When she emerged from the bathroom, I swept her into a hug so high her feet left the ground, and I wondered if she could feel my hands shaking as I did.

  God knows I haven’t yet found the right tenor for fatherhood with Leo: I’ve been too steely and too hard-nosed, much like my own dad had been, and though I want to let down my guard, just be his brother, I know that boundaries are there for a reason. My dad was never my friend (I can envision him cringing at the notion), and now, with Leo, I can’t quite find the balance either. Who knows what sort of dad I’ll be? How I’ll manage?

  “Daddy issues,” Tatum says from time to time. When I fall silent in Walter’s presence, when I grimace in Ron’s. But is it so wrong to mourn the man my dad could have been—he was only fifty-two when he died—the relationship we could have had, the ways I could have proven myself to be the son he knew I was capable of, and not wanting to open myself up to the men who could replace him? Not Walter. He doesn’t try to replace him. He just inserts himself into our lives, into our business, without ever really asking. So him I resent for plenty of other reasons too.

  Tonight, Ron finds me in the kitchen, where I am attempting to carve a turkey for Christmas dinner because Tatum is off other forms of meat/protein, partially because the scent makes her queasy from the hormones, partially because she is on some new “diet” (though she assures me it is not a “diet” because she is pregnant) that promises less heartburn, better skin, and sinewy muscles. Or something. “You try being a whale during awards season,” she’d snapped at me a few days ago. “Really. Just try it. Then tell me that you wouldn’t go on a diet too.”

  “You’re beautiful,” I’d said. Because she was, as she always was, had been.

  “Tell that to the designers who might have to make a dress to fit a blue whale.”

  “Need some help with that?” Ron asks. “I know a thing or two about carving. Though I try not to carve out a heart on the OR table.”

  Ron is a cardiac surgeon at New York Presbyterian, and he is obviously joking, so I force a smile but doubt it comes off as particularly genuine. I wish I could like him more, but I don’t. Probably, Tatum once said, because he’s not your dad. Also, probably, both literally and metaphorically, because he can carve a turkey way better than I can.

  “All good,” I say, waving a knife. “Almost there.”

  I am nowhere near almost there. In fact, the turkey looks like it’s been run through a paper shredder.

  I wait for Ron to point out how far from “almost there” I am, as my dad would have. Instead, he reaches for a wineglass.

  “Oh, there you are, Ron,” my mom says, her heels echoing on the tile kitchen floor. As if our house is so cavernous that he’d be anywhere else, as if she were utterly lost without him.

  “I’m starving,” Leo says, coming up behind her. “Can you hurry the fuck up with that thing?” He steps closer and surveys my damage. “Dude, let Ron take it from here. He chops up people’s hearts for a living. You type on a keyboard.”

  “He was doing all right,” Ron says, and this is a kindness that I accept but also cringe at. That he’s ignoring my mediocrity, that he accepts it. I sigh and pass the tools to Ron, who wields them while my mother rolls up his sleeves, then drops an apron around his neck and ties it around his waist, while Piper loops into the kitchen and out to the dining table to place the rest of the meal. Scooter, her new husband, follows dutifully, his hands steadying platter after platter that Tatum had catered and delivered, since, as she said: “I’m way too huge to cook.” Also, cooking isn’t her forte, but I’m not about to point that out with her current moodiness and temperament. (And, in fact, I never point that out even when she serves a dinner of burned roasted chicken or eggplant parmesan that’s chewy enough to make your jaw cramp. I grab my fork and knife, and dig in with more enthusiasm than is required.)

  I find Tatum moored on the living room couch, with Cheryl, her dad’s girlfriend of nearly a year, massaging her feet. Tatum has had no quandaries about Cheryl, no qualms with her dad moving on and falling in love with someone who is not her mom. Which I find wholly ironic, since she’s had qualms with her dad her whole life until now, a change brought on by their therapy sessions and his sobriety. I watch them for a beat from the corner: Cheryl, with whom Walter now lives in a one-bedroom condo in Westwood, my pregnant wife with her eyes squeezed shut in utter delight, and her sober dad reading the new issue of Variety, which features a roundtable of this season’s most buzzed-about actresses on the cover, including Tatum.

  Three people whose lives have utterly diverged in the past few years, who have taken totally unexpected paths to lead them to here. And yet, they’re all relaxing, accepting, enjoying the comforts of my living room, while I linger in the doorway like an observer to someone else’s life. Not that it’s not my life, not that I’m unhappy. But the way it has veered left when I thought it would turn right, the way I haven’t adapted to the roadblocks as adeptly as I always assumed I would. That’s on me, I know: with my surprise at how quickly this town knocked me off my pedestal when a few projects like One Day in Dallas or All the Men didn’t hit as we thought they would; with how I’ve watched Tatum ascend the Hollywood ladder as if I’m standing below her; even with how I have seen my mom fall in love again and change with that love—she’s more open, more flexible, more honest, and vulnerable too. And yet I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap her out of it. Maybe I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap me out of it as well, remind me that I’m floating in the middle, that I should be shooting for the top. If he weren’t dead, if he were to walk through the door and tell me that, I’d probably resent him for it, though I’d heed him all the same. But because he can’t walk in and chide me, I chide myself. Plenty, too much, always.

  Success alone doesn’t make you happy, he once said. But it sure does help.

  No shit.

  Tatum opens her eyes. “Hey, come sit,” she says, when she sees me.

  “Ron relieved me of my carving duties.”

  Cheryl stands and grants me the couch, then hovers behind Walter and massages his shoulders.

  “Babe, relax, please,” Tatum says, plopping her feet atop my lap. “Also, please rub.”

  Walter rests the Variety on the coffee table, his eyes misting.

  “I can’t believe that my baby is going to win an Oscar.”

  “I’m not going to win an Oscar, Dad. Please don’t say that. You’re cursing me.”

  “Yes, shhh, Walt!” Cheryl coos. “We’ll have to cleanse this room from your juju if you keep it up.”

  He stands, his knees creaking, though he’s lost twenty pounds since drying out, and now, as a regular hiker (he and Cheryl are contemplating two weeks away in the Argentinian mountains), he is in better shape than I am.

  “L
et’s help in the kitchen,” he says. “Let Tatum get a little rest.”

  “I’m fine, Dad!”

  “You have big things on your plate,” he says.

  “Just as long as the plate is under fifteen hundred calories,” I joke, but no one finds this very funny.

  “You can put the Variety at the bottom of the pile,” Tatum says once they’re gone. “We don’t have to have my face peering up at us from the coffee table.”

  “Why would I do that? I’m proud of you.”

  She wiggles her foot in my lap, as if to say, More please. Then she says aloud, “Next year you’re going to rack up the Emmys.”

  “Maybe.” I smile. “An Oscar for you, an Emmy for me. I’ll take it.”

  Eric and I had a buzzy show launching in March: Alcatraz. It’s true that we’d landed the deal because Eric’s uncle ran JH Films, one of the biggest production companies in town, but he and I were the ones who had put in the elbow grease, taken a standard prison drama and elevated it with smart, sharp writing. We wanted HBO. I’d balked at network TV, but Fox had promised us the moon, made it impossible to believe that it wouldn’t be a monster hit. It wasn’t film, true, but it was going to be great television. It was going to be my ticket back to film as well. I was banking on it.

  “Tate, you know how much I love you, even when I’m being an asshole, right?”

  She grins. “I do.”

  Ron emerges from the kitchen. “Dinner is served!”

  “Moo,” Tatum moans from the couch, which is something she’s started doing, first as a joke, then, as she grew, more seriously.

  “You are not a cow.” I smile and offer a hand to haul her up. Then, to her belly: “Hey kid, your mom is the sexiest bovine I’ve ever seen.”

  Tatum swats my butt, and I skitter.

  “Can we go out later?” Leo pops his head into the living room.

  “It’s Christmas Eve, Leo. Chill.”

  “Dude, I have to check out the competition. See what’s hot here that can translate to the city.”