Between Me and You Page 21

  “I don’t. But it was never discussed with me: him living in our guesthouse for a year, him being such a new and heavy influence in our marriage.”

  “He’s my father, Ben!”

  “And he’s my brother, Tatum. Don’t you see how you can’t have it both ways: make these decisions without me for your dad, and yet insist that you know best with Leo?”

  Ben sliced off an enormous pat of butter, though he knew I was on a rigid diet for As You Like It, and plopped it in the pan. He stood there frozen, waiting for this to drive the wedge further into our evening.

  Finally he said: “Tate, you know me. You think I want to be like this? You think I am the type of guy to not give him the benefit of the doubt if it was at all reasonable?”

  I considered this, and it was true. If anyone could make room for empathy, it had always been Ben. But before I could reply, he said:

  “So you have to do this my way. That’s it. I’m not negotiating on my own brother.”

  And so I swung up the cutting board, dumped the peppers onto the pan, and said: “Since we’re doing everything your way, I’m going to read my lines. Just leave me dinner in the fridge.”

  Our child-free evening turned into an adult-free evening as well.

  Today, at Commitments, Leo greets us with a hug that is tighter than the one from Dr. Wallis. He is skinny and disheveled, but his skin glows and his smile fans all the way to his eyes. He sinks into the white couch in the family meeting area.

  “Thanks for coming all this way,” he says. Then: “Does Ben know you’re here?”

  I shake my head.

  “Thanks for that too. I don’t want to fight with him.” He rubs his eyes, and it occurs to me that Ben is fighting so many of us these days. I think of my husband, alone in the kitchen chopping peppers, and part of me wants to race home, lean in and listen, try to figure out what’s ailing him too. It’s not like I wasn’t angry with my father for a long time, it’s not like I can’t remember what it feels like to be furious at someone for wrecking their life. It’s just that giving in, being less obstinate, was probably easier for me because I was always more malleable than Ben, like I have an emotional spigot that I turn on and access. I’m an actor, after all. Being malleable is my calling card.

  “I should probably tell him when we get back,” I say. “I don’t want him to think that I’m keeping things from him.”

  “OK,” Leo says, nodding.

  “But we’ll do what’s best for you,” my dad says in his best sober coach voice.

  “I don’t want him to be angry with me,” Leo says. “It’s not helping. Like, he comes down here, and it’s just all You need to get back to work, or Take responsibility for this. It stresses me out. Like he can’t understand that he’s not my dad.”

  A small voice in me wants to say, Stop blaming your brother for your own choices, but I’m pretty sure that’s Ben’s voice from a few nights ago, so I say instead:

  “It’s fine, Lee, don’t worry. I won’t tell him anything you don’t want me to. What matters is getting you better.”

  “Thanks, Tate. Thank you.” He eases back into the couch. “Then let’s keep this between us right now. I hate to ask, but maybe it can just be our secret?”

  I nod. “Sure, OK.”

  And with that, I learn how easy it is to betray my husband.

  23

  BEN

  JULY 2005

  Our car sputters to a stop in the middle of nowhere Arizona. I’m right, of course, we should have stopped for gas, but Tatum insisted, No, no, that’s BS, they just say the tank is almost empty, but it’s not.

  The tank is empty. Tatum squeezes the wheel and grits her teeth and looks toward me, batting her lashes. “Don’t be mad.”

  “Tatum!”

  “OK, so I should have listened to you. But . . . you know . . .”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, you’re just usually a little melodramatic about the tank running low, so I figured—”

  “That I couldn’t possibly be right when the orange light is flashing frantically to alert you that we’re about to run out of gas?”

  From the back seat, Monster yawns loudly, then rises—he’s tall enough to hit the ceiling on the SUV—and pokes his head between us.

  “Monster doesn’t like it when Mommy and Daddy fight,” Tatum says.

  “Tatum!”

  I pull out my cell phone and stick my hand out the window, desperate for a signal, which we haven’t gotten for miles since we dipped into the Arizona canyons. This road trip was supposed to be fun, a vacation of sorts. A break from babysitting her father and his new, tenuous sobriety, a time-out from her down-on-her-luck series of auditions. Not that she’s not landing a punch every now and then, but her career is not lighting up the way she expected. Not like mine, anyway, which she doesn’t say explicitly but also doesn’t have to. I’m due in Texas in three days for a week of reshoots for One Day in Dallas. We figured we’d hit up kitschy hotels (that accept dogs), stop at Southwestern diners, carve out time for each other the way we haven’t been able to lately, mostly because of my schedule, but also because of her dad and all the energy that has sucked from her.

  She’s changed because of him. Hardened and softened in ways that I’d write, if I were writing a character—which, I’ve told her, I’d like to do for her one day. Because, as she says, together we’re unstoppable. And we are. I believe that too. I’ve never been better than I was on Romanticah, though I’m chasing that greatness on One Day in Dallas, been told that the script has heat, has all the markings of an award winner.

  Tatum seems to be chasing something too now. With Walter back in her (our) life, she is more fragile, as if her father’s reentrance has turned her to glass, but she’s also more open, as if the valve she’d shut off to her empathy has spun open. This means she sometimes cries at inexplicable moments (when she found me sleeping on the couch with Monster’s head resting atop my chest—I’d been up most of the night because Monster had eaten burritos out of the garbage and had endless diarrhea), and also bristles at things that I’d never expect to rattle her. A couple weeks ago a waitress at the sushi restaurant overheard me talking about One Day in Dallas and pushed up her cleavage and batted her eyes at me in an attempt to get a shot at a bit part. Tatum fumed about it the entire ride home: how suggestive the waitress was, how disrespectful she found her. I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought if Tate hadn’t blown it up so disproportionately.

  So we embarked on a road trip to leave all that behind for a few days, and now we are out of gas in the canyons of Arizona. The sun is tucking itself behind a mountain peak, which grants us reprieve from its blistering rays, but it will be dark within hours, and then we’re really fucked.

  “I can’t get a signal,” she says. Monster licks her cheeks as if this is good news.

  “I can’t either.”

  She shrugs. “I guess we walk?”

  “We walk where?”

  “To the next town?”

  “Tatum! We have no fucking idea where we are! We have no idea where the next town is! It’s ninety degrees outside, and then it will be dark, and it’ll be, like, forty, so then what?”

  She frowns. “Well, do you think your attitude is helpful, like, at all?”

  “I think what would have been helpful is if we stopped for gas the last time I suggested it!”

  This is one of our things, one of the few quirks I cannot stand about her, and likely, she about me. Something as inane as the gas gauge, and yet symbolic too. How she pushes it to its limits; how I pull into a station as soon as the alert light goes on.

  She grips the wheel and stares ahead.

  “Don’t blame me.”

  “Don’t blame you?” I shove my phone out the window again, stare at the signal indicator, get nothing, shove it back in. “Who am I supposed to blame? Monster?”

  “I was distracted,” she pouts. “Thinking of what I was going to say to Lily Marple when I fin
ally see her.”

  “You are actually coming up with a monologue of what to say to Lily? I’ve told you: say nothing, forget it. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  I’d made the mistake of telling Tatum that Lily Marple, who plays Jackie Kennedy in One Day in Dallas, had tried to sleep with me on the shoot. I mean, I can’t be sure, but she tucked her hands down my waistband at the craft service table, and said, “I think you’re going to win lots of awards one day. And I’m thinking I could be your muse. Want to meet me in my trailer?”

  I thought it was funny, not ha-ha funny, but amusing enough: that she’d be so desperate when she was already a lead, that she thought I’d take the bait when I was clearly committed and, also, not a total dick. Plenty of this sort of favor swapping went down on sets, to be sure, but usually the writer—who was not exactly high on the totem pole of power—was not part of the sexual favor hierarchy.

  Tatum did not find it funny, not even in a ha-ha way.

  “First she gets, like, a dream part, then she tries to screw you?” she’d yelled. Tatum wasn’t up for the part of Jackie; she didn’t wield that kind of consideration among casting directors and producers. Not that she wasn’t good enough for the role, but casting was about power, and Tatum simply didn’t have a power hand to play.

  “She wasn’t, like, trying to screw me,” I said, even though that was exactly what she was doing.

  Tatum suddenly shifted to tears. “I want to be your muse. Not her, not anyone.”

  “Babe, babe,” I said and ran my hands down her shoulders. “I’ll write you something great, something brilliant. Let me just get through this first. But then I promise.”

  She wiped her cheeks and apologized, and I told her not to. Part of loving Tatum was loving the tempestuous actress, the version of her that held me riveted behind the lens on Romanticah, the version of her that I can’t imagine I’ll ever grow bored with, ever outgrow. Sometimes she’s like a firework, explosive but still mesmerizing, and it’s not like I don’t want to sit back and watch the show.

  “Tate,” I’d said then. “I see you. I have you.”

  I hadn’t realized she’d dwelled on it—Lily’s overt pass at me, but now, here we are, in the middle of the Arizona desert, and somehow her refusing to fill up the gas tank has morphed into raising the issue all over again.

  I wave my phone out the window again, still nothing. “I think we might die here,” I say. “Like, in the middle of the desert with our dog. This is how I’m actually going to fucking die.”

  I open the car door and Monster scrambles into the front seat, across my lap, and out to the shoulder of the deserted highway.

  “FUCK!!” I scream into the canyons. My voice bounces off the rocks and back to us. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck, until it fades. Monster cocks his head and looks at me curiously.

  Tatum slams her own door, marches around the Jeep, and says: “Jesus, you’re acting like I did this intentionally!”

  “I don’t think you did this intentionally, Tate. But I asked you three times to pull over, and you kept saying we were fine.”

  “I thought we were!”

  “So as I said—maybe not part of a Machiavellian master plan, but I do think that sometimes you get off on the drama without thinking through the consequences.”

  “Like when?”

  I jerk my thumb toward Monster. “Like that impulse acquisition? Like the very first time we met, at the bar, with the bet?”

  “It’s not like any of those things ended badly,” she says.

  “It’s a metaphor.”

  “So this is my fault.” She clenches her fists and rams them into her hips.

  “Well, technically, yes.”

  Monster wanders over to a bush and lifts his leg.

  “We can hitchhike,” she says.

  “We haven’t passed a car in hours.”

  Monster spins over a spot next to the bush and poops. If we were in Santa Monica, this is when I’d walk over and scoop it up with a little baggie while Tatum watches. Because we are in the middle of nowhere, I leave it be. I check my phone again. No bars. I am due in Dallas in two days. Even if we lose these hours and these miles, I’ll still make it. That’s not a concern. Freezing to death in the middle of the desert tops my list right now; not throttling my wife who was too stubborn to stop for gas isn’t far behind it.

  Tatum’s eyes well up, almost as if she’s been given a director’s cue, but I know that this is genuine, not some emotion she’s aiming for in her close-up.

  “I’m sorry, OK, I’m sorry! I thought I was being spontaneous, and I thought I was, like, I don’t know, living on the edge or something, and now we’re fucking stranded here in the middle of the desert, and I don’t have any idea where the next town is—you’re right—and I was impetuous and dumb!” She pops the trunk to the Jeep and sinks into the open space, her shoulders heaving under the weight of her tears. Monster senses her despair and leaps into the trunk, sitting next to her as if on guard.

  “OK, listen,” I exhale. “It’s just one night. And I don’t want to fight.”

  “It’s just one night!” she wails. “We’re going to be, like, eaten by coyotes!”

  “Monster will protect us,” I say.

  She momentarily slows her cries to gape at Monster, as if considering this, as if, were we to be attacked by coyotes, this goofy lump of a dog could do anything other than take a giant crap on them to scare them away. Then she rubs behind his ears absentmindedly, then gazes back toward me, her eyes still swimming pools. Though she is the best actress I know, I also can see that she is sincerely sorry for this. And because she is so transparent with me, here, now, and because this is a reminder that she is nearly always transparent and that we trust each other and we are each other’s best allies, I feel myself softening.

  I shove my hands into my pockets, teeter back on my heels, stare up at the wide-open pink and orange and still blue landscape above us. The stars are beginning to poke their heads out of the dusk sky, announcing night’s arrival.

  “Did I ever tell you how once Leo and I got lost in the woods one night in Vermont?”

  “No,” she hiccups. Monster settles in, nestling into her lap, and she pats the top of his head, then leans down and kisses him.

  “Well, anyway, my parents used to have a house up there. Good for skiing, good in the summer for hiking and getting bitten by ticks. They sold it after Leo got Lyme disease one year.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Anyway, we were pretty much given free rein to romp around the woods, do whatever, you know. That’s how kids grew up back then, like, no one watching, no responsibilities.” I pause because it occurs to me that Tatum grew up with nothing but responsibilities. But I press on. “I was always super careful to mark our trail: I carried different colored chalk in my pockets to clip the trees so we could make our way back. Once I forgot about it, and it went through the wash . . .” I laugh. “Oh my God, my mom, just . . .”

  She bites her lip, waiting for more, her eyes round and hopeful that this is leading to forgiveness.

  “Anyway, we set out one afternoon, I must have been . . . fifteen, so I guess Leo was eight, maybe nine. And he insisted he was old enough to mark the trees, to take the lead and ensure that we could find our way back.”

  She nudges her head up just a little, like she already knows what’s coming next. “Oh boy,” she whispers.

  “Yeah.” I raise my eyebrows. “Exactly. Needless to say, Leo was never a Boy Scout—”

  “In any sense of the word,” she says.

  “And we got completely turned around. Couldn’t find our way back; it was just a total disaster. We fell asleep under a tree, and then it started to rain, like the way that it rains in Vermont in the summer, so Leo took off all his clothes and I was screaming at him about how we were going to die, and he started dancing like he was on fire, shouting at the sky about it being a rain dance and how he was beckoning the gods to send down more.”

  At this, she
manages a laugh. “That does sound like Leo.”

  “Anyway, it turned out that we didn’t die—”

  “Obviously.”

  “And we hiked back in the morning. We used my old markings to figure it out.” I grin. “And my mom was in a complete panic—my dad had already left to go back to the city, but my mom was flipping out, and all night, I had planned to sell Leo out, but once we got home, I realized that this was like, the best story ever. That we got lost and did a rain dance and camped out and made it back on our own, and that I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.” I consider it and snort. “It’s something that when he ever gets married, I’m gonna use in my toast.”

  “Something about a metaphor about getting lost in the forest but finding the trees?”

  I laugh now too. “Something like that.” I slide next to her in the trunk.

  “So one day, you’ll use this in a speech about how much you had to learn from your wonderful wife?”

  “Or one day, maybe you’ll use it to remember to fill up the tank when I tell you?” I kiss her nose.

  “And maybe on that same day, you’ll acknowledge that a little adventure never killed anyone?”

  I grin. “We haven’t made it through the night.”

  I lower the back seat, and she finds a blanket that we bought at a swap exchange in Sedona. We rest our heads on our duffel bags, and Monster snores and keeps us warm. We sleep. We survive. No coyotes eat us after all.

  When we wake in the morning, a truck slows and offers to double back with gas—it turns out the next town is only three miles east, and we fill our tank, and we leave this hiccup by the side of the road where it belongs.

  We find a diner for a breakfast of eggs and bacon, which she eats only because our dinner was dry cereal found in our bag of snacks.

  “Maybe one day you’ll write this into your script for me,” she says, breaking off a piece of the strip of bacon, savoring it under her tongue. “Not that dreadful Lily Marple.”

  She means this as a rib, as something we’ve wrestled and can now leave behind, just like last night’s fight.

  I sip my coffee and nod. I’d like that. To slow down, to create something just for my beautiful wife who is so stubborn that she doesn’t fill the gas tank but also allows us to sleep under the stars, to outstretch our hands and feel like we can nearly reach the Big Dipper.