Between Me and You Page 31

So I shot the December cover for Elle wearing little more than a turtleneck sweater that had LED lights sewn into the cashmere and thus lit me up like a Christmas tree. The headline screams Tate Expectations! and the ebullience on my face nearly completely disguises the evidence of my broken heart.

  In my high-ceilinged, open, gargantuan kitchen, I thumb through the magazine now, lingering on the glossy pages, the blown-up images of me in ridiculously expensive evening gowns, in tiny skirts with too high heels, in makeup that morphs me into someone I am not. It’s all part of the fantasy of my celebrity, of course, but it has nothing to do with real life.

  The security bell buzzes, and I flip the magazine closed.

  I’ve agreed to a setup tonight. Lily Marple, of all people, had a guy in mind, and when she mentioned it at a “Women and Hollywood” luncheon last week, Luann was practically apoplectic with joy. Lily and I have formed a tentative friendship over the past year, mostly out of respect for each other’s craft and probably born out of the adage of keeping one’s enemies close, but it’s not as if I have so many friends these days, and besides, sometimes she makes me laugh with her utter contempt for the world at large. So I agreed to the date.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Lily had promised me. “Certainly at least worth a one-nighter.”

  “I don’t do one-nighters,” I’d said.

  “You didn’t before, but you haven’t met Damon.” She winked and sipped her chardonnay, her liquid lunch, because she was off solids until awards season was over.

  Luann has assured me that it doesn’t have to mean anything, but it’s important to at least pretend, because the pull quotes from the Elle article sing about how ready I am to dive back into life! And how much I’d like to find a partner to share that life with because I am so! dang! full of zeal! That my breakup didn’t gut me, that men all over the world should still want to fuck me, that their wives and sisters and moms should still want to be my best friend.

  I’ve halfheartedly tried dating over the summer when I took a break from work to decompress with Joey and just be, you know, a “mom.” But it was impossible to grab a casual coffee without being gawked at, impossible to make small talk with someone who already knew the entirety of my life with a simple Google search. Google didn’t tell them who I was, only what I’d done, but assumptions were made long before I even shook a hand, kissed a cheek. Not that the line of suitors was all that long. A cinematographer friend of Mariana’s; a lawyer whom Susan McMahon thought I’d like. He was fine, decent enough, but I was the one who was on edge, jumpy, wondering what he knew, what he thought of me, how exhausting the notion was of overcoming someone’s preconceptions over a martini.

  Instead, I retreated to Joey. We spent the summer lingering in the pool until our hands pruned, riding bikes through Italy because I’d never really been to Europe just for fun. He was almost old enough now to start to get sick of me, and I’d spent so many of his recent months and years working—working, working, working—that I didn’t want to squander these last precious moments before he realized he could start to live outside our bubble. Like Ben had with Amanda. Stay in this bubble with me forever, I wanted to say to Joey. Stay eight years old forever.

  The doorbell buzzes again, and Constance calls from upstairs, where she is playing an Xbox game with Joey. “Miss Tatum, do you want me to get that?”

  “No,” I call back. “I have it. I won’t be out late. Have fun.”

  I swing the door open, flap my hands to my sides, and say, “Hi, I’m Tatum,” in more of a sigh than a statement.

  Damon laughs and kisses my cheeks. “Your enthusiasm is infectious.” He laughs again, and his bellow echoes through my giant foyer, loudly enough to penetrate, just slightly, my protective armor.

  I smile. “OK. Let me try again. Hi, I’m Tatum Connelly. Let’s go have a normal date and pretend this isn’t really awkward.”

  That laugh again. It’s deep, baritone, and his smile, of perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth, illuminates his already handsome face, his smooth cocoa skin, his eyes that glint like he is game for anything.

  Lily has given me his résumé: grew up in Harlem, put himself through Georgetown and his first year at Fordham Law, only to discover that he didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. He worked at the Gap while saving up to start a furniture company; at first, working nights and crafting all the wood by hand, welding the iron in a garage near his apartment—something Lily told me he learned from his grandfather. Then he assembled a team, a few people at first, that is now a small empire. He relocated to LA last year for more space (his warehouse takes up half a block downtown) and for the weather too. Lily had filled her living room with his pieces, which is how he landed in my foyer for a blind date. I like that he was a little lost in his younger years; I like that he had to take some time to figure out who he was, is. This makes him feel safer, like he won’t disappoint me like Ben had. I also like that he had to earn his keep, just like I did.

  “So where are we going?” I ask, when he has escorted me to the driveway, slipping a hand on the small of my back, then opening the car door.

  “Surprise,” he says. He grins again, and I feel another piece of my armor chip away.

  “You realize that there is very little in my life that can be spontaneous.”

  He waves a hand. “Everyone can be spontaneous.”

  “You don’t live inside my bubble.”

  “I don’t,” he says, then points a finger at the air and jabs it forward. “Pop.”

  He takes me to a hole-in-the-wall place in Koreatown where I get a few double takes, but no one stops me for an autograph or asks for a photo.

  “I think my publicist wanted somewhere a little splashier,” I say. “Wanted an accidental sighting.”

  “Oh fuck your publicist,” he says, laughing again. “Lily filled me in: I know exactly what she wanted. But I tried to think about what you might have wanted instead.”

  We are seated in our own booth with a hot grill on the table. He hesitates before sliding in—sitting next to me or across—and rightly, gives me some space.

  “Ever done this?” He rubs his hands together. “It’s my favorite thing. Literally, my favorite thing in the world.” He articulates all the syllables in literally, and it makes me grin.

  “I’m a pretty terrible cook,” I say. “You’ll probably have to do mine for me.”

  “No,” he says. “If you want to eat tonight, you have to do it on your own.”

  I push out my bottom lip and pretend to pout.

  “That doesn’t work on me either.” He grins. “I have a ten-year-old daughter. Do you think I’m that easily manipulated?”

  “You have a daughter?”

  He nods. “Her mom lives in San Francisco. I have custody.” He shakes his head. “It was very complicated for a while, and then, I guess, it wasn’t.” He reads me. “You seem surprised.”

  “I . . . I guess I am. Lily didn’t mention it.”

  “I’m not as easy to google as you are,” he says with a smile.

  “You are,” I say. “I just didn’t.”

  “Figured this was going to be a bust before we even got started?”

  My cheeks redden. “No, I mean . . .” I wave a hand, fiddle with the skewers on the table. “I’m just not very good at dating.”

  “I think if you’re very good at dating, you probably do it forever,” he says.

  “Like tennis? Like, if you’re very good at tennis, you play it until you’re eighty?” I laugh now too.

  “Golf,” he says, just as the waitress approaches with a plate stuffed with beef. “Golf is what you play until you’re eighty.”

  “Well, I don’t play golf,” I say.

  “Good,” he says. “I don’t either.”

  He drives me home at a respectable hour, after we walked from the Korean BBQ place to a bar next door for a drink. A few heads turned in my direction, and he saw me squirm, and we agreed, regrettably, to rush up I-10 back to reality. I find that I
don’t want to, though, that I’d like to draw out this safe bubble for as long as I can until it’s punctured for real. Which it will be inevitably because that’s my life. Pop. We listen to a classical station he has the radio tuned to and settle into a comfortable silence until he veers off the freeway and onto the back roads toward my enclave.

  “It’s difficult dating me,” I offer eventually, because I like him enough to want him to know the truth.

  He says nothing.

  “I’m not saying that I don’t want to . . .”

  “You have a lot of walls,” he says, making the sharp turn up the hill to my house. “I get that.”

  “That’s not what I meant. There are just always people watching.”

  I don’t say, And I’m still married, though the divide in our lives is likely large enough to remain permanent—and after seeing Ben with Amanda last month, it’s clear I need to be done with us. I need to get it: that he has moved on, that I’d misread his hesitation with moving forward with the divorce. I need to absorb this so deeply that it shifts my DNA.

  I tell myself that I will call Ben tomorrow and tell him that we need to sign the papers; that this has been going on long enough—I saw them together over a month ago at the beach. How long can I put myself through this, hoping he’ll come back to me? I thought that if I found the nerve to find my way back to him that he’d want me, be ready with open arms. But she was there that day, and now, that’s that.

  The car slows to a stop outside my security gate.

  “Do you want to come in?” I ask.

  He smiles his beautiful smile. “I would love to come in, but I won’t.”

  “I don’t have walls,” I say. “I mean, I do. But I guess I’d like not to.”

  He seems to consider this. Leans in closely, kisses my cheek, his smooth skin against mine.

  “Sometimes I get a piece of wood in my studio, and I can tell that it’s going to make the perfect, just the absolute slam-dunk of a perfect piece. A tabletop, a chair . . .” He eases back in the driver’s seat, away from me, away from my cheek and his kiss. “But, man, that piece is going to take so much work. The sanding and more sanding and the staining and the polishing . . .”

  “I’m the wood,” I say, and I nod because I am and because it has been so long since anyone has seen through me. Not since Ben. Then: “Maybe you can make a piece for me? Out of one of those perfect slabs of wood?”

  I think of all the times I asked Ben to write something for me, of all the times he failed me.

  “Actually,” I say before he can answer, “maybe I could come down to your showroom, see how it’s done? Try my hand at it on my own.”

  “It’s not the type of thing you pick up after one visit.” He smiles. “But sure.”

  I think, You don’t know what I’m capable of, what I can do if I dream it.

  I say, “I’d like that. To at least try.”

  He doesn’t reply. Instead, he leans forward and kisses me for real. I step out of his car, and he drives off into the night.

  I linger in my driveway, under the shadow of the impenetrable wall that I moved behind because of the stalker and also because it shielded me from the cameras and from lingering eyes and from probably a lot more than that too. I gaze up at the sky and wonder, for the first time in years, if perhaps I didn’t mistake isolation for safety, if I didn’t get confused and think that walls protected me, when what I learned at Tisch and a million times since then—in rebuilding my relationship with my dad, in sleeping in the open air under that Arizona sky—is that sometimes the only way to free yourself is to learn what you thought you couldn’t know. To knock everything down and start over.

  39

  BEN

  DECEMBER

  “Jesus Christ!” Tatum screams when she finds me sitting at the kitchen island, nursing a glass of merlot from a bottle I’d found open in the wine fridge and flipping through the December issue of Elle, for which she’s the cover model. Her hand flies to her heart, and her heels click against the bare wood floor as she skitters in surprise.

  “Sorry, shit, sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “What are you doing here? Is everything OK?” She exhales, regaining her breath, drops her purse on the island, and reaches for an empty wineglass of her own in the cabinet.

  “I brought over Joey’s gifts to put under the tree. Figured I’d stay. Sent Constance home.”

  Her brow furrows, then relaxes. “Oh, OK. I mean, sure, that’s fine.”

  I was doing this from time to time now: stopping by unannounced, with the honest intention of spending time with Joey—our custody agreement was fluid, and Tatum never minded—but then often loitering for longer, inviting myself to stay for dinner, suggesting we all watch a movie.

  Tatum pours the merlot, swirls the wine, sips deeply. I know she’s been on a date. I can tell by the cut of her dress, by the hint of her makeup. Not the piled-on stuff she wears for work when a professional comes and fluffs her, not the uncomfortable heels and dress she’d wear for a junket or a dinner where she has to be on all the time.

  “What?” she asks now, catching my stare.

  “You look nice,” I say. “That’s all.”

  “I was just . . .” She waves her hand while holding the glass, and the wine tumbles over the lip, onto the white counter. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”

  I scramble off my stool and grab the cleaning solution from underneath the kitchen sink, then pass her the paper towels too. It’s as if nothing has changed, even though everything has. Or maybe it’s as if I wish nothing had changed, but really, it’s all gone to complete shit. I’m jealous, of course. I’m fucking jealous that she was on a date, spent an evening sizing up a guy who could occupy the space in her life that I once did. Amanda is working tonight; otherwise surely she’d be at my apartment, on my couch, in my bed. It’s happened so quickly, how we picked up like years hadn’t passed, like I hadn’t burned my old life to the ground and we were just, like, who we were back at NYU. It’s nothing like that: Leo is gone, and my dad is gone, and I’ve lived a whole life between then and now, a life with Tatum, but it’s easier to pretend that this isn’t true. Amanda hasn’t spent time with Joey yet; I haven’t mentioned her to my mom (and Ron) yet. It’s been only a month since we reconnected that afternoon on the beach, five weeks if we’re being specific, and to make those introductions feels too permanent, too real.

  I know this is what Amanda wants. Permanence. She tells me she finally feels complete, like she always knew we’d find our way back to each other. I refrain from reminding her that she left me for a residency in Palo Alto, regardless of who officially broke up with whom. I refrain, also, from telling her that when she tumbles into sleep after a long shift in the ER and after we’ve slept together in ways that were akin to how we used to sleep together when we were twenty-five, I slip out of the bedroom and retreat to my computer, where I hone the manuscript I am writing for Tatum. Finally. I want to give it to her for Christmas, which leaves me ten days to get it right, prove to her that I didn’t overlook that promise I made to her for years on end.

  It’s as if losing Tatum—even though we lost each other so slowly for so many years now—losing her for good has finally made me realize, stupidly, romantically, what I wanted all along. Amanda keeps me company; Tatum has my heart. It’s like a ridiculous romantic comedy that years ago, I’d never have even entertained, never deemed good enough to watch, much less embody. But we have detonated what we had, and in the rubble, I’ve seen the beauty of it too. Maybe the fact that I can finally uncover a silver lining in all that has gone wrong means that I’m growing, growing up. At forty-fucking-two. But finally. If I can’t, if all I can do is get mired down in the shitty ways that life has failed me, or I’ve failed life, I’ll never point myself back toward happiness. Not quick-sex happiness with Amanda. That high lasts only until I make it into the shower. Real, resonant happiness with Tatum that can’t be washed off in the shower because its g
rit and its depth has sunk into my pores.

  Tatum cleans the mess on the counter, then winds her way into the living room, where the white lights on the Christmas tree bounce off the walls and make the whole room sparkle. The three of us had gone together, driving north toward Santa Barbara, to find it. Joey had run from tree to tree, screaming each time: “This one is perfect!” but Tatum wouldn’t settle until she found one that actually was. It was a rare afternoon when no one hassled her, when we could tromp through the tree farm and not encounter another soul for swaths of time that led us all to feel a little normal.

  “This really was the perfect tree,” she says, staring up at the lights. Then: “Remember that tiny one we had years ago?”

  She means the three-footer we plopped in the corner of the bungalow on Ocean Avenue our first year out here. I was working too much on, what, I jigger my brain to remember now. All the Men or One Day in Dallas? Maybe Reagan. All those hours and years spent obsessing, as if I were chasing the crown to please my dad. Amanda had been the one to point this out to me recently, but I wonder if Tatum didn’t understand that too; maybe she just wanted me to figure it out on my own. Anyway, whatever it was that I was working on, it felt so important then, important enough that I didn’t have time to properly shop for a tree with her, despite her nudging me three, four, five times. Instead, I dragged myself home one night and found a pitiful little tree in the corner of the living room. Tatum had bought it at the grocery store and stuffed it in the back of the Prius. She’d spiraled swirls of popcorn around it from the bottom to the top and found an illuminated star to place atop; it flashed on and off every other second so our living room looked like it was constantly on the verge of losing its electricity.

  I laugh now. “I’m not even sure that could be defined as a tree. It was more of a plant.”

  She stretches back her neck, takes in the span of the tree. “God, you know, my mom always said, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it.’” She rights herself. “I’m not sure that this tree was part of that plan. I mean, I liked that plant that we had back on Ocean Avenue. It’s hard, now, to see exactly what was wrong with it.”