AUGUST 2014
Jesus, somehow I turned forty. Am turning forty. Tomorrow.
I let the hot water from the shower pulse against my face and neck for too long, and by the time I flip the shower handle to off, my skin is pink and a little angry. I grab one of the white towels hanging on the pewter hooks and knot it around my waist, then stare at the full-length mirror in the bathroom that is half packed because we’re moving next week. Tatum needs a house with better security; Tatum needs a house that moves us one more step toward isolation. We’re stuck in this bubble that is entirely our creation, and it feels as if there’s no way out, no room to breathe.
I blame her for this.
I run my hand over my stubble, meet my eyes in the mirror. It’s an unkind thought, and I chastise myself for it. She loves this house, loves the family we built here, though now that family is tenuous at best, though we are doing an excellent job at pretending that we’re not falling apart—both to each other and to the various media outlets who occasionally sniff at some unhappiness but mostly paint her (and us) as something out of a blissful, stylized magazine spread.
We both—equally—loved this home in Holmby Hills that had seen us through so much. But a month ago we’d woken up to her stalker staring at our family photographs on our living room fireplace mantel, and after she hid in the closet and I called the police, we both knew that the house was just another thing we had to let go of, like anonymity, like a normal life where we (she) kept sane hours and caught up on our days over dinner and grew a vegetable patch out back and greeted tiny trick-or-treaters come Halloween. None of that is who we are anymore, not with Tatum’s fame and the bubble that it’s forced us into. The new place in Brentwood has a ten-foot wall in a gated community and is impenetrable, literally. A large Israeli man with a Bluetooth earpiece and a holster on his hip walked us through the security system and explained the ins and outs, explained how we were safer there than at the White House. (I was dubious, but we’d only been to the White House once—Tatum was invited for a press dinner. I was literally patted down in my tux twice and screened through four metal detectors, but what did I know?) We talk about getting a guard dog; Monster is old and slow, and besides, he’d befriend anyone who gave him a treat, threw him a literal bone. We talk about round-the-clock bodyguards, though I point out that the large Israeli man told us we were already safe.
“Hey.” Tatum pops her head around the bathroom doorway. “You almost ready or are you too busy admiring yourself in the mirror? You’re an old man now, come on.”
“I’m looking good for forty.” I grin, and suck in my stomach, show her my profile.
She sighs.
“Or not? I don’t know.” I let my stomach deflate.
“No, you do, you are. I just ... I got my period. Maybe we’re just too old.”
“You’re not forty, just me,” I remind her.
We’d started trying for another child about nine months ago, last year, right around when Piper was pregnant. In fact, Tatum had sprung the news on me that she wanted another one when we were back in Ohio for Piper’s baby shower. I figured it was the excitement and the nostalgia: the little onesies, the cute stuffed animals and music boxes. We’d always been fine with one, with Joey. We’d agreed on that—one.Tatum barely had time to fit Joey in her schedule, much less me. But she announced it with such authority and such conviction that I couldn’t even question it: “I think we should have another baby, and I’ve already made time for it in my schedule, so I think it should work and let’s just do it.” I’d just gotten home from a run through her old neighborhood; I remember peeling off my shirt and Tatum lingering in the bathroom, as if she were issuing a press statement:We’re going to have another baby.Not phrased as a question, not tossed out as a possibility.
I started to say,You’ve already lost track of me. Will I be pushed out entirely when a new one comes along?But it felt needy and jealous and a little childish too. Also, I had the weight of my guilt sinking me down, all of the ways, both big and small, I’d betrayed her over the past two years, so I nodded, flipped on the shower, and said: “OK.”
I was happy with one, with Joey. Tatum needed more. I took it personally, until I remembered that I’d needed something more too, and Tatum had no idea. There are a lot of reasons that you say yes to something you don’t really want. Guilt worked perfectly well for me. Besides, Leo had been everything to me; I could understand wanting to give Joey a sibling.
“We can try again next month,” I say to her now, in the half-packed bathroom. Though the idea of rising with a screaming infant at three a.m. felt less palatable with every passing month. At forty, my own dad had a fifteen-year-old and an eight-year-old: he had the energy for us, but barely. A newborn? It sounds exhausting already. “Don’t worry,” I repeat. “We’ll try again.”
I don’t know when I stopped telling Tatum my truths. She used to read everything about me, see through me. Maybe I stopped telling her my truths as a challenge, to see if she still could.
“I’m away next month. Vancouver, remember?”
I don’t remember but I say: “Oh, right.” I don’t ask why or what for. There’s a giant master calendar in the kitchen that I can consult if I need to know where to find her on a certain day. Her assistant uses color coding to make it easier: red for on set, blue for media, green for meetings, orange for Joey. I don’t get a marker. It’s assumed, I guess, that I can write in my own commitments to fit around hers. Actually, maybe that was when I stopped telling her my truths. When a giant master calendar went up, and there wasn’t a marker for me.
“Then the following month,” I offer.
She shrugs. “OK, hurry up. We have a reservation.”
“Down in ten. When you’re this good-looking, it doesn’t take much.” I wink, try to make her laugh.
“Ha,” she says on her way out the door.
I reassess myself in the mirror. Though I don’t want a newborn, I could manage. I am a younger forty than my dad was at the same age, though he rose most mornings to play racquetball, out the door before our nanny had even made us breakfast. I’m a more involved father too: a field trip in May to go berry picking (I was the only dad); coaching peewee soccer last fall; midnight trips into Joey’s room when he has a bad dream.
For my dad’s fortieth, we took a family trip to Paris. I remember it because he had just wrapped a monster trial, which meant that I saw him even less than usual, and my mom kept telling us:We’ll all have time together on this trip!If she minded my dad’s absence, she didn’t complain; she doted on him when he was around, brought him tea, made his favorite dinners. When he wasn’t, she was busy as the president of Dalton’s PTA, as chair of one charity committee or the other. We flew to Paris first-class, and Leo, still cute and impish at eight, charmed the flight attendants into giving him all the leftover chocolate. My dad spent most of the flight quizzing me on my French (I was in honors) and then reading briefs for work upon his return. But Leo, hopped up on all the chocolate, was nearly vibrating, and he scaled the seat and somersaulted into the lap of the Frenchman behind him, who was none too pleased, and then quickly turned irate when Leo knocked the man’s coffee into his lap.
My dad, who had just started wearing reading glasses, pushed them higher on his nose and said: “Ben, apologize in French to him. Make nice. Sort it out.”
My mom was asleep from her two glasses of wine. My dad’s own French had been honed at Yale; he could speak it better than I could, and after all, hewasthe parent. But I did as I was asked, partially because I wanted to impress him, partially because it wasn’t phrased as a question.
Once I had apologized in my mostly fluent French and had Leo strapped back into his seat and had pulled out some crayons and a coloring book my mom had stowed in his backpack, my dad looked over from across the aisle and said, “Nice job, Ben,” and then returned to his briefs.
It wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t such a life-altering incident. But it was profound in its own way. That my dad sent the message that I was Leo’s keeper just as much as he was. That he also conveyed that I was the responsible son, that I was literally there to clean up Leo’s messes. I resented my dad for that. I remember stewing over it, staring out the window somewhere over the Atlantic and thinking:Why did I have to talk down that French guy who was shouting about sending “enfants” to the back of the plane, while you acted like your briefs were more important?But later in the trip, when we were touring the Louvre, I found myself showing off for my father, conversing with our tour guide as often as possible, asking questions I really didn’t even care about because I wanted my father to look over once more and say simply: “Nice work.”
I thought about that for a long time afterward. How complicated approval and resentment can be, how they can be tied together so closely that you might mistake one for the other if you’re not careful.
