My eyes falter in my bathroom mirror, as my phone buzzes on the vanity counter.
Happy birthday tomorrow. I wanted to be the first to wish you.
Then another buzz.
Sorry. Shit. I wish I hadn’t sent that. You don’t have to write me back. Or do if you want?
Instinctively, I grab my phone and start typing until my brain tells my fingers to slow down. They’re shaking with adrenaline, so I’d have to delete most of what I wrote anyway. I delete it all. Rest my phone back on the marble, then swipe it back up and throw it into the bottom cabinet drawer. As if that can stop the temptation of starting back up with Amanda, when I’d been so resolute since I cut things off last December, eight months now.
I ended it only when I found a draft of an e-mail to Tatum’s publicist, asking how she would plan a strategy for divorce. We were trying for the baby, but Tatum had always been one to have a backup plan. I read the e-mail to Luann—How would you position this so people know I tried my hardest to make it work—and something came undone in me: that while I’d been toying with Amanda, maybe seriously, but maybe not, Tatum was toying with a whole other life without me too. Amanda had been an escape. Tatum, it turned out, had one too. I’d closed out of her in-box and run to the bathroom and nearly shit myself. Literally. I’d been such a stupid, stupid fuck.
I have to remind myself of this every time Amanda texts, every time Tatum is dismissive of me, every time she doesn’t even think to give me my own marker on our enormous calendar, or when she announces that we’re going to try for another kid and doesn’t expect to be challenged because she has a team of people who surround her now, wrap her in bubble wrap, to ensure that she is protected.
But after the e-mail calamity, I met Amanda in a Starbucks near Cedars. “We have to stop doing this,” I said simply. “I’d rather cut off a limb, but I have to.” Neither of us believed that to be true.
It was raining that day, and her flame-red hair was matted and damp, and she reminded me of how Monster sometimes looks: like he still needed to be rescued even after we took him in all those years ago. But as she batted her eyes, fighting back tears, it occurred to me that I’d misplaced my own rescue operation, that I’d been reckless and gotten high off the thrill of us, but I was the one who actually needed to be saved. There is nostalgia for an ex, and there is crossing a line to entertain that nostalgia. That’s not love; that’s not worth risking your life over.
Fuck.
I’d screwed things up so badly, and it was all I could do to try to right myself, ourselves, before Tatum ever caught wind of it. It was the first time it had occurred to me, not in an impish, thrilling way, but a deep-in-my-guts way, that Tatum could find out and leave me.
“I’m sorry,” I’d said. “I’ll miss you.”
I drove home, my windshield wipers flapping too quickly, and realized I was no different from Walter, with his alcoholism and years of unkept promises, and no different from Leo, with all of his demons and screw-ups. We all have that shiny carrot we chase when we know it could be poisonous. We all step too close to the flame because we wonder how much it would hurt if we get burned.
I’d felt forgotten, overlooked by my own wife, when loyalty was what I’d always wanted. And so I found a way to be seen, found a way to trump her passive disloyalty with my own. That doesn’t make it forgivable, it doesn’t mean I excuse it. But that’s what it was, is, all the same.
I reach for my phone from the bottom cabinet drawer. I knew it would do me no good, stuffing it there. Amanda had proven devoted, as if she’d learned a lesson from the years that separated us, and now she was mine if I wanted her.
It was more than that, of course, for me. It was the wistfulness, the pining for being young and unburdened, for a different partner, different breasts and legs and lips. She was an easy escape, a sure thing, when my wife was gone so often, returning home in mercurial moods, with mercurial haircuts, with mercurial wishes that I didn’t often understand. Partially because I stopped asking. Partially because she stopped telling me.
I turn to the side and suck in my stomach again, watching it fall and rise in the mirror, amazed that this body of mine has been on this planet for forty years now, aware of how lucky I am to be alive. How fucking miraculous it is that any of us gets to be here another day.
I pick up my phone. Set it down. Pick it up again.
It’s ok,I type.I miss you too. But I still can’t.
All true.
“Ben!” Tatum’s voice reverberates up the stairwell, echoes through the now mostly empty rooms, primed and ready for the movers. “My dad’s here!”
Walter is babysitting, a concession that I’ve only recently grown comfortable with, but a small concession all the same. The first time I’d approved, agreed to let him stay home alone with Joey, Tatum had clutched my cheeks and kissed me, really kissed me, and God, it reminded me of how effervescent she was, not just compared to Amanda, but compared to what I’d grown used to now that I no longer reallysawher every day, compared to what I’d taken for granted.
“Give me three minutes,” I yell back to her, then scamper into my half-packed closet and retrieve a shirt from a suitcase. We’re having dinner, just the two of us, for my birthday. We haven’t been alone, on a date, since forever. Really, honestly, I can’t even remember the last time we made this sort of time for each other. Tatum because she was so busy, me because I retreated to the writers’ room forCode Emergencyrather than face the massive calendar in the kitchen when I couldn’t, literally, even be penciled in. It was easier to order in Chinese food with Eric and the writing staff than sit home alone in a quiet house surfing the cable channels (or sometimes porn) after Joey went down. Not unlike how I’d dumped Amanda before she could dump me all those years back when she applied to residencies three thousand miles away. Now I just stay busy so Tatum doesn’t notice that her life is so much bigger than mine.
I fold my arms into the button-down, straighten up in front of the mirror, and meet my eyes again. I find the watch she gave me this morning (because she couldn’t wait until tomorrow, and I’d laughed because impulse control was never her forte) from my top drawer, snap it on my wrist and feel its unfamiliar but not unwelcome heft.
Tomorrow,I tell myself,I will start writing something for Tatum.Something that will bring her back to me. Something that can make us whole again, after all the ways that life has sliced away tiny pieces of us. I want to be better—a better spouse, a more present husband, a more understanding partner. One who doesn’t mind that she is lost for weeks on end in the mood of whatever role she is playing; one who doesn’t begrudge her for the offers that pour in and take her away from me and from Joey, offers that she could say no to but does not. And of course, I want to make it up to her: for Amanda and my overt betrayals, though Tatum knows nothing of the tryst. I know how I failed her, and that’s enough.
I find a tie—I almost never wear a tie, but I’m turning forty tomorrow, and a tie feels like the right way to commemorate it. Tatum will be in something gorgeous, and tonight I’d like to do right by her, be her equal. I knot it around my neck, run my fingers through my hair, and assess.
I gaze at my reflection. Yes, tonight I’m her equal.
Tatum used to tell me about how she and her mom collected snow globes, how they’d pull into a gas station or stop into the hospital gift shop and search for a new one, something unique to add to their collection. “It’s always perfect inside a snow globe,” Tatum once said. I always wondered why. And how. Because what it really seems to me is that you are trapped, stuck there in that fantasyland.
I wonder now if I can write something for her that isn’t a bit like a snow globe: magical, self-preserving, romantic. I wonder, though, if staying in the bubble is really what’s best. If that’s what she wants, if that’s what I want. And if we puncture it, if we’ll still find a way to breathe.
6
