Being valued, being needed, beingseenis an easy thing to underestimate. Like air. Like you don’t realize that it’s necessary to sustain you until it’s suddenly gone.
Amanda feels like air. Not love. But somehow necessary all the same. Tatum used to say, and I used to believe, that I was the only one who couldseeher, and I could. I did. I felt the same: she inspired my directorial debut withRomanticah, she inspired everything in those early years. Now, who knows what we see? It’s happened so gradually that I can’t even say when things got so blurry: maybe as she found others who saw her as I did when it used to be only me; maybe as I chased success instead of chasing happiness. I don’t know. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be screwing my ex-girlfriend who plugs the hole in my heart but probably doesn’t fill it.
“You OK?” Amanda says, her wide green eyes finding mine.
“Yes. No.” I roll over, stare at the ceiling, then push myself up to my elbows. “I should go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Not because of you.”Yes, because of you!my conscience corrects, but I lean over and peck her nose all the same, move down to graze her lips. “I want to work today. The house is quiet. I don’t have to be in the writers’ room. It’s Eric’s day there.”
“I saw last week’s episode,” she says. “I think it was my favorite!”
I’m not working onCode Emergencytoday, but I don’t tell her that. I just want to enjoy her adoration. Tatum tries to catch the show from time to time, and God, it’s not a requirement to watch a network hospital drama that isn’t even all that great, but it would be nice. It would be nice every once in a while to hear her say: “Last night’s episode was my favorite.”
I stare at Amanda for a beat, then another. I consider saying something cheesy like:What have I done to deserve you?orWhere have you been all my life?But at the heart of it, neither of those things is true or worth asking. I’m cheating on my beloved wife, so I deserve nothing good, and Amanda hasn’t been by my side all my life because our timing wasn’t compatible in the way that you need it to be when you’re looking for your soul mate. A few weeks ago, in another hotel room, in another hotel bed, I’d asked Amanda once why she chose a residency program over me back in 2000, back when I thought she’d be mine forever. She considered it for a long time, then said:
“I don’t think I did it on purpose.”
“But you had to know that it looked that way, felt that way to me.”
She nodded. “I suppose, deep down, I wanted someone ... stronger.” She winced. “That sounds terrible. I don’t know what the word is. I guess you were too nice.”
I laughed at the irony. That I was now the least nice guy you could think of, screwing another woman instead of his wife, screwing another woman who he is pretending might be his soul mate, even though he doesn’t believe in soul mates. I don’t believe in that romantic crap that you pay twelve bucks to see on date night. Life is fucking hard, and life is fucking brutal—and maybe the most we can ask for is someone to get through it with us.
So for now, rather than soul mate, I accept her platitudes and ego stoking, and I let myself wonder about all of the what-ifs—what if I hadn’t dumped her when she moved to Palo Alto; what if I’d stayed on the phone with her on New Year’s Eve rather than run off to meet Tatum; what if my career had exploded and Tatum’s hadn’t ... would I be happier, would I be more faithful? I do this partially because, at the heart of it, I miss my wife and partially because I’m angry with Tatum too. Angry that Amanda was the one who suggested I mend fences with Eric, whom last year I’d told to go fuck himself for insisting that I spend another year pounding out the drivel of a network hospital show, which felt so beneath me.
“Dude, don’t do this,” he’d said. “We’ve been best friends since freshman year. Don’t detonate like this.”
“College was a long time ago,” I’d replied. If you lit a match near my mouth, my liquored breath would have caught fire. “Fuck this shit. I hate this show.”
“I think you mean that you hate that Leo’s gone.” He’d said it kindly, but it was a bruise that shouldn’t have been pressed.
“Fuck you, Eric, you don’t know shit about me, about what I want, about what I hate.” We’d met at a whiskey bar downtown, so I stumbled out to the valet, who refused to hand me my keys and instead stuffed me into a cab, where I nearly blew the contents of my stomach before making it home.
Eric and I didn’t speak for seven months after that. But he’d accepted my recent apologies in the way that a best friend does when he knows you were self-destructing and now you’re trying to piece together the wreckage. After Eric, I’d asked Spencer to coffee, and told him, with Amanda’s praise still massaging my ego, that I was ready to work. Tatum had the luxury of soul nurturing; I just needed to work. Amanda kept saying that to me: “You need something that’s your own, not hers.”
Spencer nodded, called the network, and just like that I was back onCode Emergency, like the blight of the last seven months hadn’t happened. Spencer made me pay the coffee bill, though, like a warning shot for being such an asshole.
“So what are you running off to work on in your quiet house?” Amanda asks while I dress. She stretches in bed, the duvet resting atop her taut stomach, her breasts exposed and calling me back beside her.
“Reagan.”
“Still? I thought you’d put that aside.”
“It’s going to be my one great thing, the script, the film, that will be my legacy or at least my new calling card.” I heard Tatum’s voice, not mine.
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?” My voice is immediately too brittle.
“Don’t be irritated with me,” she says. “I’m nother.”
“Habit,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
It is. Too often now, Tatum and I argue over misunderstandings and nuance: when she says she’s being supportive ofCode Emergency, and I take it as patronizing; when I tell her that I’m trying to trust Walter, despite his history of relapses and poor judgment, and she accuses me of being disingenuous.
“I only meanthmmmbecause I thought that Reagan was your dad’s thing. God, I remember that his office or ... library? Is that what you guys called his room?”
