She rests her script and her bright pink highlighter atop the counter.
“I have a headache. I’m wiped from Legoland, and I don’t want to turn this into something it’s not.”
“Like what?”
“Like a fight, because that’s usually where this type of thing goes.”
I try to relax my hunched shoulders. I don’t want to fight either, and yet I’m on my heels, defensive.
Tatum sighs, rubs her eyes. Then: “But you asked me: do I think you should quit, and you already know my answer.”
“You think I shouldn’t quit,” I say, a little too flatly. “I already know that the great Tatum Connelly never quits anything.”
She stares at me in a way that makes me feel both transparent and invisible. Like she used to back in the early days; like I used to gaze at her too. Now, rather than making me feel supported, I feel exposed.
“I’m not here to tell you what to do. I just thought I was here to stand beside you. So quit. And see if that makes you happy.”
8
TATUM
FEBRUARY 2002
The snow is piling up in Park City, but Ben and I are oblivious. I push him to the ground in the heap outside our hotel and fall on top of him.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I say, before I press my lips to his.
He laughs so hard he can’t keep kissing me, so I roll to his side, sinking into the eight inches of powder that fell overnight, and flap my arms and legs to create an angel. When he stops laughing, we each tilt our heads together and stare up at the gray sky, the flakes falling on top of our batting eyelashes.
It’s been months since either of us has been able to entirely forget everything else: the horrors of New York on September 11; the grief we wear like our own shadows. I’m able to lose myself in my performances: since my mom died, my work has never been stronger. One professor pulled me aside just before Christmas and told me he’d be happy to recommend me personally to the best agency in the city if I pursue theater. “I don’t know what happened between last year and this one, but you are truly extraordinary,” he said, examining me like he wondered if I’d been possessed by someone else. “Off the record, you are the shining star of this year’s class.” I blushed because I still wasn’t great at taking compliments, not as me, not Tatum the Great, and then thanked him and told him I’d take him up on that come graduation in June. I didn’t say,My mom died,and that shifted something in me, unmoored new depths, allowed me to tap into new pain and emotion that might make me a wonderful actress but made me an open sore of a person.
Ben had his own grief, of course. With his dad. He focused onRomanticah, channeled his anguish into turning his once-small short film into the best little indie movie that he could, which is why we’re in Sundance, why we’re finally buoyant with joy, swooshing our limbs into snow angels as if our respective worlds hadn’t fallen apart this past year. Sometimes I think that our grief bound us together tighter than if we hadn’t faced loss within months of one another. Like he could know my insides how I knew his insides, and without that, maybe we’d have stumbled when we had stupid fights (usually when he was tired or I was feeling ungenerous). Or when I had days when I went to call my mom and wound up purging my guts over a toilet. Or he had moments when he disappeared so far into himself that he couldn’t hear me, see me, listen to me, even if I was right there by his side on the couch: just staring at his hands without blinking, or staring at the ceiling without shifting his gaze, or gruntinguh-huhwhen I know that he’s not really listening to my chatter. We mourned differently: I wore it externally, grieved openly, then through my acting. He pushed deeper into himself, like a black hole swirled inside his guts.
But still, we were mourning together, and that was something. It was something we shared, something we saw in each other, like my scars were his and his were mine. Plenty of nights we found ourselves curled in bed, our heads intuitively touching, listening to the noise from the city and the sound of our breath and nothing else. We knew each other, we had each other, we saw each other, as if together we were whole, even if we weren’t, of course.
He’d moved out of his parents’ place in December. Well, hismom’splace now. She insisted. He felt more than ever that he should stay, but instead Helen, his mom, nearly shoved him out the door, ensuring that he didn’t have to take care of her forever. And besides, Leo was more shell-shocked than even Ben and was spending more nights at home with Helen, nursing a beer (or three) because he’d just turned twenty-one in November and could do that sort of thing legally now. Even if he hadn’t been legal, at this point no one was going to stop him.
So Ben leased a one-bedroom in the Village with a big window overlooking the treetops of Horatio Street, and most nights we ordered in Chinese food or heated up macaroni and cheese, and I rehearsed lines for whatever scene I had due or hovered over his shoulder while he pieced together a rough cut ofRomanticah. We talked about my mom; we talked about his dad. We knew neither of us would ever be the same, and that was OK. We learned that grief could be like glue, sticking us together, like veterans of war who understood only each other. Sometimes I’d read my scenes and linger in the accent, the mood of the character, long after we finished. And Ben would say some version of: “Tate, I don’t want anyone other than you,” and I’d rejigger my brain to bring me back to him. Without the pretense, without the act. Even though, way back at the bar—Dive Inn—that was exactly what I showed him. Tatum the actress. Now, he just wants me.
Today, in Park City, I roll toward him in the crevasse in the snow my body has made. His cell phone had rung thirty minutes ago. Because Ben didn’t yet have an agent, one of the chairmen of the festival had called: Ben had won Best Newcomer at Sundance. It was beyond either of our wildest expectations.
“You are going to be the next big thing,” I say, reaching a mittened hand over to clasp his gloved one, like I had when the snow started coming down on New Year’s Eve a year and a few months ago, when we first realized that maybe this could be something real. “Award-winning filmmaker Ben Livingston. God, that sounds amazing.” The swell of pride courses through me, as if his success is mine and mine is his, and together we’re a double-helix, DNA.
His wind-chapped cheeks burn even redder.
“I feel like this was a mistake, like they’re going to retract it.”
“Nope.” I squeeze his hand. “Not a mistake, no retraction. You gotta own this, right? How long have I been saying that?”
“Since we first met,” he says, then inches forward to kiss my nose. “Since the very first day we met.”
He kisses my nose again, and we right ourselves, sitting anchored in the snowdrift, absorbing how everything is about to change.
“I wish he were here,” Ben says.His dad.
“I know,” I reply.
“I think he’d be proud of me,” he says, though it’s a bit of a question too.
