“What?”
He leans closer, so only I can hear.
“Marry me.”
“What?”
He is right by my ear now, his heat electrifying. “Marry me. I don’t want to do any of this without you.”
“What?” I can’t have heard correctly, and yet my stomach leaps to my throat, my heartbeat detonating within my chest cavity. That he wants me, that he is choosingme.
He pulls back and stares at me with a hint of a smile, wordlessly, like I can read his mind. We’d discussed marriage in tangential terms, like maybe one day, like let’s put it out there at some point, but nothing concrete, nothing that ever felt like it could be real.
“Marry me. Tomorrow. Next year. Whenever. Just say yes.”
“OK,” I say, because my mouth hasn’t yet caught up with my brain, with its frenetic euphoria that wants to burst with a YES.
He raises his eyebrows. “OK?”
“OK, yes!” I giggle loudly enough that a few people hiss for me to pipe down. I clamp my hand over my mouth, but my smile is wider than the whole of it.
He removes his father’s tarnished wedding band, which they miraculously recovered in the rubble, and which he’s been wearing on his right index finger, and slides it over my thumb, the only finger it fits. “Can this do for now? We’ll get you a real one when we’re back.”
“It’s more than OK,” I say. “It’s perfect.”
Later, when his name is called and he rises to accept his award, true to his word, the first person he thanks is me.
9
BEN
MAY 2012
I sink beneath the bubbles in the hot tub and wonder: If I stay under long enough, can I force myself to drown? Not that I want to drown, necessarily, but it’s not that I don’t either. I float my hands toward my face: my fingers and gold wedding band weave in front of me like an apparition. I count to twenty, holding my breath, swooshing my arms at my sides to keep me under the too-hot water, but as my lungs grow tighter I find that I don’t have it in me to sink, to not stretch for a gasp of air. The flats of my feet find the bottom of the Jacuzzi, and I shoot upward, toward the open sky, toward the California sunshine.
Tatum appears on our back deck now, on the phone, pacing in a circle, her forehead knotted into something that signals a crisis. But what constitutes a crisis anyway? That the test screeners toArmy Women: 2.0aren’t positive? That her publicist has overbooked her interviews? Bad press for forgetting to thank me in speeches? I buckle my knees and head beneath the surface again. Even from my perch below the bubbles, I can see her scanning the pool for me, and I know I should reach out a hand, hold up a foot, to let her know that I am here and alive and breathing, but I don’t. Instead, I count to thirty this time, until my lungs burn, and when I think that I absolutely can’t take it for another second, I hold on, and I do.
Tatum’s ankles draw me upward. She’s standing on the ledge of the hot tub, and then she is crouched over, waving me north.
“It’s Joey,” she shouts, her face and voice and body language sharp like a blade’s edge. “Get out. He’s at Cedars. Broke his arm, hit his head.” She stands abruptly. “Hurry up. I won’t wait for you.”
What she means is:You spend half your time trying to drown yourself now, literally, metaphorically, whatever. I can’t rescue someone who ties bricks to his ankles, who doesn’t even attempt to swim.She’s not wrong—Tatum is rarely wrong. Since Leo, I sleep too long, though fitfully; I work too little, and not well; I pick fights with her and with Eric, who finally said, “Dude, maybe it’s time you quit,” and I did; I flip off drivers on the freeway for innocuous lane changes; I snap at the woman in Starbucks for taking forever to decide what to put in her stupid latte. Does it really matter? How much of this shitreallymatters?
I heave myself out of the hot tub, throw on my jeans, slide into my flip-flops. I feel myself moving through quicksand as everything else meteors past.
Tatum drives because she is better at outpacing the paparazzi who sit outside our house now, waiting for a wave or a glimpse or some interesting nugget about what makes this day any different from all the other days that they trail her, Oscar winner Tatum Connelly. I am an asterisk, an afterthought: her husband of nine years who used to be something great, but now, just look at his IMDB to see what he’s done because no one could really tell you. One season ofCode Emergency, that shitty NBC procedural which does OK in the ratings but isn’t exactly mentally taxing, before he had some sort of breakdown in the writers’ room one afternoon, in which he heaved the In and Out burgers (the writing staff’s dinner) against the giant whiteboard that was littered with crappy plotlines, and then after the burgers, the milkshakes and some fries too, until the whiteboard was nothing but a smashed canvas of inedible garbage. At which Ben proclaimed: “Well, at least now the plotlines match the quality of the show.” And Eric, his producing partner, said: “Dude, let’s go to a bar and talk.”
That’s the sort of anecdote you might find on his IMDB page.
Joey is with his teacher, Ms.Ashley, when we arrive at the hospital. My hair is still damp, the water still floating through my ears. I handle the paperwork while Tatum rushes into the exam room. By the time I’ve filled out the insurance forms, Tatum has soothed him into a quiet whimper, and Ms.Ashley, after explaining he fell off the monkey bars at the playground and landed with his arm pinned beneath him, has returned to Windstream, the preschool of the Hollywood elite, amid multiple apologies and promises to call later this afternoon.
The nurses have checked his vitals, which seem stable, but they need to get him down to X-ray to check on the break, and they want to monitor him for a possible concussion since he’s got a welt the size of the hard-boiled egg Tatum ate for breakfast on the back of his head. (She’s eating only protein for two meals a day now.)
“We’re going to wheel you down to Radiology, sweetie,” the nurse says. “We’re going to take a picture of your insides!”
“OK,” Joey whispers. “Can I see them too?”
“You betcha.” She smiles, then to us: “The doctor will be in to see you after she reviews everything.”
