She laughs, and I do too. A dormant staccato rising up from my chest, bouncing off the beige exam room walls.
“How about you?” I ask. “Where are you on the scale of single to rebound to commitment?” Jesus, a loaded question if there ever was one. I’m shocked at my brazenness, more shocked at how easily it comes.
“Oh, well, still single. Engaged once but that didn’t stick.” She glances to the floor. “I don’t know. I guess being a doctor pretty much takes up most of my life. And I have all these kids ... my patients.”
“Oh,” I reply because I’m suddenly nervous. Not that I’ve exposed too much or that she has, but that just as quickly, there is an unexpected tension—the tension of possibility—between us.
“Don’t feel sorry for me. There are little frozen Amandas sitting in a laboratory not far from here, ready and waiting for that perfect specimen of sperm!” She blushes and holds a hand to her face. “Shit, sorry. I always overshare when I’m uncomfortable.”
“I remember.” I smile. “And I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. God, not at all. Sorry, that’s on me. I’ve been a bit of an emotional sieve recently.” I flop my arm. “I apologize.”
“Youwerealways such a fucking nice guy.” She sighs. “I thought that would bore me, but it turns out that nice guys are harder to find than I thought. More valuable, I mean.”
“I’m really not that nice.” I should say:Just ask my wife.I turn the light out before she can come to bed; I ignore her requests to write a script just for her; I leave the room when my mom calls and Tatum holds the receiver out to me because I am petty and childish now that my mom has a new husband, Ron, and a new life where they take cruises in the Mediterranean, and have a membership to the tennis club near the summer home they’re renting in Connecticut. I’m still here. I’m still stuck.
Leo is gone, and I have lost myself with him.
“Well, Tatum’s lucky. That’s all I mean. I’m sure she knows that.” Amanda exhales and seems to consider something.
I fiddle with my wedding band and worry what else she’ll say, what else she has heard, what will break me from this foreign bubble of happiness. As if she can read my cues as well as Tatum can (or used to), she says: “Well, this is a happy accident. I mean, not that I wanted your son to break his arm! Just ... you know ... anyway, I think he’s going to be OK. I’ll check his X-rays, of course, but these things on kids manage to heal faster than you’d think.” She slows her rambling. Inhales, smiles. “Wow, your son. That kind of blows my mind.”
“Trust me, me too.” I smile back, working muscles that have nearly atrophied.
“Anyway, they’ll bring him back from Radiology, and I’ll let you know. We may need to keep him here overnight to rule out a concussion.”
“OK,” I say. “I’ll stay as long as it takes.”
She grabs the door handle to leave, then hesitates. “Look, I don’t know.” She pulls a card from the front pocket of her lab coat. “Take this. If you ever want to, like, catch up, give me a call.”
I stare at the card for a second too long. It feels like a dare; it feels like an alarm that I should run from.
“Or don’t,” she says, blood rising to her cheeks again. “God, this is unprofessional. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say.
“OK,” she replies. “Then I’m not.”
10
TATUM
MARCH 2003
We marry in Santa Barbara in March. Neither of us wanted much of a to-do; I’d have been happy at City Hall, and Ben is so busy now that he is Hollywood’s It boy that, through no fault of his own, he couldn’t involve himself in more than showing up. “I will show upveryenthusiastically,” he says, before throwing me atop the duvet and kissing my neck. “But the flowers, the cake? I don’t care. Only care about the woman waiting for me at the end of the aisle.”
But after the wreckage of the previous year—his dad, my mom—it felt like we owed something more to our families, well, to his mom, Helen, and to Leo and to Piper, my sister, and if giving them a wedding also gave them something to be happy about, it was a small concession. Not a concession. It was a celebration. But the typical trappings of a formal wedding weren’t for me. Not without my mom here, anyway, and maybe even if she’d been here, not then either.
I take a week off work: I’m the Tuesday–Saturday bartender at P.F.Chang’s on Wilshire, and Ben shutters his laptop and his trips back and forth to the studio where they are finalizing the reshoots forAll the Men, with the hopes of having it prepped for the Toronto Film Festival this fall. Since landing in LA nine months ago, our lives, well, Ben’s life, has spun into a whirlwind—mine mostly consists of pouring cosmos for tourists and snacking on bar nuts with Mariana, my bartending cohort and also an aspiring actress. Ben and I promise ourselves that we can press Pause for a five-day sliver of time to marry. Though P.F.Chang’s is my paycheck, I am stuffed with classes, workshops, mailings to agents and managers and anyone who will have me. I went to goddamn Tisch, but no one out here seems to notice all that much. Maybe if my breasts were bigger or my vibe more available. I don’t know. Mariana says the only people who make it in their first year are the rich kids with connections, “like the Spielberg kids or whatever,” so I don’t tell her that my fiancé is making it in his first year, because I’m not sure that I want her to point out that he’s “a rich kid with connections,” or maybe I’m not sure that I want to believe that Ben wouldn’t have made it regardless.
“It’s not that I don’t dream of becoming P.F.Chang’s employee of the month,” I said to her a few weeks ago.
“Oh babe, I hear you. I was Ms.January, and let me tell you, it’s the stuff dreams are made of.” She laughed.
Daisy, my best friend from Tisch, flies in from New York for the wedding, packing in a few auditions for the week (rich kid with connections), and a hodgepodge of Ben’s high school friends jet out too, landing in LA, but then driving to Santa Barbara to stay at the Biltmore or the swanky boutique hotels tucked into the sides of mountains where celebrities unwind for the weekend. In the nine months since we left New York, Ben and I have planted roots in a rental bungalow on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, and Piper heads out three days before the wedding to stay in the guest room (Ben’s office) and help me prepare, though there isn’t too much to do. Helen found a woman in Santa Barbara who coordinates beach weddings for a living, and I’ve merely had to reply to e-mails with things like “full bar,” “lilies not roses,” “salmon sounds fine,” and that’s that.
“You seem so unexcited,” Piper said the morning before we were set to drive north for the event. We were walking along the beach, just a stone’s throw from the condo complex. From my bedroom window I could see the horizon, the towering palm trees, the stairway leading downward to the path on which we now walked. “You’re happy, right?”
“Of course I’m happy,” I said, sliding off my flip-flops, stepping from the concrete boardwalk onto the cold sand. It was a gloomy morning, the skies overcast and low.
