“Almost there,” I say. “Try to enjoy it.”
Tatum had won every major award leading up to this; there would be no upset, no surprise. In exactly three minutes she’ll float up to the stage and accept her Oscar. My phone buzzes again, then quiets, then buzzes again.
“Shit, my mom won’t stop calling.”
“It’s OK, you have a minute, you can take it.”
“I’m sure she wants to wish you luck.”
Tatum turns to me and offers a lopsided smile, which reminds me of why she slayed me way back during theRomanticahshoot and then made it official when she kissed me (or I kissed her?) on New Year’s Eve.
“I’m about to puke, so just thank her for me, and I’ll call her later,” she says.
I stand, press the phone to my ear.
“Mom, I have about thirty seconds. What’s up?”
I expect her to say:Oh, just wanted to be the first to congratulate Tatum,orKiss your fabulous wife for me before she wins.
Instead she shrieks like I have heard her only once before in her life.
And in an instant, it’s ten years ago; it’s horror and death and the fallout that is destined to come.
“It’s Leo,” she yells. “My God, Ben, it’s Leo.”
I run up the aisle and out to the lobby, just as the lights flicker to return us to our seats.
I miss Tatum’s category, but then nothing that happens after this moment matters. And I miss Tatum’s speech too, but later I’ll learn that she forgot to thank me anyway.
12
TATUM
JULY 2004
My “big” break comes fifteen months of slinging cosmos and sex on the beaches and chardonnays for tourists at P.F.Chang’s. I don’t mind the work so much. It keeps me busy, though the children are often ill-behaved and whiny, and the tourists are loud and don’t tip well. But Mariana, who logs most shifts with me, has become a good friend, and with Ben still working unending hours, this time prepping forOne Day in Dallas, a Kennedy biopic set to shoot next spring, the stint gives me structure, fills my days with something other than scanning the trades for shitty auditions, staring at my cell phone in case my (relatively dodgy) agent calls, running on the beach to lose a few pounds which will take me from girl-next-door to girl-someone-wants-to-fuck. (In Hollywood terms.) I’m contemplating adopting a dog for the companionship, but Ben isn’t home often enough for me to get an affirmative. “I might just do it without you,” I said to him one night while he was nose-deep in a revision. “You’ll just come home to a strange animal in the kitchen!”
“I prefer strange animals in the bedroom,” he said, and I laughed, so he pushed his luck and teased: “See, I’m listening to you, even when you think I’m not.”
So a dog is a possibility, a positive on the potential horizon.
Still, in the months that have passed between landing in LA and now, my ambition has gone from hopeful to desperate; my attitude has devolved from optimistic to jaded. There’s a reason you see aspiring starlets hopping off the bus in movies full of sunshine that turn pale and gray as the scenes roll past. How many doors can one knock on before the rejection starts to sting? Ben tells me to keep my chin up, but Ben is working on his third feature, which I am happy for (of course). It fills our bank account, offers us stability. His success makes him happier than ever, as if each chit, each accolade, brings him closer to God. A self-anointed Hollywood God, but God all the same. He tells me sometimes that he’s chasing the ghost of his dad, and I tell him that he now has to satisfy only himself, and he nods and sometimes seems to believe this and sometimes he doesn’t. I don’t try to talk him out of it too much, though; I understand the weight of parental baggage. It’s not as if I’m not heaving my own shit around too. It’s not as if I’m not wandering about, trying to find my own way too.
What I’m trying to find is what I embraced at Tisch, and what I discovered as a senior in high school after my rocky earlier years, and after my dad was absent and my mom was present but also on one of her holistic jags where she was more focused on the soothing nature of lavender or why we should ban dairy from our home than noticing that her teenage daughter was flailing about with a broken heart (and a lost virginity), and with no one around to guide her. At the time, I was taking drama because it fulfilled my arts requirement, and we were staging a modern rendition ofRomeo and Juliet. Our teacher allowed us to adapt it for the modern era—think more Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes than Shakespeare—and when he cast me as the lead, I had to read the call sheet three times because I was sure he’d gotten it wrong. He hadn’t, and to my surprise, I held the audience rapt, silent, almost reverent. The school newspaper had given the production a mixed review but handed me a rave. My mom, an amateur poet who never had loftier aspirations, attended the performance and wept afterward.
“If you can dream it, you can be it, baby,” she said on the drive home.
“So why didn’t you ever try to get published?”
“The art is sometimes enough,” she said, squinting against the headlights of an oncoming car. “The art sometimes just has to be enough.”
But the art wasn’t just enough for me. I knew that immediately when they dropped the curtain onRomeo and Juliet; I knew it all through college, through the slog of hailed shows with great performances (Hamlet,The Heidi Chronicles), and less successful shows with still great performances (The Importance of Being Earnestand a particularly jarringLost in Yonkers, where I was the only one who could pull off the accent). Daisy wasn’t wrong back at my wedding: I probablyhadbeen the best one in our class at Tisch, but out here in LA, Tisch didn’t mean much. Out here, big boobs and a small waist and, sometimes, a suggestive nod to a producer who may or may not want to undress you in his office after a meeting meant much more.
Daisy moves out the weekend of July 4th and crashes in our spare bedroom in our small bungalow. Though it’s theoretically Ben’s office, he’s gone so often that it’s mostly empty space where I sometimes unroll my yoga mat or find an exercise show on TV and run through a series of squats and lunges that make me hate myself, or when I’m feeling more generous, hate this town for making me care about the circumference of my thighs. Daisy is tiny and oozes all-American, so it’s no shock that she has a slew of auditions at the ready. Also Daisy is connected in ways that I’m not, in ways that Ben is. I try not to begrudge them this: Hollywood never promised to be a level playing field, but when her brother’s friend casts at ABC, and when her dad’s college roommate runs Paramount, it’s hard not to feel the nick against my skin. I want to call my mother, want to complain about the inequity of it, not because it means I won’t work hard—harder—but because sometimes the complaining is the solution in and of itself. But my mother is no longer here to listen.
Sometimes I call Piper. But she’s an obstetrics nurse (like my mom) who works nights and sleeps days, and I hate waking her with my burdens. Sometimes I’ll complain to Leo, who himself calls more often, needier now that his own dad is gone, though I never had the impression that he dumped his inner life on his dad in the first place. But grief and death can do that to you—slice open a place that is vulnerable and wanting—so he leans on me like a big sister, and in return I lean on him because he makes it easy to. He listens to my grievances about my humiliating auditions or the way I collided with a waiter carrying a full plate of hot fried rice, and how even half a day later, I found charred peas in my hair and plenty down my bra too, and also how I’m just a girl from Canton who can’t call in favors. (There’s Ben, yes, who floated my name to casting withOne Day in Dallas, but I wasn’t the right “type,” as is too often the case out here.) Leo may be a rich kid with a trader job he hates, but he listens, and because he wants so desperately to shed the burdens of his own background (the job he loathes, the expectations of a dead father he can now never outrun), he understands.
Now, Daisy has rented a convertible until she leases a car of her own, but insists that I drive.
