“I’m up,” he says, the back of his hair matted upward, the exact way it used to when we were younger and he’d wake after falling asleep in my bed even though I’d try to kick him out. I was a teenager by then and wanted my privacy, and he, just seven or eight, tried to cling on for as long as he could.
He flops on the loveseat across from my desk. Tatum’s awards (SAG, Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice, all of them) line my top shelf, my Sundance newcomer award front and center on my desk, a reminder of the potential of what once was.Is.What still is.
“Please don’t tell Mom.” It’s more of a sob.
“She doesn’t know?”
“It would kill her. So please.”
“We won’t say a word,” Walter says from the hallway before I can even think to offer my reassurance. “The only thing you worry about now is getting better. Your sobriety comes first.”
Leo nods, meets his eyes. “Thank you.”
I want to say to Walter:Don’t speak for me, don’t go around making promises on my behalf.But Leo looks both so broken and so grateful in this moment for Walter and his comfort that instead I fold my hands in my lap, wait for Tatum to come clean this up, and I say nothing at all.
16
TATUM
OCTOBER 2006
The fact is this: nothing is done for you in this life if you don’t do it for yourself. I don’t care how many people claim they are “on your team”; the only person who canhelmyour team is you. We talk a lot about “teams” in our family therapy sessions, which I now do every month with my dad. It’s part of the outplacement of Commitments. “We are committed to a life of recovery,” they say in their brochures and in their e-mails and in real life. Also, when we checked my father out after his thirty days, and every single time we have revisited since. Not that my father has needed to revisit for drinking. Rather, we drive down once a month for family therapy. Well, for father-daughter therapy. Or: Dad-and-me therapy.
Piper is back in Ohio, back to her life of nursing and living in our childhood home and back to dating Scooter Smith, who, she has confided, might propose soon.
We brought my dad home after his month at Commitments, and he hasn’t left, which was not my choice, but I couldn’t just stuff him on the first plane back. The counselors told us that he needed to be away from his triggers, and that he needed a stable, supportive environment. What was I going to do? Prove that I was no better than he had been for his erratic, unreliable years and kick him out? He was trying, and so he stayed.
Ben was doing well with no signs of slowing down—there was early awards buzz onOne Day in Dallas, and he was turning down offers by the bucketload. So we boxed up the Santa Monica bungalow, which was our first home together, and took out a mortgage on a house in Holmby Hills. There was a small guesthouse in the back, nothing fancy, just a one-bedroom with a kitchenette and a bathroom with cotton candy tiles that needed updating. But my dad moved in without complaint—not that he had much to complain about: the guesthouse, with its dated decor, more closely resembled our childhood home than the main house, which had soaring beamed ceilings and a kitchen larger than my entire New York apartment. It took me weeks to get used to not being able to shout to Ben and have him hear me from anywhere in the house. Daisy swung by and said, “Yup, this’ll do,” and I didn’t say a word about how Ben had covered the entire down payment because I was earning a little more than zero, but nothing substantial.
There had been four sitcom guest parts, and an arc onCSI, and, of course,On the Highlands, but it wasn’t “down payment in Holmby Hills” sort of money. Ben didn’t care. Ben didn’t even think twice. “What’s mine is yours,” he said. “We’re a team,” he said. Which we were, but we still weren’t entirely because he had this big, looming life, and I was still stuck in mine. The best actress at Tisch who just got shot down for the girlfriend part onTwo and a Half Menbecause, my agent tells me, I wasn’t blond enough. (I am not blond at all, in fact.)
My dad had celebrated one year of sobriety in March. Our deal was: as long as he stayed sober, he had a place in our home. Ben didn’t like it; he bristled about the loss of privacy and he worried about my dad relapsing and letting me down, but he lived with it all the same, which I appreciated. Piper flew out to celebrate the one-year anniversary. We went for a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains at dawn, and he hugged me and told me he was proud of me, grateful for sticking with him. He went back to night school to re-earn his accounting certificate, which had lapsed, “something I’ve thought of doing for a long time.” We aren’t fixed, we aren’t even close to perfect, but we are better, we are healing.
Each time we drive south to our therapy sessions, Dr.Wallis, our therapist, reminds me: “Don’t be afraid to let your dad know when you feel like he’s not on your team.”
I do tell him, which is something I’d learned to avoid in my childhood, an avoidance that made me a better actress, and, frankly, freed me from the burden of my past. When I became somebody else, I no longer had a father who was an alcoholic and also negligent. But now, as myself, I am a sieve with my father:I am angry that you used Mom’s death as an excuse to fall off the wagon. I am angry that she was sick and I had to hold the house together. I am angry that I never knew if you’d be sober enough to take us to school or there to pick us up afterward. I am angry.
I am still angry some days. But every once in a while I’ll forget to be mad, and those will be the better days too.
Like when I landed a coveted role inOn the Highlands, which took me to Scotland to be directed by Sir Edmund Wolfe and was filled with a cast of British acting royalty. And me. And my dad drove me to the airport because he knew he’d missed so many other chances to take me to choir or practices or just show up. And when he picked me up at the airport upon landing too, because Ben was in San Francisco for a scouting trip, and my dad knew that after a difficult, wet, lonely shoot (surrounded by British acting royalty who didn’t warm to the young American upstart), I could use a friendly face.
Or when I lost the lead in three pilots that my agent all but assured me were locks, and he came home to me eating a peach pie straight from the pan, though he also knew that I was on a strict diet because each role—covert double-agent spy, sexy teacher-by-day-detective-by-night, and NASA engineer who discovers a plot against America—required me to lose at least seven pounds. (“Ten would really be ideal,” my agent said just before my screen test for the NASA role.) Rather than say a word about the nearly eaten entire pie, he spun out the door and returned fifteen minutes later with Entenmann’s doughnuts. Because Entenmann’s had always been my favorite for Sunday morning breakfasts before our household fell apart.
So it’s not that my dad isn’t on my team. And it’s not that Ben isn’t either.
“When I slow down, when I have the time, I want to write something for you, like how we didRomanticah, and how that was perfect.”
“I don’t need you to,” I’ll say, but I’ll crawl atop his lap anyway. “ThisCSIgig is really fulfilling.”
“Hardy har.” He’ll kiss my nose. “But you are brilliant, andIam brilliant, so let me write something for our brilliance together.” He’ll meet my eyes, see right into me. “It’s OK to let me take care of you.”
My skin will prickle when he says this, because I am so used to solely taking care of myself, but Dr.Wallis tells me I need a team, that we are all a team, so I kiss him and say, “Thank you.” And I believe that Benwillwrite something great for me, and I hold on to that because he knows me as I know myself, and so of course he can write me the role of a lifetime. He won’t write it because I need him to, and he won’t write it out of obligation; he’ll write it as a testament to how we are whole together.
Still the truth is, no matter what Dr.Wallis says, no matter what Ben says, what I have learned about this town and this industry is that most days you are a team in and of yourself. I don’t have the connections of Ben and Daisy; I don’t have the network that offers ties to prevent a hard landing. I have lost role after role, and true, gotten a few too, but Daisy knew a girl from high school onNew York Cops, who set up drinks with the producer, and now Daisy’s a regular. Next year her name will be in the opening credits. And Ben is back and forth to San Francisco working with Eric Johannsen—his old writing buddy from Williams, who happens to be related totheJohannsens, who run JH Films, the hottest independent studio in town—on a new spin on Alcatraz.
I only have me.
So when Daisy e-mails this morning that she’d run into BAFTA winner David Frears’s partner, Franklin, a costumer onNew York Cops, at Runyon Canyon, and that he’d mentioned they were headed to the Brentwood Farmers Market later in the day, I scramble into my most flattering yoga gear and click on Monster’s leash. And then I drive directly to Gretna Green Way, finding a parking space less than a quarter mile away (no small miracle). Monster and I loiter by the strawberry stand until I see them.
