Franklin frowns, and David seems to notice me for the first time.
“Exactly! Exactly. And now that rug, which if you recall, we had shipped in from Italy”—he saysItalyin three slow, drawn-out syllables—“has a giant brown shit stain right in the middle, and I can’t exactly cover it up with a piece of furniture!” He widens his eyes. “He actually proposed that we just stick a coffee table over it.”
“Like that is the worst suggestion in the world!” Franklin says.
“I mean, I guess ...” I stutter, trying to recalculate. On the one hand, Franklin is my entry point to David; on the other hand, David is the money grab.
“Look, fine,” Franklin interrupts. “I should have woken up and let him out. OK, are we happy?”
“I’m happy,” David says, though he does not look happy at all.
“Jeeeesus,” Franklin says. “These fucking dogs. They’re basically going to be the death of our marriage.” Then: “They were his idea.”
At this, Monster jumps atop David again, who rather than recoil says, “Ooh, your mama is very smart. She got Franklin to admit that he was wrong.” He purses his lips and kisses Monster on his black, wet nose. I mask my embarrassment with a too-aggressive laugh.
“I’m sorry, Tatum?” David asks, when Monster has finally jumped down and is seated, looking on expectantly. “It’s Tatum, right?”
“She’s Daisy’s best friend,” Franklin says. “You knowOn the Highlands? She’s in that.”
“Aah, we just watched a rough cut the other day. I knew I knew you from somewhere.”
I haven’t yet seen a rough cut, and my anxiety spikes in the form of an accelerated pulse, a jumbled tongue.
“Oh, gosh, I haven’t yet seen it ... I hope I was OK ... I was kind of out of my ...” I stop.No. Play the part, pull it together, don’t give them something to find fault with.I’ve almost gotten rusty at this, complacent because I am so disarmed with Ben. I refocus. “Anyway, what I mean is: I haven’t seen the rough cut yet, but I’m hearing good things.”
“You should be hearing good things,” David concurs. “It was excellent. You are excellent.”
“Oh, thank you.” I shake my head like it’s nothing. “I did love the shoot, though. I’m completely obsessed with period pieces. It’s amazing to me how the literature holds up even a hundred years later.”
“I just ... I literally just said the same thing to Franklin, didn’t I?” He turns to Franklin, their skirmish entirely behind them now.
“He did.”
“I’m dying for another one,” I add, then immediately want to retract it. I’ve fallen out of the role I’m playing, and I know better than that. Iambetter than that. The point here is to be spontaneous, not pushy, and it’s a fine line to walk. Pushy means desperate, and any actress can tell you that desperation can be smelled across the farmers market by a mile, maybe even over the shit-stained white rug that they have to throw out.
The scent goes undetected by David.
“I’m about to doPride and Prejudice. Early prep work now, shooting next spring. I know, I know, remaking a classic, but I think I can bring something new to it, you know? I wouldn’t have accepted the job if I didn’t think so.”
“You don’t have to justify it to me!” I laugh. “God, who wouldn’t want to try their hand at Austen?”
“An actress who reads!” David claps his hands together. “And whose dog is impossibly adorable and who takes my side in an argument with Franklin. I think I love you, darling.”
“Well.” I grin. “I won’t tell Franklin if you don’t.”
17
BEN
JUNE 2008
It’s raining in Los Angeles, and no one knows what to do about it. People are scattering around, hovering in Whole Foods, tweeting with panicked abandon:It’s raining! It might be the apocalypse!
I’m set to meet Spencer for lunch to discuss my next steps in my career:One Day in Dallashadn’t blown up like we’d all thought, and for the first time I have to consider strategy; I have to “take a meeting” with my agent to ensure that I don’t, as my dad would say, slide into a wasteland of mediocrity. It’s happened to plenty of other golden boys. It can’t happen to me.
Tatum is in majestic Hawaii while I am here on daddy duty for the next ten days. It’s longer than she wanted to be away from the baby, but she’d been back at work since he was four weeks old, the necessary requirements of capitalizing on Oscar-nomination heat, and thus when production onShipwreckcalled for nearly two weeks in Hawaii, she packed her breast pump and was flown first class to the Big Island. She calls on her breaks, asks for me to put Joey on the phone, though he doesn’t seem to understand that his mom’s voice is being beamed in across an ocean, and he usually just wiggles around in his crib. Eventually I put the phone back to my ear and assure her that we’re doing fine. That I am defrosting her frozen breast milk, that the night nurse is cutting his fingernails and minding his diaper rash, that we can survive a week and change without her.
I can. We can. We can survive ten days without her. I don’t want to think of myself as one of those guys whose wife does everything better than he does simply because she has a uterus. That guy was my dad. That guy was my grandfather, who showed up from time to time in a three-piece suit to hand us a hundred-dollar bill and then shooed us out of the room because he didn’t like to hear children playing. I’m fucking capable.
