Ron is a cardiac surgeon at New York Presbyterian, and he is obviously joking, so I force a smile but doubt it comes off as particularly genuine. I wish I could like him more, but I don’t.Probably,Tatum once said,because he’s not your dad.Also, probably, both literally and metaphorically, because he can carve a turkey way better than I can.
“All good,” I say, waving a knife. “Almost there.”
I am nowhere near almost there. In fact, the turkey looks like it’s been run through a paper shredder.
I wait for Ron to point out how far from “almost there” I am, as my dad would have. Instead, he reaches for a wineglass.
“Oh, there you are, Ron,” my mom says, her heels echoing on the tile kitchen floor. As if our house is so cavernous that he’d be anywhere else, as if she were utterly lost without him.
“I’m starving,” Leo says, coming up behind her. “Can you hurry the fuck up with that thing?” He steps closer and surveys my damage. “Dude, let Ron take it from here. He chops up people’s hearts for a living. You type on a keyboard.”
“He was doing all right,” Ron says, and this is a kindness that I accept but also cringe at. That he’s ignoring my mediocrity, that he accepts it. I sigh and pass the tools to Ron, who wields them while my mother rolls up his sleeves, then drops an apron around his neck and ties it around his waist, while Piper loops into the kitchen and out to the dining table to place the rest of the meal. Scooter, her new husband, follows dutifully, his hands steadying platter after platter that Tatum had catered and delivered, since, as she said: “I’m way too huge to cook.” Also, cooking isn’t her forte, but I’m not about to point that out with her current moodiness and temperament. (And, in fact, I never point that out even when she serves a dinner of burned roasted chicken or eggplant parmesan that’s chewy enough to make your jaw cramp. I grab my fork and knife, and dig in with more enthusiasm than is required.)
I find Tatum moored on the living room couch, with Cheryl, her dad’s girlfriend of nearly a year, massaging her feet. Tatum has had no quandaries about Cheryl, no qualms with her dad moving on and falling in love with someone who is not her mom. Which I find wholly ironic, since she’s had qualms with her dad her whole life until now, a change brought on by their therapy sessions and his sobriety. I watch them for a beat from the corner: Cheryl, with whom Walter now lives in a one-bedroom condo in Westwood, my pregnant wife with her eyes squeezed shut in utter delight, and her sober dad reading the new issue ofVariety, which features a roundtable of this season’s most buzzed-about actresses on the cover, including Tatum.
Three people whose lives have utterly diverged in the past few years, who have taken totally unexpected paths to lead them to here. And yet, they’re all relaxing, accepting, enjoying the comforts of my living room, while I linger in the doorway like an observer to someone else’s life. Not that it’s notmylife, not that I’m unhappy. But the way it has veered left when I thought it would turn right, the way I haven’t adapted to the roadblocks as adeptly as I always assumed I would. That’s on me, I know: with my surprise at how quickly this town knocked me off my pedestal when a few projects likeOne Day in DallasorAll the Mendidn’t hit as we thought they would; with how I’ve watched Tatum ascend the Hollywood ladder as if I’m standing below her; even with how I have seen my mom fall in love again and change with that love—she’s more open, more flexible, more honest, and vulnerable too. And yet I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap her out of it. Maybe I keep waiting for my dad to walk through the door and snap me out of it as well, remind me that I’m floating in the middle, that I should be shooting for the top. If he weren’t dead, if he were to walk through the door and tell me that, I’d probably resent him for it, though I’d heed him all the same. But because he can’t walk in and chide me, I chide myself. Plenty, too much, always.
Success alone doesn’t make you happy,he once said.But it sure does help.
No shit.
Tatum opens her eyes. “Hey, come sit,” she says, when she sees me.
“Ron relieved me of my carving duties.”
Cheryl stands and grants me the couch, then hovers behind Walter and massages his shoulders.
“Babe, relax, please,” Tatum says, plopping her feet atop my lap. “Also, please rub.”
Walter rests theVarietyon the coffee table, his eyes misting.
“I can’t believe that my baby is going to win an Oscar.”
“I’m not going towinan Oscar, Dad. Please don’t say that. You’re cursing me.”
“Yes, shhh, Walt!” Cheryl coos. “We’ll have to cleanse this room from your juju if you keep it up.”
He stands, his knees creaking, though he’s lost twenty pounds since drying out, and now, as a regular hiker (he and Cheryl are contemplating two weeks away in the Argentinian mountains), he is in better shape than I am.
“Let’s help in the kitchen,” he says. “Let Tatum get a little rest.”
“I’m fine, Dad!”
“You have big things on your plate,” he says.
“Just as long as the plate is under fifteen hundred calories,” I joke, but no one finds this very funny.
“You can put theVarietyat the bottom of the pile,” Tatum says once they’re gone. “We don’t have to have my face peering up at us from the coffee table.”
“Why would I do that? I’m proud of you.”
She wiggles her foot in my lap, as if to say,More please.Then she says aloud, “Next year you’re going to rack up the Emmys.”
“Maybe.” I smile. “An Oscar for you, an Emmy for me. I’ll take it.”
Eric and I had a buzzy show launching in March:Alcatraz. It’s true that we’d landed the deal because Eric’s uncle ran JH Films, one of the biggest production companies in town, but he and I were the ones who had put in the elbow grease, taken a standard prison drama and elevated it with smart, sharp writing. We wanted HBO. I’d balked at network TV, but Fox had promised us the moon, made it impossible to believe that it wouldn’t be a monster hit. It wasn’t film, true, but it was going to be great television. It was going to be my ticketbackto film as well. I was banking on it.
“Tate, you know how much I love you, even when I’m being an asshole, right?”
