The cheers are near deafening now, the blur of the camera flashes, the electricity palpable.
The photographers shout, “Give us a single, Tatum, give us a single!” Meaning:Leave Ben behind, give us a shot of just you.
“Go,” he says. “You look great.”
And so I do. I inhale and exhale and try to transform myself as the actress who is owning her first Academy Award nomination. And then I move into the glittering lights and the catcalls, and I step into my future.
21
BEN
SEPTEMBER 2006
The sky is robin’s-egg blue, just as it was five years ago.
I stare upward for a beat too long and am blinded for a moment, hazy yellow orbs obscuring my vision, despite my sunglasses. Leo stands ramrod straight next to me, his shoulders pinned as if literally stapled back, but his toes jigger up and down, his fingers twitch in nonstop motion. My mom is weeping silently to my other side, staring out at the vast wasteland of a construction pit at Ground Zero, staring farther to the two reflection pools she says will bring her a bit of solace, but I can’t see how. Tatum had planned to come, but then the roof to the new house in Holmby Hills cratered in, and I told her she should stay behind to deal with it. She assured me that her dad could manage on his own—he was living in the guesthouse and taking classes at UCLA for accounting—but I didn’t mind. Really. I wasn’t interested in delving too deeply back into my grief, and if Tatum had been along, she’d have poked and prodded and asked me over and over and over again if I’m OK, if I shouldn’t see a therapist—when really, I just wanted to be done with it.
I don’t need a therapist when I have learned how to soothe myself on my own: I avoid New York unless mandated here for work (or family, but it’s easy to lure them out west instead); I flip the channel when newsreels and talking heads pontificate about the horrors of the day, one dimension removed from those of us who live it, dream it, breathe it, in order to (almost) forget about it. Sometimes I start to call my dad to share some tidbit about my career—the acclaim forOne Day in Dallasor theReaganbiopic I’m drafting that he would have been so proud of because Reagan was his hero. Or even something ridiculous, like the fact that I taught Monster to wake Tatum up by licking her face. Of course those moments sting; of course they raise it all up for me again.
But mostly I just want to ignore it. Mostly, I don’t want to be standing here, listening to Mayor Bloomberg speak at the site of my father’s death. It shouldn’t seem like that much to ask.
A town car retrieves us after the ceremony, and I uncoil as we head uptown.
“Brunch now,” my mom announces.
“I’m not hungry,” Leo says.
“You’re never hungry these days,” she says, squeezing his leg, staring out the window at the rush of Eighth Avenue traffic.
“Occupational hazard.”
“Work makes you lose your appetite?” I ask.
“I made associate,” he says flatly. “All I do is work.”
My mom laughs at this. “Leo, sweetheart, I’m sure the women of New York would disagree.”
The town car deposits us outside the Plaza Athénée, where my mom has evidently arranged for a grief brunch with friends she has met through fundraising, which is how she has channeled her own pain. We all have our outlets. I bury mine. Leo works through his. And my mom raises money for the widows of firefighters. It’s admirable how she has forged on, her chin up, her cause determined. I consider, as we shake hands and make introductions in the marble lobby of the hotel, how I would cope if I lost Tatum. My mother introduces me to a man, Ron, whom she looks at with affection and who, she tells me, also lost his wife—this is simply how they introduce themselves here, in this committee of battle-wounded survivors—and I barely hear her, barely pay attention, because I’m absorbed in the question of what I would do without Tatum.
I simply don’t know. It is an unimaginable question with no answer.
I duck to the bathroom to call her, to tell her I miss her, which I don’t do often enough. In fact, I’d promised I’d call last night, but Leo and I had gone out for beers (too many beers), and I’d passed out before I could remember that I’d forgotten. That she’d be sitting by the phone, waiting to hear from me. It wasn’t intentional, my neglect. Tatum was just needier than I was; she needed more reassurance, more connection, more ofus.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Is everything OK?” She is talking in a British accent.
“Tate?”
“Are you OK?” she says again, still in the accent. I sigh. I’d forgotten that she’d caught wind that they were beginning to cast forPride and Prejudice, and she was honing her accent in the hopes of wedging herself into an audition.
“Is my wife around?”
“I’m here.” She drops the pretense.
I don’t normally mind—the masks that she wears. Sometimes it’s exhilarating, like when I flew out to Scotland and visited her onOn the Highlands, and we pretended we weren’t married and didn’t already know each other’s secrets. But today, when we mourned my dad all over again, I can’t stand it for a second; I don’t want to have to expend any more emotional effort than I’ve already put forth, talking to a woman who doesn’t feel like my wife.
“Hey,” I say. “Thanks.”
