From the back seat, Monster yawns loudly, then rises—he’s tall enough to hit the ceiling on the SUV—and pokes his head between us.
“Monster doesn’t like it when Mommy and Daddy fight,” Tatum says.
“Tatum!”
I pull out my cell phone and stick my hand out the window, desperate for a signal, which we haven’t gotten for miles since we dipped into the Arizona canyons. This road trip was supposed to be fun, a vacation of sorts. A break from babysitting her father and his new, tenuous sobriety, a time-out from her down-on-her-luck series of auditions. Not that she’s not landing a punch every now and then, but her career is not lighting up the way she expected. Not like mine, anyway, which she doesn’t say explicitly but also doesn’t have to. I’m due in Texas in three days for a week of reshoots forOne Day in Dallas. We figured we’d hit up kitschy hotels (that accept dogs), stop at Southwestern diners, carve out time for each other the way we haven’t been able to lately, mostly because of my schedule, but also because of her dad and all the energy that has sucked from her.
She’s changed because of him. Hardened and softened in ways that I’d write, if I were writing a character—which, I’ve told her, I’d like to do for her one day. Because, as she says, together we’re unstoppable. And we are. I believe that too. I’ve never been better than I was onRomanticah, though I’m chasing that greatness onOne Day in Dallas, been told that the script has heat, has all the markings of an award winner.
Tatum seems to be chasing something too now. With Walter back in her (our) life, she is more fragile, as if her father’s reentrance has turned her to glass, but she’s also more open, as if the valve she’d shut off to her empathy has spun open. This means she sometimes cries at inexplicable moments (when she found me sleeping on the couch with Monster’s head resting atop my chest—I’d been up most of the night because Monster had eaten burritos out of the garbage and had endless diarrhea), and also bristles at things that I’d never expect to rattle her. A couple weeks ago a waitress at the sushi restaurant overheard me talking aboutOne Day in Dallasand pushed up her cleavage and batted her eyes at me in an attempt to get a shot at a bit part. Tatum fumed about it the entire ride home: how suggestive the waitress was, how disrespectful she found her. I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought if Tate hadn’t blown it up so disproportionately.
So we embarked on a road trip to leave all that behind for a few days, and now we are out of gas in the canyons of Arizona. The sun is tucking itself behind a mountain peak, which grants us reprieve from its blistering rays, but it will be dark within hours, and then we’re really fucked.
“I can’t get a signal,” she says. Monster licks her cheeks as if this is good news.
“I can’t either.”
She shrugs. “I guess we walk?”
“We walk where?”
“To the next town?”
“Tatum! We have no fucking idea where we are! We have no idea where the next town is! It’s ninety degrees outside, and then it will be dark, and it’ll be, like, forty, so then what?”
She frowns. “Well, do you think your attitude is helpful, like, at all?”
“I think what would have been helpful is if we stopped for gas the last time I suggested it!”
This is one of our things, one of the few quirks I cannot stand about her, and likely, she about me. Something as inane as the gas gauge, and yet symbolic too. How she pushes it to its limits; how I pull into a station as soon as the alert light goes on.
She grips the wheel and stares ahead.
“Don’t blame me.”
“Don’tblameyou?” I shove my phone out the window again, stare at the signal indicator, get nothing, shove it back in. “Who am I supposed to blame?Monster?”
“I was distracted,” she pouts. “Thinking of what I was going to say to Lily Marple when I finally see her.”
“You are actually coming up with a monologue of what to say to Lily? I’ve told you: say nothing, forget it. It wasn’t a big deal.”
I’d made the mistake of telling Tatum that Lily Marple, who plays Jackie Kennedy inOne Day in Dallas, had tried to sleep with me on the shoot. I mean, I can’t be sure, but she tucked her hands down my waistband at the craft service table, and said, “I think you’re going to win lots of awards one day. And I’m thinking I could be your muse. Want to meet me in my trailer?”
I thought it was funny, notha-hafunny, but amusing enough: that she’d be so desperate when she was already a lead, that she thought I’d take the bait when I was clearly committed and, also, not a total dick. Plenty of this sort of favor swapping went down on sets, to be sure, but usually the writer—who was not exactly high on the totem pole of power—was not part of the sexual favor hierarchy.
Tatum did not find it funny, not even in aha-haway.
“First she gets, like, a dream part, then she tries to screw you?” she’d yelled. Tatum wasn’t up for the part of Jackie; she didn’t wield that kind of consideration among casting directors and producers. Not that she wasn’t good enough for the role, but casting was about power, and Tatum simply didn’t have a power hand to play.
“She wasn’t, like, trying toscrewme,” I said, even though that was exactly what she was doing.
Tatum suddenly shifted to tears. “Iwant to be your muse. Not her, not anyone.”
“Babe,babe,” I said and ran my hands down her shoulders. “I’ll write you something great, something brilliant. Let me just get through this first. But then I promise.”
She wiped her cheeks and apologized, and I told her not to. Part of loving Tatum was loving the tempestuous actress, the version of her that held me riveted behind the lens onRomanticah, the version of her that I can’t imagine I’ll ever grow bored with, ever outgrow. Sometimes she’s like a firework, explosive but still mesmerizing, and it’s not like I don’t want to sit back and watch the show.
“Tate,” I’d said then. “I see you. I have you.”
