“I have a beautiful man.”
“I know.” She pats my leg. “I meant for me. Also: you can look but not touch, you know.”
“If I even look in the wrong direction, it will be on Twitter in five seconds.”
This is true. It’s also a new adjustment for me, being endlessly scrutinized in public. I can’t wait on line with Joey for ice cream without noticing stares; I can’t grab apples at Gelson’s without someone posting a photo on Twitter. Now I’ll just send my assistant out for those mundane errands: tampons, tomato sauce, toilet paper, which isn’t how I want to live my life—Ben rolls his eyes in mock horror that I actually say things likeJust ask my assistant to do it—but that’s my new reality, that’s the price of my fame. It’s not by choice, certainly not by my choice. I love getting lost in the wide aisles of a grocery store, filtering through bruised fruit to find the perfect peach, gazing at my endless options in the cereal aisle. I started doing this when my mom was sick and our pantry went barren because my dad was no use. I’d hop a ride with a neighbor to the store, fill the cart until it was towering so high that I couldn’t see past it, and lose myself in the simple utopia of the cereal aisle.
At Harbor, Daisy rises to greet an impossibly handsome man whom I vaguely recognize from a show I’ve flipped past. My phone vibrates, and Piper’s text illuminates the screen in the otherwise mostly shadowy club lighting, which flares every few seconds in time with the pulsing beat.
Piper and her husband are babysitting for the weekend—my dad and Cheryl had already planned a golf trip, and Constance had given up enough of her weekends to need a break to see her own family. Not that Ben would have wanted my dad to watch Joe; he’d have just canceled his retreat instead. But I bought Piper and Scooter first-class plane tickets and promised them a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a night when I returned. They would have come anyway; they were trying for a baby of their own, and they considered this excellent practice, though Piper was already exasperated that Scooter mostly wanted to watch the World Series rather than lend a hand at bath time. I laughed when she told me this, but it wasn’t like I could join in on the complaints.
Ben had plenty of faults, but he pulled his parenting weight, more even than I did, not because I didn’t want to, but because my time was no longer my own. My heart was probably in it more than Ben’s. Joey still fought with him over meals, as if challenging his dad was a sport in and of itself (“God, this kid is like Leo,” he said to me one night after a bath where more water had ended up on the floor than down the drain); and Joey was in this interminable phase when he never wanted to wear clothing, especially when Ben tried to dress him. But still, Ben had more hours with Joey, simply because he had more time. WithAlcatrazcanceled, Ben had open days, empty nights. There isCode Emergency, but a pilot script isn’t a full-time job. I did breakfast and took him to an occasional birthday party and sometimes gym class too, when my stardom didn’t make me too self-conscious, but still, if you were to graph who put in more hours, it was Ben.
Piper texts me a picture of Joey sleeping in his toddler bed, and something comes untangled in me.What am I doing here?At Leonardo DiCaprio’s favorite new club, in a throbbing scene of lithe limbs, skinny models, vaguely recognizable faces of people I saw once on a TV rerun in the late-night hours when I couldn’t sleep? Daisy has moved to another couch, pressed close to the guy she knows from somewhere, and I rise to go. I’m bone weary from the flight and from the day of press, and I have another round tomorrow. Also, this has never interested me, this scene of too-beautiful strangers who pretend to enjoy each other’s company for the evening. Not when I was putting myself through Tisch by working at the bar, not in my early days in LA when this type of evening would have been so easy to stumble into.
I spin my wedding band on my finger, glance again at the picture of my sleeping child, and stand to leave.
It’s then that I see him.
Not clearly at first because of the lights and the bass from the song, which is nearly literally warping the walls and the dance floor.
I see him in staccato beats, in and out of the glare, in and out of my brain, like I’m not quite sure he’s in front of me. I push past the VIP hostess until I’m right in front of him, right by his side. His eyes are closed as he skitters to the beat of this song, which has suddenly become unbearable to my early-thirties ears. I jab his chest, jab it again, and his eyes fly open, and I know right away. He is not clean, not in any way sober.
“Leo,” I shout.
“Heeyyyyyy!” he shouts back, wrapping his arms over my shoulders, still bouncing to the music, like I’m now part of his groove.
I push him off me, lean closer into his ear. “Leo, what the hell?”
He slows the pulse of his legs, his arms dropping to his sides. I yank his elbow and wade through the crowd toward the bathrooms, where it is only marginally quieter, so I stick my head into the women’s room, which is empty, and pull him in, locking the door behind us.
“Talk to me,” I say. “What happened?”
He meets my eyes, and his pupils are wide and dilated. His hands jigger by his sides, so I take them in mine, hold them together, and say, “Breathe.”
He does. He inhales and exhales, and inhales once more, then says, “I fucked up. Three weeks ago. I don’t know what happened.”
“Have you been going to meetings? Lee, you were clean for over a year.” And he had been. After his sixty days at Commitments, he’d been a model of sobriety, at least as far as I could tell. And I’d gotten to be a pretty good judge with my father.
He shrugs. “Work has been crazy, and then I got invited to this weekend in Key West, so I thought ... blow off steam ...” His shoulders flop again. “Relapsing happens, you know? So fucking what? I’m not that bad, I can stop.”
“Leo ...” I release his hands but he can’t still himself. He paces back and forth in front of the vanity, just as someone knocks on the door and yells: “What the fuck? I have to pee. Open up!”
“Don’t tell Ben, OK? Please just don’t tell Ben.” His eyes are wild and terrified.
“Let me call my dad; he’ll know how to help.”
“I’ll start going to meetings again, one every day.” He is taking the floor in two steps now, spinning around, two steps more, spinning again, two steps more.
“Come back to LA with me; we’ll get you back into Commitments. My dad is there every weekend as a sponsor.”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I can do this, I’m not so bad. Just ...” He stops finally. Stares at me, pleading. “Please don’t say anything to Ben. I can’t take his disappointment, I don’t want to hear his judgment of my failure.”
“He won’t judge you,” I say quietly.
“He will,” he says back, and I know that he’s right. Ben will give you a second chance, but a third? It’s part of his hang-up with my dad: how many times he hurt me, how many ways I had to forgive him. He does this to protect me, I know, but mostly it comes off as a rigidity that makes him seem unkind, even when he is not.
“Shit, Leo. That’s a big ask. A big thing to keep from him.”
