“I’ll get clean,” he begs. “But please. It makes it so much harder if I have to do it to please him.”
“You’re not doing it to please him.”
His eyes are so frantic, so desperate. “Please, Tate.”
I don’t know what to do other than to promise him, because if I don’t he won’t come with me. Not because it’s the right thing, though maybe it is. But I consider how tightly wound Ben has become—how he has been unwilling to embrace Ron, how he has been slow to warm to my father, how I’ve gradually grown aware that my success outpacing his own has become a weed that has planted roots and is rising between us. For reasons that I can’t explain, I remember that drive through Arizona and Texas, the one where I pushed the gas tank to zero, and Ben was so angry, if only for a few moments. But the rage was there, the irritation that I should have done thingshisway, even if we spent a nice night underneath the stars. He’s angry like this more often now; he’s drinking whiskey to chase that anger too. I consider all of this as Leo’s eyes pool and he pleads with me. He’s not wrong, I realize: Ben won’t easily forgive this, and God, their family—our family—has been through enough. Isn’t it easier to tuck this away, get Leo healthy, and move on as if I weren’t at Harbor, as if Leo hadn’t relapsed?
Maybe I tell myself that this is a kindness I offer my husband, to relieve him of more anger, to relieve him of more pain. But maybe I also know, even as I make my decision, that it’s a betrayal too.
“OK,” I concede. “But you’ll go to meetings, you’ll leave with me right now, and you’ll sleep in my hotel suite—and first thing tomorrow, you will go to a meeting.”
“All right,” he says. “Thank you.”
I unlock the bathroom, and we file out past three irritated girls whose dresses barely cover their breasts. Tomorrow, thePostwill run a story about how Tatum Connelly locked herself in a bathroom with an unnamed but very attractive man, and Ben will see it, and I’ll laugh and tell him that, as always, they have it wrong. And he’ll believe me, because we tell each other the truth. Most times. Not always. Like tonight on the phone, or in plenty of our arguments about his potential and my schedule or simply in how we fill our time when the other isn’t there: he drinks whiskey rather than write; I go to Harbor rather than sleep. Besides, I lie for a living now. This one isn’t any easier; this isn’t any harder either.
25
BEN
AUGUST 2004
I wake to Tatum on top of me. She leans close to my neck, then to my ear:
“Happy birthday, baby.”
“Holy shit,” I groan. “I’m fucking old.”
“Shhh,” she whispers. “I’m about to make you feel very, very young.”
“But Leo ...” Leo is in the next room, crashing on the pullout in my office.
“Leo didn’t come home until three a.m.; he’s not going to hear a thing.”
“OK,” I say.
“OK,” she says, easing her way lower.
After a few minutes, I forget that I’m now thirty and that my brother is fifteen feet away, and that I have a deadline for a script that’s a mess but that I will somehow wrangle into greatness. I forget everything except my wife on top of me and her ability to make me feel like I could live forever.
Leo is here for the week. It’s a terrible week with my schedule:One Day in Dallasis due to the studio on September 1, so we can shoot just at the start of the new year, but Leo insisted, and Tatum thought we should make a big to-do, have a party for my birthday, so of course I said yes.
We’d spent yesterday at the beach, and admittedly it had been perfect. Leo surfed, and I dove in and out of the waves, and Tatum read a book from the sand—she never loved going in—and we bought lunch and beers from the vendor on the boardwalk. Just before sunset, we’d asked a jogger to snap a photo. “So we remember that time you turned thirty, and Leo crashed on our couch,” Tatum said. We grinned and said:Cheese!And Leo shouted: “My brother is so fucking ancient, man!”
I slip into the living room, then the kitchen, for coffee; Leo hasn’t even made it to the pullout in my office. He’s splayed on the couch, breathing through his mouth, one hand down his pants. Monster, the part-Lab, part-who-knows-what rescue dog whom Tatum had taken pity on outside of Whole Foods in July, is curled up by Leo’s head, snoring to his own beat, and they sleep in tandem. I lean over and kiss the top of Monster’s head, and he opens an eye, cocks an eyebrow, and falls back to sleep. It’s fitting, I think, these two lost boys who have made their way onto my couch, neither at my behest.
Tatum thought Monster would be an excellent warm-up for parenting; not that parenting was on the table, not that I had time to walk a dog or pick up his shit or run him to the vet when he swallowed a chicken whole. (Which he did the first night he was with us: we left the rotisserie chicken on the counter, went to open a bottle of wine, and returned to find our dinner missing and Monster’s tongue swirling across his black lips. We were going to change his name, but it was so fitting—with his jowly drool and mismatched eyes, one gray, one green—that it stuck.) Tatum adopted him on a lark—she’d tried to call me but I was in pitches all day and not answering, so she took him anyway, and when I finally trudged through the door after an exhausting afternoon of meeting after meeting after meeting with executives who wanted me to write things that neither interested me (I’m thinking space: 2070, and all the aliens have eaten the humans but now want to regenerate them!), nor seemed like particularly brilliant ideas (Stick with me here: a remake of the knockoff ofCocoon, but for teen boys!), I was greeted by a hundred-pound nearly feral beast jumping on my chest.
“Meet Monster!” Tatum sang out. She was wearing an apron, as if she had actually been cooking. She pulled that (soon ill-fated) chicken from the Whole Foods bag.
“Who is Monster?”
Monster was sitting at my feet, wagging his tail aggressively.
“Our new dog!”
Monster jumped on my chest.
“Sit, Monster,” she said. He did not sit. “Sit, Monster!”
