“Remember when we did this?” I say to Ben, who has turned the radio up too loud in an effort to signal to Joey that we won’t be held hostage to his complaining, that we can possibly drown it out. I notch the dial down again, and Ben glances toward me as if to say:I don’t want to hear his whining, so please don’t give him a voice.“Remember how we ran out of gas?”
“Howyouran out of gas,” he says, without the humor to match my own.
“It was fun!” I poke his side, and he adjusts just a tiny flicker of a movement away from me. He’s doing this more often now, pulling away, flinching as if he were in pain. Heisin pain, though, so I try not to take it personally. Even though, of course, it is personal. Our greatest strength had always been that we saw in each other exactly what the other needed, that we could intuit it without words, without anything other than being in the other’s presence. Now, who knows what Ben needs? Not me. Because he won’t let me see him, because he doesn’t try to see me. I tell myself that maybe I brought this on us: like he senses that I deceived him with Leo, and this is my just reward.
I pull my hand away from him now, rest it back in my lap. Maybe I deserve his coolness; I could have done better by him, could have told him the truth, even if he’s not aware of my deception. Maybe he is, in the way that we always understood each other. Maybe now he knows, without even knowing it, that I have done him wrong.
“I seem to remember that I reminded you about ten times to fill up the tank,” he says, as we curve around a bend.
“But if we had, I’d never have given you such a perfect story for the script you’ll write for me one day.” My voice is too light. I can hear myself trying too hard.
I see something clench in his jaw. This is a sticking point between us—how many times I’ve asked; how many times he’s deflected. I probably should have just let it rest since we’re trapped in a car together until we reach McDonald’s or wherever we pull off because Joey can’t take it for another second. Ben dropped out ofCode Emergencyin the spring, despite its huge ratings for Fox, despite its multiyear pickup, which was almost unprecedented. He didn’t want to write “some bullshit hospital garbage,” he said. He didn’t want to waste the best years of his life on “fucking shitty TV.” I’d said fine. I’d said, “Do whatever you have to in order to be happy,” but Ben was like a weathervane on a windy day, spinning back and forth with no direction at all, no idea whatsoever whatwouldmake him happy. So I’d propose writing something forme, and unlike when we used to banter about how it could be oursomething greatwe’d do together, now he just tells me that he doesn’t want to ride on my coattails, that he doesn’t want people to think that I’m the only reason the project had wings. If I argue, he’ll remind me that I once said the very same thing to him back in my early years. And then he usually leaves the room to pour himself a drink.
So now he’s not writing; he’s not doing much of anything that I’m aware of.
“Are you thinking of sendingReaganback out again?” I asked one night a few weeks ago while we were in bed, each reading our own material. Him: yet another book recounting the Reagan-Bush years; me: theRoe v. Wadescript I was highlighting and annotating for prep work.
“No one wants it.” He shrugged, his eyes not leaving the page. “Spencer said that: ‘It’s dead, for fuck’s sake, Ben, it’s fucking dead.’”
“Maybe this new bio will give you fresh material, a new angle?”
He stopped then and looked at me. “It’s dead, Tatum, OK? Let it go.”
I wanted to say:I have, but what about you?
But we don’t have these discussions anymore, not when my suggestions seem like an affront to him, not when my success has outpaced his to the point where neither one of us can ignore it. I’ve never thought that Ben has begrudged my ambition, but maybe he’s begrudged how I have gotten lucky when he hasn’t, when each of us worked as hard as the other, and yet I was the one who got the accolades in the end; I was the one who has been anointed with the Oscar. I don’t say this to minimize my acclaim, but luck is some of it, to be sure, and in that respect, surprisingly, after so many years of a bad streak, mine broke the other way. Ben’s did not.
But rather than spiral into another argument, I eased out from under the duvet to check on Joey, then to e-mail my assistant about my schedule for the next day: whom I had to meet for lunch, whom I had to e-mail and in what order of importance, where I could steal time to shop online for new school clothes for Joey. I still liked to maintain some sense of normalcy, be a mom like every other mom preparing for her child to start pre-K.
And then, because we can all be our own worst enemies, I’d google my name and remind myself of all the things that people hated about me and all the rumors that were nothing more than fiction but flamed my cheeks and accelerated my pulse all the same. You’d think I’d have more armor now, less insecurity. Sometimes I do. Sometimes, though, because my vulnerability is a requirement for my craft, I’m exactly who I was at sixteen, with my drunk father and sick mother and lonely nights working the register at the pharmacy.
On the web, there were rumors of me engaged in a texting romance with Colin Farrell (whom I viscerally loathed when we worked together onPride and Prejudice), rumors of Ben canoodling with an ex-girlfriend. I lingered on that one for more than a beat, but though Ben may have been discontent over the past year—his middling career, the catastrophe with Leo—he wasn’t disloyal. Also, it wasn’t like he had the energy or the will to canoodle anyway. I clicked theXon the tab and forgot about it: another made-up story about a life that had nothing to do with mine.
I sat in the darkness of my office, illuminated by the glow of my desktop, and told myself to go talk to him. Go tell him that I understood thatReaganwas really a love letter to his dad; I understood that Reagan had been Paul’s hero. That Paul had a signed, framed letter from the president expressing admiration of a case that he had won, and that the signed, framed letter was now collecting dust in Ben’s own office. I understood that Ben couldn’t move past this script until he moved past the fact that he wasn’t going to bring the film to life and that his dad really had no ownership over him, especially a decade after he died.
But none of this felt kind to say to Ben now. Maybe before Leo I’d have spoken up, told him that he wasn’t any type of failure, not to his dad, not to me. But now I simply slipped out of bed to hide in my own office. My own secret built a wall between us, and only in my honesty—telling him thathe couldn’t have known about Leo because Leo worked so hard to deceive him—would I free him. But then I also knew that my honesty would undo us; he wouldn’t forgive me just as he hadn’t forgiven himself.
Today in the car in the canyons of Arizona, Joey is still whimpering, so I pass him a coloring book and crayons, urging him to hold the crayon as I’ve taught him, as Constance has shown him. He grabs at it with his full fist and scribbles.
“The school isn’t going to be happy.” I sigh, turning back to Ben. “He’s still going to need OT.”
He snorts, shakes his head. “Our not-even-five-year-old is in therapy because he doesn’t hold his crayon properly. Welcome to LA, man.”
“Well, I mean, breaking that arm didn’t help. Set him back, those muscles all regressing.” I stare ahead at the wide expanse of rock ahead. “I’ll just tell them that. Say he was in a cast for two months.”
“Tatum,” Ben says. “Seriously, who gives a fuck?”
I glance to Joey, who is rapt in his coloring and hasn’t picked up on Ben’s use of “fuck,” which I have repeatedly implored him to tamp down on in front of the baby, as Joey is prone to repeating it at the top of his voice in the most public of places. Which lends to excellent tabloid fodder.What Sort of Mom Is Tatum Connelly? Her Son Yells “F*ck” in Gelson’s!
But Ben has said it intentionally, to pick a fight, and though I feel myself bristle at his churlishness, I don’t want to take his bait. I want to cruise around the winding corners of the Arizona landscape and remember how we tucked ourselves under the blankets in the back seat of our SUV and watched all the stars light up the blackened sky. And that he promised, one day, he’d write about it for me.
I look at Ben, and he sighs remorsefully. We’re not so disconnected, he and I. Not yet, not ever.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I know,” I say. I reach over and squeeze his shoulder, let my hand linger there, as if I can heal him with my touch. He doesn’t pull back this time, rather angles his head closer to me. I smile and breathe that in.
“That was a nice night,” he says. “When you were so stubborn that we ran out of gas.”
