“I don’t know who it is,” I say. “I’d only been trying to reach you.”
I free it from the cradle.
“Ben,” my mom shrieks. “Ben! It was his plane! It was his flight!”
“What?” I say, my mouth dry, my stomach already lurching through my throat.“What?”
“Your dad,” she screams, a piercing pitch that I’ll dream about for years into the future. She breaks down into unintelligible sobs. “He was here this morning. And now he is gone.”
32
TATUM
NOVEMBER 2014
Ben wants to spend the day at the beach, Leo’s favorite spot, a little north of the lifeguard stand that’s just below the drop-off of the cliff near our very first place together. That one-bedroom bungalow on Ocean Avenue.
It’s a Thursday, so Joey is at school, and I’m due in the edit bay in the afternoon, tweaking and honing the footage we shot in September and October forLove Runs Through, my second directorial feature. Directing means endless hours of prep, of hand holding, of decision making, of administration, of imagination. It distracts me from Ben and Joe, and I know it makes me less of a partner, but the studio offered, and I couldn’t say no. Didn’t want to say no; I accepted as soon as they called,onthe call, in fact. Only later that night, when I shared it with Ben—uncorking a bottle of Bordeaux that the agency sent over—did I realize I’d said yes before asking him. He paused, and his jaw flexed in a way that signaled his displeasure, but he raised his glass all the same and said:
“To Tatum. Who always said she would light the world on fire.”
He waited until the next morning to ask me how, logistically, this was all going to work, that he knew—and thought I did too—that directing again was going to turn our schedule on its head and that he didn’t think it was too much to consult him first.
He was right. Of course he was right, and I was stupid and impulsive and selfish and caught up in the moment with the offer. But part of me was also still angry about the affair with Amanda, though it had been a year, and I checked his e-mails from time to time, and it really did seem to be over. And yet, I bruised him in ways that I knew I could, when I could.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“This isn’t the sort of decision you get to make unilaterally.”
“I know.” I thought of Amanda, and how he had made that decision unilaterally, without me.
“Directing is such a bigger commitment than acting, Tate, and I’m working now too.” OnCode Emergency, which he doesn’t care about, not in the way I care about making an impact as a female director in a male-driven industry.
This was an unkind thought, truly unkind, and I blinked, literally blinked, to usher it away.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and moved to him. “I got caught up in the moment, and I screwed up.”
But today I have my morning, something that I’ve tried to hold sacred even as the days and years mounted into chaos. Just like all those years ago when Joey was a baby, and I was shooting nights or rushing to a fitting or an audition or a meeting to charm a director into giving me a part, I still did the mornings. Breakfast with Joe, then, when the paparazzi aren’t swarming outside the driveway, a drop-off at school.
I hadn’t forgotten it was Leo’s birthday, and I hadn’t forgotten that this was Ben’s ritual, and I wanted to be there to support him. Show up. That’s what he always needed from me. And I’d failed him in ways both big and small, but we’re trying again, because if I dig through our chaos, I find that I still love him. Want to keep building a life with him. Love at this stage of marriage is less concrete, more routine. Not the heady stuff of constant humping and platitudes. It’s a pulse inside of me that quickens if I think of being without him, not day to day, but in the grand scope. Of passing Joey off on weekends, of returning to an empty house, of not sharing my joy of landing a gig, of not reading the drafts of his work.
And Ben seems happier too, like sleeping with Amanda exorcised his anger at all the ways his life had diverted from his plan. I’d made a concession to myself that if this is the worst of our betrayals of each other, I could live with it. I’d betrayed Ben in my own way too: by accepting jobs without considering his needs, by stowing the secret of Leo’s relapse, by contemplating (albeit briefly) leaving him without ever confronting him about Amanda. I already know why he did it; I understand probably better than most given my profession, given my rocky teen years with my mother’s cancer: I understand how healing it can be to slip into another life, another reality, and Ben slipped into his by screwing Amanda.
Piper, whom I told at her baby shower when she caught me crying in the bathroom, couldn’t forgive him. Daisy, whom I told when we landed back in LA, suggested that I ride it out, wait for Ben to return to me. “No one can get through life without vices,” she’d said as if that made perfect sense, which, to me, it had.
“So don’t confront him?” I’d said.
“I’m not married, Tate, I don’t know what line I’d draw.”
I thought about that long afterward, the lines we all draw in all of our relationships, not just our marriages. How I’d drawn a firm line with my dad and how we’d redrawn it over the years, expanding our boundaries until the original line had all but disappeared. How I’d drawn firm lines with my career and how I’d had to redraw plenty of those too: flirting with scummy directors for parts, appearing on shitty TV shows just to launch myself out of P.F.Chang’s. How my mother had drawn and redrawn her line with my father until she finally ran out of ink. Who’s to say that my own pen had to be dry simply for Ben’s one indiscretion? Who’s to say that my own line with Ben wasn’t pliable too? I hadn’t screwed around with anyone on set, but I hadn’t confessed about Leo, and I hadn’t explained why I’d pressed Ben for a second baby, though we’d been unable to conceive. I said it was because Piper’s ebullience at her shower was infectious, that I wouldn’t mind some downtime as a family. But it had really been because of Amanda, because I thought that another baby could bring Ben back to me. So it wasn’t like I hadn’t shifted my own lines; it wasn’t like they weren’t plenty malleable too.
Today I let Ben drive because the photographers don’t follow his car like they always do mine, and we find a spot not too far from the steps that cross the Pacific Coast Highway and take us right to the sand’s edge.
“I just like coming here to remember him,” he says. “I want to do it every year.”
“OK,” I say. “We will.”
I think:I like the sound of that, every year. Our future.
