34
TATUM
DECEMBER 2015
How do you divide a lifetime?
Where do you begin? With the items that don’t matter to each of you or the ones that matter most? If we can agree on the tangential things—the lamps in the bedroom, the treadmill in the gym, will we agree on the bigger stuff—the painting we bought from that artist in Austin on the road trip, the necklace you got me afterPride and Prejudice, the watch I bought you for your fortieth birthday, Joey’s schedule, our sanity?
The moving trucks came on a dreary day in February. I was scheduled to be in the edit bay that day but canceled at the last minute. For Joey’s sake, though he was at school, and for the sake of not making us hate each other more than we already did, I stayed home, then shuffled around the house, trying to remain out of the way of the movers (and Ben), but there all the same.
It felt like I had to show up for that, for Ben, for us.
He was moving to an apartment only two miles away, but it might as well have been across the ocean.
When the truck pulled away, Ben stood in the doorway, his hands tucked into his pockets, the lines on his face pointing downward. The rain fell behind him, clattering off the roof of his Prius. He started to say something but then stopped, so I started to say something and also stopped.
Neither of us met the other’s eyes, and he stared at the doormat, and then, wordlessly, spun around and left. I watched him go, and once he had, I crawled into bed with Monster and wept like I hadn’t since my mom died. It was bad enough we were broken; it was even worse that we couldn’t look at each other, could no longer see anything about the other that we understood or thought was worth preserving.
Now, ten months later, Susan McMahon, my lawyer, insists that I be unemotional. Or, if I can’t, to let her handle the details. But how can a divorce be anything other than emotional? I ask her that, clutching the Perrier her assistant has brought, and she shakes her head and says: “Actors are particularly terrible at divorce. There’s an irony there.”
“What’s the irony?” I ask.
“That all the reasons your marriage was great are also all the reasons it goes to shit.” She says this with a little shrug, like it’s just business, which to her it is—she handles dozens of these high-profile catastrophes a year. TheHollywood Reporterjust ran a piece on her: she owns a home in Cabo, an apartment in St.Moritz. It’s good to be Susan McMahon. It’s less good to be sitting across the desk from her.
“Ben and I were different.”
She raises her eyebrows as if to say:That’s what everyone thinks; that’s the lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Piper, Scooter, and Emily, their daughter, fly out to stay with me for the holiday. Helen, Ben’s mom, and Ron are also in town to see Ben and Joey. Because Ben and I are trying to be civil, even kind, I invite them over to the house for Christmas dinner. Joey had been with Ben the few days prior; then Constance retrieved him from Ben’s apartment and returned him to me for Christmas Eve before she and her kids left for the week to visit her own extended family, a three-hour drive north.
U don’t have to send nanny. I’ll drop him,he’d texted me.
Please don’t.I’d typed it quickly and realized, only after I hit Send, that he’d misinterpret my intention. It wasn’t that I couldn’t bear to see him. It was just easier this way. With the paparazzi’s long lenses hovering in trees to spy over our wall, with the mixed messages it sent my emotional system when he loitered in the foyer, attempting small talk.
OK,he replied.
My dad, Scooter, and Joey watch football in the screening room upstairs, which I almost never use, and Piper sits on the living room floor with Emily, reminding her to be gentle with Monster, who is old now and worries me constantly: how long he has left, how I’ll ever make the decision to say good-bye. The good-bye with Ben took all the stoicism out of me; I already know that I won’t have it in me to sit with Monster, rubbing his ears, while he is lulled into a permanent sleep. Maybe I will ask Ben to come with me, but that is part of my old life, when I felt like I could lean into him, and I try not to remember much of that old life anymore. I’m too busy mourning it to allow much of it back in.
I find that I have forgiven him for Amanda, which surprises me. When he insisted, back when I was electrified with the discovery, that she’d texted him but he hadn’t reciprocated, I’d spurned his apologies. But over time I replay his words, and I believe them, and they’ve appeased me. But he was equally angry with me: for not having faith in him to do right by Leo, for thinking that I knew better because of my dad and all that we’d been through. I suppose that he has forgiven me my own mistakes now too—I see it in the way he sometimes starts to make overtures but then falters—and since neither one of us has built a bridge back to the other, I meet with Susan McMahon, I contemplate how you divide a lifetime, I worry about taking Monster to the vet on my own. Someone from my team would come, surely, but those are not the people I want to call family, even if I’m forced to by default now.
The doorbell rings today, and I jump, worried that it is Ben, worried that though I invited him, I’m unprepared as always to face him with our newly redrawn lines. But it’s only Daisy, with a poinsettia in one arm, a Bundt cake in another.
“I told you not to bring anything,” I say, kissing her hello. I’ve seen more of her since Ben and I split. She, Mariana, my old friend from P.F.Chang’s, and I will elude the photographers and, at sunset, sneak into a quiet restaurant with a view of the horizon; or she and I will power walk into the hills of Malibu or Bel Air or wherever we can go unrecognized. We’ll pretend that things were like they used to be back when we did these things all the time because we didn’t have other obligations, because we didn’t have broken hearts. (Mariana had eloped in Vegas last year, and the marriage spiraled south six months afterward.)
“I never show up for a party empty-handed.” She glances up the staircase. “Is Ben here yet?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Breathe,” she says, her hand lingering on my shoulder. I nod, blinking back a surprising burst of tears.
The caterer I’ve hired is in the kitchen, so Piper delivers Emily to my dad in the screening room, and she, Daisy, and I pour ourselves too-full glasses of mulled (and spiked) cider and wind our way to the patio. It’s Christmas, but in Los Angeles it’s seventy-three and clear, like any other day, like every other day. I’ve had the gardeners braid white lights around the trees in the back and the frame of the entire house, and as the sun sinks lower, they begin to glow like a parade of fireflies throughout the yard.
“It’s like it’s not real here,” Piper says. “This is so far removed from any aspect of real life.”
Daisy shrugs. “That’s the irony of this town: you come for the glitter, you really get the gritty underbelly.”
“It doesn’t look like there’s much grit around here,” Piper laughs, waving an arm toward our massive backyard, the tennis court, the heated pool, the guesthouse.
