I shut Joey’s door without a sound, as if I might disturb anyone, though it will just be me until Joe heads back to me on Wednesday, when Tatum flies to London to scout for her next film, which, incidentally, she’s also directing.
I grab the scotch, my dad’s old drink, from the kitchen counter, where I’d abandoned it earlier after my round ofMadden, and refresh it.
I down the glass in a single gulp. That helps. Helps numb me to all thisshitand howfuckedwe are and howfuriousI still am even though we split up months ago. The rage isn’t just about us. It’s about so many other things too. Things I need to let go of but instead find myself venting about over beers with Eric. I know that makes me childish; I know I need to grow up. But at this moment, growing up feels overrated, especially when the scotch helps so very much. I tried grown-up with Leo. Look how well that worked.
I pour myself another because seeing her today has shaken me, and one more will ease me into forgetting how my pulse accelerated at the sight of her, how I wanted to reach out and grab her cheeks and press her against the wall and kiss her, but also how much I wanted to shake her shoulders and say:You wronged me.She could just as easily do the same to me. I know. I know all of this.
I suck down the shot, then run my finger around the lip of my glass, licking off the residue of the alcohol. I weave back into Joey’s room, fall into his bed, where I’ve been sleeping during the nights he spends at Tatum’s. He sometimes asks when I’m going to come home. Tatum thinks it’s best that we just explain that we’re not getting back together, that he have concise parameters of what to expect so he can mourn his old family unit and embrace a new one. She’s probably right—she’s always right!—but I’ve been in this place for only four months. Four months is nothing; four months is a sliver of time when perhaps, like Joey, I can still make believe that we can be put back together. Which I do want some days. So I try to reassure him with vague platitudes, as if that reassures me too. Maybe, even though we almost hate each other, we’ll find our way back together? My promises sound as false to my own mind as they do when I try to offer reassurances aloud to Joey.
“Ben,” my mom said the other night when she called, as she does daily now, like she still worries about me even at forty. “Marriage is a series of small forgivenesses.” I could hear Ron in the background, talking to one of their houseguests. They’d bought a place in Sagaponack, mostly retired there now. “If you get caught up with one forgiveness, all the others you may need move out of reach.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think you do.”
“Mom,” I snapped.
“Your dad wasn’t perfect.”
“I never assumed as much.” God knows that I’d never even considered that he was perfect. I thought of his rigidness, of his push to mold Leo into something Leo never wanted to be. I blinked quickly to abate a rush of tears when I considered my own push to mold Leo into something he never was.
“She’s not perfect either,” my mom offered.
“It’s me,” I said, my voice breaking. “I’m the one who’s turned everything to shit.”
“Well,” my mom said. “If you thought that you were a perfect specimen of man, you should have just come and asked me. I could have told you otherwise. Also, Ben love, it goes both ways. You both probably turned things to shit.”
I laughed because my mom never swears. At least she never used to.
“Perfection’s not the point, honey,” she said before she returned to her weekend guests. “Forgiveness is.Acceptanceis.” Then: “Maybe you can write about this?”
I told her that I was trying to,God am I finally trying to,and then she said she loved me and hung up. She had her whole life now too, and after Leo I stopped begrudging that and instead tried to find comfort in her happiness.
I rise from Joey’s bed, my knees cracking, my empty stomach roiling from too much scotch. I shut his door tightly. Now all the doors are closed in the apartment, and though it’s just as quiet as it was when they were open, I feel more settled, like maybe the space is smaller, like maybe I have less space to occupy. I root around the half-filled pantry for something for dinner. Joey’s in a big soup phase, so I have a varied assortment: corn chowder, split pea, tomato bisque. A far cry from the catered and gourmet meals that Tatum had sent to our house each morning to adhere to her diet. I settle on three bean. I pop open the lid, which promptly gets stuck between the gelatinous soup and the side of the can, and I slice my thumb open as I try to pry it out. The blood rushes out quickly, faster than the pain hits my nervous system, and I’m momentarily stunned, wondering where this wound came from, wondering why it doesn’t hurt more acutely. Then the pain comes: a sharp pinch radiating all the way up my arm.
I suck on the cut and use my good hand to dump the soup into a bowl.
I press the Start button on the microwave and bend over, peering inside the oven as my soup goes round and round. The buzzer beeps when it finishes, but I stay there for a few seconds after, crouched, staring, still pressing my thumb against my tongue, unable to recognize that the time has passed, unable to recognize that the time is up before I’m even fully aware that it started.
4
TATUM
DECEMBER 2000
Ben sneaks a small bottle of vodka from the inner pocket of his down coat, which is too puffy and threatens to swallow his chin.
“You saved my life; you know that, right?” He leans in close, shouting in my ear.
“You barely know me,” I shout back. “And you’re already giving me credit for saving your life?”
He grins and shakes his head. Around us, the crowds’ cheers rise in swells that envelop us and carry us up with them.
“It’s a small miracle you got me here on New Year’s Eve,” he yells. “This is a native New Yorker’s worst nightmare.”
“Well, you said you’d do anything I wanted in return for doing your film for free.” I gaze up toward the flashing billboards, the neon lights. “This is what I wanted.”
Also:him, this is what I wanted to do with him. Times Square at midnight. With a boy I might want to kiss for the rest of the year by my side. I didn’t really think he’d come; I didn’t really think I’d ask. But when I’d called Piper, my little sister, who was still back in Ohio and who would be spending her New Year’s Eve in Bud Jones’s basement—the same Bud Jones who got his nickname from the amount of pot he smoked in high school and who threw the same depressing New Year’s Eve party, with a flat keg and blinking multicolored lights looped in the shape of breasts—I realized I had to: I had to dance in Times Square at midnight; I had to celebrate that I was no longer relegated to Bud Jones’s metaphorical basement. I had to celebrate how far I’d come.
