I flew back to New York for a weekend when Tatum had Joey, stayed with my mom and Ron, found myself sleeping in Leo’s bed, milling about his room, which was unchanged from when he lived there, from when he was in high school and filled with possibility.
It was a perfect spring weekend in the city. The trees were blossoming, the air had just rounded the corner from the winter chill, the sun was bright and optimistic. My mom and I walked the loop in Central Park, which we hadn’t done since I was probably eleven, when I needed to burn off energy and Leo was too old for a stroller but would fall asleep in it all the same as we walked.
“You have to forgive yourself for this, Ben,” my mom said. “You have to let it go.”
I didn’t realize she knew.
She read the surprise on my face.
“I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I stuck my head in the sand and didn’t know about what he was doing.”
“I ... he’d wanted to protect you from it; hadn’t wanted you to know.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep it a secret.”
“Yes, you did,” she corrected me. “And that’s OK too.”
I blinked too quickly, tears mounting, and it occurred to me that what I’d done to my mom wasn’t so different from what Tatum had done to me. Different motivations, perhaps, but tacit secret keeping all the same.
“I’m his mother, Ben,” she said. She still did that: spoke about him in present tense, like he was still among us, which in some ways he still was. “And I tried to help in the best way I could.”
We stopped at a crosswalk as the park traffic whizzed by. Fallen petals from the newly sprung trees littered the pavement and swirled in the air around us.
“I didn’t know,” I said. I reached out and tried to grab a white petal that was circling in front of me, held aloft by the wind. “I guess I didn’t have any idea.”
“About me? Or about Leo?” The light clicked, and we moved ahead.
“About both,” I said. Though what I really think I meant, when I thought about it later, lying in his old bed, my elbows splayed behind my head, my eyes staring at the trophies he’d accrued at Dalton, the Bruce Springsteen posters he’d pinned up, is that I really didn’t have any idea aboutme. About what I was made of, about who I’d become. About how I’d stopped aspiring for greatness because the less risky, less ambitious middle ground was all that I’d been offered lately, about how I’d lost sight of Tatum because it was easier to focus on all that I’d thought she’d taken from me—Leo, time, trust—than what she’d given back, which was actually just about everything. I’d even started to blame her for taking Amanda from me—all those years back on New Year’s Eve, when, in a different version of my life, Amanda called, and I wouldn’t have been with Tatum, and Amanda and I would have found our way back to each other. Which was dumb because I didn’t love Amanda like I loved Tatum; that deep, resonant love that isn’t exactly passion anymore but is so much a part of you that you don’t know where it ends and begins, where to turn it off, even if you wanted to.
My mom knocked on Leo’s door.
“One last thing I should have said earlier.” She pressed her lips together and seemed to consider what came next. I heaved myself to my elbows and waited. Finally, she offered: “Your dad pushed you toward success. Relentlessly at times, I know.”
I waited.
“But what he didn’t tell you—though I think he tried to show you, and I can see now may have failed at, is that there is more than one way to define success.” She sighed. “He brought me flowers every Friday, Ben. Do you remember that?”
“I do.”
“He was a real pain in the ass,” she said. “But he loved me unequivocally. And if he were here, he would say that loving someone wholly is success too. Frankly, it’s probably the one that matters most.”
I didn’t know what to say, so she nodded and retreated from Leo’s old room, closing the door so quietly, I never heard the latch click.
I flew back to LA and started writing again. For Tatum. Also for me. It came to me suddenly, like a tsunami of awakening that almost makes it hard to breathe. I’d spent years avoiding it because I couldn’t see any of it clearly; I couldn’t seeherclearly, and I couldn’t see myself either. That’s the funny thing about memory, hindsight, nostalgia, and self-perception: sometimes, many times, it gets in the way of knowing how to tell the truth.
I replayed all our years together. I wrote them down. I started in the present, how far we’d gotten from each other, and tore through the years and tore through our past. I tried to be fair, and I tried to be honest, and I tried to honor the love and the mistakes and the mess and the beauty that we’d created. I wrote about the road trip through Arizona, not the one with Joey when we’d already started to splinter, but the one with just the two of us, which I thought was a catastrophe but turned out to be perfect. I wrote about her Oscar, and I wrote about my jealousy, and I wrote about the first time I viewed her through my directorial lens inRomanticahand knew she was a star outside my galaxy. I wrote about her dad, and I wrote about mine too. I wrote about how you build a life together and how you let that life together crumble into dust.
I called itBetween Me and You, because that was all that used to matter once, what was between us. And because maybe it should beBetween You and Me, but we hadn’t quite added up to perfect, so being a little off made me smile every time I read the title page. And I promised myself—because I thought I could still read her, but I was no longer sure, not since she started concealing parts of herself in ways that she hadn’t in years—that if she showed up today at the beach, on Leo’s birthday, I would finally tell her what I’d written, tell her that it wasn’t too late, tell her that the weight of regret I bore on my shoulders was sinking me, but that I was ready to heave it into that gray ocean where I’d rebaptized myself this morning and many mornings prior.
But Tatum hadn’t shown. It turned out that I read her wrong. Icouldn’tsee her like I thought I could, like I used to.
Instead, it was Amanda.
I spin the handle of the shower, turning the temperature up until it is nearly scalding. I want to feel it, I need to feel it. It’s been so long since I’ve felt much of anything. Now it’s good to feel the burn.
38
TATUM
DECEMBER
