Inside Out(54)

Teenagers do stupid stuff. But what I saw was that how we handled the incident was going to affect her use of drugs and alcohol going forward. I was a bit tough on her. Bruce wasn’t around that weekend; Ashton was away, too. I was the only one there, and I had to leave for a charity event in New York two days later.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have gone. I should have stayed and worked through what had happened with Tallulah. But I went, and she stayed with Emma, who had married Bruce a couple of years earlier. When I returned, I came home to a note that Tallulah didn’t want to come back ever and would not talk to me.

She was a teenager, pushing boundaries, seeing what she could get away with. That’s normal. What wasn’t normal at all was that from that point on, it was like everyone in the family was siding with her. Suddenly, Scout didn’t want to talk to me, either. Mysteriously, she too “needed space.” Bruce refused to discuss the situation with me or to negotiate an appropriate way of addressing what had happened with Tallulah. I was being treated like the one who’d had to be picked up in Hollywood from the police! It was baffling.

Of course, everyone had their own reason. Scout was trying to separate, grow up, start a new life at college, and I guess this felt like an opportunity to assert her independence. Bruce was starting a new life with Emma and was not in the mood to deal with his old one. Tallulah was angry about being told what to do. She was just being a kid, but her opinion became everyone’s opinion: that I was to blame for a rapidly widening rift.

I think the part that was real was that the girls were angry I’d become so dependent on Ashton—I was addicted to him, is the best way I can put it. And I did all the things that addicts do. I prioritized my addiction over my needs and the needs of my family. I made strange, unconvincing justifications for my behavior—and his. I had held the family together as a pillar, and the pillar was crumbling.

Having two of my daughters not speaking to me was new and unprecedented and awful. It threatened the thing I was proudest of, my role as a mom. And I just plain missed my kids. Ashton was angry; he felt that I had hurt his relationship with the girls. But he still seemed to be trying really hard to be supportive. He sent me a beautiful, reassuring email that summer, saying that he felt like the luckiest man on earth, that when God made me, He had created a safety net for him.

Ashton’s incident with that girl had been a major wake-up call. For the past year, I had been trying to right the ship—any issue he’d raised I was actively addressing. I hadn’t been drinking for ten months. I was focusing more on my own projects: I was producing a show; I had a wonderful film, Margin Call, due out in the fall; and my television directorial debut was scheduled to air the same month. Ashton, meanwhile, was starting a new sitcom, Two and a Half Men, which alleviated some of his financial anxiety after the 2008 crash. (He was replacing Charlie Sheen, and would be starring with Jon Cryer. Small world.) I believed we were both working toward protecting what we had.

I was still desperate to have a baby with him. I had finally overcome the huge obstacle of my resistance to using an egg donor. I started scouring the agency lists for the right fit, sharing the most promising prospects with Ashton, and hearing his thoughts. We were in Idaho for the Fourth of July holiday when I found a donor who was a perfect match. I showed Ashton her picture. He said we should go for it.

That was on Tuesday. On Thursday we started filling out the paperwork. On Sunday, we were out walking by the river when Ashton told me, “I don’t think I can do this, and I don’t know if this is working.”

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I asked him why he’d let me research a donor, go through this very painful, prolonged process, and make myself vulnerable in this way if he wasn’t up for it. His response was simple: “I never thought you’d go through with it.”


THE NEXT DAY I went to New York for work. I was producing an interview series called The Conversation, hosted by my friend Amanda de Cadenet. I had personally enlisted Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Donna Karan, among others, and I needed to be there. I was frozen. Waiting for Ashton to reach out and make things right.

I flew back to L.A. a week later; we hadn’t been speaking. When I got home, our weekly Kabbalah class was in session in the den. I looked at Ashton as I entered the room, and I felt a chill go through me. His eyes were icy, dead. It was like I was seeing the coldest person I’d ever encountered—nothing like the man I fell in love with years earlier. And it was certainly not like looking into the eyes of someone who loved me.

That night, he said, “I think I should move out.”

“Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” was all I could say. “We’re married. That’s not how we do things. How did this go from us having issues we need to work on to ‘I’m moving out’?” I could feel that he was withholding something. I was grasping. “We need to go and talk to somebody,” I insisted.

And we did. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t really want to work on our relationship. He didn’t want us to have sex or be at all physical anymore. He was done. I was still very much in our marriage, but I was in it alone now. I was still trying to make sense of somebody who two weeks before had sent me an email saying that he was the luckiest man alive. I craved some kind of understanding of what was happening—if it made sense, then I’d be able to let go, if that was the right thing, but as it stood? It was all just too bewildering. I told him that I didn’t think he should move out, that I wanted us to work through this privately, together. We agreed: let’s keep this between us; let’s not be with anyone else until we sort this out—one way or the other.