Happy Accidents (26 page)

What I found most delightful was how much she loved Haden. It moved me to the core, how absolutely enchanted she was with her daughter. She beautifully mirrored Haden’s bright light back to her. She adored her child beyond measure, and my heart ached for the daughter who wasn’t around to know Lara’s brand of love. Lara was her best person with Haden.

In the months to come, Lara’s concerns, hopes, and dreams would become my own. And mine would become hers. This, I was discovering, was what relationships were about.

I returned to Los Angeles a woman in love. I hit the ground running, going right back to Paramount Studios to shoot the remaining episodes of our first season of
Glee
.

The night before we started shooting, Fox TV execs Dana Walden and Gary Newman took the cast and executive producers out to dinner. We sat down to steaks in a private room at BLT Steak, and Dana made a toast to the success of the pilot and expressed the high hopes we all had for
Glee
as a TV series. She basically said to all of us, “Your life as it now stands is over.”
I’d heard this sentiment before at other cast dinners for pilots past, but this time it caused me to pause and ponder. I didn’t know anyone in the cast very well, and it was a very strange and delightful thing to look around the room and think,
I may well be going on a lovely journey with these people.
This also may have been the last time that Cory, Lea, and all the
Glee
kids would leave a restaurant without being hounded by TMZ or paparazzi.

We got word from Fox International that the
Glee
pilot had also been a huge hit in Australia; on the night it aired, one of every two televisions in Australia had been tuned to
Glee.
So in September of
2009
, the execs sent the entire cast down under to Melbourne and Sydney to promote the show. By this time Lara and I had made a handful of trips to see each other, and it couldn’t have been going better. I was having a real, live grown-up relationship with a wonderful woman. As I kissed her good-bye right before I would be flying to Australia, I was hit with a wave of panic.
What if I’m killed in a plane crash and Lara and I never get to have a life together?
I said it, and she told me that she’d had the same thought. I had something so special to live for: Lara and little Haden. We were becoming a family. I reluctantly flew off to Australia with the rest of the cast and breathed a sigh of relief when on each leg of the trip the plane landed safely.

While we were in Sydney, Fox announced that we were getting an order for what’s called the “back nine” episodes. Only the pilot had aired so far, but Fox was confident enough in the success of the show that it wanted us to film an entire season, twenty-two total, including the pilot.

As an actor, I had never known job security, so having just been contracted to work through May of the following year couldn’t have pleased me more. I’d spent many years going from job to job never knowing what would be next, and I heaved a huge sigh of relief to have a place to hang my hat for at least a while. Although I was doing quite well in my efforts to root myself firmly “in the moment” as far as my relationships with Lara and Haden were concerned, I was nonetheless very heartened to know that I would have a nice bit of money coming in were we to become a family.

As I have described before, in relationships I had a tendency to jump in right away and then take it all back when I came to my senses. This time I was trying very hard to avoid this pattern. I was quite conscious of keeping my mouth shut and resisting my desire to start promising things to her. This turned out to be a very wise choice, because there’s nothing speedy about Lara.

I was learning that Lara moved slowly, carefully, and with great deliberation. We were out-and-out polar opposites in this regard. I moved crazy fast and then cleaned up any mess afterward. She wouldn’t make her flight reservations until she had fully analyzed the calendar and then sat on it for a while to be sure, whereas I was always making and then canceling them. She was like that about relationships, too, it seemed.

I was also fascinated with how she didn’t dwell on setbacks, great or small, or feel the need to apologize for who she was. It amplified my feeling that I was always bemoaning some slight, or feeling sorry about something. She was extraordinarily patient with me and charmed by my desire to be efficient and do the right thing. And she was grateful for the way I got things done in a timely manner, even if I had to go back and correct a mistake or two from moving too fast. “I hope you still find this cute in a year or two,” I’d say to her. As I raced around the house and my life like a chicken with its head cut off, she’d just smile at me, allowing me to be me and loving me for it. I was seen and I was gotten.

I also spent the first months of our relationship in wonder at her ability to let things go and to very carefully choose the battles she would fight, especially with respect to the custody drama. When I asked her about how she was able to do this, her response was “I have more patience than they have anger.”

One great benefit of
Glee
’s success was that I now had a hiatus. It wouldn’t be until January that we started shooting again, so I had months in which I could visit Lara frequently in between other bits of work. When I was in Sarasota, ensconced in her life completely, with no fish of my own to fry, I began to explore a whole new part of myself heretofore unexpressed; I became “wifely.” Lara would work all day, seeing patients, whereas I had my daily list of errands. I would drive the station wagon to Whole Foods, then head to the dry cleaners, and then zip over to the hardware store to pick up lightbulbs. I loved taking care of my girls.

I also got to develop a real relationship with Haden and to learn just how special she is. I went to lunch with her in the schoolyard most days, bringing food for us to share. On October
2
, her eighth birthday, I brought her a McDonald’s apple pie. She took a bite, closed her eyes, and said, “Now
that
tastes like October.” I always forgot to bring a ball to play with, so we would play catch with wood chips from the yard. I’d pick up Haden after school, and we would do her homework together. She was smart as a whip and she’d blow through it fast. Then we’d have a snack and settle in for a few Tivo-ed episodes of
iCarly
until Mom came home. The show was so clever, and Haden and I would laugh out loud, watching funny moments over and over again, and then repeating the lines to each other, laughing some more. We’d just
kill
it.

One afternoon, I was watching a particularly surreal and dreamlike sequence in the movie
Nine
with Daniel Day-Lewis when Haden joined me. She watched for a bit then paused the TV and, looking at me with great consternation, said, “Okay. Walk me through it.” I
loved
this kid.

One morning when I was back in LA, Lara called to tell me that when she had been walking Haden into school that morning, Haden had been deep in thought, and Lara had asked her what she was thinking about. Haden had said, “Look-alikes. I’ve been thinking about look-alikes.”

“Oh, yeah? How’s that?” Lara asked.

“Well,” Haden said, “I look like you. I mean I am smaller, but I look just like you.”

Lara had started to say something to Haden about genetics, when Haden cut to the chase. “Yeah, yeah, I look like you, but I’m funny like
Jane
.”

When Lara told me this, my heart melted; she’d
claimed
me.

Allowing me to get to know Haden and be a part of her life was also something special; I knew Lara wasn’t going to allow just any girlfriend to bond with her child unless she meant business.

Back when I had been shooting
Julie & Julia
, Nora Ephron, being the foodie she is, told me that any significant moment in her life is always accompanied by the memory of what she ate. I told her that my mother, being the clotheshorse she is, remembered what she wore. Nora gasped, “You must do our play!”

Nora and her sister Delia had put together an all-woman staged reading called
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
,
based on a book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman. Performing at the Westside Theater in New York City, the Ephron sisters put together a delightful and sometimes moving series of stories where each turning point in a woman’s life becomes associated with an article of clothing. The reading would have a revolving cast, the lineup changing each month. They invited me to be in the second group, which would begin performing in October of
2009
. During my
Glee
hiatus, I spent a month in New York, renting my friend Kara Swisher’s mother’s apartment on
57
th Street near Park Avenue.

It was just an idyllic situation, and I couldn’t have fantasized it any better: New York in the fall, doing a play where I got to sit down the entire time. I had no lines to learn as it was literally a reading, with a notebook in front of each actor, and we were performing for extremely delighted audiences. Add to that a fabulous cast of women I’d never met before, including the profoundly wonderful Tyne Daly (who upon meeting me said, “I don’t know your work but I understand you’re a credit to your profession”), and I was pinching myself to see if I was dreaming. For this brief time I got to live the life of a theater actor doing a play off-Broadway.

Lara came up to visit for the weekend, and we had a wonderful time pretending to live in the city. Her parents had gone down to Florida to take care of Haden, in yet another complicated travel arrangement. After Lara got home, we had a long talk on the phone in which Lara’s practical, planning side was fully engaged. Lara suggested that we get married and she and Haden move out to LA. It wasn’t a very romantic conversation; it was more of a logistical one. We both acknowledged that we wanted to be together, and having a long-term long-distance relationship was not plausible given the demands of our lives. We also missed each other too much. I was at the start of a potential five-year contract with
Glee
that would keep me in Los Angeles ten months of each year. Her career as a psychologist was more mobile, so they should be the ones to move. It would be better for Haden to start in a new school at the beginning of the school year, so the move should take place over the summer. Lara would also need a while to close her practice, and that process should start soon if she was going to be able to move during the following summer. And Lara didn’t want to pick up and move her entire life without being married, so we should do that in the spring. I agreed with all of it and agreed quickly.

Then I freaked out. Everything became very real and I tossed and turned all that night.
This is happening too fast. We are now involving a child. Will Lara be able to create a life for herself outside of our relationship in Los Angeles? What if it doesn’t work and we break up? We’ve only known each other for a handful of months!
When Lara awoke the next morning, she found these questions and concerns on her phone from me via text message.

I was just falling asleep when my phone buzzed at around
5
 
A.M.
with her response. She was nervous, too, and sympathized with me. “If we do this and then break up,” she said, “I will be sad but I will go on.” I was relieved and unburdened. I now could enjoy and celebrate as we started planning. And that’s all I needed, and I loved her even more for her honesty and bravery.

I was all in now, committed to her and my new family, excited to meet and embrace her older daughter, thrilled to officially become Haden’s parent. But I balked at the word “marriage.” Domestic partnership in California is almost as strong as marriage, so why not just go that route? But Lara wanted to get “married” and nothing less; we had a child, and her older daughter would most likely be a part of our life, too. Lara wanted commitment, and she saw that as being contained in the word “marriage.”

I looked at my resistance to the word and discovered a latent childhood belief that “marriage” was for straight people, and that gays were not entitled to it. Maybe it was because she is younger than I am, or maybe it was her education, but Lara felt that marriage was a perfectly natural word to use. I loved her sense of entitlement, and I used her conviction to help me vanquish my old belief, and I came to agree that there was no reason we shouldn’t be married.

My next level of resistance was my fear of telling my mother. She had completely embraced both my sexual orientation and me, but I hadn’t been in many relationships, let alone one that would lead to marriage, so this would be brand-new territory for my mom. I was pretty sure that she had no idea gay couples could get married in some states, and indeed, when I called her to tell her Lara and I were getting married, she paused for a moment and then asked in pure bewilderment, “How?”

But Mom survived the news, so I was able to move on to the great fun of making marriage plans with the woman I loved. First off, we had to pick a state where gay marriage was legal. Massachusetts won because Lara had gone to Smith College and she loved Northampton. We also decided it would be a very small wedding, with four friends each, and that we would save the family celebrations for parties we would have in each of our hometowns. Our families were already planning on meeting up in New York while I was doing the play, so we quickly scheduled an engagement brunch at a restaurant in the Village.