Chapter 2
two
TROY
There’s a specific face a journalist makes when they’ve got a question they think might get an answer worth keeping.
They glance over their notes and clean them up, shuffling them around. I have been at this for twenty years and it is always like this. Then they look up like the two of you are old friends about to be honest with each other for the first time.
The guy in the over-the-top sweater held out his voice recorder in my direction. “Can I ask about Phoebe?”
I flashed a smile. “You can ask me anything you like. It’s a press day. I’m contractually obligated to be charming.”
“How’s she finding motherhood?”
“She’s magnificent at it. Genuinely. I’m the one crying at three in the morning, she’s the one making it look like a set she’s worked on before.”
He laughed. They always laugh at that one. I’ve got about six of these and they’re all true. That’s the trick nobody believes. The good lines are just the actual answers, said a little better than you’d say them at home.
Then he tidied the notes again.
“Does she miss it?”
And I said, “You’d have to ask her,” and smiled, and moved him on to my role in the latest adaptation of ‘Emma’—the film we were supposed to be discussing to begin with.
Discussing Phoebe in interviews can be tricky.
When I met her, she was nineteen, and already the most focused human being I’d ever stood next to. Not just intense but focused, and believe me, there’s a difference.
Most people can’t do the second one without doing the first. Phoebe could sit in a hotel bar at a tournament, completely relaxed and completely somewhere else, at the same time.
I spent ten years trying to be interesting enough to keep her attention and I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life, and that includes my double-agent spy role that won me the Oscar.
And then she married me. In front of a few hundred people and roughly eleven million more who felt personally invested, and that’s its own strange fact about our life.
So when they ask me does she miss it, the true answer is that I don’t know. She says no. She has said no every single time anybody’s asked her, calmly, for two years.
I don’t say that either. The honest version has a little wobble in it, and journalists can hear a wobble the way we can pick out Colby’s cry in the middle of a pediatrician’s office full of babies.
And I’ll tell you the part I don’t say to anybody at all.
I saw her play at Flushing when she was twenty-six.
It was a round of sixteen, against a girl eight years younger who’d already taken the first set.
It went the better part of three hours and Phoebe took it in three.
At the end she didn’t celebrate, she just stood there breathing, with her hands on her hips, looking at the far corner of the court like she was checking her work.
I’ve been on sets with people who have won everything there is to win in my business, and I have never seen anybody do anything that well.
She walked away at thirty-four. She had her reasons and they’re hers, and I’ve never?—
There. See? That’s the wobble.
Jeremy caught me between the third and fourth interview with his phone already out.
“Ellis needs an answer.”
“Ellis needs to relax.”
“Ellis is a two-time Oscar-winning director who has offered you the part of your career and has been extremely patient about it.” Jeremy scrolled. “Eleven months. Budapest, Vancouver, Budapest again. Starts in March.”
“I know when it starts.”
“Do you know what it is? It’s where they stop calling you a movie star and start calling you an actor. It’s how you get to be forty-two and still working.”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“You’re thirty-eight for about ten more minutes.”
He isn’t wrong. That’s the appalling part about Jeremy—he’s never wrong, he’s just early, and he says it in a way that makes you want to do the opposite out of spite.
“Colby’s four months old,” I said.
“Colby will be a year and three months old. He won’t remember one second of it. You’ll be home before he can complain about it.” Jeremy put the phone away. For Jeremy, that’s tenderness. “Talk to Phoebe.”
“I will.”
“Troy.”
“I said I will.”
I stopped at the club on the way home because I had half an hour and nowhere to be with it.
Lexi Spencer was on the back court, hitting against the wall like she was angry at it. She’s twenty-three and she moves the way Phoebe used to move. I noticed that the first day and haven’t mentioned it to anybody. Especially Phoebe.
“Newman.” She didn’t stop hitting. “You’re late.”
“I wasn’t booked.”
“You’re always late for whatever you’re not booked for. It’s a whole personality.”
She’s funny. That’s the honest part about Lexi, and everybody who’s asked me about her since has wanted a different answer. She’s quick. It makes you want to hit the ball back.
So I got my racquet out of the car and we hit for a while and she was extremely rude about my forehand. That’s fair. My forehand is a crime. It’s why I’m not the professional here, and no matter how many times my wife’s shown me, I still can’t quite get it right.
“You’re dropping your elbow,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“You’re aware and you’re still doing it. That’s worse.”
“I’m an actor, Lexi. I don’t have to be good, I just have to look good doing it.”
To her credit, she didn’t bat an eye. “You don’t even look good doing it.” She wound up and put one past me that I didn’t see. “Your wife would’ve had that.”
“My wife would’ve had that when she was twelve.”
Lexi laughed and came up to the net and put her hand flat on my forearm to move it into the right position. She held it there about two seconds longer than the demonstration needed.
Obviously I noticed. I absolutely clocked it and yeah, Lexi knew better. What I did was step back and pick up a ball and say something funny, which is what I’ve done my entire adult life in a room where somebody wants something from me.
It works. It has always worked. Nobody ever has to be embarrassed and nothing ever has to be said out loud.
What I didn’t do was tell her to stop.
It’s the club that could only possibly exist in Malibu, with about eleven hundred members, half of them famous, and every single person in it has learned to be handled gently.
If I said Lexi, don’t do that, I’d be a forty-year-old man telling a twenty-three-year-old she’d embarrassed herself over a forearm.
It would be enormous. It would get repeated everywhere.
I made it small instead. Small was easier. I’ve done that my whole life and been thanked for it.
“Same time Thursday?” she said, packing up.
“I don’t have a Thursday.”
“You never have a Thursday and then surprise! You have a Thursday.”
And I laughed, because she wasn’t wrong.
Phoebe was on the deck with Colby asleep on her chest when I got in, and the whole afternoon went out of me like somebody had opened a valve.
“Don’t wake him,” she said, without turning around.
I placed my hand to my chest, feigning offense. “I would never.”
“You woke him yesterday.”
“I sneezed. That’s an act of God.”
“You sneezed like a Victorian.” She tipped her head back to look at me upside down. “How was it?”
“Fine. There were a dozen of them. One asked me about the shirt.”
“The blue one?”
“He said it brought out my eyes.”
“I said that.”
“You did. I told him a woman told me, and he asked which one, and I said my wife. He wrote it down like it was breaking news.” I bent over the back of the chair and kissed her, and my son made a noise of complaint about the geometry of it. “Anything happen today?”
“No,” Phoebe said. “Quiet one.”
I got a beer and sat down on the step below her chair, so my shoulder was against her shin, which is where I’ve sat for about seventeen years, and the three of us watched it get dark.
“Jeremy wants an answer on Ellis.”
“I know he does.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Jeremy called me on Tuesday to ask me to soften you up.” She dug her heel gently into my back. “He thinks he’s subtle.”
“He is the least subtle man in California.”
“He’s a good manager and a terrible spy.” Her hand came down into my hair. My son sighed on her chest like the whole conversation was beneath him. “Are you going to do it?”
“Do you want me to do it?”
“That’s not an answer, that’s a hostage situation.”
“Phoebe.”
“I want you to do what you want to do,” my wife said. “I’ve had that. It’s a good way to live.”
“Thank you.”
I meant it.
I went up to the office after she went to bed.
The manuscript’s longer than anything I’ve ever read, let alone written, and it’s the one piece of work I’ve ever made that nobody gets notes on. No director, no studio, no Jeremy. Just me, badly, at a desk, for two years.
It’s a love story. That’s what it is, whatever the publisher wants to call it. Every chapter that matters has her in it.
I opened the file and read back what I’d written on Sunday, about the first time I ever saw her play. It was good. I sat there late with my wife and my son asleep down the hall and I thought, honestly and with my whole chest: she’s going to love this.