Chapter 6
six
TROY
Jeremy told me.
If there were a record of my life, maybe I’d leave that part out.
Not the memoir, not the rest of it. This.
My manager called me while I was in a trailer having my hair aged up about ten years, and said, “Hey, quick one, is Phoebe doing the Women’s Cancer thing?
Because someone’s just asked me if we want a slot on the broadcast.”
“Sorry?”
“The exhibition. Her and Sartori.” Paper noise. “It’s announced, Troy. It went out this morning.”
Somebody was gluing something to my temple.
“Right,” I said maybe a little too mechanically. “Yeah. It’s a great cause.”
“It’s a huge cause. It’s going to be enormous. Do you want the slot or not?”
“Let me think about it.”
And I sat there in a chair in a trailer in Santa Clarita and watched a very kind woman in her fifties paint years onto my face while I worked out how to feel about something I should have known several days ago.
It didn’t hurt that she said yes. I was proud of her. There isn’t a single second of this where I’m not proud of her, and anybody who tells the story with me being threatened by my wife on a tennis court has never met either of us.
It hurt that I found out from Jeremy.
It hurt in a way that was completely out of proportion to what had actually happened. A woman made a decision about her own body and her own career and didn’t file a report with her husband about it. Put like that it’s nothing. Put like that I should have laughed.
I didn’t laugh. I sat in a makeup chair with my jaw set and thought, she told Leon.
And that’s the smallest, ugliest thought I’ve ever had about my marriage, and I had it in front of a woman holding a stipple sponge.
I went to the club after and Lexi was on the back court, because Lexi is always on the back court.
“You look like hell,” she called out while I was walking up.
“I’m sixty-one years old until Thursday.”
“That would explain it.” She wiped her face with the bottom hem of her shirt, revealing smooth, tanned skin. “You want to hit?”
So, I said yes and we hit at it. About ten minutes in she said, “Is it true about your wife?” and I should have said, ask her.
What I said was, “Yeah. Her and Sartori. She’s been training for weeks.”
Which I knew. Which I hadn’t said out loud to Phoebe once.
And Lexi said, “God, that’s amazing,” with her whole chest, and I felt better, and I’ve thought about that exchange more times than I want to admit.
I got home.
Phoebe was on the floor of the living room with Colby on his back on a blanket, moving his legs like a bicycle and narrating it in the voice of a sports commentator. My son thinks this is the funniest material ever written.
“—and Powers goes to the net, Powers is at the net, oh, that’s a bold choice from Powers?—”
“Hi.”
“Daddy’s home. Say hi to Daddy. Say hi, tell him about the bicycle.”
I got down on the floor and put my hand on my son’s stomach and he grabbed my thumb and tried to eat it. My wife looked at me sideways with her hair falling out of the clip.
“Jeremy called,” I said.
And she went absolutely still. Not guilty. Not caught. Something else.
“Ah,” Phoebe said.
“It’s announced.”
“I know. They said Thursday.” She sat up and pushed her hair back. “Troy?—”
“You don’t have to explain it.”
“I’d like to explain it.”
“You really don’t.” And I meant it, and I said it warmly, and I gave my wife an out she hadn’t asked for.
“Every time I tell somebody,” she said, “it stops being about tennis. It’s about how I must be feeling. And I wanted a couple of weeks where it was just a ball.” She looked at me. “That’s all. That’s the entire reason. It isn’t about you.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Phoebe.” I lay down on my back on the floor next to my son, because the ceiling’s an easier place to say things to. “I’ve told the entire world what I’m thinking, professionally, for twenty years. I get it. You wanted something that wasn’t a press release.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s exactly it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I should’ve told you.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I get it.”
And that was the fight. The entire fight. We had it lying on a carpet with a baby between us, it was over in about five minutes, and I lay there afterward feeling like the most reasonable man in California.
There was a whole part I didn’t say, though.
Not one word about how I’d felt in the chair. Not about how she told her father. Not how I’ve been carrying something around since a party two years ago and I don’t know where to put it down. Not once in that entire conversation did I say a single true thing about myself.
I gave her an out instead. That’s cheaper and it looks identical.
Marta took Colby, because Marta had been told, in advance, by me, which is the only piece of planning I did that entire month that turned out well.
Phoebe came out of the shower with her hair wet and one of my shirts on and nothing else. She stopped in the doorway when she saw my face.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s that kind of night.”
“It’s absolutely that kind of night.”
“Are we talking, or are we?—”
“We’re not talking.”
She smiled at me, slow, and reached up and started on the buttons of my shirt from the top down, taking her time, and I stood there with my hands at my sides and let her, because she likes doing it and I like watching her decide when to be finished.
“Turn around,” I said.
“Bossy.”
“Turn around, Phoebe.”
She turned around. I got the shirt off her shoulders and let it drop and put my mouth on the back of her neck, and she made a noise and put her hands flat on the door.
“Stay right there,” I whispered by her ear. “Don’t move those.”
“Troy—”
“I mean it. Leave them there.”
I took my time. I’ve known this woman for seventeen years and I still can’t get from her shoulder blades to the small of her back at any speed that satisfies either of us. I kissed all the way down her spine, on my knees by the end of it, my hands on the outsides of her thighs.
She was already shaking a bit. Four months since Colby and she’s more responsive than she has ever been in her life, which is a fact I’ve kept entirely to myself out of gallantry and am now putting in writing. Not in the memoir… God, no. This stays with me.
I got a hand between her legs, just resting there, not moving. She was so wet it went down my wrist.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” she said, into the door.
“What isn’t?”
“You know exactly?—”
“Say it.”
“Troy.”
“I’ve got all night, baby. Marta’s got him until seven in the AM.” I kissed the base of her spine. “Say it if you want it that badly.”
There was a pause where I could hear her deciding, and I love that pause more than almost anything in my life.
“Put your mouth on me,” my wife said in a lethal, low voice. “Please. Put your mouth on my pussy and don’t you dare be polite about it.”
“There she is.”
“Please—”
“Spread them.”
She spread her legs even wider, and I put my mouth on her from behind, and the sound she made went straight through the door and probably through the wall.
I licked into her slowly, one long stroke from her clit all the way back, then again, then again, until she was pushing back against my face and I had to put a hand on her hip to stop her running the show.
“Stay still.”
“I can’t.”
“Stay still, baby.”
She stayed still for about nine seconds. Then her hand came off the door and got into my hair and pulled hard enough that I’d feel it in my scalp for an hour afterward, and I let her have that one, because there’s a version of tonight where she runs it and I hadn’t decided which version yet.
I got two fingers into her and she said God right out loud, and I curled them and found the place I’ve known about since I was twenty-one, and worked her with my mouth at the same time, slow, no rush, listening.
That’s the skill, by the way. Listening. Everything else is just enthusiasm.
She started climbing and I felt it and I stopped.
“Are you—” Her voice cracked. “Troy. Troy, I swear to God.”
“Not yet.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t.” I kissed the inside of her thigh. “Ask me again in a minute.”
I let her come down about halfway and then took her straight back up, working my fingers in and out of her, the noises I was making absolutely obscene as I licked the juices running down her thighs.
I did it again and again, and the next time she called me a smug bastard and hit the door with the flat of her hand.
“Bed,” she said. “Now. Please. Right now.”
I put her on her back and got over her and stopped there, and she looked up at me with her hair everywhere and her mouth open.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Looking.”
“Again with the looking!”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
“I should return the favor,” she said clumsily, in a daze, her eyes glued to my crotch and what she knew was waiting for her behind the pants.
“Should is a strong word. Though I wouldn’t say no.”
That shook her out of it, and she reached up to undo my pants, her eyes taking every inch of me in as she pulled my cock out, weighing it in her hands. She made a noise not unlike my own groan when she took the head into her mouth, lightly sucking at me.
The pressure of my wife’s mouth was perfect, the way her hair framed her face was perfect, and the shape of her lips wrapped around me was perfect. She coated her hands with her own spit the way I like it, smiling up at me, pumping me with both fists.
“Mm, that’s so good,” I groaned, holding her hair back.
She nodded and took me back into her mouth, hungry, the wet, thick noises enough to send me into overdrive. I almost let her keep going…
But I guided her away and pressed her back into the bed, my cock aimed right at her.
And I pushed into her slowly, all the way, watching her red face the entire time. Her mouth forming an ‘o,’ and her fingers digging into my biceps. The sweat at her temples smelled amazing as I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
She was so fucking warm around me, so velvety soft, that I said things that didn’t even make sense after a while. It was slow. It was so slow that at one point she laughed, breathless, and told me she was going to die of old age, and I said good, and kept going at exactly the speed I was going.
I talked to her. I always talk to her. I told her what she felt like and what she looked like and what she did to me the first time I ever saw her walk into a room, and she got both hands in my hair and told me not to stop saying it.
“More.”
“Which part?”
“You know which part, Troy.”
“You feel unbelievable,” I said, against her ear.
“You always have. You did at nineteen in that hotel in Melbourne where I fucked this sweet little pussy on the balcony and you do right now with my son asleep down the hall, and I have never wanted anybody else, not for one second, not in seventeen years.”
She made a noise and turned her face into my neck.
“Harder.”
“No.”
“Troy—”
“You’ll get it. Not yet.”
“I’m going to hurt you…”
I smiled. “You’re going to have to wait.”
She got a leg up over my shoulder, which is a negotiating tactic and we both know it, and I let her win about a third of the argument and went in deeper and slightly faster and she stopped being able to hold a sentence together.
“There. There. Don’t change it, don’t you dare change it?—”
So I didn’t change it. I did exactly that, at exactly that speed, until her body let go and she came apart underneath me, and I got to watch it all happen on her face from about eight inches away. Fucking magical.
Then I gave it to her the other way.
I got her up onto her side, one leg over my hip, my hand flat on her stomach and my mouth on the back of her neck, and drove into her from behind while she reached back for me.
She was loud by then, and my balls slapping against the softness of her didn’t help either.
She’s always loud and I’ve never asked her not to be.
The only reason there’s a nanny in this house tonight is because I planned for it.
She came a second time with her heel dug into the back of my knee and my name coming out of her in pieces.
I slammed home once, twice, exploding deep inside her as everything went vivid and dark around me, hard enough that I saw the room go fuzzy, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all.
She fell asleep on her front with one arm off the edge of the bed.
I got up in the night and went to the office and opened the file.
And I wrote about the day I met her, and it was the best writing I’ve ever done, and every single word of it was true.