Chapter 8
eight
TROY
Her side of the bed was cold, so she’d been up a while.
I lay there and listened to my house. Rain app still going in the nursery. Coffee grinder downstairs, and under it the station she puts on when she doesn’t want to think, and under that my son making the noise he makes when he isn’t crying yet but he’s giving it serious consideration.
That’s the best sound in the world and I’m not being cute about it. I spent most of my thirties waking up in hotels in cities I couldn’t have found on a map, listening to a stranger’s air conditioning, thinking about this exact noise. Then I got it. So I don’t intend to be casual about it.
I went down without a shirt on because my wife likes it and because it’s my house.
She was at the counter with her back to me, shaking a bottle, hair up in the claw clip, wearing my Wimbledon shirt she has yet to acknowledge stealing. Colby was in the bouncer glaring at the ceiling fan like it owed him.
“Morning, gorgeous,” I said, and put my hands on her hips and my mouth on the back of her neck.
She leaned into me. Not all the way. Most of the way, and I clocked the difference and filed it under she was up in the night again and I slept through it, which is a crime I’ve been committing a lot lately.
“You’re warm,” she said.
“I’m a furnace. It’s one of my best features.”
“It’s in the top forty.”
“Top forty.” I turned her around by the hips. “Phoebe Powers. I have been nominated for things.”
“You have been nominated,” she agreed, and handed me the bottle, and went to get our son.
I fed him. I’ve got it down now, though for the first month and a half I held him like a bomb tech and she had to watch me do it and try to keep her face still.
Now he lies in my arm with his fist against my chest and stares at me with total contempt while he drinks, and I stare back.
It’s the most honest relationship I have.
She made her own coffee and stood at the window with it. She usually sits.
“Big day?” I said.
“Marta’s coming this morning. I’m going to the club after.”
“Hitting?”
“Serving.”
“How’s the shoulder?”
“It’s an old lady’s shoulder,” she said. “But it’s a mean old lady.”
There she is. I laughed and Colby lost the bottle and grumbled at me and I got him back on it.
“Jeremy wants the draft Friday,” I said.
She didn’t turn around.
“Friday,” she said.
“Friday. Which is a joke, but he’s the one who sold it. So.” I shifted the burp cloth. “It’s basically done. I’ve got the last chapter to clean up and then it’s out of my hands and into some poor editor’s. I almost feel bad for them.”
“Mm.”
“You want to hear the part about you?”
I said it lightly and I’d been waiting weeks to say it. I’ve been sitting on that chapter like a kid with a present under his bed, and I had a whole picture of how it was going to go, involving her on the arm of my chair pretending she wasn’t crying.
She turned around with her coffee up near her mouth.
“No,” she said.
I blinked. “No?”
“I want to read it when it’s a book,” she said easily, naturally. “Like a normal person.”
Which is the single most Phoebe answer available. She hates being described. She sat through a decade of strangers describing her, and when she won her first major and the commentator called her a phenomenon she said, on live television, into a microphone, that she was a woman with good hips.
So I grinned at her like an idiot. “You’re going to lose your mind.”
“Am I?”
“You’re going to be insufferable about it.”
“I’m already insufferable,” she said, and took the baby off me, and kissed the top of his head, and went upstairs.
I ate her toast standing up and felt terrific.
The lessons are the one thing I’ve kept from her.
Not in a bad way. She’d be lovely about it, and that’s the problem.
She’d be encouraging. She’d give me the voice she uses with the charity kids, warm and patient and faintly amused, and I’d rather eat glass.
I want to walk out there this summer and put a ball in the corner of her service box and watch her face do something.
Is it so terrible that I want to impress my wife?
That’s the plan. That’s the caliber of criminal mastermind she’s dealing with.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I drive down to the Palisades club, where nobody films anybody, and I take an hour with a twenty-three-year-old ranked in the fifties who’s the best striker of a tennis ball I’ve ever stood across a net from, and I pay her an offensive amount of money to fix my forehand.
Lexi was already on court when I got there, standing over a hopper, in the sun.
“There he is,” she said. “Mr. Movie Star.”
“I’m not a movie star, I’m a working actor.”
“That’s what a movie star says.”
She fed me a ball and I hit it into the bottom of the net, and she said “again” without any sympathy. I hit a handful more. The last one went over.
“Better,” she said. “But you’re still swinging with your arms.”
“That is where the arms are.”
“Come here.” She got behind me, put a hand flat on each hip, and turned me a few degrees. “It’s here. Everything’s here. You’re sort of an athlete, you know this. You’ve done the fight stuff.”
“I’ve done a lot of fight stuff.”
“So it’s the same.” Her hands stayed where they were. “Load. Turn. Let the arm come along for the ride.”
She held on a beat past where the instruction ended. I’ve been on enough sets to know exactly how long a hand is supposed to stay somewhere.
I stepped forward and turned around and said, “Load, turn, arm along for the ride.”
“Look at that. He listens.”
We hit until my shirt was soaked. Then she sat on the bench with a towel around her neck and drank half my water without asking, and I let her, because that’s the kind of small rudeness that makes a man feel like he’s in the sport rather than paying to stand near it.
“You know what’s funny,” she said. “You’ve got better hands than half the girls on tour.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s a little bit true.” She squinted at me. “You’re a natural. You should be annoyed about it. All that talent and you went off and got famous instead.”
I laughed, and it landed somewhere warm, and I let it sit there. A professional athlete told me I had good hands.
“My wife has better hands,” I said.
“Your wife had better hands,” Lexi said.
She said it easily. Like a fact she was fond of.
There’s a second right there where the correct response is available to me, sitting on the front of my mouth. Two words. Excuse me?
I didn’t say it.
I laughed instead. Because she was smiling. Because it’s a locker room and she’s twenty-three and ranked fifty-first and entitled to an opinion about tennis. And because some part of me that I’m not looking at directly, some low animal part with no manners at all, agreed with her.
“There’s a café upstairs,” Lexi said, standing, tucking her racquet under her arm. “You should get a smoothie. You’ve earned most of a smoothie.”
“I’ve got a call this afternoon.”
“It’s a smoothie, Troy. It takes ten minutes.”
“Fine,” I said. “Ten minutes.”
We sat upstairs by the window and she talked about her coach and her knee and her ranking, and I talked about the fight stuff, and it was fine. It was completely fine. A man had a smoothie with his tennis instructor at a private club on a Tuesday afternoon.
I stopped on the way home and got the almond pastry Phoebe likes, and I came in through the garage door holding it up in front of me like a trophy.
She was on the living room floor with Colby on his mat, doing the bicycle. No commentator voice. Just the legs.
“Almond,” I said.
“You’re a good man.”
“I’m a great man. You’re downgrading me.”
“You’re an adequate man who buys pastry.” She didn’t look up. “How was your day?”
“Errands,” I said. “Boring.”
The truth was sitting in my mouth and I let it go past, because this summer I’m going to hit a ball in the corner of her box, no pun intended, and she’s going to make a face I’ve never seen.
I got down on the floor with them. Colby immediately started performing for me, which he does, which is my son being his father’s son. Phoebe sat back on her heels and watched us.
I looked up and she had an expression I couldn’t place, and I did what I always do. Filling the silence is less an actor kind of thing, and more a me kind of thing.
“You know what I love about you?” I asked her. “You don’t miss it. You walked off the biggest stage there is and you just… didn’t look back. Most people would have been eaten alive out here.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“Yeah,” she said.
Then she picked up our son and took him in for his nap.