Chapter 10
ten
TROY
She laughed at something on her phone and I looked up too fast.
That’s where I was by the middle of that week. Sitting at the kitchen island, monitoring my wife for signs of life, like a man watching a heart rate on a screen.
It’s not that she went cold. I’ve been married long enough to know what cold looks like and this was worse, because she was lovely.
She asked about my day. She laughed at my material.
She kissed me at the door with her hand flat on my chest. She did all of it accurately, and none of it came from anywhere, and I couldn’t have made a complaint out of it if you’d paid me.
So I did what I do. I threw resources at it.
Monday, I got a sitter and booked the place in the canyon she likes. She said yes and we went and it was lovely and she was tired by nine and I drove us home.
Tuesday, I brought her the espresso she pretends she isn’t drinking. She said thank you, baby, and put it down, and I found it cold on the ledge above the sink at bedtime.
Wednesday, I got in bed and said, “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything. You pick. You’ve been somewhere else all week.”
She rolled over and looked at me for a long moment. She’s got a face that gives away exactly what she’s decided to give away and nothing else. It’s the only useful lesson tennis ever taught her about people.
“I’m in a match,” she said. “That’s all this is. My head goes somewhere when I’m training and it always has. Ask my father.”
And it’s true. That’s the maddening part. I’ve watched her go inside herself before a tournament since we were kids and I’ve always found it magnificent.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I’m not going to be the guy who needs managing while you work.”
Her whole face changed. Something moved behind it, fast, and got put away.
“Thank you,” she said, and kissed me, and turned the light off.
I lay there in the dark feeling like I’d said exactly the right words.
I sent Jeremy the manuscript on Friday, just before midnight, because I’m a professional.
He called first thing the next morning to tell me he’d read it, a lie he’s been telling me my entire career, and then he said something that stopped me halfway through pouring the coffee.
“It’s good, Troy.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m not doing anything. It’s good. The tennis chapter’s the best writing in it.” A pause. “She’s read it, obviously.”
“She wants to read it as a book. Like a normal person.”
Jeremy makes a specific noise when he doesn’t like something and has decided to say nothing about it. He made it.
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“Jeremy.”
“It’s a book about your life and she’s in most of it,” he said. “That’s all. Ellis needs an answer.”
Then he hung up, because Jeremy has never in his life ended a call politely, and I stood in my kitchen with the pot in my hand.
There’s a piece of this I could leave out, and leaving it out would be a lie.
Her phone was face up on the counter and a message came in while I was standing there. Sartori. I didn’t read it. I’ve never read one of them. I saw the name and I felt what I always feel about that man, and it isn’t jealousy, because I’ve never believed she’d do it.
It’s that he’s in love with her.
He’s been in love with her since they were kids on the junior circuit and everybody in tennis knows it and she thinks it’s a joke and it isn’t. I’ve stood in rooms with him. I’ve watched him watch her walk away, with no shame at all. In another life I’d admire it.
I’ve known for years. I’ve never said it to her.
That’s another one for the list, apparently.
Lexi was wearing something new.
I clocked it walking out, because you can’t work in film your whole adult life and not clock a costume change, and then I made myself stop, because she’s twenty-three and she’s allowed to buy a skirt.
“Not the back court today,” she said. “Number three’s free.”
“Three’s got the road behind it.”
“Three’s got a wall I can put you against for the volley work.”
She wasn’t wrong. Court three does have a wall. And her words hit a wall in me, skittering off again like I didn’t get the meaning behind it. That’s not what she meant, obviously…
We hit and I was terrible and she was patient about it, and there was a car parked up on the road side with a guy sitting on the hood, and I registered him and dismissed him the way I dismiss all of them, because in this town a man with a long lens is weather.
He’s been outside my house. He’s been outside my mother’s house. You stop seeing them or you go insane.
“Your wife’s playing Sartori,” she called out, feeding the ball.
“She is.”
“That’s a real match. People think it’s a charity thing and it isn’t.” She fed another one. “She’ll be all right if she keeps it short. She can’t go three sets with him anymore, nobody could at her age, but she doesn’t have to.”
I put one in the net.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said.
“I said she’d be fine.” Lexi smiled at me over the hopper. “You’re very sweet about her. It’s actually adorable.”
Then she called me up to the net to work on hands.
“Soft,” she said. “You’re punching it. It’s a catch, not a punch.”
“I don’t have soft hands.”
“You have unbelievable hands, you just don’t trust them.” She came around the net post. “Here.”
And she put both of her hands on me. One flat on my stomach and one on my hip, and she stepped in close enough that I could feel her breath on my collarbone, and she said, quietly, in a voice she hadn’t used with me once:
“Relax. God. Would you just relax? I’m not going to, like, bite you or anything.”
I stepped back. I took her wrist and I took her hand off my body and I put it back at her side, and I did it the way you’d move a chair.
“No,” I said.
“Wait, I mean?—”
“No. I’m married and you know I’m married and you’re my coach.” My voice came out level, which surprised me, because my heart was going. “End of story.”
She smiled at me. She didn’t flush and she didn’t stammer and she didn’t do anything a person does when they’ve been turned down at a net in the middle of the afternoon. She smiled at me like something had gone according to plan.
“Sure,” she said.
I picked up my bag and I walked off the court, and I got in my car, and I sat in the parking lot with my hands on the wheel until my pulse came down.
I wasn’t tempted. Not for a second, not in any direction, and I’d have told you that under oath in the moment it was happening.
What I was, sitting in that car, was humiliated.
Some old animal instinct had gone up like an alarm and I’d handled it correctly and I still felt like I’d been caught doing something.
The car on the road side was gone.
I said it out loud in the car, alone, on Pacific Coast Highway.
Tell her tonight. All of it. The lessons, the club, the hand, the net, the whole embarrassing business. Get in front of it, because there’s nothing to get in front of, because I did the right thing, and the only reason my hands were shaking on the wheel was adrenaline.
I rehearsed it. Of course I did. I ran it several different ways, like a man learning sides.
And then I got to the part where I have to explain why I’ve been at a tennis club twice a week for two months without telling my wife, and the whole shape of it fell over.
Because the answer is that I wanted to walk onto a court in front of her and hit one ball in a way that might actually get a rise out of Phoebe.
That’s the entire criminal conspiracy. I wanted to give her a surprise, and my wife is currently the most closed-off she’s been in seven years of marriage, and I’ve been sitting here holding the one card that might crack her open.
If I tell her about Lexi, then I have to tell her about the lessons. And if I tell her about the lessons, I don’t get to give it to her.
I turned into our road and I made a decision. It took me about as long as the turn did.
After the match, I thought. Tell her after the match. Give her the surprise first, and then tell her the funny story about the coach at the club, and she’ll laugh, because Phoebe laughs at stuff like that.
She was on the porch with Colby on her shoulder when I pulled in. She lifted his hand and waved it at me.
I got out of the car and went up the steps and took my son off her shoulder and kissed my wife.
And I said nothing at all.