Chapter 11
eleven
PHOEBE
Marta was already in my kitchen before six and she’d made coffee she doesn’t drink.
That’s how I knew something was going on.
Marta doesn’t come in early and Marta doesn’t make coffee, and she had her phone face down on the counter with her hand flat on top of it like it was going to get away from her.
“Give it here,” I said.
“No.”
“Marta. Give me the phone.”
There was a moment of hesitation, but she gave me the phone.
The Goss Tea had it at the top with the treatment they use when they want to look regretful about it.
A cropped square, hard sun, a chain-link fence in the corner.
My husband at a net post with his shirt stuck to him, and a girl in a white skirt with one hand flat on his stomach and the other on his hip, standing close enough to be smelling him.
His face isn’t in it. That’s the craft of it. You can’t see his face at all, so he could be anybody, and you can see all of hers, and she’s looking up at him.
I looked at it for a while.
Then I did something I’m not proud of. I went looking inside myself for the feeling I was supposed to be having, the way you’d pat your pockets for keys.
But it wasn’t there.
“Phoebe,” Marta said. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine to stand, actually.”
“You are not fine, you are calm, and they are not the same. I have raised three children.”
I put the phone face down and slid it back across the counter to her, and I picked up my son, who was awake and furious about it, and standing there I thought: this is going to be very hard to explain to people.
Because I wasn’t jealous. I turned it over and over and there was nothing in it. Some woman had her hands on my husband and I looked at it the way you’d look at weather in another state.
Was something wrong with me?
Wasn’t I supposed to feel angry? Jealous? Betrayed?
Marta’s jaw twitched when she stole another glance at her phone, and she hissed something in Swedish under her breath that didn’t sound very loving.
He called from a trailer in Santa Clarita before eight.
I let it ring twice. Not for effect. I needed the two rings.
I picked up without saying anything. That was maybe for effect.
“Phoebe.” My husband said my name as if it were running away from him.
“I’ve seen it.”
“Nothing happened.” Fast, and loud, and already halfway through a sentence he’d been building in a car.
“Nothing happened, I swear to God, and I want you to hear that before anything else. She put her hands on me and I took them off and I told her no and I walked off the court. I swear it to you. There’s more of it than they ran, there has to be, because I was standing on that court a while after that photo and somebody has the rest.”
“Troy.”
“I’m not finished!”
“Why were you on a court?” I kept my voice low.
The pause went on long enough that I heard somebody outside his trailer laughing at something.
“Okay,” he said.
And then he told me.
He’s been having lessons. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, since the spring, at the club in the Palisades, with a professional he pays some large sum of our money to, because he wanted to walk onto a court in front of me one day and surprise me, pretty much.
He told me all of it in a rush. He told it well. He’s a good storyteller and it was a lovely story, and it was the sweetest anybody has been to me in years, and it arrived in my ear as a man explaining himself.
That’s what he took from me and I don’t think he’ll ever fully understand it. I’d have loved that. In a different month I’d have cried in the car about it. Instead I got it as an alibi.
“Say something,” he pleaded.
“I believe you.”
“Phoebe—”
“No, I mean it. I believe you completely.” I switched Colby to the other hip, realizing everything I was saying was how I actually felt. “You didn’t do anything. I know exactly what you look like when you want somebody, and it isn’t that.”
He made a sound like he’d been let off a hook he hadn’t finished being on.
“I’m coming home. I’ll shut the day down, I’ll be back by?—”
“Don’t shut the day down.”
“Phoebe.”
“You’ve got a crew standing in a field in the heat,” I said. “So work. I’m fine.”
And then, because I could hear how it sounded, and because some part of me wanted him to hear it too:
“I’m really not angry, Troy.”
Which was true. And he took it the way you’d take a door closing. Two counties away, I heard him go quiet.
Zoe came over before lunch and didn’t knock.
She had two bags of stuff nobody needs and she put them down and looked at me across the island for a long moment, and Zoe is many things but she isn’t stupid.
“You’re not crying.”
“No.”
“Phoebe. There is a photograph of a twenty-three-year-old with her hand on your husband’s stomach on every phone in America and you’re standing there cleaning the stupid bottles.”
I glanced over at her. “Bottles have to happen regardless of the news cycle.”
“Don’t be funny at me.”
“I’m not being funny. I’m being accurate.”
She came around the island and got hold of both my wrists, which she’s done since we were small and which I have never been able to get out of.
“Why the hell aren’t you angry?”
I couldn’t answer her, because the honest answer has a date on it, and the date is three weeks ago at three in the morning, and if I said it out loud to Zoe it would be true in the world and not only in my chest.
“I’m angry,” I said. “It’s just not about that.”
She let go of my wrists slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m not going to ask you again today.”
Which is the most restraint my cousin has shown since childhood, and I nearly went under right there.
My mother-in-law started texting me that afternoon.
Phoebe darling. We are all just SICK about this
Brad has spoken to Jeremy
The line is that it is a training session and the angle is misleading. Warm, brief, united. Say nothing else
Say it exactly like that if they ask you
Francis Newman has been managing this family’s public face since before I was born and she’s extremely good at it, and there’s a version of me that would have been grateful.
Understood
My father called that evening and didn’t mention the photograph at all.
He asked about my shoulder. He asked whether I’d done the boring work.
He told me a long, pointless story about a man at his gym who wears a weighted vest to walk on a treadmill, and I laughed for the first time all day, and neither of us said one word about my husband.
“You’re all right,” he said at the end. Not a question. Leon Powers has never asked a question in his life he didn’t already have the answer to.
“I’m all right, Dad.”
“Deuce court,” he said. “You’ve been drifting.”
He hung up. He’d watched a practice video Marta sent him and he was right, and that’s my father, entire, in one phone call.
The press call for the exhibition was Thursday at the stadium, and I’d signed a contract to be at it, and I’m a professional.
Edwardo was there in a suit that cost more than my first car, and when he saw me his whole face did something complicated and then settled.
“Do you want me to be difficult with them?” he said quietly.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I would enjoy it enormously.”
I fought the smile. “I know you would.”
They ran it well for a while. The charity, the fund, what they hope to raise, how much it means to both of us, the mothers we’re playing for. Edwardo talked about his and did it beautifully and didn’t perform it. I talked about mine and got to the end of it upright.
Then a woman near the back put her hand up and asked whether this was a comeback.
“No,” I said. “It’s one afternoon. I’m going to play it and then I’m going to go home, and I’m not coming back after it, and everybody keeps waiting for me to be sad about that and I’m not going to be.”
A little ripple. Fine. Manageable.
Then a man in the second row said, “Phoebe. On the photograph. Anything you’d like to say?”
Francis’s sentence was sitting in my pocket, warm and brief and united, the one that makes it go away.
I heard myself not say it.
“It’s not a very good photograph,” I said. “You can’t see his face.”
Somebody laughed.
“But no. My husband didn’t do anything in that photograph. He took her hands off him and he walked away, and whoever sold you that square knew it when they sold it.” My own voice was perfectly level. “So you can stop asking me whether I’m humiliated. That woman is not what’s wrong in my house.”
I should have stopped there. I had it. I could feel the room deciding I’d handled it.
“I found out what’s wrong in my house three weeks ago,” I said, “at three o’clock in the morning. And it has nothing to do with anybody sitting in this room.”
Every phone in that stadium came up at once.
Edwardo, beside me, didn’t turn his head and didn’t look at me and very slightly moved his knee so it touched mine under the table.
“Next question,” he said pleasantly.
There wasn’t just one.
There were about forty.