Chapter 12
twelve
TROY
Somebody on the crew had it on their phone and I watched my wife say it while a makeup artist held a brush close to my face.
I found out what’s wrong in my house three weeks ago, at three o’clock in the morning. And it has nothing to do with anybody sitting in this room.
Level. Pleasant. Looking directly at the man who asked. That’s a Phoebe I’ve seen exactly twice, both times across a net from somebody who was about to have a bad afternoon.
“We’re going again,” the first AD said, from somewhere behind me.
“Give me five.”
“Troy…”
“Five. Please.”
I went and stood behind the trailers where the generators are and called her. It went to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail again. I texted her the only word I had.
Please
Then I stood in the noise of a diesel engine in a field in Santa Clarita and went through my own life like the TSA at the airport.
Three weeks.
The lessons. It had to be the lessons, except she already had those and had been decent about them…
Sartori. Something with Sartori? Something I’d said, or hadn’t.
Jeremy. Ellis. The Budapest job I still hadn’t answered on, and had I mentioned it to somebody and let it get back to her.
Her father? Her mother. Some date I’d walked right past without knowing?
I stood out there for a while and I couldn’t find it, because the answer was a whole book long and I had written every word of it.
Jeremy called before I got to the car.
“So that’s a nightmare.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not editorializing, I’m telling you what my morning looks like.” Keys, a car door. “What’s she talking about, Troy?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a pause. Jeremy’s been doing this a long time, and I heard him decide to believe me.
“Then find out before somebody else does,” he said.
The house was too clean when I got in.
Phoebe’s a slob in a very specific way. Racquet bags in the hall, a water bottle on every flat surface, a burp cloth over the back of every chair in the room. The living room was clear. The island was clear. Somebody had gone through and put a life away.
Marta’s car was gone. Colby’s bag was standing by the door with the strap folded over the top of it, and I looked directly at it and didn’t see it.
My wife was sitting at the kitchen island with her hands flat on the counter and the iPad in front of her, face down.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello.”
“Phoebe, I’ve been calling you since…”
“Mmhm.”
She turned the iPad over and slid it across the counter and turned it so it faced me, and I looked down at my own manuscript in my own file and the specific grey of a paragraph with a cursor sitting in it.
Everything in my body went very quiet.
“I’d like to read you something,” she said. “You can sit down if you want.”
I didn’t sit down.
She pulled it back toward herself and found the line without having to look for it, and she read my sentence to me in the voice she uses for reading to our son.
“She walked away at the perfectly healthy age of thirty-four with her body still working and her mind still on the ball, and the world called it brave, and I stood beside her at the press conference where she did and hell, I called it brave too.”
She stopped. She looked up at me.
“But it wasn’t brave. It was a mistake.”
The refrigerator was running. I could hear it.
“Phoebe.”
“There’s a whole paragraph after it, if you want the rest. It’s very well written, Troy. That’s what I can’t…” Her voice went, once, and she took it back. “It’s very well written.”
I said, “That’s not what I meant.”
She read me the next sentence.
I said, “It’s a draft.”
She turned the iPad around and showed me the top of the file. NEWMAN — DRAFT 11.
I said, “It’s out of context, you can’t take one line out of a book and…”
“Then give me the context.” No heat in it at all. “Go on. I’ve got all evening. Tell me the context in which my husband calls my life—our son’s life—a mistake.”
I didn’t have one.
And then I reached for my voice. Not on purpose. It’s what I have. A career of being paid to make people feel something, and I felt the pull of it come up my chest like water finding a drain, and I said her name with all of it in there.
“Phoebe. Baby…”
“Don’t.” Her hand came up off the counter. “Don’t do the voice.”
“I’m not…”
“I’ve watched you do that voice to directors and to my father and to a woman at the DMV.
” She wasn’t crying. She looked rested, and that’s what finally got through to me, standing there in my coat.
She’d had this for weeks. She’d already done whatever she was going to do with it, in a chair in the dark, while I slept upstairs with my mouth open, and I was arriving at it about a month behind her.
“Don’t do it to me in my own kitchen about this. ”
I stopped, and I told her the truth, which was considerably worse.
“I hated watching you stop,” I said. “That’s all it is. I hated it. I sat in that box for years and watched you be the best in the world at something and then I watched you put it down and I just couldn’t understand it.” My throat did something. “I still can’t.”
“You could have asked me.” She said it plainly, and then she kept going.
“You had two years. You were there for every bit of it. You held my hand in the tunnel at the Open. You know what my knee does in the cold. You wrote three paragraphs about my footwork and every single one of them was right, and you took the one question you had about my whole life and you sat down at a desk and answered it by yourself.”
“Yes, but?—”
“You typed it. Then you read it again. Then you went back and even edited it.” She put her hands flat on the counter. “It was still there, on draft number eleven, so don’t tell me it just slipped out.”
“I’ll cut it.”
The moment it was out of my mouth I understood what I’d done.
She looked at me for a long time.
“I don’t want it cut,” she said softly. “I want it to not be true.”
Then she went upstairs and came down with our son on her shoulder and his blanket over her arm, and she picked up the bag by the door that I had looked at and not truly seen.
“I’m going to my dad’s house.”
My brain was moving too sluggishly. I reached out. “Don’t do that. Please, you don’t need to do that. We can talk about this.”
“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m going to my father’s house because I need a week where nobody in the building has an opinion about what I gave up.
” She shifted Colby. “And because there’s a row of photographers on our road, and I told all of them on Thursday that you hadn’t done anything, so they’ll follow me and leave you alone.
You’re welcome for that. That was the last favor. ”
“At least let me carry that out for you.”
“No.”
“Phoebe. Please let me carry the bag out to the car.”
She stood there in the doorway with our son and the blanket and the bag all in her arms, and I watched her decide to not be kind about it, and to take everything I needed right then and there.
“I said no.”
My wife carried our son’s bag out to her car and put it in the back, and I followed them out, holding nothing, unsure of what to say or how to beg her to stay with me.
She fixed him in the seat and strapped it all down like the pro she is, and somehow through the moment my heart was breaking, my throat was tight, and Colby was asleep. He didn’t wake up for any of it.
Then she got in and put her window down and looked up at me, and I stood on the driveway with my hands hanging.
“Is it just the once?” I asked, racking my brain to try and remember. “In the book. Is it in there more than once?”
She thought about it.
“Ask your editor,” she said.
Then she drove out, and the cameras came off the wall at the end of the road like birds off a wire, and I stood there and listened to it happen to her instead of me.