Chapter 14
fourteen
TROY
I slept on the couch in the den because our bed was made and I wasn’t about to be the one to unmake it.
Marta made it before she left, or Phoebe did, and either way it was a rectangle with the corners tucked and I couldn’t get into it.
Instead, I slept in the den under a throw with the television on mute, and I woke up at some point in the night with the light still on and it hit me square in the chest that I could hear the house.
You can’t hear a house with a baby in it. There’s the white noise and the fridge and somebody always moving around. This place made noises I hadn’t heard since we bought it.
The bouncer was still in the corner of the den where she’d left it, tipped slightly, with the little hanging elephant on it. I couldn’t make myself move it, and went around it for a week like it was load-bearing.
Jeremy came in the morning with a lawyer, a woman from the publisher on speaker, and a well-devised plan.
“You don’t say anything for two weeks,” Jeremy said. “That’s the plan. It’s a bad couple of weeks and then there’s a disaster or a divorce somewhere else and they’re gone.”
“That’s the plan? Sitting around and doing nothing?”
“Silence is a strategy, Troy. It’s the only one with a proven track record.”
My mother was in the kitchen making coffee nobody asked for, and she turned around with the pot in her hand.
“Silence is what he did to her in the first place,” Francis said.
Jeremy didn’t like that and didn’t say so. My mother has been managing a family’s public face since before I could read, and she’s very rarely wrong about a room, and she wasn’t wrong about that one, either.
“He needs to be seen taking it seriously,” she said. “Sincerely. At length. Not some paragraph from a publicist.”
And I sat there with my head full of sand and heard her say it and thought my mother was a damn genius. That. Something enormous. Something that costs.
Jeremy looked at me for a long moment.
“Whatever you’re about to do,” he said, “call me before you do it, not after.”
I said I would.
Critics would give that bit of acting some rave reviews.
I was sitting down in front of one camera, no audience, and an interviewer I’ve known for years who agreed to have no notes.
It felt like it might become the most honest hour of my life.
I said I wrote a sentence about my wife’s career that I had no right to write.
I said she found it before I ever had the courage to say it to her face, and that I’d spent two years grieving something that wasn’t mine to grieve.
My voice cracked at one point and I let it, but I hated myself for the part of me that noticed it was good.
Then I got to the part I’d been building toward, and I leaned forward.
I said I’d spent my whole life being told my work was the important work in the room, and that I’d sat in a box for years watching the best athlete of her generation and somehow still come away thinking my desk was the serious business.
And I said that Ellis had offered me a film I’d wanted since I was a kid, eleven months in Budapest and Vancouver, and that I’d been sitting on it for weeks.
And I said I’d called him that morning and said no.
I said it quietly. I did it well. The interviewer sat back.
I got up out of that chair and I felt clean for the first time since the kitchen, and I called Jeremy from the car, after.
The interview ran on Friday night and by Saturday morning I understood what I’d done.
For me it was a triumph, and I can’t get away from that. The coverage of Troy Newman was almost gentle. A man reckoning with himself. Accountability, on camera, with nothing held back. Somebody wrote a column about the crisis in male interiority and used me as the good example.
And underneath every single one of them, in the comments, in the replies, in the group chats my mother’s friends forwarded to her thinking they were being supportive, was the new story.
She made him give up the role of his career.
He gave up the role of a lifetime for a woman who wouldn’t even put out a statement.
First she quit on herself and now she’s making him quit.
I did that. Nobody did that to her but me. She’d spent a week refusing to hand anybody her thoughts on the matter, and I went on television and handed them mine, and the whole damn thing had her at the center of it holding a knife to my throat.
How had I fucked this up so badly?
Lexi Spencer posted a simple photograph of a sunset that afternoon with no caption and the number under it climbed all day long, and looking at it I understood that she was going to be completely fine.
Zoe called me that day. Zoe has never called me in her life.
“Did you ask her?”
“Okay, so first can I ask you to have her?—”
“Did you ask Phoebe, before you went on television and gave up your job for her, whether she wanted you to give up your job for her?”
The refrigerator was running. Same as before, only I could hear it now.
“No,” I said.
“Jackass,” Zoe said, and hung up, and I’d have preferred her to keep going for an hour. Someone should’ve been berating me, if not Phoebe herself, and her cousin wasn’t a terrible alternative.
I wrote to Phoebe and got as far as a paragraph, and then I read it back and heard the interview in it, the rhythm of it, a man performing his own remorse to an audience of one, and I deleted the whole fucking thing and sat there with my thumbs over the screen.
What I sent in the end was this.
I love you
She didn’t answer. But it didn’t say delivered and then stop, either. She read it.
I drove to Leon’s on the Sunday and I didn’t think about the cars behind me until I turned into his street.
That’s not true. I thought about them. I saw them in the mirror on the freeway and I made a decision that I told myself was about urgency.
There were two of them at the top of the road by the time I parked, and a third pulling in behind, and I got out of my car in front of my father-in-law’s ugly comfortable house with a long lens tracking me the whole way up the path.
Leon opened the door before I knocked and came out and closed it behind him.
He’s shorter than me. He was in a shirt I’ve seen him wear for a decade and he had a dish towel over his shoulder, and he stood on the step with his hands at his sides.
“Leon…”
“Is she expecting you?”
“No.”
“Did you call her?”
“She’s not answering.”
“That’s an answer, son.” He said it without any cruelty in it at all, which was worse. “That’s her answer.”
Behind me a shutter went, and then a run of them, and Leon looked past my shoulder at the road and his jaw moved.
“You brought them to my house,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to…”
“My grandson is asleep in the front room. That window right there.” He didn’t point. He didn’t have to. “You brought them to my house, son.”
He wasn’t wrong, and I couldn’t figure out how to make up for it.
“I saw the interview,” he said. “Everybody’s seen the interview. Hell, even my physical therapist has seen the interview.” He took the towel off his shoulder and folded it, and it was the most contemptuous act anyone has ever performed in front of me. “It was very good.”
“Leon, please just let me talk to her.”
“Every single thing you’ve done since that book got out has been in front of people,” he said. “The statement, the sitting down, the job you turned down, driving out here today. All of it in front of people. And all of it about you.”
The door behind him stayed shut. There was no movement at the window. She knew I was there. She’s known where a ball was going since she was a child, and she knew where I was, no doubt.
“I like you,” Leon said. “I’ve always liked you. That’s not what this is.”
“I know.”
“Then go home.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “And when you work out what you’re actually sorry for, don’t come and tell me about it. I’m not the one you did it to.”
He went inside.
I walked back down the path and the cameras got all of it, every step, and one of them asked me if I had a message for Phoebe.
I got in the car and I sat there for a second with my hands on the wheel, in front of my wife’s father’s house, being photographed, having given away the job, having said all the right words on television to a country full of people who were now explaining my marriage to each other.
And I still, God help me, couldn’t have told you what I’d done wrong.