Chapter 16
sixteen
TROY
Jeremy let himself in while I was standing at the sink eating cereal out of a mug because every bowl in the house was clean and I couldn’t make myself dirty one.
Yes, it’s a problem.
He put a laptop on the island, opened it, turned it toward me, and didn’t say hello.
“Sit down,” he instructed.
“What is it?”
“Just sit down.”
It was video. Not a photograph. Somebody had been shooting video the entire time, from a car on the road side of court three, and the frame that ran was one still lifted out of the middle of it.
I watched a man who looked like me hit a forehand into the bottom of a tennis net.
I watched a woman who looked a lot like Lexi call him up to the net and say something. I watched her come around the net and put one hand flat on his stomach and the other on his hip and step in close.
Then I watched him step back.
It’s fast. It’s much faster than it felt. My hand comes up and takes her wrist and moves it down to her side, and my mouth makes a word you can read with no sound at all, and then I turn and pick up a bag and walk out of frame, and it takes less time than it takes to say it.
There’s a moment about a minute before it, though, that Jeremy didn’t stop on and I did.
She says something and I laugh. My head goes back and my shoulders come down and I laugh like a man having a wonderful afternoon, and then I say something back and she puts her hand on my arm and I don’t move my arm.
That’s on the tape too. Nobody will ever run that part, because there’s nothing in it. I’m just a man laughing at a joke on a tennis court.
I know what it is. I’ve known since the parking lot.
And Lexi Spencer stands at the net on an empty court and watches me go.
Then she turns her head and looks directly down the road, into the lens, at the man she told where to park.
And she adjusts her skirt.
“Play it again,” I said.
“Troy—”
“Play the last part again.”
He played it again, and she looked into the camera again, and it’s the single most unpleasant piece of footage I’ve ever watched, because there’s no ambiguity in it anywhere.
She’s checking that it got done.
“Where did this come from?”
“I bought it,” Jeremy said. “Last week. From the guy who shot it—some freelancer who sold The Goss Tea a still and kept the file, because he isn’t stupid.
” He shut the laptop. “It goes out tonight through somebody who isn’t me.
By the weekend she’ll be the girl who staged the photograph and that will be the only sentence anybody ever writes about her again. ”
“And then what?”
“And then you’re clean.” He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to. “On that, anyway. You understand what I’m saying to you. It clears the photograph. It does not clear the book, and your wife has not mentioned that photograph to anybody except to defend you over it.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, or you’d have looked happier just now.”
“Jeremy.”
“Understand that I did it for you and I would do it again, and that I am not proud of one minute of it.”
I stood in a kitchen full of clean bowls and waited to feel something.
It didn’t come. Lexi had lied about me on a national scale and I had it on video and I felt nothing whatsoever, and the reason is embarrassingly simple.
It was never the photograph.
Not for a single hour. Phoebe stood at a microphone in a stadium with the whole country watching and defended me over that photograph before she’d even spoken to me about it, and then she went home and packed a bag, and the bag was never about Lexi Spencer.
I’ve been cleared of the wrong crime.
Lexi called me that night, before it went out, which means somebody told her it was coming.
“So you had someone buy the tape.”
“Actually, I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know.”
There was a long pause with a bar or a party somewhere behind it.
“You know what I actually wanted?” she said. “Everyone thinks I wanted to sleep with you. Nobody wanted to sleep with you, Troy, you’re forty.”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“You’re a movie star,” she said. “I’m ranked fifty-first and I’ve been fifty-first for years and nobody outside the sport has ever heard of me and now nobody ever will.
Do you know what a name like yours does?
It puts people in front of you.” She laughed, and it wasn’t performed, and that was the worst of it.
“That’s all it was. It was never personal. You were a door.”
“You’re the one who put your hands on me.”
“You’d been letting me stand too close for weeks and I think we both know that.”
And there it was. The one true thing she said and it went through me like cold water, because she was right and it was the least of my sins and yet still counted.
“They’re running the whole video,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s going to finish you.”
“Yeah,” Lexi said. “Maybe for now. But you know what they say… there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Somebody called her name in the background. “Was she nice about it? Your wife. That day? I’ve watched that press conference more than once.”
I hung up.
I’m not proud of that either, but I wasn’t going to hand that woman one more sentence about my wife.
When I was alone and at the end of my proverbial rope, I did the only useful thing I’ve done since this started.
I opened the manuscript.
Not to read it. I put the cursor in the search box and I typed one word, and I sat there with my finger over the key for a long time before I pressed it, because I already knew.
Ask your editor, she’d said. Standing in the driveway with our son asleep behind her.
It’s in the chapter about the first time I saw her play. It’s in the chapter about the Open. It’s in the epilogue, where I use it as a graceful little callback, because I thought it was a good line and I wanted to land the ending.
Three times.
I wrote it three separate times, on three separate nights, and I revised every one of them, and at no point in any of it did I get up from that desk and go and ask the woman asleep down the hall what she thought.
The third one is the one I can’t put down. It’s in the epilogue, and it’s soft, and it’s affectionate, and I remember being pleased with it.
She made one mistake in her life and I get to sleep next to it.
I wrote that about my wife. I wrote it as a love letter. I read it back at the time and thought, that’s the ending.
And she never read it. That’s what took me longest to work out. She put the iPad down at the first one and she never went back to it.
So when she stood in that driveway and let me ask her whether it was just the once, she didn’t know either. She just wasn’t going to do my counting for me.
I sat there in the dark with the screen up and finally understood the size of it.
Any man can write a stupid sentence. What I did was worse. I had a question about the person I love most on this earth, a real one that mattered, and instead of asking her, I went upstairs to this stupid desk and answered myself in private.
That’s what I did to her. Not the embarrassment. Not the press.
She’s spent years being handled by everybody in her life, and she came home to the one person who was supposed to be inside it with her, and I was out there with the rest of them, taking notes like a fucking moron.
The video went out late and my phone started going off because that’s what it does now, and I turned it face down and left it.
The match is on Saturday.
There’s a version of this week where I walk into my family’s box to watch it in front of twenty thousand people and a live broadcast, and everybody sees the marriage repaired, and Phoebe has to play a tennis match with all of that sitting behind her baseline.
I’m not doing that to her.
I made the decision some time after midnight. I didn’t call Jeremy. I didn’t tell one single person.
Then I opened a blank document and started writing something, and it wasn’t a statement.