Chapter 18
eighteen
TROY
I heard the garage door wrenching open and I didn’t move, because I had decided that if she came home, I wasn’t going to run at her.
I stayed at the desk and listened to my wife carry our son through the kitchen and up the stairs, and the floor over my head creaked under her foot, the tap ran, and then the stairs again.
She stood in the doorway of the office in a hoodie with her hair still scraped back and her ankle still taped.
“You’re working,” she remarked.
“Not exactly.”
“You’ve got the face on like you are.”
“It’s not the book.” I pushed the chair back. “Phoebe?—”
And then I heard my own voice starting to arrive, the warm one, the one that has gotten me out of every room I’ve ever been in, and I stopped in the middle of a word and shut my mouth.
She saw me do it.
That’s the only reason any of the rest of it worked, I think. She stood there and watched me catch myself. Something in her shoulders shifted as she took a few steps further into the room.
“You won,” I said. Flat. Ordinary. It came out sounding like an idiot.
“I did.”
“You took his serve away from him twice. He was gone in the third and he knew it.”
“Yeah.” Her mouth went, very slightly. “He did know it.”
I waited a beat, still stuck on whether or not to tell her.
I did.
“I pulled the book.”
She went still.
“I called them Thursday. I’m paying back the advance, and it was stated, in writing from me, so nobody can say I was dropped and nobody gets to say you made me. Because what a crock of shit.”
“Troy.” Her voice had an edge coming up in it. “I told you I didn’t want it cut.”
“I know.”
“I told you I didn’t want it cut and I just want you not to think it was all a mistake and you have gone and?—”
“I didn’t cut it.”
“You killed the whole book.”
“Because it’s mine.” It tumbled out all at once. “That one’s mine to decide. It’s my work and it’s my name and I’m not asking your permission about my career, and I’d like you to hear the difference, because it took me a month to figure out there was one.”
She looked at me. “Go on then.”
“The book is wrong from the first page. Not the paragraph. The whole spine of it.” My hands were doing something weird so I put them on the desk, having a hard time meeting my wife’s eyes.
“It’s years of me sitting in a room writing down what I thought about your life instead of walking across the hall and asking you. Cutting a sentence out of that doesn’t fix it. It just makes it quieter.”
The house was very still. Upstairs the rain app was going.
“So it’s gone,” I said. “That’s my decision, about my work, and you don’t get a vote in it, I’m sorry. I’m not asking you to be grateful for it, I’m just telling you the truth.”
Then I picked up the pages off the desk and held them out to her.
“This is the only part that’s yours.”
She looked dubious. “What’s this?”
“It’s the chapter. Rewritten. It’s the only piece of that book that’s ever going to exist and there’s one copy and it’s that one.” She didn’t take it. “Nobody’s read it. Not Jeremy, not my mother, not the publisher. It doesn’t go anywhere after this room.”
She chewed her bottom lip in a way that always meant she was having second thoughts.
“You don’t have to read it. You can put it in the trash on your way out of here and I’ll never say a word about it.” I put it in her hand. “I’m going to go downstairs.”
“You’re not going to read it to me?”
And that was the test because there’s nothing on this earth I’d rather have done than read it to her.
“No,” I said simply. “You can read it yourself.”
I left her standing in the room.
I know what’s on the first page of it. I wrote that page more times than the rest of the chapter put together.
My wife has a scar on her left knee and cannot tell you what year she got it.
She can tell you the wind on Rod Laver Arena the afternoon of her fourth round in Melbourne, which direction it came from, and what it did to a ball struck flat and low down the line.
I was there. I was in love with her and I understood none of it, and I have spent the years since being proud of her in the way you are proud of a beautiful view.
That’s how it starts. It gets worse from there, in the sense that it gets more accurate at least.
I stood at that counter listening to the floor over my head and didn’t hear it move once.
Finally, she came down with the pages against her chest.
She’d been crying and had stopped, and she leaned on the doorframe.
“‘Melbourne, Fourth Round,’” she said.
“That’s the title.”
“You wrote three thousand words about a match I lost.”
“You didn’t lose it.”
“I lost the final that year.”
“You didn’t lose that match.” I stayed where I was, by the sink, with my hands behind me on the counter.
“You played a woman half a foot taller than you in heat that put two other players in an ambulance, and you took every ball a foot earlier than you wanted to for three hours because you worked out in the first set that it was the only way to stop her setting her feet. I sat in that box and watched you decide it. I’ve never seen anybody decide anything like that. ”
Phoebe put her hand over her mouth.
“There’s a paragraph at the end,” I said. “I’d like you to hold me to that one.”
She lowered her hand. She didn’t need to look at the page.
“‘I wrote that my wife made a mistake,’” she said.
“‘I’m putting the correction in the same place I put the error. It wasn’t a mistake.
I was never qualified to have an opinion about it, because in two years I never asked her a single question about the largest decision of her life, and a man who won’t ask isn’t entitled to an answer he made up. ’”
The refrigerator was running. I could hear it. It has been running underneath every worst moment of my life this month.
“So ask me,” she said.
I had to hold the counter.
“What did it feel like,” I said, “to stop?”
And my wife stood in the doorway of our kitchen in a hoodie with her ankle taped and told me.
“It felt like putting down something I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped noticing the weight of it,” she said. “And then everybody kept asking me where it went.”
It took a long time after that for her to finish the rest.
It isn’t mine and I’ve done enough writing down of Phoebe Powers without permission to last me the rest of my life.
Some of it was about her mother. Some of it was about her father.
Some of it was about a morning in a hotel in New York where she woke up and knew, and didn’t tell a living soul for weeks.
I didn’t say anything. She talked and I stood against a counter and didn’t offer her a single insight, and when she stopped, I didn’t fill it.
“Okay,” I said, eventually.
She nodded, her eyes ringed red.
I said, “It was never Budapest.”
“What?”
“It isn’t the book and it isn’t the film and it was never Budapest.” I had to look at the floor to get it out.
“I want the bicycle thing you do. I want to be on the living room floor with you and Colby and the stupid commentator voice, and I want to be in it instead of upstairs writing about it. I’ve wanted that the whole time and I was too impressed with myself to notice. ”
She put the pages down on the counter.
“He loves the bicycle,” she said.
“I know he does.”
“He screams.”
“I know.”
We both smiled at each other, somehow, after all of it.
“There’s one more piece,” I said. “And this one I am asking you about, because it’s yours and not mine.”
“Now what?”
“The film opens in March. All the press for it is already booked, and it’s a lot, and Jeremy can’t get me out of it and I don’t want him to.
” I made myself say the rest of it plainly, without any music in it at all.
“I’m going to do every single one of them.
And I’m not going to talk about the film, or the book, or myself, or this month, or our marriage.
Not once. If they ask me about us I’ll say it’s private and I’ll keep saying it. ”
“Then what are you going to talk about?”
“You. Your career. In detail. Match by match.” I held her eyes. “Seventeen years of it, in front of people who came to hear about me, for as long as they keep booking me. Not defending you. Not explaining why you stopped. Just what you did, said accurately, out loud, by somebody who was there.”
She didn’t say anything for a while.
“You’d look absolutely ridiculous.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll stop booking you.”
“Probably.”
“Troy.” She came off the doorframe. “You don’t need my permission to talk about my career.”
“Yes I do,” I said. “That’s the entire point. It’s the only piece of this I’ve actually learned.”
And my wife stood in the middle of our kitchen holding the pages, and looked at me for a long moment, and I have never in my life waited on anything the way I waited in that moment.
“Fine,” Phoebe said.
“Yeah?”
“Do it.” Her chin went up. “And get it right, or my father will call you.”