Chapter 19 #2
“No,” Troy said. “I didn’t.”
In March I sat in the third row of a studio audience in Burbank with a lanyard on. It’s the single funniest thing that has ever happened to me.
Nobody looked twice. I had a ball cap and no makeup and I was one more person in a room of two hundred, and my husband came out through a curtain in a good suit to a noise that was more like weather.
He did a few minutes of being charming, because he can’t help it and because they pay him for it, and then the host leaned back and said, “So. The film.”
“Sure. Can I do something first?”
“You can do anything you want, you’re the guest.”
“Nobody in this room saw the Rome final in 2016,” Troy said, “and I’d like to fix that, because it was the best tennis anybody played that decade and it went out in the middle of the night here and it isn’t on television anywhere anymore.”
There was a laugh, because they thought it was a bit.
He waited it out. Then he told them about the second set.
He told them about a woman playing on a foot she’d rolled in the quarterfinal, who lost the first set in half an hour and looked finished, and who then changed the pattern of every rally on the court by standing a full step inside the baseline on return.
It’s an insane way to play that opponent.
She dared her to hit through it. He described three points.
He got the score right. He got the wind right.
The laughing stopped somewhere in the middle of it.
“That was Phoebe Powers,” he said. “She’s my wife, and for years I told people she was an athlete the way you’d tell people your house has a nice view. I was in the building for all of it and I didn’t understand any of it, and I’ve had it explained to me since by somebody very patient.”
“Troy—”
“I’ve got about nine of these,” my husband said pleasantly. “Do you want the Melbourne one, or do you want to talk about the film?”
They took the film. Of course they did.
He gave them a clean, funny, generous eight minutes about the film, and he didn’t mention the memoir, and when the host went carefully toward this month’s version of us he said, “That’s private, and I’d rather do another match,” and the audience laughed and he did another match.
Two hundred people who came to look at a famous face went home knowing what I did in Rome.
In the car afterward he didn’t ask me how it went.
I still can’t get over that. He sat there with his tie off and his head back and didn’t ask me for one single word about it.
“Nine,” I said.
“What?”
“You said you’ve got about nine of them.”
“I’ve got about forty.” He didn’t open his eyes. “Your father’s been sending me notes. He sends them before sunrise with no punctuation and they’re extremely aggressive.”
I laughed so hard the driver looked in the mirror.
Then I sat there in the dark of a car going up the freeway and looked at the side of my husband’s face, and I thought about Edwardo standing in the road outside my father’s house offering me a whole life, and how kind he was, and how completely he’d have understood everything I did except the one part that matters.
Troy got it wrong. He got it so wrong that I packed a bag.
But he got it wrong from the inside, and he’s the only one who’s ever been allowed to be there, and he did the work to come back and stand in it with me.
Nobody outside my life gets to decide it, and that includes the ones who love me.
“What?” he said, without opening his eyes.
“Nothing.” I put my hand on his thigh. “Forty.”
We gave Marta a contract in April.
Actually, Troy gave Marta a contract. He did it before I got there, and it’s the first time in our marriage I’ve been happy to find something already decided.
Salary, health insurance, paid vacation with the dates already in it, a retirement account, a written notice period that runs in her favor and not ours.
She read it at the kitchen island with her glasses on and her mouth getting flatter and flatter.
“This is too much money.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
“Phoebe.”
“Marta, you drove me to a court and sat in a parking lot with my son for weeks so I could hit a tennis ball, and you never told a single person a single thing about this family while it was on every phone in America. I’m going to be home with him a lot more now, but I still need you. ” I pushed a pen at her. “Sign it.”
She signed it. Then she took her glasses off and got up and busied herself at the sink with her back to us for a while, and Troy and I looked at each other and knew better than to say anything.
I hit with my father on Sundays now, on the bad surface behind his ugly house, because he’s seventy-one and it’s the only exercise he’ll agree to. He still tells me I’m drifting on the deuce court. He’s still right.
I don’t play otherwise. Not once.
The exhibition raised more money than any charity event in the history of the sport. They asked me to do another one, and of course, I said no. They asked again. I said no again, more slowly.
People still write to me about coming back. Coaches, sponsors, a man in Florida who writes every month. I don’t answer them and I don’t feel a single thing about it, which took a while and is now permanent.
The memoir doesn’t exist. There’s one chapter of it in a drawer upstairs, and I’ve read it more times than I’d admit under oath.
And on a Tuesday afternoon in the living room of a house in Malibu, my son, who’s walking now and is extremely pleased about it, came at me across the rug at speed and went down flat a stride too short, which he does, and hooted about it, which he also does.
I got him on his back on the mat and started the bicycle.
Colby screamed with laughter. Troy came in from the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder and got down on the floor on the other side of him and did the commentator voice, badly, the way he has done it since the first week, and our son lost his entire mind.
I put my hands on my baby’s feet and looked at my husband over the top of him.
Nobody gets to make this choice but me.
And I’d choose it in this life and the next.