But he could hardly say no, not when she’d been taking care of his parents, preparing their meals, even doing their laundry, apparently. She’d cooked that extraordinary Father’s Day lunch: the best food Troy had ever eaten in his family home. She’d been the one to grab hold of Troy’s mother, supporting her safely to the floor when she’d fainted. She’d said, “Call an ambulance,” while Troy’s family all froze, their minds still trying to catch up. Instead of Savannah feeling indebted to them, the family was increasingly feeling indebted to her, and that was making everyone feel off-balance. Amy, Logan, and Brooke had all recently left messages for Troy saying to call them urgently regarding “the Savannah issue,” and he hadn’t yet called back.
But now Savannah was here. At his place. Why not his brother’s or sisters’? He wanted to say, You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m busy. I’ve got other things going on.
“Come on up. It’s the top floor.” He pressed the buzzer.
He looked around, trying to see his home through her eyes. Troy’s apartment was meant to be minimalist yet glamorous, luxurious yet understated, but was it possibly … pretentious?
For one terrifying moment a seismic tremor of doubt shook his entire belief system. His heart raced. Jesus. Pull it together. He was turning into his sister. Next thing he’d be in therapy.
He opened the door to his apartment, his most devastating smile locked and loaded.
“Hi,” said Savannah as she emerged from the elevator. “Wow! Have you got this whole floor to yourself?”
“Not quite.” His devastating smile faltered. There were two apartments on the top floor of the building, although his faced north so it was the better one. Was she somehow making him feel bad about his multimillion-dollar north-facing harbor-view apartment with a rooftop infinity-edged pool?
“Come in,” he said. “This is a nice surprise.”
“Is it?” said Savannah. She looked different. She had a kind of stylish bohemian look going on: yoga teacher with money.
“You look great,” said Troy. He felt an unexpected surge of attraction. She wore a long pendant with a greenish-colored stone. It somehow complemented the trashy key necklace she always wore. Her hair was tied up in a half-up, half-down way that no longer reminded him so strongly of his mother’s style: not quite as voluminous.
“Your mother bought me all this.” Savannah gestured at her outfit. “Your mother has been very good to me.”
“You’ve been good to her,” said Troy, carefully, because she seemed to be making a point. “Can I get you a drink? Tea or coffee?”
“No, I think I’ll just get straight to it,” said Savannah.
“Right, then,” said Troy. It was like this was a prearranged business meeting. He indicated his custom-made white leather couch. Amy had managed to get chocolate on it last time she visited. “Have a seat.”
She sat at the very edge of the couch, feet together, back straight. She adjusted the pendant between her breasts.
“Extraordinary view.” She swept her arm in a quick, graceful arc, as if getting a required formal acknowledgment out of the way. She didn’t even look at the view.
“What can I do for you, Savannah?” He sat in the Eames chair opposite her and smiled. She didn’t smile back, which was disconcerting. People generally smiled back when Troy smiled.
If he’d had to guess, he would have said she was here to ask him to invest in a crummy small-business venture with little hope of turning a profit, like a nail salon or a vegan café. Although she was a good cook, so maybe she could turn a profit on a vegan café?
She said, “While your mother was in hospital, and it was just your father and I alone, he…”
She stopped, lowered her eyes, and fiddled with the green pendant, turning it this way and that as if she were considering buying it.
“He what?”
She dropped the pendant and looked back at him steadily.
Troy’s heart stopped. “No.”
Her eyes held his, patiently, insistently, gently, like a doctor insisting you must understand that the cancer is incurable. “I’m sorry, but he did.”
“He didn’t actually—”
“He made a very specific request, which I refused.”
“You must have misunderstood,” said Troy.
“There was no doubt,” said Savannah. “I can give you his exact words if you like.”
Troy recoiled, held up his palm, tried to control his nausea.
“I was really upset,” said Savannah. “Because your parents seem so … happily married, and I really love your mother. I think she’s great. Truly. I thought your dad was great too.” She sighed, grimaced. “I’ve been at sixes and sevens trying to decide what to do.” She looked at the ceiling. “On the one hand I think she deserves to know the truth—”
“No,” said Troy. “I don’t think so.”
It was unbearable. He could not bear to imagine his mother’s pain, her shock, her shame. She would be so embarrassed.
How dare his father do this: his father who had spent Troy’s whole life sitting up there on his umpire’s chair, judging Troy’s every action.
“I don’t understand how you could lose control of yourself like that,” Stan had said after Troy jumped the net and attacked Harry for his flagrant cheating, propelled by white-hot rage. It was as though Troy had lost control of his bowels in public. “I just don’t understand it.” Troy had seen that same disgust each time he transgressed throughout his life, except there was never again disbelief, just resignation, as if it were to be expected now, as if once again Troy had proven himself to be exactly as disgusting as his father knew him to be.
“You’re a fool,” his father had said when Troy cheated on Claire. “She was too good for you.”
“I know,” Troy had said. That’s why I did it, Dad. Before she noticed.
His father’s betrayal felt like his own betrayal, as if he had been the one to make a move on Savannah. Hadn’t Troy just moments ago felt a faint flicker of desire for this girl? He might have acted on the very same desire his father had acted upon, as his young houseguest, young enough to be his daughter or even his granddaughter, walked past him in Troy’s family home. Did his father think Savannah would feel obliged? That he had some power over her because she had nowhere else to go? Because she’d already been knocked around by one guy? Did he forget that he was Stan Delaney, retired tennis coach in old-man slippers, not Harvey Weinstein in a bathrobe? Jesus Christ. Mum is too good for you, Dad.
Or did he think, No harm trying? Worth a shot? Because he didn’t get much these days? Oh, for fuck’s sake, now he was thinking about his parents having sex, and his father having sex with Savannah, and it was quite possible that Troy’s own sex life would be irretrievably damaged by this single moment.
Or was this just part of an ongoing pattern of behavior? Had his father cheated before? It had always been a possibility in the back of Troy’s mind that the reason for their father’s disappearances all those years ago was another woman or even another family.
“But it was always so random,” Amy said, the one and only time they discussed it, when they were both at the right level of drunkenness to bring up their father’s former habit. “So arbitrary.”
“Exactly,” said Troy. “It seemed arbitrary to us because he needed an excuse to see his girlfriend. We were walking on eggshells trying not to upset him when he’d already decided ahead of time that something stupid and meaningless was about to upset him.”
“That would be too cruel,” Amy had said.
“Well, it was cruel,” said Troy, and he’d been surprised and embarrassed by the break in his voice. “What he did was cruel.”
But all that had happened such a long time ago, when everything was different: their clothes, their hairstyles, their bodies, their personalities. If he saw old footage of himself he couldn’t believe he’d ever spoken at such a high pitch, or with such an uncouth, flat-voweled drawl. His parents were no longer those people. Now
they were smaller, weaker, less impressive, no longer in charge of anything, not even the tennis school. Once he’d run late meeting them for dinner, and when he got there his eyes skimmed right on past the elderly couple in the corner, and he’d kept looking for his parents, his huge intimidating father, his energetic tiny mother, and then he saw the elderly couple waving at him, dissolving into his parents, like that optical illusion where you saw either the old hag or the beautiful girl and once you knew the trick you could see both: it became a choice.
He could choose to see a vile old sleaze making a move on a young girl or a pathetic elderly man trying to reclaim his lost youth. He could choose to see the father who had chosen to believe Harry Haddad over him or he could choose to see the father who appeared like magic, huge and hairy in his boxer shorts, there to slay the monster, the moment Troy screamed “Daddy!” from his bed.
But then he grew out of his nightmares, and it was his mother who kept coming to his rescue after his dad gave up on him because of Harry fucking Haddad. It was his mother who charmed school principals and police officers. She was the one who helped get him back on the track that had led directly to this enviable life he now lived.
He had to ensure his mother never heard about what his father had done. He had to save her, the way his mother had always saved him, and in doing so he would give his father the pardon that he never gave Troy.
“You must not tell my mother,” said Troy.
“Like I said”—Savannah placed her hands on her knees—“I’m still trying to decide.”
And now he got it. Why she’d come to him and not one of his siblings, and why she was behaving like this was a business transaction.
She was here to make a deal.
Chapter 34
“Who can explain the difference between active and passive listening?” Logan asked his Wednesday-afternoon class.
Passive listening: that word again. Was that the way he’d listened to Indira? Passively?
A motley mix of students sat at the semicircle of desks surrounding him: teenagers straight out of school, women looking to get back into an unrecognizable workforce after years spent raising children, older men who had worked all their lives in industries that no longer existed.
“Active listening is the way I listen to my husband,” said star student Rani. “Passive listening is the way he listens to me.”
A few women chuckled. The teenagers glanced up briefly from their phones and then instantly dropped their heads again as if there were magnets on their foreheads.
Rani was only a few years younger than Logan’s mother, and she was retraining to get back into the workforce after she and her husband had lost all their money to a charming, fraudulent financial adviser now doing prison time.
“We thought this man was the bee’s knees,” Rani had said in her “about me” presentation at the beginning of the semester. “We mortgaged our home to invest with him. It was like we were under his spell.”
Rani’s sparkly demeanor reminded Logan of his mother, and Logan wondered now if Joy might one day describe Savannah as someone they once thought of as “the bee’s knees.” His mother was spellbound by her, or at least by her cooking, but Joy was astute when it came to money. There was no way she’d mortgage the house for Savannah. Or would she? In return for a roast chicken lunch?
As Logan’s class brainstormed techniques for active listening (verbal affirmations like “Yes, I see” and nonverbal affirmations like nodding your head) he thought about how Amy had said their mother was furious when she heard of Logan’s doubts about Savannah’s story. Logan was kind of furious with Amy. Telling their mother was not the plan.
“You were going to ask Savannah out for a drink,” Logan reminded her.
“I know,” said Amy. “But she gives me the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t want to even let me in the door! It was like she was their carer.” Logan had forgotten that you could never rely on Amy to stick to a plan.
“To be fair, she does make excellent minestrone,” Amy had said. “Simon and I had two bowls each.”
Simon, it transpired, was Amy’s flatmate, and for some unexplained reason he had been at their parents’ house too. Simon was going to help Amy do a “deep dive” on Savannah.
“A full-on background check,” Amy told Logan. “Like the FBI would do.”
“Right,” said Logan.
“Because he’s an accountant.”
“How does that help?” said Logan.
“He’s very thorough,” Amy said, and then she’d chuckled suggestively, and Logan had hung up and called Brooke, who said not to waste any more time with Amy and that she herself had begun preparing a “dossier” on Savannah weeks ago and she’d come back to Logan with some proper information soon. She said the word dossier with a lot of satisfaction.
Troy hadn’t returned anyone’s calls, and for all anyone knew might have been out of the country, so he was no help. In the meantime, their mother had taken Savannah shopping last week and bought her a whole new wardrobe, which was upsetting for Amy and Brooke, not because they wanted to go shopping with their mother—they couldn’t think of anything worse—but what with Savannah’s incessant baking and her tiny feet, the girl was clearly intent upon transforming herself into their mother’s “dream daughter.”
“Let’s role-play some active and passive listening,” said Logan to his class. He didn’t ask for volunteers. He chose Brian, an Irish automotive worker who had lost his job of thirty years when Holden closed its doors, and Jun, a bright, bubbly hairdresser who wanted her boss’s job because her boss was “a real b-i-t-c-h.”
“Tell Jun a story, Brian,” said Logan. “About anything. And, Jun, I want you to be a passive listener.”
Brian launched into a story about a grossly unfair parking ticket, which Jun found impossible to listen to passively, because she’d been booked at the exact same intersection near the college (so had Logan). Brian’s Irish accent became more pronounced the more excited and upset he became, and Logan was reminded of Savannah’s similarly Irish-accented boyfriend, sitting up in bed, reaching for his spectacles, the terror on his face.
He stopped dead and banged the whiteboard marker against his palm.
The source of truth. Or at least another version of the truth.
He’d go talk to the little Irish fucker.
* * *
Later that afternoon Logan stood at the apartment building where Savannah had lived with her boyfriend. He remembered the apartment number because his birthday was on the twenty-fourth, so he’d always had a fondness for the number.
“Hello?” said an Irish-accented voice.
“Hello?” Logan panicked. He hadn’t thought it through! But the man said instantly, impatiently, “Come on up. Second floor.”
The security buzzer went, and in his relief, Logan pushed the glass door so hard it crashed against the wall with a bang.
When he got to the apartment he saw that the door had been propped open with a battered old sneaker.
Logan tentatively pushed open the door.
“Hello?”
Nothing. He could hear music playing from somewhere inside. Norah Jones. It was like the guy was doing everything possible to make himself look benign.
Savannah had mentioned his name but Logan was struggling to remember it. Something bland and one syllable.
He looked at the abstract painting leaning against the wall. It was god-awful. Indira would love it. He remembered when he and Troy first came here, Savannah had said the boyfriend was the artist. He studied the signature. Did it possibly say David? Was that the bloke’s name? Dave? Dave.
“Dave?” he called out.
A voice called over the music, “Yeah! Thank you! Just leave it anywhere.”
He walked into the dining room. It was like walking onto a building site, albeit one with Norah Jones crooning from a speaker. A giant paint-stained tarpaulin protected the carpet. The unpacked mover’s boxes had been stacked in a corner, and the coffe
e table had been tipped on its side and propped up against the wall. Dave—he assumed his name was Dave—stood in front of a giant easel. He was in the process of squeezing paint from a tube onto a piece of cardboard he was using as a palette. He wore a mechanic’s blue boilersuit. There was a blob of paint on his glasses, another on his earlobe. The canvas he was working on featured swirls of queasy yellow similar to the color of Logan’s kitchen. The mood in the apartment was industrious and joyful. This was someone completely lost in something they loved to do, and Logan found himself feeling envious. He’d once lost himself in tennis, and then only sex and television. Now there was only television left.
Indira wanted to paint. Like this, maybe, Logan wasn’t sure. She’d told him this about a year ago, as if she were confessing to something deeply personal and private. “Go for it,” Logan had told her. She said she needed somewhere to paint and that maybe they could think about moving to a bigger place where she could have a studio. “Just do it right here,” Logan had said, and he’d pushed the coffee table up against the wall. Not passive listening, active listening. Very active listening! It was a heavy coffee table. The woman wants to paint, the man makes space for her to paint. But she’d said, sadly, “No, that won’t work.” And then she stopped talking about it.
If she really wanted to paint, she’d have painted. Look at this guy. This apartment had half their living space.
“Yeah, hi, thanks for that, did you … need something?” said Dave. He replaced the lid on his tube of paint.
“I’m Logan.” His mind was still on Indira.
Logan was totally supportive of her desire to paint. He just didn’t want to sell the town house. Just in case it didn’t work out. No, absolutely not, that was not the reason. He was committed to the relationship. But sometimes you lost when you were meant to win. The town house was in his name. If it didn’t work out, nothing needed to change, the girl left, Logan stayed. And see, look what happened: the girl had left. Once again. His strategy was sound.
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