Christina’s tone was now almost jocular. “Mr. Delaney, this is not looking great for you. I really think it would be in your best interests to turn your mind to your last interaction with your wife.”
Stan sighed. He tipped back his head, stuck his thumbs in his pants pockets, and studied the ceiling. “I think it might be in my best interests to shut up and get myself a lawyer.”
Chapter 53
VALENTINE’S DAY
It was seven a.m. and Joy couldn’t see the point in getting out of bed. There was nothing pressing to do. It would just be another day like yesterday and the day before that. The smoke haze outside her window was as gray and somber as a midwinter sky, except for the bloodred summer sun that burned like a cigarette end.
Joy had never experienced asthma, but she had recently found herself taking small, shallow, ladylike sips of air. Was it the smoke or the state of her marriage?
It had been months since Savannah had left, and it didn’t feel like anything was lessening or softening. The opposite: their anger was hardening and solidifying.
She and Stan had been through bad times before. The difference was that there were no distractions now: no work, no children. When they were younger there hadn’t been time to obsess and brood over how the other person had wronged them. They’d been too tired to keep sharpening the edges of their hurt feelings.
Now they were stuck in this big, empty, silent house and there was no way to escape the invisible yet tangible conflict between them. Joy felt like she could trace its outlines in the air.
January had been especially bad because of the Australian Open. Harry Haddad’s comeback had crashed and burned after a “shock loss” (some went as far as to say an “embarrassing loss”) in the first round to an unseeded nineteen-year-old Canadian. Ten double faults and over eighty unforced errors! Harry and his new coach, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, were parting ways. Joy hadn’t watched the match, but she’d walked past the living room and seen Stan gripping the sides of his chair, crackling with so much fury and distress it had felt like he was a live electrical wire. If she’d touched him she’d have gone flying.
Now, if one of them walked into the room and saw the other one there, they walked away again. They spoke only when necessary. They hadn’t slept in the same bedroom since Savannah left.
Stan slept on a mattress on the floor of Logan’s old room. Amy’s bedroom would have been more comfortable, but perhaps he didn’t want to sleep where Savannah had slept, so well done to him, that sure showed her. Joy bet his back hurt. She hoped it did hurt. Did that mean the love was finally gone? It seemed possible that not a droplet remained. She was as dry and desiccated as their desperate-for-rain front lawn.
She heard the sound of water running from somewhere in the house. She’d stopped cooking after Christmas as a test to see if Stan might offer to prepare something, to put some toast in the toaster or to order takeaway, but he hadn’t said a word.
They were quietly feeding themselves as if they were flatmates, slipping in and out of the kitchen, polishing the benchtops, rinsing their plates, leaving behind as little evidence of their presence as possible, as if this were one of the rules of the competition. Stan appeared to be working his way through the cans of spaghetti and baked beans in the pantry. Joy mostly ate toast; sometimes she boiled an egg.
She felt fragile and shaky, exhausted and constantly on the verge of tears. It reminded her of the weeks after she’d just had a baby or lost a loved one.
Joy didn’t know how Stan was spending his days. He seemed to be doing something in his office. When she walked past she caught glimpses of him frowning over his glasses as he importantly turned the page on some paperwork, although God knew what paperwork it could have been. Joy took care of the paperwork. Divorce papers? Also, why did she call it his office? When the children were little they always called it “Daddy’s office” even though Joy was the one who handled all the business of the business.
Yet they all had to maintain the pretense that because Stan was the man, whatever he was doing was automatically more important and deserved priority over any contribution from the little lady.
Well, fuck you, Stan.
The swearing in her head was a new and satisfying development. When she was thirty she’d assumed that by this time of her life nothing would matter all that much, her emotions would be muted and soft, as soft as the skin of an old lady’s face. The violence of her thoughts startled her and woke her up. She assumed these words would not make their way from her brain to her tongue, but you never knew.
Imagine if her children heard her talk like that out loud. That would show them.
She was conducting an experiment. She’d stopped calling her children. She was sick of the harried impatient way they answered her calls. She was sick of being the one to organize every family event. It had now been seven days since she had spoken to any one of her offspring. She would have assumed that her most dutiful children, Logan and/or Brooke, would have checked in by now, but no.
Hypothesis: My children don’t care.
Conclusion: My children don’t care.
Her friends were quiet and busy with their own lives too. Caro had her daughter, Petra, visiting from Copenhagen with her children. Childish laughter floated from Caro’s garden into Joy’s window. Caro shouldn’t be letting those children play outside in this smoky air. Two other friends had become first-time grandmothers: one baby boy, one baby girl. Joy had sent them Congratulations on your grandson/granddaughter! cards. She kept a stack of them in a drawer and grimly selected the correct gender each time she got the happy news.
She tried to work out what to do with her day. Her eyes traced a horrible brownish stain on the bedroom ceiling. She’d never noticed it before. It looked like blood, but she knew it was just rainwater from a long-ago storm. It hadn’t rained in forever.
She must get up. She didn’t move. Her hands clutched at the fitted sheet. Come on, Joy. Two of her fingernails were broken and kept getting caught irritatingly against the sheet. She couldn’t find the nail scissors, even though she knew she’d bought a new pair just two weeks ago. Her fingernails broke so easily now. Like elderly bones. Like her elderly heart. She was not elderly. She wasn’t even seventy. Before Christmas she’d beaten a fifty-year-old, a good player, 6–4, 6–2, but she hadn’t been back to the club this year. She didn’t seem to have the energy.
She did not feel suicidal, absolutely not, but for the first time ever she found herself thinking that maybe she’d had enough. It wasn’t worth the bother anymore. She wanted her grandparents. She wanted her mother.
She imagined their faces lighting up when she walked through the arrival gates of the afterlife. It would be nice to see them again. She would run into their arms. She’d have to wear something nice for her mother.
Today was Valentine’s Day. A day that celebrated love. She and Stan had never really taken much notice of Valentine’s Day. It was an American holiday, but every year there seemed to be more fuss about it: red roses and chocolates and teddy bears. Men in suits carrying bouquets. Joy didn’t want red roses, but she would like a husband who still shared her bed.
She rolled over onto her stomach and pressed her face into her pillow. If she started crying she might never stop.
“Get up,” she said into the pillow. “Get up now.”
She thought of her mother describing a morning when Joy was a baby. Beautiful, no-nonsense Pearl Becker woke up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. She could barely lift her head from her pillow. “It was like I had blocks of concrete tied to me,” she told Joy. When she heard the milkman at the front door (those were the days!) she called out to him to please get help, and so the doctor came around to examine her. A doctor doing a house visit: those sure were the days. The doctor said she probably had some kind of “vitamin deficiency” and told her that she needed to “get up and be strong for her baby.”
Of course those weren’t really the days, because now, with the benefit o
f modern knowledge, any layperson would diagnose her mother’s depression, although Pearl refused to accept that. “Oh, no, it was something physical, Joy, I had nothing to be sad about!” she said. “I had you! A beautiful baby! You would have looked better if you didn’t have that big round head, as bald as a cue ball, but you were a sweet little thing.” Her mother specialized in the tiny razor-sharp dig wrapped in a soft compliment, so you didn’t notice the blood until afterward.
“And I had a handsome husband!” That was before the handsome husband went off to “meet a friend” and never returned.
Joy’s limbs felt as heavy as perhaps her mother’s had felt that long-ago morning, yet her heart raced. Was this a glimpse of depression coupled with anxiety? Was this how Amy suffered? A dull ache crept across her forehead. She never got headaches. The universe must have decided it was time she experienced what both her daughters endured.
Why had her daughters had to suffer these invisible illnesses that no one seemed to understand?
“Might I suggest a firmer hand,” said their family GP with a droll wag of his finger in Amy’s face. And then: “Is this one a bit of a hypochondriac maybe? Baby of the family? Likes the attention?” He’d winked at Joy over the top of Brooke’s pain-stricken, dead-white face. Another daughter’s eyes begging Joy for relief she couldn’t give.
It was easy when she took the boys to see him. Their illnesses were masculine, visible and curable: coughs and blocked noses, rashes and broken bones.
The GP didn’t know what he didn’t know about mental health and migraines. Even the specialists didn’t seem to know much more, and they were even more expensive and patronizing. But why had Joy been so polite in the face of their ignorance? So meek and grateful? Thank you, Doctor. I’m sure you’re right, Doctor. And then she’d get back in the car with a miserable daughter beside her, and the girls misinterpreted her frustration at her own impotence as anger at them, and they blamed themselves just as she blamed herself.
That GP was dead now. So was at least one of those specialists, as far as she knew.
Useless rage directed at long since dead men propelled her out of bed and into the shower. She gathered and stoked the rage as she showered. There was only her shampoo and body wash in the shower stall now. No evidence of a husband. Stan was using the other bathroom.
Perhaps it was time to finally accept defeat on this marriage: to meet at the net, shake hands, clap each other respectfully on the shoulders, wave to the fans, and walk away.
She scrubbed her head hard. Her broken fingernails gouged her scalp.
She thought of all the truisms she and Stan had passed on to their children and their students.
You can still fight back from match point down.
If you want to overcome a losing streak, you reevaluate your game.
She was a fighter. She was a winner. She was Joy Delaney. She would not give up on this marriage. She would take decisive, aggressive action today.
She would make an apple crumble, that’s what she’d do. Stan might at times be obtuse but he would understand the symbolism of Joy making his mother’s signature dish. She would try out Savannah’s suggestion. There was a bottle of whiskey in the back of the pantry.
She took two Panadol for her headache. She brushed her teeth for twice as long as usual. She blow-dried her hair using the big round brush Narelle said she should use but that she avoided because it made her wrist ache. She put on a flattering dress, one that Stan had once lavishly described as “very nice.” Lipstick.
She walked out of the bedroom feeling peculiarly self-conscious. The house was silent. Was he even here?
“Stan?” she called out. Her voice cracked. Surely he would answer her. “Stan?”
No answer. She walked to the front room, pulled back the curtain. The car was gone. He was out early. She wondered where. Well. It was stupid to feel hurt that he had not told her he was going out, because this was the way they were living right now, but still her heart felt newly hurt, as tender and soft as bruised fruit.
She went to the kitchen, put the jug on for a cup of tea, and opened the refrigerator to get out the apples for the crumble.
She’d bought five plump green Granny Smith apples when she was in the shops on Thursday, but now there was only one left, rolling about sadly in the crisper.
Stan had managed to eat four apples in two days.
She considered going back to bed and aborting the mission.
No. She rallied. She would pop down to the mini-mart by the railway station and pick up some more. They always opened early.
Except Stan had the car and it would take forever to walk there.
She made a low growling sound of frustration.
Steffi, who was lying in her favorite cool spot by the back door, lifted her head inquiringly, her tail thumping against the floor.
“I’m trying, Steffi,” said Joy. “It’s just that he’s eaten all the apples and taken the car.”
Inspiration struck. She would change into shorts and ride her brand-new bike to the mini-mart! So far she had only been for one little spin around the cul-de-sac. She loved the idea of the bike, but she was actually a bit nervous about traffic. She would face her fears! It was exhilarating to face your fears. Or so everyone said.
Half an hour later she stood on trembling legs in the mini-mart, plunking down the money for four overpriced Granny Smith apples. She was friendly as usual to the mini-mart man even though he scowled at her as usual (why did he hate her so?). She placed the apples in her wicker basket and began the ride home. She had to really work the pedals to get up the hill. In all the years she’d lived here she had never noticed the Mount Everest–like incline of this particular street.
Someone beeped their horn, making her heart leap. The bike swerved and the front wheel banged violently against the gutter. She straightened the handles, turned the corner, looked down, and saw that the front tire was completely flat.
“For goodness’ sake, what next?”
She threw the bike to the ground, hard, like a child. She stood, hands on hips, breathing heavily, looking at the bike and the apples. She kicked one of the apples like a ball. It rolled a listless short distance. She was not going to make an apple crumble today. Or ever again.
So that was the end of that.
You can choose the right shot, you can have a good swing and good technique, you can do everything right, and it can still go wrong. No player, no matter how good, makes one hundred percent of their shots.
Some days you lose. They’d drummed that into the children too. You can be number one in the world, you can win and win and win, but it’s inevitable: eventually you will lose.
She walked the rest of the way home, carrying her helmet by the strap. The car was in the driveway. She would go back and collect the bike once she’d calmed and cooled down. Inside, the house was silent, but she could feel the skulking, sulking presence of her husband. Her shirt stuck to her sweaty body and her mood flared as scratchy and hissy as Caro’s awful thieving cat. She went to the kitchen, got herself a glass of water, and drank deeply.
“You should probably read this.”
Stan’s voice, suddenly so deep and loud behind her, made her jump. The glass banged painfully against her teeth. She turned to look at him. He threw some kind of bound document onto the table.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s Harry Haddad’s memoir,” said Stan. “This is a preview copy, I think you call it. He’s sent it to us to read. I’m in it. We’re both in it.”
“Right,” she said.
She almost said, “Whatever,” like a teenager. She’d forgotten all about that damned memoir. It didn’t matter now. The ugly little secret was out.
“He admits he used to cheat when he played as a kid,” said Stan. He tapped his finger on the document. She read the title: Game to Harry.
“He admits it?” She put the glass down and slowly sank into a chair at the table, pulling Harry’s life story toward h
er. If Harry was publicly admitting that he once cheated, then it must have been more than a few bad calls.
“Yes,” said Stan. “It’s not that surprising—”
“I beg your pardon?” She looked up at him. She couldn’t believe he would say that. “What do you mean, it’s not surprising? You didn’t believe Troy. You accused him of lying.”
“I did not,” said Stan. “I never said he lied. I told him it was an unfortunate reality of the game. I told him he would sometimes face kids who made bad calls and that he shouldn’t focus on his opponent but on his own game.”
“Rubbish!” She wanted to grab the back of his head and force him to look in the right direction where he could see his past clearly. “You took Harry’s side! You didn’t support your own son!”
“My son assaulted another player! Of course I didn’t support him. Are you crazy?”
“Don’t you dare call me crazy.” She was electrified with rage: against her husband, against those long-ago doctors who couldn’t help her daughters, against the rude mini-mart man. Her hair did not look nice right now, it was all flat and sweaty, and her legs still wobbled from that bike ride up Mount bloody Everest from her failed mission to get apples to make her horrible husband’s nasty mother’s apple crumble. “Troy lost his temper because he didn’t have your support!”
“Troy was given every opportunity. They were all given every opportunity. They have no idea how lucky they were.”
She felt the criticism of her children like a physical blow. “They played their hearts out!”
He didn’t listen. His mind was still on Harry. His mind had always been on Harry: Harry’s talent, Harry’s potential. Harry, Harry, Harry.
“Do you want to know why that poor kid cheated?” he roared. He picked up the bound document and shook it violently at her. “Because his father told him his sister had cancer.”
The words jolted Joy, like a change in direction so sudden it could rupture an Achilles tendon. She thought she already knew everything that Stan had to say in this argument.
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