Apples Never Fall Page 12

  Logan looked at him sideways. “She’ll get the next one.”

  Troy kicked again at the Subway wrapper. “Eeuuuuw. Christ almighty. It’s stuck on my shoe. Oh God, that yellow fake cheese will stain.”

  “Looks like you’re due for some new shoes anyway,” said Logan.

  “They’re brand-new Armani suede loafers!” protested Troy.

  Logan smirked.

  Troy reached down and grabbed the Subway wrapper, scrunched it into a ball, and shoved it in the side pocket of the car door, which was filled with coins, a pair of service-station sunglasses missing a lens, and a CD without a cover. “When did you last clean your car? Sometime back in the nineties?”

  “Troy would rather not be seen in my car.” Logan looked at Savannah in the rearview mirror. Wait, did he just wink at her? He wouldn’t be flirting, because he was in a long-term relationship with Indira. Indira was way out of Logan’s league, as far as Troy was concerned. It was a mystery what these women saw in him.

  The only skill Logan had was recognizing the good ones. Sometimes, Logan saw something in a woman that Troy didn’t see straight away. When they were in their late teens they’d both dated girls called Tracey, and Troy developed a secret, shameful crush on Logan’s Tracey. She was the superior Tracey! The worst part was, Troy had met Logan’s Tracey first, so he could have made a move, but he didn’t see her appeal until Logan saw it.

  “You’ve got a fancy car, Troy,” said Savannah. “What type is it?”

  They’d taken Logan’s car because he had a bigger trunk for Savannah’s stuff. Troy was happy not to park his car outside Savannah’s flat, which he assumed was in some crummy low-rent area where it would get keyed within five minutes.

  “It’s a McLaren 600LT.” Troy tried to say it in a neutral tone and ignored Logan’s inevitable faux-awed whistle.

  “How much does a car like that cost?” asked Savannah. “Is that rude to ask?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Logan. “He’s always looking for an excuse to bring his net worth into the conversation.”

  “Fuck off,” said Troy, because as a matter of fact the very last thing he wanted discussed in front of this potential con artist was his net worth.

  “What do you do, Savannah?” He turned around to look at her again. “For a living? Is that rude to ask?”

  Savannah turned her head and spoke to the car window. “Bit of this, bit of that.” Her nose piercing glinted. “Mostly retail. Hospitality.”

  So she’d worked as a checkout chick and a waitress.

  She turned away from the window and looked at him deliberately, her chin lifted. “We’d only just moved here to Sydney, so I hadn’t lined up any work yet. Obviously, I will, once this is…” She gestured at her forehead. “I’m not intending to sponge off your parents forever, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Troy, embarrassed and wrong-footed, and irritated that he’d been made to feel that way. He turned back around to face the front and shifted in his seat as he tried to straighten his legs. He thought of the lavish leg room on his Emirates flight from JFK, the stunning flight attendant leaning down to refill his wineglass, bringing with her a cloud of seductive perfume (Baccarat Rouge 540: he knew he had it right, but had checked to be sure), and now here he was, in a car that smelled of bacon.

  He shifted position in his seat. Shifted again. He sensed Logan noticing and made a decision not to move for the next minute. He counted it in his head. One elephant, two elephant, three elephant. He made it to thirty seconds and then he had to move. He was eleven years old, the Delaney kid incapable of sitting still.

  “SIT STILL, TROY DELANEY!” his teachers used to roar, and sometimes, if he liked the teacher, he would try to sit still, he would try so hard, truly, but his body just moved of its own accord, as if he were a puppet with a malicious master tugging strings to jerk his limbs.

  He gave up trying and let his legs jiggle and his fingers drum against his thighs.

  “And what do you do, Troy?” said Savannah. “For a living?”

  “I’m a trader,” said Troy.

  “What do you trade?” she asked.

  He knew she’d lose interest in a moment. Everyone did. “Anything that moves.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” said Savannah humbly.

  “Nobody does,” said Logan.

  Troy didn’t look at him. “It means anything with volatility: interest rates, equities, currencies, commodities—that’s my bread and butter.”

  “You’re a risk-taker, then,” said Savannah, and he looked at her in the rearview mirror again and saw that she had her head bowed and was examining her fingernails.

  “A calculated risk-taker,” said Troy. His family thought he played blackjack all day long.

  Logan said something under his breath.

  “What?” Troy looked at him.

  Logan lifted a shoulder. “Didn’t say anything.”

  How could he have that smug grin while driving a car filled with Subway wrappers?

  “Do you have a … partner?” asked Savannah.

  “He’s straight,” said Logan. “Just likes to act camp.”

  “Do you?” said Savannah to Troy. She’d lifted her head, interested. “Like to act camp?”

  “Apparently so,” said Troy.

  He didn’t care when people thought he was gay. He kind of liked it. Kept everyone on their toes. He didn’t do it on purpose. Or maybe he did. To differentiate himself from Logan, who was a “man’s man.” Logan thought there was only one way to be a man: their father’s way.

  Silence filled the car as they drove down the highway, every traffic light inevitably turning red as they approached, causing Troy to just about lose his mind. Logan hummed under his breath, elbow halfway out the car window, head back against the headrest, as if he were a layabout teenager off to the beach with his friends. He probably still went to the beach with his friends. They probably had barbecues and played beach cricket. Logan was still in touch with his entire circle of high school friends, which made Troy feel both contemptuous—how parochial, how very Sydney—and envious.

  Troy liked the idea of old friends, just not the reality. When old friends tried to get in touch with him, he always shuddered. It was like they were trying to take something away from him, to peel off an outer layer and show everyone the uncouth, unsophisticated kid he used to be. He was always kind of surprised old friends still existed.

  Logan continued to whistle. The guy needed a haircut, a shave, probably a shower, for fuck’s sake.

  It was the same toneless, two-note tune Logan used to hum on long car journeys to tournaments when they were kids, the tune that would malevolently worm its way into Troy’s consciousness until he had no choice but to resort to violence, because come on, now, how many times did he have to ask him to stop?

  “Don’t.” He touched Logan’s shoulder. “Please don’t.”

  Logan stopped humming abruptly. He glanced once at Troy, switched on the radio, and changed lanes unnecessarily.

  Troy closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the next traffic light turn red, and it occurred to him that maybe Logan’s humming was a nervous tic, and in the way that a random thought about your childhood can suddenly offer a startling new adult clarity, he saw in a flash that this was true: Logan hummed when he was nervous. He had hummed on the way to tournaments because he was nervous, and Troy couldn’t stand the sound of it because he himself had been suffering pregame nerves.

  So Logan was nervous right now.

  It wouldn’t be the threat to his own safety worrying him, but the possibility of being involved in a disagreement. Logan had a severe conflict allergy. He’d pick up his cutlery and eat rather than tell a waitress, “That’s not what I ordered.” Even if it was vegetarian. When he used to play the most notorious cheats on the circuit, he never questioned their calls. It was his brother’s most significant and, for Troy, most mystifying flaw.

  Of co
urse, Logan’s conflict allergy hadn’t applied to Troy. The two of them used to fight to the death. Troy traced his finger down the faint white line on his forearm. Sixteen stitches. He and Logan had smashed through a window onto the front lawn while they were fighting, like a scene from Die Hard. Logan had a similar scar on his thigh. It was one of Troy’s favorite childhood memories: the two of them looking at each other with shocked, thrilled eyes, bloody limbs, glass fragments shining in their hair, their poor mother screaming her head off.

  Now Logan competed against Troy by not competing, which was fucking genius. You couldn’t win if only one of you was playing.

  Savannah spoke up from the back seat. “When I said that about not sponging off your parents, I hope I didn’t come across as … ungrateful.”

  Troy opened his eyes. “Not at all.”

  He slid the words at and all together to make the one word a-tall, a linguistic habit he’d taught himself as a teenager, when he’d heard it used by someone on the radio and decided it sounded sophisticated. It still gave him pleasure. Like a fashion choice.

  He saw the harbor, and his heart lifted at the sight of apartment blocks, office towers, skyscrapers, the Harbour Bridge: civilization, even if it was only Sydney civilization, not proper civilization.

  Savannah continued talking. “Like, I’m really grateful to you both for doing this, and to your parents, your parents are fab.” Fab. Odd choice of word. Circa 1990? “They’re, like, one of a kind. Amazing people. Truly.”

  Amazing people. Troy looked at Logan. They’d heard a lot of that growing up: Your parents are so cool. Your parents aren’t like other parents with boring office jobs. We wish we had parents like yours.

  “It’s all good,” said Troy. “No problem a-tall.” He twisted around to smile his most dazzling smile at her. She smiled back. A girl had once told Troy that he had a “devastating” smile. He secretly treasured that compliment. Devastating.

  “So we take a left here, right?” said Logan.

  Troy jerked his head. He had not bothered to ask the location of Savannah’s unit, but had assumed they were heading over the bridge to some suburb he’d never heard of, way out in the boondocks, right under a flight path or two. Instead he saw they were driving through a hip harborside neighborhood where he himself had lived in his twenties. He’d had after-work drinks at that pub on the corner. He’d taken dates to that little Thai restaurant. This was an area for IT guys in hoodies, junior execs in high heels, and law graduates in new suits. People here were too young and happy, attractive and cashed-up to hit their girlfriends.

  “Go straight at the roundabout,” said Savannah. “And then it’s the big apartment block right there. That’s it. There’s heaps of visitors’ parking.”

  Troy craned his neck. “You must have good views?” He realized he was now feeling more sympathy toward her, as if someone who lived in this suburb really didn’t deserve a violent boyfriend. His neck turned red with shame.

  “Our unit doesn’t face the harbor,” said Savannah. “It’s just a one-bedroom. They reduced the rent because it’s got a really crappy kitchen and bathroom. It’s the only unrenovated apartment in the building.” It was like she was explaining how they could afford to live here, like she’d seen his neck and read his thoughts.

  Logan parked, and he and Troy got out of the car, unwinding their bodies with relief, the way men of their height did when released from cars and airplanes.

  Logan removed from the trunk a couple of supermarket cardboard boxes that their mother had given them for Savannah’s belongings, while Troy stuck his hands in his pockets and kicked his heels against the pavement. He looked about for any nefarious types, but the place was deserted. Everyone would be at work right now. This wasn’t an area for young families.

  “Um … is she getting out?” Troy said to Logan after a moment.

  Logan shrugged. He ducked down to look. “She’s just sitting there.”

  “Should we give her a second?” said Troy.

  Logan shrugged again. It was like his default gesture.

  They waited.

  “How’s Indira?” asked Troy.

  “She’s fine,” said Logan, his face blank.

  “You still living—”

  “Yes.” Logan cut him off. So they were still crammed together in that crummy one-bedroom town house Logan had bought decades ago. Troy’s mother had mentioned that Indira wanted to move a few years back, but that had obviously gone nowhere.

  “How was New York?” Logan asked, without discernible interest.

  “Great,” said Troy.

  As far as Troy knew, Logan had never been to New York. Imagine never having been to New York and acting like it didn’t matter. Did Logan even have a passport right now? The thought of not having a valid passport made Troy hyperventilate, but Logan seemed to live his life within the confines of a tiny radius encompassing his workplace, their parents’ house, and the homes of his married-with-children high school friends. Today’s exciting adventure to Savannah’s apartment might be the furthest Logan had traveled in years.

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the opportunities: Logan was offered a tennis scholarship to the University of Chicago, two years before Troy was offered one at Stanford, but he’d turned it down. He’d said, No thanks, I’m good, without apparent regret.

  In fact, all four of the Delaney children had been offered tennis scholarships to prestigious American universities. Troy was the only one with the brains to take the offer, the only one capable of seeing what a chance like that could mean to a Sydney public-school kid. It still infuriated him. His brother and sisters could have changed the direction of their lives. They thought it was a decision about tennis.

  They didn’t get that tennis was merely the key that unlocked the door to a bigger, shinier world. Tennis didn’t just get Troy into Stanford, it kick-started his career. His family enjoyed that story. Once he’d even overheard Logan recounting it: how Troy was in New York doing a summer internship competing against a group of terrifyingly slick young graduates for a coveted permanent position at Barclays Bank, when one day a gray-haired guy came into the office and said, with quiet menace, “Which one of you kids is the tennis player?” Troy raised his hand and the guy said, “I’ll pick you up after work. Full whites, please.” Troy had to run into Macy’s in Times Square on his fifteen-minute lunch break and buy the first white clothes he could find, no time to try them on. A shiny black car took them out to a pompous tennis club where they played doubles against two guys—one old, one young—who they decisively beat: 6–0, 6–0. Turned out the scary gray-haired guy was the big enchilada and he hated the other old guy, for a reason never explained. There were a lot of hard-eyed smiles that day.

  Guess who got the permanent position?

  Yes, his family loved that story. They loved any story where a Delaney won a match, or won anything. But it was almost like he needed each of his siblings to say: I should have taken the scholarship like you, Troy, then I’d have a life like yours, when in fact all three of them seemed to view Troy and his life’s choices not with envy but with a kind of amused, detached superiority, as if money and success were shiny, childish toys, comical and absurd.

  It was true that Brooke’s migraines gave her hell when she was a teenager, so she had no choice but to quit tennis altogether and stay in Sydney to study. Amy was Amy. She couldn’t cope with the stress of competitive tennis. He never got his older sister until the day she explained it: “Think of your worst pre-match nerves. Except there’s no match. It’s just Tuesday morning. That’s how it feels to be me.” But Logan should have said yes to Chicago! He’d been smarter than Troy at school, and he had that incredible forehand. Did he ever do anything with that brain or that forehand?

  Troy tried to imagine his brother in a classroom teaching. Who exactly took these classes? And what exactly did he teach in “business communications”? How to format a business letter? How would Logan know? Had he ever sent one in his life? People
emailed these days. He imagined Logan wearing a cheap Kmart tie, one their mother had probably given him for Christmas, standing at an old-fashioned blackboard scribbling in chalk: To whom it may concern, Yours faithfully, Dear Sir/Madam. And then shrugging whenever a student asked a question.

  To be fair, he was probably a good teacher. He’d been the best out of all four of them at coaching, and the only one who seemed to actually like it. He got that same fixed, focused look on his face as their dad did when he watched a kid play. Any kid. Even the useless ones. Logan was probably only fourteen when Troy heard him say, “You look away from the ball at the last second” to a little kid who Troy would have written off as having no hand-eye coordination.

  But that was tennis. Logan couldn’t feel passionate about spending his days teaching business communication skills to help little wannabe businesspeople enter a world Logan had no interest in entering himself. It was just … wrong. Logan was leading the wrong life and didn’t care, and for fuck’s sake, why did Troy care that he didn’t care?

  When he was a kid all he’d wanted to do was beat his older brother, in anything and everything. It was the point of his entire existence. Winning his first match against Logan had felt like a cocaine high, except, just like cocaine, it also made him feel sick. He always remembered, with resentment and mystification, how nausea had tainted the edge of his win, how he’d gone to have a shower to cool off and thought he was fine, but then he lost his temper with a tennis kid who had wandered through the back door into their house. (He hated it so much when kids thought their kitchen was a clubhouse facility.)

  It was almost like he’d felt guilty for beating his brother, as if being two years older gave Logan a lifelong right to win against Troy.

  These days their father seemed to be equally impressed—or equally unimpressed—by the careers both his sons had chosen. Brooke was the only one who impressed their dad, because she was his favorite and she was “starting her own business.” Stan didn’t seem to notice that Troy had also been his own boss for years.