Babylon and Other Stories (29 page)

But it was pretty interesting to watch. Frank McAllister had a strong serve and a pretty good backhand, and for a solidly built guy he could cross the court fast. My father, who was neither fast nor solidly built, hung back, waiting for opportunities to show off his killer forehand, which was the centerpiece, and maybe the only piece, of his game. Frank kept coming up to the net, harassing my father with his backhand, and my father kept running back to the baseline as if it were home base and he'd be declared safe once he got there. It turned into a close contest. Both of them hit the ball with audible, satisfying thwacks, and it arced fast and clean across the net. The sound of the game was like music: their shoes made rhythmic, percussive sounds on the asphalt, and the ball hit and bounced in beats, the measured pace of a serve, the sustained pause of a lob, the staccato shock of an overhead smash. Soon they were sweating mightily, their foreheads dripping, their thinning middle-aged hair damp. By the time they were done their shirts were translucent. Frank beat my father in two sets, 6–4, 6–4.

My father shook his hand. “Get you next time,” he said.

They took to playing regularly, once or twice a week in the evenings, and a longer match on weekends. The tennis club wasn't fancy—just a set of private courts with a changing room attached—but my father talked as if it were. “Going down to the
club, darling!” he'd announce to my mother as he left the house— the only time he ever used the word
darling
—and for years I pictured the place as a gentlemen's establishment, with leather armchairs and Oriental rugs and gin and tonics on the balcony. The first time I went there with my father, I couldn't believe what a letdown it was.

My father played up his own game in much the same way. He claimed that tennis was a game of finesse, just like chess; that he could minimize, through strategy, the number of calories expended versus the number of points won; that a smart man with a solid return could beat all the fancy footwork in the world. Frank McAllister was his exact opposite, with a game like his personality: messy, overfriendly, bombastic. My father said it was like playing tennis with a Labrador retriever. Frank was always chasing the ball, fixated on it, always bounding up to the net, smashing his racket down like he was killing a fly. Sometimes he managed it and sometimes the maneuver failed him, but he never changed his style. He was a risk-taker, a hand-pumper, a winker at me as I watched on the sidelines. At the end of the match he'd jog up to the net and shake my father's hand. He won every time.

Whenever my father and Frank were playing, I'd hang out at the club, sometimes playing Anil Chaudury, who was around my age and skill level, sometimes practicing my serve against a back wall of the building. I was fifteen and had a part-time job that summer, bagging groceries, which I hated, and I had friends to hang out with—skateboarding or playing basketball, both of which were much cooler sports than tennis—but my secret focus, the real target of my day, was spending time at the club, hoping Ivy would come by. Sometimes she did. Even now, without the
slightest difficulty, I can summon up in my mind a complete, five-sensed portrait of Ivy McAllister at the age of fourteen. She had long red curly hair she never tied back and that she tossed around in a manner that would've seemed affected in another girl her age. But Ivy had no self-consciousness; she was like her father in that one respect. She knew she was pretty and saw no reason to hide it. When she played tennis, with a girlfriend or sometimes, under duress or the promise of shopping money, with her mother, she wore short white tennis skirts and tiny white socks and filling the space between them was all creamy, freckle-dusted leg. The tennis court was the best chance I had of seeing her, now that school was out, although I occasionally caught a glimpse of her in the park, at night, drinking peppermint schnapps with a bunch of eighteen-year-old guys who, I could tell, were also in love with her.

What I couldn't tell was whether Ivy really liked them or not. It didn't seem to matter to her what anybody thought, not her friends, not the eighteen-year-olds, and certainly not me, and in this respect she was unlike the other girls I knew. No other girl could match her ease, her self-confidence, or how calmly she inhabited herself, so completely comfortable inside her own skin. It's hard to explain what I mean by this. I've tried talking about it once or twice to friends and wound up clamming up after seeing their stares. Years later, a girl I knew at school said, in an angry blurt, “Jesus, Kyle, you love her because you never got to sleep with her and you know you never will. If she weren't gone you wouldn't think she was so great.” I denied it, but maybe the girl was right. I really don't know.

A typical conversation with Ivy involved me stammering, trying to say her name, and her laughing, waving, and walking on. I'm not sure either of us ever got to the stage of actual words.
And to be honest, I didn't even mind her laughing at me. Her laughter wasn't mean; it was more like a basic acknowledgment of the gulf between her world and mine, a gulf that I did not dispute. I knew I didn't have a chance with her, and she knew it, so what else was there to say?

Meanwhile my father played tennis with Frank all that summer, and the next, and the next. He lost constantly, endlessly, cheerfully. Some matches were closer than others, but the final outcome was never really in question.

“Get you next time,” he'd say to Frank at the end of every match.

“Sure thing, buddy!” Frank would say, and shake my father's hand. I think he liked knowing he could always win, and it wasn't so easy that he didn't have to try. As for my father, he'd been trying for years to put together a jigsaw puzzle he'd bought at a stoop sale in New York City: a 10,000-piece picture of a Jackson Pollock painting, each piece an identical dribble of red and brown and black. He'd never been deterred by lost causes.

Over the years and matches, my father and I transformed Frank McAllister, and my father's inability to beat him, into a legend. He never mentioned Frank without referring to him as his nemesis. One time, at Christmas, when we ran into him and his other daughter, Melissa, at the mall, my father greeted him by extending his arm, as if about to strike his killer forehand, and exclaiming loudly, “If it isn't my tennis nemesis, Frank McAllister!” Melissa, who was thirteen and by some accident of chin length or nose placement nowhere near as pretty as Ivy, scowled at me and snapped her gum. Her father laughed heartily—he was always laughing heartily—but I'm not sure he knew what a nemesis was, or if my father was joking, or whether the whole
thing was good or bad. My father didn't care. He worked in advertising and was a coiner of words, an inventor of slogans, a singer of jingles, and once he'd decided that Frank was his nemesis, his nemesis he stayed. We came to use “McAllister” as a code at home, a term referring to some long-desired but impossible goal. A McAllister was like a Pyrrhic victory or a Sisyphean task. It was a mythological situation.

“Going to get an A on that history paper, Kyle?” my father would say, only asking so I could answer him with the code.

“I'm hoping so, Dad, but I think it's a McAllister. Mr. Martin's a tough grader.”

“Don't give up,” he'd say, clapping me on the back. “Even McAllister will fall one day!”

Yet however large a place Frank McAllister assumed in our conversations, however grand a figure he became, however tightly he was wound into our family lore, he and my father never socialized off the court. It wasn't that they didn't get along, only that tennis was the single thing they had in common. Frank and his wife, Beth Ann, were younger than my parents and ran with a different crowd. Beth Ann was a professional caterer whose contributions to bake sales and potlucks were intimidatingly accomplished, while my mother brought Pepperidge Farm cookies to everything. She was an archivist, and at school functions, while other mothers congregated around the food to gossip, she would corner the librarian and discuss acid-free paper.

I was an only child, and both my parents treated family life as an enjoyable, if time-consuming, hobby. I knew them as relaxed, imperturbable, and lazy, and both liked and loved them. I also loved that because my mother was sick of driving me around she encouraged me to get my driver's license as soon as possible and
practically forced the car keys into my hand. I used to spend hours on the weekends cruising around the neat suburban streets in my mother's Toyota, passing parks and pools and tennis courts and strip malls while pretending I wasn't just making a big loop around Ivy McAllister's house.

One day when I was seventeen, I finally parked the car. Ivy came to the door wearing a pink tank top whose straps seemed almost to blend into the pale freckles on her shoulders. My courage failed me, and I didn't ask her out; I couldn't. Instead, I asked her to play tennis, which seemed less wildly implausible than asking her out on a date. She shrugged and said, “Sure.” We were sort of friends by then, I guess—or at least we knew each other well in the way kids do who grow up in the same neighborhood, know the same people, see each other all the time without ever really talking to each other that much. At seventeen, Ivy still wore her hair long, but now she gathered it in a high ponytail that shook when she laughed, which was often, and that showed off her pretty, freckled cheeks. She agreed to play tennis with me, I found out, because she was on some kick involving exercise. She told me she had a new dream, of joining the youth tour in tennis, a dream I would've taken more seriously if she hadn't also taken up smoking.

The first time we played together, we hit the ball back and forth a few times for practice, then she told me to go ahead and serve. I watched her tuck a ball into the pocket of her short white skirt, bouncing my own ball against my racket a few times. I was torn between wanting to show her that I could play well and not wanting to beat her. Ivy crouched, an unusually serious look of concentration on her face, then nodded encouragingly, and I served. But instead of even trying to return it she straightened up, stood perfectly still, and watched the ball come to her, with a
calm evaluating smile. The ball hit the court and then slapped against the fence behind her, all without her moving a muscle.

“Just checking out your technique,” she said, and this completely unnerved me. She lost that first point, but it took me the next four to get any rhythm going.

I think the psychology of the contest was the only part that interested her. She'd had plenty of lessons and her strokes were decent, but after a few minutes her attention would wander, making her miss easy shots. Soon enough I found out why. The reason she was into playing tennis now was that she was in love with a guy named Patrick Goddard. He also played tennis, and he was as out of her league—he was twenty-one and home from school for the summer—as she was out of mine. Before long she started telling me about him as we sat under an oak tree in the park, drinking water (me) and smoking (her), after tennis. There is a very specific hell reserved for teenaged boys, and it involves hearing the closest confidences of a girl you're in love with, feeling her unburden herself to you, get close to you, all the while knowing that the reason she can talk to you so freely is that she'll never want to kiss you, that the thought
never even crosses her mind.
It's hell but an exquisite one, is all I can say about it.

“I'm like completely fed up with all this bullshit,” is the kind of thing Ivy would say to me after tennis. She still said whatever she wanted, and didn't seem to care what other people thought, and now she swore a lot, too. The combination of her tennis outfits and her dirty mouth made me faint with desire. “I want to move on to bigger things. Don't you want to get the hell out of this suburban shithole?”

“I don't know. What are you talking about, exactly?”

“Hey, do you ever wonder if animals have souls?”

“Not really.”

“Ha! Me either,” she said, lying back on the grass and revealing an almost unbearable amount of thigh. “I'm so sick of stupid high-school stoners asking stupid questions like that when they get high, and thinking it's so deep. I want to have a real conversation with, like, an adult.”

“Okay. What about?”

“I meant with Patrick.”

“Oh.”

“No offense.”

“None taken,” I'd say, which both was and wasn't a lie.

Every once in a while we'd run into Frank and my father at the club. That summer they'd sometimes play doubles with my mother and a woman named Eleanor MacElvoy, who was a guidance counselor at our school. Beth Ann's catering business had taken off, Frank said, so she was working nights and weekends, but there were rumors this was a cover-up. Ivy never said anything about it.

“It's the Big Macs!” Frank McAllister would cry out as he bounded onto the court. Eleanor MacElvoy was a strapping young Scottish woman with long blond hair she wore in a single braid. She'd told me I should consider medical school—I wanted to study history—because there was going to be a medical shortage in rural communities and I could get somebody else to pay for it. She was constantly doling out these harebrained ideas she apparently thought were helpful.

“That cow,” Ivy said, watching her. “I told her I wanted to be a news anchor, and she told me I should consider being a certified public accountant because math was my highest grade last term. I told her to kiss my certified public ass.”

Hellish as these long talks under shady trees were, I would have withstood them forever; but Ivy wasn't as content as I was to
know when she was out of her league. And in a way she was right; there was no such thing as being out of her league. She was seventeen and gorgeous. She got Patrick Goddard to notice her, then to watch her, then to tease her and be teased back, then to ask her out. I watched all of it. I watched Patrick Goddard, who was a good-looking, callow asshole, charm the pants off Ivy—I mean literally, in his Stingray after tennis, right in the parking lot of the club. They drank together in his car, Ivy being too young to go to bars, and in the movies, and in the park, and Ivy, I noticed miserably, seemed happy.