Doubles (14 page)

The official said, “Time. Please.”

Kaz watched my serve pass without even swinging.

My next was another ace.

My third, another.

Then I served it into the net. Fine. I hit a second serve out wide to his backhand. He swung and whiffed. I was invincible.

Douglas Adams was yelling. Manny was yelling. Everyone was yelling. I looked over at George Vecsey and saw that even he was yelling. We switched sides, passing on different ends of the net. I tried to look Kaz in the eye, but he wouldn’t meet me.

He served trash, spinning it in, and when I returned his crap down the line and won the first point, he threw his racquet. Usually my edge over Kaz was strategic. So far, though, there had been no need for strategy. I broke his serve at love.

For my next service game, a bit of the pop disappeared from my serve, and the ball came back into play. Kaz was putting more topspin on the ball than I remembered him ever doing before, making it drop late and then rise up to my shoulder on the bounce. He knew me well enough to know that was the thing I hated most. I didn’t want him to get comfortable pushing me back with that stuff, though, so at deuce, I rushed the net. He knew what I was doing, it was obvious, and I knew what he was going to do, because that too was obvious. As I closed, he swung low and lifted a topspin lob high into the black space below the lights, into the area where that moth was still orbiting. For a moment they both hovered in air, two yellow spots against the deepest night. It was hard to lob over a man more than six and a half feet tall, but this one would have been easy for a midget. It was tragically short, falling almost directly towards me. I raised my racquet, my arm
cocked over my right shoulder. The ball fell further and further away from the moth. I swung, cutting it slightly to make the ball drop. But just like I had with that pink ball on my neighborhood court, I framed it. The ball flew over the net, past Kaz, who spun to watch, past the baseline, and into the stands, towards Brah and a teenage ball girl he was holding hands with. Their hands parted, the girl’s flying to her mouth, but not in time to keep the ball from hitting it, a wet splat sounding across the hushed court.

The silence seemed to allow the darkness at the edge of the court to close in. I had never noticed the insects in Queens before, but here they were, pulsing in the space between points, like they had in North Carolina the night Anne had been hit with that motorcycle, and I let my mind leave the court a little. I went back to that January night. “Night Moves.” I hadn’t heard it since, but I knew that I would somewhere at some time, and it was a moment that I feared, because who knew what restaurant, what elevator I was going to be riding in when I heard Bob Seger next? It was a time bomb, location unknown.

I tried some moonballs. They didn’t work. I made that spooky moan, the alien sound of despair.

“WHO REMEMBERS AARON
Burr?” Manny said. “People respect that you went out there.” He was texting while he spoke, furiously poking at his cell phone. “And that was pre-Western. Those guys were like king and queen dueling. Which was also cool. One sec.”

He kept punching away.

It was the next morning. I had lost 6-2, 6-0. I had blisters on the ball of each foot. I had a blister on the base of my ring finger. My forearm was so sore it hurt to brush my teeth. My body had softened where it once was callused, had withered where it once was strong. It made me realize that I actually missed Kaz physically. Without him my body was failing.

I walked to the corner bodega to buy a Gatorade, and by the time I returned to Manny’s apartment there was a very large woman sitting in one of the plastic chairs in the living room. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, though she could have been younger. Light blue makeup shimmered on her greasy eyelids, and she wore a tube-top made of metallic silver nylon. It looked like its seams might rip. It was clear she would have been nearly six feet tall if she stood, and she was thick, just shy of being obese.

She said, “Hey.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m with Vinny.”

“Who’s Vinny?”

“Who are you?”

“Who the fuck is Vinny?”

“This is Vinny’s apartment.”

“Everything’s cool!” Manny called from the bathroom. “Be out in a second!”

“I’ll give you guys some private time,” I said and walked back down the hallway and onto the street.

There was an internet café three blocks south on Ninth Avenue, down a soulless stretch of New York real estate, an all-American region with a grocery, some trinket stores, an eyeglass retailer, an Amish market, and the business offices for a low-budget horror studio that had hung a cardboard cutout of the Toxic Avenger from the fire escape. He dangled, twirling in the breeze.

Combover had been calling. I had not been answering. There were five emails from him asking me to call him back. The last one said he was worried about his credit card charges. At the cafe I wrote back. “Everything’s going great! I’ll be back next week at some point. Took Vecsey upstate for a day. Want to stay for the finals this weekend. Made some great connections.”

Knowing Manny was making it with the roller derby queen right then made me feel like I was entitled to love. I walked the six blocks to Katie’s apartment. I hadn’t spoken to her since awakening in her bed after asking if she wanted me to do the monkey-style. I had to talk to her, apologize. It was like poking at a sore tooth. I knew I should stay away, but I couldn’t.

When Katie’s voice crackled over the brass intercom, I said, “Can I come up?”

The door buzzed, and I passed over the red carpet like I were being drawn inside by a giant magnet. I floated up the stairs. I couldn’t get to her fast enough.

Katie wore a green dress and red flats and looked like she was about to go somewhere. Her purse sat on the table beside her, a red jacket draped over the top of a chair.

I said, “I’m an idiot.”

“What?”

“Just, just the whole thing.”

She waved her hand through the air like it was nothing, then sat on a small white couch, upright and tense. The cushions were hard and surprised me as I sat beside her. She turned away from me, towards the window. The down on the base of her neck glowed from the morning sunlight. I could almost smell suntan lotion. The chlorine. Summers and daylight were her permanent accessories.

“I wasn’t acting like myself,” I said.

“We’re never who we think we are.”

“What does that mean?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I know who you are,” I said.

“Not really.”

“Yeah huh.”

“I love a woman. That fit?”

“You really think that’ll last?”

She continued to look out the window.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

She turned and put her hand on mine. I wondered if she knew Paige had kissed me in bed that morning. I felt entitled to their love, a part of the bargain. She looked me in the eyes, and I leaned towards her. She looked down, presenting my mouth with her forehead.

I stood, embarrassed. I didn’t know what I was doing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m . . .”

I backed out of her apartment and stumbled down the stairs. I emerged onto Fifty-second Street and felt like everybody was staring. I loved her. She loved a woman. She loved a woman who was walking towards me up Ninth Avenue in a navy blue power suit that shimmered in the sunlight, like a glimmering goldfish shuttling between dull tadpoles. I waved, stunned.

“Hi,” Paige said. “You coming from Katie’s?”

“I was just getting some coffee.”

She looked at my orange Gatorade.

“I heard about last night.”

I shrugged.

“I’m sure you were wonderful.”

“I wasn’t wonderful,” I said. “But I’m just glad I went out there. I mean, who respects Aaron Burr? You know what I’m saying.”

She furrowed her brow.

“You look great,” I said. “Where you going?”

“Work.”

“I thought you did acting.”

“Translation.” Her voice suddenly made sense. “Want to come?”

“To work?”

“They have visitor services.”

“Where?”

“The United Nations.”

My only other option was returning to Manny and the giantess. I flagged down a cab, and we headed east on Fifty-ninth. Beside me on the plastic upholstery, Paige’s purse sat between us, filled with shiny talismans of womanhood—glasses, assorted gleaming plastic tubes of makeup, a dark leather wallet. She said nothing as we inched through the Midtown traffic.

“What language do you translate?” I said as we crossed Fifth Avenue.

“Urdu. But I mostly work with one specific diplomat from Pakistan because he’s deaf and I sign.”

“You translate into sign language?”

She nodded as if it were obvious.

As a reflex, I almost said,
Deaf? My wife is mostly deaf.
But I didn’t want Anne in that cab with us. I just said, “Wow,” and watched people pass in a blur until the UN rose out the east side like a giant glass box
stuck into the riverbank. For years I had felt so special, that I was the best in the world at something and people should know. I had felt unappreciated. But this beautiful woman beside me translated Urdu into sign language. I felt like anyone was more special than I was.

My UN guide was an intern from Maine, a young woman who actually looked quite a bit like Katie. Refined and dark and thin. She wore a blue suit that also had a sheen. These women all shimmered. Much of the UN did. The colors were all lime greens and pale blues and oranges.

“What do you do?” the tour guide asked me. It took us a while to the get my credentials.

“I work in sports.”

“What sport?”

“Tennis.”

“My dad loves tennis. Me too, but I’m not very good. It’s hard to play in New York.”

She led me through long corridors with heavy doors open to bright antiseptic rooms.

“Do you play?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“My cousin is a tennis pro outside Bowling Green.”

“I play on the tour mostly.”

“What tour?”

“The ATP tour.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the pro circuit.”

“Do you know Preston Wittaker? That’s my cousin.”

“Did he play too?”

“Yeah, he’s the pro. Outside Bowling Green.”

“I mean I mostly just play tournaments.”

“Really!”

“Yeah.”

“You ever go to Wimbledon?”

“Eight times.”

She stopped walking and looked at me.

“You’re a famous tennis player, aren’t you?”

“Sort of.”

“Who’d you beat at Wimbledon?”

“Last year I beat Aspelin and Perry,” I said, which was true. It was a career highlight.

“Who was harder?”

“They’re both hard. They’re a doubles team. I play doubles.”

“I thought you meant
Wim
bledon.”

“Yeah, I did.”

A short blond man in a sharp blue suit looked at me sharply when I spoke, as if my tone of voice was inappropriate for the hallway. My guide stopped in front of a heavy wooden door and said, “OK. Here we are.”

I thought,
I’m never going to talk about tennis again
.

She opened the door to a room decorated with more lime green and orange and pale blue. It was essentially an ornate lecture hall, like those I’d slept in at college, with a dozen rows of empty desks angling down a raked floor towards a small lectern. The room smelled like baby powder. The wall behind the stage was lit with a strange pattern of bare, dim lightbulbs sunk into the wall. To the right of the lectern hung a few displaced continents traversed with golden bands of longitude and latitude. I didn’t know which lines were longitude, which were latitude. Surely I had learned at some point in the past, but now they just crisscrossed those landmasses, foreign and magical and unknown.

Behind one podium a man stood beside Paige, his eyes wide above a moustache so black and thick it made me raise my hand to my own upper lip. He cut the air in front of his body into pieces with his hands,
pointing, circling, lifting invisible items into the air, spreading fingers on his left hand while pointing at them with his right. It was all so circular. He opened an invisible book and touched a cupped hand to his nose. Then he waited.

Paige! In her shiny suit, she emanated power. I had never thought about why they called power suits power suits. In all my international travel I had never felt so American. She turned from the Pakistani man to a man at a second podium whom I guessed was the American, a man who also looked Pakistani. He was balding and wore rimless glasses perched above his own thick, dark moustache.

She spoke. “Degradation of any prophet is tantamount to defamation of the rest.”

“I understand,” the American Pakistani said. “But a film is not a political statement.”

Now Paige began to gesture. She massaged the air, danced with it. Whether you spoke Urdu sign language or not, her hands clearly indicated that she was speaking softly and precisely. I could hear her accent even in Urdu sign language. The man attached his bulging eyes to that air space, and I wondered if he was used to a message like this being played out before a bosom like Paige’s. I guess he must have been if she was his primary contact. She would clearly calm him down.

But no. When she finished he raised his hands into the air like he was releasing two palmfuls of burning rice. He threw the burning rice onto Paige’s head. It tumbled down her shoulders and across her power suit. It trickled into her cleavage. She didn’t even flinch. She just watched.

Then she turned and said, “We have not taken this lightly. And we are not casting away free speech. But the film will not be released in our country.”