Doubles (22 page)

For the first time since we had first played them in juniors at age thirteen, we now had a match point on the Simons. I crouched at the T of the service boxes. This was a long, slow process that drove Kaz crazy, but which I had to take my time completing because of
my knees and back, both of which were almost always so tight that if I knelt any faster, I felt like one or the other might snap. I lowered myself slowly, and then, once I was an inch or so above the court, let myself drop. Once a doubles player puts himself on the T, his partner can serve over him, but the opposing team doesn’t know where he is going to go. I held my hand behind my back and jerked my thumb to the left. Kaz’s first serve landed two feet wide. I had already started to move. I reset, forcing Kaz to wait out the process of dropping once again. During the whole laborious process the Simons bounced from side to side like two eager puppies. I finally dropped to the surface again, then motioned towards the same spot as before.

Kaz served another safe second serve, and I rose. Sam laid into it like a T-ball, returning it crosscourt so that it skidded into the empty space behind me. Kaz lunged with his backhand, just catching the ball on the frame. It rose high into the sky. The Simons were on the side of court facing the sun, and as Sam raised his racquet and backstepped into position, I hoped that the sun might blind him enough the cause him to shank it. It did not. He was two inches taller than his brother, and fifteen pounds heavier, and he slammed the ball out of the air with about twice as much speed as Kaz’s serve had had.

The ball came at my waist. I raised my racquet with the head pointed at my toes, as if pulling it out of some morass. The strings met the ball just above the handle, just enough to propel it forward. It dinked over the net, and I almost screamed in joy. Match point on the Simon brothers was a once in a lifetime chance. But then of course, in the matter of time it took for Sam to reach the ball, I knew that was the exact thing I should not be thinking of. That that was the kind of thought that would make me play safe, tentative, and tight, and that I should be thinking about nothing, just feeling and reacting.

Very few people consistently lobbed over me. My height created problems that only two or three other guys on the tour could generate.
But the Simons—what can I say? They lobbed with the best of them. And I knew when I saw the ball rise from Sam’s racquet that it would be a perfect lob. Kaz got to it, though, and flicked it crosscourt. But it caught the tape.

There are dozens of times a match that the ball hits the net cord. Some are service lets; others cut the ball off and drop it. Very few rise back into the air—in essence a coin toss—the direction almost always unclear. Even less frequently does this happen on a match point. The ball hung in the air for what seemed an eternity, and once again I questioned whether Kaz had completed his task. Then it fell onto the other side of the court. Sandy Simon lunged forward and got to the ball only after its second small bounce.

I dropped my racquet and looked up at the E train passing to the east. Manny screamed a terrifying guttural whoop, then gave a high five to an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Kaz fell to his knees and kissed the clay. When he looked back up, the green Forest Hills clay was caked to his lips. NECK FACE was passing again in the distance, and I wondered if it was the very same train I had seen before or if it was simply another tag on another car. It didn’t matter if it was the original or the duplicate, though. What mattered was that the Simon brothers were waiting to shake our hands at the net, and I suddenly had a fondness for them. I was nostalgic for the moment as I was in it. Sandy shook my hand and put his other arm around me, pulling me into a brief embrace. I almost started to cry. Kaz took the last ball from his pocket and tossed it into the stands. Three old men stood from their folding chairs and held their arms into the air, pushing and straining for it as it fell.

MANNY SAT ON
my floor, his freakish limbs snaking across the bare wooden floorboards. Sunlight lit dust floating through the room. I’d let Anne have the couch, the television, the wooden bench, the chair that had been my parents’, the floor lamp shaped like an arrow, and the old wooden chest that we used as a coffee table. I had yet to replace anything. I was traveling so much that most of the time it didn’t matter what was here anyway. I sat on the floor opposite Manny, my own long limbs stretched across the scratched hardwood. We bounced a tennis ball back and forth, avoiding the small pile of paper on the floor between our legs. One pink tab extended from its edges.

Outside, the grille of Manny’s Fiat was bare. The horns were gone. He was wearing Stan Smiths, not cowboy boots. His season of Westerns had ended. After Kaz and I had won Forest Hills, I started to win with other players. Owen Philip and I made it to the second week at the U.S. Open. Kaz was there too, his luck also improving with others. But none of our results were as good as they had been when we were together. Kaz lost in the second round, and when Owen and I played Brown and Baldwin in the quarters, Katie came back to North Carolina with me and she and Manny remarried with the magistrate in the Chapel Hill police station, a building that looked like a UFO from 1950 that had landed in a hillside. Manny had been traveling with me since, hitting, coaching, stringing more racquets. We had been at it for three months.

Now we were off for a week because we hadn’t made the cut for Montreal. The results had been mediocre, enthralling, and tempting. But we had been offered security in the least likely of places: state jobs playing tennis. After the fall semester, Coach Jester was retiring at UNC. They asked me to take his spot, and Manny to assist. We couldn’t turn it down. This month was my last on tour, no matter what the result. Because two more years of wins might still result in no long-term job at all, no money, and no idea of what to do. I had to take what I had when I could.

“She’s going to have to sign them,” Manny said. “I know how this goes.”

“I’d rather just mail them.”

“You gotta do it in person.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I’m serious.”

“I don’t even know where she lives.”

“I know where she lives.” He shrugged. “What? I had to drop off her photos.”

I threw the ball back to him, and he let it bounce right past.

“Come on,” he said and pushed himself up slowly and awkwardly, like a horse rising from a nap. The ball rolled down the hallway and into the empty guest room.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t need to know.”

He picked up the papers, opened the door, and stepped onto the porch. I followed, pulled along again. So many times. Out of bed. To practice. To Forest Hills. Off a chain-link fence. To duel. Now, to divorce. I wondered if, without Manny, I would have ever done anything.

We stepped into the front yard, damp from a rain shower that morning. It was September, and birds were singing in the two overgrown azaleas. Scattered leaves from the high oaks above had fallen
into a thin orange sheet onto the moss below. The bushes were taller than Manny. Anne had made me trim them three years earlier, but they had come back larger than ever, taller even than our small dogwood. As Manny passed one of the giant things, he reached over and shook it. More oak leaves tumbled out of it, and water fell off the web of branches in a small suburban rush. Two cardinals, a loud red male and a camouflaged brown female, screamed as they lifted to a limb above. One rabbit fled from beneath, scurrying past Manny’s feet, leaping over the drainage ditch beside the road and disappearing into the woods on the opposite side of the street. Manny shook off his arm and started the Fiat.

Past the tennis court we turned onto the gravel road that ended at the tail end of Glen Lennox, an old series of duplex cottages built in the ’40s and now filled mostly with graduate students and retired professors. We passed eight or ten of the little buildings, then turned into a small cul-de-sac. We weren’t even a half mile from my house.

“No,” I said.

Manny had always been like this: part coach, part psychiatrist, deciding what I did and didn’t need to know. The low brick bungalow was nondescript. It had a well-kept lawn and no exterior decoration.

“She’s not home,” I said.

“She’s home.”

He turned off the ignition. I took the papers and started up the thin concrete path. The stalks of mowed weeds were thick in the cracks. I carefully avoided stepping on each of them. Before I got even halfway, Anne opened the storm door.

I looked down. I was on a crack. I looked back up. Anne stood on the threshold in a blue and white dress, one of her vintage ones, stitched in a pattern of fleur-de-lis. Her hair was still short, and now there were more tattoos: A flock of small black sparrows flew from the base of her thumb up the flesh of her forearm, scattering as they
ascended. I didn’t know how she spent her days anymore, what mysteries the rest of her body hid.

“Hi,” she said, and motioned me inside. I looked back at Manny. He was leaning against his Fiat and waving to a baby in a stroller that cried as it neared him.

The living room was our old living room. The same furniture was arranged the same way. The window was in the same spot and faced the same direction. I sat in my old chair, the one my father had refinished when he had first married my mother. Anne sat where she always did, at the edge of the couch facing me, her good ear closest. I held up the divorce papers.

“Here,” she said and leaned forward. She took them from my hand, laid them on the coffee table, flipped to the page with the tab on it, and lifted a pen from the top of a half-empty crossword.

“You don’t have to do it right now.”

She put the pen to paper and signed, then set it back atop the crossword. “You just play . . . Thailand?”

“Uh. Casablanca,” I said, stunned.

“With who?”

“Jordan.”

“You gonna keep playing with him?”

I shrugged.

“You alright?”

I shrugged.

She said, “You OK with this?”

She pointed at the papers. I stuck out my bottom lip. Her camera was on the table beside her.

“Pick that up,” I said.

I felt a thrill unvisited by my system in months as she pushed the viewfinder against one spooky blue eye.

“The wreck,” I said. “It was my fault.”

The flash exploded. Anne calmly placed the dark photo on the table, then lifted the pen—the one that had just ended our marriage—and wrote THE WRECK, IT WAS MY FAULT onto the white space at the bottom.

“How?” she said, calm and detached, like a detective investigating our lives.

“The brakes.”

“What part?”

“The footplate. It fell off.”

“I remember you looking around for something.”

“Yeah. That’s what it was.”

The room dimmed as a cloud passed in front of the sun. Anne looked at me and nodded. My deepest secret and she nodded, as if she had already known. I pointed at the camera. She put the camera back to her eye, more slowly than before.

I said, “And I know you and Kaz slept together again this year, after charades.” No flash. She lowered the camera.

“I know,” I said.

She looked around the room like she might find someone else to ask.

“He tell you that?” Anne said.

“He didn’t have to. I made him promise me.”

I opened my right hand in the air, palm to the ceiling, the logic of our routine obvious. She looked at me through the dust, lit here the same as it was in our house—my house—illuminated by the now horizontal sunbeams cutting through the room and landing on the wall in a sharp orange stencil of the window.

“Kaz left ten minutes after you did.”

Anne might hide a secret for years, but once she spoke, she almost never lied. I could tell this was the truth.

“Come here,” she said.

I didn’t move.

“Come here,” she said and patted the cushion beside her.

I walked across the floor. She grabbed the pocket of my jeans and pulled me down. If they hadn’t done it all, exactly the same, that meant that there was credit beyond bananas and deflated mattresses, that my faith in our voodoo had been nonsense. That we had won not because I had wiped cream cheese off Kaz’s face at the right time and place, but we had won because we had won. She put her hand on my knee. I had a brief taste of what it was like to be with someone you were not married to. I buried my face into her neck and held it there. She smelled like suntan lotion. I put my hands under her shirt and felt the sides of her stomach. I avoided touching the scar in the middle. We kissed sloppy and wet. We were rushing, not because Manny was outside, but because it felt like this was something that could stop, and I didn’t want to give it the chance.

There were tattoos everywhere, those little birds I had seen on her wrist multiplied across her bare flesh. The scar on her stomach was a smooth flat line. She had smaller scars on her back, holes filled in with flesh up and down her spine. Residue of the accident. I had never seen them. I felt them as my fingers inched along her skin. She climbed on top of me, and then we fell onto the floor. I rolled on top of her and said, “You alright?” and she said, “What?” Her eyes were closed. She couldn’t read my lips.

Afterwards, we lay on the rug, looking up at the cracked ceiling. She held her tattooed arms into the air and wiggled them, as if to show me how fine she was. “I had a premonition that I was going to die.”

“Just now?”

“The other day. My Quick Pick numbers came up bad.”

“You’re playing the lottery?”

She nodded. It was something I had never known her to do in the past. She was a tattooed lottery player. My wife was only a memory of this woman.

“The numbers were bad. All fours.”

“Fours?”