Doubles (7 page)

The buzzer sounded, and Manny motioned to it, too busy with the phone to bother. I pressed ENTER. Steps sounded down the hallway, and he just held the phone to his ear and nodded. There was a knock at the door, and Manny motioned towards it with his hand, as if I
should open it. I made no move, though, unsure if he was really serious about not shutting off the tape first. As I waited, the door opened on its own, and Paige stepped through, holding a lit cigarette in one hand while feeding herself a peeled quail egg in the other. I stood before her in the narrow hallway and turned to Manny in desperation. He looked up, then dropped to the floor. His cell phone skidded across the hardwood. He yanked the connecting cables from the back of the camera. The television went blank as Paige stepped around me.

“What were you watching?” she said.

Manny looked up from his knees. Kaz’s voice squeaked tiny from the cell phone. “Hello? Hello?” But Manny said nothing, just grinned up at Paige.

“You were watching me, weren’t you?”

He opened his mouth in mock amazement. Paige turned to me.

“Did you just see me naked?” she said.

I looked at Manny, but he kept his eyes on her.

“You did,” she said. She took a drag from the cigarette, then blew a mouthful of smoke into my face. “I want to see it.”

As the smoke blew past my ears, Manny slowly stood up, holding his hands in front of him. She blew more smoke at him. It curled around his long, thin fingers.

“If you don’t show me, I’m going to put this out on your chest,” she said. “I swear to fucking God.”

“Why am I annoying you?” Manny said.

“What?”

“It just seems like lately I’ve been annoying you.”

“You have been.”

“What is it?”

“You’re annoying.”

“You love me,” he said and reached for her. She let him grab her around the waist, but held her head away from him. Then she raised
the cigarette to his face and said, “You tell me what you were watching, or I swear to God I’m going to put this out on your nose.”

I believed, 100 percent, that she would do exactly that.

Then she turned and asked me again. “You just see me naked?”

“No,” I said. I knew I wasn’t convincing. I had to give her something, or I was going to crack. “But I might have just seen
somebody
naked.”

“Katie?” Paige said, and Manny smiled his huge smile.

Paige placed her cigarette back into her mouth, and Manny kissed her on the cheek. She walked into the kitchen, and Manny looked at me in relief. Static flickered on the television, buzzing in the corner. I missed this crazy logic. Being here with Manny made me feel sane for the first time in months. I thought, There is no growing up, no childhood and then adulthood. Not for us. There are just constants, traits that harden. Patterns that must repeat. Allegiances. To my wife, to Kaz, and to Manny, who was now drinking champagne with a woman whom I had known for under an hour and whom I had already seen naked. I was confident that these lines were messy and thrilling but permanent. I let Paige pour me a glass.

Manny raised his drink into the air.

“Frankenfurter!” he said. It made no sense. It was a remnant of some locker room joke from a European challenger tournament in 1999. I couldn’t even remember what it was supposed to mean. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was ours, a benchmark in our shared history.

“Frankenfurter,” I said and drank.

I STOOD BEFORE
an unlit glass storefront with a dusty mannequin in the window. In white hand-painted lettering, a crooked green sign hung by twine around the mannequin neck read DRY CLEANING $2 A SHIRT. Heavy velvet curtains blocked the view of the rest of the shop.

“This is it,” Manny said.

“This is what?”

“This is the secret place.”

I looked back at the mannequin. “In there?”

“It’s secret.”

Kaz finally appeared under a streetlamp in a dark blue Adidas workout suit, his hair tied into a short, greasy ponytail. He had a thin beard. As he neared, I could already see that his fingernails were long. It was the telltale growth of a winning streak. When he was winning, he wouldn’t shave or cut his hair. He kept a diary of everything he ate and did on a day of tournament play so that, if it worked, he could recreate that exact day again when needed. As his partner, I was caught up in this cycle. After six years of winning, our routines at Forest Hills were concrete. Where we ate, when we ate, how we slept, whom we saw. Other tournament routines could shift dramatically from year to year, changing with different results. But at Forest Hills the routines were always the same, the results always victory.

He looked up and stopped walking.

“What are you doing?” he said. Traces of his Japanese childhood still lingered in his wide vowels.

“Manny got me.”

Kaz looked at Manny in confusion.

“Got you what?”

I looked at Manny.

“You two can’t be apart,” Manny said. “Get Slow out there with you.”

“With me for what?” Kaz said.

My face warmed with blush.

“I know you need him for all your voodoo shit.”

“He can’t play,” Kaz said.

“Manny,” I said.

“Just work out. Get things going.”

Kaz laughed nervously, and that’s when I knew what this was. Kaz hadn’t said anything about my coming back. This was about Manny. No one else wanted his fake coaching. For us, we knew that wasn’t what he was good for. He was a hitting partner, a stringer, and a booker of hotels, but he was more than that. He was our entertainment and our comfort. I had rarely thought about the fact that he also needed us. But now, as he stared at us with that sheepish grin, I thought about the fact that he was unemployed. This was his parent trap. He wanted his bosses to reunite. He wanted his job back.

Kaz hugged me. I smelled his deep onion body odor, snorted in disgust, and said, “Guess you’ve been winning.”

So much time together had rendered our relationship stiff in surprising ways. Manners and silences maintained sanity after years of shared space and fortune. The dim light from a streetlamp on the corner glistened on Kaz’s greasy eyelids, low over his thin, almond eyes. Young men and women in tight jeans and tighter T-shirts with floppy hats and messenger bags passed us on the sidewalk, looking sidelong at me and Kaz holding each other, gazing into each other’s eyes.

“Come on, kids,” Manny said. He opened the door to the secret place and beckoned us into the dark.

 

Kaz and I had been partners for twenty-three years. His family lived in Midway, the ghetto of Chapel Hill, a neighborhood less than two square miles located adjacent to some of the most expensive real estate in the state. The neighborhood was occupied with generations of black families whom the rest of Chapel Hill either ignored or arrested. His mother was Japanese, but his father was one of a long line of black Midway residents and had been born in a house three blocks from where they now lived. He had been stationed as an air force mechanic in South Korea in the late ’70s, and when he returned, he came with Kaz and his mother, Sue.

For years, Sue had barely spoken a word of English, but when we were in sixth grade she opened Sue-nami, a sushi restaurant off Highway 54. It was in a strip mall in what used to be an old gun shop, and the walls were hung with wallpaper made from large-scale photographs of life-size trees. It was engineered to produce the illusion that you had entered a clearing in a forest. When we were in high school, after practice, we would go to Sue-nami and Sue would bring us wooden boats filled with sushi. Afterwards we would lie on the blue carpet and she would massage us by walking across our backs, one foot on each of us. I envisioned toxins releasing with each tiny step, knots untying in my tight shoulders. Kaz and I would sometimes end up facing each other on the floor, side by side, laughing and grunting and moaning as she made her way across shoulders tightened from hundreds of serves. I never knew if it was a Japanese tradition or not. For all I knew, it could have been Sue’s invention. My family did not attend church, but for me this was prayer. It was ritual. It was otherworldly and relaxing and transporting.

Sue’s husband was a welder who dropped a bundle of rebar on his left foot and crushed it. It was amputated when Kaz was five. Part of his rehabilitation included exercise on the cheapest prosthetic I had ever seen, just an oblong slab of jiggling rubber that he kept shoed with a black velcro Reebok. There was a tennis court near Midway at an apartment complex called Millcreek, which was occupied almost entirely by undergraduates so well-to-do that they didn’t need to live in dorms, they could live in a complex with its own well-maintained tennis court that none of them ever used. Or if they did use the court, they were too scared to try when the one-footed black man with bloodshot eyes was on it hitting muddy tennis balls to a five-year-old half-Japanese kid. My older cousin lived in Millcreek at the time. I don’t remember when I first met Kaz, but I do remember playing tennis with him there while his father sat in the shade of a pine tree at the farthest edge of the court and smoked a menthol Kool.

By twelve we were ranked ninth in the country for doubles. Individually we rotated in and out of the top 15. By high school we had already been partners for almost a decade. Sometimes when Kaz left a message on my answering machine, I mistook him for myself—on my
own phone
. On VH1 a few weeks ago, Keith Richards had said that the Rolling Stones weren’t a band anymore; they were now a single musician. I thought,
That’s how it is with Kaz
.

During our troubles getting pregnant, Anne told me that she resented the fact that every time she ovulated I was in a hotel room with Kaz. I
was
always in a hotel room with Kaz, or a locker room, or a tennis court. I was everywhere with Kaz. I always had been.

 

Manny led us into a short, dark hallway, no larger than a closet, and the door swung shut behind us. The space was draped in thick velvet curtains, one of which Manny parted to reveal a narrow room lit only by candles. A bar stood in the middle against the left wall. Six or seven
booths and a few chairs at the bar were the only seating options. At the end of the room, on a stage no larger than my bed, stood a large-breasted woman in a red dress beside a suited man playing the vibraphone. The woman sang softly in Spanish.

“She saying, hombre?” Manny said. Kaz spoke Spanish but did not answer. I did not, but I’d taken enough Spanish classes in middle school to know this one.
Love, your heart is on fire. Love, my heart is on fire. I die. I die.
She repeated herself in drawn-out notes, stretching the melody. I wondered if Kaz didn’t translate because of me.

Manny ordered three tall, thin glasses topped with thick foam.

“There’s egg in these,” he said, sliding one to Kaz. “They make some crazy shit.”

“There alcohol in it?” Kaz said.

“You need to chill.”

“I have to play tomorrow.”

Manny lifted his glass. Kaz tentatively sipped at the foam. I followed his lead. Within minutes, our collective mood began to change. Manny told the story of his threesome. Kaz leaned in, listening intently.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

“Ask her yourself,” Manny said. “She’s coming tomorrow.”

I had not felt so relaxed in months. I gave Combover’s Visa to Manny, and he went to the bar for more.

Kaz and I watched the woman in red. The Spanish was now beyond my grasp. The music was ethereal and hard to follow. Circular melodies rose above wavering notes from the vibraphone. I felt like I had entered a spell.

“Manny’s a nut job,” Kaz said.

“This afternoon he showed me a sex tape.”

“He showed me one, too,” Kaz said.

We let that sit.

“How are you?” Kaz said.

“Good.”

“Pictures?”

“Every day.”

“They say . . . ?”

I shook my head. “It’s just waiting.”

“Zip it zip it zip it,” Manny said, returning from the bar. “Let’s see if those girls will dance.”

He pushed more frothy glasses into our hands and pointed to the bar. Two Indian women sat on the tall stools, both wearing long orange dresses that glimmered metallically in the soft light. They smoked cigarettes and scowled at each other, shaking their heads. They were older than us and seemed intent on a calm evening of disgust at whatever it was they were discussing. But Manny was not deterred. He spread his huge lips into that grin and held his arms open wide. He said, “Ladies!” then he put an arm on the back of each and leaned in. I don’t know what he said next, but it worked. The women stood, looking at each other in mild surprise, as if they had both been lifted into the air by some unseen force. Manny started to dance, and then we all were—Kaz with one of the women in his arms, Manny with the other, and I by myself. I hated dancing, but I had never wanted to dance so much in my life. I invented a dance. It was called the groundstroke. I hit a forehand winner, then a backhand winner. Forehand winner, slice. Forehand winner, backhand winner. Forehand winner, slice. I tossed an invisible ball and served it directly to Kaz, who returned it across the bar. Manny was licking the face of his partner. I started to feel like I might fall. I held myself against the bar and laughed, pointing at Manny licking the Indian woman.

“Do that!” I yelled. “Do that!”

I sat on the damp floor. Manny ran towards me. I closed my eyes and laughed. I threw an invisible beanbag through the air and yelled, “Cornhole!” but the sound didn’t come out. I was amazed at the silence.

“Cornhole! Cornhole! Cornhole!”

AFTER THE ACCIDENT,
friends did not fly in for support. The ones that were already in town stayed away. People would drop off food, silently leaving it on my doorstep even when I was home, sitting ten feet away on the couch.