Doubles (8 page)

Kaz, though. The day after the accident, he moved into my guest room.

That night he took me to Sue-nami. In the entryway hung photos of the two of us at Wimbledon, the French Open, at Forest Hills. Playing at Ephesus Park at age nine. One of Kaz’s old racquets hung behind the register, a wooden Wilson with its press clamped on. The wallpaper of trees had faded to a dull yellow, the vast forest finally now in autumn. His mother hugged me and led us to a table built around a huge central range. I could tell she was nervous, unsure of what to say. A miniature fishing boat filled with sushi arrived, rolls I would never be able to identify. By myself, I was helpless in a sushi restaurant. I had been too spoiled for years, riches of raw fish delivered to me by women who smiled and nodded enthusiastically. We ate it all and more. We drank massive amounts of sake and laughed at a waitress who had a piece of dried seaweed stuck to her rear end. It seemed impossible that one piece of seaweed could hang on for that long. I felt like it was the first funny thing I’d seen in weeks.

After the meal, Kaz’s mother directed us to lie on the floor. There was only one other couple dining. She didn’t care what they thought.
We positioned ourselves prostrate on our stuffed stomachs. Kaz’s mother was just a little thing, not even five feet tall. She took the shoes off her miniature feet and then stepped onto us, one foot apiece. Then she began to walk in small steps, up and down our backs, strategically placing each foot on the right muscles.

“It make you digest,” she said. The same explanation she had intoned for years.

After dark that night, I got out of bed to adjust the AC. In the hallway I heard a pulsing gasp from behind the closed door of the guest room. I leaned towards the sound. It was Kaz. I was scared of what I was hearing. But still I listened. It was sobbing.

The next day Kaz bought plywood, two-by-fours, and power tools. He must have spent hundreds of dollars on those tools. They’re still in my closet, used only that one afternoon.

When he took me outside he held out his arms. On either side of my backyard stood a ramp of wood at a low angle off the ground. Each had a hole cut near its high point.

“Cornhole,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

Red and black beanbags filled a white milk crate. Kaz lifted two and threw. The first hit the board with a thud and slid off the end, but the second arced high and dropped straight through the hole. He turned and said, “Cornhole.”

I soon began to worry that my neighbors would complain. For days, the thump of beanbags on wood was constant. One night we played so long that Kaz eventually drove to Wal-Mart and bought a bag of glowsticks, which he placed inside the holes and along the edges of the boards so that we could continue into the darkness. My yard looked like it had grown two miniature alien landing strips.

I developed a highly effective technique involving a low bend and release. One Sunday we were eating breakfast at Dip’s, a family soul
food restaurant, and I said, “My butt is so sore from cornhole.” My butt really was sore. The diners around us turned, and I felt a strange and guilty joy, like I was playing hooky. That I shouldn’t be having fun.

“Let’s get our tickets,” Kaz said.

It was two days before Delray Beach. He’d been with me for almost two weeks by then. We were so conditioned to fly one-way internationally on a few hours’ notice that it was the only travel that made sense.

I said, “I need to think about it.”

“We have to move.”

“Give me another day.”

“We have to leave.”

“I gotta stay.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know!”

He looked around the crowded dining room, then sighed and stared into his grits.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” I said.

It’s not hard to find a doubles partner on short notice. As long as you get there in time and make the rankings cutoff, you can show up and just put your name on the sign-up form and see who else comes in. But Kaz didn’t have to resort to that. He got on the phone and had a replacement within the hour. Gentleman John Maxwell, who stood six-two and had legs that looked swollen with thick tendon and muscle. John was known for immaculate and obsessive control. He bullied partners into agonizing practice times, stretched workouts too long, arranged endless court schedules around his convenience. When he served, it sounded like a baseball being hit. He was top 50.

Kaz kept asking, “Are you sure?”

“Just go,” I said.

This was the start of my sleeping late and some of that other stuff. What I should have done is filed for my protective ranking
immediately, because every week you don’t play, you lose more points. But I kept planning to return in a week or two. By the time I finally filed, I had lost almost a third of my points and was 112th in the world.

I almost never had the urge to play. Intricacies of brands of grip, changes in ball velocity on different surfaces, altitudes, strategies honed over years were now useless. There was a feeling of deadweight and waste.

For a few days after Kaz left I played cornhole by myself. One afternoon I threw cornhole on all four bags. Four cornholes was impossible. The toss is thirty feet long, and the hole is only six inches wide. When the fourth bag passed into that small, magical void, I fell to my knees in my backyard and screamed up at the trees like I had just won Wimbledon.

I OPENED MY
eyes to the back of Manny’s couch. My head felt like it had been filled with cotton. I knocked over a cup of water on the floor as I swung my legs around and sat.

“That my little Slow?” Manny called, water puddling around my clammy heels.

The smell of eggs filtered through the cotton in my head, and I walked slowly towards the kitchen, where Manny stood in limp white underwear pulled high above his navel, like a skeleton in a loincloth frying eggs.

“Jesus,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I feel like I got drugged.”

“That’s because I drugged you.”

Manny flipped the eggs onto a plate.

“Seriously.”

Manny turned and said, “No, I’m serious too. I drugged you.”

I remembered nothing past cornhole.

“I gobstopped you,” Manny said.

“I’m sorry?”

“GHB. Yellow Dog came to play.”

“GHB?”

He set a plate of eggs and toast in front of me, like a nurse tending the sick. “These are for you.”

“You serious?”

“You guys needed to relax.”

“You can’t drug us.”

“Those eggs is getting cold, Slow.”

The idea that I had been drugged by my own coach was both unbelievable and completely believable. I looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. Kaz’s match started at eleven.

“How’d Kaz get home?”

Manny winked.

“He here?” I said.

“He needed to relax, is what he needed to do,” Manny said.

I opened the door to the guest room. Kaz lay on his stomach, on top of the sheets, wearing a shirt and no pants. The solid tan line at the middle of his thighs made it seem as if he actually were wearing a pair of shorts, but it was only his olive skin covered in a fine down. It was nothing new. I had seen him naked more than any human other than Anne.

“Kaz,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“Hey.”

One eye opened.

“What?” He looked around.

“Manny’s.”

Kaz held his hand to his forehead for a moment. “Where’s my pants?”

He stood unsteadily and bent to look under the bed, pointing his rear end directly towards me. Manny stepped into the doorway and said, “Hello, sailor!”

Kaz turned, his shirt falling just above his crotch, penis dangling below the hem.

“That shit was hilarious last night,” Manny said.

“Where’s my pants?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Manny said.

“What was hilarious?” I said.

“I don’t think those pants even exist anymore.”

“What?” Kaz said.

“What was hilarious?”

Manny pointed at both of us and said, “I love you guys.”

“Fuck,” Kaz said. “I have to go, like right now.”

“Here,” I said, pulling a pair of my own jeans from my bag. “Take these.”

Kaz slid them on without underwear. They stretched far beyond his feet. He held them up with one hand as he rushed into the hallway. I heard him bang open the door and sit with a thud. I knew he was putting on his shoes. Manny made us keep them in the hall because of their stench. After all those years, he didn’t care about whether or not we were drugged or even made it to a match on time, but still our shoes couldn’t enter the room.

“Manny,” I said. I didn’t even know where to start.

“You needed a night off. Both of you.”

“Manny.”

“You loved it.”

“We do anything . . . ?”

“You went to India.”

“With those women?”

“With those women? I love you, Slow.”

“Did I . . . ?”

“No. You didn’t. You just went to India and sort of looked around, pilgrimage style.”

Kaz was gone. Manny plugged in the video camera. On screen appeared an image of me and Kaz, naked, slow dancing to Enya with the naked Indian women. Our arms reached around their waists like couples at my middle school dances. The woman whom I was dancing with let go and tapped the other on the shoulder, and they started
dancing together. Kaz and I put our arms around each other and started to slow dance. Beside me, Manny covered his face with his hands and laughed. Kaz put his head on my shoulder, and we swayed together, naked, holding each other gently. Before long, the women tore us apart, and we started dancing with them again.

“Didn’t that feel good?” Manny said.

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t have to say it, but I know,” Manny said. “It felt good.”

In the bathroom I found that someone had written SLOW’S PENIS in magic marker on my penis. I knew who had written it, too. It was my handwriting. I stared at the letters and wondered what I would have been doing at home. I knew. I would have been doing nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror, haggard and nervous and thrilled. Manny was right. I felt alive, dangerous. Free. I had my name written on my penis, and it did feel good.

OFF THE SUBWAY
in Queens, I emerged from a covered bridge to a cobblestone courtyard surrounded by buildings with exposed beams set against stucco, as if they had been constructed from gingerbread and frosting. Trees hung low over narrow streets. It was like I’d entered some Tudor fiefdom, a tony fairyland in Queens. Forest Hills. An English village off the G train.

I rushed through four tree-lined blocks to the West Side Tennis Club. This was hallowed tennis ground. The U.S. Open had been held here until 1977, when Connors beat Vilas in a match played two months after I was born. Back when tennis meant wooden racquets and serve and volley, when the Open was played on grass, players rustling silently over manicured lawns just browning at the service line and net, when the crowds were hushed masses from country clubs. White balls. And the smell, I knew the smell; it was still the smell here, and at Wimbledon, at Queen’s Club, Newport. It was still the smell in Chapel Hill beside my mother’s lawn in late afternoons in the summer. It was the fragrance of a freshly mowed lawn.

They still had challenger tournaments at Forest Hills, lower-level professional events for journeymen warming up for the majors. Kaz and I had won our first tournament ever here, in 2000, and had won the doubles title for six years in a row. We had never lost a match here. It was a club record.

From the curb, the clubhouse was small and low-lying, another gingerbread construction of timber and plaster overgrown with ivy and saddled with courts on either side. Like a country house in the Cotswolds, a lodge for the weary of Queens. It reminded me of the club near my house as a child, where Katie and I had lifeguarded in the afternoons before fox-trotting at Junior Assembly at night.

Manny stayed behind to meet with a prospective client. I wondered if it wasn’t some masked sexual escapade. Inside, a woman sat behind a massive wooden desk wearing a yellow shirt with crabs printed on it, pearls nestled into leathery cleavage. She smiled in an offhand way at me, as if she barely had time. I felt unofficial and embarrassed, naked without my tennis bag. The hallway was completely empty. The building was silent. I thought she might recognize me when I asked about Kaz, but she only said, “The Chinaman?”

I nodded.

“Court Four.”

As she watched me pass, she wiped her hands on the tops of her breasts. I wondered if that was standard for women with sweaty palms. I hoped it was.

The hallway was lined with photos. Bill Tilden in 1926 playing in an actual tennis sweater. Champion women whom I could not identify floating across the lawns in large floppy hats and long layered dresses. Here was Connors with his Wilson T2000, the space-age aluminum racquet. Here was Billie Jean King still looking mostly female. Chris Everett at sixteen. And then, at the end of the hall, there were modern photos, including one of me and Kaz after our fourth win, standing with the trophy and club president at the net. Kaz looked filthy even in the photo. I towered over them both. A small brass plate read SMITH AND GLOVER, 2004 DOUBLES CHAMPIONS.

I emerged from the back of the clubhouse, where, past a dozen metal tables beneath orange and blue striped umbrellas all tilted at
the same rakish angle, the velvet of sixteen grass courts stretched out, empty, without nets or lines. These were used for an ITA women’s tournament later in the summer, but beyond the grass courts stood the clay courts, where balls now rose over green wind-stops hung on fences, bodies rushing past, umpires sitting atop their high chairs like lifeguards of tennis. The faint pop of balls flattening for a split second against strings drifted to my perch. The C train was passing on the elevated tracks beyond, and because of the vicinity to LaGuardia, three separate aircraft were visible, roaring low in the sky. I had heard that air traffic was the primary reason the Open had finally moved to Flushing Meadows, bending to years of noise complaints from Arias and Nastase. But I didn’t believe it. Now, compared to Flushing Meadows, Forest Hills was a quaint, soundproof paradise.