Doubles (9 page)

Beyond it all was the grandstand, where the finals of those Opens had been held, a majestic three-quarter circle of high, raked seating around an empty, neglected court. The crumbling structure was radiant in the morning sunlight. The stands were elegant, molded perhaps from simple concrete, but with the look of Grecian authority, sculpted eagles at precipices and an old box office window that still read TICKETS $8. Every entrance was hung with yellow caution tape.

A teenage boy was on the stadium court practicing serves. I envied him. I wanted to run him off and step onto the court, by myself, a full hopper beside me. It was a perverse tennis desire to long to serve into an empty court, but ever since my aborted attempt with the pink ball, the desire had only increased. As I watched, the teenager sent one ball jumping into the rotting wooden backdrop, rousing a group of pigeons from the shadows. They scattered against the sky with a hollow gurgle of wings. All play these days was on the outer courts, green clay surrounded by metal bleachers
or a handful of folding chairs sparsely occupied by old men sitting alone, reading newspapers folded vertically. The grandstand was just a crumbling souvenir.

I sat in one of those folding chairs beside Court 4; applied sunscreen to my nose, the tops of my ears, and my bald spot; and folded my own newspaper vertically.

“Slow,” someone said. It was Malik Al Arif. A dark Moroccan with a thin black goatee. Singles. Singles players didn’t keep up with us. They just shared locker rooms. Malik told me about Morocco. It had been hot.

“Where you been?” he said, whispering. The chairs were set so close against the fence that anything you said could be heard on court.

“Home.”

“You retire?”

“No,” I said. “My wife’s sick.”

As he spoke, the eyes of the old men suddenly all left their newspapers in a gradual collective turn of the heads, as if watching the course of the slowest tennis ball ever. But it wasn’t a tennis ball. It was a yellow dress, a freckled piece of my childhood that still made me nervous. It was Katie.

She had almost no nose to mention—it was washed away by the sunlight—only large tortoiseshell sunglasses above a sandbar of freckles stretching from cheek to cheek. Her shoulders were boyish, square and sharp. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and a light layer of down was backlit along her jaw. It all seemed made only for summer, somewhere, anywhere. For the first time, though, there was a world approaching that I did not know. I imagined her choking Manny. I heard her yell for him to do the monkey-style. I pictured her lips on the body of another woman.

She said, “Well well well.”

“You look great,” I said, and she stuck her bottom lip out, as if to say, isn’t that strange. The gesture had been with her since childhood.

She pulled up one of the folding chairs beside mine—only feet away from the fence at the edge of the court—and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Came up for work.”

“Looks like you’re working hard.”

“Don’t move,” I said. I was inspired. I rushed back to the clubhouse, where the outdoor bar by the patio was staffed by a young man in a tuxedo. I wondered what it was like to wear a tuxedo before noon.

“Champagne,” I said.

“Bottle?”

I nodded and shrugged, sticking my own bottom lip out like Katie. The bill was $70, and when I placed Combover’s card on top, the waiter said, “Dude, you got a bunch of suntan lotion,” and lifted a finger to the side of his nose.

I wiped it off and became suddenly nervous, acutely aware of an elderly woman passing on the sidewalk. She looked at me, and I wondered if she was going to ask me what I was doing. She only grimaced and put a fingernail to her front tooth. Katie lit up when I approached.

“Why does champagne have to be saved for special occasions?” I said. “Not that this isn’t a special occasion. In Russia they drink it like water. I trust the Russians in their regard for champagne.” It was as if the Russians had taken over my tongue.

“I thought they drank vodka like water in Russia,” she said.

“Vodka is the water in Russia. There’s a fine line there.”

“What do you know about Russia?”

She grinned slyly, knowingly. She was a teaser. A know-it-all. I held my plastic champagne flute into the air and said, “Frankenfurter.”

She took a small camera out of her bag and shot. And then Anne was suddenly with us. I tasted the champagne and immediately thought it had been a bad purchase. It was sweet. Not that I didn’t
like sweet champagne. It was Anne. She liked only the driest of champagnes. I had memorized her palate and now reacted more strongly to her aversions than my own. No peppermint-flavored candies. No blue cheese. No endives. No licorice. Nothing too sweet. Nothing with milk chocolate. So much of what I had spent years perfecting—the acuity of another human’s senses, the smallest details of the game of tennis—was now completely useless. I was watching the game, not playing. I was drinking champagne for myself.

Eventually two small Asian men emerged on court, huge tennis bags hung over their shoulders. They wore matching dark blue Adidas warm-up suits with WATTANAPANIT sewn across the back. Rama and Kama. The Indonesian twins. They were ranked in the mid-60s. They unzipped their jackets almost simultaneously. Nobody in tennis wore jackets with their names on them. It must have been Davis Cup swag. Neither could have been more than five-eight, and they wore shorts that revealed only a few inches of hairless leg above high orange socks. I knew them well. They ran down everything and threw trash at you, lobs, shots with no pace. They baffled strategy.

Kaz appeared, hanging his head as he dropped his bag at his chair. His hair was balled into a bizarre nest on the side, and he wore a shirt that had an autograph on it. It was clearly something he had just found in the locker room. Usually, if he was winning, he’d wear the same shirt every day. The same
socks
. He spent huge amounts of energy getting his winning clothes to the laundry in assorted spots across the globe. When he bought new shoes, he had to immediately scuff the top of the right toe so that the mark was visible. That was the toe that he would drag after his serve. He had to have it scuffed before he ever served with it, though. And the other foot, it could never be scuffed. It had to be perfect. Sometimes he would buy new shoes just for a clean left shoe. We got most of our shoes for free from Adidas, but when our rep heard about this tic she stopped servicing Kaz.

He draped a towel over his head.

“What’s wrong with him?” Katie said.

“Manny drugged us.”

“Gobstopper?”

“Yes. Does he do this?”

“It’s one of his things.”

Gentleman John crossed the court towards us and said, “What’d you do to him?”

“It was Manny.”

John turned to the towel and said, “You went out with
Manny
?”

Kaz finally emerged and took a notepad out of his bag.

“Here we go,” Katie said.

He carefully paced the length between the chair and the net post, then wrote a figure down. He counted the bananas from his bag, then noted it. He looked at the clock and wrote down the time, then closed the book and began to trade forehands with one of the Wattanapanits before stopping to write more. Throughout it all, he made sure to not step on any lines.

The umpire called time. Kaz’s serve was never his strong suit, but he spun his first out wide, cutting away from one of the Wattanapanits, who swung and touched nothing. I heard the whiff through his strings. The next serve went into the other one’s body, which he blocked back, floating high into the air. Kaz approached the net calmly and slammed an overhead, the ball bouncing so high that it landed outside the fence. He was careless and cavalier, as if these points were an intrusion in his otherwise busy day. He won his game at love, then sent his first return of serve down the line with a forehand passing shot, pointing towards the spot.

Katie was stoic, silent behind her sunglasses.

“You getting this?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m getting this.”

“Well, come on.”

She shrugged.

“Something wrong?”

She stuck out her bottom lip.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She watched Kaz hit a leaping overhead backhand, spinning as he landed, her beautiful head moving to watch the ball cut between the twins at the net. It settled into the hands of a young ball girl, who bent like a robot to settle the ball.

“I’ll tell you later.”

She watched a miss-hit service return fly off a Wattanapanit frame and float high into the sun. She kept her eyes pointed towards the sky for a second longer than needed, her face falling only after the ball had already landed. I wondered if it was the residue of adolescence that biased me, that had me still convinced that she was the pinnacle of beauty. I loved Anne, but her greatest fault was that she was not Katie. She could never do anything about it.

After one long rally, more than a dozen strokes, one of the Wattanapanits finally hit a short ball, and Kaz drilled it down the line. He pumped his fist, and I yelled, “Come on!”

Katie looked at me blankly. There was a scar on her lip that I had forgotten, a bite from a dog in elementary school. It seemed to make her even more perfect.

I said, “Don’t feel sorry for me because I’m not playing.”

“It’s not that,” she said and poured more champagne. “Just ignore me. I’m in a weird mood.”

A few times throughout the rest of the match she cheered, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. I kept it up, though, yelling at the top of my lungs. Mostly I didn’t mean it either. I just didn’t want anyone to know how jealous I was.

YOUNG MEN IN
crumpled athletic gear ate pasta off chipped event china beside silent old women in pearls and their patrician husbands in boat shoes talking incessantly about their own tennis games. Paunches circled each other in packs before breaking off into individual paunch satellites to give a player a pat on the back. It was close to ninety degrees even when the sun was down, and I was sweating on the porch outside the dining room, drunk. Kaz was eating so much pesto penne that I could only think of it scientifically.

“Slow was about to have a heart attack,” Katie said.

“It’s harder to watch,” Kaz said.

“I mean cheering for you.”

I ordered more champagne, but the waiter, a young man with an Eastern European accent, told me only beer was free. I gave him Combover’s Visa. I had used it so many times already that I was starting to think of it as my own.

“You a player?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see what I can work out. What’s your name?”

“You don’t have to work anything out.”

“No, really. Sometimes it’s no problem.”

Katie looked at her feet.

“I’m not playing this week,” I said. “Just put it on the card.”

After he returned with the bottle, a young man with a thick blond beard and thin, greasy dreadlocks approached from across the patio. I’d grown up playing him, through juniors and up. His name was Ben Gables. But no one called him by his real name. They just called him Brah.

“Real pain for my sham friends,” Brah said. “Champagne for my real friends.”

Kaz nodded, his mouth full.

“Kazuhiro, you my hero.”

Katie took the champagne bottle from the table and walked with it towards the edge of the patio. She stepped past the edge of the light and into the dark grass of the empty courts. I waved to Brah and followed. We padded across those netless courts like we were in a carpeted museum after hours. It felt soft and illicit, and we didn’t stop until the grandstand loomed before us. I imagined the matches captured in those photos that lined the clubhouse walls. It was hard for me to picture the actual events in color. This had been the epicenter of American tennis, and now it was the dark space that halted Katie and me in our flight from Brah. Inside those stands were the old locker rooms, where Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner actually took showers between sets in the ’60s, where the national tennis mystique was cultivated. I had once convinced a groundsman to let me in. Those rooms no longer had electricity. The locker rooms we used were now in the clubhouse, the very same ones used by the members playing slow-motion doubles on Sunday afternoons with knee braces. Kaz and I owned Forest Hills, but it was like getting the keys to Atlantis. The magic was gone. Katie caught my eye as she turned away. She knew where she was going. At the end of the path dim lights glimmered on the undulating surface of the pool.

 

On the Fourth of July before I started sixth grade, Reginald Edwards, the lifeguard at the Chapel Hill Country Club, held a jar of pennies beside the pool and swept his arm out before him, sending the coins
through the air in a widening copper arc. Sunlight glittered off the newest ones before they spattered into the deep end. Katie and I dove after them with the rest of the kids. As our competitors failed under the pressure of twelve feet of water and rose, we held out, snatching those glimmering coins off the bottom with our wrinkled fingertips. We were masters of the pool. We spent every possible day there. Katie tanned from morning to dusk while I cooled off between sets played on courts only yards away. After the pennies, Reginald dumped a bucket of goldfish into the pool. Katie and I captured the most quivering creatures, our fingertips grazing each other as we reached towards the same elusive fish. They wriggled through the water like pennies come alive. When Reginald tossed the greased watermelon into the deep end, we stayed on our chaises. This task was only for adults. But when father after father emerged empty-handed, laughing and blowing their noses, it became clear that the melon was not coming up. I moved. Reginald’s voice disappeared in midshout as my head passed into that blue other world. The green oval was dark and heavy below. I pushed it across the tiled pool bottom until it reached the shallow end, where I could lift it into the sunlight. Before I did, though, I opened my eyes underwater and looked up. The shifting form of Katie stood poolside. I said, “I love you,” and a mass of bubbles came out of my mouth and rose to the surface, exploding silently into the air above.