Love Love (4 page)

“Come on—”

“He killed her!”

Then silence. She watched her brother's stare. He was having difficulty believing what he'd heard, and Judy wasn't entirely sure just how or when those three words had assembled themselves in the language department of her brain. It was almost as if the thought had come after she'd spoken. She'd always blamed her father for her mother's death, but Judy had never put it so bluntly, and the funny thing was, she hadn't even been thinking about her mother—at least not consciously. Her mother was never very far away, right below the surface of the mind. One little touch was all it took to disturb the illusive calm and reveal the fury that burned beneath.

“Okay,” Kevin said. He drained the rest of his second beer and got up. “All right.”

Judy sat down and couldn't think of anything to say, so she took a bite out of the sandwich. It was awful. The bread had an aftertaste of old ice cubes, and there was entirely too much jelly, the sweetness overpowering. She swallowed just to get it the hell away from her tongue.

“I'm gonna go,” Kevin said.

“Yeah.”

As he opened the door and was about to walk through it, he turned and said, “I think he did the best he could.”

Wasn't good enough,
she said to herself.

And yet something collapsed in her when the door closed and she heard the quiet click of the latch. She ran out to her patio and yelled after her brother, who was walking to his car, soaked by the rain that was now coming down hard. She would've given him her umbrella if she knew where it was.

“I'll! Call! You!”

“Okay!” Kevin yelled back, and she watched him go.
You're still you,
she'd told him. Easy for her to say. She wished she'd told him
something smarter. As she watched his red lights fade into the dark afternoon, she heard the phone ringing in the apartment.

“Judy?”

“Yeah?” The voice was familiar but she couldn't place it.

“It's Roger.”

“From the office.”

“Yeah.”

She sat down, sipped her beer, and waited for him to continue.

“Is this a good time to call? I mean you're not in the middle of anything?”

“I'm good,” she said.

“The bird in the lead,” Roger said in a distant, self-conscious voice that sounded as if he was reading from a textbook, “the one that's at the forward point of the V formation, is working the hardest by being the first to break through the air, which offers resistance to its flight. Just as a boat leaves a V-shaped wake of smoother water behind it, the lead bird leaves a V-shaped wake of smoother air behind it. The lead bird creates a trail of air turbulence that helps lift along the V-shaped direction, so it's easier for the other birds to fly in the wake of the lead bird. If you watch a V-formation carefully, you'll notice that the lead bird does not stay in that position for very long and will drop back into the formation, while another, not-as-tired bird takes the lead, breaking through the air first.”

Judy smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

“You're welcome.”

“How did you get my number?”

“I know the guy at HR.”

“You couldn't ask me for it?”

“No,” he said, “I guess not.”

Judy closed her eyes and bit her lower lip. She was doing it again, saying the wrong things. “That was a joke. I was only kidding.”

“I'm beginning to understand that,” Roger said, and it made her laugh. “Do you want to have dinner with me sometime?”

They agreed to meet the next evening at Gaetano's, an Italian restaurant in Red Bank they both knew.

After she hung up the phone, Judy finished her beer and opened another.

“Cheers,” she said to the room, and she clinked her bottle with the three empty ones on the table, the last one with enough gusto to
topple it over. It was Friday night, after all, and tomorrow she had a date. But then she remembered her brother turning around in the middle of her parking lot, his face wet with rain. The box she'd brought back from work was still inside her car, but she didn't need to see the framed photograph to remember it. She and Kevin were holding hands, squinting against the sun as they smiled for the camera, with hope and innocence only youth could justify.

4

N
othing impressed the beginners more than his serve, but like cars and computers and airplanes and anything else that seemed complicated, when broken down to its component parts, the magic was just good, fundamental execution. There was the toss, where Kevin held the fuzzy little ball with his fingertips, raising his arm straight as if he were a statue and letting the ball go at the apex of the lift with a touch of spin. For most amateur players, what they saw at this moment was a yellow, round object hanging momentarily in midair, but for Kevin, who'd tossed up a tennis ball like this since he was eleven years old, the open space above him was as closed and limited as the inside of a closet. When the ball reached the top right corner, he'd draw his feet together, pull his racquet from his arched backside with his thumb on the fifth strip of his grip, and spin and strike the ball on the unpainted hole inside the giant
P
printed on his racquet. During his college years, he would hit the exact same quadrant of squares on the grid of his strings, the joined corners accruing a bright green filigree that he'd happily pick out between points.

Being alone in the club's indoor tennis courts and listening to the hollow, vaguely metallic sound of the ball striking the concrete surface was as soothing as a regular beat of a drum. This was how Kevin started each working day, going over his schedule as he served to emptiness. Balls bounced and struck the canvas fence with a dull thud and rolled to a stop. He thought of the various personalities he'd have to slip into for today. Saturdays were jam-packed, with four one-hour individual sessions taking him to lunch, then the junior camp group from two to six.

Robert Weathers III would be his first, a silver-haired fifty-five-year-old CEO of a small but lucrative drug firm. Robert was a steady client of Kevin's, in here three times a week, and teaching and playing
with people like him was what made Kevin feel more like a whore than a tennis instructor. From the first time they met, Robert made his terms clear.

“Kevin,” he'd told him, “I'm going to win every time. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Kevin said. After doing this for almost a decade, nothing surprised him. At least Bob the Third was comfortable enough with himself to say what he wanted. Last year, there was a guy who was so angry at losing that he threw his racquet at Kevin, launched at his head like a warhead.

“I'm glad we can do business,” Bob the Third said, offering his hand. Kevin took it, feeling the practiced solid squeeze of a veteran handshaker. “I think of this as a positive warm-up to my day.”

“Everyone comes here for a different reason,” Kevin said. “I'm here to give you the workout you want, Mr. Weathers.”

“Call me Robert. And it won't be too terrible, Kevin. You won't have to hold back much, because I'm a very capable player.”

This turned out to be the truth. Robert had a pinpoint forehand and a terrific slice backhand, so all Kevin had to do was not run as hard and flub a return here and there, which actually made him feel worse. A part of him wished it wasn't so easy to play this limp role.

After Robert came Hillary Rosenbaum, a dentist's wife who cared more about her tennis outfits than the game itself. She was a horrendous player, barely able to hit the ball back to him, but she didn't care. She was there so she could tell her friends at Sunday brunch that she was taking lessons with a pro.

His third, Roy McDougall, was a twelve-year-old blimp of a kid. His mother came with him and stayed for the duration, badgering her son from the bench. After their first lesson, Kevin had suggested that she perhaps take advantage of the numerous facilities of the club—swimming, aerobics, yoga, anything. She shook her head tightly and quickly, as if she were trying to get bugs out of her hair.

“You see how fat my son is?”

“Well, he's kinda big for his age, but what does—”

“If I'm not here to push him, you think he'll do better?”

Kevin wasn't about to disagree with this woman, but that was exactly what he'd thought.

“Okay,” she said, smiling like a slasher-flick villain right before she disemboweled her victim. “Next time, he's all yours.”

She disappeared after dropping Roy off for their second lesson. Without his mother, the boy moved like molasses under water. He was a turtle on downers, no matter how much Kevin pushed or even yelled. Unless the balls were hit directly to him, Roy would just let them go by, not even bothering to stretch for the ones that came close. When his mother came back and stayed for the third lesson, Kevin said nothing.

Ball hopper in hand, Kevin walked over to the other side of the court to pick up the sea of yellow balls he'd been serving for the last half hour. His final personal lesson of the day was with Alexa. With her there was no acting, just tennis, though lately it seemed as if her interest in the sport was waning. She'd just started her third year of high school, and instead of asking Kevin about softening her drop shot or putting extra spin on her twist serve as she used to, the topic of conversation between games had turned toward the stupidity of the boys she was dating.

Still, he would take twenty Alexas over his other clients any day. It took her a year, but she now possessed a devastating single-handed backhand that she whipped out like a rapier from its sheath. Contained inside those economic series of muscular movements were tens of thousands of their exchanges on this court, hours of hard work compressed into one perfect swing. Whenever he saw her use it, his chest filled up with a warmth that spread like a shot of whiskey, his pride so strong it almost hurt.

“Hey, Kev!”

Kevin waved to Bill Flanagan, who jogged around the curtained fence and slipped through the flap in the middle of the court.

“You're here kinda early,” Bill said.

“You too.”

Bill was the club's other head tennis instructor and Kevin's closest friend. They'd known each other since high school, which made it something like twenty-five years. They had gone to the same college on the same scholarship, made the same amount of money, and had both messed up their respective marriages.

Bill, in his yellow and blue jumpsuit, chugged his morning bottle of coconut water. “So how did it go at the doctor's? When are they gonna yank out your kidney?”

He hadn't meant to lie, but that's what came out. “It's being discussed,” Kevin said. “No definite dates yet.”

They had always been equals, and maybe that's why Kevin didn't tell him the truth, not wanting to be the lesser one. He would come clean later, when he knew more about the situation, when he was ready.

“Hey, how about we do breakfast? I'll buy,” Kevin said.

“I gotta get to the court for Janice.”

“First-name basis with the mayor of Clinton.”

“Let's hope she can make my parking tickets disappear.”

Bill finished his bottle and looped it high over Kevin's head at the trash can as if he were shooting a basketball, the bottle rotating on its axis so precisely that it looked as if it wasn't spinning at all. Like Kevin, Bill was also an excellent athlete, and as Kevin watched the empty plastic container swish into the mouth of the metal can, he wondered if they should both be more appreciative of their innate gifts.

Robert showed up promptly at eight, as he always did. He was wearing his usual uniform of a white golf shirt and brightly colored shorts, turquoise blue today. His backhand was erratic, so Kevin stayed mostly to his forehand. For the last ten minutes, he worked on Robert's net game, feeding shots to him from the baseline. The CEO of Weathers Pharmaceuticals happily punched ball after ball onto the blue concrete, making satisfactory grunts following each batted shot. His impeccable silver hair never moved as he pivoted quickly to cover the court, and Kevin watched Robert's face as it made its motions: eyebrows furrowed with anticipation, mouth set firm as he reached with his racquet, gleaming white teeth flashing when the ball caught the line. This was probably what he looked like in the boardroom, too, as he figured out ways to push that new drug out quicker, to put away his competition, to win his corporate game.

Time went quickly, even with Hillary Rosenbaum, who unfortunately decided to go Serena Williams on him with a skin-tight hot pink tube-and-shorts combo that made Kevin wish for temporary blindness. Hillary wasn't overweight, but unless you had the physique of a world-class athlete or a supermodel, wearing something as revealing as this was the wrong way to go. Every time she crouched or leaned, fat gathered in satiny pink rolls.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Maria Sharapova,” Kevin said, “eat your heart out.”

But once they got playing, it wasn't too bad, mostly because Kevin suggested that they practice topspin baseline shots, which kept her as
far away from him as possible. At the end of their session, he asked her if she felt comfortable in her suit.