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People ask me where Brooke is, why she isn’t here for the groundbreaking. I tell them the truth. I don’t know.

N
EW
Y
EAR’S
E
VE
, the close of 1998. Brooke and I throw our traditional New Year’s Eve party. No matter how disconnected we may be, she insists that during holidays we give no sign of trouble to our friends and family. It feels as if we’re actors and our guests are an audience. And yet, even when the audience isn’t here, she playacts, and I follow along. Hours before our guests arrive, we pretend to be happy—a dress rehearsal of sorts. Hours after they’re gone, we continue pretending. A kind of cast party.

Tonight there seem to be more of Brooke’s friends and family than mine in the audience. Included in this group is Brooke’s new dog, an albino pit bull named Sam. It growls at my friends. It growls as if it’s been briefed on what Brooke thinks of all of them.

J.P. and I sit in a corner of the living room, eyeballing the dog, which is lying at Brooke’s feet, eyeballing us.

That dog would be cool, J.P. says, if it were sitting
here
. He points to the ground beside my feet.

I laugh.

No. Really. That’s not a cool dog. That’s not
your
dog. This is not
your
house. This is not
your
life.

Hm.

Andre, there are red flowers on this chair.

I look at the chair where he’s sitting and see it as if for the first time.

Andre, he says. Red flowers.
Red flowers
.

A
S
I
PACK FOR THE
1999 A
USTRALIAN
O
PEN
, Brooke frowns and stomps around the house. She’s irritated by my attempted comeback. It can’t be that she resents my hitting the road, given all the tension between us. So I can only assume she thinks I’m wasting my time. She’s certainly not alone.

I kiss her goodbye. She wishes me luck.

I reach the round of sixteen. The night before my match I phone her.

This is hard, she says.

What is?

Us. This.

Yes. It is.

There’s so much distance between us, she says.

Australia is far.

No. Even when we’re in the same room—distance.

I think: You said all my friends suck. How could there not be distance?

I say: I know.

When you get home, she says, we should talk. We need to talk.

What about?

She repeats, When you get home. She sounds overwhelmed. Is she crying? She tries to change the subject. Who do you play?

I tell her. She never recognizes the names or understands what they mean.

She asks, Is it on TV?

I don’t know. Probably.

I’ll watch.

OK.

OK.

Goodnight.

Hours later I play Spadea, my practice partner from New Year’s Day one year ago. He isn’t half the player I am. There have been days in my prime when I could have beaten him with a spatula. But I’ve been on the
road for thirty-two of the last fifty-two weeks, not to mention the training with Gil, the struggles with the school, and the maneuvering with Brooke. My mind is still on the phone with Brooke. Spadea edges me in four sets.

The newspapers are cruel. They point out that I’ve been ousted early from my last six slams. Fair enough. But they say I’m embarrassing myself. Too long at the fair, they say. Agassi doesn’t seem to know when to hang it up. He’s won three slams. He’s nearly twenty-nine years old. How much more does he really hope to accomplish?

Every other article contains the threadbare phrase: At an age when most of his peers are thinking about retiring—

I
WALK IN THE DOOR
and call out Brooke’s name. Nothing. It’s midmorning, she must be at the studio. I spend the day waiting for her to come home. I try to rest, but it’s hard with an albino pit bull eyeing you.

When Brooke gets home, it’s dark and the weather has turned bad. A rainy, wintry night. She suggests we go out for dinner.

Sushi?

Lovely.

We drive to one of our favorite places, Matsuhisa, sit at the bar. She orders sake. I’m starved. I ask for all my favorites. The blue fin sashimi, the crab toro cucumber avocado hand roll. Brooke sighs.

You always order the same thing.

I’m too hungry and tired to bother about her disapproval.

She sighs again.

What’s wrong?

I can’t even look you in the eye right now.

Her eyes are wet.

Brooke?

No, really, I can’t look at you.

Easy does it. Take a deep breath. Please, please, try not to cry. Let’s get the check and go. Let’s just talk about this at home.

I don’t know why, but after all that’s been written about me in the last few days, it’s important that tomorrow’s newspapers don’t report that I was seen fighting with my wife.

In the car Brooke is still crying. I’m not happy, she says. We’re not happy. We haven’t been happy for so very long. And I don’t know if we can ever be happy again if we stay together.

So. There it is. That’s that.

I walk into the house, a zombie. I pull a suitcase out of the closet, which I notice is so organized, so neat, it’s unsettling. I realize how difficult it must be for Brooke, living with my losses, my silences, my peaks and valleys. But I also notice how little space in this closet is allotted to me. Symbolic. I think of J.P.
This is not your house
.

I grab the few hangers holding my clothes and carry them downstairs.

Brooke is in the kitchen, sobbing. Not crying as she did at the restaurant and in the car, but sobbing. She’s sitting on a stool at the butcher block island. Always an island. One way or another, we spend all our time together on islands. We
are
islands. Two islands. And I can’t recall when it was different.

She asks, What are you doing? What’s going on?

What do you mean? I’m leaving.

It’s raining. Wait until morning.

Why wait? No time like the present.

I make a pile of essentials: clothes, blender, Jamaican coffee beans, French press—and a gift Brooke recently gave me. The scary painting Philly and I saw years ago at the Louvre. She commissioned an artist to make an exact replica. I look at the man hanging from the cliff. How has he not fallen off that cliff by now? I throw everything in the backseat of my car, a mint-condition convertible Eldorado Cadillac, 1976, the last year they made them. The car is a pure lustrous white, lily white, so I named it Lily. I turn Lily’s key, and the dashboard lights come on like an old TV set. The odometer reads 23,000 miles. It strikes me that Lily is the exact opposite of me. Old, with low mileage.

I peel out of the driveway.

A mile from the house I start crying. Through my tears, and the gathering fog, I can barely see the chrome wreath of the hood ornament. But I keep going, and going, until I reach San Bernardino. The fog is now snow. The pass through the mountains is closed. I phone Perry and ask him if there’s another way to Vegas.

What’s wrong?

I tell him. Trial separation, I say. We don’t know each other anymore.

I think about the day Wendi and I broke up, when I pulled over and phoned Perry. I think of all that’s happened since—and yet here I am, pulled over again, phoning Perry with a broken heart.

He says there’s no other way to get to Vegas, so I need to make a U-turn, head back toward the coast, and stop at the first motel that has a room. I drive slowly, picking my way through the snow, the car spinning and skidding on the slick highway. I stop at every motel. No vacancy.
Finally I get the last available bed at a fleabag in Nowhere, California. I lie on the smelly bedspread, interrogating myself. How the hell did you get here? How did it come to this? Why are you reacting like this? Your marriage is far from perfect, you’re not even sure why you got married in the first place, or if you ever wanted to
get
married—so why are you such an emotional wreck thinking it might be over?

Because you hate losing. And divorce is one tough loss
.

But you’ve suffered tough losses before—why does this one feel different?

Because you don’t see any way that, as a result of this loss, you can improve
.

I
PHONE
B
ROOKE TWO DAYS LATER
. I’m contrite, she’s hardened.

We both need time to think, she says. We shouldn’t talk for a while. We need to go inside ourselves, not interfere with each other.

Inside ourselves? What does that even mean—for how long?

Three weeks.

Three? Where do you come up with that number?

She doesn’t answer.

She suggests I use the time to see a therapist.

S
HE’S A SMALL DARK WOMAN
in a small dark office in Vegas. I sit on a love seat—how exquisitely ironic. She sits in a chair three feet away. She listens without interrupting. I’d rather she interrupted. I want answers. The more I talk, the more acutely aware I become of talking to myself. As always. This isn’t the way to save a marriage. Marriages don’t get saved or solved by one person talking.

I wake later that night on the floor. My back is stiff. I go out to the living room and sit on the couch with a pad and pen. I write pages and pages to Brooke. Another pleading handwritten letter, but this one is all true. In the morning I fax the pages to Brooke’s house. I watch the pages go through the fax machine and I think of how it all started, five years ago, sliding the pages into Philly’s fax machine, holding my breath, waiting for the witty, flirty reply from a hut somewhere in Africa.

This time there is no reply.

I fax her again. Then again.

She’s much farther away than Africa.

I phone.

I know you said three weeks, but I need to talk to you. I think we should meet, I think we need to be working through these things together.

Oh Andre, she says.

I wait.

Oh Andre, she says again. You don’t understand. You just don’t get it. This isn’t about us—this is about you individually and me individually.

I tell her she’s right, I don’t understand. I tell her I don’t see how we got here. I tell her how unhappy I’ve been for so long. I tell her I’m sorry that we’ve grown distant, that I’ve grown cold. I tell her about the whirl, the constant whirl, the centrifugal force of this fucked-up tennis life. I tell her that I haven’t known who I am for the longest time, maybe ever. I tell her about the search for a self, the endless monologue in my head, the depression. I tell her everything in my heart, and it all comes out halting, clumsy, inarticulate. It’s embarrassing, but necessary, because I don’t want to lose her, I’ve had enough losing, and I know if I’m honest she’ll give me a second chance.

She says that she’s sorry I’m suffering, but she can’t solve it. She can’t fix me. I need to fix myself. By myself.

Listening to the dial tone, I feel resigned, calm. The phone call now seems like the brief, curt handshake at the net between two mismatched opponents.

I eat something, watch TV, go to bed early. In the morning I phone Perry and tell him I want the fastest divorce in the history of divorce.

I give my platinum wedding band to a friend and point him to the nearest pawnshop. Take their first offer, I tell him. When he brings me the cash I make a donation to my new school in the name of Brooke Christa Shields. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, she will forever be one of the original benefactors.

T
HE FIRST TOURNAMENT
of my new, Brooke-less life is San Jose. J.P. drives up from Orange County for a few days of emergency counseling. He encourages, advises, cajoles, promises that better days are ahead. He understands that I have good moments and bad. One moment I say, To hell with her, and the next moment I miss her. He says it’s all par for the course. He tells me that for the last few years my mind has been a swamp—stagnant, fetid, seeping in every direction. Now it’s time for my mind to be a river—raging, channeled, and therefore pure. I like it. I tell him I’ll try to keep this image in mind. He talks and talks, and as long as he’s talking, I’m OK. I’m in control. His advice feels like an oxygen cup on my mouth.

Then he leaves, drives back to Orange County, and I’m a mess again. I’m standing on the court, in the middle of a match, thinking about everything but my opponent. I’m asking myself, If you took a vow, before God and your family, if you said I do, and now you don’t, what does that make you?

A failure.

I walk in circles, cursing myself. The linesman hears me call myself an obscene name and walks past me, across the court, to the umpire’s chair. He reports me to the umpire for using foul language.

The umpire gives me a warning.

Now here comes the linesman, walking back across the court, past me, to resume his position. I glare. The mealy-mouthed fink. The pathetic tattletale. I know I shouldn’t, I know there will be hell to pay, but I can’t hold it in.

You’re a
cocksucker
.

He stops, turns, marches straight back to the umpire, reports me again.

This time I’m docked a point.

The linesman comes back again, past me, to resume his position.

I say, You’re
still
a cocksucker.

He stops, turns, walks back to the umpire, who heaves a sigh and pitches forward in his chair. The umpire calls over the supervisor, who also sighs, then beckons me.

Andre. Did you call the linesman a cocksucker?

Do you want me to lie or tell you the truth?

I need to know if you said it.

I said it. And you want to know something? He
is
a cocksucker.

They kick me out of the tournament.

I
HEAD BACK TO
V
EGAS
. Brad phones. Indian Wells is coming up, he says. I tell Brad that I’m going through some stuff right now, but I can’t tell him what. And Indian Wells is out of the question.

I have to get well, get right, which means spending lots of time with Gil. Every night we buy a sack of hamburgers and drive around the city. I’m breaking training, big time, but Gil sees again that I need comfort food. He also sees that he might lose a finger if he tries to take the hamburger away from me.