Doubles (18 page)

I grunted.

He said, “Diane had an affair, when we were young.” Anne’s father had never before disclosed even the slightest bit of personal information to me.

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, neither does Anne. And I’m going to trust you not to tell her. But it’s true, and afterwards I imagine I felt a bit like you do right now. And I left, for a little while. I did. I moved into the YMCA. You know what that taught me?”

“No, sir.”

“That the YMCA stinks. But also that I had to put my ego on hold. That a marriage isn’t just about my ego. I had to humble myself to make it work. Do you understand what I’m saying? You’re going to have to humble yourself.”

I knew there was a truth there, but I wanted to ask him if he didn’t think this was already humbling enough. I wanted to ask him if Diane had conceived their daughter during the affair, if the affair had been with his best friend and business partner. If he had had to retire from his profession to tend to her. I wanted to say,
All affairs aren’t the same
. But I had a feeling I knew what he would say. That it still wasn’t enough. That all affairs have two sides. But this one was mine, and I had begun to hold it dear. I couldn’t say that I didn’t still love her. I did. But I felt like forgiveness was the wrong thing to do. This hurt required respect.

 

Over the next few weeks I used my vacation leave to enter six more tournaments, adding myself on to sign-in sheets as a partner to unmatched players, names only vaguely familiar to me from the bottom of the rankings sheets on Steve G, names looking for another name to add beside them just so they could get into the draw and play. I went to Cairo, Mexico City, two futures in Florida. I went to Africa twice.

While I was in Florida the second time, Anne’s father sent movers to the house to take the items I’d marked with yellow Post-it notes. In a letter I had already explained all they should take, but the Post-it notes were for additional clarity. I wanted whoever came into the house to be certain: They could take almost everything.

I lost in the first round of each tournament. By March, I had one protected entry left. After that, my points were gone. I needed to win. And when I played Forest Hills with Kaz, I won. So on March 12, when the last of the winter had dissipated from the North Carolina air, I bought a ticket to New York City. Because I was going to go to Forest Hills. And I was going to play with Kaz. And I was going to win.

THE SUBWAY ROSE
above ground as it neared Queens, sunlight filling our car, illuminating the graffiti scratched into the windows. The orange and yellow seats glowed. The only other people on the train, a teenage Puerto Rican couple, put on large white sunglasses and held on to each other like they might fall out of the seat. At unsaid intervals they kissed, groping each other’s necks.

At Forest Hills I left the teenagers bumping sunglasses. People on the sidewalk all seemed to be decades older and extremely healthy. They strolled past in summer scarves and sweaters, carrying newspapers, shopping bags, and very large drinks. This crowd made it seem like youth was a just a hassle and that they were all glad to be done with it.

At the clubhouse, out of some reverse imprinting, I wiped my own hands on my chest as I passed the woman at the desk. She did the same. I walked past the photo of Connors with his Wilson T2000, past Bill Tilden in long white pants, past those tennis-playing women in layered dresses frozen in frames on the wood-panelled walls, past the picture of me and Kaz, and upstairs to the lounge.

The ancient volunteer at the sign-in desk had a narrow, bald head with large ears that weren’t doing a very good job of holding up a pair of thick metal-frame eyeglasses. He held them on to his face with one finger as he leaned over to see whom I was signing in with. The blank beside Kaz’s name was still blank. For a brief moment I pitied him,
that the other players had all already seen this. There wasn’t even a new kid who would take this chance. But I wasn’t a new kid.

“When’s sign-in end?” I said.

The man looked at his watch.

“Nine minutes. No.” He squinted. “Seven minutes. What does your watch say?”

“It’s OK,” I said and wrote SLOW SMITH onto the paper.

The man said, “You two won this thing before, yeah?”

I set the pen down and nodded.

 

I felt the sidelong glances when I returned that afternoon to see the draw. Kaz and I were up first after 10:00 the next morning. I made sure not to look at other brackets. Projecting the next round was bad luck. Still, it was hard not to notice the Simon brothers. They were sitting not six feet away, staring. I didn’t keep up with shifts in the top rankings, who was number 3 or 5 or anything like that. It didn’t make any difference. But the Simon brothers were at the top. That much I was sure of. Number 1 and 2. They were both younger than I, wore short blond goatees, and made the sign of the cross when they won. They were some of the nicest and most talented players on the tour, and I harbored a deep disgust with almost everything they said or did. Anne always called them “the dudes.” They appeared in a Visa commercial once, the only doubles players ever to land a television spot. In it, they polished steam off a locker room mirror, revealing their almost identical faces as a voice said, “One family. One game. One goal. One card. Visa.” I saw it with my mother once, and the depths of envy I felt left me embarrassed and ashamed.

It was rare and in many ways frowned upon for top players to attend a challenger tournament, which was a tier below the top tour events and was what Forest Hills had been since they started hosting professional play again in 2000. But I knew that Sandy, the taller
and older of the brothers, had recently had an ankle sprain, and so I guessed they were slumming it here for practice.

When Kaz walked in he didn’t see me. He said something to Maxwell Council, a young black American who had a diamond in each ear, then slapped him on the back and laughed. Maxwell did not laugh back. He just stared. Kaz turned to follow his gaze. People began to leave the room like a silent order had been given.

I had not seen Kaz since he’d surprised me in DC. His nails were still trimmed. His hair was still short and clean. There was no facial hair. He said nothing, just looked at me. I knew what I looked like. Losing had made Kaz look better. Not so with me. Sleep had come only in spells of a few hours at a time for months. Dark bags hung under my eyes, and I hadn’t gotten more than a few hours’ sun since napping in my yard on a warm afternoon in February.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Winning this tournament.”

He looked at the draw sheet, then raised one of his manicured hands to his mouth. He pulled at his nose. The announcer for the soccer match on the television continued to yell in Spanish.

“You serious?” he said.

I nodded.

He looked at me deeply, something he didn’t often do, then said, “You have my book?”

I unzipped my tennis bag and lifted his diary from between racquets. He took it from me, then flipped through the pages until he stopped at one and squinted.

“OK. Tonight we eat chicken teriyaki at Teriyaki Boy. On Ninth Avenue. 7:23.”

I said, “This is so stupid.”

Kaz had always been the one to invest in the superstitious reenactment of routine. I had just played along. But now I was the one
who had combined the parts of this supernatural equation. I had the promise of surety in what we would be doing for at least the next day. I had the knowledge of what I would eat, with whom, and when and where I had to be in the morning. I knew with whom I would have to warm up and on what end of which court I would be doing so. As I left the room, the television announcer yelled, “Goal!” in one bizarre, drawn-out scream.

 

Kaz filled four small paper cups with ginger sauce and sat. He opened his diary, read a line, then got up and returned to the condiment selection, where he filled one more. He dumped them all onto his mound of steaming rice.

“Tomorrow morning, we have to eat everything bagels with cream cheese and chives at that bagel place near the subway,” Kaz said, shoveling rice into his mouth, smacking so loud that a couple beside us turned to stare.

I already knew, I already knew. It had been reenacted so many times. But as far as I knew, there was no scripted exit from this meal. So I set down my fork and stood. My voodoo quota had been met.

“We done here?”

He looked at my empty plate and shrugged. As I walked away, he said, “Nine o’clock! And wear black socks!”

When I hit Ninth Avenue I half-expected Manny, Katie, or Paige to appear. But I hadn’t told anybody I was here, and I wasn’t going to. I pulled my hood over my head and hurried to the subway.

The next morning, as Kaz chewed his bagel, I watched a small dollop of cream cheese bounce as it clung to the bottom of his chin. He couldn’t take the silence. “Where you been living?” he said. One chive dangled precariously out of the cheese. I just watched, amazed at the physics of cream cheese. “OK,” he said, giving up on a response. Then he leaned forward, presenting his chin. “Get it.”

I looked around. One young woman in a headscarf stood at the counter, an elderly couple behind her each with a large Banana Republic bag. They weren’t watching, so I did what I knew I had to do. I took my napkin and wiped the cheese off his face. Just like I had the day before our first win here, eight years earlier. And every year after. Every year but last year. As I wiped it off, folding the napkin and dabbing a second time, it occurred to me that this week was the anniversary of my knowledge about Anne. The planet was just completing the orbit it had started that night at the pool, while Brah passed away from us into the darkness and Katie told me about what else had been hiding in the darkness of my life, the actions of those whose decisions I thought I could track, expect, and fathom. No matter what rituals I enacted, no matter how strongly I wished I could go back, the next year was starting. It was just going to keep on going and going and going. In midair I could read what the spin on a tennis ball would lead it to do. Watching the white seams spin, in a split second, I knew if the ball would jump, stand up, cut left or right. But I had no perspective on which way things were going in my life. Part of me hoped that it was all spinning away from what had been left behind. Part of me wanted it back.

Vincent Philippe and Darren Jessee were our first opponents. We knew when to cross. We knew when to play two back, when to poach. This was the gift of having played together for so long. You watch other doubles teams, and before each point it’s like a conference. I knew a few players—singles specialists mostly—who had never played with the same partner in more than one tournament. But Kaz and I had a type of telepathy. At no moment did I ever find myself wondering what Kaz was going to do on court. I simply knew. Which worked well for us in that first match. Because we weren’t speaking at all.

When I was at the net, I would crouch and give hand signals behind my back for which way to serve. But when we won a point,
we didn’t high-five. We didn’t bump fists. During the third game of the first set, I overheard Philippe say he was going to serve into Kaz’s body. I turned and pointed to my chest. Kaz then stepped around the ball when it came jumping at his torso and hit an inside-out forehand that froze Philippe in his shoes. We broke their serve that game, won the first set, and stayed on serve through the second. My first serve was dropping in around 55, 60 percent of the time, and when it did, the point was ours. Which was always the case. People hated playing me because they couldn’t get into a rhythm. Some said it wasn’t real tennis. That I had one trick: my serve. Manny had always said it was the only thing you had complete control of during a match, and though he hadn’t been the one to think that up—it was every elementary coach’s maxim—it was true. My serve wasn’t a trick. It was a weapon. Kaz didn’t serve his best during the match, but he was returning well, and that’s really what got us up that break in the first set. The second went to a tiebreaker. Throughout it all, we didn’t say a word. We didn’t even yell
switch
or
mine
. We just showed up and went to work. And it went the way it always did at Forest Hills. We won.

After the match, Kaz stood shirtless in the locker room and held his diary open before him, like some sweaty minister sermonizing to a suspicious audience of one.

“You need to take an ice bath,” he said. “Eat pesto penne by yourself. Warm up with Douglas Adams tomorrow. And call Anne.”

Her name from his mouth hit me harder than I had expected.

“I’m not going to call her.”

“No . . .” he looked closely at the page. “Yeah. You have to.”

“Nope.”

He held up the book like he had nothing to do with it. “It is what it is.”

I shrugged and shook my head.

That night at the hotel, though, the phone seemed to grow larger
and larger on the bedside table. I picked it up and set it down twice. Finally I picked it up and held it. It buzzed in my palm. I dialed.

“Hello?” Anne said. She sounded perfect. At ease. Healthy. “Hello? Helllooo? Anyone there?” I said nothing. She went into her
Airplane
shtick. “What’s the vector, Victor? Roger, Roger. Over, Under.” She listened for a few seconds, then hung up. The dead phone lay in my lap until the busy signal made me jump.

 

Douglas Adams was still on the tour. He was a shaggy blond lefty from Maryland with a chiseled chinstrap beard and a terrible serve who managed to hang around the 250s in singles without anyone understanding how.

“Once I played doubles with Jin-Ho Lee,” Adams said, stretching his thighs at the net. It was the next morning. He pulled the heel of his left foot close to his lower back and grimaced. “I’d never even met him, just showed up on court, and when I asked him if he spoke English he waved his hand in the air like I’d farted.”