Doubles (19 page)

“We both speak English.”

“I know, I’m just saying it works without talking.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“This isn’t much of a conversation.”

That afternoon, we lost the first set 4-6 to Tony Rodriguez and Phil Mackey. On the changeover, Kaz furiously flipped through the pages of his diary. He said, “You eat a banana?”

“I don’t have a banana.”

Kaz whispered, “Call a bathroom break and go get one. You need a banana.”

“This is crazy,” I said and just continued to the other side of the court.

The first point of the next game, Kaz hit a backhand return so deep it hit the back fence before bouncing. He hit an overhead into the net. He whiffed a forehand volley. He turned to me and opened his eyes
wide, as if it were my fault. We lost the game at love. A subway was passing in the distance, NECK FACE painted in huge red letters across the first subway car. This could be my last match. Ever.

“Bathroom,” I said to the chair umpire. “It’s an emergency.”

I knew there was one near the court, but I just walked towards the clubhouse, on the opposite side of the grounds, purposefully acting like I had no idea I was taking the longest route possible to a toilet. I stopped at the outdoor bar, where another one of the young men in a tuxedo stood serving no one.

“I need a banana,” I said.

“No bananas.”

I went into the dining room. A bathroom break officially gave you only three minutes. If they found me in a dining room we would be disqualified.

“I need a banana!” I said to a waiter with a shaved head and a very fine black moustache. A handful of elderly lunchers looked up from chicken salad on croissants.

“We only have banana smoothies, sir.”

“What do you make them out of?”

The mustachioed waiter looked at me like I had just made a really good point. He stepped into the kitchen and—after what felt several minutes—emerged with a plastic cup filled with chopped pieces of frozen banana. I put as many of them into my mouth as would fit.

I bounded up the pathway. The banana was so hard I could just barely get my teeth into it. My head ached from the frozen core of my face. As I neared the court, I stuffed more banana into my mouth and tossed the cup into a trashcan. By the time I picked up my racquet, my head was splitting.

It was my serve.

I worried that I might have frozen part of my brain.

In seventh-grade science class,

I had read that popping a zit could send pus into your brain,

resulting in brain damage.

I still wonder if that could actually be true.

It had established in me

a deep fear of brain injury through trivial action.

But

My brain must have been mostly thawed, because when I connected I served an ace out wide to Rodriguez’s forehand. Then another down the line, past Mackey’s forehand. Kaz pumped his fist and pointed at me with glee. It was only after I smiled back that I remembered I shouldn’t.

After we won, Kaz said, “The floor!”

He didn’t need to tell me. I knew I knew I knew. After our first second-round win in 2000, I slept on an air mattress with a leak. By 3:00 AM it had deflated enough that I had to get up and refill it. The next morning I awoke stiff and miserable, but we won that day, and so now the floor was mandatory. At the Days Inn I didn’t have a faulty air mattress, so I just took the comforter off my bed, folded it in half lengthwise, and made a pallet on the floor. A diaper from some guest long ago lay wadded on the floor under the mattress. I stood and began to remake the bed, but then remembered the banana. I tossed the comforter back on the floor, in sight of the mystery diaper, and slept where I needed to sleep.

In the morning, I awoke sore and stiff and spent fifteen minutes stretching while a construction crew worked outside, sending large orange clouds of dust in dense swells against the window. I left a note for the maid that said PLEASE REMOVE DIAPER UNDER BED.

In the locker room I turned my back to Kaz and held my arms crossed against my chest, like Dracula sleeping. Kaz put his arms around me, and I smelled the odor of his two-match winning streak as he lifted my body into the air. In a sharp downward pump he cracked my spine. I grunted as my body elongated. Kaz then set me down and took his arms away. The soreness from the night before was gone. His trick, like always, had worked.

“Now do me,” he said.

“You’ll be alright,” I said and opened the door.

“Hey. Seriously!”

“This is completely stupid.”

“You keep saying that, but if this was stupid, you wouldn’t be here.”

He crossed his arms and turned. I looked at him there, expectant and trusting, then stepped back into the locker room, put my arms around him, and lifted him into the air. I bounced him harder than I ever had before, and as his body jerked in my arms, a low, guttural moan emerged from deep within his chest. I let go and he bent over, then held the position, his hands dangling just above his shoes, one scuffed and one perfect.

“Motherfucker,” he whispered. “Oh Jesus.”

“You OK?”

“No.”

“I didn’t mean to do that. Seriously. Hey, I’m serious.”

“OK.”

“Get up.”

“Just leave me here for a second.”

“I . . .”

He breathed short and shallowly as he tried to stand.

“Can I . . . ?” I stepped towards him.

“No! Just go.”

 

On court, I drank a paper cup of ice water from the courtside cooler. It hurt my teeth, and I sucked them tight against my lips as I watched Hockney and May practice serves. Nine people total sat on a pair of aluminum bleachers beside us. Eight of them were old men, and one was a beautiful young blond with Hockney. The umpire said, “Everything OK?” and I nodded. But I didn’t know. I had the sudden assurance that we were going to have to default, but then, as if in reproach to any doubt of routine, I saw Kaz slowly walking up the sidewalk, past the netless grass courts, and through the alleyway between tall chain-link.

He practiced three serves. On each, his toss looked fine, but at none did he swing. He still didn’t speak to me, and I was almost tempted to ask him what he was going to do. Then he hit an underhand serve. Hockney and May didn’t even notice. They thought he was returning the ball to the ball boy. But I knew. Kaz could barely move.

He served his first service game underhanded, and Hockney and May returned two first serves into the net. They sent one three feet long and floated another just wide. The balls were coming at them with so little pace they didn’t even know what to do. We won the first set 6-2. By the start of the second, Kaz was loose and the cramp was gone. He swatted overheads like he always had and moved smoothly across the baseline. But still he served underhand. It was part of his new routine. I hoped we would never have to repeat it. By the end of the second set we had drawn one of the largest crowds I’d ever had at Forest Hills. They were there to see the spectacle. Old men laughed. Hockney’s girlfriend had to leave. When Kaz served a drop-shot ace at 5-2, it was so ridiculous that I had to restrain myself from laughing. It
was as if the way we played was inconsequential to the outcome. No matter what we did, as long as we did it together, as long as I wiped cheese off of his face, slept beside the diaper, ate at Teriyaki Boy, and listened to Anne recite her dead call monologue, we won.

JOG IN PLACE
while listening to Snoop Dogg. Eat more penne pasta from Puttanesca on Ninth Avenue Sleep on the floor. Don’t stretch at all when you wake. I did what I was supposed to do. I didn’t question this magic anymore, even if the diaper still lay where it had. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob in hopes they would leave it there forever.

At the club, I bounced out of the locker room, past the empty grass courts on my right, past friends that were still in the draw warming up on the hard courts to my left. Our draw favored us. We had Yevgeny and Belanko, Polish teenagers who had been playing out of their minds but couldn’t keep it up. I crossed into the narrow chain-link alley between courts and stepped onto Court 4, a lonely corner with a clear view of the elevated subway to the east. The Poles were already there, wearing tight, sleeveless T-shirts, stretching their calves with their feet propped against the fence. I took off my jacket and turned to the empty seats. But today the empty seats weren’t empty. In two folding chairs set close against the chain-link sat Manny and Katie.

Manny’s giant lips were stretched into an enormous grin. He wore cowboy boots and a white turtleneck sweater with an amber medallion on the outside. Katie had on an orange dress and white stockings. Her dark hair had been cut into heavy bangs, and she wore large sunglasses perched on her tiny nose. Her mouth moved ever so slightly, but it couldn’t be called a smile. It was just movement. Every person who walked by looked at them as they passed. I could see people
commenting to each other, pointing and staring. Manny called out, “Think you’d sneak this by us?”

I waved.

“Don’t look so amazed,” Manny said. “Think we could stay apart? We’re like you and Kaz, man. We’re bound to get back together.”

I walked closer. I saw that Manny’s medallion held a wasp enclosed in amber.

“Oh, we’re not back together,” I said. “It’s just for this tournament.”

“You’re back together.”

“We’re barely talking.”

“Kaz! You guys talking?”

I didn’t know Kaz had even entered the court. I turned and there he was, stretching at the chair. He said, “We’ve barely said a word since Monday.”

For some reason, everyone laughed. Even Katie. So I laughed too. I laughed about how I wasn’t speaking to Kaz because I was mad at him for sleeping with my wife. I laughed because Katie seemed to have forgotten that I had asked her if she wanted me to do the monkey-style and then slept with her girlfriend. There was so much not to laugh about. But we laughed.

Play started, and I kept looking at Katie from the corner of my eye, silent and uncheering by the fence. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t even remember the score. But I didn’t need to, because the chair umpire—the same sad soul who had officiated our duel—announced that we had won the first game. Then he told us that we won the second. And the third. And the fourth. And so on. By match point, Manny was yelling so much that the chair umpire said, “Mr. LaSalle, please respect the players.”

“You remembered my name!” Manny said.

And I served another ace.

Immediately my thoughts went to the next match. It was the first
thing to creep in beside Katie. Because we had one day off, and then it was Sunday. And the finals were on Sunday, and now we were in them. Without even checking the results I knew who we were going to face. Because the Simon brothers were here. And nobody beat them. We had played them six times in our career. We had won a total of nine games, no sets, no matches. But we didn’t lose at Forest Hills. Something was going to give.

While packing my bag in silence, I tried to envision a way past those wankers, but I was interrupted when Manny called out, “Slow!”

I turned. He stood by the fence texting.

“Slow, seriously. I just gotta say, man. Slow.” He beckoned me over without raising his eyes. “Before you go. Slow, the photos.” He then closed the phone and finally looked up. “I mean.”

I zipped my racquets into the bag and said, “Photos?”

“The
photos
.”

I looked at Katie for help.

She said, “One of my galleries took Anne’s photos.”

“Which ones?”

“The ones you took.”

I’d left the Polaroids in that French Open bag when I walked out of University Hospital. Some days I imagined they were pinned to her wall. Other times I felt sure she had thrown them away. She tossed items easily—her yearbooks, stuffed animals from her childhood, greeting cards immediately after she read them. But the photos were artifacts of our private worlds of pain, extrapolated and spread over months. It was nice to think that they had mattered to anyone.

“They’re amazing,” Katie said. “I’ll show you.”

KATIE AND I
got out of the cab beneath an overpass on the corner of Twenty-third and Tenth. A storefront beside me was shut with a metal curtain padlocked to the curb. Three young Asian women in short dresses and bright leggings passed by, speaking loudly about construction on the west side. I felt conspicuous in my pants. They were the kind that zipped off into shorts. Katie paid the fare while I waited beside a full-length window displaying a large variety of bonsai trees circling a small village made out of Legos and populated with live mice.

“That’s Tartaglia,” she said as we passed.

Another window featured paintings of deer walking through empty cityscapes. The divide in our lives suddenly seemed more vast than I had ever imagined. We passed a large sculpture of red metal I-beams filling a white room under a group of used Big Gulps glued to the walls. Then I came upon another large white industrial space filled with Polaroids. I didn’t have to count how many photos were in there. I knew: 542. I had taken almost all of them.

People stood inside, staring silently, taking in the profile of Anne against our purple hallway, a shade chosen because we had found three extra gallons of the paint in our attic when we moved in, her stomach bulging inch by inch. For 187 photos of her in profile, there was a small remote in her left hand, wire extending from it towards the camera. I walked counterclockwise through the large space, watching
her stomach close in on the closet doorknob. In photo 124, she looked at the camera, laughing.