Love Love (32 page)

“You've been here before.”

Denise nodded. “For a place this good, it's actually decently priced. I've eaten at this very table at least a dozen times.”

There was a directness to her that he liked, a no-nonsense tone in the way she spoke. When the waiter arrived, she ordered not only the appetizer and the dinner, but the dessert as well. Kevin hadn't even looked at that part of the menu, so he followed suit and ordered her choice, the pear tart.

“I hear Daddy made you a home movie,” she said.

“That he did.”

“He told me about it, and he was afraid of your reaction. That's probably why he set us up here, so I can report back to him.”

Their drinks arrived, his beer and her cosmo. When she lifted the pink liquid and yellow twists of lemon for a toast, it was like an ad
out of a magazine, her red lipstick and canary-yellow dress complementing the colors of her mixed drink. He downed half his beer and placed the glass back on the little square napkin.

“I'm all right,” he said. “I mean yeah, I was shocked when I saw it, but I think his heart was in the right place.”

“It's just his brain that goes on the fritz once in a while.”

Kevin smiled and nodded and didn't know what to do with his hands, so he went back to the glass and drained the rest of the beer.

“Thirsty, are we?” she asked, raising one curious brow like Mr. Spock.

He'd always found first dates to be nerve-wracking, and that's what this encounter reminded him of. The only time he didn't feel this way was in a tennis match, playing a brand-new opponent, and that was because it didn't involve talking, just doing, his body taking over what his mind didn't want to face. But that wasn't true. His first date with Alice was in a restaurant not unlike this one, a fancy joint where the servers scampered to the table to refold your napkin when you left for the bathroom, and yet he hadn't felt any of his usual jitters.

It was pathetic how much she still occupied his thoughts. It was even more pathetic how he recognized this and yet still couldn't make himself stop.

The waiter returned with their appetizers, sardine toasts for him, a cucumber-avocado-melon salad for her. Kevin almost acceded when the waiter asked him if he'd wanted a refill on his beer, but he didn't want to give Denise the impression that he needed alcohol as a social lubricant.

“Your salad's good?” he asked.

“Always. Yours?”

It was simple and delicious, baguettes buttery and crunchy, the sardines ground up and spread on top like a dip. The flavor of the little salty fish was so present within the paste that with each bite he felt as if he were eating their very essence.

“Dad tells me you played tennis professionally.”

“If by playing you mean losing, then yes, that's correct.”

She sipped her drink and smiled like he did, the left corner of her mouth rising and abutting the crease of her cheek. For all these years, he'd assumed his and Judy's naturally curly hair were bestowed by their mother, but now he knew it was mere coincidence. Here, it was
different, because this woman sitting across the table was of his blood, and this shared smirk of theirs was an instant bond.

Their main course arrived, a pork shoulder basting in a bed of corn for Kevin, a chicken leg with little yellow beans and fried artichokes for Denise. His pork looked as good as it tasted, roasted in a garlic sauce that drew out the fatty richness of the pig.

“I played Andre Agassi once,” Kevin said. “If you know who he is.”

“Even people who don't care about tennis know Agassi,” Denise said, chopping her artichoke hearts into bite-size pieces. “Anybody who marries Brooke Shields is gonna be famous no matter what he does for a living.”

“And now he's married to Steffi Graf, former number one female player in the world.”

“I've seen a commercial with a pretty blond woman, so I guess that's who you're talking about. So how was it, playing a legend? And more importantly, did you beat him?”

“Somewhat,” Kevin said, and he began to tell his story.

It was in August, the summer of 1997, in Binghamton, New York, the Gouldin & Thompson Tennis Challenger. It was the sort of tournament that somebody like Agassi wouldn't have played since he turned pro, since the champion was awarded only seventy-two hundred dollars. But earlier in the year, Agassi had fallen out of the top one hundred, far from the elite player he'd once been.

“It sounds very exciting to me,” Denise said, “playing as a professional athlete.”

“I think
sounds
is the operative word. Piling into buses that cart you from the Best Western to the city park, being pretty much forced to attend golf outings and donor parties in the evenings—I mean yes, I'm not scrubbing toilets for a living, but there's not much glamour in playing Challenger tournaments.”

“And having to win,” she added.

“That's why you're there in the first place. In '99, Agassi would reclaim his number one ranking, so when we played, he was already finding his form,” Kevin said. “But for a couple of games, it looked like maybe I'd have a chance.”

Agassi was known as the best serve returner in the game, but on that Thursday morning in the second round of the tournament, Kevin had him for a little while. He was up a break, leading five games to four, and was about to serve out the set, leading 40–15, when the
Buddha of tennis struck back Kevin's kick serve with what felt like twice the speed.

“The only way he could've taken such a monstrous swing was if he knew where I was going to go, which serve I was going to hit.”

“Did he know?”

“Not in the beginning, but he must've figured it out. It's not surprising—the best players can read a ‘tell' that a player has. For example, Boris Becker, who was a phenomenal player and played Agassi many times, had a habit of poking out his tongue right before he served, and the opposite direction of where his tip pointed was where the ball would land.”

“Agassi saw that from that far away?”

“Seventy-eight feet, to be exact. I guess in addition to being blessed with ridiculous reflexes, he also had perfect vision.”

“So what's your ‘tell'?”

Kevin sheared the browned meat of the pork from the bone. “You'll have to ask Andre.”

Never again would Kevin play anyone as accomplished. That year was the highest he'd ever rank on the ATP, 293. He was in his latter twenties then, well aware that his dream of playing in the US Open would remain just that, a dream. He'd seen enough world-class talent to know that he could never compete for anything beyond the first round of a Grand Slam tournament, but he would never make it to the big stage, advancing only to the second round of qualifiers that year. Of course he would've been trounced by whomever he played next, and with his luck it probably would've been Pete Sampras or Agassi himself, but to play a match in the gladiatorial expanse of Arthur Ashe Stadium—he'd wanted that. He'd practiced as hard as he could, even working with a sports psychiatrist to be more free and less controlling, and yet it still wasn't good enough. Maybe he shouldn't have been so accepting of his mediocrity, or maybe he should've tapped into anger like John McEnroe. When things weren't going their way, many of his opponents slammed their racquets hard enough onto the concrete to warp the frame, garnering warnings from the chair umpire, but as a pro, Kevin never threw a fit. He never saw a reason for getting mad at the ball or the equipment or the linespeople, because even when he was losing, he wasn't exactly unhappy to be on court.

Because at the core of it, he loved to play the game more than he wanted to win it. Which meant he lacked the killer instinct that
all champions have, that drive that gave them the impetus to win at all costs. Even against Agassi in Binghamton on that sun-beating August afternoon, there wasn't a moment he wished he were somewhere else. After losing the first set 7–5, there was no mercy from the other side. Kevin did everything he could, mixing it up with serve-and-volley points, risking drop shots from the baseline, slicing his backhand low until the fine fuzz of the tennis ball kissed the tape as it floated over the net, but he was no longer playing a human being. That was what separated the best from the not-so-best, the unfathomable, robotic consistency. No matter how well a rally was going, Kevin knew it was just a matter of time until his ball either dumped into the net or sailed long. The first set had taken more than an hour. The second, the one he'd lose 6–0, winning 4 points total, took twenty minutes.

At 5–0, with Agassi about to serve out the set and the match, Kevin forced himself to take in his surroundings, to remember this day because in a few minutes, it would be over. The seats to his right were gray folding chairs five rows deep, and you couldn't slide a bookmark between the packed spectators, a number of them standing in the aisles. Beyond the chain-link fence of the park, people were leaning out of the second-floor windows of their houses with binoculars, trying to catch a glimpse of the match. Everyone wanted to witness the resurgent legend beat him, though maybe not this badly. At least Kevin had given the crowd a good first set; this second one was just a display of the innate unfairness of life. A decade later, Agassi would tell the world in his autobiography how much he'd hated the game that gave him everything, how much emotional and physical toll it had taken, and yet for almost two years, there was no one on the planet who was better than he was. To be the very best at what you despise—was it possible for life to be any crueler? It was like something out of Greek mythology.

Kevin bounced from foot to foot as he waited for the last serve, Agassi up 40–15, match point. Agassi would probably aim for Kevin's body, a shot which had already handcuffed him so many times that his racquet felt like a shield. When Kevin was grooving, his racquet was an appendage, fitting into his hand with the rightness of a key sliding into its lock. Those feelings were a distant memory now, and as Agassi tossed the ball into the air, Kevin made his decision: He would slide to his left, sidestep the ball's intended destination and swing his
forehand as hard as he could for the crosscourt corner. Agassi's serve was a blur of yellow, but luck was on Kevin's side, as his plan worked to perfection, a clean winner.

The crowd cheered, hoping he could somehow work another miracle and push the game to deuce, but no, the next serve was too good, down the T, and unless Kevin could turn into Plastic Man and extend his reach by another two inches, there was no way he was even nicking that ball with the frame of his racquet.

“I shook his hand at the net,” Kevin told Denise now, the memory of that day faded but not forgotten. Agassi smiled over a frown, patting him on the shoulder before they walked over to the umpire to shake his hand.

“You must've been a little cowed.”

“Oh yeah. It isn't every day that I got to play someone as famous as he was. Andre didn't say anything memorable, just the usual exchange of pleasantries passed from the winner to the loser, but he has such an expressive face, and I'll always remember how genuine he was.”

A year later, Pete Sampras would easily beat Agassi in a forgettable Wimbledon final, except for the winner's ceremony, where he quietly motioned to Sampras that his five-o'clock shadow had trapped bits of terry cloth like Velcro. Andre wanted to make sure Pete looked good to hoist his trophy. Perhaps it was an insignificant gesture in the grand scheme of things, but for Kevin, that moment defined the man's kindness.

T
heir waiter returned to clear off the table, removing every last crumb with a pen-size dustpan tool that Kevin had seen before in high-class restaurants. Their desserts were on their way.

Denise excused herself for the bathroom, and he watched her walk down the aisle. He saw a number of eyes, both men's and women's, follow her confident strut, her head held high like a runway model on a catwalk; a busboy darted out of her way because if he hadn't, she might have plowed into him and kept going. There was an air of athletic grace about her that made him feel closer to her, though it was possible it was in his head, trying to find whatever way to forge the tenuous familial bonds in the limited time he had remaining here. As much as he liked San Francisco, he wasn't staying here forever.

By the time she returned, their tarts were in front of them, with a dollop of pear ice cream on the side, molded in the shape of a pear, a shard of chocolate for the stem.

“Now you know all about me, but I still know nothing about you,” Kevin said. “What do you do for a living?”

She forked a wedge of the tart and popped it into her mouth. She considered him, he could see, deciding.

“I'm a porn actress.”

“Oh,” Kevin said. He didn't know how to respond to this.
Good for you? Congratulations?
He hoped his nonreaction wasn't making her uncomfortable.

“Dad told me I was supposed to lie to you, say that I was the head of a nonprofit organization. Which actually isn't a lie, because I am, and I can't do what I do forever.”

“You still look . . . fine,” Kevin said.

“Thank you, but I'm gonna be . . . older next year, let's just say, and this is a young person's game more than ever. Even as little as five years ago, things were different, but with high-definition video, you can see every single wrinkle, and there's no bigger turnoff than seeing frown lines on a vagina on a sixty-inch flatscreen TV.”