Open (37 page)

It makes me wonder if we’re a good fit. I don’t think so. And yet I can’t step back, can’t suggest we take a break, because I’m already distancing myself from tennis. With no Brooke and no tennis, I’ll have nothing. I fear the void, the darkness. So I cling to Brooke, and she clings back, and though the clinging seems loving, it’s more like the clinging in that painting in the Louvre. Holding on for dear life.

As Brooke and I approach our two-year anniversary, I decide that we should formalize our clinging. Two years is a meaningful benchmark in my love life. In every previous relationship two years has been the make-or-break moment—and I’ve always chosen break. Every two years I grow tired of the girl I’m dating, or she grows tired of me, as if a timer goes off in my heart. I was with Wendi two years, and then she declared our relationship open, which prefigured the end. Before Wendi I was with a girl in Memphis for exactly two years, and then I bolted. Why my love life runs in two-year cycles, I don’t know. I wasn’t even aware of the pattern until Perry pointed it out.

Whatever the reason, I’m determined to change. At twenty-six I believe this pattern needs to be broken, now, or I’ll be thirty-six, looking back on a series of two-year relationships that went nowhere. If I’m going to have a family, if I’m going to be happy, I’ve got to break this cycle, which means pushing myself past the two-year mark, forcing myself to commit.

Of course, technically, it hasn’t been two years with Brooke. With our hectic schedules, with my playing and her filming, we’ve actually spent only a few months together. We’re still getting to know each other, still learning. Part of me knows I shouldn’t force a decision. Part of me simply doesn’t want to be married right now. But who cares what I want? When is what I want ever a good index of what I should do? How often do I
enter a tournament, wanting to play, only to lose in the early rounds? How often do I enter reluctantly, feeling like hell, only to win? Maybe marriage—the ultimate match play, the ultimate single elimination tournament—is the same way.

Besides, everyone around me is getting married. Perry, Philly, J.P. In fact, Philly and J.P. met their wives together, on the same night. After the Summer of Revenge, it’s the Winter of Marriage.

I ask Perry for advice. We talk for hours in Vegas and on the phone. He leans toward marriage. Brooke is the one, he says. How are you going to do better than a Princeton-educated supermodel? After all, didn’t we fantasize about her years ago? Didn’t he predict that she’d come along? And now here she is—destiny. What’s the problem? He reminds me of
Shadowlands
. C. S. Lewis doesn’t become fully alive, doesn’t grow up, until he opens himself to love. Love is how we grow up, the movie says. And as Lewis reminds his students:
God wants us to grow up
.

Perry says he knows of an excellent jeweler in Los Angeles. The same jeweler Perry used when he got engaged. Set aside the question of whether or not to propose, he says, and just focus for a moment on the ring.

I know the kind of ring Brooke wants—round, Tiffany cut—because she’s told me. Straight out. She’s never shy about sharing her opinions on jewels, clothes, cars, shoes. In fact, the most animated talks we have are about
things
. We used to talk about our dreams, our childhoods, our feelings. Now we avidly discuss the best sofas, the best stereos, the best cheeseburgers, and while I find such talk interesting, an important aspect of the art of living, I fear Brooke and I put undue emphasis on it.

I gird myself, phone the jeweler and tell her I’m in the market for an engagement ring. The words come out croaky. I feel my heart pound. I ask myself, Shouldn’t this be a joyous moment—one of the great moments of life? Before I can answer, the jeweler is peppering me with her own questions. Size? Carat? Color? Clarity? She keeps talking about clarity, asking me about clarity.

I think:
Lady, you’re asking the wrong guy about clarity
.

I say: All I know is round, Tiffany cut.

When do you need it?

Soon?

Can do. I think I’ve got
just
the ring.

Days later, the ring arrives by courier. It’s in a big box. I walk around with it in my pocket for two weeks. The box feels leaden, and dangerous, as do I.

Brooke is away, filming a movie. We talk every night on the phone,
and sometimes I cradle the phone with one hand and fondle the ring with the other. She’s in the Carolinas, where it’s bitter cold, but the script calls for the weather to be balmy, so the director forces her and the other actors to suck ice cubes. It keeps their breath from fogging.

Better than licking hands.

She says a few of her lines for me, and we laugh because they sound fake. They sound like lines.

After we hang up I go for a drive, the heater turned up high, the lights of the Strip winking like diamonds. I replay our conversation, and I can’t tell the difference between the lines in her script and the lines we’ve just spoken to each other. I pull the ring box from my coat pocket and open it. The ring catches and reflects the light. I set it on the dashboard.

Clarity.

A
S
B
ROOKE WRAPS HER FILM
, I conclude a miserable stretch of tennis that has sportswriters openly, sometimes gleefully, saying I’m done. Three slams, they say. That’s far more than we thought he’d win. Brooke says we need to get away. Far away. This time we choose Hawaii. I pack the ring.

My stomach rolls as our plane swoops toward the volcanoes. I gaze at the palm trees, the foaming coastline, the misty rain forests, and think: another island paradise. Why do we always feel compelled to run off to island paradises? It’s as though we have Blue Lagoon Syndrome. I fantasize about the engine sputtering, the plane spiraling down into the mouth of a volcano. To my chagrin we land safely.

I’ve rented a bungalow at the Mauna Lani resort. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a pool, a full-time chef. Plus, a long stretch of white beach all to ourselves.

We spend the first few days hanging around the bungalow, relaxing by the pool. Brooke’s engrossed in a book about how to be single and happy in your thirties. She holds the book over her face, licking her finger and loudly turning the pages. It doesn’t cross my mind that this might be a pointed hint. Nothing crosses my mind except the proposal I’m about to deliver.

Andre, you seem distracted.

No. I’m here.

Everything all right?

Please leave me alone, I think, I’m trying to decide when and where to propose to you.

I’m like a murderer, plotting, thinking constantly of the time and the place. Except that a murderer has a motive.

On the third night, though we’re planning to eat dinner in the bungalow, I suggest we dress up as if it’s a special occasion. Great idea, Brooke says. She emerges from the bedroom an hour later in a flowing white dress that falls to her ankles. I wear a linen shirt and beige pants, the perfectly wrong outfit, because the pockets of the pants are shallow and the ring box doesn’t fit. I keep my hand over the pocket to hide the bulge.

I stretch as though I’m about to play a match. I shake out my legs, then suggest a stroll. Yes, Brooke says, that sounds like a lovely idea. She takes a sip of wine, smiles casually, no idea what’s coming. We walk for ten minutes until we reach a part of the beach where we can’t see any sign of civilization. I crane my neck to make sure no one is coming. No tourists. No paparazzi. The coast is clear. I think of that line from
Top Gun
. I had the shot, there was no danger, so I took it.

I fall a few steps behind Brooke and drop to one knee on the sand. She turns, looks down, and all the color drains from her face as the colors of the sunset grow more vivid.

Brooke Christa Shields?

She’s mentioned in conversation many times that any man who proposes to her had better use her full legal name, Brooke Christa Shields. I never knew why, and never thought to ask, but now it comes back to me.

I repeat, Brooke Christa Shields?

She puts a hand on her forehead. Wait, she says. What? Are you—? Wait. I’m not ready.

That makes two of us.

She’s wiping away tears as I pull the ring box from my pocket and crack it open and remove the ring and slide it onto her finger.

Brooke Christa Shields? Will you—

She’s pulling me to my feet. I’m kissing her and thinking, I really wish I’d thought this through. Is this the person that Andre Kirk Agassi is supposed to spend the next ninety years with?

Yes, she says. Yes, yes, yes.

Wait, I think. Wait, wait, wait.

S
HE SAYS SHE WANTS
a do-over.

One day later she tells me she was in such shock on the beach, she couldn’t hear me. She wants me to repeat the proposal, word for word.

I need you to say it again, she insists, because I can’t believe it really happened.

Me neither.

She’s planning the wedding before we’re off the island. And when we get back to Los Angeles, I resume the unplanned, unceremonious end of my tennis career. I moonwalk through one tournament after another. I’m losing in early rounds, and therefore I’m home a lot, which tickles Brooke. I’m placid, numb, and I have plenty of time to talk about wedding cakes and invitations.

We fly to England for the 1996 Wimbledon. Just before the start of the tournament Brooke insists we go for high tea at the Dorchester hotel. I beg off, but she insists. We’re surrounded by older couples, all wearing tweed and bowties and ribbons. Half of them look asleep. We eat finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off, heaping plates of egg salad and scones with jam and butter—all things expressly engineered to clog the human artery, without the benefit of tasting good. The food is making me cranky, and the setting feels ridiculous, like a children’s tea party in a nursing home. But just as I’m about to suggest that we ask for the check I notice that Brooke’s ecstatic. She’s having a grand time. She wants more jam.

In the first round I face Doug Flach, ranked number 281, a qualifier who’s in over his head, though you’d never know it to watch him against me. He plays as if he’s channeling Rod Laver, and I play like Ralph Nader. We’re on Graveyard Court. By now you’d think I’d have my own plaque here. I lose as fast as I can, and Brooke and I hurry back to Los Angeles, to engage in more deep conversations about Battenburg lace and chiffon-lined tents.

As summer approaches, there is only one elaborate pageant that interests and inspires me. And it’s not my wedding. It’s the Atlanta Olympics. I don’t know why. Maybe it feels like something new. Maybe it feels like something that has nothing to do with me. I’ll be playing for my country, playing for a team with 300 million members. I’ll be closing a circle. My father was an Olympian, now me.

I plan a regimen with Gil, an Olympian’s regimen, and give all-out effort in our training sessions. I spend two hours with Gil each morning, then hit with Brad for two hours, then run up and down Gil Hill in the hottest part of the day. I want the heat. I want the pain.

As the Games begin, sportswriters kill me for skipping the opening ceremonies. Perry kills me for it too. But I’m not in Atlanta for opening ceremonies, I’m here for gold, and I need to hoard what little concentration
and energy I can muster these days. The tennis is being played in Stone Mountain, an hour’s drive from the opening ceremonies downtown. Stand around in the Georgia heat and humidity, wearing a coat and tie, waiting for hours to walk around the track, then drive to Stone Mountain and give my best? No. I can’t. I’d love to experience the pageantry, to savor the spectacle of the Olympics, but not before my first match. This, I tell myself, is focus. This is what it means to put substance above image.

With a good night’s sleep under my belt I win my first-rounder against Jonas Björkman, from Sweden. In the second round I cruise past Karol Kucera, from Slovakia. In the third round I face a stiffer test from Andrea Gaudenzi, from Italy. He has a muscle-bound game. He likes to trade body blows, and if you respect him too much he gets more macho. I don’t show him any respect. But the ball doesn’t respect me. I’m making all sorts of unforced errors. Before I know what’s happening, I’m down a set and a break. I look to Brad.
What should I do?
He yells: Stop missing!

Oh. Right. Sage advice. I stop missing, stop trying to hit winners, put the pressure back on Gaudenzi. It’s really that simple, and I scrape out an ugly, satisfying win.

In the quarters I’m on the verge of elimination against Ferreira. He’s up 5–4 in the third, serving for the match. But he’s never beaten me before, and I know exactly what’s going on inside his body. Something my father used to say comes back to me: If you stick a piece of charcoal up his ass, you’ll pull out a diamond. (Round, Tiffany cut.) I know Ferreira’s sphincter is squeezing shut, and this makes me confident. I rally, break him, win the match.

In the semis I meet Leander Paes, from India. He’s a flying jumping bean, a bundle of hyperkinetic energy, with the tour’s quickest hands. Still, he’s never learned to hit a tennis ball. He hits off-speed, hacks, chips, lobs—he’s the Brad of Bombay. Then, behind all his junk, he flies to the net and covers so well that it all seems to work. After an hour you feel as if he hasn’t hit one ball cleanly—and yet he’s beating you soundly. Because I’m prepared, I stay patient, stay calm, and beat Paes
7–6
, 6–3.

In the final I play Sergi Bruguera, from Spain. The match is delayed by thunderstorms, and the forecasters say it will be five hours before we can get on the court. So I wolf down a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s. Comfort food. On the day of a match, I don’t worry about calories and nutrition. I worry about having energy and feeling full. Also, because of my nerves, it’s rare that I’m hungry on match day, so any time I have an appetite I try to capitalize. I give my stomach whatever it asks for. Swallowing
the last bite of spicy chicken, however, the clouds part, the storm blows away, and the heat comes. Now I have a spicy chicken sandwich sitting on my gut, it’s ninety degrees, and the air is as thick as gravy. I can’t move—and I have to play for a gold medal? So much for comfort food; I’m in extreme gastric discomfort.