Doubles (13 page)

I sighed in pleasure. The champagne bubbled cold against the roof of my mouth. We talked about the TV show
Lost
. About Britney Spears. We spoke none of Anne or Manny or tennis or Kaz. We just drank and laughed and sat in short silences, watching each other, beautiful in the dim light from the gently swinging bulbs. When the champagne ran out, Katie and Paige went to bed, and I reached into the deep pocket of my jacket. I’d seen Kaz write in his notebook a million times, but had never before had any interest. Now I was almost shaking. I lifted it out and laid it on the rusted wrought iron table. There had to be more in this thing than lists of Gatorade. This one little book covered a whole year. I turned to the time before the accident. Kaz’s handwriting was feminine and curly. There was no editorializing, just lists of actions, the orchestration of a life recorded so that it could be reenacted when needed. The day before the finals last year, the list of actions ended with one word: ANNE.

The half-moon reflected in the pond, shimmering and breaking into pieces, a pale imitation of the sun’s trick from hours before. I held my glass of champagne up to it and said, “Here’s to moving on,” because I didn’t understand what I was feeling, and sometimes, if I can just say what I want to be feeling, it comes to some type of fruition. But this time it didn’t seem to help, because I still felt the same, and I looked around to make sure no one had seen or heard me.

Inside, the floorboards creaked and popped as I walked down the dark hallway towards my bedroom, taking extra caution when I passed the guest room. Through a sheer curtain the faint moonlight fell onto an empty bed, still made, covers drawn tight. I stepped in, the floor issuing a high-pitched moan and snap. I lay on the bed, the smell of alien detergent comforting in some strange domestic logic. It was exotic and made me feel rash and left out. I sat up and lifted my champagne to the window. “Here’s to not being a giant pussy,” I said.

Then I straightened out the sheets, like a giant pussy, and walked down the hallway, rapidly, allowing the floorboards their full range of sound. It sounded like a boat in a storm. I swayed as I walked and stopped at one point with my hand against the wall.

Katie’s room was on the far side of the house, adjacent to the kitchen. The door came unstuck from the jamb with a pop, and the old hinges screamed. From the darkness Katie said, “Hello?”

I knocked into a small table on my way to the bed. Papers fell off in a small rush.

“Slow?” Katie said. In the moonlight I could see the other body beside her.

I crawled onto the bed from the foot and lay atop the sheets between those bodies. I said, “Oh God.” Arms wrapped around me from both sides. One of them began petting my face. I couldn’t even tell whose hand it was. I lifted my arm and placed it over Katie’s waist, then buried my face into her neck as more hands ran down my body. A few strands of her hair found their way into my mouth. I bit on them gently, hearing them crunch between my teeth. From behind, Paige petted my head. I was in bed with the woman whom I had loved since I was a boy. I was chewing her hair. I had saved a life. I thought,
What would Manny do in this situation?
He would say something fearless, something that would thrill. So I put my mouth so close to Katie’s ear that my lips grazed her skin as I whispered, “You want me to do the monkey-style?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘You want me to do the monkey-style?’”

The hands stopped petting my head, and she said, “Manny tell you to say that?”

“I.”

She pushed me away.

“I didn’t . . .”

Katie rolled over, her hair sliding across my tongue and out of my mouth. I looked into the darkness above me, awake, my face warm with blush. Paige slid her hand into mine, and it felt like a lifeline tossed from some dark and unseen shore.

“What?” she said. “Shhhh.”

I held on to that sweaty palm. Katie lay with her back to me. The room was silent for what seemed like hours, and I passed into a sickening drunken sleep filled with dreams of drowning.

“I WILL BE
dog
,” Manny said.

I opened my eyes. The air was thick with dust illuminated by sunlight through long yellow curtains. I lifted my head. Manny stood in the doorway of the bedroom wearing a cowboy hat.

“Slow, I will be dog.”

Katie sat up, awake and keen in an instant. The sheets fell off of her as she rose. The fine down on her breasts shone in the sunlight just like it did on her jaw. I felt sick with the memory of the night before.

“What are you doing in my house?” she said.

“It’s not just yours.”

“Yes it is.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s completely mine.”

“What about the car?”

“That too.”

“You still shouldn’t have stole it,” Manny said. Katie stood. The sheet slid off her hips and fell back onto the mattress. A large bruise spread green across a thigh. Small scratches and abrasions were scattered across the fronts of her legs.

“What happened to you?”

She put her hands against his chest and started to push him out of the room.“Slow, it’s on,” he said as Katie backed him into the hallway.

Paige pulled the covers over her head.

“The duel!”

Katie shut the door.

“The duel!” he said again, muffled now through the door.

Paige slowly sat up and looked around. She was beautiful, her breasts loose and pointy beneath a black tank top.

“Duel?” she said, groggy.

“Oh my God.”

I lay back down.

“Just stay here,” Paige said. She lay beside me.

Manny called my name from outside.

“Slow!”

I could hear Katie urging him to do something, her voice muffled through the door.

Paige whispered, “Stay.”

She touched my thigh. I turned my head to her. The glowing dust seemed to swirl around her backlit face, soft and dark, its features lost to the light. We kissed. The door popped open again, and Manny said, “Slow!”

By the time I turned he was gone.

I dressed and stepped onto the porch. Manny was strapping my bag onto a small luggage rack on the front of a sidecar attached to an orange Honda CB700.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

“Can you ask Katie for the bungee cords?”

“Manny, I can’t ride in that.”

“They’re in the kitchen closet.”

“Hey!”

“What?”

“I’m not getting in that.”

“You have got to face this shit.”

“There is no reason I need to get onto a motorcycle.”

“You’re not going to be on a motorcycle. You’re going to be in a sidecar.”

“I can’t do this,” I said. “You don’t get it. It was my fault.”

“Say what?”

“I broke the brakes.”

“On what?”

“The Dart.”

“That doesn’t mean shit.”

“You just hear what I said?”

“If you took the brake pedal and stabbed her in the neck with it, maybe then it would be your fault.” He finished securing the bag with the luggage strap and stepped back to admire his work. “Whatever you just said, though”—he shook the bag—“is bullshit. Doesn’t have anything to do with anything. You expect me to feel sorry for myself, after coming up here and finding you porking my wife? My wife and my Scarlett?”

“I didn’t pork anybody,” I said.

“No sir! I’m going to get onto this motherfucking motorcycle and drive down this motherfucking mountain on this motherfucking incredible day. And if you aren’t going to come, then you are going to leave a whole bunch of people disappointed, because the duel is on.”

He swung a leg over the bike and kicked it, and it roared to life. Another heron appeared overhead, striking a strange silhouette with the
S
of its neck. Maybe it was the same one I’d seen on my walk with Katie. If it was crying out again, I couldn’t hear it over the engine. I thought of those hands on my body last night, the secret memory of flesh. I wondered at the thrill Kaz and Anne must have felt in the days after their secret rendezvous. I had done nothing but kiss another woman, and I was already almost drunk with the memory. Anne and Kaz’s transgression must have been intoxicating. I envied them.

I looked back into the living room behind me. The old
Times
was still spread across the floor. A bowl of fruit Paige had bought at the co-op sat on the table. I turned my back on it. I couldn’t go back in there. Manny held out a white helmet with a black stripe down the middle. I walked to him and took it into my hands. It was cold to the touch, glittering and pocked. I strapped it on. There was a tinted visor, which I flipped down. I thought,
People are going to look at us
. I wanted to be looked at. I got in. The sidecar was surprisingly roomy. As we began to roll down the gravel drive slowly—I couldn’t believe Manny was driving slowly, perhaps he had a compassionate bone in that crazy body after all—sunlight flashed on us in dusty bursts through the weave of pine boughs above. I had my helmet on. I had my visor down. Manny began to pick up speed. I wanted him to.

THREE FLOODLIGHTS CAST
soft yellow orbs onto the grass courts, the light fading to black before the next pool of light edged from darkness into green again. The grandstand was an open bowl glowing at the edge of the grounds. At its entrance, the yellow caution tape was cut. Seating took up only three sides of the court, like the ancient outdoor theaters I’d seen on a tour of Rome the first time I played there. It looked like every player still in town for the tournament was in the stands. Brah, Al Arif, Douglas Adams, Michael DuClos, Tim Kelly, Shannon Ferguson, Gentleman John. Others. ATP officials. There were some people I did not know, mostly young women. And sitting near the net, beside a photographer, drinking coffee from a blue and white paper cup was George Vecsey. Unmistakable, like a Quaker sports minister in his dark suit and wispy beard. Manny told me he’d made some calls. At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. Now I knew. If Vecsey wrote anything about this it would be the first time he’d ever used my name in print. A career and it took this.

I walked around the left side of the grandstand, into the darkened walkway, and stopped. I stood there in the darkness, the end of the tunnel glowing ahead of me. I reached my hand to the concrete wall. I had not felt the importance of a tennis match like this in years.

When we were in fifth grade, Kaz’s mother arranged a tennis tournament at Ephesus Park. Kaz and I were the only entrants. Her employees were a wall of smiling Asian faces pressed against the chain-link. The
sushi chefs, serious and smoking, waifish waitresses, old men in visors and white socks with sandals, they all came to watch. And Kaz’s father, running the show, hobbling on that rubber foot from person to person, shaking hands and laughing. I won two games simply by hitting moonball after moonball. It drove Kaz crazy. He just hit them into the net, again and again. I was always smarter. But he was better, even then. He finally got his timing, and the moonballs started coming back. They passed me, hitting corners and skidding off the lines as he won game after game. The set was his at 6-2. It was the last time we’d competed against each other in anything other than a practice set.

I emerged from the tunnel and a spattering of voices from the stands yelled out, their intermittent war whoops rising into the darkness.

Kaz sat in a chair at the edge of the net. Manny stood in the service box and, when I appeared, held one hand into the air. The yelling stopped. From his other hand dangled a bullwhip.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said and cracked the whip. “We are here tonight for a tennis duel of the ages, a battle to the death!” He glowed in the thrill of the show, ecstatic to be ringmaster. He spun the whip above his head. “We are here for wrongs to be settled. We are here because Kaz Glover made love to the wife of this man.” He cracked the whip in my direction. “His former tennis partner, who has returned from retirement for battle here tonight. Slow Smith!”

Kaz looked worried and unhealthy. His hair was stringy, and in the lights, his skin appeared green. He wore a brand-new left shoe, the other thrown away because of my
X
. An umpire sat in the high chair. I couldn’t believe that Manny had found someone to officiate. I knew the man. He had no chin, a bald head, and drooping pockets for cheeks. He had called our first juniors title in Kalamazoo. I had yelled at him countless times about careless calls. He would agree with anything a linesperson said, whether he was watching or not. Once I saw
him pick a bug out of his eye, drop it, then flinch up towards the court to agree with an ace wrongly called out. I wondered at the vacuity of his life, the sad schedule that would allow him time to officiate a grudge match. Maybe his wife lay in a coma; maybe he had lost an unborn child. I looked at him with softness for the first time, a kinship of mediocrity.

From the service line I watched one large moth trace an ellipse in and out of the high lights above. Then I started to count.

I had yet to hit a clean serve in close to ten months.

Just that one pink ball sent over the fence at home.

I should have practiced.

I wasn’t ready.

The crowd was silent, the grandstand buzzing from fluorescent bulbs.

The racquet grip had a small bump in the wrap. I twirled it in my hand, trying to find a hold that avoided it.