Doubles (2 page)

“Slow, I gotta tell you, man. It was a great experience. And after that, I mean, we just felt so connected. I mean, everything was on the table.
Everything
was on the table. It was like, we had just gone through it all together, you know? There were no secrets.”

“So you’re back together?”

Manny stopped the racquet in midspin. “She got into my emails.” “Who were you emailing?”

He squinted up at me, the sun full on his face.

“Come down!”

“Who’d you email?”

“You ever read those personals on Craigslist?”

In fact, I had been looking for a moped that very morning and had clicked on the personals on Craigslist, just out of curiosity. It was a litany of bizarre sexual requests, people inviting strangers to come over for anonymous spankings, threesomes, husbands wanting to watch strangers have sex with their bound wives. I couldn’t stop reading.

“No,” I said, meaning yes. He knew what I meant. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t even have to speak with him, that we could converse in silence. We had spent so much time together in cars, planes, hotel rooms, locker rooms. I had heard others formed bonds like this. Golfers and their caddies. Soldiers. Bands on tour. Theater troupes.
It was the summer camp syndrome, the creation of your own moveable world; insular, intimate, and intense. Unknowable to anyone but those within its invisible boundaries. But this I had to ask: “Anybody ever come over?”

“No,” he said. “Well yeah, this one girl came over once.” He waved his hand in the air as if it were nothing. “But nobody responds to those things. I mean, nobody thinks those personals are real.” Then he looked up at me, squinting into the sun, and said, “But they’re real.”

The neighborhood was absolutely silent, save for one basketball bouncing off the concrete court of a hidden, distant driveway.

“But so I had to come down and file this bullshit for the divorce, and now I’m heading back up. Forest Hills is this week. Kaz can’t play without you.”

Divorce seemed inevitable with anyone married to Manny, but still I was shocked at the word. I tried to keep it in check. I said, “He knows I can’t play.”

“He needs you there for all his voodoo shit.”

“I have to work.”

“My God,” Manny said. He turned to the dog, as if he might understand. “You believe this?”

Manny would never let something like work get in the way. Everyone I knew was tumbling headfirst with momentum. Winning tournaments, taking road trips, having sex with multiple women.

“Come on,” Manny said.

I considered another week by myself, answering emails, going to sleep at 9:00. I looked around, and the turtle had disappeared, replaced by a small girl in jeans with an elastic waistband who had suddenly appeared in the gravel road. She said, “You got my racquet.”

“Here,” Manny said and held it towards her.

She looked him in the face and stepped back.

“What?” he said. “Here.”

She started to run.

“Wait! It’s right here!” Manny said. He held the racquet out towards the empty road, then raised both hands into the air. “What the fuck?” He looked up at me like I should understand. “That girl is totally getting her parents. Come
on
.”

He started to climb. The fence shook as he neared. I was amazed that he could climb in those boots. The toes were just narrow enough to wedge into the fence, and with his freakish limbs he closed in quickly.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

He stopped only once he was beside me.

“Hi,” he said.

Right then a buzzard, a huge, black, oily thing, landed opposite us on the fence. It outstretched a set of wings that spread more than six feet, warming them in the sunlight.

Manny shook his head and whispered, “This is not a good sign.”

The turtle emerged from the brush at the side of the road, pressing through gravel as it inched across the little street, but the buzzard just stayed on the fence with its wings outstretched. It didn’t want that turtle until it was dead.

As long as I held on, I was master of this situation. I didn’t want to compromise. I didn’t want to rush. It was the sort of sane, clinical thinking that had earned me an adjective for a name.

The buzzard’s outstretched wings caught the breeze, slowly pushing the bird back and forth.

I looked at Manny. His oversize lips were chapped. His forehead was sunburnt.

I wanted to see Kaz.

I wanted to see Katie.

“Hello?” Manny said and reached for me.

He pulled at my shoulders, trying to pry me off.

I’d seen Manny’s face in so many continents over so many years. How many times had he told me to hit ten more serves? Ten in a row and then we can go. How many times had he told me to wake up, put ice on this, stretch it, move your feet. It’s your feet! Those giant lips were made to command. But I wanted this decision to be mine.

Then, out of nowhere, a woman said, “Excuse me?”

I looked down. It was the lady who walked her Dalmatian around the neighborhood every day while wearing a Lowe’s apron filled with plastic bags.

“I told you,” Manny said.

“You take my daughter’s racquet?” the woman said.

“Nope,” Manny said.

She stepped into the court and picked up the tennis racquet, then held it before her: evidence. “There’s a leash law, you know.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“I’m calling the police.”

“It’s a public court!” Manny said.

“I know you,” she said. “You’re the tennis player.”

“OK,” I said.

“I don’t care who you are. This is a family neighborhood.”

She walked rapidly away, disappearing beyond the vegetation. “Slow,” Manny said. He put his hand back on my shoulder and started to pull.

“Just let me think.”

“You’re scaring the neighbors.”

“You don’t look good, Slow.”

“You can’t stay on this fence. It hurts.”

“Ow! Goddamn.”

Then I counted again. Manny couldn’t get me off. I was on my ninth three when I first heard the sirens. I let my aching fingers slip out of those diamonds of galvanized wire and fell, my old coach tumbling through the air behind me. As we descended, the buzzard leapt, flapping his giant wings with a sloppy, hollow clutter, and for a brief moment we were all airborne above that tennis court, floating through the only sunlight in the neighborhood.

We landed and ran. Across the gravel we ducked into the thick brush.

One police car slowly rolled across the gravel and stopped beside Manny’s Fiat. I couldn’t believe he had been in town with me for less than ten minutes and already we were hiding from the police.

“It’s legally parked,” he whispered. “Isn’t it?”

A large young black woman stepped out of the cruiser and wiped her glistening forehead. She looked into the Fiat, her large rear end straining the polyester of her pants as she bent. The dog calmly turned to look at her. She circled the car, inspecting it closely from different angles, then took out a notepad and started to write.

“Wait!” Manny yelled and stood. “Hey!” He emerged from the woods with his hands up.

“Who are you?”

“That’s public parking.”

“I say it wasn’t?”

Manny stood in silence, his arms still in the air.

“What you doing in the bushes?”

“I thought you were after us.”

“Mrs. Sampson been wasting my time for years. This your Fiat?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You thinking about selling it?”

“That’s my baby.”

“My husband’s been looking for one of these forever. Can I give you my number?”

As the woman wrote her information onto her pad, Manny said, “Come out, Slow.”

I didn’t move.

“Slow, it’s fine,” he said, then turned back to the policewoman and shook his thumb over his shoulder. “My friend’s still in the bushes,” he said in a dramatic stage whisper. “Bad few months.”

It had been a bad few months. But I hadn’t felt so alive during any of them. And I wanted to feel alive. So I stood up. I brushed the leaves off my sweatpants and patted down a few wisps of hair. My coach was right here; my partner was in New York, waiting. We had a dog and a Fiat, and the sun was shining. I stepped over one Doritos bag, two empty orange Gatorade bottles, and a plastic grocery bag half melted into the ground—surely filled with the droppings of some neighborhood dog—and pushed aside one low-hanging live oak branch. I felt good. I felt invincible. I stepped into the light, and Manny and the police officer turned. I was going to Forest Hills.

I STOOD BY
my kitchen sink, the only spot inside that got cell phone reception, and watched Manny and the dog sun themselves on the porch. Manny had taken his shirt off, and each rib was outlined by shadowed flesh, sparse chest hairs plastered down with sweat. We had escaped the grip of the law. I felt drunk with the rush of adrenaline.

My boss squeaked hello to me from the other end of the phone line. He was named Steve Como, and he had a combover, and everyone called him Steve Combover. Not to his face. He had been my manager when I was on tour. For the past month and a half I had been doing publicity for him, writing copy, press releases, and player guides, fielding calls from sportswriters who wanted to set up interviews or get tickets. It was basically forwarding emails and arranging times and taking down phone numbers. It was a charity gig that they gave me after the accident, and I did almost all of it from home. I didn’t know when I’d be back on tour, Combover knew I wasn’t playing, and I knew he wanted me to be occupied. It wasn’t a bad idea. At some point I’d have to get a real job. Doubles could sustain me for only so long. Combover had a voice like a creaky door. He was divorced, and his three daughters all lived with him. At his Fourth of July party he’d smoked marijuana on his patio and then started to cry. I liked him very much.

I said, “George Vecsey just emailed me.”

Vecsey was a columnist for
The Times
. He was revered. I had never spoken to him in my life. I probably never would. But he had just
emailed, or at least his assistant had, asking if I could send him a photo of Tim Wheeler, a teenage client of ours.

“About what?” Combover said.

“He wants to talk about Tim getting a wildcard into the French. In person.”

“No.”

“Yeah.” I let that sit for a second. That part was the lie. I could almost hear Combover’s mind moving numbers. Tennis players never had real managers. Only the top guys, really. Combover was just an ambitious accountant. The company ran on low salaries out of a dingy office in a Pittsboro strip mall.

He said, “Tim’s not getting it.”

“He might.”

“In New York?”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“I have a ride.”

“With who?”

“Manny.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“No.”

“I just need a card for expenses.”

“
No
.”

“Steve, I need this.”

Steve Combover. I guess he was just too nice. Three hours later I was riding in the passenger seat of Manny’s Fiat with a black dog in my lap and Combover’s credit card in my pocket.

Manny kept the speed well above the limit as we drove from Pittsboro back into Chapel Hill. He always seemed employed by life, close to the source. His recklessness was innate. In high school, he
specialized in car surfing, the practice of standing atop a moving car with arms outstretched, surfing the pavement swells of Chapel Hill. He fell off the roof of his Mitsubishi and knocked out his front teeth in the eleventh grade. He wrecked three cars before he was twenty.

“Did you file?” he said, south of the Chatham County line.

“Yeah. I filed.”

You stop playing for any sort of injury, and you can file for a protective ranking. What this does, if the ATP approves it, is it freezes your points. Points are what you amass for every tournament win. Their total yields your ranking. And your ranking determines what tournaments you get into. So points are everything. But the thing about points is, they only last for fifty-two weeks. One year. Which means you have to win the same tournaments every year if you just want to keep your ranking the same, let alone raise it. An injury, without protected points, means the points just disappear, week after week, tournament after tournament. But even though I wasn’t the one who had actually been injured, the former strength trainer for the UNC soccer team had written a letter to the ATP for me saying that I’d injured my back. They don’t send private detectives to confirm these things. They just approve or they don’t. In my case, they did. So I was frozen at 32 in the world. I had another five weeks before I could even start to use it.

“Where you playing first?” Manny said.

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m enjoying living like a human. Eating and drinking normal. Sleeping.”

“I always watered you, Slow.”

“I’m serious.”

“What? How do humans eat?”

“Remember when I ate the mayonnaise?” I said, because one morning I’d woken up in Manny’s van and gotten out while he was
still asleep. I wanted a place to eat, but I had no idea where we were. We were parked behind a long line of loading docks. I kept walking, but I couldn’t even get out of the loading area. I finally just got back into the van, and under the seat I found a jar of warm mayonnaise that we’d taken from a player lounge at some point. And so I ate four large spoonfuls of mayonnaise.