Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (9 page)

'Shit,' said Updike. It was his one profanity of the morning. He had just led me into the wrong carpark. We were leaving Mass. General and proceeding to Harvard, where Updike had a lunch.

'You once wrote a novel, or a "romance", called
Marry
Me,' I said. 'Your new book of stories is called
Trust Me.
But maybe you should have called it
Divorce Me.'

For the book is riven with divorce and its aftermath. Brave ex-wives and their watchful replacements, half-grown children seldom seen, possessions divided, houses scoured and then abandoned. 'They don't call them orphanages any more, do they?' asks one character. 'They call them normal American homes.' I put this to Updike, and quoted the line: 'In the pattern of his generation he had married young, had four children, and eventually got a divorce.'

'A pattern, that's right. Marriage was very erotic when I was growing up. You got married in college and had kids when you were still kids yourselves. Four children in two-year notches. It was the same for everybody we knew. The marginal couples stayed together. The ones who were any fun all broke up. In my case we'd just had enough of each other. It was terrible for the children, having to become grownups overnight.'

This turned out to be the third time Updike and I had met. He couldn't remember the second time, when I had shaken his hand at a London publishing party. And I couldn't remember the first time, when I was a nine-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. 'I spent an evening with your mother and father and some other people. Were you there? You might have been in bed. We played cards. We were all drunk but no one, I think, was as drunk as your father.'

'Those were wild times. Everyone was at it.'

'So I've read,' said Updike. 'So I've read. It was a revolution for all of us - not just for Abbie Hoffman. Kind of a dark carnival. We were all wearing love-beads, in a way.'

Three years later, my parents duly divorced. Divorce, in those days, was like a dreadful disease that everyone's parents kept catching. It occurred to me for the first time that this had determined the pattern of
my
generation. The children of these divorcees, we married late, had children late — too late, perhaps, for the body's good. Updike was delighted to hear about our strained backs and spongy knees, our pleading ankles.

We left the hospital grounds and drove to Cambridge in Updike's powerful Audi. We drove from American sickness to American health - Harvard Yard, in July sunshine, and the student body, muscular and tanktop, yelling, jogging, frisbeeing, cartwheeling, and necking and quarrelling and breaking up. Updike's kids passed through here some time ago. Whereas my first born will be three in November. Sprawled here on the lawns, this particular batch seem to be oddly poised. Seventy-five per cent of them think that they will die in a nuclear war. Probably even more of them believe that they will meet their fate in a singles' bar. Marriage has been re-eroticised for them, whether they like it or not. 'Nature is hard to outsmart,' as Updike said. 'It's always one jump ahead. Nature doesn't really care about us at all.'

He was dropping off some paperwork at the Widener Library: correspondence, the galleys of
Trust Me —
no sooner published than filed away, the decks cleared for the next thing. We parted, and then he called me back, telling me to give his best to my parents. Watching him strut away, head in air, I felt - suddenly and ridiculously - what it was to have been one of
his
children, and how I would have hated to see him go.

I sat on the grass and looked again at one of the new stories. The passage verges on the sentimental (the weakness for the word 'little', the cutely agrammatical 'that' towards the end); but then I was verging on the sentimental myself.

Though Foster was taller, the boy was broader in  the shoulders, and growing. 'Want to ride with me to  the dump?' Tommy asked.

'I would, but I better go.' He, too, had a new  life to lead, By being on this forsaken property at all, Foster was in a sense on the wrong square, if not
en prise.
He remembered how once he had begun to teach this boy chess, but in the sadness of watching him lose - the little furry bowed head frowning above his trapped king — the lessons had stopped . ..

Seeing his father waver, he added, 'It'll only take twenty minutes.' Though broad of build, Tommy had beardless cheeks and, between thickening eyebrows, a trace of that rounded, faintly baffled blankness babies have, that wrinkles before they cry.

'O.K.,' Foster said. 'You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you.'

Observer, 1987

TENNIS: THE WOMEN'S GAME

The emerging women's game can be imagined — perhaps with literal accuracy - as a transcontinental jumbo, with three classes. In First Class you find the top ten ladies (or bobbysoxers or nymphets), with footrests up, harassed by the courtesies of the cabin stewards: Steffi is playing backgammon with her dad; Gaby is hunched under a Sony Walkman. In Club World, together with the shrinks and physios of the top ten ladies, are the second-string ladies, all of them quite well attended, and wearing those special pairs of Club World slippers. In the chaos of Coach, wedged together in blocks of three and four, are the 'gym rats', the eternal aspirants of the modern tour, on yet another leg of their frazzled quest for ranking points, sponsors, backers. Nearly every girl on board has entrusted her schooling to the correspondence course. They are all enduring, or developing, a variety of injuries: 'always
something
hurts.' And they all have jet-lag.

It is raining in Boca Raton, to the disgust of the entire resort. The PR machine is reshuffling flights, drivers and schedules; and the ladies are in the clubroom, playing snap and Scrabble. When the action resumes, Jo Durie will go out in the first round, foreclosing British interest in the event. But that's where all similarities to Wimbledon end, The crowd isn't cringing under umbrellas, smelling of damp dog. It is strolling the landscaped grounds, lightly clad and gorging itself on ice-cream and gooey pretzels. For we are in Florida, the global nursery of the women's game, where the girls can conveniently flit from condo to sports ranch to tournament, and to the stratospheric tendrils of mammoth Miami Airport. The county is still mopping its brow from Prince Charles's recent visit to Palm Beach; but lots of locals are rich and idle enough to turn out for the tennis. The heavy sun gives the young flesh of the players a sumptuously toasty tang, and turns the rest of us into various shades of peanut butter and hotdog mustard.

'Nice place, don't you think,' said my driver as we approached, and then added, before I got any ideas, 'You have to be a millionaire to live here, though.' I believed him. Chris Evert lives here, or has a 'home' here anyway. This is polo-club America, with shaved grass, caddycarts, rows of identical modern villas, and fanatical security. I look in on the sodden press tent to collect my ID tag. But there is hardly time to sample the free Danish ('For
MEDIA
Only!'), and to be disabused of the idea that tennis journalism is a glamorous job, before we hear the rumour of play. The clouds clear and the voluptuous raindrops cease to fall. Soon the sky is wearing an outfit of faded denim; at dusk it will don a watermelon T-shirt. This is Florida, and even the sky is in questionable taste.

In the absence of Martina Navratilova (either injured or conserving herself for 'the Slams'), and in the absence of any hard gossip about burnout, grasping parents or lesbian molestation, there was only one big story, one big question, at the Virginia Slims of Florida. The question was: can anybody beat Steffi Graf, who nowadays seems to be losing about one match a year? Pat Cash recently called women's tennis 'rubbish'. Yet many well-informed observers believe that the women's game is now more interestingly poised than the men's - as well as being better fun to watch. The men have entrained a power struggle of outsize athleticism, machismo and foul temper. It's all
rat-a-tat-tat,
or
rat-a-tat,
or, on fast courts, simply
rat.
Where is the pleasure in witnessing an ace? The women's game has become just as powerful while remaining significantly slower, so that the amateur has time to recognise the vocabulary of second-guessing and disguise. Although it's still a fight, it's a woman's fight, settled not by the muscles but by the subtler armaments with which women wage their wars. Women's tennis is
Dynasty
with balls, bright yellow fuzzy ones, stroked and smacked by the Fallons, Krystles and Alexises of the lined court.

The crowd wants something to talk about, and the press must have something to write about; so for the first few days attention fixes on the Latest Sensation — the latest double-fisted infant to be groomed for stardom, Monica Seles from Yugoslavia, who has just turned fourteen. The older girls hate playing the child wonders, and Helen Kalesi, the Canadian number one, is having a terrible time with Monica. 'Better than Steffi at that age,' a coach informs me. 'Look at her nerve. She
loves
the ball.' The contest looks elegant but sounds barbaric. Helen is a 'grunter', and Monica is a 'whoofer', emitting a duosyllabic shriek with each contact of ball and racket. 'Uhh!' 'Ugh-
eh
!' 'Uhh!' 'Ugh-
eh
!' Jimmy Connors started the grunting, with his legendary 'Hworf!' Then, as Clive James noted, Bjorn Borg responded with his own nordic variant: 'Hwörjf!' The idea, supposedly, is to incorporate the strength of the stomach muscles; but the strength of the women all derives from their
timing,
in at least two senses. Prodigies can't happen in men's tennis because the physique develops later. Hence the money trap of the women's game, and one of its peculiar cruelties: as an earner, a girl can peak at puberty and be 'history' by the age of sixteen. At the press conference after her shock win Monica looks like a startled elf in a Disney cartoon. Her charmingly nervous laugh reveals a garrison of orthodonture. 'What do you feel?' 'Very happy.' 'What is your goal?' 'To be number one.' Later, Steffi Graf strides into the tent, having briskly lunched on her first opponent. Asked about the child wonder, Steffi concedes with a shrug that Monica, while 'very skinny', is 'a good player'. She is especially haughty about Monica's reliance on the two-handed groundstroke, which Steffi clearly regards as a contemptible anachronism, like using your knickers to store the ball for the second serve. As befits a number one, Steffi is visibly impatient with questions about her rivals, and generally shows little interest in disguising her feelings. She quite lacks the PR burnish of the American girls, all of whom have impeccable media manners and a nice tidy image. It makes sense: they might want to diversify later on, like Pam Shriver. If you retire at twenty-five there are a lot of years ahead, and sportscasting may fill some of them.

The next evening, under the lights, little Monica plays Chris Evert, who knows a thing or two about child prodigies, having traumatised them by the dozen year after year. She was also one herself, and remains the only player in the modern game who has paced her hunger over two decades. Given a big build-up by the PR witch with the mike ('Ladies and gentlemin! . . . Wimbledin . . . the US Opin' etc, plus details of her career earnings), Chris steps forward, sternly smiling, as straight and crisp as the pleats in her skirt, and shining with money dignity and hardened achievement. 'Mm,' says Chris as she strikes the ball (for Chris is no whoofer: more a gentle moaner). 'Mm.' 'Ugh-
eh
!' 'Mm.' 'Ugh-
eh
!' 'Mm.' Monica cuts a chastened figure at the post-match conference. She broke Chris's serve three times, but she failed to hold any of her own. No laughter now, poor mite. She looks as though she is longing for a refreshing weep with her mother, or five hours with her coach, rewiring that drive volley.

Now that the Latest Sensation is history for the time being, the public eye greedily swivels and fixes with an incredulous leer on Gabriela Sabatini. As she unveils herself for the first match, under the sun's spotlight, a sigh of admiration and yearning wafts through the crowd. Sabatini looks like a human racehorse, a (successful) experiment in genetico-aesthetics, engineered, cultured and conditioned for optimum gorgeousness. Her beauty alone scares the life out of her opponents — because tennis is above all an expression of personal power and, in the women's game, is closely bound up with how a player looks, and how she feels she looks.

Up against Gabriela is the noble veteran Wendy Turnbull, with her gym knickers and boyish bob. It is, perhaps, not too great a trespass against gallantry to point out that Wendy is shaped like a Prince Pro tennis racket. She plays a stubby game, too, while Gabriela, of course, is pure motion sculpture on the court, with her balletic delay in the service action and her bravura — her toreador — backhand. It looked like a deeply thankless hour for Wendy, facing this bronzed hallucination of fluency and youth. She tried her 'old tricks' (block return, chip-and-charge), but Gabriela's topspin was a torment to her ageing legs. 'Time,' explained the umpire, every five minutes. 'Time. Time.' And it's the operative word. To Monica it says, 'Not yet'; to Wendy, 'No longer.'

Soon, the Sabatini charisma is devastating the press tent. 'Still got the red BMW, Gaby?' asks one tennis expert from the floor. 'This Argentine singer friend - what's his name?' 'Elio Roza.' 'How do you spell Elio?' 'E,l,i,o.' 'Great. How do you spell Roza?' What did you feel? What will you buy? At the best of times the press tent is hardly a fortress of shrewd inquiry, and when a superstar is near, the Sports Department quickly collapses into Features or Lifestyles. All week the girls troop in and tell the corps that they're crazy about their new coach and are now doing ten thousand pull-ups a day and eating nothing but alfalfa. It is an obligation, and a ritual. 'Have you dreamt of this moment all your life?' 'Yes.' This exchange will go into the paper as follows: 'I have dreamt of this moment all my life.' Thus a cliche is thrown up by the press, and printed by the press. The closed circle suits everybody. And if you put in a 'request' and secure a private interview, if you try to look 'behind the scenes', then all you'll find is another scene, another layer of press patter. This shouldn't surprise anyone. And besides, it has never been a particularly fruitful business, asking teenage girls
what they feel.