Windy City Blues (13 page)

I don’t know much about tennis, but even I’d heard of Callabrio. After dominating men’s tennis in the sixties he had retired to his family home in Majorca.
But five years ago he’d come out of seclusion to coach a few selected players. Lily had piqued his interest when he saw her at the French Open last year; Monica had leaped at the opportunity to have her daughter work with him. Apparently Gary was less impressed. As the morning wore on Gary’s advice began clashing with Paco’s more and more often.

In the midst of a heated exchange over Lily’s upswing I sensed someone moving onto the bench behind me. I turned to see a young woman leaning at her ease against the bleacher behind her. She was dressed in loose-fitting trousers that accentuated the long, lean lines of her body.

Lily saw the newcomer at the same time I did. She turned very red, then very white. While Paco and Gary continued arguing, she signaled to the young man to start hitting balls to her again. She’d been too tired to move well a minute ago, but the woman’s arrival infused her with new energy.

Mary Ann had also turned to stare. “Nicole Rubova,” she muttered to me.

I raised my eyebrows. Another of the dazzling Czech players who’d come to the States in Martina’s wake. She was part of the generation between Martina and Capriati, a year or so older than Graf but with time ahead of her still to fight for the top spots. Her dark, vivid beauty made her a mediagenic foil to Graf’s and Lily’s blondness, but her sardonic humor kept her from being really popular with the press.

“Gary’s afraid she’s going to rape his baby. He won’t let Lily go out alone with any of the women on the circuit.” Mary Ann continued to mutter at me.

I raised my brows again, this time amazed at Mary Ann’s pithy remarks. She’d never talked so bluntly to me when she was my basketball coach.

By now Gary had also seen Rubova in the stands. Like Lily he changed color, then grew even more maniacal in his demands on his daughter. When Paco advised a rest around eleven-thirty, Gary shook his head emphatically.

“You can’t spoil her, Paco. Believe me, I know this little girl. She’s got great talent and a heart of gold, but she’s lazy. You’ve got to drive her.”

Lily was gray with exhaustion. While they argued over her she leaned over, her hands on her knees, and gasped for air.

“Mr. Oberst,” Paco said, his chilly formality emphasizing his dislike, “you want Lily to be a great star. But a girl who plays when she is this fatigued will only injure herself, if she doesn’t burn out completely first. I say the workout is over for the day.”

“And I say she got to Wimbledon last year thanks to my methods,” Gary yelled.

“And she almost had to forfeit her round of sixteen match because you were coaching her so blatantly from the seats,” Paco shouted back. “Your methods stink, Oberst.”

Gary stepped toward the Catalan, then abruptly
turned his back on him and yelled at his daughter, “Lily, pick up your racket. Come on, girl. You know the rules.”

“Really, Oberst,” Monte Allison called tentatively down to the floor from the stands. “We can’t injure Lily—that won’t help any of us.”

Monica nodded in emphatic agreement, but Gary paid no attention to either of them. Lily looked imploringly from Paco to Gary. When the coach said nothing else, she bent to pick up her racket and continued returning balls. She was missing more than she was hitting now and was moving leadenly around the court. Paco watched for about a minute, then turned on his heel and marched toward a door in the far wall. As he disappeared through it, Monica got up from Mary Ann’s left and hurried after him.

I noticed a bright pink anorak with rabbit fur around the hood next to where she’d been sitting, and two furry leather mittens with rabbits embroidered on them.

“That’s Lily’s,” Mary Ann said. “Monica must have forgotten she was holding them for her. I’ll give them to the kid if she makes it through this session.”

My old coach’s face was set in angry lines. I felt angry, too, and kept half rising from my seat, wondering if I ought to intervene. Paco’s departure had whipped Gary into a triumphant frenzy. He shooed the kid serving balls away and started hitting ground strokes to his daughter at a furious pace. She took it
for about five minutes before collapsing on the floor in tears.

“I just can’t do it anymore, Daddy. I just can’t.”

Gary put his own racket down and smiled in triumph.

A sharp clap came from behind me, making me jump. “Bravo, Gary!” Nicole cried. “What a man you are! Yes, indeed, you’ve proved you can frighten your little girl. Now the question is: Which matters more to you? That Lily become the great player her talent destines her to be? Or that you prove that you own her?”

She jumped up lightly from the bench and ran down to the court. She put an arm around Lily and said something inaudible to the girl. Lily looked from her to her father and shook her head, flushing with misery. Nicole shrugged. Before leaving the court she and Gary exchanged a long look. Only an optimist would have found the seeds of friendship in it.

The Slims started the next Monday. The events at the Skokie Valley Tennis Club made me follow the newspaper reports eagerly, but the tournament seemed to be progressing without any open fireworks. One or two of the higher seeds were knocked out early, but Martina, Rubova, Lily, and one of the Maleeva sisters were all winning on schedule, along
with Zina Garrison. Indeed, Martina, coming off knee surgery, seemed to be playing with the energy of a woman half her age.

I called Mary Ann McFarlane Thursday night to make sure she had my pass to the quarterfinal matches on Friday. Lily was proving such a hit that tickets were hard to get.

“Oh, yes,” she assured me. “We linespersons don’t have much leverage, but I got Monica to leave a pass for you at the will-call window. Dinner Sunday night?”

I agreed readily. Driving down to the Pavilion on Friday, I was in good time for the noon match, which pitted Martina against Frederica Lujan.

Lujan was seeded twelfth to Martina’s third in world rankings, but the gap between their games seemed much wider than those numbers. In fact, halfway through the first set Martina suddenly turned her game up a notch and turned an even match into a rout. She was all over the court, going down for shots that should have been unhittable.

An hour later we got the quarterfinal meeting the crowd had come to see: Lily against Nicole Rubova. When Lily danced onto the court, a vision in pink and white with a sweatband pulling her blond spikes back from her face, the stands roared with pleasure. Nicole got a polite round of applause, but she was only there to give their darling a chance to play.

A couple of minutes after they’d started their
warm-up, Monica came in. She sat close to the court, about ten rows in front of me. The man she joined was Paco Callabrio. He had stood next to Lily on the court as she came out for her warm-ups, patted her encouragingly on the ass, and climbed into the stands. Monica must have persuaded him not to quit in fury last week.

At first I assumed Gary was boycotting the match, either out of dislike of Paco or for fear his overt coaching would cause Lily to forfeit. As play progressed, though, I noticed him on the far side of the court, behind the chair umpire, making wild gestures if Lily missed a close shot, or if he thought the lines-persons were making bad calls.

When play began Rubova’s catlike languor vanished. She obviously took her conditioning seriously, moving well around the court and playing the net with a brilliant ferocity. Mary Ann might be right—she might have designs on Lily’s body—but it didn’t make her play the youngster with any gentleness.

Lily, too, had a range of motion that was exciting to watch. She was big, already five ten, with long arms and a phenomenal reach. Whether due to Gary’s drills or not, her backhand proved formidable; unlike most women on the circuit she could use it one handed.

Lily pushed her hard but Rubova won in three sets, earning the privilege of meeting Navratilova the next afternoon. It seemed to me that Lily suddenly began
hitting the ball rather tentatively in the last few games of the final set. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to know if she had suddenly reached her physical limit, or if she was buckling under Rubova’s attack.

The crowd, disappointed in their favorite’s loss, gave the Czech only a lukewarm hand as she collected her rackets and exited. Paco, Monica, and Gary all disappeared from the stands as Lily left the court to a standing ovation.

Mary Ann had been a linesperson on the far sideline during the Rubova match. Neither of the players had given the umpire a hard time. Rubova at one point drew a line on the floor with her racket, a sarcastic indicator of where she thought Mary Ann was spotting Lily. Another time Lily cried out in frustration to the chair umpire; I saw Monica’s shoulders tense and wondered if the prodigy was prone to tantrums. More likely she was worried by what Gary—turning puce on the far side—might do to embarrass her. Other than that the match had gone smoothly.

Doubles quarterfinals were on the agenda for late afternoon. I wasn’t planning on watching those, so I wandered down to the court to have a word with Mary Ann before I left.

She tried to talk me into staying. “Garrison has teamed up with Rubova. They should be fun to watch—both are real active girls.”

“Enough for me for one day. What’d you think of the kid in tournament play?”

Mary Ann spread her hands. “She’s going to go a long way. Nicole outplayed her today, but she won’t forever. Although—I don’t know—it looked to me in the last couple of games as though she might have been favoring her right shoulder. I couldn’t be sure. I just hope Gary hasn’t got her to injure herself with his hit-till-you-drop coaching methods. I’m surprised Paco’s hanging on through it.”

I grinned suggestively at her. “Maybe Monica has wonderful powers of persuasion.”

Mary Ann looked at me calmly. “You’re trying to shock me, Vic, but believe me, I was never a maiden aunt. And anyway, nothing on this circuit would shock me…. They have free refreshments downstairs for players and crew. And press and hangers-on. Want to come have some coffee before you go? Some of the girls might even be there.”

“And be a hanger-on? Sure, why not?” Who knows, maybe Martina would meet me and remember an urgent need for some detective work.

A freight elevator protected by guards carried the insiders to the lower depths. Mary Ann, in her linesperson’s outfit, didn’t need to show any identification. I came in for more scrutiny, but my player’s-guest badge got me through.

The elevator decanted us onto a grubby corridor. Young people of both sexes hurried up and down its length, carrying clipboards at which they frowned importantly.

“PR staff,” Mary Ann explained. “They feed all the statistics from the match to different wire services and try to drum up local interest in the tournament. Tie-ins with the auto show, that kind of thing.”

Older, fatter people stood outside makeshift marquees with coffee and globular brownies. At the end of the hall I could see Paco and Monica huddled together. Gary wasn’t in sight.

“Lily may have gone back in for a massage; I think she already did her press interview. Gary must be inside with her. He won’t let her get a workover alone.”

“Inside the locker room?” I echoed. “I know she’s Daddy’s darling, but don’t the other women object to him being there while they’re changing? And can she really stand having him watch her get massaged?”

“There’s a lounge.” Mary Ann shepherded me into the refreshment tent—really a niche roped off from the cement corridor with a rather pathetic plastic canopy overhead. “Friends and lovers of the stars can sit there while the girls dress inside. I don’t expect he actually hangs around the massage table. Don’t go picturing some fabulous hideaway, though. This is a gym at a relatively poor university. It’s purely functional. But they do have a cement cubbyhole for the masseuse—that sets it apart from the normal school gym.”

I suddenly realized I was hungry—it was long past lunchtime. The Slims catering was heavy on volume
and carbohydrates. I rejected fried chicken wings and rice and filled a plastic bowl with some doubtful-looking chili. Mary Ann picked up a handful of cookies to eat with her coffee.

We settled at an empty table in the far corner and ate while Mary Ann pointed out the notables to me. Zina Garrison’s husband was at the buffet next to Katarina Maleeva. The two were laughing together, trying to avoid a fat reporter who was unabashedly eavesdropping on them.

A well-groomed woman near the entrance to the marquee was Clare Rutland, the doyenne of the tour, Mary Ann explained. She had no formal tide with the Slims, but seemed to be able to keep its temperamental stars happy, or at least functioning.

As I ate my chili, six or seven people stopped to talk to Rutland. They’d nod at her remarks and race off again. I imagined tennis stars’ wishes, from lotus blossoms to Lotus racers, being satisfied at the wave of her hand.

Mary Ann, talking to acquaintances, began picking up some of the gossip buzzing the room: Lily might have strained her shoulder. Maybe torn her rotator cuff. In this kind of environment the worst scenarios are generated rapidly from the whiff of an idea. And Gary apparently had been thrown out of Lily’s press conference and was now sulking in the women’s lounge.

A collective cry from the group across the room
made me jerk my head around. Nicole Rubova was sprinting down the hall, wet, a towel haphazardly draping her midriff.

“Clare,” she gasped.

Clare Rutland was on her feet as soon as she heard the outcry, almost before Rubova came into view. She took off her cardigan and draped it across the player’s shoulders. Rubova was too far from us for me to be able to hear her, but the reporters in the room crowded around her, tournament etiquette forgotten.

It only took a minute for Mary Ann to get the main point of the story from one of them: Gary Oberst was on the couch in the players’ lounge. Someone had wrapped a string from a tennis racket around his neck a few times.

It was only later that everyone realized Lily herself had disappeared.