The Singles Game

by Lauren Weisberger

  Charlie turned back to her iPad and surfed some more. She clicked through some Instagram photos of Piper and Ronin at a fund-raising party at Ronin’s hospital. All the other wives were wearing typical DVF wrap dresses in varying prints or black pants with a jewel-colored silky top; Piper was swathed in a leopard-print romper with sky-high, studded heels and her hair piled wildly atop her head. She was the only person Charlie had ever met who could pull off fuck-me red lipstick at all times of the day or night without ever looking like a hooker. Charlie smiled and picked up her phone.

  Saw your pics from the lupus benefit. Very respectful of the cause. I was impressed.

  The three dots flashed for a few seconds before the message came back: an emoticon of a hand giving the finger.

  No, seriously, I saw those heels at a peep show joint in Times Square a few months ago. Very chic.

  This time, Piper replied with a picture of her own bitmoji holding up her middle finger.

  Love you, too. Did I mention I’m in Anguilla? They pronounce it Ang-gee-lah. Just thought you should know.

  If you weren’t screwing the hottest guy on the planet, I’d be forced to point out what a huge, raging loser you are.

  Yes, well. I am screwing the hottest guy on the planet. Who now calls me his gf, btw

  I am going to have to work extra hard as your maid of honor to upstage the two of you. I might start planning now

  Hahahahah not so fast!

  Charlie put her phone down and noticed her heart was pounding. Of course Piper was kidding, but the mere mention of marrying Marco made Charlie nauseated, excited, and anxious all at once. It had only been ten days since they’d gone public, but she supposed you could count the whole year they’d been sleeping together as something . . .

  An email from Isabel, the WTA publicist, popped up on Charlie’s iPad and she opened it.

  Dear Charlie,

  Please find enclosed the roundup of last week’s events. I’ve included all the mentions, stories, interviews, spottings, blind items, and photographs that include either you, Marco, or both of you since the night of the player party in Miami. Congratulations! This is truly tremendous reach, and we are always appreciative of the chance to draw attention to our sport. I hope you’re enjoying the VF shoot. I’m in constant contact with their people, but please do let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

  All the best, Isabel

  Below the note were three dozen links, which at first glance included everything from US Weekly to O, The Oprah Magazine. “Page Six” had a juicy tidbit insinuating rumors that she and Marco had been having an affair—“in various luxe hotel suites all over the world”—for over a year now; Gawker featured a rambling, sexist exploration on why female tennis players were, in their words, “pretty much the only attractive professional women athletes on earth,” with especially derogatory commentary aimed at female basketball players and swimmers; E! Online had dug up a dozen photos of both she and Marco as junior players, and paired them with lots of empty, breathless copy lines like “Meant to be!” and “Fated from birth!” across their website. Most online magazines and blogs featured the photograph now dubbed “The Kiss”: some zoomed in to make it look like a sneaked paparazzi shot and others blurred the background using Photoshop so you couldn’t quite tell that Charlie and Marco had pecked while walking a red carpet in front of hundreds of people, but they all sent the same message: Hot New Couple Alert.

  Charlie turned off the iPad and tucked it in her beach bag. Lowering the lounge chair to flat, she stretched her arms overhead and felt the early-morning sun hit her body. It had all happened so fast. New coach, new look, new boyfriend, new aggressive style of play. And just in case there was any doubt it had been the right call, there were the tangible results to consider: a semifinal finish at a Premier Mandatory tournament, a bump in her ranking, and more media attention in the last week than Kate Middleton had gotten with her second pregnancy announcement.

  When she woke up a half hour later, it felt like she’d been asleep all morning. When was the last time Charlie had been relaxed enough to fall asleep poolside? Hell, when was the last time she’d even been poolside? Of all the fabulous hotels she stayed in, all the exotic cities and far-flung countries, she rarely ever saw anything except the airport, the tennis site, and the inside of her hotel room. Occasionally she’d have dinner at a great restaurant or attend the player party at a fun nightclub, but all of these five-star places with the best chefs and the prettiest clientele could be anywhere. If it weren’t for the jet lag and the passport stamps, Charlie could barely ever remember if she was in Hong Kong or Shanghai, Melbourne or Auckland. One time she’d written a group email update to Piper, Jake, and her father and told them about what she’d seen out of her window on the drive from the Abu Dhabi airport to her hotel; it had taken her father replying to ask if she wasn’t playing in Dubai that week before she realized he was right.

  Her phone read 9:08 a.m. Normally Charlie hated running, but it was widely acknowledged among players as the only way to squeeze in a little sightseeing: it counted as a workout, and you got to see a bit of local flavor at the same time. She headed back to her room to change and although the private plunge pool on the balcony of her oceanfront suite nearly dismantled her motivation, she changed into shorts, laced up her sneakers, and tucked a twenty-dollar bill in her sports bra in case she found a place to buy some water. Meads Bay beach was nearly empty when she jogged down, only a couple of families with young children sitting in the shallow surf, and they all gave her tired waves as she ran by. Her feet hit the sand rhythmically and her breath started to come faster. Despite her fitness level, she could never manage more than a seven-minute mile for any real length of time, but she settled into a comfortable pace and focused on taking in the salty air. In a few minutes Charlie was running past another resort, not nearly as luxurious as the Viceroy, but nice enough and filled with happily shrieking children. In another half-mile or so the beach ended abruptly with an understated PRIVATE PROPERTY sign affixed to an imposing gate. Behind it, lush vegetation rose seemingly out of the sand to mask a stucco mansion: only the shingled roof was visible above the palm trees.

  Veering off the beach onto a paved sidewalk, Charlie followed the path out toward a village road. To her left was a sprinkling of cottage houses, a church, and what looked like a schoolhouse. She turned right and ran toward a village with a charming little pedestrian area dotted with local shops and restaurants. There were a few tourists poking around with their telltale sunburns and oversized straw bags, but mostly the customers were Anguillan: old ladies bustling about with plastic sacks of plantains and schoolchildren in crisp uniforms finishing their breakfasts. A little donut shop at the end of the strip advertised bottled water, so Charlie jogged over.

  “Hey!” she heard a familiar voice say from somewhere behind her.

  Charlie stopped, her heart doing little flip-flops. Had Marco followed her? Was he here to apologize?

  When she turned around, it took her a moment. “Dan? What are you doing here?”

  He sat in a green plastic chair, an espresso cup in front of him. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he looked up at Charlie and said, “I could ask you the same.”

  Charlie mopped a stream of sweat from her forehead and then awkwardly wiped her wet palm against her shorts. “I was just out for a run. Figured it was my only chance to leave the hotel and look around a little.”

  “It’s pretty nice, huh?”

  “The hotel? It’s gorgeous.”

  Dan laughed, a hearty laugh with crinkly eyes and his face turned to the sky.

  “I’m going to get a bottle of water. Do you want one?” she asked him.

  He motioned to the cluster of three empty chairs at his table. “Why don’t you join me? We don’t have to be back for another forty minutes or so. They have the most killer coffee. Even better than Turkey.”

 
Charlie glanced around helplessly. Why did she suddenly feel so uncomfortable? And then she realized: she’d never been alone with Dan. She barely ever spotted him off the court, to the point where Jake often wondered aloud where he went and what he did. It seemed Dan was not interested in hanging out if he wasn’t on the clock. Other women befriended their hitting partners—some were even rumored to sleep with them—but Dan clearly wanted no part of any of it.

  “No pressure, Silver. If you don’t want a coffee, I won’t be offended.” Another smile, this one a little bit mocking.

  Charlie took the seat directly across from him. An Anguillan man appeared almost instantly.

  “She’ll have a double,” Dan announced.

  Charlie opened her mouth to protest that Todd didn’t allow caffeine, but Dan held his hand up. “Trust me, Silver. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Thank you,” she said, clasping her hands together. “So, what brings you here?”

  “You do, actually.”

  “No, I mean here. This village.”

  Dan shrugged. “I just went out for a walk this morning and ended up here. I heard the food was good on the island, but I can’t believe I didn’t know anything about this coffee.” He looked so peaceful, so collected. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a vintage surfing T-shirt and flip-flops.

  “Do you do that a lot?”

  “What? Go walking?” Dan asked. “You know, I guess I do.”

  “Is that where you always are when we’re not hitting?”

  He appeared to think about this. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s my chance to see things, you know?”

  The waiter reappeared and placed espresso cups in front of Charlie and Dan and a miniature pitcher of steamed milk in the middle.

  “Here, do it like this.” Dan poured the milk into Charlie’s cup and popped in a single cube of white sugar.

  “Todd will have your head for that,” Charlie said, her voice singsongy and teasing.

  “Well, screw him then,” Dan said. And then, a beat later: “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

  Charlie laughed. “So it all comes out! I had no idea.”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Dan rushed to say, looking more agitated by the second. “I didn’t mean that. I respect Todd as a coach, and I owe him a lot for this gig. For picking me.”

  Charlie reached across the table and placed her hand on Dan’s. “Hey, slow down. You were kidding. Todd can be a huge dickhead. I get that. I’m not going to run off and tell him anything, okay? Don’t worry.”

  Dan stared at Charlie’s hand for a long, awkward moment. She yanked it back to her lap.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for!”

  “It’s just that I’m really grateful for this job, even if he is . . . difficult sometimes.”

  “Difficult?” Charlie shrieked. “He’s a first-rate asshole. But that stays between us.”

  Finally, a smile.

  “So, when you say you ‘owe him for this gig,’ am I to interpret that there was competition? Because Todd showed me a video of you hitting one day—I think it was your final year at Duke in a match against UVA, if I’m not mistaken—and he was all like, ‘This is the guy. I got him and he’s going to change your life.’ ”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure that’s exactly how it went down, but it’s nice of you to say that,” Dan said.

  “I’m serious! He was insistent it be you, and only you.”

  They each sipped their coffee and Charlie tasted instantly that Dan was right: it was insanely good.

  “So what were you doing when Todd called you? You were two years out of college, right?”

  Dan nodded. “I was back home in Marion, in Virginia, working for my family’s hardware store. I was playing some local tournaments, but man, it was depressing.”

  “You never thought about turning pro? First singles at Duke is pretty impressive.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not that I never thought about it, but it didn’t really seem like an option. There was no extra money growing up for lessons or coaches or anything, so I pretty much taught myself. The whole point was to get a full ride to college, which I did, so I certainly couldn’t leave once I got there. I was good, yes, but I’m not sure I was good enough to go the distance. I couldn’t risk it. The guaranteed degree was way more valuable than the small possibility I could make any real money playing tennis. At least that’s what I tell myself,” he said with a smile.

  “And then Todd called . . .” Charlie let her voice trail off.

  “And then Todd called. He said I was perfect for the position, but I think the truth is that my price was right. No one else would have done it for practically free—” He stopped, clearly horrified. “I didn’t mean it like that. My god, I can’t keep my mouth shut today.”

  “I knew the salary wasn’t a lot, but Todd told me that was the going rate,” Charlie said quietly. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to this when it was all happening?

  Dan waved her off. “Stop. Please. I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing it because it’s probably my only chance to travel the world and see these incredible places before I go back to Virginia and take over the store for good.” He coughed. “And if we’re being completely honest here, I’m doing it because I think you’re a fucking awesome player with incredible talent and potential, and I want to be there when you win your first Grand Slam. Because I know you’re going to, and I also know it’s going to be the first of many. I would have been crazy to turn this down.”

  “You think so?” Charlie asked. It was all she could do not to hug him.

  “I fucking know so.”

  “You say ‘fuck’ a lot,” Charlie said. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  Dan grinned. He glanced at his watch. “Come on, Warrior Princess, we have to go. Practice courts wait for no one.”

  He dug for his wallet, but Charlie said, “I’ve got this.”

  “What, you think I’m so poor I can’t buy us some Caribbean coffee?”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. She liked the new cursing, joking Dan. “No, I’m just thinking it’s fun to have an excuse to pull money out of my bra.” And she plunged her hand into her shirt.

  Dan averted his eyes, but it didn’t stop him from saying flirtatiously, “Best reason I can think of. Come on, Silver. I’ll race you back.”

  “Oooooh, you think you can beat me just because I’m a girl? I run a seven-minute mile choking for air like no one’s business.” Charlie left the entire twenty on the table, and finished the last sip of coffee. The caffeine felt like a transfusion of pure life. “Now, move your ass!”

  Dan sprinted forward, and, laughing, Charlie ran after him to catch up.

  13

  tennis royalty

  DANIEL ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA

  APRIL 2016

  “Aaaargh!” Charlie screamed as her racket connected with the rising ball right at the sweet spot. It sailed back, barely clearing the net, before landing so close to the baseline that Charlie wasn’t sure it was in. She rarely grunted—she thought it a gross and unladylike strategy some of the women used to distract their opponents—but this time it had been a purely biological response to hitting the ball with every ounce of her strength. The shrieking grunt had escaped her lips involuntarily. She was horrified but had to admit it felt good.

  “Thirty–love,” the female line judge announced into her microphone from her raised courtside chair.

  “Challenge!” Karina bellowed, pointing a sizable hand toward the line. “That was out!”

  “Ms. Geiger has challenged the call. We will review the point,” the umpire declared.

  Charlie’s heart pounded from the exertion and excitement. They’d been playing for two and a half hours already, and she was two points away from winning the entire tour
nament in Charleston. She took deep inhales through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, walking slowly to keep her legs loose. When she glanced toward the player box she saw her father, Jake, Dan, and Todd all turned away from her, their attention directed at the mammoth overhead screens, waiting for the replay to begin.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the camera focused on Charlie’s shot: it sailed over the net, making a near-perfect arch on its path to the baseline. There, just before it landed, the camera zoomed in so only the ball and a few inches of the baseline tape were visible. In the slowest of slo-mo, the ball inched its way toward the line and tap! A tiny sliver of the ball’s underside grazed the very back of the tape. A shadow-like graphic of the slo-mo camera confirmed it: there had been one centimeter—perhaps less—of overlap between the ball and the baseline. But that’s all she needed. She pumped her fist at the same time the crowd cheered. Todd sprang to his feet and raised both arms over his head and screamed, “Yeah, Charlie! Now, finish this!”

  “The score shall remain thirty–love,” the umpire announced calmly. “Karina Geiger is out of player challenges.”

  Karina slammed her racket against her leg hard enough to hurt and shouted, “Mach es dir selber!”

  Trying to stay calm, Charlie walked to the line and motioned to the ball girl, who immediately ran over and proffered two balls. Charlie tucked the first one in the leg of her black undershorts. The second one she bounced rhythmically one, two, three times and then tossed in the air. The late afternoon Charleston sun was blinding, but she’d practiced in enough bright sunshine to stay focused on the ball. She watched it rise toward the sky, and then at the perfect moment, just as the ball was reaching the peak of its ascent, Charlie launched both feet off the ground, extended her right arm from behind her back to over her head, and went after it with the strength of her entire body.