A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

Paul could feel the family sympathies ranging against his brother; it gave him a kind of pleasure but also made him feel sorry for Nathan. This is what his childhood was like – you can win a lot of battles just by keeping your temper.

  ‘Well, these are very rough calculations.’

  ‘Which show …’

  ‘Which don’t prove anything.’

  ‘Listen, Nathan. I have a pretty robust and realistic sense of what my chances are. I just want to hear what you came up with.’

  Liesel said, ‘I don’t understand what they’re arguing about.’

  ‘Nothing. Nobody’s arguing.’

  ‘Fine,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  But instead he took a bite of his food.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ Paul said, but in fact Liesel was right; he didn’t want to hear. Not that he expected to have a reasonable chance, but he didn’t want to talk about the odds in front of his father – he knew that Bill had unrealistic hopes.

  Nathan finished his mouthful. ‘According to this, you’re not a very good bet at twelve hundred to one.’ He looked up at Paul. ‘That gives you a roughly point oh eight percent likelihood of winning, whereas my calculations suggest you’ve probably got … a little less than that.’

  ‘If only someone here could have told you that.’

  ‘Can I say it again,’ Jean said. ‘That’s a better chance than I’ve got.’

  ‘Can we just eat,’ Bill said.

  He hadn’t ordered any food for himself, but Liesel told him her omelet was too big and tried to give him half. First she offered and then she threatened – if he didn’t take it, it would be thrown away. So he signaled for the waitress to bring an extra plate. Nathan also offered him a taste of his shakshouka. Jean gave him part of her short stack. The plate filled up. Only Paul said, ‘I need every calorie I can get.’

  ‘The girls start school next week,’ Nathan said, changing the subject.

  ‘So they were telling us.’

  And then for a few moments the table went quiet. Jean broke the silence at last. ‘The Fressingers,’ she said, to no one in particular. To fress is to eat like an animal, to feed. ‘The one thing that can shut us up.’

  ‘Tell me another story about Hitler,’ Julie said.

  *

  Bill paid in cash – he always kept a large roll of bills in his wallet. On their way out, the waitress asked Paul, ‘Are you a tennis player?’

  ‘More or less,’ Paul said.

  ‘Are you playing in the Open?’

  ‘Monday afternoon. Court 12.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. My brother plays for Emporia State, in Kansas. Can I ask your name? I was going to check the credit card but your dad paid cash.’

  ‘Paul Essinger.’

  ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘I know you. You used to do those tennis ball commercials.’

  Sometimes this happened to him, but not often; he felt pleased to show off his celebrity, especially in front of his brother. But he was embarrassed, too, because she would have heard their conversation. When you’re an athlete your chances in life become public property. ‘I’d ask you to sign something for him,’ she went on, ‘but he’d probably get mad at me for bugging you.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ Paul said, but somehow he left without giving his signature; he couldn’t really tell if she wanted him to.

  On the street again, Nathan said to him, ‘I was sorry to hear about Marcello.’

  ‘Well, me, too.’

  They walked in a long straggle towards the apartment for sale on 84th. In the late August sunshine, which came from almost directly overhead, the wide pavement of Amsterdam felt uncomfortably warm, but as soon as you entered the shadows of a side street, the temperature dropped and the breeze kicked in. Paul put on his Longhorn baseball cap – when he played, he had to wear Adidas, one of his sponsors. Dana brought up the rear; she’d had a hard time getting the stroller out. Jean and Liesel were waiting for her with the girls, though Liesel was paying only distracted attention. She was looking ahead at her sons: the younger one was also shorter and more self-contained; Nathan had a way of crowding you on the pavement. Bill stood a long way in front; he became impatient in large groups.

  Paul said, ‘You go to these events and you realize you’ve got a kind of public reputation or persona. People expect you to be a certain way. And I realized last night that I didn’t much like mine. It’s hard to put your finger on it. I was thinking about it last night, lying in bed.’

  ‘What kind of persona?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘I don’t know, a hanger-on. Somebody who’s always around at these things, but nobody knows who invited him or what his connection is. Somebody who joins other people’s conversations.’

  ‘Well, these people don’t know you very well. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  ‘That’s what I told myself last night, but that’s not quite what I mean. Maybe persona is the wrong word. Because it basically struck me that that’s who I am. I hang around, I join other people’s conversations. What are you supposed to do? As soon as you open your mouth, you turn into one kind of jerk or another. And if you don’t say anything, then you’re just one of those assholes who doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘Not everything is a moral act.’

  ‘I don’t believe you believe that.’

  ‘Put it this way. The stakes aren’t always especially high.’

  ‘I’m not really talking about morality anyway. It’s just that – I don’t think of myself as a needy person or a follower or a hanger-on, but probably in this context that’s what I am.’

  ‘This isn’t an ordinary context, right. Your … mentor doesn’t die every day.’

  ‘It’s not just that, it’s every time I enter a locker room or a press conference. Whatever, it really doesn’t bother me much. But I was thinking about Marcello. He never made me feel this.’

  ‘You miss him. That’s acceptable.’

  ‘That’s not quite right, either. I used to see him once a year. Less, sometimes.’

  ‘There’s a big difference between that and never again.’

  ‘I know, I know all this. But it doesn’t feel exactly like grieving. It’s more like – certain things becoming clear. You know, on the tour, there’s a big difference between different kinds of events. There are the slams, there’s the Masters Series, there’s the Challenger Tour. That’s what I was saying about Nadal. I can beat him in Basel or Atlanta, because he doesn’t give a damn. If you win the first set, maybe he has a flight to catch. But I can’t beat him at the Open. And you realize after a while that none of these games matters much. I’d like to think, from a healthy point of view, the whole tour is basically like the Challenger Tour. Nobody cares, it’s not important. But, like, raising a kid, keeping up a marriage, these things … What’s depressing to me is that I’m better at tennis than I am at anything else. Really, very much better – it’s not even close. And by one perfectly reasonable set of standards, I’m not that good at tennis. You made that pretty clear at lunch.’

  Nathan didn’t answer at first. They waited at 83rd to cross the road, while Liesel and Jean and Dana brought up the rear. In fact, they had stopped to look into a shop, and Julie ran up to her father to say that Aunt Jean had offered to buy them both a treat and was it okay with him?

  ‘What kind of treat?’

  ‘We don’t know yet, we haven’t decided. They have key chains in the window with little yellow cabs. Just New York stuff.’

  ‘Nothing sugary?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe. They’ve got chewing gum too, Tic Tacs, things like that.’

  ‘Okay. Nothing expensive.’

  ‘We won’t,’ Julie said and ran back, running not quite like a teenager or a kid, but slowly and almost dutifully. Her black heavy-soled Dr Martens boots felt like weights on her feet, but she liked them because they were waterproof – she considered them practical.

  When the light changed, the two men crossed over, they
wanted to keep talking. In some of the more obvious ways, they weren’t particularly close. In high school, they didn’t share clothes or get drunk together or chase girls, and Nathan stopped playing sports around the time that Paul turned ten or eleven and started beating him. But they had always been capable of interesting each other. When Paul dropped out of Stanford after two years, he committed himself to a lifetime of feeling intellectually inferior, especially around his brother. But maybe he would have felt that anyway. The only things Paul was better at were basically childish, knocking a ball around, playing cards, games you can win. But then they grew up – you’re supposed to outgrow those games. As a kid, Nathan liked the company of adults, but he had an abrasive quality, he wanted to be taken seriously. Later, as an adult, he didn’t have to fight for it anymore. The people he knew respected him, he could relax. But even around them, he missed something that he found in Paul’s company. They had the same father. This seemed to matter more and more as they got older.

  In 1961, Bill graduated first in his class at Port Jervis High School. He made Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford and got elected editor-in-chief of the Cornell Law Review a few years later. By most measures, he had lived a successful life, which had been comfortably rewarded by tenure, money and healthy children. But at some point in his twenties the arc of his success began to dip or level, for reasons Bill only partly understood. While the kids were growing up, they had no sense of their father’s professional frustrations: that he was having a hard time getting his articles published and felt himself institutionally passed over for the kinds of honors he used to take for granted in his grade-getting days. But later, as they entered their twenties, Paul and Nathan realized that these frustrations were a part of their inheritance – just as Paul began his own slide down the ATP rankings. Nathan had so far kept up the momentum of his accomplishments, from grad school to law school and from law school to tenure at Harvard. But he felt always the shadow of his father reaching out to him, intimately, almost honourably, which none of his colleagues could see. Paul understood this, which made possible for both of them a conversation about ambition and failure they couldn’t have had with anyone else.

  As they walked up Amsterdam, Nathan said, ‘You’re clearly going through something right now. You don’t have to take seriously every thought that honestly occurs to you.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going through. But listen, there’s something else I wanted to bring up. If you’re looking at apartments on the West Side because of us – I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be living here.’

  ‘I thought the plan was to move into television.’

  ‘That’s Bill’s plan. I’ve had enough of all of that. Maybe it’s what Dana wants, too; I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve been looking at some real estate in Texas. Just land, really, outside of Austin, where I can build a house.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you intend to do?’

  ‘As little as possible. I don’t know if you know this, Nathan. But I’ve made a lot of money – too much. More than I in any way deserve. Right after my first Open, Marcello put a few of his players in touch with this sports equipment start-up. I was one of them. This was in my rising star days. Weeks is more accurate. Anyway, it’s very hard to break into the tennis ball market and that’s what these guys were trying to do. Wilson and Head pretty much have the game sewn up. They couldn’t pay us much, but my agent at the time negotiated some stock options.’

  ‘And they broke in?’

  ‘No, they don’t make tennis balls anymore. But they designed the soccer ball for the last two World Cups.’

  ‘So how much did you make?’

  ‘It varies on the day, but I’ve been slowly selling up. After taxes, around six million dollars.’

  ‘Well, that will buy you some decent real estate outside of Austin.’

  ‘It’s not just that. I’m clocking out. I don’t want to do any of this anymore. I don’t want to have any kind of contact. And I figure, with six million dollars in the bank, I don’t need to. This will see me through.’

  ‘What do you mean, contact?’

  ‘I don’t mean you guys. In fact, that’s something else I want to talk to you about. You must have done pretty well for yourself. We don’t need this, right? We don’t need any of this. It’ll be like when we were kids again. I don’t know, just riding our bikes, hanging out.’

  ‘You’ll go crazy.’

  Paul looked at his brother, half-smiling. There was no fat on him, none at all, and when he smiled you could see the muscles in his face and guess at the skull beneath them. ‘Maybe I already am a little crazy.’

  ‘And that’s not what we were doing when we were kids. You were playing tennis. I was taking classes at UT.’

  ‘Before that. Before that started.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you can live like that. I don’t think your kids will want to, either.’

  ‘That’s how we lived.’

  ‘What does Dana think?’

  Bill was waiting for them at the corner of 84th, but they stopped outside a restaurant to look at the menu – Pickles and Biscuits, one of these up-market down-market foodie bars, with a cask in the window and naked light bulbs.

  ‘Look,’ Paul said. ‘You can get a chicken-fried steak for twenty-two dollars.’

  ‘What does Dana think?’

  He didn’t answer at first, he was reading the menu. ‘When I first moved to New York, you could buy a beer for three bucks, even in this neighborhood. There was a little Polish bar that actual Polish people went to.’ After a moment, he added, ‘It’s gotten to the point where I can’t stand the way she loads the dishwasher. It’s started to feel like a deliberate affront.’

  They walked slowly towards their father, who was watching them. Nathan said, ‘I think you need to back off from that point.’

  ‘Hey, Dad.’ Paul put his arm around Bill’s neck. ‘Everybody’s slow. I think I’m going to peel off and hit the courts.’

  ‘Knock ’em dead, son.’

  And Paul jogged on – up Amsterdam towards 86th Street. He had left his rackets at the apartment; he needed to get changed. Bill took pleasure from watching him. As a young man, he used to run the same way: almost flat-footed, with the legs bowed slightly at the knee, but lightly and easily in spite of these things, as if at any step he could change direction.

  When the ‘girls’ joined up with them, Liesel said, ‘Where’s Paul?’

  ‘He was late for his court time.’

  ‘Without saying goodbye?’

  Jean turned to her brother. ‘Well played.’

  ‘He’ll see us at dinner.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Dana said. ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘Did you guys have a fight?’ Liesel asked her son.

  ‘No, he was just running late.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Bill said; and, in fact, at that moment he noticed a woman in a trouser suit standing outside a set of brownstone steps, around thirty yards from the corner. She had a set of papers in one hand and was trying to type something into her phone at the same time. ‘Is that the place?’

  ‘Probably.’ Nathan looked at his children. ‘So what did you get?’

  ‘Different things,’ Julie said. ‘Margot hasn’t learned yet that if you buy something like candy, after you eat it, you don’t have anything.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Margot said, with a full mouth.

  ‘Not now, but maybe later. Because I’ll still have this.’ And she held up one of the yellow cab key-chains.

  ‘I don’t want one of those.’

  ‘Well, you probably will,’ Julie said, but Margot’s comment had already taken the shine off it, and she felt like a little girl holding a trinket.

  *

  Bill didn’t want to move to New York but he liked looking at houses. He liked talking to strangers, too, and when the woman in the suit said to him, ‘Nathan, right? We spoke on the ph
one,’ he told her, ‘That’s my son. I’m just an innocent bystander.’

  ‘Looks like we got the whole family.’

  She had a pretty, almost boyish face, though she didn’t look young either – forty-something, dark-skinned and short-haired. Her accent sounded faintly South American. You could see her hips sticking out of the suit; the clothes hung on her like they would on a rail.

  ‘Who is the buyer?’ she asked, handing out brochures. They were made of stiff glossy card, with a photograph on the front, and contributed to the air of toyshop unreality.

  ‘He is. They are,’ Nathan said, letting his mother go past him. She climbed slowly up the front steps, holding her brochure.

  ‘These are the only stairs,’ the realtor said, and Liesel, annoyed, responded, ‘I don’t mind stairs.’

  There was a tall bow window to the side, protected by a grille, which bent in front of the glass in flowing curves – the image on the photograph. Ivy grew up the bars, and a wide crate-like window box of chrysanthemums sat on the ledge in a patch of dirt. It all looked charming and expensive.

  ‘Let me just say something quickly before we go in,’ the woman went on. ‘There was a little confusion with the owner. Mostly I talk to her daughter. I thought she was going out, but she isn’t – the owner, I mean. She’s there now. So maybe if we don’t all go in at once.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jean said, and Dana added, ‘I’m happy to wait outside. That way we don’t have to carry the stroller up.’

  ‘What about the girls?’

  ‘I want to see it,’ Julie said, and Margot wouldn’t leave her so they came along.

  Years later, her memories of that afternoon blended with other memories and Margot couldn’t be sure if the old woman she saw lying on a sofa in the apartment was Liesel or not. It couldn’t have been Liesel – they never bought the apartment on West 84th. But still the memory was associated with her grandmother. A woman lying on a couch, under a blanket, with thin gray hair. The television was on; it sat on a stack of big art books in front of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with more books. The ceilings were high, too, and there were plants on the shelves; a pot of ivy trailed its leaves across the spines. The old woman was watching CNN, and the realtor said, ‘Mrs Mitroglou, do you mind if I turn the sound down a little or turn it off?’