Partly because they played without serve. One of them would knock the ball across the net, they rallied a little, and then started going at it. Games to seven, like a tiebreak, win by two. And when Luigi saw Paul, this is what he did, flung a ball at him and said, ‘Come on, prince. Let’s go.’ (He called people prince, count, jefe, capo, boss.)
‘I need to warm up a little.’
‘You want to warm up, you come early, like me.’
And so they started knocking it around. It was really almost unbelievable, how hard and low Luigi could hit the ball. He caught it rising, in the fat of the racket, and never seemed to move his feet. Wherever he happened to be, that’s where the ball came back at him. Boom boom boom, like banging in a nail. If the first knock didn’t get the job done, the next two would. And, in fact, Paul felt his wrist give slightly, and he feathered a forehand into the net.
‘One love,’ Luigi said. And then two-love and three-love.
But if Paul could stay in the point, if he could move Luigi around a little, wear him out, Luigi hit too hard and flat not to make mistakes.
Under the big bubble of the canopied roof, echoes flattened out and ran away from you, sounds came back after a slight delay. There were half a dozen courts around them, people hitting balls, chasing them down, talking a little; and for a while Paul felt faintly underwater. There was too much space around his head. Everything seemed small and random, his own head included, the balls doing their math against the green of the Har-Tru surface and the white of the roof. You felt lucky just to make contact, and Luigi took the first game seven–two.
Afterwards, they met at the net and shook hands.
‘Come on, big man,’ Luigi said. ‘I don’t want to feel sorry for you.’
Luigi had been at Marcello’s memorial, and they talked about that, too. ‘Fucking beautiful,’ he said, and Paul couldn’t tell if he meant it. But Luigi went on, ‘Beautiful beautiful, fucking fucking, blah blah blah. Everybody says what they have to say. It don’t mean nothing.’ Luigi liked Marcello but didn’t have any illusions about their relationship. ‘For me, in my mind, I am number one guy, simple. But for Marcello, number six, maybe number seven. You, maybe number ten or twelve. Everybody knows this. Nobody says it.’
‘I never felt that with him,’ Paul said.
‘Because you don’t want to. But that’s not his problem, that’s yours.’
By the time they started up again, Paul’s head had cleared. He was breathing without thinking, moving his feet. And he felt good. Sometimes your body sends back physical reports, delivers its news, and the weather is fine. Hit and move; hit and move; follow through. Come to net when you can. Hit and move.
When he was playing well, he often thought about something else – something stupid or important, which kept his brain busy and let the rest of him get on with the job. The music that was playing at that party: They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no no no. His sister Susie, sitting on somebody’s sofa with Cal asleep on her arm. Sometimes it annoyed Paul, the way she took on the mother-role. ‘Go have fun,’ she told him. ‘You need a break.’ But it pleased him, too. You get these glimpses of continuities – when they were kids, she made him play tea-parties, they pretended to drink from tiny china cups. A few weeks ago she had told him she was pregnant again. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told Mom yet. What am I doing with my life.’ Susie was the only one who referred to their parents as Mom and Dad. They were worried about her career.
The ball flashed at him and he struck it. Sometimes it amazed him afterwards, watching videos of himself. Did he mean to hit it there? On the line or a few inches inside. The ball as it touched the surface left a print in your mind’s eye, yellow on green. And sometimes only then did you realize, yes, that’s where. Or no, it was long or short, and you had to adjust.
He won the second game handily, seven–three or seven–four. There was some dispute about a line call, and later they couldn’t remember the score. But it didn’t matter. Paul gave him the point and won anyway.
The next was closer; they traded leads. Luigi still had a certain amount of pride at stake. Their relationship was based on various facts – one of them being, that he was a better player than Paul. At least, his own view of their relationship was based on this fact. And there was a lot of evidence to support it. You could measure his superiority in different ways: career prize money, for example, or highest ranking or head-to-heads. But Luigi was also older and fatter, a little rusty. The way he thought was, I’m better, but out of shape, I can’t keep it up. But if I want to win a point, I can win it. So sometimes he really wanted to win. At seven–six down, he hit a backhand down the line that touched the line, and he skipped a little afterwards, out of pleasure. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘not bad, huh? For a fat fuck.’ But then he dropped the next two points on stupid errors: a crosscourt forehand, which almost climbed the tape but didn’t; and an overhead, which he lost in the lights. When it bounced behind him, he laughed. Maybe when he was younger, he would have chased it down.
This was Paul’s style. He hit everything back and made you work until you screwed up. If you don’t screw up, you beat him, but even good players screw up. And afterwards ask themselves, how’d I lose to that guy?
By this point, Luigi had started to puff a little. When he was tired he tended to jump the gun, over-anticipate, reach out and swat; his feet couldn’t keep up with his hands. He caught the ball too early on the rise and sent it long, or flat into the net. And so they worked it out between them, this argument about who was better, hardly talking much, except to report the scores. Four–three and five–three. Six–four, six–five. Game. And so on. One game after another. Luigi said, ‘Too much good living.’ He was sweating it out, enjoying himself, feeling his legs again, which would ache in the morning. But the system started producing errors. He hit short and Paul could move him around, force him to the net and lob or pass him. After a while, it didn’t matter. It’s hard work, concentrating. Your brain gets tired quicker than your feet, and Luigi wasn’t used to it any more. You have to care, and he stopped caring – there’s even a muscle for that which gets tired.
Just to keep the points alive, Paul planted himself in the middle of the baseline and traded shots – pound for pound, forehand to forehand. They stopped counting score. A couple of high school kids in Dalton Tigers T-shirts, playing next door, started to watch, and Paul could feel them watching, or feel something watching, his life’s work condensed into these repeated motions, muscle memory serving as a kind of history. (Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, Paul tried to work out roughly the number of forehands and backhands he had hit in his life and the hours he had spent hitting them, thousands and thousands and thousands.) Afterwards, when Luigi, laughing, rimmed skywards, the boys turned back to their game.
In the showers, he kept thinking about Susie. That phrase, ‘I haven’t told Mom yet,’ had been running through his head. Every time he hit the ball it came back to him. I haven’t told Mom yet – bam. I haven’t told Mom yet. Susie complained about the smoke smell when he came in from the balcony. Ireney’s cigarettes. ‘It’ll wake Cal up.’ Give me a break, he said. He’s out cold. Anyway, I remember when you used to smoke. I never really did, she told him. God I miss babies. Her two boys were five and eight at the time, a little older than Nathan’s kids. She was younger but had started earlier. It’s like, she said, their whole childhood you’re in this period of slow mourning. For what, he asked her. For their childhood, because they keep getting older. I really want another baby. And now she was pregnant again. He didn’t know who knew.
One of the Dalton boys stopped him in the lobby. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ he asked and handed Paul his sweaty shirt, so Paul signed that. He had worked hard in his early twenties to make his signature legible, when he thought he might become famous. Now it amused him to think that sometimes the kids who asked him for it would have to look him up afterwards, with no other information to hand but that bit of scrawl. Did
the Dalton boys know who he was, or did they just figure, you must be somebody? Luigi was standing back, waiting, probably feeling annoyed. Usually it was the other way around. People recognized Luigi from New York One; he was sometimes a guest on The Last Word. Maybe this was another good sign, and Paul remembered catching his razor cleanly in the bathroom, by the handle, and putting it back in the toothbrush cup.
Not that he believed in signs but he believed in something – hard-to-pin-down alignments of certain facts, biological and other. Outcomes are the products of complicated multi-systems. Every athlete knows that. Some of them you can control, and some you can’t. But either way you try to tune in to what’s going on.
Afterwards, they went for a drink; Luigi wanted a slice of pizza, too. They could tell from the air and the streets that it had been raining, hard. The drains were still making their happy noise, the awnings dripped. There was a divey kind of place near Times Square that Luigi liked, on 8th Avenue. Paul was happy to walk, to break down the lactic acid in his leg muscles. Maybe that was just another myth, he didn’t care. The rain had stopped and some of the streets were steaming. He felt good and just slightly sore, with the racket bag bumping against his hip.
Paul asked Luigi about Borisov, his first-round match-up. But Borisov was too young – they had never played. ‘You got that guy, easy,’ Luigi said. ‘He’s nothing special, just another one of those Russian guys.’
‘Bulgarian.’
‘Same difference.’
But Luigi was never reliable on this front. He picked whatever attitude amused him most. Now it amused him to pep Paul up. ‘That guy does everything okay,’ he said. ‘Like I said, nothing special.’ At the back of his mind, Paul also thought, you’re getting back at me this way. Everything you say about Borisov, you can say about me, and you know that. Luigi was savvier about his own career, much more interesting. And over his slice of pepperoni, which stained the paper plate with oil, he talked about that US Open when he reached the semi-finals, more than a decade ago now. As the sugar hit his blood, he seemed to calm down a little, he lost his edge. Paul drank an O’Doul’s.
‘I was lucky,’ Luigi said. ‘I think about this a lot. I was twenty-three years old, number forty-four in the world. But I didn’t think I was lucky. I thought, maybe I’m good. Nobody worried about me, nobody heard of me, so they wanted to make it into a big story. This fat Italian guy, look at him. But who did I play? In the first round, nobody. Todd Singler. Guys like that I beat every day. In the second, Marcel Kunick – a qualifier. In the third, Portas, who was number eighteen, nineteen, something like that. But you only got to worry about him on clay. This guy never gets past the third round in the US Open his whole career. So I beat him, too. Then I play Todd Martin. The year before, he lost to Agassi in the finals. So this is a big deal. But he’s getting old, his shoulder is bad. People don’t know it, but the downhill has begun. And then in the quarters, Tommy Haas. Number five in the world. But, who knows why, Haas – I can play Haas. Our whole careers, the record is something like, eight and twelve, eight and thirteen. Usually he wins. Sometimes I win. This time I win. And then, against Sampras, like this.’ He makes the knife sign across his neck. ‘six–one, six–three, six–two. No chance. But everybody thinks, something is beginning. Me, too.’
He stood up to order another slice then went to the bathroom while it was heating up. Paul thought, watching him go, sometimes when we play it’s evenly matched, and sometimes it’s like today, and the outcome is really pretty clear. It was bad he didn’t know who else knew about Susie’s pregnancy. Everybody probably, but nobody had said anything to him. The family network of communication sometimes broke down; people assumed. But he was also being a little self-involved at the moment. Not noticing things. I bet Ireney didn’t remember my name. Hey, you.
When Luigi came back, the slice was ready. He bought another beer and another O’Doul’s for Paul (which Paul didn’t drink) and carried everything back to their table.
‘How come you don’t got a coach?’ Luigi said. ‘Guys these days got so many people.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got as many people as I want.’
‘You don’t got nobody.’
‘Well …’
The kind of look he gave Luigi, modest and wry, was the kind he couldn’t tell if Luigi understood. But Luigi didn’t care; he was already talking about something else.
On the way uptown (Paul caught the subway again), he replayed in his mind many of their exchanges. Luigi won some of them, but Paul won more. The drop shot worked well for him, the lob worked well, he had a lot of success with Luigi at the net. Borisov was taller by a couple of inches. He was certainly in better shape. But I don’t think he’s comfortable at the net. If you hit some of your rally shots short, maybe you can force him in. Something to think about in the third or fourth set. Guys take the easy way out when they get tired. And they think, if I can get to net, maybe I can kill this thing off. It’s funny, sometimes, when you’re not in the mood, you’ve got things on your mind, you play better. Sometimes when you really don’t care, you start winning. But you can’t fake not caring. You have to not care. And for some reason he remembered Cal trying to fling himself out of his arms the night before. Until Dana took him away, while Liesel watched. 66th Street. 72nd Street. 79th.
*
Everybody came together for early supper at Paul’s place. Early because Julie and Margot, Margot especially, had to get to bed. They brought in pizza, but Paul ate a big plate of spaghetti instead, with Zabar’s marinara sauce and a little parmesan. His pasta was ready before the delivery arrived, but Paul didn’t wait, he sat down by himself and tucked in.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I get the shakes, and later I can’t sleep.’
Bill watched him approvingly. ‘The kid can eat. The kid always could eat.’
Dana tried her best to seem intimate with Paul. She wanted everyone to think they were getting along. This in itself was the kind of thing that sometimes annoyed him. He figured, if we’re fighting, they can see us fight. But tonight he didn’t appear to mind; or maybe he just wasn’t paying much attention. She brought him a glass of water before he asked for it; she brought him the cheese grater and the pepper mill. She leaned over the table and kissed him on the head.
Cal and Julie and Margot were watching TV. The living room shared an arch with the dining room, and Paul could watch them watching while he ate. Julie had taken Cal onto her lap, between her legs, holding him by the belly, and for some reason he thought about Nathan and Susie sitting in the bath with him, exchanging backrubs, the kid in the middle giving and receiving at the same time.
He wanted more children, but Dana wasn’t so sure. She needed to get her career on track. Lately he had stopped bugging her about it, and she didn’t know why.
The doorbell rang and she and Nathan decided to let the kids eat in front of the TV. She brought in three small chairs from Cal’s bedroom and laid out plastic plates on the glass coffee table. Paul didn’t want them eating pizza on the new couch.
‘Well, anyway,’ Dana said. ‘This way the grown-ups can talk.’
Sometimes the Essingers talked at meals and sometimes they didn’t – sometimes they just ate. Bill could be extremely quiet. Paul had finished and kept wandering in and out. He stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. Then went back into the kitchen to make a fruit salad, which was one of the things he made. Jean and Liesel seemed to be arguing about something in an underground way – they weren’t talking much. Which left Dana to make polite conversation.
‘How was the other apartment?’
But Jean wasn’t in the mood for politeness. ‘Anybody in their right mind would be lucky to live there.’
Bill said, ‘His right mind. Her right mind.’
Liesel had the gift of not always paying attention to her children’s tones of voice. ‘The balcony was too high. I don’t know if I would sit out there.’
‘The views were too spectacular,�
� Jean added.
‘The neighborhood was also a little quiet, for my taste. Bill liked it.’
Nathan turned to Dana. ‘They don’t have a realistic sense of what it takes to get an offer accepted in Manhattan.’
And Liesel said, ‘It was very dramatic, in the rain. I love this kind of weather – we all had to stand under a bit of awning. My shoes got a little wet. They were supposed to be waterproof. I had a very nice afternoon.’
When the pizza was finished, Paul brought out the fruit salad – in a big china bowl covered in bright flowers, which Bill and Liesel had given them for Christmas. He tried to get the kids to turn off the TV. But they refused to come, and Margot just picked up the remote control and turned it on again.
‘Come on, kids,’ he said. ‘I want us all to sit down at the table for a part of the meal, like a family.’
‘It’s the middle of a show,’ Julie said. She sounded very sensible, grown-up and matter-of-fact.
‘It’s always the middle of something.’
‘Well, if you waited until the end, it wouldn’t be.’
Paul watched for a minute. It was a cartoon – there was some kind of ship, people were singing, one of the figures, a bright red squirrel in a pirate bandana, played guitar. ‘When does it end?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, I’m not discussing this with you. It’s over.’ And he took the remote forcefully from Margot (who started to cry) and turned it off again. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said. ‘Eat dessert. If you finish your dessert, maybe you can watch a little more TV.’
A Weekend in New York Page 12
