A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  Sometimes, when the boys were young, he asked them if they wanted to watch a Longhorns game at Disch-Falk field – ten minutes in the car, there were always tickets. For most of their childhood, the Longhorns were pretty good. It was a chance to spot a future major-leaguer. Maybe he took the kids once or twice, but they sat there bored. Sometimes he played catch with Nathan in the backyard. Nathan had a decent arm. But the way childhood works, from one generation to the next, keeps changing. You try to recreate what you had but can’t overcome the resistance. There was a park, Adam’s Park, a short walk from the house, and he often spotted people playing basketball on the court by the fire station – there was a baseball backstop, too. But when you’ve got a hoop at home, a big garden, who needs to go out. His kids were rich man’s kids, which shouldn’t surprise him, because he was the rich man. They had no sense of community, of living in a neighborhood with other kids. And once Paul got hooked on tennis, he was happy enough banging a ball against the net Bill set up in the garden, or playing at Whitaker, by the law school.

  It meant a lot to him to have a son to play ball with. Nathan had been aggressive, but not competitive. He didn’t like losing and that’s how you always start out, by losing. How you finish, too. Susie did her duty at YMCA soccer but quit when she was ten or eleven; she didn’t want to spend her Saturday mornings out at Zilker Park when she could stay at home with a book instead. But Paul from an early age had a fixed expression on his face every time a game got played. If he didn’t win, you could see him afterwards, practicing by himself whatever you needed to practice, working things through. He was never especially communicative but if you paid attention like this he was easy to read, very single-minded. At four he was playing on Susie’s co-ed soccer team, some of the kids were twice his age, but he held his own. Bill stood on the sidelines watching, trying not to boast but also feeling a strong affinity for the kid, sent out as it were into the world to do his business again, the business of childhood. Playing ball.

  By the time Nathan left for Harvard, his little brother could challenge him at basketball, even though Paul was six years younger, still pre-pubescent and probably thirty pounds of muscle-weight lighter. They played in the backyard, after school, or sometimes, under the lights, when dinner was over. The only way Nathan could win was by backing him down, using his butt and his elbows – Bill sometimes had to step in. The court was poured concrete, covered in abrasive paint. Sometimes Nathan said, I’m coming down the middle, knee-first; if you want to stand there and take the charge, feel free. Not while Bill was watching, but he heard about it afterwards: Paul sometimes got hurt. Eventually they stopped playing together, which was a shame, because you never get back that intensity of relationship.

  It transferred to Bill, who used to play tennis with his son on the university courts. Even when Paul was ten or eleven years old, Bill let himself go all-out. He used to be a decent player himself. Though his serve was soft, he had soft hands at the net, too, and liked to force Paul to pass him. ‘If you pass me, you beat me,’ he told his son. Paul hated losing, especially to this old guy sweating into his sweatband, with a straggly beard, a lopey run, hanging shoulders – his dad. Sometimes, when the shots weren’t falling for him, Paul would smash his feet against the hard court (jumping and then landing-kicking at the same time), to gee himself up. It was embarrassing to watch. These were semi-public courts, students used them, one of his colleagues might be playing alongside. But Bill had a thick competitive streak, too; it was like being a kid again, he loved going at it. As a father, you win for a certain number of years, and then, when the tide turns, it comes pouring in. You never win again.

  Eventually the question started coming up, around Paul’s fourteenth birthday: how much of our lives are we supposed to rearrange for this one kid? It’s true (Bill remembered the conversations), Marcello thought he needed to enroll full time at one of these academies. Most of the best were in Florida. They could have sent him away. But in other respects, Paul was a late developer, still a child, his mother’s son. Liesel put her foot down about sending him to boarding school; and they weren’t going to relocate either. Susie was finishing high school, Jean was just about to start junior high. Bill and Liesel had jobs and lives, they weren’t the kind of family that moves to Hollywood or Florida – the truth is, it was never under consideration. Liesel also saw the danger of letting just one part of his personality colonize the rest. The tennis-playing part. He was a smart kid, with an interest in art, in painting, like Susie, and a good eye; he could draw like a Polaroid. He needed to go to college, he needed to figure out for himself, at a reasonable age, what he wanted to do with his life.

  When Paul dropped out of Stanford, Liesel was almost too upset to speak to him. For several months before-hand, he had been calling to argue it out with her: they fought constantly. For some reason, he needed his mother to consent to his independence – the package couldn’t be delivered without a signature. Which she refused to give; it clouded their relationship for several years. Then, when he made it to the quarters at the US Open, Paul felt vindicated and tried to explain this feeling to her, which started the whole thing up again. For Liesel it was an enduring disappointment that he should waste his life on a hobby. A bruise that doesn’t heal because you keep bumping into it. It seemed to her one of those things America had done to her children. Whenever she watched Paul play, the tension between her mixed feelings was almost visible. Because she hated it when he lost, too, and couldn’t bear that what he had turned out to be was a mid-ranking, top-100 professional. Who, at the age of thirty-three, needed to work out for a second time what he wanted to do with his life.

  But for Bill, there was a special kind of national pride in having an athlete in the family. When your grandfather spoke no English, your uncles were in the grocery business, and your son, short-haired and handsome, appears on television as a tennis star, an ordinary American, some very deep itch is being scratched – a part of you that never expected acceptance has been recognized. Bill got phone calls from people who did not otherwise keep in touch, cousins and old fraternity buddies, after they saw Paul playing on ESPN or in one of those commercials. Sometimes offering advice: he’s got a beautiful backhand, but why doesn’t he come to net? His second serve is just putting it in play. And so on. For a while it wasn’t clear how good he would become, and then it was. He went up the rankings, stopped, and started going down. It was like watching the world conduct a highly refined and public experiment upon your son, using the best researchers and the most expensive equipment, according to which, at the end of a ten-year trial, his talents (and its limits) have been measured and graded to the decimal point. This is who you were, they tell him, when it’s over.

  *

  At the sign for Mets–Willets Point, everybody started pouring out of the train. The tournament still had a Day One feel, people excited just to be showing up, it didn’t matter who they were seeing. A dad with teenage kids, his mother coming, too, clutching his arm, gangs of guy friends, young men wearing college sweatshirts or USTA-approved official gear, T-shirts and polos, fat-soled sneakers, middle-aged women with tennis-preserved bodies and exaggerated tans, every type and stereotype of American (though most of them white), the straw-hat brigade, Hasidim in dusty black coats, an old lady dressed for a party, in pink feathers and an artificial boa, happy attention-seekers getting attention, and in spite of the crush, everybody shuffling along, rubbing shoulders, according to some natural but also slightly formal American principle of friendliness … I flew in yesterday from Boca where it was 102 degrees, there are a number of food concessions of every variety, I saw Federer here last year in the second round, and my husband complained, that for the next two weeks … out of the station, and across the echoing floorboards of the long pedestrian bridge, riding like a ship over a sea of car parks, bus and train depots, sheds of corrugated metal, bulk containers, rusty tracks, while low-level construction activity continued with the small-scale urgency of bugs somewhere belo
w (the intestinal operations of a great city, plainly on display) – everybody floating above it, until the wooden walkway opened onto a concrete concourse where the ticket queues were already forming.

  There was an atmosphere of patient high spirits (everybody’s got a long day ahead) but also of a kind of duty being done, people showing up to witness something of minor significance to the culture, playing their part by buying tickets, making their way to the suburbs of Queens, walking the distances they needed to walk, standing in lines, showing their bags to security, proceeding as directed to the courts in question, and carrying afterwards the proof of a job done, as spectator and consumer, of tennis caps, signed balls, programs, and T-shirts that read, NOTHING BEATS BEING HERE, US OPEN CHAMPIONSHIPS NYC 2011. Along the way you pass a park, almost empty in tournament season, avenues of trees, bright blue public courts, dusty patches in the grass where the kids play soccer, a golf course, spreading greenly into the distance, but you turn your back on it, and on the far side of the ticket turnstiles, the tennis-industrial complex begins: trees dotted at regular intervals in the kind of open space Americans call a plaza, a convention center, a food village, with a series of landed spaceships growing in size, until you reach – at the end of another concourse, composed of alternating pink and white concrete bricks and lined with municipal shrubs and benches and streetlights – Arthur Ashe Stadium, looking as if it’s about to take off.

  At the security checkpoint, they refused to let Bill through with his Zabar’s bag. The guidelines said No Food, except in strictly limited quantities. ‘How am I supposed to know this?’ Bill asked.

  ‘It’s on the website.’ The guard was just some collegeage kid, working a summer job. He wasn’t stupid but he didn’t really care. His cheeks were pink, his hair was sandy; he wore glasses. Any personal qualities he might have possessed were concealed beneath the official role – one of those people who play a functional part in your life and make no impression.

  ‘What’s a limited quantity. This is a limited quantity. I don’t understand what strictly limited quantity means.’

  ‘I can let you through with the bagel chips or something like that. Unless you have a medical reason.’

  ‘I need to eat, is that a medical condition.’ Bill wasn’t really angry; he was enjoying himself. ‘If I don’t eat, I starve. How about that?’

  But the kid was already checking the next in line – he didn’t have time for hermeneutics. Eventually Bill said, ‘You go ahead’ to Liesel and the rest of them and stood by the side eating one of the sandwiches. ‘If anybody’s hungry, I’ve got plenty.’ He offered food to some of the passers-by – this was his kind of scene. But there wasn’t really room for standing aside, the queues were packed tight, everyone inching along.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ Jean said. As the youngest, she was traditionally best placed to reason with him. It was her job – no one gets mad at the baby of the family. ‘This happened a couple of years ago, too.’

  ‘It’s a scam,’ Bill said, finally getting annoyed. The basic social conservatism of his children baffled him sometimes. Not just his children, it seems, but the whole generation. Their willingness to go along with the rules. Also, to spend money later on sub-mediocre food, at inflated prices. ‘There’s no reason I can’t bring in a few sandwiches. This is just some deal they strike with the food concessions.’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be an economist. This is how the market operates.’

  Eventually the kid let him through, still eating, but Bill had to throw most of the rest away. ‘You eat it,’ Bill told the security guy. ‘Otherwise, it’s just a waste.’ But the sandwiches ended up in the trash. There was a large container by every row, filled with soda cans and water bottles.

  By this point it was twenty to one. Nathan said, ‘We probably want to eat before the match starts, which doesn’t give us much time.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’ Bill shook his head. ‘I’m going in.’ But he didn’t move, he just stood there.

  ‘You do what you want to do. The kids need to eat.’

  ‘I need to pee,’ Liesel said.

  She always felt uncomfortable in crowds, pushed around, she didn’t like the mass conformity of them. There was a predictably long line in front of the women’s restroom. (Another example of American mealy-mouthedness. She preferred the German Klo, simple and direct, short for closet, which children and adults could use without embarrassment.) Julie came with her; Nathan took Margot to the men’s. Jean and Susie and Ben started queuing for food – pizza was usually the safest bet with the kids. That or hot dogs. Jean had decided to suspend her culinary beliefs. For the past week, at work, she had been looking up food blogs about what to eat at the US Open. There was a food-truck grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized shallots that she wanted to try, but you get used to sacrificing your interests around people with kids.

  Margot, walking among the legs, said to her father, ‘I know where they come out.’ She had been worried at the security check-in: everybody seemed to be coming in, no one was going. It was the practical problem that bothered her; the place was filling up. But then she noticed the flow of people towards Arthur Ashe Stadium – the tallest spaceship at the end of the walkway. It occurred to her that maybe it had access to an underground exit, like a subway station, like Times Square, which is why she couldn’t see anybody leaving.

  ‘Come out where?’ Nathan said, and she tried to explain, but he wasn’t listening or couldn’t understand her. She didn’t need the bathroom but he made her go anyway, after wiping the seat down carefully with wet toilet paper.

  Everybody met up again outside Plazza Centro Pizza and Pasta. Jean practiced saying it in an Italian accent: Plazza centro. Pizz’ e pasta. For some reason this amused her. It was now a few minutes to one – Bill kept pacing around. ‘We should have met at eleven,’ he said. ‘This is what I said.’ But when the pizza came, two margherita pies (one with pepperoni on top), he helped them by eating a slice. Just to keep things moving. ‘We can eat and walk,’ he said.

  ‘Relax. He’s on second.’ Nathan had decided to be in a good mood. ‘The schedule says, not before one o’clock.’

  ‘It’s one now.’

  ‘The first match probably isn’t over yet.’

  ‘It was a women’s singles.’

  ‘Look,’ Jean told the kids. ‘If you fold it over like this, it’s easier. That’s it. Now you’re New Yorkers.’

  Paul was playing on Court 12. It took them a while to find it, among the currents of people going in other directions: down a leafy alley (hedges on one side, zinnias on the other) that ran into an intersection of little pathways with a low bowl of a stadium at the end. Just a few tiers of bleachers, Nathan could look over the wall. Not much bigger than a pub theater, seats arranged around a small stage. Very much Off Broadway, there were a lot of empty rows. It was the first round, early in the day. You felt a kind of intimacy among the spectators, showing up for some second-rate match. Maybe because they knew somebody or had a hard-core interest in the sport. Several commentators had identified Borisov as a potential problem for Djokovic in the third round, if he made it that far. (His record against the Serb was two and three, though both of Borisov’s victories had come on clay.) Though it’s also possible that what people wanted was a place to sit down without queuing – they didn’t care who played.

  In any case, the court was empty, apart from a few ground-crew. Bill cheered up instantly; he slowed down. Jean saw Dana first, two rows up on the other side. She had spread out her baby paraphernalia along the bleacher to claim their seats: her bag, her coat, a change of clothes, a milk bottle and several containers of baby food. It looked like the aftermath of some buggy-on-buggy crash. Cal was standing up and trying to climb the rows. Dana held him around the waist, though whether in struggle or play was difficult to tell. A husband and wife rose to let Jean through, and then the rest filed past: Susie, Ben, Julie, Nathan, Margot, Bill, Liesel. ‘It’s a convention,’ Bill said to
the couple, retirees probably, late sixties. Bill liked talking to strangers.

  ‘You got the whole family, I see.’ The man’s acnescarred face hung a little low in the cheeks, though he looked otherwise skinny enough. Maybe he had recently lost weight. His voice, though perfectly with-it, sounded like a marble rolling around a bowl, as if there had been some stroke-damage in his medical history.

  ‘My son is playing,’ Bill told him. ‘Which one is he?’

  ‘Paul Essinger.’ It was curious what happened to your name, when you said it like that.

  ‘Go get ’em,’ the man said. Maybe there was some impediment there.

  Dana started sweeping up the contents of her diaper-bag when she saw them coming. ‘I’m turning into one of you,’ she told Jean.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But Liesel pushed her way through before Dana could explain. ‘I’ve got something for Cal,’ she said. ‘Something small.’ She looked through her purse and eventually brought out a little stitched-cloth finger puppet with a red hood. ‘Rotkäppchen,’ she called it and tried to take Cal by the hand. But he pulled away.

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Dana had been trying to keep him still for the past half-hour. She’d had enough. ‘Your grandmother wants to give you something.’

  Liesel said, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ and put the puppet on her own finger. ‘Weißt du wer das ist?’ she asked the boy. Do you know who that is.