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by Sameer Pandya

  “We need some time to think this through.”

  I got up to go. I still had the paper in my hands. Mr. Forman reached out for it. Maybe he needed it as evidence.

  “Can I have that?” he asked.

  For a second, I thought about crumpling it up. It was, after all, my son’s property.

  “When you’re done with it, I’d like it.” I imagined keeping it safe, framing it, and giving it to Neel as a high school graduation present, a token of his early foibles.

  I walked out of the office and went to get the kids. I’m not sure why, but I felt exuberant for the first time all week.

  “Can we go to Scrappy Art?” Neel asked when he got in the car. “I need some stuff for an art project.”

  “Can we just swim instead?” Arun asked.

  “I’m sick of swimming,” Neel said.

  “How can you be sick of water?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say I was sick of water. Just treading in it.”

  I didn’t want to go to Scrappy Art, but since Neel seemed excited to go for a school project, I obliged. Arun would likely complain to his therapist years later that Neel always got to choose their after-school activities.

  Scrappy Art was a place in town that sold all sorts of random donated things—old trophies, ribbons, broken clocks. In essence, clean junk. Their business model relied on the idea that the things you didn’t need, the things you might normally throw into a landfill, could be repurposed into art. One man’s trash, as they say. Neel was a hoarder and he loved stuff. He was also very bad at keeping track of time. If I said five more minutes, he heard fifteen. And so half an hour after I told him it was time to go, the young woman behind the counter had finally rung up all the scraps Neel had gathered.

  “This is amazing,” she said. “What are you going to do with the bowl?”

  “It would make a perfect belly,” Neel said.

  “Oh, definitely,” she said, as if they were on the same artistic wavelength.

  The junk he bought—old pipes, buttons, a cigar box, screws, used corks, and on and on—cost me $20. Arun bought himself a used basketball trophy and a stack of baseball cards.

  On the drive home, both kids were happy in the back, working through their treasure of junk and discussing their possible uses. I kept glancing back at them, so content now. Eva flashed in and out of their beautiful little faces. Of course, just then I felt the burn on my heel, as if to remind me that all happiness is fleeting—I could go at any moment.

  “What’s the matter, Dad?” Arun asked.

  He and I looked at each other through the rearview mirror. My eyes were moist.

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” I said, quickly turning away. “You two keep playing.”

  I brought the kids into the house and Neel went to his room with his booty. We wouldn’t see him for the rest of the evening. When he got into a project, he fully got into it.

  While the kids were in their rooms, I cooked my go-to meal: chana masala and rice. The kids loved it. And I loved the idea that the food was infusing them with some ineffable Indianness that I hadn’t otherwise provided in our day-to-day lives. Regardless of any other cultural shortcomings, I was very proud of how skilled they’d become in Indian buffet lines.

  When dinner was ready, I brought large bowls to the kids, and they happily sat in their rooms, ate, and worked on their projects. Or more precisely, Neel worked on his project and Arun sat beside him, watching and fiddling around with a small box of stray Legos. I changed into my tennis clothes and waited for Eva to come home. When she did, she dropped her handbag on the floor of the kitchen as if it were full of bricks.

  “Why are they so quiet? Are they watching something?”

  “They’re eating and doing Scrappy Art things. We should budget going there every week.”

  I didn’t tell her about the mole. I knew she would have allayed some of my concern, but subconsciously, I think I wanted to continue worrying about the mole so that I had less energy left for worrying about my job. I made her up a dinner plate, poured her a glass of wine, and as she finished her first long sip, I told her about Neel’s doodling.

  “Jesus,” she said. “What is going on this week? Let’s just try get through the rest of it without any more drama.”

  “Trust me, I’m trying,” I said. “Let’s talk to him when I get back.”

  “Who are you playing with?”

  “I don’t know. I’m assuming they’re going to stick me with a stinker. I’m not expecting a welcome party.”

  It was interclub season. The various clubs around town, public and private, played against one another. On Wednesday nights, it was the A league: college-level players and middle-aged roosters strutting around. Tuesday nights were the B’s, like me, all of us playing under the assumption that we were just an improved backhand away from the A’s.

  I assumed that word of Sunday night had spread as it always does at the TC: each member of the committee had told one other person about what had happened, insisting they not tell anyone else. In turn, that one person had told one more person, extracting the same promise not to divulge. By now, it was likely that half the club knew. But still I wanted to get on the court. Hitting that ball back and forth would give me some semblance of peace, even if only for an hour or two.

  “Are you nervous?” Eva asked.

  “About the match?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think you’re more nervous about me going than I am.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

  * * *

  After all these years and all these matches, after the kind of bad day I’d had, I still got excited as I neared the court. This time, I would play better than I ever had before. This time, I would move to all the right places at exactly the right time. This time, I would levitate, just for a moment, as I whipped a forehand across the net.

  It was the first time I had been to the TC since Sunday evening. While some ineffable thing had changed for me, the place was still sunny, the huge oaks and magnolias were still resplendent, the greens of the leaves matched by the deep greens of the court. The place was continuing on as it always had. As I walked through the parking lot, I saw Stan getting out of his car. I assumed he was going to walk behind me without saying a word. I kept my head down and carried on.

  “Want to hit?” he asked, now walking a few feet behind me. I was happy to be surprised.

  “Sure.”

  “You have any balls?”

  I reached my hand into my tennis bag.

  “A few.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  We found an empty court and stood several feet from the net on opposing sides, hitting the ball back and forth slowly. Usually we would chat during this part of the warm-up, something about the Lakers or the Turgenev he’d just finished. But neither of us said anything. Gradually, we stepped farther and farther back, until we were both at our respective baselines, hitting the ball with decent pace. Stan knew how to warm up properly before a tennis match. His strategy was to wear out his opponent with his consistency. He’d told me once that early in matches, he did everything he could to return every shot. He wanted to let his opponent know that he would always be there.

  When I played poorly, I used my arms to hit everything. When things fell into place, I used my feet and my body to generate power. With Stan, I was stroking the ball beautifully, and the pop coming off the sweet spot of the racket was blocking out all the other noise in my head. I even forgot about the pain of my heel. The game had always allowed me a break from the everyday stresses of life. That was how I’d first started playing, really.

  * * *

  Two years after we’d arrived in the country, my parents bought a condominium in a brand-new complex. After living in a nearby apartment that was beyond cleaning, the newness was important to them. The complex had sixteen buildings with four units in each, most overlooking a swimming pool and a small clubhouse. Our second-floor unit was on the far side, ove
rlooking a seldom-used tennis court. I can still remember the condo’s cost: $88,000. Back then, it seemed like an enormous amount of money.

  The first year we lived there, the place was full of young families and recently married couples, swirling with excitement and energy at having bought into a desirable building. Everyone decorated their balconies with flowers and plants, and there were lots of potlucks in the clubhouse. My parents made friends with the Iranian, Sikh, and Jewish families who lived close to us. I learned to swim properly in that pool. The whole place was tucked behind a gate with a security code; inside, we felt secure.

  But after a few years, the place and the people changed. Families moved out, divorces were finalized, and the people who moved in didn’t always stay for long. There were a few boys my age, and we would roam around together after school and in the summers, swimming, playing catch, and keeping track of who had moved out and who had moved in.

  One afternoon, three of us had broken into one of the apartments that we’d been monitoring for months. Looking through the windows, we could see the place was empty, but somehow the back patio door had been left unlocked. We walked right into the master bedroom; there was a mattress on the floor, made up with sheets and a few pillows. Next to it was a neat stack of Playboys. We stayed there for an hour.

  A week later, riding the confidence from our previous break-in, we entered another apartment, whose former occupants my family knew. Reza Faruki had left Iran after the 1979 revolution with a wife and young child. A few weeks earlier, my father had bought some of their furniture: a few coffee tables, a dining room set, and Reza’s beloved stereo system, with its enormous speakers. My father had never been the type to have friends. Though he’d never said it, he implied that the needs of the family and the demands of work left little time for anything else. And yet, I could see my father’s affection for Reza, and how Reza returned that affection. In late middle age, it seemed that both men had found pals.

  “Why are they selling this to us?” I remember asking. “Don’t they need somewhere to eat?”

  “They need to move,” my father had said, the disappointment clear in his voice. And then added, “Quickly.”

  I knew there was more to the story.

  I led my friends to Reza’s old apartment, hoping that the front door would be unlocked.

  It wasn’t, but when I pushed it, it opened. Before we noticed anything, we instinctively plugged our noses.

  Overtaken by the stench, and the immediate absence of more magazines, my friends walked out. But I lingered in the living room.

  The layout of the apartment was the same as mine: living room, dining room, and two bedrooms down the hall. But it was now nothing like the warm apartment I’d seen when my family had visited. The carpet was haphazardly cut up, as if someone had taken a knife to it. There were only a few stray pieces of furniture left, and the walls were discolored.

  Every time we’d come over, Reza had handed my father a Michelob and then taken great pride in choosing a record to put on. Cat Stevens, Miles Davis, Ravi Shankar, the Rolling Stones.

  “Bhatt,” Reza had once asked my father, “what did you listen to in Bombay? Miles was the thing in Tehran.”

  “A little Miles,” my father had responded, taking a sip of the beer. “A lot of Coltrane.”

  My father seemed like a different man with Reza. At ease. A bit playful. It gave me a sense of what he might have been like before the stresses of work and raising a family had shaped his life.

  Now, many of those records Reza had handled so carefully lay shattered on the floor. I walked through the living room, stepped into the kitchen, and opened the fridge. There were a few Coke bottles, some milk, and an open can of tuna. I grabbed a bottle, opened it, and took a big, greedy gulp, and then another. I walked down the hall, drinking, and peered into one of the bedrooms. I nearly dropped the cold bottle from my hand.

  Reza was asleep on the bed, facing away from me. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. It was four in the afternoon. I had led my friends up here because I was sure that he and his family were long gone. I saw him stirring on the bed, shifting in his sleep. I stepped backward and ran out of the apartment as fast as I could. I stopped only to throw the unfinished bottle of Coke in a bush, then kept running all the way home.

  I never told my parents; I felt I’d seen something I shouldn’t have and was worried about getting into trouble. But that moment haunted me: a warning about what happens to men when they can’t keep their lives together.

  I spent more and more time at home after that, gazing out at the tennis court from our kitchen window. It was usually empty, but once in a while a couple would come to play, and I would watch them. The woman was the better player. They would hit for a while, then meet at the net and maul each other, his tongue reaching deep into her mouth. I wonder now if my earliest interest in the game was born from a kind of erotic charge.

  Sometime later, a man started coming to the court, with a little shaggy dog and a frayed leather travel case filled with faded balls. He would serve out all the balls and then go to the other side, gather them, and serve them out again. He was methodical. Ten in the corner, ten down the T. I started going to the court, shyly hanging around on the side. Not long after, I started chasing balls for him. I can’t remember now whether the dog’s or the man’s name was Teddy. Let’s say it was the man’s. One day I showed up and Teddy pointed to his things. There was an old aluminum Prince racquet in his bag.

  “For you.”

  “I can’t.” Even my twelve-year-old self knew not to accept a gift right away.

  “Of course you can. A boy needs a racquet.”

  Teddy showed me the western grip for a forehand and a backhand. This was the first and last private tennis lesson I would receive until I took one with Richard, but I saw Teddy on most Saturdays and Sundays after that. I went from collecting balls to hitting them back.

  One Saturday, Teddy didn’t show up. He was absent again on Sunday.

  “Go play with someone your own age,” my father said.

  When I saw a woman walking around the complex with the dog, I went up to her.

  “Teddy’s not been feeling well,” she said. “He’ll be out there again soon.”

  But he never came back. I moved on to skateboarding. A few years later, when my parents started earning more money, we moved into a house. I took up playing again at the public courts nearby with a group of older, encouraging Filipino men. They made me much better, tougher, on the court. Whenever I showed meekness by hitting a ball with no real pace, one of them would crush it back and say, “Don’t Gandhi the shot.” It was effective. During matches, when I babied the ball over, I’d mouth the phrase to myself to get my adrenaline pumping.

  Despite their coaching, I went on to play unremarkable tennis on my high school team, and then in college and graduate school, when I started reading Marx and Weber, I let it slip away. Tennis was not a part of any of my social circles. I was embarrassed for loving it so much.

  I didn’t step back onto the court until we joined the TC. Now I was playing the best tennis of my life. I was getting to balls quickly; there was torque and ferocity in my forehand and backhand. After a wrist injury, I’d added a piercing backhand slice to my game that bailed me out when I wasn’t fast enough to set up for the Lendl backhand I’d emulated in high school. And now, using an open stance, I could whip my forehand pretty well, even as I knew that I was tearing my elbow to shreds. There wasn’t a drop shot I couldn’t chase down, and I often salivated when I saw one coming my way.

  In this strange country of my mid-forties, I was playing better than I had in my teens. I knew that as the years passed, that would not continue. But for now, I felt strong and athletic on the court. In the middle of a match, waiting for a serve that I would return flawlessly, everything slowed down. The ball was twice its normal size. These hours on the court had become vitally important to me. I wasn’t going to let Mark or anyone else threaten my peace.<
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  * * *

  Our team captain—an anesthesiologist by day—came up to the court where Stan and I were hitting with a can of new balls. “You two stay on the show court,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “Are we the lambs?” Stan asked the captain.

  “Of course not,” the captain said, failing to disguise his disingenuousness. “We don’t do lambs.” Any excitement I’d felt about the match deflated. Sometimes when the opponent’s best players were too good, the captain sacrificed the first line and placed the better players lower down so that some of those matches could be competitive. We were playing a club from across town, which traditionally had not had solid tennis players. But this year they were much better.

  Their number one team walked over to our court. I’d played one of them before. A few years back, I’d come across a book called Use Your Head in Tennis, published in the early 1950s. While it professed to be all about tennis, it was actually about manners. It had these witty chapter titles: “Service with a Smile,” “When You Are Overmatched,” “Middle Class Tennis.” My favorite line came under the heading “Don’t Be a Murderer”: “There’s at least one in every tennis club: the slam-bang, neck-or-nothing player who hits every ball as if he wants to batter it to smithereens.” The perfect description for this guy. He either hit the ball to the fences or hit screamers just inside the line and out of reach. Stan’s shots were so consistent, if this guy’s game was off, we’d maybe have a chance.

  His partner, though, was different. We hit some warm-up ground strokes to break in the new balls. He was calm, his body moving forward gracefully with each crisp shot he hit. It was clear he could hit the ball better at thirty percent than I did at one hundred and ten. If I posed any challenge, he would turn up the strokes to fifty and blow me off the court. After we joined the TC, I encountered this kind of player more and more, who had learned the game from pros as a kid, played plenty of junior tennis, his parents driving him from tournament to tournament, buying him shoes and tennis clothes that I still felt were too expensive for me to buy for myself. He had probably played in college, and now, in adulthood, his game was effortless. No matter how hard I worked on the court, I was never going to catch up to someone like that. And the TC was full of them: men whose work lives had never conflicted with their love of the game.