Doubles (11 page)

Kaz said nothing.

“Tell him,” Manny said.

“What was it?”

“Say it,” Manny said.

Kaz shook his head.

“What? Say it,” I said.

“Say it!” Manny said.

But Kaz wouldn’t say it. Finally, after a moment of silence, he looked up. Any doubt disappeared with the look on his face.

“We . . .” He looked back and forth between the two of us. “Did I already tell you?”

A small indoor cloud blew in front of him. “We did it.”

I had never shed a tear before either of them, but now it wouldn’t stop. I put my hands on my face, tears running through my fingers and down my arms.

“Oh my God,” Kaz said. “I can’t think about any of this.” He stood. “I’m sorry, man. I . . .” His eyes were crazy. He began to walk away, one arm against the wall for support.

I breathed deeply, trying to gain control, and saw Manny looking at me, unsurprised and fascinated, as if he knew exactly what was happening.

“You knew?” I said.

He stuck out his huge bottom lip and shrugged.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“The other person never needs to know.”

“That she was sleeping with him?”

He held his hand towards me as if I were on display. “Not really.” I looked at my best friends, my business partners, my coach and my doubles partner in the mist before me. These were the people I had always been able to speak to. But there was nothing my lips could conjure. I felt like the dry ice had frozen me.

Kaz’s hand slid across the old rough stucco as he staggered slow and jagged into the hall.

Manny looked right at me, his eyebrows high on his forehead in apprehension. He was ready for action.

Manny looked at Kaz and then back at me.

“Kaz,” I said. And he stopped, pausing under one of the tubes. Fog rushed onto his head like water from a spigot.

Some animal reaction was required here, something I was too analytic to produce. Manny was the only person I could imagine proceeding with appropriate passion.

Manny nodded at me, as if to say, you’re all right, get to it. But I didn’t know what to get to. So I tried to imagine I was him. I pouted my lips. I sneered. I searched myself for brute impulse.

On the mantel over Manny’s shoulder stood a VHS copy of
High Noon
, an illustrated Gary Cooper on the cover with one gun at his shoulder—smoke trailing from the barrel—and another at his hip, pointed right at me.

For a moment it all seemed clear. I said, “I want to duel.”

“Huh?” Kaz said. He held out his hands, like he was warding off an imminent attack.

“Oh
yeah
,” Manny whispered.

Kaz waved his hand as if the fog were impeding his progress. “You mean fight?”

“I mean duel,” I said. But I didn’t know what I meant. I just wanted to let myself talk, allow whatever nonsense was inside of me to come out. Like Manny would, to be fearless and trusting of instinct. Kaz continued to move the fog with his palms, then took two wavering steps into the guest room. I watched the door for a moment, expecting him to
reemerge, but he didn’t. He was gone, only feet away. But I wasn’t done. I was high on the act of channeling Manny. I stood and walked to the door. I looked in. He lay on his stomach on the mattress, eyes closed.

“He’ll be fine,” Manny said.

One leg dangled off the side. It was bad for his back, and if he didn’t move at some point he was going to have a hard time serving, and when Kaz had a hard time serving nothing else in his game worked. I tried to put it out of my mind. I shouldn’t care. I turned to Manny and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Slow. This is
exactly
how this should be handled.”

“OK, fine. But why didn’t you
tell
me?”

“I’ll set it up. We’ll do it on court. It’ll be a tennis duel.”

“Forget about the duel,” I said. I already regretted the ridiculous challenge. “Hey!”

“’Cause you didn’t need to know! But this was different, man. Anne was just here with us. She
wanted
you to know.” Manny paced the room, thrilled with the confusion of life.

“Anne wasn’t here.”

“Is this going to be sweet—what?”

“Anne wasn’t here.”

“You have to open your mind.”

“I was pushing it.”

For a moment he untangled what I had done, then said, “Slow. Damn! After my own heart, brother. How’d you know?”

“Katie told me.”

He shook his head and said, “Slow. You’re doing the right thing.” “Jesus! Forget about the duel.”

“No sir. Wait. Wait! Where you going?”

“I don’t know.”

But I knew. I walked out of the apartment and into the warm night. I couldn’t listen to him draw up any more plans to duel. I was
increasingly mortified. I told myself Kaz wouldn’t remember a word of what had been said. I took three steps to the sidewalk in slow, measured steps. The street was awash with young people. I dried my eyes, and two young women watched me as they passed. It felt like the first time I’d ever been noticed on a New York City sidewalk. Let them look. Who were they? The only person I wanted to see was in a new apartment four blocks away.

KATIE’S BRASS BUZZER
glimmered within a frame of caked white polish, years of it rubbed into each crack of the marble jamb. I pressed the pearl beside her name. She answered, relaxed and happy. Immune to the tiny explosions of my erratic life.

“It’s Slow,” I said, and the door began to buzz.

On the third floor, I exited the elevator to a lobby with one door ajar. I gently swung it open. Here, the rooms had furniture. The walls were hung with paintings above paintings surrounded by framed photos. Above me the second floor reached out in a small interior balcony.

“Up here,” Katie called.

I ascended a curving flight of stairs. On the wall beside me hung an old photo of two naked boys boxing in a field, surrounded by a ring of other naked boys sitting in a circle around them, laughing. Another showed steel girders, cropped close, dark and angular and heavy. I couldn’t imagine decorating a space like this, finding these objects and hanging them, and it then occurred to me that people like Katie, they didn’t do these things themselves. They had people do it for them. She could call one of the galleries she worked with and within an hour have a van filled with men in blue jumpsuits and white gloves. It was unbelievable to me that she had ever even lived in Manny’s apartment. This space was so clearly hers.

On the landing, one wall was lined with African masks above a small fireplace with an actual fire burning inside. It gave off no heat.
Beside it Katie sat erect on a love seat, joined on the cushion by Paige. Both were dressed in white. Lit by the flickering flames, they looked like they were preparing for some religious rite. Katie wore a simple cotton dress, but Paige’s white blouse had enough starch in it that it could stand up on its own. Her lipstick was so red that it was the first time I had ever thought of makeup as scandalous. Opera played softly from unseen speakers.

“Slow,” Katie said. “This is Paige.”

“It is very nice to meet you,” Paige said, her robot accent even more rigid than it had been before.

I shook her hand and tried to not make eye contact. The electricity of secret filled the room. It seemed impossible that Katie couldn’t feel it.

“What are you doing?” Katie said.

“Kaz came over to Manny’s,” I said. And then, before I said another word, the tears welled up. I put my face in my hands. Katie patted the space between herself and Paige. I fell into it, touching more female thigh than I had in nine months.

“You told him you knew?” Katie said.

I nodded.

“What’d he say?”

“I challenged him to a duel.”

“A duel?”

“A tennis duel,” I said and started to cry outright.

No one spoke. I guess they were at a loss. Most people had been at a loss with me since the accident. In a way, I savored it. It gave me a type of power over the social moment. I let my drying eyes fall to the photo album in Katie’s lap and found myself looking back from her sixth-grade birthday party. That was the year that, after watching boys carve snakes into their shoulders in the movie
Stand by Me
, I had scratched KATIE into my own shoulder with a pocket knife. I never
showed it to Katie, but rather cultivated the fantasy that she would discover it one day by chance, maybe find me sleeping or see me from across a classroom and glimpse that scabbed token of obsession peeking out under my shirtsleeve. Within days of the act the name grew swollen and too rich with pus to hold it all. In my embarrassment, I did not tell my parents until my whole arm became so sore that I couldn’t play tennis. When they saw what I had done, neither my parents nor my doctor asked for an explanation. They just treated Katie’s name with antibiotics, ignoring the boyish lust behind it. That was the same year Katie showed me the illustrated instructions that came in a box of tampons and asked me if I had ever had sex. As if there were a chance I had. A month later, she asked me if I would show her a boner. We were on the phone, though, so I couldn’t show her anything, but I told her I would sometime, and weeks later, at that birthday party—the one in the photo I was looking at now—we danced to Salt-N-Pepa on a boom box in her garage, and she whispered, “Bo
ner
.
Boner
.” I said, “There it is.” It was pressed against her pelvis. And that was it. We just kept on dancing, as if I were not shaking, blood vessels bursting, envisioning the future of the memory even then, knowing it was momentous, knowing that, at least for me, it would haunt.

Katie said, “You really said you wanted to duel?”

I nodded and laughed.

“That’s badass.”

Of course she thought so. It was Manny’s logic, not my own.

I flipped through more of the album. At age three or four, Katie straddled a small motorcycle in the lap of a teenage uncle. In fifth grade she tanned poolside with her headgear on. She still looked beautiful with that plastic halo holding shining hooks in her mouth. As a toddler, she held an unlit cigarette to her lips while her family laughed. I stood on a tennis court at the club, so tall and thin it reminded me
of my growing pains. And then she flipped a page to a Polaroid of an azalea in bloom. It was like Anne had entered the room.

“Why did you guys get this out?” I said.

“Paige wanted to see me as a girl.”

“How do you know each other?”

“Through Manny,” Katie said. Paige sat silent beside her, her eyes cast down at the photos.

“Do you live here in New York City?” Paige said.

“No,” I said. “I live in North Carolina. Where do you live?”

“Fifty-second Street.”

“That’s how you know Manny?”

She nodded.

I said, “I’ve been staying over there.”

“Stay here tonight,” Katie said.

“I am staying too,” Paige said. “It is a slumber party.”

As the girls got ready for bed, I stayed on the love seat looking at photos. Everything seemed to have just happened, no matter what I saw. Roller-skating at age nine was just yesterday. My hair—it had been there just days ago. While I stretched a thin blanket across the couch, Paige emerged from Anne’s bedroom in a red Japanese robe and whispered, “Thank you.”

“But what’s the secret?”

“You are so cute,” she said and hugged me, her body soft under my arms. It reminded me of the shift Anne’s skin had made in the last few months of her pregnancy as her thin torso filled out, her limbs becoming soft where they once were hard, all of her flesh infused with a thin layer of give. When Paige let go, she went back into Katie’s room and waved as the door swung shut.

I knew what Manny had told me. Katie had kissed those lips. They weren’t only having a slumber party beyond those doors. For one moment I thrilled myself by considering joining them in the
bedroom, but that thrill soon turned to fear. I surprised myself by falling asleep almost immediately. I guess I had used up everything left. The night was filled with nightmares and dreams of strange sexual scenarios. Everything was mixed up. Everyone seemed to love everyone and hate everyone at the same time, and I felt terrified and left out.

IN THE MORNING
the three of us walked to Manny’s apartment to steal the Fiat. Katie and Paige found the car while I snuck inside for my bag. Kaz was asleep on the bed. Again he wore no pants. Two rats scurried from out of a potato chip bag in the corner and rushed under the bed. On their way one ran over the top of my foot. I tried not to jump. I didn’t want to wake Kaz. I wanted to look at him.

He had almost no body hair, just one dark mound of thick wire above his uncircumcised penis. I stood there at the foot of the bed and imagined my wife holding that body, lying atop it. Kissing it.

One of Manny’s Sharpies was on the bedside table, and I took the lid off, picked up Kaz’s immaculate left shoe, and drew an
X
on it. Then I opened his backpack and found a small, hard-backed black sketchpad. It was his journal. He always used the same kind and had changed volumes only a handful of times because of the brevity of his entries. I opened it to a page that said 1 ORANGE GATORADE, 1 GRAPE GATORADE, 1 GRAPE GATORADE, 2 BOTTLES WATER ON COURT (CRYSTAL SPRING). 82 DEGREES. 2 BANANAS AT SET BREAK. I put it in the pocket of my jacket, then picked up the potato chip bag and silently sprinkled the contents around him on the bed, letting them fall where a rat might most easily find them.

Outside, the girls were already in the Fiat. The car was running. I put my bag in the trunk and sat on top of it, my legs dangling into the interior space behind the two passenger seats. Katie hit the gas, and I
held tightly to her headrest and yelled into the wind, “I’m not riding like this the whole way up there.”