Doubles (16 page)

The restaurant was a fluorescent glass storefront on the corner of a block where the steps of brownstones receded up a hill into darkness. The workers made me wonder what had happened to the Mexican woman with the bags. Adam told me about Rio while I ate a spinach empanada.

“I thought you already spoke Spanish,” I said.

“I do.”

“Then what were you studying?”

“Portuguese. They speak Portuguese there.” Chewing a mouthful of empanada, he looked at me like I was an idiot. In some of the places I played, I never even spoke to a local unless they were working at the hotel or driving us to a court. And even then, I didn’t pay attention. I was usually on my phone, reading a magazine, or zoning out to music. It is important when you travel as much as we did that you do not engage in every new destination, but rather keep your own world constant, insular, and distinct. Adam went on. “And we kept our eye on some of the favela violence a little, too. But that’s mostly narcotics.” He often told me things like this, things that spoke of a wide underworld, unknown and vast. “And there was this girl,” he said, “who looked like Molly Ringwald. Brazilian. Ever notice how Molly Ringwald’s mouth always hangs open?”

I had not. I devoured three spinach empanadas. Adam recommended the chicken. “Spinach is for vegetarians,” he said. I drank two Pacificos. I was thrilled to be out of New York, away from Kaz, removed from anyone who knew about what he had done with my wife.

Adam lived up a dark hill behind the restaurant in a basement apartment of one of the shadowed brownstones. The venetian blinds on the one window facing the street were closed with the authority of having been in that position for months. A three-foot television monopolized the living room, surrounded by mounds of DVDs. An L-shaped leather couch stretched across two walls, the coffee table
covered in
Wall Street Journal
s and gun manuals. Above the couch hung two framed prints of West Point. I helped him set up the Ping-Pong table in an extra bedroom furnished with nothing other than one desk lamp sitting on the carpet, its green lampshade tilted upward, revealing the hard, bright edge of a lit lightbulb.

Ping-Pong. Gin. Vodka. Coors Light. A walk for more empanadas. I could barely stay awake. I lost track of how many Ping-Pong games I won in a row. It felt wonderful to dominate. I hit Adam in the forehead with the ball twice. I beat him left-handed. We were pouring sweat. My body felt like it was shutting down. Before I fell asleep on the couch, Adam showed me pictures of the Brazilian. Her mouth was shut. As I drifted off, the monolithic muted television flashed CNN, seeping red in surges through my heavy, closed eyelids.

I awoke wet. I reached into my crotch. The liquid was not urine. The leather beneath me was slippery with it. For a moment I was sure someone had spilled a large amount of water on me, but then I realized how hot I was. It was sweat. In the bathroom I vomited until I was left with nothing, bending over the toilet with thin strings of saliva dangling from my chapped lips. I couldn’t believe I had done this to myself. I changed spots on the couch and wrapped the damp blanket around me. In the extreme air-conditioning, my flesh recoiled from the fabric. Back in the bathroom, I filled the toilet again, this time with frothing diarrhea. I shook, then pulled the trash can in front of me and heaved nothing into it.

I put on dirty dry clothes from my bag and lay on the couch, shaking. I longed to turn off the television but could not find the remote. I passed in and out of sleep. I vomited more. I bled from the application of so much toilet paper. I’d never had a hangover like this. Something was terribly wrong. For one fever-induced hour, I convinced myself that I had contracted malaria from years in my swamp of a neighborhood.

At dawn, Adam passed through in a freshly pressed suit, carrying a newspaper and coffee. Dim sunlight exploded into the room as he
opened the door. He closed it behind him without even looking at me. I tried to focus. Pictures of fields of spinach flashed on the television, interspersed with CNN anchormen. I crawled to the television and turned it up at the source.

Wolf Blitzer said, “The hospitalization of dozens of people across the country has been attributed to the tainted spinach.”

I had been poisoned by empanadas. I shook in the bathroom again, showered in a state of rapidly fluctuating temperature. There was nothing that might help. I checked the kitchen. It was filled with beer cans and specialty pastas, olives, and a number of jars of artichoke hearts. I walked outside, down the hill, trying to gauge the amount of time before I would need a toilet. My head was splitting. I found a corner bodega and bought Ritz crackers and Bayer. The discovery made me briefly euphoric.

With daylight I settled into a rhythm of shaking, going to the toilet, and sleeping. I thumbed through the weapons manuals piled in a basket by the edge of the couch. I watched the only movie I could find that wasn’t a James Bond film.
Spies Like Us
. Adam’s apartment confirmed everything. He was a caricature of himself.

In a moment of desperation I called Combover. On his voice mail I said, “Steve, it’s Slow. I’m in DC. I got spinach poisoning. I gotta get home, man. This was a business trip. It really was.”

It was almost impossible to discuss my sickness with Adam when he returned. “That sucks” and “oh man” was all we could say. We were incapable of investigating empathy. We were schooled only in personal destruction. He said, “I told you you shouldn’t have gotten the spinach. Want to get a drink with me and some friends?”

“Seriously?”

“It’ll be good for you.”

I wanted a doctor. A trainer. I wanted Anne. She would have brought me tea and crackers and made me get into a hot bath or a
cold bath. Whichever was appropriate. I didn’t know. I longed for her. I sipped water, which then trickled out of me in various ways. More dry dirty clothes and then
The Color of Money
.

CNN covered spinach like it was a terrorist attack. Two children died. I wondered if, when I died, they would mention me on CNN. Former tennis player Slow Smith dies due to poison spinach. I doubted it. Another night of diarrhea and shivers. My head hurt so bad that I cried. Again Adam exited healthy with confidence at dawn.

I awoke in the afternoon to knocking on the door and crawled to it with the blanket wrapped around me. I opened it, the sunlight an electrical shock to my brain. Fever had never induced hallucinations before, but for a moment I questioned whether or not what I was seeing was real. I was looking at Kaz. He was clean-shaven, and his hair had been cut into a bristly crop. His fingernails were perfect.

He said, “Combover called me.”

It must have only taken a couple phone calls for Kaz to figure out where I was. He knew who I knew in DC. He stepped inside and sat with his back to the window, a silhouette before the drawn blinds. He had gone heavy on the aftershave. The aroma made my stomach turn. I had eaten nothing but crackers in more than a day. I was drained in every possible way. I let the silence ripen.

“Let me take you home,” he said.

“You serious?”

“I want to apologize.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“What can I do?”

It was a question I couldn’t answer. What I wanted from him was all in the past. I wanted him to not sleep with my wife.

I sighed. “Tell me what happened.”

“Slow.”

“Tell me.”

He didn’t speak for a long time. I felt nauseated for a moment but breathed softly and shallowly until the vomit lowered itself back into the last safe area of my stomach.

“It happened in New York.”

“Last year?”

He nodded. “After charades.”

“Who started it?”

“I’m not going to go into detail, man.”

“You guys do it without a condom?”

He didn’t look up. I could feel the vomit beginning to rise.

“Now this one’s important,” I said. “You do it without a condom? Hey!” He looked up. It was the most energy I had expended in days.

“This isn’t smart, Slow.”

“She kissed you,” I said. “Then you kissed her. Then what, you started groping each other? She put her hands in your pants? She took her clothes off? One of you probably said, ‘What are we doing?’ Or ‘We can’t do this.’ But you did it. Am I right?” I shook my head. “You know what happens when people have sex? You know what the outcome can be? The miracle of life?” I was floating, high on spinach fever. “Yeah. That happened.”

“We didn’t . . .” Kaz said. “OK?” He held up one open hand. “What Anne and I did was wrong. We knew that. She knew that. But I know what’s been going on with you and Katie and Paige. So you’re doing this stuff with Katie and Paige—no, just listen. And in the end, we’re all good people. We are. We’re good and we’re bad. You too. Just wait! We all love each other too much. I’m serious, I think we all love each other so much that we’ve messed everything up. Because I love you, man. And I’m not going to lie to you. We didn’t use a condom. She didn’t want me to.”

The blanket fell off of my shoulders as I stood. I took the two steps to Kaz and then vomited onto the side of his face.

OVER THE TOP
of my computer, I watched my officemate put a hand on the back of his head and twirl one finger into an area of hair that was only a few inches long and stood out at strange angles like it had been caught in a paper shredder. For weeks I couldn’t make sense of the hairstyle until I finally realized that it was not a style. It was from him pulling his own hair out. He wound one hair around his finger, then yanked. He held it in front of his face, said, “I know!” into the phone, and dropped the hair onto the carpet. He covered volleyball, field hockey, gymnastics, and softball. Track-and-field, crew, and tennis were mine. We worked for the university. The Combover incident had made me look elsewhere for work, and in truth, this wasn’t a better job. It was more of the same, handling sports information, emailing dates and phone numbers and stats and quotes. I had been here for three months. He continued to talk, and so I opened Steve G Tennis—a website that gathered every tennis result and statistic—and started reading the names of friends.

Sixteen months had come and gone since Anne had gone into the hospital, sixteen months since I had filed for my protected ranking. Anne was still in the hospital, but the ranking was now unlocked. It gave me eight chances, eight tournaments to sign in with the same ranking points I’d had a year ago. I’d used my first option two weeks earlier when I’d flown to Baton Rouge by myself, signed in, and took what came to me. Nick Jones. A twenty-nine-year-old American with
short dreads who had been on the tour for seven years and still had only two points to his name. To other players he was an ancient joke, and I was one year older than him. We lost in the first round. I got my check for $70 and got back on a plane the same day I’d arrived. I felt like I had played a different game than the one I had once made my living at. It wasn’t my strokes, my legs, or my volleys. It wasn’t even Nick, who had actually played well. It was that Nick wasn’t Kaz. I felt lost on court without him.

I was searching for my own name in the rankings when the phone rang. I flinched. It almost never rang.

“Sports Information,” I said. “Slow Smith.”

“This is Dr. Julia Green,” a young woman said. I barely registered the woman’s voice, my attention instead focused on the fact that Kaz had lost 1 and 3 in qualifying at Estoril. He had signed in with DP Burris? I couldn’t imagine what circumstances had led to that pairing. Burris, who had beaten Roddick in juniors in ’91 and been going downhill since. I had been watching Kaz’s progress for months. His ranking had been plummeting, racking up results like Estoril with partners not even as good as Burris. I had the feeling he was just as lost on court as I had been with Nick.

The woman on the phone said, “Hello?”

“This is Sports Information,” I said. We often received misdirected calls from the main switchboard, and this repetition of error had made me almost immune to the voice of another over the phone. The woman’s voice grew muffled as she spoke to someone else in the room. Then she said, “Your wife would like to talk to you.”

“This is Sports Information.”

“Slow Smith?”

“Uh.”

“Your wife is Anne Smith?”

“Yes?” I looked away from the Steve G.

“OK. Hold please.”

I did have a wife. It suddenly occurred to me that this call was for me. I had the momentary impulse to place the phone back on its base. Then, with no regard for my desire to pace, Anne said my name. There was no zombie tenor, no wavering slur. Her voice sounded exactly the same as it always had.

“Slow?” she said. “Hello?”

“Anne?”

My officemate plucked another hair and then, holding it aloft, turned to me and stared.

“Where are you?”

“Anne?”

“Yes! Where are you?”

“At work.”

“Work?”

“Yeah,” I said. I even laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s.”

“What happened?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m . . . at the hospital?”

“Are you alright?”

“What happened?”

“We had an accident.”

“Can you come?” she said. She sounded confused and half-asleep.

“I’ll be there in a second.”

My hands shook on the steering wheel. It was a 2002 Volvo wagon. I sped onto Franklin Street, dodging the afternoon traffic. I couldn’t understand the rules of the road. I didn’t know when to stop, when to go. I pulled into the parking lot of the art museum to breathe. There was a large sculpture of a horn in the lawn, lifted into the air
on two small poles, with a pedestal at the small end. I remembered walking across that small expanse of grass with Anne before a gala at the museum one summer evening. I was in a tuxedo, she in a long golden dress from the ’30s. The curator’s husband had asked her if she was going to the Oscars. I let go of her hand and stood on that pedestal and whispered “This is your conscience” into the small end of the horn. My voice emerged amplified from the other end, secret and metallic, audible even to Anne.