The door buzzed and I stepped into the loud green of an equatorial anteroom. On the astroturf carpet stood Fielding Goodney, drinking real orange juice from a tall beaker. His skin had the perennial tan, highlighting the milky down on his limbs and the sharp creases of his pristine shorts and shirt, the chunky bleach of his high-tec footwear.
‘Hey, Slick,’ he said, and turned towards the glass wall. I joined him. As if from the bridge of a ship we looked down on to the court. It was television: two top grand-slammers thwacking it out, all grunt and sprint. At the far end of the deck was another window. Behind the dark screen sat twenty or thirty people. The court itself must have been three floors deep. A hundred dollars an hour? Two hundred? Three?
‘Who are they over there?’ I asked.
‘They just come in and watch. See that kid down there? Jo’burg out of Texas. Eleventh on the computer. He’s under investigation by the TPA. He takes guarantee money to appear in the minor majors. Bribes. It’s illegal, but practically the whole top thirty are triple earners. There’s going to be a real shitstorm in a couple of years. They should legalize it, fast. I’m a capitalist, Slick. I’m a good capitalist. It’s supply and demand. Why fight it? Here are your trunks.’
He pointed to the door.
‘Oh, Mr Goodney,’ I heard the white-smocked lady sing. ‘You’ll finish prompt, won’t you. Sissy Skolimowsky is on at four, and you know what she’s like.’
I knew what Sissy Skolimowsky was like too. She was the world champion.
So I slipped into my gear next door. Hippie-red, tanktop drummer’s T-shirt, Fielding’s hideous trunks (they weren’t tennis shorts at all, damn it: they were skintight Bermudas, with golfing check), black socks, my cracked and parched sneakers … Usually, as I think I’ve said, New York is a holiday from the nine-to-five of my social shame. But I felt a bad premonition now — intense, adolescent. I tiptoed to the can. The shoes pinched like crazy: my feet must still have jet-lag, jet-swell. I unzipped the trunks and did my thing. The pee looked awful pale against the Vitamin B-steeped mothballs of the curved jug. I turned. There was a mirror. Oh forget it. They won’t let you play anyway.
But they did. The lady gave me a startled glance — at the tureen of my gut, no doubt, and at the crushed bullybag in the wide-checked Bermudas — but she gave me my racket and opened the door. I came down the steps and on to the deck. Fielding had already loped hungrily to the far end, holding his barndoor-sized steel bat in one hand and a dozen yellow tennis balls in the other.
‘Want to hit for a while?’ he shouted, and the first of the balls was burning through the air towards me.
——————
I should have realized that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis. Even in my prime I was never more than an all-weather park-player. A certain wrong-footing slyness has sometimes enabled me to dink and poke my way to victory over more talented players. But basically I’m a dog on the court. Fielding was good. Oh, he was good. And there were differences of health, muscle-tone and coordination to be accounted for too. Fielding, tanned, tuned, a king’s ransom of orthodonture having passed through his mouth, reared on steaks and on milk sweetened with iron and zinc, twenty-five, leaning into his strokes and imparting topspin with a roll of the wrist. Me, I lolloped and leapt for my life at the other end, 200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food, ten years older, charred and choked on heavy fuel, with no more to offer than my block drive and backhand chip. I looked up at the glass window above Fielding’s head. The middle-management of Manhattan stared on, their faces as thin as credit cards.
‘Okay,’ said Fielding. ‘You want to serve?’
‘You do it.’
I watched Fielding bend forward, pat the ball, then straighten up to aim his gun. My serve is no more than a convulsion which occasionally produces a baseline overhead. But Fielding was precise in his stance, measured in his action, with a touch of the severity that all natural ballplayers have. What is it with ballplayers? What is it about roundness that they understand better than we do? The world is round. They understand that too.