“You mean that slick of gooey tar with or without the curdled milk?”
“Oh, it’s not so terrible,” you said.
And suddenly I realized that my scorn for the coffee they brew here was all along a simple affectation, an exaggeration meant to draw your attention, like everything I say here. But you weren’t biting. You are not given to hyperbole, irony, or wry humor. You say it like it is.
So I took your advice, bought a protein bar and ordered a cup of coffee and took it to the balcony to watch you play. I loved how before hitting the ball, you drew your right arm all the way back and how you stretched out your left hand to aim the ball where you wished to send it. There is grace, and skill, and follow-through in everything you do. No affectation, no exaggeration, just the thing itself. I envied you.
As I watched you play, I noticed you had changed your bandage to a smaller one. I wanted to comment on that and meant to wait for you, seeing as we had started talking.
But why fool myself? We hadn’t started talking at all. You were no more thinking of my shoes than I of my protein bar.
Eventually, I ate the protein bar, took another sip of the coffee, poured the rest of it into one of the gutters, watched you play some more, and then, after shaving and showering, left.
I did not go straight to the office that morning. I bought another cup of coffee, walked up the stairs to the High Line, found a quiet, empty spot, and just sat there, staring at the water, at the near-deserted walkway, at the plants and the trees and the bushes, all so vibrantly green that day. I was savoring my misery, trying to remember your voice, or just the words you’d said in case I was unable to summon your voice. But nothing came to me. I wanted to think of you. But nothing stirred there either, except a feeling at once sad yet not unpleasant. I’m in love, aren’t I? Yes, I think so. On a paper napkin I’d pocketed after buying coffee at the tennis house, I began to write: I know nothing about you. I don’t know your name, who you are, where you live, what you do. But I see you naked every morning. I see your cock, your ass, your balls, everything. I had no idea why I’d written these words. But it was the first time I had taken something in my chest about you and put it in words out into the real world. I didn’t want to stop, because it was like talking to you now, yet better than talking to you, because I could let down my guard and felt soothed by the words, knowing there was no reason to feel soothed by anything, much less by my own words. I folded the napkin and slipped it in my wallet. I knew that I’d never throw it away.
But as I was about to stand up to walk to my office, I felt something almost like pain in my chest. I liked the pain. And once again I wished my father were alive. He’s the one person who’d understand the inflections of what I felt, the sting and the salve braided together like twin serpents going at each other. This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.
And while staring at the Erie Lackawanna station across the Hudson, I remembered him standing at the dock waving farewell as our ferry was chugging away from the island. Here was a sad man, I thought. Little did he know then that this would be his last summer of love. But knowing him as I did now, he must have feared and indeed foreseen it might never be given to him to find love again, which is why he treasured it until the end.
* * *
THIRD WEEK AFTER we spoke that time.
We say hello. For the next two or three weeks, I’ll say hello first. Then you’ll say hello. But on our way to the courts, never a glance. You budgeted one, not two greetings a day, and our slim quota brings us no closer than when we were strangers. After a few words the chill immediately rises like frost creeping on a windowpane. In no time, I am back to surreptitious glances that instantly shift the moment they land on you, or that shift before even spotting you, so no one could even call them glimpses.
Sometimes, when you’re given the chance to avoid my glance, there’s no greeting at all. Clearly, we’ve slipped back to where we were before. At the watercooler, as I’m bending down and drinking, I don’t see you standing right next to me, waiting to drink as well. Neither of us has spotted the other until it is too late. “Oh, hello!” I say. “Oh, hi,” you say.
When it’s time to leave, you roll your orange towel into a ball and slam-dunk it cavalierly into your bag before zipping up the bag and slinging it across your shoulder. You never say goodbye to anyone, not even to the attendant who is always on the premises or to Mike, who strung your racket once. Not to me either. You simply slink away, like those who are either too arrogant and self-centered, or unspeakably shy and don’t know how to be the first to say goodbye.
A month later, though, you are the first to greet me. Very unusual. Still, before I let it go to my head, I realize that your few words were nothing more than a string of commonplaces. The twisted smile that wasn’t so welcoming, the terse wording, the gaze that turns opaque and nearly flees after saying Oh, hi, as though your whole body felt obligated to greet me when it would much rather have drifted away. It’s the kind of greeting I give Mrs. Lieberman whenever I’m unable to duck her in time.
Still, three weeks into our first conversation, we’ve moved from one daily greeting to sometimes two. Within a month, you’ve managed to add: Have a great weekend, followed by How was your weekend? or How are you doing today? I reply using the same bromides, hoping to modulate them differently each time to show that I really mean what I say when I reply with the same tired fine, or just fine, or really fine, occasionally throwing in a no use complaining to add variety to what have become pabulum and hackneyed exchanges. All along I’m thinking: I’ve got a crush on someone who is evidently no less platitudinous than I am. It’s all my fault. I’ve set it up this way and should have seen this coming. You budget your greetings, your smiles, your nods, but you never throw in that minor extra, seemingly inadvertent something to make me think that you mean more than what you say. Your words, like mine, are without content, without meaning, limping signifiers. The old silence was preferable.
We toss occasional remarks at each other the way a tennis instructor keeps tossing balls at old Mrs. Lieberman, who is trying to practice her forehand after her operation but misses eight out of ten times. And yet I live for those two to three minutes of clumsy, insipid chitchat: the weekend, the latest movie, plans for the summer that never pan out, your thigh, my tennis elbow, and again your thigh, my brother, your brother. I live for this. And if this is all there is, well, this is all there is.
* * *
BUT NO ONE can prepare for the worst. The worst doesn’t only dash hopes; it tears through everything in ways that are almost meant to hurt, to punish, to shame. Despite my most sobering forecasts, life can still play the cruelest card and scuttle everything—and just when I thought we were sailing past the shoals. This happened on April 26. I can’t forget the date. It was the anniversary of the death of my father.
We were discussing the tennis house and how it needed a face-lift. “A face-lift!” you said. “You mean a complete and total do-over.” I had never heard you say anything critical, much less something that seemed open-ended and did not instantly snuff out conversation. Ironically, I found myself coming to the defense of our poor old tennis house. You listened and then said, “Yes, but when was the last time they had paper towels in the dispenser or even a paper dispenser, for that matter?” And after a brief pause, “To say nothing of toilet paper.”
We both laughed about the toilet paper. What I liked was the puckish and playful tone in your voice. I’d mistaken you for a straight arrow. Suddenly you were making me laugh.
Caught by surprise, all I could say was, “I didn’t think you noticed things.”
“Oh, I notice plenty.”
This frightened me. Were you talking about me?
“But I’ve never heard you complain before,” I said.
“You don’t know me
yet.”
I loved this. The possible double entendre in your words, the air of impish mischief, the hovering promise of getting to know each other, the banter that could so easily die in its tracks or, with a nudge or two, take us to exactly where I hoped you were leading us. I was scared, scared of what you’d say to set me straight, scared that I wasn’t misreading you at all.
Until now, talk has never gone anywhere. All I do is steal wisps of information in the hope of cobbling together your portrait, the way sketch artists do at police stations. I know you went to Oberlin, I know you come home late sometimes and all you want to do, after tutoring learning disabled students in the evening, is listen to Haydn sonatas, because they make you happy and help you unwind, which you’ve once said is why you need to play tennis every morning, otherwise you tense up during the day and get impatient with your students.
Our conversation about sad conditions at the tennis house was going well. We’d never spoken so much. We even spoke about your college years, and how difficult Christmas breaks were for you when you had to go back home with so many papers hanging over your head followed by the promise to bring back German fruitcakes for all your friends in the U.S. Stollen, I said. I hadn’t said that word in so long. You laughed. Which made me laugh, which made you laugh. I could have put all my cards on the table and said it right then and there: Let’s grab a drink one of these days—said casually, of course.
But just as I was warming up to say something like this, the bombshell. You were talking about schools and careers when for some reason you said, “My partner is a professor in classics.” I needed to struggle not to tell you that my undergraduate major had been Greek and Latin literature and that I had translated Animal Farm into classical Greek. But this would have sounded so fatuous, as though I were trying to measure up to your partner. Still, I was thinking of finding something to say about my own life as a lapsed classicist when what you had just said finally hit me. You weren’t talking about your tennis partner. You were talking about your partner. “He is writing a book about Thucydides,” you said. My favorite author, I wanted to add, but didn’t. Had you read Thucydides? I found myself asking, even though my mind was miles away at that point. “I had to,” you replied. “Twice!”
Clearly, they have a collaborative relationship, I thought, loving the very word I’d spun out in a moment of anger, envy, and derision. Collaborative. I could just hear your pieties: His problems are my problems, my troubles his troubles. We share, we care. I wanted to laugh at the two of you. But all I kept thinking as I left the tennis courts that morning was, So, you knew, you knew what I was doing when I kept trying to chat you up all these weeks and months. All you needed was to wait for the least intrusive way to play the partner card. My partner this, my partner that, oh, that’s what my partner always says. For someone who budgets his words, you knew where you were headed the moment you brought up Germany and stollen and Haydn. You must be a good teacher. Nothing you say is without purpose.
What didn’t go down well was the sheer simplicity, the tawdry, ordinary, threadbare, flat-footed, mundane simplicity with which you hit me with the “boyfriend” line—the kind of disingenuous aside a girl in her late teens might drop when she says, This is exactly how my boyfriend feels.
I felt numb all day.
Partner. With that one word you not only tore down my flimsiest and untold fantasies; you also shattered the romance I’d been coddling for two years. All I could do now was hold fast to the wreckage of what were mere illusions.
That day changed everything. I was devastated, quietly, as though barbarians had swept through my life and forgotten to kill me after slaughtering everyone and eradicating everything, including memory. I couldn’t remember what I had wanted from you or how I could even have thought of making love to you, night after night, the very thought of our mouth-to-mouth love robbing me of hours of sleep. I struggled to remember the raw fantasies, but their stirring sound track had gone dumb. All I was left with after hearing the p word was a collapsed house of cards, which it had taken me forever to build. What was inside that house, or why I had built it, or what storms it was meant to withstand, or which pleasures it hoped to billet—all gone. A mere nothing, and it was finished.
And here our story ends.
* * *
I CAN RELAX NOW. I can speak to you of my life, open up, let you peek into my world as it really is, feel less harried by the things I try to hide from you, stop boasting and saying I had a great weekend when it was altogether insipid.
I try to picture times ahead. One day you’ll finally invite me over to dinner with your partner, and we’ll talk. Of the classics, of Thucydides, and of young Alcibiades who made a pass at Socrates but was turned down because the philosopher knew the young hunk was way too handsome for him. And we’ll talk of Nicias, who was executed because he was a worthier general than Alcibiades and went to his death knowing that the Athenian warriors he ferried across the sea with the promise of glory would die the ignominious death of slaves in the quarries of Syracuse off the island of Ortigia.
And if the two of you come over to my place, I’ll pour your wine and your partner’s, and it will be a dry white, and I’ll cut open everyone’s branzino as I’d seen a waiter do in Europe, using a flat spoon, and think to myself, Better this than nothing. At least he’s under my roof.
And it will be so odd watching you and Maud eye each other with the uneasy premonition of people who can’t quite put their finger on what troubles them only to ignore it when they begin to see it. The two of you will end up talking about one thing or another and eventually find a slim something to share in common. And we’d be having such a good time the four of us together and it would seem so natural for people who meet on the tennis courts to join for dinner that we’d forget to ask why it had to be now and not two years ago.
But this fantasy peters out too. It’s too homespun, too tame, and my mind can’t stand it for long. I prefer to think of sex. But I don’t want to think of sex, don’t want to see you naked any longer, won’t even look when you’re naked, don’t want to like when I do look only then to catch myself thinking, This is where his partner’s mouth goes when they’re alone at night. And, yes, I do still like. I haven’t seen you naked in months, even though you’re naked right before me every morning. I don’t look, or I look but not to see.
The other day I saw you had a bluish scar on your thigh. I had never noticed it before. I’d seen the bandage, seen the thinner one too, then stopped noticing you’d removed the bandage altogether. The scar made me feel sorry for you, I wanted to touch it, to speak about it, to ask if it still hurt. But I held back. I looked at your face and it was the face of someone with a scar on his inner right thigh. It made you so human. And I loved you human. I wanted to hold you.
You smile when you speak to me. I suppose I smile too. Then just a day later you were bending down to pick up something and I spied, if for the most fleeting second, your anus. It too brought out a feeling verging on compassion, partly because I felt I had trespassed by just looking and partly because it made me know for the first time that you were kind, vulnerable, soft. I should never have looked. When I thought about it, it made me feel I’d infringed on something wholesome and private and ever so chaste about you, like an instance of the holy that suddenly flares before our eyes and then leaves us speechless, humbled, and shaken.
But then just as I was attempting to wean myself, suddenly you took me completely by surprise. I was playing tennis on court 14, you were, as always, on court 15, and your ball spun out and hit my side of the net. You shouted Thank you! as we all do to ask for the ball when it lands on somebody else’s court. It’s a peremptory Thank you! but no one takes it amiss. I hadn’t heard you the first time and didn’t respond. So you called out again, except that this time you shouted Thank you, Pauly.
Pauly! Which is when I realized that I had indeed heard you the first time but hadn’t been aware of it.
It wasn’t just Pauly t
hat you said but Paulyyyy, so chummy, so close, so intimate in the way you lengthened the last vowel of what used to be my nickname, that it suddenly tore me out of the tennis courts in Central Park and took me right back to my childhood where everyone at home and later in high school used to call me Paulyyyy exactly as you did, because it was an affectionate diminutive underscored with such good cheer and warmth. The boy in the picture I wanted to show you is called Pauly. And you’d hollered my name without even pretending you were unaware of it. The only place where Pauly appears is in a scanned image of my college yearbook on the web. Had you looked me up online?
Hearing my name spoken that way made me more happy than I might have expected. Everything I’d felt and all the fellowship I’ve been seeking from you had all along been there right before me, except that I wasn’t seeing it, perhaps because pride and fear and raw desire stood in the way. But from your mouth my name had suddenly acquired a new timbre, a new sound, its real sound. I could have dropped my racket and leaned into the court’s chain-link fence, the way people do when they’re exhausted and take a moment to catch their breath, and I wanted to cry. I interrupted my playing to send you your ball. And then you smiled and said it again: “Thank you so much, Paul”—as if my nickname had been a slip you wished to disown.
Still, I felt like a boy who worships a much older schoolmate, and who, during recess one day, is asked to buy cigarettes for him at the local bodega. It’s no longer a busboy’s errand but a privilege. And I did feel privileged. Your use of my name put me on a different plane. It was as if you had thrust your hand in my locker when it was open and seized the apple I keep there for a snack and said, I’m taking the apple, you can have my protein bar.
One thing occurred to me when I had finished playing tennis that morning. I had never once asked your name or attempted to know it. My way perhaps of staving you off, of keeping you unreal, of not showing I cared.