The Arriviste, page 15
A few spectators entered the grandstand: a pair of military officers, one whose head was shaped like an anvil; an unshaved young swinger with sunglasses on top of his head and hair spilling from his open shirt; and three women, two blondes and a doe-eyed wavy-haired brunette. Security-agency types took up positions in the stands and assumed sanctioned looks of boredom. Others brought out a canopy to shelter the seats along the sideline. Another pro, not Dennis but a whiskery Latin who kept the arms of a tennis sweater tied across his chest, came onto the court and flashed his smile at the spectators. Whoever they were waiting for was taking his time about it. In the meantime, they watched Bud and me hopping on our toes at the baseline.
“Who’s winning?” one of the military officers shouted over to us during a water break.
The man they were waiting for was escorted by the director of the club onto the court through a portal at the base of the stands. He was young, overfed, and even from the distance between courts gave off a whiff of cologne. His shirt was tight, his shorts tighter. His sunglasses were too big and kept sliding down his nose. His mouth was set between a smirk and a sneer, though this might have been the face he made when he was out of breath, which he seemed to be instantly.
“Who’s that?” Bud asked the next time we stopped to pick up balls at the net.
“It’s Ramses Alonso, the former president’s son, the national playboy. He plays polo and flies fighter jets. But mostly what he does is chase tail. I’ve seen him scoping out prospects at the Tropicana. The aristocrats all worry that he’ll jump their daughters’ bones.”
“A swordsman, eh? He’s certainly not much of a tennis player.” In fact he wielded his racquet like a sword, thrusting and parrying at the ball more than stroking it, leaping like a swashbuckler, exulting whenever he chanced to hit it inside the lines, swearing when he failed. Or so it appeared—my Spanish is slim.
His followers in the grandstand laughed, whistled, cheered, whooped. The convention by which the game is played in silence was evidently unknown to them. When we paused, Bud would try to stare Ramses down. But Ramses was too caught up to notice.
“I’ve half a mind to tell him to put a lid on it,” Bud told me across the net.
“Better not,” I said. “We’re lucky they let us on at all. When his father played, they kept the court next to his empty. I’d have thought it was the same with him. He must have given permission for us to stay.”
“Imagine his needing two courts,” Bud replied in a somewhat louder voice than the one in which I had spoken. “One is too much for him.”
I sidled farther from the other court and turned my back to it. “Pipe down,” I whispered. “You don’t want to get that kid’s back up. He’s an army general, you know. His father had him commissioned when he was thirteen.”
Bud faced the grandstand court now, not disguising the fact that he was talking about Ramses, who stomped around, holding his ill-fitting sunglasses in front of him, throwing them on the ground and crushing them underfoot, then commandeered an officer’s Ray Bans. “You think we should humor a punk like him?” Bud asked me.
“How do you think he got to be that way? He can do whatever he wants.”
Ramses retreated to his canopy for a breather. His camp followers grew louder and more animated now that he’d stopped playing. The officer whose glasses Ramses had taken climbed down from the grandstand and tried to take them back. Ramses gave him a hat instead. The pro began to clown with the glasses Ramses had cracked. An officer tossed one of the women’s shoes over the rail. She retaliated by tearing a medal off his uniform and tossing it after her shoe. The officer shouted at the woman. Ramses picked up the medal and pinned it to his shorts.
In the rumpus I took my eye off a ball and shanked it. It rolled toward Ramses; by the time he retrieved it, Bud and I had already started hitting another. We kept it in play for a while, and Ramses waited for us to miss to throw the ball back. He was impressed and made his followers quiet down. At the end of our next rally, they applauded. Their talk grew quieter.
Ramses came over to our court. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said in deliberate, courtly English, removing the sunglasses. “As you see, I cannot play this game. But you, you can play. Please, come over here and play for us.”
This display of humility was startling. He had a gift for regal condescension, for making you feel honored to be spoken to. “Thank you, but we’re nearly done, General.”
“Finished? But it isn’t possible. I am asking you to play for us.” He opened his palm in a gesture of supplication. You could see from the flintiness of his eye that he was unaccustomed to refusal. “These courts are mine,” he continued. “Please, I invite you.”
If he wanted an exhibition, I said, he had one pro right there and could surely dig up another.
There was nothing more for him to say. He gave me a menacing look, put the sunglasses on, and sauntered back to his court.
Bud came up to the net to find out what the matter was. “Nothing much,” I told him. “He wants us to play for them on his court. He couldn’t believe we’d forego the honor.”
Bud followed me to the far sideline, where I toweled off. “It doesn’t matter to me where we play,” he said. “I don’t mind moving over a court, especially if it’ll keep them quiet.”
I took a cup of water from the cooler. It tasted metallic and I had to resist the urge to spit it out. “A minute ago you didn’t seem to have much patience for him.”
“That was before you advised me to stay on his good side.”
I agreed to move over for a few minutes before we quit. We had already hit a lot of balls and I was nearly out of gas.
Almost as soon as we set foot on the grandstand court, Ramses came out from under his canopy and said, “Please, please, you play a game for us. A competition. A winner, a loser.”
I protested. So did Bud. But Ramses wouldn’t hear of our refusing. The dispute grew embarrassing, then tedious.
As I was about to give up and walk off, Bud waved me up to the net. “We’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We’ll hit it back and forth to each other like before. Only we’ll start the points with a serve and keep score to satisfy them.” He gave a quick glance at the grandstand. “What do we care who comes out ahead? It’s all in fun.”
“It’s all in fun.” When you hear that, you know that none of it is likely to be. How could it not have occurred to me that an urge to settle the score might grow up in Bud? And if it had, wasn’t he entitled to it? A friendly tennis match—there were surely more spiteful methods of revenge he might have tried to exact. I was getting off easy, if this was even what he was doing.
He certainly seemed to be taking something out on me. He had said we’d bat it back and forth but the plan hadn’t stuck. We had agreed to try to hit the ball straight, but we hadn’t said anything about how hard we would hit it. And the harder we hit it, the more difficult it became to control. Sooner or later, one of us would make the other scramble, and all bets were off.
Bud could scramble better than I. My bum knee prevented me from covering the court as well as I’d have needed to keep up with him—my knee and the heat of the afternoon. Though past its meridian ferocity, the sun had come back strong. The clouds were in tatters; the last of the rainwater rose in a mist from the grandstand’s metal seats.
In all our dealings, in our every negotiation and exchange, the ten or dozen years I had on Bud had never mattered in so brute a fashion. Being faster and stronger was no use to him at the dinner table or on the phone, but it certainly was here. And what about experience, what could it have done for me? Mightn’t it have permitted me to opt out, put me past caring whether he beat me, let me let him have his revenge and the innocent satisfaction it might bring him? If I needed reassurance, I might have reminded myself that I had a handicap, an injury, and that I was easily the more skilled player. I mightn’t have minded about the outcome of our match. But I did mind. The competitive fires kicked in on their own.
I lost the first game. In the middle of the second, the swinger and one of the women got up and left. I expected the rest of the group to follow, but they didn’t. Something about our match held them. They watched closely, applauding and making clipped, teeth-gnashing remarks under their breath between points. I found it hard to take their interest seriously. I thought they were mocking us.
I lost that game too and was trailing in the third. It’s odd that so frivolous a thing as a tennis match can feel like a prison sentence, but it can: you are bound by strict rules in a circumscribed space until you win, which sometimes seems impossible, or lose, which is often unacceptable.
The woman who had gotten up came back. I thought I heard her ask the score—3–0 for Bud, by then—and sigh when she heard the answer. It was a down-but-not-out sigh with a combative edge to it. I felt that she was counting on me.
One of the officers suddenly leapt over the grandstand rail and came toward us, the butt of his revolver undulating in his holster. He veered toward Bud and stood over him like a boxing trainer. I couldn’t hear him, but his anvil-shaped head looked ready to crack Bud’s skull open if he was disobedient.
Ramses came down to give me a pep talk too. His breath hung in the heavy air as he barked at me. His face looked more dissolute up close.
But there was something in this fight-corner reveille. I might at least have been putting up more resistance to Bud, though not by trying to out-hit him. I couldn’t cover enough of the court. I’d have to finesse him, feed him dinks, floaters, lobs, slices—junk—to throw off his rhythm, sabotage the game, lower the level of play in the hope that he’d sink further than I. But I was reluctant. This was an older man’s strategy, an older man’s game. It might have been only fitting. Still, I didn’t like the idea.
But to lose to him would also have been a sign of age, an even clearer one. And now Ramses and his followers had adopted me. I had fans to play for. As holiday dilemmas go, it was a thorny one. Or would have been—Bud looked defeated from the moment we walked back onto the court. His step had lost its bounce. His shoulders hunched. His eyes gazed into the distance. His curl had detached itself from the mass of his hair and dangled in his eyes.
Bud served—his usual serve, flat and without much of a hop to it, but no lollypop either. I bunted the return back short. He ran to get it and netted the reply. I hit another short one after that. He chased my shot down and hit it back to me. I chipped it to the other side of the court. He didn’t even bother chasing it. “Nice shot,” he said without enthusiasm.
Our next points followed the pattern. He’d hit the soft, spinny balls of mine that he had chased down right back to me or miss trying. I won them either way.
He might have started to play the same game I was, hitting bunts and dinks to exploit my immobility. Lame as I was, he wouldn’t have had to do it well. But he was evidently too gentlemanly to play this way, if it even occurred to him. He’d either knock the ball right back to me or let it go, and soon I took the lead without so much as a look from him that said, why are you spoiling the fun?
The fun wasn’t ours, though, but some of our spectators’. They were gleeful at the turn the match had taken. Ramses clapped everyone on the back, even the women, and strummed his racquet like a guitar. One of the blondes twirled her harem jacket in a mock striptease. The brunette, her doe eyes suddenly heavy-lidded, threw me amorous looks. The hairy-chested swinger and the pro were as depressed as the others were jubilant. They’d gone for Bud, and though he’d occasionally fire a ball past me, more often than not I had the answers.
Bud looked resigned. The heat had taken the stuffing out of him. Or maybe the way I was playing was so irritating to him that he couldn’t be bothered to extend himself. The fewer points he won, the less he seemed to care. He was in a hurry to get it over with. This suited me, though near the end I couldn’t suppress a certain shame at the tactics I’d resorted to, at having wanted to win enough to do whatever it took.
I glanced at the grandstand on my way off the court. It looked like a tableau from the Rialto in Venice’s heyday. The officers, the swinger, the brunette, and the blondes: everyone was exchanging cash. Some paid, others pocketed, and Ramses, grinning, collected from them all.
I’d wondered why they’d stuck around to watch us, why they hadn’t gone off to the next lark. Now I knew why. We were the next lark.
“You taught me a lesson,” Bud said in the car, our progress reflected in the spill of light and shadow across the hood and dash and along his profile.
“And you let an old man have his day.”
“Not at all. I was thrown, I admit, when that hatchet-faced thug came down and ranted at me.”
“What did he want?” I asked distractedly. We had picked up more speed than I’d have liked, but I tried to hold my tongue.
“Nothing to do with the match. I’m not exactly sure what he wanted. To rattle me, I guess. He said it was his duty to remind me to show the authorities their due respect. I thought he was going to try to coach me. I got a civics lesson instead.”
He was driving like a local cabbie, bouncing down the middle of the road, passing around blind curves, doing fifty where the rusty signs from colonial days set the limit at thirty, gesticulating, sometimes with both hands, and turning to look at me. “I can see why you lost your concentration,” I said to remind him of the concept.
“Evidently that joker was taking bets on us. Like we were fighting cocks.”
“I know.” Acacia blossoms had blown in through the windows and were flurrying around us. “There’s no driving test here, you know. Licenses are for sale. You’ve really got to watch out.”
“While you were hitting me all those fancy shots, I kept wondering what kind of place you’d brought me to.”
“Say, Bud, would you mind slowing down a little? I’m in no hurry, and the way they drive—”
“Don’t worry,” he replied, training his gaze on me.
“Keep your eyes on the road, will you?” I leaned forward in my seat and pulled at my shirt where it was sticking to my back, till a bump in the road had me pressing my hands against the dash.
We got stuck in a row of cars behind a bus. Bud kept waving his hand at the line of traffic ahead of us. The driver of a crowded taxi-van tooted his horn. The acacia petals that had been swirling in the wind settled over us.
The bus turned off. Bud checked his watch, kicked the accelerator, and raced up the national road—the harbor, a leaden sliver with an oil derrick bobbing like a hen pecking for worms, coming into sight below—and down.
“You missed your turn,” I said.
He didn’t hear me or chose not to. I was about to say it again but decided that a detour was preferable to a palaver over directions.
We drove through an open chain-link gate into an industrial park: old trucks and a rusty forklift, crates, a dumpster surrounded by weeds, and a cavernous metal shed with a wooden sign that read “Revtex Ltd.” above the double doorway. A desk chair propped open one of the doors.
Bud stopped a good distance from the shed. He left the motor and air conditioning running.
“Your site?”
“I’d invite you in to look around if there was anything to see,” he said. “We’re still getting things off the ground. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Five minutes later I was still there, with nothing to look at but used nails, wood shavings, and empty cigarette cartons on the ground beside the car. I got out to see what was keeping him.
He was on his way out of an office in the far corner when I went in. “You got it,” I heard him say. The interior had no other partitions. The close air smacked of sheet metal and coffee. Bands of dusty light splashed through high louvered windows in which fans turned, striking ductwork or spilling across the concrete floor. An array of heavy machinery ran along the back wall. Pipes, lighting fixtures, and rolls of fiberglass were stacked at the sides. At the head of a row of workbenches, a fantailed pigeon stared at me with vacant impudence.
“You’ve got plenty of room,” I said as Bud hustled me out. Not that I needed the encouragement—the air in the parking lot was cool by comparison.
“The machines needed a bit of retrofitting. It’ll be done in a matter of days. There’s no use air-conditioning a space that size in the meantime. Your investment’s got to take me a long way. I’m running a tight ship.”
I had to admire his thrift. “Good for you.”
“For us, you mean.” The road followed a ridge along the coast and was reinforced on one side by new concrete piling. “We’re meeting the engineer for a drink. You can hear all about our process, though you may get distracted.”
“I don’t know. When’s that?”
“Not when, who. Your friend Cecilia will be joining us. You know, she looked crestfallen when you left us the other afternoon. How many more days have you got down here—just a few, right? You don’t want to waste her sweetness on the desert air.”
“When did you have in mind?”
“Why, now! It’s as good as on your way home.”
It wasn’t a place I’d have gone on my own, but he drove there reasonably, and that was enough for me. We parked on one side of a lagoon and took a ferry to the other. Frangipani lined a steep upward path that ended in a fountain. Inside the bar, sea fans, conch shells, coral, and stuffed blowfish collected dust. Outside again, on one end of a panoramic terrace, where begonias spilled from terra cotta pots in front of an iron balcony, the mainland opened behind the lagoon—white sand and sea grapes, hills dotted by tile-roofed villas shielding the town below, with the saw-toothed cordillera in the background. At the other end, a crowd was gathering to watch the sun set over the water.
Cecilia hadn’t turned up yet, but the engineer had, a long lean jumpy type who twisted his metal watchband with the fingers of his free hand while he talked. He had a lot to say. I wasn’t listening. Every now and then, one or the other would make an inclusive gesture, but I wasn’t that curious. Newcomers squeezed past our table and jostled our drinks. “She’ll be here any minute,” Bud called to me over the crowd. The shadows that had been creeping along the stonework lengthened.
