The Arriviste, page 3
In her girlhood Vicky had been a natural at tennis, strokes smooth and balance steady from the moment she’d picked up a racquet. I encouraged her and got fast results, victories in local tournaments, and a regional ranking. But before long the round of camps and clinics and coaches was taking her away from us. Joyce was for weaning her off competition. I had another idea. I had played seriously myself and didn’t see why Vicky and I shouldn’t work out together. I decided to build a court for her at home.
And I did build it, over Joyce’s objection and despite some hostile geology: the ground was less stable than I’d been led to expect, the bedrock higher, the drainage faster, the water table deeper; a silver-colored copper beech that in the original plans had been left alone had had to come down. I let Joyce choose the barrier between the court and the surrounding ground. She rejected them all: clubhouse, fence, hedges, ditch, terraces, a stone wall. Nothing would do. The clay court we ended up with was easy on the feet and the eyes too, but it punished you for missing. Other than the brick ledges I had the builder sneak in, there were no backstops. The ball could fly or roll—or fly and roll—where it would. What we had, thanks to Joyce, was a court for experts. This was okay, my partners qualified. And Vicky could hit a spot and hit it again. You’d have had trouble pitching it from ten feet as accurately as she could put it there from the other side.
But that was Vicky at twelve. Thirteen was something else. She put her racquet down right on schedule and for the next four years hardly picked it up. It was all I could do to drag her out there. If not for visitors using it from time to time, the court would have gone to waste.
Now seventeen, Vicky had come home from a summer cycling trip with an appreciation for physical fitness. All that pedaling had done her good. She had decided to go out for her school tennis team. She would train in the afternoons and on weekends for as long as the fall weather would let her. Was I willing to help? Of course I was willing. If my legs weren’t what they had been, my eyes were still good.
It was a far-fetched plan. Tennis was serious business at her school; no one joined the team as a senior. Her real motive was for us to take up where we had left off five years earlier, to revive a broken home. But I was too enthusiastic to see it then. The plan was a portal to a fuller salvation—turn the clock back on one mischance and you turn it back on all the rest.
That evening we sat on the porch watching the last of the fireflies on the lawn, and drank to our future success. She would play on her school team in the spring, and next year in college. Had I been able to guess at the stray forehands and backhands to come, I’d have had her go out for baseball instead.
A check that I had left Vicky miraculously reconstituted itself on her return from the village as racquets, balls, shoes, and what had to be one of the skimpiest tennis dresses a father ever saw on his daughter. It was no more than a bikini, really, with a few beads for a bodice. After an arm-crossing, foot-stomping, teary melodrama, I prevailed on her to take it back.
That afternoon and the next, all through the week, we hit the court, though it’d be more accurate to say of Vicky that she hit everything but the court. She sprayed balls everywhere, upending the grooming tools, knocking roses from the vines and leaves from the trees.
She was bound to be rusty, I reminded myself. I might even have taken her wildness as an encouraging sign. But I couldn’t take it that way. Her once smooth strokes were now hurried; her hips and shoulders, whose motion had been instinctively coordinated with her racquet’s, now lurched on their own. None of this would in itself have doomed her chances, though. The damning fact wasn’t that she was missing her shots. It was that she smiled after she missed them. She hadn’t lost just her form. She had lost her drive.
The old Vicky had been intense and exacting. The new Vicky was a hit-and-giggler, as giddy at the sight of an errant ball as at a shooting star. She’d spin around, wave her arms, even laugh, and seeing my frown, cry “C’mon, lighten up, will ya, Dad?” Lighten up! I saw Vicky’s campaign as a second chance and myself as at an age where second chances are not to be taken lightly. My humorlessness seems foolish now, or worse.
We kept running low on tennis balls, though our hopper would be full to overflowing when we began. With Vicky swatting them like a sandlot slugger the shortage wasn’t surprising. We lost time collecting them, and lost them themselves in the undergrowth and in the salt pond. Then there was Frances. For such a hulking beast, she was avid for tennis balls. But she was no retriever. She’d pick them up, gallop away in triumph, and, slobbering them up, scatter them like giant seeds. We might have had tennis-ball trees everywhere.
Vicky was coming back from a recovery mission, the half-empty hopper swinging on her arm, when she announced that she’d just met our neighbor and invited him over for a game.
“Him?” I pointed Bud’s way with my racquet. “When?”
“Oh, sometime, I don’t know. I thought you’d be glad to have someone to spell you.”
“Gee, thanks. I didn’t know he played.”
“Maybe he doesn’t really. We’ll see.”
“Maybe he doesn’t really? Now Vick, you don’t want to waste your time out here. Didn’t you ask him how he plays?”
She straightened her racquet strings, which clicked like the tongues of a disapproving chorus. She could infuse our discussions with the feeling that I was interrogating her. Call it an instinct for sullenness. “Sure I asked him, but, you know, how much can you tell from that?”
“Exactly. And what did he say?”
“He said ‘un peu.’ You know, ‘a little.’”
“He answered you in French?”
She moved from her strings to her barrettes. Refastening her mane was an undertaking. She pulled back a tress and held an open barrette in her teeth. “Uh huh,” she said through the clip.
“Why’d he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was in context.”
“In context? In what context?”
“In the context of my telling him I’d been in France and him asking me whether I’d picked up any of the language and my saying ‘un peu’, which is what you’re supposed to say, and so him saying it when we got to talking about playing.”
“I see. He was answering in kind. But a little might really mean a little. He might have picked up a racquet once or twice in his life. You know, when you’re working on your game the way you are, honey, you really shouldn’t agree to play with just anyone. A weak partner can bring you down.”
“God, Daddy, I was only being friendly. He seemed nice.”
“He is nice. But it may be hard to get rid of him for just that reason. I’ve been in that kind of situation before. It can be awkward. And he does live right there.”
We’d planted a dogwood on the first anniversary of Peter’s death, put a bench beside it on the third, and planted a rose that turned out to be a climber on the fifth. The rose had clambered over the bench and was taking over the tree. I was looking at it a couple of evenings later, thinking it needed trimming, when the percussion of a tennis ball being steadily exchanged reached me from the court below.
Vicky and I had agreed to take a few days off from training. She needed to get ready to go back to school, she said. They were rainy days anyway—not the misty September rain that drips in slow tears from the leaves, but a gustier variety that shakes down those leaves and sets them hopping like birds in the grass. Though I’m sure that Vicky’s excuse for our layoff was honest, I couldn’t help suspecting that she was also making me pay for the way I’d spoken to her after she’d invited Bud for a game.
I marched down the overgrown avenue in what was supposedly our apple orchard but was really our apple graveyard. We never managed to harvest the fruit, and the worms gorged themselves on it. As I came over the rise at the top, I pushed an apple aside with my toe and exposed one that was as thick as a slug, with that band in the middle like a cummerbund put on for the meal.
“Daddy!”
The call seemed to come from behind me. I took a few seconds to line it up with the figure of my daughter below on the court, reluctant to believe that the thwack . . . thwack of shots and replies like the call of a bottle-throated bird had been coming from her racquet and Bud’s.
“Neil!” he called.
I waved and they started up again. There was some uncertainty in his motion, the mechanical exaggeration in something newly learned, but he had the knack. His shots were square, and even if he’d only recently taken up the game, he and Vicky played it in sympathy.
Darkness was falling on them, pink cloud trails consuming the daylight. They’d soon have to quit, unless they were so attuned that they could play by moonlight. They stopped rallying and approached the net, and I saw that someone was watching them from the bench beside the court—a hunched figure in a dark jacket with a briefcase on his lap. “What next?” I heard myself exclaim.
I turned back up the row of apple trees.
“Come down!” Bud cried.
“Catch up with you later!” I shouted back and continued over the hill.
“Catch up with you later,” I had said to Bud, and now, deeper into the week, he was catching up with me or, having come off the court from a second game with Vicky, trying to. But again his timing was off. By catch up with you later, I must have meant something less definite and further off than later this week. He had done no more than accept my daughter’s invitation to play tennis and been a good partner to her. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t about to thank him for it either.
In the intervening days, Vicky and I had gone back to practicing together and I had gotten to appreciate her improvement up close. But it didn’t bring us together—we didn’t click. I wanted to help her to continue her progress, but she wanted me to marvel at it. She not only ignored my corrections, she took offense at them wherever she could find it. What she was after was a yes-man, not a coach. And that was what I became, looking past her flaws and limiting my comments to compliments that couldn’t have done her good in the end.
This end was mercifully approaching—the end of school vacation, that is and, a few weeks later, the end of the season. The wind would replace the dirt it had stripped from the foundation with leaves, and a dry thaw would crack the clay. The net would be taken down from the posts, the tape for the lines up from the ground, the pipes that fed the sprinklers drained, the roller and brushes stowed away, our racquets screwed into presses.
It was a matter of chance that I should have come home early from work. I hadn’t gone in till noon, but the firm’s internal investigation had reached such a pitch that I grew tired of the shouting and knocked off before five. I might have had it in the back of my mind for Vicky and me to squeeze in one last workout.
The auspices were good. At Penn Station I ducked into a train as the doors were shutting. My timing had given me no chance to pick up an afternoon paper, but even this turned out well. The trees were in their autumn beauty. The farther we got from Manhattan—past the markets, depots, sedge-stubbed marshland, and water towers of Woodside and Flushing—the farther east we traveled, the deeper the color of the leaves, the redder, the more golden, the fierier, and the more advanced the season. With the section-ends of the rails clipping beneath us like the second hand of an accidental clock, we seemed to be heading into the future, except that since I was riding backward, I imagined instead that I was backing, counterclockwise, into a lovely past that unfurled itself in retreat from the setting sun. I arrived home renewed.
I went inside, and hearing voices from the back, found Bud, Vicky, and a boy about her age in the living room, racquets, soft drinks, and a briefcase on the coffee table between them. “How are you, fella?” Bud said and stood up. He had a way of engaging you before you’d had a chance to size things up, a forward charm. But I didn’t find it charming then. Even from the periphery he was becoming a persistent presence. My domain was shrinking.
“This is my son Daniel,” he said. “Danny, shake hands with Mr. Fox.” The boy was sitting cross-legged, and the uncrossing seemed to give him some trouble. Bud might have reached over and jerked him up if the coffee table hadn’t been in the way. “Get up, Danny! Sorry, Neil. He’s got no instincts for the social graces. Brilliant kid, though. Mind like a steel trap.”
Bud wasn’t kidding about his son’s lacking social graces. Still in his overcoat, the boy looked like a seminarian. Darkly sallow, pimply, and shy, he was already taller than his father but stooped away the extra inches, which were just more awkwardness.
He limply shook my hand while gawking past me. I thought that he was staring from shyness at his briefcase till my glance shifted from the coffee table to Vicky’s side of the couch. I felt my jaw set and my blood rise. “Excuse us for a moment, will you?” I said. “Vicky, if I may speak with you privately?”
Vicky took her time getting out of her chair. A cobweb dangled from a curtain rod behind her. “Put down your glass,” I said to her, “and follow me.”
I led her to the maid’s room, shut the door, and switched on a light. The wallpaper had horse-and-buggy drawings and was beginning to peel. The bedspread was covered in newspaper, the bolster doubled up for reading against.
“I thought we’d agreed on your returning that . . . that outfit.”
“I didn’t get a chance. I needed something to wear today. No laundry gets done around here anymore.”
“You must have a dozen other things.”
“Not for tennis, Daddy.”
“And in your mother’s closets?”
“Her stuff? You must be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
As we argued, I advanced toward her and she retreated, not so far that I was standing over her but near enough to see the goose bumps on her arms—and not only her arms. In the entirety of its width and span, that Italian number wouldn’t have covered more than a few dozen goose bumps.
“We’ve already had this discussion,” I said. “We’ve got guests out there.”
“So why are we in here then? Let’s go entertain them!” she shouted and did a lewd little shimmy that her slinky top didn’t begin to clothe.
“I can’t . . . I won’t have you—”
“Listen to yourself—you can’t even speak! You should see yourself quivering like an old schoolmaster.”
“—I’m saying that I won’t have you looking like a tart!” And when I heard myself, I even felt like a schoolmaster, a tyrannical schoolmasterly father who thinks it’s his duty—his impossible duty—to see his daughter through other eyes than his own. But then I looked at her again in her half-naked ripeness and thought, She doesn’t know what she’s doing!
“I mean,” I continued more quietly, “that you shouldn’t provoke—”
“Who, who am I trying to provoke, which member of the family”—she pointed toward the living room—“the bookworm in there? He’d only notice me if I were in a book. His dad? He seems to like you. You think he’s hard for his friend’s daughter—the man he thinks is his friend. Imagine that!”
“Not them, me. You’re trying to provoke me.”
She started past me for the door.
“You are not going back out like that!” I said.
She grabbed the doorknob, and I grabbed for her. I wanted her shoulder but instead got her hair, and before I quite realized what I was doing, I yanked her by it, wrenching back her head. She staggered, and one of her barrettes landed on the twisted bolster.
She went over to get it and sat down on the bed. “Is that what you do?” she asked through tears. “I wonder why she waited so long.”
I went back to the living room. They’d had the sense to go, though Bud had found a cardboard coaster and left a note on the back in block letters, with a cursive postscript: NEIL,
SUPPER TIME. WE’RE OFF.
SEE YOU AT OUR PARTY IF NOT SOONER.
BUD
P.S. Quite a girl you’ve got. Hits it like a ton of bricks.
That damned party—I still hadn’t sent my excuses. After this performance, it was a wonder he still wanted me to come.
I picked up the pen and scribbled on the coaster, “THANKS FOR THE INVITATION. AWAY ON BUSINESS. REGRETS,” and walked it down to the mailbox at the top of his driveway.
And what sight greeted my eyes at the bottom? An Alfa roadster not unlike my own, a newer model in a different color—beige, taupe, off white, ecru, who knew what they called it. I knew what I called it, by any color.
chapter two
Sometimes, when Frances was a pup, I would walk down with her for a late paper and a pack of smokes to a stationery shop in the village that stayed open on weekends. It was a nice ritual. The shopkeeper was cordial and the cigarette on the way back tasted especially good. But a shopping center opened, dozens of storefronts on the spine of a hill running almost a mile west to the center of the next town, and the supermarket at our end ran the village shop out of business.
I went out for cigarettes one Friday night. The moisture was licking the panes from below as much as drizzling from above, and the automatic garage-door opener sounded even more like a cement mixer than usual. I fumbled for the lights and wipers on the new station wagon I’d finally managed to come by.
The thought that I wouldn’t have walked to the old shop anyway on a cold damp November night couldn’t keep me from ruminating on the tendency of good things to yield to bad. My gloom expressed itself in haste—I raced down the driveway. When I saw the car blocking me in at the end, it was almost too late. Only by veering off the gravel and plowing over the shrubs on the margin was I able to avoid a collision. I jumped out of my car fit to smash the other, an Olds. Then I saw that that the Olds wasn’t the only car blocking me in. It was part of a long row parked on the edge of my property. I heard voices in the distance and car doors thudding shut and remembered the Youngers’ party.
