Enough Rope

  “The inner game?”

  “He didn’t lose his temper at all.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

  “I’ll bet you’re proud of him.”

  “Very proud.”

  “You’ve been quoted as saying he’s always been a perfect gentleman off the court. Now he seems to be every bit the perfect gentleman on the court as well. That must be extremely gratifying to you.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling furiously. “Extremely gratifying.”

  It was in the U.S. Open that the extent of the change in Terrible Tommy Terhune became unmistakably evident. Earlier, prior to his still-secret visit to West Africa, some commentators had theorized that the brilliance of his play might be of a piece with the ungovernability of his temper. Passion, after all, was the common denominator. Put the one on a leash, they suggested, and the other might wind up hobbled in the bargain.

  But this was clearly not the case. Tommy had an easy time of it in the early rounds at Flushing Meadows, winning every match in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, his Croatian opponent won a single game in the first set and none at all in the second and third, but the fellow’s play was not as pathetic as the score suggested. Tommy was simply everywhere, getting to every ball, his returns always on target and, more often than not, unreturnable.

  The calls, of course, did not always go his way. But his reaction was never greater than a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Spectators looked for him to be struggling with his emotions, but what was becoming clear was that there was no struggle, and no emotions.

  In the semifinals, Tommy’s opponent was the young Chinese-American Scott Chin, but most fans were looking past the semis to a final round that would see Tommy pitted once again with his Australian rival, Roger MacReady. But this was not to be—while Tommy moved easily past Chin, MacReady lost the fifth set to a previously unknown Belgian player named Claude Macquereau.

  Two days later, after a women’s final in which one player grunted while the other wept, Terhune and Macquereau met for the men’s championship. If the fans had been disappointed by MacReady’s absence, the young Belgian soon showed himself as a worthy opponent for Tommy. His serve was strong and accurate, his game at net and at the baseline a near mirror image of Tommy’s. Macquereau won the first set 7–6, lost the second 7–5. Most games went to deuce, and most individual points consisted of long, wearying volleys marked by one impossible return after another.

  By the third set, which Tommy won in a tiebreaker, the fans knew they were watching tennis history being made. Midway through the fourth set, won by Macquereau in an even more attenuated tiebreaker, the television commentators had run out of superlatives and the crowd had shouted itself hoarse. Both players, run ragged in the late-summer heat and humidity, looked exhausted, but both played as though they were fresh as daisies.

  In the third game of the final set, a perfectly placed passing shot of Tommy’s was called out. The audience drew its collective breath—they knew the ball was in—and Tommy approached the platform.

  “Ball was out?” he said conversationally.

  The official managed a nod. The man must have known he’d missed the call, and must have been tempted to reverse himself. But all he did was nod.

  “Okay,” Tommy said, and played the next point, while the audience released its collective breath in a great sigh that mingled relief with disappointment.

  After ten games in the final set, they had taken turns breaking each other’s service, and were tied 5–5. In the eleventh game, Tommy served and went to the net, and Macquereau’s return flew past Tommy’s outstretched racquet and landed just inside the sideline.

  The official called it out.

  It was close, certainly closer than the call that had gone against Tommy earlier in the set, but the ball was definitely in and, more to the point, Tommy Terhune knew it was in. The game had been tied at 15–all, and this point put Tommy ahead, 30–15.

  His response was immediate. He went to the service line, hit two serves into the net to tie the score at 30–all, then deliberately double-faulted a second time, putting Macquereau a point ahead, as he would have been had the call been correct.

  The act was uncommonly gracious, and all the more so for coming when it did. It is, as one reporter pointed out, easier to give back a questionable point when you’re winning or losing by a considerable margin, but Tommy’s unprecedented act of chivalry might well cost him the championship.

  Not so. Trailing 40–30, he won the next point with a service ace, then won the game by playing brilliantly for the next two points. The final game was almost anticlimactic; Macquereau, serving, seemed to know how it was going to end, and scored only a single point while Tommy broke his service to take the game, the set, the match, and the United States Open championship.

  All of which made the aftermath just that much more tragic.

  The whole world knows the rest. How Tommy Terhune, flushed with triumph, accompanied by his curiously unemotional wife, returned to his hotel, racquet in hand. How Roger MacReady was waiting for them in the lobby, and accompanied them upstairs to their suite. How Jennifer explained haltingly that she and MacReady had fallen in love, that they had been, like, having an affair, and that she wanted Tommy to give her a divorce so that she and MacReady could be married.

  She said all this calmly, expecting Tommy to take it every bit as calmly. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to tell him—riding high after his victory, he could presumably take a lost love in stride. In any event, Tommy had never shown much emotion off the court, and now was equally cool on it, so she knew she could count on him to be a gentleman about this. If he could be gallant enough to hand two points to Claude Macquereau through purposeful double faults, wouldn’t he be equally gallant and self-sacrificing now?

  As it happened, he would not.

  He was clutching his tennis racquet when she told him all this. It was the racquet he had been using ever since his return from Togo, and it had lasted longer than any racquet he had previously owned, because he had not once swung it at anything harder than a tennis ball.

  By the time he let go of it now, it was in pieces, and his wife and his rival were both dead. He smashed the edge of the racquet into Roger MacReady’s head, striking him five times in all, fracturing his skull even as he smashed the racquet, and he went on swinging until all he had left in his hand was the jagged handle.

  Which he continued to hold as he backed the terrified Jennifer into a corner, where he pinned her against the wall and drove the racquet handle into the hollow of her throat.

  Then he picked up the phone and told the desk clerk to summon the police.

  Everyone had a theory, of course, and one that got a lot of play held that Tommy’s temper, no longer released periodically on the tennis court, didn’t just disappear. Instead it got tamped down, compressed, so that the eventual inevitable explosion was that much greater and more disastrous.

  One enterprising newsman found his way to Togo, where the enigmatic Atuele told him essentially the same thing. “I gave the man a spirit,” he said, between puffs on a cheroot. “To help him when he played tennis. And it helped him, is it not so?”

  “But off the court—”

  “Off the court,” Atuele said, “the man had no problem. So, when he was not playing tennis, the spirit’s work was done. And the anger had to go somewhere, didn’t it?”

  Three in the Side Pocket

  You’d think they would have a pool table. When you walked into a joint called the Side Pocket, you expected a pool table. Maybe something smaller than regulation, maybe one of those dinky coin-operated Bumper Pool deals. But something, surely, where you poked a ball with a stick and it went into a hole.

  Not that he cared. Not that he played the game, or preferred the sound of balls striking one another as background music for his drinking. It was just a matter of unfulfilled expectations, really. You saw the neon, “The Side Pocket,” and you walked in expecting
a pool table, and they didn’t have one.

  Of course, that was one of the things he liked about his life. You never knew what to expect. Sometimes you saw things coming, but not always. You could never be sure.

  He stood for a moment, enjoying the air-conditioning. It was hot out, and humid, and he’d enjoyed the tropical feel of the air as he’d walked here from his hotel, and now he was enjoying the cool dry air inside. Enjoy it all, he thought. That was the trick. Hot or cold, wet or dry. Dig it. If you hate it, then dig hating it. Whatever comes along, get into it and enjoy it.

  Right.

  He walked over to the bar. There were plenty of empty stools but he stood instead. He gazed at the light glinting off the shoulders of the bottles on the top row of the back bar, listened to the hum of conversation floating on the surface of soft jazz from the jukebox, felt the cool air on his skin. He was a big man, tall and thickly muscled, and the sun had bronzed his skin and bleached blond streaks in his brown hair.

  Earlier he’d enjoyed being in the sun. Now he was enjoying being out of it.

  Contrasts, he thought. Name of the game.

  “Help you?”

  He’d been standing, staring, and there was no telling how long the bartender had been right in front of him, waiting for him to order something. A big fellow, the bartender, sort of an overgrown kid, with one of those sleeveless T-shirts cut to show off the delts and biceps. Weightlifter’s muscles. Get up around noon, pump some iron, then go lie in the sun. Spend the evening pouring drinks and flexing your muscles, go home with some vacationing schoolteacher or somebody’s itchy wife.

  He said, “Double Cuervo, neat, water back.”

  “You got it.”

  Why did they say that? And they said it all the time. You got it. And he didn’t have it, that was the whole point, and he’d have it sooner if they didn’t waste time assuring him that he did.

  He didn’t like the bartender. Fine, nothing wrong with that. He examined the feeling of dislike and let himself enjoy it. In his imagination he drove two stiffened fingers into the bartender’s solar plexus, heard the pained intake of breath, followed with a chop to the windpipe. He entertained these thoughts and smiled easily, smiled with genuine enjoyment, as the fellow poured the drink.

  “Run a tab?”

  He shook his head and drew out his wallet. “Pay as you go,” he said, riffling through a thick sheaf of bills. “Sound fiscal policy.” He plucked one halfway out, saw it was a hundred, tucked it back. He rejected another hundred, then found a fifty and laid in on top of the bar. He drank the tequila while the bartender rang the sale and left his change on the bar in front of him, returning the wallet to his side pocket.

  Maybe the bar’s name had nothing to do with pool, he thought. Maybe the Side Pocket meant a pocket in a pair of pants, not the hip pocket but the side pocket, which could have made it an unhip pocket, but in fact made it a more difficult target for pickpockets.

  They had a pool table there once, he decided, and the owner found it didn’t pay for itself, took up space where he could seat paying customers. Or the bar changed hands and the first thing the new guy did was get rid of the table. Kept the name, though, because he liked it, or because the joint had a following. That made more sense than pants and pickpockets.

  He kept his own wallet in his side pocket, but more for convenience than security. He wasn’t much afraid of pickpockets. Draining the drink, he felt the tequila stirring him and imagined a hand slipping artfully into his pocket, groping almost imperceptibly for his fat wallet. Imagined his own hand taking hold of the smaller hand. Squeezing, breaking small bones, doing damage without looking, without even seeing the face of the person he was hurting.

  He saw the bartender was down at the end of the bar, talking to somebody on the telephone, grinning a lazy grin. He waited until the kid looked his way, then crooked a finger and pointed at his empty glass. Get it? You got it.

  A pair of double Cuervos gave you a nice base to work on, got the blood humming in your veins. When the second was gone he switched to India Pale Ale. It had a nice bite to it, a complicated flavor. Sat comfortably on top of tequila, too. Not so comfortably, though, that you didn’t know it was there. You definitely knew it was there.

  He was halfway through the second IPA when she came in. He didn’t exactly sense her presence, but the energy in the place shifted when she walked through the door. Not that everybody turned to look at her. For all he knew, nobody turned to look at her. He certainly didn’t. He just stood there, his hand wrapped around the base of the longneck bottle, ready to refill his glass. He felt the shift in energy and turned it over in his mind.

  He caught sight of her in the back bar, watched out of the corner of his eye as she approached. One empty stool separated the two of them, but she showed no awareness of his presence, her attention directed at the bartender.

  She said, “Hi, Kevin.”

  “Lori.”

  “It’s an oven out there. Sweetie, tell me something. Can I run a tab?”

  “You always run a tab,” Kevin said. “Though I heard someone say Pay As You Go is a sound fiscal policy.”

  “I don’t mean a tab like pay at the end of the evening. I mean like I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” he said. “The thing is I’m not supposed to do that.”

  “See, the ATM was down,” she said.

  “Down? Down where?”

  “Down as in not working. I stopped on the way here and it wouldn’t take my card.”

  “Is Jerry meeting you here? Because he could—”

  “Jerry’s in Chicago,” she said. “He’s not due back until the day after tomorrow.” She was wearing a wedding ring, and she fiddled with it. “If you took plastic,” she said, “like every other place . . .”

  “Yeah, well,” Kevin said. “What can I tell you, Lori? If we took plastic the owner couldn’t cook the books as much. He hates to pay taxes even more than he hates to bathe.”

  “A wonderful human being.”

  “A prince,” Kevin agreed. “Look, I’d let you run a tab, the hell, I’d just as soon let you drink free, far as it goes, but he’s on my ass so much these days . . .”

  “No, I don’t want to get you in trouble, Kevvie.”

  He’d been taking this all in, hanging on every word, admiring the shape of it even as he’d admired her shape, long and curvy, displayed to great advantage in the pale yellow cotton shift. He liked the way Kevin had quoted his pay-as-you-go remark, a sure way to draw him toward the conversation if not into it.

  Now he said, “Kevin, suppose I buy the lady a drink. How will that sit with the owner?”

  This brought a big grin from the bartender, a pro forma protest from Lori. Very nice, little lady, he thought, but you have done this before. “I insist,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “That’s the whole problem, and you, kind sir, are the solution. What am I drinking? Kevin, what was that drink you invented?”

  “Hey, I didn’t invent it,” Kevin said. “Guy was drinking ’em in Key West and described it to me, and I improvised, and he says I got it right. But I never tasted the original, so maybe it’s right and maybe it isn’t.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to call it. I was leaning toward Key Hopper or maybe Florida Sunset but I don’t know.”

  “Well, I want one,” Lori said.

  He asked what was in it.

  “Rum and tequila, mostly. A little OJ.” Kevin grinned. “Couple of secret ingredients. Fix you one? Or are you all right with the IPA?”

  “I’ll try one.”

  “You got it,” Kevin said.

  During the first round of Key Hoppers she told him her name was Lori, which he knew, and that her husband’s name was Jerry, which he also knew. He told her his name was Hank Dettweiler and that he was in town on business. He’d been married once, he told her, but he was long divorced. Too many business trips.

  During the second round she said that she and Jerr
y weren’t getting along too well. Too few business trips, she said. It was when they were together that things were bad. Jerry was too jealous and too possessive. Sometimes he was physically abusive.

  “That’s terrible,” he told her. “You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

  “I’ve thought about leaving him,” she said, “but I’m afraid of what he might do.”

  During the third round of Key Hoppers (or Florida Sunsets, or whatever you wanted to call them) he wondered what would happen if he reached down the front of her dress and grabbed hold of one of her breasts. What would she do? It was almost worth doing just to find out.

  There was no fourth round, because midway through the third she suggested they might be more comfortable at her place.

  They took her car and drove to her house. It was a one-story box built fifty years ago to house vets. No Down Payment to Gls, Why Rent When You Can Own? He figured it was a rental now. Her car was an Olds Brougham a year old and her house was a dump with Salvation Army furniture and nothing on the walls but a calendar from the dry cleaners. Why rent when you can own? He figured Lori and Jerry had their reasons.

  He followed her into the kitchen, watched as she found an oldies station on the radio, then made them both drinks. She’d kissed him once in the car, and now she came into his arms again and rubbed her little body against him like a cat. Then she wriggled free and headed for the living room.

  He went after her, drink in hand, caught up with her, and put his arm around her, reaching into the front of her dress and cupping her breast. It was the move he’d imagined earlier, but of course the context was different. It would have been shocking in a public place like the Side Pocket. Here it was still surprisingly abrupt, but not entirely unexpected.

  “Oh, Hank,” she said.

  Not bad. She remembered the name, and acted as if his touch left her weak-kneed with passion. His hand tightened a little on her breast, and he wondered just how hard he could squeeze before fear and pain took the place of passion. They’d be more genuine emotions, certainly, and a lot more interesting.