Slowly, though, Gray drew her racket farther back behind her for a wider stroke. Slowly she took a deeper breath below the amber folds of her old tennis dress. Gradually the arc on the ball straightened and the yellow fur began to blur across the net. Gray leaned slightly more forward and crouched farther down. Her hand tightened around the tattered leather grip as her shots angled toward the corners and skittered in sickly curves off to the side.
But in dull horror Errol watched Raphael’s game respond in kind. Sarasola’s weight shifted fully onto the balls of his feet; the long muscles in his thighs rose over his knees to ripple under his cutoff jeans. His calves expanded above the rumpled cotton socks, and the tendons in his forearm caught the summer sun. His skin, already a deep brown in June, went liquid until his neck glistened and his forehead beaded like a tall glass of beer. The strings dangling from the fringe of his jeans moistened and matted and clung to his thighs. Errol shuddered and looked down at his lap. His own thighs were white. His shorts were beige and a little too long. He knew his legs were strong, but they didn’t, somehow, assemble in that way, and they’d certainly never carried him around the court with that loping, buoyant alacrity.
Errol tried to keep his eyes off Raphael, and looked back to Gray in time to catch a forehand that she snapped just over the net and straight down. Raphael stood motionless in the back court, watching the ball skim its way over the next two courts. He laughed, and his teeth were brilliant, as if they, too, were sweating.
“All right,” he said, “let’s play.”
They collected the balls. As Errol would have expected, Raphael was stylish in picking up balls, tipping them against the side of his tennis shoe or bouncing them quickly from the court with his racket from a stationary position. (Errol had never been able to do that, though he’d tried plenty of times when Gray wasn’t looking. He’d hit the ball with the face of his racket, and it would just sit there. He would hit it harder until the racket struck it at an angle and the ball would roll into the next court. Lately Errol just picked the damned things up with his hand.)
The rally for serve lasted a long time. Finally Raphael got her off in a corner and smashed it to the other side. Gray’s eyebrows shot up, and she looked keenly at Raphael for a good ten seconds before she nodded and centered herself to receive his serve.
Raphael stood behind the line very straight. He inhaled. Once he exhaled this breath, there wasn’t a trace of tension in his face. His eyelids looked heavy. He tilted his head backward as if the muscles in his neck were no longer stiff enough to support it. His limbs went limp. Once, he bounced the ball in front of him, until in one rising motion like drawing himself out of bed he tossed the ball and fell into it in a gesture so complete, so full and uncontemplative, it brought tears to Errol’s eyes. Raphael was alive. The serve was in, and Errol was actually surprised that Gray returned it. Through the point, too, Raphael responded to the ball in one continuous liquid ripple. Sarasola plays tennis, Gray, like an animal.
Gray’s response was competent. She did not fall apart, and Errol had to admit that she was playing as well as she did with him. That wasn’t good enough. There was a dogged quality to her play that was new. She didn’t fall apart; neither did she win. She survived well into each point, and did put a few of her usual untouchables across, but she lost the whole first set without even making it to deuce.
In the second set, Gray’s head was cocked a little to the side. Between points she walked more slowly than usual; sometimes she forgot the score or went to the wrong side of the court to deliver a serve. Her eyes were fenced in, and Errol’s every effort to meet them and to somehow encourage her she pointedly closed off. Again, doggedly, she lost the next game, and the next.
“Gray!” Errol shouted after a game point. “Get over here!”
Gray rigidly shook her head. “Don’t interrupt me, Errol.”
The third game was a shutout. Switching sides, Gray didn’t look Errol in the eye as she crossed right in front of him. Errol stared down at his feet, drawing aimlessly in the green powder with the tip of his sneaker. Gray lost the whole fourth game without Errol looking up once.
Now it was a just a matter of waiting out the rest of the match. Dully Errol leaned back and watched the next game, sighing, sighing again; somehow it was hard to get enough breath or, once it was taken, to get rid of it. Gray looked smaller than usual, shorter even. Her legs didn’t look so taut anymore, simply thin. Her movements were abrupt, and there was an odd delay in her response to each of Raphael’s shots; with Sarasola’s game you didn’t have the luxury of that hesitation. Errol made himself look at Gray’s face. He had never seen her defeated; he presumed that to observe this was good for his education. She’d taught him so much, but this was one lesson Errol wished he could have picked up somewhere else.
But where was the defeat? Errol looked hard at Gray’s face, watching for a clenched jaw, pain. Instead, he seemed to be observing the latest IBM computer running through its paces for prospective buyers. Her eyes weren’t glazed or flat but insanely busy, digesting information, filing each shot. The pong of each ball hitting the racket had the solid sound of a card falling into place, chocking into its assigned slot, and soon it made sense, though she missed them, that, yes, the shot would go there and nowhere else. Increasingly the game made sense, and it made sense that she was losing it. Now in this fifth game Gray lost perfectly, she lost more perfectly than she had lost any game, and at the game point she stopped and watched his last shot slam into its proper corner. She took a breath. She nodded her head.
She smiled.
Errol looked hard. That’s right, she was smiling. And the smile was real; she wasn’t just being a sport. Raphael, too, paused and stared. Gray looked different. She was losing, fantastically; she had one more game to go and the whole match was over, but she stood behind the back line leaning lightly on her racket like a cane, looking dapper, arch, amused; tall, spare, relieved. When she took the racket back in her grip to serve, it seemed to weigh nothing. As the ball rose and poised at its midpoint, there was a moment of complete stillness, Gray’s arm bent behind her back; Raphael crouched, frozen, on the other side; Errol balanced on the very last board of his bench. There was no breeze. The clouds above them were round and turfy and still, like the tennis ball over Gray’s head. In the adjoining courts, no one was finishing a point or retrieving a ball. There were no airplanes overhead, no children with scraped knees by the backboard, no birds—only Gray Kaiser and the pretty yellow target poised, tempting, waiting for her, until the moment broke and Gray was still smiling grimly as the racket cracked forward and Errol wondered seriously whether some women did not reach their prime until the age of fifty-nine. Singing across the net went the most exquisite serve that Errol had ever seen. Raphael barely managed to whip his racket back by the time the ball was well behind him, flipping up from the fence and tripping back to the net.
Raphael whistled lightly between his teeth. Errol decided that even if this were the only such moment in the match, this last serve redeemed the entire humiliation; he leaned back on his bench to enjoy the rest of the game. Gray herself looked not smug or ecstatic or surprised but simply content. She walked quietly to the other side and did it again.
Gray aced this game on her serve alone, but later Raphael mastered jabbing his racket out in time for the ball to ricochet halfheartedly over the net, and Gray had to actually play the point. However, the data were in. The program had been run. The cards had all, chock, chock, chock, fallen into their proper slots. Each shot Raphael sent over, Gray was there, and there, and there again—simply: input, output, as if her coordinates came tapping out on fanpaper. Raphael played like an animal, but Gray played Raphael like someone who had studied animals.
After Gray had won the second set and was into the third, their court began to collect an audience. The fact was, Raphael had not suddenly begun to play badly. Rather, he brilliantly and at great cost put each ball where he was supposed to. The two of them p
layed like instruments in a duet with narrow harmonies. While the balance of the chord was precarious, neither was a half step off. The games were composed, though, so that at the end of each phrase Gray hit the last note.
Up until the final game of the match Errol was so caught up with Gray’s computation that he neglected to scrutinize Raphael. When at last he turned to the other side of the court, Errol expected a red face with eyes constricted and grudging—after all, this twenty-five-year-old man with a splendid tennis game was now tied with an old lady. How happy could he be?
Very happy, it seemed.
Errol found when he faced Raphael not a blotch, not a rumple, not a single grimace of frustration. Raphael’s hair flamed ecstatically out over his headband. His skin flushed with the blood not of anger but of excitement. His face shone smooth and bright with open pores. Dilated and wide, his eyes consumed Gray’s every move. At length he stalked rather than returned her shots, licking his red lips, crouching behind the net, padding across the turf. Raphael prowled over the court with the gleam of a lithe and clever creature to whom hunting came so easily that slaughter had become a bore. At last, now, something faster and worthy of this predator.
The match point went back and forth for a long time. Raphael returned the ball with a meatier twist than he had all afternoon. Still, Errol didn’t imagine that Raphael was actually trying to win. Rather, he was losing with abandon. Finally, with a wrenching downward slam, he threw himself on one of Gray’s neat slicing shots; the ball smacked the top tape of the net and dropped, bounced, stopped. Still carried a few steps by his follow-through, Raphael continued to lope over to Gray’s side of the court. In front of her he breathed, watched, nodded. He took her tennis racket from her, reached for her hand, and kissed it.
“You lost,” said Gray. “Why do you look so pleased with yourself?”
“I’m not,” said Raphael. “I’m pleased with you.” His eyes were massive and fixed. He had not relinquished her hand. He turned it and ran his finger over the palm. “You have beautiful calluses.”
Gray took her hand and her racket back. “You really know what gets to a woman, Mr. Sarasola,” she said, and strode over toward Errol.
Errol kissed Gray’s cheek, congratulating her on her game. She thanked him with the attention she paid strangers in reception lines.
“Rapha-el!” They all turned to find a pretty young brunette clutching Sarasola’s arm. She was out of breath. “Long time no see!” The girl raked her hair out of her eyes with her fingers so that it flipped attractively back. Raphael stared at her hand on his arm and said nothing until she laughed nervously and removed it. “So what are you doing here?”
Raphael glanced down at his racket. “Playing soccer.”
She laughed quickly and raked her hair out of her eyes again. “Right, sure.” She turned to Errol. “So didn’t anyone warn you not to play with Raphael Sarasola?”
Errol cocked his head and watched her shift her weight back and forth and smooth down her tennis dress and rake her hair back again, though it wasn’t in her eyes this time. “No,” said Errol, “but no one warned you not to play with him either, did they?”
She laughed again. “Oh, I learned my lesson.”
“If you’d really learned your lesson, Pamela,” said Raphael quietly, “you wouldn’t be here.”
Pamela blinked, decisively. In this small, strange silence it was if she’d just batted the remark away, like a bad ball. “Listen,” she said, “I was wondering if—next week—I could borrow the car. You see, my father’s going to be in town, and he thinks he bought it for me.”
“Tell him,” said Raphael, his eyebrows raised, “you lost it.”
Pamela’s head bobbed dully. “I lost it.”
“Yes,” Raphael instructed. “Just like that.”
Silence. Pamela didn’t leave.
“So how was your game?” she asked brightly.
“Superior,” said Raphael, looking at Gray.
“You mean you killed him,” said Pamela.
Raphael sat on the bench and began zipping up his racket cover. “You assume a good game for me is one in which I trammel my opponent. Actually, I dislike that kind of game enormously.”
“So it was a close game?”
Raphael pulled off his sopping T-shirt and completely ignored her. The silence got longer and longer, and still Pamela waited. Finally someone said, “Yes,” softly. It was Gray.
“What was the score? Did you guys play a whole match?”
Raphael compressed his lips, swabbing the sweat from his neck. Pamela followed the towel as it traveled down Raphael’s dark, tight, neatly haired chest. As he reached for a fresh shirt from his bag, Pamela looked regretful. She turned to Errol. “You must be pretty good to give him competition.”
“I’m quite mediocre,” said Errol, feeling sorry for her. “Dr. Kaiser gave your friend a good run around the court.”
Pamela noticed Gray for the first time. She looked quizzically at Raphael and tried to catch his eye.
Raphael looked stonily back. “She’s better than I am.”
The two women looked at each other. “Gray Kaiser.” Gray extended her hand.
“Pamela Rose.—Didn’t you use to be in sociology or something?”
“Anthropology. I still dabble in it occasionally.”
“I suppose it’s good to stay active,” said Pamela. “It keeps your mind alert.”
“Why certainly,” said Gray mildly. “I find that with anthropology, a little knitting, and charity work I can still remember the names of all my great-grandchildren.”
“Don’t believe a word of it,” said Errol. “Gray has never done charity work in her life. So what do you say, old lady? How about a beer?”
“I’d love one,” said Gray. “But I think we could buy Pamela something a little stronger.”
“No.” Raphael swung his bag over his shoulder, ready to go.
“Excuse me?” said Gray.
“No,” he repeated.
“No, what?”
“No, Pamela doesn’t feel up to it.” He turned to the girl. “Your behavior is unattractive, Pamela. Please stay away from me. Go home.” He spoke with the sternness one has to muster to discourage a dog that has followed one too far for its own good.
“I believe,” said Gray, “that I invited your friend for a drink. That I did.”
“I believe,” said Raphael, “that I just uninvited her.”
“I believe,” said Gray, and they were facing each other squarely now, “that you can’t do that.”
Raphael shrugged. “Then have a nice time.” With that he strode toward the parking lot, leaving Gray, Errol, and this woman an absurd threesome. They all watched Raphael walk away in silence until Errol turned his attention to Pamela Rose. All the remarks that Pamela had successfully batted away came pelting back at her. Pamela withered like a blow-up doll someone had pulled the plug on. The lines in her face curdled. Her stiffly held spine and firmly set shoulders collapsed. Her hair wilted strand by strand back into her face.
“This is silly,” said Pamela weakly. “I don’t know you. I’m sorry about…” She fluttered her fingers toward Raphael and looked off in a direction where there was nothing to see.
“Are you going to be all right?” asked Gray.
“Oh, just fine,” said Pamela, with an unsettling little laugh. “He’s always like that, you know. Kind of—funny.”
“If you find that funny,” said Errol, “then you have one sick sense of humor.”
“I mean just a little insensitive. Some people,” she said bravely, “like to spar. In conversation.”
“You were sparring?” asked Errol.
“I’m—well. I’m real nice. I don’t even know you, I’ll tell you I’m sorry, right?” Pamela swallowed and shook her head, wafting her fingers behind her as she walked toward an open field, dragging her racket behind her along the pavement.
As they walked through the parking lot they found Raphael waiting
for them, leaning against Gray’s car.
8
Pamela Rose was the first evidence, but there was more. Errol didn’t need to hire any private agencies; information came to him as if he were being warned or led. Yet in a way these clues were wasted, for Errol did not need to be warned; it was not Errol who was in danger.
A colleague, Ellen Friedman, stopped by one afternoon. It was a lovely day, so the two sat out on the swing on Gray’s porch.
“I spent a lot of time on porch swings as a kid,” said Ellen, moving the swing listlessly with her foot. It made a high-pitched ee sound. “Sitting around with friends on a Saturday afternoon. We’d put up someone’s hair…”
“Talk about relationships.”
“Mm,” said Ellen. “Which at the time were fairly simple.”
“Were they, though?”
“Jane loves Mark; next week: Jane hates Mark. None of this Jane loves Mark but also hates him at the same time. That’s adult stuff.”
“Well, no,” Errol reflected. “I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.”
Ellen laughed. “That’s a dismal point of view.”
“It goes way back.”
“I can see why you never married.”
“No,” said Errol pleasantly, “you probably can’t.”
Ellen looked down at her hands. “Sorry. You’re quite right. I have no idea why.”
Her sudden embarrassment made her appealing, and Errol found himself watching Ellen Friedman move the swing back and forth with her heel and play with the ratty pillow at her side with real fondness for a moment. She was trim and short and had little feet. Her hair was dark and neatly styled close to her head; he imagined she’d once been pretty, and now—at Errol’s age? a little younger?—would be considered “smart.” She could have been his wife. Errol could have met her at twenty-five and gone to movies and agreed with her on everything she had to say about them; he could have been charmed by her idiosyncrasies and married her. This might be their house, with the porch swing to remind her of her adolescence; they’d be in the same field and recommend books to each other and have children and dinners and she would still be “smart.” They could have dinners and once in a while invite Gray Kaiser and be nervous about what to have, since Gray was so bored by gourmet cooking. Yet he couldn’t necessarily know that, since he wouldn’t really know Gray Kaiser, and that was the end of that fantasy.