I know nothing about you. I don’t know your name, where you live, what you do. But I see you naked every morning. I see your cock, your balls, your ass, everything. I know how you brush your teeth, I know how your shoulder blades flex in and out when you shave, I know that you’ll take a quick shower after shaving and that your skin glows when you come out, know exactly how you’ll wrap a towel around your waist, and, for that short moment that I crave every morning in the tennis house, how you’ll drop your towel on the bench and stand naked after drying yourself. Even when I’m not looking, I love knowing that you’re naked right next to me, love thinking that you want me to know you’re naked, that you couldn’t possibly be unaware that I long for your naked body and that every night I lull myself to sleep, thinking that I’m cradled in your arms and you in mine. I know what soap you use and how long you take to comb your hair when it’s still wet, how you splash cream over your elbows, your knees, your legs, and in between each of your dainty toes, always generous but never wasteful with the cream, which you keep in your locker. I love to watch you inspect yourself in the mirror and seemingly approve the shape of your arms, your shoulders, your chest, your neck. Sometimes you’ll stand naked by the long urinal next to me, unaware that I’m trying my best not to look. I never look, don’t want to look, don’t want to be caught looking, don’t even want you to know I’m struggling not to look, though I can hear your stream and, for a brief moment, if only I had the courage, am tempted to slip a bare foot in its way to know the warmth from your body.
You, of course, never look. Ditto on the terrace, when you sit and start eating your morning ration of half a protein bar. Nor do you look when you’re stretching your legs against the banister before tennis. I’ll never come close to you when you’re stretching; I’ll wait or find another spot to stretch. But you’ll come right next to me, put a leg on the bar, stretch one calf, then the other, and not give it a second thought. I avoid getting close to you because I want to get close. You could almost graze my foot as you did once and never even knew it.
Sometimes, after we’ve each played for an hour in the morning and you’ve removed your shirt before showering, I love watching the sweat glisten down your spine. My mouth wants to go everywhere on your body. I want to taste you, I want to know you with my mouth.
You know nothing about me. You see me. But you don’t see me. Everyone else sees me. And yet no one has the foggiest notion of the gathering storm within me. It’s my secret private little hell. I live with it, I sleep with it. I love that no one knows. I wish you knew. Sometimes I fear you do.
To the rest of the world I might be the most cheerful person who ever leaves the tennis courts in the morning. I’ll stroll over to the 96th Street subway station, maybe run into a neighbor, joke with the neighbor, hope you’re following not far behind, which always gives me a thrill, even when I know you’re not following. Part of me wants you to see me happy, wants you to be envious of what could make me so happy. I carry this alleged happiness all the way to my office, and there I’ll greet everyone with so expansive a smile that it hovers on the brink of laughter. I can’t tell whether it’s real or contrived happiness, but it spills into every aspect of my life. Everywhere I go I affect joy, and by some strange miracle, this counterfeit joy brightens me up as well as those whose lives I touch. People look at me and I know what they think: He’s got a life. I flirt with everyone, but it’s really you I’m flirting with.
No one knows why I seem so happy, nor would anyone guess that the sprightly person so pepped up for the day and whose life seems so pulled together might be a disguised alien loping among earthlings. I seem happy even when I’m alone and couldn’t be happy. And yet wanting you does make me happy. In the office bathroom I catch myself whistling. At the salad bar the other day, I was impatient and started humming a tune. “You’re happy today,” said the lady at the cash register, which ended up making her happy as well. Work makes me happy. All I have to do at times is smile and I’ve jump-started my heart. At long, tiresome meetings, I’m the one who buoys everyone’s spirits with the most fatuous comments. Mr. Mirth-Palaver to the rescue!
It took me a while to suspect that the happiness I feel is not affected. The merest glance from you or the most cursory hello can cause a surge of happiness that lasts a whole day. Even if I can’t ever touch you, just looking at you makes me happy. Wanting you makes me happy. Thinking that I could steal one fraction of a second to place a cheek on the damp down on your chest after you’ve just showered gives more meaning and brings more joy than anything else I’ve wanted or done in a long time. I think of your skin all day, all the time.
Sometimes work gets in the way. Work keeps me busy. Work is my screen. My whole life is a screen. I am a screen. The real me has no face, no voice, isn’t always with me. Like thunder after lightning, the real me could be many, many miles away. Sometimes, there is no thunder. Just lightning and then silence. When I see you, there’s lightning and then silence.
I want to tell people. But there’s no one to tell. The only person I can think of is my father, and he’s no longer alive. You would have liked him. And he would have liked you.
I’m shrouded in silence, like a beggar hooded in burlap, skulking in a cellar. I am a cellar. My passion feeds on everything but air, then curdles like bad milk that never goes bad enough. It just sits there. And if it wastes the heart a tick per day, still, anything that touches the heart is good for the heart, is like feeling, becomes feeling. When I do not speak to you I hope that you will, which you never do, because I never do, because we’ve stopped talking even before we’ve started speaking.
You speak to no one at the courts. I once overheard an older man ask to play tennis with you. It took guts to ask, since you’re an excellent player. I envied him the courage. No sooner had he asked than you smiled and answered, “I’d like that.” I envied the answer he got. It took me a month to realize that I’d like that was just polite humbug, meaning never.
You’re always so quiet. When you take a two-minute rest after stretching before playing, you stand and look out toward the trees with a vacuous, almost woeful gaze that lets you drift so far away. You look sad and ashen. Are you not happy? I want to ask. Do you even like tennis?
And yet you must be happy. You don’t need anyone. You are like a walled citadel, proud of its battlement and of its colored pennants flapping in the summer wind. Every morning I watch you walk to your court, I watch you play, and I watch you leave an hour and a half later. Always the same, never brooding, just silent. Occasionally, you’ll say “Excuse me” when I happen to stand in your way, and “Thank you” when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I’ll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts—just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what’s called a broken heart.
Sometimes I want to turn my head to the bedroom wall and tell the wall things. But what could speaking in the dark do? I should give up, but I can’t. I’m like someone who never got off a train that traveled past the last stop.
* * *
ON FRIDAY EVENINGS, when I leave the office and am struck by the torrent of traffic lights—the cars, the buses, the clamor and frenzy of bicycles and delivery boys cutting ever so close as they speed through one red light after another, and all those people doing things, going places—just a whiff of the brisk night air and it’ll all come back to me: I’m wasting my life, I am so alone. A rush of tenderness fills my heart. But I’m not fooled. Tenderness is sham love, easy love, the muted, civil face of love.
Sometimes on those evenings I’ll put off going home. Why go home? To face what? I prefer to linger on the sidewalks and make up reasons to walk to the next bus stop, and to the next one after that. Or I’ll step into this or that store and forget work, forget everyone, and let myself sink deeper, because I want to suffer, I want to hurt, I want to feel something, even if I know that thinking of you never lasts long enough, and that swept by the scents and the press of a large store, my mind will invariably drift to other things, other faces, and in the crowd I’ll lose you and won’t remember your face.
On one such evening at Barneys, I ran into Claire. “I’m thinking of buying a tie and can’t decide which of these two.” She was buying a tie as well. “Who’s the lucky man?” I asked. She gave me a semi-amused, reproachful smile, perhaps to mean Must you always joke? “Just my father,” she said. She had already picked a tie and was walking around with it to make sure there was nothing else she wished to buy. “How about you?” “Can’t decide,” I said, holding one tie in each hand and catching myself imitating the seesawing motions of a scale. “Wouldn’t it be just like you to waver?” she asked, still amused but also chiding. I did not answer. Instead, I asked what she was doing after buying the tie. “Nothing.” Would she have a glass of wine with me on 63rd Street? She hesitated. “It’s Friday night, Claire.” “I promised…,” she started but then relented. “Fine. One glass.” We buy our ties. “Come. I’ll tell you all about my obsessive romance with neckties and how I court them, love them, and am forever loyal to each one.” But all I wanted was to talk about you. She laughed. She humors me. But I know she doesn’t approve. I never told her that I had wanted to buy you a tie as well. Then I chickened out and didn’t buy you one. But an hour later, I am alone again. I know how the evening will turn out. If only I could dream of you. Sometimes I do. But not often enough. Dreams are like practice runs and mini-rehearsals; they tell us what we’ll do, when to ask, how we’ll touch when the time comes, if the time comes. In the morning, when I stand naked in front of the mirror, I like to think that you’re there behind me. Then you’ll come closer and stand flat against me, naked as well, your chin resting on my shoulder, close to my collarbone, your cheek glued to mine, your arms around me. I smile at you and you smile back. We’re good together. We’ve had a good night. I want to hear you say you liked what we did. Did you really? I ask again, as if I need you to repeat it, because I won’t quite believe it myself until I’ve heard you say it. You bite your lip and you nod four or five times.
I know this nod. I’ve seen it many times on the tennis courts. It’s your quiet way of driving a point home, of following a tennis ball and watching it land exactly where you aimed it. You never pump your arm when you score, you never exclaim anything, you don’t even smile when you fire a perfect backhand straight down the line. All you do is nod several times. Sometimes you bite your nether lip. That says it all. It’s what you do when you catch your body in a mirror in the locker room and check yourself out, especially your shoulders, which you know are perfect. Sometimes you’ll even turn sideways to eye your shoulder blades, which you flex once or twice, and then nod. You approve. It’s what happens when mind, will, body, earth, and time are in total alignment. It’s probably what you did—the nod thing—as a child when hurling a flat stone and watching it skitter on a large body of water, three, four, five, six, seven times. Or when you’d spot an A+ when your teacher handed back the weekly science quiz on Mondays. The nod thing again. It confirmed that something you worked on and saw through finally gave you pleasure. Sometimes, though rarely, when you hit a ball hard, you’ll grunt. I love to hear your muffled grunt. It makes me think that this is how you groan when you come. I like thinking of you coming. It brings you down to earth, makes you human, gives a sound to exertions that might otherwise slip unnoticed. I want to see your face when you come.
I look at myself in the mirror as we’re shaving almost shoulder to shoulder in the tennis house and imagine you’re sending me the nod. I wonder what it must be like to be you, to look in the mirror whenever I catch my reflection and simply nod two to three times. To have your skin, your lips, the palms of your hands, your cock, your balls.
Everything about you is perfect, willed perfect, deliberate. Everything in its time, from the first half of your protein bar before stretching your legs to the second half of your protein bar when you leave the locker room on your way out to the subway station. Timeliness in all things. Which is why I’ve never asked you to even hit a few balls with me. My skittish, uneven playing would irritate you no end.
You arrive by 6:45 and you leave at about 8:20. By 8:30 you’re at the 96th Street station, carrying today’s paper in your right hand. You ride the downtown train to 34th Street and then you change for the uptown R or N to Queens. I know, because I followed you once. Twice, actually. Every weekend I am sure that you have your hair trimmed, because it’s always shorter at the start of the week. On your way to or from the barber, I bet you pick up the shirts you delivered last Saturday and drop off this week’s laundry. I know that you have your shirts laundered because in the morning you always tear out the tag stapled around the lowest buttonhole. I’m quite certain that you iron your pants before going to bed every night or early in the morning before tennis. I can just see you occasionally putting down the iron to eat from a bowl of high-protein cereal. You never rush through anything; everything in its time, down to the way you store your clothes in the locker. You’ll fold your scarf, then hang your jacket and trousers on the hanger you keep in your locker, and finally fold your paper and stand it so it won’t crinkle in the locker or stain your clothes. Everything is minutely taken care of and premeditated. When I think of what kind of work you do, I am almost sure you’re either an actuary, an accountant, or a fussy patent office clerk who prefers not meet clients.
People like you live alone, like living alone. God, you must be dull.
You probably were no different as a little boy—the kind of classmate everyone admires and envies but secretly hates. I can just see you leaving school, dutifully saying goodbye to your homeroom teacher, and heading home early every afternoon. You look happy. You don’t mind walking alone. You’re neither slack nor rushed as you think of what’s awaiting in the kitchen. Unlike others your age, you’re still wearing shorts and you don’t care what anyone says. Along the way home, you’re already planning how to tackle your homework, knowing that if you finish on time you might get to watch your favorite show and later, after supper, go back to the book you’ve been reading. I imagine you have two siblings; you’re the youngest. The one you’re closest to is already in college away from home. You miss him sometimes, especially since you like rowing out with him on Sunday afternoons to fish, the two of you watching the herons standing on the warm sedge, while he talks and tells you about things you know nothing about and you listen. Your parents won’t let you use the boat when he’s not there; you listen to them too, you always listen.
There are no ruffles in your life, no fretting before exams, no threats of having your allowance withheld, you always know what to do, what to expect, what to avoid—poison ivy, ticks, brambles, and the bad boys who linger around but won’t cause trouble if you duck them in time. You’re seldom caught by surprise, and you always budget your time. You don’t call it budgeting your time yet, but I heard you use the expression once when a tennis player asked you what you did for work, and when you told him and he asked how you managed to divide your time between teaching high school during the day and special education in the evening, you smiled and said, “I guess I budget my time.” You were probably never late for school, never late handing in your homework, not late reaching puberty. Punctual in all things. And, yes, unremittingly dull.
* * *
AFTER MORE THAN two years, I still know nothing about you. I can’t even tell how old you are. Sometimes I’ll swear you couldn’t be older than twenty-five. But the elusive hints of incipient male-pattern baldness throw me off and give the lie both to your boyish face and to the taut, marble-white chest on which the outlines of blood vessels are as visible as on the face of a child. I’d have settled for thirty-plus, but your voice is too high, which is why I’ll fall back to late twenties. The other day while riffling through a box of old photographs, I landed on a picture taken of me at the beach when I was twelve. I hadn’t seen this picture in years, and yet it radiates a startling new meaning to me now, because all I want is to show it to you, to draw you into my life, and let you see that the man I am today and the boy I was once are the same person. With you I want to go back to the beginning to restart the story of my life. I remember exactly when this picture was taken. It was late one morning. Two brothers who were going for a swim stopped by to greet my father and stood watching him as he snapped my picture while I felt awkward in front of them and was trying to stand straight and not squint though the sun was in my eyes. I had a crush on one of them and was too young to realize it. Had you told me back then what I want from you now, I’d have laughed in your face; had you held me as I so want you to now, I’d have struggled and freed myself and kneed you in the groin, called you all manner of foul names that I’d dread you’d easily use on me now. Today, all I want is the courage to ask you to hold me as you might have done when I was in that picture at the beach and, after wrestling me to the ground and holding me there with my mouth biting the sand, tell me not to struggle against you, against your mouth, against my life.
* * *
EVER SINCE I first noticed you, I made a point of speaking to everyone else at the courts so that you might get to know me, if only by overhearing my conversations. I wanted to let you know that I love laughter and good cheer, and that despite being friendly with just about everyone, I am no fool.
I love starting conversations with people whom, in other circumstances, I wouldn’t even notice. I’ve made friends with the help, one of them the pert Wendy at the concession stand whose real Chinese name is not Wendy and with whom I flirt every morning when I complain about her coffee. And then there’s the handyman who’s told me the story of his life and how he had to flee Russia and now lives on Staten Island with his Dominican wife and needs to leave home to take the ferry by four thirty every morning to show up at the tennis courts on time. I know about his daughter who works nights as a nursing assistant at Mount Sinai and about his sister-in-law who lives with him ever since her accident. I’ve also spoken to another handyman in my broken Spanish. Now he seeks me out, wants to talk, may even have mistaken my overzealous camaraderie for friendship.
In the tennis house I am forever again Mr. Mirth-Palaver, the one everyone greets and around whose shoulder everyone, from the players to the handymen to the tennis coaches, likes to put an arm when they pass by. Some even shout my name. I want you to know my name. I want you to know I’m five lockers down from yours. But as soon as I see you, I freeze. Should I look, or pretend not to? Should I speak, or say nothing? Better say nothing. For there are indeed days when the whole thing fritters away like a bad dream and I begin to scorn you. I like scorning you. Sometimes I’ll coddle those moments when desire seems to have totally ebbed and indifference has chilled the little that’s left. Then I thank my stars for helping me hold my tongue. I look at your ass, your cock, your face, and feel nothing. The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn. But then, just hearing your flip-flops on the wet pavement of the shower area reminds me that indifference was just a reprieve, not a verdict. By the end of your game, your white shirt is all damp and sticks to your chest, and I can make out your rib cage and your abs, not an ounce of fat, the six-pack no secret though never declared. Scorn disappears. I want to bury my head in your chest the moment you remove your shirt, I want to wrap the shirt around my face. So I watch. After taking off your clothes, you’ll put them in the usual white Apple plastic shopping bag and pull the drawstring tightly before dropping it into your swanky leather messenger bag. Sometimes I’ve watched you toss your damp shirt and shorts into your bag as if you’ve suddenly lost your patience with them and refused to be neat. I love the scruffy you. It makes me long to know the unkempt, unbudgeted you, the you who needs others and makes room for them at night and likes dessert when having a story told before bedtime.
* * *
IT’S BEEN HAPPENING again this year. Before shaving and showering, you’ll still come to where the sinks are, close to where I’ll be standing and shaving, and for a split second—and this is my moment—you’ll stand behind me totally naked. If my timing is right, I’ll keep shaving and observe you in the mirror. But just sensing you are scarcely inches behind me is enough to send my heart racing and bring me to the brink of doing something foolish, like leaning back to feel your chest, or turning around to let you see that I’m getting hard. I like when my heart races, when I start to forget things, when I cease to care and all I want is for you to reach over to me, and without warning rest your towel, rest the light stubble of your unshaved chin against my back and lock me in your arms, your cock tucked between my cheeks, staring at ourselves in the mirror as though after a good night together. This is when I must think other thoughts, this is when I push my cock against the rim of the sink to keep it in check.
Sometimes, as you did last year, you disappear for two, three weeks and once again I fear I’ve lost you. Either you’ve moved or found better tennis courts elsewhere. I know we’ve been through this before. But this time I dread the signs. I picture you playing tennis in Queens near your school. And then it hits me: I’ve lost you. You now rank among the things I’ll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone. In a few years, I’ll remember this shabby tennis house and its puddles and think back on the splash of your yellow flip-flops. I’ll remember the courts in late winter, when only the regulars and the diehards, including old Mrs. Lieberman, play, or April weekday mornings or May afternoons when lilacs bloom all over Central Park, or when the silence that hovers over these courts and over the park by eight in the morning is as spellbinding as the silence on empty beaches at the break of day. I’ll look back to that beautiful backhand of yours, how you knelt down in something like silent worship for the death blow you were about to strike and then, having slammed the ball, stood there, staring at your befuddled adversary, biting your lower lip as a humble disclaimer in the face of heaven’s silent praise. I’ll regret that nod, because it is the nod I picture on your face whenever I imagine my cock entering your body, slowly, very slowly at first, and then, when I’m all the way in and want to tell you that this is the best life can offer, you’ll nod again and bite your lip, which I now want to bite more than anything in the world as you finally reach up to me and kiss me with your tongue deep in my mouth. What I’ll regret is never seeing your face when you come, never holding your knees, or caressing your face, many, many times, or even knowing that tinge of disappointment after sex that immediately begs to be expiated with more sex.
* * *
ONE MORNING I arrived earlier than usual. By now I’d made a habit of entering the park at 93rd, not 90th. We entered the park at the same time. I hadn’t seen you in weeks. Clearly something could have been said on such an occasion. You did not look at me, and after giving you a chance to say something, I decided not to stop looking at you. This was very unusual. I kept glancing at you a few times, perhaps in an attempt to greet you if you so much as looked my way, but you were staring straight in front of you, budgeting your steps, budgeting your thoughts, your day. Better not disturb him, better not intrude, yours were clearly get lost signals.
An hour later, in the locker room, when I saw a huge bandage around your right thigh, I figured I had to seize my chance. “What happened to you?” I asked, with a tone that wished to imply a friendly what idiotic scrape did you get yourself into? “Oh, I was just trying to open a bottle of wine that broke a few weeks ago.” “Stitches?” “Many.” You smiled. Then seeing I wasn’t looking away from you, “You’re the third person who’s noticed.”
“Hard not to. Can you play tennis with this?”
“Tennis is easy. It’s showering that’s difficult.”
We laughed.
“I’ve got it down to a system.” And so saying, you produced a box of Saran wrap from your swanky leather bag, plus a collection of sturdy rubber bands. It made the two of us laugh again.
“It’s really a lot better. But thanks for asking.”
Thanks for asking. There it was. Perfunctory courtesy bordering on dry, dismissive pap. The emperor of clichés. It did not surprise me.
A few days later just as I was opening my bag I cursed out loud. “Can you believe it?” I said, turning to you. “I forgot my sneakers.”
“Don’t you keep them in your locker?” you asked.
“Normally I do, but I took them to play tennis on Riverside Drive last Sunday.”
I looked at my watch, as if I could get back home and make it to the courts in time. You read my thoughts.
“Well, even if you rushed back home you’d probably lose the court. So my advice is sit in the benches, have a protein bar, and enjoy a fresh cup of coffee.”
“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 that 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.
Later, after showering and getting dressed, I looked at you and, from seemingly nowhere, said that I didn’t know your name. I did this perhaps to show you I was fully aware that you had used my name for the first time that morning and that the gesture did not go unnoticed. You immediately told me your name. I would never have guessed. I don’t know why, but I kept thinking it was going to be Friedrich, or Heinz, or Heinrich, or Otto. And because this is what people do when they exchange names, I reached out and shook your hand. I liked what I felt when I touched your hand. I knew that I’d feel some sort of signal race from you to me. Or perhaps I wanted to think I felt it. But feel something I did. I was not going to keep your hand in mine, but I wanted to, and I know, by the way you were polite enough not to withdraw yours too soon, that perhaps you had felt something as well. Suddenly, and I loved this, I had become the older schoolmate who sends the younger one to buy cigarettes. I loved your intimidated smile. And I loved this about us: we were swapping roles. He’s shy, I thought.
“Let’s grab a drink one of these days.”
“Why not, I’d like that.”
I had wanted to kiss your hand, to lace my five fingers in all five of yours and know the softness of your palm. Nothing like that happened, of course. But I did look you straight in the eyes hoping you’d know.
I went to work in a halo of bliss. What I failed to notice was that you were walking right behind me by no more than ten paces. I saw this not when I went down the stairs to the subway, or even when I reached the platform, but on the train itself. You had gotten in through another door and had found a seat in the same car. I was standing reading the paper. If you saw me, you were back to your usual silent and averted gaze. We don’t speak outside the tennis courts. I didn’t want to push things or be obtrusive, so I pretended to be lost in thought while reading the paper. I apologized to someone sitting down when I felt my paper graze her face, but I said it loudly enough for you to hear. I’d been doing this for two years in the locker room: talk to anyone, but talk to no one but you. Perhaps I expected you’d make a motion to talk. But then you didn’t need my voice to know I was on the train. You already knew, the way I knew.
And there you were seated, casting that same lifeless, faraway gaze I’d seen on the courts once before as you stared blankly at the nameless humanity in the car. Your legs were slightly parted and you had the back of each hand resting on each thigh with the palms up, in a gesture so helpless, so passive, conveying such resigned acquiescence in your slumped posture that it hurt me to watch an athlete sit that way. I wanted to say something, anything, to break through all our hurdles and ask what was the matter and why were you staring with so forlorn and vacant a gaze at those around you. But who could have dared such a thing? So I pretended to go on reading.
Here I was reexperiencing these old stirrings of tenderness for you when it occurred to me that despite all my vigilance, I was so rapt by the article in the paper that I’d failed to notice we had reached your stop and that you had already left the car, probably brushing right past me without saying a word.
What snuffed the joy I felt that morning once I reached my office building was what you’d said when I asked about drinks. “I’d like that.” Yours, I remembered, was not a yes. It was polite humbug.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, ON my computer, I did some sleuthing. Not knowing your last name, I typed in “Manfred,” the name of your private school in Queens located near the subway stop to which I’d once followed you, the word “tennis.” Nothing came up. So I tried a host of words, removed others, added others, even went so far as to follow an old hunch and checked American army bases in Germany. Nothing again. Finally I typed in “Oberlin” and “Manfred” and computed graduation years. And suddenly, to my complete surprise, there was your picture with your full name.
From this I couldn’t resist asking more questions. Where did you live in New York? What had people said about you? Did you have a Facebook? Who were your friends? I read everything.
Not only did an address pop up with a telephone number, but on social media up came the name of someone who might be your partner. When I entered his name, the name “Thucydides” came up. Then “Professor, Classics.” You hadn’t lied. He’d already published a monograph on Thucydides.
I envied the two of you. I could just picture your meeting during freshman orientation week, then I saw you coming back together from the library late at night, every night. Perhaps you’d meet in the library after dinner. Then one winter night on the way back from the library to your dorm he stopped, sat down on one of the benches even though it was freezing, and said, “I just need to know, Manfred. Do you have feelings for me?”
* * *
WHAT CHANGED BETWEEN us was the dissolution of what seemed a war of nerves. Now it was you who’d start conversations. My plodding Fine to your How was your weekend? turned into a litany of things you had done or gone to see. I found out about your father and his bone marrow transplant, and about the sorry state of the central air-conditioning in your apartment on 95th Street, and about your elder brother who had gone back to Germany, and the black-and-white films you and your partner liked to watch on Turner Classic Movies. You didn’t speak about sports, didn’t even ask if I had watched the French Open. Rather than overlook the decaying state of the tennis house as you’d done before, you began to make fun of the grimy sink where we shaved, the puddles we had to wade through to put on our clothes, the homeless men who would sneak into the tennis house early in the morning to shower or wash their clothes in the very sinks where we’d just shaved and brushed our teeth. “If only my colleagues at school knew we hobnobbed with the homeless every morning.”
In fact, one day a homeless man walked in and dumped his dirty clothes in one of the sinks. “What did I tell you,” you said. “Hi, Paul,” said the homeless man. “Hi, Benny,” I said.
As we walked back to our lockers, I told you that Benny’s was a very sad story. He had worked as a bartender, but after drugs and one misfortune following another, he ended up homeless. Lost his license, his home, his wife, his children, and yet had read all the Russian classics and could recite all the ingredients of every cocktail ever concocted this side of the Atlantic. “He’s trying to work his way back,” I said, adding a touch more earnestness in what I was saying, perhaps to show that under the veneer of mischief and sarcasm, I was really a good soul. You said nothing. But I liked talking to you as we were getting dressed, because you’d have to face me and thus offer a frontal view of your body, your chin, your pecs, your abs, your eyes. I didn’t want to look any lower, so I kept staring at your chest, but staring at your chest made me want to touch it, so I stared at your face, which I wanted to kiss, until I’d looked below your waist before your eyes could follow mine—all this as we’re talking about the lapsed bartender who was trying to make a comeback.
“Paul?” said Benny, who had come out into the locker area after wringing his clothes in one of the deeper sinks.
“What is it?”
He seemed uncomfortable speaking in front of you and signaled for me to approach him, finally whispering, “Can you help me out?”
I walked back to my locker, secretly took out my wallet, and sidling back to the bathroom, handed him a few bills. I didn’t want you to see. But I did want you to see that I had made an effort to hide that I’d given the poor man money.
“You gave him money,” you said when I was back at my locker.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“He’s a good man,” I finally said.
To which you replied, “Another ‘Metropolitan Diary’ moment.”
We smiled at each other.
“Well, we’re even, then.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I gave him something too.”
It turns out you’d given him far more than I had.
I smiled at you and shook my head with mock reproof.
“What?” you asked, not letting the matter go.
I wanted to say that we thought along the same lines, liked the same things, were more alike than either of us knew. Instead, I ended up saying something entirely different. “That was a lovely gesture and far more discreet than mine.”
It ranked among the most saccharine banalities ever to come out of my mouth.
You said nothing.
“What?” I asked, echoing your words.
“Nothing.” Then after a pause, “I think I’m beginning to understand you.”
“Oh? Tell me more, because I’m not sure I do.”
“You’re not easy,” you said.
“And you are?”
“I suppose not.”
We stood there speechless, trying to avoid staring at each other, and though we were both fully dressed and ready to leave the tennis house, it seemed to me that neither of us wanted to leave with the other.
I said I needed to pee. I was giving you the exit line you needed to leave the locker room without me. I felt I was doing the right thing.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Saturday morning, as I’m heading to the farmers’ market, my fantasies take over. It’s a lovely, clear, summery beach day, and I’m thinking of what you might have done last night and whether you’re gone for the weekend. The weather was still a bit cool, but I had an image of the summerhouse I’m sure you share with your friends and I pictured all of you having drunk too much last night. Yet everyone knows you’re an early riser, and last night your friends asked you to get some milk in the morning, maybe bagels and things, and don’t forget a few treats, someone ordered. Dreamily, you step out of the house to face this gorgeous morning. You’re the only one up in the house and the only one on the lane. This is good. The weather is good. The lanes are quiet, and the silence doesn’t let up. I can hear your flip-flops on the dusty slabs. You’re happy. Last night, great dinner, good friends, nice talk, good wines, great sex. You haven’t showered and you don’t plan to until after your first swim in the ocean. All you did before heading out was put on the shorts you wore last night and a T-shirt, no underwear. This is heaven. You’re going to surprise everyone by buying something like a cake—why not, you think, especially made locally with strange berries and grains found nowhere but here. I envy you the errand. Suddenly, I am there with you and would love to walk with you, because we’ve never walked together, and going to get bagels and things plus a treat on a Saturday morning at the beach seems so easy, so uncomplicated, such a source of clear, simple, undiluted joy.
Yet another part of me wishes that you’d asked me instead to pick up milk and breakfast for everyone. I know that once I walk out of the house you’ll find a way to talk about me to those who are already up having coffee. They must have heard our moaning last night from the other end of the house, and someone is sure to say something, possibly comical, The two of you making the beast with two backs, did you two ever consider catching your breath? Everyone laughs, partly because I’m new among your friends. And you laugh with them, but then, on impulse, you pick yourself up and dash out of the house, and before I’m twenty paces on the lane, you’re running after me, I wanted to come with you. I look back and smile.
But there’s another Saturday scenario: you say you’ll head out to get breakfast and ask me to stay in. Have coffee with Esmeralda. I’ll take care of things, you say. No sooner have you walked out and closed the screen door behind you than we start talking. I’m new to this scene, so Esmeralda hands me freshly brewed coffee.
Be good to him, she says, don’t hurt him.
But I am good to him.
Do you love him?
Do I love him? I’m crazy about him.
That doesn’t seem to satisfy her.
Two other risers totter into the kitchen and help themselves to coffee.
But do you care for him? asks one of the two.
I can repeat this scene in my mind all day.
Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.
That same Saturday night I finally dream of you. I am walking with Maud around the Lincoln Square area. We are just leaving the movie theater when we run into you and your partner on the same sidewalk. It’s late in the summer and you’ve been gone from the courts for more than a week, so seeing you standing in front of me startles me so much that, without even thinking or rehearsing our usual lukewarm hello, rather than shake your hand, I let my palm reach out to you and touch your cheek. I would never have dared this, but part of me can already tell this is probably a dream and knows it’s not unseemly to do this in dreams, especially when one’s not seen the other for more than a week. Perhaps it’s your tanned neck exposed down to your shiny breastbone that stirs the impulse.
But then, in my dream, you do something more startling yet. Not only are you not taken aback by my bold caress in front of your partner, but you actually yield to my palm, because you like this, and by leaning into my hand, you’re trying to make my hand stay there. We shake hands right after, perhaps to cover up what has just happened, and then make introductions left and right. Maud and your partner begin discussing how much they liked the film. “He certainly didn’t,” you say, pointing at me. “You don’t say!” says Maud, making a joke at my expense. We ask which way you two are walking. It happens to be ours as well. At some point, she and he drift ahead while the two of us lag behind, almost intentionally putting distance between them and us. We’ve never walked together, yet here we are, more together than we’d ever been in two years. You grab my hand and don’t let go. Surely this is a dream, I think. “Haven’t seen you in ages,” you say. “Let’s walk together.”
“But what about them?” I ask, mistaking your meaning, only then to realize that I haven’t mistaken it at all.
“They’ll live,” you say.
And just as you utter these words, I know with unshakable certainty that those few minutes when we walk hand in hand together are, even in a dream, more real and better than anything I’d ever know in life, and that I would be lying if I called what I’ve been doing all these years living.
The happiness that came with the dream stayed with me all day.
I resolved one thing. The next time I saw you I’d do exactly what I’d done in my dream. I’d touch your cheek, either on the courts, or in the tennis house, or in the locker room, but something like this had to happen.
Or else.
Or else what? Shoot myself? Seriously?
When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I’d resolved. You were chilly again, as though you’d intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don’t fly out and rat on one another’s dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren’t willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you’d taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn’t you?
When I saw you again the next morning, the element of surprise, which would have justified a seemingly spontaneous show of affection, was undercut by your immediate complaint about the poor maintenance of the courts. Then on Thursday you didn’t show up at all. I’d have to wait forever, till Monday.
And yet the joy of having run into you in a dream was still not wearing off, nor could I hide that joy; it touched every hour of my days, so that what I grew to fear was not that you wouldn’t turn out to be the person I met in a dream, but that the joy that came from the dream the moment you held my hand and said Let’s walk together would, without warning, without my knowing it even, gradually and unavoidably evaporate. How to coddle it, how not to let it go …
Early Friday afternoon, I decided to head to the courts. It was an unusually warm day for early spring, and I wanted to put everything that had happened to me that day behind me and enjoy the weather. I had spare clothes in my locker and had no need to go home to change. Then, as I was entering the tennis house, there you were, Manfred. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, I almost never go to the courts at that time, and, as it turned out, neither do you. You had left school early and hadn’t reserved a court. You asked me and Harlan if we could play doubles with you if you found a fourth partner. A fourth would be easy to find, I said. As luck would have it, you spotted the elderly gentleman who had once asked you to play but had never dared ask again. He readily accepted and rushed to his locker to pick up his racket. It was clear that you hate asking people for anything. You seemed so diffident and unsettled in asking me to play with you that to put you at ease, and perhaps because Harlan was present when you asked, all I could do was raise my palm and let it stay on your cheek and say it was perfectly okay, really okay. You didn’t shy away from the gesture, nor did you lean into it. But you smiled and I smiled. We didn’t say a word.
“This makes me very happy,” I ended up saying. “We’ve never played before.”
“I know,” you said, “me too.”
Neither of us was quite sure what the other meant, but, as in dreams, our words could be taken in so many ways, which was fine too, because we liked thinking they had more than one meaning, one obvious, one not so obvious, one hinted at but so muddled that neither of us knew which to grasp, because each was so laced into the others that all three ultimately meant one and the same thing.
“Maybe we can grab that drink afterward,” I said. Perhaps I was pushing things.
“Oh, yes, that drink,” you said, as though to show you hadn’t forgotten there’d been a vague allusion to a drink once and that it hadn’t escaped you at all. For a second I thought you were making light either of the idea of a drink or of its coded meaning. Your empathic irony surprised me. Were you going to be difficult before turning me down?
“But I’m buying,” you said.
After tennis, we go to a bar on Columbus Avenue. It’s four fifteen in the afternoon, the sun couldn’t be brighter, we’re sitting in our damp tennis clothes at a bar-café on the sidewalk. Our bare knees are touching, and neither you nor I is pulling back. We could make small talk. But I’m older, I cut to the chase.
“Tell me about your partner,” I say. Something in the way you react to my words shows you want to pretend they come from out of the blue, but then you change your mind. Not the time for evasive maneuvers; our cards are on the table.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?”
“We’ve been together since college.”
“But?”
“No buts. I know this may not be what you want to hear.”
“So you’ve known. About me, I mean.”
“I am not sure. But I think so.”
How delicately you phrased this.
“And?”
“And nothing. I think about you.” And then you added, “A lot, actually.”
Yours, I realize, is the first real card on the table. I admire this. Mine had been just a joker.
I lower my right hand under the armrest of my chair and grasp your left hand, which is also dangling below your armrest. You didn’t expect this, and I can sense that part of you wishes I hadn’t done it. But I don’t want to let go, not now.
“I’m living with someone too,” I said. “But everything you’ve said, I could say too.”
“So say it.” This is how you fought back, something catty, touchy in your voice. I like it. Your hand relaxes and is actually holding mine. I am so, so glad I never let go.
“We’ve been together for almost a year,” I say, “but it’s you I think of—even when we’re making love.” Nothing will shut me up now. “Especially when we’re making love.”
“And?”
I grow silent.
“I want to know.”
“And nothing. Do you really want the graphic details?”
“No,” you say. “Actually, yes, I do.”
I loved how you said this.
“I’m always thinking of you. Even when I’m not looking at you, I’m with you all the time. I know everything about you. I know where you live, where your parents lived in Germany, I even know what high school you attended in Virginia, I know your mother’s maiden name. Want me to go on?”
“I could say the exact same thing about you.”
“How so?”
“I know your tennis schedule, I know what train you take after tennis, I know where you live, I can go on and on. I know all about Maud too, she’s also on Facebook.”
I’ll never forget the moment when it finally dawned on me that we are mirror images of each other. And yet … so many months, so much time wasted.
“What else do you know about me?” you asked.
“I know what clothes you wear, I know the color of every single tie you own, I know that you put on your socks after, not before, putting on your trousers, I even know that you occasionally use collar stays, that you button your shirt from the bottom up, and I know that I want to know you for the rest of my life. I want to see you naked every night. I want to watch you brush your teeth, watch you shave, I want to be the one to shave you when you don’t want to shave, I want to be in the shower with you, I want to rub lotion on your knees, your arms, your inner thighs, your feet, your dainty little toes. I want to watch you read, I want to read to you, I want to go to the movies with you, I want to cook with you and cuddle up and watch TV with you, and if you don’t like chamber music, I’ll drop my subscription and watch action films with you, if that’s what you’re into. I want to lie naked with you now. All I want is to be with you, to be like you—”
You did not let me finish. “I want to call you tonight.”
Your words hit me in the gut. You could have said, We’re fucking tonight, and it wouldn’t have stunned me more.
“I’ll put my phone on silent,” I said.
“So will I.”
As you withdrew your hand from mine, you let it rest on my knee.
“On second thought, I don’t think I’ll call you tonight,” you said.
“Why?”
“Messy. I don’t want anyone hurt.”
A moment of silence threatens to erase everything that has just happened between us and seems to throw us back to where we’d been last week, last month, last year. I had to say something.
“I don’t want this afternoon to turn into nothing,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
And as though this would prevent you from changing your mind, I took out my cell phone and showed you the picture of me as a twelve-year-old.
“This is who is speaking to you now. Earnest, horny, so scared.”
You looked at the picture and nodded, and I know you understood that I was desperately trying to build the flimsiest pontoon bridge between us.
“Will you think of me tonight?” you asked.
I snickered to show there was no way that I wouldn’t.
“Will you?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
This threw me off.
“Just teasing, Pauly, just teasing. Tennis tomorrow?” you asked.
“It might rain,” I replied.
“But you know I’ll be here. You know I’ll wait. And you know why.”
“Why?”
“You already know why.”
I couldn’t resist. My hand touched your face, and better than in my dream, this time you didn’t just smile, nor did you just lean into my palm. You cupped your hand over mine and let our hands rest there together.
“I have so much to say.”
“Me too.”
Once home, I go online to look for your picture again. I stare at your face. You are smiling, faintly, possibly at me. I want to close the page but I can’t stop staring. All I want is to look at you, touch your face, I want this face to be in my house, my office, my life. I want it so much that I am suddenly gripped by the worst fear: tomorrow morning you won’t show up. I’ll be there, waiting, and you won’t come. I’ll wait for you, and keep waiting, even if you’re two, three, four hours late, I’ll wait in the afternoon and by evening still say I shouldn’t stop waiting. I don’t know why I’ll wait or what I mistrust and fear so much.
All through dinner at Pamela’s, I keep thinking of your voice and of how I’m never able to summon it in my mind. Everyone at the dinner table is talking, we drink too much, and as I keep rubbing the wristband of my watch under the table, I like to think that it’s your wrist I’m holding, not mine, and if not your wrist under the table, then it’s your hand gently cuffing my wrist, and the more I touch my wrist, the more I want to think it’s your hand squeezing my cock. It makes me happy. And it makes me miserable. By the fourth glass of wine, I become aware of myself struggling not to tell everyone at the dinner table, I’m luckier than all of you sitting here tonight, I’m in love, desperately in love, and this is total agony, and none of you is helping, because from the look on your faces, none of you knows a thing about love, and frankly, neither did I until now. I keep quiet, but if you walked in on our meal like a resurrected Jesus and said, Come, walk with me, Pauly, I would stand up, drop my napkin on my chair, leave my wineglass still full, and make the most perfunctory apology to Maud and the other guests before being spirited away by you. If I have to pay with my life to hear you say, Come, walk with me, Pauly, I would do it.
But you do not appear. And however I squeeze your wrist, I cannot make you stay. My smile fades, I stop talking, and am Mr. Mirth-Palaver no more. And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what’s tearing me up. And yet, what if each of us at this very table were a monsoon-ravaged island trying to look its best, with all of our coconut trees bending to the winds till hopelessness breaks their backs and you can hear each one crash and all their mealy, hardheaded coconuts pelt the ground, and still we’ll keep our spirited good cheer and add a lilting sprint to our gait on the way to the office every morning, because we’re each waiting for someone’s voice to tear us out of our bleak and blistered lives and say, Follow me, Brother. Follow me, Sister.
I turn to my right and look at Pamela, and to my left at Nadja. Maud is speaking to the man at her right. Are they all looking for someone to take them away and save them from themselves? And there is Duncan getting old, and there is Diego, and as always Claire, who never laughs at anything I say, who always looks as though she’s struggling not to tell me what a dolt she really thinks I am—is Claire also waiting for someone to come into her life and say, Follow me, Claire, just follow me?
And suddenly I realize that you did ask me to follow you today and that you held my hand when I touched your cheek, and that what scares me more than going to the tennis courts tomorrow morning and not finding you is finding you waiting for no one but me, just me, Manfred. You’ll be sitting under the canopy, holding your two rackets between your knees, and, seeing me, you’ll say, The courts are wet today, they said it might even snow tonight, which is what I’d have said had I spoken first, and it would be my way, and possibly yours as well, of saying We have the whole day to ourselves and the night too, come, live with me.