The Service Door

Our second match was meant to start at four. At ten past, half the lamps above court three went dark.

The coach shut the gate before anyone could serve. We were playing the other losing pair in an exhibition that would give one team third place and the other nothing except an additional hour of tennis. I wanted the hour. It was the first time I had wanted more time with a partner after losing, and I didn’t want Mara to know how much.

The electrician was on his way. The coach told us to wait in the upstairs room where the sandwiches had been laid out at noon. I had eaten mine. The ones left were curling at the edges and guarded by a plate of grapes nobody had touched.

Mara followed me through the service door. It made its small strangled laugh as I pushed it open.

“You warned me,” I said.

“I have one useful piece of knowledge about this building.”

“Two. You know the lamps fail.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Then you need a new partner with better local knowledge.”

She held the door while I took the stairs. “I thought we’d agreed to decide after Saturday.”

I had meant the joke. Her answer made me careful with my next step.

In the room above the courts, three parents were standing at the windows watching the electrician’s van come through the gate. The other team had claimed the table nearest the heater. Mara took two bananas from the food tray and handed me one without asking whether I wanted it. I would have refused a question. I ate it.

“I’m not hungry,” she said when I noticed she had not opened hers. “Keep that for later.”

“You have a way of issuing instructions while calling them provisions.”

“You can give it back.”

I set the second banana beside my kit bag. She didn’t make me say I would keep it.

We sat on opposite ends of the low windowsill. I had taken off my left shoe because the calf felt easier without its tight edge. Mara noticed the shoe and said nothing. That ought to have relieved me. Instead I kept expecting her to supply a useful theory about what I should do, and I grew irritated with the theory she had not offered.

“You can ask,” I said.

“About the shoe?”

“About why I took it off.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It pulls after I stand still. It settles when I walk.”

“Are you going to tell the coach?”

I looked at the electrician below us. “I don’t know yet.”

“All right.”

“You’re not going to tell me to?”

“You know where he is.”

I put my shoe back on. It was not a concession, but it felt uncomfortably like an end to a conversation she had allowed me to lead. I could tell her more. I did not. Below us the electrician opened a box on the wall and the coach tried to be helpful. From the court it was impossible to hear what they said. I liked watching a conversation that couldn’t ask anything of me.

“Your mother enjoyed it,” Mara said.

“She enjoyed seeing me happy. She doesn’t care where the ball lands.”

“She understood when you took mine.”

“Everybody understood that.”

“Not everybody looked like they wished they could stop it before it happened.”

I turned to her. She was looking at the blue scarf moving towards the car park, not at me. I had thought the moment at thirty-all belonged to my embarrassment. Mara had seen my mother in it too.

“She’s had years of practice,” I said. “Watching me make a decision, then wanting to stand in front of it.”

“And you don’t like to be stopped.”

“Do you?”

“If I’m about to hit my partner with a racquet, yes.”

That made me laugh, briefly and against my will. She looked pleased for a second, and I would have missed it if I had been still looking out of the window.

“We should tell each other sooner,” she said. “When one of us needs something changed.”

“We have a system for balls.”

“I wasn’t talking about balls.”

The electrician shut the wall box with a metal click. All the lamps came on. The parents at the windows applauded. I had an answer for Mara, or several, and the applause made every one of them too late to say.

We went down to the court. At the bottom of the stairs she stopped to retie the loose strap on her bag. I took mine through the gate alone. The half-hour off court had left the muscles in my left calf stiff when I first moved, the pull from the earlier match returning as a complaint rather than a warning. I walked it out across the baseline while our opponents warmed up.

Mara came in behind me. “You changed the grip on your spare racquet?”

“No.”

“The top is peeling. You were catching it with your thumb.”

I looked down. She was right. I’d filed an edge with the thumbnail of my left hand without noticing. The racquet had been in my bag all morning. I hadn’t seen her touch it.

“It can wait,” I said.

“I have tape. After the match.”

“You make this sound like a long-term arrangement.”

“I bought a whole roll.”

I hit the first warm-up ball into the net.

The consolation match was shorter than the first. We had learned how to take turns on the awkward balls. We still argued after points; once Mara was right and once I was. At one-all in the second set I took a ball I should have left, then felt the pull in my calf when I tried to recover. I stopped at the back fence rather than run for the next one. The shot went past me.

Mara walked over as our opponents collected it. “Can you move?”

“I can.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Yes, it was exactly what you asked.”

She waited. There was no room inside that silence for a joke I could live with.

“It tightened,” I said. “When I turned.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“I want to finish the set.”

“That’s not the same answer.”

“I know.”

The coach was watching from the gate. This was a club exhibition, not a match whose loss would change our careers. I had no good reason to make it important enough to hurt myself for, except that Mara had asked me directly and I could not bear to become a person she had to protect after two days.

“I’m calling the coach,” I said. I had to say it before I could take it back.

Mara stepped aside and let me walk to him. I told him where it hurt. He asked me to stop, and I did. A sports clinician at the club saw me before I left, checked the leg and told me to arrange a fuller assessment if the tightness returned or failed to settle. I listened. I did not promise Mara anything the clinician had not promised me.

Our opponents were given the match. One of them came over before she went to collect her bag. “We could wait if you’re being checked,” she said. She was about my age and had spent the set hitting balls at my feet without once trying to be cruel. I told her they should take the result. The event had a schedule, and I did not want the privilege of holding four people on court while I found a way to make the stoppage sound temporary. She asked if she could put a hand on my shoulder. I nodded. She said she hoped I would be back soon.

I had prepared myself for people to talk about the leg as though it were the whole of me. I had not prepared for a player who wanted to win and could still regret how it ended. I watched her go back to her partner, who had already begun packing balls into a tube. Their ordinary business continued around my changed afternoon.

The score existed on a sheet at the desk, and nobody made a speech about it. I had expected to feel humiliated. Instead I felt cross about an hour that had almost begun to belong to us.

Back in the empty upstairs room, I sat to change shoes while Mara went to get my bag. The lamps stayed on. The room smelt of oranges and the coffee someone had abandoned on the heater. She came back with both our bags and the roll of grip tape.

“You can do it yourself,” she said, holding it out.

“You offered.”

“I offered before I knew whether you’d want me near your things after that.”

“After what?”

“The coach.”

I rested the racquet across my knees. She stood an arm’s length away and waited for me to hand it to her. She had not made the decision about my leg. She hadn’t even spoken to the coach for me. I could give her a racquet without giving her the rest.

“After the coach,” I said, “I’d like you to fix my terrible grip.”

“It’s not terrible. It’s coming loose.”

“You need to work on compliments.”

“I said you were right on Thursday.”

“And I expect to keep that memory a long time.”

She sat on the floor by the window, where the last daylight showed the overlap. She stripped the old tape slowly and began to wrap the new one, stopping after the first turn to make sure I liked the thickness. There was nobody left to see the work. She did it as precisely as she played.

“My last partner used to tell people I could see every opening except one in front of my own face,” she said.

“Which opening?”

“When she wanted me to ask instead of decide.”

“Did you?”

“Too late.”

She finished the grip and put the racquet in my hands. She didn’t ask for the story of the former partner and I did not offer mine. The new tape was firm without being thick. The thumb that had been worrying the old edge came to rest.

At the service door she let me push it open. It laughed once, thin and ugly.

“You’re right,” I said. “It would be a terrible way to leave quietly.”

“Are you trying to?”

“Not yet.”

She did not pretend I had answered only about the building. She walked with me to the front door, slowly enough that I did not have to ask.