Court Three

Jules didn’t use the middle of the court the way I did. She stayed close to the net and made Mara take a step farther behind her on returns. Within two games they had found an arrangement that worked.

I stood on the Vale balcony with a paper cup of tea and watched them win a point I would have played differently. The difference made no difference to the score. Jules caught a difficult volley with the face of her racquet hardly moving and sent it into open court. Mara touched her shoulder once as they changed sides. Nothing about the touch belonged to me; it was the sort of thing partners did.

That didn’t stop me from feeling it.

Anika found me at the railing. She had come to watch the later match and had arrived early enough to see me pretending that the court, rather than the people on it, was holding my attention.

“How’s the leg?” she asked.

“Being assessed.”

“That’s an answer you can put on a form.”

“It’s the one I have.”

She accepted it. We watched Mara serve. Jules took the next ball out of the air so quickly that it seemed to leave Mara’s hand and land on the other side without crossing the net.

“They’re good,” Anika said.

“They are.”

“You’re good with her too.”

“I didn’t say otherwise.”

“I know. You looked as if you needed somebody else to say it.”

Anika went down to her seat. I stayed through the first set. Mara and Jules won it, and the people along the balcony applauded. Mara looked up once, not searching the whole crowd but checking the place where I had been standing. I lifted my hand. She nodded.

During the break I left.

I had told Mara I might watch and that I might not. Leaving wasn’t a broken promise. I could have gone to the café and waited to hear the result. Instead I walked past the front desk, out of the building and halfway to the station before I stopped. My calf was not the reason I had to slow down. I was walking as if I could get ahead of what I’d seen.

They had a language I couldn’t hear from the balcony. Of course they did. Mara had worked with Jules before, and I had no right to make their competence evidence against what Mara had said to me upstairs. I knew that. I still wanted to be the person whose next movement she could predict.

At the station I bought a ticket home and sent Mara a message: I left after the first set. I hope the second goes well. See you at seven.

Her reply came an hour later. We won. Seven. You can ask me about the match or not.

I read it three times. She had not demanded a reason for my leaving. She had not pretended she wouldn’t notice. I had sent the true fact before she could ask for it, and the world had continued.

At seven I found her outside a small restaurant near the canal, wearing a coat I had never seen and no bag at all. On court she carried so many things that her shoulders seemed built around a strap. Without one, she kept putting her hand beside her hip and finding nothing there.

“You look different,” I said.

“I changed clothes.”

“That explains part of it.”

She looked at my shoes, then back at my face. “You walked here?”

“From the bus. Four minutes.”

“I wasn’t checking the leg. I wondered whether you’d had trouble finding it.”

“You can ask about the leg. You shouldn’t have to pretend you haven’t noticed it exists.”

“All right.” She opened the restaurant door and let me decide whether to go first. “How is it?”

“Better than Wednesday. Not ready for a match.”

“Thank you.”

I went inside before I could turn the exchange into something about her tone. The room was narrow and warm. The owner had written the menu on a chalkboard that leaned against a stack of old newspapers. We were given a table by the window. When the waiter asked if we wanted to share plates, we both said yes and then had to work out whether we had agreed on the same ones.

“I watched your first set,” I told her after we’d ordered.

“I saw you.”

“I left because watching you and Jules play well made me angry. Not at either of you. I thought if I stayed I’d make you responsible for how I felt.”

Mara put down her water. “I knew you might not stay.”

“I’m not going to ask you to play worse.”

“Good. I couldn’t promise it.”

There was enough wit in her answer to make me smile. Then she said, “When I looked up and you were gone, I wanted to know whether you were all right. I also had another set to play. Both things were true.”

“I sent you a message.”

“I was glad you did.”

The waiter brought the first plate, a heap of charred peppers on thick bread. We each took one. I burned my tongue and tried to conceal it. Mara pushed her water across the table without comment. I drank it. We had been doing versions of this on court: one person making a bad choice, the other offering what was needed without a speech. Across a dinner table it felt less like strategy and more dangerous.

“What was your best point?” I asked.

“Mine or ours?”

“Yours first.”

She described a return that had gone wide, a second serve she had altered because Jules was standing closer than I usually did, and a volley that barely cleared the tape. She spoke with more pleasure than she let herself show after a win. I asked why she had chosen the serve. She started to answer with a court diagram drawn in the condensation on her glass, then stopped.

“You said you didn’t want the evening to be a report.”

“I asked about one point. I like hearing you explain something when you’re pleased with it.”

She finished the diagram. I could have told her where I would have stood. I kept the thought to myself and asked how Jules had celebrated. Mara said Jules had wanted the world’s largest coffee, which was either a measure of the match or of Jules, and I laughed hard enough to draw a look from the next table.

The waiter asked whether we wanted dessert. I was still trying to finish the peppers, but Mara wanted the orange cake she’d seen on the chalkboard. We ordered one piece and two forks. When it came, she cut the larger half without pretending she hadn’t. I took it from her plate.

“You didn’t need to offer me more because I had a difficult afternoon,” I said.

“I offered it because you’d have taken it anyway.”

“That’s different.”

“Very.”

I ate a bite, then put down the fork. “When you asked me to dinner, I thought you might be doing a careful thing because I’d had to withdraw.”

“I have been careful.”

“Is that the reason?”

“No. I was careful before Southmere. I wanted you at the table before I knew whether your leg could finish a match.”

I could have asked her to prove the difference. She would have tried, and I would have found a way to doubt whatever she offered. Instead I said the harder part: “If I don’t get back for a while, I won’t always be charming about it.”

“You’re not always charming now.”

“Mara.”

“I know what you mean. You don’t owe me a graceful injury. I also can’t promise that I’ll always be good company when I lose. I came here because of how you argue with a cone and because you asked me to say what I wanted. That part of you didn’t get hurt.”

The cake was more bitter than I expected, with peel in the icing. I liked it. She had told me something specific enough to make it difficult to dismiss as kindness. I did not say that I was relieved. I pushed the smaller half of the cake back towards her, and she ate it without thanks. The equality of that small exchange stayed with me when we walked outside.

Later, walking beside the canal, Mara told me she had been wrong about her last partner. Not about every point, but about the way she had decided a plan for both of them without first making sure the other woman wanted it.

“I thought being prepared was a gift,” she said. “Sometimes it was. Sometimes it meant she had to fight me before she could tell me what she saw.”

“Did she tell you?”

“Eventually. In front of people. I’d made it hard to do privately.”

It would have been easy to offer Mara the version of the story in which her former partner had simply misunderstood. I had spent a week watching Mara learn a new way of asking; she deserved to be believed about the old one too.

“I didn’t tell you what I saw in my own leg,” I said. “You had to fight me for that.”

“I know. We don’t owe each other a perfect account of ourselves after ten days. We do owe each other the chance to correct one.”

We reached the footbridge. The canal beneath it reflected lights from the houses in lines that broke whenever a boat moved somewhere out of sight. Mara put her hand on the rail beside mine. I turned my palm over so she could see it, and she laid her fingers across it. She stopped moving. I closed my hand around hers.

“Is this all right?” she asked.

“Yes.”

We stood there longer than the view required. Her hand was warm from the restaurant. I did not know when my calf would let me run or whether she and Jules would win tomorrow. I knew she had asked me to dinner after choosing a different partner, and I had come. Whatever we were making, it had survived being useful to nobody.