Babylon and Other Stories

The Tennis Partner

The first time my father played tennis with Frank McAllister, it was a cool, sunny, the-best-of-summer-is-yet-to-come afternoon in the middle of May. The McAllisters had moved to the neighborhood six months earlier, into a three-bedroom, split-level, single-car-garage ranch identical to ours, and joined the tennis club before it even got warm enough to play. As soon as my father saw Frank hitting practice balls in the frigid spring weather, he decided that he'd found a new and noteworthy opponent. Frank was a broad-chested man with short red hair, pale eyebrows and pale legs, and when he played his face turned as red and wide as a beefsteak tomato, the freckles standing out like seeds.

“That guy looks all right,” my father told me, pointing at him unsubtlely with his racket. “Might even pose a challenge.” The thing about my father was that he had no perspective whatsoever on his own game. He thought he was a fair player who compensated for his less-than-stellar fitness with a strong intellectual grasp of the sport. None of this was true, but it took me years to figure it out.

“Please don't ever play with that guy,” is what I said to my father at the time. I recognized Mr. McAllister from a drug and alcohol presentation he'd made at my high school earlier that year. He was a drug counselor and made us all yell slogans back at him—“We're not sheep! We don't sleep!” which had something to do with peer pressure — and showed slides. It was the kind of forty-five minutes that made me dread going to school.

“I know what you're thinking,” Mr. McAllister had said about the slide that showed a joint. “Peace and love, right? If they'd just put this stuff in the water, there would be no more war.” We were supposed to laugh. Throughout the presentation I stared at his daughter, Ivy, who had enrolled at the start of the spring term. Like him she was redheaded, unlike him she was beautiful, and I had a furious crush on her.

“What's the matter with you, son?” my father said. He only called me son when we were playing tennis. The game brought out the patriarch in him. I told him the “there would be no more war” line, and he laughed.

“We'll have no rush to judgment,” he said. “On the court he might be all right.”

He walked up to Frank, welcomed him to the club — where my father considered himself an elder, as at a church — and invited him to play the following Saturday. Frank pumped my father's hand in his enthusiastic, drug-counselor way, and said, “Hey, that sounds great! ” As the days wore on, my father kept mentioning the match and rubbing his hands in anticipation. His previous tennis partner had wrecked his left knee diving for a ball one day and, after an expensive operation, had elected to take up water aerobics instead, a phrase my father went around repeating, in a disgusted, wondering tone, for weeks after he heard the news. He'd been at loose ends ever since, with only me to play with; he just didn't have the heart, he said, to whip me.

When the afternoon finally came, I went down to the club to watch. Mostly I was hoping that Ivy would be there, and we'd strike up a casual yet witty and flirtatious conversation about our fathers and their foibles, a conversation that would lead to a date, and then to another, and, eventually, though my vision here got cloudy, to sex. Of course she didn't show up. She was above watching her father play tennis on a Saturday afternoon. I, sadly, wasn't.

But it was pretty interesting to watch. Frank McAllister had a strong serve and a pretty good backhand, and for a solidly built guy he could cross the court fast. My father, who was neither fast nor solidly built, hung back, waiting for opportunities to show off his killer forehand, which was the centerpiece, and maybe the only piece, of his game. Frank kept coming up to the net, harassing my father with his backhand, and my father kept running back to the baseline as if it were home base and he'd be declared safe once he got there. It turned into a close contest. Both of them hit the ball with audible, satisfying thwacks, and it arced fast and clean across the net. The sound of the game was like music: their shoes made rhythmic, percussive sounds on the asphalt, and the ball hit and bounced in beats, the measured pace of a serve, the sustained pause of a lob, the staccato shock of an overhead smash. Soon they were sweating mightily, their foreheads dripping, their thinning middle-aged hair damp. By the time they were done their shirts were translucent. Frank beat my father in two sets, 6–4, 6–4.

My father shook his hand. “Get you next time,” he said.

They took to playing regularly, once or twice a week in the evenings, and a longer match on weekends. The tennis club wasn't fancy — just a set of private courts with a changing room attached — but my father talked as if it were. “Going down to the club, darling!” he'd announce to my mother as he left the house— the only time he ever used the word darling—and for years I pictured the place as a gentlemen's establishment, with leather armchairs and Oriental rugs and gin and tonics on the balcony. The first time I went there with my father, I couldn't believe what a letdown it was.

My father played up his own game in much the same way. He claimed that tennis was a game of finesse, just like chess; that he could minimize, through strategy, the number of calories expended versus the number of points won; that a smart man with a solid return could beat all the fancy footwork in the world. Frank McAllister was his exact opposite, with a game like his personality: messy, overfriendly, bombastic. My father said it was like playing tennis with a Labrador retriever. Frank was always chasing the ball, fixated on it, always bounding up to the net, smashing his racket down like he was killing a fly. Sometimes he managed it and sometimes the maneuver failed him, but he never changed his style. He was a risk-taker, a hand-pumper, a winker at me as I watched on the sidelines. At the end of the match he'd jog up to the net and shake my father's hand. He won every time.

Whenever my father and Frank were playing, I'd hang out at the club, sometimes playing Anil Chaudury, who was around my age and skill level, sometimes practicing my serve against a back wall of the building. I was fifteen and had a part-time job that summer, bagging groceries, which I hated, and I had friends to hang out with — skateboarding or playing basketball, both of which were much cooler sports than tennis — but my secret focus, the real target of my day, was spending time at the club, hoping Ivy would come by. Sometimes she did. Even now, without the slightest difficulty, I can summon up in my mind a complete, five-sensed portrait of Ivy McAllister at the age of fourteen. She had long red curly hair she never tied back and that she tossed around in a manner that would've seemed affected in another girl her age. But Ivy had no self-consciousness; she was like her father in that one respect. She knew she was pretty and saw no reason to hide it. When she played tennis, with a girlfriend or sometimes, under duress or the promise of shopping money, with her mother, she wore short white tennis skirts and tiny white socks and filling the space between them was all creamy, freckle-dusted leg. The tennis court was the best chance I had of seeing her, now that school was out, although I occasionally caught a glimpse of her in the park, at night, drinking peppermint schnapps with a bunch of eighteen-year-old guys who, I could tell, were also in love with her.

What I couldn't tell was whether Ivy really liked them or not. It didn't seem to matter to her what anybody thought, not her friends, not the eighteen-year-olds, and certainly not me, and in this respect she was unlike the other girls I knew. No other girl could match her ease, her self-confidence, or how calmly she inhabited herself, so completely comfortable inside her own skin. It's hard to explain what I mean by this. I've tried talking about it once or twice to friends and wound up clamming up after seeing their stares. Years later, a girl I knew at school said, in an angry blurt, “Jesus, Kyle, you love her because you never got to sleep with her and you know you never will. If she weren't gone you wouldn't think she was so great.” I denied it, but maybe the girl was right. I really don't know.

A typical conversation with Ivy involved me stammering, trying to say her name, and her laughing, waving, and walking on. I'm not sure either of us ever got to the stage of actual words. And to be honest, I didn't even mind her laughing at me. Her laughter wasn't mean; it was more like a basic acknowledgment of the gulf between her world and mine, a gulf that I did not dispute. I knew I didn't have a chance with her, and she knew it, so what else was there to say?

Meanwhile my father played tennis with Frank all that summer, and the next, and the next. He lost constantly, endlessly, cheerfully. Some matches were closer than others, but the final outcome was never really in question.

“Get you next time,” he'd say to Frank at the end of every match.

“Sure thing, buddy!” Frank would say, and shake my father's hand. I think he liked knowing he could always win, and it wasn't so easy that he didn't have to try. As for my father, he'd been trying for years to put together a jigsaw puzzle he'd bought at a stoop sale in New York City: a 10,000-piece picture of a Jackson Pollock painting, each piece an identical dribble of red and brown and black. He'd never been deterred by lost causes.

Over the years and matches, my father and I transformed Frank McAllister, and my father's inability to beat him, into a legend. He never mentioned Frank without referring to him as his nemesis. One time, at Christmas, when we ran into him and his other daughter, Melissa, at the mall, my father greeted him by extending his arm, as if about to strike his killer forehand, and exclaiming loudly, “If it isn't my tennis nemesis, Frank McAllister!” Melissa, who was thirteen and by some accident of chin length or nose placement nowhere near as pretty as Ivy, scowled at me and snapped her gum. Her father laughed heartily — he was always laughing heartily — but I'm not sure he knew what a nemesis was, or if my father was joking, or whether the whole thing was good or bad. My father didn't care. He worked in advertising and was a coiner of words, an inventor of slogans, a singer of jingles, and once he'd decided that Frank was his nemesis, his nemesis he stayed. We came to use “McAllister” as a code at home, a term referring to some long-desired but impossible goal. A McAllister was like a Pyrrhic victory or a Sisyphean task. It was a mythological situation.

“Going to get an A on that history paper, Kyle?” my father would say, only asking so I could answer him with the code.

“I'm hoping so, Dad, but I think it's a McAllister. Mr. Martin's a tough grader.”

“Don't give up,” he'd say, clapping me on the back. “Even McAllister will fall one day!”

Yet however large a place Frank McAllister assumed in our conversations, however grand a figure he became, however tightly he was wound into our family lore, he and my father never socialized off the court. It wasn't that they didn't get along, only that tennis was the single thing they had in common. Frank and his wife, Beth Ann, were younger than my parents and ran with a different crowd. Beth Ann was a professional caterer whose contributions to bake sales and potlucks were intimidatingly accomplished, while my mother brought Pepperidge Farm cookies to everything. She was an archivist, and at school functions, while other mothers congregated around the food to gossip, she would corner the librarian and discuss acid-free paper.

I was an only child, and both my parents treated family life as an enjoyable, if time-consuming, hobby. I knew them as relaxed, imperturbable, and lazy, and both liked and loved them. I also loved that because my mother was sick of driving me around she encouraged me to get my driver's license as soon as possible and practically forced the car keys into my hand. I used to spend hours on the weekends cruising around the neat suburban streets in my mother's Toyota, passing parks and pools and tennis courts and strip malls while pretending I wasn't just making a big loop around Ivy McAllister's house.

One day when I was seventeen, I finally parked the car. Ivy came to the door wearing a pink tank top whose straps seemed almost to blend into the pale freckles on her shoulders. My courage failed me, and I didn't ask her out; I couldn't. Instead, I asked her to play tennis, which seemed less wildly implausible than asking her out on a date. She shrugged and said, “Sure.” We were sort of friends by then, I guess — or at least we knew each other well in the way kids do who grow up in the same neighborhood, know the same people, see each other all the time without ever really talking to each other that much. At seventeen, Ivy still wore her hair long, but now she gathered it in a high ponytail that shook when she laughed, which was often, and that showed off her pretty, freckled cheeks. She agreed to play tennis with me, I found out, because she was on some kick involving exercise. She told me she had a new dream, of joining the youth tour in tennis, a dream I would've taken more seriously if she hadn't also taken up smoking.

The first time we played together, we hit the ball back and forth a few times for practice, then she told me to go ahead and serve. I watched her tuck a ball into the pocket of her short white skirt, bouncing my own ball against my racket a few times. I was torn between wanting to show her that I could play well and not wanting to beat her. Ivy crouched, an unusually serious look of concentration on her face, then nodded encouragingly, and I served. But instead of even trying to return it she straightened up, stood perfectly still, and watched the ball come to her, with a calm evaluating smile. The ball hit the court and then slapped against the fence behind her, all without her moving a muscle.

“Just checking out your technique,” she said, and this completely unnerved me. She lost that first point, but it took me the next four to get any rhythm going.

I think the psychology of the contest was the only part that interested her. She'd had plenty of lessons and her strokes were decent, but after a few minutes her attention would wander, making her miss easy shots. Soon enough I found out why. The reason she was into playing tennis now was that she was in love with a guy named Patrick Goddard. He also played tennis, and he was as out of her league — he was twenty-one and home from school for the summer — as she was out of mine. Before long she started telling me about him as we sat under an oak tree in the park, drinking water (me) and smoking (her), after tennis. There is a very specific hell reserved for teenaged boys, and it involves hearing the closest confidences of a girl you're in love with, feeling her unburden herself to you, get close to you, all the while knowing that the reason she can talk to you so freely is that she'll never want to kiss you, that the thought never even crosses her mind. It's hell but an exquisite one, is all I can say about it.

“I'm like completely fed up with all this bullshit,” is the kind of thing Ivy would say to me after tennis. She still said whatever she wanted, and didn't seem to care what other people thought, and now she swore a lot, too. The combination of her tennis outfits and her dirty mouth made me faint with desire. “I want to move on to bigger things. Don't you want to get the hell out of this suburban shithole?”

“I don't know. What are you talking about, exactly?”

“Hey, do you ever wonder if animals have souls?”

“Not really.”

“Ha! Me either,” she said, lying back on the grass and revealing an almost unbearable amount of thigh. “I'm so sick of stupid high-school stoners asking stupid questions like that when they get high, and thinking it's so deep. I want to have a real conversation with, like, an adult.”

“Okay. What about?”

“I meant with Patrick.”

“Oh.”

“No offense.”

“None taken,” I'd say, which both was and wasn't a lie.

Every once in a while we'd run into Frank and my father at the club. That summer they'd sometimes play doubles with my mother and a woman named Eleanor MacElvoy, who was a guidance counselor at our school. Beth Ann's catering business had taken off, Frank said, so she was working nights and weekends, but there were rumors this was a cover-up. Ivy never said anything about it.

“It's the Big Macs!” Frank McAllister would cry out as he bounded onto the court. Eleanor MacElvoy was a strapping young Scottish woman with long blond hair she wore in a single braid. She'd told me I should consider medical school — I wanted to study history — because there was going to be a medical shortage in rural communities and I could get somebody else to pay for it. She was constantly doling out these harebrained ideas she apparently thought were helpful.

“That cow,” Ivy said, watching her. “I told her I wanted to be a news anchor, and she told me I should consider being a certified public accountant because math was my highest grade last term. I told her to kiss my certified public ass.”

Hellish as these long talks under shady trees were, I would have withstood them forever; but Ivy wasn't as content as I was to know when she was out of her league. And in a way she was right; there was no such thing as being out of her league. She was seventeen and gorgeous. She got Patrick Goddard to notice her, then to watch her, then to tease her and be teased back, then to ask her out. I watched all of it. I watched Patrick Goddard, who was a good-looking, callow asshole, charm the pants off Ivy — I mean literally, in his Stingray after tennis, right in the parking lot of the club. They drank together in his car, Ivy being too young to go to bars, and in the movies, and in the park, and Ivy, I noticed miserably, seemed happy.

Ivy and I still played every once in a while, but only, I think, because she didn't want to cut me off immediately after reaching her objective; she was trying to be polite, or sensitive, or something. The talks under the trees got shorter, though. During one of the last ones, I asked her — emboldened by my understanding that the talks were coming to an end — whether she was having real, adult conversations with Patrick Goddard. She just looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. Then she said, “Look, girls have to get experience somehow. And high school guys — no offense, but they don't know what the hell they're doing. The guys at school, they'll get drunk and feel me up and I'll be like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I feel like saying, ‘Hey, what are you even trying to accomplish down there?’ I almost feel bad for them, and that's not a good thing to have happen. You know why?”

I didn't.

“You wind up giving it away out of pity,” she said flatly. “And pity, Kyle, is the worst.”

But Ivy was wrong. It wasn't the worst, not at all, not even in the same neighborhood. The worst was that one morning I came down to find my parents standing in the kitchen. The phone had just rung. Generally my parents ignored me at breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and refusing to make any conversation whatsoever until they'd finished their first cups of coffee. On this day, though, my mother was actually cooking, frying eggs and sausages, and pouring glasses of juice. I sat down and started to eat without asking any questions.

After watching me for a few minutes, my father cleared his throat and spoke. “Ivy McAllister died last night in a car accident,” he said. “She and Patrick Goddard were driving home at midnight and he lost control of the car. They hit the highway median and rolled over. Patrick's in critical condition but he's going to survive. We just heard from one of the neighbors.”

I put my fork down. It was years before I ate eggs again. “He was drunk,” I said.

“They didn't say anything about that,” my father said in a measured tone.

My mother looked at me. “What makes you say that?”

“I just know,” I said.

I left the house and drove around for hours, all that day and well into the night, passing through all the dark, safe, suburban streets, and when I got back at one in the morning my parents were sitting straight-backed on the couch, waiting for me to come home.

Neither my father nor I returned to the tennis club for the rest of the summer. He was obviously not going to play with Frank, and I planned never to go back to the tennis club ever in my life. My plan was to avoid all the places I had ever seen Ivy; that way, I reasoned, it wouldn't be so glaringly obvious she was gone. I was helped in this line of thought by the fact that I was leaving home at the end of August. I had another terrible summer job, packing boxes in a factory, and worked as much overtime as I could, exhausting myself day and night.

When my father drove me to college he tried to get me to talk about her — he knew how I felt, and I knew he knew — but I just wouldn't, or couldn't, and I never did. Even over the years, even after I went back to the club, I never talked about Ivy with my parents, and if the subject came up with people from school, people who'd also known her, I changed the subject or left the room. I only rarely talked about her, with people who'd never met her; it was as if she belonged to me, and couldn't be shared.

My father and I stopped using “McAllister” as a code word, and so far as I know he never played with Frank again. They lost touch, and anyway it wasn't as if they were ever really friends; they just played tennis together for three years. My father played with a rotating succession of partners and, when I was home in the summers, with me. We slipped into long, lazy matches in which we focused as much on maintaining long rallies as we did on hitting good shots; there was a harmony between us, on and off the court, that only increased the older I got. Though I'd been playing tennis all my life, it was in those later years, after I graduated from school, that I really fell in love with the game, its easy back and forth, the thud and twang of racket strings, the shadows of trees over an asphalt court on an otherwise sunny day. There was no more graceful moment, I came to see, than the finite silence of the ball before it hit and bounced, no more satisfying equation than a strong serve meeting a stronger return. It was like my father always said: it was a game of finesse.

Of course we saw the McAllisters from time to time, in the store or on the street, and news of them reached us now and then. What happened was that Frank, to no one's great surprise, left Beth Ann for Eleanor MacElvoy. Beth Ann kept the house and was given custody of Melissa. Frank had two more kids with Eleanor, strapping, poorly behaved blond children, according to my mother, who thought Beth Ann had gotten the short end of the marital stick. I couldn't help wondering if he would've gone through with leaving Beth Ann if it hadn't been for Ivy dying. But of course there was no telling. The world would have been different in a million ways if she hadn't died, and that was only one of them.

As I got older I came home less often — saddled by job commitments and, eventually, family ones as well — but always visited at least once in the summer, and my father and I always played tennis when I did. The game grew into a staged ritual for us, less sport than ceremony, a language each of us spoke best with the other. My father stood practically glued to the baseline with stiff knees, his old man's legs seeming too thin to support the rest of his body. He'd stretch his arms out far, then farther, to return my shots, with his feet unmoving, and if one made it past him, which happened all the time, he'd only shrug. He'd grown philosophical to an intense degree. Then, in his seventy-fifth year, he was diagnosed with cancer and soon became too sick from the treatments to play. Over a period of months he grew thinner, older, sicker, and a year later, philosophical even then, he said good-bye to us and died.

My mother and I shared the work that followed his death: arranging the funeral, settling the estate, selling the house. She was going to live with her sister out West, and I wasn't going to be coming home anymore, not to this home, anyway.

On a windless, quiet Sunday I went to hit a few last balls at the club with Anil Chaudury, who still lived in town. It was a cool July afternoon; a front had blown through the night before, and the air still held the wetness of it. We served a few balls, slowly, no hurry. On the next court over, a father was yelling instructions to his teenaged son, and I stared at them for a second, awash in memory, before realizing that the father was Frank McAllister. He'd grown stout in his middle years, his face rounder and redder, and his hair was almost gone; but he still ran back and forth to the net like a bounding Labrador, and was trying to teach his son to do the same. The boy was thin and freckled and had very blond hair. He looked around fifteen.

Does it make any sense to say that although I was grieving for my father — whom I had the joy of loving and of knowing well, as a friend and as a parent — it was at that moment, thinking about Ivy, that I thought my heart would break? All of a sudden I was fighting back tears. It seemed crazy to me that I had gone on living without her all these years, that the world had somehow kept functioning, that anyone had grown reconciled to the death of a seventeen-year-old girl. From the other side of the net, Anil asked if I was okay. I lifted my palm to him, asking for a pause, then walked over to Frank McAllister and said hello.

“Hey there!” he said right away, holding out his hand. “How are you?” He seemed so happy to see me that I didn't realize at first he had no idea who I was. He was just that kind of guy — a meeter and greeter — and he never turned it off.

“Kyle Hoffman,” I said. “You used to play tennis with my dad.”

“Is that a fact.” He stood there nodding and grinning.

“Dean Hoffman,” I said. “You were his nemesis.”

“Nemesis!” Frank McAllister said, shaking his head in hearty amusement. He didn't have a clue what I was talking about.

“I was a friend of Ivy's,” I said.

The smile never left his face. It had been false to begin with, and it stayed false. “Well, nice to see you,” he said, and shook my hand again.

I saw that he didn't want to hear that I'd known Ivy or— which I'd almost said — that I'd loved her. He didn't want to talk about her any more than I wanted to talk about her with the people she and I had gone to high school with. He wanted her to belong to him, too.

“Dad,” his son called from the other side of the net, “can I get a drink?”

“Sure thing, kiddo,” Frank said.

“You want to hit a few balls?” I said.

“Hey, that sounds great!” Frank said. “I'm in the book. Give me a call.”

“I meant right now,” I said. “Unless you're too tired.”

He watched his kid, who was talking to another teenager over by the Coke machine, and nodded. He looked winded from all his bounding, but I could tell he didn't want to admit it. “Sure thing,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

I ran over and explained to Anil that I was going to play with my father's old partner for a few minutes. He hadn't kept up his game and looked relieved, wandering over to the sidelines.

I took my place at the baseline. Frank McAllister was bouncing the ball against his racket, getting ready to serve. As I crouched there, I began trembling with anger. I wanted to beat the shit out of Frank McAllister, humiliate him in front of his kid, make him feel tired and pathetic. I knew I could do it, too; he looked out of breath and old. I wanted to beat him not because he wouldn't talk about Ivy but because he didn't remember my father. We had mythologized the McAllisters, had loved them, and he didn't even know who we were, just as Ivy had never known who I was, not really, never cared to find out before she'd gone off and died. To the McAllisters we were nothing. The world, I thought then, is divided into sides just like a tennis court is: into winners and losers, into forgetters and forgotten.

I realized that my father had always known which side he was on, and he didn't care. He was even, I thought, proud. All around me was the sound of his game, of rubber soles and asphalt and the hiccup of a ball crashing into the net; and, beyond that, the sound of the suburbs on a summer afternoon, the lawn mowers and radios and family conversations. Across the court, Frank McAllister asked me if I was ready.

“Sure thing,” I said, and prepared myself to lose.