The Return of Service

The Return of Service

I am in a tennis match against my father. He is also the umpire and comes to my side of the court to advise me of the rules. “You have only one serve,” he says. “My advice is not to miss.” I thank him — we have always been a polite family — and wait for his return to the opposing side. Waiting for him to take his place in the sun, I grow to resent the limitation imposed on my game. (Why should he have two serves, twice as many chances, more margin for error?) I bounce the ball, waiting for him — he takes his sweet time, always has — and plan to strike my first service deep to his forehand. And what if I miss, what if ambition overreaches skill? The ordinary decencies of a second chance have been denied me.

“Play is in,” says the umpire.

The irreversibility of error gives me pause. It may be the height of folly to attempt the corner of his service box — my shoulder a bit stiff from the delay — and risk losing the point without a contest. The moral imperative in a challenge match is to keep the ball in play. If I aim the service for the optical center of his box, margin for error will move it right or left, shallow or deep, some small or remarkable distance from its failed intention. Easily enough done. Yet there is a crowd watching and an unimaginative, riskless service will lower their regard for me. My opponent’s contempt, as the night the day, would follow.

I can feel the restiveness of the crowd. The umpire holds his pocket watch to his ear. “Play is in,” he says again. “Play is in, but alas it is not in.”

It is my father, the umpire, a man with a longstanding commitment to paradox.

Paradox will take a man only so far. How can my father be in the judge’s chair and on the other side of the net at the same time? One of the men resembling my father is an imposter. Imposture is an old game with him. No matter the role he takes, he has the trick of showing the same face.

I rush my first serve and fault, a victim of disorientation, the ball landing two, perhaps three, inches deep. I plan to take a second serve as a form of protest — a near miss rates a second chance in my view — and ready myself for the toss.

The umpire blows his whistle. “Over and done,” he says. “Next point.”

This one seems much too laconic to be my father, a man who tends to carry his case beyond a listener’s capacity to suffer his words. (Sometimes it is hard to recognize people outside the context in which you generally experience them.) I indicate confusion, a failed sense of direction, showing my irony to the few sophisticates in the audience, disguising it from the rest.

My latest intuition is that neither man is my father, but that both, either by circumstance or design, are stand-ins for him, conventional surrogates.

I protest to the umpire the injustice of being allowed only a single service.

“I’m sorry life isn’t fair,” he says.

I can tell he isn’t sorry, or if he is, it is no great burden of sorrow.

The toss is a measure low and somewhat behind me. Concentrated to a fine degree, I slice the ball into the backhand corner of my father’s box. The old man, coming out of his characteristic crouch, slides gracefully to his left and though the ball is by him, he somehow manages to get it back. A short lob, which I put away, smashing the overhead at an acute angle, leaving no possibility of accidental return.

A gratifying shot. I replay it in the imagination. The ball in the air, a lovely arc. The player, myself, stepping back to let it bounce, then, racket back, waiting for the ball to rise again, uncharacteristically patient, feeling it lift off the ground, swelling, rising, feeling myself rise with the ball. My racket, that extension of myself, meets the ball at its penultimate height as if they had arranged in advance to meet at that moment and place, the racket delivering the message, the ball the message itself. I am the agent of their coming together, the orchestrator of their perfect conjunction.

I didn’t want to leave that point to play another, hated to go on to what, at its best, would be something less. I offered to play the point again. There was some conversation about my request, a huddle of heads at the umpire’s chair. The crowd, in traditional confusion, applauded.

The decision was to go on. My father advised, and I appreciated his belated concern, against living in the past.

What a strange man! I wondered if he thought the same about me, and if he did — strange men hold strange opinions — was there basis in fact for his view of my strangeness?

We were positioned to play the third point of the first game.

It was getting dark and I expected that time would be called after this exchange or after the next. If I won the first of what I had reason to believe would be the last two points, I was assured of at least a draw. Not losing had always been my main objective. Winning was merely a more affirmative statement of the same principle. I took refuge in strategy, thought to tame the old man at his own game. (I kept forgetting that it wasn’t really him, only somebody curiously like him.)

I took a practice toss, which drew a reprimand from the umpire’s chair. I said I was sorry, mumbled my excuses. It’s not something, the toss of a ball, you have any hope of undoing when done. “This is for real,” I said.

My credibility was not what it had been. I could feel the murmurs of disbelief whistling through the stands, an ill wind.

“Let’s get the road on the show,” said the umpire.

My service, impelled by anger, came in at him, the ball springing at his heart, requiring a strategic retreat. I underestimated his capacity for survival. His return, surprising in itself, was forceful and deep, moving me to the backhand corner, against my intention to play there, with disadvantageous haste. “Good shot,” I wanted to say to him, though there wasn’t time for that.

There’s hardly ever time, I thought, to do the graceful thing.

I was busy in pursuit of the ball (my failure perhaps was compliment enough), staving off defeat. Even if I managed the ball’s return, and I would not have run this far without that intention, the stroke would not have enough arm behind it to matter. It would merely ask my opponent for an unforced error, a giving up of self-interest.

There were good reasons, then, not to make the exceptional effort necessary to put the ball in my father’s court, and if I were a less stubborn man (or a more sensible one), I would not have driven myself in hopeless pursuit. My return was effected by a scooplike shot off the backhand, an improvised maneuver under crisis conditions. Wherever the ball would go, I had done the best I could.

My father tapped the ball into the open court for the point.

His gentleness and restraint were a lesson to us all.

I was more dangerous — my experience about myself — coming from behind. Large advantages had always seemed to me intolerable burdens.

The strain of being front-runner was beginning to tell on my father. His hair had turned white between points, was turning whiter by the moment, thinning and whitening. I perceived this erratic acceleration in the aging process as another one of his strategies. He was a past master in evoking guilt in an adversary.

The umpire was clearing his throat, as a means of attracting attention to himself. “Defecate or desist from the pot,” he said, winking at the crowd.

Such admonishments were intolerable. He had never let me do anything at my own time and pace. As if in speeded-up motion, I smashed the ball past my opponent — he seemed to be looking the wrong way — for the first service ace of the match.

There was no call from the umpire, the man humming to himself some private tune. We looked at each other a moment without verbal communication, a nod of understanding sufficient. I was readying the toss for the next serve when he called me back. “Let’s see that again,” he said.

Why again?

“Didn’t see it p’raps should. However didn’t. ‘Pologize.” He wiped some dampness from the corner of his eye with a finger.

I could see that he was trying to be fair, trying against predilection to control all events in his path, to perceive history as if it were the prophecy of his will.

I said I would play the point over, though under protest and with perceptible displeasure.

“I will not have this match made into a political spectacle,” the umpire said. He gestured me back to the deuce court, world weary and disapproving, patient beyond human forbearance.

I would only accept the point, I said, if it were awarded to me in the proper spirit. I had already agreed to play it again and would not retract that agreement.

The umpire, my father, crossed his arms in front of him, an implacable figure. “Are we here to argue or play tennis?” he asked no one in particular.

I started to protest, then said “Oh forget it” and returned to the court he had gestured me to, embarrassed at getting my way. I was about to toss the ball for the serve when I noticed that my opponent was sitting cross-legged just inside his own service box.

I asked the umpire if time had been called and he said, “Time calls though is almost never called to account,” which made little sense in my present mood. My father, I remembered, tended to treat words as if they were playthings.

“Are you ready?” I shouted across the net. “I’m going to serve. “

My opponent cocked his head as if trying to make out where the voice was coming from.

“I’m going to count to five,” I said, “and then put the ball into play. One…”

There was no point in counting — the old man had no intention of rousing himself — though I was of the mind that one ought to complete what one started. I wasn’t going to be the one to break a promise.

I finished counting in a businesslike way and served the ball. “Indeed,” said my father as it skittered off his shoe. The point was credited to my account.

My father stood in the center of the court, arms out, eyes toward the heavens, asking God what he had done to deserve ingratitude.

I would not let him shame me this time, not give him that false advantage.

The umpire coughed while my father got himself ready, dusting off the seat of his shorts, combing his hair.

I hit the next serve into the net cord, the ball catapulting back at me. I caught it with a leap, attracting the crowd’s applause.

“Deuce,” said the umpire with his characteristic ambiguity.

I had lost count, thought I was either ahead or behind, felt nostalgic for an earlier time when issues tended to have decisive resolutions.

I suspected the umpire not of bias, not so much that, no more than anyone’s, but of attempting to prolong the match beyond its natural consequence.

The umpire spoke briefly, and not without eloquence, on the need to set our houses in order. “Sometimes wounds have to be healed in the process.” He spoke as if the healing of wounds was at best a necessary evil.

My opponent said the present dispute was a family matter and would be decided at home if his prodigal son returned to the fold.

What prodigal son? I was too old, too grown up, to live with my parents. I had, in fad, a family of my own somewhere which, in the hurlyburly of getting on, I had somehow misplaced. “Why not stop play at this point,” I said, “and continue the match at a later date under more convivial circumstances. Or…”

“What alternative, sir, are you proposing?” said my father from the umpire’s chair, a hint of derision in the query.

I had planned to say that I would accept a draw, though thought it best to let the suggestion emerge elsewhere.

“I will not be the first one to cry enough.” said my father.

“Don’t look to me for concessions. On the other hand…”

The umpire interrupted him. “The match will continue until one of the contestants demonstrates a clear superiority.” His message was announced over the loudspeaker and drew polite applause from the gallery.

My plan was to alternate winning and losing points. There was nothing to be gained, I thought, in beating him decisively and no need to take the burden of a loss on myself.

If I won the deuce point, I could afford to give away the advantage. I could afford to give it away so long as I created the illusion that it was being taken from me.

“Can’t win for losing,” I quipped after the second deuce. “Deuces are wild,” I said after the fourth tie.

These remarks seemed to anger my adversary. He spat into the wind, sending some of it my way, swore to teach me a lesson in manners. When he lost the next point after an extended rally he flung his racket and threw himself to the ground, lamenting his limitations and the blind malignity of chance.

I turned my back, embarrassed for him, and kicked a few balls to show that I was not without passion myself.

I had served the last add point into the net and assumed a repetition of that tactic would invite inordinate suspicion among an ordinarily wary and overbred audience. My inclination was to hit the serve wide to the backhand, an expression of overreaching ambition, beyond reproach.

A poor toss — the ball thrown too close — defeated immediate intention. I swung inside out (as they say in baseball when a batter hits an inside pitch to the opposite field), a desperation stroke whose only design was to go through the motions of design. (Perhaps this is rationalization after the fact. The deed, of course, manifests the intention.) The ball, which had no business clearing the net, found the shallow corner of his box, ticking the line. As if anticipating my accidental shot, he came up quickly. He seemed to have a way of knowing what I was going to do — perhaps it was in the blood — even before I knew myself. He was coming up, his thin knotted legs pushing against the artificial surface as he drove himself forward. There was a small chance that he might reach the ball on its first bounce, the smallest of chances.

His moment arrived and was gone.

My father swung majestically and connected with space, with platonic delusion, the ball moving in its own cycle, disconnected from his intention.

Game and match to the challenger. My father came to the net on the run as is the fashion, hand outstretched. We never did get to shake hands, our arms passing like ships in the night. “I was lucky,” I said. “That serve had no business going where it did.”

He looked through me, said in the iciest of voices, “I’m grateful for your lesson,” and walked off.

Murmurs went through the gallery, an ominous buzzing sound. I asked one of the linesmen, a sleepy old man with thick glasses, what the murmurs signified.

“Well, sir,” he wheezed, “this may be out of line, my saying this, but there’s some feeling among the old heads that your final service was not in the best traditions of fair play.”

I was perfectly willing to concede the point, I said, an unintentional ambiguity. “Why don’t we call the match a stalemate.”

The old linesman said that it was not within his authority to grant such dispensation. He suggested that I talk directly to my father.

“If I could talk directly to my father, if either of us could talk to the other, we would never have gotten into this match.” (That wasn’t wholly true. Sometimes you said things because they had a pleasant turn to them.)

“Sir,” said the linesman, “a broken heart is not easily repaired.”

I walk up and down the now-deserted corridors of the stadium, looking for the old man. He is, as always, deceptively difficult to find.

Someone comes up to me in the dark and asks if I’d be interested in a match against an aggressive and skillful opponent.

I say that I am looking for my father; perhaps another time. “Hold on,” he says, holding me by the shoulder. “What’s this father of yours look like? An old dude passed here maybe ten minutes ago, tears running down his ancient face.”

“The old man was crying?”

“Crying! Jesus, the falls of Niagara were nothing to those tears. I mean, it was not a good scene.”

I try to get by, but my companion, a younger man with a vicelike grip, holds fast. “Excuse me,” I say.

“After we play, we’ll talk,” says my companion. “I want to show you my new serve.”

I am in no mood to look at serves and say so in a kind way, not wanting to hurt his feelings or not wanting to hurt them to excess.

“I may be your last chance, pal,” the kid says in his brash way.

“To count on chances beyond the second is to live a life of unreproved illusion.”

His remark, like most nonsense, has a ring of truth.

I return to the playing area alongside my insinuating companion.

We take our places on opposing sides of center court, though I have not at any time, by word or sign, agreed to play him.

My father, or someone like him, is again in the umpire’s chair and announces, after a few preliminary hits, that the match is begun.

It is the moment I’ve been waiting for. “I have not agreed to play this young man a match,” I say. “This is not a contest for which I feel the slightest necessity.”

My refusal to play either comes too late or goes unheard. My opponent has already tossed the ball for his service, a brilliant toss rising like a sun to the highest point of his extension. The meeting of racket and ball resounds through the stadium like the crash of cymbals.

The ball is arriving. Before I can ready myself, before I can coordinate arm and racket, before I can coordinate mind and arm, the ball will be here and gone, a dream object, receding into the distance like a ghost of the imagination. The first point is lost. And so the game. And so the match. Waiting for the ball’s arrival — it is on the way, it has not yet reached me — I concede nothing.