Free Doubles by Nic Brown Page A

?”
    “No. You didn’t. You just went to India and sort of looked around, pilgrimage style.”
    Kaz was gone. Manny plugged in the video camera. On screen appeared an image of me and Kaz, naked, slow dancing to Enya with the naked Indian women. Our arms reached around their waists like couples at my middle school dances. The woman whom I was dancing with let go and tapped the other on the shoulder, and they started
dancing together. Kaz and I put our arms around each other and started to slow dance. Beside me, Manny covered his face with his hands and laughed. Kaz put his head on my shoulder, and we swayed together, naked, holding each other gently. Before long, the women tore us apart, and we started dancing with them again.
    “Didn’t that feel good?” Manny said.
    I didn’t answer.
    “You don’t have to say it, but I know,” Manny said. “It felt good.”
    In the bathroom I found that someone had written SLOW’S PENIS in magic marker on my penis. I knew who had written it, too. It was my handwriting. I stared at the letters and wondered what I would have been doing at home. I knew. I would have been doing nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror, haggard and nervous and thrilled. Manny was right. I felt alive, dangerous. Free. I had my name written on my penis, and it did feel good.

9
    OFF THE SUBWAY in Queens, I emerged from a covered bridge to a cobblestone courtyard surrounded by buildings with exposed beams set against stucco, as if they had been constructed from gingerbread and frosting. Trees hung low over narrow streets. It was like I’d entered some Tudor fiefdom, a tony fairyland in Queens. Forest Hills. An English village off the G train.
    I rushed through four tree-lined blocks to the West Side Tennis Club. This was hallowed tennis ground. The U.S. Open had been held here until 1977, when Connors beat Vilas in a match played two months after I was born. Back when tennis meant wooden racquets and serve and volley, when the Open was played on grass, players rustling silently over manicured lawns just browning at the service line and net, when the crowds were hushed masses from country clubs. White balls. And the smell, I knew the smell; it was still the smell here, and at Wimbledon, at Queen’s Club, Newport. It was still the smell in Chapel Hill beside my mother’s lawn in late afternoons in the summer. It was the fragrance of a freshly mowed lawn.
    They still had challenger tournaments at Forest Hills, lower-level professional events for journeymen warming up for the majors. Kaz and I had won our first tournament ever here, in 2000, and had won the doubles title for six years in a row. We had never lost a match here. It was a club record.

    From the curb, the clubhouse was small and low-lying, another gingerbread construction of timber and plaster overgrown with ivy and saddled with courts on either side. Like a country house in the Cotswolds, a lodge for the weary of Queens. It reminded me of the club near my house as a child, where Katie and I had lifeguarded in the afternoons before fox-trotting at Junior Assembly at night.
    Manny stayed behind to meet with a prospective client. I wondered if it wasn’t some masked sexual escapade. Inside, a woman sat behind a massive wooden desk wearing a yellow shirt with crabs printed on it, pearls nestled into leathery cleavage. She smiled in an offhand way at me, as if she barely had time. I felt unofficial and embarrassed, naked without my tennis bag. The hallway was completely empty. The building was silent. I thought she might recognize me when I asked about Kaz, but she only said, “The Chinaman?”
    I nodded.
    “Court Four.”
    As she watched me pass, she wiped her hands on the tops of her breasts. I wondered if that was standard for women with sweaty palms. I hoped it was.
    The hallway was lined with photos. Bill Tilden in 1926 playing in an actual tennis sweater. Champion women whom I could not identify floating across the lawns in large floppy