Free Doubles by Nic Brown Page B

hats and long layered dresses. Here was Connors with his Wilson T2000, the space-age aluminum racquet. Here was Billie Jean King still looking mostly female. Chris Everett at sixteen. And then, at the end of the hall, there were modern photos, including one of me and Kaz after our fourth win, standing with the trophy and club president at the net. Kaz looked filthy even in the photo. I towered over them both. A small brass plate read SMITH AND GLOVER, 2004 DOUBLES CHAMPIONS.
    I emerged from the back of the clubhouse, where, past a dozen metal tables beneath orange and blue striped umbrellas all tilted at
the same rakish angle, the velvet of sixteen grass courts stretched out, empty, without nets or lines. These were used for an ITA women’s tournament later in the summer, but beyond the grass courts stood the clay courts, where balls now rose over green wind-stops hung on fences, bodies rushing past, umpires sitting atop their high chairs like lifeguards of tennis. The faint pop of balls flattening for a split second against strings drifted to my perch. The C train was passing on the elevated tracks beyond, and because of the vicinity to LaGuardia, three separate aircraft were visible, roaring low in the sky. I had heard that air traffic was the primary reason the Open had finally moved to Flushing Meadows, bending to years of noise complaints from Arias and Nastase. But I didn’t believe it. Now, compared to Flushing Meadows, Forest Hills was a quaint, soundproof paradise.
    Beyond it all was the grandstand, where the finals of those Opens had been held, a majestic three-quarter circle of high, raked seating around an empty, neglected court. The crumbling structure was radiant in the morning sunlight. The stands were elegant, molded perhaps from simple concrete, but with the look of Grecian authority, sculpted eagles at precipices and an old box office window that still read TICKETS $8. Every entrance was hung with yellow caution tape.
    A teenage boy was on the stadium court practicing serves. I envied him. I wanted to run him off and step onto the court, by myself, a full hopper beside me. It was a perverse tennis desire to long to serve into an empty court, but ever since my aborted attempt with the pink ball, the desire had only increased. As I watched, the teenager sent one ball jumping into the rotting wooden backdrop, rousing a group of pigeons from the shadows. They scattered against the sky with a hollow gurgle of wings. All play these days was on the outer courts, green clay surrounded by metal bleachers
or a handful of folding chairs sparsely occupied by old men sitting alone, reading newspapers folded vertically. The grandstand was just a crumbling souvenir.
    I sat in one of those folding chairs beside Court 4; applied sunscreen to my nose, the tops of my ears, and my bald spot; and folded my own newspaper vertically.
    “Slow,” someone said. It was Malik Al Arif. A dark Moroccan with a thin black goatee. Singles. Singles players didn’t keep up with us. They just shared locker rooms. Malik told me about Morocco. It had been hot.
    “Where you been?” he said, whispering. The chairs were set so close against the fence that anything you said could be heard on court.
    “Home.”
    “You retire?”
    “No,” I said. “My wife’s sick.”
    As he spoke, the eyes of the old men suddenly all left their newspapers in a gradual collective turn of the heads, as if watching the course of the slowest tennis ball ever. But it wasn’t a tennis ball. It was a yellow dress, a freckled piece of my childhood that still made me nervous. It was Katie.
    She had almost no nose to mention—it was washed away by the sunlight—only large tortoiseshell sunglasses above a sandbar of freckles stretching from cheek to cheek. Her shoulders were boyish, square and sharp. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and a light layer of down was backlit along her jaw. It all seemed made only for summer, somewhere, anywhere. For the first