Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  The pro nodded and winked at me. He suggested I try the Wilson pro staff model, the closest to the width and thickness of the antique woodies. “This is what Stefan Edberg uses. It’s still got plenty of power,” he commented dryly.

  Before making the trip downtown, I had stopped by Paragon on Union Square and, with some difficulty, bought plain white shorts. I couldn’t find a single plain shirt, so I wore one of my white polos. I had wrongly assumed the dress code at a place called the Wall Street Racquet Club would be white. In fact, I saw no other player in white. Copley showed up in a black and purple nylon matching outfit: black warm-up jacket with purple piping over a black shirt with a purple lightning bolt; black warm-up pants with zippers up the legs so they could be pulled off over his sneakers to reveal black shorts with purple piping.

  “You changed already?” he said as a greeting.

  “I came like this.”

  “Do you have a change of clothes?” His tone was curt and commanding, as if I were his child.

  For a yes, I showed him my bag.

  “Here,” he gestured for me to give it to him. “I’ll put it in my locker.” He turned to the clerk. “We have Court One?”

  “Yes, Mr. Copley,” the clerk said, although Stick hadn’t announced himself.

  Copley disappeared into the lockers briefly. Returning, he led me onto the courts. When we passed through the rotating doors into the bubbles, my ears popped. Along with the roar of air-conditioning (outside the temperature had reached ninety-five) it felt as if we were in a jet. “How did it go with Andy?” Copley asked. He put his large tennis bag on a wood bench to the side of the net and opened it. He followed the serious tennis player’s equipment recommendation to the letter: he brought two identical wide-body racquets for alternating use to maintain equal string tension in case one broke during play. (It was no surprise, by the way, that he hadn’t offered me his spare racquet. Copley wasn’t the sort of person who would allow another man to handle his phallus, even a spare phallus.) I didn’t answer his question, apparently preoccupied by stretching my legs. He opened two cans of soft-surface balls for us to rally. I was nervous. I had played a lot of tennis as a teenager, but that was a long time ago. Stick watched me, bent over, moaning as I failed to touch my toes. When I didn’t answer right away, he tried again. “You talked to Andy?”

  I straightened and nodded. I arched to the left, my right hand reaching toward the opposite shoulder, like an ungainly ballerina.

  “And? Was it helpful?”

  “It was okay,” I said doubtfully, as if it weren’t.

  “He was helpful?”

  Again, I seemed reluctant to answer. I nodded and said, “You’ll have to be patient with me for the first fifteen minutes or so. I haven’t hit a ball in awhile.”

  He dropped his chin a little and stared up, from the shadow of the bony ledge of his brow, into my eyes. The look was insistent, as if he were trying to instill confidence. He handed me three of the new balls. “We’ll hit and get the rust out.”

  He stretched a little on his side before stroking the first ball to me. I hardly bothered to hit it back hard, merely tried to meet the ball cleanly. My swing was late. I put so little weight into it, I expected my shot not to clear the net. Instead, the ball fled from my strings and carried over to the service line. The power in the racquet was astonishing. Stick leaned into my shot. His reply was past me before I knew it. I hit the next two balls into the bottom of the net. The light racquet had me out in front. Copley made no effort to help me. He stepped into every ball, his form graceful, a picture from a primer for topspin tennis: full shoulder turn, racquet face closed, sweeping from low to high. He used topspin to keep the shots in court, but he was also meeting the ball on the rise, his follow-through relatively level. He wasn’t rallying, he was hitting winners.

  After ten minutes of humiliation—my shots returned out of my reach to the corners, or my balls sailing long, nearly to the back wall—I abandoned hitting with topspin. I tried the old slice forehand, a shot that I knew (from watching professional tennis) had died out with the new technology of the racquets. Instead of the characteristic high bounce of a topspin stroke, my slice skipped away from Copley, staying low. Off-balance, he smashed it into the bottom of the net. He paused, stared at the mark on the clay where it had landed, and shook his head. He took out another ball and hit it at me. Again, I sliced into it, hard. Sure enough, it sailed out, although by no more than six inches; I couldn’t take a full stride into the slice forehand with the lightweight racquet. In keeping with his behavior that we were playing rather than rallying, Copley didn’t go for the ball. He did, however, pay careful attention to how it bounced on the surface and quickly looked up at me. Now he understood.

  He gathered my errant ball, and, to my surprise, as if we were playing a game, avoided the new forehand I had displayed and hit to my backhand. I sliced it back defensively, again refusing to play a power game with him. My shot floated deep into his end of the court, nearly to the baseline. Copley had to wait for it. He prepared early, full shoulder turn, back foot raised slightly, head down. He put all his weight into his shot, trying to bang it back, although he was two feet behind the line. The ball smacked into the tape and fell on his side of the net.

  He likes pace. From then on, I gave him mostly low, softly hit under-spin. I used topspin only for variety. I tried to pace each reply differently. That didn’t prevent Stick from hitting what would be the occasional winner (if we had been scoring) but he also mishit a lot, starting his swing early, stubbornly anticipating the bounce of each ball, trying to drive them with maximum power, rather than judging the movement of each shot and accepting what was given.

  After a half hour, I was exhausted. I moved toward the net, intending to leave the court, calling out, “I need a drink.”

  “I’ve got water,” Copley said, coming toward me. He appeared cooler and more rested than when we began. He unzipped his warm-up jacket. I admired his strong sinewy arms and bulging pecs. He was in superb shape, not merely for a fifty-five-year-old man, but for any age. I doubt most people, with his full head of hair and lean body, despite the lines of his craggy face, would have thought him more than forty-five. He opened another compartment of his enormous rectangular black and purple tennis bag. He gave me a bottle of spring water packaged in a clear plastic container. The brand was Glacéau. There were four more in his bag. The bottle didn’t have a top that came off; instead, you had to lift a nub at the top and suck through it.

  “Like mother’s milk,” I joked, but Copley didn’t get it. Feeling foolish, I pulled the nipple out and fed. He said matter-of-factly, “You’re playing like an old man.”

  I coughed a little, starting to talk before I finished swallowing. I looked embarrassed and shrugged. “I am an old man.”

  He frowned. “Come on. You’re forty, right?”

  “Thirty-nine,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I mean the old-fashioned forehand. You can’t hit it hard.”

  “Not yet,” I said and took another pull on the water, sucking so hard the middle of the bottle momentarily collapsed. Made me feel rather sympathetic to mothers. I put the bottle into a holder for drinks attached to the net. “I will,” I said, trotting back to my side.

  He lingered for a moment at the net. He wasn’t finished with the conversation. He knew now that I hadn’t played in more than a decade. “I’m ready,” I called. He shrugged and returned to his backcourt. I tried driving the slice forehand, but Copley was correct. Too much speed and I couldn’t clear the net; too much arc and it floated long. I could only rarely hit hard and be accurate. Also, he became accustomed to its low skipping motion. His replies to the underspin were more often good and getting deeper, harder to reach each time. Topspin allowed him to hit with all his strength and still keep the ball in play. Toward the end of our practice hour, he got bored, and stopped trying to hit winners. Only when he concluded that I wasn’t a worthy adversary or a good potential partner, d
id he rally politely, sending the ball within easy reach and at less than full speed.

  The other two men appeared at ten minutes before seven. They are unimportant to an understanding of Copley except in one respect. They were both ten years younger than Stick and his equals in business, one, the head of a software company, the other, a merger and acquisitions man at an investment banking firm. That surprised me. I expected his tennis partners would be the modern equivalent of courtiers, men motivated to lose to him, lawyers who worked for him, or perhaps a less successful friend. The head of the software company wore a skintight sky blue brace on his left knee. Copley introduced me and the software man said, “So you’re the ringer, huh? Stick claims you haven’t played in a while.”

  “He hasn’t,” Stick said calmly, no rancor. “Not since you were in college, I bet.”

  “Not since high school,” I said.

  “Great,” the mergers and acquisitions man said to Copley. “He’s your partner.”

  “What’s wrong with your knee?” I asked the software man.

  He blanched at the question and answered with his head down. “It’s okay. I sprained it skiing last winter. Some jerk smashed into me. This is just a precaution.”

  We warmed them up. I hit my awkward self-conscious topspin to them, saving my underspin for the game, and kept my eyes on the side-to-side movement of Mr. Software. When he tried to push off quickly on the injured knee, there was a delay. He was stubborn, too. Although we were merely rallying, if I pulled a ball wide to his wounded side, he chased it. Mr. M&A seemed obsessed with beating Copley, clumsily trying to psyche him out. “Oh, you’re hitting ’em too hard for me!” he called whenever Copley didn’t whack the ball with every ounce of his strength. During one lull of ball gathering, he commented, “Are you doing something new with that backhand, Stick? It looks great.”

  “Nothing,” Stick answered with a smile, “and you know it.”

  I had a pleasant surprise when we practiced our serves. Here the modern racquet helped me. The extra power meant that my softer, more accurate second serve had good pace, whereas their serves seemed no faster than what I remembered from opponents of my youth. Indeed, with the new power, I could place serves wide or down the middle and retain speed, a combination that wasn’t possible in the old days for me. Stick, who had adopted a resigned air since our warm-up, was impressed. Hope returning, he whispered, as we moved to our positions to start the game, “You’ve got a good serve.”

  “We’re going to win,” I told him.

  “They’re good,” he said. “Better than you.”

  “I’m smarter,” I answered.

  The flaw in playing this gambit with Stick was that I had to come through and I wasn’t convinced I could. I needed a lot more practice, and perhaps more talent, to defeat these men. Besides, my partner Copley wasn’t superior to our opponents. In fact, I felt he was slightly inferior. Mr. Software had a lot of variety to his shots and placed them well, relying less on raw power. His consistency and the fact that he played the net superbly are both keys to winning at doubles. Copley was aggressive at net, I discovered, but rarely hit a clean winning volley, since he refused to try for angles, insisting on trying to bang them past our opponents, which he failed at more often than not.

  For the first four games, they held their two serves easily, smashing my feeble returns, and outhitting Stick, anticipating his passing shots as if they could read his swing. However, my height and reach helped me. Playing net while Copley served, I startled them with both my wingspan and my leap. Mr. M&A tried one lob. After I put it away, with an awkward but effective jump, he said, “That’s the last time I try to go over your head.” Also, my training with the more finesse game of wood helped at net. I had no trouble hitting drop volleys, or spinning them out of court. We held Stick’s serve easily. As for the game on my serve, I was able, unlike with my ground strokes, to overpower them.

  We were tied at two games all. It was soon apparent that, unfortunately, our opponents had been merely feeling us out. Beginning with the fifth game, they kept the ball away from me when I was at net and consistently hit to me when I was back, confident that my topspin ground strokes would be weak. They held their serves at love and broke Copley easily, partly because he stubbornly tried too hard to carry us by himself, and ended up overhitting. He also made mistakes while I was serving, driving what should have been two put-away volleys long. But we held my serve. We were now down five games to three, in immediate danger of losing the set.

  Before receiving Mr. Software’s first serve of the ninth game, I conferred with Copley in the backcourt. I whispered, “I’m going to hit with sidespin and underspin. I want to move him around on that knee.”

  “You think it’s bothering him?”

  “I think he won’t protect it. Do you care if I test it?”

  Stick frowned, as if I had insulted him. “Of course not.”

  Mr. Software had found my high, weak returns so easy to volley that he had been coming in behind his serve each time. He opened this game with a hard one to my backhand and followed it in. I replied with an abbreviated sidespin stroke, aiming to hit it at his feet and out wide. When he saw the low arc of my ball, he tried to stop. He tried to stop on the braced knee and it buckled as my shot passed him for a winner. He immediately stood, raising his knee off the ground. If I had blinked, I might not have noticed the collapse.

  I rushed forward and stammered, “You—you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I’ve been passed before,” he grumbled and rolled his eyes at his partner to highlight my foolishness.

  When he moved to serve the second point to Stick, I didn’t position myself at the net, instead playing back. This could be taken as an insult to Copley’s ability to return Mr. Software’s serve. And that’s how Stick took it. “You should be up,” he said.

  “No I shouldn’t,” I answered insolently.

  “Ready boys?” Mr. Software asked sarcastically.

  Copley whacked the return hard. He made a good one, driving it across court to Software. Since I was back, Software took advantage. He hit a deep topspin shot to me. Although a groundstroke was called for, I floated a high lob over M&A, to force Software to have to run to the other side. He got to it easily, returning it to me, and I continued this old-womanish tactic, mooning balls over M&A each time, so that Mr. Software had to keep shifting laterally. He was stubborn and persisted in returning them to me. The play slowed down so much that M&A had the leisure to complain, “Cut it out, girls.”

  Finally, I hit my first underspin forehand, without much pace, almost a drop shot, about twelve feet in front of Software. He couldn’t push off that knee fast enough to have a chance for it, but he tried anyway, and again his foot came down hard as he tried to reach, the knee buckling. This time he stayed down for a moment or two. He covered it by banging his racquet on the clay, as if the pose were frustration rather than physical weakness.

  Copley was shrewd, as I expected. From then on, he stopped trying, for the most part, to hit winners and resorted to lobs or short balls at Mr. Software, keeping him on the run. Software lunged at balls as he tired, in pain I suspected, and made errors. We ran off four games quickly and won the set, seven to five. Not before, however, there was another clue to Mr. Software’s immaturity about his infirmity. On the final and decisive point, although he had no hope of getting it, he recklessly chased a volley I had spun toward the alley into the netting that separates Court One and Court Two. He got tangled in the mesh, the right foot twisting, and he fell hard. We all rushed over to help. He brushed us off angrily, and insisted his ankle was okay. In fact, he was limping, wounded now in his left knee and his right foot. I suggested we quit for the night.

  “Are you nuts?” Mr. Software said. “I’m just getting loose.”

  Copley frowned at me. “We play the best two out of three.”

  Taking a break, everybody sat on the bench, produced Glacéau bottles and sucked. I fell into a reverie. Was this a clas
s difference? In Washington Heights, when we played touch football or basketball, the kind of strategy I had adopted against Mr. Software, including the meanness of the last few points, where I had deliberately varied the height and pace to force him into abrupt stops and starts, was considered fair play. Under the boards in basketball, we gathered rebounds with our sharp elbows out, whacking noses and foreheads until someone decided he’d had enough and let the sharpest elbow prevail. But an admission of injury and defeat was allowed and respected. No, this wasn’t a matter of class. I knew from Albert that code was gone from the streets. Was it also gone from the penthouse?

  For the second set, I resumed a losing strategy of hitting at Mr. M&A and returning serves to Mr. Software with topspin. Relieved by the reappearance of my feeble groundstrokes, Mr. Software strode into them. He hit two lovely winners down the line. He was certainly the best player on the court. Soon, we were behind three games to love.

  Copley brought the balls for me to serve the fourth game. We were at the rear of our court. He turned his back to our opponents. Laying the balls on my racquet, Stick spoke through his thin lips so they hardly moved. “Cut it out.”

  “Cut what out?” I said.

  “Play to win.”

  “He’ll get hurt.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He’s out of control.”

  “That’s his problem. Are you scared to win, Doctor?” Copley moved into position at the net. So be it, I decided. I spun a serve out wide to Mr. Software. He couldn’t move quickly in that direction, nor, once he made the return, could he, with alacrity, get back into position for the rest of the point. His reply was short and slow. Three-quarters of an open court were available to Copley for a winning volley. Instead, at point-blank range, he punched the ball at Mr. M&A, who tried to cover up, but got smacked in the groin. It must have smarted. Mr. M&A pretended it didn’t.

  Copley and I blooped balls or floated them out of Mr. Software’s reach, presenting him the choice of cutting back and forth to try to salvage a win, or allowing us our sneaky triumph. We won five straight games to come to within four points of victory when it happened. Mr. Software, knowing that a lazy lob of mine over his left shoulder was merely the prelude to a series of them, tried to end the point quickly with a twisting leap. He reached the ball, but came down with his foot going in one direction and his thigh in another. The knee crumpled. While he lay on the ground, Copley smashed a groundstroke at Software’s head. He missed by an inch and then pretended surprise at the spectacle of his fallen opponent. That ended our friendly game of doubles.