Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “And pretty?”

  “Pretty indeed.”

  “And, as you American men say, a good lay?”

  He seemed shocked; she wondered if, by trying to tease him as much as he teased her, she had stepped over a line.

  “If that were important,” he said, “the world is filled with pretty women who are good lays.” He wasn’t smiling.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I am taking the faults from my bad match and putting them between us.”

  “But you may be right,” he said. Now that she had apologized, now he would play with her. “If the getting laid is important, maybe I should be looking at other young and pretty tennis players. I might go after one of them.”

  “Who might you go after?”

  “I’m not sure. Possibly some tall Russian.” He grinned at her. She marveled at how surprisingly boyish he looked when he put on the grin. “Some leggy blonde.”

  “And why a Russian?”

  “Only that there are so many of them.”

  “Then why did you begin to look at me?” she wondered. “I’m not Russkaya.”

  “Exception that proves the rule,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a saying. It means that only you are you, and everybody else is Russian.”

  She pulled the towel off her hair and threw it at him. “Some foolishness,” she said.

  * * *

  HE ASKED FOR A TABLE BY A WINDOW. “For the scenery,” he said, which she took as a joke. The view out the window was of the hotel’s outdoor pool sheltered on two sides by a wall that blocked any possible view. Two small children, a boy and a girl, were splashing each other at the shallow end. A woman—of course their poor mother— reclined in an orange deck chair, holding a paper novel with a title on its cover too small to read from here.

  “This was only my second time in the quarters,” she said.

  “I know. Next time you’ll make the semis.” He reached across to cover her left hand, just for a moment. “At least.”

  “You really believe?”

  “Of course I do. You know I don’t love losers.”

  “Except the tall Russians with legs.”

  He frowned. “Not funny anymore.”

  Only funny if he were the one saying it, but she didn’t tell him that. Instead, she waited while he ordered drinks—Irish whiskey for himself, Campari for her, though he always teased her for liking its bitterness.

  “People in the room are admiring you,” he told her.

  “Why would they do such a thing?” she said. “I’m not a somebody.” She looked around the dining room. “I don’t see any admiring.”

  “They’re embarrassed. They look only out of the corners of their eyes so you can’t catch them.”

  “You always tease me.” He did this too often, she thought. It pleased him to make her feel like a child.

  “They know you’re a famous tennis player,” he said. “They wonder why they can’t seem to recall your name.”

  “To be serious,” she said when the drinks arrived, “are you proud of me for this week?”

  “I’m always proud of you.” He raised his glass, touched hers. “You’re a strong player, and you keep getting better.”

  “You never come to the matches. You never see me, as they say it, alive.”

  “I see you, live, on the television screen. I see your ground strokes and your net play and your terrific volleys just as they happen, just as if I were up in the stands. I marvel at your devastating fuck-you overheads. I hear the noises you make. I see your frustrations. It’s the same as being there,” he said. “I’m only not able to smell your healthy sweat until you come home to me.”

  She didn’t know to laugh or be angry. “How you put things,” she said.

  “The point is,” he said, “I’m proud of you, whether I’m there or not.” He sipped his drink. “Besides, I don’t like Boris.”

  “Who is Boris? I don’t know a Boris.”

  “Your trainer. Your coach.”

  “Alexei,” she said. “Alexei, Alexei, Alexei. Why can you not remember that name?”

  “Why can’t you remember Irish?”

  “It isn’t the same. Alexei is a person, and he is important to me and my career.”

  “I realize his importance. I just don’t like him. And he’s always around, always appearing, like a bad penny.”

  “What is that? ‘A bad penny’?”

  “Somebody nobody likes, but who always turns up where you’d rather he didn’t.” He gestured toward the dining room entrance. “For example,” he said.

  She turned, and here was Alexei, just entering, dressed as though clothes were no matter—the worn jeans, the football shirt with the wide stripes, the old soiled Tretorns. When he recognized her, he came over, making a sort of bow to both of them.

  “Ten a.m.,” he said to her. “We’ll work on the serve.”

  “Yes. I will be on time.”

  Alexei pointed an index finger at the table and raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him.

  He frowned and went away, to sit in a corner far away from the scenery.

  “You see? A bad penny.”

  “You make too much out of him,” she said.

  “And what was he pointing at?”

  “The Campari. I am never to drink more than one drink. He calls it a regimen.”

  “Colonel Boris,” he said. He twirled an imagined mustache with his fingers. “The regimental commander.”

  “And why do you call him Boris?”

  “He reminds me of Boris Badenov,” he said. “I think it might be the mustache.”

  “I don’t know a Badenov,” she said.

  “That’s because you don’t watch enough television,” he said. “Badenov is a figure of evil, like what’s-his-name.”

  “You don’t like Boris,” she said, “because he doesn’t like you. I’m being honest.”

  “I know you are. What’s his reason? That you sleep with me instead of with him?”

  “He doesn’t like you because you smoke cigarettes.”

  That made him laugh. “And all this time I thought we were rivals for your affections.”

  “Boris does not like what is called ‘second-hand smoke.’ He worries about my lungs.”

  “I worry about them too,” he said. “I consider them whenever possible.”

  She took this as his strange kind of flattery.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WAS READY TO LEAVE the room the next morning, he was leaned against the pillows, reading the paper the hotel put under the door and smoking his third cigarette of the day.

  “I have to go now,” she said.

  “How are you getting to the stadium?”

  “Alexei is driving.” She hunched her bag—rackets, water, towels—to her shoulder. “Are you watching the tennis today?”

  “No matches till afternoon. Men’s quarters. They don’t interest me.”

  “No blondes?”

  He smiled. “No Russians. No long legs.”

  “What will you do while I am working?”

  “What I always do: wait for you to ditch Boris and come back to me.”

  She hesitated in the doorway. “What is ‘ditch’?”

  “Something old men say.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “Tell Boris to drive with care.”

  “Don’t be afraid.” She closed the door between them.

  Alexei was already in the lobby, sitting in a leather chair near the elevator, his fingers playing a secret music on the chair arm. He stood when she appeared.

  “Good morning, Alexei.”

  He touched her right hand with the fingertips of his. “I was fearful you might be oversleeping.”

  “Never,” she said. When had she ever been so lazy? When had she ever been late for a workout or a match?

  He steered her to his car, his hand a light pressure at the small of her back. The car was a white Honda with an orange parking ta
g hanging from the inside mirror. She slid onto the front seat while he took her bag and held the door for her. He laid her gear on the back seat and came around to the driver’s side.

  “Did you make love with him last night?” He said this as he started the car and pulled back the shift lever.

  “It’s nobody’s business,” she said.

  “Perhaps nobody’s,” he said, “but I see how when you sleep with the boyfriend, the next day you lose a half-step and add two double-faults to your game.”

  She doubted the truth of that. “It is nobody’s business still.”

  They were in traffic now, and Alexei was silent through two traffic-light stops. Then he said, “Your boyfriend dislikes me.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “But he isn’t a boy.”

  “What is his difficulty? Is he jealous because he thinks I’m your lover? Does he imagine we screw in the locker rooms while you make believe to be out on the court?”

  She found this funny, a joke, though she didn’t say so. If there was a difference between these two men, it was that to Alexei she was first a tennis player, second a woman, while to her lover it was what was called vice versa. How could this not be obvious to anybody?

  * * *

  WHEN SHE CAME BACK to the room it was almost one o’clock. He had gone back to sleep, his head half-buried in the pillows, the newspaper fallen to the floor. The television was on, tuned to a news channel, only there was no sound.

  She chose not to wake him. Even after she had showered and dried her hair, she sat for several minutes on the edge of her bed, watching him sleep. He must have been a beautiful young man; now, more than twice her age, he was perhaps rather handsome than beautiful. This afternoon he would need to shave, and he should think soon about having his hair trimmed—just so, just off the collar.

  Neither of them had ever mentioned love, except if they were discussing tennis scores, so questions concerning their feelings failed to arise. When she was unhappy, or when like yesterday her own errors had cost her a match, she would sometimes put such a feelings question to herself. She could not speak for him, but for herself she almost always concluded that she was fond of him. Fond was a satisfactory English word for what she felt.

  She crossed the space between the two beds and leaned to kiss his forehead. This was fond, and it woke him, eyes opened, mouth smiling. He put out his hand to draw her toward him until now she was lying against him, her head on his chest.

  “Damp hair,” he said. “How was practice? Did you excel? Did Boris give you a gold star?”

  “I was very good. I served a thousand times, and each was harder and faster than the one before.”

  “That Boris,” he said. “A slave driver.”

  He slid away from her until he was sitting and reaching for his cigarettes. She fluffed her hair where it had flattened against his chest, waiting while he lighted up, wondering if they would have lunch.

  “You remember the motel in Palm Desert?” he said. “Where we had the poolside room?”

  “Of course,” she said. “After Indian Wells.”

  “And how, after we’d had enough sun, we came back to the room and lay on the bed together? Not talking. Not fooling around. Just being quiet and close.”

  “I remember.” She thought she hadn’t seen him so serious in a long time, perhaps not since the very beginning, when she had no idea who was this older man, and why was he talking to her?

  “How the blades of the fan over the bed caught the light reflected off the pool?” He looked at her—that look she liked but never quite understood. “And how the fan blades seemed to slice the light into tiny pieces that shimmered on the walls of the room?”

  “Yes.” She knew what slice meant. Shimmered.

  “Years from now,” he said, “that’s what I’ll remember—the way the sunlight looked, flickering, dancing, on the walls above our heads.”

  “And me,” she said. “You will remember me, being there beside you.”

  He took her hand, lifted it, pressed her fingers to his lips. “Until the day I die,” he said.

  She freed her hand. He was telling her the history of her progress. First the qualifying, then the wild card, then the seeding. So far the quarters. Perhaps one day soon the semis. She bent toward him and kissed his forehead, which had only today become the definition of fondness. By the time she reached a final he would perhaps be too old for her and, she realized now, she would be much, much too good for him.

  Six Love Stories

  1. VISITS

  Coming back to the city on the 10:40 bus from Hartford, Laurence Hussey sits next to a window on the driver’s side. The window is askew in its frame, just enough open to let in an unpleasantly cold stream of air, and though he tries as the bus is leaving to push the window closed, he fails—the window moves upward easily, but as soon as he takes his hands away it drops open again like a slack jaw. Twice more he tries, then surrenders and sits back to watch the shabby downtown storefronts become shabbier old homes like the one where he has just visited his father. Solemn red brick places with peeling white trim. Sparse lawns barely beginning to green. Buckled sidewalks and sick elms. Anne Street. Asylum Avenue. The chill air hisses through the crack in the window and draws forbidden cigarette smoke toward him from the seat just ahead. He leans so he can see the bus driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but the driver is not looking back—and even if he were, what good would it do?

  “We had a super dinner,” says a woman’s voice behind him. “The nicest Easter ever.”

  “Your daughter-in-law cooked?” A second woman. An accent.

  “Her nicest meal ever.” The first woman sighs and laughs. “In the beginning she wasn’t much in the kitchen.”

  “Nobody is much in the beginning.”

  Laurence smiles. Perhaps he should take notes; then the next time he goes to see his father he’ll have a story to tell. Dad? There were these two women on the bus.…

  “Were you visiting your children for Easter?” says the first woman.

  “We don’t do Easter,” says the second.

  The women didn’t know each other, he will say to his father. They were, you know, thrown together by circumstance. He wishes he had gone across the street from the bus station and bought a paper. He wishes he had thought to bring a book to read. This is not a long trip, but it’s boring.

  “What did she cook for you, this daughter-in-law?”

  “Ham. A beautiful ham.”

  The traditional, Laurence thinks. What he and his father ordered, yesterday, in the restaurant: ham, with raisin sauce, and mashed potatoes and green beans, Parker House rolls, a little light wine. Wine for himself, not for his father.

  “What else?” The woman with the accent—Polish, he thinks now—must be making a list. “A fancy dessert?”

  “Yes, but for the moment I can’t think what.”

  An old woman, forgetful. Laurence tries to recall the others waiting at the bus station, several of them women. Which is she, this lady with the faulty memory? Not to be critical—his own memory is beginning to sputter like an old outboard motor, and his father, nearly ninety, can remember in detail all the jobs he held during the Depression, but can’t recall what happened yesterday.

  He wants to turn and tell the women to talk about something else, something significant, and the desire is just for an instant over-whelming—so that he sees himself rising up from the seat, bending toward them, saying angry words—but then he calms himself and makes his muscles relax, and he thinks: We’ll talk about anything to keep from feeling alone.

  * * *

  THE RESTAURANT WHERE HE HAD TAKEN his father for Easter dinner was on the way to Meriden, a white frame place where they didn’t accept credit cards, and where most of the waitresses were older—motherly gray-haired women with opaque stockings and discreet hairnets. How many years had it been since he’d seen hairnets?

  “This is a nice restaurant,” his father said. “Timothy brought me here once. I
think it was my birthday.”

  Timothy is the son of a friend his father served with in the war.

  “I’ve never been here,” Laurence said.

  “They serve the best chowder,” his father said. “Fish. Clam. Lobster stew.”

  The Easter before, Laurence had driven his father to the shore— in his father’s car, never used because the old man’s eyesight had gotten so poor. He had cruised from New London to Niantic to Old Lyme, but it was before the season and many places were closed. They ended up at a Howard Johnson’s; his father had ordered lobster stew, then complained for the whole meal about the sparseness of lobster meat. The old man ate slowly, deliberately, filling the spoon too full and letting milk dribble over his chin and onto his shirt front. The white shirt was yellow with age and stained by the fallout of other meals.

  “I remember,” Laurence said. “Seafood chowders are your favorite.”

  Their waitress appeared, younger than the others, thirtyish.

  “I’ll have a bowl of your clam chowder,” his father said, “and lots of crackers.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman told him, “but clam chowder isn’t on the menu today.”

  “Not on the menu?”

  “It’s Easter. We have a special Easter menu.”

  Laurence leaned across the table and pointed. “See?” he said. “It’s pasted over with the Easter special. Ham and raisin sauce. Choice of vegetable.”

  “No chowder? Not any kind of chowder?”

  “We have pea soup,” the waitress offered.

  “Why don’t you give the special a try?” Laurence said.

  “All right.”

  “And I’ll have the same, with the green beans.”

  The waitress wrote. “Green beans for the other gentleman?”

  “Yes,” Laurence said. “That will be fine.”

  He watched the waitress go into the kitchen. Tall, no hairnet, big shoulders that would look wonderful naked.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this,” his father said, “but it looks like you’re not wearing your wedding ring.”

  Laurence made his left hand into a loose fist and looked at it as if he were noticing for the first time that the ring was missing.