She had told me over the phone about Ryan. Nice guy to work with, good to read lines with, fun to get a drink with while filming in a small-town location, but she never mentioned him as a boyfriend, all evidence in my web browser to the contrary.
I clicked to a photo of Ryan whispering in Ana’s ear and maybe taking a nibble while there. She looked happy. I knew they were starting another film together in Vancouver the following week.
I clicked out of the browser and stretched out on the couch to stare at the ceiling. When English or Australian guys on the tour had something bad happen to them, they’d say “I feel gutted.” That was how I’d felt with Liz. Clicking through each photo for a lengthy study was the most masochistic thing I’d done and I had a fairly high pain threshold.
Adam walked into the hotel suite and saw me on my back on the couch. I didn’t look over.
“What’s up, my man?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“A little down in the mouth, no?”
“Maybe.” I found that I did want to talk about it.
“So what is it?”
“I’m hearing from Ana less and less.” Since we met more than a year ago we’d had two dinners and a hundred phone calls.
“She busy on a picture?”
“About to be. It’s more that I just looked through some pictures of her snuggling with some actor on a red carpet.”
Adam laughed. “You should hear yourself. Really.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Let me be sure I have it right. You’re not getting enough attention from the super-hot-A-list-Oscar-bound actress? You poor thing.”
“Screw you, Adam.”
“I’m just saying. It’s a pretty first-class problem, Anton.”
I sat up. Whenever something goes wrong on the court, I need to lead myself back into play with the right attitude, the right body language. I can’t win if I don’t expect to win. No down-in-the-mouth player wins. “True,” I said.
I was in a hole and needed a ladder out. Ana was a twenty-four-carat ladder but I just needed a way up. A wooden ladder would do the job. Any girl. Any friend. Adam said, “Anton, lots of fishies out there. Guy like you? Like a commercial fishing ship. You’ll fish out an entire coastline.”
“Mmm.” The fish-in-the-sea stuff bounced off me. The truth was I didn’t want a wooden ladder. I liked Ana.
“So is she dating this guy? They’re together?”
“Seems that way, but I don’t know.”
“Could be just publicity stuff for the picture.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It could also be real,” he said.
“Right.”
“And if it’s real, can you blame her?”
I looked at him.
“You two both travel around the planet, maybe rendezvous a few days a few times each year. And you’re kids. Legally in bars, you’re still kids. For a relationship like that you need to be legally adults. At the least. Probably legally adults plus five years, and maybe a divorce or two thrown in first.”
“So no girls until I’m twenty-six.”
“Not that. It’s just you picked a tough one here. Date someone who’s more free to travel with you. Not travel to everything or you’ll start to think of her as luggage, but someone who can make it a week each month. Or date a girl on the tour. Half the girl players are your age. Or younger.”
Adam was trying to help but the only thing that could help me was to learn as incontrovertible fact that Ana was not sleeping with Ryan Hall. “Yeah.”
“Actresses are tough, Atom Bomb. Her star can go up and down, same as yours, and when hers goes down while yours is up, that’s hard. Vice versa, hard too. And actresses are insecure. I don’t know about Ana, but most of them are. Lots of tennis players date actresses and it never works out. It’s been going on since the dawn of the Open Era and that combination always ends ugly.”
“She’s not insecure.” I sounded like a child. I knew it.
“Well, we’re not picking a wife now anyway. What you need is a date.”
“I don’t want a date.” I actually did, sort of. I just wanted Ana more.
“Okay, no date.” Adam sat down on the chair next to the couch. I thought he was going to turn on the PlayStation but he didn’t. “So let’s send her a note. A handwritten note.”
“I don’t have an address for her. Not for a couple more weeks when she’s settled.”
“Text message it is. Hand me your phone. You’re in no condition.”
I handed my phone to him. I said, “I read everything first. Don’t start firing things off.”
“Okay, let’s brainstorm.”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing for Halloween?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to dress up as?”
“A tennis player.”
“Funny. Seriously.”
“Adam, I haven’t dressed up for Halloween since I was eight. I never do anything for Halloween.”
“I’m taking you to a great Halloween party this year.” Adam started typing on my phone then handed it back to me and said, “Send this.”
It read:
“Jesus.” I deleted it before either of us accidentally hit send.
“Come on. That was perfect. Gets the point across, but not too heavy. Still funny and charming.”
“It would sound weird. We’ve never texted like that.”
“So change it up. If she’s canoodling on the red carpet with another guy, you need to change it up. That’s just basic math.”
“No pumpkins.”
“Fine,” he said.
I had an idea. I typed:
I hit send before reason could get in the way.
“Atom Bomb. What did you write?”
“I have no idea,” I said. I held the phone and in my mind listened to the beep from hers. Then mine beeped.
Reversal of emotional fortunes. I was sweating, my heart racing.
Mine beeped.
I reconsidered Adam’s pumpkin message, then wrote instead:
I leaned back in the couch and the rush subsided. I tossed the phone to Adam.
“Not a bad back and forth,” he said after reading.
“I’m in the same spot. She didn’t say she’s getting dinner with Ryan Hall but she may as well have.”
Adam moved next to me on the couch and put an arm around my shoulders. “Buddy, will you let me set you up on a date?”
“I don’t know, Adam. I’m an idiot. I wouldn’t know what to do on a date.”
“You were just talking about thongs with the hottest actress on the planet. That puts you in the top one percent of one percent of people who know what to do.” He shook my shoulders. “Come on. There’s that hot Croatian. Victoria Jancovic. She’s eighteen, mile-long legs.”
“Her English is pretty broken.”
“Even better. Focus on the legs.”
“What, like a dinner?”
“Sure. Or you can even start with hitting practice balls one afternoon. Gabe can set that up.”
“Maybe.”
“Plus, the media might get a hold of it. Take a few photos. Then it’s Ana clicking around the Internet and getting all worked up.”
Now you’re talking. “Okay, set it up.”
“My man,” he said.
I had underestimated Adam to that point. Not his strategic capability. It didn’t matter what the strategy was. It was that he cared, he was rooting for me, not as a player but as a person. He was getting to know me.
CHAPTER
23
Months later back in New York I saw Dr. Minkoff face-to-face for the first time. I talked for ten minutes about how my life was rote, same routine with the same people in similar hotel rooms with similar tournament results, and an identical me. I could actually feel my utter lack of personal growth.
It was the same talk I’d given him weekly by telephone since he and I started together.
When I had finished, he said, “Anton, now that we’re together in person, I feel more comfortable saying this.” He paused. “Don’t you get tired of hearing yourself?”
I was stunned. He had insulted me. I replayed the remark in my head a few times to be certain, then I was certain that it was a flat insult. “Am I boring you, doctor?”
“We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. I’ve just noticed that you talk about the same things every time and I wonder if you’ve noticed as well.”
“I have,” I said. My voice was clipped and angry.
“Why do you think we’re stuck on this issue?”
“Because it’s a big issue,” I said getting louder. I was in an argument with my shrink.
“It is, and we can make small amounts of progress.”
“I was hoping we were.”
“We probably are,” he said. “But I think we can do more. We can do better.”
“Okay.” I was trying to cool off, stay constructive, the way I would take a tip from Gabe on the court.
He said, “Before we come up with a plan, we need to determine who the players are, the people who will carry out the plan.”
“Sure,” I said.
“There’s only one that matters, and that person is you, but I’m not sure that you’ve truly realized that yet.”
I wanted to say obviously I have, but maybe there was something not obvious that I had missed.
He said, “You are very recently a child, a dependent, and people, parents usually, made decisions on your behalf. You are no longer a child and you need to enforce that transition in your own life. Given your profession, you have unusual circumstances and I would argue this makes it even more important that you take charge of the way your life is going to be. Only you can set up your life the way you want it. If you offer that role to someone else, if it is usurped by anyone else, then your chance of happiness is greatly diminished.”
Our argument had turned into something healthy. Everything he said would have made sense to me at any point in the last years, but now I heard it in such a way that I felt it too. It wasn’t just an intellectual thing.
I said, “Sure, I get it. I just don’t know how to put any of that into practice. As simple as some of this sounds, it feels very complex.”
“Why complex?”
“It’s like a two-front war. One front is just to keep moving ahead with my tennis. Then the very support structure to help me with the one front is actually the second front. It’s like a virus that makes your cells eat yourself. I need to fight my own team that’s helping me fight everyone else. That just feels overwhelming. Depressing.”
“I’m sure it’s overwhelming to a degree. Not depressing, but it feels big and we’ll start to make it smaller.”
“No, it’s depressing.”
“You’re not depressed, Anton. If you were truly depressed, we’d look into that and I could prescribe something for you.”
“I’m not taking a pill for depression.”
He laughed. “That’s interesting. Why not?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“If you felt bad and there was a pill that could make you feel well, why wouldn’t you take it?”
Hmm. When he put it that way. “I don’t know.” It also occurred to me that there was a pill, of sorts, that could make me play well, and I was already taking it.
“You’re not depressed,” he said again. “You’re overwhelmed, daunted, but not depressed.”
I shrugged.
He said, “Anton, I’ve seen many teenagers in my practice, and I’ve worked with them through their twenties and thirties.” He gave me a half smile, the affectionate kind. “You are a highly self-aware young man. Not just for a nineteen-year-old, but for any age.”
I watched him and his words swirled around inside me. We watched each other. I smiled. It was the nicest compliment anyone had ever paid me. “Thanks,” I said.
“When you leave today, consider yourself at square one. Your naked self with no tennis clothes. Consider that you could be a nineteen-year-old retiree from tennis. What might motivate you then? What would you do?”
“Okay.”
“And not just a thought-bubble exercise. Put it on the table. Really make it a choice.”
“Okay.”
“If you want to quit tennis, let’s talk about it. That might be the right answer. If you want to stay with tennis, let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons and then let’s discuss practical ways to improve your life inside and outside tennis. That might mean changing up your team, limiting your father’s involvement, moving out of your parents’ home and getting your own apartment.”
This all sounded good. Dad would hate it.
CHAPTER
24
You cannot make an omelet without cracking eggs. You cannot make a revolution with white gloves. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I would tell myself things like that over the next couple years. My world ranking hit a plateau at twenty-five but everyone thought I’d be a top-five player by then so everyone was disappointed in me.
I had taken something from my first face-to-face meeting with Dr. Minkoff. I didn’t quit tennis, but I quit being the old me. The dependent child. My first step had been to tell Dad that I wanted him to travel with me only to the four majors each year, same as Mom. I knew that would be a fight so I had gone to Gabe first to say that Dad was a distraction to me, that I couldn’t focus on tennis and winning in Dad’s authoritarian presence. With Gabe on my side, Dad grumbled his agreement. He was off the team.
His departure was like the parent leaving after the drop-off of a college freshman. I had freedoms and free time away from watchful eyes. I hadn’t realized how much the constant chaperone my father had become had impeded me from making friends. I spent more of my downtime with other players on the tour, playing cards, watching movies, talking. Drinking.
I dated a few girls on the tour. Nothing serious. No one like Ana, with whom there was little now other than periodic updates that she was happily and casually dating some actor or another.
I was having fun. And having some sex. I’d gone from a nineteen-year-old virgin to a twenty-two-year-old of experience with beautiful women. I was shocked at just how experienced the European women of my own age were. Most had dated older and more experienced European men at some point in their teens and so while I was shocked at the experience they displayed in the bedroom, they were equally shocked at my lack of experience.
But we were all lonely in our ways, and in it together, child campers at a never-ending summer camp. Some of the girls were patient with me, taught me things. By twenty-two, I knew everything that a European pervert twice my age would know.
The worst moments were the frustrated calls from Dad after each loss, threatening to rejoin our travelling band. Nothing useful happened on the calls. He would just ask in a hundred different ways, What’s wrong with you? I had no answer to satisfy him so after thirty minutes of mutually inflicted brain damage we would hang up.
This was the two-front war that I kept fighting. The front that was the tennis world, my tennis ranking, was classic trench warfare. I was on one side, the tournaments and hotels on the other, everyone dug in, static, no sign of a breakthrough in either direction.
On the other front, there was movement. It was a campaign across plains, through valleys and over a mountain pass to liberate the prized, occupied city. For the first time I learned how I handled situations on my own, who was my independent self. Was I funny and goofy on a date to dinner and a movie, or was I brooding and reserved? I didn’t have any idea so I tried out different things to see which version of me I liked and wanted to stick with, like picking characters out of a book for me to play.
I hear people say of someone, Oh, he’s this type or that type, and Oh, he won’t care if you borrow his shirt and I guarantee he won’t even notice if you wear it right under his nose. So-and-so is the opposite and would have a
conniption.
No one could predict me nor could I predict myself because I had no track record. I felt uncertain, that my behavior would be guided by the moment, that my preferences and will were unformed so that the will of another would drive the moment and I would slot in. That wasn’t my nature to slot in. I knew at least that much. I could feel my discomfort. I needed to experiment with enough versions of myself to decide on one of them. It was kindergarten socialization dynamics at twenty-two years old.
It was confusing and frustrating. A sort of rat in a maze, bumping into walls, turning round and round, smelling something he’s certain is cheese and trying to get it.
Through the confusion I did feel an undercurrent of progress. I made wrong turns and bumped into dead ends and I was a rat, but I was my own rat.
I remembered reading David Copperfield as a teenager and thought again about the opening line: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else …
I wondered then what hero meant. What does it take to be the hero of your own life? Choice, certainly. You have to be in charge of your life to be the hero of it. What if you make bad choices, or just-below-average choices? Do you need to reach the cheese to be the hero, and then what the hell is the cheese anyway? Self-understanding? Happiness? A Wimbledon title? Could the cheese be to perform one noble act in an otherwise unremarkable life spent not in charge of it?
In any case, I was taking charge of my own life, setting it up the way I wanted it to be, based on my limited knowledge. I thought that had to be done if I could ever have the opportunity to be the hero.
I would sometimes hum the tune of my metaphor to myself. The dog takes the cat, the cat takes the rat, the rat takes the cheese. The cheese stands alone.
CHAPTER
25
I was showered up and back in street clothes after the loss when I walked back into the hotel suite.
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