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by Sameer Pandya

  Once, when I was in my first year of graduate school, I was at the anthropology department potluck, waiting in the food line in front of a senior visiting scholar who’d written a remarkable book on matrilineage in an East African tribe which rethought ideas of power, hierarchy, and seemingly everything else. I admired her work so much it left me tongue-tied. As I piled my plate with too much pesto pasta, I tried hard to figure out the right thing to say so that she might remember me. I wanted to take a class she was offering the following semester that I knew would be packed. I should have just told her how much her book had shaped my thinking and taken my chances with that, but instead, this came out of my mouth: “So how was it spending so much time with all those strong women for a change?” I had meant it to be a genuine question, with a playful chaser—something that gestured at our mutual struggle, as different kinds of minorities in a field traditionally dominated by old white men. But the second the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d missed my mark. Did she think I was suggesting that she had no strong women in her life already? That she had to travel halfway across the world to find them? Maybe she didn’t like me suggesting that we were similar, considering that she was at the top of this particular academic totem pole and I was the Indian at the bottom.

  She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she turned to the table with the food, took a few slices of a beautifully glazed ham, and walked away. I didn’t bother trying to get into her class. And a few days later, my advisor stopped me in the department hallway and suggested I needed to work on my professionalism.

  It was the same advice I now wanted to pass on to Suzanne.

  “Here they are,” she said. Two couples walked into the clubhouse.

  The Blacks, of course, were white. But the Browns were black. I looked at the handsome couple and breathed a sigh of relief. It was as if an alternate, younger version of the Obamas had just walked in.

  I glanced at the rest of the committee, all of them looking at the alt-Obamas with big, friendly grins. The room was completely silent. We could hear the cicadian murmur of kids finishing up at the pool outside.

  “Let me introduce you to Doctors Bill and Valerie Brown,” Mark Black said.

  Bill was roughly six feet tall and fit. He was wearing lean, perfectly fitting khakis, loafers, a button-down, light pink shirt, and a navy-blue wool blazer. I had recently read an article somewhere about how every man needed a perfect navy-blue blazer. Bill’s certainly was that. On one of his wrists was a bracelet of Tibetan prayer beads, and on the other, a blue-faced octagonal Audemars. I placed my hand on my stomach and sucked it in a bit. I wished I went to the gym more often, got my shirts pressed more regularly.

  Valerie was a tall, striking woman who stood comfortably on her own, close enough to be intimate with her husband, but not subsumed by him.

  The Browns’ sponsors were Mark Black, a well-regarded cardiologist in town, and his wife, Jan. Mark had the confidence that comes with being able to slice open chests. I didn’t see him on the courts often, but when I did, his strokes were compact and tidy, his body always moving instinctively in the right direction. He struck me as a little uptight, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion he was attending. I don’t think I’d ever seen his toes, which was noteworthy given the fact that one of the only things we had in common was access to the same pool.

  Jan was pretty and put together, her prettiness perhaps enhanced by all the time and money she had to take care of herself. They were a family obsessed with being on the cutting edge of trends. They bought their Range Rovers—his in black, hers in white—while most people were stuck in their Audis. Jan took the family to spend a year in Spain so their kids could get used to playing on real, red clay before everyone was taking a year off and calling it a sabbatical. Once, I overheard Mark say that his shoulders were sore because he had been skeet shooting the day before. I genuinely thought he was kidding, until I realized he wasn’t. Who goes skeet shooting? Perhaps everyone soon enough, if the Blacks continued to have their fingers on the upper-middle-class pulse.

  The Browns went around the room, shaking hands with all of the committee members. When they came to me, they lingered for an extra few seconds, their eyes asking for help managing what was clearly an awkward situation: a roomful of white people deciding whether they wanted to let a black couple into their club. I’m here for you, I tried to say as I reached out my hand to shake theirs. “Rajesh Bhatt. Everyone calls me Raj.”

  “I knew a Raj in college,” Bill said, smiling.

  I think everyone knew a Raj in college. Except, of course, the woman from earlier in the evening.

  Bill had a deep, calming voice, one you might hear on a TV commercial for a Mercedes sedan. “I think he runs Google now. Or something.”

  “I use Google,” I said, returning his smile.

  “Can we get you anything?” Suzanne asked.

  “Water would be great,” Bill said.

  I happened to be the one closest to the table with the drinks. Suzanne glanced at me for the slightest beat of a second. I looked at her as Bill looked at me.

  “You know, how about a sip of something stronger instead,” Bill said, moving toward the table. “I’ll get it.”

  I stepped over to the table with him.

  “What do you like?” he asked, examining the open bottles of white and red. I sensed that he knew his way around labels.

  I reached for a lone, half-full bottle of a nearly translucent pinot tucked behind the mineral waters. “This is the high-end stuff.”

  Bill took two clear plastic cups from a stack. I gave us both a liberal pour. Bill took a small sip and then turned to me and said, “It certainly is.”

  Our backs were turned to the rest of the group. Bill ate a dried apricot, I had a piece of salami, and we both took another sip. Before placing the bottle back, I poured us a little more of the wine.

  “Shall we?” I asked.

  Bill took his wine in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He handed the water to his wife and took a seat next to her. I sat down on the couch facing them.

  For a moment, I wondered whether Bill was originally from the Caribbean. If he was, he would have grown up with Indians, maybe had a grandfather who had arrived on the island as an indentured servant, worked through his contract, and decided to stay instead of going back to the small Indian village he barely remembered. Maybe somehow, over the years, the “Bhatt” had changed to “Brown.” If that was the case, I mused, going back several generations, Bill and I could well be cousins.

  Since Eva and I had joined the TC, I’d slowly learned the rules of places like this—what games to join, when to engage in conversation, when to say nothing. Never to ask what someone did for a living. I’d made plenty of tennis friends, but I hadn’t met anyone with whom I felt simpatico. I wanted Bill to be that guy. He and I were different kinds of doctors, but certainly he’d have some appreciation for my doctorate, in contrast to most of the rich knuckleheads I met here, who probably thought of Indiana Jones when I said I taught cultural anthropology at the university in town. I’d not been getting many invitations to matches lately. I couldn’t understand why. My game had continued to improve. I’d begun to wonder if they’d realized finally that I didn’t fully fit in, that when they talked about the vacations they were going on, to Marrakesh or Fiji, I usually pretended to be adjusting the strings of my racquet. But maybe Bill and I could play.

  “We’ve read all of these wonderful letters of support you have,” Suzanne said, holding up their file. “You’re so new to the area, and yet you’ve obviously made a lot of friends and set your roots quickly. Why don’t you tell us about yourselves, your family. And your interest in tennis.”

  I’d read the file, which had letters from the Blacks and several other members attesting to how wonderful the Browns were. As I was reading the letters, I could sense something different about them, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Now I knew that they were a master class in colorblindness. The
Browns were “friendly” and “laid-back.” The phrase “they’ll fit right in” had been used in three different letters.

  “Where shall we start?” Valerie asked.

  “Wherever you like,” Suzanne said.

  “Bill and I met in medical school in San Francisco, and we went to Boston to do our residencies. Bill in cardiology, me in trauma surgery. We both grew up in Los Angeles. Just a few miles apart, but we never knew each other.”

  I wanted to know which part of LA they’d grown up in, but I didn’t ask. Inglewood always up to no good? Perhaps Baldwin Hills.

  “After winters and residencies that lasted far too long, we realized we missed the sun, the oak trees, and the huge, congested freeways,” Valerie continued. “And so when the opportunity opened up at the hospital, we jumped at it. We’re less than two hours away from our families in LA, and the community here has been very welcoming to us. Our sons are also showing some interest in tennis, and Mark can’t say enough about how much he loves this place, so it seemed like the right fit for us.”

  As she spoke, Valerie made careful eye contact with everyone in the room. She knew exactly how to make a roomful of strangers feel comfortable as they gawked at her, trying to piece together her beauty, all her fancy degrees, the fact that every day when she went to work, she kept death at bay.

  “How old are your sons?” I asked.

  “Eight and five,” Valerie said.

  Perfect, I thought. They’ll be fast friends with my own.

  “Boys are fun, but they can be complicated,” I said.

  “Yes,” Valerie said. “Yes, they can.”

  I sensed from the inflection of the second “yes” that raising boys for them was going to be a particular kind of complication, similar to but ultimately different from the one Eva and I would experience. As our boys grew older, I’d talk to them about the dangers of driving while brown and how they would not always get the second chances some of their classmates would get. But Bill and Valerie would have to have this conversation on a much higher, far more sobering level.

  “I’m glad your kids are interested in the game,” Suzanne said. “What about you two? We have a strong, competitive interclub team you could play on.”

  “Bill and I had our first date on a tennis court. And I’ve hit the ball around with him since, but it’ll be a while until I’m game-ready.”

  Eva and I had also had a tennis first date. I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but I could imagine a regular doubles match in our future.

  The women’s interclub matches were on Wednesday mornings, and most of the other women we’d interviewed were eager to play, especially because the TC team had won the interclub championship for the past two years running.

  “I’m sure Wednesdays are busy at the hospital,” Leslie interjected, distinguishing Valerie from all of the women we had interviewed who didn’t work.

  Leslie and Eva had grown up coming to the TC. Their parents were friends, and they’d run cross-country together in high school. Leslie had been a hippie in college, had a girlfriend her junior year, and had worked in New York and Boston for several years before returning home to get married and have a family. She and her husband Tim had sponsored us, and since we’d joined, we’d spent countless weekends together, barbecuing and drinking and talking while the kids swam and ran around. I liked her; we shared a similar ironic sensibility. Throughout the interviews, however, she’d rebuffed my attempts to dish about the inherent problems with the process—namely, that the prospective members were all so interchangeable—but Leslie liked the place a little too much to go there. Lately, I’d sensed that Eva had been pulling away from her too. I don’t think they’d had a disagreement, but Eva worked and Leslie didn’t, and that may have been the difference.

  “Yes, Wednesdays are tough,” Valerie said. “But Bill is the tennis player in the family anyway.” She placed her hand on her husband’s knee, handing the ball over.

  “I played some in college,” Bill said, a little too matter-of-factly. I sensed Bill was downplaying his level.

  Stan jumped in. “Where?”

  In every interview, the only time Stan spoke up was when there was a mention of a college. He’d ask about it, and without missing a beat, talk about Williams, how he’d played fullback there, read philosophy, went on to Harvard Law School, and settled into a life of contracts. Stan was lean and the veteran of two shoulder surgeries, brought on by several decades of playing tennis four times a week.

  Before this whole interviewing process had started, I’d had no opinion of Stan. I’d seen him around, always getting off the court with an ice pack balanced on his shoulder. But at the start, Suzanne had asked everyone on the committee about their vision for these interviews. Everyone, including me, had said this and that about considering the past to forge the future. And then there was Stan: “I’ve thought about it and I’ve realized I don’t have a vision. I just want high-level tennis players. Bad tennis offends me. This is a tennis club.”

  A few days earlier, I’d seen him sitting in the hot tub reading a tattered copy of Don Quixote. When I asked him about it, he’d said that he was rereading all the books that he had loved as a young man to see if they still hooked him in the same way. “I’m trying to remember who I was back then.” He had just finished with the Russians, and after Cervantes he was going to hit the Americans. I loved the idea that The Great Gatsby might help Stan see the conspicuous consumption all around us. It made me realize that, despite all the Williams business, there was much to like about him, and I appreciated that he was up-front about the fact that, in asking people about their alma maters, he was sizing them up. At least I always knew where I stood with him.

  “Stanford,” Bill said.

  I wasn’t the human U.S. News & World Report annual college ranking that Stan was, but I knew how to translate “played some” at Stanford. Bill was very good. Like heavily recruited in high school and nationally ranked good. John McEnroe had played some at Stanford.

  “Were you there with Tiger Woods?” Richard asked, suddenly perking up. Richard wasn’t a member, but traditionally one of the senior pros sat on the membership committee, perhaps to make it seem like the process was more equitable. He and I were both in our mid-forties, but working under the blazing sun had prematurely aged him.

  “In fact, I was,” Bill said. “I was just glad that he wasn’t on the tennis team as well.”

  That’s it, I thought. Don’t ask him any more about Tiger. I was sure that at this point in his life, Bill must be tired of answering questions about Tiger just because they were vaguely alike.

  “What was he like?” Stan asked. “Did you take any classes with him?”

  “I didn’t. I was stuck in bio and chemistry.”

  Bill and Valerie made the slightest eye contact.

  “What did Tiger study?” I asked, wanting to turn the conversation away from whether Bill had known Tiger, toward Tiger alone. Somehow that seemed better.

  “I’m not sure,” Bill said. “Econ maybe. He was only there for a couple of years. Clearly, he didn’t need to take any more classes. He figured out macroeconomics all on his own.”

  I couldn’t contain my grin.

  “So, did you both always want to go to medical school and become doctors?” I asked, moving us away from Tiger entirely. The main purpose of these brief interviews—some as short as ten minutes—was to let the prospective members talk so we could get some sense of them. The due diligence was performed in the letters and in whispers.

  “I did,” Valerie said. “My father is a doctor, so it was assumed that I’d go into the family business. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I still can’t.”

  “I thought about other things,” Bill said. “I flirted with law school, but it didn’t feel quite right.”

  “As usual, Bill’s being a little modest,” Mark interjected. Throughout the interview, he’d sat there self-satisfied, like he’d brought the fatted calf to the banquet. “
He decided to forgo the Tour to go to medical school.”

  This bit of information dazzled the men in the room. They all seemed to lean in toward Bill at that moment. I suddenly felt sad about the state of both my game and my career. I had done just enough to get by at both. Bill, on the other hand, had excelled, and had the freedom to choose between two enviable options.

  “That’s not exactly how it went,” Bill said. “I played in a few professional tournaments and lost in the early rounds. I couldn’t deal with the uncertainty of it all. But the fact is that I haven’t had much time in the past fifteen years to keep up with the game. Medical school and then residency and kids didn’t leave time for doubles. But I was thinking that I’d get out there a little more now. Get rid of the rust. At least if Mark doesn’t work me too hard at the hospital.”

  Bill’s mention of work got me thinking about my own. I had papers to grade before the next morning. I’d grab a burger after this to soak up some of the wine swirling around in my head. And by the time I got home, I hoped, the kids would be asleep. I felt exhausted from all this talking and smiling.

  Bill added, “It’ll take me some time to catch up with you all.”

  I bit at my lower lip. I have a tendency to mouth words to myself before I actually say them, as a way of testing out the safety of what I’m about to say, something I’d learned from lecturing: sound out the joke before letting it loose. But this time—maybe because I was distracted, maybe because I was so desperate to show Bill that we could be on the same team, that I understood where he was coming from—as I mouthed the words, the complex mechanism that occurs between air and tongue and throat to create sound did its job, against my deepest wishes.

  “Nigga, please.”

  For a second after I said it, I thought it might be fine. That in a room with four other committee members and two other couples, all engaged in various conversations, no one had heard me. That maybe I hadn’t really said it at all.

  But it became very clear that none of that was true. They all turned to me as if I’d suddenly caught on fire. And in many ways, I had.