Open

by Andre Agassi

  I go to San Jose and get annihilated by Pete. Definitely not what the doctor ordered. I lose my temper several times during the match, cursing at my racket, screaming at myself. Pete looks bemused. The umpire penalizes me for swearing.

  Oh, you like that? Here, take this.

  I serve a ball into the upper deck.

  I go to Indian Wells, lose to Chang in the quarters. I can’t face the post-match press conference. I skip out, pay a hefty fine. I go to Monte Carlo. I lose to Alberto Costa of Spain in fifty-four minutes. As I walk off the court I hear whistles, catcalls. They may as well be coming from inside my heart. I want to yell at the crowd: I agree!

  Gil asks me, What is it?

  I tell him. I come right out with it. Since losing to Pete at the U.S. Open, I’ve lost the will.

  Then let’s not do this, Gil says. We’ve got to be clear on what we’re doing.

  I want to quit, I say, but I don’t know how—or when.

  At the 1996 French Open I’m coming unglued. I’m screaming at myself all through my first-round match. I receive an official warning. I scream louder. I’m penalized a point. I’m one motherfucking cocksucker away from getting DQ’d for the tournament. Rain starts to fall, and during the delay I sit in the locker room and stare straight ahead as if hypnotized. When play resumes I outlast my opponent, Jacobo Díaz, whom I can’t see. He’s as blurry and watery as the reflections in the rain puddles along the alleys of the court.

  Beating Díaz merely delays the inevitable. In the next round I lose to Chris Woodruff, from Tennessee. He always reminds me of a country-western singer, and plays as if he’d rather be performing at a rodeo. He’s even more awkward on clay, and to compensate he gets aggressive, especially on his backhand. I can’t counter his aggression. I make sixty-three unforced errors. He reacts with unbridled joy, and I gaze at him, coveting not his victory but his enthusiasm.

  Sportswriters accuse me of tanking, not going for every ball. They never get it right. When I tank, they say I’m not good enough; when I’m not good enough, they say I tank. I nearly tell them I wasn’t tanking, that I was torturing myself for not being good enough. Whenever I know that I don’t deserve to win, that I’m unworthy of winning, I torture myself. You could look it up.

  But I don’t say anything. Once again I leave the stadium without sitting for the obligatory news conference. Once again I happily pay the fine. Money well spent.

  BROOKE TAKES ME TO A JOINT in Manhattan where the front room is smaller than a phone booth but the main dining room is big and warm and mustard yellow. Campagnola—I like the way she says it, I like the way it smells, I like the way we both feel as we walk in off the street. I like the autographed photo of Sinatra next to the coat room.

  This is my favorite place in New York, Brooke says, so I christen it my favorite too. We sit in a corner, eating a light meal in that hazy twilight hour between the lunch crowd and the dinner rush. They don’t normally serve food at this hour, but the manager says in our case they’ll make an exception.

  Campagnola quickly becomes an extension of our kitchen, and then of our entire relationship. Brooke and I go there to remind ourselves of the reasons we’re good together. We go there on special occasions, and we go there to make humdrum weekdays feel like special occasions. We go there so often and so automatically after every match at the U.S. Open that the chefs and waiters begin to set their watches by us. In a fifth set I sometimes find myself thinking of the gang at Campagnola, knowing that they’re keeping one eye on the TV while prepping the mozzarella, tomatoes, and prosciutto. I know, as I’m bouncing the ball, just about to serve, that I’ll soon be seated at the corner table, eating buttery fried shrimp with white wine sauce and lemon, plus a side of raviolis so soft and sweet they should count as dessert. I know that when Brooke and I walk in the door, win or lose, the place will erupt with applause.

  Campagnola’s manager, Frankie, is always dressed razor sharp, Gil sharp. Italian suit, flowered tie, silk handkerchief. He always greets us with a gap-toothed smile and a fresh batch of funny stories. He’s a second father to me, Brooke says when she introduces us, and those are magic words. Surrogate father is a role for which I have the greatest respect, so I like Frankie right away. Then he buys us a bottle of red, tells us about the celebs and grifters and bankers and mobsters who hang out in his joint, makes Brooke laugh until her cheeks are pink, and now I like him for my own reasons.

  Frank says, John Gotti? You want to know about Gotti? He always sits right over there, corner table, facing out. If anybody’s going to take him down, he wants to see it coming.

  I feel the same way, I say.

  Frankie laughs darkly, then nods. I know, right?

  Frankie is honest, hardworking, sincere, my kind of people. I find myself looking for his face the moment we walk through the door. I feel better, my aches and anxieties fade, when Frankie throws out his arms and smiles and whisks us to our table. Sometimes he kicks out other customers, and Brooke and I pretend not to notice their frowning and complaining.

  Frankie’s chief virtue, in my book, is the way he talks about his kids. He loves them, brags about them, pulls out photos of them at the drop of a hat. But clearly he worries about their future. Running a hand over his tired face one night, he tells me his kids are only in grade school, but he’s already stressed about college. He groans about the cost of higher education. He doesn’t know how he’s going to make it.

  Days later I talk to Perry and ask him to put aside a nest egg of Nike stock in Frankie’s name. When Brooke and I next drop into Campagnola, I tell Frankie about it. The shares can’t be touched for ten years, I say, but by then they should be worth enough to significantly lighten that tuition burden.

  Frankie’s bottom lip trembles. Andre, he says, I can’t believe you’d do that for me.

  The look on his face is a complete shock. I didn’t understand the meaning and value of education, the hardship and stress it causes most parents and children. I’ve never thought of education like that. School was always a place I managed to escape, not a thing to be treasured. Setting aside the stock was merely something I did because Frankie specifically mentioned college and I wanted to help. When I saw what it meant to him, however, I was the one who got educated.

  Helping Frankie provides more satisfaction and makes me feel more connected and alive and myself than anything else that happens in 1996. I tell myself: Remember this. Hold on to this. This is the only perfection there is, the perfection of helping others. This is the only thing we can do that has any lasting value or meaning. This is why we’re here. To make each other feel safe.

  And as 1996 wears on, safety seems like an especially precious commodity. Brooke is regularly receiving letters from stalkers, threatening her—and sometimes me—with death and unspeakable horrors. The letters are detailed, grisly, sick. We forward them to the FBI. We also ask Gil to work with the agents, monitor their progress. Several times, when a letter is traceable, Gil goes rogue. He boards a plane and pays the stalker a visit. He usually appears early in the morning, just after dawn, at the stalker’s house or workplace. He holds up the letter and says very softly, I know who you are and where you live. Now take a good look at me, because if you ever bother Brooke and Andre again, you will see me again, and you don’t want that, because then it will be on.

  The scariest letters can’t be traced. When they rise above a certain gruesome threshold, when they threaten that something is going to happen on a specific date, Gil will stand outside Brooke’s brownstone while we sleep. By stand I mean stand. On the stoop. Arms folded. He stations himself there, looking left, then right, and he stays that way all night.

  Night after night.

  The strain, the sordidness, exact a heavy toll on Gil. He worries constantly that he’s not doing enough, that he may have missed something, that he’ll blink or look away one time and some creep will slither past. He becomes obsessed. He falls into a nearly debilitating depression, and I fall with him, because I’m the
cause. I brought this on Gil. I feel deep guilt, and I’m beset by premonitions of doom.

  I try to talk myself out of it. I tell myself that you can’t be unhappy when you have money in the bank and own your own plane. But I can’t help it, I feel listless, hopeless, trapped in a life I didn’t choose, hounded by people I can’t see. And I can’t discuss any of it with Brooke, because I can’t admit to such weakness. Feeling depressed after a loss is one thing, but feeling depressed about nothing, about life in general, is another thing altogether. I can’t feel this way. I refuse to admit that I feel this way.

  Even if I wanted to discuss it with Brooke, we’re not communicating well these days. We’re not on the same frequency. We don’t have the same bandwidth. For instance, when I try to talk with her about Frankie, about the satisfaction of helping him, she doesn’t seem to hear. After the initial fun of introducing me to Frankie, she’s cool about him, indifferent, as if he’s played his part and now it’s time for him to move offstage. This follows a precedent, a pattern that repeats itself with many people and places Brooke brings into my life. Museums, galleries, celebrities, writers, shows, friends—I often get more from them than she does. Just as I start to enjoy something, to learn from it, she casts it aside.

  It makes me wonder if we’re a good fit. I don’t think so. And yet I can’t step back, can’t suggest we take a break, because I’m already distancing myself from tennis. With no Brooke and no tennis, I’ll have nothing. I fear the void, the darkness. So I cling to Brooke, and she clings back, and though the clinging seems loving, it’s more like the clinging in that painting in the Louvre. Holding on for dear life.

  As Brooke and I approach our two-year anniversary, I decide that we should formalize our clinging. Two years is a meaningful benchmark in my love life. In every previous relationship two years has been the make-or-break moment—and I’ve always chosen break. Every two years I grow tired of the girl I’m dating, or she grows tired of me, as if a timer goes off in my heart. I was with Wendi two years, and then she declared our relationship open, which prefigured the end. Before Wendi I was with a girl in Memphis for exactly two years, and then I bolted. Why my love life runs in two-year cycles, I don’t know. I wasn’t even aware of the pattern until Perry pointed it out.

  Whatever the reason, I’m determined to change. At twenty-six I believe this pattern needs to be broken, now, or I’ll be thirty-six, looking back on a series of two-year relationships that went nowhere. If I’m going to have a family, if I’m going to be happy, I’ve got to break this cycle, which means pushing myself past the two-year mark, forcing myself to commit.

  Of course, technically, it hasn’t been two years with Brooke. With our hectic schedules, with my playing and her filming, we’ve actually spent only a few months together. We’re still getting to know each other, still learning. Part of me knows I shouldn’t force a decision. Part of me simply doesn’t want to be married right now. But who cares what I want? When is what I want ever a good index of what I should do? How often do I enter a tournament, wanting to play, only to lose in the early rounds? How often do I enter reluctantly, feeling like hell, only to win? Maybe marriage—the ultimate match play, the ultimate single elimination tournament—is the same way.

  Besides, everyone around me is getting married. Perry, Philly, J.P. In fact, Philly and J.P. met their wives together, on the same night. After the Summer of Revenge, it’s the Winter of Marriage.

  I ask Perry for advice. We talk for hours in Vegas and on the phone. He leans toward marriage. Brooke is the one, he says. How are you going to do better than a Princeton-educated supermodel? After all, didn’t we fantasize about her years ago? Didn’t he predict that she’d come along? And now here she is—destiny. What’s the problem? He reminds me of Shadowlands. C. S. Lewis doesn’t become fully alive, doesn’t grow up, until he opens himself to love. Love is how we grow up, the movie says. And as Lewis reminds his students: God wants us to grow up.

  Perry says he knows of an excellent jeweler in Los Angeles. The same jeweler Perry used when he got engaged. Set aside the question of whether or not to propose, he says, and just focus for a moment on the ring.

  I know the kind of ring Brooke wants—round, Tiffany cut—because she’s told me. Straight out. She’s never shy about sharing her opinions on jewels, clothes, cars, shoes. In fact, the most animated talks we have are about things. We used to talk about our dreams, our childhoods, our feelings. Now we avidly discuss the best sofas, the best stereos, the best cheeseburgers, and while I find such talk interesting, an important aspect of the art of living, I fear Brooke and I put undue emphasis on it.

  I gird myself, phone the jeweler and tell her I’m in the market for an engagement ring. The words come out croaky. I feel my heart pound. I ask myself, Shouldn’t this be a joyous moment—one of the great moments of life? Before I can answer, the jeweler is peppering me with her own questions. Size? Carat? Color? Clarity? She keeps talking about clarity, asking me about clarity.

  I think: Lady, you’re asking the wrong guy about clarity.

  I say: All I know is round, Tiffany cut.

  When do you need it?

  Soon?

  Can do. I think I’ve got just the ring.

  Days later, the ring arrives by courier. It’s in a big box. I walk around with it in my pocket for two weeks. The box feels leaden, and dangerous, as do I.

  Brooke is away, filming a movie. We talk every night on the phone, and sometimes I cradle the phone with one hand and fondle the ring with the other. She’s in the Carolinas, where it’s bitter cold, but the script calls for the weather to be balmy, so the director forces her and the other actors to suck ice cubes. It keeps their breath from fogging.

  Better than licking hands.

  She says a few of her lines for me, and we laugh because they sound fake. They sound like lines.

  After we hang up I go for a drive, the heater turned up high, the lights of the Strip winking like diamonds. I replay our conversation, and I can’t tell the difference between the lines in her script and the lines we’ve just spoken to each other. I pull the ring box from my coat pocket and open it. The ring catches and reflects the light. I set it on the dashboard.

  Clarity.

  AS BROOKE WRAPS HER FILM, I conclude a miserable stretch of tennis that has sportswriters openly, sometimes gleefully, saying I’m done. Three slams, they say. That’s far more than we thought he’d win. Brooke says we need to get away. Far away. This time we choose Hawaii. I pack the ring.

  My stomach rolls as our plane swoops toward the volcanoes. I gaze at the palm trees, the foaming coastline, the misty rain forests, and think: another island paradise. Why do we always feel compelled to run off to island paradises? It’s as though we have Blue Lagoon Syndrome. I fantasize about the engine sputtering, the plane spiraling down into the mouth of a volcano. To my chagrin we land safely.

  I’ve rented a bungalow at the Mauna Lani resort. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a pool, a full-time chef. Plus, a long stretch of white beach all to ourselves.

  We spend the first few days hanging around the bungalow, relaxing by the pool. Brooke’s engrossed in a book about how to be single and happy in your thirties. She holds the book over her face, licking her finger and loudly turning the pages. It doesn’t cross my mind that this might be a pointed hint. Nothing crosses my mind except the proposal I’m about to deliver.

  Andre, you seem distracted.

  No. I’m here.

  Everything all right?

  Please leave me alone, I think, I’m trying to decide when and where to propose to you.

  I’m like a murderer, plotting, thinking constantly of the time and the place. Except that a murderer has a motive.

  On the third night, though we’re planning to eat dinner in the bungalow, I suggest we dress up as if it’s a special occasion. Great idea, Brooke says. She emerges from the bedroom an hour later in a flowing white dress that falls to her ankles. I wear a linen shirt and beige pants,
the perfectly wrong outfit, because the pockets of the pants are shallow and the ring box doesn’t fit. I keep my hand over the pocket to hide the bulge.

  I stretch as though I’m about to play a match. I shake out my legs, then suggest a stroll. Yes, Brooke says, that sounds like a lovely idea. She takes a sip of wine, smiles casually, no idea what’s coming. We walk for ten minutes until we reach a part of the beach where we can’t see any sign of civilization. I crane my neck to make sure no one is coming. No tourists. No paparazzi. The coast is clear. I think of that line from Top Gun. I had the shot, there was no danger, so I took it.

  I fall a few steps behind Brooke and drop to one knee on the sand. She turns, looks down, and all the color drains from her face as the colors of the sunset grow more vivid.

  Brooke Christa Shields?

  She’s mentioned in conversation many times that any man who proposes to her had better use her full legal name, Brooke Christa Shields. I never knew why, and never thought to ask, but now it comes back to me.

  I repeat, Brooke Christa Shields?

  She puts a hand on her forehead. Wait, she says. What? Are you—? Wait. I’m not ready.

  That makes two of us.

  She’s wiping away tears as I pull the ring box from my pocket and crack it open and remove the ring and slide it onto her finger.

  Brooke Christa Shields? Will you—

  She’s pulling me to my feet. I’m kissing her and thinking, I really wish I’d thought this through. Is this the person that Andre Kirk Agassi is supposed to spend the next ninety years with?

  Yes, she says. Yes, yes, yes.

  Wait, I think. Wait, wait, wait.

  SHE SAYS SHE WANTS a do-over.

  One day later she tells me she was in such shock on the beach, she couldn’t hear me. She wants me to repeat the proposal, word for word.