My father and Catherine appear behind the blond boy in their tennis whites.
“Let’s go,” my father says.
We pick up our racquets and loop around the pool.
“Ace ‘em,” the blond boy whispers to me.
I smile, relieved that my sunburn hides my blush.
The courts are clay. A black man in tennis whites is sweeping ours. The instruments are the same as at the club at home, a wide broom the size of a narrow hallway that you pull behind you like a cart, and a small round brush on rollers. We sit on the green bench and watch him drag the big broom in long dramatic curves across one side and then the other, then clean the lines with the small brush that makes a scritch-scratch noise as it passes us. The lines he cuts are crisp and perfect, which is not easy to do. I can’t tell how old he is, in his teens or twenties or thirties, his hair cropped close, his thighs no thicker than his calves, and his legs and arms so long and so very black against the white of his clothes. I wish I could watch him do the other courts, but ours is ready and my father walks onto it with his big splayed feet, bouncing a ball off his racquet and scuffing it up immediately.
I think my father hopes, each time we step on the court together, that since our last match I have transformed myself into Chrissie Evert. I think he actually believes, despite years of witnessing the raw truth, that I possess that kind of talent and am stubbornly withholding it from him, deliberately making him suffer. He insists on getting me out on the court, even though it makes him miserable.
Garvey was the tennis player. His room, before Frank moved into it, was filled with trophies of little gold men getting ready to serve and Garvey’s name on the plaques at the bottom. He played on the varsity team at St. Paul’s his freshman and sophomore years and then quit. My father often refers to that moment as the greatest disappointment of his life.
So now there is just me, who’s never done any better than the improvement prize in any sport.
“Daley and I will take you two on,” my father says, to my relief. It’s easier playing with him than against him.
We confer at the baseline. My father has that hopeful look on his face. “Catherine’s wrist is hurting again. Play to her backhand. She barely has any strength in it. And Patrick — well, you can take on Patrick.” Patrick is a very good tennis player. I’ve gotten about four games off of him in all the sets we’ve played, but my father hasn’t forgotten them. “Okay, let’s go get ‘em.” He pats my shoulder and gives me the three balls.
My practice serves go in.
“Look at that!” my father shouts. “Look at that!”
My real ones are abysmal. The first slaps the bottom of the net. The second hits the fence. My father comes down to the baseline.
“Stand right here. A little farther over. Good. Now,” he stands behind me and lifts my racquet back for a serve, “try and snap your wrist at the top, like this.” He takes my arm and slowly lifts it over my head, flicking my wrist at just the right moment. He smells like lime and cigarettes, his Caribbean smell.
I double-fault two more times.
My father comes back down to the baseline.
“If you’d just leave her alone, she’d be fine, Gardiner,” Catherine says. “She just needs to warm up a little.”
After that, I get one in. Patrick, startled that it has gone in, misses it entirely. My father high-fives me. I win the next point, too, by hitting down Catherine’s backhand alley.
No matter what mood I begin with, I always have the same feeling playing tennis, a sort of claustrophobia despite the open space, fresh air, and wind in the trees, combined with a boredom bordering on despair. I keep looking at the clean lines and thinking about the black man in his white shorts. He has left glasses of ice water and a plate of sliced melon on our bench. For three sets a day I’m caged here, the white lines flashing in the heat, the sky too hot to be blue, and the sun searing our already burned skin.
My father never gives up. I don’t think he feels anything but completely alive and exhilarated on the tennis court. He can’t understand my mood, the stupor his ambitions for me puts me in. Even in the last game of the third set (0–6, 1–6, 0–5), he is still giving me tips, showing me the footwork involved in receiving an overhead lob. I watch him move at a backward diagonal, his lovely crisscrossed steps a dance I will never learn. I hit my best shot in the last point, a low crosscourt pass, but it falls just beyond the line.
“Out,” Patrick yells, thrilled not to have won but for the match to be over.
“Bullshit!” my father yells back. “It was a perfect shot.”
“Baloney, Gardiner,” Catherine says.
He’s too pissed to speak and threatens her with a finger as he marches over to their side. My father has a reverence for the rules of tennis, and is a gracious loser on those rare occasions when he does lose. But his desire for my one beautiful shot to be in is far greater than his abilities of perception.
The court is clay, however, and Patrick is pointing to the freshly made imprint, just outside the line.
“That’s bullshit,” my father says again, but weakly.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
He shakes his head as we walk off the court. “You just need to play more. Practice makes perfect.”
But we have played every day for a week and I’m only getting worse.
I stand next to the blond boy that night at the salad bar.
“How’s your game?” he asks, staring down into the cottage cheese
“I suck.”
He smiles but does not look at me. “Beach afterwards?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t bring your boyfriend.” He flicks his eyes at Patrick, three people ahead of us.
“He’s my brother.”
“Step,” he corrects me. “Big difference, Daley.”
He’s found out my name and my family configuration. His power thrills me. I can barely eat. Things are tense at our table. Frank has not shown up.
“You play with fire, you’re going to get burned,” my father keeps saying. Even here he has his A-1 for his steaks. His nose has already started to bead up. Catherine isn’t eating much either. She jerks her head up every time someone comes through the thatched archway into the restaurant. She drinks. This pleases my father.
“You’s keeping up with me good tonight,” he says, trying to pinch her tit discreetly. She flinches away. “Oh fuck that,” he says under his breath.
Every night there is baked Alaska. The kitchen staff wheels it out and everyone is expected to stop eating and talking and watch it flame up.
“Oh for chrissake, don’t clap for these monkeys,” my father says.
There is dancing after dinner to a steel band. Usually my father and Catherine stay and dance while we go back to the cottage and watch TV, but tonight she doesn’t want to.
“It’s all right, my little pussy,” my father croons at her, but she’s just watching the doorway now.
“I know what you need,” my father says, and does something to her under the table.
“Keep your fucking hands off me!” she says loudly. People look, even Elyse and her new family all the way across the room. Even the blond boy who hasn’t glanced at me since the salad bar.
I tip my head to the beach. He nods. I get up then, leave Patrick, leave Catherine, leave my father and his purple sweaty face and yellow eyes and shaking hands and follow the blond boy to the sand.
The sun drops early at the equator. The sky is dark blue, no hint of a sunset left, just a cold pale line at the horizon. The sand is still warmer than the air. We walk down the beach away from the restaurant and all our cottages. We tell each other where we live. He’s from Connecticut. When we get far enough away from the last old lady collecting shells, he pulls me down on the sand and starts kissing me. His kisses are hard and wet, purposeful, like he is trying to get something out of my mouth with his tongue. His saliva is all over me and makes my skin cold. I think of stopping him, then remember where I am, in St. Thomas, staying at that cottage that I don’t want to go back to until all the fighting is over. So I refocus, try to remember Neal Caffrey’s kisses and how floaty I felt afterward, and I try not to think about the Penthouse letter and the dead star feeling, and when all that fails I think once more that I should stop him and go home, but then I remember where I am again.