“My raccoon. For the grapes.”
“What, have you invited him? What’s this raccoon? You’re sick!”
She slammed away to her retreat in the plump covers of our king-size bedroom where more Japanese television was.
Yes, I was sick, and it continued. I was not the same, maybe am still not. I’ve got myself in trouble, a minor disaster I rather like — not a well man. I neglected my raccoon friend and imagined that it cared.
In the early spring I began playing more tennis, but not with Jane, who cared less now for the game. I played with little Mary. Not in spite, either. There was no special reason to tell Jane, and Mary’s now careful friendship was too precious to lose.
One day I went down to the courts with too much beer in me. I knew I could not drink over two beers without going straight into depression, more a desert than an abyss for me, longer and no abrupt way out with great effort. See here, I have sought help professional and amateur for myself. I’ve tried to heal myself, always a bit sick that the cluttered mentocracy of self-study that afflicts this fat nation had enrolled me too. I agreed with the last food doctor entirely on the beer and had been much better for it. I’d never been a real drinker anyway, just a medicator of joylessness.
Mary keeps running and trying, dear heart, even without a great deal of strength, but with the advantage of growing up on a family court in Memphis with a mother who was a tour player. I’m just a bit better, without a single formal lesson. I watch a good player — the Indians — and try to absorb their spirit. There is a dullish way of playing perfect tennis, by all the percentages, that causes tennis burnout to the young even in their twenties — the young of a certain sensitivity. They get tired of the geometry and the predictions, their coaches and families. I’ve been close to that just by the repetition of a few weeks of near-perfect play. Maybe I’d drunk the beer to make the match more even between Mary and me. She was winning and I was not slacking.
One of those body men of the same pair — who played beside me ranting about their exercise and food regimen months ago — came over as I was beginning to serve.
“Say, did you know you were always late with your backhand, just a little late? You should step up to the ball more, get to the height of its arc, and be in front of it.”
Hardly without a pause, I dropped my racket and slapped him in the face. I’d never hit a man with a full fist, and in this case the result would have been even sillier if I had. He popped me so fast with the ham of his forearms, twice, I was out cold for a time. I woke up sitting, with his face over me and into mine, now with more concern than anger. He was smiling. Then he must have smelled the beer on me. Mary was up by me, amazed on her little legs.
“You shouldn’t come out here drinking, pal. I’m sorry, but you’re very lucky I’m a belt. I only told you you were late with your backhand,” the man said.
“I’ve been late with my backhand for thirty years. It’s the way I play, it’s fun that way. You fucking loudmouth pig.”
Mary moved down to get between him and me as he took a step, saying no to both of us. He wore athletic sports glasses. In his horror over my infirmity, he cut into me with a high-beamed glass stare that reminded me of every imperious monster of life that had ever hounded me. I almost fainted with hatred, overcome by all my failures at once, and proud of them too.
Afterwards Mary and I drank even more beer in my closed store together. I took out a new Jaguar poster with an even nuder woman poised in a diaper on the hood, her toes stretched out as just then in the moment of sexual crisis. I tacked her up. She was more Ford than Jaguar.
“Yes, and I think I’m separating from Jane. This antiseptic thing is coming on too strong. We’re going to just be a laboratory with the right wallpaper soon. She even asked me if I thought we’d still make love after age fifty. My God, fifty. That’s probably gotten dirty too. Or unkempt. That’s what it is about those St. Louis Midwestern people. Their fear of soil, wood, anything that could leave a stain—that’s why they’re creeps. Want to pave the world, they’re paving the goddamn beaches, they want designer nursing homes for resorts.” And so on. “She doesn’t even like sex, I’ll bet. She just wants a picture of it.”
I thought I’d get some agreement from Mary. But now she scolded me, and I quit the beer.
“You’re not separating. No you are not. Separating is all you’ve done since I’ve known you. And you will work with Jane, you will compromise. At your age it’s just indecent, you, to always want to be a social nigger. You won’t get along without her. You’ll get worse.”
“We might strike up something again, you and me,” I said.
“Not a prayer. You’re had. You worked for it hard to be had, and you’re not stepping out now! You’re married, Royce! You’re so absolutist. You think heaven’s supposed to feel like heaven. If you quit this, I know this: you’ll get old and tired instantly, with all your little principles intact. Just old and tired.”
Now she was wet in her eyes.
But my raccoon, my arbor, my self! “A house should be a boat on this planet, riding nature. She wants a high-profile mausoleum, a monolith with a lawn like a pool table around it.” This felt original to me, and I was in rare beer eloquence, with my face good and bruised by that fiend on the court. I felt good and brave.
Mary simply left, on her little legs, and I had the shop alone.
So now our love life is getting worse, although the raccoon came right up for the muscadines when they were out two years later. It didn’t care if the poles were green metal. I fixed a couch under the vines that Jane seemed to like, but easing her toward long talks — we had nothing left to say — and pleasures under the moon will be a job. Sometimes on the television we’ll see a number of people, peasants, driven off into a chasm in the desert by charioteers with great-looking helmets in pursuit, and she’ll get a little warm. Sometimes there’s a sort of new kindness about her. I saw her feeding the raccoon with a can of premium King Oscar sardines once, out there by herself with it. I don’t think she knew I could see through the vines from the house.
She got bored and the granny decorator, with his delicious whip of a tongue, wanted her to work with him, since she was educated to his home touches. I imagine he’s seen with her at very good restaurants where they eat in St. Louis. She eats with him a lot more than with me, and that’s fine, really, since we can’t talk very much. One week there was a sort of scandal, rather pathetic, when the old granny was lying in his own bed playing with himself in easy view of several straight young workmen busy at his house. Jane took his side. I was surprised how this desperation endeared him to me too, sad fellow. Because I’m on his team. The coach has sent me in whether I wanted to play the last losing quarter or not. I look at my lean face in the mirror and see less a younger man than a thing in progress to a remarkable death’s head.
Thanks deeply for listening as I wind down this scratchy log. I’ve gone back to the Presbyterian church of my youth a few times, alone and secretly. White church music is still awful and middle-aged everybody still appalls me, especially the sudden careful holiness they’re given over to, having bought a ticket to a proverb convention — I judge.
Yet the very few graceful, profound, and bewildering words of Our Saviour do get through to me more and more, so different from this loser’s, lost like a two-headed snake in jabber at itself, condemned to my own story like somebody already in an Italian hell. I am slow, I am windy. I have so little vision, engaged in this discourtesy of length and interminable excuse, but seeing bits of light here and there ahead. The Indian tennis players aren’t winning much anymore, but I hope they’re still around.