For the next week we will be staying at the Knights Inn in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are courts nearby at the high school, and Vivi and I are out there training. Are you available early next week? I would not mind at all making the trip to your house in Grosse Point.
With hopes of seeing you soon,
Maximilian Gross
Mr. Wilcox,
I imagine you are surprised to see the postmark on the outside envelope. But yes, in point of fact, I find myself living productively and gainfully in Copenhagen, Denmark, thanks to the efforts of Vivi and her parents, the Ingebritzens. They have put me up in an apartment outside their indoor tennis club a mile or so from the great Tivoli Amusement Park. I am now coaching five young ladies and two young men, all of whom have some degree of talent, the best being Vivi. I read somewhere that you lived in this city for a year, and I wonder if there are any places you would have me go in my first months here. I did make it to your house, you know, though it must have been when you were in Los Angeles visiting with Lee and the Samprases. Did they have you to their ugly house? I find myself swinging these days from stretches of loneliness and doubt to pockets of unrestricted happiness, and as strange as it sounds I think I owe both of those moods to you. To your music, your imagination, and your strange and gifted son. If I never see him again, he will still live within me, as do you, Mr. Wilcox. The Danish girl and I had a two-hundred-shot rally today, and one nearly as long right after. I’m wondering how many times early in your career you were in places like this, relying on your wits and your talent, and a woman who did not judge you, who trusted you when you’d forgotten how to trust yourself. I do not often think of Lee these days, but I hope he is in your life where he belongs. As you requested, I will not write again or try to get in touch with you or Lee, but know that you will always be part of my neurochemistry, the part of me that sings and mourns and deeply understands. This is what I’ve learned from your music, and from my coaching, and what I will continue to pass on to the Danish boys and girls, of whose talent I am sole guardian.
I am taking a Danish immersion class at night, and now when I dream I dream in Danish. When I wake up in my Copenhagen apartment, under my cold cotton sheets, I sometimes feel touched by magic, as though nothing in my life can ever go wrong. Do you know this feeling? Did you feel it when you saw your son hitting peerless ground strokes with the great Pete Sampras, and if you did, did you recognize the gift I’d given you?
Can we say that we are even?
Yours truly,
Maximilian Gross
January
My mother is dating a man named Russell who owns a boat with the words Smooth Sailing on the back. Russell has put Smooth Sailing away for the winter and he’s trying to talk my mother into an all-day Nordic safari, maybe even a drive out onto frozen Lake Ontario, which on a day like today will feel like the Sahara itself, he says. He shows up at our house with his blue-tinted sunglasses and neon green ski jacket on, as though there’s a ski lift in our house.
“If you’re going to live in the cold, you may as well love it,” he says, as if it’s that easy to love something. Russell has a way of making you feel small because he does so many big things, like shooting the rapids and hang gliding off rocky gorges. He bounds through our house like a happy Lab waiting to go out and shit.
My mother is drying dishes in the kitchen, and though I can’t see her, I imagine she is shyly smiling. Russell is what my mother wants, probably always wanted in some ways, like a trip to Europe or a house in the mountains.
“The Jeep’s still running, babe,” he says, and the word is a bug in my ear. Russell has snow in his hair and it’s starting to melt, which makes it sparkle when the light hits it. He looks over at me. I am on the couch reading Guitar Player magazine.
“Come on and take a ride in the Jeep. The fresh air’ll put some blood in your cheeks,” he says, and I wonder if I look as sick as I feel. I would just as soon take a pass from December through March on all this outdoor crap. I haven’t exercised much since I sprained my knee on Halloween and long walks tire me out.
My mother strolls out of the kitchen drying off her hands and pulling her long black hair out of the band she wears when it’s just us in the house. She’s wearing a burgundy fleece that Russell bought her and blue jeans. The two of them are dressed like the college kids I see at the coffee shop.
“The Jeep’s still running. Let’s go,” he says to both of us, and I wonder if he thinks the thing will drive away if we don’t leave in the next minute.
“Let’s go, Dex,” she says. “Have you ever been in a Jeep before?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“Well, put something warm on and let’s go.”
I look at Russell but all I can see are those blue glasses and that square jaw and that smug toothy smile. I want him to jump in that Jeep and drive off to wherever he took Smooth Sailing and pick up people’s mothers down there.
But I say, “Wait a minute. I’ll be right out.” And I grab my coat from my room.
It is January again. My father is watching television and dying. He’s at Columbia-Presbyterian in New York City and he’s watching television all day long from 6 A.M. until Larry King, which he’ll fall asleep in front of. He used to watch TV with me when he lived up here in Oswego with us, but my mom got tired of all that nothing, she said, and kicked him out. He didn’t threaten her, didn’t swear, didn’t even argue like he used to. When she asked him to leave, he said she was right to want that. He said it while CSI: Miami was on.
When he left, my mom gave all the TVs away so I’ve taken to reading magazines and playing games on my computer. There’s not much else to do where we live, being that it’s freezing cold half the year and I’m fifteen and too young to get into bars, which is what everyone else does. My mom says she’d rather I shoot drugs than watch TV, although that’s not true.
My mom used to say it was the TV that made my father sick. But I said it was getting kicked out in the cold that did it. She asked him to leave in January and you do not want to know what January is like where I live.
It’s close to zero every day and the ice mats in big chunks on the door so it’s a hassle prying it open every morning, and the wind howls and whips through the piles of snow that cover our car and our mailbox and the red-and-white barbershop pole downstairs.
The day they fired my father we stayed in all afternoon watching soap operas and game shows. He ordered a pizza and said this was an opportunity, but it wouldn’t last long and so we should enjoy this time together.
When my mom came home from work, he told her he’d been let go but it was all right, he loved us and that’s what was important. She hugged him, but she looked desolately out the window, like an Iraqi war widow I saw on CNN whose husband came home with no legs. And I knew things were about to change. We watched movies that night until I got tired and went to sleep, but when I woke up at two to get a glass of juice from the fridge, he was in the family room, the couch surrounding his body like an old coat.
Something happened the day they fired him. He seemed content in the way calm people get when their bus is delayed and they figure complaining will do no good. He entered this funk in which he stopped washing or changing his clothes or eating at the table or bothering to sleep anywhere but the couch. And he watched TV. My mom says now she could see it coming on even before he got fired because no one gets fired for no reason, though it never seems justified when it happens to you.