He collected his athletic gear from the locker at the hotel. It was getting stale; he would have to take it home after the game. Allan was already on the court, playing alone, darting enthusiastically over the hardwood. Donny waited for the ball to get away, to twist madly into a corner and stop, and then he opened the glass door and slipped inside.
Allan was a year younger than Donny and liked to pretend it made a big difference. “It’s not just that I work harder than you do to stay in shape,” he would say, “I’m also younger.” He was very tall, very thin, with a thatch of wheatlike hair that he kept short but unkempt. His eyes were green, his skin fair. But today, Donny thought, as Allan served gently into the corner and then loped after the ball, he looked a lot like an underfed wolf forced into a set of tennis whites.
They knew each other from the university. Allan was finishing a PhD in philosophy while Donny completed his residency. They would run into each other at the vending machines, slugging back terrible oily coffee, or hogging window seats at SpaHa, a university hangout. Now Allan ran an organic food shop on Adelaide. It was too far out of the way to make much money. Allan had thought that by setting up next to the fashion district he was guaranteed an image-obsessed clientele, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Still, it meant that he and Donny had kept in touch — the odd lunch together, or even a jog up to and around Queen’s Park, an occasional squash game and then a pint at the Wheat Sheaf or, if they were feeling more sociable, up two blocks at the Paddock on a Friday afternoon.
Allan leaned against the glass, bent over to catch his breath.
“Working hard?” Donny asked. “How long have you been here?”
“I closed up early.”
“Small world.” Donny collected the ball, squashed it in his fist. “I did the same thing. I had to get out of there.”
“The young soul rebels,” laughed Allan. He waved his racket in a way that was an indication for Donny to serve.
They rallied for a while without talking. Donny realized, not for the first time, that much of the pleasure he derived from these games was in seeing Allan struggle. He liked nothing better than to watch Allan tie himself up in a corner, his long limbs betraying him, or smack his racket against the wall in frustration, or come to a skidding halt on the varnished floor as the ball careened past him. He didn’t feel guilty about this; he was positive Allan felt the same way about him. Maria had come to watch them once and she was adamant she would never come again.
These gentle opening rallies were also a time when both of them strategized, planned their conversation. What did they want to talk about today; how hard would they push their points?
Donny suggested they get to it. He said he wanted to build up a sweat.
“You seem pent up,” Allan said, a little ways in.
Donny was winning. The score was seven to four. He held the ball way out in front of him, delicately, his racket pulled back. He looked over at Allan, whose eyes were fixed on the ball. Tension was evident in his thighs. “Pent up?” Donny said. “Pent?”
“It sounds odd when you say it, sure,” Allan agreed. “Pent suddenly seems like a made-up word.”
Donny served. The ball cleared the service line, but only just, then ricocheted into the corner behind Allan before he could lay his racket on it and died next to the glass. “Eight-four,” Donny said, pleased. That was his best serve. If he could repeat it at will, he’d give up medicine.
“So everything’s okay?” Allan tossed him the ball and held up a hand. He opened the door to the court and stepped out. He bent over the water fountain, in profile to Donny. The water rose up to meet his mouth in a weak glossy arc. Donny could see the individual bumps of his friend’s vertebrae through the thin white cotton of his shirt. When Allan reentered the court his chin was wet and he wiped it with his forearm, which also became wet. Allan pulled up his shirt and wiped his face with it. This was precisely how epidemics were spread.
Donny stabbed at the air with his racket. He felt the blood in him, a rush hour of molecules on the inside track. But then he paused. He thought of his patients. At home around their supper tables, telling their wives and husbands, their children, how their appointment had been cancelled, something about the doctor having an emergency. He thought of Adam Govington. He thought of Maria. Saw her vividly in her orange coveralls, making her way to the top of a slash pile, a drip torch in her right hand like a flaming scalp. Smoke in the air, moose hunters moving through the uncut trees at the horizon. He thought of Al Gore and George W. Bush sitting in their offices. The mass of thoughts in their heads. All of them, every one, had more right to be pissed off than he did. And yet he had acted the most dramatically. It was only he who had blown up.
Allan looked at him curiously. “You going to play?”
Donny served. It was a weak effort, the ball sailed on him, struck the wall near the point where it joined the ceiling and rebounded to center court. Allan pounced on the ball, smacked it dramatically at the bottom of the wall. It picked up a wicked spin somewhere in that series of events and bounded in a strange loop past Donny’s windmilling arm.
“I’m warming up,” Allan said.
Donny took the game comfortably and they began a second. They hadn’t spoken again. Actually, Donny supposed that couldn’t be true. He vaguely remembered Allan asking if he wanted to go again. And something about grabbing a bite. And Maria, how was she? They had swapped many words apparently, but none of them ran together to form what Donny considered civil conversation. He shouldn’t have come, he was still too screwed up. He thought of whiskey and of a newspaper article he had read that said any personality trait you had when you turned thirty you were stuck with for life. If you were a fuck-up at thirty, the reasoning went, then you may as well live with it, or shoot yourself, because the wiring was locked in. The article had annoyed Donny, probably because he was twenty-nine when he read it. He hated it even more now, because he had been unable to shed the memory. The more he tried, the more it cemented itself into the foundation of whatever process it was that allowed him to think. The brain was a mystery to Donny. He vividly remembered dropping a tomato slice into the sand on a trip to the beach with his parents when he was four years old, his father telling him to be a good boy and bury it. He remembered digging the tiny grave. But he couldn’t come up with, at this moment, the phone number for his own office.
Allan, though, was saying something.
“Say again,” Donny said. “I was miles off.”
“Nothing important.”
“It’s okay. What were you saying?”
“Really,” Allan said, “don’t worry about it.”
Their game was degenerating into a chore. Donny had derailed and needed to get back on track. He was taking out his middle age and his absent wife, and those dumb fuckers south of the border, and Adam Govington, on a pop band. And on a friend. Making them pay the price. After a moment, he told Allan he felt better. He could smell his own sweat, thought he could make out the sharpness of his own anger and frustration.