"Fuck!" he shouts, tossing down and kicking his racquet, and then turns to his hushed gallery. "You can clap for him, for chrissake. He's goddamn playing well enough."
So they do, and with what I detect is an extra measure of appreciation for my helping to make this something other than your standard boss's brunch, not to mention the fact that they would always gladly pay good money to see Richie suffer a substantial hit to his ego, if not bottom line. But none of it matters, because in my game focus I just now notice that Rita has been watching at courtside, maybe for a whole game or two, her face still sour for this endless intrusion, for my once again (I can anticipate her now) thrusting myself in the center ring of everyone else's business and pleasure.
"Why don't you two call it quits now," Rita says. "You're tied and we've had our fun."
"The fun's not over," Richie says, testing his racquet strings against his heels. I'm sitting on the ground, trying to stretch my legs, which are feeling suddenly hollowed out but calcified, these toppled, petrified trunks. "Come on, Jerry, get up, let's do it."
"Why do you want to do this?" Rita says, to us both. Maybe only I can tell, for she's not yelling or gesticulating and her expression hasn't changed, but she's really very angry now, practically livid. I know because her chin is noticeably quivering, something that happens to most other people when they're on the brink of crying. But she's far from that.
"Don't you see how disgusting this is? You really have to take away each other's toys, don't you? It's vulgar, Richard. And Jerry, let's be honest, you can't afford to lose your plane."
"Hey now…"
"I'm not talking about just money. What would you do without it? What, Jerry? Come on, tell me. What are you going to do?"
It's an excellent question, exactly the kind of query I get all the time from my loved ones, thoroughly rhetorical but also half holding out for some shard of the substantive from yours truly, some blood-tinged nugget of circumspection and probity.
But maybe just not right now, as I'm wondering myself how I'm going to unsticky this wicket I'm on, despite the 6—all tally I've worked, for my legs (are they mine?) feel absolutely inanimate, dumb, these knobby flesh logs that might as well be deli-catessen fodder, glass-encased in the chill.
"I can't get up," I say to Rita. "I can't move."
"Cut the horseshit, Jerry," Richie says. "You've had enough rest. Come on. Your serve starts the tiebreak. Then we serve in twos. First one to seven."
"I really can't, Rita," I say. "I'm not kidding."
Rita quickly approaches, kneels down beside me.
"Are you serious?"
"Everything just froze up."
"Both legs?"
"Yeah. But in different parts."
Rita turns to Richie, who's now coming to inspect. She tells him, "Okay, that's it, Richard. He's all cramped up. He's probably totally dehydrated. Game's over."
"Hey, if that's what he wants."
"That's what's going to happen," Rita says, firm and nurselike.
"I guess I'll start taking flying lessons," Richie says.
"You can't do that," she says. "You can't take his plane because of this."
"I'd rather not, but I will. You were inside when we agreed to the rules."
Rita looks at me as though I've descended to yet another circle of stupid-hell, and I can only, lowly, nod.
She says to him, "Richard. Don't be a jerk. Just call it a tie and Jerry can go home and everybody will be happy."
"Listen, Rita, you're completely missing your own point about toys. That's exactly right. There's no purer pleasure. So would you butt out right now, okay? Jerry and I made an honest wager with clear guidelines, and Jerry himself will tell you that if I were in his shoes, or in my own, to be exact, he would be doing the same thing. Ain't it so, Jerry?"
Of course I don't want to, but I have to nod, because he's absolutely right, even Rita knows it, I'd be righteously slipping that fat Ferrari fob on my mini — Swiss Army knife keychain before even helping his skinny ass up off the deck.
"I can't stand this," Rita says, using my thighs as a support to stand. It hurts, but sort of helps, too. The cool touch of her hands. She doesn't say anything, but just picks up her straw handbag (the one I brought back for her from the Canary Islands, with a heart cross-sewn into the weave) and just walks away, traversing the lawn straight to the carriage house, where she rumbles her banana mobile to life. For the whole time we watch her, neither Richie nor I saying a word, though I wonder if what he wants to say to her is just what I want to say, which isn't at all original, or earthshaking, or even romantic; it's the most basic request, what a guy like me who always has plenty to say but never quite when it counts, wants to say most often: Don't go. And as I mouth it, she whirs her car backward on the driveway and into the street, and then, with a bad transmission jerk, rattles off.
Richie says, "Okay, Jerry, now that that's done, what the fuck are you going to do?"
I can't answer, angry as I am with his that.
"Come on, Battle, get up now Or quit."
And I will tell you that Jerry Battle gets up on his feet then.
And I make my legs work. And I make Richie pay for what we both should have done.
At least in that, I am magnificent.
eight
HERE AT MY SHARED DESK at Parade Travel, the foe is always inertia.
No one mentions it by name, certainly not me, but every trip or vacation I book for my customers is one more small victory for those of us who believe in the causes of motion and transit.
This morning, for instance, I set up a December holiday for Nancy and Neil Plotkin, sending them first on a ten-day cruise of Southeast Asia, ports of call to include Bali, Singapore, and Phuket, where they will disembark and switch to overland on the Eastern Oriental Express for an escorted railway tour of the famous Silk Road, snaking up through Bangkok and to Chiang Mai, after which they'll fly back to Hong Kong for a two-night stay at the venerable Mandarin Oriental, to shop for trinkets and hike Victoria's Peak and take a junk ride across the harbor to the outdoor markets of Kowloon.
Pretty damn nice. The Plotkins, like me, are semi-retired, Nancy now periodically substituting at the middle school where she taught for thirty years, Neil actively managing their own retirement portfolio instead of the institutional mutual fund he ran since Johnson was president. They're pleasant enough people, which is to say typical New Yorkers, charming when they have to be and surprisingly generous and warm when they don't, though instantly skeptical and pit-bullish if in the least pushed or prodded. And they're easy customers to work with (this is the fourth big trip I've arranged for them), not just because they have plenty of time and disposable income and have varied touristical interests, but more that they seem to understand that a primary aspect of traveling is not just the destination and its native delights, but the actual process of getting there, the literal travail, which is innately difficult and laborious but also absolutely essential to create any true sense of journey.