“Hey there!” he said right away, holding out his hand. “How are you?” He seemed so happy to see me that I didn't realize at first he had no idea who I was. He was just that kind of guy — a meeter and greeter — and he never turned it off.
“Kyle Hoffman,” I said. “You used to play tennis with my dad.”
“Is that a fact.” He stood there nodding and grinning.
“Dean Hoffman,” I said. “You were his nemesis.”
“Nemesis!” Frank McAllister said, shaking his head in hearty amusement. He didn't have a clue what I was talking about.
“I was a friend of Ivy's,” I said.
The smile never left his face. It had been false to begin with, and it stayed false. “Well, nice to see you,” he said, and shook my hand again.
I saw that he didn't want to hear that I'd known Ivy or— which I'd almost said — that I'd loved her. He didn't want to talk about her any more than I wanted to talk about her with the people she and I had gone to high school with. He wanted her to belong to him, too.
“Dad,” his son called from the other side of the net, “can I get a drink?”
“Sure thing, kiddo,” Frank said.
“You want to hit a few balls?” I said.
“Hey, that sounds great!” Frank said. “I'm in the book. Give me a call.”
“I meant right now,” I said. “Unless you're too tired.”
He watched his kid, who was talking to another teenager over by the Coke machine, and nodded. He looked winded from all his bounding, but I could tell he didn't want to admit it. “Sure thing,” he said. “Why the hell not?”
I ran over and explained to Anil that I was going to play with my father's old partner for a few minutes. He hadn't kept up his game and looked relieved, wandering over to the sidelines.
I took my place at the baseline. Frank McAllister was bouncing the ball against his racket, getting ready to serve. As I crouched there, I began trembling with anger. I wanted to beat the shit out of Frank McAllister, humiliate him in front of his kid, make him feel tired and pathetic. I knew I could do it, too; he looked out of breath and old. I wanted to beat him not because he wouldn't talk about Ivy but because he didn't remember my father. We had mythologized the McAllisters, had loved them, and he didn't even know who we were, just as Ivy had never known who I was, not really, never cared to find out before she'd gone off and died. To the McAllisters we were nothing. The world, I thought then, is divided into sides just like a tennis court is: into winners and losers, into forgetters and forgotten.
I realized that my father had always known which side he was on, and he didn't care. He was even, I thought, proud. All around me was the sound of his game, of rubber soles and asphalt and the hiccup of a ball crashing into the net; and, beyond that, the sound of the suburbs on a summer afternoon, the lawn mowers and radios and family conversations. Across the court, Frank McAllister asked me if I was ready.
“Sure thing,” I said, and prepared myself to lose.
An Analysis of Some Troublesome Recent Behavior by H. G. Higginbottom, Ph.D. Department of Biology, Western University
ABSTRACT
This paper will address the root causes and consequences of some troublesome recent behavior by Hank Higginbottom, Ph.D. Professor Higginbottom studies sexual selection in Poecilia reticulata, aka the Trinidadian guppy. In his office, on the sixth floor of a concrete building in the southwest corner of the university campus, his main enjoyment comes from the blue burble of the tanks and the swishing, distinctively orange-spotted bodies of Poecilia reticulata within them. It's a precarious enjoyment, a calm easily disturbed. It's most easily — and frequently — disturbed by Joseph Purdy, who studies sexual selection in the human male, whose office is located next door, whose research is more provocative and better funded than Hank's, and who therefore has a much nicer and larger lab, with windows, even though said research seems to take place mainly through the observation of pickup lines in bars and therefore does not even require much office space, and whose seemingly favorite activity during the day is to stroll into Hank's office wearing his cowboy boots and offer Hank some deer jerky from an animal he has personally shot himself. On the day in question Hank responded to this offer with a right hook to Joseph Purdy's angular jaw, landing Purdy in the hospital.
INTRODUCTION
In all honesty, the day did not begin well. It began as so many had lately — with Erica crying in bed in the silent fashion she had, without noises or sniffling, and what really got to Hank was how she could get up, turn off the alarm, start the coffee, and get dressed, all without ever acknowledging that she was crying, without so much as wiping away a single tear. She stayed stony-faced while tears ran in multiple streams down her cheeks, the snot swimming down from her nostrils; she wouldn't lift a hand to wipe the snot off her face, and Hank knew she did this to broadcast her suffering and his role in it, that even her mucus was a personal indictment of him and of their life together. Even Max, who was only five and not generally perceptive of adult behavior — in fact his own behavior was causing a lot of problems and costing Hank and Erica some serious money in child therapy bills — looked at his father and asked what was wrong with Mommy. Hank only shrugged — which he knew Erica hated, but still couldn't stop doing — and told Max to get dressed.
Then, as Hank drove him to kindergarten, Max threw a fit because he wouldn't pull over and buy him some ice cream, even though it was eight o'clock in the morning and Hank had explained the proper moments and places for the eating of ice cream time and time again. Obtuseness was the major facet of Max's personality — that and anger. No one knew where it came from, the anger, not Hank, not Erica, not the teachers or the therapists. They gave him crayons and he drew mushroom clouds and corpses with blood pooling around them in waxy, Razzmatazz Red streaks. They gave him toys at group playtime and he threw the toys at the other children, whose parents later (and understandably) requested that he be removed. Max, in general, hit people. He was a disturbed child. After a while the teachers and therapists who'd once nodded sympathetically in conversation with Hank and Erica began to look at them searchingly and then stare down at their own hands, as if there were questions in their minds they weren't quite sure how to phrase. Hank knew what those questions were. In fact it came down to only one question:
What kind of people are you, that you produced this child?
He looked to work for relief from the problems of home. This was essentially the reason work was invented, as far as Hank was concerned. That and to pay the child therapy bills, since Erica had quit work to spend more time with Max, not that it was helping, which was another subject that had been gone over time and time again. In the office, crammed with fish tanks and filing cabinets and scientific journals and old posters for talks his graduate students had given at regional conferences, Hank felt at ease. He was working on a manuscript that summarized his recent research into sexual courtship and predator behavior in Poecilia reticulata. He had crunched the data into graphs and tables and believed that he could clearly demonstrate the truth of his hypothesis that the male guppy showed a constant interest in appropriate females regardless of the presence of potential predators. The male guppy was oriented to risk-reckless behavior, and Hank could prove it. It was a sheer joy to work quietly at the office all by himself; the place promoted a sense of relief so strong that it almost felt physical — like blushing, or being drunk — and that's why it was so extremely annoying when Purdy strolled in to his office yet again, without even knocking, his cowboy boots scuffling, his jaw working away at a stick of jerky, to say, “Hey, how's it going, dude?”