“I like them.”
He eyed me appraisingly. “Where’d you get this one?” he said.
“Don’t tease him.”
“Actually, I’m not teasing,” he said gently. “The last one she brought around here was a real bastard.”
“Ingraham,” she explained, “from high school.”
“But I like this new guy.”
“I’m likable.”
“Hey,” George cried agreeably, “me too! Okay, let’s play some tennis.” He thrust himself out of his chair and clambered around in the closet under the stairs, emerging with a pair of old wooden rackets.
“Well, George,” Nora said, “we’ve got perfectly good regular rackets.”
“No.” He bowed. “This is the tradition. If you don’t mind.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It is,” he pronounced, “more sporting this way.”
He was better than I was, I think—I mean, he could hit the ball squarely and very hard and he served fast and accurately, he had grown up with the court in his backyard, after all, whereas I had bonked the ball around only in the neighborhood parks. But he had no stamina, and he wouldn’t run for balls he could have got, so I kept it fairly close for a while. He began to get red in the face, and he took off his shirt, which showed his narrow chest, with a fuzzy badge of black hair on his sternum. The sun lit half the court through the pine trees with a stagey, slanty beauty. I wasn’t in the best shape either, I began to fade halfway through the set, but I did all right, and finally I beat him, 6–4. He sagged at the back line and I felt a moment’s compunction for my having been, as it seemed to me suddenly, impolite, a poor houseguest, but then he joined me at the net, flushed and sweaty. “Nice,” he said.
“Thanks. You too.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got malaria,” he said, flicking sweat from his eyebrows, “just for your information.”
He wasn’t that much older than me: a year, maybe two. It stung him, I thought, to have been beaten at home, with his sister watching, off and on, from the upstairs windows. I said, “Sorry.”
“Not your fault. Got it in Ecuador.”
“You’re better than I am,” I said. “Just lost your wind. Plus these rackets.”
“Yeah, well, don’t go to Ecuador.”
“Okay.” But as far as I knew, he’d never been to Ecuador.
“Or if you do,” he said significantly, “take precautions.”
My only real dealing with Mr. Vardon came just after this, while I was in the hall, heading for the shower. “You give the boyo a workout?” he asked.
I said something nice, I don’t know what.
“I used to play. That’s why we built it. For me. But I fouled up my back. Fixing a flat tire, if you can believe it. So I just get to sit here and look at it. At least it gets some use from somebody. My wife likes it. And you beat George. Good for you. I never could. That lucky bastard.”
“Said he’s a little sick.”
“Sure. Actually he smokes too much and never exercises. He’s got the body of a forty-year-old man. Like a little skinny one.”
I thought about telling Mr. Vardon what his son had said to me, but I thought both of us would end up looking a little strange. Or he’d look strange and I’d look mean for repeating it. So I just kept my mouth shut, and Nora’s father walked off into his bedroom, where, with the door open, he shucked off his white shirt with a brisk, demonstrative flourish. His stomach was still trim, his biceps hefty. Then he reached over and closed the door, and that was really the last I saw of him until several months later, after everything had changed.
Heading home aboard the all-night charter bus, Nora slept on my shoulder and I sat with my head resting against the glass, with the sewery citrus stink of the bathroom catching me now and then. At about three in the morning we passed through Seattle, where all the drunken uncles of my line were sleeping it off. My own parents had managed to construct a safe little life for themselves and for me, but this project had taken up all their effort, as I thought of it then, and while they were proud of me for walking the straight and narrow, and I could admire them for having done the same, we didn’t really have a lot to say to one another anymore. (This has remained true until today, in fact.) It was as though none of the three of us quite knew what to do with ourselves if our lives weren’t burning down in the way everyone else’s were. So I wasn’t sad or particularly anything as the bus barreled through the city and south toward Oregon. The bus stopped in Kelso and we all wandered around stunned in the fluorescent lights, smelling the hash browns, and then it was back on the bus for the last hours south into Eugene, which, in the early morning, was a lovely place, pink and yellow, with sheets of pale sunlight falling over the college buildings and fog rising from the fountains, the fast-food franchises just opening up, and the dark gray houses holding within themselves their little secrets, innumerable men and women starting up from their beds, getting on with the day. The joke, when I was in high school—or maybe it was really a joke from The Breakfast Club, I don’t remember—was that if you didn’t actually have a girlfriend, you said you had a Canadian girlfriend, someone who was off somewhere out of sight, immune to judgment. But here I was with the Canadian girlfriend on my shoulder, for real. It was true now, and different from what I thought it would be, easier, less contentious, more like real life than I had imagined.
Nora and I stayed in Eugene that summer, working, and over the weeks that followed Nora got mostly bad news from home. George had gone back to work, then quit again. Then it turned out he’d actually been fired after he started a fire in the grease trap, which closed the restaurant for two days, after which he moved back home, into his old bedroom. Then he stopped coming out of his room. It sounded ominous to me, as though he was seriously off-track, but Nora never thought of it that way until George was arrested naked, in the summer rain, in the middle of the high school athletic fields, turning in circles and talking to himself. After this his parents kept him at home for a while, watching him, and there were long conversations back and forth, which I basically got the gist of, they were obviously worried about his mind, and eventually (after what seemed a long delay) they took him in to see a doctor, and he was medicated, which seemed to help. The Vardon family history had found another occasion to express itself, evidently. I never told Nora about his malaria comment, though I felt uneasy about it—I saw it now for what it seemed to be, an early indication of some delusion.
“He says he’s hearing voices,” Nora told me. “But everybody hears voices. I hear voices. Everybody does. I hear my name in the cafeteria, I always think somebody’s calling me, it’s this voice, but it’s not—it doesn’t have any qualities. It’s not masculine, it’s not feminine, it’s just a voice, it’s like the idea of a voice. It’s like telepathy.”
I regarded the pretty curve of her shoulders. The easy warmth of an Oregon July filtered around the edges of the window frame. I put my hand on the small of her back. I whispered: “Nora.”
“Don’t.” She swatted at me.
“But sweetheart,” I said, “you’d know if you were crazy.”
“But I probably wouldn’t. Don’t you see? That’s sort of the definition of crazy.” She fixed me with a hard, calculating stare. She had her own opinions, and I didn’t then know how to talk her out of them, or that I was supposed to simply listen to her; I was too young to know what to say or do, I had so little experience with things and with women in particular, and I believed a kind of frictionless amiability was what would serve my interests. So when she said things like this, I mostly just discounted them, thinking that would help. She said, finally, “We’re sort of a pathetic couple, when you think about it.”