“Play is in,” says the umpire.
The irreversibility of error gives me pause. It may be the height of folly to attempt the corner of his service box — my shoulder a bit stiff from the delay — and risk losing the point without a contest. The moral imperative in a challenge match is to keep the ball in play. If I aim the service for the optical center of his box, margin for error will move it right or left, shallow or deep, some small or remarkable distance from its failed intention. Easily enough done. Yet there is a crowd watching and an unimaginative, riskless service will lower their regard for me. My opponent’s contempt, as the night the day, would follow.
I can feel the restiveness of the crowd. The umpire holds his pocket watch to his ear. “Play is in,” he says again. “Play is in, but alas it is not in.”
It is my father, the umpire, a man with a longstanding commitment to paradox.
Paradox will take a man only so far. How can my father be in the judge’s chair and on the other side of the net at the same time? One of the men resembling my father is an imposter. Imposture is an old game with him. No matter the role he takes, he has the trick of showing the same face.
I rush my first serve and fault, a victim of disorientation, the ball landing two, perhaps three, inches deep. I plan to take a second serve as a form of protest — a near miss rates a second chance in my view — and ready myself for the toss.
The umpire blows his whistle. “Over and done,” he says. “Next point.”
This one seems much too laconic to be my father, a man who tends to carry his case beyond a listener’s capacity to suffer his words. (Sometimes it is hard to recognize people outside the context in which you generally experience them.) I indicate confusion, a failed sense of direction, showing my irony to the few sophisticates in the audience, disguising it from the rest.
My latest intuition is that neither man is my father, but that both, either by circumstance or design, are stand-ins for him, conventional surrogates.
I protest to the umpire the injustice of being allowed only a single service.
“I’m sorry life isn’t fair,” he says.
I can tell he isn’t sorry, or if he is, it is no great burden of sorrow.
The toss is a measure low and somewhat behind me. Concentrated to a fine degree, I slice the ball into the backhand corner of my father’s box. The old man, coming out of his characteristic crouch, slides gracefully to his left and though the ball is by him, he somehow manages to get it back. A short lob, which I put away, smashing the overhead at an acute angle, leaving no possibility of accidental return.
A gratifying shot. I replay it in the imagination. The ball in the air, a lovely arc. The player, myself, stepping back to let it bounce, then, racket back, waiting for the ball to rise again, uncharacteristically patient, feeling it lift off the ground, swelling, rising, feeling myself rise with the ball. My racket, that extension of myself, meets the ball at its penultimate height as if they had arranged in advance to meet at that moment and place, the racket delivering the message, the ball the message itself. I am the agent of their coming together, the orchestrator of their perfect conjunction.
I didn’t want to leave that point to play another, hated to go on to what, at its best, would be something less. I offered to play the point again. There was some conversation about my request, a huddle of heads at the umpire’s chair. The crowd, in traditional confusion, applauded.
The decision was to go on. My father advised, and I appreciated his belated concern, against living in the past.
What a strange man! I wondered if he thought the same about me, and if he did — strange men hold strange opinions — was there basis in fact for his view of my strangeness?
We were positioned to play the third point of the first game.
It was getting dark and I expected that time would be called after this exchange or after the next. If I won the first of what I had reason to believe would be the last two points, I was assured of at least a draw. Not losing had always been my main objective. Winning was merely a more affirmative statement of the same principle. I took refuge in strategy, thought to tame the old man at his own game. (I kept forgetting that it wasn’t really him, only somebody curiously like him.)
I took a practice toss, which drew a reprimand from the umpire’s chair. I said I was sorry, mumbled my excuses. It’s not something, the toss of a ball, you have any hope of undoing when done. “This is for real,” I said.
My credibility was not what it had been. I could feel the murmurs of disbelief whistling through the stands, an ill wind.
“Let’s get the road on the show,” said the umpire.
My service, impelled by anger, came in at him, the ball springing at his heart, requiring a strategic retreat. I underestimated his capacity for survival. His return, surprising in itself, was forceful and deep, moving me to the backhand corner, against my intention to play there, with disadvantageous haste. “Good shot,” I wanted to say to him, though there wasn’t time for that.
There’s hardly ever time, I thought, to do the graceful thing.
I was busy in pursuit of the ball (my failure perhaps was compliment enough), staving off defeat. Even if I managed the ball’s return, and I would not have run this far without that intention, the stroke would not have enough arm behind it to matter. It would merely ask my opponent for an unforced error, a giving up of self-interest.
There were good reasons, then, not to make the exceptional effort necessary to put the ball in my father’s court, and if I were a less stubborn man (or a more sensible one), I would not have driven myself in hopeless pursuit. My return was effected by a scooplike shot off the backhand, an improvised maneuver under crisis conditions. Wherever the ball would go, I had done the best I could.
My father tapped the ball into the open court for the point.
His gentleness and restraint were a lesson to us all.
I was more dangerous — my experience about myself — coming from behind. Large advantages had always seemed to me intolerable burdens.
The strain of being front-runner was beginning to tell on my father. His hair had turned white between points, was turning whiter by the moment, thinning and whitening. I perceived this erratic acceleration in the aging process as another one of his strategies. He was a past master in evoking guilt in an adversary.
The umpire was clearing his throat, as a means of attracting attention to himself. “Defecate or desist from the pot,” he said, winking at the crowd.
Such admonishments were intolerable. He had never let me do anything at my own time and pace. As if in speeded-up motion, I smashed the ball past my opponent — he seemed to be looking the wrong way — for the first service ace of the match.
There was no call from the umpire, the man humming to himself some private tune. We looked at each other a moment without verbal communication, a nod of understanding sufficient. I was readying the toss for the next serve when he called me back. “Let’s see that again,” he said.