Why again?
“Didn’t see it p’raps should. However didn’t. ‘Pologize.” He wiped some dampness from the corner of his eye with a finger.
I could see that he was trying to be fair, trying against predilection to control all events in his path, to perceive history as if it were the prophecy of his will.
I said I would play the point over, though under protest and with perceptible displeasure.
“I will not have this match made into a political spectacle,” the umpire said. He gestured me back to the deuce court, world weary and disapproving, patient beyond human forbearance.
I would only accept the point, I said, if it were awarded to me in the proper spirit. I had already agreed to play it again and would not retract that agreement.
The umpire, my father, crossed his arms in front of him, an implacable figure. “Are we here to argue or play tennis?” he asked no one in particular.
I started to protest, then said “Oh forget it” and returned to the court he had gestured me to, embarrassed at getting my way. I was about to toss the ball for the serve when I noticed that my opponent was sitting cross-legged just inside his own service box.
I asked the umpire if time had been called and he said, “Time calls though is almost never called to account,” which made little sense in my present mood. My father, I remembered, tended to treat words as if they were playthings.
“Are you ready?” I shouted across the net. “I’m going to serve. “
My opponent cocked his head as if trying to make out where the voice was coming from.
“I’m going to count to five,” I said, “and then put the ball into play. One…”
There was no point in counting — the old man had no intention of rousing himself — though I was of the mind that one ought to complete what one started. I wasn’t going to be the one to break a promise.
I finished counting in a businesslike way and served the ball. “Indeed,” said my father as it skittered off his shoe. The point was credited to my account.
My father stood in the center of the court, arms out, eyes toward the heavens, asking God what he had done to deserve ingratitude.
I would not let him shame me this time, not give him that false advantage.
The umpire coughed while my father got himself ready, dusting off the seat of his shorts, combing his hair.
I hit the next serve into the net cord, the ball catapulting back at me. I caught it with a leap, attracting the crowd’s applause.
“Deuce,” said the umpire with his characteristic ambiguity.
I had lost count, thought I was either ahead or behind, felt nostalgic for an earlier time when issues tended to have decisive resolutions.
I suspected the umpire not of bias, not so much that, no more than anyone’s, but of attempting to prolong the match beyond its natural consequence.
The umpire spoke briefly, and not without eloquence, on the need to set our houses in order. “Sometimes wounds have to be healed in the process.” He spoke as if the healing of wounds was at best a necessary evil.
My opponent said the present dispute was a family matter and would be decided at home if his prodigal son returned to the fold.
What prodigal son? I was too old, too grown up, to live with my parents. I had, in fad, a family of my own somewhere which, in the hurlyburly of getting on, I had somehow misplaced. “Why not stop play at this point,” I said, “and continue the match at a later date under more convivial circumstances. Or…”
“What alternative, sir, are you proposing?” said my father from the umpire’s chair, a hint of derision in the query.
I had planned to say that I would accept a draw, though thought it best to let the suggestion emerge elsewhere.
“I will not be the first one to cry enough.” said my father.
“Don’t look to me for concessions. On the other hand…”
The umpire interrupted him. “The match will continue until one of the contestants demonstrates a clear superiority.” His message was announced over the loudspeaker and drew polite applause from the gallery.
My plan was to alternate winning and losing points. There was nothing to be gained, I thought, in beating him decisively and no need to take the burden of a loss on myself.
If I won the deuce point, I could afford to give away the advantage. I could afford to give it away so long as I created the illusion that it was being taken from me.
“Can’t win for losing,” I quipped after the second deuce. “Deuces are wild,” I said after the fourth tie.
These remarks seemed to anger my adversary. He spat into the wind, sending some of it my way, swore to teach me a lesson in manners. When he lost the next point after an extended rally he flung his racket and threw himself to the ground, lamenting his limitations and the blind malignity of chance.
I turned my back, embarrassed for him, and kicked a few balls to show that I was not without passion myself.
I had served the last add point into the net and assumed a repetition of that tactic would invite inordinate suspicion among an ordinarily wary and overbred audience. My inclination was to hit the serve wide to the backhand, an expression of overreaching ambition, beyond reproach.
A poor toss — the ball thrown too close — defeated immediate intention. I swung inside out (as they say in baseball when a batter hits an inside pitch to the opposite field), a desperation stroke whose only design was to go through the motions of design. (Perhaps this is rationalization after the fact. The deed, of course, manifests the intention.) The ball, which had no business clearing the net, found the shallow corner of his box, ticking the line. As if anticipating my accidental shot, he came up quickly. He seemed to have a way of knowing what I was going to do — perhaps it was in the blood — even before I knew myself. He was coming up, his thin knotted legs pushing against the artificial surface as he drove himself forward. There was a small chance that he might reach the ball on its first bounce, the smallest of chances.
His moment arrived and was gone.
My father swung majestically and connected with space, with platonic delusion, the ball moving in its own cycle, disconnected from his intention.
Game and match to the challenger. My father came to the net on the run as is the fashion, hand outstretched. We never did get to shake hands, our arms passing like ships in the night. “I was lucky,” I said. “That serve had no business going where it did.”
He looked through me, said in the iciest of voices, “I’m grateful for your lesson,” and walked off.
Murmurs went through the gallery, an ominous buzzing sound. I asked one of the linesmen, a sleepy old man with thick glasses, what the murmurs signified.
“Well, sir,” he wheezed, “this may be out of line, my saying this, but there’s some feeling among the old heads that your final service was not in the best traditions of fair play.”
I was perfectly willing to concede the point, I said, an unintentional ambiguity. “Why don’t we call the match a stalemate.”
The old linesman said that it was not within his authority to grant such dispensation. He suggested that I talk directly to my father.
“If I could talk directly to my father, if either of us could talk to the other, we would never have gotten into this match.” (That wasn’t wholly true. Sometimes you said things because they had a pleasant turn to them.)
“Sir,” said the linesman, “a broken heart is not easily repaired.”
I walk up and down the now-deserted corridors of the stadium, looking for the old man. He is, as always, deceptively difficult to find.
Someone comes up to me in the dark and asks if I’d be interested in a match against an aggressive and skillful opponent.