I say that I am looking for my father; perhaps another time. “Hold on,” he says, holding me by the shoulder. “What’s this father of yours look like? An old dude passed here maybe ten minutes ago, tears running down his ancient face.”
“The old man was crying?”
“Crying! Jesus, the falls of Niagara were nothing to those tears. I mean, it was not a good scene.”
I try to get by, but my companion, a younger man with a vicelike grip, holds fast. “Excuse me,” I say.
“After we play, we’ll talk,” says my companion. “I want to show you my new serve.”
I am in no mood to look at serves and say so in a kind way, not wanting to hurt his feelings or not wanting to hurt them to excess.
“I may be your last chance, pal,” the kid says in his brash way.
“To count on chances beyond the second is to live a life of unreproved illusion.”
His remark, like most nonsense, has a ring of truth.
I return to the playing area alongside my insinuating companion.
We take our places on opposing sides of center court, though I have not at any time, by word or sign, agreed to play him.
My father, or someone like him, is again in the umpire’s chair and announces, after a few preliminary hits, that the match is begun.
It is the moment I’ve been waiting for. “I have not agreed to play this young man a match,” I say. “This is not a contest for which I feel the slightest necessity.”
My refusal to play either comes too late or goes unheard. My opponent has already tossed the ball for his service, a brilliant toss rising like a sun to the highest point of his extension. The meeting of racket and ball resounds through the stadium like the crash of cymbals.
The ball is arriving. Before I can ready myself, before I can coordinate arm and racket, before I can coordinate mind and arm, the ball will be here and gone, a dream object, receding into the distance like a ghost of the imagination. The first point is lost. And so the game. And so the match. Waiting for the ball’s arrival — it is on the way, it has not yet reached me — I concede nothing.
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