Five Tuesdays in Winter(19)

At one point, Grant held Ed underwater for a long time, too long, I thought, and just as I opened my mouth to tell him so, Ed elbowed him hard in his soft stomach. Grant released him with a long whimper and Ed’s head pushed up through the water screaming, “What the fuck?” and Grant seemed to be crying, though it was hard to tell with the weird green shadows and all the water already on his face.

Grant got out, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went inside to do the dishes. Ed swam laps back and forth. I was afraid their argument would be like the ones my parents had, a few sharp words followed by days of silence. But after Grant finished up in the kitchen, he came back outside with a beer and placed it at the edge of the pool. Ed glided toward it and drank it standing in the shallow end. He made a joke in French and Grant laughed and things were tranquil between them again.

Later we sat on the porch. Their clothes were back on and that was more comfortable for me, though still I was not entirely at ease around them and found myself shaking with nerves despite the heat. They drank beers and Ed suggested I have one but Grant said no.

“I cannot believe it’s not Friday yet,” Ed said.

“It’s not even Tuesday yet.”

“The smell of that stuff.” He meant the liquid asphalt. “Le pire.”

“Why do you always say ‘le pire’?” I asked.

He gave a very French frown, a thinking, eyebrows-raised frown of consideration. He lifted his palms up to me. “When in the Dordogne.”

I woke up in the middle of the night. Someone was coughing below my window. I looked down and saw Ed on the back porch rattling cookies out of a package. He ate five in a row then lit a cigarette. “Fuck,” I heard him say. “Fuck that.”

I went into my father’s study. It was a big room, meant to be a bedroom. Bookcases lined the walls. They were crammed with books and papers and journals in no particular order. The cleaning lady had done that in the spring, taken everything that had been scattered around for years and shoved it on the shelves. His desk was in the far corner, a chair on either side, its surface clean and empty now. It was an old desk, with green leather inlaid on the top and fat brass handles on the drawers. I sat down and opened each one, checking for the gun that was no longer there. Then I turned around to the wall, stuck my finger in the hole between his diploma from the Sorbonne and an old painting of the sea.

I heard a cough in the hallway and then a tap at the door.

I spun around in the swivel chair, wiping the plaster off my finger.

“Can I come in?” Ed said, already in and coming toward me.

He sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. I tried to block his view, but he saw it anyway, the hole and the fissures in the plaster around it.

“Wasn’t exactly a crack shot, was he?”

“I think maybe he took a bit of skin off his cheek. He wore a Band-Aid for a few days.”

Ed smirked. He was wearing boxer shorts. It was a hot night and we were both stuck to the leather chairs.

“It’s not here anymore,” he said.

“What?”

“What happened.”

“Then where is it?”

“It’s gone. It’s over. You can’t find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.”

During the interview my mother had asked Ed and Grant if they played either tennis or golf and they had lied and said they did, thinking that that was the kind of person she was looking for. In fact she had wanted to know solely for practical reasons, because if they did she would put their names down in the guest book at the club and they could come and go as they liked. That first weekend I took them to play tennis. On weekends you had to wear all whites and so they put on my father’s clothes. It was only as we were walking there that I noticed Ed had forgotten to put on my father’s white socks. I didn’t say anything but Grant did, and Ed said he was going to move so fast on the court that no one would arrest him for his black socks.

I made sure we got court 8, the farthest one from the clubhouse. Ed picked up on it right away.

“You don’t want to be seen with a couple of slouches, do you?”

He was right. I could tell by the swings they’d taken in the yard that neither of them had any form. I probably told myself I was protecting them from ridicule, but I was protecting myself. I could already hear my tennis teacher telling me how bad it was for my game to play people like that. Fortunately the court next to us was empty and the wild lobs they hit at first did not bother anyone else’s game. I was disappointed by their lack of skill. After living with them for five days I had convinced myself they could do anything. They looked like buffoons, especially Ed in his black socks, who was clearly athletic and could reach everything, but once he got there he flung his body along with his racket at the ball with very little success. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t easily imitate my stroke, which I showed them again and again. After rallying for a while, Ed moved over to Grant’s side and they challenged me to a set. I suggested a little more practice was in order but they insisted. I spun my racket, they called up, it was down, and I served.

I decided to crush them. I lifted that first toss and decided to shred them to pieces. I had never had that feeling on the tennis court before, the raw desire to win. I was a competent player, but I had more runner-up trophies than anything else. I determined that I would not let them win one point off me. Because suddenly I found I resented my awe of them, my infatuation with them both, and the dread that had already lodged itself in my chest of their leaving in the middle of August. I wanted somehow to even the scales a bit, to show them that I was worth something, too, that I had something to teach them, something for them to be in awe of.