Crooked Little Heart (2 page)

The parents had tried all last year to get the police to make him stop watching their daughters, but because he wasn’t doing anything wrong and was never publicly drunk, there was nothing they could do. The club tournaments were open to the public, and many tournaments were held at public parks; he was the public. He didn’t push his luck, either, didn’t walk or hitch rides to the lonely satellite courts where overflow matches were often played—junior college courts or cracked, dilapidated public courts with metal nets. He stayed right in the public eye, shuffling from match to match. Just watching.

Rosie’s stepfather James tried to find out who this man was and whether he had a record. Everyone naturally assumed he was a child molester, and James hoped to discover that he was breaking probation. But no one knew his last name, and none of the police in any of the towns and cities James contacted had any information on him, except that the tournament officials there had also been calling to inquire about him. One old-timer from the Golden Gate Park courts—where Luther spent quite a lot of time, according to the kids who practiced there—claimed that Luther was a veteran, with a wound that had left him … well, as the old-timer put it, had left him Luther.

James was not crazy about Luther, although he was not convinced that the man was dangerous, but he actually hated Rosie’s coach, her big handsome pro, J. Peter Billings. Peter was a man of fifty, handsome as a model in a toothpaste ad, with a shaggy blond head of hair and big blue eyes. He was the pro at the club where Rosie had a junior membership, a club to which only the seriously wealthy could belong. The only exceptions were three junior members who paid a small monthly fee in order to play there and be coached by J. Peter Billings. Most of the young people who took lessons from Peter were the children of rich parents, who either played tennis themselves or lounged around the Olympic-sized pool. Their family memberships cost nearly fifteen hundred dollars a year, and since this paid Peter’s salary, membership included his effusive friendliness.

Rosie and Simone, on the other hand, each paid forty dollars a month for their junior memberships, and since neither could afford more than two lessons a month, they did not warrant a great deal of loyalty. Furthermore, he was coaching two promising boys who had been nationally ranked for several years now and who were sure—at the very least—to snag a couple of great tennis scholarships; he also had a female protégé who had gone from winning national singles tournaments at sixteen to being a touring pro who now won her share of international doubles tournaments.

So J. Peter Billings had no need of two teenage girls lacking the national recognition or wealth of his three main students, students who bought two and three and four rackets every year and had each of these strung every few months. The girls were doubles champions, that was true, but Simone was lazy, and Rosie had a tendency to “choke,” to blow solid leads by spooking herself into a state of dread. Real champions
entered matches assuming that they would win; Rosie played many singles matches driven by the terror of losing. Still, Peter had all but promised that if the girls kept up their games, they would get scholarships to decent colleges someday.

He rarely showed up specifically to watch either of the girls play, but if he drove to a tournament where one of his boys was playing, he might give Rosie and Simone a ride, and then would sometimes stand with a fatherly, proprietary air near the court where one of the girls was playing. Rosie basked in his attention and tried to play so well and so hard that he would stay. But James watched him watch Rosie with thinly disguised contempt. James said that you could never trust a man who parted his name on the left. And he hated Peter’s sexy, stupid little jokes: “You know where they get virgin wool, don’t you, Rosie? From the fastest sheep.” When Rosie repeated the joke to her parents at the dinner table, they had just stared back at her blankly. Rosie found Peter impossibly handsome, with his movie-star hair and long, tautly muscled body, and he coached her well, worked her hard at lessons, pounding thousands of balls at her from a shopping cart at the net. She’d heard him bragging about her achievements, and sometimes that felt wonderful, like sunshine, and sometimes she felt like a pet rock in whom he had begun to lose interest. But she was grateful and relieved for any attention from him whatsoever, because she knew that she was not a true champion, not a singles champion. And no one cared nearly as much about doubles.

James also disliked most of the kids, except for Rosie and a few of her friends.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “All I see are a bunch of spoiled kids, raised in the lap of luxury. They’re billboards for suburban perfection. Do you think they are really happy?” he asked Elizabeth once. “They have all the accoutrements, all the right clothes, and it all seems so lost on them.”

Still, every so often, he came along when Elizabeth drove Rosie to wherever that week’s tournament was, and he alone could exert a calming effect on Rosie in the hours before important matches. He said funny things to make her laugh, let her play her awful music on the car stereo, and he censored his caustic commentary on the world for her sake. He surprised her with Baggies of trail mix or dried fruit to boost her energy, moleskin in case she developed a blister, a washcloth to
tuck in the waistband of her tennis skirt, with which she might mop up her sweat or tears. And Elizabeth hoped each time that he’d come around, see the animal beauty and skill of the young bodies, the dedication, the joy. But it did not stir him, did not send him into the disciplined trance of the other parents, huddled in their unhappy groups.

One day in February, he and Elizabeth sat a discreet distance from Rosie and Simone, who were paired in the fourteen-and-under doubles final in the season’s first tournament, traditonally held in Bayview, where they lived.

Once there had been Miwok Indian villages here, then dairy farms and fisheries, and in the 1880s, the railroad, with tracks all through town, a depot, a roundhouse, a pier on San Francisco Bay so that railroad cars might carry their freight and passengers by ferry to San Francisco and beyond. Now, wherever you looked, you found shops, boutiques, cafés. The railroad tracks had been converted into bike paths on which the tanned, handsome people of Bayview jogged, walked pedigreed dogs, or raced along on bicycles and roller skates. The railroad workers, the fishermen, and farmers could never have afforded to live here now. The Fergusons and James lived here only because Elizabeth’s first husband, Andrew—killed in a car crash when Rosie was four—had bought an old ramshackle house fifteen years ago, before all the boutiques and coffeehouses, before three tennis clubs and four private schools had sprung up within five miles of each other. Outside the walls of these clubs and schools and boutiques, women, pregnant or with sad dirty children, and men huddled by the road at intersections, holding their signs, begging. James had heard them referred to once on the radio as the residentially challenged. He almost always gave them a dollar or two. Their numbers were growing: on the way to the previous season’s last tournament, held in Palo Alto in late November, James and Simone and the Fergusons had counted twenty-eight people asking for money at traffic lights, seven with children, one with four all her own.

Still, Bayview was about as beautiful a place as you could wish to be, with its low rolling lion-claw hills and tree-lined streets, temperate weather and wondrous views. Two islands floated on the wide blue bay, Angel and Alcatraz; Angel green and lovely, peopled by hikers, picnickers, children; Alcatraz haunted, dark, abandoned, chill. Sailboats and ferries sliced through the rough blue waters; way over to the right was
the Golden Gate Bridge, its arms outstretched from Marin on the north to the golden lights of San Francisco. And watching over the town’s ten thousand people was their mountain, small and sublime, the mountain the Indians called Tamalpais, the sleeping maiden. You could see her verdant shoulders and head and breast from almost everywhere in the county, and the hills and slopes unfolded beneath her like big swells in the ocean. You could see her from the street where the Fergusons lived; you could see her from the bleachers where James and Elizabeth sat today, watching the match. Whenever Elizabeth drove the five miles from home to the base of the mountain, to its beautifully defined skirt around which Rosie had been crawling her entire life, she thought of the mother in the
Nutcracker
, with her huge hoopskirt and all her children pouring out from underneath.

E
LIZABETH
sat watching her daughter and Simone play hard and fierce. She was mother to them both today, as Simone’s mother had been unable to get away from the nail salon that she owned in town. The girls were concentrating on each shot, moving like quicksilver around the court, up and back and over in the ballet of girls’ doubles. Simone played gracefully, steady and serene, with a powerhouse forehand and a slightly reserved topspin backhand. Rosie, on the other hand, looked like she was out to avenge the Holocaust. She was scrappy and pigeon-toed, moving about with unbridled energy like a shark. Their opponents never had a chance. One of the girls, who’d gained twenty pounds since last season, wore a baseball cap for a visor, with a thick river of reddish hair pouring out the back like a horse’s mane. She had entered the court holding her racket carrying case like a briefcase, as if she had just come home from the office. Her partner was a very small black girl, nearly thirteen, with glasses and cornrowed hair, who hesitated coming up to the net and so kept getting caught in the no-man’s-land between the T of the service line and the baseline, where it was ridiculously easy for either Rosie or Simone to pass her. Her name was Kaya, and she had been ranked in the top five of the girls twelve and under, but she wasn’t doing so well in the fourteens. She played angry and erratic, like a colicky baby grown up.

An incredibly lucky return of serve had emboldened Rosie early on, and she simply wasn’t missing. She and Simone, together at the net,
were an old married couple who knew how to finish each other’s physical sentences. Rosie, for instance, playing backhand, knew that Simone’s backhand net game was more deadly, more precise, than her own forehand volley, and she knew how to tell by the most minute adjustment in Simone’s posture whether Simone was going to step into the path of an oncoming ground stroke and try to put it away or whether she herself should step in and take it. They did not have a foolproof system though, and sometimes each would think the other had the ball, and both would move out of the way, and then they would get passed down the middle of the court. When this happened, they would hang their heads good-naturedly, or roll their eyes, or smite their foreheads. But for the most part, they were smooth, exciting dancers, instinctive, brilliant in anticipation underneath the transparency of their also being best friends.

Elizabeth watched in awe and so felt disloyal when she laughed under her breath at James’s sarcastic comments.

James looked around nervously from time to time, scanning the bleachers for Luther, who wasn’t there, and taking in the opulence, the luxurious landscaping—irises and early roses in the flower beds, kaleidoscopic flower boxes everywhere, bursting clownlike with gardenias and purple African daisies. Sometimes he scribbled down observations in a little notebook he kept in the back pocket of his jeans. He wrote down funny things she and Rosie said; he collected what he called Simone stories to use in writing his novels. Just today, driving over to the club, Simone had confessed that she was so afraid of being buried alive that she’d written a note that she kept in her desk that said, “In case of my death, make sure if they’re going to bury me that you shoot me in the head and heart first.” James had whispered, “Whoa,” and Simone had gone on to something else, and at the next red light, James had extracted the little notebook from his back pocket, and scribbled this down.

An arrogant rodent-faced boy of Rosie’s age, playing singles on the next court against a tall impassive Chinese boy, made a wheezing, droning grunt with every shot he hit. It sounded like an approaching mosquito. James shuddered.

“Is that some kind of mantra?” he said. Elizabeth shook her head.

“Neee-ow,” said James.

“Nee-ow,” said the boy, hitting a backhand.

“It’s like the sound a kid makes when he’s playing with toy airplanes. Maybe it helps him guide the ball in. Like air traffic control.”

Elizabeth studied James, his wild fluffy hair, his beautiful green eyes, and he looked at her and smiled. She loved being with him; it was that simple. She felt happy when he was around. He loved her, he loved her child, he made them laugh. Sometimes when she called from the grocery store to see if he needed anything, he would cry out plaintively, “Come home! Why aren’t you home?” She reached out now, at the club, and touched his cheekbone with the back of her fingers, and then moved her fingers down to his lips, and he opened his mouth, enough for her to feel his warm breath, and she felt him smiling, just barely, beneath her fingers. After a moment he kissed one of her knuckles and went back to watching the girls.

“You know what I do like about this place,” he said, “is the sound of the ball on the racket and the court. It sounds like something is being accomplished. How often do you get to
hear
skill? I find it comforting.

“But on the other hand, this right here represents the end of white Anglo-Saxon America. The boats are unloading beautiful rainbow people onto our shores right now, whose turn it will be. Ah,” he exclaimed, looking over to the right. “Speaking of rainbows.”

Simone’s mother, Veronica Duvall, had shown up after all, wearing a cotton dress of prismatic hues. She waved to James and Elizabeth and tottered over on high-heeled mules. She was very pretty, with dark yellow hair, ten years younger than Elizabeth, very friendly, full of innocence and New Age platitudes. She drank perhaps a little too much on occasion, but nothing like the quantities Elizabeth used to put away, after Andrew’s death and before she got sober. Everyone exchanged quiet pleasantries as the girls played on, Elizabeth bending over to whisper into Veronica’s ear that the girls were winning the finals easily. Almost all the other parents wore expensive tennis shoes and were dressed as if they might play a set of doubles together themselves after the children were done; Veronica looked as though she were off to serve cocktails at the harmonic convergence.