Open (27 page)

It feels as though this might become a turning point in our lives, J.P. says. And I don’t mean in a good way.

Thanks for the positive thinking.

Finally we come to a shack. An old hermit loans us his shovel. We hike back to the Hummer, and I hurriedly set about digging around the back wheel. Suddenly my shovel hits something hard. Caliche, the cement-like layer of soil under the Nevada desert. I feel something snap deep inside my wrist. I cry out.

What is it? Wendi says.

I don’t know.

I look at my wrist.

Rub some dirt on it, J.P. says.

I dig out the Hummer, make my flight, even win my match the next day. Days later, however, I wake in agony. The wrist feels broken. I can barely bend it back and forth. I feel as if several sewing needles and rusty razor blades have been implanted in the joint. This is bad. This is big.

Then the pain goes away. I’m relieved. Then it comes back. I’m scared. Soon the occasional pain becomes constant. It’s tolerable in the morning, but by day’s end the needle-razor feeling is all I can think about.

A doctor says I have tendinitis. Specifically
dorsal capsulitis
. Tiny rips in the wrist that refuse to heal. The result of overuse, he says. The only possible cures are rest and surgery.

I choose rest. I shut myself down, gentle the wrist. After weeks of carrying the wrist around like a wounded bird, I still can’t work out, do a push-up, or open a door without grimacing.

The one upside of the wrist injury is that I get to spend more time with Wendi. Instead of hard-court season, the start of 1993 becomes Wendi Season, and I throw myself into it. She enjoys the extra attention, but she also worries that she’s neglecting her studies. She’s enrolled in yet another college. Her fifth. Or sixth. I’ve lost track.

Driving along Rainbow Boulevard, steering with my left hand to avoid engaging my bad right wrist, I roll down the window and turn up the radio. The spring breeze flutters Wendi’s hair. She turns down the radio and says how long it’s been since she really knew what she wanted.

I nod and turn up the radio.

She turns down the radio and says she’s attended all these different colleges, lived in all these different states, she’s been searching her whole
life for meaning, purpose—nothing ever feels right. She just can’t seem to figure out who she is.

Again, I nod. I agree. I know that feeling. Winning Wimbledon has done nothing to salve it. Then I look over at Wendi and realize she’s not just idly talking, she’s going somewhere with this. She’s making a point—about us. She turns in her seat and looks me in the eye. Andre, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I just don’t think I can be happy, really happy, until I figure out who I am and what I’m supposed to do with my life. And I don’t see how I can do that if we stay together.

She’s crying.

I can’t be your traveling companion, she says, your sidekick, your fan, anymore. Well, I’ll always be your fan, but you know what I mean.

She needs to find herself, and to do that she needs to be free.

And so do you, she says. We can’t realize our separate goals if we stay together.

Even an open relationship is too confining.

I can’t argue with her. If that’s how she feels, there’s nothing I can say. I want her to be happy. Of course at this moment our song comes on the radio.
I will always love you
. I stare at Wendi, try to catch her eye, but she keeps her face turned away. I make a U-turn, drive back to her house, walk her to the door. She gives me one long, last hug.

I drive away and barely make it to the end of the block before pulling over and phoning Perry. When he answers I can’t speak. I’m crying too hard. He thinks it’s a prank call.

Hello, he says, annoyed. Hel
-lo
?

He hangs up.

I call back, but still can’t speak. Again he hangs up.

I
GO UNDERGROUND
. I hole up in the bachelor pad, boozing, sleeping, eating junk. I feel shooting pains in my chest. I tell Gil. He says it sounds like a typical broken heart. Tiny rips that refuse to heal. The result of overuse.

Then he says, What are we doing about Wimbledon? Time to start thinking about getting ourselves overseas. Time to throw down, Andre. It’s on.

I can barely hold the phone, let alone a tennis racket. Still, I want to go. I could use the distraction. I could use some time on the road with Gil, working on a common goal. Also, I’m defending champion. I have no choice. Right before our flight Gil arranges for a doctor in Seattle,
who’s supposed to be the best, to give me a shot of cortisone. The shot works. I arrive in Europe wiggling the wrist, pain-free.

We go first to Halle, Germany, for a tune-up tournament. Nick meets us there and immediately puts the touch on me for money. He sold the Bollettieri Academy, because he got himself into debt, and it was the biggest mistake of his life. He let it go for too little. Now he needs cash. He’s not himself—or maybe he’s more himself. He says he’s not getting paid what he’s worth. He says I’ve been an unsound investment. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing me, and he’s entitled to hundreds of thousands above the hundreds of thousands I’ve already given him. I ask if we can please talk about this back home. I have a few things weighing on my mind right now.

Of course, he says. When we get back.

I’m so shaken by the confrontation that in the Halle tournament I fall on my face in my first-round match against Steeb. He beats me in three sets. So much for the tune-up.

I’ve barely played in the last year, and when I’ve played, I’ve played badly, so I’m the lowest-seeded defending champ in Wimbledon history. My first match on center court is against Bernd Karbacher, a German whose thick hair always looks the same, from the beginning of the match to the end, which irks me, for obvious reasons. Everything about Karbacher seems designed to distract. Apart from his enviable locks, he’s bowlegged. He walks as if he not only sits on a horse all day, but as if he just dismounted, and it’s been a long ride, and his ass is chapped. Befitting his appearance, he plays a very odd game. His backhand is huge, one of the game’s best, but he uses it to avoid running. He hates running. Hates moving. At times he doesn’t care much for serving, either. He has an aggressive first serve, but not much of a second serve.

With my numbed wrist I have my own serve issues. I’ll have to alter my motion, taking only a small backswing, limiting sudden movements. Naturally this causes problems. I fall behind quickly in the first set, 2–5. I’m about to become the first defending champion in decades to get knocked out in the first round. But I collect myself, force myself to make peace with my new serve, and tough out the win. Karbacher hops on his horse and rides away.

British fans are kind. They cheer, they roar, they appreciate the effort it’s taken to get my wrist ready. British tabloids, however, are another matter. They’re filled with venom. They carry strange stories about, of all things, my chest, which I’ve recently shaved. Just a bit of innocent manscaping, but you’d think I’d cut off a limb. My wrist is broken, and they
talk only about my chest. My news conferences turn into Monty Python skits, every other question about my newly smooth pectorals. British reporters are hair obsessed—if they only knew the truth about the hair on my head. Several tabloids also say I’m fat, and writers take malicious joy in calling me Burger King. Gil tries to blame my appearance on the cortisone injection in my wrist, which can cause bloating, but no one is buying it.

Nothing, however, fascinates the Brits quite like Barbra Streisand. She arrives at Centre Court to watch me play and there is practically a flurry of trumpets. Celebrities attend Wimbledon all the time, but Barbra’s appearance causes a stir like none I’ve seen. Reporters harass her, then later pester me about her, and the tabloids take great pains to dissect and belittle our relationship, which is nothing more than a passionate friendship.

They want to know how we met. I refuse to tell them, because Barbra is the shyest, most private person I know.

It began with Steve Wynn, the casino impresario, whom I’d known since I was a kid. He and I were playing golf one day, and I mentioned that I enjoyed Barbra Streisand’s music. He said she was a good friend. Thus began a series of phone calls, during which Barbra and I connected. When I won Wimbledon, she sent a sweet telegram, congratulating me, telling me, sarcastically, it was nice to put a face with the voice.

She invited me weeks later to a small get-together at her ranch in Malibu. David Foster would be there, she said, and a few other friends. Finally we’d meet.

Her ranch was dotted with cottages, one of which was a movie theater. After a luncheon we wandered down there for a sneak preview of
The Joy Luck Club
, a quintessential chick flick, during which I thought I might expire of boredom. Then we all wandered over to another cottage, a music salon, with a grand piano under a window. We stood around eating and talking while David sat at the piano, playing a medley of torch songs. He made several attempts to get Barbra to sing. She wouldn’t. He persisted. She refused. He kept after her until it became awkward. I wished he would stop. Barbra’s elbows were resting on the piano, and her back was to me. I saw her stiffen. She was clearly petrified about performing in front of other people.

Not five minutes later, however, she let fly a few bars. The sound filled the room from the rafters to the floorboards. Everyone stopped talking. Glasses shook. Flatware rattled. The bones in my ribs and wrist vibrated. I briefly thought someone had put one of Barbra’s albums on a Bose
sound system and turned the volume up full blast. I couldn’t believe that a human being was capable of producing that much sound, that a human voice could pervade every square inch of a room.

From that moment I was even more intrigued by Barbra. The idea that she possessed such a devastating instrument, such a powerful talent, and couldn’t use it freely, for pleasure, was fascinating. And familiar. And depressing. We met soon after that day. She invited me to the ranch. We shared a pizza and talked for hours, discovering many things in common. She was a tortured perfectionist who hated doing something at which she excelled. And yet, despite years of semiretirement, despite all her self-doubts and nagging fears, she admitted that she was pondering a comeback to the concert stage. I urged her to do it. I told her it was wrong to deprive the world of that voice, that astonishing voice. Above all, I told her that it would be dangerous to surrender to fear. Fears are like gateway drugs, I said. You give in to a small one, and soon you’re giving in to bigger ones. So what if she didn’t want to perform? She had to.

Naturally I felt like a hypocrite every time I said this to Barbra. In my own struggles with fear and perfectionism, I was losing more than I won. I talked to her the way I talked to reporters: I told her things I knew to be true, and things I hoped to be true, most of which I couldn’t bring myself to fully believe and act on.

After we’d spent one long spring afternoon playing tennis, I told Barbra about a new singer I’d seen in Vegas, a woman with a big voice not unlike Barbra’s. I asked, Do you want to hear her?

Sure.

I brought her out to my car and put in a CD by this new sensation, a Canadian named Céline Dion. Barbra listened closely, biting her thumbnail. I could tell she was thinking: I can do that. She was picturing herself back in the game. Again, I felt helpful, but also like a raging hypocrite.

My sense of hypocrisy reached a crescendo when Barbra finally did push herself to perform. There I was, front row—wearing a black baseball cap. My hairpiece was malfunctioning again, and I feared what people would think and say. Beyond being a hypocrite that night, I felt a slave to fear.

More often than not, Barbra and I laugh at the shock and scandal our dates cause. We agree that we’re good for each other, and so what if she’s twenty-eight years older? We’re simpatico, and the public outcry only adds spice to our connection. It makes our friendship feel forbidden, taboo—another piece of my overall rebellion. Dating Barbra Streisand is like wearing Hot Lava.

Still, if I’m fatigued, if I’m not in the right mood, as is the case at Wimbledon, then the public belittling can sting. And Barbra plays into the hands of the belittlers by telling a reporter that I’m a Zen master. Newspapers have a field day with this comment. I begin to hear the Zen master quote constantly; it briefly replaces
Image Is Everything
. I don’t understand the reaction, maybe because I don’t know what a Zen master is. I can only assume it’s a good thing, since Barbra’s a friend.

B
RUSHING ASIDE THE SUBJECT OF
B
ARBRA
, avoiding newspapers and TV, I stay on task at the 1993 Wimbledon. After surviving Karbacher, I beat João Cunha-Silva, from Portugal, Patrick Rafter, from Australia, then Richard Krajicek, from the Netherlands. I’m in the quarters, facing Pete. As always, it’s Pete. I wonder how my wrist can possibly hold up against his serve, which he’s developed into a force. But Pete’s suffering his own aches and pains. His shoulder is sore, his game is a tad off. Or so they say. You’d never know it the way he comes out against me. He wins the first set in less time than I spent getting dressed for the match. He wins the second set just as fast.

Going to be a short day, I tell myself. I look up at my box, and there’s Barbra, flashes going off around her. I think: Is this really my life?

As the third set begins, Pete stumbles. I get a second wind. The set falls to me, as does the fourth. The wheel clicks in my direction. I see fear creep into Pete’s face. We’re tied, two sets apiece, and doubt, unmistakable doubt, is trailing him like the long afternoon shadows on the Wimbledon grass. For once, it’s not me but Pete yelling and cursing at himself.

In the fifth set, Pete’s wincing, kneading his shoulder. He asks for a trainer. During the delay, while he’s being worked on, I tell myself this match is mine. Two Wimbledons in a row—won’t that be something? We’ll see what the tabloids have to say then. Or what I’ll say.
How do you like your Burger King now?