Open (28 page)

When we resume play, however, Pete is a different person. Not revived, not reenergized—wholly different. He’s done it again, sloughed off that other doubt-ridden Pete as a snake sheds its skin. And now he’s in the process of shedding me. Leading 5–4, he starts the tenth game of the set by blasting three straight aces. But not just any aces. They even have a different sound about them. Like Civil War cannons. Triple match point.

Suddenly he’s walking toward the net, extending his hand, the victor once again. The handshake physically hurts, and it has nothing to do with my tender wrist.

·  ·  ·

B
ACK AT THE BACHELOR PAD
, days after losing to Pete, I have one simple goal. I want to avoid thinking about tennis for seven days. I just need a break. I’m heart sore, wrist sore, bone tired. I need to do nothing for one week—just sit and be quiet. No pain, no drama, no serves, no tabloids, no singers, no match points. I’m sipping my first cup of coffee, flipping through
USA Today
, when a headline catches my eye. Because my name is in it.
Bollettieri Parts Ways with Agassi
. Nick tells the newspaper he’s done with me. He wants to spend more time with his family. After ten years, this is how he lets me know. Not even a panda ass-up in my chair.

Minutes later a FedEx envelope arrives with a letter from Nick. It says no more than the newspaper story. I read it a few dozen times before putting it in a shoe box. I go to the mirror. I don’t feel all that bad. I don’t feel anything. Numb. As if the cortisone has spread from my wrist to engulf my being.

I drive over to Gil’s and sit with him in the gym. He listens and feels bad and angry right along with me.

Well, I say, I guess it’s Break-Up-With-Andre time. First Wendi, now Nick.

My entourage is thinning faster than my hair.

T
HOUGH IT MAKES NO SENSE
, I’d like to get on the court again. I want the pain that only tennis provides.

But not this much pain. The cortisone has completely worn off, and the needle-razor feeling in my wrist is simply too much. I see a new doctor, who says the wrist needs surgery. I see another doctor, who says more resting might do the trick. I side with the rest doctor. After four weeks of rest, however, I step on a court and realize with one swing that surgery is my only option.

I just don’t trust surgeons. I trust very few people, and I especially dislike the notion of trusting one perfect stranger, surrendering all control to one person whom I’ve only just met. I cringe at the thought of lying on a table, unconscious, while someone slices open the wrist with which I make my living. What if he’s distracted that day? What if he’s off? I see it happening on the court all the time—half the time it’s happening to me. I’m in the top ten, but some days you’d think I was a rank amateur. What if my surgeon is the Andre Agassi of medicine? What if he doesn’t have his A game that day? What if he’s drunk or on drugs?

I ask Gil to be there in the operating room during my surgery. I want him to act as sentry, monitor, backstop, witness. In other words, I want him to do what he always does. Stand guard. But this time wearing a gown and mask.

He frowns. He shakes his head. He doesn’t know.

Gil has several endearingly dainty qualities, like his horror of the sun, but the most endearing is his squeamish streak. He can’t abide the sight of needles. He gets the willies when he has to have a flu shot.

For me, however, he’ll rally. He says, I’ll tough it out.

I owe you, I tell him.

Never, he says. No such thing as debts between us.

On December 19, 1993, Gil and I fly to Santa Barbara and check into the hospital. As nurses flutter about, prepping me, I tell Gil that I feel so nervous, I might pass out.

Then they won’t need to give you the gas.

This could be it, Gil, the end of my tennis career.

No.

Then what? What will I do?

They put a mask over my nose and mouth. Breathe deeply, they say. My eyelids are heavy. I fight to keep them open, fight against the loss of control. Don’t go away, Gil. Don’t leave me. I stare at Gil’s black eyes, above his surgical mask, watching, unblinking. Gil is here, I tell myself. Gil’s got this. Gil’s on duty. Everything’s going to be all right. I let my eyes close, let a kind of mist swallow me, and a half second later I’m waking and Gil is leaning over me, saying the wrist was worse than they thought. Much worse. But they cleaned it out, Andre, and we’ll hope for the best. That’s all we can do, right? Hope for the best.

I
TAKE UP RESIDENCE
on the green chenille double-stuffed goose-down couch, remote in one hand, phone in the other. The surgeon says I must keep my wrist elevated for several days, so I lie with it propped on a large, hard pillow. Though I’m on powerful pain pills, I still feel wounded, worried, vulnerable. At least I have something to distract me. A woman. A friend of Kenny G’s wife, Lyndie.

I met Kenny G through Michael Bolton, whom I met while playing Davis Cup. We were all at the same hotel. Then, out of the blue, Lyndie phoned me and said she’d met the perfect woman.

Well, I like perfect.

I think you two will really hit it off.

Why?

She’s beautiful, brilliant, sophisticated, funny.

I don’t think so. I’m still trying to get over Wendi. Plus, I don’t do setups.

You’ll do this setup. Her name is Brooke Shields.

I’ve heard of her.

What have you got to lose?

Plenty.

Andre.

I’ll think about it. What’s her number?

You can’t phone her. She’s in South Africa, doing a film.

She must have a phone.

Nope. She’s in the middle of nowhere. She’s in a tent, or a hut, in the bush. You can only reach her by fax.

She gave me Brooke’s fax number and asked for mine.

I don’t have a fax. It’s the only gadget I don’t have in the house.

I gave her Philly’s fax number.

Then, just before my surgery, I got a call from Philly.

You have a fax here at my house—from Brooke Shields?

And so it began. Faxes back and forth, a long-distance correspondence with a woman I’d never met. What began oddly became progressively more odd. The pace of the conversation was outrageously slow, and this suited us both—neither of us was in any hurry. But the enormous geographical distance also led us to quickly let down our guard. We segued within a few faxes from innocent flirting to innermost secrets. Within a few days our faxes took on a tone of fondness, then intimacy. I felt as if I were going steady with this woman I’d never met or spoken to.

I stopped phoning Barbra.

Now, immobilized, my bandaged wrist propped on the pillow, I have nothing to do but obsess about the next fax to Brooke. Gil comes over some days and helps me work through several drafts. I’m intimidated by the fact that Brooke graduated from Princeton with a degree in French literature, whereas I dropped out of ninth grade. Gil brushes aside such talk, pumps up my confidence.

Besides, he says, don’t worry about whether she likes you. Worry about whether you like her.

Yeah, I say.
Yeah. You’re right
.

So I ask him to rent the collected works of Brooke Shields, and we have a two-man film festival. We make popcorn, dim the lights, and Gil puts in the first movie.
The Blue Lagoon
. Brooke as a prepubescent mermaid,
stranded with a boy on an island paradise. A retelling of Adam and Eve. We rewind, fast-forward, freeze-frame, debate if Brooke Shields is my type.

Not bad, Gil says. Not bad at all. She’s definitely worth another fax.

The courtship via fax continues for weeks, until Brooke sends a short fax saying she’s finished filming her movie and she’s coming back to the U.S. She’ll be here in two weeks. She lands at LAX. By coincidence I have to be in Los Angeles the day after she arrives. I’m filming an interview with Jim Rome.

W
E MEET AT HER HOUSE
. I race there straight from the studio, still wearing the heavy TV makeup from my interview with Rome. She throws open the door, looking very much the movie star, wearing a flowing scarfy thing around her neck. And no makeup. (Or at least less than I.) But her hair is chopped short, which gives me a jolt. All this time I’ve been picturing her with long, flowing hair.

I cut it for a part, she says.

In what?
Bad News Bears
?

Her mother appears from nowhere. We shake hands. She’s cordial, but stiff. I get a strange vibe. I know, instinctively, regardless of what happens, this woman and I will never get along.

I drive Brooke to dinner. Along the way I ask, Do you live with your mother?

Yes. Well, no. Not really. It’s complicated.

It always is with parents.

We go to Pasta Maria, a little Italian joint on San Vicente. I ask to be seated in a corner of the restaurant, so we can have privacy, and it doesn’t take long before I forget about Brooke’s mother, her haircut, everything. She has remarkable poise, and charisma, and she’s surprisingly funny. We both laugh when the waiter comes to our table and asks, Have you two ladies had a chance to look over the menu?

Might be time for a haircut, I say.

I ask about the movie Brooke just wrapped in Africa. Does she like being an actress? She talks with passion about the adventure of filmmaking, the fun of working with talented actors and directors, and it strikes me that she’s the polar opposite of Wendi, who never knew what she wanted. Brooke knows exactly what she wants. She sees her dreams and doesn’t falter in describing them, even if she’s having trouble figuring out how to make them come true. Five years older than I, she’s more worldly,
more aware, and yet she also gives off an airy innocence, a neediness, which makes me want to protect her. She brings out the Gil in me, a side I didn’t know I had.

We say most of the same things we’ve said by fax, but now, in person, over plates of pasta, they sound different, more intimate. There is nuance now, subtext, body language, and pheromones. Also, she’s making me laugh, a lot, and making herself laugh. She has a lovely laugh. As with my wrist surgery, three hours pass in a millisecond.

She’s exceptionally kind and sweet about my wrist, examining the inch-long pink scar, touching it lightly, asking questions. She’s also empathetic, because she’s facing surgery too, on both her feet. Her toes are damaged from years of dance training, she says, and doctors will need to break them and reset them. I tell her about Gil standing guard in the operating room with me, and she asks, joking, if she can borrow him.

We discover that, despite our outwardly different lives, we share similar starting points. She knows what it’s like to grow up with a brash, ambitious, abrasive stage parent. Her mother has been her manager since Brooke was eleven months old. The difference: her mother still manages her. And they’re nearly broke, because Brooke’s career is slumping. The Africa movie was the first big job she’s landed in a while. She does coffee commercials in Europe just to pay the mortgage. She says things like this, startlingly candid, as if we’ve known each other for decades. It’s not only that we’ve softened the ground with faxes. She’s just naturally open, all the time, I can tell. I wish I could be half as open. I can’t tell her much about my own inner torments, though I can’t avoid admitting that I hate tennis.

She laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis.

Yes.

But you don’t
hate
hate it.

I do. I hate it.

We talk about our travels, our favorite foods, music, movies. We bond over one recent movie,
Shadowlands
, the story of British writer C. S. Lewis. I tell Brooke that the movie struck a chord with me. There was Lewis’s close relationship with his brother. There was his sheltered life, walled off from the world. There was his fear of risk and the pain of love. But then one singularly brave woman makes him see that pain is the price of being human, and well worth it. In the end Lewis tells his students:
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world
. He tells them:
We are like blocks of stone … [T]he blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect
. Perry and I have seen the movie twice, I tell Brooke,
and we’ve memorized half the lines. I’m moved that Brooke too loves
Shadowlands
. I’m slightly awed that she’s read several of Lewis’s books.

Well after midnight, lingering over empty coffee cups, we can no longer ignore the impatient stares of the waiters and restaurant owner. We need to go. I drive Brooke home, and on the sidewalk outside her house I have a feeling that her mother is watching us through an upstairs curtain. I give Brooke a chaste kiss and ask if I can call her again.

Please do.

As I walk away she notices a hole in my jeans, at the small of my back. She sticks her finger through the hole, scratching my tailbone with her nail. She flashes a sly grin before running inside.

I drive my rental car along Sunset Boulevard. I’d planned to head back to Vegas, never dreaming the date would go so well or last so long, but it’s too late to catch a flight. I decide to stop for the night at the next hotel I come to, which turns out to be a Holiday Inn that’s seen better days. Ten minutes later I’m lying in a musty room on the second floor, listening to traffic hissing along Sunset and the 405. I try to review the date—and, more importantly, to reach some conclusions about it, about what it means. But my eyelids are heavy. I fight to keep them open, fight as always the loss of control, which feels like the ultimate loss of choice.

M
Y THIRD DATE WITH
B
ROOKE
is the night before her foot surgery. We’re in Manhattan, in the ground-floor sitting room of her brownstone. We’re kissing, on the verge, but first I need to tell her the truth about my hair.

She can sense that I have something on my mind. What’s wrong? she asks.

Nothing.

You can tell me.

It’s just that I haven’t been completely honest with you.

We’re lying on a couch. I sit up, punch a pillow, take a breath. Still searching for the right words, I look at the walls. They’re decorated with African masks, eyeless faces with no hair. They’re eerie. Also, vaguely familiar.