Big Hitters III
The Champion Nobody Cares About
Látal Yivrin, the fussy argyle line printed across his knifelike chest, the bones beneath the preppy motif fused outward like those of a chicken, was grinding under the lighted hum of his home court, behind his high hedges. Also at the Greenwich estate, is Grycz, his companion of the old country, the gray Eastern home, the university. Grycz, the constant supporter and financial partner, always up to hit some balls, ends the current marathon of slice backhands with a mouthful of curses that sound like his teeth breaking. He soils the deep Connecticut night with his guttural language. Grycz’s ball clipping the tape has the exact sound and effect of a movie clapperboard signaling the beginning of the next act in the cinematic epic Yivrin has been creating at Forest Hills. They are winding down from Yivrin’s morning victory over Charlie Messenger, a crowd favorite and heartthrob. Grycz feels that now, with Messenger eliminated, he has been coursing with a future major winner. So optimistic are the foreign duo Grycz returns to digging a hole for a swimming pool just yonder toward the trees. Yivrin, at breaks, has been lugging bags of kwik set, leaning them to the fence. Grycz mutes his subsequent curses, fearing he might have waked Krinky or the dog, as the two of them like to sleep before the television screen nearby at the window. Krinky, formerly associated with the Luftwaffe nursing corps, has arrived suggesting vegetable juices, guided sleep, and Jungian dream interpretation along with cottage cheese and grapefruit. Usually, Krinky is to be found arrayed upon the clever massage table he unlimbered in the living room weeks ago. However slowly, Grycz means to orient Krinky to their progress in the new country. He has twice caught the therapist tapping the telephone receiver with a ballpoint pen in the way of spies.
“What treachery do you intend, Pomeranian?” Grycz had asked finally.
Krinky, in guise of an answer, simply glared and got the moment on by the force of aggrieved eyebrows. He continued his message, tap-tap-TAP. Grycz cedes to this intrusion without further mention, as his new soul comes from a less hardened place, where the custom is to laugh off such mittel-colic, wholly unknown outside of Brooklyn. (Látal took one look at Brooklyn upon arrival, then hailed a cab for Grand Central, holding his hand weirdly high and stiff. Grycz and Yivrin had simply boarded the train with the best-dressed passengers, hence Greenwich). Amid such abundance in Greenwich, with its vast varieties of cereals and margarine, Grycz has shed the habit of pointed grievance. He feels overmanned by this spy, Krinky. The mornings of breakfast sausage and whole milk are perhaps at an end, but whatever happens tomorrow they will still be an easy drive to the airport, or as in the case of Open, half an hour of perfect traffic down the Thruway to the Hutchison, across the Whitestone, thence to Flushing Meadows. Yivrin’s practice court has been built in duplicate to the center court in Queens and is maintained by the same groundskeeper.
His message finished, Krinky stood. “I bring you only joy,” he declaimed expansively, a Bohemian king, his bathrobe coming open. “Health! Vitality!” He replaced the receiver. A month ago, Grycz had met him at JFK with the wagon, but this is the most they had spoken since.
But for now, in this dark night of practice, Krinky has reappeared in the picture window, glowing blue, half asleep. Yivrin’s chopping backhands had summoned him back from his notions of maidens riding on the wings of the last Junkers transport flying west. The aging caregiver missed the throb of illusory pistons. The frigid places in Krinky’s past, he felt, lent a sharpness to his missions. Ever since Stalingrad, his every tropism has been toward the sun, his orientation forever west, the morning rays of Ronald Reagan warming his shoulders. The backhand chops of the practice session still circle in the night like the debate of owls. Látal shuffles off to the garage, skirting Grycz’s incomplete hole. Grycz, finding himself alone, kills the lights. He watches his friend Látal enter the quaint barn once used as an amputation salon during the American Revolution. The vehicle that emerges from the double doors is sleek and low. Yivrin drives, by preference, alone. It is understood that Grycz is to follow in the wagon with the gear. The Porsche purrs down the hedges, seeking the tiny lane. Grycz hurries to sweep the court lest he be left too far behind. He doesn’t like it when Látal is alone. I, thinks, Grycz, an assistant, strike the ball with more luscious grace than Látal. I hide my power out of politeness and gratitude for this unexpected adventure. I should be buried somewhere east of the Urals, yet here I am, brooming quickly with the mosquitoes, with no legal permit to operate the more humble vehicle, the Ford Country Squire. Gryzc ponders how the three of them are caught up in the profound Connecticut summer and set to cross purposes, without the distraction of women or the presence of a child. I, Grycz, occupy myself with the champion’s comfort, his vitamin subscriptions, the meager autograph correspondence. This, he had imagined, would be sufficient regime for anyone. Together, so to speak, they had reached the final of the US Open, had they not? Krinky, thought Grycz, carries something else in his black valises, my utility’s replacement. What, in effect? Látal cannot fall back into the sofa so long as old Grycz is there to keep his blood up, protect him from the club wives. Had he failed? Whence Krinky? It had been Látal who had defected, slid his rubber bones under the Iron Curtain via Budapest, one-by-one, only to reassemble himself on the other side, driven by a deep thirst for money. Krinky has come threatening diets containing nothing red or yellow. Oh well, we’ll see.
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The nutritionist Krinky, disturbed by these midnight strokes, rises from the massage table as if summoned by superior voice. Krinky has already insisted upon increased sleep and has hinted heavily at a vegetarian mandate. He has only yesterday received approval from the sports institute. “Grycz,” he says with his tight smile, “Soon you may want to take your meals at the diner.” The dachshund whimpers and bats its feet, deep within a tiny dream.
Yivirin, driving slowly that Grycz may follow, brakes to allow a red-eyed fox fleeing across the road. This, he knows, will be his last normal breakfast before Krinky imposes the threatened diet. Yivrin supposes he should be reconciled to the coming change. He has spent too much time ranked first on the men’s tour, but has yet to win a major. The Americans know him as a choker. Everyone writes him into the toughest draw. Even should he enjoy a victory this afternoon, Látal will seem unachieved. After losing in the semis at Roland Garros, a journalist called him manqué. Upon looking it up at the hotel, he put his shoes in the corridor and slept in for the rest of the week. After yesterday’s victory over the American favorite, the beloved Charlie Messenger, the first court-side question had been “Don’t you regret your defection?” Yivrin sweats into the towel he has arranged on the driver’s seat sheepskin Grycz installed one day. He sets Chopin’s nocturnes tinkling from the eight-track and prepares to be overcome by dawn. This Porsche is beginning to smell too much like tennis. At the moment, Yivrin is concerned to keep the strokes flowing through his body. The Chopin helps. As well his awful chife. He can feel their whole catalog alive within him like eels--service, backhands slice and top, the topspin lob--knows he must not hurry or become too distracted, lest they flee from his grasp. Although filthy, he cannot risk a wash. He must store as much tennis as possible as his confrontation with James Jimbeau is at hand. Yivrin must release the tennis, his body’s shorthand for the blackboard theories picked up at the Sports Academy in Prague, at exactly the right moment and in the right dosage much as a nuclear powerplant is managed. According to Krinky’s calculations, the half hour to Forest Hills cannot be prolonged. “Stick to the roundabouts,” Krinky has said, “Run the lights.” The ghosts of the backhands yet unhit dance with Chopin’s triads. The air bears the slight chill presaging a crescendo of later heat. Yivrin sucks the farm eggs Grycz prepared. This is his monstrous yellow breakfast. He tosses the shells to the floorboards of the 914, tries not to involve the fragments into the racquet. The effect of eggwhite on the pale gut strings of the GTX Pro have yet to be determined, but are unlikely to be of benefit. Yivrin guns past abandoned diners, rushes of grand oaks and maples. Everything must be broken down to its smallest components, its basic notes, studied and analyzed for interactive effects. Eggs are not magic because of their protein but by the grace of being a single cell. Vast America, for Yivrin, is a carburetor to be rebuilt, a forehand to be tweaked. He does not look in the retro for Grycz or the sloppy wagon with the extra racquets and towels. His faithful countryman has scrimmaged this morning to a dutiful and honorable loss. He has followed this with a backhand test-to-failure exercise. There is no practicing with Látal, only troubleshooting.
Grycz is ardently cautious in the precision of his turns, his vague progress through the roundabouts, going easy down the lanes lined with piled stones with the care of a resident alien, alert for squirrels and deer. Grycz brings with him a superior stroke, equivalent power, quiet reminders of the score. His plan is to melt into the crowd wearing an easy-to-spot bucket hat and flash signals. Látal’s forehand, when sufficiently prepared is no longer returnable, thanks to the Swedish technique. Grycz saved his friend from a trip to Stockholm, but it required a season’s recalibration and even a painful loss to Messenger at Indian Wells. Since then, the press had sifted the statistics and was beginning to discern the emerging face of tennis. It is vital that Látal carry forward enough effervescent technique through the first set. They would decide, reflects Grycz slowly navigating the roundabout, after seeing what James Jimbeau brought on the court. Grycz was to touch the crown of the bucket hat to signal the beginning of a backhand duel, which was meant to be a destabilizing surprise, an insult in the face of Jimbeau’s ad-side strength.
In the roundabout is also the Porsche, Látal simply driving around and around again, lost in the ecstasy of Chopin. His shoulders seem relaxed. He steers with his knee, on the verge of nodding off, looking up at the stars. Grycz stabs the baleful horn of the Ford, disturbing doves from the treetops. Látal pulls aside, reaches into the glove box, shakes out a Newport from the secret pack Grycz replaces every week. Grycz catches the spark, sees the Porsche straighten itself onto the parkway, extend itself beyond the horizon with easy speed he cannot match. The Silesian utters a blessing.
Látal Yivrin has fed on the electricity of America only briefly, letting it ray out fully into his nerves. He has ingested as much real estate and money as he can flying out from Westchester into other secondary airstrips from Las Vegas to Cleveland to harvest the prizes of the small tournaments. In his new country, he has become known as the tall man with ugly strokes. He pulls his socks all the way up, those of a man set upon domination. He plucks his eyebrows before serves, a woman alone before a mirror. His forehand is a mysterious violence, delivered like artillery, from afar. He seldom abandons the baseline. Yet even Yivrin’s acquisitiveness is outstripped. In this era of American tennis, a time of small sweet spots, high tensions, and leather grips, the field is united by an invasive fury should any point somehow escape a player’s racquet. The overclassed juniors Yivrin crushes collapse in tears. He is their first taste of anything but success. They have learned from James Jimbeau and Johnny Mac that impossible perfection is their only option and it is there just for the beckoning. “Assert yourself,” Yivrin heard a parent implore from the bleachers in Tempe. The whole country is alive with perfection. Any failed break is met with immediate peevishness, abuse of the umpire. (“I win,” says Yivrin at the handshake. And then the whole water works reliably ensues). The rest of the world seems to be following suit. The queen at Wimbledon is just another presence, a side show, someone to whom not to bow.
But Látal has kept his tennis pure. As to America herself, he comes the unwanted invader. His victory at Flushing Meadows the day before, against an improbable crowd favorite, the pomaded Charlie Messenger of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi put new lines into Messenger’s affable features with every error Yivrin forced. By the end the planter’s third and final set, his face had aged to that of the mountain Presbyterian or a frequent double faulter. So cruelly had come the balls, that even New Yorkers whistled in gnashing sympathy for the Southerner. Messenger, when his timing was correct, swung inches too low to the drop, hitting high in the string bed and thence flatly to the net. And, when the swing path seemed certain and fluid, it had flowed too early to the ball, shanking it out cross court, once bonging it off the umpire’s chair. So disturbed was he, Messenger did not make his habitual excuse to his godless adversary when he hit a lucky net cord, his sole point in the second set. The lack of gentility stropped the crowd to worse edge. He was not their boy, but there he was, being murdered on broadcast television. There was the sense that the nation had swerved seriously wrong, into an ugliness that could never be erased by the mixed-double match to follow. Indeed, the Chilean woman ended up throwing her racquet at her partner before storming off to the drunken chuckling of Bobby Riggs doing color in the booth. Yivrin, watched Messenger from the heights of a two-set lead. These Yanks lose so hard, he thought. Látal was, he realized, embarrassed. Upon overcoming the opponent with a gale of Stockholm topspin, no joy disturbed Látal’s weird, fish-like face. Like the flounder, God had flicked both of his eyes to the same side of his hatchet face, whereas his teeth were an afterthought added by a technician working a glue gun.
Látal’s every outward aspect conjured for toil and hidden deficit carried over great distance. His low vehicle passes beneath the drop gate at Forest Hills, muttering like a lawn mower. Its driver did not look at the guard, nor did the guard look away from his radio, recognizing the Porsche’s rich orange, the only spot of color on the predawn lot. The entire grounds lie as Látal’s disposition. Passing the concessions, he fiddles out a raw hotdog, consumes it without chewing, renders himself to the practice court, the wall. He does not bother with the lights. Grycz is drawn to the familiar staccato, finds the number one naked, heavily engaged in rapid forehand volleys with a dead ball. The Pole gently removes the GTX from his hand, sits the finalist panting on a bench and dresses him in fresh shorts, new argyle, all the while remembering the young son he left behind in Katowice.
“You are still still number one,” said Grycz, “Thanks to his victory over Messenger. Thanks to all your little points. Now, pull up your socks.” He need make no reminder that both are considered illegal defectors. He does not mention the letter from Látal’s father he intercepted, notifying his son of his demotion. Once a lofty professor of Hegel, he now teaches Classics in Trade school Number 713. “Your mother,” the professor has written, “Was unspeakably humiliated by the police.” Grycz has censored all of this under Látal’s own instruction. He has not packed his own bag since the morning they took the train to Budapest. Together, with Grycz’s interventions, they have banked enough already to liberate their families. Grycz suspects that Krinky is also here to negotiate. But the new freedom has been contagious and there seems to be no hurry. He is also waiting to see the effect of western television on Krinky. He means to continue to distract them both with the swimming pool and by purchasing new amusements, like the yet-unnamed dachshund. The animal’s sole novelty, laboriously getting itself to stand on its hind legs, was at first remarkable, a great success. Soon the dog’s trick became boring. Perhaps, thinks Grycz, the time has come to stop shooing away the women, those circumspect church-sandal wearers Látal attracts, holding programs to their flatness in simple expectation of an autograph. He would invite a few, thinks Grycz, some Sunday for doubles and a dip in the future pool.
“I will acquire the Grovers Farm estate,” says Látal in a fresh shirt. “Do this for me, Grycz.” Grycz grunts. He is shoveling Látal’s long, redolent feet into new Adidas. “The purchase is to remain in anonymous escrow until I secure an American developer.” They begin a short-ball rally, recovering somewhat the rhythm of rural Greenwich. Grycz sees Látal’s arms relax, become elongated. “I will acquire and develop this land. Make it mixed use.”
“Why are you doing this?” says Grycz. “Nobody likes you. You are an advertisement for clammy, of something to which nobody aspires. Let us pay off Krinky to Coral Gables and introduce our families to your weird hound. They could be on the next Aeroflot. We could have them in the guest cottage before the Australian.”
“Have you any dust, Grycz? My pocket is empty.”
Grycz filled Látal’s pocket with sawdust. He always carried extra Ziplocs for the purpose of the stuff. Grycz was still vaguely amazed by such wondrous conveniences like Ziplocs.
“You have not slept,” says Grycz, “We have rallied through the moonlit night.”
“The tennis is in me.”
His loss to James Jimbeau is bewildering. It began with a special ruling, the first of its kind ever, allowing that Jimbeau may indeed use the facilities to relieve the dysentery. But only once. A second occurrence, the specification of which opened a terrible parenthesis for the spectators, would result in forfeit. Látal simply stares up at the chair when this is announced, wondering whether he should express his opinion, alert for any possible manipulation by the savage Midwesterner. “He is admitting physical insufficiency, yet he continues,” offered Grycz, in German, from beneath his orange bucket hat. Krinky, watching from the massage table, looking at the screen through the donut, applauds Jimbeau’s courage, snaking his long arms around the padded sides. The dachshund, ever alert for treats which follow any celebration, erects itself, blocking Krinky’s view. There is a Russian determination in this Illinois truck driver, thinks Krinky, one that Messenger lacked. Látal, deciding nothing was more imminent or pertinent than his next serve—that he needn’t pay attention to the loudspeaker—succeeds in remaining unperturbed by the terrible call made by a curly-haired lineswoman. Jimbeau smiles and the crowd remains hushed. Gryzc spots Walter Cronkite smirking in sunglasses. Yivrin lets it slide with a black look. The eels within him are alive, responsive. They travel from his guts, through his arms, into the leather of the GTX, thence to the ball. The wind dies. He double faults his first service point, the New Yorkers roaring approval of his weakness. The temperature rises. Látal cannot remember the score. Grycz signals that he is down a break, drawing a suspicious stare from Johnny Carson seated nearby.
Against Grycz’s advice, Látal chooses to play strength to strength, serve to forehand, forehand to Jimbeau’s solid backhand. He feels that, in America, every day must witness unexpected overcoming. Látal resolves there, while changing courts, in the privacy of his swing thoughts, that he will purchase a second house off the books as a refuge from Krinky. One in the village, perhaps. He imagines his mother and father there, reading Hegel by the pool. He loses the first set, having failed to impress James Jimbeau with his serve. Látal blames the wind and heat. The bowl-cut lout, who once drove a truck for a gravel concession, stands with Slavic firmness. When he looks, Grycz shakes his fist.
In the second set, Látal hits long, thus losing the second game. His smile becomes mysterious, full of frost. The wind is a swirl that introduces his passing shots directly to the net. He cannot solve for a winning shot against Jimbeau as easily as he did Messenger, as he has slightly less time to choose. At best, he takes Jimbeau into long deuces, dragging him like bags of cement from the barn. After one long game, Jimbeau protests a call, ambling to the umpire and then stalking back to the same curly-haired line judge, who had favored him previously. It seems he might even strike the girl. Krinky grins to hear obscenities unfiltered over live television. Látal waits for the tirade to end, dipping his hand into his pocket dust, then rubbing it along the grip of his racquet. The effect is disquietingly sexual.
The same offical makes yet another questionable call in the third. Látal raises his eyebrows at Jimbeau, implying that he has just been robbed. Jimbeau turns on his heel, again enraged. “You gotta get this guy outta here,” he yells, “Come on.” Grycz watches Johnny Carson presiding over the scene, smiling affably like a munificent Mafia don in his Foster Grants. The woman holds her ground, bereft, horsefaced before thousands. Her jaw is hanging open as if ready to drink. Her only relief is more abuse, which has become so excessive it clearly cannot be intended. The network mutes the feed, leaving the broadcasters to murmur as if they have just witnessed an assassination. Látal, meantime, gathers his breath. He has been on the court for days now. He is beyond fatigue into some new region where he is free to take everything apart. He must, at least, stop hitting into James Jimbeau’s backhand.
Tennis departs him in the fourth. Everywhere now, on either side of the court, were little swaths of sawdust. The ziploc bag, now empty has also betrayed Látal and now dances in a swirl of wind. The GTX now turns in Látal’s hand when intercepting Jimbeau’s stiff passing shots. Látal realizes that, since the official ruling--the on-the-spot rules change—he has been waiting for his opponent to shit himself. The blitheness of his assumption shocks him. The embarrassing disaster was never promised, but has nevertheless failed to come to pass. Jimbeau is standing there firm, cross, waiting for him to stop bouncing the ball, serve. Látal immediately feels as he did when interrupting his father’s reading. He guides the serve over and retreats into mindless ground strokes, becoming a sort of ineffective whirlwind, often hitting short into Jimbeau’s terrible volley. The punishing put-aways raise such a joyful roar. America’s victory cannot come soon enough.
Látal Yivrin, is once again at the wheel of the Porsche. He strips off the argyle shirt, cuts through surface streets in the Bronx, bare chested. He wants to avoid driving the Hutchison, lest he be recognized by a neighbor. The rest stop features a duck pond. The sun is setting but he slops in. Half way across he drinks a mouthful of pondwater, just of curiosity. It tastes of sweet bloom. After emerging he arranges his pale carcass across the orange hood of the 914, whose engine warmth permeates his back. Látal recumbent is now not unlike an exotic hunting trophy. The child spying on him has something of Grycz’s son, Chinese eyes and a wary look, as if he had been recently struck.
“Hey tennisman,” says the kid from the cattails, just beyond lunging distance, “What are you doing?”
Látal has ceased breaking down every event leading to this moment, from his first steps onto the court. He thinks of the police and their electric drills. How his mother was doing. How impressed he had been with ordinary trench coats before choosing the initial Greenwich train. He had a thought, even, for the tiny hand bones Grycz had unearthed in his hole. They were gathered in a jar. Something appropriate should be done. Látal knew he would soon find himself under Krinky’s hands. I cohabit with a pervert and a child, he reflected. Woe.
“I’m baking a cake,” says Látal.
“Want to hear a joke?”
“Sure.”
“A Swedish tennis player and a Czechoslovakian tennis player fall off of the Empire State,” said the tyke. His mother seemed to be verging around, nearby.
Látal blew a torrent of minty smoke the kid’s way.
“Sure,” said Látal.
“Who splats first?”
“Beats the hell out of me, kid.”
Látal did not take his eyes from the stars while the child’s parents reeled him away, back into the Buick Electra Estate. The boy pressed his face to the thick window of the destroyer-like automobile. Látal flicked his butt to the grass. The men’s tour number one could just make out the child’s muted bellow: “WHO CARES?”
Látal slipped down from the Porsche’s hood. Krinky would be okay, he decides. They would get along. Látal would eat clean. Grycz would be replaced with a ball machine so that he might rest. Let Grycz finish his pool. He could carry his own concrete. The ridiculous dachshund would make a nice donation, perhaps to a neighbor. The balmy air of the parkway caressed his whole body. By then, Látal was in the purer grass, lushly crawling about on all fours, with no butts, no pop tops or turds around, pulling with both hands, feeding, ingesting to his limit.
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