Page 30 of Love All
I open my mouth to charm it off, and he keeps going, because he’s found the seam, and a man like Hargrove can smell a seam.
“What is it now, third generation? Fourth? Granddad’s name on the trophy case, daddy’s on the science building, and here’s the heir, slumming it at a charity match because somebody pointed a camera at it.” He bounces a ball, savoring it. “Bet you’ve never earned one thing with that hyphen in your life. They ought to hang an asterisk on you.Prescott-Hawthorne.” He laughs. “Even your name needed two whole families to fill it out.”
I inhale sharply because t’strue,or true enough. The thing I’ve spent my life keeping under a joke. My grin goes fixed. That one old bruise takes the hit square, and for one bad second I have nothing. No charm. No return. Just a washed-up pro reading me out loud, line by line, to four hundred people.
I don’t have to find anything. Because somewhere to my left, the temperature drops.
“Or maybe,” says Charlotte, very quietly, not looking up from her strings, “he’s just better than you.”
Hargrove turns, thrilled to have a second target. “She fight all your battles for you, kid?”
She looks up.
I have watched Charlotte Astor be cruel to a great many people who had it coming. I have never, until this second, watched her be cruelforsomeone. There’s a difference. It’s roughly the difference between a scalpel and a house fire.
“Here’s what I can’t work out, Hargrove.” She crosses to the net, unhurried, and the whole court leans in with her. “You had the one thing he didn’t. Nobody boughtyoua career. Nobody hung your name on a building. You clawed every inch of it yourself — self-made, the whole bitter little fairy tale — and youstillwashed up here. On a Tuesday. Coaching other men’s children five days a week and losing to one of them on the sixth, in front of four hundred people who paid to watchus,running your mouth about a twenty-two-year-old’s grandfather because you cannot stand to look at your own tragic life.” She lets it land. “He never had to earn a thing, and he’s beating you anyway. That’s nothistragedy, is it?”
The crowd makes the sound a crowd makes when blood is actually drawn, the low, scandalizedohhh.Hargrove’s partner discovers something fascinating on the back fence. And Hargrove goes a deep, dangerous red, because she hasn’t insulted him. She hasdiagnosedhim. In public. With receipts.
“And while you’re at it—” she lifts two lazy fingers and indicates the pair of them, the way you’d point out produce that’s turned “—you, and whoever this is. Nothing, and no one. Talk less and play more. You’re giving me a headache.”
“You’re such a fucking—”
He doesn’t finish it. He doesn’t get to finish it, because I’ve crossed two steps toward the net before I’ve decided to move, racket loose at my side, and I say, “What?” — pleasant, conversational, the friendliest syllable in the language — and let it hang there, in the air, in front of four hundred people, until the word he was about to call her curdles and dies in his throat.
I smile. I tilt my head. “Good game, guys,” I say, to a game that is not over, and turn, and walk back to the baseline, and feel — for the first time all day, after a sleepless night and a rebuilt wall and a 6:48 a.m.don’t be weird— completely, blazingly fine.
To summarize about having someone’s back: it’s a circuit. It runs both ways or it doesn’t run. She stepped in front of a jab aimed at me without thinking. I stepped in front of a word aimed at her without thinking. And now we’re standing on the same side of a line we spent a year firing across. That’s the honest part, the not-thinking. You can fake almost everything; I’ve faked my whole life. You can’t fake the half-second where your body picks a side before you can stop it.
We beat them six-three, six-two. It isn’t close. He spends the second set trying to hit the ball through me out of spite. The worst possible strategy against a net player who has stopped being afraid and Charlotte runs the backcourt like a woman conducting an orchestra of one.
In the middle of it, on a changeover, the thing happens that I’ve been waiting for without admitting I was waiting. She comes up to the net to talk strategy, close, the way you have to in front of a crowd, heads bent together — and she puts her hand flat on my chest to turn me toward the deuce side. The exact hand. The exact spot. The one she shoved me off with two nights ago.
For one half-second, it just stays there. Neither of us breathing. Her palm over a heart she has to be able to feel going like a fist on a door.
Then she says, low, all business, “Down the T on the first serve, I’ll close the alley,” and takes her hand back, and walks away but her ears have gone pink, and she knows I saw. There is nowhere on a tennis court to hide a thing like that.
That’s what I mean. The court won’t let her lie. We are losing the war of pretending one involuntary tell at a time, and the scoreboard is the only thing in the building keeping the real score.
We don’t drop another service game. Somewhere in the third-to-last point I catch her eye and she does the thing, thesmall involuntary brightening, there and gone — and I think:there she is. There’s the one place you can’t brick over.
On the court, she lets me see it. On the court, she has no choice. That’s the deal I accidentally made with the universe: two hours a day where Charlotte Astor is exactly as honest as her body, which can’t lie, which keeps voting for me in front of witnesses while the rest of her drafts resolutions against it.
The trouble, and I feel it land even as we shake Hargrove’s furious hand, even as the gate bell rings and Coach Leon beams and the boosters surge — the trouble is that this is the last one.
***
Cole finds me at the fence before I’ve toweled off, and he has the face. The new one. The one I’ve spent two weeks quietly building toward, lit from somewhere structural, a house with all its windows finally on. Indie hovers twenty feet back, pretending to talk to Tess and not quite managing to look anywhere but at him, and Cole keeps drifting his eyes to her mid-sentence like a compass that found north and can’t believe its luck.
“I asked her,” he says. “To the thing next weekend. A date. I used theword,out loud, like a man, and she said yes before I’d finished it.” He shakes his head, dazed. “I don’t even know what happened. Something just clicked. The whole campus suddenly made sense.”
“I’m happy for you, Cole.” I am. That’s the pure part — the part with no angle anywhere in it, the one thing in this entire operation I never have to lie about. “You did good.”
“I almost didn’t. I was talking myself out of it, like always, and then—” he laughs at himself “—I don’t know. I just decided I’d rather find out than wonder. You know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
I do know. That’s the joke the universe has spent a month assembling at my expense. I knowexactly.I wrote the speech. Iloaded it into two terrified mouths and watched it work, twice, and now I’m standing at a fence congratulating my best friend on doing the one thing I can’t make myself do, while the woman who helped me teach it to him stands ten feet away, rebuilding a wall between us with her bare hands.
