Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

In the evenings, while she watches her TV shows, I’ve taken to long drives in no particular direction. I simply veer toward the empty road. Sometimes I play your music and listen to my own thoughts, and other times I break into tears for no reason other than that it makes me feel, oddly, loved. I try and remember the good things, matches I’ve won, people I’ve helped, a dog I once rescued from the pound. I think of walking the grounds at Wimbledon on opening day and praying it wouldn’t rain.

Lee has been playing regional tournaments in California. I know this because I have a former player out there who has sent me emails about Lee’s results. While he is winning matches here and there, I have no doubt that his progress has stalled outside the Academy, and I wonder whether Pete Sampras has the time to devote to him or whether he’s simply found a third-rate coach out there to feed Lee balls. I wonder if there’s a library out there, or anyone to go to the movies with. I wonder what happened to his friendship with the boy who smoked pipes, who I saw loitering around the Academy for a week or two after Lee left. I wonder about Lee’s ability to so easily break his attachments, and whether that comes from the same place as your ability to end relationships with the women you have been with over the years, though I know I’m overstepping my ground here.

For the next week we will be staying at the Knights Inn in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are courts nearby at the high school, and Vivi and I are out there training. Are you available early next week? I would not mind at all making the trip to your house in Grosse Point.

With hopes of seeing you soon,

Maximilian Gross

Mr. Wilcox,

I imagine you are surprised to see the postmark on the outside envelope. But yes, in point of fact, I find myself living productively and gainfully in Copenhagen, Denmark, thanks to the efforts of Vivi and her parents, the Ingebritzens. They have put me up in an apartment outside their indoor tennis club a mile or so from the great Tivoli Amusement Park. I am now coaching five young ladies and two young men, all of whom have some degree of talent, the best being Vivi. I read somewhere that you lived in this city for a year, and I wonder if there are any places you would have me go in my first months here. I did make it to your house, you know, though it must have been when you were in Los Angeles visiting with Lee and the Samprases. Did they have you to their ugly house? I find myself swinging these days from stretches of loneliness and doubt to pockets of unrestricted happiness, and as strange as it sounds I think I owe both of those moods to you. To your music, your imagination, and your strange and gifted son. If I never see him again, he will still live within me, as do you, Mr. Wilcox. The Danish girl and I had a two-hundred-shot rally today, and one nearly as long right after. I’m wondering how many times early in your career you were in places like this, relying on your wits and your talent, and a woman who did not judge you, who trusted you when you’d forgotten how to trust yourself. I do not often think of Lee these days, but I hope he is in your life where he belongs. As you requested, I will not write again or try to get in touch with you or Lee, but know that you will always be part of my neurochemistry, the part of me that sings and mourns and deeply understands. This is what I’ve learned from your music, and from my coaching, and what I will continue to pass on to the Danish boys and girls, of whose talent I am sole guardian.

I am taking a Danish immersion class at night, and now when I dream I dream in Danish. When I wake up in my Copenhagen apartment, under my cold cotton sheets, I sometimes feel touched by magic, as though nothing in my life can ever go wrong. Do you know this feeling? Did you feel it when you saw your son hitting peerless ground strokes with the great Pete Sampras, and if you did, did you recognize the gift I’d given you?

Can we say that we are even?

Yours truly,

Maximilian Gross

M y mother is dating a man named Russell who owns a boat with the words Smooth Sailing on the back. Russell has put Smooth Sailing away for the winter and he’s trying to talk my mother into an all-day Nordic safari, maybe even a drive out onto frozen Lake Ontario, which on a day like today will feel like the Sahara itself, he says. He shows up at our house with his blue-tinted sunglasses and neon green ski jacket on, as though there’s a ski lift in our house.

“If you’re going to live in the cold, you may as well love it,” he says, as if it’s that easy to love something. Russell has a way of making you feel small because he does so many big things, like shooting the rapids and hang gliding off rocky gorges. He bounds through our house like a happy Lab waiting to go out and shit.

My mother is drying dishes in the kitchen, and though I can’t see her, I imagine she is shyly smiling. Russell is what my mother wants, probably always wanted in some ways, like a trip to Europe or a house in the mountains.

“The Jeep’s still running, babe,” he says, and the word is a bug in my ear. Russell has snow in his hair and it’s starting to melt, which makes it sparkle when the light hits it. He looks over at me. I am on the couch reading Guitar Player magazine.

“Come on and take a ride in the Jeep. The fresh air’ll put some blood in your cheeks,” he says, and I wonder if I look as sick as I feel. I would just as soon take a pass from December through March on all this outdoor crap. I haven’t exercised much since I sprained my knee on Halloween and long walks tire me out.

My mother strolls out of the kitchen drying off her hands and pulling her long black hair out of the band she wears when it’s just us in the house. She’s wearing a burgundy fleece that Russell bought her and blue jeans. The two of them are dressed like the college kids I see at the coffee shop.

“The Jeep’s still running. Let’s go,” he says to both of us, and I wonder if he thinks the thing will drive away if we don’t leave in the next minute.

“Let’s go, Dex,” she says. “Have you ever been in a Jeep before?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“Well, put something warm on and let’s go.”

I look at Russell but all I can see are those blue glasses and that square jaw and that smug toothy smile. I want him to jump in that Jeep and drive off to wherever he took Smooth Sailing and pick up people’s mothers down there.

But I say, “Wait a minute. I’ll be right out.” And I grab my coat from my room.

It is January again. My father is watching television and dying. He’s at Columbia-Presbyterian in New York City and he’s watching television all day long from 6 A.M. until Larry King , which he’ll fall asleep in front of. He used to watch TV with me when he lived up here in Oswego with us, but my mom got tired of all that nothing, she said, and kicked him out. He didn’t threaten her, didn’t swear, didn’t even argue like he used to. When she asked him to leave, he said she was right to want that. He said it while CSI: Miami was on.

When he left, my mom gave all the TVs away so I’ve taken to reading magazines and playing games on my computer. There’s not much else to do where we live, being that it’s freezing cold half the year and I’m fifteen and too young to get into bars, which is what everyone else does. My mom says she’d rather I shoot drugs than watch TV, although that’s not true.

My mom used to say it was the TV that made my father sick. But I said it was getting kicked out in the cold that did it. She asked him to leave in January and you do not want to know what January is like where I live.