‘Dad,’ said Logan. Stan clenched the phone tight. Logan didn’t sound like himself. ‘Yeah, mate?’ He steeled himself for death or disaster.
‘You remember my friend Hien?’
‘Of course I remember him.’ A car accident? Did Hien have the virus?
‘He has a son. Six years old. Hien has been asking me to come and watch him play tennis for months now, and I’ve been putting it off, but this morning I thought, Oh, to hell with it, the kid has been stuck at home doing online learning. So anyway, I finally did, and, Dad –’
He paused, and in the pause, hope rushed like mercury through Stan’s veins.
Logan said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Stan watched the hair on his arms stand up. ‘He’s pretty good then, is he?’
‘Yeah, Dad, he’s pretty damned good.’
The first time Stan saw Harry Haddad play – a kid who had never set foot on a court before – it was like seeing one of the world’s natural wonders. Only a coach sounded the way Logan sounded right now, and Stan knew that Logan was a natural-born coach even if the fool boy didn’t seem to know it himself.
‘So, I know it’s been a long time,’ said Logan tentatively.
Don’t ask me.
Please don’t ask me.
Do it yourself, son, do it yourself, please say you want to do it yourself.
Logan lowered his voice as though he were sharing a shameful secret and said, ‘I think I want to coach him.’
It was the high of an ace or a perfectly executed smash.
Stan silently fist-punched the air.
‘What?’ said Joy. ‘What is it?’
Stan waved her quiet. He kept his voice controlled.
‘He’d be lucky to have you,’ he said.
There was silence and the next time Logan spoke his voice had firmed. ‘You think I can do it?’
‘I know you can do it.’
‘He listens,’ Logan said.
‘Yeah,’ said Stan. ‘It’s satisfying when they listen.’
The true talents were thirsty for anything you could give them. They listened and applied. They flourished before your eyes.
‘I think he’s going to go all the way, Dad.’
‘He might,’ said Stan. ‘You never know. He might.’
He wanted to say that it didn’t matter if the kid did or didn’t go all the way, that all that really mattered was that Logan was participating in his life again. He wanted to say that being a coach wasn’t second best or a fallback or a compromise and that Logan could still be part of the beautiful world of tennis, that everyone counted, not just the stars but the coaches and umpires, the weekend warriors and social players, the crazy-eyed parents and the screaming fans whose roars of appreciation lifted the stars to heights they would never otherwise reach.
But that would have taken more words than he had to spare, so he hung up and told Joy, who had a lot of words to spare about Hien, and Hien’s mother, who’d never played tennis as far as Joy knew but did have an athletic way about her, so Joy bet that was where the grandson had inherited his talent, and she hoped the boy wasn’t naughty, because Hien had been very naughty as a child.
Eventually Joy ran out of words, and they went out on the court and began to warm up and Stan’s crook knee felt good. They moved to the baselines, got into a rhythm as easy and familiar as sex, and Stan found himself thinking of his own father and their secret Friday afternoon matches, which had gone on for years, like the secret assignations of a double agent.
Of course, they couldn’t play on the backyard court his dad had built with his own hands. After he left, his dad had never crossed the threshold of his own home ever again.
They met instead at a crummy local court surrounded by scrubby bushland near a seedy scout hall. The surface was cracked, the net sagged, but the tennis was beautiful.
Stan’s father said that one day he’d see his son play at Wimbledon. He said it as if he’d been given inside information.
When Stan was sixteen his father died on a train platform waiting for the six forty-five am to Central. Instantly dead. Just like old mate Dennis Christos. ‘No great loss,’ said his mother, who believed that Stan had not seen his father for years and would not have comforted her son for his loss even if she’d known the truth. She was not a mother who gave comfort. When his boys were children and got fevers and Joy tended to them, her hand stroking their hair, Stan sometimes felt a deplorable ache of envy. His sons accepted their mother’s love in such a cavalier fashion, as if it was their birthright, and maybe sometimes he was tougher on them, Troy especially, because of his envy.