After I go in for lunch and to take a shower and rest, Bowe usually shows up and trains with my father for a few hours. Sometimes, as I’m getting dressed, I watch the two of them in the backyard. Bowe and my father are always either passionately agreeing or disagreeing about what Bowe should work on next. The two of them bicker at full volume—Bowe yelling to be heard over my father’s megaphone.
As the days pass by, I can see Bowe’s first serve growing more and more bold, his second serve more consistent, all from my window.
Then, every day around three, I get back on the court. And Bowe and I play a match.
Bowe always starts off trash-talking. And then I often trounce him—and my father gives us both a series of pointers for the next day.
At which point, Bowe says he’ll see us tomorrow. My father and I have dinner. And then I say I’m going to bed.
But instead, I wait until nine-thirty, when I open my door, and Bowe is always standing on my doorstep.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Every night, I grab his hand and pull him inside and bring him to my bedroom. And every night, he presses himself against me and kisses my neck and makes me wonder if anyone has ever survived jumping off the edge of a cliff.
* * *
—
A month before the US Open, Bowe is lying in my bed in the middle of the night. His arm is cradled perfectly under my neck; his right hand is tracing shapes on my upper arm, and I’m almost asleep.
“Your dad knows what’s going on,” he says.
“He just thinks you’re into me.”
“No,” Bowe says. “He knows that I’m parking across the street and sleeping here until the morning, when I go home for four hours and then come right back, pretending I’ve been gone the whole time.”
“He doesn’t know any of that.”
Bowe laughs. “He does. Today after he was done barking orders at me about my backhand, he calmly asked me if I had any idea of my plans after I retire. And when I said I wasn’t sure, he said, ‘Well, do you think settling down is in your future?’？”
I cringe so hard I nearly spasm. “No, he didn’t,” I say, sitting up. I’m now fully awake. “You must have misunderstood him.”
“I assure you, I did not.”
“Yes, you did.”
“We could tell him the truth,” Bowe says, turning onto his side, toward me in bed. He’s been sleeping here so consistently that I’ve started wondering if I should get another nightstand. But I have always had one nightstand, and I can’t conceive of being the sort of idiot who would buy a second.
“No, c’mon,” I say. “Let’s not make anything weird, all right? I want him to train you for the US Open. I want you to win the damn thing. And I want to win it too.”
“Of course.”
“So we know that we’re going to be training together for the next month…”
Bowe looks at me, his eyebrows furrowed, as if he cannot tell where my train of thought is headed.
“But who knows if we’ll even be sleeping together tomorrow.”
Bowe pulls his arm away from me. “You’re fucking impossible,” he says, rolling onto his back. “Absolutely impossible.”
“What are we doing, Bowe?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You won’t tell me.”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know!” he says.
“See? You don’t have a plan. You don’t know what you want.”
“I do know what I want,” he says. “I’m here, aren’t I? You fucking rejected me back in ’82 and took up with Randall, of all people. You rejected me back in Melbourne. You all but rejected me back in Paris. And still, I’m here, every night, any second that you want me. I know exactly what I want, Carrie. I’ve made it clear.”
I watch him throw his head back on the bed. And I let myself believe for a moment that maybe he means it. Maybe this time, maybe this man, means it.
“Just forget it,” he says. And then he turns his back to me and fluffs his pillow angrily. And I smile to myself because you don’t fluff a pillow you’re not planning to sleep on.
* * *
—
Bowe and I both take Sundays off from training. We need one day to recuperate. And sometimes, in the morning, I’ll watch tapes with my dad. But in the afternoons, even I need a break from tennis, and I can tell that my dad does not know what to do with himself.
Bowe starts coming over in the afternoons to play chess with my father on Sundays. Then it evolves into the two of them going to Blockbuster together and renting war movies.