I haven’t written about tennis since freshman year of college….return of the repressed?
Jarvis had that unique ability to conjure slang out of thin air. Slang that Adam thought he should have known already. Words that dropped from Jarvis’ mouth like licorice dripped like globs of glue from Adam’s. His mother, who almost never emerged from the Jaguar when Jarvis arrived, would honk from the car. Adam could hear murmurs and then Jarvis would walk away and say “FINE!” and Jarvis’ mother would fly out of the parking lot.
Every day during summer, they played hours of tennis on the clay courts next to the pool. Adam almost always won with his mechanically proficient, one would have to say Germanically inflected, steady strokes. He played with his collar up and his top button fastened to protect his pale skin from the sun. He would wear a hat and pull up his socks. The dermatologist had put him on a new antibiotic. It had turned him red, despite the precautions.
So the girls would flock to the fences to watch Jarvis, whose looping lefty backhands sliced through the air with a perfection of ornamentation that seemed to drain him earlier in rallies. Either that or he got bored with Adam’s precision, and just wanted to get off the court faster. It seemed that his inconsistency was a result, not of any lack of discipline, but out of lack of patience in the absence of aesthetic triumph. So he lost, a lot. But no one remembered Adam’s well-articulated series of steely crafted drop shots and smartly-placed serves.
They did remember the curvaceous (why mince words? It was sexual) flight of Jarvis’ down-the-line forehand of desperation on double match point. They remembered the overhead banged from the clouds with the force and reverse spin that could only be induced from the uncanny mirrored motions of a lefty. Sometimes it seemed Jarvis never walked on the court to win the match—just to dominate the conversation afterwards.
He never really lost anyway. He just didn’t win.
It infuriated Adam that Jarvis cared so little about the rivalry that he—Adam—held so close. After every set, they would shake hands and Jarvis would already be on his way to the pool, stripping off his shirt and executing a perfect dive into the chlorinated water. Adam would quietly relish his win and take notes in his “Things to Improve” notebook on a beach chair. He would lather himself up with suntan lotion and then put in his iPod and fall asleep, his face covered with a towel.
“You want to swim?” Jarvis would ask. Adam would pretend not to hear and wait until Jarvis, dripping onto the beach chair, came over to poke him in the side.
“Huh?” he would ask.
“I said, do you want to swim?” Jarvis would say again.
“Oh. No, I’m fine, thank you,” Adam would say.
With Jarvis standing there dripping onto the floor of the pool and Adam reclining and feeling bright red and nervous. Those moments would stand out when he thought of summer.
