Chapter Twelve - Benedict
CHAPTER TWELVE
Benedict
Last exhibition tonight. Warm up at five. Don’t be weird.
Don’t be weird. As though I’m the variable.
As though I’m the one who fisted a hand in the other one’s shirt, pulled him to within a centimeter of a decision, and then smiled the coldest smile on the Eastern Seaboard and said see, easy.
I’ve been replaying it on a loop for nine hours.
I have not slept. I’ve lain here reconstructing the exact pressure of her hand flat on my chest, the push, not the pull, the push, God, the woman can weaponize a shove — and I’ve arrived at exactly one conclusion, which is that I am in significantly more trouble than I’ve been keeping track of.
So I text back ‘who’s weird, I’m a delight’ and get, forty minutes later, ‘5:00. wear the white. it photographs.’
That’s the whole conversation. That’s the problem in miniature. She has already rebuilt the wall, brick by brick, overnight, and posted me on the far side of it with a call time and a dress code.
I know the move, because I invented the move.
Rebuild overnight. Issue the dress code.
Run the next day like the last one never happened.
That is the Hawthorne house special, it’s how I’ve handled every feeling that ever threatened to cost me something.
Watching her do it to me, expertly, in real time, is like watching a stranger pick my own front door. I should be impressed. I am, a little.
Mostly I’m furious, with no right to be, at finding myself on the receiving end of my oldest trick.
She wants to pretend it didn’t happen. Fine.
I am, professionally, the best pretender either of us knows.
I can pretend a thing didn’t happen so convincingly I start believing it myself, that’s how I’ve survived being me.
I’ll give her the pretending. I’ll give her anything she asks for; that’s the whole sick shape of it now.
Except I’ve also learned, somewhere in two weeks of bad library light, that there is exactly one room in the world where Charlotte Astor cannot pretend.
One place where the wall has no bricks. Where she’s forced to be honest with me whether she likes it or not.
A tennis court. Doubles. Same side of the line.
So I wear the white. And I wait for the one place she can’t lie.
***
She’s already on the court when I arrive at five, of course she is, because being early is how Charlotte holds shut a door she’s afraid might open. Her hair is puled back into a tight ponytail, and she doesn’t look up when I come through the gate.
“You’re here,” she tells her strings.
“I’m a delight and I’m punctual. Two of my four good qualities.”
“What are the other two?”
“I’ll demonstrate them later.”
It’s out before I’ve cleared it with the department in charge of not setting fields on fire, and the word demonstrate goes into her like a splinter. I watch her decide, with visible effort, to feel nothing about it.
“We’re not talking about it,” she says.
“About what? Warming up? I’m fully prepared to discuss warming up. It’s a passion of—”
“Hawthorne.” She looks at me then, finally, and under the wall there’s something I’ve never seen on her — something that looks almost like fear, which on Charlotte Astor is rare enough to stop a heart.
“There’s a court full of people coming in an hour, and a number we have to put on a board for some sick kids, and I need you to be my partner for two more hours and not — not this. Can you give me two hours?”
And the thing is, I’d give her the two hours. I’d give her two thousand. That’s the entire catastrophe.
“Feed me serves,” I say, gently, letting her have it. “I’ll be good.”
She exhales like I’ve snipped a wire on something, and feeds me serves, and for forty minutes we’re two athletes and nothing else, and it’s the kindest lie I’ve ever told her.
The last exhibition draws the biggest gate of the run, because the department has finally understood what it’s got, not two athletes, a story, the kind boosters open wallets for — and for the finale they’ve matched us against the meanest draw in the alumni pool.
A man named Hargrove: a genuine former touring pro who cracked the world top hundred for one shining season in the nineties and has spent the thirty years since teaching rich men’s backhands and getting bitter about it, paired with a younger alum who mostly stays out of his way.
He’s good. He’s also exactly the brand of self-made and permanently aggrieved that looks at a kid like me and sees everything he had to claw for, handed over gift-wrapped.
Within two games, he’s decided the way to beat the college kids is to take me apart at the seams.
He picks me. They always pick me. I have a face that says this one won’t mind, and most days it’s right.
“You float those volleys, Hawthorne,” he calls, after I miss one. Friendly. Lethal. “All that talent. Never had to work a day for a lick of it, did you?”
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’s true, 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 cruel for someone. 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 bought you a career.
Nobody hung your name on a building. You clawed every inch of it yourself — self-made, the whole bitter little fairy tale — and you still washed 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 watch us, 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 not his tragedy, is it?”
The crowd makes the sound a crowd makes when blood is actually drawn, the low, scandalized ohhh. Hargrove’s partner discovers something fascinating on the back fence. And Hargrove goes a deep, dangerous red, because she hasn’t insulted him. She has diagnosed him. 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.