Joe McConnell
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The class had been canceled for four weeks in a row due to lack of registration. That’s what the coach told us with a confused expression when eight of us showed up at the Sutton East tennis courts, on the corner of East 59th and York Avenue, as if we had interrupted his plans.
We were there for what the club calls “Drill and Play,” a two-hour session of drills, point play, and doubles, but no instruction. I chose the 9:00-11:00 p.m. session because I had no friends in New York who were interested in seeing me since I had returned from a month abroad, and I was lonely and desperate for human contact, but I also wanted to play tennis. The other people, whose names I didn’t know and whose life situations I couldn’t even begin to imagine, had chosen the session for reasons perhaps similar, though probably different, than mine.
We drew two lines and took two shots each, one ball closer to us, one a little farther away to get our feet moving. Then we started picking up balls with little caddy baskets or with rackets. You might think you’d talk to each other as you picked up balls. But we didn’t. We picked them up, eight of us like pickers on a court, and then went back to the baseline for more warmups. Over the course of the two-hour session, the only things we shouted at each other were “Mine!” or “Yours!” when we were playing doubles. Or “Do you prefer a forehand or a backhand?” Yet I vividly remember what their forehands looked like, their volleys, their shot-making preferences.
There is, I learned that night, a certain freedom to the 9 p.m. Drill and Play that I associate with anonymous relationships. The intimacy is specific to the meeting, and there is no expectation that it will evolve into something more. It doesn’t have to. You don’t even have to bring expectations from other areas of your life into the meeting. These are not your friends. These are not people you will see again. If you see them again, it will be for the Drill and Play, and only for the Drill and Play. In fact, they chose the 9 p.m. session probably for the same reason you did: it’s the only one available for the day when you have time to play, and, perhaps more importantly, because they have no one else to play with. We are the discard pile. The lonely ones.
At Sutton East, the courts are open until 11 p.m., when the lights go out in a progressive darkness that starts at the far end of the court and overwhelms you in the middle of your serve. You can play later at some places, such as the indoor courts tucked into a hard-to-reach corner of Grand Central Station. At Vanderbilt Court, so called because it’s just above Vanderbilt Avenue, the lesson rate was half what I’d pay for rent in the Midwest, but there were discounts during what they call rush hours, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., squeezed in before commuters showed up at 6 a.m. for their private lessons.
At first I was confused by the idea of taking a tennis lesson at 2 a.m. It’s strange to think that there are tennis coaches in New York who have the same hours of availability as doctors, nurses, delivery drivers, or janitors. Then I remembered that a creative writing teacher once described my preference for late-night writing as a preference for working while the world sleeps, a desire to enter a world that belonged only to me.
When the coach told us that particular night that the lesson had been canceled for the last month because no one had shown up, I was surprised. I was in one of my obsessive, fanatical tennis-enthusiasm phases, where it’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to do anything other than play tennis or get ready to play tennis. It also had to do with the fact that I always assume that, in New York, there are hundreds of people willing to be in a particular place at a particular time. You don’t associate the city with a lack of demand. But then again, it was 9 p.m. and it was summer. People had things they wanted to do, people they wanted to see.
AVsceker my session at Sutton East, I grabbed my tennis bag and walked from the courts to my apartment on West 56th near the park. For company, I had delivery boys on their bikes and scooters. Otherwise, there was the sterile darkness of closed banks. The boutique furniture stores, which retain a bit of the eccentricity of another era in the city. The streets were quiet on that lonely stretch from York to Eighth. I passed people on dates. When I got to Madison Avenue or FiVscekh or the Park, the buildings got bigger, grander. The city started to look like itself again.
I moved slightly north, closer to the park, where I could watch the horses and carriages, peer through the trees, or watch people buying pretzels and hot dogs from the carts.
Sometimes I wish I were a different person. Someone brave enough to order a hot dog from a cart. But I’m too shy. I’m afraid of making a mistake. Of saying the wrong thing. That night I didn’t order. I just watched the other people and hoped someone would ask me if I wanted something.
I didn’t stop to ask myself if I was doing this with my friends, if my loneliness was perhaps the result of my shyness. Instead, I simply booked another Drill and Play session for the following evening, so that if anyone asked me if I had plans, I’d have something interesting to say.
Brandon Taylor’s most recent novel is “The Late Americans”, published by Vintage
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