Playing Days (19 page)

Over lunch I asked Mel whether Hadnot didn't deserve more court time, given his ‘efficiency.' It seemed to me just a question of numbers. ‘He banks one point two, one point three a shot,' I said. By such talk, technical and brief, I hoped to impress the big-shot scout. ‘Very high for any kind of player, especially a guard. Higher than Karl.'

‘What does it matter, when you're winning ball games?' Mel said. ‘If you ask me, they're easing him out. It's a question of numbers all right, three grand a week. Bo just costs too much. At his age, to take a three-month contract – he should have known better.'

‘I've been thinking about that. You know, he held out a couple weeks at the start of the season. I think he wanted to quit – he got fat over the summer and needed a month to play himself into shape. Hadnot told me once he only came back because of Karl. He figured already Karl would attract the attention of guys like you, and it was his last chance to get noticed. Then Henkel benches him.'

‘You mean, I guess, what do I think of him professionally?'

He stubbed out a cigarette; the smell of it mixed with the plant smells and food smells.

‘I scouted him out of Mississippi ten years ago,' he went on. ‘OK, he can shoot, and he knows how to play. But he's three or four inches short for a two guard, and a
step slow. On defense, against top-flight talent, all he can do is hack. Don't get me wrong, there's a place for that, too. With the right club, a dominant big man or slasher, he can work himself open off the double-teams and knock down jumpshots. Coaches like shooters like chess players like chess pieces: they can draw up plays around them. But then you look at his character. Some kids can't afford to be selfish, they don't have the talent. Maybe you like the guy personally, I don't know, but there are people who make every situation they're in a little more difficult, and he's one of them. Don't pretend that isn't a part of what's going on here. But let's imagine he isn't a headache; let's imagine he's twenty-two years old. If he counts for a good soldier and some small-market club like Cleveland or San Antonio can claim him for a local boy, maybe they draft him and he spends two or three years at the end of their bench. He's white, after all; at least he's white. Then someone gets injured and he has a chance to prove himself, and takes it. A lot of these guys don't, by the way. They get scared. This way he stretches out some kind of NBA career. But at his age, coming into the league? Ben, I'll be honest. This is delusional, this is unhappy thinking.'

Mel's assurance offended me, as it sometimes did. I felt a little of what Hadnot might feel about him, the righteous anger of the school bully. Listen to this skinny-chested kid talk big! ‘You mean,' I said, making a joke of it, ‘that if he was taller, faster, sweeter and younger, and didn't come from Mississippi, he might have a shot?'

‘Sure, why not?'

‘How about the rest of us?'

He tapped his cigarettes against the table and pulled another one out. Then lit it, collecting his thoughts. His answer, when it came, had the quick cadence of a professional opinion. Olaf was also three or four inches short. Bad hands, too, small and what coaches call ‘hard.' Decent ups, a respectable shooting stroke, but no inside moves. His rotational quickness was poor, which is what big men depend on in the pivot. Then he was lazy and didn't care. The rest might be overcome, but sometimes the psychological was harder to fix than the physical. Probably he was the second best talent on the team, but uncoachable. Milo had moderate quickness, moderate ups, moderate hands, but at his position he's competing against athletes like you wouldn't believe. Unless you're a freak you don't get to play, with two exceptions. You're very smart and you don't miss. Milo played dumb and used too much elbow on his follow-through – it might take a good coach two years to correct it, and Henkel showed no inclination. Then he's a head-case, and who needs it? Charlie at least knows what he is. A third-rate talent and a bully. Small European clubs can use a guy like him to lick the rest into shape. He's smart and under control, but two steps slow, a half foot short. Also, he holds the ball too long and drives too deep, shoots corkscrews, and cheats on defense to make up for lack of foot speed. Plotzke isn't worth talking about. This is a guy
who doesn't suit up in any other league in Europe, to say nothing of the US.

And what about me, I asked when he was finished.

‘My professional opinion?' he said.

‘Sure, why not?'

‘You're twenty pounds underweight. That's fixable, with a serious regime, though it might take two years.'

Then he did a strange thing. He left his cigarette smoking in the ashtray and took one of my hands in the palm of his own. He had fine-boned fingers, though dirty under the nails; and my skin, at his touch, seemed to me as soft as a woman's.

‘Your hands are too small,' he said, and let go of me again. ‘You jump off the right foot. As a right-handed player, that leaves you unbalanced in the air. Again, this is fixable, though such instincts die hard. You're one of those guys who's easy to push off the ball. I don't know the reason. High center, low center of gravity, one of the two. Some guys are up-and-down guys: they don't take up much space on the floor, so it's easy to strip them, it's easy to box them out. You're one of those guys.'

He picked up his cigarette again.

‘On the plus side,' he went on, ‘you've got a quick first step, especially going left, because you plant with your right, and other idiosyncrasies that make you hard to figure out the first time around. That counts for something, but there's always a second time. Your lateral footwork is terrible, and you end up reaching on defense and
catching cheap whistles. Then there's a kink in your shot I haven't seen in twenty years. I don't know where you picked it up, probably the fifties. Your left thumb pushes on the ball, which makes you unreliable anywhere inside of twenty feet, including the foul line. Another two years to fix. As I say, some of it can't be helped, some of it can. If you put in the sweat, you might turn yourself into a decent second division player in a mid-level European league, a fourth or fifth man. Honestly, though, I don't think you've got the heart for it, the stomach, what you will.'

He looked me in the eyes with a challenging, humorous air. The meal was over, but the rain continued to spread itself thickly against the window. We wouldn't shift ground any time soon. Some conversations, however, also give us the chance to stretch our legs, and I had the feeling, as we sat there, of ranging indiscriminately. Look, I seemed to say, as if pointing out a landmark, that's me, some way below . . . Mr. Sahadi came hovering to remove our plates, but I explained to him that my friend was leaving town shortly and this was our last meal together. The food was so good, I could happily pick at it for hours, if he didn't mind; it seemed to me the kind of meal to be picked at.

‘What about Karl?' I asked, when he had hustled off to bring us mint tea. I get cold easily, sitting still, and wanted to warm my hands around something.

‘Karl's all right,' Mel said. ‘There's nothing wrong with Karl.'

‘What do you mean there's nothing wrong with him?'

‘What I say. Somebody will pay what it takes to bring him over, and maybe I'll have something to do with it and maybe I won't. Either way, he'll be fine.'

And just at that the muddle of strange feelings acting together (loneliness, friendliness, coldness, wounded pride) produced in me a very simple one, a rush of blood. That a prodigy like Karl, seven feet tall and the best athlete on the team – quick, strong, balanced; technically perfect; clear-headed, confident – should belong to some kind of normal! In the first few weeks of that long summer, which I spent on trains and in corporate hotels, measuring myself from day to day against strangers, I wondered if I was any good at basketball. Suddenly, I had a glimpse of what being good meant.

The memory of this conversation, as I get older, has a somewhat different effect on me. I don't know that I've ever been around a set of people more exceptionally suited, by nature or inclination, to their chosen profession. Charlie, Milo, Hadnot, Olaf. These were the kids crawling at six months, walking at nine. They were first on the playground slide and last off the playing field at dusk. Childhood, for them, was the game you won at. Their whole lives all they practiced was how to get a round ball into a round hoop and stop other people doing the same. And they weren't even close to the big
time, not even close. Of course, our failings aren't only professional, and after that year I began to see everything in a cold assessing light. What chance do the rest of us have to give a reasonable account of ourselves, not just at work and play, but in more complicated and difficult contests? How many of us have the talent or skill, or in some cases the opportunity, to lead decent, loving, useful, satisfied lives?

Maybe this climate of assessment affected my feelings for Anke. Once you become used to measuring people, it can be hard to stop. As the season wore on, I retreated deeper and deeper inside my own head.

One more story about my father.

I think he saw what was happening to me and tried in his way to shake me out of it. A few mornings before he left, on the Monday, our first practice session after the weekend's game, he watched me warm up with Karl in the shootaround. Karl, beginning to enjoy his success, was light-hearted and loose, messing around, but still insisted on making eight of ten before moving from each spot. This meant that I spent much of the time chasing down his misses. My father, when he had seen enough, took off his jacket and laid it carefully over the bench.

‘Give an old man a shot,' he said, stepping on court. And Karl, who was basically a good kid, passed him the ball. My father short-armed the first and then clapped his hands, calling for the ball again. He said to Karl, ‘You know how to play H-O-R-S-E? I'll play you H-O-R-S-E. You want to play H-O-R-S-E?'

‘Sure, I know how to play,' Karl said.

‘OK, OK.' My father shrugged his shoulders and pulled his shirt out of his belt. ‘We'll play. I go first. Age before beauty.'

He bounced the ball a couple times flat-handed and lined up an eighteen-footer from the baseline. Then he thought about it a minute. ‘You gonna make me shoot it?' he said at last, with the ball in his hands. ‘You don't think I'm gonna miss this, do you?'

Karl partly turned to me. ‘I don't understand,' he said, in his thick German English, as if he had a mouthful of good cheddar. ‘Do you want to play or not?'

‘OK, OK,' my father repeated.

He has a characteristic way of cocking the ball at his eye, measuring up and letting go. The act, in his hands, seems carefully considered, never mind that I learned my set shot from him, with the left thumb guiding. His first shot dropped in. ‘Getting warmed up,' he said, making an odd swinging motion with both arms. Meanwhile, I stood stupidly aside, and when Karl's reply bounced off the back rim towards midcourt, I let him run it down.

Until I was seventeen or eighteen, long after he had any right to, my father could beat me routinely at H-O-R-S-E. He never played much, and I spent every afternoon in the back yard working on my shot. Still, he seemed not to feel the pressure of defeating his son, as I felt it the other way around. The fact that he had made and reared me gave him a continued hold.

Some part of that spell seemed to have transferred
itself. I could see in Karl's red face, as the game went on, the sullenness of a son. He stopped answering when my father talked and simply waited his turn. My father, for his part, kept up a steady stream of banter. ‘You gonna give it to me?' he said, taking position. ‘In golf they have something called a gimme. Between friends, when you can't miss. You don't think I'm gonna miss this, do you?' And so on.

What I heard, though, and what he meant me to hear, was: You don't have to let these guys push you around. I don't care if they're better than you. Sometimes even when you're wrong you have to stick up for yourself.

I still like to think of the two of them going at it. My father, six one in his prime, but bent a couple inches forward by children and a shuffling habit. Anyway, a good head and neck shorter than the younger man. Hadn't played organized ball since 1956 and spent most of that year on the bench. But growing happy, as he only is in company, garrulous, knocking down eighteen-footers. Karl silent and mechanical in his motions, chasing the ball, back-rimming his shots. Two years later he signed his first American contract, for three years and twenty-five million dollars. A future all-star; a league MVP.

Another thing my father liked to say. If you got beat to nothing, he called it a perfect bagel. The word had a verb form, too: Karl got bageled.

When I was fifteen years old, my family spent a year in Berlin and my brother for the first time brought home, over Thanksgiving, a girlfriend from college. He arrived with a suitcase full of frozen pizza from some campus eatery, and a short, pretty, very nice girl from upstate New York.

Her name was Martha. It wasn't their idea, though, to spend the whole time at my parents' place, and in an act of generosity that was, I now see, as much hers as his, he took his kid brother and three kid sisters away for a long weekend in Flensburg.

It's five hours by slow train from Berlin, and the train we caught had old-fashioned cabins in it. At some point one of us discovered that the two long leather benches against the walls could be folded down to meet in the middle, making an enormous bed. And that's what we lay on, under several duvets, for the rest of the journey – as if my brother's introduction of a sexual life into the bosom of the family were no less innocent than a midnight feast.

On the twelve-hour train ride from Landshut, a few days before Christmas, I thought of that long weekend. There
was no cabin, and Anke and Franziska continually exchanged seats beside me, depending on who needed to sleep or stretch her legs. The day darkened as we made our way north, and the hills gave way to the flatness of Schleswig-Holstein: an endless journey, cramped, sometimes embarrassing, as any journey with a child can be; exhilarating, too. We were playing at families, and I wondered from time to time what my brother would do.

Around nine o'clock the train pulled in, and I paid for a taxi to take us to my mother's house, which is outside of town, about twenty minutes by car. Just long enough, as Anke said, for a small tired girl to fall asleep.

When the tarmac gave way to dirt and stone, I knew we were near. The trees opened up beside us, and we could see the sea – even at night, distinguishable in its darkness from the darkness of everything else. Dirt gave way to gravel on the steep drive down, and gravel to grass, and then there was nothing but trees on one side and water on the other.

Franziska had fallen asleep, and Anke lifted her screaming from the warm car-seat, still caught up in dreams.

‘Mami, mami,' she cried, slapping her cheeks with small hands.

I stood aside for a moment and breathed in deeply the familiar stony smell, then carried what bags I could up the broken steps to the terrace. Home-coming is always a private experience, and I resisted the strong desire to
communicate some part of it to Anke. (Look at the lights of Denmark across the water. Can you hear that boat at anchor?) The taxi reversed loudly up the drive, and then its headlamps shifted on to the road above; it was suddenly dark and quiet. For an awful minute, I thought our neighbor had forgotten to leave the front-door key under the shoe-grate, but then my fingers found cool iron among the grit and pebbles.

Everything was tidy when I pushed my way in, tidy and dusty and cold as a house unlived-in. Dead flowers in a vase on the sitting room table scattered at my touch. Someone had left a note beside them:

Write down the numbers on the telephone meter.

There are two jars of jam in the cellar.

Don't eat them.

It's gooseberries from the garden and I laid them down myself.

A scrawled signature; probably one of my uncles.

In the kitchen, the fridge door was open and the light inside was off. I found a can of soup inside the larder door and began looking for a can-opener. Anke said, ‘What are you doing? I have to get her to bed.'

‘I'm trying to make us something to eat.'

‘I have to get her to bed.' After a moment, ‘What are you waiting for? I don't know where her bed is.'

She stood aside for me in the kitchen doorway, and I felt the stiff formality of the gesture. Franziska also turned her shoulder to let me through; she had stopped
crying but her lips were thick with sleepiness or unhappiness. I led the way up the narrow stairs into a small room under the eaves. There was a tree outside the window that brushed against the glass all night in windy weather. I opened the window to let some air in and inhaled again, rather self-consciously, deep draughts of nostalgia.

‘This is where I used to sleep. She can sleep here.'

‘The wallpaper is peeling off over her head.'

‘Yes, we all used to pick at it.'

For the next hour, I hunted up sheets and towels, and made beds, and found the hot-water dial, and switched it on, and the central heating, and turned that on, too. The stairs outside Franziska's bedroom were too steep for a small girl in a strange house, so I stacked two chairs in front of them. Meanwhile, she resumed her screaming, and Anke at last lay down in bed beside her. I went downstairs and made soup, waited for a half hour until it grew cold, then set it on the hob again and ate from the pot as soon as the soup was hot. After that, I began looking through all the cupboards for things I remembered: puzzles, children's games, old maps.

Around eleven o'clock Anke came down again with her daughter in her arms.

‘Didn't you hear me?' she said. ‘I've been calling for the last ten minutes. The bed is too narrow for two. I'm going to take her in with us.'

‘Where should I sleep?'

‘Wherever you like; it's your house.'

‘There's soup if you want it.'

‘Right now I only want you to show me where our bedroom is.'

I led the way upstairs again and along the narrow corridor to the door at the end. Behind it was a wide, carpeted room with two single beds pushed together. The house had been furnished to accommodate various large families and adapt itself to each. Consequently, it had some of the durable, seedy comforts of a seaside hotel: a bedroom sink, rough carpeting. When my grandfather at last grew too old to live in it, he left several pieces of good furniture behind, and these remained, pushed into odd corners of rooms. The result was a kind of shabby gentility of which I now felt ashamed.

Anke sat down and tried to wriggle out of her jeans and blouse. Franziska was by this point perfectly quiet in her mother's arms, but as soon as she let go, the screaming began again. ‘Can you help me?' Anke said at last, and I bent down to pull her trousers off. A quiet, intimate act for which I was suddenly grateful. ‘When were you coming to bed?' she asked me, lying carefully back with her arms full.

‘I was waiting for you to come down.'

‘Will you come to bed now?'

Franziska lay in the crack between the two mattresses, against her side, with one hand holding tight to her mother's ear. She was tall and her feet had the boyish roughness and flatness of a child who goes barefoot.

‘What's wrong?'

‘I've never slept with her in the bed before.'

Anke thought about this. ‘I don't think she'll mind.'

I slept lightly in the unfamiliar bed with the unfamiliar small body under the duvet beside me. There was only one small window in the room, overlooking the garden and drive. None of the vague white noise of city lights reached us there, and the night was properly dark – the sort of dark that is itself a kind of wilderness. Even so, whenever I woke up, my eyes adjusted, and I could make out the shape of Franziska's face and something of her expression: her lips pursed, as if she sucked on a lemon pip. I didn't want to roll over, in case it disturbed them, but I'm a restless sleeper at the best of times and suffered from the sense of restraint. Then there was the mild embarrassment of what happens to a man's body involuntarily in the course of a night. Around five or six, at the first signs of graying in the curtains, I drifted at last into deeper sleep.

When I woke up, Anke was standing at the small window with Franziska on a chair beside her. ‘We're bored,' she said. ‘Where is the sea? I promised her the sea.'

‘Lean out and look to your left.'

‘Oh,' she said, after a minute. And then: ‘Get dressed, get dressed. What are you waiting for? It's so still.'

There's a set of routines my family adheres to more
or less strictly in Flensburg, and I tried to introduce them then, explaining myself from under the duvet. In the morning, we go into the village and buy rolls, a fifteen-minute walk along the dirt road; then come back and eat them in the glasshouse. At that point, we consider plans – there's a boat that needs a lot of talking about. But Franziska only wanted to go down to the beach. Anke told her to pull my covers off, which she thought about for a minute, then did. I kissed her mother good morning at the window and felt easy in the girl's presence, since it meant Anke and I didn't have to be alone together.

It was a pale blue watery clear sort of day. Denmark looked about as close as the end of your arm, brown and leafless against the sea. Since the bathroom was unheated, Anke decided not to shower: she would rather be warm than clean. We pulled on yesterday's clothes, then breakfasted on nothing more than mugs of water from the tap and handfuls of stale wheat squares left behind by someone else – cereal for children. Anke filled a plastic bag with some of them, which she took with her, feeding Franziska from time to time as we descended the uneven footpath to the shore.

The sea emerges only at the bottom, once you push through a dark growth of woodland and an alley of sharp rosehip. But once it emerges it is everywhere.

Outside our house there's a patch of beach that used to belong to my family, before the city took over the shoreline, but still we claim over it a kind of seigniory. A spit of weedy rocks jutting out had been built up over
time by my uncles and cousins to ease the access for a sailing boat. Franziska helped me to gather loose stones together, which were mostly too heavy for her to lift, and throw them out to sea, where they landed with a great splash and a loud clash. The water itself was much too cold for anything but dipping your hand in. Afterwards, we wandered along the coastal path to the children's playground, an old-fashioned assortment of landlocked boats and wooden slides and wobbly bridges, on which I remembered playing every summer of my childhood.

It occurred to me that I might easily tire Anke's patience for reminiscence. At the same time I felt there was something in my stories she found attractive. Evidence of the fact that I was properly German and at home. Also of something else: that we were ‘landed' people.

After the playground, I led us by another route back up the hill and ran into Frau Kohler, the neighbor who had left the key. A short, stiff-backed woman with a good, decisive sort of face. Her husband, who was dead, had known my grandparents well, and Anke sweetly asked her about the family connection.

This involved a few more stories and eventually we were invited in for tea and cake, which Anke accepted, since we hadn't had any breakfast. Frau Kohler gave us toys for Franziska to take down to the house, including an antique rocking horse and a wooden high chair.

On our way home, I apologized to Anke for ‘all the family business. My grandfather once did the Kohlers a good turn, and she likes talking about him.'

‘Not at all,' Anke said, politely.

She had been on her best behavior; it survived for about half an hour any need for it. In Frau Kohler's presence, she had addressed me with the attractive propriety of a woman being courted. Anke always liked fifties clothes; sometimes she dressed up in fifties manners, too. Her childhood had been a thoroughly prosperous middle-class sort of childhood, until her father's illness, which had the effect of wearing a little thinner the fabric of her family life. Their traditions had more to do with doctors' visits, the routines of convalescence, the allowances made for her mother's late career. When she dropped out of school, she dropped down a rung in the social ladder, too. Occasionally she talked about acting or going to university, but I think what she really wanted were the customs and community of middle-class life.

That afternoon I phoned my mother, just to tell her we had safely arrived. She asked to speak to Anke; they chatted for about five minutes. Afterwards she said to me, ‘Your father has been worrying to me about her. I'll tell him, I know just the kind of girl she is.'

She meant by that, a good German girl, someone like me. Nothing worse.

I didn't respond to this, or mention her remark to Anke, but the line stuck with me. Sometimes, when I
looked at her, I heard my mother: I know just the kind of girl she is. It is strange for me, that my son takes a lover, but this is less strange. In her German youth, my mother looked not unlike Anke, fashionably demure, upright, very slender. Her presence in our relationship seemed particularly strong that week; it cast a shadow on us, but a warm shadow.