“Julia did well.”
“I did not.”
“Wait for Bernie to finish me off,” Julia's father said. “Then we’ll take you home.”
“How much longer?”
“When we’re finished,” said Bernie sharply.
He smiled. “Not more than twenty.”
They waited in the enclosure, behind a thin white net that was meant to keep out the balls, but didn’t, and ordered fresh lime sodas.
“We need an hour to get ready, at least.”
“I’m not going.”
“Yes you are.”
Anouk put her legs up on the table and Julia did the same and they compared: Anouk's were longer and thinner, but Julias had a better shape. Julia's phone beeped.
“It's from Zubin.”
Anouk took the phone.
“It's just about my lesson.”
Anouk read Zubin's message in an English accent: CAN WE SHIFT FROM
FIVE TO SIX ON THURSDAY?
“He doesn’t talk like that,” Julia said, but she knew what Anouk meant. Zubin was the only person she knew who wrote SMS in full sentences, without any abbreviations.
Anouk tipped her head back and shut her eyes. Her throat was smooth and brown and underneath her sleeveless white top, her breasts were outlined, the nipples pointing up. “Tell him I’m hot for him.”
“You’re a flirt.”
Anouk sat up and looked at the court. Now Bernie was serving. Both men had long, dark stains down the fronts of their shirts. A little bit of a breeze was coming from the trees behind the courts; Julia felt the sweat between her shoulders. She thought she’d gone too far, and she was glad when Anouk said, “When are they going to be finished?”
“They’ll be done in a second. I think they both just play ’cause the other one wants to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, my dad never played in Paris.”
“Mine did,” Anouk said.
“So maybe he just likes playing with your dad.”
Anouk tilted her head to the side for a minute, as if she were thinking. “He would have to though.”
The adrenaline from the fight they’d almost had, defused a minute before, came flooding back. She could feel her pulse in her wrists. “What do you mean?”
Her friend opened her eyes wide. “I mean, your dad's probably grateful.”
“Grateful for
“The job.”
“He had a good job before.”
Anouk blinked incredulously. “Are you serious?”
“He was the operations manager in Central Asia.”
“Was,” Anouk said.
“Yeah, well,” Julia said. “He didn’t want to go back to the States after my mom did.”
“My God,” Anouk said. “That's what they told you?”
Julia looked at her.
“You have it backwards,” Anouk said. “Your mother left because of what happened. She went to America, because she knew your father couldn’t. There was an article about it in
“Four-five,” her father called. “Your service.”
“But I guess your mom didn’t understand that.”
Cars were inching out of the club. Julia could see the red brake lights between the purple blossoms of the hedge that separated the court from the drive.
“It doesn’t matter,” Anouk said. “You said he wouldn’t have gone back anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether he
A car backed up, beeping. Someone yelled directions in Hindi.
“And it didn’t get reported in America or anything. My father says he's lucky he could still work in Europe- probably not in oil, but anything else. He doesn’t want to go back to the States anyway-
The game had finished. Their fathers were collecting the balls from the corners of the court.
“Ready?” her father called, but Julia was already hurrying across the court. By the time she got out to the drive she was jogging, zigzagging through the cars clogging the lot, out into the hot nighttime haze of the road. She was lucky to find an empty taxi. They pulled out into the mass of traffic in front of the Hagi Ali and stopped. The driver looked at her in the mirror for instructions.
“Malabar Hill,” she said. “Hanging Garden.”
Zubin was actually working on the essay, sitting at his desk by the open window, when he heard his name. Or maybe hallucinated his name: a bad sign. But it wasn’t his fault. His mother had given him a bottle of sam-buca, which someone had brought her from the duty-free shop in the Frankfurt airport.
“I was thinking of giving it to the Mehtas but he's stopped drinking entirely. I could only think of you.”
“You’re the person she thought would get the most use out of it,” his father contributed.
Now Zubin was having little drinks (really half drinks) as he tried to apply to college. He had decided that there would be nothing wrong with writing a first draft for Julia, as long as she put it in her own words later. The only problem was getting started. He remembered his own essay perfectly, unfortunately on an unrelated subject. He had written, much to his English teacher's dismay, about comic books.
“Why don’t you write about growing up in Bombay? That will distinguish you from the other applicants,” she had suggested.
He hadn’t wanted to distinguish himself from the other applicants, or rather, he’d wanted to distinguish himself in a much more distinctive way. He had an alumni interview with an expatriate American consultant working for Arthur Anderson in Bombay; the interviewer, who was young, Jewish and from New York, said it was the best college essay he’d ever read.
“Zu-bin.”
It was at least a relief that he wasn’t hallucinating. She was standing below his window, holding a tennis racket. “Hey, Zubin-can I come up?”
“You have to come around the front,” he said.
“Will you come down and get me?”
He put a shirt over his T-shirt, and then took it off. He took the glass of sambuca to the bathroom sink to dump it, but he got distracted looking in the mirror (he should’ve shaved) and drained it instead.
He found Julia leaning against a tree, smoking. She held out the pack.
“I don’t smoke.”
She sighed. “Hardly anyone does anymore.” She was wearing an extremely short white skirt. “Is this a bad time?”
“Well-”
“I can go.”
“You can come up,” he said, a little too quickly. “I’m not sure I can do antonyms now though.”
In his room Julia gravitated to the stereo. A Brahms piano quartet had come on.
