‘Joyce, please,’ admonished the umpire. ‘Not today. On this of all days.’
The Irishman continued, ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing, Tom—’
‘Please, no,’ said the umpire. ‘Can we just this once not have any unpleasantness.’
‘You’re an alleycat, Joyce,’ snapped SuperTom. ‘Rough and dirty and spraying your stink everywhere.’
‘Christ, you’re elegant,’ smiled Joyce. ‘So fucking intelligent.’
‘Have you any awareness whatever of what constitutes acceptable on-court language?’ asked Eliot.
‘You’re a great man for the pomp and circuspants, Tom. Have you had a woman lately?’
‘Really,’ insisted the umpire. ‘Joyce, can you just play the game?’
‘I’ll not be told how to express myself by a fucking sermonising misogynist eunuch,’ said Joyce.
‘Drivel from a fool!’ spat SuperTom.
‘Or is it not really the women you’re after, Tom? Is it the lads that steam the engine up?’
The height of SuperTom’s dudgeon at this point was inestimable. He walked away and stood on the service-line, waiting. Joyce wiped his nose on his shirt and sauntered out to receive. SuperTom served like a man who knew he was playing in a classic and won the second set going away. The third was a see-sawing affair in which Eliot moved away again to a 6–4 win.
If Joyce was concerned, he didn’t show it. He was still talking to people in the crowd and at 2–3 in the fourth he approached a woman about two rows back and borrowed money to continue.
In the fourth set, he talked non-stop. SuperTom bristled. He walked to the net and stared at Joyce for nearly a minute.
Joyce looked up. ‘How are you going, Tom?’ he asked. ‘I’m putting a new grip on my racquet.’
Joyce finished winding on the new grip but Eliot hadn’t moved.
‘Time, Mr Eliot,’ said the umpire. ‘Hurry along, please. It’s time.’
Eliot stood at the net, rolling up the legs on his shorts.
‘I am Lazarus,’ he said, ‘come back from the dead.’
‘And I am Molly,’ said Joyce, ‘come back from Blazes.’
‘Time please, Mr Eliot.’
When play restarted, Joyce carried on and the stream of his words continued, not loud enough for the umpire to take any action. In fact, it was rather mellifluous. His tennis was now moving at the pace of his voice and he was ‘in the zone’. He won seven straight games to take the fourth set and to break Eliot in the first game of the decider.
Eliot was now cautioned for banging his racquet on the ground and yelling ‘Jug, jug, jug, fucking juuuuuugggggg!’
He walked to the net and glared balefully at Joyce again. ‘Can you keep the interior monologue down?’
‘Tell me a tale of Jim and Tom,’ hummed Joyce to himself, ‘all of the river is flowing Jim, the river is flowing over him, the rivering under the floater Tom, the blow to just under the nose is gone, and into the afterglow is on, and go with the afterburners on, and go with the flow from here to there, and go with it knowing your man Flaubert, and everythings fine and Dante there, and then as you hit the final straight, you hammer it down the line and wait, and look at the time and consummate.’
‘I haven’t been playing well, of late,’ said Eliot. ‘Teller 3 is now available, incidentally. I’m afraid you have insufficient funds in this account.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked the umpire.
‘Step this way please,’ said SuperTom. ‘I think we’d better see the manager.’
‘I am the manager,’ said the umpire.
‘Very good,’ said Eliot. ‘Carry on.’
Joyce was untroubled from here and served the match out to a great reception on all sides.
Edna St Vincent Millay was in the crowd today to see the Beckett and Duchamp and Braque and Derain match. Duchamp had completed his singles match and must have wished it would all go away but he and Beckett are examplars of the ‘doing-only-what-you-need-to-do’ approach and it got them through. Braque and Derain are both strong, attacking players with good ground strokes and plenty of angles. Beckett and Duchamp rotated at the net and never let their opponents settle. The players were in high spirits at the press call and wished it known that they always knew B and D were going to beat B and D.
Philip Rahv and Mary McCarthy took the first set against Tallulah Bankhead and her current partner but from there it was all the Bankhead pairing. Whether or not her partner today was the young man with whom she performed so spectacularly in the first round against Hammett and Hellman was not known. She herself was not saying. ‘I would have to check my records,’ she confided to the garrulous young man from Paris-Match, ‘and in order to do that I would have to have some interest in keeping records which, I can reveal to you privately, is not the case. What’s your name?’
‘Gervase,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t keep records?’
‘I don’t have the time, Gervase,’ she said. ‘I’m out a lot.’
Magritte and Dali, drawn to play Chaplin and O’Neill today for the right to play the winner of the Chekhov–Miller versus Cocteau–Picasso match, upped their offer of the previous round and proposed that they play Chaplin, O’Neill, Chekhov, Miller, Cocteau and Picasso in a ‘fabulous once-only premier spectacular event’, to save time.
‘No,’ said Darwin, uncertain how this would evolve. ‘What would we do if you lost? We would have six winners of one match.’
‘If you accept our proposal,’ said Dali. ‘We will undertake not to lose.’
‘Thank you,’ said Darwin, not wishing to create a precedent. ‘We’ll let you know.’
Their offer rejected, Magritte and Dali won two games in the first set against Chaplin and O’Neill and sat down to discuss progress. They identified two problems. O’Neill was solid, strong and had the endurance of a clydesdale. Chaplin was confident, quick and clever like a fox.
Magritte and Dali decided to have their racquets restrung very loosely. When play started again, they found that if they didn’t ‘middle
