Sunday
WE WERE JUST starting our third night of interviews, and I felt the kind of weariness that comes from having wasted time.
“Raj,” I said, introducing myself to the first couple.
The man was wearing a casual half-sleeve shirt, and his wife was refreshingly unremarkable—in a loose dress, her hair in a simple ponytail. I liked them for it, but only for about ten seconds.
“Rog?” the wife asked, leaning in.
It was a question I had been asked too many times in my life.
“Raaaj,” I exaggerated.
“As in Federer?”
I feigned a smile, unsure if she was joking. They moved on, introducing themselves to the rest of the membership committee.
The committee—Suzanne, the efficient and disciplined chair; Stan, a balding sixtyish lawyer; Richard, a leather-skinned club pro; Leslie, a childhood friend of my wife; and I—had a particularly difficult task. Over the course of two evenings the previous week, we had already spoken with ten different couples about why they wanted to join the Tennis Club, simple nouns elevated to proper status. Tonight, we would talk to still more and then choose five out of the total fifteen to let in.
The club had opened several decades before, in the early seventies, when couples were riding high from breaking rules in the sixties and yet wanted to make sure their children knew how to slice a backhand properly. The original membership had been a mixture of old money and lawyers and doctors, all of whom downplayed the breadth of their bank accounts. But the past several years had brought the movie and hedge fund people, who’d bought up the old estates and come driving into town in cars that were never more than a year old. As the town’s gilding glowed ever brighter, the club—or the TC, as it was known among members—had continued on, a simple place with eight courts, a swimming pool, and a rustic clubhouse with worn wicker couches. No flat-screen TVs, no towel service; there was a soda machine that still charged fifty cents for a Coke. Simplicity was the brand. And the simpler it stayed, the more people wanted to join, perhaps to rub off some of their new-money sheen. The membership committee was tasked with bringing in families that had some sense of that earlier, understated ethos, as well as some of the newer sort, who paid their monthly dues but generally preferred to use their home swimming pools and tennis courts.
My wife, Eva, had grown up coming here, her parents a little ambivalent about its clubbiness and yet appreciative of that selfsame simplicity. When we moved to town, we had joined together, though both of us were concerned by how quickly we were losing our urbanity. I, in particular, had fought the idea of the place, though quietly, somewhere inside, I knew I had been drawn to its luster. But for me, tennis courts and swimming pools were meant to be public. I had honed my tennis skills on muni courts in the East Bay, after my family had moved to California from Bombay. I was hazed into playing better by a group of Filipinos who worked the night shift at the post office, slept several hours in the morning, and then set up shop at the courts until they had to go to work again.
In high school, I secretly hated the kids on our team, who, with their multiple, freshly gripped racquets and unscuffed Nikes, went off to private clubs after practice for further instruction. They had at least one parent who came to all their matches, while my parents were always working. I could sense then the deeper differences between us, though I didn’t yet have the language to articulate them, or the experience with which to understand them.
But, somehow, now, I had grown to love belonging to my own club—or at least parts of it. I loved the late afternoon matches when the soft winter California sun lit up the surrounding hills in orange phosphorescence. I loved grilling meat with our friends while the children swam and swooped in for bites of hot dog. I loved diving into the pristine pool, swimming the length in one breath, and appearing at the other end, refreshed and alive. And most of all, I loved being there with Eva and our boys when the place was empty, hitting balls on a court and then jumping into the pool, the four of us a perfectly self-contained pod.
In most every way, the club was not so different from the club my family had belonged to before we left Bombay. We’d joined a gymkhana—one of many clubs that had originally been made for British colonials, but later, by the time we were members, were populated mostly by Bombay’s upper middle class—after my father had gotten a big promotion. That was where I’d swum in a pool for the first time, and after swimming I’d lounge in the comfortable, dilapidated clubhouse with a mango lassi and a vegetable frankie.
I had easily blended into the background at the gymkhana; not so much at the TC.
“Can we get you anything?” Suzanne asked, pointing to a side table spread with cheese, dried meat, and wine. The couple and their sponsors—every prospective new member needed a sponsoring couple—sat on one side of the center table, and we all sat on the other. They said no. The couples who declined a glass of wine were usually the nervous ones, the ones I tried to put at ease.
“Why don’t you tell us a little about your family and your interest in tennis?”
Suzanne exuded order—her milky, unblemished skin, contrasted by her shiny dark brown hair; her expensive outfits draped over her wispy body, always impossibly pressed; her immaculate Tesla. Suzanne easily fit in with countless other women at the TC who spent their days marinating in their luck and good fortune. But she was also something more: driven, smart, restless. She’d had a full, successful career as a management consultant before she stopped to have kids. Now, our older sons were in the fourth grade together, and she was the head of the PTA. She brought a certain fat-trimming zeal to that group, as well as the TC’s membership committee, several nonprofit boards, and her own home, none of which seemed to burn her substantial reserve of fuel. Eva liked her for who she had been, but not for what she had become—a sharp, skilled woman who now devoted too much of her time to the success of her children. I liked her for the impatience she was unable to hide from her face during some of the interviews. Like this one.
“Who doesn’t love tennis?” the husband asked. At first it seemed like a rhetorical question, but then he continued, lowering his voice a bit and raising his eyebrows so that his eyes got bigger: “But actually, I do find myself getting a little bored after a while. Like, is this all there is? A game comprised entirely of hitting a yellow ball back and forth into a bunch of squares?” He was holding his arms out and his palms up in mock exasperation, as if he had just delivered the punch line in a comedy routine.
I bit my lip not to laugh. I appreciated his honesty, but man, he’d gotten his audience wrong. His wife seemed to lean slightly away from him. Both Suzanne and Leslie gave him a tight, polite frown.
“I know that feeling,” I said, trying to pull him away from the nervous wilderness he was entering. “I’m often thinking about other things on the court, but then a ball comes whizzing by and I’m back.”
The husband just sat there, not taking my help. I wondered if he would have taken the lead if Stan or Richard had offered.
Sensing that things might be going south, the sponsors interjected, talking about how wonderful the applicants were, how much their children would take to the game. And for the next ten minutes, the committee discussed family, tennis, and community, topics that had been preassigned to each of us by Suzanne. I talked about the strong communal sensibility of the club.