I'm off on Friday, but here, for the weekend, is a slightly fictionalized story from my tennis past.
In the spring of my junior year of college, I took an
English class that had something to do with the Renaissance. I can’t remember the
title of the course, and most of the reading we did also escapes me. I know
there were discussions of Don Quixote and Petrarch, but beyond that what I
recall most was sitting with five or six other students once a week for three hours, all of us huddled around a small
table, in a bare-walled room inside the campus’s rickety Humanities
building. The school I went to was liberal arts and Quaker, so no matter how
much tuition they charged, the style was ascetic, and comfort wasn’t a
priority. The one person in the room whom I do remember vividly, though, was
our professor, a gray-haired woman of 60 or so who sat at one end of the table.
She had a nervous, distracted air. She talked slowly,
fluttered her hands, stammered a little, and looked down at the table as she
talked. Her customary red sweater, which was always wrapped around a black
collared shirt, had a layer of fuzz on it that can only be described as
academic. Maybe I noticed her discomfort because of my own nerves; I hated the
thought of talking in front of other people, even four or five other people,
and I spent most of my time staring at the table in front of me as well. But it
didn’t seem to be anxiety, exactly, that bothered her. It seemed to be
something deeper and harder to identify, something fundamental.
My own nerves weren’t helped by the fact that I was
hopelessly unprepared for most of the classes. I lugged Don Quixote and
Petrarch and whatever other ancient and seemingly irrelevant European
tomes—Rabelais’ name is coming back to me as I write this—we’d been
assigned to the library. I even sequestered myself on the top floor, in a
distant, spookily silent set of carrels. It didn’t work. It would only take a
couple of pages for my mind to begin wandering, and for the library’s many
other possibilities to begin calling me. Soon I was hunting through the aisles
and stacks for writers that I did like at the time—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Robert
Lowell, Theodore Roethke, none of whom I was actually reading for a course.
Each week I returned to class, and to the small table and my fellow students,
having barely cracked the book we were discussing. I’d spend the entire time avoiding all eye contact, which is an immensely awkward thing to do for three hours in a room with just five
other people.
My professor was a tennis fan. That spring I
would look up on a blustery afternoon at practice, or during a match, and see
her and the head of the English department, a short, high-strung gray eminence, in the bleachers above the courts. One day after class,
fidgeting with her books as we walked into the hall, she mentioned that she
could spend hours watching the sport, live or on TV. “It’s soothing,” she said.
She liked the new kid, Sampras. I said I liked Agassi, but that I was using Sampras' racquet. We both said we liked Steffi
Graf, who wasn’t far removed from her Golden Slam. It was more words than I’d uttered in
four weeks of classes.
One evening that semester, up again on the
library’s fourth floor, I pulled down a biography of Roethke. I’d been
introduced to his poetry by my 12th grade English teacher three
years before. In his mid-30s, a frustrated poet with a receding hairline, beady
eyes, and a fleshy face, Mr. Grimes (as I’ll call him) had been as irascible as
any English teacher is supposed to be. He’d started the year by intimidating
us—“cutting our heads off and watching them fall into our laps,” was how he put
it. In the first week, he’d asked me to get up and read a soliloquy from
Sophocles. I stood and mumbled in a monotone for a few minutes before I was
interrupted by what I thought were the sounds of someone weeping in the back of
the room. It was Grimes, holding a handkerchief, pretending to be crying over
my stumbling recitation. “It’s just so moving!” he cried out sarcastically as
my classmates’ laughter filled up my ears. A few days later, a pretty girl,
Maria, was slouching in her chair in the front row, her legs stretched in front
of the desk. “Well that’s a very provocative position!” Grimes bellowed in her face. She sat up ramrod straight. We were the only
two students that he gave A’s to that semester. Later that year, as I was writing an absurd farewell note in Maria's yearbook, I happened to flip to the page with Grimes's photo. She's written "I LOVE YOU!" in huge capital letter across his fat face. Was that what girls liked? Bellowing intimidation? I didn't ask her.
Near the end of the year, once he’d covered Chaucer and
Hamlet and all the proper high school English books we needed to cover, Grimes
had rearranged our desks into a circle. He sat up on one of
them, his legs dangling, and began to talk about what he really liked, modern
poetry. Lowell, Plath, Stevens, ee cummings, Ashbery, Crane, Sexton. The poems
were hard to penetrate; they seemed determined to ward the reader off. I had
trouble coming up with much to say about them on the spot, and never really
added much to the discussion. But it was a thrilling and
eye-opening the experience nonetheless. Slowly getting to the root of a poem like
Lowell’s “Rounds, Rounds” felt like discovering something at the root of your
own brain that you’d never known was there.
Roethke had been a favorite of Grimes’. He took special
pleasure in pointing out the sexual metaphors in his nature imagery. To an
adolescent mind, Roethke had a lot to offer. Not only was he a poet, which
meant he had a spiritual access to life that the vast majority of us lacked,
but he also an alcoholic and a chronic depressive, both of which were
undeniably cool.
According to Roethke’s biography, he’d been a hard drinker, but his instability
seemed a little scarier than I'd realized. In the middle of teaching a class, he might open
the window, climb out on the ledge, and make lunatic faces at the
freaked-out kids inside. I also found out he’d been the tennis coach at Penn
State, a school 50 miles from where I grew up.
That night, after having read absolutely nothing for my class
again, I got back to my dorm room late. Unable to sleep, I fished out a dog-eared Norton poetry anthology from high school, and read
the half-dozen Roethke poems that were included. The rhythm of one, “In a Dark
Time,” was immediately familiar:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall
Did I feel this way sometimes? College wasn’t easy, and I
was certainly drifting in this class, a class I needed for my major. But
depression wasn’t in the cards for me, which was somehow disappointing. It was
a little like Woody Allen’s mock lament about never being able to commit
suicide because he was “too middle class.”
I handed in my first paper for class a full week late.
I’d thought this wouldn’t be a big deal, but my professor looked hurt and angry. She looked down and shook her head as I handed it to her. I
don’t know what I thought she would do, but I was stunned by her reaction. My
failure came home to me. At the end of class the
following week, she handed it back to me with a C in red ink at the top. Short
of not doing the assignment at all, this was pretty much lowest grade that it was possible to get.
A dark time, a dark moment, but something in the
reading for her class finally connected. It was one of Petrarch’s
over-the-top, desperate love poems, and it clicked with me as a dead ringer for
the thoughts and atmosphere of the Roethke poem—this was the rhythm I'd immediately recognized. Petrarch’s verses were Renaissance and lyrical, and
his dark moment was tied to a woman. Roethke’s desperation was 20th
century, hard, and existential. No woman was needed to send him to the ledge, to pin
him to a sweating wall.
I took the two poems to my professor’s tiny office with the idea of comparing the two
of them in my final paper. It was my last hope in the class. When I got there, she was scrunched
at her desk between towering piles of books and papers, humming to herself as
she read an article on her desk. She looked a little shocked to see me, the underachieving jock.
I handed her my beat-up Norton anthology and showed her the Roethke poem. She
read it and began to shake her head. It wasn’t a shake of dismay, but
appreciation. When she finished, she dropped the book in her lap, leaned back,
and began nodding quickly. “It’s good, really good, you’re right.” She gave me
the go-ahead to write the paper. I left right away. There was something
intimidating about her, something too
painfully grown-up and and heavy for me to face as a 20-year-old.
I worked
obsessively on the paper. The time in the library was suddenly a pleasure, the productivity a refuge from the feeling academic failure
that had been building that semester. I spent hours in the silent carrels on
the top floor, writing it by hand, in pencil, rewriting, the
graphite caked onto the far edge of my left hand. When I handed it in, I got the barest of smiles from my professor. She looked more distracted than
ever.
That year the NCAA Division III tennis championships were
held at our school. We won the team event, though I didn’t spot anyone from the
English department at the matches. But my partner and I were in the individual
doubles tournament the next week, and in the middle of one of our
matches, I looked up to see four English profs, including mine and the chair of
the department, in the bleachers above us. The match went to three sets, and I began to serve out of mind in the third. I couldn’t miss the wide one in the deuce
court. In these moments, your mind doesn’t wander a whole lot; when you play a really meaningful match, time seems compressed, to be running a little to fast, as if you can feel all the practice you’ve done beforehand, as well
as all the second-guessing you’ll do for days after, pressing down on you and making this moment, the one that counts, incredibly urgent—you can't quite believe it's happening, right now. Still, after hitting
an ace and walking to the other side of the court, I wondered for a second if
those English professors, who must have known I was no star of their
department, were thinking, “So that’s how he got in here. It must have been
his serve.”
We lost anyway. We got close, but we couldn’t finish it.
Which was especially appalling, considering that one of the guys we were
playing was a first-class a—hole who my partner and I despised. When it was over, I walked to the back of the court, smashed my Pro Staff on the
asphalt, and threw it over the fence. There was a frightening moment, as it
hurtled end over end though the air, when it looked like it might land on
the windshield of an approaching car. I covered my head, but it missed by a
couple of feet. I looked up to see the English department collectively staring at the racquet
as it bounced into the bushes across the street.
There was one seminar left in our class. It was scheduled to
be held at our professor’s house, a few blocks from campus. The other students
and I met up and walked. When we got there, the place was empty, so we
sat in a circle in the chairs in her living room. After 15 minutes, the chair
of the department drove up and walked in the front door. He said that our
teacher wouldn’t be here today, that we wouldn’t see her again this year, and
that we would get our papers and grades back from her by mail. That was it, that’s
all he said. I never found out what happened.
A month or so later I was back at my parents place, lying on
the couch, reading. It might have been something from the Renaissance class; I
could always concentrate on books better when they hadn’t been assigned. An
envelope from my college came. Inside were my grades. My eyes flicked down
the list: B-, B-, C+. Total mediocrity, as expected. The last grade was from my
English class. It was the only A+ I’ve ever gotten in my life.
***
Have a good weekend.