The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese

Author:Abraham Verghese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

24

I saw David late one afternoon when he came to my office to pick up his backpack. He told me that Gloria was coming into town the next day. “She’ll be here for two weeks.”

“Great!” I said, but what popped into my head was whether she would take away our Wednesday and Sunday routine.

He didn’t call for a week. I thought that he was probably staying over at Gloria’s parents’ house, and so I didn’t call him. The weekend came and went. By the middle of the following week, I still hadn’t heard from him. I knew his schedule as precisely as my own—he was in obstetrics and gynecology: clinics in the morning, lectures at midday, operating room twice a week. Occasionally I spotted his backpack in my office, but it would be gone by five o’clock when I came back from rounds. I searched my desk to see if he had left me a note, but there wasn’t one. The thought even crossed my mind of peeking into his backpack for clues to what he was up to. Gloria had simply swallowed him up, eliminated him from my life.

While I shaved on Friday morning, I had an imaginary conversation with David in which I chastised him for his fickleness. And then I had a conversation with myself asking why I was acting this way. I had come to rely on our tennis dates, they were the central ritual of my fractured existence—his too I assumed. Did he not feel the itch to meet, to play?

That evening I stopped by Rajani’s house to pick up the kids. Every time I visited, I saw Rajani blossoming, as if in my absence the roots she had put out had finally broken through rock and found rich, loamy soil. She had dug up a large oval patch of lawn and planted rosebushes. The bushes were already thick with tight, colorful buds, standing tall and proud and ready to prick flesh. Her mother had an identical garden.

A beat-up pickup truck with Chihuahua plates was parked outside and two men were laying a sprinkler feed and putting brick edging around the rose bed.

The carpet had been torn off the bedroom floor and a wooden floor laid. She had invested in a sleigh bed, a rich, polished work of art. Did I want the platform bed? Otherwise she was going to throw it away. The wood paneling in the living room had been painted white. She was taking piano lessons and an upright piano sat in the corner. Her eyes had lost their murkiness and sparkled; there was a lightness in her step, a cheeriness.

How could I not think that my presence had inhibited this blooming? I was like a blight that had been eradicated. In my apartment, I woke to piles of books around me, more books with bookmarks in them in the bathroom, coffee cups on the tops of books, and clothes tossed on the floor, as if in that disorder I found the same satisfaction she seemed to find in order.

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