Everything on the Line (22 page)

“That little Italian sonuvabitch!” Ira repeats, then reads the letter aloud to Jack:

Dear Jack,

I write to wish you many luck for the Wimbledon tournament next week.

I know how important this match is for all the two of us, and I want also

to say that whoever wins, it has been an honor to play against you during

these many matches.

Buona fortuna e tanti auguri, Ugo

“What does he think he’s trying to pull, writing you like this?” Ira bellows. “I mean, that’s the oldest trick in the book, trying to make nice so you’ll feel all soft and mushy toward him when you two meet in the finals. What a pathetic little sandbagger!”

“Well, maybe he really means it,” Jack offers.

If hot steam, accompanied by a train whistle sound, could shoot out of Ira’s ears right about now—like it does with one of those cartoon characters who is jumping up and down and shaking his fist and fit to be tied—it would.

“Goddammit, you sonuvabitch,” a red-faced Ira screams, his left eye twitching like the devil. “I don’t
ever
wanna hear words like that coming out of Jack Spade’s mouth again. I got too much invested in you to have you spewing crap like that and acting like Mister Softee!”

Jack is feeling like an article of second-hand merchandise but knows his place and zips his lip.

“Listen up,” Ira says, “week after next is the most important moment of your entire life, a moment that’s been building up and gaining steam for nearly fourteen years. And now it’s
here.
If you beat this Italian kid in the finals,
the kid who wrote you this idiotic letter
, you will be the clear number one in the world for now and probably forever. You will undoubtedly be considered until the end of time as the greatest player ever to step on a tennis court. That’s how important this goddam match is! And you’re sitting there telling me, ‘Well, maybe he really means it?’”

Jack’s face reddens, but it is pink compared to Ira’s maroon.

“A long time ago,” Ira says, “the great basketball player, Michael Jordan, said, ‘I gotta win. Nobody remembers losing.’ And that’s what America is all about. No one in this country wants to die a nobody,
a
loser
. Everyone wants to be a somebody,
a winner
, someone people will remember. And all the work I’ve put into your career might make you a nobody if you don’t win at Wimbledon!” Ira is screaming at the top of his lungs and the blood vessels in his forehead are threatening to burst and his voice cracks and he is out of breath and can rant no longer.

Jack Spade nods obediently and smiles faintly, but what he really wants to do is to dig himself a hole and crawl all the way to China.

* * *

Sitting on the redwood deck that overlooks the expansive Florida estate, impressive martini in hand, Avis Spade hears the scolding, screaming voice of her husband down at the tennis court, this voice she knows so well and hears in her sleep, and stares out into space and wonders what the meaning of life could possibly be.

Her bland, blanched features reflect a fatigue that is not simply a result of sleep deprivation, but one that has been accruing for nearly two decades now. Two decades of neglect and abuse and abandonment and being forced to play second fiddle. Two decades of watching Ira take over the parenting chores with an iron fist, in his relentless, greedy pursuit of wealth and fame, forcing her maternal instincts to be washed away, tear by tear.

She is thinking about how those decades are gone now, vanished, in the books, and how Ira has forced her to squander her considerable talents for nurturing and for giving.

She is thinking about how pretty she used to be years ago, and how that modest beauty has faded little by little until now the best she can make herself look, even with the most hi-tech cosmetics, is respectable or nice or even mildly appealing.

She is thinking about how, ever since Jack was ten and this tennis thing got serious, she was compelled to harbor deep inside of her the greater part of her natural warmth and compassion and love, these feelings that she had at the ready, that she longed to share and to offer with no strings attached, and about how the strings of her fiddle have gotten, after all this time, so terribly out of tune.

Avis takes another sip of her exceedingly dry martini, looks out at the mind-numbing Florida flatness and the distant pastel horizon, and fills her head with scary thoughts she’d been trying so hard to forget, or at least to suppress, ever since that seemingly endless night and early morning she’d spent in Jack’s bathroom.

17

Showtime!

HIS POINTY, LOBSTER-RED NOSE HOVERS above the two-pint Waterford Crystal Lismore Pilsner glass, the cavernous nostrils twitching and greedily sniffing the sensuous bouquet of a Chimay
Grande Réserve
Trappist Monk Belgian Ale. As his gnarled but dainty left hand rotates the brew with erotic swirls, he grins lustily, the ghoulish smile exposing his forked tongue and all twenty-eight of his ghastly yellowed teeth.

At last, Satan takes a sip.

“Damnation, this is
fine
!” he chortles with his best Jack Nicholson impression, winking to the august white-bearded gentleman seated across from him.

Clad in His finest formal white linen robe with purple and gold piping, God winks back solicitously and sips His Peanut-Soy Milk Power Smoothie.

On this eve of The Championships at Wimbledon, the two antagonists are sitting at a booth in
Neither Fish nor Fowl
, a specialty lunch eatery in Purgatory, an agreed-upon neutral site. The joint only serves meat or vegan dishes, and nothing in between, catering largely to resident sinners on the verge of either descending or floating upward.

As God bites into His tofu burger with avocado and tomato-mushroom ragout and the Devil chomps on his blood sausage and barbecued tripe-with-the-works hoagie, a tension fills the booth, as if something were preventing either antagonist from uttering the first word. Finally, God breaks the ice.

“So, then, I suppose this is
it
?”

“Yep, it’s
showtime
!” Satan hisses. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.”

The moment we’ve been waiting for.

Sipping His Power Smoothie, God ruminates on all that has happened, the Good and the Evil alike, on Earth since He created it. The Six Days of Creation and the Seventh Day of Rest. The Casting of Adam and Eve out of Eden. Noah and the Flood. Moses, Egypt, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments. The Wheel. The Birth and Crucifixion of Christ. The Fall of the Roman Empire. Columbus Discovers the New World. The Rise and Fall of Napoleon. Electricity. World War I. The Great Depression. World War II. Bobby Thomson’s Home Run. The Computer. The Slaying of Osama Bin Laden.

After all the ebb and flow of Good and Evil on Earth, man’s successes and failures and advances and setbacks, and now it has finally come down to the long-awaited moment, to…settling this thing once and for all?

Chugging his Belgian brew, a dribble of foam oozing down his cheek and seeping into the bright scarlet collar of his Salvatore Mondobasso turtleneck shirt, the Devil ruminates on one memory, the only one that has been obsessing him lo these millennia, the single ignominious blot on his estimable escutcheon. Never will he be able to eradicate from his memory the humility of that fateful day when God tossed him unceremoniously from heaven. Never will he be able to extirpate from his brain that precipitous fall from grace…downward, downward he plunged into the darkness, like a helpless and traumatized Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Never will he able to rid himself of this festering feeling aimed at God that has been gnawing at him like a famished rodent, this excruciating feeling deep within his belly that is an amalgam of hatred, envy, anger, injustice, and rebellion.

Never, perhaps, until now.

At last and once and for all, Satan will have the opportunity to exact a long-awaited revenge upon his Oppressor and Tormentor. And all he has to do to accomplish this lifelong dream is to have Jack Spade beat Ugo Bellezza tomorrow at Wimbledon!

“I think we agree,” God says, “that every single match these two combatants have ever played, major or not, has been a heart-stopping, nail-biting squeaker, and that if anything separates them, it is barely discernible to the naked eye.”

“I can’t disagree with you,” Beelzebub replies, “yes, they are dead even, they are nearly at the height of their tennis powers, and what better time to break the logjam and have our wager be resolved and decide once and for all whether Good or Evil is the stronger force and which shall prevail on Earth forever and evermore than tomorrow, at the granddaddy of all tennis tournaments?”

As the two antagonists finish their lunch (God picks up the tab this time), Satan has one final thought before leaving the booth. He is thinking back in time about the other wager he had made with God, eons ago, concerning whether Job would eventually curse God as he endured his hardships. Satan had lost that bet and it still stings after all this time and how very sweet it would be to even the score at Wimbledon and have Evil triumph forever! And he is thinking even more about how much is riding on this tennis match, after all this time he has spent resenting God and longing for revenge, and he is thinking how high the stakes will be tomorrow.

All the marbles.

As he leaves the eatery, something painful is sticking in Satan’s craw.

And it is not the remnants of his hoagie.

18

On the Line

SUSPENDING CREDULITY, THE SCORE
of the gentlemen’s finals at the 2053 Championships, indicated on the green Wimbledon scoreboard with gold numbers, now reads:

At the conclusion of the titanic 123-shot rally that just precipitated the fourth-set tiebreaker, Ugo Bellezza claps appreciatively, as do his 13,998 companions-in-awe.

It is an awe that has been building for over a decade, that has surrounded these two magnificent talents as their greatness and gravitas accrued through their formative years, all leading up to this consequential and ponderous court appointment, which is at long last
here.
All the anticipation and all the hype and all the buildup for the Big Showdown of All Time pitting the two greatest players ever at the absolute peak of their games is not disappointing a soul.

The great Roger Federer had retired at the age of 39, having had the perfectly normal vision to do it in 2020. Since then, the only dominant player had been Jaden Gil Agassi, offspring of two all-time champions, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. With his genetic gifts and natural abilities, Jaden had scooped up ten Grand Slam singles victories before—in 2030, at the age of 29 and in the same year as the birth of both Ugo Bellezza and Jack Spade—spontaneously opting to dedicate his life to working with his parents on philanthropic projects. And so, the path had been cleared.

For generations, the tennis argument had been between the Old Guard (Tilden and Lacoste and Cochet, then Perry and Vines and Budge, then Riggs and Kramer and Gonzalez) and the New Guard (Hoad and Rosewall and Trabert, then Laver and Emerson and Newcombe, then Borg and Connors and McEnroe, then Sampras and Andre Agassi, then Federer and Nadal, then Jaden Gil Agassi). But today’s two combatants have superseded all these past stars in the tennis constellation with something utterly
other
. From a purely statistical standpoint, Ugo Bellezza has won seven consecutive French Opens, all against Jack Spade in the finals. And Jack has won six consecutive U.S. Opens, all against Ugo in the finals. And between them, they have won seven consecutive Aussie Opens (with Jack winning four). But due to injuries and occasional upsets, they have curiously never met in a Wimbledon finals, each having won three against less formidable opponents. All in all, they have garnered a preposterous grand total of thirteen majors apiece at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

And now they are here, unprecedentedly co-seeded number one, in their big showdown, playing each other for the very first time in the finals of Wimbledon, to determine, once and for all, who is the Greatest Player of All Time.

The most meaningful Wimbledon tennis finals in history is inexorably approaching its climax, and in the process electrifying over three billion tennis fans around the planet, redefining competitive athletic excellence forever, demanding that true aficionados abandon their memories of other transcendent rivalries in the world of sports.

Instantly faded in the mind’s historical eye are the fierce court battles between Lenglen and Wills, Tilden and Johnston, Budge and Von Cramm, Evert and Navratilova, Borg and McEnroe, Agassi and Sampras, Federer and Nadal. Not to mention other historic athletic showdowns between Giants and Dodgers, Yankees and Red Sox, Lakers and Celtics, Ohio State and Michigan, UNC and Duke, Auburn and Alabama, Hogan and Snead, Palmer and Nicklaus, Chamberlain and Russell, Magic and Bird.

The Big Showdown of All Time has already eclipsed—in excitement, intensity, and sheer shotmaking brilliance—the most memorable previous Wimbledon final, when lefty Rafa Nadal beat righty Roger Federer forty-five years ago in another barn burner, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7.