I guess there was no emotion left, it was all over, and we both experienced this finality as a surprising relief. We were both so calm it was as if the island of Manhattan had been gassed with some kind of Valium vapor. When he was finished, he wiped his chin with his napkin. These were the wretched rags of resentment so bitter and old, so petty, that I had been too ashamed even to mention them in therapy, so now I balled them up and tossed them onto Denis’s court.ĭenis just ate his soup. We went to the restaurant across from our building, a little neighborhood place where the waiters know our names and the chef knows how we like our burgers.
“The thing is,” he said as we walked, “I’m tired and hungry.” I clung to his arm, and we bent our bodies into the wind. I just needed something to hold on to so I wouldn’t slip and fall. I couldn’t walk on the icy sidewalks with those heels, so I asked if I could hold his arm, if he could walk me home. I had boots with heels, and the sidewalks were icy. When we got to the street, it was snowing. We had stormed out of those doors and stomped down those steps in such rages before, but now Denis held the door for me, and I thanked him. When we left, it felt as if we were floating, we were so calm. Though we had found tennis late, we had found each other quite early in our adult lives, and now we were going through a rough patch, one that had lasted for years.ĭespite all of this, the marriage continued to flounder, and the time came when we met in our marriage counselor’s office and I said, “I think it’s over.” I’m ashamed to admit that one year we spent several days of a family vacation not speaking to each other after a game of “Denis Tennis” that I had lost “unfairly” (I repeatedly hissed at our children), until finally our son and daughter had to intervene and coerce a truce between us. This caused some heated courtside squabbles. Their game involved no serving and a complicated but curiously malleable set of rules that often appeared, to me, to change midgame and almost always to Denis’s advantage. Instead of learning the rules, he wanted to play a variation of tennis he had invented with another actor while on location in a tropical country.
Keep the keep game how to#
As Denis repeatedly explained to us, playing by the rules placed him at an unfair disadvantage because he didn’t know the rules, and he didn’t know how to serve. When I took up tennis, my husband was happy to play with our two children and me, as long as we didn’t have to play by the rules.
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