An hour later we got the quarterfinal meeting the crowd had come to see: Lily against Nicole Rubova. When Lily danced onto the court, a vision in pink and white with a sweatband pulling her blond spikes back from her face, the stands roared with pleasure. Nicole got a polite round of applause, but she was only there to give their darling a chance to play.
A couple of minutes after they’d started their warm-up, Monica came in. She sat close to the court, about ten rows in front of me. The man she joined was Paco Callabrio. He had stood next to Lily on the court as she came out for her warm-ups, patted her encouragingly on the ass, and climbed into the stands. Monica must have persuaded him not to quit in fury last week.
At first I assumed Gary was boycotting the match, either out of dislike of Paco or for fear his overt coaching would cause Lily to forfeit. As play progressed, though, I noticed him on the far side of the court, behind the chair umpire, making wild gestures if Lily missed a close shot, or if he thought the lines-persons were making bad calls.
When play began Rubova’s catlike languor vanished. She obviously took her conditioning seriously, moving well around the court and playing the net with a brilliant ferocity. Mary Ann might be right-she might have designs on Lily’s body-but it didn’t make her play the youngster with any gentleness.
Lily, too, had a range of motion that was exciting to watch. She was big, already five ten, with long arms and a phenomenal reach. Whether due to Gary ’s drills or not, her backhand proved formidable; unlike most women on the circuit she could use it one handed.
Lily pushed her hard but Rubova won in three sets, earning the privilege of meeting Navratilova the next afternoon. It seemed to me that Lily suddenly began hitting the ball rather tentatively in the last few games of the final set. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to know if she had suddenly reached her physical limit, or if she was buckling under Rubova’s attack.
The crowd, disappointed in their favorite’s loss, gave the Czech only a lukewarm hand as she collected her rackets and exited. Paco, Monica, and Gary all disappeared from the stands as Lily left the court to a standing ovation.
Mary Ann had been a linesperson on the far sideline during the Rubova match. Neither of the players had given the umpire a hard time. Rubova at one point drew a line on the floor with her racket, a sarcastic indicator of where she thought Mary Ann was spotting Lily. Another time Lily cried out in frustration to the chair umpire; I saw Monica’s shoulders tense and wondered if the prodigy was prone to tantrums. More likely she was worried by what Gary -turning puce on the far side-might do to embarrass her. Other than that the match had gone smoothly.
Doubles quarterfinals were on the agenda for late afternoon. I wasn’t planning on watching those, so I wandered down to the court to have a word with Mary Ann before I left.
She tried to talk me into staying. “Garrison has teamed up with Rubova. They should be fun to watch-both are real active girls.”
“Enough for me for one day. What’d you think of the kid in tournament play?”
Mary Ann spread her hands. “She’s going to go a long way. Nicole outplayed her today, but she won’t forever. Although-I don’t know-it looked to me in the last couple of games as though she might have been favoring her right shoulder. I couldn’t be sure. I just hope Gary hasn’t got her to injure herself with his hit-till-you-drop coaching methods. I’m surprised Paco’s hanging on through it.”
I grinned suggestively at her. “Maybe Monica has wonderful powers of persuasion.”
Mary Ann looked at me calmly. “You’re trying to shock me, Vic, but believe me, I was never a maiden aunt. And anyway, nothing on this circuit would shock me… They have free refreshments downstairs for players and crew. And press and hangers-on. Want to come have some coffee before you go? Some of the girls might even be there.”
“And be a hanger-on? Sure, why not?” Who knows, maybe Martina would meet me and remember an urgent need for some detective work.
A freight elevator protected by guards carried the insiders to the lower depths. Mary Ann, in her linesperson’s outfit, didn’t need to show any identification. I came in for more scrutiny, but my player’s-guest badge got me through.
The elevator decanted us onto a grubby corridor. Young people of both sexes hurried up and down its length, carrying clipboards at which they frowned importantly.
“PR staff,” Mary Ann explained. “They feed all the statistics from the match to different wire services and try to drum up local interest in the tournament. Tie-ins with the auto show, that kind of thing.”
Older, fatter people stood outside makeshift marquees with coffee and globular brownies. At the end of the hall I could see Paco and Monica huddled together. Gary wasn’t in sight.
“Lily may have gone back in for a massage; I think she already did her press interview. Gary must be inside with her. He won’t let her get a workover alone.”
“Inside the locker room?” I echoed. “I know she’s Daddy’s darling, but don’t the other women object to him being there while they’re changing? And can she really stand having him watch her get massaged?”
“There’s a lounge.” Mary Ann shepherded me into the refreshment tent-really a niche roped off from the cement corridor with a rather pathetic plastic canopy overhead. “Friends and lovers of the stars can sit there while the girls dress inside. I don’t expect he actually hangs around the massage table. Don’t go picturing some fabulous hideaway, though. This is a gym at a relatively poor university. It’s purely functional. But they do have a cement cubbyhole for the masseuse-that sets it apart from the normal school gym.”
I suddenly realized I was hungry-it was long past lunchtime. The Slims catering was heavy on volume and carbohydrates. I rejected fried chicken wings and rice and filled a plastic bowl with some doubtful-looking chili. Mary Ann picked up a handful of cookies to eat with her coffee.
We settled at an empty table in the far corner and ate while Mary Ann pointed out the notables to me. Zina Garrison’s husband was at the buffet next to Katarina Maleeva. The two were laughing together, trying to avoid a fat reporter who was unabashedly eavesdropping on them.
A well-groomed woman near the entrance to the marquee was Clare Rutland, the doyenne of the tour, Mary Ann explained. She had no formal tide with the Slims, but seemed to be able to keep its temperamental stars happy, or at least functioning.
As I ate my chili, six or seven people stopped to talk to Rutland. They’d nod at her remarks and race off again. I imagined tennis stars’ wishes, from lotus blossoms to Lotus racers, being satisfied at the wave of her hand.
Mary Ann, talking to acquaintances, began picking up some of the gossip buzzing the room: Lily might have strained her shoulder. Maybe torn her rotator cuff. In this kind of environment the worst scenarios are generated rapidly from the whiff of an idea. And Gary apparently had been thrown out of Lily’s press conference and was now sulking in the women’s lounge.
A collective cry from the group across the room made me jerk my head around. Nicole Rubova was sprinting down the hall, wet, a towel haphazardly draping her midriff.
“Clare,” she gasped.
Clare Rutland was on her feet as soon as she heard the outcry, almost before Rubova came into view. She took off her cardigan and draped it across the player’s shoulders. Rubova was too far from us for me to be able to hear her, but the reporters in the room crowded around her, tournament etiquette forgotten.
It only took a minute for Mary Ann to get the main point of the story from one of them: Gary Oberst was on the couch in the players’ lounge. Someone had wrapped a string from a tennis racket around his neck a few times.