Though we were still ultracompetitive, we were becoming intensely proud when the other hit an amazing shot, and we didn’t hate the winner when we lost. (Yes, I admit, we both used to call questionable shots out when we were backed into a corner, and we used to fudge the score if we could, both of us.) Though I had many lessons under my belt, Denis is the better athlete, so almost immediately we played on more or less the same level. And we started playing a lot of tennis, just the two of us, whenever we could. We worked at treating each other more fairly. The family, after all that mad jostling, somehow had remained intact. The next day we all drove to the country. That night Denis didn’t stay in a hotel he stayed home. We called the children in the apartment to see if they wanted to go to a movie. In the movies, this would have been the moment we leapt into each other’s embrace, but in real life, we ordered more food. His calm admission inspired me to exhale my own litany of regrets and apologies. He had no reason to make up that kind of thing now. I had expected him to cry foul, to react the way he did when I said a questionable tennis shot of his was out. If I could change those things I would, but I can’t. So we were just having a last look.ĭenis carefully refolded his napkin, and then said: “I’m sorry. We had hoped to stick it out until they left the nest, but now it looked as if that would be impossible. This was how we had come to view our marriage, as a penguin marriage, a partnership devoted to raising children. They court each other, commit each other’s voice to memory, produce an egg, devote themselves to its care, and when it dies, or matures, the parents part company. They looked at the egg for a time, and then they parted ways, because penguins don’t mate for life. We were like the penguin couple in “March of the Penguins” that accidentally dropped and broke their egg. 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. 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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