Novelist Brandon Taylor on the quiet pleasure of late-night tennis

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The class had been cancelled four weeks in a row due to a lack of sign-ups. That’s what the coach told us with a confused expression when eight of us showed up at the Sutton East tennis courts, on the corner of East 59th and York Avenue, as if we had interrupted his plans.

We were there for what the club calls “Drill and Play”, a two-hour session of drills, point play and doubles, but with absolutely no instruction. I selected the 9pm to 11pm session because I had no friends in New York who had any interest in seeing me since I’d returned from a month abroad, and I felt lonely and desperate for human contact, but I also wanted to play tennis. The other people, whose names I did not know and whose life situations I did not even allow myself to imagine, had selected the session for reasons perhaps similar, though likely dissimilar, from mine.

We made two lines and took two shots each, one ball fed closer to us, one ball a little further out to get us moving our feet. We then set about picking up the balls with the little caddie baskets or with racquets. You might think that you would talk to one another as you picked up the balls. But we did not. We scooped them up, eight of us moving like pickers in a field, and then we got back to the baseline for more warm-ups. Over the course of the two-hour session, the only things we shouted to each other were “Mine!” or “Yours!” when we played doubles. Or “Do you prefer forehand or backhand return?” And yet I can remember vividly how each of their forehands looked, their volleys, their preferences for stroke production.

There is, I learnt that night, a certain freedom at 9pm Drill and Play that I associate with anonymous hookups. The intimacy is particular to the encounter and there is not an expectation that it will evolve into more. It needn’t. You also needn’t import into the encounter expectations from other zones of life. These are not your friends. These are not people you will see again. If you do see them again, it will be for Drill and Play, and only Drill and Play. In reality, they have selected the 9pm session probably for the same reason that you have: it’s the only one with availability for the day you have time to play, and, perhaps most importantly, because they do not have people to play with otherwise. We’re the reject pile. The loners.

At Sutton East, the courts are open until 11pm, at which time the lights go out in a rolling darkness starting from the very far end of the court, and come sweeping over you in the middle of your service toss. You can play later at a few places such as the indoor courts tucked away in a hard-to-reach corner of Grand Central Station. At the Vanderbilt court, so called because it is located just above Vanderbilt Avenue, the rate for lessons was half of what I used to pay in rent in the Midwest, but there were discounts during what they call off-peak hours, from 10pm to 2am, squeezed in before the commuters show up at 6am wanting their private lessons.

I was confused at first by the idea of taking a tennis lesson at 2am. It’s a strange thought that there are tennis coaches in New York who have the same on-call schedules as doctors or nurses or delivery people or custodial staff. Then I recalled that a teacher in creative writing once described my preference for writing at night as a preference for working while the world sleeps, a desire to enter a world that belonged only to me.

When the coach told us on this particular night that the class had been cancelled for the last month because no one had shown up, I was surprised. I was in one of my obsessive, fanatical phases of enthusiasm for tennis, during which it is hard to imagine that anyone could ever want to be doing anything that isn’t playing tennis or getting ready to play tennis. It also had to do with the fact that I always assume that, in New York, there are hundreds of people willing to be in any particular place at any particular time. One does not associate the city with a lack of demand. But then, it was 9pm and it was summer. People had things they wanted to do, people they wanted to see.

After my session at Sutton East, I grabbed my tennis bag and walked the distance from the courts to my apartment on West 56th near the park. For company, I had the delivery guys on their bikes and scooters. Otherwise there was the sterile dark of the closed banks. The boutique furniture stores, which retain some of the eccentricity of a different era in the city. The streets were quiet in that lonely stretch from York to Eighth. I passed people on dates. When I got to Madison Avenue or Fifth or Park, the buildings got larger, grander. The city started to resemble itself again.

I shifted slightly north, closer to the park, where I could watch the horses and the carriages, and peer into the trees, or watch people buy pretzels and hot dogs from the carts.

I sometimes wish I were a different sort of person. One brave enough to order a hot dog from a cart. But I’m too shy. I’m afraid I’ll mess it up. Say the wrong thing. I didn’t order that night. I just watched other people and hoped someone would ask if I wanted something.

I didn’t stop to wonder if I am also doing this with my friends, if my loneliness is perhaps a result of my shyness. Instead I just booked another session of Drill and Play for the following evening so that if someone asked me if I had plans, I’d have something interesting to say.

Brandon Taylor’s most recent novel is “The Late Americans”, published by Vintage

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