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collective hum, like a chorus finding its note before the song. As the floods on their four corners flickered, starting gray and warming to hot white, the court blazed with the tingling theatricality distinctive to playing at night.
      "No, Desmond," she declined when he challenged her to a match. "Let's just hit." The boy deflated. Later he might treasure his few offers of carefree rallies; now he craved a showdown. But Willy, for all her reputed keenness for head-to-head, tonight hankered for reprieve from a world with no choice but to vanquish or be vanquished. There had to be a haven in between.

      "Why the cold shoulder?" Willy demanded. "I thought we were going to go back to the way it was."
      "I wasn't the one who sat on the far side of the cafeteria," Max returned coolly.
    "I wasn't the one who chose to eat in the cafeteria."
      They were in the library, which Max adopted as his lounge after lights-out. Though the kids instinctively hid their bottles in racket covers, there were no booze bans on the books; Max was treating himself to solitary bourbon.
      Looking up, he closed Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm. "You expected that I would meet your train and scoop you off to Boot of the Med, where we'd order the fried calamari and Chianti and then—"
      "We'd practice a few drunken overheads at midnight. Why not?" Willy's T-shirt was limp with clammy sweat; she rubbed her arms.
      "What would we talk about?"
      "What we always talk about. Primpy Marcella, and your exwife, and…and we'd draw point diagrams on napkins before the zabaglione." Her tone had taken a defeated turn. To Willy's own ears, the reprise sounded ridiculous.
      "Our agreement was not to 'go back to the way we were' but for me to 'treat you like everyone else,' which I had never done, from the time you were seventeen. So I could hardly go back to anything."
      "You're always so aggressive and nasty lately."
      "I've always been aggressive and nasty. You used to like it. Don't go soft on me, Will. It's not good for your tennis."
      "Do you even care about that these days?" she entreated. "My tennis?"
      "I thought it was for the sake of your goddamned tennis that we've had such unimpeachable relations for six weeks."
      "See? 'Goddamned tennis'—"
      Max slammed his hardback to the table. "Enough! You practice your forehand, but the bust-up is blessedly a one-time-only. It doesn't improve with repetition, it just gets old."
      "Gets old! We haven't discussed this since May!"
      "Will." This time he implored her. Meeting his eyes, she pondered once more how this man contrasted with the photographs of Max's heyday twenty years ago. Many an evening she had marveled through his tour album, where his Sports Illustrated and New York Post profiles were preserved under plastic sheets. Max had maintained the same compact physique, with a dense torso whose dark hair sprang from his Lacoste shirt then as now. His face remained right-angled, and had acquired none of the fleshiness that invaded most middle-aged jowls. The beginnings to those eye crinkles were to be found in yellowed clippings. Though he'd axed the seventies sideburns, Max hadn't even restyled his no-nonsense haircut. The before-and-after pictures were, in their strictly physical detail, almost identical. So what made him look so unmistakably forty-five?
      "It's late, I should get to bed," she said, and at the mention of the word bed Max poured himself another finger. "I may have a visitor tomorrow. Is that all right?"
      He might have wanted to ask who or why, but Max Upchurch had made millions of dollars on self-control. He shrugged. She left.

      In their on-court session the following afternoon, Max didn't refer to the evening's tiff, and no one observing the two would have picked up on anything amiss in this fruitful, vigorous coach-client relationship. His very capacity to put sentiment aside when business required a cool head may have