“Where? In your house or his house or at a motel?”

“It’s not that pleasant a story,” I said.

“Neither was mine.”

Which was true. She, in bed, and I, in the chair, had both had unpleasant things done to us.

“Where?” she repeated. The locale seemed important. The measure evidently of a woman’s iniquity, at least to them, was bound up with where she chose to apply the horns.

“At a tennis club.”

I could see her look at me. It sounded idiotic. As a matter of fact, that was what had made it even more painful; it was idiotic. Even the worst things that happened to me refused to have dignity when they happened.

“A tennis club?” she said.

“Yes. I used to play tennis. I don’t any more.”

“I can see why.”

There was something sexual about tennis. I meant: there was something about it that made you sexually aggressive. Particularly, in mixed singles.

“Really?”

She didn’t know if I was being serious. I was. It was a serious theory: like eating seafood. You got out on a court with a woman on the other side of the net, and you started to volley and there was a sort of temptation to drive the damn ball right at her. As hard, and as sneakily, as you could. The thing was, you were ready of course with the most profuse apologies if the ball did thuck with a most satisfying accuracy right where her tight shorts offered that fabulous target. But it always took a great deal of restraint to at least not aim. Anyway, it was at a tennis club and with a tennis player.

“Was he the club pro?”

No. He wasn’t the pro. She didn’t quite go for the pros. It was just somebody who played at the club. Mixed singles. It was all mixed singles. I played a lousy game of tennis. It wasn’t really my game. Although what my game was I didn’t know. One of the reasons I was so bad at tennis was that I couldn’t stand all that naked sweating to win, and since I didn’t much care for losing all the time I wound up with a very erratic game. But, as I was saying, my wife played tennis. I watched it. From the baseline, of course. In a canvas chair. With a cold drink beside me. He would serve and she’d return. He gave her pointers on her backhand, which was weak; she helped him with his net game. They used to come off the court together deliciously drenched in sweat. I would go with them into the club bar, and she would order a gimlet, her drink, and he would order a daiquiri, his. Over the edges of their respective glasses, their eyes continued to volley. It was perfectly obvious to me what locker he had taken to keeping his racquet in.

I should make the point here that this was all happening at the same time that the other thing was happening to me, too. I mean, the way the jobs disappeared, the people hanging up on the phone, the being turned into a ghost. They do that to you, you know: they ghostify you.