The Appearance of a Hero (in four unequal parts) Peter Levine (bio) [Begin Page 75] By young I mean twenty-three. By easy I mean the circumstances of my life at the time, by which I mean working five days a week and six hours a day at a job that paid me a great deal of money for little more than terrific hustle and a college degree and very good luck. By beautiful I mean the setting, which was a country club, which was summertime, which was four men in a parking lot beside a cobalt-blue Ferrari 612 Scaglietti, bugs lofted up and knocking against the lamps, this country club in the middle of thirty acres of mowed grass and a golf course, a dozen tennis courts and an Olympic-sized pool, a palatial clubhouse with frescoed ceilings and gold-leafed chandeliers and views of wide lawns so green you felt at times you were drowning. By evil, I mean the fourth man. [End Page 75] Young By young I mean possessing very little responsibility. By young, I mean that when I was folded into the doubles group at that country club, I was treated kindly but patronizingly at first, until the three men, all in their forties, with whom I played discovered that I was good, called the lines fairly and consistently, listened to them politely when they went on about work, which was, respectively: lawyering, orthodontics and economics. So, the men I played with. The lawyer—dark-haired and short, a smile that made you want to smile, a mouth so filthy that when he joked you were not sure whether to be offended or laugh. The lawyer's name was Jeff. The orthodontist, then: giant, a former UCLA defensive end, hands so large I could not believe that he was able to get them into people's mouths, had grown up poor, I suspected, but had done very well, had two offices in the suburbs, one in the city, had a terrific, flat serve resulting from his size but was unable to move to the net quickly, also resulting from his size. His name was Will. The professor, then, our Hero, wholly sweet and warm, came to my defense when I first joined that foursome—said that they'd a ringer on their hands, he was sure of it, he could tell by my gait, and I said I wasn't that good, it'd been forever since I'd played. And Will, the orthodontist, asked me, as we stretched out on the soft-turf courts in the beginning of the summer, if I'd ever played tennis with a Nobel Prize winner. I said I had not. Jeff, the lawyer, said that when you win the Nobel Prize, your ego is not the only thing to increase, and we all laughed, and the professor, an economist at the University of Chicago, said not to pay these guys any attention, that they were glad I was playing with them, they needed some young blood. The professor—the prizewinner—his name was Walter. He took me on as his partner that first evening. I very much admired his way. There was a rise of earth just beyond the courts, and one could see, sometimes, deer shuffling in between the trees. One could hear, always, in the evening, crickets. One could hear, if it was about to rain, their noise quicken and drive up, the static in the air smelling good, and then perhaps a vein of lightning, and we'd go inside the clubhouse and have drinks. So young, which meant I was faster than the other three, and they treated me the way men treat someone who is older than their sons but younger than their brothers. They were all three married. They all three had children. [End Page 76] Among the things we spoke of while drinking beer out of frosted mugs at the clubhouse, having visited the steam room and showered and smelling good and clean: the women tennis pros, asses so tight they looked unreal, and Jeff, the lawyer, would say that he would give anything to be the tennis ball stuffed...