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there in his real life.
    Hannah said, “This Perez guy said he was going to write you up and didn’t, so why do you trust him?”
    Jimmy was pacing, drinking a Diet Coke out of a can. Now he stopped.
    “You don’t read the papers, do you?” he said. Knowing she really didn’t. She might read
Newsday
when she was riding the exercise bike at the Vertical Club to see what Liz Smith had to say. She liked reading the reviews in the
Times.
But Hannah wasn’t someone who read all the papers; she just wasn’t that interested in everything.
    “If you mean Marty Perez, no, I don’t read him.”
    “What I mean is, you obviously didn’t read enough when the William Kennedy Smith trial was going on, or the Mike Tyson trial,” Jimmy said. “The fighter who got convicted of rape.”
    Hannah said, “I know who Mike Tyson is.”
    “Did you read about the woman in Florida who accused the three ballplayers of raping her that time?”
    “Brian—Detective Hyland—reminded me of that one today. Apparently, she waited almost as long as I did to come forward and file an official complaint.”
    “I don’t blame that on you. I blame that on the world-famous therapist, Beth.”
    “Can we bumper-sticker this, Jim?” It was an expression she’d heard one of the other trainers use at the Vertical, meaning get to the point. On her best day, Jimmy could wear her out sometimes talking. It never worked out that he was the audience for her, even when it was supposed to.
    “You’ve got to get your side out before they get their side out, that’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “You’re up against Ellis Adair, remember.”
    Jimmy made it sound as if she was going up against Jesus Christ. Any kind of celebrity had always gotten her brother worked up.
    Jimmy said, “People love this guy so much you’d think he was white.”
    Hannah let that one go.
    “You know what I mean,” Jimmy said. “He’s a god around here, for chrissakes. People in New York treat him like he’s Peter Pan in his two-hundred-dollar basketball shoes.” Jimmy made some kind of motion like he had a basketball in his hand, tried to make his deep voice sound black and said, “Looks at me, Ah’s can fly.” Hannah’d never thought too much about it, maybe Jimmy wasn’t kidding around, maybe he really was a racist. He was standing at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He finished the Diet Coke and slammed it down for emphasis. Even before he had thought about acting, when he was still going to make everybody forget McEnroe, when he was a junior tennis player out at Port Washington Tennis Academy, he had always been dramatic.
    “I’m telling you, Sis, we’ve got to hit him before he hits us.”
    Now it was “we” all of a sudden.
    “Brian said that Adair and Collins probably wouldn’t talk, even to him.”
    “They’ll get their story out anyway, that’s the point. They’ll say you’re a groupie. Or some kind of bimbette. They won’t say it themselves, oh no. But somebody will, so then it’ll be out there. Or someone will say you’re in it for the money, that this is some kind of setup. Everybody’s sure as hell going to want to know why it took you a year to come forward. You can count on that.” He went into a slouch, like he was some kind of New York tough guy, with an accent. “What, the rape slipped her mind?”
    Hannah bit.
    “That’s not the way it is,” she said, not wanting to have this conversation anymore.
    Jimmy said, “The way it
is
, the
fact
of things, that hardly ever matters in cases like this. It’s the way it’s
covered.
Geez, don’t you get it? It’s all in the
presentation.
”
    “Presentation,” Hannah said.
    Jimmy said, “Exactly! We need to set the tone. Let them start denying their shit before we have to start denying our shit. Like I said, hit them good before they hit us.”
    “They already hit us, believe me,” Hannah said.
    He came around the counter, over to where she