“Doubles” is a very short story by Ray Bradbury that can be found in the collection We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories. It’s about a husband and wife who enjoy tennis who realize they have an issue in their marriage that needs to be dealt with. Here’s a summary of “Doubles”.
“Doubles” Summary
When Bernard Trimble bests his wife at tennis, she’s unhappy. When she beats him, he’s extremely unhappy.
Bernard Trimble drives on a Santa Barbara country road with a beautiful and compatible woman. She’s relaxed with a look of pleasant exertion. Going the opposite way, a woman driving a roadster flies by with a young man as a passenger. He’s startled because the woman is his wife; she has the same look as his companion.
Bernard is at the tennis club that night when his wife arrives. He examines her face, but the look is gone. She also looks carefully at his face. He tells her about a strange thing that happened this afternoon. A woman who looked just like her, accompanied by billionaire magnate and tennis-playing Charles William Bishop, sped passed him in a car. She had a strange experience earlier too. A man who looked just like him, accompanied by the beautiful Spanish heiress Carlotta de Vega Montenegro, sped passed her in a car.
They drink wine is silence and look at each other, listening to the sounds of the tennis balls being hit. Bernard thinks of a way to solve their problem. He takes his knife and marks a rectangle into the tablecloth between them with a line through the center, like a tennis court.
Across the court, Charles William Bishop and Carlotta de Vega Montenegro walk off, dejected. Bernard and his wife congratulate each other. On their faces is a look of contentment from recent pleasant exertion.
I hope this summary of “Doubles” by Ray Bradbury was helpful.
