Double Fault (16 page)

  The JP rushed their ceremony, stamping to warm his feet. In kissing Eric to seal their vows, Willy defied the elements as she had through December tennis. Despite adverse conditions, she would prove to Max that icy outside forces could not freeze out a passion. Despite the many superb rallies that had eluded her retention in the past, this time she was determined to keep what was fleeting.

  Willy's memory of the subsequent reception would soon blur. The Novinskys and Oberdorfs assumed opposite corners, as if social climbing or stunted ambition might be physically contagious. Max may have been attempting an air of remote amusement, but his urbanity was strained. By the end of the festivities he was bulwarked in his armchair reading sports psychology in spectacles, with all the unpersuasive aloofness of a brainy adolescent at a school sock hop who was afraid to dance.

  Surrounding Max was an entire library full of wrist sprains, regrooved forehands, and winter suntans. Willy was disconcerted that she clung so tenaciously to her place in this vacant lot. Likewise in the flotsam of finger sandwiches and slow tide of champagne, she had often to float her eye toward Eric to remind herself what this sea of chat, yet another cocktail mumble that resembled too well dreary victory celebrations like New Freedom's, was meant to mark. Ordinarily, the game was the prize; the trophy was chaff. This time the game had been incidental. The trophy was a lifetime.

  But one memory would remain sharp. Whites gleaming, a chapped hand grazing tape for the ring, the JP intoning, "I now pronounce you husband and wife": in their very union Eric and Willy stood on opposite sides of the net.

  The halcyon period of the next few months evoked a ball at the top of its toss: steady, serene, balanced. Though at its apex the ball's repose appears eternal, its very arrest implies a rise and fall. At no point did Willy take herself aside and whisper,
These are the good
times
, but it may be definitional of good times that they never get labeled as such until they are over.

  Eric shifted officially into Willy's apartment on 112th, where he had been moving in sock by sock for five months. Marriage or no, she took a breath when the sanctum of her mailbox was invaded by a man with a duplicate key. The flimsy locks that had hitherto gated her from any other person had been picked. His flipping of her mail or striding in the door unannounced were physical tokens of the fact that Eric now knew her well enough to intuit anything from which she might attempt to bar him. Eric had the keys to Willy herself.

  Suitably for them both, Willy's efficient one-bedroom was designed for hasty departures, red-eye arrivals, and weeks of desertion in between. Her freezer routinely stocked a dozen microwave lasagnas and one half-eaten carton of Häagen-Dazs laced with frost. After coming home to enough liquefied onions and shrunken, testicular potatoes, Willy had learned to line the pantry with only a few cans of tuna fish. And having swept numerous black mangles from her windowsills, she'd dispensed with thirsty plants, retaining a single cactus, which could survive on neglect. Bulbous with spurts of erratic growth from irregular waterings, the prickly, misshapen lumps alerted Willy to the dangers of the itinerant marriage, by describing the thorny deformities you fashion when tenderness is too sporadic.

  Emblems of intermittent absence grew poignant on nights Willy was left on her own. Desultorily, she'd pick a packet from their overflowing basket of uneaten USAir peanuts, select one of the many Sheraton shampoos and Hilton soaps in the shower, and treat herself to a nightcap from their copious store of airline miniatures. Though they both liked order, when Eric was on the road Willy missed his sweat-soaked T's, ragged tube socks, and crenulated jock straps drying on the curtain rod. She yearned for his dank sweats to drape the hissing radiator, their yeasty must infusing the apartment like rising bread. She'd delay disturbing the bed; though the wide white spread had once invited only the deep, self-righteous sleep of physical exhaustion, the sheets underneath now rippled with a more delicious stir. Restive, Willy would wistfully rewind her husband's jump ropes into neat coils in the foyer, pausing to sniff the foam handles, funky with his perspiration. When she was lucky, they'd still be wet.

  If anything, Eric's presence was not intrusive enough. His one mutant eyebrow hair Scotch-taped to the wall remained his sole contribution to her bedroom collage: Polaroids of Willy and her Davis Imperial hefted on her father's shoulders, clippings from sports pages, sittings for Sweetspot annuals. He demurred from miscegenating the trophies over her bureau with his own. He was content for the two frames that predated him to brighten their living room: an attractive poster rescued from the New Jersey Classic, her first satellite victory in 1990; and a lively, buoyant print from the Museum of Modern Art. The painting portrayed a Gay Nineties sportsman leaping out of the frame with a ball at his fingertips. His red-and-yellow-striped bathing costume resembled long underwear, and his handlebar mustache was off-center. Though the orb was actually a volleyball, the comic abandon of the figure, his carefree exuberance, captured the unfettered explosion of pure joy that Willy identified exclusively with a tennis court.

  Aside from distibuting its every surface with drying sports clothes, Eric assisted in decorating their apartment only by helping to fill Willy's offbeat coffee table, of which he became inordinately fond. She'd glued it together herself: a large clear Plexiglas box whose top was perforated in the center with a three-inch-round hole. Popped through that hole over the last two years, spent tennis balls crowded against the walls of the box, tinted rust from clay, violet from Riverside's berries, or gray from afternoons it had begun to rain and Willy couldn't bear to stop playing. Gradually the level of discards rose, and balls pixelated behind the plastic like the dots of a photograph enlarged to the point of absurdity.

  In sum, Willy's space had hardly been invaded. Eric was away more than half of every month, and Willy herself was out of town a proportion of the time he was home. So the estrangement and reacquaintance of Worcester became routine, and Willy no longer expected to quite recognize Eric's face when it poked through the door. In continually reappraising its planes, she never achieved the classic wife's blasé familiarity with her husband's countenance, tantamount to no longer seeing it at all. Searching for a prompt to jog her memory, she often discovered a fresh feature that might otherwise have escaped notice—a new wild hair wending from an eyebrow, the first faint track of crow's feet, the purple undertones in his sockets that told he'd taken the late flight from Houston in order

to spend the next day, for once, at her side. They both cleared the decks for these reunions. At Flower of Mayonnaise, Eric would eat two plates of fried rice and half of hers, and the two would trade results of forays far afield.

  Nineteen ninety-three began to shape up as a successful year, though also Willy's most strenuous. For there comes a point with any native gift where you get nothing more for free. Willy had plundered her bequest in her teens. By twenty, she could no longer trade entirely on talent. Suddenly having to work for improvement had been frightening at first, but maybe sailing on ability alone was cheating.

  Moreover, as she narrowed the distance between her ranking and the Top Ten, each increment cost more than the last. Eric had explained the calculus: as she approached a limit, half the gain might take twice the effort. Surging from a ranking in the latter 400's in April '92 to 355 after the New Freedom had been arduous enough, but clawing from 355 to 321 in the same number of months proved debilitating.

  The competition was bound to get more vicious still. Willy was not the only woman on the domestic circuit who was determined to join the international tour. It was technically possible to hit Kennedy Airport ranked anywhere in the top 500, but fiscally prohibitive when you were well down the list. Max refused to fly her to Argentina only to hack through qualifiers. She had to be able to enter on points and have a chance at payback prize money. For Max to bankroll her abroad, she had to break into the top 200. Though aging, anxious, and impatient, Willy regarded his stipulation as fair. Max was right: he wasn't her friend but her coach, and a businessman.

  While Willy could no longer cash in on the "something special" that had brought her father to his knees when she was ten, Eric was barreling along on his genetic gravy train. His game seemed to mature by itself. Naturals who are still flourishing on knack alone do not understand, as Willy did not in high school, anyone who fails to grow new skills like fingernails. Too, the athlete who has finished mining the seam of his gift has a dronish aspect, marked by sedulous, painstaking progress, as if scaling a cliff with no chinks for sudden ascent; the precocious find handholds to make breathtaking leaps in a day. It was prettier to be effortless, and she worried that Eric found her monotonous two-hour net drills pathetic.

  Walking in on just such a drill at Forest Hills (where, to Willy's silent consternation, his father had finagled him a membership as well) Eric had taken the notion, whimsically, to "work on" his diagonal lob. He strolled to the baseline, and beckoned Willy to shoot him backhands. After three or four experimental sweeps that from the first showed brilliant instincts, adding a touch of top like a cook throwing in a pinch of salt, he had promptly potted his lob in the exact opposite corner. The stroke had taken him ten minutes, not the morning, much less the next two years. Eric was flying on the wings of inspiration, and in comparison Willy must have seemed landlocked, as if he could hop in his private Lear Jet while his wife took the bus.

  Consequently, while Willy sweated from 355 to 321, in the same six months Eric slashed his way from 926 to 708. The aberration of the Jox All-Comers was not repeated, and soon Eric would be able to enter a better quality of tournament with more appreciable points on offer without submitting to qualifiers. While there was something magnificent about her husband's growing into his game, Willy couldn't shake the sense that his burgeoning was a little horrible as well. She suffered the increasing ambivalence of watching a cute puppy with huge, awkward paws loom by the week into a sinewy monster of a dog.

  Though their "casual" matches with each other were more and more rare, as of the summer of 1993 Eric had yet to beat his wily, agile wife. Yet they always went three sets; tiebreaks were frequent; games went to deuce. The tactics she was forced to employ were fiendish. Worse, she had come to rely too heavily on Eric's unforced errors, which were decidedly on the wane. He was at last tightening that cross-court backhand, and when it was in it was unreturnable. Frankly, he was breathing down her neck. The closer Eric came to an upset, the more crucial that Willy stave off defeat. Surely something more considerable than her pride was at stake. For there is no parity in tennis. From early in the marriage their matches with each other had ceased to be quite fun. When Willy prepared to play her husband, a lump beneath her rib cage formed as if she'd been punched.

  Willy had always been in her element coming up from behind. Thanks to the ball and chain of her dismal family, Willy excelled most when the least was expected; she thrived on being thwarted. That lately no one was trying to stop her was destabilizing, as if she'd been hurtling against a locked door suddenly unbolted from the other side. Adversity was focusing; opportunity was too wide and undefined. She missed her father as archenemy, and was sometimes subject to the lost, evaporating sensation of an agoraphobic in a football stadium who yearns for a closet.

  Hence the crick in her neck from looking over her shoulder at Eric. Aiming to overtake, change is your friend; protecting a lead, change is intrinsically disagreeable. All that can happen to number one in the world is that he should become number two. Heel-chasers are optimistic and fearless, with nothing to lose; front-runners are naturally conservative and paranoid.

  A marriage should not be a race. That didn't keep it from being one. "He's only 708," Willy would mumble on her way to LaGuardia. But in the same taxi Willy would calculate that Eric had rocketed

218 rankings in the same half-year she'd hobbled up 34. At this rate, in two years Eric would be on TV, and Willie would be adjusting the vertical hold.

  Meanwhile her husband proved offhandedly superior at everything that shouldn't have mattered. When they retreated to the Walnut Street backyard, Eric threw ringer after ringer that knocked Willy's horseshoe off the stake. When they dropped into a pool hall on Houston Street, Willy spent the evening chalking her cue. When they bowled in New Jersey, Willy hooked gutterballs, while Eric's scorecard was stitched with little X's.

  So for one precious evening together in June, Willy proposed staying home to play Scrabble, at which she had always slaughtered her sister. From the first round Eric drew all the high-value letters, while Willy was stymied by rackfuls of vowels.

  "I've been hoarding this for half an hour," Eric admitted when only three tiles rattled in the bag. "I was afraid I'd get stuck with it." He placed down the only
Z. "Zwieback."

  "What's
that?"

  "Some kind of nasty cracker…. So that's twenty-eight points, spanning two triple-word scores: 174."

  "Get out, what—?"

  "Times six, of course. Then I used all seven letters, which is a bonus of fifty…" For a math major to take any time to add it up was pure sadism. "224."

  "You mean you now have a total of 224."

  "No, that's for the one play."

  She flipped the board off the coffee table.

  Eric hadn't finished aligning his
zwieback
tiles in anally precise parallels; he drew his hands to his lap. His expression of infantile glee took a few seconds to evanesce. "Willy. It's only a game."

  She was breathing harder than the exertion of hurling bits of plastic quite merited. "Is there
anything
you're not good at?"