Double Fault (15 page)

  She raised her fist in the air, and they cheered.

  "Where
were
you?" Willy exclaimed when they were finally back in their hotel room. "At the end of the match, I looked everywhere. You'd vanished."

  "I had to take a leak," said Eric, tossing his bomber jacket on the bed.

  "On the
last game?
" They didn't have time for a fight. The end-oftournament party was in half an hour, and the winner was obliged to be on time. Hurrying, Willy pulled off her sweatpants, and they got stuck around her sneakers.

  "It wouldn't have been the last game if you'd lost it," Eric explained with suppressed impatience, pitching clothes. "It was 5–3 in the second set, you were down love—30, and with a break Patterson would be back on serve. I'd put off dashing out for an hour, and I was about to bust a gut."

  "If you could wait an hour, you might have waited five more minutes," Willy grumbled, wrestling from her sweatshirt. "You wouldn't have left your seat coming up to
Edberg's
match point."

  Down to his boxers, Eric turned with his hands on his hips. "I wasn't watching Edberg, was I?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

"All that 'I'm gonna be a Top Ten'—"

"I didn't say that—"

"It was a bit much."

  Her cheeks tingling, Willy bound her arms over her bare breasts. "The crowd expects rah-rah. So does the WTA."

  "I came all the way up here to see you play." Eric stepped into his dark suit pants, zipping them up officiously and slapping the leather belt. "For a week I've had nothing else to do but grab a few pick-up games with local losers. And now you're riding my ass for barely making it to the men's room—"

  "I'm sorry." Willy reached out to touch his arm through the starched white shirt, letting her breasts swing free. The few inches between them seemed uncrossably vast. Her portable electric clock shuddered as if every second were more effort than the last, and the air in their shabby brown hotel room had gone to pudding. She wasn't used to touching Eric being difficult; that she had to force her hand came as a shock. "I'm grateful you're here," she added, holding firmly to his sleeve and employing the same peculiar emphasis with which Eric had stressed "I'm glad you won" from Oklahoma. "Very grateful. You helped inspire me. Maybe that's why I did better than…I mean, I had a cheering section. I like to perform well for you. Then you missed the last game. So I was disappointed, that's all."

  Eric didn't throw his arms around her, but at least he had not drawn back. His own motions had the same creakiness of hers, as if their joints lacked oil. Why had simple conversation grown so laborious? "I am doing my best," he said heavily, "to support you in every way I can. Sometimes I have to
tend to my own needs
, as they say. Okay?" The exhausting exchange completed, he pulled away.

  "Aren't you glad it matters to me that you're watching?" Willy asked softly.

  Eric whipped his tie around his raised collar. "Delighted."

  Willy slithered silk over her head in silence. A lascivious red, this was one of her favorite outfits, but just now the dress glared; it looked garish, too low-cut and showy, as if she thought she was hot stuff. She tugged the skirt down brusquely, and would only toss an offhand glance in the mirror, not to be seen preening. Willy smoothed the white tights up her legs. Eric's back turned, she traced an admiring finger under the hard disc of her calf muscle, and then felt guilty. She shook out her hair, as if to get a spare part rattling in her head to clunk into place. This wasn't the way she usually felt after winning a tournament. There was no elation, no relief, and her only relation to this upcoming party was dread. It was almost as if, since the victory was only hers and not also Eric's, she had only half won.

  In fact, for a fleeting instant Willy wished that she'd missed that last overhead—that she'd lost the final. In a flush of regret both alien and unnerving, Willy imagined this evening otherwise, telling the WTA to stuff their stupid party and sweeping off with Eric to splurge on a compensatory dinner neither could afford. In mutual commiseration, they might not feel exactly jubilant, but at least they'd feel close.

  Though that very morning they'd winked like gold bullion, with the New Freedom's computer points now in hand they clinked cheaply in Willy's palm like spare change. Her momentary impulse was to give them away. Standing in her stocking feet and staring helplessly at Eric's back as he worked his broad shoulders into his jacket, Willy lifted a hand as if to offer him a gift—one that would make more difference than some flimsy Sweetspot T-shirt. But the computers weren't programmed that way; just because the points were yours didn't mean you could donate them where you liked. Willy was stuck with them, and maybe the fact that they were nontransferable was what made the points feel trifling.

  "Honey," Willy whispered at her future husband's side, "you don't have to go to this party if you don't want to."

  "I never said I didn't want to go," he said stiffly, readjusting the Windsor knot more tightly around his neck than seemed necessary.

  "It's only a cheapie WTA cocktail affair for a second-rate tournament. It's bound to be dull…."

  "Isn't the event to celebrate your achievement?" he asked stolidly.

"In a way, but mostly to keep the sponsor—"

  "Then my presence is more or less required, is it not? A given?
Why
would I not want to go?"

  She shrugged and peeped, "No reason."

  "All right, then. Get your coat."

  The victory party was in the student union, and infiltrated by sophomores with an eye for free drink. The glasses were plastic, the wine poured ominously from carafes. Indifferent to the low-rent catering, Willy concentrated on shepherding Eric.

  There was clearly no need to. He was perfectly well behaved—too perfectly. He was gracious and demurring. As pruney, overtanned WTA administrators chattered about Willy's technique, he maintained a courteous if vacant expression. But Willy kept him hooked on her arm, inserting into every exchange, "
Eric
plays pro as well."

  "That so?" asked the rep from New Freedom—a man; men were bound to take an interest in women's periods when there was money in them. "What's your ranking, bud?"

  Since Eric's adjacent competition had also dropped points, at least his poor performance in Oklahoma hadn't cost him lost ground. "926." Eric's enunciation was even and neutral.

  "Good for you. Best of luck, keeping up with this little powerhouse. Don't let her get away from you."

  "I don't plan to," said Eric with a distant smile. She could not put her finger on it, but through the evening Eric kept his arms close to his sides, drank a single glass of wine, and spoke only when spoken to, all with the composed distraction of a man who was making resolutions.

O
F COURSE YOU'LL BE
invited," Willy promised. "But I was concerned you might find it difficult to watch." "I make my living as a voyeur." "How can you stand it, Max?" she ventured. "Looking on while other people play?"

  "It's the best of all possible worlds." In the confines of Sweetspot's library, his cigar smoke was noxious. "I get credit when you win; if you lose, you're easily replaced. I make lots of money; I risk nothing."

  "That's how you see your job?"

  "Increasingly."

  Willy had glimpsed another side of Max those few weeks in spring—a side that would risk the whole game on a single play at her dormitory door; the side that hit the ball in his prime, gladly putting himself on the line instead of placing these cowardly hedged bets on proxies. Little of that bravery glimmered now. Settled in his usual corner, cupped in lamplight that hugged his chair, he looked complacent and safe, and she saw again why she had to marry Eric. Remembered anxiety and immediate anxiety were chalk and cheese. Max, in his retirement, could never understand her.

  "Why don't you have it here?" he volunteered. "Save your pennies." She'd have been touched, except he met her eyes flippantly, tapping his ash. The offer didn't cost him. Maybe her romance had already foreshortened to another match he'd follow from afar.

  "You're too kind," she said formally.

  "Use this library for the reception. It's small, but you don't have many friends."

  "When would I have had time for them?"

  "You regret that?"

  "Not enough." She hefted her kit bag. "Max? You're my friend, aren't you?"

  "I'm your coach. Turning a relationship like ours personal is
ruin
ous
. Remember? It was your word."

  Eric was uneasy about getting married at Sweetspot; Max's donation of the school radiated an obscure vengefulness. But Willy was more uneasy about asking her father to spring for a commercial venue. All her childhood he'd denied her bus fare and Motel 6 bills, forcing her to save babysitting money for the spare racket he considered an extravagance. She needed to preserve the impression of her father as cheap to keep from finding him spiteful.

  At any rate, for their ceremony neither a synagogue nor a Methodist altar was appropriate. Eric had never owned a yarmulke; the temple on Seventy-fourth Street promoted ascension on earth. Willy was raised in the church of abstention, where the kingdom belonged to immaculates who declined to participate. While the Novinskys subscribed to the faith of the spurned, and the Oberdorfs to the faith of the spurning, their families sat on opposite sides of the same house of worship, and Willy was uncomfortable in either pew. There was something ghastly about Axel's clawing up New

York's ladder and kicking aspirants on lower rungs; there was something unpersuasive about her father's sulking at the bottom with his arms crossed.

  For their own parts, Eric and Willy had gravitated to sanctuaries of austere design: great green open-air chapels exposed to passing airplanes. The commandments of their bible were not always easy to keep, but its catechism was crisp, its theology straightforward: thou shalt not double-fault; thou shalt not question line calls. Theirs was a religion both of ruthlessness and equal opportunity, and if they revered a material grace bestowed on an elect, they were both members of the chosen people. Should their marriage be blessed on hallowed ground, it made perfect sense to say their vows on a tennis court.

  So the two settled on Sweetspot, and scheduled the event for December, the only downtime in the tennis calendar. As they compiled the guest list, it evolved that Eric had scads of acquaintances, but few intimates. Eric's loyalties were few, absolute, and sequential. The majority of his confidants he had either finished with, or finished off—one contentious best-friendship had ended in a fistfight. Eric pursued his every project with blinkered intensity and then one way or another brought it to conclusion. (It was like him, for example, to flat-out propose to Willy, and not suggest they live together first. Anything short of ultimate struck Eric as namby-pamby and disturbingly indefinite.) This proclivity for closure suited him to a career in tennis, and to marrying, less well to marriage itself, with its undemarcated forevermore and its slight haziness about what, beyond
I do
, the project is exactly.

  They settled on a smattering of peripherals, since shy of a quorum a wedding felt dinky. Accordingly, the preponderance of their guests—hitting partners, Princeton and UConn ex-teammates, Sweetspot grads, steeds of the Upchurch stable whom Willy could abide (
not
Marcella Foussard), all descending on Westbrook in Vuarnet sunglasses—were tennis players. While the bride and groom had invited no one whom they despised, even individuals you like can be revolting as a group. One wedding guest and his Mazda Miata was neither here nor there; a roomful of people all of whom owned flashy cars was gross.

  After the guests had warmed themselves with coffee in the library, they trooped up the hill in muffs and fur-lined hoods to court number seven, where Willy and Eric awaited with a Westbrook justice of the peace. At a distance, Willy recognized the shrill, showy laughter of athletes accustomed to being interviewed. The phalanx of taut bodies approached like a mobile paste-up from
Vogue
. Trailing, the single dowdy clump in this army of mannequins was Willy's family. Her father's suit was rumpled from the trip up (why was no one else's?), and his hair scraggly to match the crabgrass at his feet. Her mother's excess of costume jewelry was heartrending. For once Willy was even grateful that Gert was plain. The Novinskys were their only wedding guests who looked like people.

  Maybe it was gimmicky, but Willy had enjoyed decking out for the ceremony. The sleeveless shift with its short flared skirt replicated her tournament dress in white satin. For an outdoor event in December, she'd special-ordered a sweatshirt in pearl angora. The shoes had taken days to locate—slight heels, but the toes, tied with ribbon, laced like sneakers.

  Eric was leaning on the net post with the inaccessible composure that any tennis court fostered in him. He really should have played in the sport's aristocratic golden age. Those long legs were made for white flannels. In the bone cable-knit sweater with maroon and navy trim, a starched white collar sheering from its V-neck, Eric might have been lifted straight from a frame at Forest Hills—Ellsworth Vines, 1930. Like dapper gentlemen of yore he'd slicked back his hair. All he needed to complete the portrait was a laminated wooden racket.

  It was cold, though fitting to marry in weather that drove you to bed. Isolated snowflakes drifting to the court recalled previous winter afternoons when Willy would push the envelope of the season. At the end of many a December session with Max she'd had to prize her rigid fingers from her grip, much as they would unclench a racket from her rigored hand when she was dead. Sweetspot had four indoor courts, but they were airless, protected, and sterile; nottennis. Until number seven was blanketed, Willy hit outside. Tennis as well as marriage was "for better or for worse."