Double Fault (17 page)

  Eric's very pause told all. "Languages," he said at length.

  "Ever tried to learn one?"

  "I satisfied degree requirements." On his chest, he scouted consonants from under the couch. "Two years of German."

  "But you made A's."

  "So? I watched a lot of war movies."

  His deflection convinced her only that had he concerned himself with Chinese or ancient Greek he'd have been a whiz at philology as well. All that seemed to determine Eric's expertise was whether he turned to a given field. Willy had long been dimly aware there were such people, but never expected to share a bed with one. From close up, the grotesque facility was so inhuman that she was tempted to regard her husband as born not with something extra, but with something missing.

  "Would you really prefer," he inquired from the floor, "that I were a shitty Scrabble player?"

  That was easy. "Yes!"

  Looking up, he scrutinized her critically. "That would make for a poor game."

"Which I would win."

"Beating someone who's crummy? I can't see the satisfaction."

"It would satisfy me to beat you at
something
."

  "You beat me at tennis. Which is what we both do, or one of us does rather, for a living." That their tiebreaker tennis games were her sole purchase on equality was cold comfort. "And even if I did beat you at tennis," he added, maybe remembering the last 7–6, 4–6, 7–6 score, "what would it matter?"

  Eric may have graduated summa cum laude, but his question indicated an idiocy of a kind.

  "Can't you imagine how it might feel if I excelled at everything you didn't?" Willy implored. "If I could read faster and run faster and add faster? If I went to one of the best universities in the country, and you barely squeaked into a state school on a sports scholarship?"

  One tile had fallen through the hole in the coffee table; Eric removed the top to retrieve it from the balls. "In that case I'd simply be proud of you."

  "And in this case?" she asked softly. "With a wife who's rotten at everything? Eric, what do you see in me?"

  "What's all this you're rotten at, Wilhelm?" Eric replaced the Plexiglas and joined her on the couch, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Willy hunched, hands sandwiched tightly between her knees.

  "That computer of yours," she said. "All I get is error messages…I can't preprogram the VCR…My checkbook doesn't balance…I never remember which year Bill Tilden was caught messing with little boys—"

  "Years," Eric corrected; he couldn't help himself. "He was arrested twice."

  "See! And I won't make 224 points on one Scrabble play until hell freezes over!"

  Eric pecked her forehead. "And if you ever did, I'd fling the board out the window to the Hudson River."

  That was the concession she was waiting for, and she rewarded it with a lingering kiss.

  "I'm hungry," he mumbled. "Any zwieback in the house?"

  Willy biffed him playfully on a pectoral, but the punch landed harder than she intended. Eyes flashing, Eric wrested Willy's left arm behind her back. He yanked her wrist just high enough that she yelped more from surprise than pain. For a moment she was helpless. With a twist she wrenched free, but he must have let her. Willy socked him in the gut, though this jab was cautiously calibrated merely to wind him a bit.

  Eric lunged for his wife and tackled her to the open floor. They'd done this before. They liked to tussle. It was always both serious, and not; aside from the odd bump or scratch, no one ever got hurt. Eric pinned Willy's wrists, hooking his feet around her calves. She slipped her legs free and thrust her knees under his chest, rocking to use his weight against him. As they flipped over sideways, Eric's hand shot out to make sure that she didn't nick her head on the table.

  With Willy's knees on his elbows, Eric's arms were long enough for him to work her shirttail out. Willy used her free hands to grab the sides of his T-shirt, and when he toppled her once more she held on. As planned, Eric could escape only by letting her pull the T-shirt over his head. Another familiar game: who could get whose clothes off first, and with Eric now bare-chested Willy already had the edge. A tirelessly entertaining cross between pro wrestling and strip poker, the sport never quite descended to play-rape.

  In no time, Eric was standing with a grip on the hems of Willy's denims, her back and head on the floor. The jeans were so snug that to get them off Eric began dragging her across the carpet like a dray pulling a plow. Traction suffered from a couple of waxy Scrabble tiles skating under Willy's bare back. Though her shoulders would probably show rug burns later, she'd started to laugh. Cracking up was deadly, and in the end only the fact that Eric wasn't wearing boxers kept her one article of clothing ahead.

  Panting and sweaty and down to socks, they concluded in a prone, tensely immobile clutch, exerting force for force. Willy could feel he'd got hard under her stomach. For an instant, however, the rest of Eric's body relaxed, of which she took full advantage to whip off his last sock. She dangled it victoriously in his face.

  "Bitch," said Eric fondly. In this contest, they both won. "Get your diaphragm," he advised.

  When she emerged from the bathroom a minute later, Eric was still laid out on the living room floor, which he evidently preferred to the bed. Willy spread herself on his chest, and they locked hands. Eric tried to bend her wrists back; she resisted. He applied more pressure; she held.

  "God, you're strong," he said admiringly, though he looked beyond her rippled arms, as if the actual muscles were unimportant.

  But Willy didn't like this duel because he was humoring her. At any time he could have easily cocked her wrists back and made her cry uncle. Meanwhile she was pushing as hard as she could, and his own wrists didn't bend a millimeter. Hands trembling, she cast her eyes down his lean, beautifully proportioned torso. Of course he wouldn't be much of a man if he weren't the stronger. It still wasn't fair. Willy would keep the upper hand in any cat fight, but this draw was artificial, and she relaxed her grasp.

  Eric insinuated his prick inside her, but the battle was not quite over. For the next twenty minutes they played Who's on Top, another struggle from which even the loser benefited. When their rolling around grew more earnest, Eric drew on his superior strength. Once they were done—with Willy on the bottom—she climbed unsteadily upright to collect her clothes in sublime exhaustion, brushing off the Scrabble tiles stuck to her back. Willy would never admit it, but after all their horseplay those 224 points still irked her a bit.

W
ILLY HAD LEARNED THE
relativity of success from her parents, who for all their seeming resignation to obscurity had both organized themselves into notables among dross. At Bloomfield College, Chuck Novinsky rose head and shoulders above student bodies for his splendid sentence subordination alone. He'd never sought higher status employment. A colossus among dwarves had no motivation to go seeking other giants.

  Likewise, her mother's choice to become nutritional advisor at The Golden Autumn may also have been sly. Daily, Willy's mother confirmed the futility of ambition, destined for so much gnarling and drool. Whatever her charges might have accomplished was encoded by senility, reduced to garbled scraps of ill-remembered better days to which their overseers would attend with distracted tolerance. When Willy had visited The Golden Autumn she could barely breathe from the oppression, but her mother took in the stale, medicinal air as if it braced her, and clipped briskly down the gleaming halls of the home, beaming at her slack-jawed wards with a wave. In the leveling of old age her mother seemed to find vindication.

  So her mother mightn't pull off a grand jeté, but she could control her bowels; her father didn't wax eloquent in the
Paris Review
, but his subject-verb agreement was unimpeachable. Willy's own profession determined that you were as good as you were better than the girl behind, as wanting as worse than the one in front. Greatness was context.

  Previous to her marriage, in the context of other avids at Sweetspot, Willy had reasonably considered herself a disciplined, focused athlete. As of December 14, 1992, that context changed. For when Eric Oberdorf ran he covered not four miles, but six, and in better time; Eric preferred to rise not at 7 A.M., but 6 A.M.; and on the road, he traveled with a jump rope, lassoing more than one hotel room overhead off its screws.

  If Willy was focused, Eric was fanatic. His reading matter consisted of tennis bios, tennis history,
Tennis
magazine,
Racquet
, and
Serve
and Volley
. When he returned from LaGuardia, his carry-on was padded with the
Austin Star
and the Cleveland
Plain-Dealer
folded to the sports page. Their VCR was pre-programmed in their absence to record ESPN and USA, and his idea of a relaxing evening at home was to rewind and take notes on Indian Wells. If he rented a video, Eric would cart home, not
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, but the McEnroeBorg Wimbledon final of 1980, of which he'd continually replay single points. In context, therefore, overnight Willy Novinsky—who had rather hoped to see
Last Exit to Brooklyn
—could reasonably consider herself a dabbling, flabby slacker.

  Adjacent zealotry drove her in two directions at once. On the one hand, when Eric threw back the blankets and leapt upright while the light outside was still the color of old, overcreamed coffee, Willy was inclined to loll sullenly abed till noon. On the other, she was tempted to set her own alarm for total darkness and complete an hour's calisthenics while Eric snoozed. After vacillating between defiance and triumphalism, she marched to a slightly

quicker beat and made a soldierly effort at keeping abreast. She, too, rose at New York's version of cock's crow (when the garbage trucks yawned), ran six miles instead of four, and took up jumping rope.

  Axel's wedding present had been a family membership in the Hamilton Jordan Indoor Racquet Club, to which Willy began to accompany her husband midday when they were both in town. Eric booked a regular sixty-minute training session in a squash court, an enclosure, he assured her, large enough for them both. Skipping rope together presented opportunity to spend precious extra time in the same room, and Willy had assumed that Eric's bouncing up and down entailed such drudgery that he'd welcome companionship. Yet the first time Willy came along in June, she discovered the
ta
dum-ta-dum
tedium of her imagination required some touching up.

  For the initial few hundred, he skipped in the left-hand service square until the slim black plastic tubing churned like an eggbeater. As he accelerated, a low whir rose to a high-pitched whistle, and his heels seemed to hover, immobile, three inches above the floor.

  Eric had lent her a leather Everlast, knotted to accommodate her height; that through the next few months she continued to cadge his rope instead of investing in her own was a reminder that the regime itself was borrowed. She assumed the opposite service square, their ropes clicking the boards as one. But Willy was left well behind after the first 250. As she disentangled the thong from her socks, the whine of Eric's whip continued to rise in pitch.

  Warmed up, Eric zigzagged up and down the court on the tips of his toes, like the nimble electric stitch of a sewing machine with special attachments. Next, he sliced a set of scissors kicks, his long legs held stiff as shears, his Lycra cross-training shorts switching like beveled blades. Through her own plodding
tu-dum, tu-dum,
Willy cut her eyes askance as Eric repeatedly clicked his heels together in midair, as if he had just won the lottery. Then he plunged deep on each thigh, extending the opposite leg like a Russian Cossack. When he crossed his arms over and back,
s-swip, s-swip
, the loops closing and opening out again in an unbroken snake, Willy's Everlast once more hit her shins.

  Her eyes narrowed. Willy centered again in her own square, gathered momentum, and crossed her arms.

  
Pthwack.

  This clearly took more than one go. Willy built a rhythm, trying to shut out Eric's
whoo-ooo-PUM, whoo-ooo-PUM
of double-jumps by counting in her head:…
6, 7, 8, 9—CROSS!

  
Pthwack
. The rope circled her left leg, wrenching the wooden handle from her grip; it clattered to the floor.

  Despite the clamor, Eric didn't falter, but went into a mixed routine of doubles, arm crosses, Cossack dips, and heel clicks. Behind the squash court's transparent back wall, a small crowd of club members had gathered to watch.

  Retrieving her rope from the floor, Willy studied her husband. His lips were delicately parted. Half-closed, his eyes fixed on a midpoint in space. The pupils weren't quite cold; perhaps that pure a concentration qualified as an emotion. The lone indicator of his exertion was a dimple dented between his eyes, as if an invisible divine finger were touching his forehead. As the black whip blurred an oval halo around his body, he looked blessed. She might have never seen his face more tranquil, more affectionate, or more attentive—but all that engrossment converged inward. He was oblivious to her grunts of exasperation when her own rope hooked her toes. Willy beheld the part of Eric that was concerned with Eric, and it was unnerving to encounter this contented, self-congratulatory grace outside her embrace. Willy had previously indulged the fiction that in her absence Eric was not quite there.

  
Ssee-ow-sseee-ow, ta-hooo-ta-hooo, SMACK
. Eric wound the rope around its handles, dried his dripping face on his shirt, and turned to Willy as if she had just walked in the door.

  "Eight thousand?" she inquired.

  He shrugged. "The usual."