Double Fault (26 page)

  Eric swiveled from his chair and raked his fingers over his scalp. "Willy, you think this is humility, I'm sure. So you hurt your knee because you did something
wrong
. Anything that happens to you, you made happen. But that's not humility, it's hubris. There's such a thing as an accident, an event outside your control. This country is so litigious and so secular lately that any disaster has to be some poor bastard's fault. But it isn't always. There's such a thing as a bad break."

  "And a good break?" Willy prodded softly. "You're doing well yourself because you're lucky?"

  Eric's pace around her bed came up short. "I haven't been unlucky. Maybe that's the same thing."

  "You most certainly don't attribute your own successes to the fates," Willy insisted, "or to a well-worn rabbit's foot. You earn what you achieve. Likewise, I got what I had coming."

  "For some
bizarre
reason this way of thinking makes you feel better," Eric ranted. As his volume rose, the visitor at the next bed pulled the curtain. "I thought I was the ultra-rationalist, but you're the real culprit. Everything has to be ordered: rightful rewards and just deserts. No randomness, nothing from left field. That sort of rigid one-two-three makes no sense of the world, because it doesn't add up. But I'll leave you to it for now. As if this ordeal weren't hard enough, on top of everything you have to be to blame! As if it didn't hurt enough already, make you nervous about your career already! But stew if you have to, whip yourself if that provides you some masochistic, flagellistic satisfaction. Christ!" He was back to pacing. She could tell this was not the spirit in which he would have wanted to depart.

  Willy held out her hand. "Kiss me."

  He did so, and muffled into her neck, "I'm so sorry." Willy drew back in amazement. It was the first time she had ever seen him cry.

M
AX?" WILLY RASPED, HER
face contorted and her breath shallow.

     "You don't think I was looking for a way out, do you? That secretly I wanted a rest, or to quit?"

  "Why?" Spotting her down the parallel bars, Max hovered with his hand an inch from Willy's shoulder. He was forcing himself not to help. "Are you telling me that you want to quit?" Whenever she distressed him, Max sounded irritated.

  "No." Sweat drizzled down her neck; through the pain, it tickled. "But maybe subconsciously—"

  Max rolled his eyes. "So I guess the interstates are overrun with drivers
subconsciously
hankering to plow into jackknifed tractor trailers."

  Having shuttled the length of the bars placing a few pounds on the knee, Willy hopped to the leg pull and sank onto its bench. "Oh, Max. This equipment," she gestured at the fitness suite, since July grown crowded, "rented for me; that physiotherapist three times a week; your time, when your new summer school is still on—all because I was a klutz."

  "Kid, this compulsion to regard that spill as your fault—"

  "I was indecisive!"

  "What do you want from me?" Max despaired. "Absolution? Or for me to agree that yes, you were a clumsy oaf, serves you right? I'll do either. Whatever will get you to
drop it
."

  Willy tugged at the elastic brace to peek at the scars, still bright pink, then snapped it against the tender skin. "I want to know what you really think."

  "I've coached you for eight years. I've never had a student who was faster or more surefooted. Even that choke of yours with Marcella—which will dumbfound me to the day I die—you weren't
awkward
. No, you were agile enough, always getting to the shot, and I may never have seen you hit the ball harder—straight into the net, as if you were aiming for it. So over eight years, you're ass-backwards for three seconds. Does that mean you deserve to be taken out of the game for six months, go through this hideous rehab and then retraining this winter, and meanwhile your ranking plummets to a number requiring scientific notation to fit on one page? I bet you think shoplifters should get the chair."

  "Thank you," she said shyly.

  "Grow up." This irritation was not feigned.

  Eric had offered to stick around—or not exactly. Rather, he asked diffidently, "Should I stay with you?" with the pleading expression of a child who has done his chores and is begging to go play. He had already sacrificed a tournament by flying back for the disastrous Tanqueray, and she could not conscionably demand that he hold her hand at such severe cost to his ranking. As ever, Eric had to keep in the running just to stay in place, like jogging on the Sweetspot treadmill, which punished a single pause with ejection from the track.

  As for Willy, maybe a compassionate computer would put the rankings of injured athletes in suspended animation through recov ery. But desperate players might too easily falsify incapacity to preserve their standing, so the associations had to keep the clock ticking come what may. As the season marched on, points dropped from Willy's name, for the computer tabulated accrual on a rollover basis. Her subsequent sinking heart resembled the despondency of a stalwart wage-earner abruptly laid off, watching his once robust savings account dwindle to nothing.

  But if Eric would not submit to the monotonous business of tugging on her foot to lengthen her reattached ligaments, if he declined to spot her at the parallel bars as she pulled the heel toward her buttock until tears streamed down her cheeks, then he had no right to squawk when she accepted Max's offer to recuperate at Sweetspot.

  Max seemed to welcome her renewed dependence on his facility for everything from breakfast to clean knee braces. He lifted his head at the squeak of her crutches on his waxed mess floors as if straining to catch a bittersweet melody, and later wheeled gladly at the click of her cane as it resonated his wide porches. When at last she could balance unaided down the flagstones of her dormitory, eyes wide and fingertips outstretched, his expression was worthy of Bob Cratchit before a mended Tiny Tim. Max personally led her through her exercises with a patience that seemed unlike him; he was patient
for
her. When at the end of her tether she asked why he bothered with a "tennis player" who couldn't touch her toes, quipping, "They shoot horses, don't they?" Max chided that he did not believe in planned obsolescence. If he would take a lifeless CD player in for service he would certainly repair an athlete.

  As she made incremental progress, a camaraderie grew between coach and client that might ordinarily have cemented the bond between husband and wife. Now that Willy had been restored to his custody, Max enfolded her with consoling solicitude, as if her marriage were a grueling kidnapping attempt mercifully foiled, of which he was loath to speak and thereby recall her ordeal. When his private line jangled in the library, he handed her the receiver with a you-know-who shrug, no comment.

  Though Max always slipped off to give her privacy, he needn't have bothered. The arithmetic regularity of Eric's calls bespoke duty more than impulse, and what besides duty would drive anyone to repeat such conversations?

  Eric was full of complaints. The players' bus drivers didn't speak English and didn't know the way to the stadium. Practice courts were double-booked. His luggage was lost for two days, the plane was three hours late. Some disorganized tournament director did nothing but waddle from court to court trailing cigar ash. The courtesy car chauffeurs were forever sneaking off to the pool. The food was too rich and fussy, and he missed the plain broiled chicken at Flower of Mayonnaise. The toilets in Germany were perverted, offering up your feces on a throne for examination. Everywhere it was murder to find space to jump rope. A nagging ache in his right arm might be nascent tendonitis….

  As Eric's querulousness mounted, so did Willy's incredulity. Here she was lurching about the Connecticut boondocks like Igor, game for little more than a stiff round of Snakes and Ladders, and he was on the international ATP tour competing with the crème de la crème of the sport, staying in chic hotels and ordering Black Forest gâteau while she gnoshed one more overdone flank steak from the cafeteria. And he was
complaining?

  As Willy fumed after one more session of intercontinental bellyaching, Max pointed out how she might feel if instead Oberdwarf raved about what a marvelous lark he was on. What if he lavished praise on the exotic delicacies at his table, his posh digs, the breathtaking view of the Alps out his window? "He doesn't want you to think he's having too good a time without you. It's an ancient marital gambit. I peeved away to my wife all the time. Not that it worked. She was always sure I was covering up. To give the woman credit, she was right."

  "So he's lying."

  "Oh, I don't know. You've learned yourself that the hotel routine gets old fast."

  "Motel Six's get old. He's in Europe."

  "No, they all get old. There's only one thing on the tour, if you're the real McCoy, that doesn't wear thin. Which is also the one thing, if I don't miss my guess, that he's bashful about discussing."

  Max's intuitions were on the money. Eric hanged himself regardless: if he griped he was ungrateful; if he rhapsodized he was rubbing-the-nose. But if he couldn't win with Willy, he compensated on the court, and it was precisely these victories that he short-shrifted over the phone. Often by the time Eric was finished moaning about greasy paella riddled with shrimp shell, the call had got too expensive to go into any detail about the second round in Madrid. And this from a man who used to burst into their apartment to deliver the blow-by-blow of an incidental practice match. Moreover, he was often disparaging about his performance, whereas previous to the Chevrolet he hadn't a discouraging word to spare about his game.

  "But you did
win
, didn't you?" Willy once pressed in exasperation.

  "Just."

  "What was the score?" She picked distractedly at a flap of skin on her right palm.

  "Mmm…" He pretended to not quite remember. "6–4, 7–5, something like that."

  "Straight sets. That's not scraping by, Eric."

  She could feel him recoil on the other end; the note of accusation in her voice was unmistakable. No doubt he was racking his brain for what he had done wrong this time. In the absence of an answer, or in avoidance of one, he changed the subject. "So how's tricks at Sweatspot?"

  Several other patches were moulting off her fingers and thumb; the lifting skin was hard, thick, and yellow.

  "Oh, I brought my forehead to my knee yesterday," she informed him dryly. "Cause for champagne."

  "Honey, that's terrific!"

  "Yeah," she slurred. "Just swell. Next week I'm allowed a light jog. One mile, then a whirlpool bath. In case you're wondering what it's like to be eighty-five, I can give you some previews."

  Next to the phone, she had amassed a pyre of skin scraps on the library table, all that remained of her tennis calluses.

  In truth, some of Eric's triumphs were truncated. He was contending in a higher stratum than domestic satellites, and his shimmy up the ladder had slowed to a more laborious clamber. Still the program was on track; by the end of September Eric was ranked 169, and Willy had slid to 357. They were no longer parallel trains chugging forward at varying rates. Willy's engine was stalled for overhaul at the station, while her husband's caboose rattled off to the horizon. All she could do was gimp to the edge of the platform and wave.

  They were living in different worlds. Traveling, Eric accumulated a battery of exotic images that set him apart. How luscious it might have been instead to mock the tournament director's cigar ash together, to later reference German toilets and snicker. So many jokes came down to I-guess-you-had-to-be-there, and Willy wasn't.

  At the unsatisfying conclusion of their phone calls Willy grew doleful, and not only on her own account. Eric had cherished a wife who could fully appreciate the nuances of a tennis match. Now to this very soulmate he felt bound to telescope, dismiss, and skate over the focal narratives of his life. Only when he was cut down in the first round in Stockholm did he indulge the whole set-by-set story. When instead he confessed to advancing to the quarters of the Brussels Classic, he spoke in the furtive, abashed tones of a man who has been arrested for public indecency.

  In early October, Willy found herself about to hang up, having run up a ruinous bill jabbering how it was nice to have the regular students back at Sweetspot rather than the buy-your-way-to-glory kids of the summer school, into which any slob with cash was admitted. "I'm sorry this is all so boring," she hurried. "I can run gently now, and I'm hitting the free weights pretty heavy for upperbody strength. Talk to you in a couple of days?"

  "Willy—don't you want to know how I played in the quarters today?"

  "Oh, I forgot, how did it go?"

  "How could you forget? I spoke to you just last night, I said the quarters were this afternoon, and I'd call this evening to let you know how the match went. I stayed up late, though I was dog tired, just so I could catch you your time after dinner."

  "I'm sorry, OK? But Belgium seems pretty far away from here, my knee has been killing me, and your quarters are not exactly on the top of my mind."

  "That's obvious." (Breathing.) "When you've made it through three rounds," he continued, "I would never
forget
about your quarter-finals. I doubt I'd think of anything else all day."

  "That's because my setting foot on a tennis court would be headline material."

  "No, before—And this is the Brussels Classic—"

  "You mean it's not like the rinky-dink tournaments I used to enter," shot out before she could stop herself.

  "Just forget it, Willy."

  "
Well?
Did you win or didn't you?"

  "You don't give a damn." The dial tone was unusually loud.