Double Fault (34 page)

  The closest Willy comes to hitting a tennis ball herself is kicking the damned thing out of the way when it's dribbled between the liquor cabinet and the TV. Eat, unkempt, foul-mouthed, and slanderous, Willy has become a serious liability for Eric's bid for the Senate when he retires. It doesn't look good, either, that they've had no children, though there's been little likelihood of kids. Erie-has avoided his wife's bed ever since Willy was arrested for calling in a bogus bomb scare during his first U.S. Open final.

  If Eric does break Bjorn Borg's Wimbledon record or endorse presidential candidates, he can have the tinsel of celebrity with her blessing. Willy has ceded the spotlight. All that she asks in return is to be left alone.

  She eats little or nothing, and her body has grown so ethereal that any day now she will be able to fly while she is still awake. It isn't that she has no feelings, but her emotions are pastel: bemusement, whimsy. She has no relations to people that she could not also have to objects. In bed, Willy is acquiescent; he is welcome to whatever he can lay hands on. If Eric wins or loses she murmurs, "That's nice, dear," or "That's too bad, dear," and sometimes she gets the appropriate responses mixed up. She functions, and doesn't appear a danger to anyone or to herself, but she's heard Eric quizzing psychiatrists in the study about whether his wife has lost her mind. In fact Willy has not lost it but crawled into it, and she likes it there.

  "You left an option off the list. Try adding
Willy gets her act togeth
er
." So Eric had won at Forest Hills—he had that blithe, refreshed look.

  Willy whipped the envelope from Eric's hands. On its back, an embellished scrawl listed,
1) Willy becomes a good little wifey, 2) Willy
becomes a big bad wifey, 3) Willie becomes one of the disappeared
, and was heavily framed by dense, jagged scribbles. There'd been no need for three alternatives; they all came down to the same answer: suicide. "That's none of your business."

  "We're married. What happens to you is my business.
To
you," he mumbled, dropping his sports bag on the floor. "That's your problem, you let things happen
to
you."

  "Every day I've got a different problem." Willy crumpled the envelope and free-threw it to the trash can. She missed.

  "You're a great tennis player," he retrieved the balled paper and arced it into the can—a swish, "you're underachieving like fury, and the trouble is all in your head."

  "Isn't that the ultimate terminal injury?" she asked calmly. "To my head?"

  "Willy, you've said yourself that the difference between good and great players is character."

  "So my flaws are central to my very nature," she elucidated matterof-factly. "
Character
is the very definition of what you can't do anything about."

  He threw up his hands. "Do you not
want
there to be a solution anymore? I swear, sometimes I think you enjoy wallowing in this! Like a pig in shit!"

  Eric was breathing hard; he rarely permitted himself to insult her. Her husband's rare flash of anger freed Willy to remain sedate. The reserve had a delicacy; she could see how he'd acquired a taste for it. And she was more than happy for Eric to sample the grapes of wrath.

  "That's right," she said quietly, folding her arms. "I enjoy being poky and disreputable; I lose for fun. The disparity in our performance is destroying our marriage, and I enjoy that, too."

  "Nothing's 'destroying our marriage'! We said 'for better or for worse.' I meant it."

  Oh, the phrase had echoed before. But long ago Max had been right: Willy had initially anticipated doing better to Eric's worse. This had been a day for fantasy futures, so a fitting one to admit what she'd foreseen at her wedding: Willy would rise to eminence.
She
would hit the international tour,
she
would endorse presidential candidates,
she
would have her agent to lunch.
Eric
would pour the tea.

  Maybe the vision had been invidious, Willy reflected, a
Mrs. Eric
Oberdorf
in reverse: Mr. Willy Novinsky. But one aspiration wasn't horrid. In her original pipe dream, Willy was consoling—and how she yearned for once to stroke his bowed head, to pour a stiff whiskey for her disconsolate partner. Surely it wasn't his dejection she wanted so much as a chance to play the foul-weather friend, the good woman on whose devotion he could rely when the world had turned its back. But the world never turned its back. He was a winner. They doted on him. She wasn't his Rock of Gibraltar, but a millstone around his neck. Willy couldn't remember the last time she bucked him up, cheered Eric with
You're a great tennis player,
and concocted strategies to turn his luck. She might well become a classic helpmate, if only sometimes she could be the voice of confidence when his own had fled, the bolsterer enfolding him in bed, reminding him (lying) that there's more to life than tennis.

  It was sapping, always thinking one thing and saying another. "Better or worse?" she repeated, sinking to the sofa. "I guess I'd hoped to be the one to do better."

  "And I would do worse?" Eric remained standing. To sit down was to resign himself to this conversation.

  "I should say no, that I'd like us to do equally well. But parity is inequality waiting to happen." Willy confessed, "Honestly, I'd have preferred to keep the edge."

  "You said I was good when we met. You should have trusted your own judgment. Why would you of all people marry a second-rate player? More to the point, why would you want to?"

  "I'd have thought even a couple of years ago that I craved proper competition," she said dolorously, propping her feet on the Plexiglas table. "Now I think I'm not so grand as that. Maybe I'd do better with a husband who couldn't hit a ball in the court if his life depended on it."

  "But my life
does
depend on it," he chided. "So I can't believe that you want me to fail. Not in your heart."

  It was precisely this innocence of Eric's that Willy traded on daily. If he could visit her head for ten seconds, he would die.

  "Willy, I don't like this situation any more than you do." Eric vigorously collected newspapers. "I will do
anything
to help you turn things around."

  Willy faced the window. His persistent kindness was a torture. "You always get to be so sweet, and all I get to be is beastly."

  The syntax was peculiar, except that Willy's experience of her marriage lately resembled having been dubbed the ugly stepsister in the school play. And the only alternative to being hideous was to lie.

She could at best conceal her envy, but she was powerless to forbid it. When Eric toted one more trophy home, where she awaited emptyhanded, she might cry,
Well done!
or
I hate you!
but the only difference was what she said. Tinkering with the gut indignation itself—feeling gracious rather than acting that way—was beyond her. She could as easily fall in a lake and refuse to get wet.

  For Willy had never understood whether you could be held responsible for your own emotions. As far as she could discern, circumstance had dealt them discrepant menus as the waiter had at Lutèce. Rather than lack prices, Willy's listed different entrées: rancid resentment, gristly consternation, and prickly spite, all with an aftertaste of self-reproach—a sort of collective squab. After swallowing her pride, Willy's only just dessert was humble pie. Meanwhile, Eric's menu cataloged an emotional haute cuisine: tender solicitation, sweet concern, and creamy largess. In fact, she wondered if Eric himself wearied of his princely diet, got full to his eyeballs with his own decency, and coveted her shrieking fits. He was an aggressive, complicated man. Nobility and forbearance morning to night must have bound him like a woman's corset.

  "This state of affairs isn't easy for me either," Eric objected, hands on hips. "I have problems, too."

  "Oh?" Willy asked archly. "Name one."

  "When I win, you suffer. So what's in victory for me? How do you think I felt at Forest Hills today, with my opponent's girlfriend cheering in the front row? Where were you? And I come home, you don't even ask if I won!"

  "It's obvious you won, Eric. Waves of self-congratulation come off you like a smell."

  "See?" His hands Hailed; his voice grew louder. "I bust my butt today, and I'm supposed to apologize. Besides, how can I ever take pleasure in my game going well when you go to bed sobbing?"

  "I'd pay money for your problems."

  "They'd cost you a bundle, because I've got plenty. The more highly I'm ranked, the more other people are counting on me. The pressure's enormous. I have to keep reproducing successes month after month—"

  Willy laughed. "You sound like Monica Seles bitching to reporters about the tyranny of obsequious fans in restaurants. Be honest: would you trade places with me?"

  "You claim you want to be 'sweet,' but when I give you a chance to sympathize with me for once, you won't take it."

  "
Answer
me. Would you trade places?"

  He sighed and flopped beside her on the couch. "No."

  Willy stroked the long dark hairs sprouting from his hand. "Have you ever considered what it might be like if the tables were turned? If I were the one whizzing around the world and making stacks of money while you moped back here after being sandbagged in some squalid satellite?"

  "I can see how I might feel…a little left out."

  She studied Eric's face, incredulous.
A little left out?
In the understatement was a refusal to do what she requested, a small favor in the scheme of things: to try and really think how he might feel in her shoes. Then, any efforts in this direction had always seemed mere feints. Winners first and foremost did not wish to imagine themselves as anything but winners. The refusal was superstitious:
Don't look down
. Besides, since triumph filled the rankest bastard with goodwill, the victor, halfheartedly forming his fictional failure, always pictured a similar magnanimity in defeat. In fact, one source of friction between Willy and her husband was Eric's tacit presumption that he would surpass her even at losing.

  But he was right. A hologram of Eric the Megaflop materialized perfectly before her on the coffee table, and it bore little resemblance to her own bilious tearing of hair. Had his career come up snake eyes and hers a natural, Eric would be a gentleman. When she won, he'd buy flowers. His brittle congratulations would never strike him as cold or less than sincere. In public, his rigid bows to her glory would impress others as gallant. Eric's performance as her unreserved advocate would be so well acted that he'd be persuaded by the theater himself. Only a pervasive vacancy would pester him at times, as if the doors in his mind were all shut and locked and he found himself out in the hall.

  Abruptly, he'd fall in love with someone else—a younger, pretty woman with a hesitant manner who had, more's the pity, never picked up a racket in her life. (He was teaching her to play. They had a lovely, goofy time, though she displayed, sadly, little aptitude.) Eric would come to his wife remorseful, perplexed, declaring that he'd had no more warning than she, but the thing was done: behind his own back his love for Willy had died. Mystified and affronted, his tone would imply that he, not she, had been betrayed. He would describe their shattered marriage like a vase he had knocked over by accident, whose several pieces defied glue. Of this she was sure: in confessing his tragic disaffection, nowhere would the information feature that she was ranked number three in the world and was worth several million dollars while he, a stickler for pulling his weight, was part-timing in a sporting goods store. Since Eric could not apprehend her vision, Willy had to stop herself from exclaiming,
Why, you self-deceiving sack of shit!

  "Can you at least grant that your being ranked 864 while I was 75 might put our relationship under strain?" she asked dryly.

  "Not that long ago I
was
ranked in the 800's, and you were ranked—"

  "You were on your way up and you knew it. Me? I've hit the skids. I'm through."

  Eric sighed and shook his head. "When we met, I'd never have figured you for a quitter."

  "A quitter is the last thing I'd have figured myself for," Willy concurred agreeably. "But isn't there a point at which giving it another go is delusional? Pushing on for its own sake, rather than striving for a goal you've a hope of attaining? Isn't there a stick-tointiveness that starts to look pathetic? For heaven's sake, I'm twentyseven."

  "You're twenty-six."

  "Twenty-seven," she corrected. "As of today."

  Eric covered his eyes. "Oh, God, Willy. I'm sorry." But when he lowered his hands, he was clearly relieved. Forgetting her birthday was a catastrophe on a scale he could handle.

  "Don't worry, I'm not in the mood for cake." She reclined to the far side of the sofa.