Double Fault (42 page)

  Abstractly, she recognized that love was paramount, that a good man's devotion could not be measured in anything so trifling as tennis trophies. Abstractly, she grasped that the best recompense for a stymied ambition was Eric's kiss on her temple after gnocchi and Sherlock Holmes. Abstractly, she could see how if she allowed passing travails to derail the only other thing of value in her life,
she
would never forgive herself
. But all these insights floated unattached, hovering weightlessly over the crumbled court of her childhood—as worthless and impertinent to the moment as the principles of quantum physics. Incapable of acting on his well-intended but ultimately wasted good advice, Willy threw herself into her father's arms and wept, grieving over her own calamitous lack of foresight.

Y
OU'LL BE PLEASED TO
hear I lost the semis." Eric slammed the door. Willy didn't protest, though for once she couldn't have cared less whether he made it to the Pilot Pen finals. "I'm sorry," she said mechanically.

  She was sitting at the dining table, bent at the broken angle her father had described in Montclair, fingering the list from the WTA that arrived in that morning's mail. Though the sheaf contained one thousand names, "Novinsky" was nowhere to be found. Scanning the last page, she could as well have returned from beyond the grave to find a stranger's surname on her buzzer. The WTA had posted Willy Novinsky her own obituary.

  When she leaned forward to rest her face in her hands, her breasts bulged up from the walnut, firm and tender. Willy had

always regarded them as a nuisance to bandage out of the way, and now no running bra could pin them, boyishly immobile, to her chest.

  "Of course, if you'd
come
you could have watched me walloped firsthand. Missed a thrill." Eric was banging around the apartment, pitching his rackets in the foyer, disturbing the others, and they fell.

  "I had something else to attend to."

  "You had to wash your hair. Visit a sick friend. Should have reserved those lines for our first few dates. Would have saved me a peck of heartache."

  "Yes. I'm sure you wish I had."

  Eric stopped flinging sports clothes from his bag and grimaced. "I take that back. I shouldn't have said that."

  "Oh, Eric." Willy massaged her forehead. "If I only said what I
should
, we wouldn't carry a conversation."

  "Can you even remember the last time you watched me play?" Eric resumed. "And are you ever planning to attend one of my matches again, or from now on am I on my own? Me, I've opted out of tournaments to urge you on. Organized my whole summer schedule around helping you find your game. I've rallied with you, played the same gig, entered that mixed doubles, dug up Milton Edsel…what do I get in return?"

  "Grief," Willy volunteered.

  "So what about the Open? I'm playing in the goddamned U.S. Open next week; can I expect my own wife to show up, or will you have 'something else to attend to'?"

  She let him rant. He'd earned a tirade and more, though his timing was poor. "I'm doing my best to generate you an additional spectator."

  He appeared to read nothing into the coy remark but evasion. Eric marched off to stuff his sweaty clothes in the hamper. Losses usually put him in a shrugging, fuck-it humor, but this evening the Pilot Pen had triggered something else. He seemed to blame her. Fair enough, Willy should sometimes experience the irrational imputation on the receiving end.

  "Has Max been any help?" she asked, doodling desultory spirals on the ranking list.

  "Good God,
interest in my life!
That must have cost you. As a matter of fact, he takes great pleasure in bossing me around. And he wants to change so much at this late date—grip, stance, you name it—that he may have taken me on to sabotage my first Slam."

  "No, shaping you into a champion would make much more effective revenge."

  "For what?"

  She sighed.

  "He's a cold customer. I don't think there's much chance we're getting married…. My." Eric checked his watch. "It's only nine. Time for another cozy, romantic evening. Maybe we could head to Flor De Mayo and relive our glorious getting-to-know-you, the prelude to all this wedded bliss." The S hissed. He'd reverted to the proper name of the restaurant. Presumably he reserved pet monikers for people he felt close to.

  "I don't have much appetite."

  "You never do. I might add, for
anything
."

  "I did seven weeks ago," she said precisely.

  "Oh, right. The guilt fuck." Eric picked up tennis magazines and straightened the bedspread covering their bloodstained couch. His fussing impugned her—dragging around the apartment all day she might at least have found time to clean up—but he hadn't the nerve to say so out loud. "You eat so little lately, it amazes me how you've put on some weight. What, are you bingeing in secret now? Christ, when we met you were so well adjusted."

  "You're the victim of wife-swapping, my dear. I'm not the person you married."

  "A clever dodge," said Eric, working a shard from around the Gay Nineties volleyball player. Willy had left both frames hanging with their glass still shattered, their remaining splinters pointed reminders of the night she lost control. "You're not yourself, so you can't be held responsible for what some impostor does."

  Willy slid forward on her elbows, pushing the WTA rankings aside. "Eric, please." She rubbed her cheeks; the skin was tight and dry. A persistent metallic taste leaked from her gums, as if she'd been sucking on a nickel.

  "I'm sorry I'm not in the finest of moods, because I just lost a very big tournament in front of hundreds of people—incredibly,
total strangers
will turn out to watch me play—and I'm about to enter my first Grand Slam and that makes me edgy. Except, whoops!" Eric pitched a shard to the trash can; a three-pointer. "I forgot. I don't have problems."

  "Eric, I'm pregnant." She blurted it out. The subject was hardly going to arise of its own accord.

  As he flushed, the pink scar slicing through his eyebrow went scarlet. "God, I—" He was holding another fragment from the poster, and waved it around, unsure where to put it. "I feel like such a heel, I—"

  "Don't put that in your pocket."

  He fished it out. Placing it on the table, he looked embarrassed. Having seen his share of sappy sitcoms, Eric must have felt duty bound to lunge for her groceries and insist she sit down, but she was already seated. And the burdens Willy shouldered were not so easily lifted as paper bags.

  Eric knelt by her chair. "Honey, that's great."

  Willy cocked an eyebrow. "Is it?"

  "You know I didn't want to wait until we were decrepit. Kids deserve young parents. The timing's good."

  "For whom?"

  "For us."

  She looked at him askance; of late they rarely shared the same pronoun. "One minor sticking point. How many pro tennis players have you seen waddling around the court with a beach ball in their shorts?"

  "Of course you'd have to take some time out—"

  "Honestly, at my age isn't 'taking time out' a euphemism for retirement?"

  "But we're not talking hypothetically here." Eric got up off his knees. "You're pregnant—physically pregnant right now—so the question's not Well, is this the absolute, exact moment you'd choose to have a child? I'm not right-wing about abortion, Willy, but I don't like it—"

  "Oh, who
likes
it?"

  "
I don't like it
," he repeated. "And we don't have an excuse.

We've got money, we're married, neither of us is in junior high school. If you think childbearing would be a strain on us right now, I guarantee you that flushing our own kid down the John would do us more damage by far."

  Willy screeched her chair back. "Are you threatening me?"

  "Are you seriously suggesting that we not take this child to term because of
tennis
?"

  "Don't sound so derisive when it's what you do for a living."

  "It's not important!"

  "Tennis seemed awfully important to you when you walked in the door tonight." Willy circled the room. "But I'm supposed to blow it off. Oh, sure, I'll carve one, two years out of my prime, no problem!"

  "Some prime," Eric muttered.

  Willy wheeled. "Whether or not I have been down on my luck the last two years, I've devoted my whole life to this sport."

  "You're only twenty-seven. You've no business talking about a
whole life
."

  "It's all the life I've got. And now you expect me to throw it over for your scruples. Have you taken one minute to think about what would happen? Even though tennis is 'unimportant,' Daddy would keep slugging away—zipping all over the world, sending postcards, and asking Mommy to put Junior on the phone. Who'd do all the work? And what kind of a mother am I likely to be when every time I look at my own kid I can only see sixteen tournaments a year that I'm not playing?"

  "Nothing would keep you from going back to it."

  "What, go on tour with a stroller? And leaving aside that pregnancy itself can total your body, I'd have to start at ground-zero again—"

  "You're
already
at ground-zero!"

  They faced each other, breathing hard. Willy's face flashed cold; her raised hands blanched white.

  "For two years," said Eric, lowering his voice, "I've said it's salvageable, Willy, you've got the goods, Willy, you just have to get your head in gear, Willy, you're so talented, give it another try …And meanwhile you scoff at me for being a Pollyanna, for massaging you with platitudes, though I've never known what you expect me to say instead. You're all washed up? All right, then.
You're all
washed up.

  She couldn't remember Eric saying something cruel that he did not immediately take back. She waited. He didn't take it back.

  "It's bitter medicine." Eric grasped her by the shoulders firmly so that she couldn't wriggle free. "But there's more on the line now than your pride. Most women these days hit their peak in tennis by twenty. For a long time I did believe you could turn it around, so I haven't been full of shit. But this 'slump' of yours has gone on long enough that what began as some bad breaks and a passing surfeit of anxiety has blossomed into a full-fledged loser complex. Which could take years for you to beat, if then. You know I know tennis history backwards and forwards. I've come across
no one
who has gone down so far for so long and has bounced back to become a top player. It's too late, Willy. You were once a remarkable athlete, but something happened. What that was I'm frankly beyond caring. But you won't sacrifice our child for another year of agony. Wilhelm, I said I'd help you any way I could, but this time not to put your shoulder to the wheel, but to
let tennis go
."

  Fleetingly, Willy wished her husband were a violent man. How much better if he'd hauled off and smacked her. True, Eric's homilies had often been torturous:
Don't let them see you sweat; Show your grit;
Half of any success is determination
. His barrage of mindless cliches had demonstrated little appreciation for the bruising she'd taken, for how incessant humiliation sapped the very quantity she called upon to persevere. And coming from a man who had little experience of disgrace, his sermons had inevitably come off as glib. But no insensitive, brainless aphorism had ever cut her to the quick like this unadorned advice that she should quit. Willy had regularly spewed her husband's spoon-fed pabulum encouragement back in his face. Yet served up instead this indigestible hard cheese, Willy could only swallow. There was nothing to say.

  Her posture erect, Willy swiveled calmly to the New Jersey Classic poster. Systematically, she worked the paper out from under the thin silver frame, avoiding the slivers on its edges. Having peeled the masking tape off the cardboard backing, Willy rolled the freed poster into a tube, secured it with a piece of tape, and rested it by the front door. Equally methodical, she disassembled the MOMA print. The figure's brightly striped swimming costume was inappropriately gay and goofy, like pajamas. His handlebar mustache tilted at an inserious angle, and the ebullience with which the man leapt from the frame with that orb at his fingertips had grown alien. For anyone to get so much pleasure out of a silly ball was childish.

  Willy's knee had seized again; it was difficult to bend it without wincing. Whisking to the kitchen, Willy kept her legs straight as a toy soldier's. She returned to the living room with a box of black garbage bags. After lifting off the top of the coffee table, Willy leaned it on its edge against the sofa. The chronology the ball discards once documented had already been disturbed when Willy tipped the table on her birthday. The disorder was no loss; the history the dead balls recorded was complete. Besides, the layers of muddied Penns and Dunlops was merely the sediment of a moderately promising tennis player whose gifts had come to nothing and whose name not even the sport's fanatics would ever know. Willy removed the balls three at a time, laying them in the bag, cautious to assure that none of them rolled off.

  When the box was empty, Willy twist-tied the bag and dragged the several hundred balls to sit by the tubes at the door. Standing at the nearest window, Eric studied a patch of the Hudson reflecting the lights of New Jersey through the black trees of Riverside Park. The moon was full. She could see only the back of his head. His crown was beginning to bald; a second moon shone in the lamplight between branches of black hair. Maybe, as with her father's face, something was wearing him away.

  When she took a second garbage bag to the bedroom, Eric remained at his lookout. Kneeling in the closet, she moved Eric's copious tennis shoes out of the way, keeping the pairs together. The boxes were stacked in the back. Within them the trophies still nestled in tissue. Before hefting them to the door, Willy checked that the cartons contained her own trifles, confirming that she