Double Fault (43 page)

wasn't chucking Eric's tributes by mistake. This housecleaning was the least painful—trophies were chaff—or would have been the least painful if she felt anything at all. Instead the only twinge was from her knee, stabbing from her stoop in the closet.

  Yet at the next renunciation, Eric would have noticed a flicker of hesitation if he'd been watching, which he was not. The recently disturbed rackets in the foyer were mixed up, and she had to sort through them to retrieve her own from among the Wilsons. ProKennex was a lesser-known make, though you could hardly call it an off-brand. While Willy no longer played the same racket for years as she had the Davis Imperial in her childhood, nonetheless she had employed successive generations of this uncommon line since college. Sticking to the same brand had given the series a sense of heritage and relation.

  Willy felt sorry for the rackets. This early retirement was not their fault. Had Eric not been standing by the window, she'd have apologized out loud. But there was no point in leaving them for her husband; the grip sizes were too small, and he was contractually obliged to play Wilsons in public. Willy supposed that she could have donated the equipment to the Salvation Army. But Willy's rackets had standards, and she was loath to subject these stalwart allies to the loose wrists, late preparation, and poor follow-through of some bargain-hunting slacker. Surely they'd prefer a dignified burial. She might have carted them to the cans downstairs slung on her shoulder in their cases, but she didn't want them to see. Willy placed them in a black bag with the kindness of binding firing-squad targets with a blindfold.

  With a third bag, Willy went for the mop-up, though her motions had slowed. For brief beats she would forget what she was doing. Must be the pregnancy; they said it made you spacey. On the desk facing the main room's second window, she located the
WTA Rule
book
and dumped it in the bag, leaving the ATP's. Blank tournament applications littered the desk; she sifted each pile to weed hers from Eric's. One completed form lay sealed in the out box. Before adding it to the rubbish, Willy tore off the uncanceled postage and slipped it in a drawer. Though he was wealthy now, Eric wouldn't approve of waste. Done. The remaining papers were dominated by USTA mailings: regulations, lists of hotels, and time schedules all pertaining to the upcoming U.S. Open.

  Collecting the ranking list from the dining table, Willy returned to the bedroom to prize photographs and clippings from the wall. She was willing to leave any pictures that did not have tennis rackets in them, that were not of tournaments, that hadn't been snapped on courts.

  There weren't any. Even the shots of her family were marred by the Crosshatch of Willy's strings; where she balanced on her father's shoulders at eight, a telltale green shimmered behind her flying hair. In every picture of her married life, she and Eric wore sports garb, or were caught after practice mopping sweat. All the more recent snaps of Willy captured that unsightly brace masking her knee, like tape over pornographic posters in Times Square. Last of all were their wedding pictures—Willy in high-heeled sneakers, Eric in white flannels kissing over a net: tennis. They all went in the bag.

  Once every scrap of grip, flash of hardcourt, and pleat of tennis dress were excised from the montage, little else remained besides residual yellow gum and the tiny perforations of pushpins. Willy herself was expunged. The sticky remnants and minute holes suggested that the enterprise was flawed—that every history, however edited, leaves marks. Yet notably, as she eradicated tennis, Eric as well vanished from the wall.

  Lugging the detritus to the elevator and hauling it to the cans in the basement took longer than it would have with assistance; Eric didn't help, though he also didn't stop her. Yet on her return upstairs, Willy wondered at how little time it had taken, really. "You must be hungry," she said evenly.

  "Not anymore."

  But it was only ten-thirty, and they both felt the same lifeless desperation to evacuate the premises that one might at the scene of an atrocity. Though even the voracious Eric was bound to stare dumbly at his chicken as if it were papier-mâché, they shambled out to Flor De Mayo after all. That's what they both called it: Flor De Mayo. Right before she shut the door, Willy caught the eerie gray loom of the New Jersey Classic frame, its cardboard blank, like the decor of a woman who has no interests.

  Willy had left a single souvenir behind on the bedroom wall: Eric's mutant eyebrow hair, pulled from the same spot now marked by a knit pink scar, as if the one hair had drawn blood. Still taped shyly on the edge of the ravaged collage, the scraggle was once plucked to prove what her father had cautioned: that some trophies can't be earned or sought but have to be offered.

"
Where the juck have you been?
" Once more, the door slammed.

  Willy sat on the couch, eyes to her lap. What she'd just put Eric through was so overtly abusive that it didn't bear contemplating. Instead she considered Edsel, with whom she'd canceled yesterday's appointment, and hunched with the old high school cringe of having cut class.

  "I came back from Flushing Meadow early so we could spend the evening together," Eric railed, "and no sign of you. I waited, and waited, it got late…I called your parents, I called Max, I even called
my
parents. I'm playing the U.S. Open
tonight
, Willy, and I got
no
sleep
. And I've just come back from the police."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, I've heard that a lot lately. Where
were
you?"

  Her lips parted, and nothing came out. To allow the words to escape would amount to being publicly sick. She looked to Eric in mute appeal; it wasn't that she would not speak, but could not. Overnight Willy had tutored her husband in helplessness, and he had learned his lesson.

  Eric raked his fingers through his hair, making a
pfffff
sound as if trying to slow his breathing. "You're OK, though?"

  "More or less."

  "Come here." He held out his hand. Willy rose, and Eric clutched her to his chest. "You look pale. I'm so relieved you're all right." Eric squeezed her until Willy was too weary to hold on anymore. Then he led her to the couch. She wished he wouldn't be so nice.

  "Listen," he said, "you scared the daylights out of me, but maybe that shocked me into something. I want to make you an offer." She nodded. "You know I'm always mouthing off about what jerks tennis jocks are. Last night I was thinking, maybe I'm a hypocrite. I want to beat them but I also want to join them. So maybe you think I'm an asshole. And maybe you're right."

  "I don't—"

  "Hear me out. This whole gig, even for me, is at most for another ten years. And obviously the danger is that you get out, you're not qualified for anything but one of those moronic commentating jobs."

  "But you could also—"

  "Hear me out. I know how hard it's been for you to watch me get somewhere and even make it to the Open, when that's all you've ever wanted for yourself. When you love the game so much, and I only like it. It's not fair, is it?"

  "But you do so well partly because—"

  "Let me finish." He clasped her hands. "People our age think there's all the time in the world to have a family. But this country is coast-to-coast with couples blowing thousands a whack on treatments to conceive. You never know when it's your only chance. So I want this baby, sweetheart. And I know the way you described it, that would be no good, with me on the road most of the year, you up to your eyeballs in Gerber and baby shit. So I wanted to propose a deal: if you have this kid, I'll quit."

  Willy looked at her husband in bafflement. "Quit—tennis?"

  "Lock, stock, and barrel. Except for kicks. Teach the kid to play, which would be a riot. Or you and me. Long summer afternoons in Riverside, just rallying, until the sun sets, until we can't stand up we're so whipped, and we limp off for chicken and rice. Like it used to be."

  "Oh, honey." Willy's shoulders caved inward. "It can never be like it used to be."

  Eric had cherished his hologram; he looked cross. "I don't see why not."

  "So you mean, like the Open. Tonight. You're not planning to go?"

  "No, I'll play." He squirmed. "You know, I'm obligated."

  She laid her hands gently on his. "Admit it. You've worked hard for this. You
want
to play."

  "Of course I want to! But after the Open, that's it."

  "What if I asked you to withdraw from the Open as well?" Willy tested.

  Eric was still. In his silence, she could see that he was bereaved. "I guess I'd say," he proceeded slowly, "that maybe you were being—unreasonable. But. If you really insisted. Yes. I would withdraw." By the time he got the words out, he looked spent.

  She touched his cheek, guiding his head to face her. "Look at you. How much giving up this one tournament would cut you up. Think of all the others. 'Unreasonable,' you said. Of course bartering your career for a family would be
unreasonable
. Do you think you could ever live with such a bargain? That I could? You're on a roll now, riding an emotional crest, but later you'd hate me."

  "I could never hate you," he said staunchly.

  "Is that right?" she asked, looking him in the eye. "Your deal isn't on, Eric, because I have nothing to trade."

  His expression went blank. "What?"

  "Last night I checked into a clinic."

  "Something went wrong?"

  "Nothing went wrong."

  He stood up, stricken. If he was driven to go, he did not know where. "Without asking me. Or telling me. Or talking about it."

  "There was nothing to discuss."

  When he turned he was smiling, though the grin had an ugly twist. "You're really trying, aren't you? Like, beyond the call of duty, the whole nine yards."

  Willy frowned. "Trying—?"

  "To force me to leave you."

  "I wouldn't say—"

  "I would. Why else? Why did you do it?"

  The cramps in Willy's uterus had started in earnest—thin, stiletto stabs. She pictured a pair of fencers, unskilled at their art, who kept missing each other and foisting their foils in her walls. The pain gave her focus, and she was grateful for it.

  Willy bowed her head. "I can't have a child as a substitute for a life."

  "Nobody was asking you to. Lots of women—"

  "But that's how it's felt the last few days. You practicing in Flushing Meadow while I stay home and take my vitamins. I know some women can flourish through their children. I can't. I'm too selfish. You said the timing was good. I thought the timing couldn't be worse: give up my profession and have a baby. It made me feel like someone else. Some lumbering vehicle for posterity. I started resenting the child for its opportunities, the same ones I've squandered. I could see it learning—"

  "A baby's not an
it
."

  "It is now," she said sharply, then averted her eyes. "I'm sorry. She, if you like. I could see our daughter learning to play tennis. You taking her to the park, just like my father…. With our genes combined, think what a natural she'd be, how talented…until she enters her first tournament. And all the while I'm on the sidelines keening,
Don't get your hopes
up."

  Eric faced her with an expression that Willy recognized from the baseline. She had long attributed his success in sport to nonchalance; on court he was fearless because losing didn't scare him much. Maybe she'd been unfair. If Eric's commitment was to himself and not to the game, that didn't make the commitment any less fierce. He won because he never gave up. He was suited to tennis because up until the very, very last point you could win, however dire the score. Right now he embodied the defiant optimism of receiving down 5–0 in the fifth set and refusing to roll over.

  "It won't work," he said stolidly. "I'm not leaving. If you want to end this marriage, you'll have to do it yourself."

  Willy's sanitary napkin had soaked through. The pad squished between her legs; a bubble formed and popped. The inside of her thighs felt damp, and a sweet, cloying smell rose from her lap. They'd said she'd bleed, but she hadn't been prepared for this Red Sea. The blood must have seeped beyond her thin summer skirt to the sofa. One more dark stain.

  Willy wadded the skirt in her hands. "You didn't fall in love with a loser."

"You're more than a tennis player, Willy—"

  "Not to
myself
." She looked up. "I know you love me, but I no longer know why."

  "That's for me—"

  "It's two-way. For your love to do me any good, I have to be able to see how you could feel that way about your wife. Can't you grasp why I might be in love with you?"

  "I have my points," Eric allowed warily.

  "Well, my points have always been a wicked slice backhand and a deadly drop shot."

  "Not to—"

  "To
me!
You're not listening!"

  "We can work through this—"

  "
Please
," Willy pleaded. "You've only been sweet to me. I wish I could say the same in reverse. I've treated you abominably, think I don't know that? And my every bitchy remark sticks in my own craw. Awful as you might find living with a cow, it's much more horrible to be one."

  Willy would have liked to roam the room, but she didn't want to expose the puddle on her skirt. Sitting while Eric paced, she felt like a suspect whose confessions were bound to contradict a detective's painstakingly constructed case. "When you finally told me a few days ago that I was 'washed up' in tennis, I couldn't believe you said that out of spite. I have faith in your judgment, and I think your advice was ironically kind. When I threw all that stuff away, I wasn't being melodramatic—"

  "Sure you weren't."