Double Fault (8 page)

  "It's inhuman! If your face never tingles with humiliation when someone slams an ace down your throat, if you don't experience a trace of exasperation when you muff a simple drive that you'd hit right since you first picked up a racket—well, then, I can't see how you could have feelings about anything!"

  "Like what?"

  She squirmed. "I don't know, whatever…"

  "
Like what?
" he needled into her neck, teasing up under her chin, where he knew she was ticklish.

  "
Me!
" Willy tried not to laugh. "Me, me me!" He moved to her ribs, which precluded addressing this very serious issue in their relationship with proper gravity. "All your fascist blather about
control
…and that snotty, antiquated bullshit about
dignity…
" She wriggled out of his clutches long enough to deliver, "And on top of that, you need 'variety' and get 'bored easily'!"

  Eric backed off, shaking his head. "So if I could possibly get bored with tennis, of course I'll get bored with you."

  "Well, how do I know? You play like a martinet. You have no commitment to tennis, since you
look forward
to quitting. Where's the devotion, the fire? Taken to its extreme, self-possession is mentally ill!"

  In a single motion, Eric slipped one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her off the couch. He marched with Willy bundled against his chest to the bedroom and dropped her, bouncing, on the mattress. He dropped on top, stretching her arms overhead with both her wrists manacled in his hands.

  "
Mentally ill
," Eric lectured, "is not knowing the difference between some stupid little sport and real life. One of the main reasons I like Edberg and Becker is they keep their careers in perspective. They recognize that the rest of the world would roll merrily along without them
or
tennis, if it came to that.

  "Now, do I feel anything on the court?" he asked rhetorically, his forehead pressed against her own. "Sometimes. I don't show it, and that's a gambit. I play better when I don't give my reactions away. But tennis is not about 'everything,' you moron, not by a mile. Sure I like control, and dignity, in its place. This," his hands slid down her arms, "ain't the place."

  Grappling under her shirt, Eric popped a button. Willy decided this was not a very good time to go look for it. When he unzipped his fly his cock sprang forward, and for once Eric didn't seem selfpossessed but simply possessed. He wouldn't wait for them both to get all their clothes off, and plunged into her with his jeans still binding his thighs. Willy had always considered fucking partially clad tacky, but now she changed her mind. Urgency took precedence over aesthetics. Apparently Eric did not always bother about appearances, about what people might think; he groaned loudly enough to titillate adjoining tenants. Yet his consideration was not so readily shed as his sense of decorum; even in the heat of the moment, he'd managed to slip a condom on.

  Eric flipped her gracefully on top, and grasped Willy by the waist. He raised her whole body until the tendons in his arms stood out. Bringing her pelvis back tight to his, he bellowed. In the echo of his exclamation, a rich, round cry she had never heard issue from that throat, Willy gaped wondrously at Eric's face. The muscles spasmed. The sharp planes of his brow and cheekbones sloughed and blurred. His countenance was almost unrecognizable; he didn't look clever, caustic, or
contained
. Some people would have found the contortion of his features ugly. To Willy, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and she came.

  Turnabout was fair play. If the seemly Eric Oberdorf could wake up half of 112th Street with an orgasmic roar, the volcanic Willy Novinsky could keep the lid on for one tennis game. The next day she tempted Eric into another match at Riverside. Willy insisted on the northern courts, whose surface eccentricities her boyfriend detested. To Eric, a court was an idealized graph from which the ball should take predictable trajectories if you'd got your equations right. This Oberdorf was Germanic by nature and liked order. A Novinsky had a genetic Eastern European predisposition to chaos. Willy was only delighted that overhanging branches had recently baptized number eight with a shower of purple berries, whose pits were rolling across the composition like violet ball bearings.

  Rather than click her heels at a winner or bop her forehead when she botched a gift put-away, this afternoon Willy set her face into the very impassive mask she had learned from Eric himself. No whistles of admiration, racket twirling, or knocking the frame on her shoe. Instead, Willy marched woodenly from serve to serve without one stomped foot. Stifling her running monologue, today she straightened her mouth in a line so flat that were it an EKG the patient would be dead. When Eric asked if his serve was a let she would only nod.

  "Are you upset about something?" he worried on the second changeover.

  She shook her head rigidly, though whether or not she was upset had nothing to do with
getting on with the job.

  Whatever Eric seemed to want she denied him. He loved to dive for low, whistling passes, so each time he rushed the net she lobbed—exquisite topspin arcs cresting a few tantalizing inches from the tip of his racket. He'd streak to his baseline, plow back again,
bloop
…When he paced up his game, she dragged the points to a crawl.

  And Willy had never been more coldly conniving. Her sidespins were given a happy assist when they landed on berries. She'd sweep her racket back as if for a doozy and at the very last second bring it to a shrieking halt;
dink
, the ball would cough over the tape and wheeze to Eric's feet. Finally, when he'd been lulled into anticipating only junk, she'd let tear, jangling the ball into the fence. Composed and serenely mechanical, Willy dispatched the first set 6–2.

  Receiving in the second at 5–1, Willy reflected that she'd aimed only to enrage him, to teach Eric that he could be fervid once he got out of bed. Yet her methods had begun to backfire. The score was sweet enough; she needed only to break him this game, or hold the next. But instead of at last revealing his wit's end—by kicking another of her winning balls at the net, or at least shooting her a glare—Eric had started to laugh.

  His serve went wiggly and folded into her service court, as if itself doubled over in hysterics. She flattened it. He didn't even attempt to retrieve, and wiped away a tear. Willy narrowed her eyes to make them all the more steely, and disciplined her mouth to a bar. Meanwhile he had started to hoot, losing his balance and gasping for breath. At love—40, match point, he shoveled a fat, juicy floater to her midcourt. She squashed it. Barely able to get the words out through his guffaws, he said something.

  The match over, it was now permissible to speak. "What was that?" asked Willy courteously.

  This time he shouted unmistakably, "Marry me!"

  Willy cartwheeled her racket fifteen feet in the air, and caught it neatly by the grip. Oberdorf had finally displayed a little passion on the tennis court.

I
F TWENTY-THREE WAS YOUNG
to marry for 1992, Willy did not situate herself in modern history any more than she regarded herself as American. She owed allegiance to the tennis court, whose lines described a separate country, and to whose rigid and peculiar laws she adhered with the fervor of patriotism. Likewise Willy conceived of her lifespan in terms of the eighteenth century. As a tennis player, she would at best survive to forty; twenty-three was middle-aged.

  That the institution of marriage had been thoroughly discredited by the time Willy was born didn't delay her acceptance of Eric's proposal by ten seconds. Granted, her own parents set a poor example; Willy envied neither her glumly patriarchal father nor his cheerfully submissive sidekick. But she might have envied her parents at their first meeting, in 1961: when her mother, Colleen, was a flighty modern dance student, leaping through recitals to the beat of bongos inside a helix of scarves, and her father, Charles, was an undiscouraged beatnik scribbler, whose pockets bulged from squiggled napkins and leaky ballpoint pens. Willy clung to the notion that nothing about marriage itself condemned her mother to dismiss an ambition to dance as vain folly, nor her father to turn on his own credulous literary aspirations with such a snarl. And surely had she wed in this more liberal era, the acquiescent Colleen might have told Charles to get a grip and stop moaning and sometimes gone her own way. Despite overwhelming evidence that both true love and domestic balance of power were myths, Willy still believed in the possibility of an ardent, lasting union between equals, much as many religious skeptics still kept faith in an afterlife because the alternative was too unbearable.

  So all through a militantly independent young adulthood Willy had been waiting. At last along came Eric Oberdorf, who radiated the same clear-eyed courage that shone from pictures of her father in the early sixties—before Charles joined the opposition in celebrating his own defeat. Willy had inherited her mother's grace, and given it structure and purpose. Together she and Eric could rewrite history, which may have been what children were for.

  As for Eric, Willy's primary concern was that he might regard marriage, like his so far useless degree in mathematics, as an end in itself. Eric had a modular mind. He might not conceive of pro tennis as death row, but he thought of his life in blocks, and therefore as a series of little deaths. But Willy knew enough about the altar to be sure that marriage demarcated not only the successful completion of a project, but the beginning of another, far more demanding endeavor.

"Daddy, it's Willy."

"
Hola!"

  Willy let the receiver list. Her father had never forgiven her for majoring in Spanish. "You're going to interpret for the UN?" he'd inquired dryly when informed of her decision. "No, I'll sell veggie burritos in Flushing Meadow," she'd snipped back. "Which by the time I finish this BA is the closest I'm going to get to the U.S. Open." Her father held nothing more against Spanish people than against anyone—meaning he held a great deal against them, indeed. But he knew that she'd chosen an easy major to have maximum free time for the tennis team.

  "
Qué tal?
" asked Willy.

  "Nothing ever changes here, Willow, you know that."

  "You could always get old and die," she recommended. "At least that would get it over with."

  "It's important to keep something to look forward to."

  "Listen, I have someone I want you to meet."

  "Another brain surgeon?"

  "Yes, he's a tennis player, Daddy," she said impatiently. "But with a degree from Princeton."

  "A tennis player with a degree!" he exclaimed. "You told me that was impossible."

  Willy almost hung up. If she could barely make it through this phone call, how was she going to survive the whole evening she proposed? "How about Friday night? We'll take the seven-twenty from Port Authority."

  "I'm sure I can squeeze you and your young man into my busy social calendar."

  "Listen, Daddy," she added effortfully. "I really like this guy. Could you…be friendly?"

  "Willow, I'm always—"

  "I mean, don't be quite such a gloomy Gus? Like, don't rain on any parades for one night."

  "Gloomy! After an electrifying week of teaching budding car mechanics commonly confused words, I'm sure to be happy as a clam."

  "Oh, never mind," said Willy, and hung up with a sigh.

  "When you first talked about your father, I thought he was some working-class stiff," Eric swung the Chateauneuf du Pape in its plastic bag, "not an English professor."

  "I'm sorry if I seem dismissive of his job," Willy mumbled. "But that's the product of careful coaching."

  They were standing in line at Gate 413. Willy was relieved that the bus was late. Her stomach knotting, she now wished they'd brought two bottles of wine.

  "When I was a kid my father sensed I admired him," Willy went on, "since any little girl would. I must have been—oh, eleven, alone with my father in the car. He explained that most of his classes could barely read, so if teachers were judged by the quality of their students my father was, I quote, 'the bottom of the barrel.' He announced that with a weird, vicious pleasure."

  "What's his problem?" asked Eric as the line began to move. "Bloomfield College isn't a great school, but it's not disgraceful."

  "To Chuck Novinsky it is. I didn't understand until I was fifteen. Nobody had told me. I was pottering in the attic when I found a box of duplicate hardbacks. Unappealing cover—plain; I think it was cheap.
In the Beginning Was the Word
, by Charles Novinsky."

  Eric chuckled. "A little inflated, if you don't mind my saying so. What was it, criticism?"

  Willy glanced at her fiancé in the light streaming through the door of Gate 413. A fresh feeling came off of him that had nothing to do with having ironed his shirt for the occasion. His mental basement wasn't knee-deep in naysaying bilge; the storage in his parents' ritzy East Side apartment wouldn't breathe musty disillusionment.

  "A novel," she said sorrowfully, climbing into the bus and snuggling by a window. "Begpool Press, 1962—never heard of them."

  "Did you read it?"

  "I had a feeling that I shouldn't mention the books to my father. So I sneaked up to the attic with a flashlight."

  "Was it any good?"

  "I don't know," she puzzled.

  Had her father's book been any good? Naturally the novel had commented on the nature of literature, and there wasn't a soul who wanted to read about
that;
likewise it celebrated the power of language, a power he now derided. The plot was playful, about a novelist whose every printed word came to life. (She loved it when a mixed metaphor gave rise to a grotesque behemoth slouching toward the narrator's house until he frantically rewrote it.) But the prose clanked with thesaurus plunder, a whole paragraph conceived to accommodate
stereotropism
. Still, the slim volume seemed an eager, trusting effort and couldn't have deserved the scathing reviews shoved down the side of the box.