Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  “You’re a pro,” said Max.

  “Yes,” said Eric.

  “Ranked?”

  “972.”

  Max cocked his mouth. “Ways to go.”

  “I’d never picked up a racket with any seriousness until I was eighteen. My first year at Princeton I was on the basketball team.”

  “ Eighteen. Late.”

  “As in better than never.”

  They were both ignoring Willy, who was looking daggers at her new friend, the pro. She should have sensed it. At her stoop, his right palm had scratched her neck with lumpy calluses. He had not arrived at Sweetspot toting one racket but three, and as he zipped the Prince into its expensively padded case, she recognized the classic asymmetry of his arms: the right so comparatively overdeveloped that it suggested a skewed proportion of mind, as if a tennis player placed too much weight, literally, on one side of his life.

  “I’ll show you the showers,” she offered. Eric didn’t respond. His motions were jagged, his manner curt. The last time he was hammered he’d been jubilant; perhaps she was to infer from this truculence that he’d won the match.

  As she traipsed with her guest toward the locker rooms, Max motioned her back. “I know his strokes are rough,” he warned her quietly. “Sleazy. But underneath the junk, that kid can play.”

  Trudging across the field, Eric walked ahead, indulging the naturally extreme stride of a man at least six-two. They were trapped in the estranged silence of two people who had played tennis, but not with each other. And Willy could hardly make conversation about a match she had declined to follow so belligerently that she didn’t know who had won.

  “So what, we’re supposed to shovel institutional slop with a bunch of pampered, brain-dead sportsmen of tomorrow?”

  “There’s an Italian place in town. Max would lend us a car.”

  “Upchurch would lend you a car.” Eric kicked the ragweed.

  “For a sport in which you apparently have aspirations yourself, you don’t seem to have much respect for the folks who play it.”

  “You respect these people?” he asked incredulously.

  “Respect may be the wrong word. But the game itself—”

  “Is a pretty doable business. Sometimes you beat people at their own game not because you think it’s so all-fired marvelous but because you don’t.”

  Scurrying to keep up, Willy was mesmerized by the long, loose legs eating the ground with such blithe assurance. Surely it behooved her to defend the crowd in which she ran, but for a moment Eric’s contempt was liberating. He was right, in a way. The lofty regard in which most pro players held their calling was insupportably pompous. The majority of her “colleagues” were narrow, fatuous, and catty. All they wished for Willy was defeat, and in truth she owed them nothing. Though she’d always tried to keep the sport and its practitioners separate in her head, Eric lured her with the giddy freedom of seeing even tennis itself as “a pretty doable business,” a skill she had mastered but did not master her. For Willy’s reverence for tennis was a tyranny—the more gravity she gave it, the more it crushed her when she fell short of the sport’s uncompromising standards. Any man who found the diversion ordinary would have a peculiar power.

  Eric waved his hand over the manicured lawns. From this distance the school’s tidy Colonial Revivals looked contrived, self-consciously New England, precious. “This crowd makes me puke.”

  “Then why would you yourself want—?”

  “To whip them where it hurts most.”

  “You don’t think there’s something special about someone who can play spectacular tennis?” asked Willy, nervous that to join him in denouncing this crew was not necessarily to escape being lumped in with them as well.

  “I think there’s something special about the way you play tennis.” He stopped. “Or maybe I just think there’s something special about you, and fuck the tennis.”

  Willy had long regarded herself and her strokes as synonymous. “Love me, love my game,” she said warily.

  He conked her lightly on the back of the head with the heel of his hand. “You’re warped.”

  “That waitress knows your name,” Eric charged.

  “There’s not much to choose from in Westbrook.”

  “Who’d you come here with?”

  “Various people,” said Willy stolidly.

  “Uh-huh.” He stabbed four calamari rings on the same fork and drowned them in hot sauce.

  “You regard yourself as a jealous man?”

  “Not especially. But when a situation calls for jealousy, I can rise to the occasion.”

  The Boot of the Med subdued her. She’d had second thoughts about coming here on the drive over. The hideaway had once seemed so enchanted, despite garish red lighting and clichéd Chianti bottles fat with candle wax. Maybe she’d have better left the past undisturbed, and not disillusion herself by discovering this was a tacky dive with bad food.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting at the courts today,” Willy submitted, prepared for reassurance that he hadn’t minded.

  “Just don’t let it happen again,” Eric said instead, and did not wait for the next subject to be gracefully introduced. “Overgrown boys like Max Upchurch piss me off. They go out and make scads of money doing for a living what in a sane world is leisure amusement, well, okay. They didn’t make the rules, I guess.”

  Willy smiled. “Max did make the rules. He helped bully Wimbledon into Open tennis.”

  “So he’s a scam artist. It’s not against the law. But what gets me is these muscleheads turn forty and still expect little girls to whisper, He used to be number six! They convince every brat who’s ever hoisted a ball over the net with the help of a forklift that he’ll be swelling in a limousine before he’s twenty. Meanwhile, his parents cough up twenty thousand a year for a third-rate education. All right, I’ll give Upchuck this: for a geezer he can still play. He beat me cold today and I don’t even think I taxed him. I tried, too. But I don’t like the way he acts as if he owns you and I don’t like the way he touches you and before I get into this any deeper I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  Willy discovered that she was pleased Max had won. Here, she had offered up to Eric. This is my coach; his excellence is my excellence. Take defeat at his hands as evidence of my worthiness for yours.

  THREE

  “SO, WHAT, UPCHUCK’S BEEN schtuping you since you were twelve?” Eric snapped a breadstick.

  “We didn’t meet until I was seventeen.” Willy folded her arms in front of the gummy pasta that Eric was bound to finish for her.

  “Beyond statutory. A stand-up guy.”

  “Exasperatingly so, if you have to know.”

  “How’d you hook up with him, anyway?”

  “Max was the one serendipitous result of my father’s determination that I not turn pro. Max and I were both on vacations that made good on the emptiness of the word.”

  Having become the number three amateur in the New Jersey juniors by sixteen, Willy had exhausted most of the local competition but was not allowed the financing or time off from high school to participate in tournaments far afield. With the U.S. Open nearby in Flushing Meadow, in 1986 Willy had anticipated skipping her usual ballgirl stint to take a last crack at the junior title, even if that meant plowing through the qualifying rounds. Naturally this was also the summer that her father resolved to take his family on a cross-country car trip, into which Willy was summarily drafted.

  Outraged at being denied the National Tennis Center, she spent the long, hot drives hunched in the backseat saying nothing. Willy particularly froze out Gert, who’d made a great show of being willing to come along as a college sophomore and had urged Willy to be, as Gert would say, mat-yure.

  Willy hadn’t been ma-cher. She left the family stranded in the Mount Rushmore souvenir shop to go for a six-mile run. Her sole interest was in finding a motel with a court, and in completing the day’s loathsome sight-seeing before the light waned and it wa
s too late to scavenge a partner. Like the rest of her high school gym class, neither Gert nor her father would play her anymore.

  Chuck Novinsky was tightfisted, but limited vacancies in Nevada drove him to a luxury motel. At least The Oasis would mollify his second daughter, since it harbored three tennis courts.

  The resort also hired a resident pro, a former 600-something who preyed on wealthy travelers working off their afternoon ice creams. Though Ed Sanders was going to seed from rum sours, he strutted those three baking hardcourts as if taking a second bow at the Foro Italico. As Willy later remarked to Max Upchurch, “Big prick, small pond.”

  Willy skipped a canvass of the old bags and brats in the lobby and went straight to Sanders. He was practicing his serve; the sizzling topspins all landed two feet deep.

  “Hey, mister.” Willy sidled to his baseline. “Game?”

  “I charge sixty bucks an hour, sweetheart. Better check with your daddy first.” She was treated to the beefcake smile for free.

  The Oasis was already bankrupting her father. At the additional expense of some charlatan’s worthless counsel her father would blow a gasket.

  “Tell you what,” Willy proposed, tossing a Wilson hand to hand. “You win, I pay you double. I win, you pay me.”

  “Okay, darling. You’re on.”

  Those were the days when not a cloud of hesitation had shadowed Willy’s sunny certainty that she could take all comers. She sometimes supposed that had she sustained her adolescent sense of peerlessness by now she could be in the Top Ten. It was astonishing how far blind self-regard could take you, even if the braggadocio was arguably unfounded. For Willy had made the common error as a teenager of mistaking for excellence what was merely potential.

  “I wasn’t as good as I thought,” she told Eric. “Still, playing Ed Sanders was like taking candy from a grown man.”

  When the bill arrived at Boot of the Med, Willy dived for her wallet, Eric held up his hand. Apparently he would pick up checks as a kindness but not as an obligation.

  “Halfway through this wham-bam-thank-you-mister match,” she resumed in the car, “a face appeared behind the fence. Just like you. Beady eyes, fingers crimped around the wires. I gave the guy a show. I was so pissed off. The junior qualies were starting in Queens, and here I was glowering out car windows at the Painted Desert.

  “I’d no idea who the guy was. When he saw Sanders fork out the sixty bucks, he asked if I was tuckered out. So I put the sixty back on the line, figured I’d double it. Like fun. This time I’d been hustled. I was playing Maximilian Upchurch. He put me right in my place, which at the time was the only way to get my attention.

  “Max took the sixty bucks to teach me a lesson. Then he bought me a soda and grilled me about my training. It was such a relief to find anybody who gave a damn. My parents and teachers were goading me to learn the Pythagorean theorem; I’d never had a serious conversation about my forehand. I felt like the ugly duckling who’d finally met a swan.”

  Willy parked the school car at Sweetspot. Ambling, she instinctively drifted toward the courts.

  “We met up in the piano bar that night,” she rambled. “Max and I were in the same boat. His wife had refused to spend one more summer schlepping to tournaments and buying his clients corn kits. She wanted a real holiday, with nothing to do with tennis. To salvage the marriage, he’d agreed.”

  “My wife has no interest in tennis,” Max had explained. “Or, I take that back. She hates tennis. Which is a kind of interest, I suppose.”

  Willy had stirred her Virgin Mary. “How could anyone marry a tennis coach and dislike the sport?”

  He smiled, dismally. “You’re too young to understand, but it makes perfect sense. Why, it’s almost inevitable.” He reveled in her naïveté. Max told her anything, the way you confide in a dog.

  “But I’d think turning against tennis would be the same as turning against you.”

  “Duh,” he said.

  It seemed the Upchurch’s marriage wasn’t flourishing on their edifying scenic drives, since every evening Max wolfed his dinner and rushed back to the motel to scan cable channels for Ivan Lendl. As a reprieve from Taco Heaven and Navaho beadwork, he’d loiter soulfully on public courts to side-eye local talent. But his subversion of their “vacation from tennis” into the stalking of a new junior discovery was the last straw. At the end of the couple’s stay in The Oasis, Max was free to tail the Novinsky’s Chrysler to Yellowstone, since his wife had flown back to Hartford to file for divorce.

  “So when you returned to New Jersey,” Eric prodded as Willy led him to the Sweetspot courts, “Max proposed.”

  “To be my coach, dickhead.”

  Having plowed up their Montclair drive, Max had offered Willy a contract: he’d coach her pro bono in exchange for 20 percent of her winnings the first five years of her pro career. “You’re pretty,” he’d observed cynically, lounging against his Saab Turbo. “The money’s in sponsors. Your face would sell.” Max had appraised her clinically up and down, as if she were a head of cattle. For months after she’d act more temperamentally than came naturally, if only to be recognized as a girl.

  “Max offered me a full scholarship to Sweetspot for my senior year.” Willy kicked open the chain-link gate. “But my father wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Upchuck made him nervous.”

  “His worries proved unwarranted. Contrary to your sleazy assumptions, Max never laid a hand on me. And I was dying for him to. I used to lie in bed at night fantasizing about winning some big tournament, and Max would sweep down from the stands and lift me over his head—”

  “Like I did.”

  “Like you did,” she said shyly. “But I never earned better than a clap on the shoulder and a slug of Gatorade.” Even now, her voice was melancholy. “At any rate, I was allowed to take the bus to Connecticut on weekends if I promised to go to college. Later I tried to renege on the deal, but Max was on my father’s side. Max said he wasn’t grooming an imbecile. Later I wondered which slot he was grooming me for. He didn’t push his other students to go to college.”

  “So far I don’t understand why I’m not speaking to the second Mrs. Upchurch. That’s the usual program.”

  “He was waiting. He wanted me to make an informed decision as an adult. That was his mistake.” The deserted facility was lit by the single floodlight of the moon, and Willy sank onto what for no rational reason was her favorite court. She laid her palms flat, soaking up heat from the tar.

  “By this spring, the tension had become unbearable,” she continued, leaning against the fence. “Pausing outside the women’s locker room, he’d repeat some coachy tip I’d heard a million times, just to keep talking. Or we’d dawdle by my dorm before I hit the sack and stand a little too far apart because any closer and we’d have had to do something.” She shrugged. “So finally we did something.”

  “But it didn’t last long,” she went on quietly. “Weeks. Oh, I won’t pretend that the first few nights weren’t a dream come true. But during practice nothing was the same. We started quarreling. I balked at his advice; I didn’t like his pushing me around. I’m sure he’d told me to ‘move my fat ass’ before, but suddenly I got offended, and I’d stomp away in a snit. Then one morning in May … Still chilly, I guess. It was eight-thirty, late for me. I started to get up. He reached for me and mumbled, ‘It’s cold. Come back to bed.’ That was the end.”

  “You lost me.”

  “It wasn’t cold. Not especially. And what did I care if it was five below? It was time to practice, and he didn’t give a damn anymore. I’d started questioning everything: why he chose me in Nevada, whether he really thought I was gifted or just liked my legs. His every stingy compliment sounded in retrospect like a pick-up line. I was convinced that other players were laughing at me behind my back. For years I thought that all I wanted was Max. I wanted one thing more.”

  Willy reclined flat onto the court, its warmth steeping through her jeans and cotton shirt. Eric l
owered himself on top of her and exhaled. “You’re warning me that I better not get on the wrong side of your racket?”

  But sandwiched between Eric and number seven, Willy had her first intuition that it might be possible to have a man on one side and a court on the other. “I’m tipping you off,” she murmured, “that I’d rather play tennis than have sex.”

  “I’d rather play tennis,” he said, tugging her shirttail from her jeans and sliding his hand up her rib cage, “then have sex.” He was a math major, a calculating man; he prized a small foil packet from his watch pocket.

  “Right here?”

  Eric flipped her on top of him. “I’ve wanted to for years. After all, tennis is like sex, isn’t it? I think that’s why you like it. Thrusting across the net—the ball is just a medium, a messenger of love and loathing all rolled up in one. That antagonism—you’re enemies but you need each other. Listen to the language! Long-body, sweet spot, throat of the racket. Dish and shank, stab and slice, punch and penetrate—it’s pornographic!” Eric sidled her Levi’s down her thighs. “Approach and hold, break, break back, stroke, regain position, and connect—it’s romantic. And we both know that libidinal high from finally finding the right partner, and how you raise each other up. You never thought you could be so good, and they never thought they could be so good, and more than caring who wins, most of all you don’t want to stop … Good God, Wilhelm.” He had grasped her buttocks, one in each hand. “Your buns are about as pliant as Goodyear radials.”

  Willy faced the fact that she’d always wanted to do it here as well. It was significant that she and Max had never thought to, as if they’d sensed that number seven and Max’s bed were incompatible. When she wriggled from Eric to step from her jeans, being naked here felt normal. She always felt naked playing tennis, each blemish on her character laid bare: every unjustified conceit or nascent timidity, the least laziness, flagging, or despair. The body, in comparison, was a trench coat.

  In one motion Eric shed his grungy black T-shirt, and so revealed an unsuspected artistry of torso, as the sly elegance of a surprise drop-shot is covered until the last moment of opening the face. While Willy had indulged a few flings with other athletes at UConn, the dullness of their conversation had cast a pall over their anatomies, the idealized bodies prosaic and lifeless as line drawings in Gray’s. With more than one Adonis she’d remained so unaroused that she’d dragged her shirt back on and trudged off to her own dorm. Willy had supposed it took some aching flaw—a belly sag, an appendectomy scar—to capture her imagination. But while Eric had no flaws to speak of, an intriguing stir across his shoulders flickered the moonlight from plane to plane, like the facets of a mirror ball, or a series of complex, interlocking ideas.