Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  Willy tromped up the brown steps, shuffled over the brown porch, and poked her head in the brown door. “Hola!”

  Her father dwelt on the paper in his lap a beat before looking up; she supposed it took him a moment to ready himself. Willy always seemed to drain him, and before he rearranged his features into arch remove, he looked stressed.

  Crinkled snapshots of Charles Novinsky at Willy’s age looked like portraits of some brave eldest later shot down in a war. The young man’s eyes were searing and his bearing was vertical; there was no presentiment in that face of the mortars to come. It took effort to see any relation to the jaded veteran she faced now. Her father’s rich curls had thinned to a dry frizzle, as if he’d been singed. Though his complexion was naturally ruddy, he had a psoriasis condition, and shedding skin flaked his cheeks gray.

  Her father adjusted his spectacles down his nose. “Say, I’ve been reading a Chomsky book that pertains to your calling. According to Noam, in the secular era sports are the opiate of the people. Seems the masses are enervated by vicarious gladiatorial contests, much the way they were once mesmerized by mumbojumbo in church.”

  “Eric,” said Willy, “this is my contentious, curmudgeonly father, who is trying his best to offend you before he even knows your name.”

  “Princeton, I hear.” They shook hands. “What possessed you to join the yahoos after earning a degree from a place like that?”

  “Willy and I plan to make millions in endorsements for deodorant,” Eric tossed easily back.

  They each took a seat in brown chairs, and Eric nodded at the term papers in her father’s lap. “That doesn’t look like Chomsky. What are you reading?”

  Don’t get him started, Willy almost intruded, but Eric liked to get people started.

  “Reading may be too dignified a word. I play little games to keep myself amused, though. My charges divide into those who think commas are states of catatonia after a car accident, and others who regard them as decorative curlicues—in which case, the more the prettier. So I sponsor home contests. This is a prizewinner.” He held up an essay. Whisked with red deletes, from three feet away the paper was pink. “Thirty-five superfluous commas on one page. A record.”

  “What are you trying to do, Daddy, impress us with your powers of punctuation, or get us to feel sorry for you?”

  Frankly, his keen of condescension was so familiar that she turned it off. Willy had grown up with the vague impression that their family was superior, although not in a worldly way. Theirs was a loftiness that left them outside of things. Her father had the aura of an Old Testament prophet who had tried preaching a time or two, was paid no mind, and now, spitefully, would deliver no more tidings. If that meant leaving the hordes to floods and locusts, very well.

  The cornerstone of her father’s supremacy was his valiant realism. He recognized that the planet was teeming with acned adolescents all planning to be film directors, industrial magnates, and Pulitzer prize-winning foreign correspondents, and he set his students straight on the odds. Only the frail and simpleminded clung to their delusions. Chuck had insisted that his offspring grow up in the world the way it was.

  Willy’s mother scuttled from the kitchen, wiping her hand on her apron before extending it to Eric. Colleen Novinsky carried herself at a forward angle, stooping with her whole body so that you always worried she was about to fall over. She clasped her hands at her waist in an attitude of perpetual supplicant. After accepting Eric’s bottle of wine with a gasp about how he shouldn’t have, she saw to their drinks with an attentiveness bordering on hysteria.

  As Eric lengthened across the central recliner her parents shrank from him, edging their chairs and glancing askance. It was that freshness. Eric wasn’t brown. He floated above his seat with a faint white outline, as if snipped from a glossy magazine and pasted on Novinsky newsprint. Eric straightened his long legs and crossed his ankles, locking hands behind his head; his articulated Adam’s apple caught the lamplight. This household managed, congenitally, to be both phlegmatic and agitated, and they regarded her boyfriend’s graceful, interweaving banter with mistrustful awe.

  “You must be pretty pleased with your daughter, Mr. Novinsky,” Eric purred. “Last week she got to the semis in Des Moines. Her performance was stupendous. It isn’t easy to yank your ranking from 612 to 394 in one year.”

  Her father waved his hand. “I can’t make heads or tails of all those sports numbers.”

  “It’s simple arithmetic, Mr. Novinsky,” Eric reproached him. “Rankings are comprehensible if you can count.”

  “We’re just worried how she’s going to keep body and soul together.”

  “Body, maybe,” Willy grumbled. “You’ve never seemed too bothered about my soul.”

  “I am concerned about how you will make a self-respecting living,” he shot back.

  “Is that what your work is? Self-respecting?”

  “It is a living,” he countered. “I don’t see why you can’t get a proper job to have something to fall back on.”

  “You can’t play pro tennis part-time,” Eric intervened. “You’re always on the road, and it takes unequivocal devotion.” Exactly what Willy had said for years, but when Eric said it her parents listened. “And Willy’s doing well for herself, Mr. Novinsky. I shouldn’t have to remind you, but she’s got something—something special.”

  “But she’s in debt to this Upchurch fellow up to her eyeballs,” her father objected. “And what if she breaks a leg?” On Walnut Street, “break a leg” really entailed breaking a leg.

  “Everyone lives with uncertainty,” Eric returned smoothly. “In the meantime, imagine being able to support yourself playing tennis! It’s almost as outrageous as being paid to write stories.”

  Her father assessed Eric gamely, then tapped some paperback novels on the table beside him. “What’s outrageous is being paid to write these stories.”

  “And you, Mrs. Novinsky? What do you do?” Put to women of her mother’s generation, the question was a risk. Forced to admit they were housewives, they were embarrassed, for the very question implied that vacuuming wasn’t enough. If instead you neglected the inquiry and they had jobs, they were insulted as well. But Eric didn’t take gambles he didn’t think he could win. He knew Mrs. Novinsky worked in a nursing home.

  “The way the age structure is shifting,” Willy’s father chimed in cheerfully, “pretty soon we’ll all be working in nursing homes, if we’re not committed to one already. Colleen’s ahead of her time.”

  “Mother originally studied modern dance,” Willy volunteered.

  “That was years ago,” her mother scoffed. “I didn’t have the talent to join a company. And I’d never have refrained from all those cookies.”

  Willy rolled her eyes. This tried routine had hoodwinked both daughters for years into insisting that no, no, she had a lovely figure she might have kept, and come on, she moved like an artist. “Sure, Mama. That’s just what your instructor said when he gave you the lead in ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ your senior year: this klutz belongs munching Oreos with old people in diapers.” That her mother always made other people stick up for her was a kind of laziness. “Now, can we eat?”

  “We’re waiting for Gert.”

  Oh, great.

  If Willy didn’t detest her sister she might have felt sorry for the woman. Born around the time that those typescripts would have been shoved in the attic for Roach Motels, Willy’s older sister had suffered the initial brunt of her father’s barbaric practicality. He could just as well have kept a foot on her head. From the start, Gert had been overly grown-up, with that restrained, well-spoken modesty that in a child is a little disturbing. In the early days when the girls still played together, Gert would never agree to rambunctious reenactments of Kojak chase scenes, but insisted on playing Mary Tyler Moore. In junior high, she never wanted to be a rock star, but a school-teacher. Her tennis game was safe and soft, and as soon as Willy got good Gert quit the sport without a fight.
In high school, she dressed with a matronly mutedness all through the era of wacky New Wave clothes. Her garb in her twenties was still sensible, like her marriage—her husband and shoes alike would wear well, so much better than heels that were flashy and precarious. Willy’s father had succeeded: Gert was a bore. Her single pretension was to claim that she hadn’t one.

  When Gert efficiently whisked in the door (her suit was brown) she asked Willy while fussing keys into her pocketbook, “How’s tennis?”

  “Fine,” said Willy.

  That was that.

  At dinner, so assured and fluid was her fiancé’s patter that Willy wasn’t needed. Inspecting him, she had the irrational impression that she’d brought not a prospective son-in-law but a surrogate—rather than their surly, guarded, too-private second child who always made life so prickly, here was a self-possessed, engaging young adult in whose presence her parents, incredibly, laughed. At previous family mealtimes, whenever Willy launched into insider tennis scuttlebutt Gert would ask for more potatoes and her father went back to harping on how deconstructionism was blessedly kaput. But when Eric gossiped about Agassi, they all three leaned forward and asked questions (“Who’s Agassi?”). Presently her father was exploring with convincing curiosity how Eric tamed his nerves before a game, a question he had never bothered to ask his own daughter.

  Having sucked up to her mother by eating three helpings of inedibly undercooked chicken cacciatore, Eric expanded back from the table. In the pool of light at his open collar, shadows swam in his clavicle like the darting of small fish. Willy grew alarmed. Eric’s extreme features could be regarded as either striking or overdrawn. In the past she had bestowed him with a provisional handsomeness, which she was thereby free to rescind. Yet tonight, like it or not, the branched veins over his broad forearms made Willy’s mouth water as surely as an open candy dish of licorice strings. If his beauty was a present, it was one he would keep.

  “At the January ’89 Buenos Aires Davis Cup match with Argentina?” Eric opined. “Agassi was playing Martin Jaite, a heartthrob local talent. Andre was whitewashing the poor bastard, 6—2, 6—2. At 4—0 in the third set Jaite had a chance to win a game. Down 40—love, Agassi shouted to his coach, ‘Hey, Nick, watch this!’ Jaite served, and Agassi caught the ball with his left hand.”

  “Why would he do that?” Gert frowned, fascinated.

  “Twisted charity. To humiliate Jaite and offend the crowd. It worked. Then he’d the nerve to claim to journalists that the trick was ‘just something he always wanted to do.’”

  Willy’s brow creased as well. She’d tried to tell this exact same story at Thanksgiving last year. Her mother had continued clearing the table, Gert had rifled through sample questions for her next accountancy exam, and her father, far from readjusting his chair at a rapt angle, had turned absently to The New York Times. Willy had abandoned the anecdote well before she got to the punchline.

  If only to get a little attention, Willy pinged and raised her glass. “Hey. A toast. We’re getting married.”

  They were thrilled.

  When everyone went to bed, her mother pointedly directed the engaged couple to separate rooms. Willy might have staged a scene, but the chummier her fiancé became with her father (“Eric, please call me Chuck”) the more she was inclined to tolerate the arrangement.

  “Well, you charmed the bejesus out of my family,” Willy growled in the hallway.

  “They’re not so bad,” he whispered.

  “Maybe to you they’re not,” she muttered. “Good God, I’m engaged to Eddie Haskell.”

  “Willy—?”

  She didn’t kiss him good night. Willy had been nervous whether her family would like Eric. She hadn’t thought to worry that they’d like him too much.

  SIX

  WHEN WILLY NEARED MONTCLAIR, New Jersey, she dwarfed, as if mere proximity to her mother’s womb shrank her to fetal dimensions. In contrast, as Eric swept into the polished lobby on East Seventy-fourth Street and hailed the doorman by his first name, her betrothed seemed to grow taller with every step. By the time he strode in the door of his parents’ apartment she was afraid he would hit his head.

  After much shoulder-clapping and bear-hugging of his firstborn, Axel Oberdorf turned to greet the girlfriend. “Pleasure. He does bring home the lookers.” Axel winked.

  She had expected a lanky, balding version of Eric. Instead Axel (“Axe”) Oberdorf was a head shorter than his son, compact and stocky. With the stance of a linebacker, he was hard to get past. His full head of black hair matched his arms, which were matted in thick animal fur. A senior surgeon at Mt. Sinai, Axel exuded the sharp scent of a rigorous detergent, a two-layered smell of harshness masked by a cloying but insufficient perfume. He pumped Willy’s hand; his nails were short and clean. Through initial small talk, his face explored a restricted range of expressions: the self-congratulatory beam of aren’t-we-all-grand; a stolid wait-and-see, indicating a withholding of judgment that wouldn’t last; and the occasional flicker of suspicion.

  “What’ll it be, Eric? Laid in two sixes of that Pickwick Ale you said you liked. Or you on some health kick? Wheat-grass juice? Boys be glad to run out and fill special orders.” It was a small matter, but had Willy ever let on to her parents that she was partial to Pickwick Ale, they’d have gone out of their way to stock Old Milwaukee.

  Axel led the couple into his capacious living room, whose plush ivory carpet looked as if it were vacuumed three times a day. The fluffy furniture was modular, like Eric’s mind. Bright, primary-colored rectangles, cones, pyramids, and cylinders, all stripped with Velcro, could be whimsied into a variety of configurations. It was easy to picture Eric working out geometric theorems here as a child, or designing his own Rubik’s Cube with furniture. Eric’s mother ran an art gallery, and the walls were spaced with original canvases that themselves might have passed for math diagrams or magazine puzzlers—abstract impressionists mazed with triangles, Russian prints whose Cyrillic phrases challenged anyone in the room to pronounce them, and white-on-white grids more witty than beautiful. Though the room was splashed with an array of hues, not a single cushion or painting was brown.

  Eric set about building himself a chair. Willy perched on a plain cube, a poor choice. She couldn’t lean back; already jittery, she was now literally on edge.

  “So bring me up to date, my boy,” said Axe, on a big-armed throne. “What happened in Toronto?”

  “Oh, I won,” said Eric. Drizzling his beer, he was determined to drain the whole bottle into his glass. When the last drop trembled at the rim, he looked victorious.

  Axe nodded vigorously. “Good, good. Not surprised, mind you.” Eric’s father often left out the subject of such sentences, as if his centrality were a grammatical given.

  “It wasn’t an important tournament,” Eric deflected. “Chump change, meager computer points.”

  “He was terrific,” added Willy. “And there was more depth of field than Eric’s letting on.” While on Walnut Street she’d been grateful when Eric stuck up for her, on Seventy-fourth her support felt thin, surplus.

  “Winning’s winning,” said Axe. “It’s a habit, one I’m glad to say you got into at an early age. You gotta hand it to this guy.” Axe gestured with his vodka and tonic. “Picks up a racket at eighteen, two years later he’s on Princeton’s tennis team.”

  “Pretty amazing,” said Willy.

  “Could just kick myself I didn’t get him started as a brat. Maybe now he’d be giving Agassi a run for his money. When you learn to play, Willy?”

  “At four. Though I didn’t start to play seriously until—”

  “And you’re ranked what?”

  “386.”

  Eric intruded, “That’s likely to go up after this month, since Willy’s entered in—”

  “Three hundred and eighty-six.” It sounded like a long number.

  Mrs. Oberdorf glided in with a tray of tea sandwiches, whose triangles of salmon, accents of black olive, and strips of
daikon reiterated the Russian prints. Here was where Eric got his looks: she was tall, spare, and stately, with strong cheekbones and the same grand, angular nose. Alma Oberdorf dressed with a simplicity that costs. Her manner was collected, her voice murmurous. When she leaned over her eldest and kissed his forehead she teased that he’d lost more hair—the first intimation of the evening that Willy’s fiancé had a single failing.

  “Willy, I’m so glad that Eric has somebody to play with,” said Alma good-humoredly, and Willy accepted a sandwich.

  “Your mother’s making that polenta mush for dinner again,” Axel groaned. “I’ve tried to tell her that cornmeal porridge is peasant food, but you can’t fight chichi New York.”

  “The recipe is from the Union Square Cafe.” With the obdurate calm of her delivery, Mrs. Oberdorf must have been accustomed to standing her ground, although perhaps not gaining any either. “And it’s only a side dish, dear.” Obliviously, she slipped away.

  When Axe began to extol his son’s renown as “Rick the Slick” on Trinity’s basketball team, Eric interrupted impatiently, “Dad! Look alive—Willy already likes me. Though she may not continue to, if you don’t give it a rest.”