Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  The wearing family festivities were dispatched. Willy wryly bought Eric a copy of Learn Tennis in a Weekend, and Eric gave his wife her own jump rope. Between Christmas and New Year’s both their pools of hitting partners had drained out of town, and Willy would not return to Sweetspot until after the first. They were stuck with each other. Not long before, Willy could have conjured no more delectable a curse; now she prepared for the Jordan as if for the gallows.

  On court, Eric looked worried; his high forehead rippled as he kissed her temple. This was the last she would see of his solicitous persona for the duration, since as soon as his feet touched baseline Eric transmogrified. Willy told herself that she shouldn’t hold it against him, that this alternative Eric was the one who won tournaments and without a Hyde to his Jekyll his natural kindness would destroy him on the circuit.

  Still it was disturbing when she faced him and his mouth set with a ravenous twist. The way he leaned and swayed as if tethered suggested that the net was strung between them for her own protection. This time he allowed her to warm up as long as she liked.

  Through the first set, a whole new sensation began to snarl in her lower intestine: a mistrust akin to nausea. Even when easy balls came her way midrally, she clutched with misgiving before impact: How did I hit this shot all those other times? I can’t remember! Infinitesimal hesitation often sent the ball deep. By 0–5 she was calling her every instinct into question, and so began to play more cautiously, popping her lobs, pushing her volleys, and going for safe, flabby shots that landed prostrate at midcourt with such a please-let-me-make-your-day degradation that she might as well have taken off her clothes. By the time he blanked her in the first set she had become such a full participant in her own disgrace that the second took on the feasting self-hatred of a bulimic binge.

  Eric treated her soft, shallow returns to the abuse they deserved. Freshly cut, his hair flickered black fire. Willy kept telling herself that a killer instinct was in his nature; that to demand that Eric desist from slaughtering her helpless, bleeding sitters was as absurd as putting a wounded antelope before a lion and expecting the beast to turn its head. Still she glanced across the net with bafflement that this man she had married was now the agent of her abasement. By the time his last dazzling cross-court whistled past her backhand, Willy was too devastated to lift her racket.

  As his adrenal rush subsided, Eric’s hair fell limp to his scalp. Yet while his claws retreated and his pupils contracted to normal size, the two zeroes in succeeding sets continued to stare back at her with wide, accusing eyes.

  “Yo.” Eric touched her arm, and Willy sprang away as if from a hot poker. “This doesn’t feel so good. You make me feel like a bruiser.”

  “You got what you wanted,” she charged. “Willy’s magic on the court revealed as smoke and mirrors. I’m debunked, like all your other entrancements. One more disposable practice partner, all used up. Like a box of Kleenex.”

  “You win a few, you lose a few,” said Eric sharply. “Comes with the territory. Take it like a—” he seemed to think better of his phrasing, and amended “—like a good sport.”

  Willy hung her head. “I’m sorry. I was being childish. You played fantastically well. I wish I could have given you a better game.”

  “So you had an off day.” Eric raised her chin. “But next time let’s just rally. Do some drills. We’ll help each other. No more matches for a while.”

  They both knew he meant: forever. They both knew as well that even rallying was volatile, not disengaged from victory and failure, good shots and weak, and as a consequence they’d each find themselves strangely busy in the next few weeks, unable to make much time for playing each other. By February they’d have tournaments to play in different states… When he was no longer challenged, Eric got bored, and Willy couldn’t bear to be regarded as tedious on a tennis court. Grieving, she would certainly decline to attend the Oberdorfs’ New Year’s Eve party that evening, crawling miserably to bed before the knell of twelve.

  “So, then,” Willy encapsulated softly. “Resolutions for 1994: we can’t play Scrabble, or horseshoes, or billiards, or go bowling. We can’t even jump rope in the same squash court. And now we can’t play tennis. What is it that we’ll ever do together besides fuck?”

  “We could do worse.” Eric pressed her head to his chest, and she cried. To Eric’s dismay, Willy packed up on January second to head back to Sweetspot.

  “You’re taking ten running bras,” he observed, fingering into her suitcase. “How long will you be gone?”

  “Maybe two weeks,” she said offhandedly, stacking T’s. “The school laundry won’t be staffed yet, so …”

  Eric’s face folded like a Coney Island hot-dog stand, battening down against the elements for a cold, windy winter. “That’s quite a while,” he said at length. “This is the only time of year—”

  “This is the only time of year that I can have Sweetspot to myself, and Max as well.”

  “So nobody else will be there? Just you and Upchuck, stretching your hams, chumming in low-lit restaurants?”

  “I suppose Marcella will be up,” she noted, crossing briskly to the closet. “She never misses an opportunity to slime herself into Max’s good graces.”

  “What are you taking that red dress for?”

  “Eric, I can’t wear sweats all day.”

  “You do for me.”

  Willy sighed, and tossed the red silk on the bed. “Would it make you feel any better if I left it behind?”

  “Take it, I’m not going to wear it.” Though his tone was gruff, Eric rearranged the rumpled silk fondly on the spread, tugging out wrinkles, removing specks of lint. “I thought you weren’t going to compete with Marcella any longer over who can be Upchuck’s darling.’

  “I don’t need to compete. Marcella’s game is repulsive. She only wins because she drives her opponents mad, and tempts them into doing something rash if only to stop her blobbing at them. Max prefers sting and drive to witless attrition.”

  “But, Willy, two weeks!”

  “You saw my game yesterday. It’s diseased. I need a doctor.”

  “Then maybe,” he proposed shyly, “I can come with you.”

  Willy bustled, wrapping a pair of tennis shoes in plastic. The bags crackled white noise.

  “Wilhelm?”

  Socks. “That’s not a great idea.”

  “But why—?”

  “I need to concentrate. The next six months—”

  “You want to get away from me, don’t you?”

  The remark was not remotely like him. Eric was a great one for letting sleeping dogs lie, and conventionally accepted Willy’s explanations at face value. He didn’t like problems. He expected a marriage to simmer murmurously on the back burner, and when situations like Scrabble and rope-skipping and now even tennis stirred the pot, his solution was to avoid those situations. For Eric the observation was brave, and she had to reward him with honesty in return.

  “Yes, I do. For now. Since our anniversary—I’ve been disturbed. You’re having a nasty effect on my game.”

  “I know you, Wilhelm. That’s the same thing as saying that I’m having a nasty effect on you.”

  “Sweetheart, I just need to get my head on straight.” She reached for an inch-long eyebrow hair and tamed it against his face.

  Eric insisted on seeing her off at Penn Station, and as he waved from the platform for once he didn’t look trim and taut but scrawny. Tufts of cropped hair cringed over his bald spots in lonely, desolate curls. It took all her willpower to keep from dragging Eric in the door, throwing her arms around him, and whispering feverishly that she’d been terribly foolish, that their time with each other was far too dear to waste, and of course he must come along. One by one she would ease the worry lines from his forehead with the tips of her fingers and apologize that now he hadn’t any luggage, but they could pick up a toothbrush and a shirt or two in Old Saybrook. Flopping into a booth and propping their feet on facing seat
s to ward off strangers, they’d do the Times crossword together. She’d admire his memory for Civil War generals, one hand scribing and the other resting reassuringly on his inside thigh for the whole trip up.

  Instead, the rubber edges of the train door kissed, and Willy was banished to the overheated car. She rushed to a window and waved at Eric, though the reflections of the station lights probably masked her hand. As the train drew into the tunnel, she pressed against the cold glass, and the condensation of her breath fogged a last glimpse of her husband as he shuffled toward the escalator. His posture was unusually poor. The car went black, and for an instant Willy was afraid of the dark—a grown-up sort of dark. Once the lights flickered on, she opened her New York Times halfheartedly to the crossword. Unable to get one-across right away, she closed her eyes, slumped into her leaden independence, and folded the paper over her face.

  Willy’s original idea was to return to the old days, she and Max against the world. Yet though they put in long sessions on her strokes, evenings rang hollow. When she dined out with Max, the twittering Marcella Foussard often came along. Even after Marcella left for a fat farm their nights felt roomy, like an oversized coat; hours hung off either side of dinner like sleeves off her hands. Getting ready for bed, Willy’s ablutions went too swiftly and she was pestered by a sensation of having forgotten something.

  Her game did, after shuddering and sweating as if shaking off a flu, return to its muscular surety. But when she brought off a barreling down-the-line pass, Willy would turn to the side as if to say, “Did you see that?” and no one was there.

  With Max, she was often at a loss for conversation. Sometimes they’d resort to current events; while Willy was sincere enough in her disappointment that Hillary Clinton’s leadership of health care reform was turning out a disaster, newspaper chatter between old friends felt desperate. Ten days into her stay, after a gaping silence over calamari, Max finally ventured, “How are you two getting on?”

  “We’ve refrained from clawing each other’s eyes out.”

  “I didn’t realize it was quite that bad.”

  “Between me and Marcella?”

  “Between you and Underwood.”

  “Oh, God no. Eric’s doing terribly well.” Willy’s voice lilted. “In the quarters of the Mennon in Detroit? He was down a set, 1–5 in the second. But you know Eric, the Comeback Kid—”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t know Eric.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Nobody’s. I’m not remotely interested in the man.”

  “I’m very proud of him,” she recited, in the monotone of the multiplication table.

  “I repeat: how are you getting on? Are you still having trouble?”

  “I didn’t say we were having trouble.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  Near the end of her stay Max threw his racket in disgust. “Not one more word!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Everything I tell you, it’s ‘Eric doesn’t do it that way,’ or ‘That’s one of Eric’s favorite shots,’ or ‘Eric hates it when I …’ Stop thinking about Underfuck!”

  “I’m not!”

  “Listen to yourself, woman! Because I only want to hear about how you hit the ball, what are your favorite shots, which bad habits drive you up a wall.”

  Newly mindful, Willy was shocked to discover how frequently she stopped herself from describing Eric’s underspin. At dinner, she refrained from mentioning how Eric would have vacuumed up her pasta. And at the end of the evening she excused herself, naming no names, with “I have to make a call.” Deleting Eric from her discourse required great vigilance and self-control. Before she was married, Willy had lived in a world with a population of 1.5; Max was the .5, and in keeping him pruned to a partial, cipherous extension of her own ambition, she had nipped their romance in the bud. So maybe the novelty of a whole other human being in her universe had not worn off. In any case, having waved from the platform or not, her husband had accompanied Willy to Sweetspot after all.

  She’d so looked forward to seeing him. Her head overrun with visions of grateful, torrid reunion on the train, Willy reread the same page of her novel about twenty times before casting it aside and gazing longingly out the window even through the extensive black tunnel into Penn. But when she walked in the door, Eric barely looked up. The ATP Rulebook splayed at his elbow, he was feeding forms into his Bubble Jet. He didn’t so much as say hello.

  “Some tournament promoter,” he mumbled instead, aligning the page, “Bob Evanston? Saw the two of us play on our anniversary. Seems he was impressed.”

  “He wouldn’t have been impressed with me.”

  “He wasn’t.” When Eric glanced up, he looked tired, and irritated with mandatory diplomacy. “I mean, he may well have been, but didn’t mention it. The point is, there’s a small ATP tournament in February at Madison Square Garden. They’ve got Hans Sörle seeded first. But there have been last-minute cancellations, injuries. Evanston offered me a wild-card slot.”

  “Sörle—he’s ranked, like, twelve, isn’t he?”

  “Ten. He’s in the Top fucking Ten.”

  Willy dropped her luggage. “What’s the draw?”

  “Thirty-two. In New York; expenses negligible.”

  “Since when do you worry about expenses?”

  “I do work within a budget, Willy.”

  “But how did you get into a draw of thirty-two?”

  Eric took a deep breath. “It’s sort of a decorative tournament—like Mahwah, only with a few points on the line. So the audience get their money’s worth, it’s best of five sets. Sörle’s agent is trying to attract endorsements; Sörle’s slipping. And Evanston liked the drama of a low-ranked challenger. Said I’d only have to win one match to pay off as entertainment. This is the break I’ve been waiting for, Willy. The satellite crawl is for suckers.”

  “Suckers like me.”

  “That you’ve gotten as far as you have playing grade-B tournaments is obviously to your credit.” Having to compliment her seemed to try him. “But satellites are tooth-and-nail. It’s far more efficient to beat a highly ranked player. Jesus, it pays points like a one-armed bandit coughs quarters, Willy. The trouble is getting at the bastards. Now I’ve got a Top Ten within arm’s reach.”

  “What, you expect to beat Hans Sörle?”

  “Why not?”

  Willy shrugged, and dragged her valise to the bedroom. “I guess you’ll find out.”

  Eric had hitherto an attractive breeziness about his upcoming tournaments, which may have helped him overtake opponents who tossed the night before. For six weeks, his cool vanished. He had trouble sleeping, and Willy would wake to find him with his feet hooked under the bed frame, tucking into tight, panicked sit-ups. Previously a human garbage disposal, he became picky and superstitious about his diet. He never suggested practice with his lowly wife; for the period before Madison Square Garden, Eric selected hitting partners with the same finicky care with which he inspected T-bones in D’Agostino’s for the slightest marbling.

  When Willy departed for LaGuardia to enter her 1994 inaugural tournament, an indoor Har-Tru affair in Chicago, she was relieved to flee the self-importance that thickened the air in their apartment and stuck in her throat. Eric was getting his hopes up, for which Willy felt a genetic disapproval. But Willy had taken her share of knocks, and maybe it was time Eric took the odd blow on the chin himself. It would keep him human.

  By the time she returned from Chicago, Eric had played his own indoor warm-up in Paterson, New Jersey. That she was now ranked 265 seemed a little less of an achievement when Eric announced that as of Paterson he had broken into the 400’s. That was the plan, of course, but Willy was a little tired of everything slotting so cooperatively into her husband’s designs. Where were those famous slings and arrows that typified everyone else’s life? Besides, he provoked the same optical illusion as heading up to Westbrook, when her train was traveling alongside an
other Amtrak going the same direction. If the adjacent train started to go faster, it induced the impression that her train was going backward.

  The field at the Garden was motley, though Eric was the darkest horse in the running. There were several other players, however, in the top 75, all of whom would net Eric generous bonus computer points if he serendipitously outdid them. When he drew one of these for his first round—ranked 54—Willy commiserated that it was an awfully bad break to face such stiff competition at the start, which could stop him from playing Sörle. Her husband shook off her consoling hands. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “This is great luck. Pounding 54 will net points at the start.”

  “But you’ve never played anyone in the top 100. You don’t know how good they are.”

  “Willy, they’re just tennis players. You can seem so savvy sometimes, but you still buy into this bullshit mystique. Some greaseball climber gets into the upper rankings and you go timorous with Messianic wonder. You think playing 54 is supposed be an honor. Well, screw that. They’re just like us. Where do you think we’re headed? He should be honored to play me.”

  Willy stepped back; whenever Eric blustered like this she was torn between wonderment and recoil. “A little humility could go a long way, Eric. Pride goeth—”

  “A little humility is poison. What do you think this game is all about? You’re the one who claims I concentrate too much on technique, always pointing out how what makes tennis fascinating is character. You say the distinction between players isn’t in their forehands but their heads. Okay—you’re right. So the last thing I’m going to do is to quiver into the Garden simpering ‘Thank you, Mr. Fifty-four, for stooping to hit me a ball.’”

  Whether Eric’s arrogance was magnificent or odious was nugatory. All that mattered was it worked. He got his bonus points, with games to spare. That 498 had upset 54 sent a ripple of curiosity through the crowd. Clearly Willy’s husband had made another of his breathtaking leaps. For the Eric Oberdorf who played in the Garden was not the same promising but still ragged-edged athlete with whom she was so recently neck-and-neck. No, this Eric she couldn’t have touched with a barge pole.