Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  In the round-of-sixteen, he made mincemeat of 87 in straight sets. The quarters went to four sets, the semis to five. Meanwhile, Willy barely saw her husband. Between rounds he was practicing, after victories swept off on the arm of this Bob Evanston creep for celebratory dinners. She might have come along, but her headaches were genuine. Only when Eric slipped in at 1 A.M. did Willy get her hands on her husband, and then exclusively on his more public parts.

  The night after the semis, Eric disrobed and slid under the coverlet, where Willy lay still awake. She turned and smoothed his rib cage, tickling the scrub on his chest. As she grazed her fingertips over his left nipple, Eric grasped her hand, pinning it firmly to his clavicle. She wriggled free, and ran her palm to his stomach, whose muscles hardened at her touch.

  “Willy,” he whispered. “I’ve got to get to sleep.”

  “Eventually,” she said slyly, easing down to cup his scrotum, rolling the glands like marbles in a bag. “But what better way to doze off? You always say you sleep more soundly after, right?”

  “Honey,” Eric censured. “I have to play Sörle tomorrow.”

  “The finals are tomorrow night. You can sleep in, late as you like.” As her fingers padded up the shaft, it expanded as if inflated with a bicycle pump.

  Eric grabbed her wrist and wrenched it from his groin. “Stop it! That’s enough!”

  Willy immediately retracted, recoiling into a ball like a sea anemone when poked at. “You haven’t so much as kissed me since this tournament started,” she mumbled, knees clutched to her breasts. “And we haven’t made love for weeks, not since before I left for Sweetspot. What’s wrong? Did I do something? Are you still angry at me for leaving in January? Did you meet someone while I was gone?”

  Eric lay on his back, and his controlled sigh suggested that among other things he was not in the mood to tick down her list of insecurities one by one. “I realize I’ve been distracted. But I don’t think we should have sex before the finals.”

  Willy lifted her head. “You buy into that bullshit?” she asked in amazement. “That you can’t allow your precious elixir of manhood to drain your strength?”

  Eric raised on his elbows. “I know it’s probably an old wives’ tale—”

  “Better believe it! Doctors say sex is good for you, that it gives you energy!”

  “But on the off chance there’s something to it …” Eric appealed. “Sometimes those old wives knew a thing or two, and if it makes any difference at all—”

  “The old wife was always trying to get out of fucking any way she knew how.” Willy heaved out of bed, stripping the top blanket, and caped her shoulders. “But in case it makes any difference at all, you can sleep by yourself. I wouldn’t want to accidentally turn in bed and disturb His Majesty’s rest.”

  She flounced from the bedroom, dragging the blanket. Eric stepped on it from behind and said, “Stop being a baby and come back to bed.”

  “Me a baby! You hear some asinine superstition when you’re seven years old and you still believe it.”

  “I know it’s probably nuts, but if you could only indulge me my little—”

  “I’ve been indulging plenty. If it’s any comfort, I wouldn’t let you lay a hand on me now with a knife to my throat. Good night.” She yanked the blanket out from under his feet and sent him sprawling in the hall.

  “Willy, goddamn it, you could have hurt me!”

  “Oh, tragedy, falling on your million-dollar butt.” Willy trundled to the sofa.

  Eric picked himself up and stood uncertainly in the moonlight hazing from the bedroom window. His prick had shriveled in the cold to an unalluring knot of blue gristle. Willy bunched on the couch. Teetering in the hall, Eric was clearly torn between cajoling her to bed and talking it out and no doubt fucking after all to reconcile, versus leaving her to her huff and at least getting a decent night’s sleep for his first Top Ten match. His indecision lasted only a few seconds. It wasn’t much of a contest.

  As if success in a lucrative sport were not already cushy enough, pros in the upper echelons could often rely in a crunch on “winning by reputation.” It wasn’t unheard of for a no-name like Eric to blast through the first few rounds, only to come up short against one of the hallowed Top Ten, who might well be in poor form and ripe for picking. Yet the halo surrounding the anointed could blind a challenger to opportunity. To participate in a sports hierarchy was commonly to endorse it; no one wished to climb a ladder whose rungs were diaphanous. In sweating blood to obtain them, players needed to regard computer points as laden, and thereby to perceive the Chosen as blessed. Underlings often threw matches in acquiescence not just to the elite but to the status quo, in preference to spinning the sport’s painstaking arithmetic into disarray. Most tennis players, in submitting to the ladder, believed in the ladder, and would sacrifice their own glory for the greater glory of an orderly universe.

  Eric had no such qualms. He did not believe in tennis exactly; it was a vehicle for his own beatification. He readily admitted to his wife that, unlike Willy, he did not worship the game. Tennis happened to be something he was good at; what Eric worshiped was that he was good at it. Eric’s sole religion was Eric. That’s what Willy found glorious and that’s what Willy found repugnant. Her ambivalent crackling between those poles may have generated the very electricity of her passion; maybe Willy loved her husband because she could never quite decide if she could stand the man.

  And if Eric did not even honor the absolute god of tennis the sport, much less did he bow before its worldly manifestation in the ATP. The last thing he suffered was an overabundance of respect. Eric didn’t care for tennis players in general, and would gladly blow the myth of the Top Ten to kingdom come. For though the Association produced plenty of megalomaniacs, folding before “reputation” was ultimately a failure of vanity.

  If Hans Sörle was counting on his opponent seizing up in insecurity after Eric took the first set 6–4, Sörle hadn’t done his homework. Eric’s face betrayed no spasm of incredulity. As he held serve through most of the second, the eyes of this Oberdorf kid didn’t glaze with stage fright; the upstart never reached to pinch himself to check he wasn’t dreaming. And even when the 400-something neophyte was put in his place at 7–5, his shoulders didn’t slump with I-knew-this-couldn’t-last. The jaw squared slightly, that was all.

  Willy perched in a front row seat, where Alma Oberdorf kept patting her hand. Between the anxious parents of this astonishing long shot, Eric’s three brothers were arranged in order of birth and at rigid attention, all with scrubbed-pink skin, wetted cowlicks, and fresh haircuts. A price tag trailing Robert’s sleeve betrayed bright sweaters bought for the event. Alma folded his collar down. Robert squirmed and tugged it tough-guy to his chin.

  Axel stretched to swat the twelve-year-old’s crown. “Sit still!” All three boys snapped upright.

  The score even, Willy’s mind wandered back to the days before her marriage, watching her boyfriend play tennis. Certainly she had admired him; and Willy being Willy, she had not solely been enchanted by his devious smile or his nervy claim on her every available evening. Something in his game had struck her fancy. Yet in the old days her admiration hadn’t seemed to cost so much. Choosing to love him, she had reveled in her own creation. It was almost as if she’d made him up.

  But in the Garden Willy couldn’t have retracted her adulation if she tried. This love was helpless, sucked from her at a glance. Eric no longer flourished under her benevolent eye like her own art but gleamed under the radiant floods with such a hard, separate clarity that it was Willy who felt invented. Amid hundreds of other onlookers, Eric didn’t need her one more pair of pupils to call him to life. In fact, through double break points Willy would read Kodak billboards on upper tiers, anything but allow her gaze to seek his face, as her mother had warned her not to look directly at the sun. To follow his fluid grace around the court for the entire match was more draining than she could afford. The more Eric Oberdorf awed her, the l
ess she was impressed with herself.

  In the clench of this compulsive desire Willy resisted where before the wedding she had happily capitulated. She was no longer giving, but given. So many ordinary people fell in love and married; how did they manage without resentment, without struggling against their own defenseless ardor, no longer a freely written check but a monthly debit drawn from their accounts? Eric had worn his new black gear, and Willy wilted at his good looks. Once proud to be associated with such a striking man, now she cowered before his bony shoulders, binding her jacket about her stomach, its little round folds in contrast to the lean sirloin on court.

  “Look at that retrieval!” cried Axel hoarsely to Steven, prodding the boy’s thigh. “I couldn’t have touched that shot with a broom handle tied to my racket!”

  Nor could I, thought Willy. That was the problem: her every homage left a negative afterimage. Each rally echoed through the hall, I could never reach that high, I could never run that fast, I could never hit a ball that hard. When Eric made an aside to a linesman, Willy could think only that playing her first Top Ten she’d never have possessed the easy élan to toss off suave retorts. Any adjective she might apply to her husband slid to the comparative—he was more talented, more intelligent, more athletic, for there was no such thing as specially gifted without someone to be more gifted than. Was that why Eric had scooped her up in Riverside? Had he been shopping not for a partner but for a fan?

  Axel jumped to his feet, pounding fist in palm. “That’s my boy!”

  Startled by the roar of the crowd, Willy looked hastily at the scoreboard to find that Eric had taken the third set. Now that her husband needed only one more set of two, she couldn’t enjoy the luxury of a peripatetic attention. When first Eric broke, then Sörle broke back, Willy leaned off the chair until her knees hit the forward rail. She crushed the empty Coke cup to shed wax in her lap. Alma squeezed her daughter-in-law’s arm, and risked a glimpse away from the game to share a look of sympathetic solidarity. Alma obviously understood that for Willy watching her husband on the very cusp of acclaim was agony. Imagine what a sad night it would be if after all this buildup, coming so, so close, he moped home having missed by a hair. Willy would be left nursing a disconsolate hulk, powerless to moderate his disappointment.

  The crowd, which loved an underdog and the eventfulness of an upset, exhaled and whistled when Eric won a point; they inhaled, then groaned faintly when his net-corder wavered, then dribbled to his court.

  Willy jumped at a hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you really his wife?” When Willy nodded, the young woman behind her added, “You must be thrilled!”

  Willy was Eric’s wife, so she must be thrilled. Yet her respiration was out of synch with the crowd’s. When the Oberdorfs sighed, Willy took a sharp breath. When the surrounding throng drew a strangulated sough, the air eased from Willy’s lungs, ah-ah.

  Eric was jaunty enough in the 400’s and 500’s. Should he lose this evening, Eric would recover his self-esteem in ten minutes. But if he swaggered back to 112th Street triumphant, the man would be insufferable. The girl in the row behind could go home with her own lover, their felicity independent of an entertainment’s results. It was Willy who had to live with the consequences of this match for months to come.

  Willy was rooting for Sörle.

  TWELVE

  WHIPPING NUMBER TEN DIDN’T make Eric number nine. But he did skip from 498 to 293 in one week, which in tennis terms was leaping tall buildings in a single bound. At 265, for the first time Willy shared that crucial initial digit with her husband.

  After the mandatory fête with the tournament promoters and another lavish spread at the Oberdorfs, who invited the entire Upper East Side, Eric and Willy scheduled their own celebratory dinner for two days later. Though overfed, Eric was flush with his $50,000 first place, and proposed Lutèce. An evening at New York’s chicest French restaurant was a generous gesture, so Willy repressed a grumble when Eric instructed her to lug along his tux and meet him at Jordan after his practice match. Herself catching a plane to Florida the next morning, Willy had her own errands to run, but time was short.

  When Willy arrived with his black-tie rig over an arm the game wasn’t over. Though Lutèce was picky about punctuality, he had to complete the set. She harrumphed into a chair, scowling. Terrific. One more compulsory audience conscripting Mrs. Eric Oberdorf. Lately what she wouldn’t give to watch him lose, just once.

  He lost.

  Willy sat immobile in dull shock. She hadn’t seen her husband defeated in months. It was as if a fairy had read her mind and granted Willy’s wish. Or maybe Eric had looked into his wife’s eyes and been so disheartened at what he saw there that he tanked the match.

  The tuxedo still draped her arm, and under its clinging dry-cleaner plastic her skin had gone juicy and reeked of guilty anxiety. She kissed her husband and handed him the tux. “Are you feeling all right? We could do this another time.”

  “I’m fine,” he said lightly.

  “But the way you—”

  “I don’t know, something fell away. The whole business seemed—silly, all of a sudden. Eh. Let’s get some chow.”

  “The few times you’ve lost,” Willy observed, “you imply that you didn’t apply yourself. Not once have you admitted to coming up against your limitations.”

  Eric prized a fishbone from between his teeth. “I may never have confronted any limitations. Not absolute ones, anyway.”

  “You would have if you were a girl.”

  “I’m not.”

  Crammed with fragile floral china, Lutèce was a poor setting for a fight. Willy folded her hands over her linen napkin. “Have you ever envisaged yourself born as a woman?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You think women are that different? Don’t we share the same emotions, the same ambitions?”

  “You might have more emotions.”

  Willy poked at her squab—a rash order, but dining at Lutèce on one of the filthy, ratlike pigeons that splatted the public library had appealed to her as pleasantly perverse. “So, say, I love you more than you love me?”

  “Willy, we’re supposed to be celebrating. Why are you trying to start something?”

  “Why, does the idea of yourself as female repel you?”

  “The idea strikes me as ridiculous!”

  Willy leaned back from her plate. The squab had been a mistake—tiny, brown, and withered. The only way to get any meat off the scrawny thing would have been to pick it up in her bare hands. Already in chasing the pigeon about the plate she’d slopped port sauce onto her favorite red silk dress. She didn’t dare admit it to Eric—her menu had no prices, so God knows what this cost—but she’d have had a better time, with heartier food, in Flower of Mayonnaise. If this was their new champion’s lifestyle, there was something to be said for struggling instead.

  Willy looked enviously at Eric’s salmon trout with vanilla sauce, a more intelligent order, then up at her husband, dashing in his black tie, and pondered the thin line between icon and nemesis. Why of all people had she married this Princeton-alumming, triple-jumping, hoop-swishing, math-whizzing tennis prodigy? Had she been searching for the one person on earth of whom she was bound to feel unworthy?

  Or might she feel inadequate with any man? Since girlhood Willy had chafed at being female, and for a tennis player the resentment was rational. For the better portion of this century the women’s game was considered a frivolous sideline; even now, women’s prize money came to little more than half of the men’s. Besides, who wouldn’t choose to serve at 120 mph instead of 85?

  “You like movies,” Willy admonished her husband. “Films invite you to imagine being someone else for an hour or two. You don’t march out of the cinema because being expected to identify with someone different from you is ‘ridiculous.’ So why is my asking you to picture yourself as a woman so absurd?”

  “Maybe it’s not absurd, but it’s a dead end. Even if I did wear a dress
in my head, I couldn’t know if the image was accurate. Since I have no idea what it’s like to be a woman.”

  “Do you think I’m so alien?”

  “I don’t think you’re alien.”

  Willy tapped her tines on the tablecloth. This was true. Eric had demonstrated little use for women on the whole. He had never had a single close female friend, nor, previous to his wife, one regular female sports partner. Willy was the exception, and thereby an honorary boy.

  For her own part, Willy had always suspected that she was either born in the wrong body, or born in the right body as a penalty for not being quite up to masculine snuff. Which was why Eric’s smug security in his sex riled her, though any woman might be offended when at the prospect of swapping genders her husband became derisive. On the other hand, had Eric confided that he was “trying to get in touch with his feminine side” she’d have gagged. Willy didn’t so much revile his patrician self-assurance than covet it for herself.

  “You know,” Willy changed the subject, “your match at the Garden irked me one more time about this guarantee business. You can bet that Sörle was paid far more than you, just for showing up, and you won the tournament.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “I’m complaining. If he’s paid oodles for walking to the baseline, there’s no motivation for a Top Ten to put out any effort. He can just tank and collect his check.”

  Eric leaned back from his trout, its skeleton picked surgically clean; he and his father had skills in common. “Pride,” he noted, “is its own guarantee.”

  “The trouble is, the Rule of Fourteen encourages slacking.”

  Now that players who could afford the expense of more than fourteen tournaments a year were free to eliminate poor performances from tabulation of their rankings, Willy’s assertion wasn’t controversial. Many a big name had been accused of accepting a guarantee and then just going through the motions when a loss wouldn’t affect his standing. Yet Eric didn’t chime in.