Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  “Willy, I guess it goes without saying that you thought you had the match?”

  The microphone was shoved aggressively in Willy’s face, and she reared back as from a loaded gun. “If I ever did, that was my error. It’s only over when it’s…” she swallowed, “and all.”

  “Willy, you’re married to Eric Oberdorf, who beat then number ten Hans Sörle earlier this year, and just snagged the Chevy men’s singles title last night—pretty effortlessly, by all appearances. How do you feel after this setback?”

  How did she feel? She stared incredulously at the ESPN reporter, but television mesmerized you into pro forma inanities. “I’m very happy for my husband, and I’m just sorry that I couldn’t make his trophy half of a matched set. That would have been—romantic.”

  “You likely to hit the road with your husband, or will you keep working on your own game?”

  “I think,” another swallow, “Eric is plenty experienced with packing his own suitcase by now. There’s lots of tennis left in this old girl.” Which was Willy’s way of claiming that she was still alive.

  “So would you say that you choked?”

  “Choked?” Willy repeated, her voice strangled. “Marcella has a deceptively crafty game; she wears you down. I think midmatch she started playing really, really well and I’d just like to commend her for an impressive performance, especially recovering from behind like that. I gave it my all, but she got the better of me this time.”

  “You don’t believe you choked?”

  “Sometimes,” she stammered, eyes darting to his badge, “Mr. Dawson, the gods switch sides.”

  In answer to her imploring gaze, Dawson thanked her and proceeded to glad-hand the winner. The last five minutes had been the most supremely adult of Willy’s life. In front of millions of viewers, she didn’t cry.

  THIRTEEN

  WILLY INSISTED ON ACCOMPANYING Eric to the victors’ reception, though even Max, to Marcella’s dismay, skipped the party altogether. Max claimed he felt unwell; he certainly looked it. Eric was mobbed. Unchaperoned, Willy drank too much, and her jovial self-deprecation masked a more vicious self-deprecation that’s a little frightening. The guests were so grateful. Discussion of her real devastation would have been awkward. Edgy, truncated chat quickly moved on from shame-about-your-final to neutral subjects like whether Monica Seles would ever return to the game after being stabbed. No doubt Willy’s yes isn’t my husband amazing yes I have terribly high hopes for him was as enervating as it was obligatory.

  Back in their room at the Marriott, Willy collapsed on the bed as if all night she’d been holding her breath. “Christ, I could have spread that bitch across that court like tartar sauce on a bun.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” Eric demanded. “What’s a better definition of what you could do than what you did do?”

  Willy had looked forward all evening to when they could finally be alone, and now Eric was being as insensitive as that ESPN reporter. “Don’t you ever see a discrepancy between your ability and how well you played a match?” she pleaded.

  “If I do, I shouldn’t. If you discriminate between the two, what you ‘could’ do is infinite. You’re capable of what you actually do. If ability is a finite, measurable quantity, it’s the same thing as performance.”

  “So if Marcella beats me, she’s better than I am. Period.” Willy had meant her formulation to sound ridiculous. It didn’t.

  “Marcella is better than you are until you prove otherwise on the court. Not in your head. And not in mine.”

  “You’re being a jerk,” Willy accused him sulkily. “You know Marcella plays like a marshmallow. She didn’t win, I lost. I had a bad day—”

  “Your bad days are also your days,” Eric interrupted sternly. “They count. I don’t see why you want me to humor you. You’re as good as your execution. This is sport. It’s external. That’s its strength and that’s its limitation. I agree there’s a lie in it. But there’s a lie in the interior as well. You know yourself that people who are all talk, who sit around feeling valuable and busting with potential, are full of shit.”

  “What happened today was a travesty, an outrage! Why can’t you agree? Why can’t you have confidence in me?”

  Eric dragged Willy by the wrist to sit up. “I do have confidence in you, which is why I’m not going to pander to post-match rewriting. Yes, it was a travesty, but it happened. Something went wrong. Turn your mind to what that was. My patting your hand about how awfully more gifted you are than Marcella won’t help. Because, damn it, if she clouts you again, and again, no matter how tawdry her devices, then you are not better. There’s only one way to prove otherwise. Beat her.”

  Willy slumped back to the pillow. “I was beating her,” she observed glumly.

  “Willy, it was 5–zip, 40–love!” Eric exploded. “What happened?”

  Folding her hands funereally across her chest, Willy announced to the ceiling, “I was afraid.”

  If a simple explanation, it was plausible. In sport, fear alone could raise a dread to life. That Willy would squander so vast a lead had seemed farfetched. Yet by merely entertaining the possibility, she had called the unimaginable into being. Since she only needed one point of three, and from long thereafter a single game, which she should have picked up along the way if only from habit, the scale of the terror must have been monstrous.

  “What could you possibly be afraid of, at that score?” asked Eric incredulously.

  “I don’t want you to leave me.” Willy’s voice, ordinarily a sturdy alto, was frail.

  “I wouldn’t leave you over a tennis game!”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’re going on the ATP tour—”

  “Which is part of the deal; we discussed this before we got married. You fly off to plenty of tournaments yourself. I don’t like separation any more than you do, and some day soon this will all be over and we’ll—”

  “No. You’ll leave me behind. You’ll be famous. If you pull far enough in front, you’ll be thousands of miles away when we’re in the same room.”

  “Nonsense,” Eric dismissed. “Besides, you lost one match. You can make up the points this summer, in the Tanqueray, for example—”

  “Then you agree. In order for us to stay together, truly together, I have to keep up with your ranking.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Your answer to what if such-and-such happens is just to say it won’t happen,” Willy spoke to the overhead light. “You’re nervous that I’m right.”

  “Willy, you’ve been more highly ranked than me by a yard the entire time we’ve been together. It’s been the other way around for twenty-four hours, and you’re going off the deep end. We can obviously manage not being exactly on a par, because that’s the way we’ve been managing.”

  “You knew you were gaining on me.” Willy’s voice had gone flat and factual. “It’s psychologically apples and oranges, coming up from behind and overtaking versus starting out in front and being surpassed. You know that from tennis. You’re being intentionally thick.”

  “You can wear the shoe on the other foot for a month or so after two years of my playing second fiddle.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors,” said Willy wearily. “You must be rattled.” As if to demonstrate, the phone rang, and they both jumped.

  Willy picked up. “No, it’s not too late … Yes, I can see your point … Well, I’m sure she’ll be perfect … No, the whole thing wasn’t my cup of tea anyway, I don’t mind. Yes. Goodbye.”

  Willy dangled the receiver on two fingers and dropped it c’est la vie in the cradle. “That was Slick Chick. The editor said that if we’d both won the Chevy it would have been a great story. But the way it shook out would make their readers ‘uncomfortable’—a fractured fairy tale, you know. So she was schmoozing with Marcella at the party. They’ll do a spread on Foussard instead.”

  “Willy, I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged off his arm. “It was stupid anyway. I loo
ked like a whore.”

  “Honey…” Eric loitered helplessly at her side; for once Willy wished that she smoked. “What I said before—I only meant that your tennis game is as good as you play. I didn’t mean that you are.”

  “The distinction is lost on me.”

  “I love you, sweetheart. I don’t care if you win tournaments.”

  “That’s love? My career doesn’t matter?”

  “It only matters to me because it matters to you. If it would help—I’ll come to the Tanqueray. To give you support.”

  “You’ll be in Europe.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  She hadn’t the heart to tell him that his courtside presence was kryptonite.

  ***

  When Eric left for Switzerland, Willy fled to Sweetspot to train intensively for the Tanqueray in July. Fewer than half the points were on offer as she might have collected at the Chevrolet, but Willy needed a win like a fix.

  In practice she had the shakes. Willy no longer quite believed that her shot would arrive where she aimed and, lo, it did not. Max called this self-fulfilling failure of faith the “Tinkerbell Syndrome”—in Peter Pan, unless children believed in fairies Tinkerbell would die. Putting a successful stroke on a par with the supernatural, his coinage recalled Willy’s recurrent flying dreams, to which she was both prone and partial. Yet lately, soaring over mountain ranges with her arms outstretched, suddenly it would occur to her that people couldn’t fly. At the instant of misgiving, her body would plummet, and Willy woke with a start, her heart thumping and the bedclothes dank. If the fatality of hitting bottom in falling dreams was apparently a myth, certainly in its metaphorical sense hitting bottom would be a death of sorts.

  The cancerous mistrust was periodic, and bred itself. Hesitation begat poor shots, which begat more hesitation, which begat more poor shots. Often the only way to break the cycle was to quit, an impractical solution in a match.

  Admittedly, Willy’s game always had its ups and downs. When Willy was on form, a point flowed like water; when she was out of kilter not the point but the atmosphere went liquid, and slogging toward the alley she might have been hoofing it in a swimming pool. The gods of tennis were capricious, their gifts no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Yet this latest invasion of doubt seemed the more human failing of Thomas than divine neglect. Sensing her diffidence after an especially atrocious practice session, Max sat Willy down in the library that evening and regaled her with, of all things, tales of dentistry.

  “I have good teeth,” he began. “As a kid I never had a cavity. Until I was twenty-nine, when I was mortified to be told that I needed a filling.”

  “I asked my dentist, why after all this time? He explained that molars are formed in pieces, and grow together to make a solid tooth. In my case, the pieces had never quite united. For my whole life a little pocket had waited, hidden. Finally some bit of flotsam invaded the gap, and the tooth decayed.”

  “I assume this is another of your parables, and not a lesson in the importance of floss?” asked Willy tolerantly.

  “I’ve never coached a woman who wasn’t riddled with holes,” Max declared. “Sometimes the missing chunks are gaping, and the poor girl can’t comb her hair without bursting into tears. You, though—I thought at first I’d found a female whose ego wasn’t Swiss cheese. Now I wonder if you aren’t like my molar—no pits on the outside, but in the very center, there’s a hollow.”

  “If they’re ‘riddled with holes,’ why coach women?”

  “I’d have made a good dentist. And hey, the holes aren’t their fault. Most girls have been blasted with buckshot by the time they’re five.”

  “You sound as though you’re coaching the Special Olympics,” Willy grumbled. “So what’s the answer? To my ‘hollow’?”

  “Well, it’s ultimately a Daddy thing, but Chuck’s not going to change much at this point. You’ve sealed him off. You’ve sealed everyone off, even me,” Max volunteered cheerfully. “That’s been your secret. Keep fending us away, then. And fortify your enamel with the fluoride of victory.” Max clasped his hands over his stomach, in a gesture of literary repletion.

  The time had long passed when Willy’s leaving for her own dorm room was noticeably painful to either of them, and she dragged herself unceremoniously upright. “If a man had been stabbed by his competitor’s fan,” she posited, “not horrendously, but unnervingly, would he quit the game?”

  “No,” said Max. “I doubt a man would be ‘traumatized.’ I think he’d be angry.”

  “So Monica Seles has a hollow, too. Backhanded comfort.”

  “Will,” he called behind her. “I don’t like to say I told you so. But you know what ‘bit of flotsam’ is the catalyst for your decay, don’t you? Who’s worked into your hollow like a husk of popcorn?”

  “That’s a lie,” said Willy before slamming the door. “You love to say I told you so.”

  As promised, Eric did fly back to attend the Tanqueray after his tournament in Zurich, where he’d made the round-of-sixteen—a reputable showing for a greenhorn on the tour. For his July return, Eric sacrificed his next European foray. Superior ranking had made him kinder. Magnanimity is to some degree a function of what you can afford; with a few moving exceptions, rich people buy more extravagant presents than the poor. Much as the gesture touched her, Willy envied him the luxury of generosity. How nice to be nice.

  The Tanqueray was played in New Haven, though any town on the circuit came down to a price tag—how much it cost to get there, how much it cost to stay. To Willy, New Haven didn’t mean grand Ivy League university, notorious drug problem, and quaint, resuscitated downtown. It meant cheap—within an hour’s train ride of New York. Otherwise it simply meant comedown. Though with poor depth of field its trophy was ripe for picking, winning the Tanqueray would confer less prestige than losing the Chevrolet finals.

  As Willy’s first round began, no one in the stands would have noticed anything amiss. Oh, it looked dismal, playing in that enormous Yale stadium before such a tiny crowd; and perhaps 223 versus 522 going on to three sets was unexpected, though not unheard of. Eric beamed from the sidelines, punching the air after Willy’s winners. But Willy herself kept hearing that deep interior hollow echo in her ears as if someone were pounding on an empty oil drum.

  Granted that in tennis you were always making decisions, since most oncoming shots could be returned in a variety of canny directions. Several variables had to be calculated at once: where were this opponent’s weak spots; how had you contended with similar configurations earlier in the match, and so what was your adversary expecting; could you handle the probable replies. Yet a good player hit with the illusion of making no decisions at all. Compacted into a split second, all that geometry, game memory, and espionage condensed into gut, spontaneous instinct.

  But in the opening round of the Tanqueray, Willy was thinking too much. The summer’s incipient uncertainty, the self-conscious decision-making, was back. Just before impact with the ball, she could have listed her alternatives on paper.

  It was 3–4 in the third set, on-serve, Willy receiving. The game went Willy’s way, until at 15–40 she confronted a vital break point.

  Willy drove deep, and came to net. Her first volley was gettable, though the returning lob was weak. Willy could either streak back and take it on the bounce and so be driven to the baseline, or smash it midcourt and resume the net. Willy went for the more aggressive overhead. Keeping the ball in view, she backed into position.

  But then Willy remembered that midcourt volleys were inherently risky, and a spin was beginning to curve the ball unpredictably to her right. Maybe take the bounce instead. Not having firmly opted for one course of action or the other, Willy was torn literally in two directions at once: her torso swiveled toward the baseline, while her feet danced forward to smash.

  Her scream was still reverberating around Yale Stadium when Willy discovered herself splayed on the court. Her right knee was twisted in an implausible postu
re, like the figure drawing of an inept art student. Of the last few seconds she had no memory; she did not understand how she’d landed on the court, until a second wave of pain broke over her leg, oceanic and obliterating.

  “Willy, sweetheart, don’t move” came a familiar voice. Her vision spotted and the lines of seats wavered; she couldn’t make out his face. “Don’t try to get up. Wait for a doctor. Here, hold my hand. That’s right. Squeeze hard. Stay still. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Funny how people always said that. They had no idea if everything was going to be all right.

  The gold band was warm under her fingers. She squeezed his wedding ring harder, as if it were in danger of falling off. “Eric?” she whispered. “Did I make the shot?”

  “Sure you did. A real killer.”

  Before blacking out, she knew he was lying.

  Willy didn’t realize she was going into surgery until she was out of it. Groggy from sedation, she worked her way up on her elbows as 3–4 in the first set swam into memory. A break, didn’t she break? For a moment she was ready to serve for the match before a tear in the narrative appeared, as if someone had ripped out a page. What had happened was still unclear. That something had happened was certain, and as certainly it was bad. As she grasped the reality of her hospital bed—the stiff, scratchy sheets, the squashed pillow, the blare of neon that made even nurses look sickly—Willy was smitten by the primitive ignorance of a Civil War casualty. Her right leg … she couldn’t feel it! When she lifted the sheet, what a relief that the leg, though bandaged at the knee, was still there.

  Had Willy been able to maintain this variety of crude gratitude—she had all her body parts, she was in her right mind, she was alive—the next few months would have gone more gently. But crude gratitude was the stuff of crude expectations. The terminally ill could feast on surviving another day in however stuporous a fashion. For a young, ambitious tennis player abruptly unable to hobble to the bathroom without a crutch, thankfulness was fleeting.