Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  Finding herself in Yale Medical Center instead of proceeding to the second round, Willy was dizzied by an emotional kaleidoscope; it was impossible to fix her feelings for more than an instant. Livid anger vied with duller grays of lethargy and gloom. Brief silver flashes of determination lit up the room, only to give way to inky hatred for every pedestrian within eyesight blithely striding about the ward on two legs. For moments her panorama washed clean with wide, white, annihilating denial. Others Willy was blanketed by a soft, beige, biding sensation—the patient numbness of waiting for a bus in cold weather. Yet gradually the miasma behind her eyes turned an ugly, sulfurous yellow, and for minutes Willy couldn’t move a finger from pure, perfect terror.

  When the orthopedic surgeon came to chat at her bedside, Willy didn’t interrupt. She caught at the term cruciate ligament, with its semantic aura of importance. She was trying to pay attention, but there was only one question she wanted to put to the man.

  “Doctor,” Willy rasped. “Will I—” She considered putting off the inquiry for later, but in that case she wouldn’t sleep. “Will I be able to play tennis?”

  “Oh, a little recreational sport, taking it easy—”

  “No, Doctor, I play for a living. Can I go back to it?”

  The young man sniffed the air, as if he might smell her fate on the wind. “Oh,” the surgeon supposed, “probably.”

  “Probably! What does that mean?”

  “It means probably,” he repeated with vexation. “Medicine isn’t exact; all bodies are different. One of the things that’s compelling about being a doctor—”

  This was hardly the time to explore her surgeon’s fascination with his job. “Can’t you pin it down better than that? Like, what are the odds?”

  “Generically, with this sort of injury? Fifty to sixty percent,” he stabbed, shrugging. “But odds on an individual basis are meaningless. I have hopes for your recovery, but that depends on how you respond to physical therapy. You may feel twinges for the rest of your life, and your right knee will always be a weak point. You’ll have to be careful.”

  “I got here being careful,” she muttered.

  “If you build up the muscles around the knee you may well return to normal, or nearly normal.”

  Willy’s stomach lurched. The distinction between “normal” and “nearly normal” could easily be the difference between rankings of 215 and 902.

  “I’ll tell you this much,” he assured her, moving off her bed. “If you’d snapped the cruciate completely, you’d be out of the game for good.”

  Having administered another dose of crude gratitude, he left her to the roll of a die.

  Willy had made a poor Methodist, and so her prayers were offered to a presence she was not sure was out there, with the instinctive dumb crooning of a dog baying at the moon. Please, please, if I can play again I’ll—She was not sure what she was promising to do for whom. If she was vowing to never take tennis for granted again, she knew better. Permitted back on the court, Willy would take the sport for granted in five minutes, chafing when a volley landed wide. But maybe it was that very chafing, the fight toward an ideal game that no player achieved, that she would most miss.

  The sensible vow was to trust. Doubt itself had shuttled her to bed. But now that very mistrust had materialized, another monster roused from her imagination to lumber the world. Being “careful” meant that she could no longer trust her right knee. In this way the punishment was apt. By the time Eric arrived for visiting hours, Willy had convinced herself that she deserved it.

  Her husband bore treats, for which Willy had no appetite, and she was loath to put on weight via the sedentary, bored nibbling of the bedridden. Although she’d lain here less than a day, she could already feel her muscles decomposing into jelly.

  “The doctor says you’re going to be fine,” Eric purred, stroking her cheek.

  “That’s not what he told me,” said Willy.

  “He said the percentages were on your side. Come on, you’re in great shape and perfect health. I bet you’ll heal like time-lapse photography.” Eric fluffed her bedclothes, but looked away when the sheet rose, avoiding a glimpse of the bandaged knee. Despite her husband’s go-get-’em-champ, the errant strands of his eyebrows were sticking straight up in alarm. His hair greasy and coloring wan, Eric probably hadn’t showered or slept.

  Sweeter and as carefully selected as his gift of Godiva chocolates were Eric’s tales of miraculous injury comebacks, which he must have stayed up researching overnight. But for every Pat Cash or Thomas Muster, Willy could name a Peter McNamara, who also turned to chase a lob, also tore up his knee ligaments, and was thereafter qualified for little more than hawking frozen yogurt at Flushing Meadow.

  “Recuperation has a lot to do with attitude,” Eric asserted, pouring her a glass of grape juice she didn’t want.

  “Maybe so,” Willy agreed. “All the worse. My attitude already sucks.”

  “Wilhelm, this mess just happened yesterday, of course you’re depressed. But later, recovery is fifty percent character.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “It doesn’t worry me.” For a man who wasn’t worried, Eric’s forehead was awfully crimped, folded between his eyes like an accordion. “You’re the most persevering woman I’ve ever met.”

  “It was character got me into this,” Willy grumbled. “‘He who hesitates is lost.’”

  “You’re talking crazy. It’s the sedative.”

  “I was graceless.”

  “Hey,” Eric separated the fine pale hairs at her temple, “think I’ve never had a minute when I was ungainly on the court?”

  “I’ve never seen one. You know when you want to volley and you go volley. You don’t hand-wring and change your mind and sprawl on your butt in the shape of a pretzel.”

  Eric swiveled from his chair and raked his fingers over his scalp. “Willy, you think this is humility, I’m sure. So you hurt your knee because you did something wrong. Anything that happens to you, you made happen. But that’s not humility, it’s hubris. There’s such a thing as an accident, an event outside your control. This country is so litigious and so secular lately that any disaster has to be some poor bastard’s fault. But it isn’t always. There’s such a thing as a bad break.”

  “And a good break?” Willy prodded softly. “You’re doing well yourself because you’re lucky?”

  Eric’s pace around her bed came up short. “I haven’t been unlucky. Maybe that’s the same thing.”

  “You most certainly don’t attribute your own successes to the fates,” Willy insisted, “or to a well-worn rabbit’s foot. You earn what you achieve. Likewise, I got what I had coming.”

  “For some bizarre reason this way of thinking makes you feel better,” Eric ranted. As his volume rose, the visitor at the next bed pulled the curtain. “I thought I was the ultra-rationalist, but you’re the real culprit. Everything has to be ordered: rightful rewards and just desserts. No randomness, nothing from left field. That sort of rigid one-two-three makes no sense of the world, because it doesn’t add up. But I’ll leave you to it for now. As if this ordeal weren’t hard enough, on top of everything you have to be to blame! As if it didn’t hurt enough already, make you nervous about your career already! But stew if you have to, whip yourself if that provides you some masochistic, flagellistic satisfaction. Christ!” He was back to pacing. She could tell this was not the spirit in which he would have wanted to depart.

  Willy held out her hand. “Kiss me.”

  He did so and muffled into her neck, “I’m so sorry.” Willy drew back in amazement. It was the first time she had ever seen him cry.

  FOURTEEN

  “MAX?” WILLY RASPED, her Face contorted and her breath shallow. “You don’t think I was looking for a way out, do you? That secretly I wanted a rest, or to quit?”

  “Why?” Spotting her down the parallel bars, Max hovered with his hand an inch from Willy’s shoulder. He was forcing himself not to help.
“Are you telling me that you want to quit?” Whenever she distressed him, Max sounded irritated.

  “No.” Sweat drizzled down her neck; through the pain, it tickled. “But maybe subconsciously—”

  Max rolled his eyes. “So I guess the interstates are overrun with drivers subconsciously hankering to plow into jackknifed tractor trailers.”

  Having shuttled the length of the bars placing a few pounds on the knee, Willy hopped to the leg pull and sank onto its bench. “Oh, Max. This equipment,” she gestured at the fitness suite, since July grown crowded, “rented for me; that physiotherapist three times a week; your time, when your new summer school is still on—all because I was a klutz.”

  “Kid, this compulsion to regard that spill as your fault—”

  “I was indecisive!”

  “What do you want from me?” Max despaired. “Absolution? Or for me to agree that yes, you were a clumsy oaf, serves you right? I’ll do either. Whatever will get you to drop it.”

  Willy tugged at the elastic brace to peek at the scars, still bright pink, then snapped it against the tender skin. “I want to know what you really think.”

  “I’ve coached you for eight years. I’ve never had a student who was faster or more surefooted. Even that choke of yours with Marcella—which will dumbfound me to the day I die—you weren’t awkward. No, you were agile enough, always getting to the shot, and I may never have seen you hit the ball harder—straight into the net, as if you were aiming for it. So over eight years, you’re ass-backwards for three seconds. Does that mean you deserve to be taken out of the game for six months, go through this hideous rehab and then retraining this winter, and meanwhile your ranking plummets to a number requiring scientific notation to fit on one page? I bet you think shoplifters should get the chair.”

  “Thank you,” she said shyly.

  “Grow up.” This irritation was not feigned.

  Eric had offered to stick around—or not exactly. Rather, he asked diffidently, “Should I stay with you?” with the pleading expression of a child who has done his chores and is begging to go play. He had already sacrificed a tournament by flying back for the disastrous Tanqueray, and she could not conscionably demand that he hold her hand at such severe cost to his ranking. As ever, Eric had to keep in the running just to stay in place, like jogging on the Sweetspot treadmill, which punished a single pause with ejection from the track.

  As for Willy, maybe a compassionate computer would put the rankings of injured athletes in suspended animation through recovery. But desperate players might too easily falsify incapacity to preserve their standing, so the associations had to keep the clock ticking come what may. As the season marched on, points dropped from Willy’s name, for the computer tabulated accrual on a rollover basis. Her subsequent sinking heart resembled the despondency of a stalwart wage-earner abruptly laid off, watching his once robust savings account dwindle to nothing.

  But if Eric would not submit to the monotonous business of tugging on her foot to lengthen her reattached ligaments, if he declined to spot her at the parallel bars as she pulled the heel toward her buttock until tears streamed down her cheeks, then he had no right to squawk when she accepted Max’s offer to recuperate at Sweetspot.

  Max seemed to welcome her renewed dependence on his facility for everything from breakfast to clean knee braces. He lifted his head at the squeak of her crutches on his waxed mess floors as if straining to catch a bittersweet melody, and later wheeled gladly at the click of her cane as it resonated his wide porches. When at last she could balance unaided down the flagstones of her dormitory, eyes wide and fingertips outstretched, his expression was worthy of Bob Cratchit before a mended Tiny Tim. Max personally led her through her exercises with a patience that seemed unlike him; he was patient for her. When at the end of her tether she asked why he bothered with a “tennis player” who couldn’t touch her toes, quipping, “They shoot horses, don’t they?” Max chided that he did not believe in planned obsolescence. If he would take a lifeless CD player in for service he would certainly repair an athlete.

  As she made incremental progress, a camaraderie grew between coach and client that might ordinarily have cemented the bond between husband and wife. Now that Willy had been restored to his custody, Max enfolded her with consoling solicitude, as if her marriage were a grueling kidnapping attempt mercifully foiled, of which he was loath to speak and thereby recall her ordeal. When his private line jangled in the library, he handed her the receiver with a you-know-who shrug, no comment.

  Though Max always slipped off to give her privacy, he needn’t have bothered. The arithmetic regularity of Eric’s calls bespoke duty more than impulse, and what besides duty would drive anyone to repeat such conversations?

  Eric was full of complaints. The players’ bus drivers didn’t speak English and didn’t know the way to the stadium. Practice courts were double-booked. His luggage was lost for two days, the plane was three hours late. Some disorganized tournament director did nothing but waddle from court to court trailing cigar ash. The courtesy car chauffeurs were forever sneaking off to the pool. The food was too rich and fussy, and he missed the plain broiled chicken at Flower of Mayonnaise. The toilets in Germany were perverted, offering up your feces on a throne for examination. Everywhere it was murder to find space to jump rope. A nagging ache in his right arm might be nascent tendonitis…

  As Eric’s querulousness mounted, so did Willy’s incredulity. Here she was lurching about the Connecticut boondocks like Igor, game for little more than a stiff round of Snakes and Ladders, and he was on the international ATP tour competing with the crème de la crème of the sport, staying in chic hotels and ordering Black Forest gateau while she gnoshed one more overdone flank steak from the cafeteria. And he was complaining?

  As Willy fumed after one more session of intercontinental bellyaching, Max pointed out how she might feel if instead Oberdwarf raved about what a marvelous lark he was on. What if he lavished praise on the exotic delicacies at his table, his posh digs, the breathtaking view of the Alps out his window? “He doesn’t want you to think he’s having too good a time without you. It’s an ancient marital gambit. I peeved away to my wife all the time. Not that it worked. She was always sure I was covering up. To give the woman credit, she was right.”

  “So he’s lying.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ve learned yourself that the hotel routine gets old fast.”

  “Motel Six’s get old. He’s in Europe.”

  “No, they all get old. There’s only one thing on the tour, if you’re the real McCoy, that doesn’t wear thin. Which is also the one thing, if I don’t miss my guess, that he’s bashful about discussing.”

  Max’s intuitions were on the money. Eric hanged himself regardless: if he griped he was ungrateful; if he rhapsodized he was rubbing-the-nose. But if he couldn’t win with Willy, he compensated on the court, and it was precisely these victories that he short-shrifted over the phone. Often by the time Eric was finished moaning about greasy paella riddled with shrimp shell, the call had got too expensive to go into any detail about the second round in Madrid. And this from a man who used to burst into their apartment to deliver the blow-by-blow of an incidental practice match. Moreover, he was often disparaging about his performance, whereas previous to the Chevrolet he hadn’t a discouraging word to spare about his game.

  “But you did win, didn’t you?” Willy once pressed in exasperation.

  “Just.”

  “What was the score?” She picked distractedly at a flap of skin on her right palm.

  “Mmm…” He pretended to not quite remember. “6–4, 7–5, something like that.”

  “Straight sets. That’s not scraping by, Eric.”

  She could feel him recoil on the other end; the note of accusation in her voice was unmistakable. No doubt he was racking his brain for what he had done wrong this time. In the absence of an answer, or in avoidance of one, he changed the subject. “So how’s tricks at Sweatspot?”
r />   Several other patches were moulting off her fingers and thumb; the lifting skin was hard, thick, and yellow.

  “Oh, I brought my forehead to my knee yesterday,” she informed him dryly. “Cause for champagne.”

  “Honey, that’s terrific!”

  “Yeah,” she slurred. “Just swell. Next week I’m allowed a light jog. One mile, then a whirlpool bath. In case you’re wondering what it’s like to be eighty-five, I can give you some previews.”

  Next to the phone, she had amassed a pyre of skin scraps on the library table, all that remained of her tennis calluses.

  In truth, some of Eric’s triumphs were truncated. He was contending in a higher stratum than domestic satellites, and his shimmy up the ladder had slowed to a more laborious clamber. Still the program was on track; by the end of September Eric was ranked 169, and Willy had slid to 357. They were no longer parallel trains chugging forward at varying rates. Willy’s engine was stalled for overhaul at the station, while her husband’s caboose rattled off to the horizon. All she could do was gimp to the edge of the platform and wave.

  They were living in different worlds. Traveling, Eric accumulated a battery of exotic images that set him apart. How luscious it might have been instead to mock the tournament director’s cigar ash together, to later reference German toilets and snicker. So many jokes came down to I-guess-you-had-to-be-there, and Willy wasn’t.

  At the unsatisfying conclusion of their phone calls Willy grew doleful, and not only on her own account. Eric had cherished a wife who could fully appreciate the nuances of a tennis match. Now to this very soulmate he felt bound to telescope, dismiss, and skate over the focal narratives of his life. Only when he was cut down in the first round in Stockholm did he indulge the whole set-by-set story. When instead he confessed to advancing to the quarters of the Brussels Classic, he spoke in the furtive, abashed tones of a man who has been arrested for public indecency.