Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  Willy wrenched away and stepped off the treacherous scale. It was obviously calibrated wrong. “I haven’t puked since I was twelve,” she said stiffly, tugging at her stretched-out collar.

  “So you’re just hopping it all away, are you?” Max taunted. “Why should I pay for a dishrag to go to Providence?”

  “My game is in great shape, you said so yourself.”

  “But you’re not. Your skin is the color of oatmeal. I hate oatmeal. Your hair has no luster. Your eyes are dull as frozen dogshit. We’re going to pass on that wild card, kid, I’m not letting you go. Providence would be a disaster.”

  “Max, no! I’ve got to go!” Willy wailed, knowing full well that Max never made empty threats, never changed his mind, and was never moved a millimeter by petulance, promises, or imprecation. “After I’ve worked so hard! After all those exercises!”

  “I’ve worked hard, too. It’s cost me plenty time and money just to get that knee of yours to bend more than six degrees and bear more than five ounces. I don’t go to that much trouble as a roundabout way of returning one of my players to the hospital. What the fuck are you trying to do, kill yourself?”

  Glowering, Willy picked up a towel and smeared her face. “Some days that’s an appealing idea.”

  Max grabbed her wrist, forcing her to look him in the eye. “Don’t you ever say that. Not even as a joke.”

  She twisted her wrist from his grip. “Don’t fret. I’m not the type.”

  “You are.”

  Willy snorted.

  “Oh, fine, maybe not with razor blades,” he jeered. “You may not like to hear this, but when I ran across you in Nevada your skills were way behind your potential. I snapped you up anyway because what you did have was power—a tenacity, a fire, a singlemindedness that’s a lot harder to find than pretty forehands. But, Will, kiddo? Boomerang that power back in your own direction, it’s gonna take your head off.”

  SIXTEEN

  FOR THE NEXT SIX weeks, even with his students returned, Max didn’t let Willy out of his sight. No more rope, no more treadmill, no more line sprints. Two hours of practice, end of story, after which he force-fed his diminished protégée until she felt sick. Meanwhile, Max remained adamant about Providence, which came and went. Ever after the name of that Rhode Island town, which means “divine guidance,” would resonate with the suggestion that the gods were no longer leading Willy in the right direction.

  Recuperation from overtraining brought new banes. For two months Willy hadn’t menstruated at all. Max rescheduled her debut match to coincide with the return of Willy’s period.

  There are periods and periods. Her mother subscribed to the grin-and-bear-it school, and Willy had never been one to lay in bed to bleed. Sure, she’d played through them before, doping up with ibuprofen. But this one was a record-breaker for Willy’s fourteen mutinous years of reproductive life. Standing straight to serve was an effort, and by the third game in the first set Willy had to request medical dispensation to dash to the locker room. It was embarrassing to explain her distress to the male umpire, but the tampon was soaked and oozing into her white overpants, and would soon bloom onto the dress. She took advantage of the break to vent her bowels, liquefied in the hormonal onslaught.

  Five Advils hadn’t made a dent in the cramps; her intestines were empty and gaseous. This was only her period, Willy recited, believing what she’d been taught: that because menstruation happens to all women (or perhaps because it happens to women) it was a trivial complaint. Still, the notion beckoned that if the same frivolous incapacity assaulted her unsuspecting husband, he would promptly check himself into a hospital.

  The match was still close and went three sets, but an attack of vertigo in the tiebreak swirled Willy out of the first round like the flush of a toilet.

  In her second attempt, Willy was playing fantastically well. All the spectators who approached her afterward agreed, sharing her outrage. Since Willy had entered a zone, she was playing the lines. But the difference between great tennis and punk tennis could come down to a single inch. Umpires distinguished between the two, since the days were long gone that an opponent could be relied upon to call shots fairly in the interests of good sportsmanship.

  But maybe someone had slipped this umpire a C-note; maybe he didn’t like her uppity attitude; maybe he was petty-power mad and abusing his clout out of sheer badness. All that was certain was that every time her shot was anywhere near the line the ump called, “Fault!” When her adversary’s backhands bounced three inches deep, the squat, pudgy arbiter picked his nose.

  Willy tried everything. Arguing, refusing to resume play—she’d learned all the gambits from ballgirling for McEnroe. Defiance dug the man in; badgered, he doubled his chin, which dimpled like a crumpet. Yet suffering injustice in stoic silence didn’t soften his calls, either. The little toad, he couldn’t hit a tennis ball himself if it were attached to his racket with a bungee cord.

  When not even the small crowd’s hisses shamed the ump, Willy had to aim so glaringly inside the court that she mollycoddled would-be winners into common returns. Although she knew the danger in this situation was not losing points but her temper, some information remains belligerently theoretical. Willy mumbled, “Don’t let that worm get to you,” to no avail. In the third set, when she was sick of babying the ball after having been in prime form at the outset, the umpire called even one of her safey-safey shots long and that was the limit. Willy blew a gasket and began to hit out.

  Hit out in every sense. The umpire smiled, like an infant passing gas. When later that year Jeff Tarango walked out of Wimbledon over prejudicial line calls, Eric would be disgusted and Willy would acquire a new anti-hero.

  Nevertheless, only as her third tournament approached did Willy begin to feel well and truly cursed. She and Max had allowed two nights before the match in Ocala for Willy to get acclimated to the baking Florida sun. Through the first evening’s dinner, her lips tingled. “So you’ll have a cold sore,” she growled in the bathroom mirror that night. It always seems bigger to you than to the rest of the world, and it will go away.

  Except this particular outbreak was bound to seem pretty goddamned big to the rest of the world. Tossing that night, Willy kept licking her lips and rubbing them together; they were hot, and itched ferociously. The area of irritation was so vast that she wondered if she’d eaten something to which she was allergic.

  Rinsing her face the next morning, Willy lifted her head to glance in the mirror and gasped. Her whole mouth had exploded. Two patches of tiny raging blisters had invaded her chin.

  “Good God.”

  “Oh, Max,” Willy wailed. “Shut the door!”

  Willy insisted they order breakfast from room service. Max took the tray from a bellboy while she hid in the john.

  “Will, dear,” Max intoned when the boy was gone. “You can’t play tennis from the crapper.”

  “I won’t show my face until you buy me some makeup.”

  Max obliged, but commercial makeup has its limitations, especially applied to a surface with a life of its own.

  “It’s turning into bubble-wrap!” Willy cried from the mirror, from which she could not be parted.

  “Will, we’ve got to go practice.”

  “I’m not leaving this room.”

  “You are tomorrow, kid.”

  It was out of the question to attempt a last-minute withdrawal because of cold sores. The WTA would consider the ailment spurious, and slap her with a fine.

  Forlornly the next morning Willy spent another five minutes examining the damage. By now the sores were suppurating. Makeup only made matters worse. Resigned, Willy dabbed off her dripping paint job, donned dark glasses, and moped downstairs. At the taxi stand, a teenage boy pointed, “Hey, VD lips!” and sniggered.

  Unfortunately, you cannot play a tennis match with your head in a paper bag. Though the sores were painful, nothing about a face like boiling marinara should have technically hampered her game. But above all tenn
is may measure confidence, of which Willy had zilch.

  When Willy shook hands with the victor at the net, the girl whispered, “That happened to me once. I couldn’t have hit a beach ball. I just wanted to go home. I heard you were terrific. Better luck when that clears up.”

  It was the sweetest thing that any opponent had ever said.

  Meanwhile? Eric didn’t get periods, Eric never got a cold sore, and if Eric had any problem with umpires it was that they fell in love with him.

  No, Eric was frolicking about the globe collecting computer points in his basket like a kid picking up Easter eggs on a hunt he was too old for. But they had both concurred that another five-month estrangement was no-go. Tallying the expenses of his last departure, Eric adjudged that for his phone bill he might have flown home twice. He promised to space his tournaments more widely, and play fewer per year. More magnanimity from the well-endowed, which Willy yearned to return in kind.

  But Willy didn’t need to be magnanimous. She managed to be home all the time. Organizing a tournament schedule, you had to decide whether to allow for success. Satellites took up to three weeks, and required as many for advance registration. Defeated in the first round, after one day you were footloose. The alternative was to assume you’d lose early and double-book. But if you planned on losing there was no point in entering in the first place. Consequently, Willy allowed the usual three weeks between tournaments, then post-calamity had most of the month on her hands.

  Though she could always head to Sweetspot to groove strokes, training was no substitute for the taut schedule of the journeyman on a roll—when you sweep off from the finals to grab your bags at the hotel, lunge into a taxi and tell the driver to step on it like in the movies, weave through other passengers at a jog to arrive panting at the departure lounge, where the plane is already boarding, and buckle up as the turbines rise in pitch. Sure it was tiring, sure you got fed up with hotel coffee the color of chicken broth, but Willy missed the grind; she even missed moaning about it. Because lately Willy packed (unheard of) the day before a tournament and arrived at the airport an hour ahead of takeoff like all the other saps who believed what the airline told them over the phone. And she was never in a motel long enough to make much of a fuss about the coffee.

  Ticketing was expensive. Each time she lost early her reservation had to be changed, and that cost; what she now owed Max Upchurch Willy shuddered to contemplate. She might have taken the odd day to explore the country, but once she’d lost in a city it was spoiled. In that event Willy was free to play the happy homemaker if she liked, though the one afternoon she did go buy new curtains she was too depressed once back home to thread them on the rods.

  Coinciding with Eric’s return for a breather in late April, a phone call from Tennis magazine was not unwelcome. Willy wasn’t a publicity maven; even Slick Chick’s replacing her in its spread hadn’t broken her heart, except inasmuch as it emblemized that unprecedented choke in the Chevrolet. But the season had been so catastrophic so far that Willy was relieved to be popping up on their screens at all, and readily agreed to an interview.

  “Why you?” asked Eric distractedly, rewinding the Borg–McEnroe final, now flecked from constant replay.

  “Has it become that surprising that anyone would be concerned with my career?”

  “Don’t be so touchy. I was only wondering what the peg was.”

  “They didn’t say.” Willy smiled wanly. “Maybe they’re doing an article on herpes simplex, and I set some kind of record.” Three full weeks later, the sores had not healed in the centers, and gray, shadowy scars etched her chin.

  The journalist, Jeremy Roman, was fresh-faced, squeaky-clean, and sporty.

  “You play yourself?” she asked idly, showing him a chair. It seemed chivalrous to solicit the interviewer when she was structurally the center of attention.

  “Strictly amateur.” He waved his hand. “I’m a hack.”

  She sensed he was proud of his game. “I forgot. Most pros couldn’t spell t-e-n-n-i-s, much less write for it.”

  Roman chortled, and Willy settled on the couch, spreading one muscular calf across the other shin. She’d worn a simple sundress and bright leather pumps. She might have frumped to the door in sweats, but Willy, still recovering from “VD lips,” was glad for an excuse to look alluring. Besides, he might want a picture.

  “So, just to warm up,” the reporter began, placing his micro-cassette on the coffee table and arranging a pad on his knee. “What’s your husband’s favorite food?”

  Willy’s hand draped her knee at an elegant angle, her back sinking in the pillows. “Broiled chicken and fried rice.”

  Jeremy scribbled on his pad.

  “I’m partial to plain chicken myself.”

  The journalist wrote nothing.

  “This is pertinent?” Willy inquired.

  “Oh, we just need color. And when did you two meet?”

  “Almost three years ago. The first day, Eric—that’s my husband—swept me off my feet. Literally. Though I was warned off marrying a tennis player, I obviously didn’t take the advice.”

  Jeremy turned up the level on his machine. “The people who told you not to marry a tennis player—so far, have they been right?”

  Willy drummed her fingers on her other arm. She was uncertain how honest to be with a reporter. The question was doubly difficult because she wasn’t sure what an honest answer was. “Of course there are tensions…”

  “Such as?”

  She chewed her lip, playing with the last little cold sore scab. There were tensions that a faithful wife was not to mention. Like the tension that the bastard was outdistancing her on the tour by a mile. That was supposed to be swell. Go team. All for one and one for all. The taste on her lip went salty; in dabbing a tissue to the spot Willy pressed herself to keep her mouth shut. “We rarely see each other.”

  “For the record, how old are you two?”

  “Eric’s a year younger than me. I’ll be twenty-six next month,” she said firmly. “That sounds old, I know. But I don’t think the game is benefiting from the trend toward younger stars. They don’t have the emotional resilience to handle the tour. You’ve got to be able to hunker down. Frankly, you need the courage to fail. To survive injuries, bad patches, and still land on your feet. That requires guts and resolve—not to mention patience—that most teenagers don’t have. If you look at the history of the really young phenoms, as soon as they encounter adversity, they crumble.”

  Willy assumed the man’s squiggling was to remind himself to transcribe this section of the tape. But readjusting on the sofa, she noticed that he was doodling daisies in his margins.

  Oh, maybe the microcassette tempted her to pontificate. But could she be blamed for holding forth, after three tournaments in a row sent her home, tail between her legs, after the first round? To bask in this no-account’s attentions was irresistible. Already the air filled her lungs more richly, her shoulders squared, and for the first time in months she felt beautiful. No one had shoved a microphone in Willy’s face in nearly a year.

  Having blackened the centers of his daisies, Roman noticed that she was finished. “When you learned of the award, how did you feel?”

  “Award?” asked Willy blankly.

  Award! Willy racked her brains to imagine for what she might be singled out this of all years. Most Star-Crossed Paid-Up WTA Member Who Has Not Jumped off a Bridge? Willy didn’t care; she’d take it.

  “Most Impressive Newcomer of the Year,” said Roman impatiently.

  “Newcomer, but I—”

  “It was announced six weeks ago, and we just haven’t had the space to…”

  Having begun to scissor her other leg on top, Willy let the calf back down. “Oh,” she said heavily. “Eric’s award.”

  “Didn’t your husband tell you?”

  “Of course he did,” Willy assured the journalist, hoping her face had not turned too bright a red. “It’s just that Eric wins so much lately, it’s hard
to keep it all straight.” Willy uncrossed her legs and crossed her arms instead. “What is the purpose of this interview, would you mind telling me?”

  “Sorry, thought I explained on the phone. We do dozens of profiles, and they get kind of monotonous. So we thought we’d take a new angle, and interview the wife this time, get the woman’s perspective, you know? Like, what are some of the stresses of holding down the fort when your husband’s on the road? When he’s back, do you hit the town, or after all that hotel fare does he really look forward to a home-cooked meal?”

  “Maybe you’d better get this rolling, Mr. Roman. I have a practice game at four-thirty across town.”

  “Say, that’s a good detail. You play tennis, too?”

  The practice game had been a lie. Once she’d finally pushed Jeremy Roman out the door, Willy kicked off her pretty shoes and yanked the bobby pins from her hair. Roman hadn’t wanted a picture after all. Slumping on the couch and crumpling her summer dress, Willy aimlessly flipped through the Times. The “A” section had run another feature on the First Lady. Hillary’s health-care reform bill had been shit-canned. She was widely regarded as having botched it. White House advisors had prescribed a more muted role. The president’s wife now made only a few modest appearances. Her new blouses tied in bows at the chin. When she accompanied her husband abroad Mrs. Clinton gathered hen parties for tea and sandwiches. She gave speeches on women’s issues—day care and child-rearing. Hillary had started her own newspaper column, which eschewed politics for household hints. The Times had reprinted the First Lady’s favorite recipe for oatmeal cookies. Eyes small and black as raisins, Willy clipped it out.

  The door slammed. Hair still wet from showering at Jordan, Eric poked his head in the kitchen. “Why are you banging pots?”

  “To make dinner.”

  “Fuck that. Let’s go out.”

  “I can’t afford to go out.”

  “My treat.” Eric took the pan off the stove and poured the water down the sink. “What’s this Hamburger Helper crap? I thought the interview this afternoon would put you in a good mood.”