Willy felt a pang. Key Biscayne was one of the two coed international events that Max had mentioned long ago, and now there was no way she and Eric were entering together. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart,” she said faintly. “You just can’t lose.”
He didn’t. It was largely thanks to Key Biscayne that Eric advanced to 75.
The second incident was less ambiguous. The day Eric came home in April, he schlepped in the door with a terse, “I’m back.” Dumping his bags, he went straight to the refrigerator and rattled its empty drawers. “Willy!” he barked into the fridge. “All my clothes reek. Take my laundry in, will ya?”
He stalked out of the kitchen and selected three rackets, propping them on the doorjamb. “I’ve got a practice game at Forest Hills later this afternoon,” he announced. “I’ll come by later and pick up my stuff. For now my legs are killing me from those shitty economy-class seats, and I’m going to Jordan to jump rope.”
“Right away?” Willy asked in incredulity. “You haven’t been home for five minutes.”
“Some home,” he groused, standing in the doorway. “You know, I’ve been on the road for six weeks. I come back, there’s not so much as a crust of bread for lunch, and this place is a pigsty.”
The door slammed. So much for how-are-you-honey, much less let’s-get-reacquainted-in-the-bedroom. Cramped transatlantic flights may have made Eric crabby, but being treated like dilatory hotel staff made Willy far crabbier. She glowered at the battered leather duffels, tattered with torn routing tickets to London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. So she was supposed to paw through his stinky sports clothes? Think again, buster.
In the foyer, his rackets peered back at her with prim expressions, awaiting the return of Master. Though their covers were sumptuously padded, the pampered Princes now lay at the mercy of their governess. Willy had always treated her own rackets with respect, never thrashing them to pieces against a fence as Andre Agassi had done with no fewer than forty rackets a year in his youth. But Eric had bought a wire cutter to replace the plug on the stereo and hadn’t got around to the repair; it seemed profligate to invest in an implement never put to profitable employ.
She unzipped the top Prince; it cowered. Working the blades of the wire cutter into the sweet spot inspired all the murderous glee of slipping a knife into human gut. They were expensive strings. With a snip the whole frame shuddered. At first the grid remained intact, as a stabbing victim might remain standing a moment before pitching forward to the pavement. After a minute, however, the center of the face subtly loosened, quivered, and unraveled like the composure of the mortally wounded. She zipped it back in its body bag.
Quickly, she did the other two accomplices and arranged the rackets back in order.
“Can you believe,” said Eric on his return from his match, “that all three of my rackets had busted strings?”
“All three?” Willy marveled.
“Plane pressure, temperature change—”
“I guess you couldn’t play.”
“I borrowed a spare off Leonard. In fact, I fell in love with his Wilson. When my racket contract is up for renewal in August, I’ll have Gary approach Wilson instead.”
She had indulged mindless, fruitless vandalism, but vandalism was by its nature fruitless, and for the first time Willy wholly understood young boys with dim prospects who took Louisville Sluggers to bus shelters.
Maybe Willy indulged the odd deviant behavior in an effort to make herself feel something, if only guilty. For repeated battering on the circuit had bludgeoned all her senses. Colors waned—vistas outside her Amtrak window appeared two-dimensional and faded, like poor landscape reproductions in cheap hotels. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which once moved her to tears, now sounded tinny and thin—peevish, self-pitying, and lachrymose. When she had heaped curry onto chicken thighs, Eric leapt for water; Willy covered hers with cayenne and couldn’t taste a thing. When she left the unlit oven turned on, she didn’t notice; the gray choke of natural gas too well resembled what Willy smelled all the time. As for sex, it took ages to come. The protraction had grown embarrassing. Eric was a patient lover, but patience is not what any woman, in bed, aims to tax.
Yet it was on the tennis court that this flattening was most pronounced. Hardcourt green no longer lured with the permeable lushness of a meadow or sea, but looked painted and easily flaked to expose a raw, ashen composition. The dimensions of the court seemed smaller, like the house of your childhood visited when you were all grown-up. The once elegant lines of the game, winking with intrigue, now looked insipidly simple, like the hopscotch chalking of a dull girl.
The single stimulus that could always provoke a reaction of some kind was Eric Oberdorf. But despite the rare flood of self-annihilating adoration, itself not always welcome, Willy had to allow, as the summer of Eric’s first Grand Slam approached, that if she added up all her feelings for her husband on a given day and divided them by the total, the average was dislike. It was frightening. Recognizing the distinctive, self-assured sweep of his stride from two blocks away, not so long ago Willy would have broken into a run, arms open. Now she was inclined to wait, irked at his swagger. Even little things that used to charm her, like the huge quantities of food he ate, now got on Willy’s nerves; she could never devour all those carbohydrates without getting fat. Flashes of hastily regretted hatred were one thing, but this unblinking glare at the man who was supposedly the love of her life was wildly unfair, to both of them, and could not continue much longer.
If grown-up birthdays serve any purpose, they are for taking stock. On that milestone in May Willy demurred from attending Eric’s second round at Forest Hills’s Tournament of the Champions, and stayed home to brood on the alternatives for her future:
1. The Mrs. Eric Oberdorf Option.
Graciously Willy throws in the towel on her own career, devoting herself to the more prodigious talents of her husband. Eric advances rapidly to the Top Ten. He is pursued for presidential endorsements, harassed to play charity exhibitions, and paid to lend his name to the “Obie,” a new Wilson racket. When her husband breaks Bjorn Borg’s record for straight Wimbledon wins, Eric booms to the crowd how he could never have made it without the constant encouragement of his devoted wife. Willy beams.
On tour, she tries to be of use in little ways, unpacking in each hotel, ordering sandwiches, vetting calls. Other seasons she stays back at their mansion in California, for the children need one parent to stay put once in a while. For her own part, she sometimes plays a friendly doubles match with neighbors on the backyard court in Palo Alto, after which she pooh-poohs her disreputable performance and serves lemonade. But she never misses the Slams, and when the set gets tense the camera always seeks her out in the stands. At home on the couch, she has practiced leaping with delight at his final put-away volley in the fifth set, genuflecting and glancing heavenward like Brooke Shields.
2. The Shrew Solution.
Snipping Eric’s racket strings dwarfs to small beer. Eric no longer stores his trophies in the closet but carts them to his parents’ apartment, where they will be displayed with doting oohs and ahs, since the last time he arrived home with French Open crystal his wife shattered it with a sledgehammer. The “accident” was embarrassing, since the presentation trophy is on temporary loan to the winner for the year, and Eric had to pay for another to be specially cut. He has likewise learned not to take his wife on tour, because she stages abusive, drunken scenes in hotel lobbies. More than once she has been ejected by court security, booing and throwing bottles at her own husband at the seemly All England Club.
The closest Willy comes to hitting a tennis ball herself is kicking the damned thing out of the way when it’s dribbled between the liquor cabinet and the TV. Fat, unkempt, foulmouthed, and slanderous, Willy has become a serious liability for Eric’s bid for the Senate when he retires. It doesn’t look good, either, that they’ve had no children, though there’s been little likelihood of kids. Eric has avoided his wife�
��s bed ever since Willy was arrested for calling in a bogus bomb scare during his first U.S. Open final.
3. The Absentee Wife Ploy.
Too self-respecting to serenade as second fiddle and too weak-stomached for hard booze, Willy withdraws. She sleeps ten to twelve hours a day; her dreams are exotic. She reads novels set in Tahiti, or science fiction; she has left the planet. Her interior life is rich and ruminative, but from the outside she appears catatonic. She is pleasant but docile; Eric has to repeat himself several times before his wife responds, “Sorry?” Eric’s career seems to be going well enough, but Willy couldn’t say how well exactly. His results neither delight nor distress her; they no longer apply. She has exhumed her Davis Imperial from her parents’ attic, and hits for hours against a backboard as she did as a child. She has given up flesh-and-blood opponents. If she cannot compete, she will not compete, and for years now Willy hasn’t thought of herself in terms of other people at all.
If Eric does break Bjorn Borg’s Wimbledon record or endorse presidential candidates, he can have the tinsel of celebrity with her blessing. Willy has ceded the spotlight. All that she asks in return is to be left alone.
She eats little or nothing, and her body has grown so ethereal that any day now she will be able to fly while she is still awake. It isn’t that she has no feelings, but her emotions are pastel: bemusement, whimsy. She has no relations to people that she could not also have to objects. In bed, Willy is acquiescent; he is welcome to whatever he can lay hands on. If Eric wins or loses she murmurs, “That’s nice, dear,” or “That’s too bad, dear,” and sometimes she gets the appropriate responses mixed up. She functions, and doesn’t appear a danger to anyone or to herself, but she’s heard Eric quizzing psychiatrists in the study about whether his wife has lost her mind. In fact Willy has not lost it but crawled into it, and she likes it there.
“You left an option off the list. Try adding Willy gets her act together.” So Eric had won at Forest Hills—he had that blithe, refreshed look.
Willy whipped the envelope from Eric’s hands. On its back, an embellished scrawl listed, 1) Willy becomes a good little wifey, 2) Willy becomes a big bad wifey, 3) Willy becomes one of the disappeared, and was heavily framed by dense, jagged scribbles. There’d been no need for three alternatives; they all came down to the same answer: suicide. “That’s none of your business.”
“We’re married. What happens to you is my business. To you,” he mumbled, dropping his sports bag on the floor. “That’s your problem, you let things happen to you.”
“Every day I’ve got a different problem.” Willy crumpled the envelope and free-threw it to the trash can. She missed.
“You’re a great tennis player,” he retrieved the balled paper and arced it into the can—a swish, “you’re underachieving like fury, and the trouble is all in your head.”
“Isn’t that the ultimate terminal injury?” she asked calmly. “To my head?”
“Willy, you’ve said yourself that the difference between good and great players is character.”
“So my flaws are central to my very nature,” she elucidated matter-of-factly. “Character is the very definition of what you can’t do anything about.”
He threw up his hands. “Do you not want there to be a solution anymore? I swear, sometimes I think you enjoy wallowing in this! Like a pig in shit!”
Eric was breathing hard; he rarely permitted himself to insult her. Her husband’s rare flash of anger freed Willy to remain sedate. The reserve had a delicacy; she could see how he’d acquired a taste for it. And she was more than happy for Eric to sample the grapes of wrath.
“That’s right,” she said quietly, folding her arms. “I enjoy being poky and disreputable; I lose for fun. The disparity in our performance is destroying our marriage, and I enjoy that, too.”
“Nothing’s ‘destroying our marriage’! We said ‘for better or for worse.’ I meant it.”
Oh, the phrase had echoed before. But long ago Max had been right: Willy had initially anticipated doing better to Eric’s worse. This had been a day for fantasy futures, so a fitting one to admit what she’d foreseen at her wedding: Willy would rise to eminence. She would hit the international tour, she would endorse presidential candidates, she would have her agent to lunch. Eric would pour the tea.
Maybe the vision had been invidious, Willy reflected, a Mrs. Eric Oberdorf in reverse: Mr. Willy Novinsky. But one aspiration wasn’t horrid. In her original pipe dream, Willy was consoling—and how she yearned for once to stroke his bowed head, to pour a stiff whiskey for her disconsolate partner. Surely it wasn’t his dejection she wanted so much as a chance to play the foul-weather friend, the good woman on whose devotion he could rely when the world had turned its back. But the world never turned its back. He was a winner. They doted on him. She wasn’t his Rock of Gibraltar, but a millstone around his neck. Willy couldn’t remember the last time she bucked him up, cheered Eric with You’re a great tennis player, and concocted strategies to turn his luck. She might well become a classic helpmate, if only sometimes she could be the voice of confidence when his own had fled, the bolsterer enfolding him in bed, reminding him (lying) that there’s more to life than tennis.
It was sapping, always thinking one thing and saying another. “Better or worse?” she repeated, sinking to the sofa. “I guess I’d hoped to be the one to do better.”
“And I would do worse?” Eric remained standing. To sit down was to resign himself to this conversation.
“I should say no, that I’d like us to do equally well. But parity is inequality waiting to happen.” Willy confessed, “Honestly, I’d have preferred to keep the edge.”
“You said I was good when we met. You should have trusted your own judgment. Why would you of all people marry a second-rate player? More to the point, why would you want to?”
“I’d have thought even a couple of years ago that I craved proper competition,” she said dolorously, propping her feet on the Plexiglas table. “Now I think I’m not so grand as that. Maybe I’d do better with a husband who couldn’t hit a ball in the court if his life depended on it.”
“But my life does depend on it,” he chided. “So I can’t believe that you want me to fail. Not in your heart.”
It was precisely this innocence of Eric’s that Willy traded on daily. If he could visit her head for ten seconds, he would die.
“Willy, I don’t like this situation any more than you do.” Eric vigorously collected newspapers. “I will do anything to help you turn things around.”
Willy faced the window. His persistent kindness was a torture. “You always get to be so sweet, and all I get to be is beastly.”
The syntax was peculiar, except that Willy’s experience of her marriage lately resembled having been dubbed the ugly stepsister in the school play. And the only alternative to being hideous was to lie. She could at best conceal her envy, but she was powerless to forbid it. When Eric toted one more trophy home, where she awaited empty-handed, she might cry, Well done! or I hate you! but the only difference was what she said. Tinkering with the gut indignation itself—feeling gracious rather than acting that way—was beyond her. She could as easily fall in a lake and refuse to get wet.
For Willy had never understood whether you could be held responsible for your own emotions. As far as she could discern, circumstance had dealt them discrepant menus as the waiter had at Lutèce. Rather than lack prices, Willy’s listed different entrées: rancid resentment, gristly consternation, and prickly spite, all with an aftertaste of self-reproach—a sort of collective squab. After swallowing her pride, Willy’s only just dessert was humble pie. Meanwhile, Eric’s menu cataloged an emotional haute cuisine: tender solicitation, sweet concern, and creamy largess. In fact, she wondered if Eric himself wearied of his princely diet, got full to his eyeballs with his own decency, and coveted her shrieking fits. He was an aggressive, complicated man. Nobility and forbearance morning to night must have bound him like a woman’s corset.
“This state of affairs isn’t easy for me either,” Eric objected, hands on hips. “I have problems, too.”
“Oh?” Willy asked archly. “Name one.”
“When I win, you suffer. So what’s in victory for me? How do you think I felt at Forest Hills today, with my opponent’s girlfriend cheering in the front row? Where were you? And I come home, you don’t even ask if I won!”
“It’s obvious you won, Eric. Waves of self-congratulation come off you like a smell.”
“See?” His hands flailed; his voice grew louder. “I bust my butt today, and I’m supposed to apologize. Besides, how can I ever take pleasure in my game going well when you go to bed sobbing?”
“I’d pay money for your problems.”
“They’d cost you a bundle, because I’ve got plenty. The more highly I’m ranked, the more other people are counting on me. The pressure’s enormous. I have to keep reproducing successes month after month—”
Willy laughed. “You sound like Monica Seles bitching to reporters about the tyranny of obsequious fans in restaurants. Be honest: would you trade places with me?”
“You claim you want to be ‘sweet,’ but when I give you a chance to sympathize with me for once, you won’t take it.”
“Answer me. Would you trade places?”
He sighed and flopped beside her on the couch. “No.”
Willy stroked the long dark hairs sprouting from his hand. “Have you ever considered what it might be like if the tables were turned? If I were the one whizzing around the world and making stacks of money while you moped back here after being sandbagged in some squalid satellite?”
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