Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  Willy might as well have hit herself on the head. In fact, better that she had. However Eric’s injury throbbed, no dull ache could have approached the sharp accusatory stab of looking up at that violet mess and remembering it was all her fault. Willy alternated between avoiding his face, and eating it with her eyes like crow.

  Eric exacted one compensation: Max Upchurch. Eric called to accept her former coach’s terms within her earshot, and Willy said nothing.

  In voluntary penance, she insisted on coming along to that evening’s dinner with her in-laws, which Eric was reluctant to reschedule. Though he was tight-lipped, maybe the sorrowing attentions of his mother appealed to him. Willy’s tenderness was tainted with guilt, and he shied from her hand as if it weren’t quite clean.

  “Come with me on one condition,” he allowed. “That I hit my head on a kitchen cabinet.”

  Willy was reminded of how many women in her mother’s generation had run into doors.

  Willy had avoided the Oberdorfs for nearly a year. She hadn’t the energy for another bicker over whether women players should earn the same prize money as men or “didn’t give the same bang for the buck,” or to riposte Axel’s digs at her ranking. And Axe was already marketing Eric’s prowess when his son was ranked 972; the ballyhoo with Eric on the cusp of the U.S. Open boggled the mind.

  Alma’s shock on opening the door prompted Eric to explain before he’d said hello. “Gracious,” the regal, willowy woman exclaimed, touching her daughter-in-law’s elbow. “I’ve never got him to walk into my kitchen.”

  Alma hustled Eric into the ebony-trimmed bathroom, sitting him on the alabaster toilet lid while she re-dressed the cut, dabbing it with orange Mercurochrome. The neon antiseptic was lambent with childhood. Though he pretended impatience, Eric visibly basked in his mother’s caresses. So all the while Willy had been yearning to take care of her husband, he had likewise yearned to be taken care of.

  “I hear you’ve been beating up on my son again!” Axel grappled Willy playfully and ushered her to the living room. Cheeks tingling, she fumbled unsuccessfully for a quick retort.

  When Eric joined them Axel played doctor. Building herself a chair with the Velcro-edged blocks while Eric furnished his “kitchen cabinet” run-in with lush detail, Willy detected the estrangement that any lie, however small, instantly inserts between people.

  “Ready for the Open, then, kid?” Axe asked rhetorically. “Said you might get a coach. Any movement there?”

  “I got a coach,” Eric said hurriedly. In the last two years he’d run out of neutral subjects. “And how’s tricks at Mt. Sinai?”

  Surprisingly, that was it. Now that Eric really was a star, Axel’s praise, no longer needed, was subdued; he segued agreeably to the rise in prostate cancer. Though Eric had treated it to many a rolled eye, he must have missed his father’s outsized veneration. It wasn’t true, then, that everyone loved a winner. Very few people did. Since they didn’t care for losers either, Willy surmised that on the whole they were awfully hard to please. Maybe her sister’s determined mediocrity reflected Gert’s drive to be liked.

  At dinner, they were a foursome. In contrast to the rambunctious, contentious tussle Willy had encountered in 1992, the polite quiet around the huge teak table was depressing, a portent of retirement.

  “So how’s Steven?” asked Eric.

  “Got him working on Bob Dole’s campaign,” said Axel, puffing his chest. “Learning the nitty-gritty of elections. Come in useful when he runs for office himself.”

  “How likely is that now?” asked Alma quietly.

  “Boy’s just gotta find his feet again.”

  His mother turned to Eric and explained, “Steven is stuffing envelopes. He finds it soothing.”

  “Is he still in that studio on Avenue C?”

  “We have been informed by his psychiatrist,” Axel intruded sourly, “that Steven’s capacity to open his own can of Chef Boyardee is something to be proud of.”

  At a distance, Willy had followed the fortunes of Eric’s brothers with as much fascination as their father had dismay. To Axel’s indignation Steven had failed to get into Yale or Harvard; the boy was left with no illusion that Dartmouth was just as good. Steven took the most demanding courses in the catalog, and on holidays was forever holed up in his room to study. Yet spectacular effort had not translated into spectacular marks. Though the boy was stupendous at memorizing facts, his negligible powers of original analysis earned him steady C’s.

  At the end of Steven’s sophomore year something had happened. Shying from the word breakdown, Axel described his second-born as “taking some time out in the real world.” But from the sound of the family’s evasions, Steven’s world had become all too real. More than once Alma had bolted from dinner in tears.

  Eric inquired, “He still working for the Development Office at Columbia?”

  “The med school let him go,” said Axe glumly. “Despite my threats to pull my alum-fund check. Kid kept calling in sick. Christ, all he had to do was answer the fucking phone.”

  “Sometimes answering a telephone can be quite terrifying,” said Alma, studying her smoked trout but eating none of it.

  “Since when? Alma, you rock-a-bye that boy like a basket case, he’s going to stay a basket case!”

  “What’s Mark up to?” Eric intervened. The Oberdorfs, like Eric and Willy, were short on neutral subjects.

  “Summer school,” Axe growled, disgust gathering like a cloud. “He wanted to gallivant around Europe, to collect material for his future oeuvre of films.” Axel sneered. “On my meal ticket, of course. But I wasn’t about to be hoodwinked a second time. His freshman year I said, You have your grades mailed here, buddy, and don’t expect to intercept the envelopes the way you snagged the ones from Horace Mann. What do I get sent? Both semesters, three incompletes each! I told him, You know Eric never took a single incomplete at Princeton, and you’re at NYU!”

  Eric interrupted, “NYU’s no tiptoe through the tulips, Dad.”

  “Wants to be a hotshot film director,” Axel went on unimpeded. “Which supposedly gives him an excuse to watch Wagon Train and Gidget Grows Up ’til 5 A.M. Then has the nerve to point to Eric here and say, Look at my older brother, he’s flying high on talent. I try to tell Mark, Eric practices three hours a day, jumps rope, weights, why I don’t even know what-all. But he earns his money, he earns those trophies—”

  “Bet that went down like a lead balloon,” Willy murmured.

  “Speaking of which, son,” Axel brightened, “thought I might give Steven a ticket to your first round to cheer him up. Get him a seat in the player’s box?”

  “Maybe,” Eric mumbled. “I’m just not sure watching me play the U.S. Open is the best therapy for Steven now, Dad.”

  Eric looked haggard, beyond the bruising around his bandage. He had to ask his father what the boys were up to because none of his brothers ever gave him a call. He must have been wondering if trophies came with prize money as compensation for what they did to the rest of your life.

  “Where did you ship Robert this year?” Eric completed the trio of updates with depleted enthusiasm.

  “Outward Bound.”

  “Going to make a man of him?” asked Eric ruefully.

  “I hadn’t in mind nearly so large an evolutionary leap,” said Axe, shoveling salad.

  The phone rang. Alma suggested they let the machine pick up, since they saw Eric so rarely. As Alma fetched the main course, the message recorded in the next room: “Dr. Oberdorf, this is John Flinders from Outward Bound. Robert was caught using drugs, and you know that calls for immediate expulsion from the program. Could you call me to discuss this? Robert was sent back from the Rockies yesterday, and is on his way home.”

  No one at the table looked astonished.

  “Jesus Christ,” Axel griped, “what the hell are we going to do with that kid underfoot the whole summer, Alma?”

  “He won’t be underfoot, dear,” she assured him. “When he en
ds up in the precinct lockup, you can refuse to bail him out, just like last time.”

  “Bad enough Robert got booted from Hotchkiss,” Axel fumed. “But I’m damned if he’s going to drop out of Williston at sixteen. Way it looks from here, Eric, you’ll be the only boy out of four to get a degree.”

  “Steven has only two more years —”

  “Yeah, but to get a diploma somebody would have to glue the kid together long enough to sign his name.”

  “And whose fault is that?” said Alma, lips pressed.

  “His fault, Alma.”

  “You can’t take credit for Eric without also taking the blame for an emotional cripple, a compulsive liar, and a juvenile delinquent,” she returned with controlled anger.

  “Eric takes credit for Eric! Though you have to admit, I must have done something right…”

  Having eaten little of Alma’s lovely meal, the party retired to the living room, where the modular furniture was breaking down. The bright primary-school colors of the cubes and cylinders had grown dingy, their Velcro tired, so one had always to be pressing the geometric shapes together again. Once rearranged by the children daily into new and amusing confabulations, these constructions hadn’t changed since Willy was last here. Back then there’d been talk of replacing the avant-garde toys with proper furniture. That the Oberdorfs had not done so suggested the same dispirited We really should of her own parents and their terminally brown house.

  Axe gestured to his usual throne, insisting Willy take the chair. Willy assumed the focal hot seat uneasily. Here it came. Dessert.

  “Eric tells me you’re climbing the wrong direction on that ladder. What’sa problem?” Axe squared his shoulders on the couch construction, his chin raised like that of a sparring partner, tempting the old one-two.

  “With a ranking of 961, I’m running out of rungs.” Rather than keep her arms close to her chest, Willy rested them on either side and left her body open. Any decent pugilist would have been appalled. “I have one more satellite, while Eric plays the Pilot Pen. If that goes as smashingly as usual, by the end of August it will have been a whole year since I made so much as the third round of any tournament at all.”

  “Sounds pretty discouraging.”

  “As lame as you can get,” Willy rejoined. Her father-in-law looked consternated. Not only would she not put her dukes up, but she was getting in the odd biff on herself. “In that case I will no longer be a ranked player.” Willy’s smile was inviting. “Poof, I disappear.”

  “Got your work cut out for you, then,” said Axe gruffly.

  Willy picked at a callous on her palm, digging it off though it was vital to her forehand. “Maybe not.”

  “What’s this, you’re gonna lay down and give up? I don’t believe what I’m hearing here.” He seemed personally aggrieved, as if Willy were depriving him of sport.

  “There is a point at which tennis gives up on me.”

  “But look at Seles.” Axe stabbed his finger. “Out of the game for two years, comes back sharing the number-one spot with Steffi, takes no prisoners!”

  “No one is saving my ranking for me while I collect my thoughts. And I’m twenty-seven. In tennis terms, a crone. As you pointed out yourself, I was kaput by the time we met. Had I listened, you’d have saved me a great deal of trouble.”

  “Hell,” Axe grumbled. “You look in pretty good shape to me.”

  “On the contrary, I’m shattered,” she volunteered pleasantly. “Tennis isn’t so different from boxing—it’s the brain that takes the biggest beating.”

  “Come now, it can’t be as bad as all that!” Axel appealed to Eric with a look, but his first-born’s eyes were shut. Eric had been tossing it-can’t-be-that-bad for two years, and obviously welcomed a relief pitcher.

  “I’ve long belonged to the never-say-die school,” said Willy, “except there’s nothing splendid about the denial when you’re bending over a corpse. So I’ve considered appealing to Eric’s sponsors to sell sporting goods. I might try for an administrative job with the WTA. Or coach the handicapped for the Arthur Ashe Foundation. Any other suggestions?” To her own ears, her voice lifted with a disconnected, absent quality. Perhaps there was an ultra-reasonableness, a runaway sanity synonymous with losing your mind.

  “Get back to it, of course,” Axe recommended brusquely. “Thought you wanted to be a tennis star.”

  “I did. More than anything. Too bad for me.” Willy shot him an airy smile, and her father-in-law drew back in horror.

  “The problem is,” she proceeded mellifluously, “I’m not qualified for squat. All I can do is play tennis. I’d join Eric’s entourage, except it turns out I make as lousy a fan as I do a competitor.”

  Willy clasped her hands. For the moment, she was visited by a freestanding pragmatism, a clarity that came from appraising herself with the same casual brutality that she employed in perceiving other people every day. While the sensation was restful, her body felt heavier than usual and more dense, sinking into the furry cubes. Mustering the energy to go to the bathroom was inconceivable.

  “Have you thought about having a family?” asked Alma.

  “Nope,” said Willy curtly.

  “But I was given to understand when you two got married that my son had found a partner in more than one sense,” Axe carped. To Willy’s surprise, he seemed anxious to efface the image of his daughter-in-law as a harried matron with a brood. “Eric said when he first brought you over here that you beat the daylights out of him.”

  “Oh, that didn’t last. He crushed me on our first anniversary. As he might have done from day one, but your son has a kind streak. Now I think back on it, his throwing all those games was incredibly sweet.”

  “I used to think I was gifted, until he came along.” Willy nodded at her husband fondly. “Eric taught me what real talent was about. Effortlessness, for one thing. But most of all, he has the mental equipment: resilience, tenacity, and if you don’t mind my saying so, arrogance. He disdains other players, so they don’t intimidate him. Eric’s a natural champion. Me, I come from defeated stock.”

  “Hold on, I saw you play three years ago,” Axel weighed in. “Maybe I was reluctant to admit it at first, but I had to agree with Eric that he’d married a real winner.”

  “Yes, your son has proved terribly loyal,” said Willy wistfully. “I wish I could say the same for myself. It was his idea to lie to you, but that awful gash? I did it.”

  As Alma’s pupils dilated with alarm, Eric opened his eyes at last. They were angry. Exaggerated by rings of violet discoloration, his glare looked dangerous. “You’ll have to forgive Willy,” he intervened sternly. “My injury upset her, and she’s not herself. She thinks it’s her fault for not having closed the door of the kitchen cabinet.”

  “Certainly no call to blame yourself for household accidents,” Axel muttered, indicating no appetite for intervening in a dispute that produced eight stitches, as if, were Willy truly that violent, he might get hit. “Why not,” he cast about, “I don’t know, go back to basics? Thought you had some big shot coach.”

  “We’ve divorced,” Willy announced.

  “What?” Eric exclaimed. He knew nothing of her “appointment” in Max’s office.

  “And little wonder.” Willy’s laughter pealed. “I played some swaggering Italian in Riverside Park last month? An amateur, right, a bad amateur, never played a pro match in his life? Beat me 0–6, 7–6, 6–2.”

  Eric leaned forward. “Willy, it’s getting late—”

  “It’s only ten o’clock.”

  “All right, then, I don’t feel well, OK?”

  Willy obediently collected her bag. “Say, why don’t we have a game some day?” she proposed gaily to her host. “The way I’m playing lately, you might surprise yourself.”

  Just perceptibly, Eric shook his head at his father.

  “No, Will,” said Axe, clapping her shoulder more gingerly than usual, as if whatever it was she’d come down with might be contagious.
“You’d drill me, and an old man can live without public humiliation. Stick with the pros.”

  Moving a ruthless man like Axel Oberdorf to charity was the crowning insult of Willy’s career. “When you lost in the qualifiers this week, how were most of the points lost?” Dr. Edsel prodded.

  “Unforced errors.”

  “Does that not suggest to you a deliberateness, even resolve? You’ve referred to ‘playing both sides of the net.’ You were once a fine athlete. Are you not playing the other side awfully well?”

  “Yes, yes, I hate myself,” Willy droned, bored with self-examination.

  “I don’t think so.” The contention jarred. “You have a flair for the dramatic,” Edsel explained, his errant eye ranging the room in one direction as he roved in the other; he had her covered. “Is it not much more operatic for your ranking to become wretched, nonexistent, rather than modestly inferior to your husband’s? In the grandiosity of your decline, I see signs of self-affection.”

  “What’s this, the old I-enjoy-wallowing number?”

  “Failure can become an ambition of its own. In its attainability lies its allure. And you have a histrionic side, Ms. Novinsky. You carry historical baggage as we all do, but nothing you’ve told me about your background suggests that you have to be losing every match you play. Your consistency betrays design.”

  “Like, better to be a bum than a mediocrity?”

  “Notoriety is a kind of distinction. This dramatizing of yours keeps you in the limelight. You claim to preserve a sense of proportion, but in truth you play the tragic figure to the hilt. And slyly, you make your husband feel responsible. Were you to have maintained a ranking at least in the 200’s, he’d have surpassed you, but the situation would not have appeared grossly intolerable. In truth, it would still have been intolerable to you. So to emphasize the indignity of being outflanked, you exaggerate the disparity.”

  This was the longest speech Edsel had delivered for weeks. That while losing her last match Willy had felt physically peculiar—heavy, tender, cramped; her period was late—she decided to keep to herself. Edsel was so pleased with his insight that to compromise its glory would be rude.