Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  “Sport is theater,” he expostulated. “You have cast yourself as the underachiever, the gifted athlete with a fatal flaw. Theater is a trap. I suspect you are as good an actress as you are a tennis player. The character you’re portraying is unappreciated, tortured, slighted. I’m sure your husband’s income is a frustration—it denies you the gutter, which may be why you’ve been so loath to avail yourself of his funds. You court poignancy as a proxy for acclaim.”

  Willy groaned. “This sounds familiar.”

  “Yes,” said Edsel, patting his hands together as if rendering himself faint applause. “Doesn’t it.”

  “Admit it,” Willy charged. “You’re happy.”

  Her father’s cocked head completed a crookedness; he always sat in that ragged armchair as if he were snapped in two. “I am happy,” he said, “that one of you has made a living off this tennis business, however improbably.”

  Willy couldn’t sit down. The den was tiny for pacing, with its brown carpet, brown paneling, brown upholstery—oh, God, it was so fecally dour she could be sick. “But if it had to be one or the other of us, you’re pleased as punch it’s Eric. That way your own flesh and blood doesn’t challenge your beloved worldview.”

  The psoriasis on her father’s face was in a shedding phase. Ashen flakes drifted to his collar, as if the friction of daily disappointment were wearing him away. “I am only ‘pleased as punch,’ Willow, that you have a husband you can be proud of.”

  For years Willy had assumed that her father’s unflappability was designed to disarm; now she suspected his placidity was intended to do what it actually did: enrage. Likewise both her parents’ aggressive hear-no-evil naïveté about her marriage, about how proud she must be of Eric, amounted to sadism, a preachy moralism, a willful gullibility. Willy had come home plenty of times and sullenly reported her husband’s latest achievements, but never had they registered her tone, the seething through her teeth as if their daughter had lockjaw.

  “But luckily you don’t have to be proud of me,” Willy grumbled. “You have too much invested in the conviction that it’s pathetic and delusional to hope for anything. If I made it, you’d have to question whether, if you’d been really determined and told those publishers to shove it, you might have become a writer after all. Christ, you didn’t even tell us you wrote that stack of books. I had to come across them by accident in the attic!”

  “I didn’t see any reason to burden you girls with my stillborn aspirations,” he returned calmly. “But yes, a stack of books. Doesn’t that indicate some dedication? Which failed to bear fruit. It’s true I have an ‘investment,’ as you said, in believing that the meritocracy in New York publishing is imperfect, that some talent goes unrecognized. But I’ve also allowed for the possibility that I might not have what it takes.”

  “So that’s supposed to keep me warm at night? ‘Oh, well, I guess I’m not good enough, just like Dad?’ Which is what I was told incessantly as a kid. Tennis is half confidence—or lack of it—and you sure did your job on that front. Now I’m collecting on your hard work in spades.”

  “Recently I’d been getting the impression you were blaming your husband. Now your ranking is all my fault?” Willy thought she could detect a smile. Theories about her parents always sounded more credible out of their earshot.

  “You haven’t helped,” Willy muttered uncertainly.

  Her father folded his newspaper neatly into the tube he’d learned to construct as a paperboy in his childhood. It was an old, compulsive habit, for which Willy felt a pang of reluctant affection.

  “Try to imagine a little girl, eight years old.” Her father held his hand out above the arm of his chair. “This high. She loves to play tennis, you take her to the park, she is uncannily good at it. But she’s just lost her baby teeth, and not that long ago you were changing her diapers. She sees some pros on TV and says that’s what she wants to be when she grows up. It’s sweet. But how seriously do you take her? Do you start throwing thousands of dollars at her pipe dream, or might that be too obvious a channeling of a parent’s own egotism?”

  “You take her seriously when she starts winning junior tournaments right and left. You take her seriously when she becomes number three in New Jersey even though you won’t let her compete as nearby as Pennsylvania!”

  “We had two children, Willow. I don’t think either of you grew up wanting for much, but my salary at Bloomfield was small. How would you feel if you were Gert, and your parents were sacrificing your summer camp, your trips to the shore so that your sister could play tennis all over the country? Might you be justifiably angry, and wouldn’t you grow to hate that sister?”

  “Your diplomacy didn’t work. She hates me anyway.” Willy collapsed to the adjacent chair.

  “Gert does think you’re a prima donna,” her father conceded. “But I can’t see how that’s my fault.”

  Willy glowered.

  “If I had pushed you,” her father continued gently, “tennis could have become a duty, a trial. As it was, you pushed yourself, which builds real confidence. In fact, I wonder if you haven’t pushed yourself so hard that you now resent the pressure as much as if it had come from me.”

  Willy had sunk from fury to funk. She’d been in a lather on the number 66 bus, mumbling accusations so that people in adjacent seats looked askance, but now everything her father said sounded so sensible.

  “Hey.” Her father patted her knee. “It’s a beautiful summer evening. It’s stuffy in here. Let’s go for a walk.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  He stood and appraised her. “I’ve never seen you so pale in this season. You usually have such a lovely tan.”

  “I can’t train at Sweetspot anymore.” Willy tried to control the quaver in her voice without success. “My membership at Forest Hills was up this month, and Max didn’t renew it. I can only practice on city courts, and I lost so badly to some hacker in Riverside that I’m too embarrassed to show my face.”

  “Come on,” her father coaxed softly. “You’ve never refused a walk with me on a night like this.”

  Head bowed, Willy creaked out of the chair like a resident in her mother’s nursing home.

  Down Walnut, a warm breeze bathed Willy’s face, shushing in oaks and maples. The barn-shaped Dutch Colonials and sturdy Queen Anne’s bulwarked the street, enduring and safe. Fireflies glinted, and with brief girlish inspiration she caught one. It so docilely submitted to capture that Willy softened and let it go.

  “If it would have meant something to you, I’m sorry that I didn’t share my frustration over not becoming much of a writer.” Her father’s voice was low and lulling, like the wind in the trees. “I simply sealed that off as another life. You’re too young to understand, but most lives are made of several. I put those books behind me. It’s not as if I never think about them, and you know yourself that I regard most of what’s published as pretty piss-poor. But I’d hate to think you’ve concluded that my life is only bitter and mean as a consequence. There’s much more out there than career success.”

  “Like what?” she asked sulkily.

  He waved at the neighborhood as they wended onto Park Street. “A walk on a lovely summer night. Music—that Samuel Barber you used to play over and over. Spinach gnocchi at Rispoli’s, and an old Sherlock Holmes movie on the late show. Or the look on your mother’s face when I announced that we were finally going to go to Japan.” He shrugged. “And sorry to raise a prickly subject—but tennis.”

  They had ambled instinctively to the public park where Willy had learned to play. The streetlight shed patchy orange on the decrepit court, like a vista only partially remembered. Its surface was cracked and crumbling. The gate, once locked after dark, was partially off its hinges and swung wide. Willy shuffled onto the macadam, toeing the rubble of backcourt. It looked like her life, in shambles.

  “I still play once in a while,” said her father.

  “You and I haven’t in years.”

  “Well
, I couldn’t hope to give you much of a game. You’ve pasted me since you were ten.”

  Willy was about to add something gratuitously self-deprecating about how he might have a chance now, but decided, Enough of that. “I would love to play you. Just for fun.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. For fun.”

  “I shouldn’t be here, Daddy,” she admitted. Willy couldn’t recall kicking across this court in the dark before. It looked wrong, dim. She always recollected these lines incandescent with sunshine. “Today Eric was playing the quarters of the Pilot Pen. I should have gone. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “You’re right, you should’ve been there. Eric deserves your support. He needs it.”

  “He deserves it all right, but sure doesn’t need it.”

  The Novinskys were not a gropey family, and her father’s hand on Willy’s shoulder was awkward. “You worry me, Willow. I never see you enjoy an ever-loving thing. I’m sorry if my trying, foolishly, I suppose, to protect you from getting your hopes dashed backfired, and you assumed that I didn’t have faith in your talent. I just never wanted you to think that our love for you was in any way conditional on whether you won kudos for our family. The affections of the rest of the world are conditional enough.

  “But you’ve got to take some eggs out of that tennis basket. Not that you shouldn’t keep trying. But any career is full of pitfalls, good and bad luck, the sometimes malign or negligent influence of other people. If you let that side of your life be everything, you deliver to others, and to forces that have no feelings or loyalties at all, the power to defeat you utterly. Profession, it’s just a game. In your case, a literal game. But the best things in life aren’t only free, you can’t even earn them: fireflies on a summer night; watching your own daughter pick up the backhand with the ease that most kids pick up nits. And now you’ve got the rarest gift of all: a boy who loves you. I could see it in his eyes the first time he walked into our house, and that’s why we were attentive, not because we liked his tennis stories. I’m warning you, if you waste that, the most precious thing on earth that you not only can’t go out and buy, but you can’t go out and look for—”

  “Daddy,” Willy choked. “He’s about to play the U.S. Open!”

  “Honey, I know that must be a little hard to swallow. But somehow you’ve got to find a way. If you don’t, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

  Abstractly, she knew he was right—as she always knew, abstractly, that in preparing for a winter jog the temptation was to bundle up too much, and presently she’d be puffing down the road in all that gear, melting and claustrophobically hot. But time and time again, the abstract information was no use. Time and time again, she swaddled in sweats because she was chilly right then, only to smother over six miles because she hadn’t quite believed what was only an idea and not an immediate agony. Clinical information you often got in time; visceral confirmation arrived reliably too late.

  Abstractly, she recognized that love was paramount, that a good man’s devotion could not be measured in anything so trifling as tennis trophies. Abstractly, she grasped that the best recompense for a stymied ambition was Eric’s kiss on her temple after gnocchi and Sherlock Holmes. Abstractly, she could see how if she allowed passing travails to derail the only other thing of value in her life, she would never forgive herself. But all these insights floated unattached, hovering weightlessly over the crumbled court of her childhood—as worthless and impertinent to the moment as the principles of quantum physics. Incapable of acting on his well-intended but ultimately wasted good advice, Willy threw herself into her father’s arms and wept, grieving over her own calamitous lack of foresight.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “YOU’LL BE PLEASED TO hear I lost the semis.” Eric slammed the door.

  Willy didn’t protest though for once she couldn’t have cared less whether he made it to the Pilot Pen finals. “I’m sorry,” she said mechanically.

  She was sitting at the dining table, bent at the broken angle her father had described in Montclair, fingering the list from the WTA that arrived in that morning’s mail. Though the sheaf contained one thousand names, “Novinsky” was nowhere to be found. Scanning the last page, she could as well have returned from beyond the grave to find a stranger’s surname on her buzzer. The WTA had posted Willy Novinsky her own obituary.

  When she leaned forward to rest her face in her hands, her breasts bulged up from the walnut, firm and tender. Willy had always regarded them as a nuisance to bandage out of the way, and now no running bra could pin them, boyishly immobile, to her chest.

  “Of course, if you’d come you could have watched me walloped firsthand. Missed a thrill.” Eric was banging around the apartment, pitching his rackets in the foyer, disturbing the others, and they fell.

  “I had something else to attend to.”

  “You had to wash your hair. Visit a sick friend. Should have reserved those lines for our first few dates. Would have saved me a peck of heartache.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you wish I had.”

  Eric stopped flinging sports clothes from his bag and grimaced. “I take that back. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Oh, Eric.” Willy massaged her forehead. “If I only said what I should, we wouldn’t carry a conversation.”

  “Can you even remember the last time you watched me play?” Eric resumed. “And are you ever planning to attend one of my matches again, or from now on am I on my own? Me, I’ve opted out of tournaments to urge you on. Organized my whole summer schedule around helping you find your game. I’ve rallied with you, played the same gig, entered that mixed doubles, dug up Milton Edsel … what do I get in return?”

  “Grief,” Willy volunteered.

  “So what about the Open? I’m playing in the goddamned U.S. Open next week; can I expect my own wife to show up, or will you have ‘something else to attend to’?”

  She let him rant. He’d earned a tirade and more, though his timing was poor. “I’m doing my best to generate you an additional spectator.”

  He appeared to read nothing into the coy remark but evasion. Eric marched off to stuff his sweaty clothes in the hamper. Losses usually put him in a shrugging, fuck-it humor, but this evening the Pilot Pen had triggered something else. He seemed to blame her. Fair enough, Willy should sometimes experience the irrational imputation on the receiving end.

  “Has Max been any help?” she asked, doodling desultory spirals on the ranking list.

  “Good God, interest in my life! That must have cost you. As a matter of fact, he takes great pleasure in bossing me around. And he wants to change so much at this late date—grip, stance, you name it—that he may have taken me on to sabotage my first Slam.”

  “No, shaping you into a champion would make much more effective revenge.”

  “For what?”

  She sighed.

  “He’s a cold customer. I don’t think there’s much chance we’re getting married … My.” Eric checked his watch. “It’s only nine. Time for another cozy, romantic evening. Maybe we could head to Flor De Mayo and relive our glorious getting-to-know-you, the prelude to all this wedded bliss.” The S hissed. He’d reverted to the proper name of the restaurant. Presumably he reserved pet monikers for people he felt close to.

  “I don’t have much appetite.”

  “You never do. I might add, for anything.”

  “I did seven weeks ago,” she said precisely.

  “Oh, right. The guilt fuck.” Eric picked up tennis magazines and straightened the bedspread covering their bloodstained couch. His fussing impugned her—dragging around the apartment all day she might at least have found time to clean up —but he hadn’t the nerve to say so out loud. “You eat so little lately, it amazes me how you’ve put on some weight. What, are you bingeing in secret now? Christ, when we met you were so well adjusted.”

  “You’re the victim of wife-swapping, my dear. I’m not the person you married.”

  “A clever dodge,” said Eric, working a
shard from around the Gay Nineties volleyball player. Willy had left both frames hanging with their glass still shattered, their remaining splinters pointed reminders of the night she lost control. “You’re not yourself, so you can’t be held responsible for what some impostor does.”

  Willy slid forward on her elbows, pushing the WTA rankings aside. “Eric, please.” She rubbed her cheeks; the skin was tight and dry. A persistent metallic taste leaked from her gums, as if she’d been sucking on a nickel.

  “I’m sorry I’m not in the finest of moods, because I just lost a very big tournament in front of hundreds of people—incredibly, total strangers will turn out to watch me play—and I’m about to enter my first Grand Slam and that makes me edgy. Except, whoops!” Eric pitched a shard to the trash can; a three-pointer. “I forgot. I don’t have problems.”

  “Eric, I’m pregnant.” She blurted it out. The subject was hardly going to arise of its own accord.

  As he flushed, the pink scar slicing through his eyebrow went scarlet. “God, I—” He was holding another fragment from the poster, and waved it around, unsure where to put it. “I feel like such a heel, I—”

  “Don’t put that in your pocket.”

  He fished it out. Placing it on the table, he looked embarrassed. Having seen his share of sappy sitcoms, Eric must have felt duty bound to lunge for her groceries and insist she sit down, but she was already seated. And the burdens Willy shouldered were not so easily lifted as paper bags.

  Eric knelt by her chair. “Honey, that’s great.”

  Willy cocked an eyebrow. “Is it?”

  “You know I didn’t want to wait until we were decrepit. Kids deserve young parents. The timing’s good.”

  “For whom?”

  “For us.”

  She looked at him askance; of late they rarely shared the same pronoun. “One minor sticking point. How many pro tennis players have you seen waddling around the court with a beach ball in their shorts?”