Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  “Of course you’d have to take some time out—”

  “Honestly, at my age isn’t ‘taking time out’ a euphemism for retirement?”

  “But we’re not talking hypothetically here.” Eric got up off his knees. “You’re pregnant—physically pregnant right now—so the question’s not Well, is this the absolute, exact moment you’d choose to have a child? I’m not right-wing about abortion, Willy, but I don’t like it—”

  “Oh, who likes it?”

  “I don’t like it,” he repeated. “And we don’t have an excuse. We’ve got money, we’re married, neither of us is in junior high school. If you think childbearing would be a strain on us right now, I guarantee you that flushing our own kid down the john would do us more damage by far.”

  Willy screeched her chair back. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that we not take this child to term because of tennis?”

  “Don’t sound so derisive when it’s what you do for a living.”

  “It’s not important!”

  “Tennis seemed awfully important to you when you walked in the door tonight.” Willy circled the room. “But I’m supposed to blow it off. Oh, sure, I’ll carve one, two years out of my prime, no problem!”

  “Some prime,” Eric muttered.

  Willy wheeled. “Whether or not I have been down on my luck the last two years, I’ve devoted my whole life to this sport.”

  “You’re only twenty-seven. You’ve no business talking about a whole life.”

  “It’s all the life I’ve got. And now you expect me to throw it over for your scruples. Have you taken one minute to think about what would happen? Even though tennis is ‘unimportant,’ Daddy would keep slugging away—zipping all over the world, sending postcards, and asking Mommy to put Junior on the phone. Who’d do all the work? And what kind of a mother am I likely to be when every time I look at my own kid I can only see sixteen tournaments a year that I’m not playing?”

  “Nothing would keep you from going back to it.”

  “What, go on tour with a stroller? And leaving aside that pregnancy itself can total your body, I’d have to start at ground-zero again—”

  “You’re already at ground-zero!”

  They faced each other, breathing hard. Willy’s face flashed cold; her raised hands blanched white.

  “For two years,” said Eric, lowering his voice, “I’ve said it’s salvageable, Willy, you’ve got the goods, Willy, you just have to get your head in gear, Willy, you’re so talented, give it another try… And meanwhile you scoff at me for being a Pollyanna, for massaging you with platitudes, though I’ve never known what you expect me to say instead. You’re all washed up? All right, then. You’re all washed up.”

  She couldn’t remember Eric saying something cruel that he did not immediately take back. She waited. He didn’t take it back.

  “It’s bitter medicine.” Eric grasped her by the shoulders firmly so that she couldn’t wriggle free. “But there’s more on the line now than your pride. Most women these days hit their peak in tennis by twenty. For a long time I did believe you could turn it around, so I haven’t been full of shit. But this ‘slump’ of yours has gone on long enough that what began as some bad breaks and a passing surfeit of anxiety has blossomed into a full-fledged loser complex. Which could take years for you to beat, if then. You know I know tennis history backwards and forwards. I’ve come across no one who has gone down so far for so long and has bounced back to become a top player. It’s too late, Willy. You were once a remarkable athlete, but something happened. What that was I’m frankly beyond caring. But you won’t sacrifice our child for another year of agony. Wilhelm, I said I’d help you any way I could, but this time not to put your shoulder to the wheel, but to let tennis go.”

  Fleetingly, Willy wished her husband were a violent man. How much better if he’d hauled off and smacked her. True, Eric’s homilies had often been torturous: Don’t let them see you sweat; Show your grit; Half of any success is determination. His barrage of mindless clichés had demonstrated little appreciation for the bruising she’d taken, for how incessant humiliation sapped the very quantity she called upon to persevere. And coming from a man who had little experience of disgrace, his sermons had inevitably come off as glib. But no insensitive, brainless aphorism had ever cut her to the quick like this unadorned advice that she should quit. Willy had regularly spewed her husband’s spoon-fed pabulum encouragement back in his face. Yet served up instead this indigestible hard cheese, Willy could only swallow. There was nothing to say.

  Her posture erect, Willy swiveled calmly to the New Jersey Classic poster. Systematically, she worked the paper out from under the thin silver frame, avoiding the slivers on its edges. Having peeled the masking tape off the cardboard backing, Willy rolled the freed poster into a tube, secured it with a piece of tape, and rested it by the front door. Equally methodical, she disassembled the MOMA print. The figure’s brightly striped swimming costume was inappropriately gay and goofy, like pajamas. His handlebar mustache tilted at an inserious angle, and the ebullience with which the man leapt from the frame with that orb at his fingertips had grown alien. For anyone to get so much pleasure out of a silly ball was childish.

  Willy’s knee had seized again; it was difficult to bend it without wincing. Whisking to the kitchen, Willy kept her legs straight as a toy soldier’s. She returned to the living room with a box of black garbage bags. After lifting off the top of the coffee table, Willy leaned it on its edge against the sofa. The chronology the ball discards once documented had already been disturbed when Willy tipped the table on her birthday. The disorder was no loss; the history the dead balls recorded was complete. Besides, the layers of muddied Penns and Dunlops was merely the sediment of a moderately promising tennis player whose gifts had come to nothing and whose name not even the sport’s fanatics would ever know. Willy removed the balls three at a time, laying them in the bag, cautious to assure that none of them rolled off.

  When the box was empty, Willy twist-tied the bag and dragged the several hundred balls to sit by the tubes at the door. Standing at the nearest window, Eric studied a patch of the Hudson reflecting the lights of New Jersey through the black trees of Riverside Park. The moon was full. She could see only the back of his head. His crown was beginning to bald; a second moon shone in the lamplight between branches of black hair. Maybe, as with her father’s face, something was wearing him away.

  When she took a second garbage bag to the bedroom, Eric remained at his lookout. Kneeling in the closet, she moved Eric’s copious tennis shoes out of the way, keeping the pairs together. The boxes were stacked in the back. Within them the trophies still nestled in tissue. Before hefting them to the door, Willy checked that the cartons contained her own trifles, confirming that she wasn’t chucking Eric’s tributes by mistake. This house-cleaning was the least painful—trophies were chaff—or would have been the least painful if she felt anything at all. Instead the only twinge was from her knee, stabbing from her stoop in the closet.

  Yet at the next renunciation, Eric would have noticed a flicker of hesitation if he’d been watching, which he was not. The recently disturbed rackets in the foyer were mixed up, and she had to sort through them to retrieve her own from among the Wilsons. Pro-Kennex was a lesser-known make, though you could hardly call it an off-brand. While Willy no longer played the same racket for years as she had the Davis Imperial in her childhood, nonetheless she had employed successive generations of this uncommon line since college. Sticking to the same brand had given the series a sense of heritage and relation.

  Willy felt sorry for the rackets. This early retirement was not their fault. Had Eric not been standing by the window, she’d have apologized out loud. But there was no point in leaving them for her husband; the grip sizes were too small, and he was contractually obliged to play Wilsons in public. Willy supposed that she could have donated the equipment to the Salvation Army. But Willy’s rackets had standa
rds, and she was loath to subject these stalwart allies to the loose wrists, late preparation, and poor follow-through of some bargain-hunting slacker. Surely they’d prefer a dignified burial. She might have carted them to the cans downstairs slung on her shoulder in their cases, but she didn’t want them to see. Willy placed them in a black bag with the kindness of binding firing-squad targets with a blindfold.

  With a third bag, Willy went for the mop-up, though her motions had slowed. For brief beats she would forget what she was doing. Must be the pregnancy; they said it made you spacey. On the desk facing the main room’s second window, she located the WTA Rulebook and dumped it in the bag, leaving the ATP’s. Blank tournament applications littered the desk; she sifted each pile to weed hers from Eric’s. One completed form lay sealed in the out box. Before adding it to the rubbish, Willy tore off the uncanceled postage and slipped it in a drawer. Though he was wealthy now, Eric wouldn’t approve of waste. Done. The remaining papers were dominated by USTA mailings: regulations, lists of hotels, and time schedules all pertaining to the upcoming U.S. Open.

  Collecting the ranking list from the dining table, Willy returned to the bedroom to prize photographs and clippings from the wall. She was willing to leave any pictures that did not have tennis rackets in them, that were not of tournaments, that hadn’t been snapped on courts.

  There weren’t any. Even the shots of her family were marred by the crosshatch of Willy’s strings; where she balanced on her father’s shoulders at eight, a telltale green shimmered behind her flying hair. In every picture of her married life, she and Eric wore sports garb, or were caught after practice mopping sweat. All the more recent snaps of Willy captured that unsightly brace masking her knee, like tape over pornographic posters in Times Square. Last of all were their wedding pictures—Willy in high-heeled sneakers, Eric in white flannels kissing over a net: tennis. They all went in the bag.

  Once every scrap of grip, flash of hardcourt, and pleat of tennis dress were excised from the montage, little else remained besides residual yellow gum and the tiny perforations of pushpins. Willy herself was expunged. The sticky remnants and minute holes suggested that the enterprise was flawed—that every history, however edited, leaves marks. Yet notably, as she eradicated tennis, Eric as well vanished from the wall.

  Lugging the detritus to the elevator and hauling it to the cans in the basement took longer than it would have with assistance; Eric didn’t help, though he also didn’t stop her. Yet on her return upstairs, Willy wondered at how little time it had taken, really. “You must be hungry,” she said evenly.

  “Not anymore.”

  But it was only ten-thirty, and they both felt the same lifeless desperation to evacuate the premises that one might at the scene of an atrocity. Though even the voracious Eric was bound to stare dumbly at his chicken as if it were papier-mâché, they shambled out to Flor De Mayo after all. That’s what they both called it: Flor De Mayo. Right before she shut the door, Willy caught the eerie gray loom of the New Jersey Classic frame, its cardboard blank, like the decor of a woman who has no interests.

  Willy had left a single souvenir behind on the bedroom wall: Eric’s mutant eyebrow hair, pulled from the same spot now marked by a knit pink scar, as if the one hair had drawn blood. Still taped shyly on the edge of the ravaged collage, the scraggle was once plucked to prove what her father had cautioned: that some trophies can’t be earned or sought but have to be offered.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Once more, the door slammed.

  Willy sat on the couch, eyes to her lap. What she’d just put Eric through was so overtly abusive that it didn’t bear contemplating. Instead she considered Edsel, with whom she’d canceled yesterday’s appointment, and hunched with the old high school cringe of having cut class.

  “I came back from Flushing Meadow early so we could spend the evening together,” Eric railed, “and no sign of you. I waited, and waited, it got late … I called your parents, I called Max, I even called my parents. I’m playing the U.S. Open tonight, Willy, and I got no sleep. And I’ve just come back from the police.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot lately. Where were you?”

  Her lips parted, and nothing came out. To allow the words to escape would amount to being publicly sick. She looked to Eric in mute appeal; it wasn’t that she would not speak, but could not. Overnight Willy had tutored her husband in helplessness, and he had learned his lesson.

  Eric raked his fingers through his hair, making a pfffff sound as if trying to slow his breathing. “You’re OK, though?”

  “More or less.”

  “Come here.” He held out his hand. Willy rose, and Eric clutched her to his chest. “You look pale. I’m so relieved you’re all right.” Eric squeezed her until Willy was too weary to hold on anymore. Then he led her to the couch. She wished he wouldn’t be so nice.

  “Listen,” he said, “you scared the daylights out of me, but maybe that shocked me into something. I want to make you an offer.” She nodded. “You know I’m always mouthing off about what jerks tennis jocks are. Last night I was thinking, maybe I’m a hypocrite. I want to beat them but I also want to join them. So maybe you think I’m an asshole. And maybe you’re right.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Hear me out. This whole gig, even for me, is at most for another ten years. And obviously the danger is that you get out, you’re not qualified for anything but one of those moronic commentating jobs.”

  “But you could also—”

  “Hear me out. I know how hard it’s been for you to watch me get somewhere and even make it to the Open, when that’s all you’ve ever wanted for yourself. When you love the game so much, and I only like it. It’s not fair, is it?”

  “But you do so well partly because—”

  “Let me finish.” He clasped her hands. “People our age think there’s all the time in the world to have a family. But this country is coast-to-coast with couples blowing thousands a whack on treatments to conceive. You never know when it’s your only chance. So I want this baby, sweetheart. And I know the way you described it, that would be no good, with me on the road most of the year, you up to your eyeballs in Gerber and baby shit. So I wanted to propose a deal: if you have this kid, I’ll quit.”

  Willy looked at her husband in bafflement. “Quit—tennis?”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel. Except for kicks. Teach the kid to play, which would be a riot. Or you and me. Long summer afternoons in Riverside, just rallying, until the sun sets, until we can’t stand up we’re so whipped, and we limp off for chicken and rice. Like it used to be.”

  “Oh, honey.” Willy’s shoulders caved inward. “It can never be like it used to be.”

  Eric had cherished his hologram; he looked cross. “I don’t see why not.”

  “So you mean, like the Open. Tonight. You’re not planning to go?”

  “No, I’ll play.” He squirmed. “You know, I’m obligated.”

  She laid her hands gently on his. “Admit it. You’ve worked hard for this. You want to play.”

  “Of course I want to! But after the Open, that’s it.”

  “What if I asked you to withdraw from the Open as well?” Willy tested.

  Eric was still. In his silence, she could see that he was bereaved. “I guess I’d say,” he proceeded slowly, “that maybe you were being—unreasonable. But. If you really insisted. Yes. I would withdraw.” By the time he got the words out, he looked spent.

  She touched his cheek, guiding his head to face her. “Look at you. How much giving up this one tournament would cut you up. Think of all the others. ‘Unreasonable,’ you said. Of course bartering your career for a family would be unreasonable. Do you think you could ever live with such a bargain? That I could? You’re on a roll now, riding an emotional crest, but later you’d hate me.”

  “I could never hate you,” he said staunchly.

  “Is that right?” she asked, looking him in the eye. “Your d
eal isn’t on, Eric, because I have nothing to trade.”

  His expression went blank. “What?”

  “Last night I checked into a clinic.”

  “Something went wrong?”

  “Nothing went wrong.”

  He stood up, stricken. If he was driven to go, he did not know where. “Without asking me. Or telling me. Or talking about it.”

  “There was nothing to discuss.”

  When he turned he was smiling, though the grin had an ugly twist. “You’re really trying, aren’t you? Like, beyond the call of duty, the whole nine yards.”

  Willy frowned.

  “Trying—?”

  “To force me to leave you.”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “I would. Why else? Why did you do it?”

  The cramps in Willy’s uterus had started in earnest—thin, stiletto stabs. She pictured a pair of fencers, unskilled at their art, who kept missing each other and foisting their foils in her walls. The pain gave her focus, and she was grateful for it.

  Willy bowed her head. “I can’t have a child as a substitute for a life.”

  “Nobody was asking you to. Lots of women—”

  “But that’s how it’s felt the last few days. You practicing in Flushing Meadow while I stay home and take my vitamins. I know some women can flourish through their children. I can’t. I’m too selfish. You said the timing was good. I thought the timing couldn’t be worse: give up my profession and have a baby. It made me feel like someone else. Some lumbering vehicle for posterity. I started resenting the child for its opportunities, the same ones I’ve squandered. I could see it learning—”

  “A baby’s not an it.”

  “It is now,” she said sharply, then averted her eyes. “I’m sorry. She, if you like. I could see our daughter learning to play tennis. You taking her to the park, just like my father… With our genes combined, think what a natural she’d be, how talented … until she enters her first tournament. And all the while I’m on the sidelines keening, Don’t get your hopes up.”