Eric faced her with an expression that Willy recognized from the baseline. She had long attributed his success in sport to nonchalance; on court he was fearless because losing didn’t scare him much. Maybe she’d been unfair. If Eric’s commitment was to himself and not to the game, that didn’t make the commitment any less fierce. He won because he never gave up. He was suited to tennis because up until the very, very last point you could win, however dire the score. Right now he embodied the defiant optimism of receiving down 5–0 in the fifth set and refusing to roll over.
“It won’t work,” he said stolidly. “I’m not leaving. If you want to end this marriage, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
Willy’s sanitary napkin had soaked through. The pad squished between her legs; a bubble formed and popped. The inside of her thighs felt damp, and a sweet, cloying smell rose from her lap. They’d said she’d bleed, but she hadn’t been prepared for this Red Sea. The blood must have seeped beyond her thin summer skirt to the sofa. One more dark stain.
Willy wadded the skirt in her hands. “You didn’t fall in love with a loser.”
“You’re more than a tennis player, Willy—”
“Not to myself.” She looked up. “I know you love me, but I no longer know why.”
“That’s for me—”
“It’s two-way. For your love to do me any good, I have to be able to see how you could feel that way about your wife. Can’t you grasp why I might be in love with you?”
“I have my points,” Eric allowed warily.
“Well, my points have always been a wicked slice backhand and a deadly drop shot.”
“Not to—”
“To me! You’re not listening!”
“We can work through this—”
“Please,” Willy pleaded. “You’ve only been sweet to me. I wish I could say the same in reverse. I’ve treated you abominably, think I don’t know that? And my every bitchy remark sticks in my own craw. Awful as you might find living with a cow, it’s much more horrible to be one.”
Willy would have liked to roam the room, but she didn’t want to expose the puddle on her skirt. Sitting while Eric paced, she felt like a suspect whose confessions were bound to contradict a detective’s painstakingly constructed case. “When you finally told me a few days ago that I was ‘washed up’ in tennis, I couldn’t believe you said that out of spite. I have faith in your judgment, and I think your advice was ironically kind. When I threw all that stuff away, I wasn’t being melodramatic—”
“Sure you weren’t.”
“All right, I wasn’t only being melodramatic. I was driving something home to myself. But chucking a few trophies was barely a start. It’s going to take me a long, long time to adjust to not practicing three hours a day, not flying off to a new city every month, not spending most of my waking hours rehearsing points I might have handled by coming to the net or staying back. My every routine has been centered around tennis, tennis, tennis, and now I’ve got to learn to think about something else, to care about something else. For the life of me I don’t know what that will be.”
“Try a family. Try your own husband.”
“Would you want my whole world to revolve around you?”
“You’d never do that. I have every confidence that you’ll come up with a new course of—”
“We’re not talking about a hobby, a passing fancy! Giving up tennis, it’s like cutting out my liver! I don’t know who I am without that sport.”
“Tennis,” he snarled. “I’m beginning to wish that when I picked up a racket at eighteen I threw it in the fire.”
“But you didn’t,” Willy admonished. “My father told me last week that a life is made of several lives, and that I wasn’t old enough to understand that. Maybe I am, just; maybe I can see it. But I have something to go through, and it’s going to be excruciating. I have to re-create myself from scratch. At twenty-seven, I have to go back to the age of five and come up with something else I want to be when I grow up.”
“Then let me help you!”
“You can’t, Eric,” she stopped him softly. “You’re deep in the top 100 now, about to play your first U.S. Open. You’re the last person on earth who can help. Because I have tried and tried to construct a scenario I could live with: becoming your right-hand supporter, bowing out and yielding to the greater talent, raising our children, who’d be so proud of their father. But I kept coming back to, What do you do, Mommy? I know there’s such a thing as gallantry, stepping aside, and I admire the pants off of people—men and women both—who can manage it. But I’ve searched myself, and I can honestly say that I don’t have that much grace in me. You know yourself that tennis is egocentric, and in some ways it’s made me what I am. Maybe I can change, but it’s going to be agonizing. I still can’t picture you hitting a last victorious volley and my being overjoyed. Think of yourself for once, Eric. Don’t you deserve a wife who at least wants you to win? It’s no more attractive to me than to you, but I wonder if I won’t always be a little bit bitter. No matter what else I find to do, for the rest of my life I’ll grieve for my game. When I say that out loud it sounds petty. But it isn’t petty to me.”
As a fatalism had begun to dog her in matches, loss begetting loss, a momentum to their discord had carried her to this blood-soaked couch. There was an inexorable logic to this end point, like the logic that losers lose. Her arguments were solid. Countless afternoons she had labored at this riddle, always arriving at the same solution, like the answer to one of Eric’s undergraduate equations. Every time, she factored herself out, and for the past few minutes her very voice had taken on the factual calm of a mathematics lecture.
Yet if this was an impasse with which she had sometimes threatened him, more often threatened herself, in the brandishing of their ruin it had become by definition a hobgoblin of the future and thereby a myth. The breakup of her marriage was not an event but an eventuality. Willy felt less anguished than perplexed. She had never meant the threat as anything but empty. She had thought the unthinkable only in order to frighten herself out of it.
Eric should have recognized that she was begging him to make her shut up. Later she was destined to wonder if, had he clapped his mouth on hers rather than allowing her to keep talking, the confrontation would have turned out otherwise. Then, perhaps not. That was a mistake that couples often made: if only she hadn’t thrown … if only he hadn’t said. But without hurling dinner, or screaming this or that, the crisis would have arisen over something else instead. Variables need filling.
“If I’m about to move on to another life, Eric,” she continued heavily, “you’re a part of the old one. The prospect of capitulation embarrasses me, though I don’t seem to have a choice. It’s going to be dreadful enough, but the one thing I can’t bear is for you to watch.”
“You seem to have it all worked out,” he said glumly. The tension had left his body. His shoulders only dropped that final notch when a match was over.
Willy looked at her husband in horror. She couldn’t believe he was letting her get away with this.
Eric glanced at his watch, which was still keeping time in the old life. “I have to go to Flushing. This is your apartment. You still get the credit for leaving me, but I’m the one who should move out. After the match tonight, I’ll go back to my parents’.”
Eric left for the bedroom, and returned tucking his passport into his back pocket. Though he was headed only for Queens, he was readying himself for a different country.
“One thing,” raised Willy, pinkening in chagrin. “Did I ever beat you? For true?”
“Willy Novinsky,” he said, his weary facial muscles falling like rubble down a slag heap. “No one has ever beaten me so completely.”
“And I… I did give it my all, didn’t I? At least assure me, I did really, really try?”
“You tried,” he said, “at tennis.”
Eric shouldered his sports bag and paused. “I know there’s little chance—” He dug out his wallet.
“But just in case, this is yours.”
He laid the U.S. Open ticket on the empty Plexiglas table, and walked out the door.
It was early afternoon. Sun blazed obliviously through the windows, beckoning little girls to tennis courts. Disoriented on the sofa, for an instant Willy forgot herself, wondering if she might pick up a game in Riverside on such a radiant day, then pulled up short: she had just broken up with her husband; she was recovering from an abortion; she had thrown her tennis rackets away.
She could take up squash. It was a nice little game.
One year of study would complete her B.A. Columbia had an adult education program, and was just across the street. She could take out a loan.
Willy’s eye fell on the fragment of glass that Eric had left glinting on the dining table. It was sharp. She could finish her degree and translate Spanish for the United Nations, or she could slit her wrists.
In truth this second option seemed at least as viable as the first. But Willy’s imagination was too vivid: in Technicolor she envisioned raising the shard over her arm, plunging the edge vertically along the veins, keeping her resolve intact to repeat the exercise on the other wrist. Nothing but a line for a moment, and then—
She might have dwelt on the idea longer, but that would have meant indulging more of Edsel’s self-dramatizing. After year-in, year-out of running and weights and line sprints, her homage to the body was too binding. Willy stood up shakily and dropped the glass in the trash.
She felt peculiar for being present. With all the components of her life disposed of, something had risen from the sofa. Apparently it was possible to survive yourself.
Willy changed out of her bloody skirt and replaced the sanitary napkin. When she forlornly wound up one of Eric’s jump ropes, she had an inkling that it was hers now; that he would never come back for any of his belongings in this apartment. Tempted by the rope, frantic to throw her hours at an activity that was bludgeoningly stupid, Willy knew that a punitive session of skipping would risk hemorrhage. Still, the blaring silence of the apartment became a kind of violence, and Willy fled to Riverside Park.
Occluded by trees, the 122nd Street courts were just audible from the Hudson overlook where Willy slumped over the wall. Pock … pock … Such a harmless, casual sound, it recalled what public parks had always tendered: balance. For every shot, a return; for every triumph, a comeuppance. With the perfect partner, tennis offered up that implausible American ideal of equality. In this archetypal vision, the weekly ebb and flow was entertainment, full of ribbings, vows of revenge next Wednesday at four. But sometimes with the most seemingly suitable of partners, one of you came out conclusively ahead. Surely that’s when you were no longer playing, and parted ways.
Drawn irresistibly by the pocking sound, Willy shuffled down the muddy path and past the flaking green benches to hook her fingers on the chain-link fence. The couple on court number one weren’t very good. In fact, they were terrible. But neither seemed perturbed by their abysmal chop and thwack. The girl fumbled more than one return because she was laughing. Their balls were bald, and when one sailed into the woods they let it go. After hitting one competent pass, the girl lifted her racket overhead and clicked her heels midair. She looked so happy. Willy couldn’t remember any of her own shots, the most ordinary of which were ten times more spectacular than that little down-the-line, giving her remotely the same degree of satisfaction since she turned pro.
“Hey!” The parks attendant sidled beside Willy at the fence. “Will-eee!”
“Those two look like they’re having a ball,” said Willy wistfully.
“Yup, it’s a real nice day,” he returned. For the lackadaisical attendant, tennis was no great test of character, but synonymous with weather.
Willy followed the amateurs on court number one with the close scrutiny of watching a Grand Slam final, as if the couple had mastered some devilish trick of which the Top Ten were ignorant. “Did you know,” Willy introduced conversationally, “that most professional tennis players are miserable?”
“That so,” said the paunchy official, who didn’t care. “By the way, where you been? Haven’t seen you down here for ages, girl.”
“No,” Willy reflected. “I haven’t really been here for years.”
That evening Willy vacuumed. She wanted the noise, white and erasing. She was pretending not to know what time it was, but there was no use pretending by herself. If nothing else, the ticket lay on the Plexiglas to remind her. It was eight o’clock, and as she’d known she would since Eric left, she turned on ESPN.
Over the wahah of the vacuum, Eric’s game had already started. His renown from the Sörle upset had assured that this would be one of the few televised first rounds. He looked skinny on screen, though the camera was supposed to add pounds. His hair was lank and weedy.
But more disconcerting was his game—the game that, however unrefined, had first caught her eye in Riverside like a rough diamond; the game she’d watched cut and shined facet by facet and had filled her with the covetous longing of a cat burglar; the game she would have recognized from a mile away except not tonight because tonight she didn’t recognize it at all.
There was a drag to his step, and Eric’s anticipation had always been stupendous. None of his returns had sting. He often double-faulted. When she turned off the vacuum cleaner, she could hear the commentator remark how Eric Oberdorf had been mooted as a promising new talent, and this was a very unimpressive performance indeed.
One of Eric’s secrets had long been that he did not admit the possibility of defeat. Since it wasn’t part of his universe, he would no more try to fend off failure than wear garlic to protect himself from werewolves. Willy had taught him surrender. Pandora, she had opened the box of nightmare disappointments into his life.
The match was short. Eric went down in straight sets. Willy switched off the TV, and for hours wrestled with whether to call his parents at about the time he might arrive at Seventy-fourth Street. If she didn’t blurt that their breakup was all a horrible mistake and please come home, at least she could offer condolences about the match. But by eleven o’clock, Willy had stayed her own hand. Eric knew her terribly well. No matter what she said, no matter how she modulated the timbre of her sympathy, he’d see through her in a flash. Eric had lost in the first round of his first Grand Slam, and something in Willy was glad. That was why she shouldn’t call, and couldn’t ask him back.
Reading group questions
By convention, spouses are meant to regard themselves as a team, on the same side. How could Willy love her husband, and yet begin to hope he loses on court?
Do you find Willy—or at least her plight—sympathetic? Or is her moral obligation to be supportive of her own husband so profound in your mind that you cannot forgive her bad attitude?
Do you know any couples that have had problems with rivalry in real life? Have you ever had similar problems with your own partners? Competition doesn’t only emerge in issues concerning career, but sometimes in smaller situations: who can competently work the DVD player, which of you can recite the full name of the president of Iran?
Have you ever fiercely wanted something for yourself, and then watched someone else get it, or achieve it, when you didn’t? Was it difficult especially if this other person was close to you? Perhaps more difficult the closer you were? If so, why is that?
In the instance that Eric weren’t another tennis player, but did something completely different for a living, would the tensions between them be less pronounced? Might she be able to wish him well as, say, a businessman or visual artist, even if she herself had fallen on hard times on the tennis circuit?
Along these same lines: tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf married. So far, they seem happy. Do you think they’ve had an easier time of it because Steffi had retired by the time they wed?
How much is Double Fault really about tennis? Can you conceive of this novel written about another field of achievement altogether? If so, why do you th
ink the author chose to write about tennis players?
Try to imagine this same plot with the sexes reversed—more like the relationship between Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star is Born. Near the end of such a book, would Eric, down on his luck and humiliatingly outdone by his own wife, seem more readily sympathetic —having been “unmanned”? That is, might we still feel, despite all the advances that women have made, that it’s more natural for the man to be the more successful spouse in a marriage?
On the other hand, might young women these days be especially disappointed to find themselves inexorably playing the weaker role in a marriage, perhaps repeating the same pattern as their mothers did—now that women are supposedly “liberated” and free to compete on a level playing field?
Men consistently beat women at tennis, if only because they’re bigger and stronger. Does the fact that Willy can beat Eric at the beginning of the novel strain credulity? In any event, why should Willy take it to heart when he beats her at last? Isn’t her losing to a man who’s on the way up in the rankings inevitable?
Compare Willy’s and Eric’s families. How might these differences have influenced their characters?
To what degree do you believe that Willy engineers her own professional downfall? Might she want to succeed too much? But you can’t really blame her for her injury, can you?
The book’s title is obviously a play on words, implying that both parties in the marriage have some responsibility for what happens. Willy’s “fault” is pretty obvious. But in what way is Eric to blame? Or is he?
Eric is much more generous than his wife. But have you ever had the experience of everything going swimmingly for you, and discovering how much more kindly disposed you become toward everyone that surrounds you? Isn’t it easier for Eric to be supportive of his wife when she no longer presents a threat? Isn’t the kind of generosity required of Willy much more demanding?
Why did Willy not seem to even consider keeping her baby? Isn’t her career pretty much over anyway?
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