Double Fault (24 page)

  What was netted was Willy's shot. She'd arrived too late to throw her weight forward. Still, there was no need to be flustered. Two more match points. No problem. Cake.

  But there was a problem. Each time Willy pounced on the wrong ball, overhitting in her anxiousness to be done. Willy didn't want to win so much as to have won. Deuce.

  Ad-out.

Game.

  
Stupid, bonkers. Three match points in a row donated to charity. Well,
let Marcella have her one game. See if it keeps her warm at night, that she
got that one off me. Now let's close that prissy doughball out.

  At 5–2, a few of the spectators who had gathered their things sat back down. Marcella's hanging in there was the kind of gritty spitting in the face of the inevitable that audiences always admire. And look at that! Imagine breaking back a second time that far behind!

  But 3–5 wasn't far behind. For tennis arithmetic is insidious. Huge leads seem to collapse in one game. At 5–2, the odds of your beleaguered opponent catching up appear laughable. At 5–3 you stop laughing.

  A familiar rope-skipping headache pinched Willy's eyes. "Idiot," she mumbled under her breath, rather than the usual up-psyching "Stay on your toes." One more game was all Willy needed, but having let three match points slip through her fingers grated and kept grating. If Eric's maxim was 'Don't look down,' Max's was 'Don't look back.' "Never cry over spilled milk," he always said. "Let it go. I can't say about the rest of life, but in tennis regret will destroy you." Yet Willy was awash in spilled milk, rapidly souring in the muggy June afternoon. Her own perspiration had the rank, turned smell of yogurt.

  Her coach's visage, commonly impassive, had sagged from grave to deathly. A dimple of concern dented Eric's forehead, on which the TV cameras hungrily zoomed in. Willy could have delivered the commentary herself:
Here we see the Chevy men's singles champion,
displaying perplexity that his wife is allowing a bimbo with a game like
porkpie to nuke a lead the size of North Dakota….

  At 5–4 Willy had to ask herself what was wrong, but she asked too late. She had forsaken her strategy. She was no longer lying in wait. She was trying to clobber every one of Marcella's flabby baseline shots, to haul off and clout them with the spanking they deserved, but Willy was hitting out of frustration.
I am out of control,
she admitted. But by the time you admit you are out of control, you are—obviously—out of control. What you have lost is not substantive but mechanical, the very means by which any end like "con trol" might be achieved. In such a state, it was as absurd for Willy to demand she "get herself together" as to insist that she try once more to reel in a fish when her entire rod and tackle had fallen into the sea.

  On the changeover, more ESPN broadcast in Willy's head:
Oberdorf
is already drafting his European itinerary, and promises to call home from
time to time, where his wife will be knitting sweatbands for her man on the
tour….

  After losing the second set 5–7 Willy went into shock. She could not have been more ahead in the match without winning outright. Victory had lain in her lap, a gift for unwrapping, and now as the sky grumbled with displeasure, out of some dark miracle she and Marcella were dead-fucking-even. No one in the stadium was packing to go home.

  Between sets a thundercloud exploded, and though the rain was brief the army of young boys who squeegeed and blasted the court with hot-air dryers took half an hour. The delay gave Willy a lethal amount of time to think, and Marcella the opportunity to change her outfit. As Foussard bounded to her baseline in a tutti-frutti skirt and fresh lemon headband, the air was cooler, almost chilly. Marcella's cheesecake for the cameras revealed that she'd wiped the lipstick off her teeth, and it seemed as if they were beginning a whole new game.

  "Willy, I guess it goes without saying that you thought you had the match?"

  The microphone was shoved aggressively in Willy's face, and she reared back as from a loaded gun. "If I ever did, that was my error. It's only over when it's…" she swallowed, "and all."

  "Willy, you're married to Eric Oberdorf, who beat then number ten Hans Sörle earlier this year, and just snagged the Chevy men's singles title last night—pretty effortlessly, by all appearances. How do you feel after this setback?"

  
How did she feel?
She stared incredulously at the ESPN reporter, but television mesmerized you into pro forma inanities. "I'm very happy for my husband, and I'm just sorry that I couldn't make his trophy half of a matched set. That would have been—romantic."

  "You likely to hit the road with your husband, or will you keep working on your own game?"

  "I think," another swallow, "Eric is plenty experienced with packing his own suitcase by now. There's lots of tennis left in this old girl." Which was Willy's way of claiming that she was still alive.

  "So would you say that you choked?"

  "Choked?" Willy repeated, her voice strangled. "Marcella has a deceptively crafty game; she wears you down. I think midmatch she started playing really, really well and I'd just like to commend her for an impressive performance, especially recovering from behind like that. I gave it my all, but she got the better of me this time."

  "You don't believe you choked?"

  "Sometimes," she stammered, eyes darting to his badge, "Mr. Dawson, the gods switch sides."

  In answer to her imploring gaze, Dawson thanked her and proceeded to glad-hand the winner. The last five minutes had been the most supremely adult of Willy's life. In front of millions of viewers, she didn't cry.

W
ILLY INSISTED ON ACCOMPANYING
Eric to the victors' reception, though even Max, to Marcella's dismay, skipped the party altogether. Max claimed he felt unwell; he certainly looked it. Eric was mobbed. Unchaperoned, Willy drank too much, and her jovial self-deprecation masked a more vicious self-deprecation that's a little frightening. The guests were so grateful. Discussion of her real devastation would have been
awkward
. Edgy, truncated chat quickly moved on from shame-about-your-final to neutral subjects like whether Monica Seles would ever return to the game after being stabbed. No doubt Willy's
yes isn't my husband amazing yes I have
terribly high hopes for him
was as enervating as it was obligatory. Back in their room at the Marriott, Willy collapsed on the bed

as if all night she'd been holding her breath. "Christ, I could have spread that bitch across that court like tartar sauce on a bun."

  "Then why didn't you?" Eric demanded. "What's a better definition of what you
could
do than what you
did
do?"

  Willy had looked forward all evening to when they could finally be alone, and now Eric was being as insensitive as that ESPN reporter. "Don't you ever see a discrepancy between your ability and how well you played a match?" she pleaded.

  "If I do, I shouldn't. If you discriminate between the two, what you 'could' do is infinite. You're capable of what you actually do. If ability is a finite, measurable quantity, it's the same thing as performance."

  "So if Marcella beats me, she's better than I am. Period." Willy had meant her formulation to sound ridiculous. It didn't.

  "Marcella is better than you are until you prove otherwise on the court. Not in your head. And not in mine."

  "You're being a jerk," Willy accused him sulkily. "You know Marcella plays like a marshmallow. She didn't win, I lost. I had a bad day—"

  "Your bad days are also your days," Eric interrupted sternly. "They count. I don't see why you want me to humor you. You're as good as your execution. This is sport. It's external. That's its strength and that's its limitation. I agree there's a lie in it. But there's a lie in the interior as well. You know yourself that people who are all talk, who sit around feeling
valuable
and busting with
potential
, are full of shit."

  "What happened today was a travesty, an outrage! Why can't you agree? Why can't you have confidence in me?"

  Eric dragged Willy by the wrist to sit up. "I do have confidence in you, which is why I'm not going to pander to post-match rewriting. Yes, it was a travesty, but it happened. Something went wrong. Turn your mind to what that was. My patting your hand about how awfully more gifted you are than Marcella won't help. Because, damn it, if she clouts you again, and again, no matter how tawdry her devices, then you are
not
better. There's only one way to prove otherwise. Beat her."

  Willy slumped back to the pillow. "I was beating her," she observed glumly.

  "Willy, it was 5—zip, 40—love!" Eric exploded. "What happened?"

  Folding her hands funereally across her chest, Willy announced to the ceiling, "I was afraid."

  If a simple explanation, it was plausible. In sport, fear alone could raise a dread to life. That Willy would squander so vast a lead had seemed farfetched. Yet by merely entertaining the possibility, she had called the unimaginable into being. Since she only needed one point of three, and from long thereafter a single game, which she should have picked up along the way if only from habit, the scale of the terror must have been monstrous.

  "What could you
possibly
be afraid of, at that score?" asked Eric incredulously.

  "I don't want you to leave me." Willy's voice, ordinarily a sturdy alto, was frail.

  "I wouldn't leave you over a tennis game!"

  "That's not what I mean. You're going on the ATP tour—"

  "Which is part of the deal; we discussed this before we got married. You fly off to plenty of tournaments yourself. I don't like separation any more than you do, and some day soon this will all be over and we'll—"

  "No. You'll leave me behind. You'll be famous. If you pull far enough in front, you'll be thousands of miles away when we're in the same room."

  "Nonsense," Eric dismissed. "Besides, you lost one match. You can make up the points this summer, in the Tanqueray, for example—"

  "Then you agree. In order for us to stay together, truly together, I have to keep up with your ranking."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Your answer to what if such-and-such happens is just to say it won't happen," Willy spoke to the overhead light. "You're nervous that I'm right."

  "Willy, you've been more highly ranked than me by a yard the entire time we've been together. It's been the other way around for twenty-four hours, and you're going off the deep end. We can obviously manage not being exactly on a par, because that's the way we've
been
managing."

  "You knew you were gaining on me." Willy's voice had gone flat and factual. "It's psychologically apples and oranges, coming up from behind and overtaking versus starting out in front and being surpassed. You know that from tennis. You're being intentionally thick."

  "You can wear the shoe on the other foot for a month or so after two years of my playing second fiddle."

  "You're mixing your metaphors," said Willy wearily. "You must be rattled." As if to demonstrate, the phone rang, and they both jumped.

  Willy picked up. "No, it's not too late…. Yes, I can see your point…. Well, I'm sure she'll be perfect…. No, the whole thing wasn't my cup of tea anyway, I don't mind. Yes. Good-bye."

  Willy dangled the receiver on two fingers and dropped it
c'est la
vie
in the cradle. "That was
Slick Chick
. The editor said that if we'd both won the Chevy it would have been a great story. But the way it shook out would make their readers 'uncomfortable'—a fractured fairy tale, you know. So she was schmoozing with Marcella at the party. They'll do a spread on Foussard instead."

  "Willy, I'm sorry."

  She shrugged off his arm. "It was stupid anyway. I looked like a whore."

  "Honey…" Eric loitered helplessly at her side; for once Willy wished that she smoked. "What I said before—I only meant that your tennis game is as good as you play. I didn't mean that you are."

  "The distinction is lost on me."

  "I love you, sweetheart. I don't care if you win tournaments."

  "That's love? My career doesn't matter?"

  "It only matters to me because it matters to you. If it would help—I'll come to the Tanqueray. To give you support."

  "You'll be in Europe."

  "I'll come back."

  When Eric left for Switzerland, Willy fled to Sweetspot to train intensively for the Tanqueray in July. Fewer than half the points were on offer as she might have collected at the Chevrolet, but Willy needed a win like a fix.

  In practice she had the shakes. Willy no longer quite believed that her shot would arrive where she aimed and, lo, it did not. Max called this self-fulfilling failure of faith the "Tinkerbell Syndrome"—in
Peter Pan
, unless children believed in fairies Tinkerbell would die. Putting a successful stroke on a par with the supernatural, his coinage recalled Willy's recurrent flying dreams, to which she was both prone and partial. Yet lately, soaring over mountain ranges with her arms outstretched, suddenly it would occur to her that people couldn't fly. At the instant of misgiving, her body would plummet, and Willy woke with a start, her heart thumping and the bedclothes dank. If the fatality of hitting bottom in falling dreams was apparently a myth, certainly in its metaphorical sense hitting bottom would be a death of sorts.

  The cancerous mistrust was periodic, and bred itself. Hesitation begat poor shots, which begat more hesitation, which begat more poor shots. Often the only way to break the cycle was to quit, an impractical solution in a match.