Double Fault (31 page)

  "Don't be melodramatic!"

  "This is
drama
, not
melodrama
. Heard of it? No. You want to shove everything under the carpet. Your solution to becoming a big shot while I dribble off into oblivion is not to
mention
you've become a big shot. Just don't tell Willy about the award because she's so meanspirited and envious that she'd throw a fit."

  He threw the ball of tissues on the table. "I'm only trying to keep the peace."

  "Whose peace? Which one of us is at peace?"

  "Not me, that's for sure."

  "I don't see why not. The crowds love you, you're making money, you're on your way! Why aren't you happy as a clam?"

  "Because you're not."

  "In other words, I'm ruining your life?"

  "No, Willy, and I'm sorry about the confusion over that interview, but it's not my fault! And it's not my
fault
that I won an award, is it? That I'm a good tennis player? I'm supposed to feel creepy about that, like I'm doing something awful to you? Because that's the way you make me feel; every time I win a match it's as if I'm winning it to spite you."

  "Sometimes I think you are," she said quietly.

  "You're talking out of your ass, Willy, and
please
do something about that cut, it's driving me crazy."

  Willy put the finger in her mouth and sucked.

  "What is it that you want from me?" he shouted. "When I walk up to the baseline, what's going to make you happy? I have to do something, I can't just stand there. So even if I were to run my professional life wholly according to your whim, in consideration of your
feelings
, do I serve an ace or drill the ball into the net?"

  A forthright answer ("drill the ball into the net") was unacceptable. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "If my ranking goes down, too, that's not going to raise yours one single point, is it?"

  "I just want a little sympathy—"

  "I
have
sympathy. It doesn't seem to do you much good."

It didn't. "That journalist didn't even know I
played
tennis!"

"Whose fault is that? Why didn't you tell him?"

  "It's my fault. My fault for having become a nothing. My fault for being ranked 696. That you feel badly now is my fault. Everything's my fault. You're perfect, you're good to me, you've become a dazzling athlete, everything's going your way except your hideous marriage. I'm probably the only mistake you've ever made in your whole life."

  "Sweetheart, no." At last she let him wrap the tissues around her finger. "I've never regretted marrying you."

  "What's happening to me?" she sobbed. "I love you, so why can't I act like it? Why am I so mean to you? That you can't even tell me when you win prizes? And I don't blame you! I want to be happy for you, but I can't! You're right, I just get mad, and it's horrible, I hate it. You come home and you've won another big match and this anger rises instantaneously in my throat like heartburn. And then I feel gross, gross to myself, bitter and ugly and twisted. How can you
stand
it?"

  Eric pulled her into his arms and murmured, "I know it's hard to feel happy for me when you're not happy for yourself. And I know you love me, because you do act like it, most of the time. But I can see how, when I come home, and things have gone great for me and rotten for you, well, I must make you worried on your own account. I know you feel excluded. I mean, no matter how I try to tell you it's your win, too, you don't believe that."

  Willy's chest shuddered. "You wouldn't buy that 'it's your win, too' stuff if it were the other way around."

  "No," Eric conceded with a smile, smoothing her hair, "probably not. So I guess you feel lonely. But you're not alone. And I doubt I could have ever come this far without your help. One of the things that gets me through the grind of the road is knowing I have you to come home to. If this tennis thing weren't something we were doing together, I might deep-six the whole tiresome business. But just try to remember that when I do win a tournament, or some nickel-anddime ATP award, it's not something I'm doing
to
you, OK? I want your ranking to turn around as much as you do."

  "Why can't I win anymore?" Willy whimpered into his shirt. "I used to be great! I used to feel great! Now I feel like a slug!"

  "Sh-sh," he stroked her head. "You've had crummy luck. You're in a slump. You'll pull out. It's a bad time. You'll see, in the end all these travails will make you stronger. You'll look back on this year and be proud that you didn't give up. It's just a bad time," he whispered again. "A slump."

  As if to embody the metaphor, Willy went slack in his arms.

A
CAREER IN DECLINE
, as opposed to ascent, rarely obliges with cathartic event. Failure is apt to be marked by what doesn't happen. True, a few lives do yield up turning points: the day a banker is arrested for embezzlement, the Tuesday in November a politician loses what the party has agreed will be his last Senate race. But more typical is the career that sinks in a leisurely fashion, with no single cataclysm at which instance its custodian can take stock. Disappointments accrue—another promotion denied, a flutter of résumés "on file," a dusty accumulation of "we had many applications this year" postcards referencing prizes gone to strangers or (worse) to someone you know, and whom if you did not dislike before now do. But no single catharsis provides for the venting of great grief; instead, many little griefs preempt a moment of reckoning. Always, promise beckons—a want ad, an untried contest, a friend's advice, a fresh attitude on waking Saturday.
Mere setback
, a voice whispers.
A fallow period, adversity to overcome
. As Eric would say?
A slump
. Bingo, you're seventy.

  As professions go, tennis allowed more reckonings than most. Besides confronting the outcome of matches themselves, players shuttled a published hierarchy of who's who. Still, more tournaments continually beckoned. A pristine year on the computer enticed another go. Quick-fix solutions tantalized: a new racket, redoubled jogging, a switch from power to finesse. Until at least the knell of thirty you could deceive yourself.

  It was consequently difficult for Willy Novinsky to get her hands on her own despair. Careers are prone to total in slow motion, like a car crash that takes decades; the phone never rings in the middle of the night. A blighted aspiration has all the earmarks of a missing persons case: nothing certain, no date to circle on the calendar when catastrophe occurred, just an absence, going on and on, and the front door stays shut. Failure is one long no-show, a surprise party when the guest of honor stands you up; a
Great Expectations
with unraveled lace and a cake full of rats. When should Willy stop Waiting for opportunity to knock? And when she'd waited this long, why not one more day, and another after that?

  Naturally, like the night Willy cut her finger, there were scenes. In fact, they grew monotonous: the tears, entreaties, accusations, the streaking to the sofa with the bedspread in tow. Eric's ritual pleading to come back to bed developed a weary trace of sarcasm. For her husband could only recite trite, impotent platitudes that might have been lifted wholesale from
The Little Engine That Could
. Willy would deride his counsel to "believe in herself" as bland and simplistic. Eric would bunch on his side with all the blankets, but neither of them would sleep.

  Willy didn't blame him for getting bored. She was constantly sounding the same alarm—
I'm foundering, this is killing me, anything
that kills me kills us
. But the alternative was to be lulled complicitously into Eric's contented domestic fiction: that they were an industrious two-career couple, each with their own tournaments to play, careful to arrange a week out of six to trudge famished hand-in-hand to Flower of Mayonnaise for the broiled chicken. In truth

they were easing over a dark maw, as if the floor of the 112th Street apartment were wafer-thin and with too heavy a tread they would plunge a story. By the spring of 1996 their stereo plug had developed an erratic connection. Eric was too busy to fix it, Willy too lethargic. Every time one of them stepped on or near the cord the music stopped. They had literally begun to tiptoe around their own home, lest the tinkle of normalcy cut abruptly off.

  "Wilhelm, pour us another round of your dee-licious ice tea, will ya?" Gary Sidewinder routinely helped himself to her nickname, deploying the Germanic V and its aura of mock obedience, as he likewise helped himself to Willy's husband.

  The two men were brainstorming around the dinner table, surrounded by the dog-eared
ATP Rulebook
and registration blanks, the phone at hand to explore another permutation of the spring's airline schedule. Sidewinder had set his glass on bare wood, and condensation was bleaching a white ring on the table. To Willy, who replaced the highball on its coaster, this carelessness was typical. Gary was accustomed to other people taking care of details. He was a middleman, a delegator; in other words, a parasite. He did nothing that Eric couldn't do for himself besides pander to her husband's vanity.

  Which Eric was fully capable of fostering as well, except that a pushy advocate allowed her husband his fabled modesty. Humility, like magnanimity, was a luxury of the prosperous. When Willy affected the same unassuming air, it came off as low self-esteem.

  "Nah, you don't want to stay in that fleabag," Sidewinder advised. "The Hilton in Tokyo is top-drawer."

  Gary Sidewinder was Eric's agent. He dressed like Tom Wolfe: white suits, sea-green tie, jade cuff-links, and sea-green socks, set off by a canary button-down and topped, when donned at the door, with a Panama. But Sidewinder relied on hirelings—dry-cleaners, bellboys who'd have his suit pressed within the hour. Accordingly, his tie was spattered with salad dressing, and the white jacket was badly creased. He appeared less dapper than once well-heeled and down on his luck. Since Gary always looked as if he needed a wash, maybe he couldn't get anyone else to shower for him.

  "Speaking of accommodations, Slick, ever think of moving out of these digs?" Sidewinder was recommending. "Mean, this apartment's got a cramped, graduate-student feel. Like you expect jug wine and fish sticks in the kitchen. With your income, you could shift into a doorman building in the eighties…."

  Willy had never had an agent. Oh, she understood what Gary was for: to negotiate with the ATP over which tournaments her husband would deign to play, to haggle down fines (as if the well-bred Eric Oberdorf would ever do anything censure-worthy on court), and, of course, to lure sponsors. Gary was an instrument of the
family
interests.

  "Gotta say, I wondered if you shouldn'tta gone for the Slams last summer," Gary declared. "But the way your points stack up now, I figure you made the right move. Even if you scraped through the qualies, players have an
attitude
about qualifiers. That puts you at a disadvantage. Lotta tennis is psychological in my book…."

  
Duh
, thought Willy, rubbing butter into the white ring.

  "This year," the agent went on, "is your peach for the picking, my man. Just get to the quarters of the Italian again and you'll stick at a solid 75. That's in the running. Makes for a superior mind-set. Gotta watch yourself in the Slams. Go down in an early round, and from then on that event has a bad smell—"

  "Willy's the one who advised me not to go for the Slams last year," Eric interrupted.

  "Wilhelm's got smarts."

  "Willy knows a lot about tennis, Gary."

  "Sure she does," Sidewinder purred.

  "I've thought of writing a book," Willy quipped on the way back to the kitchen. "A sequel to Brad Gilbert:
Losing Ugly
. Three hundred individual tips on how to throw a match to your grandmother with cerebral palsy."

  "Kids with cerebral palsy don't usually live to be grandmas, sweetheart!" Sidewinder called after her. "The question is
which
Slam." They'd talked this out a dozen times, but Sidewinder loved saying
Slam
. "You're most at home on hardcourt. Down Under's Har-Tru now, but that's behind us—and I can respect, I mean
respect,
that you wanted to take January instead to work on your marriage. Besides, lots to be said for initiating a bright-lights career in your own country. I don't see there's two ways about it. It's the U.S. Open or bust. Leaves you all summer to gear up. You given any more thought to getting a coach?"

  "Nah," said Eric. "I've got my wife."

  "He has this proprietary swagger because he 'discovered' you," Willy growled when Gary was gone. "As if you'd never gotten anywhere until you signed with Pro-Serve. He tells you where to stay, what to eat, and meanwhile he treats me like room service. He's a leech, and I wish you'd get rid of him."

  "I know Gary's a little oily—"

  "A
littler?"

  "But I'd never have been able to pull in sponsorships by myself at my ranking."

  "At
your ranking
," Willy mimicked, whisking lunch dishes from the table. "As if 75 were shameful. I hate when you little-ole-me. It's so fake."

  "75 is a long way from giving autographs." Eric bustled to help with the plates. "It was Gary who conned those companies into investing in an up-and-coming instead of another up-and-been. They're small sponsorships, too, but they do line our coffers."

  "They line
your
coffers."

  "Fine, have it your way. The money's all mine, you can't have a dime." Eric's latest tactic was to acquiesce.

  Willy sloshed Sidewinder's undrunk tea down the sink.

  "I wish you wouldn't run yourself down around him," Eric mumbled.

  "Aren't you attractively self-deprecating? You 'can't give autographs'?