Double Fault (32 page)

Willy's faltering fortunes may have transformed her husband into one more affliction, but they had just as utterly revised her vision of herself. Characteristics that she'd once have considered fixed, impervious, revealed themselves as subject to the elements, like a hat in the rain. It transpired that confidence, for example, was not some inviolate trait, but the offspring of encouraging events, and therefore vulnerable to disaster. Willy had never thought of herself as quiet, but her voice had measurably ebbed—unless she was screaming—so that Eric had often to prod, "Pardon?" on long-distance calls. The tonality of her speech had musically transcribed to a minor key, and there was a tentativeness about her assertions that in another woman Willy would have found objectionably deferential. Certainly she had always adjudged herself energetic, yet now she slept unprecedentedly long hours, and rarely rallied the vigor to make it to the cinema. If on one of his dutifully scheduled weeks home Eric proposed a movie, she'd accede early in the day, but by nightfall, up against trooping out the door, would instead sag into a chair and claim, truthfully anyway, that she was tired. Though Willy had prided herself in the past on a cynical bite, she had always been, in regard to herself and the fineness of life in general, an optimist. Yet now that acerbic edge had flipped inward, carving graffiti on the walls of her head. While she'd have previously expected—maybe