Double Fault (33 page)

  For if taken as a lot the accomplished were buoyant and looked on the bright side, was their airy disposition to their credit? Why, there were days Eric had to
pretend
to be in a bad mood. Similarly, was it sheer coincidence that the disappointed were collectively misanthropic, distinguished by an aloof, smoldering abstention and a sadistic pleasure in bursting other people's bubbles? Torture subjects testified that the stalwart who could undergo any mutilation and keep his integrity was a 007 myth. At a point, every martyr cracked. Every damn one.

  Meanwhile, the whole outside world disclosed itself as treacherously subjective. Neither good nor sinister, dull nor fascinating, luminous nor black, the exterior universe possessed no innate qualities, but was nightmarishly reliant on the grind of her interior lens. That the Boat Basin in Riverside Park would not, at least, remain a sublime and halcyon copse atrot with friendly dogs unnerved her, for the same Hudson walkway could transmogrify into a bleak and trashy strip, its dogs ratty and hostile, the vista of New Jersey grim and aggressively overfamiliar. Sweetspot as well could flip-flop overnight from tasteful clapboard haven to slick, elitist preserve for the spoiled rotten. Willy resented having responsibility for the fickle landscape outside her mind as well as in; there was no resort. As the seafarer craves dry land, she yearned for anything ineluctable and true, immutably one way or another. Instead Willy was smitten with the awful discovery that even the color of a lamppost was subject to her own filthy moods.

  On single evenings in Riverside Park Willy remembered herself. It would actually slip her mind that her ranking was on the edge of oblivion, and personality, malleable or not, is among other things a habit. If only because she had so often in the past, Willy would swing Eric's hand and playfully corral him into the river rail, bantering with garrulous lunatics while the sun returned to its originally sumptuous vermilion and sank good-naturedly into Hackensack. She could tell from the expression on Eric's face that in such twilights she was pretty again, her forehead smoothed out, the muscles around her mouth loosened so that its corners lifted naturally like seabirds from houseboats, her hair whipping free of its stern nylon tie. But there was, in his eyes, a new element—of gratitude, of mournfulness, as if he were seeing her from a long way off or were gazing at youthful photographs of a lover since grown haggard.

  Willy might have been grateful herself for these respites, which attested to the chemical impossibility of a misery that is perfectly unremitting. Surely glimpses of the woman he'd fallen in love with must have discouraged her husband from cutting his losses and bolting for the door. But in a way resuscitation was cruel—like the gift of an orange to a prisoner who would return to bread and water, or the wickedness of a too-brief remission in a terminal case.

  The rudimentary fact of Willy's downfall overshadowed its causes. But in the vast free time available to early-round rejects, it was impossible not to ponder: what had gone wrong? Willy could only surmise that she was defeating herself. This last year her opponents had hardly to lift a finger; Willy was playing both sides of the net. Whatever quantity that she once aimed outward now pointed in the opposite direction, as in Bugs Bunny cartoons where Elmer Fudd's blunderbuss is U-turned to explode in his face. Why she would wittingly warp the barrel of her own gun was another mystery, but a tennis career was too short to allow for the unraveling of the soul—as was, no doubt, any life. By the time you understood it, it was over. So Willy could only draw conclusions from the crude statistics: she was about to turn twenty-seven; she was ranked 864. Ergo, her career was finished.

  Yet if personality is partly a habit, so is ambition. Mechanically, Willy continued to file applications to the lowly tournaments that would admit her. She took the train to Sweetspot, numbly tromped to practice, and ran six miles a day in an anesthetized haze. Faith in one's self has all the earmarks of religion, and is equally susceptible to crisis; Willy sleepwalked through the motions of aspiration as the lifelong churchgoer will continue to rouse and dress on Sunday mornings long after he's ceased to believe in God. If nothing else, she did not know what else to do with the day. She had set her sites from childhood on Flushing Meadow. Having charted no alternative destination, Willy continued to shamble in the same direction, like a downed pilot in the desert who hasn't a prayer of reaching civilization before he runs out of water, but who keeps slogging over dunes because the unthinkable alternative is to lie down in the sun and wait to die.

T
HOUGH AWARE SHE WAS
changing, on no single day did Willy look in the mirror to face an ogress, any more than an aging woman confronts on a particular morning,
I am old
. True, gratuitous smiles at shopkeepers and compliments to practice partners sprang less spontaneously to Willy's lips. But the nefariously gradual pace of her transformation allowed time to adapt. New Willy considered a couple of minor incidents that year with Eric merely strange. Old Willy would have found them sinister.

  Back in January, when Eric had grandly forfeited the Australian Open to
work on his marriage
—a phrase that likened their relationship to the chore of filling out joint tax returns—he had asked her to post an application for Portugal's Estoril Open on her way to pick up bagels that morning. Willy had tucked the envelope in her parka and slogged a block up Broadway to Mama Joy's. In the aftermath of the blizzard of '96, great bluffs lined the walk.

  Maybe the extraordinary arctic vista had been distracting. It wasn't until the snow had melted, refrozen, and turned black in February that Willy encountered the creased envelope still snug in her parka. She peeled open the flap, to discover that Estoril's due date had passed. Nervously, Willy buried the application in 112th Street's basement trash cans. The Portuguese cup was worth $100,000.

  "Damnedest thing," Eric informed her long-distance in March. "I called the Estoril today, and they never received my application."

  "That's strange," she said, pulse thumping. Was she that far gone? Had she forgotten her errand accidentally-on purpose? "Maybe something went wrong with the mail."

  "Ironically, I was calling to get out of it. I'd originally wanted practice on clay, but Gary and I are having second thoughts about the French. Meanwhile I've been offered a wild card from Key Biscayne—more money, more points, hardcourt. It's lucky the application got lost, because the fine for late withdrawal in Portugal was outrageous."

  Willy felt a pang. Key Biscayne was one of the two coed international events that Max had mentioned long ago, and now there was no way she and Eric were entering together. "That's wonderful, sweetheart," she said faintly. "You just can't lose."

  He didn't. It was largely thanks to Key Biscayne that Eric advanced to 75.

  The second incident was less ambiguous. The day Eric came home in April, he schlepped in the door with a terse, "I'm back." Dumping his bags, he went straight to the refrigerator and rattled its empty drawers. "Willy!" he barked into the fridge. "All my clothes reek. Take my laundry in, will ya?"

  He stalked out of the kitchen and selected three rackets, propping them on the doorjamb. "I've got a practice game at Forest Hills later this afternoon," he announced. "I'll come by later and

pick up my stuff. For now my legs are killing me from those shitty economy-class seats, and I'm going to Jordan to jump rope."

  "Right away?" Willy asked in incredulity. "You haven't been home for five minutes."

  "Some
home
," he groused, standing in the doorway. "You know, I've been on the road for six weeks. I come back, there's not so much as a crust of bread for lunch, and this place is a pigsty."

  The door slammed. So much for how-are-you-honey, much less let's-get-reacquainted-in-the-bedroom. Cramped transatlantic flights may have made Eric crabby, but being treated like dilatory hotel staff made Willy far crabbier. She glowered at the battered leather duffels, tattered with torn routing tickets to London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. So she was supposed to paw through his stinky sports clothes? Think again, buster.

  In the foyer, his rackets peered back at her with prim expressions, awaiting the return of Master. Though their covers were sumptuously padded, the pampered Princes now lay at the mercy of their governess. Willy had always treated her own rackets with respect, never thrashing them to pieces against a fence as Andre Agassi had done with no fewer than forty rackets a year in his youth. But Eric had bought a wire cutter to replace the plug on the stereo and hadn't got around to the repair; it seemed profligate to invest in an implement never put to profitable employ.

  She unzipped the top Prince; it cowered. Working the blades of the wire cutter into the sweet spot inspired all the murderous glee of slipping a knife into human gut. They were expensive strings. With a snip the whole frame shuddered. At first the grid remained intact, as a stabbing victim might remain standing a moment before pitching forward to the pavement. After a minute, however, the center of the face subtly loosened, quivered, and unraveled like the composure of the mortally wounded. She zipped it back in its body bag.

  Quickly, she did the other two accomplices and arranged the rackets back in order.

  "Can you believe," said Eric on his return from his match, "that all three of my rackets had busted strings?"

"All
three?
" Willy marveled.

"Plane pressure, temperature change—"

"I guess you couldn't play."

  "I borrowed a spare off Leonard. In fact, I fell in love with his Wilson. When my racket contract is up for renewal in August, I'll have Gary approach Wilson instead."

  She had indulged mindless, fruitless vandalism, but vandalism was by its nature fruitless, and for the first time Willy wholly understood young boys with dim prospects who took Louisville Sluggers to bus shelters.

  Maybe Willy indulged the odd deviant behavior in an effort to make herself feel something, if only guilty. For repeated battering on the circuit had bludgeoned all her senses. Colors waned—vistas outside her Amtrak window appeared two-dimensional and faded, like poor landscape reproductions in cheap hotels. Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," which once moved her to tears, now sounded tinny and thin—peevish, self-pitying, and lachrymose. When she had heaped curry onto chicken thighs, Eric leapt for water; Willy covered hers with cayenne and couldn't taste a thing. When she left the unlit oven turned on, she didn't notice; the gray choke of natural gas too well resembled what Willy smelled all the time. As for sex, it took ages to come. The protraction had grown embarrassing. Eric was a patient lover, but patience is not what any woman, in bed, aims to tax.

  Yet it was on the tennis court that this flattening was most pronounced. Hardcourt green no longer lured with the permeable lushness of a meadow or sea, but looked painted and easily flaked to expose a raw, ashen composition. The dimensions of the court seemed smaller, like the house of your childhood visited when you were all grown-up. The once elegant lines of the game, winking with intrigue, now looked insipidly simple, like the hopscotch chalking of a dull girl.

  The single stimulus that could always provoke a reaction of some kind was Eric Oberdorf. But despite the rare flood of self-annihilating adoration, itself not always welcome, Willy had to al

low, as the summer of Eric's first Grand Slam approached, that if she added up all her feelings for her husband on a given day and divided them by the total, the average was dislike. It was frightening. Recognizing the distinctive, self-assured sweep of his stride from two blocks away, not so long ago Willy would have broken into a run, arms open. Now she was inclined to wait, irked at his swagger. Even little things that used to charm her, like the huge quantities of food he ate, now got on Willy's nerves;
she
could never devour all those carbohydrates without getting fat. Flashes of hastily regretted hatred were one thing, but this unblinking glare at the man who was supposedly the love of her life was wildly unfair, to both of them, and could not continue much longer.

  If grown-up birthdays serve any purpose, they are for taking stock. On that milestone in May Willy demurred from attending Eric's second round at Forest Hills's Tournament of the Champions, and stayed home to brood on the alternatives for her future:

  Graciously Willy throws in the towel on her own career, devoting herself to the more prodigious talents of her husband. Eric advances rapidly to the Top Ten. He is pursued for presidential endorsements, harassed to play charity exhibitions, and paid to lend his name to the "Obie," a new Wilson racket. When her husband breaks Bjorn Borg's record for straight Wimbledon wins, Eric booms to the crowd how he could never have made it without the constant encouragement of his devoted wife. Willy beams.

  On tour, she tries to be of use in little ways, unpacking in each hotel, ordering sandwiches, vetting calls. Other seasons she stays back at their mansion in California, for the children need one parent to stay put once in a while. For her own part, she sometimes plays a friendly doubles match with neighbors on the backyard court in Palo Alto, after which she pooh-poohs her disreputable performance and serves lemonade. But she never misses the Slams, and when the set gets tense the camera always seeks her out in the stands. At home on the couch, she has practiced leaping with delight at his final put away volley in the fifth set, genuflecting and glancing heavenward like Brooke Shields.

  Snipping Eric's racket strings dwarfs to small beer. Eric no longer stores his trophies in the closet but carts them to his parents' apartment, where they will be displayed with doting
oohs
and
ahs
, since the last time he arrived home with French Open crystal his wife shattered it with a sledgehammer. The "accident" was embarrassing, since the presentation trophy is on temporary loan to the winner for the year, and Eric had to pay for another to be specially cut. He has likewise learned not to take his wife on tour, because she stages abusive, drunken scenes in hotel lobbies. More than once she has been ejected by court security, booing and throwing bottles at her own husband at the seemly All England Club.