Double Fault (41 page)

  "Certainly no call to blame yourself for household accidents," Axel muttered, indicating no appetite for intervening in a dispute that produced eight stitches, as if, were Willy truly that violent, he might get hit. "Why not," he cast about, "I don't know, go back to basics? Thought you had some big shot coach."

  "We've divorced," Willy announced.

  "
What?
" Eric exclaimed. He knew nothing of her "appointment" in Max's office.

  "And little wonder." Willy's laughter pealed. "I played some swaggering Italian in Riverside Park last month? An amateur, right, a
bad
amateur, never played a pro match in his life? Beat me 0–6, 7–6, 6–2."

  Eric leaned forward. "Willy, it's getting late—"

  "It's only ten o'clock."

  "All right, then,
I don't feel well
, OK?"

  Willy obediently collected her bag. "Say, why don't we have a game some day?" she proposed gaily to her host. "The way I'm playing lately, you might surprise yourself."

  Just perceptibly, Eric shook his head at his father.

  "No, Will," said Axe, clapping her shoulder more gingerly than usual, as if whatever it was she'd come down with might be contagious. "You'd drill me, and an old man can live without public humiliation. Stick with the pros."

  Moving a ruthless man like Axel Oberdorf to charity was the crowning insult of Willy's career.

  "When you lost in the qualifiers this week, how were most of the points lost?" Dr. Edsel prodded.

  "Unforced errors."

  "Does that not suggest to you a deliberateness, even resolve? You've referred to 'playing both sides of the net.' You were once a fine athlete. Are you not playing the other side awfully well?"

  "Yes, yes, I hate myself," Willy droned, bored with self-examination.

  "I don't think so." The contention jarred. "You have a flair for the dramatic," Edsel explained, his errant eye ranging the room in one direction as he roved in the other; he had her covered. "Is it not much more operatic for your ranking to become wretched, nonexistent, rather than modestly inferior to your husband's? In the grandiosity of your decline, I see signs of self-affection."

"What's this, the old I-enjoy-wallowing number?"

  "Failure can become an ambition of its own. In its attainability lies its allure. And you have a histrionic side, Ms. Novinsky. You carry historical baggage as we all do, but nothing you've told me about your background suggests that you have to be losing every match you play. Your consistency betrays design."

  "Like, better to be a bum than a mediocrity?"

  "Notoriety is a kind of distinction. This dramatizing of yours keeps you in the limelight. You claim to preserve a sense of proportion, but in truth you play the tragic figure to the hilt. And slyly, you make your husband feel responsible. Were you to have maintained a ranking at least in the 200's, he'd have surpassed you, but the situation would not have appeared grossly intolerable. In truth, it would still have been intolerable to you. So to emphasize the indignity of being outflanked, you exaggerate the disparity."

  This was the longest speech Edsel had delivered for weeks. That while losing her last match Willy had felt physically peculiar—heavy, tender, cramped; her period was late—she decided to keep to herself. Edsel was so pleased with his insight that to compromise its glory would be rude.

  "Sport is theater," he expostulated. "You have cast yourself as the underachiever, the gifted athlete with a fatal flaw. Theater is a trap. I suspect you are as good an actress as you are a tennis player. The character you're portraying is unappreciated, tortured, slighted. I'm sure your husband's income is a frustration—it denies you the gutter, which may be why you've been so loath to avail yourself of his funds. You court poignancy as a proxy for acclaim."

  Willy groaned. "This sounds familiar."

  "Yes," said Edsel, patting his hands together as if rendering himself faint applause. "Doesn't it."

"Admit it," Willy charged. "You're happy."

  Her father's cocked head completed a crookedness; he always sat in that ragged armchair as if he were snapped in two. "I am happy," he said, "that one of you has made a living off this tennis business, however improbably."

  Willy couldn't sit down. The den was tiny for pacing, with its
brown
carpet,
brown
paneling,
brown
upholstery—oh, God, it was so fecally dour she could be sick. "But if it had to be one or the other of us, you're pleased as punch it's Eric. That way your own flesh and blood doesn't challenge your beloved worldview."

  The psoriasis on her father's face was in a shedding phase. Ashen flakes drifted to his collar, as if the friction of daily disappointment were wearing him away. "I am only 'pleased as punch,' Willow, that you have a husband you can be proud of."

  For years Willy had assumed that her father's unflappability was designed to disarm; now she suspected his placidity was intended to do what it actually did: enrage. Likewise both her parents' aggressive hear-no-evil naïveté about her marriage, about how
proud
she must be of Eric, amounted to sadism, a preachy moralism, a willful gullibility. Willy had come home plenty of times and sullenly reported her husband's latest achievements, but never had they registered her tone, the seething through her teeth as if their daughter had lockjaw.

  "But luckily you don't have to be proud of me," Willy grumbled. "You have too much invested in the conviction that it's pathetic and delusional to hope for anything. If I made it, you'd have to question whether, if you'd been really determined and told those publishers to shove it, you might have become a writer after all. Christ, you didn't even tell us you wrote that stack of books. I had to come across them by accident in the attic!"

  "I didn't see any reason to burden you girls with my stillborn aspirations," he returned calmly. "But yes, a
stack
of books. Doesn't that indicate some dedication? Which failed to bear fruit. It's true I have an 'investment,' as you said, in believing that the meritocracy in New York publishing is imperfect, that some talent goes unrecognized. But I've also allowed for the possibility that I might not have what it takes."

  "So that's supposed to keep me warm at night? 'Oh, well, I guess I'm not good enough, just like Dad?' Which is what I was told incessantly as a kid. Tennis is half confidence—or lack of it—and you sure did your job on that front. Now I'm collecting on your hard work in spades."

  "Recently I'd been getting the impression you were blaming your husband. Now your ranking is all my fault?" Willy thought she could detect a smile. Theories about her parents always sounded more credible out of their earshot.

  "You haven't helped," Willy muttered uncertainly.

  Her father folded his newspaper neatly into the tube he'd learned to construct as a paperboy in his childhood. It was an old, compulsive habit, for which Willy felt a pang of reluctant affection.

  "Try to imagine a little girl, eight years old." Her father held his hand out above the arm of his chair. "This high. She loves to play tennis, you take her to the park, she is uncannily good at it. But she's just lost her baby teeth, and not that long ago you were changing her diapers. She sees some pros on TV and says that's what she wants to be when she grows up. It's sweet. But how seriously do you take her? Do you start throwing thousands of dollars at her pipe dream, or might that be too obvious a channeling of a parent's own egotism?"

  "You take her seriously when she starts winning junior tournaments right and left. You take her seriously when she becomes number three in New Jersey even though you won't let her compete as nearby as Pennsylvania!"

  "We had two children, Willow. I don't think either of you grew up wanting for much, but my salary at Bloomfield was small. How would you feel if you were Gert, and your parents were sacrificing your summer camp, your trips to the shore so that your sister could play tennis all over the country? Might you be justifiably angry, and wouldn't you grow to hate that sister?"

  "Your diplomacy didn't work. She hates me anyway." Willy collapsed to the adjacent chair.

  "Gert does think you're a prima donna," her father conceded. "But I can't see how that's my fault."

  Willy glowered.

  "If I
had
pushed you," her father continued gently, "tennis could have become a duty, a trial. As it was, you pushed yourself, which builds real confidence. In fact, I wonder if you haven't pushed yourself so hard that you now resent the pressure as much as if it had come from me."

  Willy had sunk from fury to funk. She'd been in a lather on the number 66 bus, mumbling accusations so that people in adjacent seats looked askance, but now everything her father said sounded so
sensible.

  "Hey." Her father patted her knee. "It's a beautiful summer evening. It's stuffy in here. Let's go for a walk."

  "I don't feel like it."

  He stood and appraised her. "I've never seen you so pale in this season. You usually have such a lovely tan."

  "I can't train at Sweetspot anymore." Willy tried to control the quaver in her voice without success. "My membership at Forest Hills was up this month, and Max didn't renew it. I can only practice on city courts, and I lost so badly to some hacker in Riverside that I'm too embarrassed to show my face."

  "Come on," her father coaxed softly. "You've never refused a walk with me on a night like this."

  Head bowed, Willy creaked out of the chair like a resident in her mother's nursing home.

  Down Walnut, a warm breeze bathed Willy's face, shushing in oaks and maples. The barn-shaped Dutch Colonials and sturdy Queen Anne's bulwarked the street, enduring and safe. Fireflies glinted, and with brief girlish inspiration she caught one. It so docilely submitted to capture that Willy softened and let it go.

  "If it would have meant something to you, I'm sorry that I didn't share my frustration over not becoming much of a writer." Her father's voice was low and lulling, like the wind in the trees. "I simply sealed that off as another life. You're too young to understand, but most lives are made of several. I put those books behind me. It's not as if I never think about them, and you know yourself that I regard most of what's published as pretty piss-poor. But I'd hate to think you've concluded that my life is only bitter and mean as a consequence. There's much more out there than career success."

  "Like
what
?" she asked sulkily.

  He waved at the neighborhood as they wended onto Park Street. "A walk on a lovely summer night. Music—that Samuel Barber you used to play over and over. Spinach gnocchi at Rispoli's, and an old Sherlock Holmes movie on the late show. Or the look on your mother's face when I announced that we were finally going to go to Japan." He shrugged. "And sorry to raise a prickly subject—but tennis."

  They had ambled instinctively to the public park where Willy had learned to play. The streetlight shed patchy orange on the decrepit court, like a vista only partially remembered. Its surface was cracked and crumbling. The gate, once locked after dark, was partially off its hinges and swung wide. Willy shuffled onto the macadam, toeing the rubble of backcourt. It looked like her life, in shambles.

  "I still play once in a while," said her father.

  "You and I haven't in years."

  "Well, I couldn't hope to give you much of a game. You've pasted me since you were ten."

  Willy was about to add something gratuitously self-deprecating about how he might have a chance now, but decided,
Enough of that.
"I would love to play you. Just for fun."

  "That's what I like to hear. For fun."

  "I shouldn't be here, Daddy," she admitted. Willy couldn't recall kicking across this court in the dark before. It looked wrong, dim. She always recollected these lines incandescent with sunshine. "Today Eric was playing the quarters of the Pilot Pen. I should have gone. I couldn't bear it."

  "You're right, you should've been there. Eric deserves your support. He needs it."

  "He deserves it all right, but sure doesn't
need
it."

  The Novinskys were not a gropey family, and her father's hand on Willy's shoulder was awkward. "You worry me, Willow. I never see you enjoy an ever-loving thing. I'm sorry if my trying, foolishly, I suppose, to protect you from getting your hopes dashed backfired, and you assumed that I didn't have faith in your talent. I just never wanted you to think that our love for you was in any way conditional on whether you won kudos for our family. The affections of the rest of the world are conditional enough.

  "But you've got to take some eggs out of that tennis basket. Not that you shouldn't keep trying. But any career is full of pitfalls, good and bad luck, the sometimes malign or negligent influence of other people. If you let that side of your life be everything, you deliver to others, and to forces that have no feelings or loyalties at all, the power to defeat you utterly. Profession, it's just a game. In your case, a literal game. But the best things in life aren't only free, you can't even earn them: fireflies on a summer night; watching your own daughter pick up the backhand with the ease that most kids pick up nits. And now you've got the rarest gift of all: a boy who loves you. I could see it in his eyes the first time he walked into our house, and that's why we were attentive, not because we liked his tennis stories. I'm warning you, if you waste that, the most precious thing on earth that you not only can't go out and buy, but you can't go out and
look for—"

  "Daddy," Willy choked. "He's about to play the U.S. Open!"

  "Honey, I know that must be a little hard to swallow. But somehow you've got to find a way. If you don't, you'll never forgive yourself.

  Abstractly, she knew he was right—as she always knew, abstractly, that in preparing for a winter jog the temptation was to bundle up too much, and presently she'd be puffing down the road in all that gear, melting and claustrophobically hot. But time and time again, the abstract information was no use. Time and time again, she swaddled in sweats because she was chilly right then, only to smother over six miles because she hadn't quite believed what was only an idea and not an immediate agony. Clinical information you often got in time; visceral confirmation arrived reliably too late.