Double Fault (44 page)

  "All right, I wasn't
only
being melodramatic. I was driving something home to myself. But chucking a few trophies was barely a start. It's going to take me a long, long time to adjust to not practicing three hours a day, not flying off to a new city every month, not spending most of my waking hours rehearsing points I might have handled by coming to the net or staying back. My every routine has been centered around tennis, tennis, tennis, and now I've got to learn to think about something else, to care about something else. For the life of me I don't know what that will be."

  "Try a family. Try your own husband."

"Would you want my whole world to revolve around you?"

  "You'd never do that. I have every confidence that you'll come up with a new course of—"

  "We're not talking about a hobby, a passing fancy! Giving up tennis, it's like cutting out my liver! I don't know
who I am
without that sport."

  "Tennis," he snarled. "I'm beginning to wish that when I picked up a racket at eighteen I threw it in the fire."

  "But you didn't," Willy admonished. "My father told me last week that a life is made of several lives, and that I wasn't old enough to understand that. Maybe I am, just; maybe I can see it. But I have something to go through, and it's going to be excruciating. I have to re-create myself from scratch. At twenty-seven, I have to go back to the age of five and come up with something else I want to be when I grow up."

  "Then let me help you!"

  "You can't, Eric," she stopped him softly. "You're deep in the top

100 now, about to play your first U.S. Open. You're the last person on earth who can help. Because I have tried and tried to construct a scenario I could live with: becoming your right-hand supporter, bowing out and yielding to the greater talent, raising our children, who'd be so proud of their father. But I kept coming back to,
What
do you do, Mommy?
I know there's such a thing as gallantry, stepping aside, and I admire the pants off of people—men and women both—who can manage it. But I've searched myself, and I can honestly say that I don't have that much grace in me. You know yourself that tennis is egocentric, and in some ways it's made me what I am. Maybe I can change, but it's going to be agonizing. I still can't picture you hitting a last victorious volley and my being overjoyed. Think of yourself for once, Eric. Don't you deserve a wife who at least wants you to win? It's no more attractive to me than to you, but I wonder if I won't always be a little bit bitter. No matter what else I find to do, for the rest of my life I'll grieve for my game. When I say that out loud it sounds petty. But it isn't petty to me."

  As a fatalism had begun to dog her in matches, loss begetting loss, a momentum to their discord had carried her to this blood soaked couch. There was an inexorable logic to this end point, like the logic that losers lose. Her arguments were solid. Countless afternoons she had labored at this riddle, always arriving at the same solution, like the answer to one of Eric's undergraduate equations. Every time, she factored herself out, and for the past few minutes her very voice had taken on the factual calm of a mathematics lecture.

  Yet if this was an impasse with which she had sometimes threatened him, more often threatened herself, in the brandishing of their ruin it had become by definition a hobgoblin of the future and thereby a myth. The breakup of her marriage was not an event but an
eventuality
. Willy felt less anguished than perplexed. She had never meant the threat as anything but empty. She had thought the unthinkable only in order to frighten herself out of it.

  Eric should have recognized that she was begging him to make her shut up. Later she was destined to wonder if, had he clapped his mouth on hers rather than allowing her to keep talking, the confrontation would have turned out otherwise. Then, perhaps not. That was a mistake that couples often made:
if only
she hadn't thrown…
if only
he hadn't said. But without hurling dinner, or screaming this or that, the crisis would have arisen over something else instead. Variables need filling.

  "If I'm about to move on to another life, Eric," she continued heavily, "you're a part of the old one. The prospect of capitulation embarrasses me, though I don't seem to have a choice. It's going to be dreadful enough, but the one thing I can't bear is for you to watch."

  "You seem to have it all worked out," he said glumly. The tension had left his body. His shoulders only dropped that final notch when a match was over.

  Willy looked at her husband in horror. She couldn't believe he was letting her get away with this.

  Eric glanced at his watch, which was still keeping time in the old life. "I have to go to Flushing. This is your apartment. You still get the
credit
for leaving me, but I'm the one who should move out. After the match tonight, I'll go back to my parents'."

  Eric left for the bedroom, and returned tucking his passport into his back pocket. Though he was headed only for Queens, he was readying himself for a different country.

  "One thing," raised Willy, pinkening in chagrin. "Did I ever beat you? For true?"

  "Willy Novinsky," he said, his weary facial muscles falling like rubble down a slag heap. "No one has ever beaten me so completely."

  "And I…I did give it my all, didn't I? At least assure me, I did really, really try?"

  "You tried," he said, "at
tennis
."

  Eric shouldered his sports bag and paused. "I know there's little chance—" He dug out his wallet. "But just in case, this is yours."

  He laid the U.S. Open ticket on the empty Plexiglas table, and walked out the door.

  It was early afternoon. Sun blazed obliviously through the windows, beckoning little girls to tennis courts. Disoriented on the sofa, for an instant Willy forgot herself, wondering if she might pick up a game in Riverside on such a radiant day, then pulled up short: she had just broken up with her husband; she was recovering from an abortion; she had thrown her tennis rackets away.

  She could take up squash. It was a nice little game.

  One year of study would complete her B.A. Columbia had an adult education program, and was just across the street. She could take out a loan.

  Willy's eye fell on the fragment of glass that Eric had left glinting on the dining table. It was sharp. She could finish her degree and translate Spanish for the United Nations, or she could slit her wrists.

  In truth this second option seemed at least as viable as the first. But Willy's imagination was too vivid: in Technicolor she envisioned raising the shard over her arm, plunging the edge vertically along the veins, keeping her resolve intact to repeat the exercise on the other wrist. Nothing but a line for a moment, and then—

  She might have dwelt on the idea longer, but that would have meant indulging more of Edsel's self-dramatizing. After year-in, year-out of running and weights and line sprints, her homage to the body was too binding. Willy stood up shakily and dropped the glass in the trash.

  She felt peculiar for being present. With all the components of her life disposed of, something had risen from the sofa. Apparently it was possible to survive yourself.

  Willy changed out of her bloody skirt and replaced the sanitary napkin. When she forlornly wound up one of Eric's jump ropes, she had an inkling that it was hers now; that he would never come back for any of his belongings in this apartment. Tempted by the rope, frantic to throw her hours at an activity that was bludgeoningly stupid, Willy knew that a punitive session of skipping would risk hemorrhage. Still, the blaring silence of the apartment became a kind of violence, and Willy fled to Riverside Park.

  Occluded by trees, the 122nd Street courts were just audible from the Hudson overlook where Willy slumped over the wall.
Pock…pock…
Such a harmless, casual sound, it recalled what public parks had always tendered: balance. For every shot, a return; for every triumph, a comeuppance. With the perfect partner, tennis offered up that implausible American ideal of equality. In this archetypal vision, the weekly ebb and flow was entertainment, full of ribbings, vows of revenge next Wednesday at four. But sometimes with the most seemingly suitable of partners, one of you came out conclusively ahead. Surely that's when you were no longer
playing,
and parted ways.

  Drawn irresistibly by the pocking sound, Willy shuffled down the muddy path and past the flaking green benches to hook her fingers on the chain-link fence. The couple on court number one weren't very good. In fact, they were terrible. But neither seemed perturbed by their abysmal chop and thwack. The girl fumbled more than one return because she was laughing. Their balls were bald, and when one sailed into the woods they let it go. After hitting one competent pass, the girl lifted her racket overhead and clicked her heels midair. She looked so happy. Willy couldn't remember any of her own shots, the most ordinary of which were ten times more spectacular than that little down-the-line, giving her remotely the same degree of satisfaction since she turned pro.

  "Hey!" The parks attendant sidled beside Willy at the fence. "Will
eee
!"

  "Those two look like they're having a ball," said Willy wistfully.

  "Yup, it's a real nice day," he returned. For the lackadaisical attendant, tennis was no great test of character, but synonymous with weather.

  Willy followed the amateurs on court number one with the close scrutiny of watching a Grand Slam final, as if the couple had mastered some devilish trick of which the Top Ten were ignorant. "Did you know," Willy introduced conversationally, "that most professional tennis players are miserable?"

  "That so," said the paunchy official, who didn't care. "By the way, where you been? Haven't seen you down here for ages, girl."

  "No," Willy reflected. "I haven't really been here for years."

  That evening Willy vacuumed. She wanted the noise, white and erasing. She was pretending not to know what time it was, but there was no use pretending by herself. If nothing else, the ticket lay on the Plexiglas to remind her. It was eight o'clock, and as she'd known she would since Eric left, she turned on ESPN.

  Over the
wahah
of the vacuum, Eric's game had already started. His renown from the Sorle upset had assured that this would be one of the few televised first rounds. He looked skinny on screen, though the camera was supposed to add pounds. His hair was lank and weedy.

  But more disconcerting was his game—the game that, however unrefined, had first caught her eye in Riverside like a rough diamond; the game she'd watched cut and shined facet by facet and had filled her with the covetous longing of a cat burglar; the game she would have recognized from a mile away except not tonight because tonight she didn't recognize it at all.

  There was a drag to his step, and Eric's anticipation had always been stupendous. None of his returns had sting. He often doublefaulted. When she turned off the vacuum cleaner, she could hear the commentator remark how Eric Oberdorf had been mooted as a promising new talent, and this was a very unimpressive performance indeed.

  One of Eric's secrets had long been that he did not admit the possibility of defeat. Since it wasn't part of his universe, he would no more try to fend off failure than wear garlic to protect himself from werewolves. Willy had taught him surrender. Pandora, she had opened the box of nightmare disappointments into his life.

  The match was short. Eric went down in straight sets. Willy switched off the TV, and for hours wrestled with whether to call his parents at about the time he might arrive at Seventy-fourth Street. If she didn't blurt that their breakup was all a horrible mistake and please come home, at least she could offer condolences about the match. But by eleven o'clock, Willy had stayed her own hand. Eric knew her terribly well. No matter what she said, no matter how she modulated the timbre of her sympathy, he'd see through her in a flash. Eric had lost in the first round of his first Grand Slam, and something in Willy was glad. That was why she shouldn't call, and couldn't ask him back.

LIONEL SHRIVER
's novels include
The Post-Birthday World, We
Need to Talk About Kevin
, and
A Perfectly Good Family
. Her writing has appeared in
The Guardian
, the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street
Journal
, and many other publications. She lives in London.

"While a less ambitious author might have taken Willy's plight and turned it into an uplifting tale about overcoming adversity or exchanging failure for a caring, sharing relationship, Shriver explores the obsessive side of Willy's character and confronts some disconcerting truths that defy a pat, politically correct resolution…. Shriver shows in a masterstroke why character is fate and how sport reveals it."

—New York Times Book Review

"A brilliant tale of doomed love…. This is not a novel about tennis or rivalry; it's about love, marriage, and the balance of power in relationships….
Double Fault
is a compelling and playfully ironic take on the sex wars, blistering with…brilliant writing and caustic language."

—The Observer
(UK)

"[Lionel Shriver] has written a gorgeous, compelling tragedy in which she stays with her game every step of the way."

—Dallas Morning News

"Lionel Shriver has something new…. Whether you go for tennis or not, the furious back-and-forth of the game in
Double Fault
can hypnotize you…. Shriver brings an insider's knowledge and a truly athletic prose to her descriptions of what happens on the court."
—New York Newsday