In sum, Willy’s space had hardly been invaded. Eric was away more than half of every month, and Willy herself was out of town a proportion of the time he was home. So the estrangement and reacquaintance of Worcester became routine, and Willy no longer expected to quite recognize Eric’s face when it poked through the door. In continually reappraising its planes, she never achieved the classic wife’s blasé familiarity with her husband’s countenance, tantamount to no longer seeing it at all. Searching for a prompt to jog her memory, she often discovered a fresh feature that might otherwise have escaped notice—a new wild hair wending from an eyebrow, the first faint track of crow’s feet, the purple undertones in his sockets that told he’d taken the late flight from Houston in order to spend the next day, for once, at her side. They both cleared the decks for these reunions. At Flower of Mayonnaise, Eric would eat two plates of fried rice and half of hers, and the two would trade results of forays far afield.
Nineteen ninety-three began to shape up as a successful year, though also Willy’s most strenuous. For there comes a point with any native gift where you get nothing more for free. Willy had plundered her bequest in her teens. By twenty, she could no longer trade entirely on talent. Suddenly having to work for improvement had been frightening at first, but maybe sailing on ability alone was cheating.
Moreover, as she narrowed the distance between her ranking and the Top Ten, each increment cost more than the last. Eric had explained the calculus: as she approached a limit, half the gain might take twice the effort. Surging from a ranking in the latter 400’s in April ’92 to 355 after the New Freedom had been arduous enough, hut clawing from 355 to 321 in the same number of months proved debilitating.
The competition was bound to get more vicious still. Willy was not the only woman on the domestic circuit who was determined to join the international tour. It was technically possible to hit Kennedy Airport ranked anywhere in the top 500, but fiscally prohibitive when you were well down the list. Max refused to fly her to Argentina only to hack through qualifiers. She had to be able to enter on points and have a chance at payback prize money. For Max to bankroll her abroad, she had to break into the top 200. Though aging, anxious, and impatient, Willy regarded his stipulation as fair. Max was right: he wasn’t her friend but her coach, and a businessman.
While Willy could no longer cash in on the “something special” that had brought her father to his knees when she was ten, Eric was barreling along on his genetic gravy train. His game seemed to mature by itself. Naturals who are still flourishing on knack alone do not understand, as Willy did not in high school, anyone who fails to grow new skills like fingernails. Too, the athlete who has finished mining the seam of his gift has a dronish aspect, marked by sedulous, painstaking progress, as if scaling a cliff with no chinks for sudden ascent; the precocious find handholds to make breathtaking leaps in a day. It was prettier to be effortless, and she worried that Eric found her monotonous two-hour net drills pathetic.
Walking in on just such a drill at Forest Hills (where, to Willy’s silent consternation, his father had finagled him a membership as well) Eric had taken the notion, whimsically, to “work on” his diagonal lob. He strolled to the baseline, and beckoned Willy to shoot him backhands. After three or four experimental sweeps that from the first showed brilliant instincts, adding a touch of top like a cook throwing in a pinch of salt, he had promptly potted his lob in the exact opposite corner. The stroke had taken him ten minutes, not the morning, much less the next two years. Eric was flying on the wings of inspiration, and in comparison Willy must have seemed landlocked, as if he could hop in his private Lear Jet while his wife took the bus.
Consequently, while Willy sweated from 355 to 321, in the same six months Eric slashed his way from 926 to 708. The aberration of the Jox All-Comers was not repeated, and soon Eric would be able to enter a better quality of tournament with more appreciable points on offer without submitting to qualifiers. While there was something magnificent about her husband’s growing into his game, Willy couldn’t shake the sense that his burgeoning was a little horrible as well. She suffered the increasing ambivalence of watching a cute puppy with huge, awkward paws loom by the week into a sinewy monster of a dog.
Though their “casual” matches with each other were more and more rare, as of the summer of 1993 Eric had yet to beat his wily, agile wife. Yet they always went three sets; tiebreaks were frequent; games went to deuce. The tactics she was forced to employ were fiendish. Worse, she had come to rely too heavily on Eric’s unforced errors, which were decidedly on the wane. He was at last tightening that cross-court backhand, and when it was in it was unreturnable. Frankly, he was breathing down her neck. The closer Eric came to an upset, the more crucial that Willy stave off defeat. Surely something more considerable than her pride was at stake. For there is no parity in tennis. From early in the marriage their matches with each other had ceased to be quite fun. When Willy prepared to play her husband, a lump beneath her rib cage formed as if she’d been punched.
Willy had always been in her element coming up from behind. Thanks to the ball and chain of her dismal family, Willy excelled most when the least was expected; she thrived on being thwarted. That lately no one was trying to stop her was destabilizing, as if she’d been hurtling against a locked door suddenly unbolted from the other side. Adversity was focusing; opportunity was too wide and undefined. She missed her father as archenemy, and was sometimes subject to the lost, evaporating sensation of an agoraphobic in a football stadium who yearns for a closet.
Hence the crick in her neck from looking over her shoulder at Eric. Aiming to overtake, change is your friend; protecting a lead, change is intrinsically disagreeable. All that can happen to number one in the world is that he should become number two. Heelchasers are optimistic and fearless, with nothing to lose; frontrunners are naturally conservative and paranoid.
A marriage should not be a race. That didn’t keep it from being one. “He’s only 708,” Willy would mumble on her way to LaGuardia. But in the same taxi Willy would calculate that Eric had rocketed 218 rankings in the same half-year she’d hobbled up 34. At this rate, in two years Eric would be on TV, and Willie would be adjusting the vertical hold.
Meanwhile her husband proved offhandedly superior at everything that shouldn’t have mattered. When they retreated to the Walnut Street backyard, Eric threw ringer after ringer that knocked Willy’s horseshoe off the stake. When they dropped into a pool hall on Houston Street, Willy spent the evening chalking her cue. When they bowled in New Jersey, Willy hooked gutterballs, while Eric’s scorecard was stitched with little X’s.
So for one precious evening together in June, Willy proposed staying home to play Scrabble, at which she had always slaughtered her sister. From the first round Eric drew all the high-value letters, while Willy was stymied by rackfuls of vowels.
“I’ve been hoarding this for half an hour,” Eric admitted when only three tiles rattled in the bag. “I was afraid I’d get stuck with it.” He placed down the only Z. “Zwieback.”
“What’s that?”
“Some kind of nasty cracker… So that’s twenty-eight points, spanning two triple-word scores: 174.”
“Get out, what—?”
“Times six, of course. Then I used all seven letters, which is a bonus of fifty…” For a math major to take any time to add it up was pure sadism. “224.”
“You mean you now have a total of 224.”
“No, that’s for the one play.”
She flipped the board off the coffee table.
Eric hadn’t finished aligning his zwieback tiles in anally precise parallels; he drew his hands to his lap. His expression of infantile glee took a few seconds to evanesce. “Willy. It’s only a game.”
She was breathing harder than the exertion of hurling bits of plastic quite merited. “Is there anything you’re not good at?”
Eric’s very pause told all. “Languages,” he said at length.
“Ever tried t
o learn one?”
“I satisfied degree requirements.” On his chest, he scouted consonants from under the couch. “Two years of German.”
“But you made A’s.”
“So? I watched a lot of war movies.”
His deflection convinced her only that had he concerned himself with Chinese or ancient Greek he’d have been a whiz at philology as well. All that seemed to determine Eric’s expertise was whether he turned to a given field. Willy had long been dimly aware there were such people, but never expected to share a bed with one. From close up, the grotesque facility was so inhuman that she was tempted to regard her husband as born not with something extra, but with something missing.
“Would you really prefer,” he inquired from the floor, “that I were a shitty Scrabble player?”
That was easy. “Yes!”
Looking up, he scrutinized her critically. “That would make for a poor game.”
“Which I would win.”
“Beating someone who’s crummy? I can’t see the satisfaction.”
“It would satisfy me to beat you at something.”
“You beat me at tennis. Which is what we both do, or one of us does rather, for a living.” That their tiebreaker tennis games were her sole purchase on equality was cold comfort. “And even if I did beat you at tennis,” he added, maybe remembering the last 7–6, 4–6, 7–6 score, “what would it matter?”
Eric may have graduated summa cum laude, but his question indicated an idiocy of a kind.
“Can’t you imagine how it might feel if I excelled at everything you didn’t?” Willy implored. “If I could read faster and run faster and add faster? If I went to one of the best universities in the country, and you barely squeaked into a state school on a sports scholarship?”
One tile had fallen through the hole in the coffee table; Eric removed the top to retrieve it from the balls. “In that case I’d simply be proud of you.”
“And in this case?” she asked softly. “With a wife who’s rotten at everything? Eric, what do you see in me?”
“What’s all this you’re rotten at, Wilhelm?” Eric replaced the Plexiglas and joined her on the couch, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Willy hunched, hands sandwiched tightly between her knees.
“That computer of yours,” she said. “All I get is error messages … I can’t preprogram the VCR… My checkbook doesn’t balance ... I never remember which year Bill Tilden was caught messing with little boys—”
“Years,” Eric corrected; he couldn’t help himself. “He was arrested twice.”
“See! And I won’t make 224 points on one Scrabble play until hell freezes over!”
Eric pecked her forehead. “And if you ever did, I’d fling the board out the window to the Hudson River.”
That was the concession she was waiting for, and she rewarded it with a lingering kiss.
“I’m hungry,” he mumbled. “Any zwieback in the house?”
Willy biffed him playfully on a pectoral, but the punch landed harder than she intended. Eyes flashing, Eric wrested Willy’s left arm behind her back. He yanked her wrist just high enough that she yelped more from surprise than pain. For a moment she was helpless. With a twist she wrenched free, but he must have let her. Willy socked him in the gut, though this jab was cautiously calibrated merely to wind him a bit.
Eric lunged for his wife and tackled her to the open floor. They’d done this before. They liked to tussle. It was always both serious, and not; aside from the odd bump or scratch, no one ever got hurt. Eric pinned Willy’s wrists, hooking his feet around her calves. She slipped her legs free and thrust her knees under his chest, rocking to use his weight against him. As they flipped over sideways, Eric’s hand shot out to make sure that she didn’t nick her head on the table.
With Willy’s knees on his elbows, Eric’s arms were long enough for him to work her shirttail out. Willy used her free hands to grab the sides of his T-shirt, and when he toppled her once more she held on. As planned, Eric could escape only by letting her pull the T-shirt over his head. Another familiar game: who could get whose clothes off first, and with Eric now bare-chested Willy already had the edge. A tirelessly entertaining cross between pro wrestling and strip poker, the sport never quite descended to play-rape.
In no time, Eric was standing with a grip on the hems of Willy’s denims, her back and head on the floor. The jeans were so snug that to get them off Eric began dragging her across the carpet like a dray pulling a plow. Traction suffered from a couple of waxy Scrabble tiles skating under Willy’s bare back. Though her shoulders would probably show rug burns later, she’d started to laugh. Cracking up was deadly, and in the end only the fact that Eric wasn’t wearing boxers kept her one article of clothing ahead.
Panting and sweaty and down to socks, they concluded in a prone, tensely immobile clutch, exerting force for force. Willy could feel he’d got hard under her stomach. For an instant, however, the rest of Eric’s body relaxed, of which she took full advantage to whip off his last sock. She dangled it victoriously in his face.
“Bitch,” said Eric fondly. In this contest, they both won. “Get your diaphragm,” he advised.
When she emerged from the bathroom a minute later, Eric was still laid out on the living room floor, which he evidently preferred to the bed. Willy spread herself on his chest, and they locked hands. Eric tried to bend her wrists back; she resisted. He applied more pressure; she held.
“God, you’re strong,” he said admiringly, though he looked beyond her rippled arms, as if the actual muscles were unimportant.
But Willy didn’t like this duel because he was humoring her. At any time he could have easily cocked her wrists back and made her cry uncle. Meanwhile she was pushing as hard as she could, and his own wrists didn’t bend a millimeter. Hands trembling, she cast her eyes down his lean, beautifully proportioned torso. Of course he wouldn’t be much of a man if he weren’t the stronger. It still wasn’t fair. Willy would keep the upper hand in any cat fight, but this draw was artificial, and she relaxed her grasp.
Eric insinuated his prick inside her, but the battle was not quite over. For the next twenty minutes they played Who’s on Top, another struggle from which even the loser benefited. When their rolling around grew more earnest, Eric drew on his superior strength. Once they were done—with Willy on the bottom—she climbed unsteadily upright to collect her clothes in sublime exhaustion, brushing off the Scrabble tiles stuck to her back. Willy would never admit it, but after all their horseplay those 224 points still irked her a bit.
NINE
WILLY HAD LEARNED THE relativity of success from her parents, who for all their seeming resignation to obscurity had both organized themselves into notables among dross. At Bloomfield College, Chuck Novinsky rose head and shoulders above student bodies for his splendid sentence subordination alone. He’d never sought higher status employment. A colossus among dwarves had no motivation to go seeking other giants.
Likewise, her mother’s choice to become nutritional advisor at The Golden Autumn may also have been sly. Daily, Willy’s mother confirmed the futility of ambition, destined for so much gnarling and drool. Whatever her charges might have accomplished was encoded by senility, reduced to garbled scraps of ill-remembered better days to which their overseers would attend with distracted tolerance. When Willy had visited The Golden Autumn she could barely breathe from the oppression, but her mother took in the stale, medicinal air as if it braced her, and clipped briskly down the gleaming halls of the home, beaming at her slack-jawed wards with a wave. In the leveling of old age her mother seemed to find vindication.
So her mother mightn’t pull off a grand jeté, but she could control her bowels; her father didn’t wax eloquent in the Paris Review, but his subject-verb agreement was unimpeachable. Willy’s own profession determined that you were as good as you were better than the girl behind, as wanting as worse than the one in front. Greatness was context.
Previous to her marriage, in the co
ntext of other avids at Sweetspot, Willy had reasonably considered herself a disciplined, focused athlete. As of December 14, 1992, that context changed. For when Eric Oberdorf ran he covered not four miles, but six, and in better time; Eric preferred to rise not at 7 A.M., but 6 A.M.; and on the road he traveled with a jump rope, lassoing more than one hotel room overhead off its screws.
If Willy was focused, Eric was fanatic. His reading matter consisted of tennis bios, tennis history, Tennis magazine, Racquet, and Serve and Volley. When he returned from LaGuardia, his carry-on was padded with the Austin Star and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer folded to the sports page. Their VCR was preprogrammed in their absence to record ESPN and USA, and his idea of a relaxing evening at home was to rewind and take notes on Indian Wells. If he rented a video, Eric would cart home, not Last Exit to Brooklyn, but the McEnroe-Borg Wimbledon final of 1980, of which he’d continually replay single points. In context, therefore, overnight Willy Novinsky—who had rather hoped to see Last Exit to Brooklyn—could reasonably consider herself a dabbling, flabby slacker.
Adjacent zealotry drove her in two directions at once. On the one hand, when Eric threw back the blankets and leapt upright while the light outside was still the color of old, overcreamed coffee, Willy was inclined to loll sullenly abed till noon. On the other, she was tempted to set her own alarm for total darkness and complete an hour’s calisthenics while Eric snoozed. After vacillating between defiance and triumphalism, she marched to a slightly quicker beat and made a soldierly effort at keeping abreast. She, too, rose at New York’s version of cock’s crow (when the garbage trucks yawned), ran six miles instead of four, and took up jumping rope.
***