“So I boot some no-talent from my list,” Eric pursued. “Why does that rattle you?”
“Maybe you plan on going through wives the same way,” she said dryly. He laughed, but she hadn’t meant to be funny.
Eric raised his wife by the armpits, extending his arms until her pale, flyaway hair grazed the ceiling. “I use hitting partners. I love you.”
She supposed that made her lucky; Willy was officially the object of Eric’s whole ardor. He wasn’t very interested in friendship; since their marriage, he had failed to keep up with his old roommate, and never evinced any enthusiasm about dinner parties or having someone over for a drink. If she did arrange a social occasion, he got annoyed; Eric was possessive of intersections with his wife and stingy with their evenings. He was an absolutist, and valued efficiency. He had solved his emotional requirements like one of his equations. There was of course his family, to whom he was dutifully attentive, but the Oberdorfs were stored in their own unit and allocated the broader, fuzzier affections of blood. Eric had invested all his passion in his wife, like sinking his life savings in a single stock.
The lack of diversity in Eric’s emotional portfolio, while not a burden precisely, was a responsibility. Eric had no other great love. Tennis for her husband retained its clinical aspect, and never sent him careening on the tempestuous roller-coaster of rapture and desolation that for Willy served as a parallel romance. Though he’d been vexed with her at times, she was sure he’d never inflamed with the raging antipathy that had engulfed her skipping rope. The memory of that loathing still smoldered, an ugly secret she had vowed to keep. Had Eric stepped into the blaze of her mind at that instant, he’d have seared his heart.
Like so many men, Eric respected only those who thrashed him. Once he’d wrested the advantage, his interest dwindled, he grew derisive and restive when vanquished adversaries called, irritable when their appointments came due, until finally with a crumple he tossed their numbers in the can. Eric was fond of stalking tennis courts for choice, unravaged talent, just as he’d prowled Riverside before pouncing on his wife-to-be. Every month or two he would return from these safaris clutching a new phone number, wearing the grin of a tom chomping a live mouse, with which he planned to toy before the kill.
While Eric acclaimed the genius of his newest acquisition, Willy ground her teeth. He may as well have drooled over some other woman’s sexy gams and pert breasts. That her promiscuous husband’s practice opponents were male merely brought Willy’s jealousy to a boil. Only men could feed Eric the pace he craved; only men could dish out serves at 120 mph. Willy couldn’t compete.
With his voracious appetite for fresh meat, Eric and Willy played each other no more than every six weeks. Since for months she’d beaten him by a hair’s breadth, Willy had suffered the growing unease through the autumn that in this infrequency was reprieve.
On their first anniversary, however, Eric cleared his calendar for a ceremonial rematch. December dictated an indoor date at Jordan. As she strode to the net post at the same time of day that they had wed, Willy’s hands buzzed with the tremble that ordinarily signaled the onset of a vital finals match. When she peeled the flip top, a rubbery breath exhaled from the Wilson can. Commonly the perfume of opportunity, just this afternoon the smell was spiked with an acrid tinge.
The same sharp, acid scent exuded from Eric’s new togs, fresh from the package—his Lycra cross-training shorts, cotton overshorts, and roomy designer sports shirt were all solid black. As Willy had worn her plain white tournament dress, the aesthetic of the classic Western prevailed. A triangulated black bandanna obscured his receding hairline, Eric’s sole physical flaw. When he smiled, his teeth, under artificial lighting, flashed like little knives.
In the warm-up, rather than rally to groove their strokes, Eric continually put the ball away. If Willy initiated a point with an easy midcourt forehand, Eric cracked his return to skid the alley line, and Willy would trudge to fetch the ball. He hurried the racket flip for serve, though Willy had not remotely hit her stride.
Leaning forward to receive, twirling his racket, rocking side to side, Eric had the shiny eyes, tensed muscles, and spittle-flecked mouth of a hound with the hare in sight. Willy bounced the ball, unable to put her finger on why something felt wrong. The toss was a little low, and as she wound up at its crest Willy recognized her sensation, one that ritually afflicted her as the number 66 bus drew into Montclair.
She felt short.
Her double fault was inauspicious. Eric trotted to the adcourt, leered forward again, juggling his grip. He broke her the first game, and today the expression was resonant.
“Do you have to chew gum?” Willy implored on the changeover.
“I always chew gum,” Eric smacked.
“It’s obnoxious.”
“It’s supposed to be.” He blew a bubble, and popped it with a relish that usually comes with bursting someone else’s.
Her trouble was sourced in the preliminaries, which Eric had truncated to five minutes. Eric could switch his game on like a radio. But Willy’s strokes didn’t sing instantaneously. Until a melody gathered in her body, the racket felt clunky, apart.
Eric was so eager to punish the ball into oblivion that their rallies were rare. The fits and starts of the first few games had no music. Willy had gone down in the first set 4–6 before the object in her right hand felt like a racket and not like a shovel.
Between sets they toweled down. “Of course, you know I need fifteen minutes to find my game,” she said. “I’ve even told you.”
“No need,” said Eric. “I’ve seen it. In a quarter of an hour, you improve by a factor of five.”
“On the stock exchange, you’d be arrested,” she sniped, walking off to serve. “It’s called ‘insider trading.’”
“It’s called marriage!”
In the second set, Eric’s famous relaxation took a twist toward the snide. As he sauntered back and forth to receive, he took his time. His commonly erect posture was compromised by a cocky slouch. Picking up balls, he flipped the Wilson with the tip of his frame, then ponged it off the strings with a twirl between bounces, as if he needed some extra amusement to keep himself entertained. Smacking gum on the baseline, he looked more like a street-corner tough than a tennis pro.
While Eric pursued his usual policy of saying nothing, there was a new development: every time he missed a shot, no matter how taxing, he laughed—as if muffing such a piece of cake were hilarious.
Willy’s forehead began to pinch with a telltale headache. Anger in sports ran all the risks of nuclear power; before her building fury blew up in her face, she had to harness and channel it. But no matter how much weight she threw behind her shots, that was at most 108 pounds. Eric was used to playing other men; no amount of zing fazed him. Willy could hit a heavy ball, but heavy for a girl. In male terms, her pace was no better than respectable.
It was crucial not to be lured into playing his game; she would never overpower him. So Willy switched to cold fusion. Though it was gratifying in the moment to fry the ball, the only enduring satisfaction was to win. At 4–4, she dialed back the voltage, playing percentages, opting more to press than to destroy.
Though this cagey hunkering down elicited multiple chortles from her husband, she could still do no better than hold serve, and likewise in the tiebreak. Impatient with a tit for tat that at $35 an hour could last from now till doomsday, Willy saw her chance and threw her switches. Instead of sending his deep lob to her backhand safely down the line, Willy ran around to her forehand for an inside-out overhead. That left the rest of the court for the taking; if he hauled ass to return, she was dead. Max would have turned purple.
As it happened, the overhead did clear the tape by the requisite half inch and nicked the line. Eric was nowhere nearby, but back on his baseline chewing gum, adjusting his black kerchief at a jaunty angle. Propped against his knee, his racket was not even in his hand. “Touché,” he said, with an indulgent smile, as if she
had just done something cute.
It may be no coincidence that there are both three sets in most dynamic tennis matches and three acts in the classical play. Each set completes a discrete subdrama, whose intricate ins and outs can distract from the larger story. Hence Willy’s triumph in taking the second was quickly washed away in the briefest of intermissions, after which the players took their places. Dramatically, at 1–1 there is no telling whether the second set represents a turned tide, or a red herring.
In the first two sets what had got Willy’s goat was Eric’s apparent leisure—his insolent, ball-bobbling nonchalance, the sort of hip, slovenly posturing that most people could only manage with a cigarette. What dismayed her in the third was his exertion. Eric sloughed off his disguise of so-fucking-what to reveal how fantastically hard he was trying. He leapt two feet in the air to intersect a damned good lob; he never once conceded that her volley was too sharp to chase down, and surely he risked injury in some of the heaving changes of direction that his incredible retrievals demanded. Lunging for passing shots, he threw his whole body as if rescuing a wayward toddler from an oncoming bus. Of course she wanted him to make an effort; lack of application was an insult. But somehow he was going too far; he let her have nothing; he was even willing to hurt himself if that’s what grappling a single point from her clutches cost him. Frankly, in none of the tournaments she’d watched him play had Eric put himself out quite so extremely as in trying to sandbag his own wife on their wedding anniversary.
And he had memorized her game like a poem. No matter what she hit, he seemed to know before the ball left her racket precisely where it was headed. Even when she aimed deliberately to surprise, he looked like a sneaky child who had peeked inside his Christmas package and failed to feign delight on opening it a second time.
Worse still, Willy kept recognizing her own esoteric shots, retooled and refurbished. Of course she didn’t own the slice-drop, barely clearing the tape like a pole-vaulter grazing his back on the bar. Still Willy felt robbed when Eric duplicated her trademark, and not only reproduced but improved upon it, the way the Japanese manufacture an American car: one of Eric’s slices had so much underspin that it somersaulted back to his own court. All her helpful hints of the preceding year Eric had faithfully installed, and Willy resented how kleptomaniacally Eric had taken her advice. When they met his game was scrappy; now that she’d shared her professional secrets, only to have them used against her, she wanted them back. Surely usurping so many monogrammed shots wholesale was as unseemly as dressing up in her clothes.
A year before Eric’s strokes were potent, but his strategy was predictable. Now between his blasting masculine drives he slyly interwove the female cunning of impetuous dinks, neurotic spins, and last-minute improvisations, when it was conventionally the prerogative of women to change their minds. Yet these feminine wiles were grafted to muscle. The result was a game that glimmered with sexual ambiguity, like a construction worker with a few incongruously effeminate mannerisms, whose buddies can never quite decide if he’s gay.
Willy could not even console herself that her own game was crumbling in return. Eric was hitting so fabulously well that he lifted her with him. Though her tactics were increasingly defensive, these were still very effective tactics. Rather than be disgusted with herself, in the main of the set at 2–3 Willy considered that she may have been playing, wastefully, the best tennis of her life.
Best wasn’t good enough.
Unlike the fits and starts of the first set, now their points were drawn out; every game went to deuce. But Willy’s anger was spent. Try as she might, she couldn’t despise him. It was easy to detest a braggart jumping rope, because rope-jumping was stupid. But as an aficionado of fine tennis, Willy couldn’t revile an artist on the court. Her dark, dashing husband himself looked only more exquisite, and his beauty was murderous.
At 4–2, Willy’s arms went limp. Eric served to her ad-court. She didn’t feint in the ball’s direction, but allowed his ace to burst splendidly undefaced to the netting. She smiled, weakly conceding with a quaver, “Terrific serve.”
This and the final game were tribute. If Eric wanted her soul he could have it, though it grieved her that more than anything that’s what he craved: her dignity like a lamb on an altar. On match point she deliberately popped him a sitter, that he could fall upon it to his greater glory, and watched, sacrificial, as the ball hurtled from his overhead. Transfixed, she didn’t realize it was rocketing straight for her until it clocked her on the breast.
He ran over. “Are you all right?”
“Since when did you worry how I was?”
“Honey—” He touched her cheek.
She brushed him away. “Happy?”
Eric shrugged.
“No, tell me. Are you happy? You got what you wanted. You won. It’s our anniversary. Have I made your day?”
“Sweetheart, you’ve been pasting me for over a year. And somebody has to win, don’t they?”
In her own mind, Willy had not been “pasting” him; she’d won nothing but delay. Willy shoved her racket in its case; the zipper stuck. She wasn’t furious; she was doleful. Something more than a tennis match had been lost. “Congratulations,” she mumbled. “No one could say you didn’t put your whole heart into it.”
He touched her sleeve. “Aren’t you glad that I regard being able to best you once in a while as an achievement?”
“Once in a while” was false modesty. None of his other partners had ever broken back. Eric would see to it that she never outplayed him again.
Through the funereal unwinding of her bandanna, Eric pressed, “You wouldn’t want me to let you win, would you?”
“Of course not,” she answered brusquely, but something bruised and girlish in her whispered, hissing, Yesss.
ELEVEN
“FOR YOU, TENNIS,” MAX barked, his voice echoing over the empty indoor court, “is not a spectator sport.”
“I wouldn’t have gotten it,” Willy objected.
“Not planted on the baseline like an azalea bush you won’t. You’re wasting my time. What did you come up here for, Christmas shopping?”
These few days were a window of opportunity—the season over, students home for the holidays, Max available. During the last year Willy had spent fewer days at Sweetspot than since she and Max had met. Her coach had grown icy. In marrying, she had written herself off.
“Can we have dinner?” she pleaded at the net post.
He eyed her, and appeared to detect something strange. “The mess is shut. So it’s Boot of the Med, or a sandwich in my digs. But that might make Mrs. Undershorts nervous.”
“I told you, I kept my own name.”
“Today that’s about all you’ve kept.”
“Max, I’ve had a good year.”
“That’s what I don’t get. In six months you should be ready for the international tour. With my blessing, not to mention my money. So why are you quivering in the backcourt like a cube of Jell-O?”
She saved an explanation for a glass of wine, which she needed more than usual.
“Don’t you get lonely through the holidays?” she asked politely as they crunched the grounds patched with snow. “You must miss your family.”
“I told you about my family. You’ve forgotten.”
Willy colored. “It’s coming back to me.” The pillow talk of the jilted had a tendency to float off and disperse like so many feathers.
“They detest me. All the world loves a winner except his own kin. You should know that.”
‘’Would they like us any better if we failed?”
“No, you only get to choose between teeth-gnashing at your success and malicious pity for your downfall. Take your pick.”
“You don’t have very high hopes for people, do you?”
“I’ve always had the highest hopes for you.”
Max spoke so rarely from the heart that Willy glanced to make sure that he wasn’t being caustic.
At Boot of
the Med, Willy delivered the blow by blow of her anniversary match the day before.
“That’s all? He’s a man, Will. It’s staggering that you held him off so long.”
“You always say it’s no coincidence that people who make excuses are the same people who need them.”
“He’s a foot taller than you! And Oberdork would never have a chance on the tour if he couldn’t clobber a girl. You should be relieved on his account.”
Willy twirled spaghetti on her fork. When one strand was wound, the others flopped down.
“You’ve had men get the better of you before,” Max badgered, mashing his own spaghetti into inchworms. “You haven’t shown up the next day holding your racket like a dead fish and watching my groundies with a pair of field glasses.”
“This is different.”
“You understood that other hitting partners could muscle you, but not your own husband. Whose masculinity I assume you have sampled from close range.”
“I know he was bound to beat me eventually, but the dynamic—” Willy dipped a mussel in marinara. “Walloping me gave him so much pleasure.”
“Didn’t you enjoy beating him?”
“Not really. Winning only filled me with foreboding. It put an onus on me to keep it up, and I knew I couldn’t. Yesterday, he tried so hard, Max—he hurt my feelings.”
Max studied her with the concerned, diagnostic expression of a doctor who had received unsettling lab results. “Maybe you shouldn’t play together anymore.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she snapped.
“I would like that,” he measured, “if it meant that your tennis game did not get all fouled up, your head all morose and hangdog just because you couldn’t win some private domestic trophy that wouldn’t put ten cents in either of our pockets even if you came out ahead. Which you won’t. I don’t often recommend that you resign yourself to anything, but this time you’d better. Fixating on being able to rout Doberman is like setting yourself the long-term goal of growing a dick.”