“Really,” Eric appealed a last time. “Your advice last spring was right on target. I’d have gotten nothing in the Slams but abuse. This year we’ll do great.”
We’ll do great, will we? Women must have some genetic predisposition to hiding out in kitchens. Willy rested her forehead on the wet counter. Sure she’d talked Eric out of breaking down the gates of the All England last year. But not because Eric wasn’t ready. Willy wasn’t ready. And the long, strenuous discussion had produced nothing but delay. Willy still wasn’t ready. She never would be.
The next morning Willy was jangled awake by the phone. She didn’t set her alarm for 6 A.M. anymore. There didn’t seem much point.
As she groped for the receiver, Eric’s long arm pinned her to the mattress. “Hello? Right, Gary… Chump change, but doesn’t hurt. Free shades, anyway. Thanks.”
When he hung up, Willy growled through the cord dragged in her face, “You assume it’s for you.”
“Wasn’t it?” asked Eric, getting up. He was fond of facts, and used them to protect himself from what they meant.
“Move the phone to your side of the bed, then,” Willy grumbled, grabbing the set. “You’re right, it’s always for you. Another company offering you an electrolyte contract. A tournament director dangling a guarantee—” She gave the phone a yank, and the jack popped from the wall.
Eric picked up the jack and stuck it stoically in the socket. “You broke it,” he announced calmly. “The plastic tab snapped off.”
“Buy another one. You’re rich.” Willy grabbed her clothes. Lately she felt uncomfortable when Eric saw her naked.
“I’m not rich. For the first time I’m making a living wage. That doesn’t mean you can start smashing things up. For once what you’ve broken doesn’t cost much,” he lectured with Daddyish self-control, “but the repair will be a hassle.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll end up taking care of it. Just like I buy all the groceries, and vacuum, and take out the garbage, and clean the toilet—”
“I’ve said we could get a maid.”
“You’ve got a maid!”
The polarity widened; it always widened. The more mature reserve her husband marshaled, the more childish Willy became. If anything, awareness that she was being puerile made her more so, from the same punitive strategy she employed at her blackest on the court: hitting an even ghastlier shot as fitting reprisal for the gaffe that preceded it. For no matter how disgusted Eric became with Willy’s petty invective and hypersensitivity, Willy was far more disgusted with herself. Since additional disgraceful behavior seemed appropriate penance for disgraceful behavior, her tantrums tended to snowball.
Banging about the apartment, Willy concluded that Gary was right, the place had got cramped. The foyer now spilled two dozen rackets—all, barring Willy’s three Pro-Kennex frames, gratuities from Eric’s sponsor. How distant the era of one treasured, beloved trusty—like the Davis Imperial, whose wooden laminate she’d lavished with lemon oil as a child, neurotically ramming the frame in its press the moment a game was over. In the old days there was no such thing as one of my rackets. When she’d recently come upon the battered Imperial in the Walnut Street attic it had looked doleful—once so faithful, now abandoned, like a sidekick in grade school who gets dumped when you become popular in junior high. The small face and arcanely tight throat had dated all out of proportion to its time. These days Willy would no more play a match with the Imperial than drive to the court in a horse and buggy.
But Eric’s state-of-the-art freebies were impersonal and interchangeable. He was like a man with too many friends, who wouldn’t notice when one or two didn’t call for a year. Willy might have filched one, but they were all the wrong grip size, intensifying her awareness that her husband’s bounty had not fallen to her own hand. Eric’s rackets collected at his feet, begging for the privilege of being played with, and she had come to disdain them as she might human sycophants.
The Plexiglas coffee table had long ago topped up with used balls, and the floor rolled with plastic cans. Eric brought his discards home for Willy, but the ambiance of his rejects was distasteful, like one-night stands thrown over for fresher game.
And the clothing! How Willy missed his threadbare shorts and limp socks draped over the radiators, the stench of cut-rate sneakers reeking from under chairs. How she had loved to nuzzle her cheek against his flanneled three-for-ten-dollars T’s. Nowadays? Eric sent out his laundry: collared knits with loud logos and clever underarm netting for air. Even Eric admitted the designs were hideous, but he was paid for wearing them.
Willy glugged boiled water into the cafetière, and plunked it, sloshing, on the dinner table. As the coffee steeped, Willy left to wrench the bedclothes in order, leaving Eric barricaded behind the Times. She shot a cool glance at the dusty line of tournament trophies over her bureau. They were arranged in chronological order, from the cheap chrome figurine of the Montclair Country Club Championship to gaudier chalices, cups, and crystal bowls. Two years before Willy had anticipated adding a third shelf, but the few recent additions were the dwarf sort for semis or quarters. Midget achievements had fit easily on the remaining board.
As she stooped to tuck the sheet under the mattress, a glaring neatness nagged the corner of her eye.
Eric had never built his own display shelf. He’d piled his trophies on his dresser higgledy-piggledy, though he was a tidy man. The overflow had lined the baseboard; Willy was prone to trip on the clutter of her husband’s success.
“Eric!”
He took his time. “What now?” he asked warily from the doorway.
“What have you done with them?”
“Done with what?”
“Your trophies. They used to be all over the place, and now your dresser is crowded with exactly one comb.”
He shrugged. “Too junky.”
“You didn’t throw them out?”
“Probably should have. But as you’re ever eager to point out, I’m too conceited for that, so I stuffed them in the closet.” As if to emphasize this renewed concern with order, he whisked up a wad of socks and stuffed them in the hamper. She didn’t know why he bothered with laundry anymore. With several unopened cartons from sponsors beneath the bed, he had enough new clothes to use them once and throw them away, like tennis balls.
“Besides,” Eric noted, carting two more pairs of shoes—gels and air-pumps, with fuchsia and aqua stripes—to the closet, “those trophies are garish.”
“If you think they’re kitschy or boastful, I should take mine down, too.”
“No, don’t!” Eric cried as she stretched for the Montclair Country Club Championship and tossed it on the bed. “Those are history!” Hastily he revised, “I mean, they’re precious.”
“Because they’re an endangered species?”
“Because they’re yours.” Eric returned the chrome figurine to its place. Flakes of waning silver came off on his hands. Willy pushed him out of the way and rose on her toes, toppling the New Freedom trophy with her fingertips. The bowl nicked the dresser and clunked onto the carpet.
“You’re being infantile!”
“I’m being adult for once,” she countered. “Why keep my trophies in view and yours with the shoes? All those shoes? You’re the one treating me like a kid, wanting to magnet my drawings to the refrigerator.”
Defeated, Eric allowed, “Put yours away, too, then. But I thought you were proud of them.”
“I was. But now they mock me. You’re right, they’re history. I’m too young to live in the past.”
Resolutely, Willy edged two cups forward and pitched them on the mattress. Likely pained by watching Willy crane her neck, her six-three husband laid a hand on her shoulder and removed them himself. Eric lined the tributes lovingly in order on the bed, then insisted on shrouding each in tissue paper and wedging the mementos into stiff cartons left over from a shipment of shirts. While he packed, Willy glanced in the closet and her heart melted. Eric had tumbled his own troph
ies, unwrapped, into a battered, open-topped box.
“Underwood?” she asked timidly, vowing to make fresh coffee; by the time he was finished, the pot would be cold. “If you were married to somebody else—like, a real homemaker, or some insurance executive, or another super-successful player—would you stuff your trophies away like this, as if they were dirty secrets?”
“Of course,” he said gruffly. “They’re vulgar.”
“Then mine are, too—”
Eric crushed a sheet of tissue and threw the wad on the bed. “They don’t mean as much to me as yours do to you! Tennis doesn’t mean as much to me. It’s something I’m good at but I don’t love it. And in no time I’ll be too creaky to play professionally, I’ll have to do something else, and that will be fine.”
Willy looked at her hands. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. There’s a connection. You want to be a champion too much. That’s why you seize up. If you didn’t care so damned much, you might get farther.”
“Apathy is the answer?”
“No, but a dose of easy-come wouldn’t hurt. A few extracurricular pleasures.”
“Like what?”
Eric gripped her shoulders and wheeled her to face him. “Like me.”
Willy’s faltering fortunes may have transformed her husband into one more affliction, but they had just as utterly revised her vision of herself. Characteristics that she’d once have considered fixed, impervious, revealed themselves as subject to the elements, like a hat in the rain. It transpired that confidence, for example, was not some inviolate trait, but the offspring of encouraging events, and therefore vulnerable to disaster. Willy had never thought of herself as quiet, but her voice had measurably ebbed—unless she was screaming—so that Eric had often to prod, “Pardon?” on long-distance calls. The tonality of her speech had musically transcribed to a minor key, and there was a tentativeness about her assertions that in another woman Willy would have found objectionably deferential. Certainly she had always adjudged herself energetic, yet now she slept unprecedentedly long hours, and rarely rallied the vigor to make it to the cinema. If on one of his dutifully scheduled weeks home Eric proposed a movie, she’d accede early in the day, but by nightfall, up against trooping out the door, would instead sag into a chair and claim, truthfully anyway, that she was tired. Though Willy had prided herself in the past on a cynical bite, she had always been, in regard to herself and the fineness of life in general, an optimist. Yet now that acerbic edge had flipped inward, carving graffiti on the walls of her head. While she’d have previously expected—maybe gullibly, stupidly expected—for matters to turn out well enough in the end, lately she gave intelligent credence to every new day’s potential for catastrophe. It was an unwelcome education. She’d have given her eyeteeth to go back to being an idiot.
Effectively living with a stranger, she sometimes reminisced about Untrammeled Willy as she might have about a bosom buddy with whom she’d lost touch—her Davis Imperial. On the other hand, she was disillusioned with the joie de vivre her doppelgänger had exuded. Elation hadn’t been intrinsic to Willy after all, but was the mere by-product of occasion. Wistfully Willy imagined the go-getter she’d be on a winning streak instead—consuming sports pages and tennis magazines; sharing gossip about boyfriend bust-ups in locker rooms; game for new ethnic cuisines, controversial plays, and late-night sneaks into locked motel pools. Now even were that mischief maker to return Willy would never quite trust the vivacity again. She’d cast an uneasy eye at her own springy step, so easily shuffled by a woeful tennis match. By the spring of 1996, Willy was forced to accept that a self was not an unassailable constant, but a ragbag accumulation of batterings and bolsterings, not only an agent but a consequence. Even happy people were victims of a kind.
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 sights from childhood on Flushing Meadow. Having charted no alternative destination, Willy continued to shamble in the same dir
ection, 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.
EIGHTEEN
THOUGH 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.”