Sure enough, Willy could pummel juniors into submission, but on the pro circuit she would never win a slugfest. She had a higher percentage trading on her wits. Though it took absurd restraint to keep from hauling off and slaughtering every ball—if only for the sheer sensation of hitting any object that hard without being arrested—Willy discovered delights in delicacy as well, until certain backspinning dinks slithering over the tape made her laugh out loud. Max played her a video of the Ashe—Connors Wimbledon final of ’75, where instead of belting Jimmy’s shots back laced with his own medicine Arthur deliberately slowed the points to a crawl. The long, easy returns drove Connors wild, and he’d slash them to the net or overhit. In the end, of course, the tortoise beat the hare.
In fact, Max was not coaching her in anything new at all. Players who specialized in craftiness—drops, lobs, disguises, and changeups—were playing old-style women’s tennis, for the sport had been routinely won on guile before the advent of oversize rackets and hunky grunters like Monica Seles. Yet the standard, abandoned long enough, becomes fresh. Willy sometimes suspected that his shaping her into an icon of bygone tactics was an exercise in nostalgia—for the days when women players were lithe, limber, and ingenious; and for the days when women players were women.
Thus it was thanks to Max Upchurch that Willy didn’t spend every passing day in a state of hysteria. While she moped through another unwelcome birthday, Max had serenaded her with tales of Kathy Rinaldi, Andrea Jaeger, and Thierry Tulasne—young hopes-of-tomorrow who fizzled out as fast as they once burned brightly. “Early to rise, early to bed,” he’d assured her when she turned nineteen, and was glowering at yet another year wasted at UConn on Spanish verbs. “Tennis is for grown-ups. You won’t peak until you’re twenty-five, Will. There’s time.”
***
As of six weeks ago, a tarnish had mottled her memories of those first trips to Sweetspot that Willy couldn’t quite rub off. Though she and Max had agreed to go back to “normal,” when Willy stepped off Amtrak in Old Saybrook it was an older student who waved her to the car. Once again, Max hadn’t met her train, and that wasn’t normal, but one more petty reprimand.
“What do you think of Agassi taking Wimbledon?” the boy bubbled. “Nobody thought he had the goods for grass. I was sure he’d show up in, like, fuck-you orange check or something, but no...”
Desmond was so eager that he forgot to pause for the answers to his questions. Willy observed enviously how in the last two years his dark mop had bobbed nearer the roof of the car. He’d be well over six feet, and had the compact, long-limbed figure for his sport. Had she a taste for little boys, she might have helped herself to Sweetspot’s choice morsels. But Willy spent her own teenage years so virulently disdaining the likes of Desmond that cradle-robbing would amount to a post-deadline rewrite. Wistful, she admired but didn’t quite covet his naive enthusiasm, not yet seized by savvy terror.
At any rate, the envy worked more in the opposite direction. Desmond was still undistinguished from the common ruck; Willy belonged to the select stable of older pros whom Max was grooming for the tour. Many of these were handpicked from the graduating class, though a few, like Willy, were bagged on Max’s cross-country shopping trips. Willy herself had never been a Sweetspot student, and often wondered how much more advanced her game might be now if she hadn’t been marooned at Montclair High School, which didn’t even have a tennis court. Making use of the nearby public park, the school had offered one tennis gym course, for which in her sophomore year she’d maliciously signed up. That memory tweaked her now, reminding her why that Eric person had been right, that she’d never had many friends. Little wonder—she’d assaulted the lot of them with such contemptuous serves that they rarely had the luxury of losing a proper point. Toward the end of the course, with an odd-numbered enrollment, no one would play her at all, and she spent gym class pounding a ball mercilessly against the backboard, as if to break another barrier less tangible but just as impassable, it seemed, if she remained a public school student in suburban New Jersey.
They were drawing into Westbrook now, a small, tucked-away community on Long Island Sound whose property values were astronomical, but whose houses had been kept in families; the town retained its middle-class, unassuming character. Downtown, such as it was, included an ill-stocked drugstore with superlative homemade fudge, one Italian restaurant that overcooked its spaghetti, the obligatory military monument though few residents would remember to which war, and the beloved Muffin Korner, whose loose eggs, hot biscuits, and forgivably weak coffee cost $1.49. On the outskirts, where unprepossessing clapboards weathered by the shore, sturdy dowagers paddled the lapping surf in underwire swimsuits.
That Westbrook, Connecticut, was a steady, settled place may have inspired Max to select this location for Sweetspot. Pro tennis was such a roller-coaster, packing the events of what ought to have been a lifetime into perhaps ten frenzied years. It was sedative to bring students of age in an atmosphere of the reliable, the ongoing, and to coach them in the calming context of a place where tennis didn’t mean much—the public courts by the firehouse looked like landfill.
Desmond was asking her to take a look at his serve. Doubtless he was hoping that Willy would put in a good word for him with Max. Desmond was entering his last year, when his mentor would be either asking him to stay on or merely wishing him the best, and so would take incidental privileges like being trusted with a school car this evening as auspicious. Willy had the urge to warn him, bitterly, that her good word would have meant a great deal more six weeks before, but a stray grumble would ruin months of discretion. When she glanced again at Desmond’s yearning, mysteriously unwritten face, she ached. The first cut at Sweetspot was just the beginning of a cruel, sometimes savagely short process of elimination through which eagerness and even, by laymen’s standards, awesome ground strokes counted for nothing.
This counsel, too, she swallowed. Willy had heard the poor odds enough times from her father, and the remonstrance was hateful. Desmond would have to find out for himself the staggering unlikelihood that he should ever be ranked at all, much less be deciding, after his idol, whether to concede whites to the fusty All England Club.
Threading outside of town, they curled the drive of the school, whose buildings blended with Westbrook architecture: green-trimmed white clapboard Colonial Revivals, each skirted with a wide wooden porch. Below the overhangs, rockers listed with curled afghans, and wicker armchairs beckoned with quilted pillows, calling out for long, fractious games of gin rummy. Nothing about this lulling, serene laze suggested the sweat shed on these grounds except that it was two hours after the dinner bell and the porches were deserted. Any student worth his salt at eight o’clock was back on the courts.
Willy drifted into the dining hall, to spot her coach at a side table, next to the horrid Marcella Foussard. He was scraping up the last of his meal—so once again they would not be snuggling into their regular booth at Boot of the Med to pick languidly at flaccid linguine. Willy grabbed a tray, brightening her laughter. Max would see through her insipid vivacity without looking up. What a disaster. What an awful mistake, though she wasn’t certain which of them had made it.
The cafeteria betrayed that this was a sports academy and not a prep school. No vats of brick-solid cheese macaroni and liquefied kale; no lime Jell-O. Since Max had bought into high-protein theories, replacing the old saws about carbohydrates, they confronted skinless chicken breasts and lean flank steaks, undressed snow peas, and an inexhaustible mound of bananas. Facing down the bananas one more night, Desmond moaned, “You know, Agassi lives on junk food.”
Willy slid her tray next to Desmond on the side of the hall opposite from Max. She might have braved Max’s table if it weren’t for that Foussard creature, who surely spent more time on her nails—the back of her hand—than on her backhand. The hall recalled a mess in more ways than one, and Willy was frantic to get out. Shredding her chicken, she asked Desmond to hit a few after dinner. Ecs
tatic, Desmond chucked his flank steak merrily in the trash.
On the way out Willy forced herself to turn to Max’s table. He was watching her steadily. She wiggled two fingers. He didn’t wave back, his expression unreadable. She made a swinging motion and pointed at Desmond. Max dipped his chin a half inch, and as Willy swept through the screen door she at least had the satisfaction that with Marcella jabbering away Max had not heard a single word the silly girl said.
Sweetspot’s twenty hard and four clay courts were built right on the sound, which made them breezy. But Max believed in the strengthening of adversity. He’d situated his school in the Northeast because, he claimed, European civilization had surpassed southern cultures due to rigorous, hard winters. Cold had invigorated northerners to activity and enterprise, while tropical layabouts lounged beaches munching pomegranates. According to Max, Tahitians would never have invented tennis. But Willy was confident the whole pro-winter hoo-ha really just meant that Max hated Florida.
Stars were emerging, the glow from the powerful floods fissiparating into the salted air. The lights projected a blue halo that could be seen from miles away. Closer up, the bulbs produced a low-level collective hum, like a chorus finding its note before the song. As the floods on their four corners flickered, starting gray and warming to hot white, the court blazed with the tingling theatricality distinctive to playing at night.
“No, Desmond,” she declined when he challenged her to a match. “Let’s just hit.” The boy deflated. Later he might treasure his few offers of carefree rallies; now he craved a showdown. But Willy, for all her reputed keenness for head-to-head, tonight hankered for reprieve from a world with no choice but to vanquish or be vanquished. There had to be a haven in between.
“Why the cold shoulder?” Willy demanded. “I thought we were going to go back to the way it was.”
“I wasn’t the one who sat on the far side of the cafeteria,” Max returned coolly.
“I wasn’t the one who chose to eat in the cafeteria.”
They were in the library, which Max adopted as his lounge after lights-out. Though the kids instinctively hid their bottles in racket covers, there were no booze bans on the books; Max was treating himself to solitary bourbon.
Looking up, he closed Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm. “You expected that I would meet your train and scoop you off to Boot of the Med, where we’d order the fried calamari and Chianti and then—”
“We’d practice a few drunken overheads at midnight. Why not?” Willy’s T-shirt was limp with clammy sweat; she rubbed her arms.
“What would we talk about?”
“What we always talk about. Primpy Marcella, and your exwife, and … and we’d draw point diagrams on napkins before the zabaglione.” Her tone had taken a defeated turn. To Willy’s own ears, the reprise sounded ridiculous.
“Our agreement was not to ‘go back to the way we were’ but for me to ‘treat you like everyone else,’ which I had never done, from the time you were seventeen. So I could hardly go back to anything.”
“You’re always so aggressive and nasty lately.”
“I’ve always been aggressive and nasty. You used to like it. Don’t go soft on me, Will. It’s not good for your tennis.”
“Do you even care about that these days?” she entreated. “My tennis?”
“I thought it was for the sake of your goddamned tennis that we’ve had such unimpeachable relations for six weeks.”
“See? ‘Goddamned tennis’—”
Max slammed his hardback to the table. “Enough! You practice your forehand, but the bust-up is blessedly a one-time-only. It doesn’t improve with repetition, it just gets old.”
“Gets old! We haven’t discussed this since May!”
“Will.” This time he implored her. Meeting his eyes, she pondered once more how this man contrasted with the photographs of Max’s heyday twenty years ago. Many an evening she had marveled through his tour album, where his Sports Illustrated and New York Post profiles were preserved under plastic sheets. Max had maintained the same compact physique, with a dense torso whose dark hair sprang from his Lacoste shirt then as now. His face remained right-angled, and had acquired none of the fleshiness that invaded most middle-aged jowls. The beginnings of those eye crinkles were to be found in yellowed clippings. Though he’d axed the seventies sideburns, Max hadn’t even restyled his no-nonsense haircut. The before-and-after pictures were, in their strictly physical detail, almost identical. So what made him look so unmistakably forty-five?
“It’s late, I should get to bed,” she said, and at the mention of the word bed Max poured himself another finger. “I may have a visitor tomorrow. Is that all right?”
He might have wanted to ask who or why, but Max Upchurch had made millions of dollars on self-control. He shrugged. She left.
In their on-court session the following afternoon, Max didn’t refer to the evening’s tiff, and no one observing the two would have picked up on anything amiss in this fruitful, vigorous coach-client relationship. His very capacity to put sentiment aside when business required a cool head may have contributed to his looking his age, though if Willy didn’t miss her guess the faculty faintly depressed him.
But Willy knew the difference. Since May a formality had invaded their sessions. Briskness prevailed, though the tightening of the interval between drills may have only been a matter of fifteen seconds. Max no longer tucked strands into her bandanna but ordered gruffly, “Get that hair out of your face.” He was hard on her—always had been—but now his criticism was knifed with genuine derision. He seemed glad for her mistakes, and Willy submitted to his abuse with uncharacteristic meekness.
They were working on corner-to-corner backhand drives, and as Willy spotted a peaked hairline sifting across the field to their court she bent her knees lower, drew her backswing more quickly, and forced the whole of her weight onto her right foot. The ball skimmed an inch over the net, and scooted from underspin.
“That’s more like it,” Max commended, though he sounded annoyed.
She put something special on the next one. It kissed the corner and skipped at a cockeyed angle beyond Max’s racket. By the gate, the gangly Jew whistled, and Willy realized that she was showing off.
“I’m afraid we’ll be another hour!” she cried.
Willy had orchestrated this exhibition, suggesting Eric take a train that would get him into Sweetspot before her afternoon’s drills were done. Now she felt obvious, demonstrating what a real pro hits like with a real pro coach. The ensuing hour was painful, as her visitor bounced his back against the adjacent court’s fence. Rather than gawk in slack-jawed awe, he looked put out. She could as well have been a little girl oppressing a house guest with her piano études. Moreover, while she’d intended Eric’s visit to accustom Max to her new admirer, the ploy abruptly appeared tactless. From the age of five Willy had learned to control a tennis ball, and had virtually abandoned the more challenging project of managing people with the same aplomb.
Between drills, Willy bent and grasped her calves, bringing her forehead to her knees. The tension of the antagonism she’d contrived was tightening her tendons. Max rolled his eyes and flicked his finger, commanding her to the net post. Pulled hamstrings could put you out of the game for weeks; Max took no chances.
As she braced against the net post, Max kneeled at her feet and cradled an ankle on his shoulder. Gradually he stood nearly upright, which brought his groin level with her open crotch. Willy grunted at the ache in her thigh. As Max lowered her leg and prepared to lift the next, she glanced over at Eric, who was intently rewrapping his grip.
When the recital was mercifully over, she abbreviated introductions. “Max Upchurch, Eric Underwood.”
Eric’s mouth twitched.
Max skipped the so-you’re-a-friend-of-Willy’s-are-you and how-do-you-two-know-each-other and went straight to all he cared about in regard to anyone. Nodding at Eric’s racket, he squinted. “You play?”
&nbs
p; “No, I use this to catch butterflies.” Deadpan.
Max sprang his palm against his strings. “How about a game?” The casual inflection was a lie. He had never challenged anyone to a match casually in his life.
In reply, Eric began whisking practice balls to the next backcourt, implying that Willy was to pick them up.
Willy hated watching other people play tennis. It consumed her with jealousy. Though she’d flagged minutes earlier, now she summoned a second wind, and how dare anyone abscond with her partner while she still had a stroke left in her?
Thus as the two men warmed up—Eric insolently relaxed, Max inscrutably impassive—Willy could not tell for which player she was rooting. She detested them both. This sucked: sulking cross-legged on the sidelines, the court hard and hot. As the match commenced, Willy gazed at banking seagulls overhead. However, it was impossible to screen out the familiar grunts that were Max’s version of flattery, or the pooch-puh-poom-puh-poom-puh-poom-poom-poom of a protracted point.
In that Willy’s calculation of a tennis score was automatic, neglecting to keep track of who won what took a concentration of its own. (Gentlemen did not announce the score.) She’d have expected Max to dispatch the parvenu in thirty-five minutes, though once Willy had realigned her racket strings and bounced a ball off the face five hundred times without missing, the half hour was long past and those two were still batting away. Max was moist. Eric was playing plenty of trash, but it sometimes worked. At last, after another point during which she had found a rally two courts away more compelling, she turned to find them shaking over the net, stiffly.
Willy picked herself up, dusting off her shorts, and the two gladiators ambled to their bags.