"He was terrific," added Willy. "And there was more depth of field than Eric's letting on." While on Walnut Street she'd been grateful when Eric stuck up for her, on Seventy-fourth her support felt thin, surplus.
"Winning's winning," said Axe. "It's a habit, one I'm glad to say you got into at an early age. You gotta hand it to this guy." Axe gestured with his vodka and tonic. "Picks up a racket at eighteen, two years later he's on Princeton's tennis team."
"Pretty amazing," said Willy.
"Could just kick myself I didn't get him started as a brat. Maybe now he'd be giving Agassi a run for his money. When you learn to play, Willy?"
"At four. Though I didn't start to play seriously until—"
"And you're ranked what?"
"386."
Eric intruded, "That's likely to go up after this month, since Willy's entered in—"
"Three hundred and eighty-six." It sounded like a long number.
Mrs. Oberdorf glided in with a tray of tea sandwiches, whose triangles of salmon, accents of black olive, and strips of daikon reiterated the Russian prints. Here was where Eric got his looks: she was tall, spare, and stately, with strong cheekbones and the same grand, angular nose. Alma Oberdorf dressed with a simplicity that costs. Her manner was collected, her voice murmurous. When she leaned over her eldest and kissed his torehead she teased that he'd lost more hair—the first intimation of the evening that Willy's fiancé had a single failing.
"Willy, I'm so glad that Eric has somebody to play with," said Alma good-humoredly, and Willy accepted a sandwich.
"Your mother's making that polenta mush for dinner again," Axel groaned. "I've tried to tell her that cornmeal porridge is peasant food, but you can't fight chichi New York."
"The recipe is from the Union Square Cafe." With the obdurate calm of her delivery, Mrs. Oberdorf must have been accustomed to standing her ground, although perhaps not gaining any either. "And it's only a side dish, dear." Obliviously, she slipped away.
When Axe began to extol his son's renown as "Rick the Slick" on Trinity's basketball team, Eric interrupted impatiently, "Dad! Look alive—Willy
already likes me
. Though she may not continue to, if you don't give it a rest."
Eric muscled the conversation back to Willy. He rattled off that she'd been the number-three junior in New Jersey without being allowed to compete outside the tristate area, that she'd been number one on the tennis team from her sophomore year at UConn, and that she'd recently made the semifinals in the Norfolk Masters, which was worth gobs more computer points than his own lowly satellite in Toronto. Though flattered, Willy was perplexed as to why Eric felt compelled to blurt this rush of statistics. They were supposed to be getting acquainted, and here Eric could as well have printed out her résumé, as if she were applying for a job.
"Your dad your coach, Willy?" Axel topped up his V&T with tonic at the bar.
"Willy's coached by Max Upchurch, one of the best in the business," Eric interceded, adding effortfully, "They're very…close. Willy's his bright and shining hope for the nineties."
"What's your father do, then?"
"He's an English professor," Willy jumped in to answer for herself. "Head of department."
"Rutgers?"
Willy's cheeks warmed. "Bloomfield College. He writes novels, and doesn't much care about the academic—"
"What's his name?"
"Chuck—Charles Novinsky."
Axe rubbed his chin. "Can't say I ever…What's he published?"
Willy slumped as much as the backless cube would allow. "One book. You wouldn't have heard of it. But it's very good. It went underappreciated at the time."
"Never met a teacher who didn't have three novels stashed in his bottom drawer. At least your dad managed to get one published."
Willy straightened her shoulders. "Well, I think my father is a pretty gifted writer. But you know, we can't all be famous."
"Yes." Axel smiled; his teeth were small and perfect. "Many a worthy man's toil is thankless, isn't it?" he added grandiloquently. Floweriness neither suited his style nor served the sentiment. He raised his V&T. "To the unsung."
Willy didn't take a sip of her wine.
Before they were called to dinner, Eric gave Willy a tour of the two-floor condominium. When he showed her his old room, she was struck by its bare walls and bald surfaces. Had his mother cleared all trace of him away?
"No, I always kept it neat and simple," he explained.
But the real explanation did not emerge until they ducked into the master bedroom. Prominently displayed across one wall was every award Eric had ever earned: his straight-A report cards, his grade school Advanced Reading Group assignment, the covers of his gold-starred essays from Trinity on Ronald Reagan, a letter of thanks from the Republican National Committee, several blue ribbons in track, eight consecutive dean's list notifications from Princeton, his Phi Beta Kappa certificate dangling with a gold key, and a freshly framed summa BA in mathematics. A table underneath was crammed with sports trophies. Willy stared at the display agog. She was reminded of devout Catholics who kept novena cards, candles, crucifixes, and statues of the Virgin Mary cluttered in a hallowed corner of their homes. No doubt about it: this was a shrine.
"What is all this doing in
your parents
' bedroom?" she asked incredulously.
"Personally, I count my blessings that this worthless crap isn't plastered all over the goddamned living room." Eric seemed both irritated and embarrassed, but he had shown her this array on purpose. If they were going to be married, there was something he wanted her to understand.
"But why didn't you want to keep your awards in your own room?"
"I did, or I tried. I shoved them in my desk, but my father always filched them. When he helped me clear out of my dorm in May, he bullied me into forking over the Princeton stuff, claiming he'd paid for it. And in high school, he got so intrusive that I started throwing little bullshit tributes away. No use. Those blue ribbons in track? He rooted them out of the trash, banana peels and all. See?" Eric pointed. "That one's still grease-stained."
"Have you always been so humble?"
"It's not humility; it may be the opposite, to tell the truth. I'm not interested in anything I've already done. I keep my eyes on the next hurdle. Ask any horse what happens when you run looking backwards, congratulating yourself on how well you cleared the last hedge. This is dross, Wilhelm. And rinky-dink dross at that." He sounded disgusted.
"God, I can't imagine my father even—"
"
Don't
," Eric cut her off sotto voce, "get envious too fast. Sure, these trinkets are in my father's room. Because they're his. You can't imagine that he was bragging about
me
down there." Eric gestured to the floor. "He was bragging about
himself
."
When they returned downstairs, Eric's three brothers were already seated at the sleek teak dining table, where the two younger boys were fighting over which building was the tallest in the world.
"Wrong! The Sears Tower! One thousand four hundred fifty-four stories—"
"
Feet
, you moron. Think it goes all the way to the moon?"
"
Nobody cares
," Eric interrupted. "You guys? This is Willy. Willy? Robert, Mark, and Steven," he introduced from youngest up.
They were all roughly attractive boys, though the two older ones had more of Axel's build, short and square. Maybe they'd not grown into themselves yet, but not one of his siblings possessed Eric's arresting angularity and confident ease. They all three turned to Willy with expressions that mingled admiration with resentment. So Eric had brought home another good-looking girl. Big surprise.
The second eldest, Steven, was perhaps the most homely and about seventeen. Steven began drilling his brother Mark on which five American presidents had been shot, but when Axel arrived, drying his hands, their father took over as referee. "Begins with a
G
," Axel prodded.
"No clues!" Steven complained. "You never help me!"
"Garfunkel!" Mark guessed.
Steven hooted. "So everyone in the sixties was listening to Simon and Garfield?"
As Alma delivered the first course, a venison tureen, Willy's attention began to stray. Mark had begun to list every Robert De Niro film ever made. Steven had apparently memorized George Bush's cabinet. Something about the banter disturbed her. At the Oberdorf's, all fact was on a par. It didn't seem to matter whether in which film De Niro played the devil was important, only that Mark knew it was
Angel Heart
and Steven didn't. When knowledge had value only as a weapon, all information was cheap and fungible. These kids threw facts the way unrulier kids threw food.
Only Robert, the scrawny, sullen twelve-year-old at the end of the table, had ceased to joust as soon as his father appeared. Having mashed his venison into turds, he neglected his dinner for the notebook computer in his lap.
"Boys!" Axel called the family to order. "I'll have you know that your brother Eric here just won a big Canadian tournament."
"Enough!" Eric despaired. "It was a piece of shit tournament, and I
told
you that, Dad!"
Robert's notebook wheedled. "I bet all the girls threw flowers and wet themselves," the youngest muttered. "We can't wait to hear
all
about it."
"Gosh," said Mark, "did you win, like, a million dollars?"
"I won squat," Eric insisted. "You didn't even have to be ranked to get in, the draw was overrun with amateurs, and what I won wouldn't buy Robert a copy of 'Microsoft Golf.'"
But Eric's protestations washed off his brothers like rainwater. Willy supposed that modesty made him only a little more irritating.
"My debate team won the first round against Dalton, Dad," Steven piped up.
"I got my paper back on
GoodFellas
," Mark intruded. "My film teacher gave me an A plus!" The "plus" had the tinny ring of an embellishment.
Though in the early hubbub Willy couldn't quite keep the brothers straight, she now discerned that their interests were cautiously discrete: tennis, politics, movies, and computer games. Each son dwelt in his own preserve, like animals in a zoo that had to be fenced from one another lest they eat each other up.
Alma presented the main course, which to Willy's surprise was a stuffed tenderloin. Eric had said his family was ultrasecular, but pork seemed ostentatiously so. Robert excepted, the children's table manners, like Eric's, were impeccable. Alma refilled her sons' Pellegrino, quietly pointing to a little chunk of venison on Mark's chin. He brushed it off with a collusive glance of gratitude at his mother. She is the real family, Willy thought. The one who picks up the pieces when one of these paragons shuffles home having been, perish the thought, denied the lead in the school play.
Willy was seated next to Steven, who might have picked up his ambition to become a politician from his older brother's discarded fascinations, like a hand-me-down jacket. When she asked whether that meant a law degree he went vague, as if already oppressed by the mandatory admission into Harvard. He doubled back to that afternoon's debate coup, the details carefully loud enough for his father to hear. Yet though Steven extolled his own lucidity, never once did he mention what the debate had been about. More, through his bluster she detected too high a ratio of relief to relish. Willy had seen it in tennis players before: with sufficient dread of a drubbing, victory inverts to not-getting-egg-on-your-face-this-time; triumph becomes a squeaking-by, more reprieve than reward. The conversion was deadly. Any defeat you put off rather than preclude takes on all the inevitability you accord it. There may even come a point when, just to get it over with, you invite your ruin with open arms like an old friend.
Inspecting her future husband across the table, Willy searched for signs that Axel's summary dismissal of losers, his apparent lack of interest in complexity or excuses, had rubbed off on her fiancé. Despite the sharpness of its planes, there was gentleness in Eric's face, in contrast to his father's, whose round, jolly contours were punctuated by a merciless, impatient twitch around the mouth. Axe promoted a Darwinism that only a life of untrammeled success could afford. Willy speculated that doing well could be bad for you, should it result in this callous disregard for also-rans. If Eric seemed unbattered by such an upbringing, he had rarely disappointed his father. Mark, by comparison, had the wince of a boy who had failed to make first-chair clarinet, and the furtive fidget of a liar. Though infirmity had hitherto appeared universally unjust, Willy looked forward to their robust, barrel-chested father getting long in the tooth. For the harsh intolerance of weakness to which he had subjected his own family, Axel deserved old age.
"If you're walking off with trophies," Willy overheard Axel say to Eric, "you must have toughened up that tender heart. Had me worried with that track business."
"That was back in high school, and I wish you'd let it go," said Eric.
"Get this," Robert muttered in Willy's direction. "Not only is big brother Magic Johnson, Albert Einstein, and Andre Fagassi all in one, he's Manhattan Gandhi, too."
Axel brought Willy in. "The night before a big track meet, this guy starts limping from a sprain. Wraps the ankle with an Ace bandage; even gets himself a crutch. Day after the race, I find the little bastard running laps in the Trinity gym. Ace on a bleacher, crutch on the floor. Took him by the collar and said, leave the props, kid, you've got some explaining to do. Thought he'd chickened out. Figured he was just afraid to lose.
"Alma here squeezed it out of him. His best friend, What's-its—"