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
F
OR 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."
The wearing family festivities were dispatched. Willy wryly bought Eric a copy of
Learn Tennis in a Weekend
, and Eric gave his wife her own jump rope. Between Christmas and New Year's both their pools of hitting partners had drained out of town, and Willy would not return to Sweetspot until after the first. They were stuck with each other. Not long before, Willy could have conjured no more delectable a curse; now she prepared for the Jordan as if for the gallows.
On court, Eric looked worried; his high forehead rippled as he kissed her temple. This was the last she would see of his solicitous persona for the duration, since as soon as his feet touched baseline Eric transmogrified. Willy told herself that she shouldn't hold it against him, that this alternative Eric was the one who won tournaments and without a Hyde to his Jekyll his natural kindness would destroy him on the circuit.
Still it was disturbing when she faced him and his mouth set with a ravenous twist. The way he leaned and swayed as if tethered suggested that the net was strung between them for her own protection. This time he allowed her to warm up as long as she liked.
Through the first set, a whole new sensation began to snarl in her lower intestine: a mistrust akin to nausea. Even when easy balls came her way midrally, she clutched with misgiving before impact:
How did I hit this shot all those other times? I can't remember!
Infinitesimal hesitation often sent the ball deep. By 0–5 she was calling her every instinct into question, and so began to play more cautiously, popping her lobs, pushing her volleys, and going for safe, flabby shots that landed prostrate at midcourt with such a please-let-memake-your-day degradation that she might as well have taken off her clothes. By the time he blanked her in the first set she had become such a full participant in her own disgrace that the second took on the feasting self-hatred of a bulimic binge.
Eric treated her soft, shallow returns to the abuse they deserved. Freshly cut, his hair flickered black fire. Willy kept telling herself that a killer instinct was in his nature; that to demand that Eric desist from slaughtering her helpless, bleeding sitters was as absurd as putting a wounded antelope before a lion and expecting the beast to turn its head. Still she glanced across the net with bafflement that this man she had married was now the agent of her abasement. By the time his last dazzling cross-court whistled past her backhand, Willy was too devastated to lift her racket.
As his adrenal rush subsided, Eric's hair fell limp to his scalp. Yet while his claws retreated and his pupils contracted to normal size, the two zeroes in succeeding sets continued to stare back at her with wide, accusing eyes.
"Yo." Eric touched her arm, and Willy sprang away as if from a hot poker. "This doesn't feel so good. You make me feel like a bruiser."
"You got what you wanted," she charged. "Willy's magic on the court revealed as smoke and mirrors. I'm debunked, like all your other entrancements. One more disposable practice partner, all used up. Like a box of Kleenex."
"You win a few, you lose a few," said Eric sharply. "Comes with the territory. Take it like a—" he seemed to think better of his phrasing, and amended "—like a good sport."
Willy hung her head. "I'm sorry. I was being childish. You played fantastically well. I wish I could have given you a better game."
"So you had an off day." Eric raised her chin. "But next time—let's just rally. Do some drills. We'll help each other. No more matches for a while."
They both knew he meant: forever. They both knew as well that even rallying was volatile, not disengaged from victory and failure, good shots and weak, and as a consequence they'd each find themselves strangely busy in the next few weeks, unable to make much time for playing each other. By February they'd have tournaments to play in different states…. When he was no longer challenged, Eric got bored, and Willy couldn't bear to be regarded as tedious on a tennis court. Grieving, she would certainly decline to attend the Oberdorfs' New Year's Eve party that evening, crawling miserably to bed before the knell of twelve.
"So, then," Willy encapsulated softly. "Resolutions for 1994: we can't play Scrabble, or horseshoes, or billiards, or go bowling. We can't even jump rope in the same squash court. And now we can't play tennis. What is it that we'll ever do together besides fuck?"
"We could do worse." Eric pressed her head to his chest, and she cried.
To Eric's dismay, Willy packed up on January second to head back to Sweetspot.
"You're taking
ten
running bras," he observed, fingering into her suitcase. "How long will you be gone?"
"Maybe two weeks," she said offhandedly, stacking T's. "The school laundry won't be staffed yet, so…"
Eric's face folded like a Coney Island hot-dog stand, battening down against the elements for a cold, windy winter. "That's quite a while," he said at length. "This is the only time of year—"
"This is the only time of year that I can have Sweetspot to myself, and Max as well."
"So nobody else will be there? Just you and Upchuck, stretching your hams, chumming in low-lit restaurants?"
"I suppose Marcella will be up," she noted, crossing briskly to the closet. "She never misses an opportunity to slime herself into Max's good graces."
"What are you taking that red dress for?"
"Eric, I can't wear sweats all day."
"You do for me."
Willy sighed, and tossed the red silk on the bed. "Would it make you feel any better if I left it behind?"
"Take it, I'm not going to wear it." Though his tone was gruff, Eric rearranged the rumpled silk fondly on the spread, tugging out wrinkles, removing specks of lint. "I thought you weren't going to compete with Marcella any longer over who can be Upchuck's darling."
"I don't need to compete. Marcella's game is repulsive. She only wins because she drives her opponents mad, and tempts them into doing something rash if only to stop her blobbing at them. Max prefers sting and drive to witless attrition."
"But, Willy,
two weeks!"
"You saw my game yesterday. It's diseased. I need a doctor."
"Then maybe," he proposed shyly, "I can come with you."
Willy bustled, wrapping a pair of tennis shoes in plastic. The bags crackled white noise.
"Wilhelm?"
Socks. "That's not a great idea."
"But why—?"
"I need to concentrate. The next six months—"
"You want to get away from me, don't you?"
The remark was not remotely like him. Eric was a great one for letting sleeping dogs lie, and conventionally accepted Willy's explanations at face value. He didn't like problems. He expected a marriage to simmer murmurously on the back burner, and when situations like Scrabble and rope-skipping and now even tennis stirred the pot, his solution was to avoid those situations. For Eric the observation was brave, and she had to reward him with honesty in return.
"Yes, I do. For now. Since our anniversary—I've been disturbed. You're having a nasty effect on my game."
"I know you, Wilhelm. That's the same thing as saying that I'm having a nasty effect on
you
."
"Sweetheart, I just need to get my head on straight." She reached for an inch-long eyebrow hair and tamed it against his face.
Eric insisted on seeing her off at Penn Station, and as he waved from the platform for once he didn't look trim and taut but scrawny. Tufts of cropped hair cringed over his bald spots in lonely, desolate curls. It took all her willpower to keep from dragging Eric in the door, throwing her arms around him, and whispering feverishly that she'd been terribly foolish, that their time with each other was far too dear to waste, and of course he must come along. One by one she would ease the worry lines from his forehead with the tips of her fingers and apologize that now he hadn't any luggage, but they could pick up a toothbrush and a shirt or two in Old Saybrook. Flopping into a booth and propping their feet on facing seats to ward off strangers, they'd do the
Times
crossword together. She'd admire his memory for Civil War generals, one hand scribing and the other resting reassuringly on his inside thigh for the whole trip up.
Instead, the rubber edges of the train door kissed, and Willy was banished to the overheated car. She rushed to a window and waved at Eric, though the reflections of the station lights probably masked her hand. As the train drew into the tunnel, she pressed against the cold glass, and the condensation of her breath fogged a
last glimpse of her husband as he shuffled toward the escalator. His posture was unusually poor. The car went black, and for an instant Willy was afraid of the dark—a grown-up sort of dark. Once the lights flickered on, she opened her
New York Times
halfheartedly to the crossword. Unable to get one-across right away, she closed her eyes, slumped into her leaden independence, and folded the paper over her face.
Willy's original idea was to return to the old days, she and Max against the world. Yet though they put in long sessions on her strokes, evenings rang hollow. When she dined out with Max, the twittering Marcella Foussard often came along. Even after Marcella left for a fat farm their nights felt roomy, like an oversized coat; hours hung off either side of dinner like sleeves off her hands. Getting ready for bed, Willy's ablutions went too swiftly and she was pestered by a sensation of having forgotten something.