Admittedly, Willy's game always had its ups and downs. When Willy was on form, a point flowed like water; when she was out of kilter not the point but the atmosphere went liquid, and slogging toward the alley she might have been hoofing it in a swimming pool. The gods of tennis were capricious, their gifts no sooner bestowed than withdrawn. Yet this latest invasion of doubt seemed the more human failing of Thomas than divine neglect. Sensing her diffidence after an especially atrocious practice session, Max sat Willy down in the library that evening and regaled her with, of all things, tales of dentistry.
"I have good teeth," he began. "As a kid I never had a cavity. Until I was twenty-nine, when I was mortified to be told that I needed a filling.
"I asked my dentist, why after all this time? He explained that molars are formed in pieces, and grow together to make a solid tooth. In my case, the pieces had never quite united. For my whole life a little pocket had waited, hidden. Finally some bit of flotsam invaded the gap, and the tooth decayed."
"I assume this is another of your parables, and not a lesson in the importance of floss?" asked Willy tolerantly.
"I've never coached a woman who wasn't riddled with holes," Max declared. "Sometimes the missing chunks are gaping, and the poor girl can't comb her hair without bursting into tears. You, though—I thought at first I'd found a female whose ego wasn't Swiss cheese. Now I wonder if you aren't like my molar—no pits on the outside, but in the very center, there's a hollow."
"If they're 'riddled with holes,' why coach women?"
"I'd have made a good dentist. And hey, the holes aren't their fault. Most girls have been blasted with buckshot by the time they're five."
"You sound as though you're coaching the Special Olympics," Willy grumbled. "So what's the answer? To my 'hollow'?"
"Well, it's ultimately a Daddy thing, but Chuck's not going to change much at this point. You've sealed him off. You've sealed everyone off, even me," Max volunteered cheerfully. "That's been your secret. Keep fending us away, then. And fortify your enamel with the fluoride of victory." Max clasped his hands over his stomach, in a gesture of literary repletion.
The time had long passed when Willy's leaving for her own dorm room was noticeably painful to either of them, and she dragged herself unceremoniously upright. "If a man had been stabbed by his competitor's fan," she posited, "not horrendously, but unnervingly, would he quit the game?"
"No," said Max. "I doubt a man would be 'traumatized.' I think he'd be
angry
."
"So Monica Seles has a hollow, too. Backhanded comfort."
"Will," he called behind her. "I don't like to say I told you so. But you know what 'bit of flotsam' is the catalyst for your decay, don't you? Who's worked into your hollow like a husk of popcorn?"
"That's a lie," said Willy before slamming the door. "You love to say I told you so."
As promised, Eric did fly back to attend the Tanqueray after his tournament in Zurich, where he'd made the round-of-sixteen—a reputable showing for a greenhorn on the tour. For his July return, Eric sacrificed his next European foray. Superior ranking had made him kinder. Magnanimity is to some degree a function of what you can afford; with a few moving exceptions, rich people buy more extravagant presents than the poor. Much as the gesture touched her, Willy envied him the luxury of generosity. How nice to be nice.
The Tanqueray was played in New Haven, though any town on the circuit came down to a price tag—how much it cost to get there, how much it cost to stay. To Willy, New Haven didn't mean grand Ivy League university, notorious drug problem, and quaint, resuscitated downtown. It meant cheap—within an hour's train ride of New York. Otherwise it simply meant comedown. Though with poor depth of field its trophy was ripe for picking, winning the Tanqueray would confer less prestige than losing the Chevrolet finals.
As Willy's first round began, no one in the stands would have noticed anything amiss. Oh, it looked dismal, playing in that enormous Yale stadium before such a tiny crowd; and perhaps 223 versus 522 going on to three sets was unexpected, though not unheard of. Eric beamed from the sidelines, punching the air after Willy's winners. But Willy herself kept hearing that deep interior hollow echo in her ears as if someone were pounding on an empty oil drum.
Granted that in tennis you were always making decisions, since most oncoming shots could be returned in a variety of canny directions. Several variables had to be calculated at once: where were this opponent's weak spots; how had you contended with similar configurations earlier in the match, and so what was your adversary expecting; could you handle the probable replies. Yet a good player hit with the illusion of making no decisions at all. Compacted into a split second, all that geometry, game memory, and espionage condensed into gut, spontaneous instinct.
But in the opening round of the Tanqueray, Willy was thinking too much. The summer's incipient uncertainty, the self-conscious decision-making, was back. Just before impact with the ball, she could have listed her alternatives on paper.
It was 3–4 in the third set, on-serve, Willy receiving. The game went Willy's way, until at 15–40 she confronted a vital break point.
Willy drove deep, and came to net. Her first volley was gettable, though the returning lob was weak. Willy could either streak back and take it on the bounce and so be driven to the baseline, or smash it midcourt and resume the net. Willy went for the more aggressive overhead. Keeping the ball in view, she backed into position.
But then Willy remembered that midcourt volleys were inherently risky, and a spin was beginning to curve the ball unpredictably to her right. Maybe take the bounce instead. Not having firmly opted for one course of action or the other, Willy was torn literally in two directions at once: her torso swiveled toward the baseline, while her feet danced forward to smash.
Her scream was still reverberating around Yale Stadium when Willy discovered herself splayed on the court. Her right knee was twisted in an implausible posture, like the figure drawing of an inept art student. Of the last few seconds she had no memory; she did not understand how she'd landed on the court, until a second wave of pain broke over her leg, oceanic and obliterating.
"Willy, sweetheart, don't move" came a familiar voice. Her vision spotted and the lines of seats wavered; she couldn't make out his face. "Don't try to get up. Wait for a doctor. Here, hold my hand. That's right. Squeeze hard. Stay still. Everything's going to be all right."
Funny how people always said that. They had no idea if everything was going to be all right.
The gold band was warm under her fingers. She squeezed his wedding ring harder, as if it were in danger of falling off. "Eric?" she whispered. "Did I make the shot?"
"Sure you did. A real killer."
Before blacking out, she knew he was lying.
Willy didn't realize she was going into surgery until she was out of it. Groggy from sedation, she worked her way up on her elbows as 3–4 in the first set swam into memory. A break, didn't she break? For a moment she was ready to serve for the match before a tear in the narrative appeared, as if someone had ripped out a page. What had happened was still unclear. That something had happened was certain, and as certainly it was bad. As she grasped the reality of her hospital bed—the stiff, scratchy sheets, the squashed pillow, the blare of neon that made even nurses look sickly—Willy was smitten by the primitive ignorance of a Civil War casualty. Her right leg…she couldn't feel it! When she lifted the sheet, what a relief that the leg, though bandaged at the knee, was still there.
Had Willy been able to maintain this variety of crude gratitude—she had all her body parts, she was in her right mind, she was alive—the next few months would have gone more gently. But crude gratitude was the stuff of crude expectations. The terminally ill could feast on surviving another day in however stuporous a fashion. For a young, ambitious tennis player abruptly unable to hobble to the bathroom without a crutch, thankfulness was fleeting.
Finding herself in Yale Medical Center instead of proceeding to the second round, Willy was dizzied by an emotional kaleidoscope; it was impossible to fix her feelings for more than an instant. Livid anger vied with duller grays of lethargy and gloom. Brief silver flashes of determination lit up the room, only to give way to inky hatred for every pedestrian within eyesight blithely striding about the ward on two legs. For moments her panorama washed clean with wide white, annihilating denial. Others Willy was blanketed by a soft, beige, biding sensation—the patient numbness of waiting for a bus in cold weather. Yet gradually the miasma behind her eyes turned an ugly, sulfurous yellow, and for minutes Willy couldn't move a finger from pure, perfect terror.
When the orthopedic surgeon came to chat at her bedside, Willy didn't interrupt. She caught at the term
cruciate ligament
, with its semantic aura of importance. She was trying to pay attention, but there was only one question she wanted to put to the man.
"Doctor," Willy rasped. "Will I—" She considered putting off the inquiry for later, but in that case she wouldn't sleep. "Will I be able to play tennis?"
"Oh, a little recreational sport, taking it easy—"
"No, Doctor, I play for a living. Can I go back to it?"
The young man sniffed the air, as if he might smell her fate on the wind. "Oh," the surgeon supposed, "probably."
"
Probably!
What does that mean?"
"It means probably," he repeated with vexation. "Medicine isn't exact; all bodies are different. One of the things that's compelling about being a doctor—"
This was hardly the time to explore her surgeon's fascination with his job. "Can't you pin it down better than that? Like, what are the odds?"
"Generically, with this sort of injury? Fifty to sixty percent," he stabbed, shrugging. "But odds on an individual basis are meaningless. I have hopes for your recovery, but that depends on how you respond to physical therapy. You may feel twinges for the rest of your life, and your right knee will always be a weak point. You'll have to be careful."
"I got here being
careful
," she muttered.
"If you build up the muscles around the knee you may well return to normal, or nearly normal."
Willy's stomach lurched. The distinction between "normal" and "nearly normal" could easily be the difference between rankings of
215 and 902.
"I'll tell you this much," he assured her, moving off her bed. "If you'd snapped the cruciate completely, you'd be out of the game for good."
Having administered another dose of
crude gratitude
, he left her to the roll of a die.
Willy had made a poor Methodist, and so her prayers were offered to a presence she was not sure was out there, with the
instinctive dumb crooning of a dog baying at the moon.
Please, please,
if I can play again I'll
—She was not sure what she was promising to do for whom. If she was vowing to never take tennis for granted again, she knew better. Permitted back on the court, Willy would take the sport for granted in five minutes, chafing when a volley landed wide. But maybe it was that very chafing, the fight toward an ideal game that no player achieved, that she would most miss.
The sensible vow was to trust. Doubt itself had shuttled her to bed. But now that very mistrust had materialized, another monster roused from her imagination to lumber the world. Being "careful" meant that she could no longer trust her right knee. In this way the punishment was apt. By the time Eric arrived for visiting hours, Willy had convinced herself that she deserved it.
Her husband bore treats, for which Willy had no appetite, and she was loath to put on weight via the sedentary, bored nibbling of the bedridden. Although she'd lain here less than a day, she could already feel her muscles decomposing into jelly.
"The doctor says you're going to be fine," Eric purred, stroking her cheek.
"That's not what he told
me
," said Willy.
"He said the percentages were on your side. Come on, you're in great shape and perfect health. I bet you'll heal like time-lapse photography." Eric fluffed her bedclothes, but looked away when the sheet rose, avoiding a glimpse of the bandaged knee. Despite her husband's go-get-'em-champ, the errant strands of his eyebrows were sticking straight up in alarm. His hair greasy and coloring wan, Eric probably hadn't showered or slept.
Sweeter and as carefully selected as his gift of Godiva chocolates were Eric's tales of miraculous injury comebacks, which he must have stayed up researching overnight. But for every Pat Cash or Thomas Muster, Willy could name a Peter McNamara, who also turned to chase a lob, also tore up his knee ligaments, and was thereafter qualified for little more than hawking frozen yogurt at Flushing Meadow.
"Recuperation has a lot to do with attitude," Eric asserted, pouring her a glass of grape juice she didn't want.
"Maybe so," Willy agreed. "All the worse. My attitude already sucks."
"Wilhelm, this mess just happened yesterday, of course you're depressed. But later, recovery is fifty percent character."
"That's what worries me."
"It doesn't worry me." For a man who wasn't worried, Eric's forehead was awfully crimped, folded between his eyes like an accordion. "You're the most persevering woman I've ever met."
"It was character got me into this," Willy grumbled. "'He who hesitates is lost.'"
"You're talking crazy. It's the sedative."
"I was graceless."
"Hey," Eric separated the fine pale hairs at her temple, "think I've never had a minute when I was ungainly on the court?"
"I've never seen one. You know when you want to volley and you go volley. You don't hand-wring and change your mind and sprawl on your butt in the shape of a pretzel."