"You're making some kind of
point
?" Eric asked coldly from Nashville.
"It's easy to forget, but there are still two careers between us, and I have to—"
"So that's the point," he interrupted. "Now that I get it, will you meet me in our own apartment, please?"
Mr. Room Service, Mr. Top Ten of Tomorrow was accustomed to having his way. "I need intensive practice before reentering the fray. I can't afford to pay—"
"I have plenty of money," he intruded wearily. "Enough for you to practice at Jordan two, three hours a day."
"It's not my money."
"We're married, for Christ's sake. It's
our
money, you idiot."
It had been Willy's idea to segregate their finances. To Eric, she had cited her need to calculate Max's cut of her winnings after expenses; to herself, she had cited a vague feminist conviction that a girl should have her own cash.
"I didn't earn it," Willy insisted. "I've had a setback, but I haven't lost my self-respect."
"You'll take money from Max, but not from your husband?"
"Max and I have a business relationship."
"Sure you do."
In stony silence, Willy wouldn't rise to the charge.
Eric carped, "I'm supposed to squeeze onto that single bed in your dorm room for six weeks?"
"You can sleep in another room, if you need your beauty rest," Willy said coolly.
"Are you threatening me?"
She regretted the remark, but wouldn't take it back, so proceeded to make matters worse. "This isn't negotiable. I need my coach. Max means Westbrook."
"If you need Upchuck more than me…"
This was getting out of hand. "I need both of you, damn it. You'll have been suiting yourself for coming up on five months. For once you could accommodate me."
"I want to go
home
," he finished forcefully. Sadly, she knew exactly how he felt.
FIFTEEN
E
RIC SQUINTED. "YOU LOOK
thin."
"What did you expect?" Willy raised her chin. "That I've been flat on my back popping Cheez Doodles?"
They had kissed once on the station platform, lips tight; Eric didn't like public display. "Why do you interpret everything I say as criticism?" he asked in dismay. "I'm concerned, is all. And you're pale."
"You may not have noticed in South America, but up here it's winter."
"It was snowing in Nashville; I figured it out." He trailed behind her to the car. "Willy, you're
goose-stepping
."
"I've been given a clean bill of health."
"Recently?"
As Eric scrutinized her askance, Willy assessed her husband in
return. Among the other washed-out Amtrak passengers his tan looked out of place. He was more nodular than she remembered, the Adam's apple, nose, and forehead lumpy and tuberous. In the snapshot she referred to he was smiling; this uneasy man's features were wrung like a wet towel.
Conversation en route to Westbrook was choppy; they were too used to speaking on the phone. Newly visible, Willy felt exposed. She let him into her dorm room and checked her watch, though the last hour had dragged so that she knew the time almost to the minute. "I've got to go work out," she said hurriedly by the door. "I guess later we can go out to dinner." The "I guess" leeched eagerness from the proposition.
"Do you have to exercise now?"
"I always do. In fact, I'm running late."
"There's exercise and exercise…" His scraggled eyebrows raised, Groucho Marx.
Willy wasn't being difficult; she really didn't get it. "Come again?"
"Not before the first time."
She wasn't laughing.
"I was hoping we could, ah…stay in your room awhile. Get reacquainted." He seemed embarrassed. Married almost two years, they should have been comfortably frank.
"I'd feel guilty if I skipped my routine, and we've plenty of time, right?" She urged a smile, and joked wryly, "That is, unless there's some tournament you have to save it up for."
"I'm sorry about that, Willy," he responded in earnest. "I've decided my abstinence thing was retarded."
"Aw, I was just kidding." Willy was still standing in the door.
"I'll get some winks, then. I'm pretty tired."
"Yes," she said. "You look tired."
"Willy?" he called as she collected her jump rope from its hiding place under her underwear. "You are glad to see me, aren't you?"
"Of course," she said formally, and fled down the hall.
Willy lucked out and found an indoor court free; students were cramming for exams. Though Har-Tru was kind to leather, the rope's central section had frayed from use.
Ta-dum, ta-dum…
The phases of each monotonous rope-skipping session replicated the rhythms of a prison term. The beginning went surprisingly fast, as perhaps would the first months in San Quentin. The early middle was the worst—the routine already grown tyrannical, an appalling preponderance of servitude to go. The vast middle-middle was almost restful, with no tempting parole in view; the walls of any cell must evolve to the walls of the world. The killer was glimpsing release. Some days in her last one thousand Willy thought she might scream; it is said that a convict may experience his final weeks of captivity as longer than the rest of his sentence.
Bobbing in the middle-middle, Willy caught a flicker by the EXIT light. Eric, no doubt. Realigning a quarter turn, she kept her back to the door with the pretense of having seen no one. He didn't emerge, but lurked in shadow. To demonstrate that she was no slacker off the road, Willy spun into a sequence of scissors, heel clicks, and double-jumps.
"Very impressive."
The voice was low and level. As she shuddered at its gravelly timbre, the rope smacked her ankles and lay still.
"And how many of those do you do a day?" The figure strode measuredly into the light.
"Oh," she said offhandedly, wiping a drip from her temple, "a few thousand. You know—"
"No, I don't know. So tell me. How many thousand?" The voice was even, coaxing, but it was also a voice that someone might use before he was going to hit you.
Willy folded the rope loosely, as if she were calling it quits. "It varies—"
"I don't believe you. You're a slave to numbers. Rankings. Miles per hour on the treadmill. So I think you do the same number
every
day
."
She knew she should fudge, but Willy was proud of her stamina and couldn't bring herself. "Twelve," she squeaked.
"I take it you mean not twelve hundred but twelve thousand?"
Willy nodded; she was cringing.
"Now, for whom is this performance?"
Max was extending his hand for the rope. Had Eric done the same, Willy would have withheld it, indignant. But she relinquished the Everlast to Max. Maybe she could get another one in town somewhere.
Willy gestured to the empty court. "No one's here."
"Let's not be so literal. A performance doesn't need its audience to be physically present. Is this theater for me?"
"Maybe, in a way…"
He shook his head sadly. "I don't think so. I think it's for
Oberdick
."
"He just got here!"
"Nope. He never left." Max lay the Everlast on his palm like a whip. "What is it you want? To beat him?"
Willy and her husband were 350 ranking places apart. The notion of exceeding Eric any time soon was preposterous. "I'd be content to be as good as he is. To keep up."
"You don't even want to fucking
beat
him?"
She stepped back. "I guess I'd like to impress him. To make him proud of me. So I might want to beat him…a little bit…." She added mournfully, "Since with Eric, beating him and impressing him are the same thing."
Max lashed her rope on the court. "
Why
do you think I took you on in the first place?" The crack of the rope echoed off the arched ceiling. His modulated tone had broken, and Max was shouting. "What drove your motor when we met? Did you pound line drives for two hours so I'd take you out for a soda?"
"No, I—" Willy shrank back. "I liked practicing line drives."
"And I'd buy you a soda anyway." Max advanced on her, snapping the rope tight between his fists like a garrote. "My approval was a perk, not what made you tick. I took you under my wing because you didn't give two hoots what anyone else thought of your game. No matter how much I required of you, you required more of yourself. You used to please yourself. And now you're just one more little girl out to please Daddy. They're a dime a dozen. He's fucking ruined you. It makes me want to fucking cry."
Willy turned her back, running her fingers across the net. "I may use Eric as a yardstick. But I also want to get in shape for the coming season. In tip-top shape. Is that so terrible?"
Max had come up behind her; he wound the rope around her waist, tugging the loop tight as he brought his hands together at her stomach. "Your knee is swollen," he whispered in her hair. "I can see it, even with the brace. Skipping, you favor your left leg. Is that why you kept it secret? You knew I'd see." He kissed her bowed neck. The Everlast's wooden handles bobbled on her shins. "It was so awful," he groaned, "when you fell. Your leg twisted at that sickening angle. And I couldn't even run up to you. I had to stay back and let…" He sighed, and the moist straggles at her temple fluttered. "Later, watching you hobble…Don't make us go back to that. Please be careful."
Max leaned down, nuzzled his cheek against her ear, and kissed under the lobe. The skin must have been salty. Since she didn't stop him, he was obliged to stop himself.
Showering, Willy turned the pressure up high to pelt Max's smell from her skin, willing the agitating memory of his advances down the drain. Instead she considered his allegation that the source of her inspiration had become displaced. But wasn't it human enough, when you loved someone, to want to make them happy even more than yourself? Was it so dreadful to have grown less selfish?
For a tennis player the shift was lethal. Tennis players were selfish and good ones stayed selfish. Lovers were a cheat, a way out; if she jumped rope to impress Eric, she might escape the more exacting demands of her own expectations. It was too easy to delight lovers; they were inclined to be delighted. Eric would make excuses for her, about her knee, about being out of practice, about being a girl. One's self was not so easily fobbed off.
Toweling down, Willy noted that her knee was indeed puffy. Bent, her whole body ached, as it did all day lately. Yet Willy still kicked herself: in meeting Eric's train she had skipped serving practice, and had to cut her run to four miles.
Max's formulation was skewed. True, her private slave driver had towered to six-three, sprouted broad forearms and sharp shoulders, and developed a 120 mph serve beside which her own would forever look feeble. But when she envisioned its face, her taskmaster had Willy's eyes.
For the next week she saw Eric only evenings, attending to line sprints, weights, and ground stroke drills during the day. Though Max had commandeered her jump rope, Willy borrowed and knotted one of Eric's, careful to confirm that Max was occupied before tiptoeing to the rec room, shoving a desk against the door, and playing the radio to cover the clicking sound on the floor. Though she tried to keep Eric and Max apart, when they ate in the cafeteria the two men's mutual presence was unavoidable. Granted, she was too familiar with Max; she made compulsive private jokes while her husband shoveled his meal in silence. Maybe she even flirted a little, which was naughty, or worse than naughty. But Willy could no more conceal her intimacy with her coach from Eric than she could hide her remoteness with her husband from Max. Max was so much easier to talk to.
Every night she and Eric made love. He was hungry, and vowed he'd been celibate on the tour. Willy patently believed him. An absolutist, Eric married = Eric faithful. Though even rote fidelity beat betrayal, she'd have preferred an admission that he'd wrestled the odd demon on her account.
Willy still found her husband attractive; after so much tennis, his body was tight, neat, and deliciously stringy. But she was so tired, she felt so heavy, that feeling below the waist took effort. She had to remind herself to become aroused. And no matter how deeply he pressed on the narrow single bed, his presence felt indefinite, delayed, sealed up; it was like fucking by mail. His whisper in her ear sibilated, its tones thinning as if filtered through a telephone line, and the call of her name echoed plaintively as if shouted down a canyon from a mile away. Drifting to sleep, she wondered what they might do to get closer, then remembered that most couples converged by having sex and they had done that.
A gingerliness to his touch was new, and when they bent to sleep like a 22 he would ask whether her knee was comfortable; his fingers were feathery. She almost asked him,
Be a little rough with me
, but they'd been apart so long that she didn't want him to think that in the interim she'd got into anything kinky.
After five days he proposed, why not hit a few with her own husband?
"I supposed you wouldn't want to rally with me anymore," she shrugged. "You've cracked the top 200. I've slid to the fives. You're out of my league."
Eric insisted, but in practice he rallied as he stroked her in bed. He was too lenient and helpful. Far from trying to defeat her, he let her good shots go, nodding from his baseline with a whistle. The copious compliments actually hurt her feelings. That she could no longer excite his rivalry was the ultimate insult.
"Can you even remember the days," she remarked dryly when they were done, "that I used to give
you
advice?"