WILLY ALMOST SKIPPED BREAKFAST, but avoidance was delay. Which dictated Max’s table; to sit anywhere else would be more awkward yet. Ordinarily a hearty eater, Max was propped before a lone cup, his face drained and inexpressive. Summer camp was in full swing; the rowdy shriek and tussle of kids jangled Willy’s nerves. A good proportion of this year’s intake were overweight. Their parents couldn’t have hoped that the little porkers would play Wimbledon so much as that on their return home there would simply be less of them. Sweetspot-turned-fat-farm no doubt depressed its proprietor, or would have depressed him on mornings he was aware that he had students.
Willy nodded and assumed a seat opposite, stirring her cup and blowing on the coffee. Max sat immobile, at rest. He seemed relaxed. If the night before he was “beyond ambition,” this morning he was beyond something else.
“You expect,” he introduced in a craggy monotone, “to do some line sprints, a few weights, and then of course I’ll spend a couple of hours with you on court.”
“Unless you have other—”
“But that’s what you expect.”
The coffee tasted awful. “It is what we usually…”
Willy could meet his eyes only in sorties, but Max stared at her squarely. “After sliding so far, your gall remains intact. Maybe that hollow of yours isn’t all that cavernous. Your ego is remarkably robust. I wish I could say the same for mine.”
Willy bowed her head, her stomach acid. The gray sludge in her cup looked like liquid dread.
“Since we do have a business relationship,” he continued, “might you join me in my office? Before you avail yourself of my facilities? Consider yourself as having an appointment.”
In his office, Max was bulwarked behind his desk, surrounded by copies of dunning letters rich with five-figure sums. This was the Max Upchurch whose implacable edifice met the parents of fat children, parents who would pay through the nose for every ounce he sweated off their kids. This was the Max Upchurch who had no intention of engraving his All England trophy with any other name than Maximilian E. Upchurch.
“Our contract,” he began, clasping his hands, “bound me to cover your expenses in exchange for a cut of your earnings the first five years of your pro career. You turned pro at twenty-one. You’re twenty-seven. Our contract,” he paused, “has expired.”
“What do you want to do about it?” She didn’t take a chair.
“I originally had in mind a somewhat different arrangement, but last night you apprised me that my alternative proposal was not suitable.” He said syewtable, like a Brit.
“I told you years ago that it wasn’t syewtable.”
“I can take a long time to get the message.”
“But you’ve got the message now.”
“Entirely,” he said, tracing a light red scratch on his left arm. “So maybe we should proceed on a more à la carte basis. You are welcome to rent a dorm room on the premises for $700 per month, or $1000 with board. Court time is $15 per hour—”
“Spare me—”
“My own time,” he overrode, “is $100 per hour, and that is a discount.”
“I’m bowled over by the break.” A light, cold sweat had broken out over Willy’s forehead.
“A C-note would not be nearly enough compensation, I assure you.”
“Is all this because I wouldn’t fuck you last night? Revenge?”
“I’d call it justice,” said Max, mock-aggrieved. “Your ranking doesn’t merit a renewal of our arrangement. My investors would be rightly irate. I couldn’t even argue that you were a hard-luck case; your husband is well paid. For this year I can write you off as a tax deduction … You’re smiling?”
“That I’m a write-off. Literally.”
“My business is one of calculated risks.”
“And you’ve been calculating.”
“You haven’t been.”
“So I should have kept my shirt off? To keep you on board.”
“Might have worked for a while, too,” Max conceded. “But integrity is expensive. Why most people give it a miss.”
“What about yours?”
“What have I done to be ashamed of? I carried you for over a year I didn’t have to. And there’s an injury clause in your contract. After your ligaments tore, I could’ve cut my losses. In fact, if I’d documented that you were done for, your insurance would’ve paid me a lump sum of fifty thou.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’m a nice guy?” Max supposed.
“You don’t sound as if you believe that.”
“I’ve felt nicer. Ask Angela: when it comes to subdividing property, I’m merciless.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“You’re the property. And uncharacteristically, I cede all claims. Please don’t imagine that I’m kicking you out. I’m treating you the way I would any other player at your ranking, at your age, with your prospects. Isn’t that what you wanted? And Eric can afford to buy you a bit of coaching, rent your room. Husbands have been financing their wives’ costly, eccentric hobbies for hundreds of years.”
Blinded for an instant by the same blazing fury that her husband could ignite, Willy had to consider if maybe she loved Max, a little, after all.
“We’ve worked together for a decade,” said Willy, the good loser. “Are you taking everything back?”
“You do have one of my rackets.”
Willy nodded at the files on his desk. “You get to keep your racket. No, I meant all those Good shot’s. The Well done, Will’s and You’ve got what it takes, Will’s. Did you really mean Nice tits?”
Max winced, as if pricked by his own brass tacks. “When I came across you in Nevada you had more raw talent than any client I’d taken on in five years.” The compliment seemed to tax him; he dropped back in his chair.
“So what went wrong?”
“Talent’s only the half of it, Will. You know that.”
“You used to say I had the other half.”
“Your heart was once in the right place.” His eyes scrunched. “It shifted.”
“My decline is all Eric’s fault?”
“It could be partly my fault,” Max allowed, and taking some responsibility for her downfall appeared to cheer him. “I may have undermined you—”
“Yes. You did.”
“Ironic, isn’t it? Pretty girls throw themselves at me all day long. You might have been flattered.”
“If I were Marcella. But I’ve never made a very good girl.”
“And of course there’s one more thing. Which may reduce psychologizing to empty gab.” His gaze indicted her. “The Tanqueray.”
“It healed,” she jumped in.
“Not quite, Will. You might put one over on Eric. But how could you hide it from me? Look at the way you’re standing.”
Willy glanced down at her bent right knee. The majority of her weight rested on her left foot.
“You favor the left all the time,” Max noted. “And there’s a diffidence … You don’t trust it, and maybe you shouldn’t. Because it hurts, doesn’t it? Sometimes all day, or when it rains. During practice you grimace twenty times in an hour. Your admirable stoicism amounts to a hill of beans.”
“I did my exercises,” Willy insisted. Standing symmetrically, she blinked, hard.
“And how. You might have recuperated properly if it weren’t for all that mindless rope-skipping.” He added bitterly, “Eric’s routine.”
“So I’m damaged goods?”
“Tennis players arc a commodity. Even good ones are a dime a dozen. It’s not enough to manage a brisk walk without collapsing.” Max spread his hands. “You have to be perfect.”
“This is my parting gift? An excuse?”
“You need one.”
Only while clearing out her dorm room did Willy realize that for the first time in years Max had used her husband’s real name.
When she opened the door Eric jumped, guiltily, as if she’d caught him over a girlie magazine with his pants down, though he was only wrapping a new racket with a rubber grip.
“You’re back early,” he observed, his face flushed.
“Since we both know I only go to Westbrook to fuck my coach, I thought I’d skip the pretense of practicing my strokes.”
“That’s not funny,” said Eric mutedly. He rushed to help her unload, but didn’t remark on the fact that she’d returned with twice as much luggage, most of it in plastic bags. His motions were jerky, and he didn’t look her in the eye. “Hungry? I got some—”
“No.” There was a starkness to this day that Willy intended to preserve. She didn’t want props.
“Say,” Eric raised, wiping his hands on his shorts as if something wouldn’t rub off. “I got some good news.”
“How unusual,” said Willy.
“For both of us. I got an offer that I couldn’t refuse.”
“You’re not in the habit of refusing offers anyway.”
“I, uh, I got a coach.”
Willy stood in the middle of their living room, like a guest whom no one had invited to sit down. The apartment looked bedraggled. She didn’t care; with the drape of sponsorship sports clothes and conspiracy of alien rackets, this didn’t feel like her own place any longer. It was harrowing, to yearn to go home when you were already there. “Oh?”
Eric collected the crimped strip of his racket’s original grip. Skirting around his wife to the trash can, he gave her wide berth, like a squash player midpoint avoiding the arc of his opponent’s swing. “It’s only six weeks to the Open. I’ve one warm-up scheduled, the Pilot Pen in August. Gary’s been pressuring me for months, and maybe it’s time I stop being so pig-headed, like, this is the big time, a Slam… Maybe I don’t know everything, and if I’m going to get some, ah, help, now’s the time.”
“I fail to perceive why this turn of events is good news for me.”
“Well.” Eric blushed. His laundry had been sent back damp; he began folding garish sports shirts drying on chairs. “It’s, you know… Max.”
Willy remained standing in the same spot. She was practicing distributing her weight evenly between both legs. Straight and bearing a full fifty-two pounds, the knee began to ache. A ligament with which she’d grown intimate was tightening, slowly, like a violin string tuned gradually from D to E.
“This way,” Eric went on hurriedly, “you and I can head up to Connecticut together. Spend more time—”
“You couldn’t find,” she said evenly, “any other coach?”
“Willy, you’ve said yourself that Max Upchurch is the best there is in this part of the country. Why should I opt for less? And what better recommendation than yours?” Though Eric could not have acquired his new confederate long before, the speech sounded rehearsed. “Max said he could have me up to Sweetspot, then leave the summer kids to his pros and accompany me to the Pilot Pen. I thought, if you had nothing else on, you could come along.”
“Nothing else on. You mean, get chucked from the qualifiers of another satellite.”
“You could give me pointers, right? Tell me what I’m doing wrong?”
“I think you know what you’re doing wrong.” Her tone was ministerial.
Eric avoided looking at his wife. “Max wants to do some intensive, really hands-on work with my game.”
“As opposed to getting his ‘hands on’ me. And you’ll escort me to Sweetspot. As a chaperone.”
Eric’s folding was usually precise, but the roll collar on top of his stack was off center. “Willy, this decision is totally impersonal.”
“According to you everything is impersonal. Your rise in the ranks, my fall. You helplessly succumb to your own monstrous talent; I’m blighted by an abstract bad luck. I’m beginning to wonder if we have a relationship at all.”
“Look, I need a coach, and Max is the obvious choice. His name popped up constantly when I asked other players for suggestions. And he came to me.”
“So he phoned you this morning. And nothing he said suggested that I might take this personally?”
Eric concentrated on bunching his socks. “Why can’t we share a coach? We share everything else.”
“We share nothing, Eric. For the last two years, I doubt there’s been a single minute of the day when you and I have felt the same way.”
“That’s not true. I also feel frustrated, angry, powerless—”
“On my behalf.” Willy picked Eric’s freshly gripped racket off the Plexiglas table, inspecting the label. A Wilson. So he got the new sponsorship after all. Not that he’d mentioned it. That would be indecorous. “Tell me,” she requested calmly. “Are you to pay him one hundred an hour? Discount rates, of course.”
“No, like with you—a percentage. He asked me my current gross, and said he’d settle for ten percent. If he makes any difference at all, it’ll be worth it.”
“He makes a difference,” said Willy, creaking the strings of the sweet spot in line. “To me, at least. You know, you really are amazing, Underwood. You’ve assumed half a dozen of my signature strokes, and refined them. Moved into my apartment, and installed all your fluffy free clothes. Ingratiated yourself with my family—as a real tennis player they can believe in, not one of their own sorry-ass kids. Sometimes it even seems as if you’ve been downloading my computer points into your file. And now you’ve helped yourself to my coach. From the sound of your amicable arrangements, I don’t see why you and Max don’t get married. Because I’ve been swapped for a newer model. Like your racket.” She looked up wonderingly from the strings. “You sort of are me, aren’t you?”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“The new, improved version.” She hefted the Wilson, patting the frame on her palm. “Willy Novinsky without all those icky, human flaws. No holes in your molars. With a proper rah-rah Daddy, not some dour, unpublished Montclair nothing. Best of all, a boy.”
Eric shoved his clothes aside on the dining table; he’d nothing left to fold. “You’re going off the deep end again—”
“That was the problem with the old version. Obsolete Willy had feelings. Little moments of hesitation, specks of doubt as to whether she was just the greatest fucking thing that ever happened to the game of tennis. And the moods—the disreputable behavior—we’ve had complaints! So our updated model is a gentleman.”
Eric advanced with his hand out. “Calm down.”
“He never loses, which doesn’t stop him from being an expert on how to go down in style. Max—funny how suddenly you two are on a first-name basis; what ever happened to ‘Upchuck’? Max himself said this morning that a tennis player has to be ‘perfect.’ He’s found his archetype in one phone call.”
Eric grabbed for the Wilson, and she whirled to the dining table.
“No temper,” she said, sweeping his pile of neatly folded shirts to the floor. “Always concerned for the welfare of the less fortunate; I’m sure you’ll make many a charitable donation as a millionaire. And good at everything! Scrabble, German, mathematics—as if you had the microchips installed.”
The brandished racket smashed the glass over the New Jersey Classic poster, and shards tinkled to the floor.
“Willy, get a grip,” Eric growled.
“Don’t worry,” Willy eluded her husband, chucking couch pillows in his wake, “Mrs. Eric Oberdorf can clean all this up. She can tidy,” she kicked his dozen sycophants across the floor, “all your sports equipment—”
“Get a hold of yourself!”
“—and bake cookies!” This time she aimed for the MOMA print on purpose, and its glass shattered.
“Give me that!” Picking his way through the shard-strewn rackets, Eric tripped over his jump ropes.
“You’re not my husband,” Willy lifted the racket overhead, “you’re my replacement!”
Willy did not remember heaving the Wilson downward. Like flow in good tennis, the stroke expressed an absolute confluence of intention and execution. Because if she’d thought about it, she wouldn’t have done it.
Eric cupped his right eye. He was kneeling amid the scattered rackets with his head bowed. For a long moment he did nothing but breathe; Willy did nothing but stare; until between his fingers red began to seep, drizzling down his hand. Pat... pat… Blood dropped onto a vinyl racket cover like the first few drops of rain on the court when the sky has turned black and though you keep hitting, you know the game is over.
“Eric!” Willy stooped and fretted over his damp, thinning hair. “What did I do? Oh, God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—Let me see!” She pried weakly at his fingers, which remained tightly clamped. His body was trembling and hunched into a fetal ball. For a minute, perhaps two, he wouldn’t speak or remove his hand from the wound, and she knew that for those minutes he was entering the life in which his own wife had blinded his left eye.
When at last Eric edged his fingers away, blood was everywhere and it was impossible to see the scale of the damage. Willy ran to moisten a towel, and returned to dab gingerly at the perimeters of his socket and help him to the sofa, through murmurous remorse. “Honey, can you see? Tell me please, can you see?”
He took a deep breath, and underneath the coagulating ooze an eyelid fluttered. The breath held, and held, then rushed out. “It’s blurred—but yes—I think so.”
“Shut your right eye. How many fingers?”
He took the towel and wiped the left eye. “Six?”
“No, two, Eric—!”
“I was joking.”
The four-hour wait in St. Luke’s emergency room allowed Willy so much opportunity to embellish her apology that Eric asked her quietly to give it a rest. Willy forced herself to examine the wound, a deep laceration over an inch long, slicing through Eric’s wild eyebrow. Later when the doctor inquired what had happened, Willy was about to bare all. Eric interceded that he had stumbled into the corner of an open kitchen cabinet.
Remembering how her husband had held her hand when she fell in the Tanqueray, Willy slipped her palm into Eric’s as the doctor squirted Novocain across his brow, the excess anesthetic drizzling down his face like the tears he hadn’t shed. She wished he’d squeeze hard, as she had crushed his fingers on the New Haven court, but Eric’s hand was curled, lax, and dry. He kept his eyes closed while the doctor assessed eight stitches, warning his patient, “Hope you’re not too vain. This is going to scar.” She was about to quip that Eric was the vainest man alive, just not about his face, then swallowed the remark. Ribbing didn’t seem appropriate.
Willy insisted on taking a taxi home, though it was only three blocks. By the time they shuffled in the door the wound had swollen, reducing his eye to a slit. The socket was purpling. Willy had got her wish: she’d wanted to console her husband, and his life was so charmed that to do so she’d had to bash his head in.
The apartment was a shambles. Glass, rackets, and tennis shirts littered the floor. Hastily, Willy gathered the couch pillows and plumped them on the sofa. The sopping red towel was still wadded on the cushion where they’d abandoned it for a fresh one. Its crimson had soaked the upholstery. Next to this sticky puddle and its livid adjacent handprints, the rusty drips on the piping from Willy’s kitchen cut the year before looked trifling. She smoothed a fresh sheet on the sofa and led Eric to lay down. Though he said he could use one, when she fixed him a brandy he slumped stuporously before the snifter and left the cognac untouched.
Willy rushed to stack his rackets lovingly in the corner, collected and refolded his clothes, and had begun clinking shards into the trash can when Eric spoke at last. “I don’t think you’re in the right mood to do that now.”
Eric was right. Her careless handling of the jagged edges tempted a competing injury. Obvious, and classless. Willy used a broom.
“I might have put your eye out,” she mumbled, sweeping.
“Yes.”
“That would have ruined your depth perception. Before your first Grand Slam.”
“Yes,” Eric repeated flatly.
“You’d never have forgiven me.”
“You’d be surprised what I could forgive. But that’s not a limit you want to test.”
“Since I could have blinded your eye, I might as well have.”
“Even the law recognizes the difference between an act and an attempt.”
She held the broom handle forward like a microphone. “Do you think I tried to put your eye out on purpose?”
“Please don’t get worked up again,” Eric appealed, dropping his head back. In the lamplight, the gauze glared. “That’s not a question worth asking.”
“I’ve become… dangerous. You’re not safe with me in the same room.”
“Typically, you would blow this out of proportion. Excoriate yourself enough and you’ll manage to turn things around so that I feel sorry for you. Supposedly you don’t want my sympathy, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
“I don’t deserve sympathy. I’m a witch.”
“Try deriving a smaller lesson and you have a better chance of learning it.” He spoke with no inflection. “Like that you’re so keen for expressing your emotions, but that there is a place for self-control. Or that you may be a woman, but a powerful one who can do a lot of damage if you’re not careful. I’m not an icon, Willy, I’m an ordinary man, and you can hurt me very badly.”
“If you were a wife, you’d be in a battered women’s shelter by now. You’d be surrounded by counselors convincing you to press charges, to demand a restraining order. In the courts, if you murdered me in my sleep you could get off with probation.”
“If you don’t stop turning a minor incident into a Greek tragedy, I will hit you and then we’ll be even. Is that what you want?”
Willy dumped another load of glass from the dustpan and looked up. “Wouldn’t you like to?” She located the offending Wilson and held it grip-first toward the couch. “Be my guest.”
To her surprise he grabbed it, and wrenched her to his side. Curling Willy under his arm, Eric chucked the racket to the floor. “Do me a real favor,” he murmured. “My head is pounding. I’m shaky. I’m exhausted. Get me three aspirin, and come to bed.”
As they shambled to the bedroom, for fifteen feet they enjoyed a picturebook marriage: it was hard to say who was leaning on whom. Willy fetched Eric his aspirin, brushed her teeth, and paused at the sink. Whenever they were both home she inserted her diaphragm before going to bed, to avoid having to get up and interrupt matters should the mood strike them. The optimistic habit persisted, if the mood had waned. But tonight, shrinking from the implicit self-protection, from the effrontery of expecting that this of all nights he would want to make love, she left the contraceptive in its case.
Yet when Willy slunk under the sheet Eric slipped his hand into her hair and pressed her temple to his heart. For whole minutes he held her head against his breast, close and motionless, his chest barely rising from the slow, shallow breath of fear—much the way he’d cupped his palm against the eye that afternoon, as if he were frightened of another kind of blindness, which might also entail a darkness on a whole side of his life. At last, satisfied somehow, able to see into at least the next few minutes, Eric released the pressure on her crown, trailed his fingers to her back, and exhaled deeply. He reached for her hand, but this time didn’t try to bend it backward, commend her resistance, match his strength to hers. If there was any contest, it was over which of them felt weaker or less interested in a contest of any description.
Softly lacing her fingers, Eric traced tiny circles on her knuckles. Willy propped on an elbow and felt the urge to blurt again that she was sorry, but he’d had enough of that. “I…” she mumbled, and the next words caught, “love you.” A chill crawled the nape of Willy’s neck, her eyes shot hot. Still trembling slightly from his trauma, Eric raised from the pillow to kiss her and so seal her sense that this most rudimentary of marital avowals was what he far preferred to more regret. There had been so many apologies, and they had healed nothing. Willy’s eyes brimmed and sluiced over both cheeks, washing her clean as the flood of tears shed in this bed on her own account had never done. She shuddered, and sank. The few inches to Eric’s shoulder felt like a long, vertiginous drop.
Landing, her body relaxed—relaxed and gave way as it hadn’t in years, so that only now did Willy realize that she’d been holding herself stiff, that she’d been fighting, even in her sleep tugging against something but never free. But all of Willy’s struggling had only pulled their knot of problems tighter. As the tension left her limbs, her legs entwined loosely with Eric’s like snarled shoelaces that were finally coming undone.
Eric placed two fingers in a Cub Scout salute on Willy’s waist, right where her hips, though narrow, still flared a little. He loved that tender, supple curve, duplicated nowhere on his own body, itself drafted in hard right angles. The two-fingered salute to her distinction was an old signal, and with it his prick rose, traced an arc over his thigh, and semicircled of its own accord to nestle against her ribs.
“Honey,” Willy chastised him, “you’re so tired. And you’re hurt—”
“Sh-sh,” he hushed, stroking the curve. “I want to.” He meant that he was tired, yes—other nights Eric had hefted her full weight overhead with those steely cabled arms, but this evening all his muscles had retreated, and barring the single rousing at his groin his body was limp. And that he was hurt, certainly—but that the doctor’s ministrations in St. Luke’s had managed only the feeblest repair. The laceration over Eric’s eye had also opened a gash between them, and Eric would suture this wound with a blunter but more powerful needle.
Willy stilled her husband, and plumped his pillow beside each ear so that his head lay steady. Resting a hand on his clavicle to emphasize that he mustn’t do any of the work, Willy straddled his hips and eased down onto the instrument of their mending. She couldn’t help but remember watching the doctor’s needle puncture Eric’s brow, in and out, in and out, and for a moment Willy felt a little sick but that passed. She and her husband had done this so many times, but tonight Eric seemed to be piercing a place that had resisted his penetration for at least the last two years. She wondered briefly where he’d been jabbing all those other times and what it had felt like for him, maybe like sewing on a perforated button, stabbing blindly through the material from underneath, and hitting hard, unyielding plastic when you miss the hole.
He’d found it, that tiny point of entry, where there was no obstruction and no terminus, so that tonight he seemed to slide up and through her torso until she could feel him as a lump in her throat. Willy gazed down at Eric’s face to find it puffy, bruised, and improbably gracious.
“It’s all right,” he said quietly. Though he was already saying as much without words, he didn’t want to be misunderstood. “You worked yourself into a state, that’s all. I know you wouldn’t do it again. I love you, Wilhelm. You’d have to whack me a hell of a lot harder to change that.”
“Thank you,” Willy whispered, which she’d been taught as a child was the best, simplest response when someone does something nice for you, better than abashedly stuttering, You’re too kind, you needn’t have. Real forgiveness was always an option, not a requirement, and she wondered if there was ever such a thing as being too kind.
Studying the bandage over his eye in the moonlight, its gauze crosshatching red from seepage, Willy was mystified how she could ever have confused the only bona fide ally she possessed in all the world with one more enemy. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough genuine enemies out there already: her sister, who wanted her ordinary; her coach, who wanted her punished for the very same loyalty that he revered when she applied it to tennis; all those official opponents on the circuit, who wanted her beaten and brought to her knees. For once she faced not another catty singles aspirant out for Willy’s prize money but her partner and champion: a tall but not especially large man, with his own troubles, as isolated as Willy herself, as easily assailed, as readily floored by a single blow as she had been felled by one tumble in New Haven. Eric, too, was desperate for an island of respite in a rising tide of hostile adversaries, as Willy was for “safe harbor” in Edsel’s office. So Eric Oberdorf was normal-sized after all, and alone in league with her against the vast, monolithic Them whom Eric had identified at their first dinner in Flor De Mayo: a morass of humanity who if they did not wish her ill at least, maybe worse, were indifferent to Willy Novinsky’s fate altogether. Alas, this accurate glimpse of her spouse was rare and bound to be temporary, but she tried to capture the moment all the same. As she came, Willy felt a mesh drop from between them, and a fresh, clear, unimpeded expanse of bright, floodlit air rush forward once the curtain fell. If four years ago Eric had introduced her to tennis without the ball, tonight they finally invented tennis without the net.