BY THE NEXT MORNING Eric’s face had ballooned, his eye mooned underneath with a mulberry crescent. Its lid was fat. When they eased off the bandage to change the gauze, it stuck. The gash had oozed during the night; peripheral blood and fluid had solidified with the main scab. Leery of picking at the wound, Eric left the extra gunk, which made the cut look even worse than it was.
Willy might as well have hit herself on the head. In fact, better that she had. However Eric’s injury throbbed, no dull ache could have approached the sharp accusatory stab of looking up at that violet mess and remembering it was all her fault. Willy alternated between avoiding his face, and eating it with her eyes like crow.
Eric exacted one compensation: Max Upchurch. Eric called to accept her former coach’s terms within her earshot, and Willy said nothing.
In voluntary penance, she insisted on coming along to that evening’s dinner with her in-laws, which Eric was reluctant to reschedule. Though he was tight-lipped, maybe the sorrowing attentions of his mother appealed to him. Willy’s tenderness was tainted with guilt, and he shied from her hand as if it weren’t quite clean.
“Come with me on one condition,” he allowed. “That I hit my head on a kitchen cabinet.”
Willy was reminded of how many women in her mother’s generation had run into doors.
Willy had avoided the Oberdorfs for nearly a year. She hadn’t the energy for another bicker over whether women players should earn the same prize money as men or “didn’t give the same bang for the buck,” or to riposte Axel’s digs at her ranking. And Axe was already marketing Eric’s prowess when his son was ranked 972; the ballyhoo with Eric on the cusp of the U.S. Open boggled the mind.
Alma’s shock on opening the door prompted Eric to explain before he’d said hello. “Gracious,” the regal, willowy woman exclaimed, touching her daughter-in-law’s elbow. “I’ve never got him to walk into my kitchen.”
Alma hustled Eric into the ebony-trimmed bathroom, sitting him on the alabaster toilet lid while she re-dressed the cut, dabbing it with orange Mercurochrome. The neon antiseptic was lambent with childhood. Though he pretended impatience, Eric visibly basked in his mother’s caresses. So all the while Willy had been yearning to take care of her husband, he had likewise yearned to be taken care of.
“I hear you’ve been beating up on my son again!” Axel grappled Willy playfully and ushered her to the living room. Cheeks tingling, she fumbled unsuccessfully for a quick retort.
When Eric joined them Axel played doctor. Building herself a chair with the Velcro-edged blocks while Eric furnished his “kitchen cabinet” run-in with lush detail, Willy detected the estrangement that any lie, however small, instantly inserts between people.
“Ready for the Open, then, kid?” Axe asked rhetorically. “Said you might get a coach. Any movement there?”
“I got a coach,” Eric said hurriedly. In the last two years he’d run out of neutral subjects. “And how’s tricks at Mt. Sinai?”
Surprisingly, that was it. Now that Eric really was a star, Axel’s praise, no longer needed, was subdued; he segued agreeably to the rise in prostate cancer. Though Eric had treated it to many a rolled eye, he must have missed his father’s outsized veneration. It wasn’t true, then, that everyone loved a winner. Very few people did. Since they didn’t care for losers either, Willy surmised that on the whole they were awfully hard to please. Maybe her sister’s determined mediocrity reflected Gert’s drive to be liked.
At dinner, they were a foursome. In contrast to the rambunctious, contentious tussle Willy had encountered in 1992, the polite quiet around the huge teak table was depressing, a portent of retirement.
“So how’s Steven?” asked Eric.
“Got him working on Bob Dole’s campaign,” said Axel, puffing his chest. “Learning the nitty-gritty of elections. Come in useful when he runs for office himself.”
“How likely is that now?” asked Alma quietly.
“Boy’s just gotta find his feet again.”
His mother turned to Eric and explained, “Steven is stuffing envelopes. He finds it soothing.”
“Is he still in that studio on Avenue C?”
“We have been informed by his psychiatrist,” Axel intruded sourly, “that Steven’s capacity to open his own can of Chef Boyardee is something to be proud of.”
At a distance, Willy had followed the fortunes of Eric’s brothers with as much fascination as their father had dismay. To Axel’s indignation Steven had failed to get into Yale or Harvard; the boy was left with no illusion that Dartmouth was just as good. Steven took the most demanding courses in the catalog, and on holidays was forever holed up in his room to study. Yet spectacular effort had not translated into spectacular marks. Though the boy was stupendous at memorizing facts, his negligible powers of original analysis earned him steady C’s.
At the end of Steven’s sophomore year something had happened. Shying from the word breakdown, Axel described his second-born as “taking some time out in the real world.” But from the sound of the family’s evasions, Steven’s world had become all too real. More than once Alma had bolted from dinner in tears.
Eric inquired, “He still working for the Development Office at Columbia?”
“The med school let him go,” said Axe glumly. “Despite my threats to pull my alum-fund check. Kid kept calling in sick. Christ, all he had to do was answer the fucking phone.”
“Sometimes answering a telephone can be quite terrifying,” said Alma, studying her smoked trout but eating none of it.
“Since when? Alma, you rock-a-bye that boy like a basket case, he’s going to stay a basket case!”
“What’s Mark up to?” Eric intervened. The Oberdorfs, like Eric and Willy, were short on neutral subjects.
“Summer school,” Axe growled, disgust gathering like a cloud. “He wanted to gallivant around Europe, to collect material for his future oeuvre of films.” Axel sneered. “On my meal ticket, of course. But I wasn’t about to be hoodwinked a second time. His freshman year I said, You have your grades mailed here, buddy, and don’t expect to intercept the envelopes the way you snagged the ones from Horace Mann. What do I get sent? Both semesters, three incompletes each! I told him, You know Eric never took a single incomplete at Princeton, and you’re at NYU!”
Eric interrupted, “NYU’s no tiptoe through the tulips, Dad.”
“Wants to be a hotshot film director,” Axel went on unimpeded. “Which supposedly gives him an excuse to watch Wagon Train and Gidget Grows Up ’til 5 A.M. Then has the nerve to point to Eric here and say, Look at my older brother, he’s flying high on talent. I try to tell Mark, Eric practices three hours a day, jumps rope, weights, why I don’t even know what-all. But he earns his money, he earns those trophies—”
“Bet that went down like a lead balloon,” Willy murmured.
“Speaking of which, son,” Axel brightened, “thought I might give Steven a ticket to your first round to cheer him up. Get him a seat in the player’s box?”
“Maybe,” Eric mumbled. “I’m just not sure watching me play the U.S. Open is the best therapy for Steven now, Dad.”
Eric looked haggard, beyond the bruising around his bandage. He had to ask his father what the boys were up to because none of his brothers ever gave him a call. He must have been wondering if trophies came with prize money as compensation for what they did to the rest of your life.
“Where did you ship Robert this year?” Eric completed the trio of updates with depleted enthusiasm.
“Outward Bound.”
“Going to make a man of him?” asked Eric ruefully.
“I hadn’t in mind nearly so large an evolutionary leap,” said Axe, shoveling salad.
The phone rang. Alma suggested they let the machine pick up, since they saw Eric so rarely. As Alma fetched the main course, the message recorded in the next room: “Dr. Oberdorf, this is John Flinders from Outward Bound. Robert was caught using drugs, and you know that calls for immediate expulsion from the program. Could you call me to discuss this? Robert was sent back from the Rockies yesterday, and is on his way home.”
No one at the table looked astonished.
“Jesus Christ,” Axel griped, “what the hell are we going to do with that kid underfoot the whole summer, Alma?”
“He won’t be underfoot, dear,” she assured him. “When he ends up in the precinct lockup, you can refuse to bail him out, just like last time.”
“Bad enough Robert got booted from Hotchkiss,” Axel fumed. “But I’m damned if he’s going to drop out of Williston at sixteen. Way it looks from here, Eric, you’ll be the only boy out of four to get a degree.”
“Steven has only two more years —”
“Yeah, but to get a diploma somebody would have to glue the kid together long enough to sign his name.”
“And whose fault is that?” said Alma, lips pressed.
“You can’t take credit for Eric without also taking the blame for an emotional cripple, a compulsive liar, and a juvenile delinquent,” she returned with controlled anger.
“Eric takes credit for Eric! Though you have to admit, I must have done something right…”
Having eaten little of Alma’s lovely meal, the party retired to the living room, where the modular furniture was breaking down. The bright primary-school colors of the cubes and cylinders had grown dingy, their Velcro tired, so one had always to be pressing the geometric shapes together again. Once rearranged by the children daily into new and amusing confabulations, these constructions hadn’t changed since Willy was last here. Back then there’d been talk of replacing the avant-garde toys with proper furniture. That the Oberdorfs had not done so suggested the same dispirited We really should of her own parents and their terminally brown house.
Axe gestured to his usual throne, insisting Willy take the chair. Willy assumed the focal hot seat uneasily. Here it came. Dessert.
“Eric tells me you’re climbing the wrong direction on that ladder. What’sa problem?” Axe squared his shoulders on the couch construction, his chin raised like that of a sparring partner, tempting the old one-two.
“With a ranking of 961, I’m running out of rungs.” Rather than keep her arms close to her chest, Willy rested them on either side and left her body open. Any decent pugilist would have been appalled. “I have one more satellite, while Eric plays the Pilot Pen. If that goes as smashingly as usual, by the end of August it will have been a whole year since I made so much as the third round of any tournament at all.”
“Sounds pretty discouraging.”
“As lame as you can get,” Willy rejoined. Her father-in-law looked consternated. Not only would she not put her dukes up, but she was getting in the odd biff on herself. “In that case I will no longer be a ranked player.” Willy’s smile was inviting. “Poof, I disappear.”
“Got your work cut out for you, then,” said Axe gruffly.
Willy picked at a callous on her palm, digging it off though it was vital to her forehand. “Maybe not.”
“What’s this, you’re gonna lay down and give up? I don’t believe what I’m hearing here.” He seemed personally aggrieved, as if Willy were depriving him of sport.
“There is a point at which tennis gives up on me.”
“But look at Seles.” Axe stabbed his finger. “Out of the game for two years, comes back sharing the number-one spot with Steffi, takes no prisoners!”
“No one is saving my ranking for me while I collect my thoughts. And I’m twenty-seven. In tennis terms, a crone. As you pointed out yourself, I was kaput by the time we met. Had I listened, you’d have saved me a great deal of trouble.”
“Hell,” Axe grumbled. “You look in pretty good shape to me.”
“On the contrary, I’m shattered,” she volunteered pleasantly. “Tennis isn’t so different from boxing—it’s the brain that takes the biggest beating.”
“Come now, it can’t be as bad as all that!” Axel appealed to Eric with a look, but his first-born’s eyes were shut. Eric had been tossing it-can’t-be-that-bad for two years, and obviously welcomed a relief pitcher.
“I’ve long belonged to the never-say-die school,” said Willy, “except there’s nothing splendid about the denial when you’re bending over a corpse. So I’ve considered appealing to Eric’s sponsors to sell sporting goods. I might try for an administrative job with the WTA. Or coach the handicapped for the Arthur Ashe Foundation. Any other suggestions?” To her own ears, her voice lifted with a disconnected, absent quality. Perhaps there was an ultra-reasonableness, a runaway sanity synonymous with losing your mind.
“Get back to it, of course,” Axe recommended brusquely. “Thought you wanted to be a tennis star.”
“I did. More than anything. Too bad for me.” Willy shot him an airy smile, and her father-in-law drew back in horror.
“The problem is,” she proceeded mellifluously, “I’m not qualified for squat. All I can do is play tennis. I’d join Eric’s entourage, except it turns out I make as lousy a fan as I do a competitor.”
Willy clasped her hands. For the moment, she was visited by a freestanding pragmatism, a clarity that came from appraising herself with the same casual brutality that she employed in perceiving other people every day. While the sensation was restful, her body felt heavier than usual and more dense, sinking into the furry cubes. Mustering the energy to go to the bathroom was inconceivable.
“Have you thought about having a family?” asked Alma.
“Nope,” said Willy curtly.
“But I was given to understand when you two got married that my son had found a partner in more than one sense,” Axe carped. To Willy’s surprise, he seemed anxious to efface the image of his daughter-in-law as a harried matron with a brood. “Eric said when he first brought you over here that you beat the daylights out of him.”
“Oh, that didn’t last. He crushed me on our first anniversary. As he might have done from day one, but your son has a kind streak. Now I think back on it, his throwing all those games was incredibly sweet.”
“I used to think I was gifted, until he came along.” Willy nodded at her husband fondly. “Eric taught me what real talent was about. Effortlessness, for one thing. But most of all, he has the mental equipment: resilience, tenacity, and if you don’t mind my saying so, arrogance. He disdains other players, so they don’t intimidate him. Eric’s a natural champion. Me, I come from defeated stock.”
“Hold on, I saw you play three years ago,” Axel weighed in. “Maybe I was reluctant to admit it at first, but I had to agree with Eric that he’d married a real winner.”
“Yes, your son has proved terribly loyal,” said Willy wistfully. “I wish I could say the same for myself. It was his idea to lie to you, but that awful gash? I did it.”
As Alma’s pupils dilated with alarm, Eric opened his eyes at last. They were angry. Exaggerated by rings of violet discoloration, his glare looked dangerous. “You’ll have to forgive Willy,” he intervened sternly. “My injury upset her, and she’s not herself. She thinks it’s her fault for not having closed the door of the kitchen cabinet.”
“Certainly no call to blame yourself for household accidents,” Axel muttered, indicating no appetite for intervening in a dispute that produced eight stitches, as if, were Willy truly that violent, he might get hit. “Why not,” he cast about, “I don’t know, go back to basics? Thought you had some big shot coach.”
“We’ve divorced,” Willy announced.
“What?” Eric exclaimed. He knew nothing of her “appointment” in Max’s office.
“And little wonder.” Willy’s laughter pealed. “I played some swaggering Italian in Riverside Park last month? An amateur, right, a bad amateur, never played a pro match in his life? Beat me 0–6, 7–6, 6–2.”
Eric leaned forward. “Willy, it’s getting late—”
“It’s only ten o’clock.”
“All right, then, I don’t feel well, OK?”
Willy obediently collected her bag. “Say, why don’t we have a game some day?” she proposed gaily to her host. “The way I’m playing lately, you might surprise yourself.”
Just perceptibly, Eric shook his head at his father.
“No, Will,” said Axe, clapping her shoulder more gingerly than usual, as if whatever it was she’d come down with might be contagious. “You’d drill me, and an old man can live without public humiliation. Stick with the pros.”
Moving a ruthless man like Axel Oberdorf to charity was the crowning insult of Willy’s career. “When you lost in the qualifiers this week, how were most of the points lost?” Dr. Edsel prodded.
“Unforced errors.”
“Does that not suggest to you a deliberateness, even resolve? You’ve referred to ‘playing both sides of the net.’ You were once a fine athlete. Are you not playing the other side awfully well?”
“Yes, yes, I hate myself,” Willy droned, bored with self-examination.
“I don’t think so.” The contention jarred. “You have a flair for the dramatic,” Edsel explained, his errant eye ranging the room in one direction as he roved in the other; he had her covered. “Is it not much more operatic for your ranking to become wretched, nonexistent, rather than modestly inferior to your husband’s? In the grandiosity of your decline, I see signs of self-affection.”
“What’s this, the old I-enjoy-wallowing number?”
“Failure can become an ambition of its own. In its attainability lies its allure. And you have a histrionic side, Ms. Novinsky. You carry historical baggage as we all do, but nothing you’ve told me about your background suggests that you have to be losing every match you play. Your consistency betrays design.”
“Like, better to be a bum than a mediocrity?”
“Notoriety is a kind of distinction. This dramatizing of yours keeps you in the limelight. You claim to preserve a sense of proportion, but in truth you play the tragic figure to the hilt. And slyly, you make your husband feel responsible. Were you to have maintained a ranking at least in the 200’s, he’d have surpassed you, but the situation would not have appeared grossly intolerable. In truth, it would still have been intolerable to you. So to emphasize the indignity of being outflanked, you exaggerate the disparity.”
This was the longest speech Edsel had delivered for weeks. That while losing her last match Willy had felt physically peculiar—heavy, tender, cramped; her period was late—she decided to keep to herself. Edsel was so pleased with his insight that to compromise its glory would be rude.
“Sport is theater,” he expostulated. “You have cast yourself as the underachiever, the gifted athlete with a fatal flaw. Theater is a trap. I suspect you are as good an actress as you are a tennis player. The character you’re portraying is unappreciated, tortured, slighted. I’m sure your husband’s income is a frustration—it denies you the gutter, which may be why you’ve been so loath to avail yourself of his funds. You court poignancy as a proxy for acclaim.”
Willy groaned. “This sounds familiar.”
“Yes,” said Edsel, patting his hands together as if rendering himself faint applause. “Doesn’t it.”
“Admit it,” Willy charged. “You’re happy.”
Her father’s cocked head completed a crookedness; he always sat in that ragged armchair as if he were snapped in two. “I am happy,” he said, “that one of you has made a living off this tennis business, however improbably.”
Willy couldn’t sit down. The den was tiny for pacing, with its brown carpet, brown paneling, brown upholstery—oh, God, it was so fecally dour she could be sick. “But if it had to be one or the other of us, you’re pleased as punch it’s Eric. That way your own flesh and blood doesn’t challenge your beloved worldview.”
The psoriasis on her father’s face was in a shedding phase. Ashen flakes drifted to his collar, as if the friction of daily disappointment were wearing him away. “I am only ‘pleased as punch,’ Willow, that you have a husband you can be proud of.”
For years Willy had assumed that her father’s unflappability was designed to disarm; now she suspected his placidity was intended to do what it actually did: enrage. Likewise both her parents’ aggressive hear-no-evil naïveté about her marriage, about how proud she must be of Eric, amounted to sadism, a preachy moralism, a willful gullibility. Willy had come home plenty of times and sullenly reported her husband’s latest achievements, but never had they registered her tone, the seething through her teeth as if their daughter had lockjaw.
“But luckily you don’t have to be proud of me,” Willy grumbled. “You have too much invested in the conviction that it’s pathetic and delusional to hope for anything. If I made it, you’d have to question whether, if you’d been really determined and told those publishers to shove it, you might have become a writer after all. Christ, you didn’t even tell us you wrote that stack of books. I had to come across them by accident in the attic!”
“I didn’t see any reason to burden you girls with my stillborn aspirations,” he returned calmly. “But yes, a stack of books. Doesn’t that indicate some dedication? Which failed to bear fruit. It’s true I have an ‘investment,’ as you said, in believing that the meritocracy in New York publishing is imperfect, that some talent goes unrecognized. But I’ve also allowed for the possibility that I might not have what it takes.”
“So that’s supposed to keep me warm at night? ‘Oh, well, I guess I’m not good enough, just like Dad?’ Which is what I was told incessantly as a kid. Tennis is half confidence—or lack of it—and you sure did your job on that front. Now I’m collecting on your hard work in spades.”
“Recently I’d been getting the impression you were blaming your husband. Now your ranking is all my fault?” Willy thought she could detect a smile. Theories about her parents always sounded more credible out of their earshot.
“You haven’t helped,” Willy muttered uncertainly.
Her father folded his newspaper neatly into the tube he’d learned to construct as a paperboy in his childhood. It was an old, compulsive habit, for which Willy felt a pang of reluctant affection.
“Try to imagine a little girl, eight years old.” Her father held his hand out above the arm of his chair. “This high. She loves to play tennis, you take her to the park, she is uncannily good at it. But she’s just lost her baby teeth, and not that long ago you were changing her diapers. She sees some pros on TV and says that’s what she wants to be when she grows up. It’s sweet. But how seriously do you take her? Do you start throwing thousands of dollars at her pipe dream, or might that be too obvious a channeling of a parent’s own egotism?”
“You take her seriously when she starts winning junior tournaments right and left. You take her seriously when she becomes number three in New Jersey even though you won’t let her compete as nearby as Pennsylvania!”
“We had two children, Willow. I don’t think either of you grew up wanting for much, but my salary at Bloomfield was small. How would you feel if you were Gert, and your parents were sacrificing your summer camp, your trips to the shore so that your sister could play tennis all over the country? Might you be justifiably angry, and wouldn’t you grow to hate that sister?”
“Your diplomacy didn’t work. She hates me anyway.” Willy collapsed to the adjacent chair.
“Gert does think you’re a prima donna,” her father conceded. “But I can’t see how that’s my fault.”
Willy glowered.
“If I had pushed you,” her father continued gently, “tennis could have become a duty, a trial. As it was, you pushed yourself, which builds real confidence. In fact, I wonder if you haven’t pushed yourself so hard that you now resent the pressure as much as if it had come from me.”
Willy had sunk from fury to funk. She’d been in a lather on the number 66 bus, mumbling accusations so that people in adjacent seats looked askance, but now everything her father said sounded so sensible.
“Hey.” Her father patted her knee. “It’s a beautiful summer evening. It’s stuffy in here. Let’s go for a walk.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
He stood and appraised her. “I’ve never seen you so pale in this season. You usually have such a lovely tan.”
“I can’t train at Sweetspot anymore.” Willy tried to control the quaver in her voice without success. “My membership at Forest Hills was up this month, and Max didn’t renew it. I can only practice on city courts, and I lost so badly to some hacker in Riverside that I’m too embarrassed to show my face.”
“Come on,” her father coaxed softly. “You’ve never refused a walk with me on a night like this.”
Head bowed, Willy creaked out of the chair like a resident in her mother’s nursing home.
Down Walnut, a warm breeze bathed Willy’s face, shushing in oaks and maples. The barn-shaped Dutch Colonials and sturdy Queen Anne’s bulwarked the street, enduring and safe. Fireflies glinted, and with brief girlish inspiration she caught one. It so docilely submitted to capture that Willy softened and let it go.
“If it would have meant something to you, I’m sorry that I didn’t share my frustration over not becoming much of a writer.” Her father’s voice was low and lulling, like the wind in the trees. “I simply sealed that off as another life. You’re too young to understand, but most lives are made of several. I put those books behind me. It’s not as if I never think about them, and you know yourself that I regard most of what’s published as pretty piss-poor. But I’d hate to think you’ve concluded that my life is only bitter and mean as a consequence. There’s much more out there than career success.”
“Like what?” she asked sulkily.
He waved at the neighborhood as they wended onto Park Street. “A walk on a lovely summer night. Music—that Samuel Barber you used to play over and over. Spinach gnocchi at Rispoli’s, and an old Sherlock Holmes movie on the late show. Or the look on your mother’s face when I announced that we were finally going to go to Japan.” He shrugged. “And sorry to raise a prickly subject—but tennis.”
They had ambled instinctively to the public park where Willy had learned to play. The streetlight shed patchy orange on the decrepit court, like a vista only partially remembered. Its surface was cracked and crumbling. The gate, once locked after dark, was partially off its hinges and swung wide. Willy shuffled onto the macadam, toeing the rubble of backcourt. It looked like her life, in shambles.
“I still play once in a while,” said her father.
“You and I haven’t in years.”
“Well, I couldn’t hope to give you much of a game. You’ve pasted me since you were ten.”
Willy was about to add something gratuitously self-deprecating about how he might have a chance now, but decided, Enough of that. “I would love to play you. Just for fun.”
“That’s what I like to hear. For fun.”
“I shouldn’t be here, Daddy,” she admitted. Willy couldn’t recall kicking across this court in the dark before. It looked wrong, dim. She always recollected these lines incandescent with sunshine. “Today Eric was playing the quarters of the Pilot Pen. I should have gone. I couldn’t bear it.”
“You’re right, you should’ve been there. Eric deserves your support. He needs it.”
“He deserves it all right, but sure doesn’t need it.”
The Novinskys were not a gropey family, and her father’s hand on Willy’s shoulder was awkward. “You worry me, Willow. I never see you enjoy an ever-loving thing. I’m sorry if my trying, foolishly, I suppose, to protect you from getting your hopes dashed backfired, and you assumed that I didn’t have faith in your talent. I just never wanted you to think that our love for you was in any way conditional on whether you won kudos for our family. The affections of the rest of the world are conditional enough.
“But you’ve got to take some eggs out of that tennis basket. Not that you shouldn’t keep trying. But any career is full of pitfalls, good and bad luck, the sometimes malign or negligent influence of other people. If you let that side of your life be everything, you deliver to others, and to forces that have no feelings or loyalties at all, the power to defeat you utterly. Profession, it’s just a game. In your case, a literal game. But the best things in life aren’t only free, you can’t even earn them: fireflies on a summer night; watching your own daughter pick up the backhand with the ease that most kids pick up nits. And now you’ve got the rarest gift of all: a boy who loves you. I could see it in his eyes the first time he walked into our house, and that’s why we were attentive, not because we liked his tennis stories. I’m warning you, if you waste that, the most precious thing on earth that you not only can’t go out and buy, but you can’t go out and look for—”
“Daddy,” Willy choked. “He’s about to play the U.S. Open!”
“Honey, I know that must be a little hard to swallow. But somehow you’ve got to find a way. If you don’t, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
Abstractly, she knew he was right—as she always knew, abstractly, that in preparing for a winter jog the temptation was to bundle up too much, and presently she’d be puffing down the road in all that gear, melting and claustrophobically hot. But time and time again, the abstract information was no use. Time and time again, she swaddled in sweats because she was chilly right then, only to smother over six miles because she hadn’t quite believed what was only an idea and not an immediate agony. Clinical information you often got in time; visceral confirmation arrived reliably too late.
Abstractly, she recognized that love was paramount, that a good man’s devotion could not be measured in anything so trifling as tennis trophies. Abstractly, she grasped that the best recompense for a stymied ambition was Eric’s kiss on her temple after gnocchi and Sherlock Holmes. Abstractly, she could see how if she allowed passing travails to derail the only other thing of value in her life, she would never forgive herself. But all these insights floated unattached, hovering weightlessly over the crumbled court of her childhood—as worthless and impertinent to the moment as the principles of quantum physics. Incapable of acting on his well-intended but ultimately wasted good advice, Willy threw herself into her father’s arms and wept, grieving over her own calamitous lack of foresight.