Zipping his cover, Eric directed, “Time we had Randy’s beer. Flor De Mayo. I’m starving.”
“I may have missed it—was that asking me out?”
“It was telling you where we’re having dinner.”
“How do you know I don’t have plans with a friend?”
“You don’t,” he said simply. “I doubt you have a lot of friends.”
“I seem that likable?” she asked sardonically.
“No one with your tennis game is likable. And no one with your tennis game spends much time holding hands in bars.”
“You’re going to change all that?” she jeered.
“As for loitering in gin mills, no. But a hand to hold wouldn’t do you a speck of harm.” Eric grabbed Willy’s athletic bag as well as his own, and strode in the twilight with both carryalls toward court three with a self-satisfied jaunt. He had correctly intuited that wherever her rackets went, Willy was sure to follow.
“So where’d ‘Willy’ come from?”
Her imprecations to consider the West Side Cafe’s pleasant outdoor tables having been resolutely ignored, they were seated snugly inside Flor De Mayo. Willy was recovering from a petty sulk that she’d been co-opted into a Cuban-Chinese greasefest. At least the restaurant was clean and not too frenetic; the white wine was drinkable.
“Would you go by ‘Wilhemena’?”
“Yikes. What were your parents trying to do to you?”
“Let’s just say it’s not a name you expect to see in lights. My older sister fared even worse—‘Gertrude,’ can you believe it? Which they hacked barbarously down to ‘Gert.’”
“They have something against your sister?”
Willy screwed up her eyes. He was just making conversation, but she had so few opportunities to talk about anything but open- versus closed-stance ground strokes that she indulged herself. “They have something against the whole world, in which we’re generously included. But my parents bear Gert no special ill-will. Their feelings for my sister are moderate. Moderation is what she invites. In high school, she made B’s on purpose. Now she’s studying to become a CPA. The sum of this calculated sensibleness is supposed to make my father happy. It doesn’t. In my book, they both deserve what they’ve got … I’m sorry, you have no reason to be faintly interested in any of this.”
“Oh, but I am.”
Afraid he was going to add something flirty and odious, she went on quickly, “I think they scrounged ‘Wilhemena’ and ‘Gertrude’ from the nursing home where my mother works. Even as kids, we sounded like spinsters.”
Eric knocked back his beer with gusto. “You’re awfully young to worry about becoming an old maid.”
In the terms of her profession Willy was already shuffling toward her dotage; this man instinctively honed in on soft spots. “I’m not,” she fended off lightly. “It’s the implausibility of ‘Wilhemena Novinsky’ on a Wimbledon scoreboard that’s unsettling.”
“Wee-Willy-Wimbledon. ’Sgot a ring. Besides: shitty name, one more obstacle to overcome. On which you thrive, I’m sure. They did you a favor.”
All this assumed familiarity was grating, and only the more intrusive for being accurate. “If I thrive on obstacles, my parents have done me dozens of favors.”
The waiter arrived with their baked half-chickens with mountains of fried rice. Eric had ordered two plates for himself, which he arranged bumper to bumper.
“You’re going to eat all that?”
“And the remains of yours, when you don’t finish it.”
“How do—?” She gave up. He was right. She wouldn’t.
The rice was marvelous, scattered with pork and egg. The chicken lolled off the bone. “Don’t look so greedy,” said Willy. “I may finish more than you think.”
“Just promise me you won’t go puke it up afterwards.”
“I’m not that trite.”
“No tennis dad, no bulimia, and you’re not overweight,” Eric ticked off on his fingers. “Too good to be true. You must be having an affair with your coach.”
Willy was a sucker for any contest, but this was the limit. “None of your business.”
His eyes flickered; he could as well have scribbled her response on a scorecard.
“While I’m being crass…” Eric dabbed his mouth with his napkin; she couldn’t understand how he could suck up all that rice in such a mannerly fashion. She’d have predicted he’d eat like an animal. “What’s your ranking?”
There was no getting away. In tennis circles, this question arose five times a day, though it secreted far more malice than What’s your sign?
Willy placed her fork precisely beside the vinegar, then edged the tines a quarter inch, as if to indicate the incremental nature of progress in her sport. “I’m ranked 437. But that’s in the world—”
He raised his hands. “I know! I’m surprised your ranking is so high.”
“Surprised! I pasted you today!”
He laughed. “Wilhelm!” He pronounced her new name with a Germanic V. “I just meant that I don’t expect to run into a top 500 in the course of the average day. Touchy, touchy.”
“There’s not a tennis player on earth,” Willy grumbled, picking her fork back up, “who isn’t sensitive about that number. You could as well have asked on our first date how much money I make, or whether I have AIDS.”
“Is that what this is?” he asked gamely. “A date?”
“You know what I mean,” she muttered, rattled. “A ranking is … like, how valuable a person you are.”
“Don’t you think you’re giving them a little too much power?” Eric rebuked her, for once sounding sincere.
She asked sarcastically, “And who’s they?”
“They are whoever you can’t allow to beat you,” Eric returned. “And the worst capitulation is thinking just like the people who want your hide.”
“So maybe you’re my they?”
“I’m on your side.”
“I’ve only had one person on my side in my life.”
“Yourself?”
“No,” she admitted, “I am not always on my own side.” This was getting abstruse. “I mean a real person.”
“But didn’t you like it?”
“Yes.” The question made her bashful. “Can we stop talking about me for a second? Like, what do you do?”
“I graduated from Princeton in May. Math. Now I’m taking some time out to play.”
“With me?”
“Yes, but play, not toy. Playing is serious business. You of all people should know that.”
“Do you … have any brothers and sisters?” The low grade of repartee in locker rooms had left Willy rusty and obvious over dinner.
“Three brothers. My father wants to take over the world.”
She let slide the implication that a patriarch would only do so with boys. “You,” she determined, “are the oldest.”
“Good.”
What he was applauding, or should have been applauding, was her having made the effort to imagine being in anyone else’s shoes but Willy Novinsky’s for an instant. Self-absorption was a side effect of her profession. Oh, you thought about other people’s games, all right—did they serve and volley, where was their oyster of vulnerability on the court. But that was all a roundabout way of thinking about yourself.
“Princeton,” she nodded. Extending herself to him was work. “Brainy, then. You wouldn’t have two words to say to the people I know.”
“I doubt you know them, or they you. Players on the women’s tour live in parallel universes. Though they’re all pigthick.”
“Thanks.”
“The men aren’t nuclear physicists,” Eric added judiciously.
“Your folks have money, don’t they?” The tidy table manners were a giveaway.
“Hold that against me?” Eric lifted his drumstick with his pinkie pointed, as if supping tea.
“I might resent it,” she admitted.
“Check: you’re not bankrolled by nouvea
ux riches climbers.” He tallied again on the rest of his fingers. “And no pushy old man, no eating disorders, and you’re not a blimp. Four out of five right answers ain’t bad.”
That Willy hadn’t denied having an affair with her coach had evidently stuck in Eric’s craw. “This is a test?”
“Aren’t I taking one, too?” he returned. “Princeton: feather in cap. Math: neither here nor there. Money: black eye.”
“You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Technically. Plus or minus? Watch it.”
Willy said honestly, “I don’t care.”
“So why’d you ask?”
He was flustering her. “I guess I’m pig-thick, too.” She glared.
“When I asked walking down here if your name was Polish, you seemed to realize that Pole-land was in Eastern Europe and not in the Arctic Circle.”
“Stupidity may be an advantage in tennis,” Willy proposed, teasing pork bits from the rice.
“The adage runs that it’s a game you have to be smart enough to do well, and dumb enough to believe matters.” Incredibly, Eric had cleaned his first plate and was making rapid inroads on the second.
“With the money on the line, tennis matters,” Willy assured him. “No, I look at fourteen-year-olds romping on TV and think, they don’t get it, do they? How amazing they are. They don’t question being in the Top Ten of the world because they’ve no conception of how many people there are in the world. And the game is best played in a washed, blank mind-set. Nothing is in these kids’ heads but tennis. No Gulf War mop-up, no upcoming Clinton-Bush election, just balls bouncing between their ears.”
Yet Willy didn’t quite buy her own dismissal of tennis players as stupid. Yes, exquisite tennis was executed in an emptied state that most would consider not-thinking. But more accurately the demand was for faultless thinking—since to regard hesitation, rumination, and turgid indecision as a mind functioning at its best gave thinking a bad name. Supreme thought streamed wordlessly from the body as pure action. Ideally, to think was to do.
But the lag between signal and execution was also closing up in Flor De Mayo. Willy no longer heard words in her head before they spilled on the table, and so became as much the audience of her own conversation as Eric, and as curious about what she would say. There was a like fluidity to be found, then, in talk.
Clearly hoping for one more right answer, Eric inquired, “Are you going to college?”
Meaning, will go, or are going, not have gone. After knowing this guy for a few hours, Willy already had a secret. “No,” she said flatly.
He took a breath, seemed to think better of the lecture, and exhaled, preferring the remains of her fried rice. She’d left him a few baby shrimp. Something about the sheer quantity of food he consumed was magnificent.
“So which players do you admire?” he asked.
“I’m old school. Still hung up on the last generation. Connors. Navratilova.”
“She cries,” he despaired.
“So what, if she feels like crying? I bet you like Sampras.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Eric shrugged. “His strokes are impeccable.”
“He’s a robot.” Willy scowled. “Give me back McEnroe any day, and a decent temper tantrum or two. John taught the world what tennis is about: passion.”
“Tennis is about control,” Eric disagreed.
“Tennis is about everything,” Willy declared with feeling.
Eric laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But you’re right, it’s not the eyes. The tennis game is the window of the soul.”
“So what can you see about me in my game?”
“You play,” Eric replied readily, “out of love. Sampras loves himself. You love tennis.”
“I have an ego, I assure you.” She was lapping this up.
“You have something far nobler than an ego, Wilhelm,” said Eric, lowering his voice. “Which your ego, if you’re not careful, could destroy.”
Too mystical by half; Willy retreated. “Sampras—that there’s nothing wrong with his game is what’s wrong with it. Maybe more than anything, tennis is about flaws.”
He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got a future.”
“Your game is... incoherent,” Willy groped. “As if you scavenged one bit here and one there like a ragpicker.”
“Rags,” he said dryly. The bill arrived; he counted out his share and looked at her expectantly.
She stooped for her wallet, abashed by her assumption that he would pay. “I didn’t mean tattered. You made me work today.”
“My,” he said drolly. “Such high praise.”
“Praise is praise.” She slapped a ten-spot on the check. “Take what you can get.” Willy was offended in return. She doled out flattery in such parsimonious dribs, to anyone, that she had expected him to run home with the tribute and stick it under his pillow. He wouldn’t bully her into a standing ovation. He was better than she expected. Period.
Eric offered to walk Willy to her apartment, but up Broadway the air between them was stiff with grudge. “That was good food,” she said laboriously at 110th.
“You thought it would be ghastly.”
“I did not!”
“ Cuban-Chinese? Beans and stuff? You whined, like, Sher, I mean, if you wanna. Vintage Capriati.”
She laughed. “OK, I thought the food would be revolting.” The air went supple. Willy strolled a few inches closer to her companion, though he’d still have to reach for her hand.
His arms swung free. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Heading up to Westbrook, Connecticut, for the weekend. I train up there.”
“Let me come see you.”
She felt protective of Sweetspot, but a visitor would serve a purpose. “Maybe.”
Eric crimped her phone numbers into the margins of his New York City tennis permit.
She lingered at her stoop for a kiss. It was not forthcoming. In the glare of the entrance light, Eric’s woodsy eyebrows shimmered with mutated stray hairs, some up to an inch and a half long. Intrigued, not really thinking, Willy reached for the longest eyebrow hair to pluck it.
He slapped her hand.
“Sorry,” he said as Willy rubbed her knuckles. He’d hit her hard. “I like those.”
Cheeks stinging, Willy studied her tennis shoes. “I guess I liked those weird hairs, too,” she mumbled. “Maybe that’s why I wanted one.”
When she glanced up again, he was pinching the same overgrown straggler; he plucked it and laid it in her palm. “Then it’s yours.”
Her fingers closed over the specimen. She didn’t know what to say. Willy didn’t go on dates.
“Eric?” It was the first time she’d ever said his name. The syllables felt ungainly on her tongue, their use a monumental concession to the young man’s existence. “I did go to college. My father made me. I quit, after my junior year, to go pro. I’m not nineteen, I’m twenty-three. I’m way behind. I have very, very little time left.”
In reward for the successful exchange, one eyebrow hair for one confession, he kissed her. Willy could only hold one broad shoulder. The other hand fisted Eric’s peculiar gift. Unaccountably, once in her apartment she would store it in a safe place.
TWO
MAX UPCHURCH CALLED SWEETSPOT a “School of Tennis,” dismissing Nick Bollettieri’s more famous Florida academy as a camp. The education Sweetspot students received was better than perfunctory; Max couldn’t bear colossal forehands at the expense of confusing Tiananmen Square with Chinese checkers. Max eschewed Bollettieri’s reform-school trappings, dispensing with Bradenton’s sniffer-dog drug checks, five-dollar fines for chewing gum, and restrictions to one TV program per week. As far as Max was concerned, if parents wanted to pay two thousand dollars a month for their kids to pop bubbles in front of The Munsters it was no skin off his nose. Should his students turn pro they might as well get practice at the tube. Isolated in an indistinguishable string of hotels waiting for the rain to clear or their draw t
o come up, most journeymen on the tour spent more time watching American reruns than they did on court.
Despite Sweetspot’s unfashionable liberality, Willy was not alone in regarding Max’s operation as more elite than his competition’s in Florida. Bollettieri accepted 225 would-be champions a go; Max admitted seventy-five. Max Upchurch himself had had a distinguished career, ranked number six in the world in 1971, and making a solid contribution toward pulling the U.S. ahead of Australia playing Davis Cup. As a young aspirant in the late sixties, he’d made a name for himself behind the scenes, finagling with a handful of other infidels to drive this snooty, exclusive, stick-up-the-ass amateur sport into the crass, low-rent, anything-goes, money-mad and cut-throat Open era that was now so happily upon us.
But the biggest difference was tennis. Bollettieri’s protégés blindly cannoned from the baseline like ball machines. To Max, crash-crash was not what tennis was about. Sweetspot emphasized cunning, style, finesse. While Nick assembly-lined bruisers, Max handcrafted schemers and ballerinas. Willy’s coach believed that in every player lurked a singular tennis game struggling to get out—a game whose aberrations would prove its keenest weapons. He regarded his mission as to coax those idiosyncratic strokes from unformed players before their eccentric impulses were buried forever beneath the generic “rules” that constituted common coaching.
When Max first took Willy on at seventeen he demolished a game twelve years in the making and reconstructed it from the ground up. Willy had grown up fighting—fighting her parents; fighting her extraneous algebra homework when she was on the cusp of a breakthrough with the slice backhand; fighting the USTA for transport to junior tournaments that her father hadn’t the remotest intention of financing; and later, fighting her height, when it became crushingly apparent that she would never exceed five-three. The appetite for battle Max encouraged. He drew the line at Willy’s fighting herself. He insisted that she stop overcoming weaknesses and start playing to strengths.
All through high school, Willy had rushed forward at every opportunity, to prove a dwarf could cover the net, and she’d clobbered every ball with pleasingly improbable pace. It was Max who’d convinced her to stop defying physical fact. She was short; she should approach selectively. She was light; she’d never overpower heftier, Bollettieri blunderbusses. What Willy had going for her was that she was fast, that from scrapping with Daddy and the USTA and Montclair High School she had tremendous reserves of spite, and, scarcest of all, that she was intelligent.
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