Eric pulled his own jeans off, balancing on one leg, then the other. He seemed to enjoy her watching. Willy had often found the prick, both its shriveled button of retreat and its strangely dissociated waving and poking when in heat, ridiculous. But Eric’s, at halfmast, drooped down his thigh at that unhurried and luxurious stage of excitation that was a man’s most alluring.
As he kicked his clothes to the side and glided toward her where she rested against the net, Eric didn’t strut with the gutsucking, chest-thrusting swag she had learned to associate with the vain male athlete who has taken his clothes off. At the same time the confidence of his stride, the wryness of his smile signaled plenty of vanity. But those vacuous hard bodies had flexed their deltoids as if to make up for other lacks. Triangular pectorals were all they had to offer and so seemed paltry, like lone finger sandwiches on a picked-over platter. Eric Underwood instead uncloaked his body as if it were a pleasant incidental, like free leather upholstery when you buy the car.
If Eric considered his physique a trifle, Willy was in awe of it. Awe in general had not been a prevalent emotion in her life, and she wore the sensation awkwardly. She scanned his body for some restful ugliness. His feet were long, but this attenuated body should have big feet. Willy was ordinarily content with her own figure; it was taut and neat. But as Eric approached in the moonlight, she was aware that her breasts, while small, sagged just enough to fail the pencil test. She recited to herself that she was in good shape, that all women have a layer of subcutaneous fat; when Eric put his hands on her waist Willy heard in her head the very phrase, subcutaneous fat. Her own trunk was smooth and bland, with none of those conniving, thinking ripples musing over his chest. Eric sighed as he traced her hip, but Willy found the slight flare too wide and envied him the clean, parallel shoot to the thigh.
The foil packet in his right palm scratched when he stroked her ribs. From the shading of dark hair, his forearms loomed in relief, while hers, blanched in the wash of the moon, looked flat, paper-doll. He smoothed his left hand from her hip to her thigh, teasing his fingers up and inward, and she panicked at what he could possibly find in the absence between her legs that could compete with the whole fifth limb that arced against her stomach. Maybe, in sufficient thrall, it was impossible to imagine that so riveting a sex could conceivably be attracted by one’s own.
“Oberdorf,” he said cryptically. She didn’t recognize the syllables, which sounded like an incantation, an open sesame from The Arabian Nights that would move boulders from caves.
“What?” Her voice was thin and vague.
“My last name is Oberdorf,” he announced. “‘Underwood’ is for deviled ham.”
Something about this new name oppressed her. Underwood had been a flimsy, easily manipulated infatuate who had pursued her all the way to Westbrook on the basis of one Cuban-Chinese meal; an adventitious young man who might eventually prove a pest but whom she could employ usefully as insulation from Max Upchurch’s forbidding disappointment. Underwood’s phone number would be scrawled on scrap paper, later accidentally thrown away. An Underwood sent her flowers that she forgot to water. And an Underwood had a gutsy but goofy and entirely forgettable tennis game. An Underwood wouldn’t have had a prayer in pro tennis—but with a name like that an Oberdorf could improve.
“Eric Oberdorf,” she said faintly. Her acknowledgment of his real name seemed to satisfy something he’d been waiting for, and he tore open the foil.
If condoms once indicated consideration for the girl, they did no longer; and here Willy was yielding to a man she knew so slightly that she couldn’t be sure if he’d have bothered to protect her from pregnancy if he weren’t primarily protecting himself from disease. Nor could she tell if he was packing contraceptives with the specific arrogance of expecting to fuck her or if he simply went everywhere with the generic arrogance of expecting to fuck somebody. But it was too late to worry what she was getting into because something was already getting into her.
Willy’s back pressed the net cord; it groaned. Eric Oberdorf lifted her to cradle the small of her back on the tape, crouched, stood, and closed his eyes. Consequently Wilhemena Novinsky discovered what a match was like without the go-between meddling of a tennis ball.
The following morning Willy insisted that Eric leave. To have imported a man she was pretending to be interested in was tacky; to foist under Max’s nose a man she was genuinely interested in was sadistic. Eric dispatched, she warmed up with Max that afternoon on number seven with an irrepressible smile. In her mind’s eye the net cord retained a telltale dent from the pressure of her back, and she could still hear it creak from her pleasure. Though Willy had contrived the intersection of their paths, she now resolved to keep these two men as far apart as possible.
“You’re hitting well,” Max accused her. “Unusually well.”
Willy begged off a day early, claiming she had paperwork to post for a satellite tournament in August, but in truth she wanted to try tennis again without the ball.
FOUR
THERE ENSUED A COURTSHIP in every sense. After Willy just missed making the semis of the Fresca Cup in Dayton, Eric met her plane at LaGuardia toting his Prince, and dragged her from the taxi directly to Riverside Park. Since by wristing and framing and stabbing he got the ball back more often than not, she had to agree with Max that though Eric’s technique was raw, somewhere in this Neanderthal was a tennis game.
As for the game off court, he had no pride, or so it seemed when he announced that, barring his own tournaments, his schedule was at her disposal. Eric was unabashedly eager to see her every day she was in town and, rather than emphasize that he had his friends and many professional matters to attend to, cheerfully volunteered to sweep any other considerations aside if she had time for him. Initially this carte blanche had struck her as shameless, groveling, foolishly self-abnegating, and bound to backfire.
Eric bludgeoned her with invitations to have spaghetti with his roommate, or to pick up a slice of pizza for lunch, and was eternally available to practice in the park, even if that meant canceling other partners. He fanned nightly tickets to the U.S. Open before her like a deck of cards, of which she was free to avail herself. And he was thoughtful in a way that somehow meant more because the gestures were so minor and instinctive; he didn’t expect pats on the back. If he fixed himself a drink in her apartment, he refilled the ice cube trays. He replaced the lining in the garbage pail without being asked, washed his own coffee cup, and never left toothpaste globs in the sink. One afternoon in August, when she was pressed for time packing for the next satellite in Norfolk and was out of clean sports socks, he bundled to the basement with her reeking shorts and tank tops, returning with her laundered clothes folded and the sock pairs matched.
Willy’s new boyfriend showed up at her door with tokens on evenings they went out—a silk bandanna the same crimson as her favorite sweatshirt, or a pirated Janis Joplin cassette, on which he’d written out all the names of the songs. The presents were always small, inexpensive, and beautifully wrapped.
Willy had grown up among the enemy, and initially regarded his generosity with suspicion. If Eric was trying to wrest something from her, she felt bound to keep him from getting it. And Willy had developed many a woman’s instinctive disdain for niceness. Men who treated her too lavishly well were patsies. Yet one lunchtime when Eric tossed her a new jar of mayonnaise, she did a double take. Remembering the condiments for their sandwiches was considerate. Noting that her own jar was scraped to the dregs had been attentive. What was the problem? She would prefer a cad, a moocher, some heedless creep? At last Willy entertained the notion that there wasn’t something wrong with niceness, but something wrong with her.
So on their next date, shyly, Willy handed Eric a package in return. Coming up with a gift had been hard, and while the modesty of Eric’s presents was always charming, the paltriness of her own gift seemed niggardly. She kept apologizing. It was only a Sweetspot T-shirt, and maybe she’d been insensitiv
e; Eric didn’t, after all, have much time for the school. But Eric was overjoyed, and insisted on wearing it to Flor De Mayo. In fact, he wore the shirt for days after, until it was filthy and smelled. Willy didn’t mind. She was proud of herself. She even wondered if all Eric’s little gestures weren’t meant to ingratiate himself so much as to teach her to make one back.
Besides, through the summer Willy came to understand that her suitor’s strategy was sourced not in self-abasement but conceit. Eric Oberdorf was a single-minded man who once bent on a project did not relent until its object was achieved. He did not court Willy with an eye to his own self-protection, because it never entered his head that he would fail. This proclivity for unreserved full-tilt at what he would not be denied was both winning and unsettling. Willy’s experience of getting anything she wanted was always over somebody else’s dead body. But Eric evidenced no signs that anyone had ever stood in his way. Simply, he was spoiled.
If Eric boasted few former girlfriends, he was given to infatuations of other varieties. In his early teens he had thrown himself into politics, devoting himself to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign of 1984. (To Willy’s Democratic horror. Unusually for New York Jews, the Oberdorfs were Republicans. While the Clinton-Bush campaigns heated, he and Willy’s electoral joustings were regularly sidetracked when Eric snidely marveled that here she was a pro tennis player and she knew who was running for president.) At fourteen, every weekday Eric had leafleted his Upper East Side neighborhood after school let out at Trinity. His homework essays had detailed how to increase defense spending, decrease taxes, and still reduce the national debt—papers that presaged Eric’s aptitude at Princeton for imaginary numbers.
Subsequently Eric had become consumed with basketball. “Rick the Slick” was apparently a legend at Trinity still. When in a stroll through Riverside he and Willy happened upon a rough-house four-on-four that lacked an eighth man, she had the opportunity to verify that Eric was no slouch at hoop. Though jostled by colossal, trash-talking homeboys tingling with fast-twitch muscle fiber, Eric racked up more points than anyone on his team. Notably, Willy had no trouble watching him swish baskets, in contrast to following his tennis match with Max. God, Eric was graceful, so precise and fleet; his head fakes were comic, though wickedly effective. Willy shouted, “Go, Slick!” and burst into spontaneous applause so many times that she embarrassed him, but she was relishing not only the game itself but her own clean feeling: pure, free-flowing adoration.
Eric clearly excelled at whatever he put his mind to. A resultant summa cum laude assured Willy that once he concentrated on mathematics at Princeton he was adept at his equations. In fact, he emitted an arithmetic coolness even on the tennis court, where he maintained the implacable remove of a programmer entering information in his banks, and defeats were mere data, blips no less relevant than victories for the graph that he was plotting in his head.
Fundamentally, Eric Oberdorf liked to play games. That concluded, Willy considered a more cynical view of this no-holds-barred woo. Was romance just another contest to him? If Eric was given to infatuations, was Willy one such passing amusement in a string? For her boyfriend’s capacity to shift energies willy-nilly from one engrossment to another was perplexing. It was inconceivable to Willy that anyone should aim to become a bankable tennis player without having nurtured the ambition from the age of five.
Willy appreciated that Eric seemed to be going about the project with some seriousness. He played for hours every day. He trained every other morning in Gold’s Gym, with light weights and eight thousand skips of rope. He had scheduled out the whole next year, as she had, with a series of successively more challenging satellite tournaments. Though his ranking sounded abysmal to a layman, Eric had managed to accumulate a handful of computer points after graduating only in May, and through his disappearances in July and August scraped up several more. The bookshelf over his bed was crammed with how-to and tennis history; his knowledge of tennis stars and statistics was encyclopedic. But despite his laudable whole-hog, she was dubious whether such a capricious embrace of what for Willy had been a lifelong passion ought to be too readily rewarded.
Accordingly, in Flor De Mayo—or Flower of Mayonnaise, as they had now dubbed their regular dive—Willy inquired how he might feel if his aspirations failed to flourish into a career. She observed what Eric, with his thorough research, would have ascertained already: that although Top Tens raked in $10 million a year, the earning curve in tennis fell off sharply. With rankings from 11 to 25, a man might pull in $1 million a year; a woman, Willy noted wrathfully, half that. From 26 to 75, a player’s total income came to no more than $200,000 to $300,000, though that depended on staying in the top 75, and in tennis, standing still could wear you out. However, by 125 you could expect no more than $100,000, half of which would be consumed by economy-class airfare and overpriced hotel breakfasts. If they both didn’t scramble into the top 200 neither would do much better than break even.
Unperturbed, Eric reached for the remains of her rice. “You pay your rent, don’t you?”
“Barely. I made thirty thousand dollars last year, which included winning two satellites. Five thousand went to Max. Another five to expenses. If you factor in what I don’t pay for—his coaching time, my dorm at Sweetspot—I’m in the red. How do you plan to make ends meet?”
Eric hunted out chunks of pork. “My father.”
“What?”
“Why look so shocked? My dad’s backing me my first two years on the circuit. If I succeed, I won’t need him. If I don’t, I do something else. But I doubt that will prove necessary.” Eric licked his fingers.
“Don’t you want to make it on your own?”
“I never said word-one about wanting to ‘make it on my own.’ I said I wanted to make it. How that is achieved is of little consequence. If you’re short and need to fly to Indianapolis, who hands you a ticket? Upchuck. Me, it’s my father. What’s the diff?”
Willy went quiet.
Eric lifted her chin. “The profession’s rigged anyway. How do you earn computer points? By winning tournaments that award computer points. How do you get into tournaments that award computer points? By having computer points. That’s not the only catch-22. How do you make a living playing tennis? By getting into the top 200. How do you get into the top 200? By devoting one hundred percent of your time to tennis, and thereby not making a living. You can’t get there from here with a day job, Wilhelm. This is still an upper-class sport. I’m sorry your own father hasn’t been supportive, and I’m glad, financially anyway, that you’ve got Max. But you won’t make me feel lousy about my dad. Patronage is how it’s done.”
She dropped it, eaten by a new curiosity. “Underwood? Why do you want to play tennis professionally? After an Ivy League degree in math?”
“You wouldn’t go out with a computer hacker, would you? Reason enough.”
“I’m serious.”
Eric drummed his fingers. “It’s challenging. Keeps me in shape. I could stand to make a packet of money. And I’ll have to retire by forty at the latest, so it allows for a second career.”
“You like that? Being forced to quit?”
“Sure. I need variety. I get bored easily. Who’d want to play tennis all day until they’re ninety-two?”
“I would!”
“Well, you’re a nut,” he said affectionately.
“God, I dread retirement. When I think about how few years I have left, I feel like I’m on death row.”
“Why do you want to play pro, Wilhelm?”
“What kind of a stupid question is that?” she snapped.
Eric laughed. “The same stupid question you asked me.”
“In my case that’s like asking why do I insist on breathing.”
Eric examined her with real incredulity. “You’ve really never asked yourself that, have you?”
“Not once,” Willy acceded. “I don’t have reasons, though I was pretty sure that you would. I’m a tennis player. I ca
n’t envision being anything else and still being me. If I thought up explanations, they’d come afterwards. They’d just be something to say.”
“OK, but unreasoning isn’t generally a compliment.”
Willy had the queer impression that he was jealous. “You grew up with a whole series of ambitions,” she said softly, taking his hand. “Politics, basketball, mathematics. Me, maybe you’d call me limited, or obsessive. I’ve always had one true love.”
His eyes narrowed another millimeter, and he slipped his fingers out from beneath her palm. “Are you accusing me of being a dilettante?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything!” Willy cried in exasperation. “I’m sure you’re more adaptable than I am. You’re brilliant at all kinds of stuff, and that’s hardly a criticism. But I’m not the only one who’s irrational or less than candid with themselves. Because you’ve never answered my question. What if it turns out you don’t have the goods in tennis? What if your two years go by and you’re stranded in the 800’s? Or unranked altogether? That happens, and to decent players. How would you take it?”
“Told you,” he said. “Do something else.” Eric didn’t usually speak with his mouth full; the garbling of his answer seemed deliberate, as if he didn’t want to hear it himself.
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