Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  Axel’s wedding present had been a family membership in the Hamilton Jordan Indoor Racquet Club, to which Willy began to accompany her husband midday when they were both in town. Eric booked a regular sixty-minute training session in a squash court, an enclosure, he assured her, large enough for them both. Skipping rope together presented opportunity to spend precious extra time in the same room, and Willy had assumed that Eric’s bouncing up and down entailed such drudgery that he’d welcome companionship. Yet the first time Willy came along in June, she discovered the ta-dum-ta-dum tedium of her imagination required some touching up.

  For the initial few hundred, he skipped in the left-hand service square until the slim black plastic tubing churned like an eggbeater. As he accelerated, a low whir rose to a high-pitched whistle, and his heels seemed to hover, immobile, three inches above the floor.

  Eric had lent her a leather Everlast, knotted to accommodate her height; that through the next few months she continued to cadge his rope instead of investing in her own was a reminder that the regime itself was borrowed. She assumed the opposite service square, their ropes clicking the boards as one. But Willy was left well behind after the first 250. As she disentangled the thong from her socks, the whine of Eric’s whip continued to rise in pitch.

  Warmed up, Eric zigzagged up and down the court on the tips of his toes, like the nimble electric stitch of a sewing machine with special attachments. Next, he sliced a set of scissors kicks, his long legs held stiff as shears, his Lycra cross-training shorts switching like beveled blades. Through her own plodding tudum, tu-dum, Willy cut her eyes askance as Eric repeatedly clicked his heels together in midair, as if he had just won the lottery. Then he plunged deep on each thigh, extending the opposite leg like a Russian Cossack. When he crossed his arms over and back, s-swip, s-swip, the loops closing and opening out again in an unbroken snake, Willy’s Everlast once more hit her shins.

  Her eyes narrowed. Willy centered again in her own square, gathered momentum, and crossed her arms.

  Pthwack.

  This clearly took more than one go. Willy built a rhythm, trying to shut out Eric’s whoo-ooo-PUM, whoo-ooo-PUM of double-jumps by counting in her head:… 6, 7, 8, 9—CROSS!

  Pthwack. The rope circled her left leg, wrenching the wooden handle from her grip; it clattered to the floor.

  Despite the clamor, Eric didn’t falter, but went into a mixed routine of doubles, arm crosses, Cossack dips, and heel clicks. Behind the squash court’s transparent back wall, a small crowd of club members had gathered to watch.

  Retrieving her rope from the floor, Willy studied her husband. His lips were delicately parted. Half-closed, his eyes fixed on a midpoint in space. The pupils weren’t quite cold; perhaps that pure a concentration qualified as an emotion. The lone indicator of his exertion was a dimple dented between his eyes, as if an invisible divine finger were touching his forehead. As the black whip blurred an oval halo around his body, he looked blessed. She might have never seen his face more tranquil, more affectionate, or more attentive—but all that engrossment converged inward. He was oblivious to her grunts of exasperation when her own rope hooked her toes. Willy beheld the part of Eric that was concerned with Eric, and it was unnerving to encounter this contented, self-congratulatory grace outside her embrace. Willy had previously indulged the fiction that in her absence Eric was not quite there.

  Ssee-ow-sseee-ow, ta-hooo-ta-hooo, SMACK. Eric wound the rope around its handles, dried his dripping face on his shirt, and turned to Willy as if she had just walked in the door.

  “Eight thousand?” she inquired.

  He shrugged. “The usual.”

  Willy had managed only six thousand in the same period.

  “You didn’t mess up one time, did you?”

  “I do, some sessions,” he defended.

  “What, like once? In eight thousand?”

  “Is there something wrong with that, Willy? Do I not have permission?”

  “Don’t be absurd. Here, this is yours.” She held out the Everlast with distaste.

  “You just need some practice!” he shouted after her. “I’ve done this for years!”

  But Willy did not easily resign herself to shortcomings, or readily concede superiority. Through the summer, in breaks between tournaments she accompanied her husband to the sweltering squash court and bore down on his variations one by one. She mastered the zigzag and the scissors step; her speed and consistency improved. But as soon as she got the knack of the double-jump, Twinkletoes moved on to triples.

  Though her skipping had become more lucid, Willy never quite attained the Zenlike perfection of her husband. Eric’s claim that he did miscue “some sessions” proved accurate only in the strictest sense. Once or twice a month the whirling dervish would sputter to a halt. Though his fumbles flooded her with a brief, malignant joy, his very errors came to serve as reminders of how rarely they occurred. More, through a flub he was so unflappable, his pupils riveted on their fixed point in space, his lips angelically parted, that when he resumed as if nothing had happened, it really was as if nothing had happened.

  By November, Willy demanded the same seamless dexterity from herself, refusing to forgive the few stumbles that regularly blighted her routine. As a result, their skipping sessions were increasingly poisoned by Willy’s outbursts of bilious rage. As Eric cavorted into his Polish polka, Willy would punctuate her regime by chiding herself, “Klutz! Bonehead! You stupid, clumsy slob!” The interjections were mumbled at first, but grew louder as her temper flared, her timing crumbled, and Eric vaulted into a wizardry correspondingly more balletic and baroque: “You dishrag! You worthless, stinking, steaming pile of dogshit!” Spit spattered the floor; a sharp pain pitched between her eyes; red splotches bloomed in her field of vision and spattered the walls. The day Eric mastered skipping with the rope moving backward, Willy considered that a squash court, with its stark white paint and vivid crimson markings, would make an excellent setting for a chain-saw massacre.

  Once the session drew mercifully to a close, sweat drizzled down her temples and Willy was drenched in shame. In private she contemplated her tantrums, disquieted by the dark, sticky place in her head that they uncovered.

  So the first week of December Willy experimented with booking a squash court by herself. The air felt cooler. The cube looked cleaner, simpler, whereas with Eric the sperm-shaped ball smudges above the service line had seemed to squiggle and worm. Willy was reminded that she had never harbored any aspirations to become a rope-skipping wunderkind—that her skill at this exercise was of no importance to her whatsoever.

  Spared Eric’s flights of fanciness, a halting regularity returned. The requisite eight thousand completed, Willy stared at the limp rope in confusion. Her performance wouldn’t have taken any prizes, but she was hardly inclined to call herself a butthole. Aimlessly, Willy tried the crossed-hands. After a few failed efforts, she shrugged and wound the Everlast around its handles. So she couldn’t do the crossed-hands. Big deal.

  Fortified by the revelation that rope-skipping was Mickey Mouse, Willy next accompanied Eric to the Jordan on Eighty-sixth Street with a lift in her stride. In a spirit of fresh repose, Willy began jumping in unison with her husband. She fashioned a blasé regret on discovering that in company she couldn’t quite smooth through the first five hundred without goofing up. Resolved, at each error Willy placed the rope behind her heels, took a deep breath, and silently recited, It doesn’t matter.

  Breezy aplomb persisted through the first one thousand, until Eric dipped into his Cossack step. The tips of his toes kicking at the corner of her eye tickled something in her head; her Everlast thwacked and lay still. “Dipshit!”

  The rebuke had escaped; she had not meant to say it; she would say no more. She resumed, but as Eric bounced into a fox-trot Willy’s breathing constricted, a discrete bull’s-eye below her rib cage beginning to heat. Though training her gaze to the front wall, Willy was unable to elude the message drumming through the floorbo
ards: he never makes a mistake.

  In contrast to a certain someone. Swiveling, Willy forced herself to face him as an extra punishment for having screwed up three times in the last one hundred. She would make herself confront real agility in order to feel that much more of a toad.

  Eric’s muscles rippled as if a spectral pianist were playing arpeggios across his thighs. Beneath the blazing squash lights, shadows striated between the tendons in his forearms. His hair was wet and splayed, but flopped into the inspired disarray of genius. If he had always looked striking skipping rope, now Eric exuded a more menacing beauty: the tortuously exquisite good looks of a man who is denied you.

  Granted that she possessed him in a way; Eric was her husband. Still, this was the part of Eric that was his and only his, that indeed she could not have. Now, by reputation at least, a woman in generations past had derived her status from her spouse, assuming his achievements as transitive achievements of her own. But as Eric segued into a series of three hundred consecutive hand-crossings—now the totem of her own limitations—Willy could not see how her husband’s adroit, superhuman grace conferred on her one little bit.

  Meanwhile, a larger than usual audience had collected in the back bleachers and overhead gallery. Under observation, Willy herself abandoned any tricks. She would only appear an apprentice struggling with elaborations over her head, attempting poor forgeries of the maestro, who had himself begun his most magnificent confabulation: the mixed routine, weaving boxes of waltz, lunges of polka, sashays of Irish jig, and reversals of forward to backward, climaxing in ten consecutive triples.

  At which point the onlookers exploded into spontaneous applause, and all the blood vessels in Willy’s head swelled to bursting with revulsion.

  While one might speculate, in the droll composure of a glass of wine after dinner, that aversion for your lover is merely devotion flipped upside down, Willy couldn’t find the barest resemblance between this splenetic antipathy and the warm, vertiginous rush of adoration. There was no use having a word for love if its synonym was hatred. And hatred such as she had never felt before, a hatred that challenged whether she had ever hated anyone else really, not a single opponent however forbidding or unworthy, not even Marcella Foussard. She hated his self-righteously sweaty clothes, she hated his smarmily perfect body, she hated his fancy-schmancy exhibitionist theatrics raised to a power just because a lot of nobody pseudo-sportsmen were gooning at him. In a spreading tide of anathemas, she hated his priggish recitation of who won the Italian in 1963, his look-at-me-I’m-so-dedicated posing in front of tournament videos with a pen and pad, his chuckling superiority slipping out those zwieback tiles when he’d merely lucked into the Z, and most of all she hated his conceited, swaggering upper-class assumption that just because he deigned to pick up a tennis racket at eighteen he could sashay into the pantheon of her profession when she’d been busting her ass since she was five.

  Eric was cooling down with plain skipping, the floor on his side of the court flecked with dark drops of perspiration. Though a few spectators drifted off, the show was not, quite, over.

  That gorge of odium had not done wonders for Willy’s flow. “Goddamn motherfucking hell!” she cried, bungling once more.

  “Willy,” said Eric quietly, at last breaking his code of silence. “People can hear. Watch your language.”

  “Watch your own.” The remark wasn’t clever, it didn’t even make sense; but the first thing to go in rage is your wit.

  Eric turned his back, as if to disavow her.

  Willy had begun to fling the rope as fast as she could. When the rope convulsed from nicking her heel, it lashed her forearm, raising long red welts above her watch. In the impromptu flogging was a vindictive, almost erotic pleasure.

  “You shit!” Even Willy wasn’t sure if she was speaking to Eric or herself. She could no longer hurl the rope around more than a handful of times without tripping, and with each blunder the rope scourged her left arm, which was glowing a crisscrossed pink and starting to swell. “You piece of garbage! You nothing!”

  At Eric’s hand on her shoulder, Willy leapt back.

  “Hey.” He assumed the fake-reasonable tone of a doctor cornering a mental patient, or a cop coaxing a suicide risk from a ledge. “Call it a day, huh?”

  “I haven’t done my eight thousand. I can’t go home until I’ve done my eight thousand, can I?” Willy was panting.

  Eric glanced furtively to the glass back wall. The onlookers had retreated to behind the bleachers, and were side-eyeing the squash court as if they weren’t really watching. Members met one another’s eyes with complicitous amusement, exchanging whispered incredulities. Well, screw them.

  “You’re worried I’m making a spectacle of myself. Isn’t that what you just did? Made a spectacle?”

  “Willy, this self-abuse—it doesn’t help.”

  “What, I should be like you? Patting myself on the back every minute for what a glorious athlete I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s the answer. Be a preening asshole.”

  “Yes.”

  She was taken up short.

  “Because it’s a better life,” he added. “And it works.” Eric tugged his Everlast from her hands. They walked home without speaking. Eric draped his sopping sports clothes over the radiators and left to hit a few balls. When he returned that evening, Willy wanted to say she was sorry, but could not quite get on the other side of something to get the words out.

  Eric, by contrast, was resolute. “Willy, you mentioned that you jumped better by yourself, right?”

  Willy wrestled with a jar of spaghetti sauce. She wasn’t in the mood to ask Eric to open it. “Some.”

  “Why don’t we book separate sessions, then? My companionship doesn’t seem to have a great effect on you.”

  “You don’t have to put it in terms of my interest. You want your serenity back, don’t you? Your happy, complacent self-communion?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  The lid wouldn’t budge. “OK.” She had failed to rise to enough challenges for the day, and put the jar down.

  Willy bunched up on the sofa to flip through Tennis magazine. Her left arm was hot; a few lashings had broken skin. As she swung her foot, it kicked the Scrabble box, which had been shoved under the couch post-zwieback and remained there since. Neither of them had suggested the game again.

  He was right, of course: they ought to jump rope in different slots. Her behavior today was appalling, he shouldn’t have to put up with it, and indeed she had done a better job at skipping on her own. An era was over. Then, it had never exactly been a barrel of laughs, skipping together. Good riddance, she supposed. So why did Eric’s proposal depress her?

  The answer to Willy’s Scrabble tantrums was to no longer play. The answer to jump-rope rivalry was to separate. Both activities in themselves were niggling, expendable. But Willy wondered if it was not so much the nature of their problems that measured her marriage as the remedies they chose, and these solutions were ominous.

  TEN

  “I DON’T THINK SO … No, Tuesday’s my wedding anniversary, but that’s not the problem. I just think we’ve reached the end of the road, John. If it’s no longer competitive, there’s no point. I’ve got some other names if you—Yes, they are my ‘discards,’ if you insist on—Hello?” Eric put down the phone. “Bastard hung up on me.”

  It was a small apartment; Willy couldn’t help but listen in. “Can you blame him? I thought John Lance was a friend of yours.”

  “He wasn’t a friend, he was a hitting partner. You should know the difference.”

  Well, she did. The decorative pregame natter about romances or weather camouflaged the utilitarian character of the sports “friendship.” Beyond a post-match beer, itself only tolerable if the score was close, hitting partners were rarely invited into your social circle. Because hitting partners got used up. But Willy had never seen anyone consume as many partners in such short order as her own
husband. He chewed them up and spit them out, ingesting morsels of strategy or technique along the way as he sucked oysters from a chicken back and left the bones.

  “Why not beg off that you’re out of town?” Willy suggested. “Anything but, ‘Your game stinks, don’t call again.’”

  “He’d know I was making excuses. I double-bageled him our last match. John’s ranking will never rise from the late 700’s.”

  “You were in the 700’s six months ago. Why now the peeyew?”

  “Because I’m pushing to the 400’s by early next year,” Eric explained impatiently. “You can’t bear partners you shellac.”

  “There’s just something hideous about telling someone point-blank that they’re not good enough for you anymore.”

  “This is a ruthless sport.”

  “Which brings out a side of you that makes me nervous.”

  “What should make you nervous is if out of some misplaced altruism I keep playing inferiors and bring my progress to a standstill.”

  “What if John improved?” she pressed. “Games wax and wane. He might overtake you again.”

  Eric snorted. “Never happen.”

  It never happened. Eric had yet to be surpassed by any opponent over whom he’d established dominion. In no endeavor had her husband ever experienced a stall, much less a setback; the prospect of regression was as preposterous to him as the notion of waking up two inches shorter. Willy had been in this game longer, and herself knew the brief, shuddering horror of watching your ranking slip the wrong direction for a month or two. She had shared a locker room bench with plenty of hasbeens, once in the top 200 and wandering, bewildered, in the wasteland of the 800’s. They all had a distinctively stunned, battered look, like accident victims in shock. Particularly to Americans, for whom life was definitionally a series of betterments, a shift into reverse defied some hitherto immutable rule of physics—as if time itself had run backward. Regression was betrayal, bequeathing the shaken trust of earthquake survivors, for whom the solidity of the very earth is newly unreliable. But the ground under Eric’s feet had never rumbled; his second hands plowed unremittingly clockwise. While his innocence gave him power, it accorded him a callousness as well.