In early October, Willy found herself about to hang up, having run up a ruinous bill jabbering how it was nice to have the regular students back at Sweetspot rather than the buy-your-way-to-glory kids of the summer school, into which any slob with cash was admitted. “I’m sorry this is all so boring,” she hurried. “I can run gently now, and I’m hitting the free weights pretty heavy for upper-body strength. Talk to you in a couple of days?”
“Willy—don’t you want to know how I played in the quarters today?”
“Oh, I forgot, how did it go?”
“How could you forget? I spoke to you just last night, I said the quarters were this afternoon, and I’d call this evening to let you know how the match went. I stayed up late, though I was dog tired, just so I could catch you your time after dinner.”
“I’m sorry, OK? But Belgium seems pretty far away from here, my knee has been killing me, and your quarters are not exactly on the top of my mind.”
“That’s obvious.” (Breathing.) “When you’ve made it through three rounds,” he continued, “I would never forget about your quarter-finals. I doubt I’d think of anything else all day.”
“That’s because my setting foot on a tennis court would be headline material.”
“No, before—And this is the Brussels Classic—”
“You mean it’s not like the rinky-dink tournaments I used to enter,” shot out before she could stop herself.
“Just forget it, Willy.”
“Well? Did you win or didn’t you?”
“You don’t give a damn.” The dial tone was unusually loud.
“I tried to call you back,” said Willy morosely. “Turned out I didn’t have the name of your hotel.”
When still smarting from the reproof of his dial tone, she had located Fodor’s Belgium in the library, and rang down the list of hotels for an Oberdorf among their guests. Hurling self-recrimination, whispering ardent apologies and promises to be kinder, Willy imagined that their subsequent reconciliation would be warm, weepy, and remorseful. But after ten fruitless inquiries, she’d been forced to give up. Now Eric had waited a week to call again, and in the interim Willy had journeyed from tortured and ashamed of herself to surly and pissed off. Eric had never been incommunicado for so long; his implicit castigation lifted the onus from Willy to castigate herself.
“So,” she continued heavily. “Did you win the quarters?”
“Yes, but you’ll be happy to know I was knocked out in the semis.”
“I’ve never once said I was happy when—”
“You haven’t had to.”
“I’m really sorry, sweetheart, because you came so close—”
“Please don’t bother, Willy, the crocodile tears don’t wash. I guess you can’t help being, well, a little begrudging. But I can’t help being hurt, either. It’s … the situation. Maybe in your place I’d… it’s hard to say. But everything between us will straighten out when you get back on the road.”
“If I do.”
“I warned you about attitude.”
“And I warned you about mine.” The line crackled. Their talk was halting, but at least a relief from their usual diversionary prattle. It was time they faced what they were avoiding.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” Willy proceeded with difficulty, “having such a crucial part of your body ripped to ribbons. And to live with this tepid reassurance that you’ve a ‘fifty percent’ chance of returning to ‘nearly’ normal. I’m scared, I’m mad, I hate everybody. Of course you’re going to be generously included. My whole life is on the line.”
“I’m part of your life. I’m not on the line.”
“Oh,” Willy whispered sadly, her voice catching, “but you are.”
“Don’t—”
“Listen to us!” Willy pleaded. “Think of how we used to talk! Now we fight or we’re fake … we have nothing in common—”
“Maybe it seems that way, but that’s temporary!”
“You’re doing it again,” she admonished gently. “Always the answer to what this situation is doing to us is to change the situation.”
“Of course. It was circumstances that put us at each other’s throats to begin with.”
“You don’t have to be so diplomatic, Underwood. I’m the one at your throat. You’ve been an angel. Solicitous, encouraging, and incredibly tolerant.”
“I don’t know about that,” he demurred. “If I were really angelic, I wouldn’t be in Europe while you go through all this awful knee shit. But once you’re on your feet again, we’ll go right back to being a team.”
“I wonder if we’ve ever quite been a team, Eric,” she said mournfully. “Neither of us is the type. Besides, what if my knee doesn’t sufficiently recover? Then you’re just married to a shrew?”
“You’re not a shrew,” he lied. “You’re in a lot of pain, in every way, and I’m sorry I’m not always sympathetic. But I get lonely over here, Wilhelm. Sure, the tennis is great, but nobody else within three thousand miles is rooting for me to win but me.”
Willy allowed herself a droll quip. “That’s a considerable cheering section, as I recall.”
“Fuck off,” he said fondly. “I mean I need your support. I have no one else to talk to.”
“I can’t even remember what you look like, Underwood,” Willy admitted. “I have a photograph, and whenever I think of you I see the same frozen smile. I can’t remember you moving around.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he assured her. “But first I’ve got to, uh…” Eric was indistinct.
“What?”
“South America. I’m heading to Buenos Aires—”
Willy’s soft, yearning confessionalism flew right out the window. “Oh, well be sure to write.” The T on her palate was cold and precise, like a knife ticking china.
“But then I’m definitely flying home for a break.”
“Yes, it would be nice to see you before the year is out,” she clipped.
“I miss you,” said Eric, with feeling.
Willy returned, “I miss you, too,” in a rote monotone. He deserved better. In all honesty, Willy missed one thing more than her husband, and that was tennis. Without tennis, her days were aimless. She watched too much television. Though diligent at what exercise she was permitted, weights, sluggish jogging, and ceaseless isotonic stretching left her body feeling lumpy and inert. Willy pined as if for a lover; Eric seemed to have eloped with the sport itself, wooing it on a honeymoon to Europe.
At long last Max extended her Pro-Kennex over the breakfast table. Willy’s crude gratitude at shaking hands with her best and oldest friend was bound to give way in short order to irascibility at being rusty. But what Willy needed now far more than victory was to recapture her pure aesthetic joy, a ten-year-old’s exuberance born in the obscure and unlucrative shade of a public park with her father. Tennis in its Eden had been conceived without enemies, with partners rather than opponents, and anyone who outplayed her had been not foe but resource. Too bad, she reflected wryly, she hadn’t got married at ten as well.
All the latter summer a mellow sun had taunted from outside the weight room window, her favorite season frittered in the stuffy fitness suite, late, lean evening light squandered on sitcoms. A life has a finite number of summers, horribly countable. To have lopped off half of one was a loss that could never be restored, like the missing segment of a finger. Now that it was nearly November, a chill bit the air; court seven rasped with brown leaves. Max had insisted she wear sweats to keep her knee warm, in addition to dragging on the hated, constricting brace, the old-lady beige of support hose. But Willy wasn’t complaining. She clasped the cold grip of the racket, pressed it against her cheek, and kissed it.
In all, it was more marvelous than she remembered. Because you couldn’t remember. That was why, as Max had averred, the sport never wore thin. Like love or pain, tennis could be recalled only by repetition. You had to do it to have it.
“Easy does it!” Max scolded.
“Send me something hard! Stop hitting right to me!” She couldn’t stop laughing.
“No leaping up and down, stupid!” he barked. “… Now look what you did!” Willy had frozen in a crouch, and eased upright, working her knee. Max tore to her backcourt, and had his arm under her oxter in seconds.
“Max, don’t be hysterical. So it’s a little stiff.”
“Come back inside.”
She pushed him away. “In a pig’s eye! Get over there!”
When they had used up the practice balls, winners littered Max’s side. She loped to help collect them, tossed three in his basket, and breathed deep for the sheer, sharp crack of the air in her lungs. “Max, I’m OK,” she announced, stooping beside him. “I can play!”
Though she’d done no such thing her whole married life, Willy could no more help dropping the balls and throwing herself into his arms than Max could help wrapping them around her back and lifting her off the court in a circle. Even when the turn was done and he gently rested his protégée onto her toes, he didn’t let go, and she didn’t let go, until she kissed what deserved to be kissed instead of a thankless, inanimate racket.
“Honey, I played today! I’m so happy!” This was their first upbeat phone call since Eric’s departure for Europe. Memory of that embrace on number seven niggled; in the course of the call, she told Eric she loved him three times.
And, a first in four months, meant it. She adored her husband, she adored Sweetspot, of course she adored her coach because she adored the whole world. If this meant Eric was right, that the answer to situational woes was situational redress, a darker correlate shadowed this revelation that Willy was in no mood to contemplate. It was Eric himself who claimed that no individual was omnipotent; that “there was such a thing as accident, as a bad break,” and therefore even to be lifted by circumstance was to remain at its mercy. If events could summon Willy’s love for her husband, events could as capriciously send it packing.
“My knee,” she went on breathlessly, “is right as rain.”
“Right as rain” was an exaggeration that Willy decided to perpetuate. Through the hitting session she had refused to heed the sharp, electric jolts shooting up through her thigh. If she did not acknowledge the pain, there was no pain. More, if she mentioned the slightest strain to Max, he would scoop her off the court and condemn her to the dungeon of the weight room for another month. He’d bring in that humorless physiotherapist, who would put her back to lifts of three ounces and those odious, interminable stretches. And with a peep of apprehension to her husband, Eric would ring Max’s private line from Buenos Aires and lay into her coach for letting his wife off her leash before she was ready. Better to keep the twinges to herself.
Since the Tanqueray, a part of her body that had previously melted into her overall person had been selected out for special consideration and so had become distinct, separate, a set of complex ligaments, cartilage, and bone whose workings she now knew more intimately than she wished and whose competence she could no longer assume. Objectified, the hinge had taken on a character, vacillating between servant and master, friend and enemy, but in any case one of those pestilent relations who is a part of your life whether you like it or not. The knee had been unruly, but penalized, as Max said himself, far out of proportion to its crime. While its fate was touch-and-go, Willy had attended to the advice of its counselors down to the finest detail. Now that the obstreperous chunk of gristle was out of intensive care, it was time to get tough and stop being so indulgent. If at first the knee required tenderness, now it demanded discipline, and no amount of squealing You’re hurting me! or Yikes! or I can’t! would temper its new regime.
The night of her first practice session, Willy sat at the desk in her dorm room and wrote out a daily training schedule for the next several weeks:
12,000 rope-jumps (not 8!)
416 miles treadmill, 7 mph warming to 9 mph
2 hr. ground stroke practice (Max will stop at 1)
1 hr. volleying
1 hr. serving practice
Weight room circuit every other day; INCREASE LB’s!
While the exclamation points were rousing, the pen was painful to hold. Since July her hands had evolved into the soft, white, padless extremities of a debutante. A single hour on the court had raised blisters.
That Willy expected her ten-year-old’s glee to dissipate did not make its rapid evaporation any the less disheartening. Within the week Willy was disgusted. All her strokes were creaky, and she could not control the accuracy of her serve within two feet. She hadn’t been away from the game for four months since she was five, and now she understood why.
More, it is actually easier to turn a deaf ear to the wailing of one’s own child than to the petulance of the body. Stabs in her knee regularly delayed her that vital fraction of a second. Willy’s resolve, her enthusiasm were at record highs. The mind was willing; the body was reluctant. The accident had left its legacy of mistrust. Once its ligaments were stretched and its supporting muscles warm, the joint appeared reliable, yet she could never be unreservedly confident as her weight transferred to her right leg. A whisper of nervousness, a girlish sense of delicacy were perhaps now with her for life.
Willy’s consternation that her ranking was in free-fall ate her hollow. Wheedling failed to convince Max to let her enter an indoor tournament before the season was through. She couldn’t do it without him—she hadn’t the money—and frankly her game was not yet up to snuff. After six months of retirement Willy calculated that she would dive from 214 in June to the early 500’s in January. The waste, the wanton waste, made Willy want to vomit. In her mind her points were soldiers; she was their general kept in chains while one by one her conscripts were captured by foreign troops. After reading the sports pages, Willy crumpled them into balls.
Eric had made it through the quarters in Buenos Aires, thereby raising his ranking to 159. Naturally he couldn’t pass up the mid-November National Indoor in Nashville. The promised “break” after South America came down to: when the season was over he would come home. In the meantime she was to find vast consolation in the fact that at last they were sharing the same continent.
Well, then, in December he could find her at Sweetspot. If his earth-shattering career was such a cardinal priority that he couldn’t skip a single tournament to see his wife, who’d been to hell and back in his absence, then he could very well come to her for once. As for Christmas, Willy was damned if she would interrupt her training to celebrate a holiday of no canonical importance to her, or to visit Eric’s neurotic, quiz-show family. Much less did she wish to visit her own relatives, all of whom were fervently hoping that 1995 would be the year in which silly Wilhemena turned over a sensible new leaf and embarked on a life as a poorly but at least steadily paid and safely pusillanimous bank clerk. So Eric didn’t like it at Sweetspot; tough. She wouldn’t rush back to New York to fetch him his slippers. And if he didn’t like it either that she and Max were getting along like a house on fire, too bad. He would have to be, as Gert would say, mat-yure.
It was to the rhythm of these mutterings that Willy jumped 12,000 times each day on a deserted indoor court or in the unattended rec room. She moved around, for though Max had not forbidden the exercise, she hadn’t asked for clearance either. Willy figured that if she could not outdo Eric with his fancy-schmancy tricks she could at least best him with numbing, mindless endurance. The rope itself conjured Eric, and for the entire hour and a half she mumbled to her spouse. It must have taken a total of 150,000 skips, however, to work up the nerve to announce her Christmas plans when he could hear her.
“You’re making some kind of point?” Eric asked coldly from Nashville.
“It’s easy to forget, but there are still two careers between us, and I have to—”
“So that’s the point,” he interrupted. “Now that I get it, will you meet me in our own apartment, please?”
Mr. Room Service, Mr. Top Ten of Tomorrow was accustomed to having his w
ay. “I need intensive practice before reentering the fray. I can’t afford to pay—”
“I have plenty of money,” he intruded wearily. “Enough for you to practice at Jordan two, three hours a day.”
“It’s not my money.”
“We’re married, for Christ’s sake. It’s our money, you idiot.”
It had been Willy’s idea to segregate their finances. To Eric, she had cited her need to calculate Max’s cut of her winnings after expenses; to herself, she had cited a vague feminist conviction that a girl should have her own cash.
“I didn’t earn it,” Willy insisted. “I’ve had a setback, but I haven’t lost my self-respect.”
“You’ll take money from Max, but not from your husband?”
“Max and I have a business relationship.”
“Sure you do.”
In stony silence, Willy wouldn’t rise to the charge.
Eric carped, “I’m supposed to squeeze onto that single bed in your dorm room for six weeks?”
“You can sleep in another room, if you need your beauty rest,” Willy said coolly.
“Are you threatening me?”
She regretted the remark, but wouldn’t take it back, so proceeded to make matters worse. “This isn’t negotiable. I need my coach. Max means Westbrook.”
“If you need Upchuck more than me…”
This was getting out of hand. “I need both of you, damn it. You’ll have been suiting yourself for coming up on five months. For once you could accommodate me.”
“I want to go home,” he finished forcefully. Sadly, she knew exactly how he felt.
FIFTEEN
ERIC SQUINTED. “You look thin.” “What did you expect?” Willy raised her chin. “That I’ve been flat on my back popping Cheez Doodles?”
They had kissed once on the station platform, lips tight; Eric didn’t like public display. “Why do you interpret everything I say as criticism?” he asked in dismay. “I’m concerned, is all. And you’re pale.”
“You may not have noticed in South America, but up here it’s winter.”
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