Double Fault

by Lionel Shriver

  “You could give me pointers, right? Tell me what I’m doing wrong?”

  “I think you know what you’re doing wrong.” Her tone was ministerial.

  Eric avoided looking at his wife. “Max wants to do some intensive, really hands-on work with my game.”

  “As opposed to getting his ‘hands on’ me. And you’ll escort me to Sweetspot. As a chaperone.”

  Eric’s folding was usually precise, but the roll collar on top of his stack was off center. “Willy, this decision is totally impersonal.”

  “According to you everything is impersonal. Your rise in the ranks, my fall. You helplessly succumb to your own monstrous talent; I’m blighted by an abstract bad luck. I’m beginning to wonder if we have a relationship at all.”

  “Look, I need a coach, and Max is the obvious choice. His name popped up constantly when I asked other players for suggestions. And he came to me.”

  “So he phoned you this morning. And nothing he said suggested that I might take this personally?”

  Eric concentrated on bunching his socks. “Why can’t we share a coach? We share everything else.”

  “We share nothing, Eric. For the last two years, I doubt there’s been a single minute of the day when you and I have felt the same way.”

  “That’s not true. I also feel frustrated, angry, powerless—”

  “On my behalf.” Willy picked Eric’s freshly gripped racket off the Plexiglas table, inspecting the label. A Wilson. So he got the new sponsorship after all. Not that he’d mentioned it. That would be indecorous. “Tell me,” she requested calmly. “Are you to pay him one hundred an hour? Discount rates, of course.”

  “No, like with you—a percentage. He asked me my current gross, and said he’d settle for ten percent. If he makes any difference at all, it’ll be worth it.”

  “He makes a difference,” said Willy, creaking the strings of the sweet spot in line. “To me, at least. You know, you really are amazing, Underwood. You’ve assumed half a dozen of my signature strokes, and refined them. Moved into my apartment, and installed all your fluffy free clothes. Ingratiated yourself with my family—as a real tennis player they can believe in, not one of their own sorry-ass kids. Sometimes it even seems as if you’ve been downloading my computer points into your file. And now you’ve helped yourself to my coach. From the sound of your amicable arrangements, I don’t see why you and Max don’t get married. Because I’ve been swapped for a newer model. Like your racket.” She looked up wonderingly from the strings. “You sort of are me, aren’t you?”

  “You’re talking crazy.”

  “The new, improved version.” She hefted the Wilson, patting the frame on her palm. “Willy Novinsky without all those icky, human flaws. No holes in your molars. With a proper rah-rah Daddy, not some dour, unpublished Montclair nothing. Best of all, a boy.”

  Eric shoved his clothes aside on the dining table; he’d nothing left to fold. “You’re going off the deep end again—”

  “That was the problem with the old version. Obsolete Willy had feelings. Little moments of hesitation, specks of doubt as to whether she was just the greatest fucking thing that ever happened to the game of tennis. And the moods—the disreputable behavior—we’ve had complaints! So our updated model is a gentleman.”

  Eric advanced with his hand out. “Calm down.”

  “He never loses, which doesn’t stop him from being an expert on how to go down in style. Max—funny how suddenly you two are on a first-name basis; what ever happened to ‘Upchuck’? Max himself said this morning that a tennis player has to be ‘perfect.’ He’s found his archetype in one phone call.”

  Eric grabbed for the Wilson, and she whirled to the dining table.

  “No temper,” she said, sweeping his pile of neatly folded shirts to the floor. “Always concerned for the welfare of the less fortunate; I’m sure you’ll make many a charitable donation as a millionaire. And good at everything! Scrabble, German, mathematics—as if you had the microchips installed.”

  The brandished racket smashed the glass over the New Jersey Classic poster, and shards tinkled to the floor.

  “Willy, get a grip,” Eric growled.

  “Don’t worry,” Willy eluded her husband, chucking couch pillows in his wake, “Mrs. Eric Oberdorf can clean all this up. She can tidy,” she kicked his dozen sycophants across the floor, “all your sports equipment—”

  “Get a hold of yourself!”

  “—and bake cookies!” This time she aimed for the MOMA print on purpose, and its glass shattered.

  “Give me that!” Picking his way through the shard-strewn rackets, Eric tripped over his jump ropes.

  “You’re not my husband,” Willy lifted the racket overhead, “you’re my replacement!”

  Willy did not remember heaving the Wilson downward. Like flow in good tennis, the stroke expressed an absolute confluence of intention and execution. Because if she’d thought about it, she wouldn’t have done it.

  Eric cupped his right eye. He was kneeling amid the scattered rackets with his head bowed. For a long moment he did nothing but breathe; Willy did nothing but stare; until between his fingers red began to seep, drizzling down his hand. Pat... pat… Blood dropped onto a vinyl racket cover like the first few drops of rain on the court when the sky has turned black and though you keep hitting, you know the game is over.

  “Eric!” Willy stooped and fretted over his damp, thinning hair. “What did I do? Oh, God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—Let me see!” She pried weakly at his fingers, which remained tightly clamped. His body was trembling and hunched into a fetal ball. For a minute, perhaps two, he wouldn’t speak or remove his hand from the wound, and she knew that for those minutes he was entering the life in which his own wife had blinded his left eye.

  When at last Eric edged his fingers away, blood was everywhere and it was impossible to see the scale of the damage. Willy ran to moisten a towel, and returned to dab gingerly at the perimeters of his socket and help him to the sofa, through murmurous remorse. “Honey, can you see? Tell me please, can you see?”

  He took a deep breath, and underneath the coagulating ooze an eyelid fluttered. The breath held, and held, then rushed out. “It’s blurred—but yes—I think so.”

  “Shut your right eye. How many fingers?”

  He took the towel and wiped the left eye. “Six?”

  “No, two, Eric—!”

  “I was joking.”

  The four-hour wait in St. Luke’s emergency room allowed Willy so much opportunity to embellish her apology that Eric asked her quietly to give it a rest. Willy forced herself to examine the wound, a deep laceration over an inch long, slicing through Eric’s wild eyebrow. Later when the doctor inquired what had happened, Willy was about to bare all. Eric interceded that he had stumbled into the corner of an open kitchen cabinet.

  Remembering how her husband had held her hand when she fell in the Tanqueray, Willy slipped her palm into Eric’s as the doctor squirted Novocain across his brow, the excess anesthetic drizzling down his face like the tears he hadn’t shed. She wished he’d squeeze hard, as she had crushed his fingers on the New Haven court, but Eric’s hand was curled, lax, and dry. He kept his eyes closed while the doctor assessed eight stitches, warning his patient, “Hope you’re not too vain. This is going to scar.” She was about to quip that Eric was the vainest man alive, just not about his face, then swallowed the remark. Ribbing didn’t seem appropriate.

  Willy insisted on taking a taxi home, though it was only three blocks. By the time they shuffled in the door the wound had swollen, reducing his eye to a slit. The socket was purpling. Willy had got her wish: she’d wanted to console her husband, and his life was so charmed that to do so she’d had to bash his head in.

  The apartment was a shambles. Glass, rackets, and tennis shirts littered the floor. Hastily, Willy gathered the couch pillows and plumped them on the sofa. The sopping red towel was still wadded on the cushion where they’d abandoned it for a fresh one.
Its crimson had soaked the upholstery. Next to this sticky puddle and its livid adjacent handprints, the rusty drips on the piping from Willy’s kitchen cut the year before looked trifling. She smoothed a fresh sheet on the sofa and led Eric to lay down. Though he said he could use one, when she fixed him a brandy he slumped stuporously before the snifter and left the cognac untouched.

  Willy rushed to stack his rackets lovingly in the corner, collected and refolded his clothes, and had begun clinking shards into the trash can when Eric spoke at last. “I don’t think you’re in the right mood to do that now.”

  Eric was right. Her careless handling of the jagged edges tempted a competing injury. Obvious, and classless. Willy used a broom.

  “I might have put your eye out,” she mumbled, sweeping.

  “Yes.”

  “That would have ruined your depth perception. Before your first Grand Slam.”

  “Yes,” Eric repeated flatly.

  “You’d never have forgiven me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I could forgive. But that’s not a limit you want to test.”

  “Since I could have blinded your eye, I might as well have.”

  “Even the law recognizes the difference between an act and an attempt.”

  She held the broom handle forward like a microphone. “Do you think I tried to put your eye out on purpose?”

  “Please don’t get worked up again,” Eric appealed, dropping his head back. In the lamplight, the gauze glared. “That’s not a question worth asking.”

  “I’ve become… dangerous. You’re not safe with me in the same room.”

  “Typically, you would blow this out of proportion. Excoriate yourself enough and you’ll manage to turn things around so that I feel sorry for you. Supposedly you don’t want my sympathy, but I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “I don’t deserve sympathy. I’m a witch.”

  “Try deriving a smaller lesson and you have a better chance of learning it.” He spoke with no inflection. “Like that you’re so keen for expressing your emotions, but that there is a place for self-control. Or that you may be a woman, but a powerful one who can do a lot of damage if you’re not careful. I’m not an icon, Willy, I’m an ordinary man, and you can hurt me very badly.”

  “If you were a wife, you’d be in a battered women’s shelter by now. You’d be surrounded by counselors convincing you to press charges, to demand a restraining order. In the courts, if you murdered me in my sleep you could get off with probation.”

  “If you don’t stop turning a minor incident into a Greek tragedy, I will hit you and then we’ll be even. Is that what you want?”

  Willy dumped another load of glass from the dustpan and looked up. “Wouldn’t you like to?” She located the offending Wilson and held it grip-first toward the couch. “Be my guest.”

  To her surprise he grabbed it, and wrenched her to his side. Curling Willy under his arm, Eric chucked the racket to the floor. “Do me a real favor,” he murmured. “My head is pounding. I’m shaky. I’m exhausted. Get me three aspirin, and come to bed.”

  As they shambled to the bedroom, for fifteen feet they enjoyed a picturebook marriage: it was hard to say who was leaning on whom. Willy fetched Eric his aspirin, brushed her teeth, and paused at the sink. Whenever they were both home she inserted her diaphragm before going to bed, to avoid having to get up and interrupt matters should the mood strike them. The optimistic habit persisted, if the mood had waned. But tonight, shrinking from the implicit self-protection, from the effrontery of expecting that this of all nights he would want to make love, she left the contraceptive in its case.

  Yet when Willy slunk under the sheet Eric slipped his hand into her hair and pressed her temple to his heart. For whole minutes he held her head against his breast, close and motionless, his chest barely rising from the slow, shallow breath of fear—much the way he’d cupped his palm against the eye that afternoon, as if he were frightened of another kind of blindness, which might also entail a darkness on a whole side of his life. At last, satisfied somehow, able to see into at least the next few minutes, Eric released the pressure on her crown, trailed his fingers to her back, and exhaled deeply. He reached for her hand, but this time didn’t try to bend it backward, commend her resistance, match his strength to hers. If there was any contest, it was over which of them felt weaker or less interested in a contest of any description.

  Softly lacing her fingers, Eric traced tiny circles on her knuckles. Willy propped on an elbow and felt the urge to blurt again that she was sorry, but he’d had enough of that. “I…” she mumbled, and the next words caught, “love you.” A chill crawled the nape of Willy’s neck, her eyes shot hot. Still trembling slightly from his trauma, Eric raised from the pillow to kiss her and so seal her sense that this most rudimentary of marital avowals was what he far preferred to more regret. There had been so many apologies, and they had healed nothing. Willy’s eyes brimmed and sluiced over both cheeks, washing her clean as the flood of tears shed in this bed on her own account had never done. She shuddered, and sank. The few inches to Eric’s shoulder felt like a long, vertiginous drop.

  Landing, her body relaxed—relaxed and gave way as it hadn’t in years, so that only now did Willy realize that she’d been holding herself stiff, that she’d been fighting, even in her sleep tugging against something but never free. But all of Willy’s struggling had only pulled their knot of problems tighter. As the tension left her limbs, her legs entwined loosely with Eric’s like snarled shoelaces that were finally coming undone.

  Eric placed two fingers in a Cub Scout salute on Willy’s waist, right where her hips, though narrow, still flared a little. He loved that tender, supple curve, duplicated nowhere on his own body, itself drafted in hard right angles. The two-fingered salute to her distinction was an old signal, and with it his prick rose, traced an arc over his thigh, and semicircled of its own accord to nestle against her ribs.

  “Honey,” Willy chastised him, “you’re so tired. And you’re hurt—”

  “Sh-sh,” he hushed, stroking the curve. “I want to.” He meant that he was tired, yes—other nights Eric had hefted her full weight overhead with those steely cabled arms, but this evening all his muscles had retreated, and barring the single rousing at his groin his body was limp. And that he was hurt, certainly—but that the doctor’s ministrations in St. Luke’s had managed only the feeblest repair. The laceration over Eric’s eye had also opened a gash between them, and Eric would suture this wound with a blunter but more powerful needle.

  Willy stilled her husband, and plumped his pillow beside each ear so that his head lay steady. Resting a hand on his clavicle to emphasize that he mustn’t do any of the work, Willy straddled his hips and eased down onto the instrument of their mending. She couldn’t help but remember watching the doctor’s needle puncture Eric’s brow, in and out, in and out, and for a moment Willy felt a little sick but that passed. She and her husband had done this so many times, but tonight Eric seemed to be piercing a place that had resisted his penetration for at least the last two years. She wondered briefly where he’d been jabbing all those other times and what it had felt like for him, maybe like sewing on a perforated button, stabbing blindly through the material from underneath, and hitting hard, unyielding plastic when you miss the hole.

  He’d found it, that tiny point of entry, where there was no obstruction and no terminus, so that tonight he seemed to slide up and through her torso until she could feel him as a lump in her throat. Willy gazed down at Eric’s face to find it puffy, bruised, and improbably gracious.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly. Though he was already saying as much without words, he didn’t want to be misunderstood. “You worked yourself into a state, that’s all. I know you wouldn’t do it again. I love you, Wilhelm. You’d have to whack me a hell of a lot harder to change that.”

  “Thank you,” Willy whispered, which she’d been taught as a child was the best, simplest response when someone does something n
ice for you, better than abashedly stuttering, You’re too kind, you needn’t have. Real forgiveness was always an option, not a requirement, and she wondered if there was ever such a thing as being too kind.

  Studying the bandage over his eye in the moonlight, its gauze crosshatching red from seepage, Willy was mystified how she could ever have confused the only bona fide ally she possessed in all the world with one more enemy. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough genuine enemies out there already: her sister, who wanted her ordinary; her coach, who wanted her punished for the very same loyalty that he revered when she applied it to tennis; all those official opponents on the circuit, who wanted her beaten and brought to her knees. For once she faced not another catty singles aspirant out for Willy’s prize money but her partner and champion: a tall but not especially large man, with his own troubles, as isolated as Willy herself, as easily assailed, as readily floored by a single blow as she had been felled by one tumble in New Haven. Eric, too, was desperate for an island of respite in a rising tide of hostile adversaries, as Willy was for “safe harbor” in Edsel’s office. So Eric Oberdorf was normal-sized after all, and alone in league with her against the vast, monolithic Them whom Eric had identified at their first dinner in Flor De Mayo: a morass of humanity who if they did not wish her ill at least, maybe worse, were indifferent to Willy Novinsky’s fate altogether. Alas, this accurate glimpse of her spouse was rare and bound to be temporary, but she tried to capture the moment all the same. As she came, Willy felt a mesh drop from between them, and a fresh, clear, unimpeded expanse of bright, floodlit air rush forward once the curtain fell. If four years ago Eric had introduced her to tennis without the ball, tonight they finally invented tennis without the net.

  TWENTY-ONE

  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.