Hands in his pockets, loose legs swinging, Eric looked up at the sharp fall sky. Willy would have assumed he was terribly popular, but she realized now that Eric had, until recently, no one to talk to.
“So when Yossi had to go out for track, too, I almost quit the team,” Eric carried on, lengthening his stride. “But I needed to work on my conditioning for basketball. The whole feel of the track team that year was contentious, kind of nasty. Everybody was always dropping their times in conversation, and lying, of course, making the other guys nervous they were slow. Yossi and I were both working on the 800 meters. It’s a difficult distance—long enough to require pacing, but short enough that you still have to sprint. I knew Yossi’s personal best, since he was always bringing it up; and I knew mine, which I kept to myself. I had him by several seconds.
“That race my dad went on about, it wasn’t important—a two-school meet, though that only made it more intense. We cared more about races against teammates than the big state meets. At any rate, my sprained ankle ruse was the product of eleventh-hour disgust. When I pictured leaving Yossi in the dust, I could just see that closed, black, murderous look he’d get when we cooled down. I thought, Let him have it. Maybe I’d had enough of Yossi, period.”
“You don’t think you were being nice?”
“Condescending, maybe. Or sick and tired. Hey, you got my number back there. If I were nice, I’d have let him beat me on the track. And you were right: I’d opt out, but I wouldn’t lose. I don’t think I’m capable of losing for anybody.” Eric sounded morose, as if his own constitution depressed him.
“Besides,” he went on, his cordovans scuffing the sidewalk, “I’d feel prouder of myself without the epilogue. Afterwards, Yossi went on about that 800 meters so relentlessly, like he was so glad to have something over on me for once, that I finally told him that I’d faked the injury and given him the race.”
“How’d he react?”
Eric shrugged. “He called me an asshole—which I was—and claimed that he’d have won anyway. But I’d burst his bubble. He didn’t brag about the race again. I know I was a prick, but I was a kid.”
His mother’s delicate portions inadequate, Eric stopped at a vegetable stand and bought some fruit.
“What happened to the friendship?” Willy asked.
“It died fast after that nail in our coffin,” Eric confided as he inhaled a banana back up Broadway. “I didn’t miss him. Constantly comparing notes, who got this, who won that, it was gross. You never got to be real buddies. And that kind of game, it’s only fun so long as it’s a toss-up who’s ahead. Like, when we met, we’d have races doing the Times crossword, and it was neck and neck. But by senior year, I’d handicap myself by referring exclusively to the across clues, while he got to use the downs, too. I’d still beat him by a quadrant. I made him feel like crud. He made me feel sheepish. What was in it for anybody?”
Willy found this tale unaccountably disquieting, and changed the subject. “Do you think your family was happy as they pretended, that we’re getting married?”
“My mother, sure. She liked you—if only for standing up to my dad. Of course, you must have noticed that my brothers went ashen with dread. Dad will just use the event to make a fuss over me and they’ll feel like earthworms in comparison. My father? Can’t marry me himself, so I guess he’ll get used to it.”
“Has he gone for the jugular of every girl you’ve brought home?”
“No, you’re the first woman I’ve shown up with that he’s goaded like that. I’m awfully sorry. And I was impressed—you handled yourself great, really kept a cool head. It’s just, he tests people. His version of taking you seriously is to take you on. I’m sure it didn’t feel like a compliment, but you ought to be flattered. He sized you up as a contender and thought you could take it.”
“But how can he make fun of my ranking of 386,” Willy puzzled, “when you’re ranked 927?”
“Why do you think you got under his skin? You make me look bad.”
“Eric, you just started—”
“That’s what he’s telling himself. Too loudly. He’s nervous about this tennis thing.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not especially.”
“Why not?”
Eric tossed her an apple. “You know the first thing you learn on the high wire? Don’t look down.”
SEVEN
CLAMOROUS SWEETSPOT STUDENTS HAVING sifted off to dinner, the weight room was silent but for the squeal of the shoulder pull and the compressed hiss of exhalation through Willy’s teeth. Max’s shadow fell from behind her onto the facing wall.
“You’re tilting to the right,” Max observed wearily.
Willy released the bar to dangle overhead. She rested thirty seconds between sets—plenty of time for a single sentence. “My right shoulder is three times stronger than my left; a tilt is inevitable.” The wrong sentence.
“Since my advice is impossible to follow, I’ll leave you to it.” The shadow shifted, bloated, and faded.
“Wait! See if this is better.” Willy clutched the slippery grips and bowed her head. With her eyes shut, the position was prayerful.
“Yes. That’s straight.” His voice dragged. When Willy resisted his coaching he got angry; when she did what she was told he got sad. Go figure. The shadow expanded again. The doorknob clicked.
“Max, we need to talk.” Willy wiped her hands on her shorts, working her shoulders in circles. The left one ached. She swiveled to the upright bench press, adjusted to five more pounds of bullion than she usually raised. But the clink of pins would reverberate unbearably, so she left them as they were. Nestling her back on the padded rest, she grasped the squishy, foam-covered handles.
Max remained by the door. He wasn’t slumped; he never slumped. Still there was a preternatural relaxation about the man that was almost deathly. She had seen it in coaches before. They all struck a been-there-done-that posture, like a soul reincarnated one too many times. Maybe the post-everything otherworldliness was not to be envied. Max looked conclusively like a man who had nothing left to prove, and she didn’t understand what you did with your life if not prove something.
Facing him now, arms open, her pose was frank. She got the impression that he still liked looking at her breasts.
“Max, I’m getting married.”
The sentence didn’t take anywhere near thirty seconds. Since Max’s face registered no change, Willy wondered if her dread of this exchange for the last month was pure hubris, and he didn’t give a damn.
“Underwood?” Max asked dispassionately.
“Oberdorf. I got it wrong. Though one and the same.”
“Good idea, if you’re going to take it, to learn his name.”
“I’ll stay Novinsky.”
“You’ve thought this through, then.”
“I’ve thought of little else.”
Max transferred his weight from his left to right foot, as if torn between Willy and the door. “That sounds distracting.” He shifted to the left again. “The New Freedom satellite is next week.”
Willy hefted her arms forward. On this contraption the asymmetry of her strength was the most glaring. Her right arm plunged to its full extension; the left quaked catching up. The disparity was another reminder that, in focusing on one goal only, she had refined a single proficiency at the price of ineptitude at a great deal else.
Willy squeezed out between breaths, “I’ve done nothing—but think of tennis—since I was five.”
“And look where it’s got you.”
The metal slabs clanked still. “Not far enough.”
“It’s got you ready. The next two years are your big push. I find your timing on this marriage business peculiar.”
“Marriage isn’t a business.”
“It is,” he objected. “And it will affect your business; it may affect mine.” Max, who seemed to have made up his mind about staying, straddled the leg pull three machines away, twisting her towel.
> ‘’Might you consider that I get lonely?” asked Willy. “None of the girls in locker rooms will speak to me—”
“A good sign. If they’re friendly, you’re not intimidating enough.”
“Well, maybe—I could use—a hand to hold, maybe—a happy tennis player—is a better—tennis player.” The iron clapped to rest.
Max squinted. “You know, I couldn’t name a happy tennis player.”
Willy traced a handle with her forefinger, elbows limp at her waist. Her whole upper body was burning. “When I was a kid, tennis was ecstasy.”
“Meaning it’s different now.”
“When I haven’t been on a court for two or three days I still tear my hair.”
“When did you last go three days without tennis?”
She smiled. “I don’t know, five years ago?”
“Grown-up tennis isn’t concerned with ecstasy,” Max hazarded, tightening the towel into a rope. “Facing down what you’re made of on a daily basis doesn’t lend itself to peace of mind.”
“None of which—explains why—I shouldn’t get—married.” Her chest had begun to shudder; her left arm was trembling so violently that the vibration rattled her jaw. This was too much weight, but she was not about to stop shy of twelve repetitions under Max’s scrutiny.
“Don’t talk pressing that much weight, Will. I mean, it’s hard enough to wrestle the gremlins in your own head without living alongside somebody else’s heebie-jeebies, too.”
Willy forced herself to ease the weights down with a controlled sigh. She caught her breath. In truth, she felt a bit nauseated.
“Eric doesn’t have heebie-jeebies,” she recited. “Eric is sure that he’ll do very well. And that I’ll do very well, too.”
Max eyed her. “A few months ago, a hand to hold was the last thing you wanted.”
“Your hand!” Max had her towel, so she wiped her face on her shirt. “My coach’s hand.”
“I guarantee,” Max went on in that horribly moderate voice that reminded Willy of her father, “that if you came to me and said you’d found a nice boy who didn’t hit you and had some grasp of the dedication demanded by your career—a decent fellow who would tend to his own dog food factory or whatever and would wait loyally for you to come home from Tokyo—I would wish you the best of luck.”
“Eric is nice and he doesn’t hit me and understands better than anyone the demands of my career, since it’s his career, too. So when do I get the good wishes?”
Max slapped the vinyl of the leg pull with her towel. “You are being deliberately stupid!” The restraint in his voice had given. Willy appreciated that they were at least conducting their first legitimate conversation since that wretched morning of It’s cold, come back to bed, and instead she’d left his bed forever.
Willy adjusted the sit-up board at a severe angle, banging the hooks on the rungs. Tucking her ankles under the padded brace, she rested her little fingers on her temples and her thumbs under her jaw. As she rose her elbows drew forward; they sheltered her breasts. Though Willy did sit-ups like this every other day, there was a suggestion in the fenced arms, hands over her ears, that she didn’t want to hear what Max had to say.
Max was badgering her by the board. “You’re the only girl I coach who has an inkling that a successful tennis career is a miracle of God. Half these poor whelps honestly believe they will waltz out my gate and straight into an Evian contract worth three million bucks a year. You’re not that retarded. So I am shocked by your shabby imagination.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” With her stomach muscles contracted, Willy’s voice was squeaky.
“You’ve always had this precociously cynical bite to you, Will. It’s not like you to be so trusting.”
“Of Eric?” she wheezed.
“Of yourself.”
“Trusting yourself is tennis in a nutshell.” She flopped on her back head-down.
“Only at its best.”
The blood rushing to her head made Willy dizzy. She raised to clutch the ankle brace and bowed her head.
“He’s a tennis player, Will.”
She clapped her palms back over her ears, bent her knees, and resumed wrenching up and down. “Isn’t that fabulous,” she grunted. “He’s good, too.”
“All the worse.”
Willy toiled through her sit-ups, eyes shut, but still Max preyed at her elbow as the embodiment of all she didn’t want to consider. She was happy, and the novelty of the emotion slapped the rest of her life with reproof. Willy had never regarded herself as miserable in the past. But now it turned out she’d led a barren young adulthood; she’d never had boyfriends even in high school. All the guys thought she was stuck up, or involved in something that didn’t pertain to them, which it didn’t. At last she had a lithe, lean, lovely man, and sleep had never been so gorgeous, a luxury in itself rather than one more drudgery to dispense with. She was only twenty-three but already fatigued; perseverance required respite. And here Max would convert her sole salvation into one more obstacle.
Willy rolled off the board and turned into the staple-shaped dip bar. Laying her arms across its corners and gripping the iron, she stood facing Max with her chin thrust, willing to make him the enemy if the alternative was to return to a life that, had it been palatable before, could only seem destitute now.
“If nothing else,” she said steadily, “I have found an excellent hitting partner whom we don’t have to pay.”
“A husband’s just a cheap addition to your entourage, then,” said Max sardonically, hands on the hips of his sweatpants. “An economy.”
Willy withdrew an inch. “We can work out together, run together—”
“Really.” Max grasped the dip bar, leaning to her ear. His cheek brushed her hair. He’d not dared come so close since May. “What other paradisiac visions do you have of a life together in the same sport?”
“We can enter the same tournaments—”
“On the satellite circuit, there are a handful of coed events. But your ranking is better than twice his, and Oberdwarf’s not going to get into the same gigs. Moreover, you don’t intend to stay in satellites, do you?” Max spoke with a measured enunciation, as if addressing a child or an idiot. “Isn’t the plan to amass enough points in the coming year or two and hit the WTA international tour?”
“Of course.”
“And Oberdork, he wants to get on the ATP tour?”
“Naturally...”
“Do you realize, aside from Grand Slams, how few international events invite men and women to compete at the same place and time? Two. I guess you’d really look forward to them.”
“I was hoping you’d congratulate me, but I should have known better.”
“I’m just being practical.” One of her father’s favorite words. “Let’s take the possibilities one at a time, shall we?” Max pressed back forefinger with forefinger. “One: you both succeed splendidly. Top 200, maybe better. So you’re on the road, different roads, all but December. Merry Christmas. Meanwhile you’ll both have umpteen affairs from Munich to Tel Aviv, since that’s the only way either of you will feel anything from the waist down. After fifteen years, you’ll retire to a bald stranger with bad knees and back problems, who you’re right back to calling ‘Underwood’ because you no longer remember his name.”
“I already call him ‘Underwood,’” Willy objected. “It’s a joke.”
“Very cute,” said Max, and bent back his middle finger. “But let’s peek behind Curtain Number Two. Let’s say, tennis being tennis, that you both fall on your butts. Oberklutz never does get his backhand cross-court on the more profitable side of the alley. You go back to charging a net you can’t cover—”
“I can, too—”
“Shut up. So you’re both washouts, wandering about in the 700’s, where you can’t make a living like just about everybody else can’t make a living at this sport. Maybe for a time you get along because misery loves, etc. But I bet that after a year or
two, unable to get your constricted, furious hands around the throat of the whole world, you’ll start going for each other instead.”
“These fully furnished dioramas are a hell of a wedding present, Max. Remind me to send you a thank-you note—”
“But let’s look behind the third curtain,” he barged on, bending the next finger. Max was double-jointed, and its angle was shiveringly obtuse. “Will hits the tour. Underwood, tragically, falls short. But that’s lucky in a way, isn’t it? Because now your cut-rate hitting partner is free to accompany you around the world—booking your practice courts, massaging your shoulders, and balancing your burgeoning bank account. Shall I go on?”
“No thank you,” she said coldly.
“Excuse me, have I left an alternative out?” He wiggled his remaining pinkie.
“That will do.” Willy about-faced to the running machine, whose hum would mercifully mute her coach’s malicious monologue. The treadmill began at an easy lope, but as she sped from 5.2 to 7.4 mph she did not manage to run so much as a yard from Max, or from what he was saying.
The jolt of her step gave Willy’s voice a huffiness. “There are plenty of tennis couples on the tour.”
Max crossed his arms. “Name one.”
“Chris Evert and John Lloyd.”
“They’re divorced,” said Max flatly. “And what is John Lloyd best known for?”
Her flush was covered by a natural reddening when she accelerated the treadmill still faster. “Being married to Chris Evert,” she admitted. “But they made a good team for a while!”
“Since when do you join any team, Will? You can’t even play doubles. You compete with the girl on your side of the net.”