“I’m not in love with the woman on my side of the net,” she puffed.
Max sneered. “And I thought you liked classical music and proper literature. The way you talk you’ve been listening to Top Forties and reading Harlequins—baby, baby, baby. Now you think that love conquers all? I refuse to believe that being over the moon about some horny hunk has turned your mind to mush.”
“Liz and Peter Smylie!” More speed.
“Liz made it to 36. Peter quit.”
The machine rose from a rumble to a whine. At 10 mph the tromp of her shoes and the rasp of her breath made it necessary for Max to shout: “You forget how well I know you! You’d compete with a fly if you thought it was trying to climb walls faster than you. All the world’s a contest. A fine quality in a sportswoman. Not in a wife.”
She thumped the stop button. “Nobody’s asking you to marry me!”
The mat had come to an abrupt halt; Max steadied her when Willy lurched forward. He kept his hand on her arm. The treadmill silent, he spoke quietly. “Do me one favor. Fill out the picture in your head of this glorious future of yours. See if it doesn’t include Underboy shouldering your luggage to Kennedy and requesting your wake-up calls in ten different languages. When your career takes off and he’s still hacking away in the 900’s, you think he’s going to be all meek and supportive, from the sidelines? Because Will, my friend, if you’re this gaga over a kid after years of being Miss Frosty, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that he’s just like you.”
“That’s so terrible?”
“It is,” said Max, dropping his hand to his side, “disastrous.”
The New Freedom Championship was held in the disheveled town of Worcester, Massachusetts, where Willy’s beige and umber hotel recalled her parents’ living room. If an event backed by panty shields was embarrassing, the WTA was not nearly so flush as the men’s ATP, and couldn’t be choosy about sponsors. The WTA had still not kicked its habit, Virginia Slims, despite frequent placards picketed outside Slims tour venues: WOMEN’S LIVES ARE GOING UP IN SMOKE, or YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, WTA: DIVORCE VIRGINIA SLIMES. In comparison with a cigarette company, a promoter of menstrual hygiene was a godsend.
But Willy would have entered if the tournament were bankrolled by a company that produced assault weapons or child pornography. The New Freedom paid its winner only eight thousand dollars, but made up for the poor purse with computer points. Besides, points were money; they were better than money.
This fortnight was as Max foretold: the Worcester satellite had no men’s counterpart; if it had, Eric’s ranking would have precluded him. Instead Eric was in Oklahoma, competing in the Jox All-Comers. Jox paid a pittance in every respect, but Eric couldn’t afford to skip any tournament that earned points at all. Willy couldn’t manage a ticket to Oklahoma City to applaud him through his first two rounds, and until she started hauling in substantial prize money this was bound to be a standard fiscal constraint. Her original visions of urging each other on all over the globe began to cloud.
Until the Jox–New Freedom overlap, they had managed to spend a misleading amount of time together. For the previous three months their tournaments had been fortuitously staggered, and in the rash prodigality of headlong romance they had each flown to watch the other play. Sweet but irresponsible, their mutual admiration society couldn’t last.
Sudden isolation in Worcester demoted Willy to a single life grown hollow and torpid. On the train up, she had half-turned to share a snippet from the paper with an empty seat. Time yawned between check-in and dinner. The food, too, was brown. More time yawned between dinner and bedtime. Finally Willy lay down, bored and wide-eyed, perplexed how she’d ever gone to sleep without first getting laid.
The idea of allowing her own fingers to wander down there was repellent. Not only did the notion present itself as a betrayal, but any sex without Eric no longer qualified as sex, in Willy’s new grasp of the term. To Willy, even the word fuck could no longer function syntactically as an intransitive verb. That was the difference: Eric was always having sex with her. In earlier encounters, Willy could as well have thrown her partner a piece of Portnoy’s liver and got up to read. In fact, had she on some occasions Willy would have had a better time. But Eric often called out urgently, “Willy? Willy!” to remind her that he knew she was there. He never cried Oh, baby! the way one athlete at UConn had done, and she’d recognized at once that this guy shouted Oh baby! with every girl he took to bed. Besides, with previous men the whole operation had become so physically complicated—first he would go down on her and next she would go down on him and then they’d have to try exotic positions. But Eric displayed no interest in exchanging favors like nervous neighbors, who borrowed cups of sugar and then returned them the next day. Rather than get tangled in an elaborate macramé of limbs, both their bodies seemed to melt away. When Willy closed her eyes and opened her legs, the part of her that Eric entered was her head.
So in her Worcester hotel room, Willy shut her eyes and let the perimeters of her body bleed into the room, until its walls dissolved and her fingers ventured not to her own nether regions but across state lines. Over the darkened country, Willy reached from these cold sheets to Oklahoma, groping until she found Eric’s hand. Clutching it warmly in her grasp, she slept.
Tennis, as ever, brought Willy to herself. Max had sent Desmond up on the early train to warm her up. Later that afternoon as she tied her shoes in the locker room of Worcester State, the jerk of her tightened laces yanked Willy back to who she was and what she was, which to Willy were the same thing.
Willy’s opponent, Robin Lascombe, had finally stopped yammering about her devoted father, only to outline her all-protein diet, including a long list of much-missed contraband like sausage pizza and frozen Mars bars. Willy hid a creeping smile by stretching out her calves. At maybe seventeen, Robin was young, but fatally so—skittish young, too-friendly young. Maybe Max had a point, that adulthood remained an advantage. Had it not been so absent, the girl’s face might have been pretty. Instead, any fetching curve was fogged by fear, which clouded off her cheeks as steam wafts from hot tarmac after a downpour. A profusion of moles splashed her skin like mud spatter. One unpronounced feature slurring into another, hers was a roadkill face, pulpy and boneless. Willy’s own features were sharp; her nose sheared in a straight ridge, her chin pointed, her cheeks jutted, her brow cut a clean shelf; even her eyes had edges, flashing vertical highlights like bevels. Glancing in the basin mirror, Willy concluded that on the basis of looks alone she would slice through this girl’s game like a knife through pâté.
Willy tucked the last wisps of hair under the crimson bandanna from Eric, pulled the elastic of her underpanty to wedge snugly under her buttocks, and tugged the plain white sleeveless tennis dress to smooth over her jog bra. Bandaged with elastic, her breasts were solid and immobile; it was like being ten again, or a boy. She double-checked that her kit bag was equipped with four rackets, a towel, water, and a sweater—in the nip of October, the danger was getting heated and sweaty, then chilling on breaks. As Willy shouldered her bag and headed into the small sports stadium, Robin trailed behind her and shouted, “Good luck!” Willy rolled her eyes.
Willy arranged her gear on a single fold-up chair, set starkly on the sidelines as if to emphasize how from here on she was on her own. At the first round of an only modestly known tournament, the audience was small and scattered, but Willy had never relied on fans to get psyched. She was sorry that Max couldn’t get here until the quarters; she was sorrier that Eric was in Oklahoma. But Willy made her offering not to ticket buyers or well-wishers but to Tennis itself—an abstraction, but with all the intangible presence and mute observation of God.
Even in the warm-up Robin kept hitting the ball out, then grinning at a bruiser in the front row. “Shift your porking ass, Rob!” he’d bark back, or “Anticipate!” Robin’s grin only got wider and more sickening.
Willy won the toss and just about everything after. Lascombe started
wobbly and proceeded to disintegrate altogether. A few shots she botched would have taken effort to miss; stick out the racket and the ball would bounce back, but Lascombe seemed more intent on getting out of the way. There was something almost erotic about the way Robin presented the vulnerable flank of her backhand side naked and unprotected, always with that unnervingly thankful smile. It took concentration not to feel sorry for her, but Willy knew pity was death. Sympathize with your opponent and before you know it they’re feeling sorry for you.
Only back in the locker room did Willy permit herself a gentler glance at Robin Lascombe. She was seated with her legs splayed, her skirt hiked carelessly to expose an aging, ocherous bruise, wide as a hand. At first Willy thought the girl had been playing connect-the-dots with the moles on her face, until Willy realized that Lascombe’s mouth and fingers were covered in melted chocolate.
On the phone with Eric late that evening, Willy nattered about the match, the high from the afternoon’s shutout not yet subsided. “The audience was dead bored, getting up for Cokes. I almost felt guilty.”
Eric was strangely unresponsive. When she’d finished spilling her victory, the conversation was clumsy; silence would be succeeded by both talking at once.
“I’m sorry,” she remembered. “Your quarters were today. How’d it go?”
“Eh. 6–4, 6–7, 6–3.”
“So it went three sets, but that’s not bad.”
“Not bad for John Reilly. I was the 4 and 3.”
Shock was too strong, but she was surprised. Eric had entered three minor tournaments since she’d known him, and taken two trophies; Jox was the sorriest of the lot. Out of the way, too easy to get into, and with little to offer, the draw could only have been weak. “What went wrong?”
“It’s that cross-court backhand—just wide.”
“Take something off it.”
“I don’t want to take something off it,” he said edgily. “Without pace it’s not effective. I’ll work on it.”
“We’ll work on it,” she offered.
“Right.” His voice was clipped. “There’s no point in my hanging around Okie City now, so why don’t I schlep up to Worcester? Catch the end of your gig.”
“I could use a hitting partner.”
“And a ballboy, too, I’m sure.”
He sounded so sour that she gave him the option to take it back. “What did you say?”
A long, slow breath rushed in Willy’s ear with a low roar. “That I miss you, Wilhelm.”
“I miss you, too—” She was about to call him Underwood, and thought better of it. “And I need more than a hitting partner. I need a partner.”
She was signing off when the receiver yipped, “Hey! I’m glad you won, Willy. Keep it up.” A funny firmness marked his tone, an underscoring that was excessive.
That evening she had no trouble dozing off by herself. Naturally Eric’s loss at Jox had saddened her, so it was odd how his misfortune sent a warm lull creeping through her chest. Maybe sadness was like that.
Meeting up with Eric in the hotel, she sensed a strain, evidenced in a forced bubbliness on her part, a terseness on his. They’d been out of each other’s company a mere two weeks, yet Eric kissed in an alien tongue, and their teeth clacked. When they made love, it didn’t feel safe to make jokes. At first he hadn’t fit inside, as if their bodies in the interim had grown slightly shy of interlocking shapes. It took the whole next day to locate the lucid, easy banter that had seemed like breathing before they’d parted.
Eric had shrugged off the All-Comers as of no importance. He could box and bury disappointment six feet under, well aware that in the open air of his head it would begin to smell. Whenever results did not square with his ascendant vision of himself, the event, not the vision, had to go. But aspects of Eric were opaque. Willy was uncertain whether he had truly cast the defeat aside, or merely appeared to have done so. Barring the odd backhand, Eric did all things well; if his insouciance was fake, it was seamless.
As promised, Max drove up for the quarters, but choreography was cumbersome. Eric insisted on stretching Willy’s hamstrings; he’d not allow her coach to leer into his fiancée’s crotch. When Max gave her the low-down on her opponent’s shortcomings and Eric chipped in what he’d picked up spying on enemy practice, Max contradicted that what Eric had seen was an aberration and in fact the girl’s backhand volley was extraordinary. Willy was left with no idea whether to pass on the forehand or backhand sides and decided to lob.
Lobbing turned out to be the ticket, and to celebrate Willy’s victory in the quarters they dined as a threesome in the hotel. A nightmare; never again. Max expressed aggressive sympathy with Eric’s loss in Oklahoma, and name-dropped former Top Ten confederates with the nimble regularity of Hansel sowing crumbs. Eric was stonily polite, and declined to mention that his parents had been good friends of Ted Tinling’s. Some games were best won by refusing to play.
The morning after she won the semis, Willy was rallying with Eric on a practice court, when Max marched onto Eric’s backcourt with an unsheathed racket and stood on the T as Eric collected a ball by the fence. Eric looked briefly confused. Max held his racket out for the ball. Eric didn’t hand it over. Instead he advised across the net, “Willy, you might take those approaches even earlier—”
“If you take an approach too early, you lose control,” Max interrupted. “Placement in an approach is everything—”
“I wasn’t talking half-volley, Upchurch—”
“Willy, come here!” It was the stern command of calling a dog to heel. Willy padded over. Max didn’t often shout, and he didn’t now. “You can fuck him. You can even marry him. But if he’s going to be your coach as well, you’d better tell me now.”
“Of course not, he’s just—”
“All right. Today’s the final. It may only be worth eight thousand dollars, but sixteen hundred of that is mine. You need those points, badly. If you need those points, I need those points. So get that man off this court.”
“Eric, maybe you’d better…”
Eric zipped up his racket, his motions quick and tight. Max called after him, “Ever hear the adage about too many cooks?”
Eric was right: tennis was like sex. You mostly remembered the times it was awful. After matchmaking reached its heady climax a successful encounter blurred; all that was left was the score. Awkwardness, missed connections, the wrong partner at the wrong time lasted longer, pricking into memory point by point with all the precision of a child’s pin drawing held up to a lamp. Calling up her year’s tennis highlights, Willy saw only drop shots that hit net cord, break points she failed to convert, lunges that sent her sprawling. No matter how many trophies she had accumulated, the year-in-pictures cataloged disaster. It was as if nothing about competence was worth retaining; as if memory existed exclusively for the purpose of self-torture.
Consequently, as soon as Willy’s racket followed through her match-winning overhead in the New Freedom final, the game behind her shrank to a statistic. Shaking hands with her opponent and turning to her chair, Willy searched the twilight for the afterimage of match point before it faded forever. It must have been gratifying, but she could no longer be sure. As with sex, maybe that’s what kept you coming back for more: when it was good, you couldn’t keep it.
Toweling down and shaking hands thrust from the stands, she spotted Max ambling toward her with an understated sketch of a smile. But when Willy searched the front row, no Eric. Though his seat was empty, he hadn’t bounded to her side.
Meanwhile, Max was working the elastic of her sweatpants over her shoes.
“Max, these look ridiculous with a tennis dress.”
“You’ll get cold.”
Once she was swaddled, her skirt lapping over the gray sweats, Eric threaded from an exit and apologized as he unseated neighbors to reach his chair. The cheesy Chariots of Fire sound track was already PUM-pum-pum-ping through the speakers, and there was no time to exchange a word before she had t
o waddle to the mike and accept the cut-glass trophy.
Arm around the bowl, she flicked the skirt with her free hand and curtsied. “I know you must get tired of players thanking their coaches and fiancés,” she began, “but I face the music if I leave either of them out.”
The crowd chuckled. American audiences were putty in the hands of any victor; she could obviously say anything.
“At least I’ll spare you the ritual gratitude for my father’s support,” Willy continued, her voice booming into the stands, “since for years he had his heart set on my becoming a certified public accountant. [Huh-huh-huh.] But most of all, I want to thank everyone for coming out to a satellite. We all like watching the stars, but Top Tens have to come from somewhere, right?”
She raised her fist in the air, and they cheered.
“Where were you?” Willy exclaimed when they were finally back in their hotel room. “At the end of the match, I looked everywhere. You’d vanished.”
“I had to take a leak,” said Eric, tossing his bomber jacket on the bed.
“On the last game?” They didn’t have time for a fight. The end-of-tournament party was in half an hour, and the winner was obliged to be on time. Hurrying, Willy pulled off her sweatpants, and they got stuck around her sneakers.
“It wouldn’t have been the last game if you’d lost it,” Eric explained with suppressed impatience, pitching clothes. “It was 5–3 in the second set, you were down love–30, and with a break Patterson would be back on serve. I’d put off dashing out for an hour, and I was about to bust a gut.”
“If you could wait an hour, you might have waited five more minutes,” Willy grumbled, wrestling from her sweatshirt. “You wouldn’t have left your seat coming up to Edberg’s match point.”
Down to his boxers, Eric turned with his hands on his hips. “I wasn’t watching Edberg, was I?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All that ‘I’m gonna be a Top Ten’—”
“I didn’t say that—”
“It was a bit much.”