Her cheeks tingling, Willy bound her arms over her bare breasts. “The crowd expects rah-rah. So does the WTA.”
“I came all the way up here to see you play.” Eric stepped into his dark suit pants, zipping them up officiously and slapping the leather belt. “For a week I’ve had nothing else to do but grab a few pick-up games with local losers. And now you’re riding my ass for barely making it to the men’s room—”
“I’m sorry.” Willy reached out to touch his arm through the starched white shirt, letting her breasts swing free. The few inches between them seemed uncrossably vast. Her portable electric clock shuddered as if every second were more effort than the last, and the air in their shabby brown hotel room had gone to pudding. She wasn’t used to touching Eric being difficult; that she had to force her hand came as a shock. “I’m grateful you’re here,” she added, holding firmly to his sleeve and employing the same peculiar emphasis with which Eric had stressed “I’m glad you won” from Oklahoma. “Very grateful. You helped inspire me. Maybe that’s why I did better than… I mean, I had a cheering section. I like to perform well for you. Then you missed the last game. So I was disappointed, that’s all.”
Eric didn’t throw his arms around her, but at least he had not drawn back. His own motions had the same creakiness of hers, as if their joints lacked oil. Why had simple conversation grown so laborious? “I am doing my best,” he said heavily, “to support you in every way I can. Sometimes I have to tend to my own needs, as they say. Okay?” The exhausting exchange completed, he pulled away.
“Aren’t you glad it matters to me that you’re watching?” Willy asked softly.
Eric whipped his tie around his raised collar. “Delighted.”
Willy slithered silk over her head in silence. A lascivious red, this was one of her favorite outfits, but just now the dress glared; it looked garish, too low-cut and showy, as if she thought she was hot stuff. She tugged the skirt down brusquely, and would only toss an offhand glance in the mirror, not to be seen preening. Willy smoothed the white tights up her legs. Eric’s back turned, she traced an admiring finger under the hard disc of her calf muscle, and then felt guilty. She shook out her hair, as if to get a spare part rattling in her head to clunk into place. This wasn’t the way she usually felt after winning a tournament. There was no elation, no relief, and her only relation to this upcoming party was dread. It was almost as if, since the victory was only hers and not also Eric’s, she had only half won.
In fact, for a fleeting instant Willy wished that she’d missed that last overhead—that she’d lost the final. In a flush of regret both alien and unnerving, Willy imagined this evening otherwise, telling the WTA to stuff their stupid party and sweeping off with Eric to splurge on a compensatory dinner neither could afford. In mutual commiseration, they might not feel exactly jubilant, but at least they’d feel close.
Though that very morning they’d winked like gold bullion, with the New Freedom’s computer points now in hand they clinked cheaply in Willy’s palm like spare change. Her momentary impulse was to give them away. Standing in her stocking feet and staring helplessly at Eric’s back as he worked his broad shoulders into his jacket, Willy lifted a hand as if to offer him a gift—one that would make more difference than some flimsy Sweetspot T-shirt. But the computers weren’t programmed that way; just because the points were yours didn’t mean you could donate them where you liked. Willy was stuck with them, and maybe the fact that they were nontransferable was what made the points feel trifling.
“Honey,” Willy whispered at her future husband’s side, “you don’t have to go to this party if you don’t want to.”
“I never said I didn’t want to go,” he said stiffly, readjusting the Windsor knot more tightly around his neck than seemed necessary.
“It’s only a cheapie WTA cocktail affair for a second-rate tournament. It’s bound to be dull…”
“Isn’t the event to celebrate your achievement?” he asked stolidly.
“In a way, but mostly to keep the sponsor—”
“Then my presence is more or less required, is it not? A given? Why would I not want to go?”
She shrugged and peeped, “No reason.”
“All right, then. Get your coat.”
The victory party was in the student union, and infiltrated by sophomores with an eye for free drink. The glasses were plastic, the wine poured ominously from carafes. Indifferent to the lowrent catering, Willy concentrated on shepherding Eric.
There was clearly no need to. He was perfectly well behaved—too perfectly. He was gracious and demurring. As pruney, overtanned WTA administrators chattered about Willy’s technique, he maintained a courteous if vacant expression. But Willy kept him hooked on her arm, inserting into every exchange, “Eric plays pro as well.”
“That so?” asked the rep from New Freedom—a man; men were bound to take an interest in women’s periods when there was money in them. “What’s your ranking, bud?”
Since Eric’s adjacent competition had also dropped points, at least his poor performance in Oklahoma hadn’t cost him lost ground. “926.” Eric’s enunciation was even and neutral.
“Good for you. Best of luck, keeping up with this little powerhouse. Don’t let her get away from you.”
“I don’t plan to,” said Eric with a distant smile. She could not put her finger on it, but through the evening Eric kept his arms close to his sides, drank a single glass of wine, and spoke only when spoken to, all with the composed distraction of a man who was making resolutions.
EIGHT
“OF COURSE YOU’LL BE invited,” Willy promised. “But I was concerned you might find it difficult to watch.”
“I make my living as a voyeur.”
“How can you stand it, Max?” she ventured. “Looking on while other people play?”
“It’s the best of all possible worlds.” In the confines of Sweetspot’s library, his cigar smoke was noxious. “I get credit when you win; if you lose, you’re easily replaced. I make lots of money; I risk nothing.”
“That’s how you see your job?”
“Increasingly.”
Willy had glimpsed another side of Max those few weeks in spring—a side that would risk the whole game on a single play at her dormitory door; the side that hit the ball in his prime, gladly putting himself on the line instead of placing these cowardly hedged bets on proxies. Little of that bravery glimmered now. Settled in his usual corner, cupped in lamplight that hugged his chair, he looked complacent and safe, and she saw again why she had to marry Eric. Remembered anxiety and immediate anxiety were chalk and cheese. Max, in his retirement, could never understand her.
“Why don’t you have it here?” he volunteered. “Save your pennies.” She’d have been touched, except he met her eyes flippantly, tapping his ash. The offer didn’t cost him. Maybe her romance had already foreshortened to another match he’d follow from afar.
“You’re too kind,” she said formally.
“Use this library for the reception. It’s small, but you don’t have many friends.”
“When would I have had time for them?”
“You regret that?”
“Not enough.” She hefted her kit bag. “Max? You’re my friend, aren’t you?”
“I’m your coach. Turning a relationship like ours personal is ruinous. Remember? It was your word.”
Eric was uneasy about getting married at Sweetspot; Max’s donation of the school radiated an obscure vengefulness. But Willy was more uneasy about asking her father to spring for a commercial venue. All her childhood he’d denied her bus fare and Motel 6 bills, forcing her to save babysitting money for the spare racket he considered an extravagance. She needed to preserve the impression of her father as cheap to keep from finding him spiteful.
At any rate, for their ceremony neither a synagogue nor a Methodist altar was appropriate. Eric had never owned a yarmulke; the temple on Seventy-fourth Street promoted ascension on earth. Willy was raised in the
church of abstention, where the kingdom belonged to immaculates who declined to participate. While the Novinskys subscribed to the faith of the spurned, and the Oberdorfs to the faith of the spurning, their families sat on opposite sides of the same house of worship, and Willy was uncomfortable in either pew. There was something ghastly about Axel’s clawing up New York’s ladder and kicking aspirants on lower rungs; there was something unpersuasive about her father’s sulking at the bottom with his arms crossed.
For their own parts, Eric and Willy had gravitated to sanctuaries of austere design: great green open-air chapels exposed to passing airplanes. The commandments of their bible were not always easy to keep, but its catechism was crisp, its theology straightforward: thou shalt not double-fault; thou shalt not question line calls. Theirs was a religion both of ruthlessness and equal opportunity, and if they revered a material grace bestowed on an elect, they were both members of the chosen people. Should their marriage be blessed on hallowed ground, it made perfect sense to say their vows on a tennis court.
So the two settled on Sweetspot, and scheduled the event for December, the only downtime in the tennis calendar. As they compiled the guest list, it evolved that Eric had scads of acquaintances, but few intimates. Eric’s loyalties were few, absolute, and sequential. The majority of his confidants he had either finished with, or finished off—one contentious best-friendship had ended in a fistfight. Eric pursued his every project with blinkered intensity and then one way or another brought it to conclusion. (It was like him, for example, to flat-out propose to Willy, and not suggest they live together first. Anything short of ultimate struck Eric as namby-pamby and disturbingly indefinite.) This proclivity for closure suited him to a career in tennis, and to marrying, less well to marriage itself, with its undemarcated forevermore and its slight haziness about what, beyond I do, the project is exactly.
They settled on a smattering of peripherals, since shy of a quorum a wedding felt dinky. Accordingly, the preponderance of their guests—hitting partners, Princeton and UConn exteammates, Sweetspot grads, steeds of the Upchurch stable whom Willy could abide (not Marcella Foussard), all descending on Westbrook in Vuarnet sunglasses—were tennis players. While the bride and groom had invited no one whom they despised, even individuals you like can be revolting as a group. One wedding guest and his Mazda Miata was neither here nor there; a roomful of people all of whom owned flashy cars was gross.
After the guests had warmed themselves with coffee in the library, they trooped up the hill in muffs and fur-lined hoods to court number seven, where Willy and Eric awaited with a Westbrook justice of the peace. At a distance, Willy recognized the shrill, showy laughter of athletes accustomed to being interviewed. The phalanx of taut bodies approached like a mobile paste-up from Vogue. Trailing, the single dowdy clump in this army of mannequins was Willy’s family. Her father’s suit was rumpled from the trip up (why was no one else’s?), and his hair scraggly to match the crabgrass at his feet. Her mother’s excess of costume jewelry was heartrending. For once Willy was even grateful that Gert was plain. The Novinskys were their only wedding guests who looked like people.
Maybe it was gimmicky, but Willy had enjoyed decking out for the ceremony. The sleeveless shift with its short flared skirt replicated her tournament dress in white satin. For an outdoor event in December, she’d special-ordered a sweatshirt in pearl angora. The shoes had taken days to locate—slight heels, but the toes, tied with ribbon, laced like sneakers.
Eric was leaning on the net post with the inaccessible composure that any tennis court fostered in him. He really should have played in the sport’s aristocratic golden age. Those long legs were made for white flannels. In the bone cable-knit sweater with maroon and navy trim, a starched white collar sheering from its V-neck, Eric might have been lifted straight from a frame at Forest Hills—Ellsworth Vines, 1930. Like dapper gentlemen of yore he’d slicked back his hair. All he needed to complete the portrait was a laminated wooden racket.
It was cold, though fitting to marry in weather that drove you to bed. Isolated snowflakes drifting to the court recalled previous winter afternoons when Willy would push the envelope of the season. At the end of many a December session with Max she’d had to prize her rigid fingers from her grip, much as they would unclench a racket from her rigored hand when she was dead. Sweetspot had four indoor courts, but they were airless, protected, and sterile; not-tennis. Until number seven was blanketed, Willy hit outside. Tennis as well as marriage was “for better or for worse.”
The JP rushed their ceremony, stamping to warm his feet. In kissing Eric to seal their vows, Willy defied the elements as she had through December tennis. Despite adverse conditions, she would prove to Max that icy outside forces could not freeze out a passion. Despite the many superb rallies that had eluded her retention in the past, this time she was determined to keep what was fleeting.
Willy’s memory of the subsequent reception would soon blur. The Novinskys and Oberdorfs assumed opposite corners, as if social climbing or stunted ambition might be physically contagious. Max may have been attempting an air of remote amusement, but his urbanity was strained. By the end of the festivities he was bulwarked in his armchair reading sports psychology in spectacles, with all the unpersuasive aloofness of a brainy adolescent at a school sock hop who was afraid to dance.
Surrounding Max was an entire library full of wrist sprains, regrooved forehands, and winter suntans. Willy was disconcerted that she clung so tenaciously to her place in this vacant lot. Likewise in the flotsam of finger sandwiches and slow tide of champagne, she had often to float her eye toward Eric to remind herself what this sea of chat, yet another cocktail mumble that resembled too well dreary victory celebrations like New Freedom’s, was meant to mark. Ordinarily, the game was the prize; the trophy was chaff. This time the game had been incidental. The trophy was a lifetime.
But one memory would remain sharp. Whites gleaming, a chapped hand grazing tape for the ring, the JP intoning, “I now pronounce you husband and wife”: in their very union Eric and Willy stood on opposite sides of the net.
***
The halcyon period of the next few months evoked a ball at the top of its toss: steady, serene, balanced. Though at its apex the ball’s repose appears eternal, its very arrest implies a rise and fall. At no point did Willy take herself aside and whisper, These are the good times, but it may be definitional of good times that they never get labeled as such until they are over.
Eric shifted officially into Willy’s apartment on 112th, where he had been moving in sock by sock for five months. Marriage or no, she took a breath when the sanctum of her mailbox was invaded by a man with a duplicate key. The flimsy locks that had hitherto gated her from any other person had been picked. His flipping of her mail or striding in the door unannounced were physical tokens of the fact that Eric now knew her well enough to intuit anything from which she might attempt to bar him. Eric had the keys to Willy herself.
Suitably for them both, Willy’s efficient one-bedroom was designed for hasty departures, red-eye arrivals, and weeks of desertion in between. Her freezer routinely stocked a dozen microwave lasagnas and one half-eaten carton of Häagen-Dazs laced with frost. After coming home to enough liquefied onions and shrunken, testicular potatoes, Willy had learned to line the pantry with only a few cans of tuna fish. And having swept numerous black mangles from her windowsills, she’d dispensed with thirsty plants, retaining a single cactus, which could survive on neglect. Bulbous with spurts of erratic growth from irregular waterings, the prickly, misshapen lumps alerted Willy to the dangers of the itinerant marriage, by describing the thorny deformities you fashion when tenderness is too sporadic.
Emblems of intermittent absence grew poignant on nights Willy was left on her own. Desultorily, she’d pick a packet from their overflowing basket of uneaten USAir peanuts, select one of the many Sheraton shampoos and Hilton soaps in the shower, and treat herself to a nightcap from their copious store of airline miniatures. Thou
gh they both liked order, when Eric was on the road Willy missed his sweat-soaked T’s, ragged tube socks, and crenulated jock straps drying on the curtain rod. She yearned for his dank sweats to drape the hissing radiator, their yeasty must infusing the apartment like rising bread. She’d delay disturbing the bed; though the wide white spread had once invited only the deep, self-righteous sleep of physical exhaustion, the sheets underneath now rippled with a more delicious stir. Restive, Willy would wistfully rewind her husband’s jump ropes into neat coils in the foyer, pausing to sniff the foam handles, funky with his perspiration. When she was lucky, they’d still be wet.
If anything, Eric’s presence was not intrusive enough. His one mutant eyebrow hair Scotch-taped to the wall remained his sole contribution to her bedroom collage: Polaroids of Willy and her Davis Imperial hefted on her father’s shoulders, clippings from sports pages, sittings for Sweetspot annuals. He demurred from miscegenating the trophies over her bureau with his own. He was content for the two frames that predated him to brighten their living room: an attractive poster rescued from the New Jersey Classic, her first satellite victory in 1990; and a lively, buoyant print from the Museum of Modern Art. The painting portrayed a Gay Nineties sportsman leaping out of the frame with a ball at his fingertips. His red-and-yellow-striped bathing costume resembled long underwear, and his handlebar mustache was off-center. Though the orb was actually a volleyball, the comic abandon of the figure, his carefree exuberance, captured the unfettered explosion of pure joy that Willy identified exclusively with a tennis court.
Aside from distributing its every surface with drying sports clothes, Eric assisted in decorating their apartment only by helping to fill Willy’s offbeat coffee table, of which he became inordinately fond. She’d glued it together herself: a large clear Plexiglas box whose top was perforated in the center with a three-inch-round hole. Popped through that hole over the last two years, spent tennis balls crowded against the walls of the box, tinted rust from clay, violet from Riverside’s berries, or gray from afternoons it had begun to rain and Willy couldn’t bear to stop playing. Gradually the level of discards rose, and balls pixelated behind the plastic like the dots of a photograph enlarged to the point of absurdity.