“But it wasn’t worse,” she said hotly. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are,” Edsel soothed. Though he glanced decorously at his lap, his left eye swivelled to look straight at her, as if it could see things the good eye couldn’t. “But even if we jump-start your career again, you will face much the same brick wall in a few years.”
“I recognize that an early retirement in tennis is inevitable, and quitting the tour would be difficult for me in the best of circumstances. I just want to leave this part of my life behind me with something, you know? Tennis is all I care about. If I’ve made a fool of myself in it, I’d rather… die.” She looked away, embarrassed.
The therapist remained placid. “Literally?”
“Some days. You think I’m a baby.” When Edsel didn’t rise to the charge, Willy scowled. “I am a baby. Knowing that doesn’t mature me by ten minutes.”
“Tennis is ‘all’ you care about. Don’t you also care about your husband?”
“I do,” she said impatiently, “but I won’t submit to marriage under any conditions, so maybe I don’t care for him enough. I thought when we met that Eric would be a reprieve from the pressures of the circuit. Now not only my career’s on the line when I play, but my marriage, too. Eric’s no safe harbor; he’s an added pressure to prove myself. That’s why I choked in the Chevrolet. I may not seem that way now because I’m such a goddamned mess, but I’m a proud woman, Dr. Edsel. I’m not the housewife type. I detest cooking and cleaning, and the prospect of being some toadying schmoe while my husband gets famous makes me gag.”
Edsel’s wandering eye roved in her direction and for once the pupils synchronized. In the single coherent glance glimmered a nascent affection. “Let me get this straight. Your estimation of yourself depends on tennis, since you ‘are’ tennis—”
“I wish you’d stop repeating that. It sounds retarded.”
“Does it?” he asked innocently, and bent back his next finger. “Your marriage is on the line—the baseline. Your association with your coach is, I assume, contingent on performance?”
Willy raised her chin. “It is a professional relationship.”
The wandering eye curved her way again. “And you’re not close to your family? Or rather, you can only bear their waiting for you to fail when you’ve demonstrated that you’re not a flop?”
She’d come in here vowing to maintain a dignified reticence, but Walnut Street had been on her mind. “My sister, Gert, has been rubbing her hands the last two years like a greedy kid about to come into an inheritance. The high-and-mighty’s falling-on-butt presumably redeems her killingly sensible existence. My mother is waiting for me to crawl back in the womb, where I belong, or better yet check in early to The Golden Autumn and drool in the halls so she can wipe my chin and spoon me strained peas. My father… created me in his own image, and was aghast when he recognized his own credulous face. He’s been stepping on it ever since as a substitute for stepping on his own. How would you feel walking into that rat’s nest with a ranking of 902?”
Edsel had kept his yourself; your marriage, your coach, and your family fingers bent back with his other forefinger. “You have few friends?”
“Tennis is demanding, I—”
“No friends.” Edsel appraised his bent fingers with his good eye. “What else have you left?”
“What’s the drift?”
“Everything in your life, according to you, is dependent on your success in tennis. In sum, not only does your choking in the occasional tournament not surprise me, but I am staggered that you’re able to wobble a ball over the net at all.”
Willy looked back at the psychologist steadily; she couldn’t make him out. “Are you ridiculing me?”
“You mock yourself so incessantly that you perceive ridicule from every corner.” Edsel slipped his pencil through the spiral of his notepad. “Your situation is not uncommon. Women are by and large more emotional than men in sports. That’s both a strength and a weakness. In fact, strengths often convert to weaknesses, and we need to see if yours can be switched back again. Self-criticism has helped you to set high standards for yourself, but now the lash is out of control and is flaying you to shreds. Comparing yourself with others has spurred you in the past, but now makes you feel worthless. And maybe something in you wants to perceive Eric as your superior. At any rate, men don’t like to be overshadowed, even in the nineties. When we love someone we feel a nagging impulse to do what they want. Maybe you are losing on purpose, as a favor to your husband, do you think?”
“I’m no altruist, Dr. Edsel. I find that theory frankly incredible.”
“An idle thought. Or perhaps you are short-circuiting. All other tennis players are the enemy; your husband is your friend; your husband is a tennis player. It doesn’t compute. In your mind I can see quite an electrical fire.”
“Might Eric,” Willy drummed her fingers on the couch piping, “have a part in this?”
“I’m sure he does, but how do you mean?”
“I’ve wondered if he’d have gotten so far without me around to show up. If I’ve inspired him to clobber me.”
“The person you are describing is not a paragon at all, but a very cut-throat, competitive, even destructive man.”
“Yes,” she said brightly. “Like his wife.”
“I’m going to give you an assignment,” Edsel announced, putting down his notebook. “I want you to play for fun. You must have done that as a girl. Those were good days?”
“The best.”
“Try to remember how you felt then. The vibration of the strings in your grip. If you hit the ball out, enjoy hitting it out. Because do you feel ‘at home’ on the court nowadays?”
“On the contrary, I feel banished.”
“Go home,” Dr. Edsel ordered, and Willy stood to leave.
He touched Willy’s arm on her way out the door. “I think you should decide why you are coming here. Do you wish to save your career or your marriage?”
“At this point? Save one, save the other.”
“Perhaps we should try and decouple them.”
“Decouple is an ominous choice of words, Dr. Edsel.”
“What if I were to tell you that you will not rescue your tennis game without breaking up your marriage?”
Willy paled. “I might find a new therapist.”
“Don’t be alarmed; it was a hypothetical question. For now, go play for fun. If you stop having a good time, quit and try again another day.”
Willy headed down the hall. “Ms. Novinsky,” he said quietly behind her. “You’re limping.”
“Willy, what’s wrong? Honey, you’re crying!”
Willy parted her hands around her mouth. “I did—” She stopped to inhale; the air wheezed.
“Take your time.” Eric fetched a Kleenex.
Willy kept her eyes closed, and when blindness didn’t allow sufficient privacy she angled her face toward the wall. It took concentration to get the words out, and her enunciation was precise, like Milton Edsel’s. “I did my ‘assignment.’ I went to Riverside to have fun.”
“You don’t look as if you did your homework very well.”
“I played Randy, remember him?”
“Gold chains? All mouth no strokes.”
Willy groaned. “I lost.”
“You’re joking.” Eric made her another appointment.
“We live in a culture of celebrity. Yet only a handful achieve renown. How do you think that so many nobodies manage?”
“I haven’t an inkling.” Willy had brooded on the question before. “All that managing boggles my mind. Edsel, are you urging me to give up again?”
“You may have to allow yourself to give up in order to keep going. If you continue to equate failure with death—the death of everything that matters to you about yourself, the death of your marriage—the prospect will terrify you into choking. Somehow scads of your peers adjust to a life that falls short, often desperately short, of their desires. They ar
e not all Stepford wives or suicides or even divorcées.”
“You sound like my mother: ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’”
“Hope, but don’t put quite so much at stake.”
“Staking everything used to distinguish my game. I’ve always been wholehearted. My parents protect themselves by expecting to fail—they, like, prefail, as if anticipation softens the blow. Which it doesn’t. Did I ever tell you about this dinner in high school? After I was in the finals of the New Jersey Junior Classic, and my parents couldn’t come?”
“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”
“They always had excuses. Department meetings, a flat-liner in the nursing home. Let’s just say they never changed their plans. But they promised we’d ‘celebrate’ that night. Anyway, I won. I came home pumped, right? And my mother’s putting dinner on the table. Some mushy tuna casserole with soggy noodles, creamed spinach. Bananas and custard for dessert. My stomach sank.”
“What did you expect?”
“Steak! Champagne! Cake! It was a victory dinner!”
“How could your parents have known that you’d won?”
“That’s the point, Edsel. My mother made the same food she serves in her nursing home: bland, pale, and soothing. She fixed a consolation meal. Then when I blew my stack, she cried. No matter how many trophies I hauled back, they always prepared the hankies for when I came shuffling home in tears… Why are you smirking?”
“Because you can see defeat even in casseroles.”
“Just come right out and say it: I’m nuts.”
The stray eye rolled to the ceiling, but the fixed one humored her. “Maybe your mother could only show she loved you through comfort. It’s hard to feel close to victors. They don’t seem to need sympathy.”
“It’s lonely at the top?” said Willy flippantly. “Ask Eric.”
“Let’s go back to your assignment. You thought it would be easy, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I just leapt at one more opportunity to fail at something. I can’t even have a good time.”
“I told you to stop if you began to get upset.”
“It was the middle of a match, Edsel. What was I supposed to do? Tell Randy, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m beginning to have feelings of self-revulsion and my psychologist tells me I have to quit’? Give me a break.”
The wandering eye sank toward his cheek, dolorous. “You often describe yourself in terms that make your situation seem comical. Yet I don’t hear you laughing.”
“It is comical! Edsel, I read the papers. All over the “A” section, Muslim genocide, Africans hacking each other to bits. These people have real problems. And meanwhile I’m blubbering because I can’t win a tennis tournament. My career is zip in the big picture, of no moment even to the game. Other women with good backhand slices will take my place. I bow out? Big deal.”
“Putting your plight into perspective doesn’t seem to cheer you up.”
“I hate self-pity,” Willy muttered. “Which only makes me feel more sorry for myself.”
“When a young woman tries as hard as she can to achieve what she wants most, and her aspirations are frustrated, do you not think that story is a little bit sad, too?”
“I don’t know,” Willy admitted, hands behind her head. “In every novel I read, the hero prevails. He has to suffer adversity, of course, or there wouldn’t be a book. But by the end it’s always Rocky. No one writes about people who bite the dust. So I keep expecting that one day I’m going to turn my own page and in the last chapter everything turns out swell.”
Edsel got up and rummaged his shelves, returning with a beaten copy of Jude the Obscure. “Read some old books,” he recommended. “This era doesn’t suit your state of mind.”
“Hardy? My father loves him.”
“Yes.” Edsel smiled. “I thought he might.”
Sessions with Edsel didn’t salve Willy’s anxiety but brought it to a pitch. Mid-July she was entered in the New Jersey Classic, staged on old turf in Newark, where she’d competed in the juniors. Maybe that was what set her off. After all, it was humiliating to hack through the qualifiers when she’d won this same tournament six years before.
Nobody paid attention to qualifying matches, one reason they were difficult to concentrate through. While the stands ambled with chatting players, Willy went down in the third set’s tiebreak 15–13. She hurled her racket at the microphone, barely missing the umpire, and the sound of the frame striking the mesh amplified over the loudspeakers to a small nuclear explosion. Cited for “gross misconduct,” Willy would have been defaulted if she hadn’t already lost. Eric had come along for moral support, which was unfortunate. He turned chalk-white, and wouldn’t speak to her the whole train ride home.
Just as well. Yes, she had lost her temper. Yes, or in a way, she was sorry. Yes, it looked bad to chuck her racket at the umpire, to scream obscenities in public, and yes, she knew that Eric was touchy about appearances.
But she was not simply sorry. Previous to hard times, Willy had given little thought to the brutally harsh gestalt of the good loser. Victors, of course, were expected to be mannerly, but grace fell to the winner’s circle like manna from heaven. Willy’s own gallantry in triumph—extolling the fine fight, her opponent’s mastery—had only redounded to her glory; the grander the adversary, the nobler the champion. And look: already proven the superior athlete, she was munificent as well! The chivalry was always sincere; Willy could only be grateful to an antagonist who so cooperatively bungled the last point. It was such a breeze to love your enemy when he was beaten that good winner wasn’t even a pat phrase.
But what was extorted from the vanquished? He could not weep, curse, or flee. While champions could give over to instinct—to their free-flowing generosity and élan—the defeated was compelled to suppress his every impulse. It wasn’t bad enough, was it, to lose, to drown in a rush of dismay and self-disgust? No, a second subjugation awaited après-game. Willy had obliged at the Chevrolet: expounding on that fat cow’s brilliance while elucidating her own deficits, paying homage to the last person on earth she was in the mood to praise. Forcing losers to display genuine generosity—that is, generosity with a price—was like hitting up the destitute for charitable donations. A good sport was a considerate liar, who successfully disguised his every true emotion and so spared one and all the medical unpleasantness of his intestinal cramps, the obscenities in his head, the spasms of his heart. How much would it have cost Eric and that handful of onlookers to forgive a brief display of pique and a few well-earned profanities?
The graciousness exacted from the also-ran was a travesty for losers everywhere, who deserved emancipation as much as the wheelchair-bound or overweight. As Edsel had emphasized, the world was dense with losers. How many comers climbed to the pinnacles of their professions? The vast majority foundered, so why was there no spokesman for the second-rate, the runner-up, the penultimate, the huge disheartened horde? Would no one defend their right to hurl their rackets? All the way home on the PATH train, Willy knew she was supposed to apologize. Her refusal was a political statement.
“You only care about how I behave,” said Willy, throwing T-shirts into her suitcase. “Never mind how I feel, just so long as I don’t embarrass you. I failed to convert five match points, two of which I double-faulted down the drain. What normal human being wouldn’t scream?”
“Any mature adult with a little self-control.” It was an old, unresolvable difference: Willy placed a premium on honesty, Eric on decorum. “You worry me, Willy. Flying out of orbit like that. You never used to throw tantrums in public.”
“What do you know about losing? You haven’t a clue how I feel!” All through an avalanche of socks. The number of times a year Willy and Eric watched each other pack gave the relationship a tumultuous texture, as if they were always trooping off to Mother in a huff.
“Edsel doesn’t seem to be doing you much good. I wonder if we should find someone else.”
“Typical American solution. Go get h
elp. And if the latest painkiller doesn’t do the job, switch brands. Well, in case you care, Edsel’s too reasonable. ‘So your husband is about to play the U.S. Open while you can’t make it through the qualies of a satellite; why should that matter? Why not be happy for him? And oodles of people flunk at what they do, what makes you so special? Join the club!’”
“Uh-huh. And what does Upchuck tell you instead? Since I presume that’s where you’re going.”
“At least he understands—”
“That scumbag isn’t sharing your agony. He sees we’re having trouble and he’s dancing. Since you obviously go up to Wetspot and pour your heart out. But he doesn’t give a fuck about your career!”
“Then who does?”
“I do!”
“Who’s literally invested in it? Max!”
“But what is he buying?” Eric sputtered. “He’s making down payments on your ass, Willy. Lying in wait—”
“You find it incredible that anyone would stick by me because they thought I was talented?”
“Willy, you’re ranked 924, you’ve been costing him thousands for over two years, and he still pays your health insurance, finances your plane tickets, and eats your hotel bills, not to mention giving you the run of his camp—”
“School.”
“School, with permanent access to a dorm room he could be letting out to a younger, more profitable client.”
“Why are you doing this? I’m not a big enough train wreck, you have to tear off some extra parts yourself?”
“Because I’m tired of going along with a charade that’s entirely at my expense. He’s making a fool of me, Willy. Just because you’re having a rough time doesn’t mean I have to take humiliation lying down. Why would he lavish all that money on you? When he’s the most prominent coach on the eastern seaboard, and could take his pick from top 200 players, who would reward his attentions in cash? At this point, how are you planning to pay him back?”
“Thanks,” said Willy, slamming her suitcase shut. “Not only am I a zero, a black hole to pour money down, but I’m a whore.”
“What you are is vulnerable. He sees you’re weakened, that you and I fight a lot, and that some other man slipping a hand down your shirt might make you feel wanted. But I want you. That ought to be enough. I’m warning you: I don’t give a fuck if you’re ranked 5,007. But call me old-fashioned, I won’t be made a cuckold. I’ve had plenty of opportunities on the road and I’ve spared you the details because I never, ever consider screwing around. Then I come back here and you can’t see through that dirty old man in Connecticut. I have to wonder what bullshit lines you might fall for.”