“Like what?”
“Dunno,” he said tersely. “What about you?”
“What about me what?”
“If you don’t make it.”
Willy was tempted to defend that $30,000 didn’t sound like much but it was plenty for her rank and she was starting to make a living and so she had already, to some degree, “made it,” unlike some people who still got a monthly check from their daddies.
“I can’t imagine, I—try not to think about it.”
“Exactly.” Eric dabbed his mouth with a teachery expression, as if he’d been putting her to a test again and she’d barely passed. “I don’t believe in contingency plans. A little imagination is a dangerous thing. Picture the future where you’re foundering and before you know it this bleak landscape is framed on your living room wall. Put up travel posters. You’ll do great. I’ll do great. We’ll do great.”
He spanked rice grains off his hands. Though only a year his senior, for once Willy felt appreciably older than her boyfriend.
The National Tennis Center had a wretched reputation among players—the crowds were rambunctious and disrespectful; the stadium was plunked smack-dab under LaGuardia Airport’s flight path. Willy had long turned a deaf ear to such carping. She herself had been forced to focus through a foofooraw of wailing car alarms, plinking ice cream trucks, or thumping outdoor rock concerts in nearly every scrappy tournament she’d entered. As far as Willy was concerned, the National Tennis Center was as reverent and hushed as St. Peter’s. If Steffi Graf groused that she couldn’t concentrate there, Willy Novinsky would happily take her place.
Willy loved Flushing Meadow. She’d been a ballgirl there in the McEnroe era, and had a crush on the volatile bad boy of tennis when she was fifteen. Since then, she always ducked behind security tape to say hello to the man who still managed the ball-retrieval team, and brought him up to date on her career. Though she’d never been a contender here, familiarity with the tunnels and locker rooms, of which the public were ignorant, infused her with a proprietary sense of access. At the NTC she dared to believe, as Eric did daily with such unnatural ease, that center court was her destiny.
With amazement, Willy was led by the hand on September 7, not up switchbacking ramps to the upper tiers of rowdy proles, but to the hallowed courtside seats reserved for corporations and blue-blood families. Screwed on the backs of their chairs gleamed two plastic plaques: OBERDORF. In that it had become customary to hand on permanent U.S. Open seats in one’s will, some day these thrones could belong to Eric. Willy conceded that privilege did not seem altogether obnoxious from the standpoint of its beneficiary.
Yet Willy and Eric seemed destined to remain on opposite sides of the net. As he supported the incumbent Reagan in ’84, Eric promptly backed Stefan Edberg, the obvious favorite, who had won the U.S. Open the previous year. Eric knew she was rooting for the challenger, Larry Punt—a modestly ranked hopeful who had battled his way through the qualies into the round-of-sixteen.
“Are you being deliberately contrary?” she asked. “Every time we watch a match, you back the other guy.”
“That’s because you have such a soft spot for long shots, Wilhelm. Whenever some poor slob is ranked 4,002, or is coming back from an injury that will eventually put him out of the game forever, you take his side. Who’s being contrary?”
“Since your ranking isn’t far from 4,002 you might sympathize with the player who isn’t famous.”
“For most of these people, this is entertainment,” he murmured, leaning forward. “For you and me, this is a vicarious exercise. So it’s a question of with whom you identify. That piece of kelp out there, even if he freakishly took this match, would only get cut to ribbons in the quarters. Why go down with the no-name in your head? Make it easy on yourself, and identify with the front-runner. If you throw your mental lot in with the lowly, there’s no logical limit. You may as well imagine yourself as an aspirant ballgirl.”
“I was a ballgirl,” she said icily, tugging the empty arms of her sweater around her shoulders and jerking them in a knot. “Edberg is drab. Typical Swede. He has no personality, and his face is about as expressive as set cement.”
“Who needs personality with a volley like that?”
“Tennis should be a test of character.”
“Character, maybe. Not personality.”
“What’s the difference?”
Eric assumed a patient tone. “Personality involves frilly quirks like I-have-to-wear-my-lucky-headband. Character entails flushing all that emotional froufrou down the toilet and getting on with the job.”
She turned to Eric’s face with amazement, which had assumed the same rigid intensity that he wore on court. Eric was a great admirer of technique, the exterior game, and if the interior existed for him at all, it was to be obliterated. Presumably in Eric’s view the most exemplary tennis players didn’t, themselves, exist. But Willy was riveted by the storms of frustration, beleaguerment, and redoubled determination washing over a player’s face like island weather. To Willy, the interior game was the game—your feelings could be played like a violin, or they could play you. Eric’s solution was not to master the emotions but to make them go away. If he himself could pull off such a vanishing act, he was either a shaman, or a machine.
When she turned back to the game, Punt had been given a warning for racket abuse. The underdog was screaming at the umpire, who gazed unconcernedly at an airplane overhead.
“No class,” Eric hissed.
“It was a bad call!”
“Which wouldn’t be overturned if Edberg’s shot had landed so far wide that it bounced on our picnic basket … Christ, what a trashy outburst.”
“Punt is 5–1 down! He’s frazzled.”
“So if he can’t play tennis, he could at least behave himself. Losing all the more behooves him to be gracious.”
“Gracious defeat is always insincere, and if I were being humiliated at what I cared about most in the world in front of thousands of people, I’d blow off a little steam at the umpire myself.”
Meanwhile, Larry Punt was giving his all. He was drenched in sweat, and lunged for every return, if reliably to no avail. For Edherg was in a zone, and deep lobs drove him to his backcourt for only the one winning overhead. Willy tried to get Eric to appreciate that at least Punt didn’t roll over.
Eric shrugged. “Makes for better spectating, but doesn’t affect the result.”
“God, you sound so contemptuous… when he’s playing his guts out—”
“Quiet!” shushed a woman behind them.
“Keep it down,” Eric muttered.
“Oh, who cares what the buttinsky thinks?”
“I care,” he scolded.
“Of course you do; anything to do with what other people think and how somebody appears. All this stiff-upper-lipping tut-tut when you’re not even British—” Willy burst into tears.
“Willy! What’s with you?” Apologizing to their neighbors, Eric ushered her from the stands.
“Honey.” He wrapped his arms around her under what might have been the Open’s single spindly tree. “What’s wrong? I thought we were having a nice time.”
Now that Willy had the most to say she couldn’t talk. “All you care about is—” Her throat caught. “All you care about is—” she would have to choose single words carefully “—winning.”
She expected the usual There-there-I-care-about-you-sweetheart! but instead he laughed and smoothed her hair and said, “Oh, Willy. Not nearly as much as you do.”
Her sniffles subsided and they resumed their seats, where Willy discovered that she didn’t revile Edberg quite so virulently any longer. Yet on the subway back to Manhattan, Willy was reserved, choosing to stand and read the MTA’s Poem of the Week even when two adjacent seats became available.
“Little Miss Macho,” Eric muttered in her ear, swinging from the next strap to dig a forefinger discreetly into her ribs. “Can’t be caught sitting down.”
H
e meant lighten up; she couldn’t. Some bitter pill from their outing was still undissolved. “Happy?” Over the clatter of wheels, she had to shout. “The impertinent nothing was crushed. More laurels for the automaton.”
“I’m delirious with joy,” he said, flouncing into one of the seats. Eric wouldn’t be lured into another public confrontation, and grabbed a discarded New York Times.
Willy grew alarmed that in reviving the antagonism she’d gone too far, and now Eric wouldn’t come home with her. At that prospect, her face drained and broke out in a sticky sweat. The train jostled her clenched jaw, and her teeth clacked. When Eric didn’t tromp out of the car at Grand Central for his connection with the number six, she went so weak-kneed with relief that she dropped into the seat next to him, with only one stop to go. Something awful was happening. It shouldn’t have mattered so much, whether he stayed over. Willy had slept complacently alone most of her life.
“OK, I give up!” he declared, slamming the door of her apartment. “Truth is, you don’t give a rat’s ass about Larry Punt. So what’s this really about?”
Eric switched on the overhead, and in its blaze Willy felt pasty and exposed.
“I’m a little distressed that we admire such different players,” she said haltingly.
“You like Boris Becker?” he fired at her, bombing into the couch.
“Yes, I—”
“Bingo. We have something in common. Feel better?”
“There’s one other player who we may not see eye to eye on.” Willy stood staring down at her hands.
“I can’t see what better to unite any couple than mutual revulsion for Andre Agassi, so who do you have in mind?”
“Me,” said Willy quietly.
“Hey, come here.” Eric reached and pulled her to his side, and then thought better of the overhead light. He lit a candle and killed the third-degree glare.
“You like these stony, stoic types,” she went on in the crook of his shoulder. “But I stamp my feet, leap up and down—”
“And talk to yourself all the time,” he finished for her with a smile. “Take your racket back! Kill the son of a bitch! Follow through on that volley!”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Of course.” He kissed her forehead. “You charm the pants off me on the tennis court, you know that.”
“But you’re so contained. I’ve never seen you display a single emotion in a match.”
“That’s illegal?”
“It’s inhuman! If your face never tingles with humiliation when someone slams an ace down your throat, if you don’t experience a trace of exasperation when you muff a simple drive that you’d hit right since you first picked up a racket—well, then, I can’t see how you could have feelings about anything!”
“Like what?”
She squirmed. “I don’t know, whatever… ”
“Like what?” he needled into her neck, teasing up under her chin, where he knew she was ticklish.
“Me!” Willy tried not to laugh. “Me, me me!” He moved to her ribs, which precluded addressing this very serious issue in their relationship with proper gravity. “All your fascist blather about control… and that snotty, antiquated bullshit about dignity…” She wriggled out of his clutches long enough to deliver, “And on top of that, you need ‘variety’ and get ‘bored easily’!”
Eric backed off, shaking his head. “So if I could possibly get bored with tennis, of course I’ll get bored with you.”
“Well, how do I know? You play like a martinet. You have no commitment to tennis, since you look forward to quitting. Where’s the devotion, the fire? Taken to its extreme, self-possession is mentally ill!”
In a single motion, Eric slipped one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her off the couch. He marched with Willy bundled against his chest to the bedroom and dropped her, bouncing, on the mattress. He dropped on top, stretching her arms overhead with both her wrists manacled in his hands.
“Mentally ill,” Eric lectured, “is not knowing the difference between some stupid little sport and real life. One of the main reasons I like Edberg and Becker is they keep their careers in perspective. They recognize that the rest of the world would roll merrily along without them or tennis, if it came to that.
“Now, do I feel anything on the court?” he asked rhetorically, his forehead pressed against her own. “Sometimes. I don’t show it, and that’s a gambit. I play better when I don’t give my reactions away. But tennis is not about ‘everything,’ you moron, not by a mile. Sure I like control, and dignity, in its place. This,” his hands slid down her arms, “ain’t the place.”
Grappling under her shirt, Eric popped a button. Willy decided this was not a very good time to go look for it. When he unzipped his fly his cock sprang forward, and for once Eric didn’t seem self-possessed but simply possessed. He wouldn’t wait for them both to get all their clothes off, and plunged into her with his jeans still binding his thighs. Willy had always considered fucking partially clad tacky, but now she changed her mind. Urgency took precedence over aesthetics. Apparently Eric did not always bother about appearances, about what people might think; he groaned loudly enough to titillate adjoining tenants. Yet his consideration was not so readily shed as his sense of decorum; even in the heat of the moment, he’d managed to slip a condom on.
Eric flipped her gracefully on top, and grasped Willy by the waist. He raised her whole body until the tendons in his arms stood out. Bringing her pelvis back tight to his, he bellowed. In the echo of his exclamation, a rich, round cry she had never heard issue from that throat, Willy gaped wondrously at Eric’s face. The muscles spasmed. The sharp planes of his brow and cheekbones sloughed and blurred. His countenance was almost unrecognizable; he didn’t look clever, caustic, or contained. Some people would have found the contortion of his features ugly. To Willy, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and she came.
Turnabout was fair play. If the seemly Eric Oberdorf could wake up half of 112th Street with an orgasmic roar, the volcanic Willy Novinsky could keep the lid on for one tennis game. The next day she tempted Eric into another match at Riverside. Willy insisted on the northern courts, whose surface eccentricities her boyfriend detested. To Eric, a court was an idealized graph from which the ball should take predictable trajectories if you’d got your equations right. This Oberdorf was Germanic by nature and liked order. A Novinsky had a genetic Eastern European predisposition to chaos. Willy was only delighted that overhanging branches had recently baptized number eight with a shower of purple berries, whose pits were rolling across the composition like violet ball bearings.
Rather than click her heels at a winner or bop her forehead when she botched a gift put-away, this afternoon Willy set her face into the very impassive mask she had learned from Eric himself. No whistles of admiration, racket twirling, or knocking the frame on her shoe. Instead, Willy marched woodenly from serve to serve without one stomped foot. Stifling her running monologue, today she straightened her mouth in a line so flat that were it an EKG the patient would be dead. When Eric asked if his serve was a let she would only nod.
“Are you upset about something?” he worried on the second changeover.
She shook her head rigidly, though whether or not she was upset had nothing to do with getting on with the job.
Whatever Eric seemed to want she denied him. He loved to dive for low, whistling passes, so each time he rushed the net she lobbed—exquisite topspin arcs cresting a few tantalizing inches from the tip of his racket. He’d streak to his baseline, plow back again, bloop… When he paced up his game, she dragged the points to a crawl.
And Willy had never been more coldly conniving. Her sidespins were given a happy assist when they landed on berries. She’d sweep her racket back as if for a doozy and at the very last second bring it to a shrieking halt; dink, the ball would cough over the tape and wheeze to Eric’s feet. Finally, when he’d been lulled into anticipating only junk, she’d let tea
r, jangling the ball into the fence. Composed and serenely mechanical, Willy dispatched the first set 6—2.
Receiving in the second at 5—1, Willy reflected that she’d aimed only to enrage him, to teach Eric that he could be fervid once he got out of bed. Yet her methods had begun to backfire. The score was sweet enough; she needed only to break him this game, or hold the next. But instead of at last revealing his wit’s end—by kicking another of her winning balls at the net, or at least shooting her a glare—Eric had started to laugh.
His serve went wiggly and folded into her service court, as if itself doubled over in hysterics. She flattened it. He didn’t even attempt to retrieve, and wiped away a tear. Willy narrowed her eyes to make them all the more steely, and disciplined her mouth to a bar. Meanwhile he had started to hoot, losing his balance and gasping for breath. At love—40, match point, he shoveled a fat, juicy floater to her midcourt. She squashed it. Barely able to get the words out through his guffaws, he said something.
The match over, it was now permissible to speak. “What was that?” asked Willy courteously.
This time he shouted unmistakably, “Marry me!”
Willy cartwheeled her racket fifteen feet in the air, and caught it neatly by the grip. Oberdorf had finally displayed a little passion on the tennis court.
FIVE
IF TWENTY-THREE WAS YOUNG to marry for 1992, Willy did not situate herself in modern history any more than she regarded herself as American. She owed allegiance to the tennis court, whose lines described a separate country, and to whose rigid and peculiar laws she adhered with the fervor of patriotism. Likewise Willy conceived of her lifespan in terms of the eighteenth century. As a tennis player, she would at best survive to forty; twenty-three was middle-aged.
That the institution of marriage had been thoroughly discredited by the time Willy was born didn’t delay her acceptance of Eric’s proposal by ten seconds. Granted, her own parents set a poor example; Willy envied neither her glumly patriarchal father nor his cheerfully submissive sidekick. But she might have envied her parents at their first meeting, in 1961: when her mother, Colleen, was a flighty modern dance student, leaping through recitals to the beat of bongos inside a helix of scarves, and her father, Charles, was an undiscouraged beatnik scribbler, whose pockets bulged from squiggled napkins and leaky ballpoint pens. Willy clung to the notion that nothing about marriage itself condemned her mother to dismiss an ambition to dance as vain folly, nor her father to turn on his own credulous literary aspirations with such a snarl. And surely had she wed in this more liberal era, the acquiescent Colleen might have told Charles to get a grip and stop moaning and sometimes gone her own way. Despite overwhelming evidence that both true love and domestic balance of power were myths, Willy still believed in the possibility of an ardent, lasting union between equals, much as many religious skeptics still kept faith in an afterlife because the alternative was too unbearable.