Double Fault

“Hold that against me?” Eric lifted his drumstick with his pinkie pointed, as if supping tea.

“I might resent it,” she admitted.

“Check: you’re not bankrolled by nouveaux riches climbers.” He tallied again on the rest of his fingers. “And no pushy old man, no eating disorders, and you’re not a blimp. Four out of five right answers ain’t bad.”

That Willy hadn’t denied having an affair with her coach had evidently stuck in Eric’s craw. “This is a test?”

“Aren’t I taking one, too?” he returned. “Princeton: feather in cap. Math: neither here nor there. Money: black eye.”

“You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“Technically. Plus or minus? Watch it.”

Willy said honestly, “I don’t care.”

“So why’d you ask?”

He was flustering her. “I guess I’m pig-thick, too.” She glared.

“When I asked walking down here if your name was Polish, you seemed to realize that Pole-land was in Eastern Europe and not in the Arctic Circle.”

“Stupidity may be an advantage in tennis,” Willy proposed, teasing pork bits from the rice.

“The adage runs that it’s a game you have to be smart enough to do well, and dumb enough to believe matters.” Incredibly, Eric had cleaned his first plate and was making rapid inroads on the second.

“With the money on the line, tennis matters,” Willy assured him. “No, I look at fourteen-year-olds romping on TV and think, they don’t get it, do they? How amazing they are. They don’t question being in the Top Ten of the world because they’ve no conception of how many people there are in the world. And the game is best played in a washed, blank mind-set. Nothing is in these kids’ heads but tennis. No Gulf War mop-up, no upcoming Clinton-Bush election, just balls bouncing between their ears.”

Yet Willy didn’t quite buy her own dismissal of tennis players as stupid. Yes, exquisite tennis was executed in an emptied state that most would consider not-thinking. But more accurately the demand was for faultless thinking—since to regard hesitation, rumination, and turgid indecision as a mind functioning at its best gave thinking a bad name. Supreme thought streamed wordlessly from the body as pure action. Ideally, to think was to do.

But the lag between signal and execution was also closing up in Flor De Mayo. Willy no longer heard words in her head before they spilled on the table, and so became as much the audience of her own conversation as Eric, and as curious about what she would say. There was a like fluidity to be found, then, in talk.

Clearly hoping for one more right answer, Eric inquired, “Are you going to college?”

Meaning, will go, or are going, not have gone. After knowing this guy for a few hours, Willy already had a secret. “No,” she said flatly.

He took a breath, seemed to think better of the lecture, and exhaled, preferring the remains of her fried rice. She’d left him a few baby shrimp. Something about the sheer quantity of food he consumed was magnificent.

“So which players do you admire?” he asked.

“I’m old school. Still hung up on the last generation. Connors. Navratilova.”

“She cries,” he despaired.

“So what, if she feels like crying? I bet you like Sampras.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Eric shrugged. “His strokes are impeccable.”

“He’s a robot.” Willy scowled. “Give me back McEnroe any day, and a decent temper tantrum or two. John taught the world what tennis is about: passion.”

“Tennis is about control,” Eric disagreed.

“Tennis is about everything,” Willy declared with feeling.

Eric laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But you’re right, it’s not the eyes. The tennis game is the window of the soul.”

“So what can you see about me in my game?”

“You play,” Eric replied readily, “out of love. Sampras loves himself. You love tennis.”

“I have an ego, I assure you.” She was lapping this up.

“You have something far nobler than an ego, Wilhelm,” said Eric, lowering his voice. “Which your ego, if you’re not careful, could destroy.”

Too mystical by half; Willy retreated. “Sampras—that there’s nothing wrong with his game is what’s wrong with it. Maybe more than anything, tennis is about flaws.”

He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got a future.”

“Your game is … incoherent,” Willy groped. “As if you scavenged one bit here and one there like a ragpicker.”

“Rags,” he said dryly. The bill arrived; he counted out his share and looked at her expectantly.

She stooped for her wallet, abashed by her assumption that he would pay. “I didn’t mean tattered. You made me work today.”

“My,” he said drolly. “Such high praise.”

“Praise is praise.” She slapped a ten-spot on the check. “Take what you can get.” Willy was offended in return. She doled out flattery in such parsimonious dribs, to anyone, that she had expected him to run home with the tribute and stick it under his pillow. He wouldn’t bully her into a standing ovation. He was better than she expected. Period.

Eric offered to walk Willy to her apartment, but up Broadway the air between them was stiff with grudge. “That was good food,” she said laboriously at 110th.

“You thought it would be ghastly.”

“I did not!”

“Cuban-Chinese? Beans and stuff? You whined, like, Sher, I mean, if you wanna. Vintage Capriati.”

She laughed. “OK, I thought the food would be revolting.” The air went supple. Willy strolled a few inches closer to her companion, though he’d still have to reach for her hand.

His arms swung free. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Heading up to Westbrook, Connecticut, for the weekend. I train up there.”

“Let me come see you.”

She felt protective of Sweetspot, but a visitor would serve a purpose. “Maybe.”

Eric crimped her phone numbers into the margins of his New York City tennis permit.

She lingered at her stoop for a kiss. It was not forthcoming. In the glare of the entrance light, Eric’s woodsy eyebrows shimmered with mutated stray hairs, some up to an inch and a half long. Intrigued, not really thinking, Willy reached for the longest eyebrow hair to pluck it.