Double Fault

Meanwhile, Larry Punt was giving his all. He was drenched in sweat, and lunged for every return, if reliably to no avail. For Edberg 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.”

He 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.