Читать книгу Double Fault - Lionel Shriver - Страница 11

“So, what, Upchuck’s been schtuping you since you were twelve?” Eric snapped a breadstick.

“We didn’t meet until I was seventeen.” Willy folded her arms in front of the gummy pasta that Eric was bound to finish for her.

“Beyond statutory. A stand-up guy.”

“Exasperatingly so, if you have to know.”

“How’d you hook up with him, anyway?”

“Max was the one serendipitous result of my father’s determination that I not turn pro. Max and I were both on vacations that made good on the emptiness of the word.”

Having become the number three amateur in the New Jersey juniors by sixteen, Willy had exhausted most of the local competition but was not allowed the financing or time off from high school to participate in tournaments far afield. With the U.S. Open nearby in Flushing Meadow, in 1986 Willy had anticipated skipping her usual ballgirl stint to take a last crack at the junior title, even if that meant plowing through the qualifying rounds. Naturally this was also the summer that her father resolved to take his family on a cross-country car trip, into which Willy was summarily drafted.

Outraged at being denied the National Tennis Center, she spent the long, hot drives hunched in the backseat saying nothing. Willy particularly froze out Gert, who’d made a great show of being willing to come along as a college sophomore and had urged Willy to be, as Gert would say, mat-yure.

Willy hadn’t been ma-cher. She left the family stranded in the Mount Rushmore souvenir shop to go for a six-mile run. Her sole interest was in finding a motel with a court, and in completing the day’s loathsome sight-seeing before the light waned and it was too late to scavenge a partner. Like the rest of her high school gym class, neither Gert nor her father would play her anymore.

Chuck Novinsky was tightfisted, but limited vacancies in Nevada drove him to a luxury motel. At least The Oasis would mollify his second daughter, since it harbored three tennis courts.

The resort also hired a resident pro, a former 600-something who preyed on wealthy travelers working off their afternoon ice creams. Though Ed Sanders was going to seed from rum sours, he strutted those three baking hardcourts as if taking a second bow at the Foro Italico. As Willy later remarked to Max Upchurch, “Big prick, small pond.”

Willy skipped a canvass of the old bags and brats in the lobby and went straight to Sanders. He was practicing his serve; the sizzling topspins all landed two feet deep.

“Hey, mister.” Willy sidled to his baseline. “Game?”

“I charge sixty bucks an hour, sweetheart. Better check with your daddy first.” She was treated to the beefcake smile for free.

The Oasis was already bankrupting her father. At the additional expense of some charlatan’s worthless counsel her father would blow a gasket.

“Tell you what,” Willy proposed, tossing a Wilson hand to hand. “You win, I pay you double. I win, you pay me.”

“Okay, darling. You’re on.”

Those were the days when not a cloud of hesitation had shadowed Willy’s sunny certainty that she could take all comers. She sometimes supposed that had she sustained her adolescent sense of peerlessness by now she could be in the Top Ten. It was astonishing how far blind self-regard could take you, even if the braggadocio was arguably unfounded. For Willy had made the common error as a teenager of mistaking for excellence what was merely potential.

“I wasn’t as good as I thought,” she told Eric. “Still, playing Ed Sanders was like taking candy from a grown man.”

When the bill arrived at Boot of the Med, Willy dived for her wallet, Eric held up his hand. Apparently he would pick up checks as a kindness but not as an obligation.

“Halfway through this wham-bam-thank-you-mister match,” she resumed in the car, “a face appeared behind the fence. Just like you. Beady eyes, fingers crimped around the wires. I gave the guy a show. I was so pissed off. The junior qualies were starting in Queens, and here I was glowering out car windows at the Painted Desert.

“I’d no idea who the guy was. When he saw Sanders fork out the sixty bucks, he asked if I was tuckered out. So I put the sixty back on the line, figured I’d double it. Like fun. This time I’d been hustled. I was playing Maximilian Upchurch. He put me right in my place, which at the time was the only way to get my attention.

“Max took the sixty bucks to teach me a lesson. Then he bought me a soda and grilled me about my training. It was such a relief to find anybody who gave a damn. My parents and teachers were goading me to learn the Pythagorean theorem; I’d never had a serious conversation about my forehand. I felt like the ugly duckling who’d finally met a swan.”

Willy parked the school car at Sweetspot. Ambling, she instinctively drifted toward the courts.

“We met up in the piano bar that night,” she rambled. “Max and I were in the same boat. His wife had refused to spend one more summer schlepping to tournaments and buying his clients corn kits. She wanted a real holiday, with nothing to do with tennis. To salvage the marriage, he’d agreed.”

“My wife has no interest in tennis,” Max had explained. “Or, I take that back. She hates tennis. Which is a kind of interest, I suppose.”

Willy had stirred her Virgin Mary. “How could anyone marry a tennis coach and dislike the sport?”

He smiled, dismally. “You’re too young to understand, but it makes perfect sense. Why, it’s almost inevitable.” He reveled in her naïveté. Max told her anything, the way you confide in a dog.

“But I’d think turning against tennis would be the same as turning against you.”

“Duh,” he said.

It seemed the Upchurch’s marriage wasn’t flourishing on their edifying scenic drives, since every evening Max wolfed his dinner and rushed back to the motel to scan cable channels for Ivan Lendl. As a reprieve from Taco Heaven and Navaho beadwork, he’d loiter soulfully on public courts to side-eye local talent. But his subversion of their “vacation from tennis” into the stalking of a new junior discovery was the last straw. At the end of the couple’s stay in The Oasis, Max was free to tail the Novinsky’s Chrysler to Yellowstone, since his wife had flown back to Hartford to file for divorce.

“So when you returned to New Jersey,” Eric prodded as Willy led him to the Sweetspot courts, “Max proposed.”

“To be my coach, dickhead.”

Having plowed up their Montclair drive, Max had offered Willy a contract: he’d coach her pro bono in exchange for 20 percent of her winnings the first five years of her pro career. “You’re pretty,” he’d observed cynically, lounging against his Saab Turbo. “The money’s in sponsors. Your face would sell.” Max had appraised her clinically up and down, as if she were a head of cattle. For months after she’d act more temperamentally than came naturally, if only to be recognized as a girl.

“Max offered me a full scholarship to Sweetspot for my senior year.” Willy kicked open the chain-link gate. “But my father wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Upchuck made him nervous.”

“His worries proved unwarranted. Contrary to your sleazy assumptions, Max never laid a hand on me. And I was dying for him to. I used to lie in bed at night fantasizing about winning some big tournament, and Max would sweep down from the stands and lift me over his head—”

“Like I did.”

“Like you did,” she said shyly. “But I never earned better than a clap on the shoulder and a slug of Gatorade.” Even now, her voice was melancholy. “At any rate, I was allowed to take the bus to Connecticut on weekends if I promised to go to college. Later I tried to renege on the deal, but Max was on my father’s side. Max said he wasn’t grooming an imbecile. Later I wondered which slot he was grooming me for. He didn’t push his other students to go to college.”

“So far I don’t understand why I’m not speaking to the second Mrs. Upchurch. That’s the usual program.”

“He was waiting. He wanted me to make an informed decision as an adult. That was his mistake.” The deserted facility was lit by the single floodlight of the moon, and Willy sank onto what for no rational reason was her favorite court. She laid her palms flat, soaking up heat from the tar.

“By this spring, the tension had become unbearable,” she continued, leaning against the fence. “Pausing outside the women’s locker room, he’d repeat some coachy tip I’d heard a million times, just to keep talking. Or we’d dawdle by my dorm before I hit the sack and stand a little too far apart because any closer and we’d have had to do something.” She shrugged. “So finally we did something.”

“But it didn’t last long,” she went on quietly. “Weeks. Oh, I won’t pretend that the first few nights weren’t a dream come true. But during practice nothing was the same. We started quarreling. I balked at his advice; I didn’t like his pushing me around. I’m sure he’d told me to ‘move my fat ass’ before, but suddenly I got offended, and I’d stomp away in a snit. Then one morning in May … Still chilly, I guess. It was eight-thirty, late for me. I started to get up. He reached for me and mumbled, ‘It’s cold. Come back to bed.’ That was the end.”

“You lost me.”

“It wasn’t cold. Not especially. And what did I care if it was five below? It was time to practice, and he didn’t give a damn anymore. I’d started questioning everything: why he chose me in Nevada, whether he really thought I was gifted or just liked my legs. His every stingy compliment sounded in retrospect like a pick-up line. I was convinced that other players were laughing at me behind my back. For years I thought that all I wanted was Max. I wanted one thing more.”

Willy reclined flat onto the court, its warmth steeping through her jeans and cotton shirt. Eric lowered himself on top of her and exhaled. “You’re warning me that I better not get on the wrong side of your racket?”

But sandwiched between Eric and number seven, Willy had her first intuition that it might be possible to have a man on one side and a court on the other. “I’m tipping you off,” she murmured, “that I’d rather play tennis than have sex.”

“I’d rather play tennis,” he said, tugging her shirttail from her jeans and sliding his hand up her rib cage, “then have sex.” He was a math major, a calculating man; he prized a small foil packet from his watch pocket.

“Right here?”

Eric flipped her on top of him. “I’ve wanted to for years. After all, tennis is like sex, isn’t it? I think that’s why you like it. Thrusting across the net—the ball is just a medium, a messenger of love and loathing all rolled up in one. That antagonism—you’re enemies but you need each other. Listen to the language! Long-body, sweet spot, throat of the racket. Dish and shank, stab and slice, punch and penetrate—it’s pornographic!” Eric sidled her Levi’s down her thighs. “Approach and hold, break, break back, stroke, regain position, and connect—it’s romantic. And we both know that libidinal high from finally finding the right partner, and how you raise each other up. You never thought you could be so good, and they never thought they could be so good, and more than caring who wins, most of all you don’t want to stop … Good God, Wilhelm.” He had grasped her buttocks, one in each hand. “Your buns are about as pliant as Goodyear radials.”

Willy faced the fact that she’d always wanted to do it here as well. It was significant that she and Max had never thought to, as if they’d sensed that number seven and Max’s bed were incompatible. When she wriggled from Eric to step from her jeans, being naked here felt normal. She always felt naked playing tennis, each blemish on her character laid bare: every unjustified conceit or nascent timidity, the least laziness, flagging, or despair. The body, in comparison, was a trench coat.

In one motion Eric shed his grungy black T-shirt, and so revealed an unsuspected artistry of torso, as the sly elegance of a surprise drop-shot is covered until the last moment of opening the face. While Willy had indulged a few flings with other athletes at UConn, the dullness of their conversation had cast a pall over their anatomies, the idealized bodies prosaic and lifeless as line drawings in Gray’s. With more than one Adonis she’d remained so unaroused that she’d dragged her shirt back on and trudged off to her own dorm. Willy had supposed it took some aching flaw—a belly sag, an appendectomy scar—to capture her imagination. But while Eric had no flaws to speak of, an intriguing stir across his shoulders flickered the moonlight from plane to plane, like the facets of a mirror ball, or a series of complex, interlocking ideas.

Eric pulled his own jeans off, balancing on one leg, then the other. He seemed to enjoy her watching. Willy had often found the prick, both its shriveled button of retreat and its strangely dissociated waving and poking when in heat, ridiculous. But Eric’s, at halfmast, drooped down his thigh at that unhurried and luxurious stage of excitation that was a man’s most alluring.

As he kicked his clothes to the side and glided toward her where she rested against the net, Eric didn’t strut with the gutsucking, chest-thrusting swag she had learned to associate with the vain male athlete who has taken his clothes off. At the same time the confidence of his stride, the wryness of his smile signaled plenty of vanity. But those vacuous hard bodies had flexed their deltoids as if to make up for other lacks. Triangular pectorals were all they had to offer and so seemed paltry, like lone finger sandwiches on a picked-over platter. Eric Underwood instead uncloaked his body as if it were a pleasant incidental, like free leather upholstery when you buy the car.

If Eric considered his physique a trifle, Willy was in awe of it. Awe in general had not been a prevalent emotion in her life, and she wore the sensation awkwardly. She scanned his body for some restful ugliness. His feet were long, but this attenuated body should have big feet. Willy was ordinarily content with her own figure; it was taut and neat. But as Eric approached in the moonlight, she was aware that her breasts, while small, sagged just enough to fail the pencil test. She recited to herself that she was in good shape, that all women have a layer of subcutaneous fat; when Eric put his hands on her waist Willy heard in her head the very phrase, subcutaneous fat. Her own trunk was smooth and bland, with none of those conniving, thinking ripples musing over his chest. Eric sighed as he traced her hip, but Willy found the slight flare too wide and envied him the clean, parallel shoot to the thigh.

The foil packet in his right palm scratched when he stroked her ribs. From the shading of dark hair, his forearms loomed in relief, while hers, blanched in the wash of the moon, looked flat, paper-doll. He smoothed his left hand from her hip to her thigh, teasing his fingers up and inward, and she panicked at what he could possibly find in the absence between her legs that could compete with the whole fifth limb that arced against her stomach. Maybe, in sufficient thrall, it was impossible to imagine that so riveting a sex could conceivably be attracted by one’s own.

“Oberdorf,” he said cryptically. She didn’t recognize the syllables, which sounded like an incantation, an open sesame from The Arabian Nights that would move boulders from caves.

“What?” Her voice was thin and vague.

“My last name is Oberdorf,” he announced. “‘Underwood’ is for deviled ham.”

Something about this new name oppressed her. Underwood had been a flimsy, easily manipulated infatuate who had pursued her all the way to Westbrook on the basis of one Cuban-Chinese meal; an adventitious young man who might eventually prove a pest but whom she could employ usefully as insulation from Max Upchurch’s forbidding disappointment. Underwood’s phone number would be scrawled on scrap paper, later accidentally thrown away. An Underwood sent her flowers that she forgot to water. And an Underwood had a gutsy but goofy and entirely forgettable tennis game. An Underwood wouldn’t have had a prayer in pro tennis—but with a name like that an Oberdorf could improve.

“Eric Oberdorf,” she said faintly. Her acknowledgment of his real name seemed to satisfy something he’d been waiting for, and he tore open the foil.

If condoms once indicated consideration for the girl, they did no longer; and here Willy was yielding to a man she knew so slightly that she couldn’t be sure if he’d have bothered to protect her from pregnancy if he weren’t primarily protecting himself from disease. Nor could she tell if he was packing contraceptives with the specific arrogance of expecting to fuck her or if he simply went everywhere with the generic arrogance of expecting to fuck somebody. But it was too late to worry what she was getting into because something was already getting into her.

Willy’s back pressed the net cord; it groaned. Eric Oberdorf lifted her to cradle the small of her back on the tape, crouched, stood, and closed his eyes. Consequently Wilhemena Novinsky discovered what a match was like without the go-between meddling of a tennis ball.

The following morning Willy insisted that Eric leave. To have imported a man she was pretending to be interested in was tacky; to foist under Max’s nose a man she was genuinely interested in was sadistic. Eric dispatched, she warmed up with Max that afternoon on number seven with an irrepressible smile. In her mind’s eye the net cord retained a telltale dent from the pressure of her back, and she could still hear it creak from her pleasure. Though Willy had contrived the intersection of their paths, she now resolved to keep these two men as far apart as possible.

“You’re hitting well,” Max accused her. “Unusually well.”

Willy begged off a day early, claiming she had paperwork to post for a satellite tournament in August, but in truth she wanted to try tennis again without the ball.