Double Fault (38 page)

  "Our contract," he began, clasping his hands, "bound me to cover your expenses in exchange for a cut of your
earnings
the first five years of your pro career. You turned pro at twenty-one. You're twenty-seven. Our contract," he paused, "has expired."

  "What do you want to do about it?" She didn't take a chair.

  "I originally had in mind a somewhat different arrangement, but last night you apprised me that my alternative proposal was not suitable." He said
syewtable
, like a Brit.

  "I told you years ago that it wasn't
syewtable
."

  "I can take a long time to get the message."

  "But you've got the message now."

  "Entirely," he said, tracing a light red scratch on his left arm.

"So maybe we should proceed on a more à la carte basis. You are welcome to rent a dorm room on the premises for $700 per month, or $1000 with board. Court time is $15 per hour—"

  "Spare me—"

  "
My own time
," he overrode, "is $100 per hour, and that is a discount."

  "I'm bowled over by the break." A light, cold sweat had broken out over Willy's forehead.

  "A C-note would not be nearly enough compensation, I assure you."

  "Is all this because I wouldn't fuck you last night? Revenge?"

  "I'd call it justice," said Max, mock-aggrieved. "Your ranking doesn't merit a renewal of our arrangement. My investors would be rightly irate. I couldn't even argue that you were a hard-luck case; your husband is well paid. For this year I can write you off as a tax deduction…You're smiling?"

  "That I'm a
write-off
. Literally."

  "My business is one of calculated risks."

  "And you've been calculating."

  "You haven't been."

  "So I should have kept my shirt off? To keep you on board."

  "Might have worked for a while, too," Max conceded. "But integrity is expensive. Why most people give it a miss."

  "What about yours?"

  "What have I done to be ashamed of? I carried you for over a year I didn't have to. And there's an injury clause in your contract. After your ligaments tore, I could've cut my losses. In fact, if I'd documented that you were done for, your insurance would've paid me a lump sum of fifty thou."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "I'm a nice guy?" Max supposed.

  "You don't sound as if you believe that."

  "I've felt nicer. Ask Angela: when it comes to subdividing property, I'm merciless."

  "Is that what we're doing?"

  "You're the property. And uncharacteristically, I cede all claims. Please don't imagine that I'm kicking you out. I'm treating you the way I would any other player at your ranking, at your age, with your prospects. Isn't that what you wanted? And Eric can afford to buy you a bit of coaching, rent your room. Husbands have been financing their wives' costly, eccentric hobbies for hundreds of years."

  Blinded for an instant by the same blazing fury that her husband could ignite, Willy had to consider if maybe she loved Max, a little, after all.

  "We've worked together for a decade," said Willy, the
good loser.
"Are you taking everything back?"

  "You do have one of my rackets."

  Willy nodded at the files on his desk. "You get to keep your racket. No, I meant all those
Good shot's
. The
Well done, Will's
and
You've got what it takes, Will's
. Did you really mean
Nice tits?"

  Max winced, as if pricked by his own brass tacks. "When I came across you in Nevada you had more raw talent than any client I'd taken on in five years." The compliment seemed to tax him; he dropped back in his chair.

  "So what went wrong?"

  "Talent's only the half of it, Will. You know that."

  "You used to say I had the other half."

  "Your heart was once in the right place." His eyes scrunched. "It shifted."

  "My decline is all Eric's fault?"

  "It could be partly my fault," Max allowed, and taking some responsibility for her downfall appeared to cheer him. "I may have undermined you—"

  "Yes. You did."

  "Ironic, isn't it? Pretty girls throw themselves at me all day long. You might have been flattered."

  "If I were Marcella. But I've never made a very good
girl
."

  "And of course there's one more thing. Which may reduce psychologizing to empty gab." His gaze indicted her. "The Tanqueray."

  "It healed," she jumped in.

  "Not quite, Will. You might put one over on Eric. But how could you hide it from me? Look at the way you're standing."

  Willy glanced down at her bent right knee. The majority of her weight rested on her left foot.

  "You favor the left all the time," Max noted. "And there's a diffidence…You don't trust it, and maybe you shouldn't. Because it hurts, doesn't it? Sometimes all day, or when it rains. During practice you grimace twenty times in an hour. Your admirable stoicism amounts to a hill of beans."

  "I did my exercises," Willy insisted. Standing symmetrically, she blinked, hard.

  "And how. You might have recuperated properly if it weren't for all that mindless rope-skipping." He added bitterly, "
Eric
's routine."

  "So I'm damaged goods?"

  "Tennis players are a commodity. Even good ones are a dime a dozen. It's not enough to manage a brisk walk without collapsing." Max spread his hands. "You have to be perfect."

  "This is my parting gift? An excuse?"

  "You need one."

  Only while clearing out her dorm room did Willy realize that for the first time in years Max had used her husband's real name.

  When she opened the door Eric jumped, guiltily, as if she'd caught him over a girlie magazine with his pants down, though he was only wrapping a new racket with a rubber grip.

  "You're back early," he observed, his face flushed.

  "Since we both know I only go to Westbrook to fuck my coach, I thought I'd skip the pretense of practicing my strokes."

  "That's not funny," said Eric mutedly. He rushed to help her unload, but didn't remark on the fact that she'd returned with twice as much luggage, most of it in plastic bags. His motions were jerky, and he didn't look her in the eye. "Hungry? I got some—"

  "No." There was a starkness to this day that Willy intended to preserve. She didn't want props.

  "Say," Eric raised, wiping his hands on his shorts as if something wouldn't rub off. "I got some good news."

  "How unusual," said Willy.

  "For both of us. I got an offer that I couldn't refuse."

"You're not in the habit of refusing offers anyway."

"I, uh, I got a coach."

  Willy stood in the middle of their living room, like a guest whom no one had invited to sit down. The apartment looked bedraggled. She didn't care; with the drape of sponsorship sports clothes and conspiracy of alien rackets, this didn't feel like her own place any longer. It was harrowing, to yearn to go home when you were already there. "Oh?"

  Eric collected the crimped strip of his racket's original grip. Skirting around his wife to the trash can, he gave her wide berth, like a squash player midpoint avoiding the arc of his opponent's swing. "It's only six weeks to the Open. I've one warm-up scheduled, the Pilot Pen in August. Gary's been pressuring me for months, and maybe it's time I stop being so pig-headed, like, this is the big time, a Slam…. Maybe I don't know everything, and if I'm going to get some, ah, help, now's the time."

  "I fail to perceive why this turn of events is good news for me."

  "Well." Eric blushed. His laundry had been sent back damp; he began folding garish sports shirts drying on chairs. "It's, you know…Max."

  Willy remained standing in the same spot. She was practicing distributing her weight evenly between both legs. Straight and bearing a full fifty-two pounds, the knee began to ache. A ligament with which she'd grown intimate was tightening, slowly, like a violin string tuned gradually from D to E.

  "This way," Eric went on hurriedly, "you and I can head up to Connecticut together. Spend more time—"

  "You couldn't find," she said evenly, "any other coach?"

  "Willy, you've said yourself that Max Upchurch is the best there is in this part of the country. Why should I opt for less? And what better recommendation than yours?" Though Eric could not have acquired his new confederate long before, the speech sounded rehearsed. "Max said he could have me up to Sweetspot, then leave the summer kids to his pros and accompany me to the Pilot Pen. I thought, if you had nothing else on, you could come along."

  "
Nothing else on
. You mean, get chucked from the qualifiers of another satellite."

  "You could give me pointers, right? Tell me what I'm doing wrong?"

  "I think you know what you're doing wrong." Her tone was ministerial.

  Eric avoided looking at his wife. "Max wants to do some intensive, really hands-on work with my game."

  "As opposed to getting his 'hands on' me. And you'll escort me to Sweetspot. As a chaperone."

  Eric's folding was usually precise, but the roll collar on top of his stack was off center. "Willy, this decision is totally impersonal."

  "According to you everything is impersonal. Your rise in the ranks, my fall. You helplessly succumb to your own monstrous talent; I'm blighted by an abstract bad luck. I'm beginning to wonder if we have a relationship at all."

  "Look, I need a coach, and Max is the obvious choice. His name popped up constantly when I asked other players for suggestions. And
he
came to
me
."

  "So he phoned you this morning. And nothing he said suggested that I might take this
personally
?"

  Eric concentrated on bunching his socks. "Why can't we share a coach? We share everything else."

  "We share nothing, Eric. For the last two years, I doubt there's been a single minute of the day when you and I have felt the same way."

  "That's not true. I also feel frustrated, angry, powerless—"

  "On my behalf." Willy picked Eric's freshly gripped racket off the Plexiglas table, inspecting the label. A Wilson. So he got the new sponsorship after all. Not that he'd mentioned it. That would be indecorous. "Tell me," she requested calmly. "Are you to pay him one hundred an hour? Discount rates, of course."

  "No, like with you—a percentage. He asked me my current gross, and said he'd settle for ten percent. If he makes any difference at all, it'll be worth it."

  "He makes a difference," said Willy, creaking the strings of the sweet spot in line. "To me, at least. You know, you really are amazing,
Underwood
. You've assumed half a dozen of my signature strokes, and refined them. Moved into my apartment, and installed all your fluffy free clothes. Ingratiated yourself with my family—as a
real
tennis player they can believe in, not one of their own sorryass kids. Sometimes it even seems as if you've been downloading my computer points into your file. And now you've helped yourself to my coach. From the sound of your amicable arrangements, I don't see why you and Max don't get married. Because I've been swapped for a newer model. Like your racket." She looked up wonderingly from the strings. "You sort of
are
me, aren't you?"

  "You're talking crazy."

  "The new, improved version." She hefted the Wilson, patting the frame on her palm. "Willy Novinsky without all those icky, human flaws. No holes in your molars. With a proper rah-rah Daddy, not some dour, unpublished Montclair nothing. Best of all, a
boy
."

  Eric shoved his clothes aside on the dining table; he'd nothing left to fold. "You're going off the deep end again—"

  "That was the problem with the old version. Obsolete Willy had
feelings
. Little moments of hesitation, specks of doubt as to whether she was just the greatest fucking thing that ever happened to the game of tennis. And the moods—the
disreputable behavior
—we've had complaints! So our updated model is a
gentleman
."

  Eric advanced with his hand out. "Calm down."

  "He
never
loses, which doesn't stop him from being an expert on how to go down in style. Max—funny how suddenly you two are on a first-name basis; what ever happened to 'Upchuck'? Max himself said this morning that a tennis player has to be 'perfect.' He's found his archetype in one phone call."

  Eric grabbed for the Wilson, and she whirled to the dining table.

  "No temper," she said, sweeping his pile of neatly folded shirts to the floor. "Always concerned for the welfare of the less fortunate; I'm sure you'll make many a charitable donation as a millionaire. And good at everything! Scrabble, German, mathematics—as if you had the microchips installed."

  The brandished racket smashed the glass over the New Jersey Classic poster, and shards tinkled to the floor.

  "Willy, get a grip," Eric growled.

  "Don't worry," Willy eluded her husband, chucking couch pillows in his wake, "
Mrs. Eric Oberdorf
can clean all this up. She can tidy," she kicked his dozen sycophants across the floor, "all your
sports
equipment—"

  "Get a hold of yourself!"

  "—and bake
cookies
!" This time she aimed for the MOMA print on purpose, and its glass shattered.

  "Give me that!" Picking his way through the shard-strewn rackets, Eric tripped over his jump ropes.

  "You're not my husband," Willy lifted the racket overhead, "you're my
replacement
!"

  Willy did not remember heaving the Wilson downward. Like flow in good tennis, the stroke expressed an absolute confluence of intention and execution. Because if she'd thought about it, she wouldn't have done it.