Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

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.

       chapter 4

      There ensued a courtship in every sense. After Willy just missed making the semis of the Fresca Cup in Dayton, Eric met her plane at LaGuardia toting his Prince, and dragged her from the taxi directly to Riverside Park. Since by wristing and framing and stabbing he got the ball back more often than not, she had to agree with Max that though Eric’s technique was raw, somewhere in this Neanderthal was a tennis game.

      As for the game off court, he had no pride, or so it seemed when he announced that, barring his own tournaments, his schedule was at her disposal. Eric was unabashedly eager to see her every day she was in town and, rather than emphasize that he had his friends and many professional matters to attend to, cheerfully volunteered to sweep any other considerations aside if she had time for him. Initially this carte blanche had struck her as shameless, groveling, foolishly self-abnegating, and bound to backfire.

      Eric bludgeoned her with invitations to have spaghetti with his roommate, or to pick up a slice of pizza for lunch, and was eternally available to practice in the park, even if that meant canceling other partners. He fanned nightly tickets to the U.S. Open before her like a deck of cards, of which she was free to avail herself. And he was thoughtful in a way that somehow meant more because the gestures were so minor and instinctive; he didn’t expect pats on the back. If he fixed himself a drink in her apartment, he refilled the ice cube trays. He replaced the lining in the garbage pail without being asked, washed his own coffee cup, and never left toothpaste globs in the sink. One afternoon in August, when she was pressed for time packing for the next satellite in Norfolk and was out of clean sports socks, he bundled to the basement with her reeking shorts and tank tops, returning with her laundered clothes folded and the sock pairs matched.

      Willy’s new boyfriend showed up at her door with tokens on evenings they went out—a silk bandanna the same crimson as her favorite sweatshirt, or a pirated Janis Joplin cassette, on which he’d written out all the names of the songs. The presents were always small, inexpensive, and beautifully wrapped.

      Willy had grown up among the enemy, and initially regarded his generosity with suspicion. If Eric was trying to wrest something from her, she felt bound to keep him from getting it. And Willy had developed many a woman’s instinctive disdain for niceness. Men who treated her too lavishly well were patsies. Yet one lunchtime when Eric tossed her a new jar of mayonnaise, she did a double take. Remembering the condiments for their sandwiches was considerate. Noting that her own jar was scraped to the dregs had been attentive. What was the problem? She would prefer a cad, a moocher, some heedless creep? At last Willy entertained the notion that there wasn’t something wrong with niceness, but something wrong with her.

      So on their next date, shyly, Willy handed Eric a package in return. Coming up with a gift had been hard, and while the modesty of Eric’s presents was always charming, the paltriness of her own gift seemed niggardly. She kept apologizing. It was only a Sweetspot T-shirt, and maybe she’d been insensitive; Eric didn’t, after all, have much time for the school. But Eric was overjoyed, and insisted on wearing it to Flor De Mayo. In fact, he wore the shirt for days after, until it was filthy and smelled. Willy didn’t mind. She was proud of herself. She even wondered if all Eric’s little gestures weren’t meant to ingratiate himself so much as to teach her to make one back.

      Besides, through the summer Willy came to understand that her suitor’s strategy was sourced not in self-abasement but conceit. Eric Oberdorf was a single-minded man who once bent on a project did not relent until its object was achieved. He did not court Willy with an eye to his own self-protection, because it never entered his head that he would fail. This proclivity for unreserved full-tilt at what he would not be denied was both winning and unsettling. Willy’s experience of getting anything she wanted was always over somebody else’s dead body. But Eric evidenced no signs that anyone had ever stood in his way. Simply, he was spoiled.

      If Eric boasted few former girlfriends, he was given to infatuations of other varieties. In his early teens he had thrown himself into politics, devoting himself to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign of 1984. (To Willy’s Democratic horror. Unusually for New York Jews, the Oberdorfs were Republicans. While the Clinton-Bush campaigns heated, he and Willy’s electoral joustings were regularly sidetracked when Eric snidely marveled that here she was a pro tennis player and she knew who was running for president.) At fourteen, every weekday Eric had leafleted his Upper East Side neighborhood after school let out at Trinity. His homework essays had detailed how to increase defense spending, decrease taxes, and still reduce the national debt—papers that presaged Eric’s aptitude at Princeton for imaginary numbers.

      Subsequently Eric had become consumed with basketball. “Rick the Slick” was apparently a legend at Trinity still. When on a stroll through Riverside he and Willy happened upon a rough-house four-on-four that lacked an eighth man, she had the opportunity to verify that Eric was no slouch at hoop. Though jostled by colossal, trash-talking homeboys tingling with fast-twitch muscle fiber, Eric racked up more points than anyone on his team. Notably, Willy had no trouble watching him swish baskets, in contrast to following his tennis match with Max. God, Eric was graceful, so precise and fleet; his head fakes were comic, though wickedly effective. Willy shouted, “Go, Slick!” and burst into spontaneous applause so many times that she embarrassed him, but she was relishing not only the game itself but her own clean feeling: pure, free-flowing adoration.

      Eric clearly excelled at whatever he put his mind to. A resultant summa cum laude assured Willy that once he concentrated on mathematics at Princeton he was adept at his equations. In fact, he emitted an arithmetic coolness even on the tennis court, where he maintained the implacable remove