Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

door of his parents’ apartment she was afraid he would hit his head.

      After much shoulder-clapping and bear-hugging of his firstborn, Axel Oberdorf turned to greet the girlfriend. “Pleasure. He does bring home the lookers.” Axel winked.

      She had expected a lanky, balding version of Eric. Instead Axel (“Axe”) Oberdorf was a head shorter than his son, compact and stocky. With the stance of a linebacker, he was hard to get past. His full head of black hair matched his arms, which were matted in thick animal fur. A senior surgeon at Mt. Sinai, Axel exuded the sharp scent of a rigorous detergent, a two-layered smell of harshness masked by a cloying but insufficient perfume. He pumped Willy’s hand; his nails were short and clean. Through initial small talk, his face explored a restricted range of expressions: the self-congratulatory beam of aren’t-we-all-grand; a stolid wait-and-see, indicating a withholding of judgment that wouldn’t last; and the occasional flicker of suspicion.

      “What’ll it be, Eric? Laid in two sixes of that Pickwick Ale you said you liked. Or you on some health kick? Wheat-grass juice? Boys be glad to run out and fill special orders.” It was a small matter, but had Willy ever let on to her parents that she was partial to Pickwick Ale, they’d have gone out of their way to stock Old Milwaukee.

      Axel led the couple into his capacious living room, whose plush ivory carpet looked as if it were vacuumed three times a day. The fluffy furniture was modular, like Eric’s mind. Bright, primary-colored rectangles, cones, pyramids, and cylinders, all stripped with Velcro, could be whimsied into a variety of configurations. It was easy to picture Eric working out geometric theorems here as a child, or designing his own Rubik’s Cube with furniture. Eric’s mother ran an art gallery, and the walls were spaced with original canvases that themselves might have passed for math diagrams or magazine puzzlers—abstract impressionists mazed with triangles, Russian prints whose Cyrillic phrases challenged anyone in the room to pronounce them, and white-on-white grids more witty than beautiful. Though the room was splashed with an array of hues, not a single cushion or painting was brown.

      Eric set about building himself a chair. Willy perched on a plain cube, a poor choice. She couldn’t lean back; already jittery, she was now literally on edge.

      “So bring me up to date, my boy,” said Axe, on a big-armed throne. “What happened in Toronto?”

      “Oh, I won,” said Eric. Drizzling his beer, he was determined to drain the whole bottle into his glass. When the last drop trembled at the rim, he looked victorious.

      Axe nodded vigorously. “Good, good. Not surprised, mind you.” Eric’s father often left out the subject of such sentences, as if his centrality were a grammatical given.

      “It wasn’t an important tournament,” Eric deflected. “Chump change, meager computer points.”

      “He was terrific,” added Willy. “And there was more depth of field than Eric’s letting on.” While on Walnut Street she’d been grateful when Eric stuck up for her, on Seventy-fourth her support felt thin, surplus.

      “Winning’s winning,” said Axe. “It’s a habit, one I’m glad to say you got into at an early age. You gotta hand it to this guy.” Axe gestured with his vodka and tonic. “Picks up a racket at eighteen, two years later he’s on Princeton’s tennis team.”

      “Pretty amazing,” said Willy.

      “Could just kick myself I didn’t get him started as a brat. Maybe now he’d be giving Agassi a run for his money. When you learn to play, Willy?”

      “At four. Though I didn’t start to play seriously until—”

      “And you’re ranked what?”

      “386.”

      Eric intruded, “That’s likely to go up after this month, since Willy’s entered in—”

      “Three hundred and eighty-six.” It sounded like a long number.

      Mrs. Oberdorf glided in with a tray of tea sandwiches, whose triangles of salmon, accents of black olive, and strips of daikon reiterated the Russian prints. Here was where Eric got his looks: she was tall, spare, and stately, with strong cheekbones and the same grand, angular nose. Alma Oberdorf dressed with a simplicity that costs. Her manner was collected, her voice murmurous. When she leaned over her eldest and kissed his forehead she teased that he’d lost more hair—the first intimation of the evening that Willy’s fiancé had a single failing.

      “Willy, I’m so glad that Eric has somebody to play with,” said Alma good-humoredly, and Willy accepted a sandwich.

      “Your mother’s making that polenta mush for dinner again,” Axel groaned. “I’ve tried to tell her that cornmeal porridge is peasant food, but you can’t fight chichi New York.”

      “The recipe is from the Union Square Cafe.” With the obdurate calm of her delivery, Mrs. Oberdorf must have been accustomed to standing her ground, although perhaps not gaining any either. “And it’s only a side dish, dear.” Obliviously, she slipped away.

      When Axe began to extol his son’s renown as “Rick the Slick” on Trinity’s basketball team, Eric interrupted impatiently, “Dad! Look alive—Willy already likes me. Though she may not continue to, if you don’t give it a rest.”

      Eric muscled the conversation back to Willy. He rattled off that she’d been the number-three junior in New Jersey without being allowed to compete outside the tristate area, that she’d been number one on the tennis team from her sophomore year at UConn, and that she’d recently made the semifinals in the Norfolk Masters, which was worth gobs more computer points than his own lowly satellite in Toronto. Though flattered, Willy was perplexed as to why Eric felt compelled to blurt this rush of statistics. They were supposed to be getting acquainted, and here Eric could as well have printed out her résumé, as if she were applying for a job.

      “Your dad your coach, Willy?” Axel topped up his V&T with tonic at the bar.

      “Willy’s coached by Max Upchurch, one of the best in the business,” Eric interceded, adding effortfully, “They’re very … close. Willy’s his bright and shining hope for the nineties.”

      “What’s your father do, then?”

      “He’s an English professor,” Willy jumped in to answer for herself. “Head of department.”

      “Rutgers?”

      Willy’s cheeks warmed. “Bloomfield College. He writes novels, and doesn’t much care about the academic—”

      “What’s his name?”

      “Chuck—Charles Novinsky.”

      Axe rubbed his chin. “Can’t say I ever … What’s he published?”

      Willy slumped as much as the backless cube would allow. “One book. You wouldn’t have heard of it. But it’s very good. It went underappreciated at the time.”

      “Never met a teacher who didn’t have three novels stashed in his bottom drawer. At least your dad managed to get one published.”