Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

      “Wee-Willy-Wimbledon. ’Sgot a ring. Besides: shitty name, one more obstacle to overcome. On which you thrive, I’m sure. They did you a favor.”

      All this assumed familiarity was grating, and only the more intrusive for being accurate. “If I thrive on obstacles, my parents have done me dozens of favors.”

      The waiter arrived with their baked half-chickens with mountains of fried rice. Eric had ordered two plates for himself, which he arranged bumper to bumper.

      “You’re going to eat all that?”

      “And the remains of yours, when you don’t finish it.”

      “How do—?” She gave up. He was right. She wouldn’t.

      The rice was marvelous, scattered with pork and egg. The chicken lolled off the bone. “Don’t look so greedy,” said Willy. “I may finish more than you think.”

      “Just promise me you won’t go puke it up afterwards.”

      “I’m not that trite.”

      “No tennis dad, no bulimia, and you’re not overweight,” Eric ticked off on his fingers. “Too good to be true. You must be having an affair with your coach.”

      Willy was a sucker for any contest, but this was the limit. “None of your business.”

      His eyes flickered; he could as well have scribbled her response on a scorecard.

      “While I’m being crass …” Eric dabbed his mouth with his napkin; she couldn’t understand how he could suck up all that rice in such a mannerly fashion. She’d have predicted he’d eat like an animal. “What’s your ranking?”

      There was no getting away. In tennis circles, this question arose five times a day, though it secreted far more malice than What’s your sign?

      Willy placed her fork precisely beside the vinegar, then edged the tines a quarter inch, as if to indicate the incremental nature of progress in her sport. “I’m ranked 437. But that’s in the world—”

      He raised his hands. “I know! I’m surprised your ranking is so high.”

      “Surprised! I pasted you today!”

      He laughed. “Wilhelm!” He pronounced her new name with a Germanic V. “I just meant that I don’t expect to run into a top 500 in the course of the average day. Touchy, touchy.”

      “There’s not a tennis player on earth,” Willy grumbled, picking her fork back up, “who isn’t sensitive about that number. You could as well have asked on our first date how much money I make, or whether I have AIDS.”

      “Is that what this is?” he asked gamely. “A date?”

      “You know what I mean,” she muttered, rattled. “A ranking is … like, how valuable a person you are.”

      “Don’t you think you’re giving them a little too much power?” Eric rebuked her, for once sounding sincere.

      She asked sarcastically, “And who’s they?”

      “They are whoever you can’t allow to beat you,” Eric returned. “And the worst capitulation is thinking just like the people who want your hide.”

      “So maybe you’re my they?”

      “I’m on your side.”

      “I’ve only had one person on my side in my life.”

      “Yourself?”

      “No,” she admitted, “I am not always on my own side.” This was getting abstruse. “I mean a real person.”

      “But didn’t you like it?”

      “Yes.” The question made her bashful. “Can we stop talking about me for a second? Like, what do you do?”

      “I graduated from Princeton in May. Math. Now I’m taking some time out to play.”

      “With me?”

      “Yes, but play, not toy. Playing is serious business. You of all people should know that.”

      “Do you … have any brothers and sisters?” The low grade of repartee in locker rooms had left Willy rusty and obvious over dinner.

      “Three brothers. My father wants to take over the world.”

      She let slide the implication that a patriarch would only do so with boys. “You,” she determined, “are the oldest.”

      “Good.”

      What he was applauding, or should have been applauding, was her having made the effort to imagine being in anyone else’s shoes but Willy Novinsky’s for an instant. Self-absorption was a side effect of her profession. Oh, you thought about other people’s games, all right—did they serve and volley, where was their oyster of vulnerability on the court. But that was all a roundabout way of thinking about yourself.

      “Princeton,” she nodded. Extending herself to him was work. “Brainy, then. You wouldn’t have two words to say to the people I know.”

      “I doubt you know them, or they you. Players on the women’s tour live in parallel universes. Though they’re all pig-thick.”

      “Thanks.”

      “The men aren’t nuclear physicists,” Eric added judiciously.

      “Your folks have money, don’t they?” The tidy table manners were a giveaway.

      “Hold that against me?” Eric lifted his drumstick with his pinkie pointed, as if supping tea.

      “I might resent it,” she admitted.

      “Check: you’re not bankrolled by nouveaux riches climbers.” He tallied again on the rest of his fingers. “And no pushy old man, no eating disorders, and you’re not a blimp. Four out of five right answers ain’t bad.”

      That Willy hadn’t denied having an affair with her coach had evidently stuck in Eric’s craw. “This is a test?”

      “Aren’t I taking one, too?” he returned. “Princeton: feather in cap. Math: neither here nor there. Money: black eye.”

      “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

      “Technically. Plus or minus? Watch it.”

      Willy said honestly, “I don’t care.”

      “So why’d you ask?”

      He was flustering her. “I guess I’m pig-thick, too.” She glared.

      “When I asked walking down here if your name was Polish, you seemed to realize that Pole-land was in Eastern Europe and not in the Arctic Circle.”

      “Stupidity may be an advantage in tennis,” Willy proposed, teasing pork bits from the rice.

      “The adage runs that it’s a game you have to be smart enough to do well, and dumb enough to believe matters.” Incredibly, Eric had cleaned his first plate and was making rapid inroads on the second.

      “With the money on the line, tennis matters,” Willy assured him. “No, I look at fourteen-year-olds romping on TV and think, they don’t get it, do they? How amazing they are. They don’t question being in the Top Ten of the world because they’ve no conception of how many people there are in the world. And the game is best played in a washed, blank mind-set. Nothing is in these kids’ heads but tennis. No Gulf War mop-up, no upcoming Clinton-Bush election, just balls bouncing between their ears.”

      Yet Willy didn’t quite buy her own dismissal of tennis players as stupid. Yes, exquisite tennis was executed in an emptied state that most would consider not-thinking. But more accurately the demand was for faultless thinking—since to regard hesitation, rumination, and turgid indecision