Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

Flor De Mayo. Willy no longer heard words in her head before they spilled on the table, and so became as much the audience of her own conversation as Eric, and as curious about what she would say. There was a like fluidity to be found, then, in talk.

      Clearly hoping for one more right answer, Eric inquired, “Are you going to college?”

      Meaning, will go, or are going, not have gone. After knowing this guy for a few hours, Willy already had a secret. “No,” she said flatly.

      He took a breath, seemed to think better of the lecture, and exhaled, preferring the remains of her fried rice. She’d left him a few baby shrimp. Something about the sheer quantity of food he consumed was magnificent.

      “So which players do you admire?” he asked.

      “I’m old school. Still hung up on the last generation. Connors. Navratilova.”

      “She cries,” he despaired.

      “So what, if she feels like crying? I bet you like Sampras.”

      “Who wouldn’t?” Eric shrugged. “His strokes are impeccable.”

      “He’s a robot.” Willy scowled. “Give me back McEnroe any day, and a decent temper tantrum or two. John taught the world what tennis is about: passion.”

      “Tennis is about control,” Eric disagreed.

      “Tennis is about everything,” Willy declared with feeling.

      Eric laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But you’re right, it’s not the eyes. The tennis game is the window of the soul.”

      “So what can you see about me in my game?”

      “You play,” Eric replied readily, “out of love. Sampras loves himself. You love tennis.”

      “I have an ego, I assure you.” She was lapping this up.

      “You have something far nobler than an ego, Wilhelm,” said Eric, lowering his voice. “Which your ego, if you’re not careful, could destroy.”

      Too mystical by half; Willy retreated. “Sampras—that there’s nothing wrong with his game is what’s wrong with it. Maybe more than anything, tennis is about flaws.”

      He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got a future.”

      “Your game is … incoherent,” Willy groped. “As if you scavenged one bit here and one there like a ragpicker.”

      “Rags,” he said dryly. The bill arrived; he counted out his share and looked at her expectantly.

      She stooped for her wallet, abashed by her assumption that he would pay. “I didn’t mean tattered. You made me work today.”

      “My,” he said drolly. “Such high praise.”

      “Praise is praise.” She slapped a ten-spot on the check. “Take what you can get.” Willy was offended in return. She doled out flattery in such parsimonious dribs, to anyone, that she had expected him to run home with the tribute and stick it under his pillow. He wouldn’t bully her into a standing ovation. He was better than she expected. Period.

      Eric offered to walk Willy to her apartment, but up Broadway the air between them was stiff with grudge. “That was good food,” she said laboriously at 110th.

      “You thought it would be ghastly.”

      “I did not!”

      “Cuban-Chinese? Beans and stuff? You whined, like, Sher, I mean, if you wanna. Vintage Capriati.”

      She laughed. “OK, I thought the food would be revolting.” The air went supple. Willy strolled a few inches closer to her companion, though he’d still have to reach for her hand.

      His arms swung free. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

      “Heading up to Westbrook, Connecticut, for the weekend. I train up there.”

      “Let me come see you.”

      She felt protective of Sweetspot, but a visitor would serve a purpose. “Maybe.”

      Eric crimped her phone numbers into the margins of his New York City tennis permit.

      She lingered at her stoop for a kiss. It was not forthcoming. In the glare of the entrance light, Eric’s woodsy eyebrows shimmered with mutated stray hairs, some up to an inch and a half long. Intrigued, not really thinking, Willy reached for the longest eyebrow hair to pluck it.

      He slapped her hand.

      “Sorry,” he said as Willy rubbed her knuckles. He’d hit her hard. “I like those.”

      Cheeks stinging, Willy studied her tennis shoes. “I guess I liked those weird hairs, too,” she mumbled. “Maybe that’s why I wanted one.”

      When she glanced up again, he was pinching the same overgrown straggler; he plucked it and laid it in her palm. “Then it’s yours.”

      Her fingers closed over the specimen. She didn’t know what to say. Willy didn’t go on dates.

      “Eric?” It was the first time she’d ever said his name. The syllables felt ungainly on her tongue, their use a monumental concession to the young man’s existence. “I did go to college. My father made me. I quit, after my junior year, to go pro. I’m not nineteen, I’m twenty-three. I’m way behind. I have very, very little time left.”

      In reward for the successful exchange, one eyebrow hair for one confession, he kissed her. Willy could only hold one broad shoulder. The other hand fisted Eric’s peculiar gift. Unaccountably, once in her apartment she would store it in a safe place.

       chapter 2

      Max Upchurch called sweetspot a “School of Tennis,” dismissing Nick Bollettieri’s more famous Florida academy as a camp. The education Sweetspot students received was better than perfunctory; Max couldn’t bear colossal forehands at the expense of confusing Tiananmen Square with Chinese checkers. Max eschewed Bollettieri’s reform-school trappings, dispensing with Bradenton’s sniffer-dog drug checks, five-dollar fines for chewing gum, and restrictions to one TV program per week. As far as Max was concerned, if parents wanted to pay two thousand dollars a month for their kids to pop bubbles in front of The Munsters it was no skin off his nose. Should his students turn pro they might as well get practice at the tube. Isolated in an indistinguishable string of hotels waiting for the rain to clear or their draw to come up, most journeymen on the tour spent more time watching American reruns than they did on court.

      Despite Sweetspot’s unfashionable liberality, Willy was not alone in regarding Max’s operation as more elite than his competition’s in Florida. Bollettieri accepted 225 would-be champions a go; Max admitted seventy-five. Max Upchurch himself had had a distinguished career, ranked number six in the world in 1971, and making a solid contribution toward pulling the U.S. ahead of Australia playing Davis Cup. As a young aspirant in the late sixties, he’d made a name for himself behind the scenes, finagling with a handful of other infidels to drive this snooty, exclusive, stick-up-the-ass amateur sport into the crass, low-rent, anything-goes, money-mad and cut-throat Open era that was now so happily upon us.

      But the biggest difference was tennis. Bollettieri’s protégés blindly cannoned from the baseline like ball machines. To Max, crash-crash was not what tennis was about. Sweetspot emphasized cunning, style, finesse. While Nick assembly-lined bruisers, Max handcrafted schemers and ballerinas. Willy’s coach believed that in every player lurked a singular tennis game struggling to get out—a game whose aberrations would prove its keenest weapons. He regarded his mission as to coax those idiosyncratic strokes from unformed players before their eccentric impulses were buried forever beneath the generic “rules” that constituted common coaching.

      When