Double Fault

“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 as a mind functioning at its best gave thinking a bad name. Supreme thought streamed wordlessly from the body as pure action. Ideally, to think was to do.

But the lag between signal and execution was also closing up in 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 Max first took Willy on at seventeen he demolished a game twelve years in the making and reconstructed it from the ground up. Willy had grown up fighting—fighting her parents; fighting her extraneous algebra homework when she was on the cusp of a breakthrough with the slice backhand; fighting the USTA for transport to junior tournaments that her father hadn’t the remotest intention of financing; and later, fighting her height, when it became crushingly apparent that she would never exceed five-three. The appetite for battle Max encouraged. He drew the line at Willy’s fighting herself. He insisted that she stop overcoming weaknesses and start playing to strengths.

All through high school, Willy had rushed forward at every opportunity, to prove a dwarf could cover the net, and she’d clobbered every ball with pleasingly improbable pace. It was Max who’d convinced her to stop defying physical fact. She was short; she should approach selectively. She was light; she’d never overpower heftier, Bollettieri blunderbusses. What Willy had going for her was that she was fast, that from scrapping with Daddy and the USTA and Montclair High School she had tremendous reserves of spite, and, scarcest of all, that she was intelligent.

Sure enough, Willy could pummel juniors into submission, but on the pro circuit she would never win a slugfest. She had a higher percentage trading on her wits. Though it took absurd restraint to keep from hauling off and slaughtering every ball—if only for the sheer sensation of hitting any object that hard without being arrested—Willy discovered delights in delicacy as well, until certain backspinning dinks slithering over the tape made her laugh out loud. Max played her a video of the Ashe—Connors Wimbledon final of ’75, where instead of belting Jimmy’s shots back laced with his own medicine Arthur deliberately slowed the points to a crawl. The long, easy returns drove Connors wild, and he’d slash them to the net or overhit. In the end, of course, the tortoise beat the hare.

In fact, Max was not coaching her in anything new at all. Players who specialized in craftiness—drops, lobs, disguises, and change-ups—were playing old-style women’s tennis, for the sport had been routinely won on guile before the advent of oversize rackets and hunky grunters like Monica Seles. Yet the standard, abandoned long enough, becomes fresh. Willy sometimes suspected that his shaping her into an icon of bygone tactics was an exercise in nostalgia—for the days when women players were lithe, limber, and ingenious; and for the days when women players were women.

Thus it was thanks to Max Upchurch that Willy didn’t spend every passing day in a state of hysteria. While she moped through another unwelcome birthday, Max had serenaded her with tales of Kathy Rinaldi, Andrea Jaeger, and Thierry Tulasne—young hopes-of-tomorrow who fizzled out as fast as they once burned brightly. “Early to rise, early to bed,” he’d assured her when she turned nineteen, and was glowering at yet another year wasted at UConn on Spanish verbs. “Tennis is for grown-ups. You won’t peak until you’re twenty-five, Will. There’s time.”

As of six weeks ago, a tarnish had mottled her memories of those first trips to Sweetspot that Willy couldn’t quite rub off. Though she and Max had agreed to go back to “normal,” when Willy stepped off Amtrak in Old Saybrook it was an older student who waved her to the car. Once again, Max hadn’t met her train, and that wasn’t normal, but one more petty reprimand.

“What do you think of Agassi taking Wimbledon?” the boy bubbled. “Nobody thought he had the goods for grass. I was sure he’d show up in, like, fuck-you orange check or something, but no …”

Desmond was so eager that he forgot to pause for the answers to his questions. Willy observed enviously how in the last two years his dark mop had bobbed nearer the roof of the car. He’d be well over six feet, and had the compact, long-limbed figure for his sport. Had she a taste for little boys, she might have helped herself to Sweetspot’s choice morsels. But Willy spent her own teenage years so virulently disdaining the likes of Desmond that cradle-robbing would amount to a post-deadline rewrite. Wistful, she admired but didn’t quite covet his naive enthusiasm, not yet seized by savvy terror.

At any rate, the envy worked more in the opposite direction. Desmond was still undistinguished from the common ruck; Willy belonged to the select stable of older pros whom Max was grooming for the tour. Many of these were handpicked from the graduating class, though a few, like Willy, were bagged on Max’s cross-country shopping trips. Willy herself had never been a Sweetspot student, and often wondered how much more advanced her game might be now if she hadn’t been marooned at Montclair High School, which didn’t even have a tennis court. Making use of the nearby public park, the school had offered one tennis gym course, for which in her sophomore year she’d maliciously signed up. That memory tweaked her now, reminding her why that Eric person had been right, that she’d never had many friends. Little wonder—she’d assaulted the lot of them with such contemptuous serves that they rarely had the luxury of losing a proper point. Toward the end of the course, with an odd-numbered enrollment, no one would play her at all, and she spent gym class pounding a ball mercilessly against the backboard, as if to break another barrier less tangible but just as impassable, it seemed, if she remained a public school student in suburban New Jersey.

They were drawing into Westbrook now, a small, tucked-away community on Long Island Sound whose property values were astronomical, but whose houses had been kept in families; the town retained its middle-class, unassuming character. Downtown, such as it was, included an ill-stocked drugstore with superlative homemade fudge, one Italian restaurant that overcooked its spaghetti, the obligatory military monument though few residents would remember to which war, and the beloved Muffin Korner, whose loose eggs, hot biscuits, and forgivably weak coffee cost $1.49. On the outskirts, where unprepossessing clapboards weathered by the shore, sturdy dowagers paddled the lapping surf in underwire swimsuits.

That Westbrook, Connecticut, was a steady, settled place may have inspired Max to select this location for Sweetspot. Pro tennis was such a roller-coaster, packing the events of what ought to have been a lifetime into perhaps ten frenzied years. It was sedative to bring students of age in an atmosphere of the reliable, the ongoing, and to coach them in the calming context of a place where tennis didn’t mean much—the public courts by the firehouse looked like landfill.

Desmond was asking her to take a look at his serve. Doubtless he was hoping that Willy would put in a good word for him with Max. Desmond was entering his last year, when his mentor would be either asking him to stay on or merely wishing him the best, and so would take incidental privileges like being trusted with a school car this evening as auspicious. Willy had the urge to warn him, bitterly, that her good word would have meant a great deal more six weeks before, but a stray grumble would ruin months of discretion. When she glanced again at Desmond’s yearning, mysteriously unwritten face, she ached. The first cut at Sweetspot was just the beginning of a cruel, sometimes savagely short process of elimination through which eagerness and even, by laymen’s standards, awesome ground strokes counted for nothing.

This counsel, too, she swallowed. Willy had heard the poor odds enough times from her father, and the remonstrance was hateful. Desmond would have to find out for himself the staggering unlikelihood that he should ever be ranked at all, much less be deciding, after his idol, whether to concede whites to the fusty All England Club.

Threading outside of town, they curled the drive of the school, whose buildings blended with Westbrook architecture: green-trimmed white clapboard Colonial Revivals, each skirted with a wide wooden porch. Below the overhangs, rockers listed with curled afghans, and wicker armchairs beckoned with quilted pillows, calling out for long, fractious games of gin rummy. Nothing about this lulling, serene laze suggested the sweat shed on these grounds except that it was two hours after the dinner bell and the porches were deserted. Any student worth his salt at eight o’clock was back on the courts.

Willy drifted into the dining hall, to spot her coach at a side table, next to the horrid Marcella Foussard. He was scraping up the last of his meal—so once again they would not be snuggling into their regular booth at Boot of the Med to pick languidly at flaccid linguine. Willy grabbed a tray, brightening her laughter. Max would see through her insipid vivacity without looking up. What a disaster. What an awful mistake, though she wasn’t certain which of them had made it.

The cafeteria betrayed that this was a sports academy and not a prep school. No vats of brick-solid cheese macaroni and liquefied kale; no lime Jell-O. Since Max had bought into high-protein theories, replacing the old saws about carbohydrates, they confronted skinless chicken breasts and lean flank steaks, undressed snow peas, and an inexhaustible mound of bananas. Facing down the bananas one more night, Desmond moaned, “You know, Agassi lives on junk food.”

Willy slid her tray next to Desmond on the side of the hall opposite from Max. She might have braved Max’s table if it weren’t for that Foussard creature, who surely spent more time on her nails—the back of her hand—than on her backhand. The hall recalled a mess in more ways than one, and Willy was frantic to get out. Shredding her chicken, she asked Desmond to hit a few after dinner. Ecstatic, Desmond chucked his flank steak merrily in the trash.

On the way out Willy forced herself to turn to Max’s table. He was watching her steadily. She wiggled two fingers. He didn’t wave back, his expression unreadable. She made a swinging motion and pointed at Desmond. Max dipped his chin a half inch, and as Willy swept through the screen door she at least had the satisfaction that with Marcella jabbering away Max had not heard a single word the silly girl said.

Sweetspot’s twenty hard and four clay courts were built right on the sound, which made them breezy. But Max believed in the strengthening of adversity. He’d situated his school in the Northeast because, he claimed, European civilization had surpassed southern cultures due to rigorous, hard winters. Cold had invigorated northerners to activity and enterprise, while tropical layabouts lounged beaches munching pomegranates. According to Max, Tahitians would never have invented tennis. But Willy was confident the whole pro-winter hoo-ha really just meant that Max hated Florida.

Stars were emerging, the glow from the powerful floods fissiparating into the salted air. The lights projected a blue halo that could be seen from miles away. Closer up, the bulbs produced a low-level collective hum, like a chorus finding its note before the song. As the floods on their four corners flickered, starting gray and warming to hot white, the court blazed with the tingling theatricality distinctive to playing at night.

“No, Desmond,” she declined when he challenged her to a match. “Let’s just hit.” The boy deflated. Later he might treasure his few offers of carefree rallies; now he craved a showdown. But Willy, for all her reputed keenness for head-to-head, tonight hankered for reprieve from a world with no choice but to vanquish or be vanquished. There had to be a haven in between.

“Why the cold shoulder?” Willy demanded. “I thought we were going to go back to the way it was.”

“I wasn’t the one who sat on the far side of the cafeteria,” Max returned coolly.

“I wasn’t the one who chose to eat in the cafeteria.”

They were in the library, which Max adopted as his lounge after lights-out. Though the kids instinctively hid their bottles in racket covers, there were no booze bans on the books; Max was treating himself to solitary bourbon.

Looking up, he closed Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm. “You expected that I would meet your train and scoop you off to Boot of the Med, where we’d order the fried calamari and Chianti and then—”

“We’d practice a few drunken overheads at midnight. Why not?” Willy’s T-shirt was limp with clammy sweat; she rubbed her arms.

“What would we talk about?”

“What we always talk about. Primpy Marcella, and your ex-wife, and … and we’d draw point diagrams on napkins before the zabaglione.” Her tone had taken a defeated turn. To Willy’s own ears, the reprise sounded ridiculous.

“Our agreement was not to ‘go back to the way we were’ but for me to ‘treat you like everyone else,’ which I had never done, from the time you were seventeen. So I could hardly go back to anything.”

“You’re always so aggressive and nasty lately.”

“I’ve always been aggressive and nasty. You used to like it. Don’t go soft on me, Will. It’s not good for your tennis.”

“Do you even care about that these days?” she entreated. “My tennis?”

“I thought it was for the sake of your goddamned tennis that we’ve had such unimpeachable relations for six weeks.”

“See? ‘Goddamned tennis’—”

Max slammed his hardback to the table. “Enough! You practice your forehand, but the bust-up is blessedly a one-time-only. It doesn’t improve with repetition, it just gets old.”

“Gets old! We haven’t discussed this since May!”

“Will.” This time he implored her. Meeting his eyes, she pondered once more how this man contrasted with the photographs of Max’s heyday twenty years ago. Many an evening she had marveled through his tour album, where his Sports Illustrated and New York Post profiles were preserved under plastic sheets. Max had maintained the same compact physique, with a dense torso whose dark hair sprang from his Lacoste shirt then as now. His face remained right-angled, and had acquired none of the fleshiness that invaded most middle-aged jowls. The beginnings of those eye crinkles were to be found in yellowed clippings. Though he’d axed the seventies sideburns, Max hadn’t even restyled his no-nonsense haircut. The before-and-after pictures were, in their strictly physical detail, almost identical. So what made him look so unmistakably forty-five?