Double Fault. Lionel Shriver
on the tennis court.
If twenty-three was young to marry for 1992, Willy did not situate herself in modern history any more than she regarded herself as American. She owed allegiance to the tennis court, whose lines described a separate country, and to whose rigid and peculiar laws she adhered with the fervor of patriotism. Likewise Willy conceived of her lifespan in terms of the eighteenth century. As a tennis player, she would at best survive to forty; twenty-three was middle-aged.
That the institution of marriage had been thoroughly discredited by the time Willy was born didn’t delay her acceptance of Eric’s proposal by ten seconds. Granted, her own parents set a poor example; Willy envied neither her glumly patriarchal father nor his cheerfully submissive sidekick. But she might have envied her parents at their first meeting, in 1961: when her mother, Colleen, was a flighty modern dance student, leaping through recitals to the beat of bongos inside a helix of scarves, and her father, Charles, was an undiscouraged beatnik scribbler, whose pockets bulged from squiggled napkins and leaky ballpoint pens. Willy clung to the notion that nothing about marriage itself condemned her mother to dismiss an ambition to dance as vain folly, nor her father to turn on his own credulous literary aspirations with such a snarl. And surely had she wed in this more liberal era, the acquiescent Colleen might have told Charles to get a grip and stop moaning and sometimes gone her own way. Despite overwhelming evidence that both true love and domestic balance of power were myths, Willy still believed in the possibility of an ardent, lasting union between equals, much as many religious skeptics still kept faith in an afterlife because the alternative was too unbearable.
So all through a militantly independent young adulthood Willy had been waiting. At last along came Eric Oberdorf, who radiated the same clear-eyed courage that shone from pictures of her father in the early sixties—before Charles joined the opposition in celebrating his own defeat. Willy had inherited her mother’s grace, and given it structure and purpose. Together she and Eric could rewrite history, which may have been what children were for.
As for Eric, Willy’s primary concern was that he might regard marriage, like his so far useless degree in mathematics, as an end in itself. Eric had a modular mind. He might not conceive of pro tennis as death row, but he thought of his life in blocks, and therefore as a series of little deaths. But Willy knew enough about the altar to be sure that marriage demarcated not only the successful completion of a project, but the beginning of another, far more demanding endeavor.
“Daddy, it’s Willy.”
“Hola!”
Willy let the receiver list. Her father had never forgiven her for majoring in Spanish. “You’re going to interpret for the UN?” he’d inquired dryly when informed of her decision. “No, I’ll sell veggie burritos in Flushing Meadow,” she’d snipped back. “Which by the time I finish this BA is the closest I’m going to get to the U.S. Open.” Her father held nothing more against Spanish people than against anyone—meaning he held a great deal against them, indeed. But he knew that she’d chosen an easy major to have maximum free time for the tennis team.
“Qué tal?” asked Willy.
“Nothing ever changes here, Willow, you know that.”
“You could always get old and die,” she recommended. “At least that would get it over with.”
“It’s important to keep something to look forward to.”
“Listen, I have someone I want you to meet.”
“Another brain surgeon?”
“Yes, he’s a tennis player, Daddy,” she said impatiently. “But with a degree from Princeton.”
“A tennis player with a degree!” he exclaimed. “You told me that was impossible.”
Willy almost hung up. If she could barely make it through this phone call, how was she going to survive the whole evening she proposed? “How about Friday night? We’ll take the seven-twenty from Port Authority.”
“I’m sure I can squeeze you and your young man into my busy social calendar.”
“Listen, Daddy,” she added effortfully. “I really like this guy. Could you … be friendly?”
“Willow, I’m always—”
“I mean, don’t be quite such a gloomy Gus? Like, don’t rain on any parades for one night.”
“Gloomy! After an electrifying week of teaching budding car mechanics commonly confused words, I’m sure to be happy as a clam.”
“Oh, never mind,” said Willy, and hung up with a sigh.
“When you first talked about your father, I thought he was some working-class stiff,” Eric swung the Chateauneuf du Pape in its plastic bag, “not an English professor.”
“I’m sorry if I seem dismissive of his job,” Willy mumbled. “But that’s the product of careful coaching.”
They were standing in line at Gate 413. Willy was relieved that the bus was late. Her stomach knotting, she now wished they’d brought two bottles of wine.
“When I was a kid my father sensed I admired him,” Willy went on, “since any little girl would. I must have been—oh, eleven, alone with my father in the car. He explained that most of his classes could barely read, so if teachers were judged by the quality of their students my father was, I quote, ‘the bottom of the barrel.’ He announced that with a weird, vicious pleasure.”
“What’s his problem?” asked Eric as the line began to move. “Bloomfield College isn’t a great school, but it’s not disgraceful.”
“To Chuck Novinsky it is. I didn’t understand until I was fifteen. Nobody had told me. I was pottering in the attic when I found a box of duplicate hardbacks. Unappealing cover—plain; I think it was cheap. In the Beginning Was the Word, by Charles Novinsky.”
Eric chuckled. “A little inflated, if you don’t mind my saying so. What was it, criticism?”
Willy glanced at her fiancé in the light streaming through the door of Gate 413. A fresh feeling came off of him that had nothing to do with having ironed his shirt for the occasion. His mental basement wasn’t knee-deep in naysaying bilge; the storage in his parents’ ritzy East Side apartment wouldn’t breathe musty disillusionment.
“A novel,” she said sorrowfully, climbing into the bus and snuggling by a window. “Begpool Press, 1962—never heard of them.”
“Did you read it?”
“I had a feeling that I shouldn’t mention the books to my father. So I sneaked up to the attic with a flashlight.”
“Was it any good?”
“I don’t know,” she puzzled.
Had her father’s book been any good? Naturally the novel had commented on the nature of literature, and there wasn’t a soul who wanted to read about that; likewise it celebrated the power of language, a power he now derided. The plot was playful, about a novelist whose every printed word came to life. (She loved it when a mixed metaphor gave rise to a grotesque behemoth slouching toward the narrator’s house until he frantically rewrote it.) But the prose clanked with thesaurus plunder, a whole paragraph conceived to accommodate stereotropism. Still, the slim volume seemed an eager, trusting effort and couldn’t have deserved the scathing reviews shoved down the side of the box.
“The reviews were hideous.” Willy shuddered. “All in local papers, fly-by-night magazines. Probably by young journalists trying to make a name for themselves, and so acrobatically snide. One reviewer called In the Beginning Was the Word so awful that it was ‘a bit of a giggle.’”
Newly