Double Fault. Lionel Shriver
having discovered her father’s secret body of work slowly rotting in the attic like a murdered corpse, Willy envisioned the young, determined Charles Novinsky as a different person altogether. She stood sentinel over the innocent predecessor, fending off ridicule from the mordant man he became. She cherished her picture of the stranger: a tirelessly ebullient aesthete, bursting with ideas, destined to become a great writer. This was her real father. The ornery Chuck Novinsky she grew up with was an impostor. In paging through those mildewed manuscripts, Willy could as well have unearthed documentation that she was adopted.
Maybe Chuck in adulthood was attempting to remedy his own parents’ optimism on his account, which he described as a kind of abuse. Willy’s grandparents had been hardworking Eastern European stock whose modest dry-cleaning business had grown prosperous by the fifties. Their unanticipated comfort, and the classically American structure of their lives whereby this year was always better than last, encouraged them to buy wholesale into the country’s claim that any boy could be president. They must have lauded little Charlie’s lucid first few words, taped his poems to the refrigerator door, and cooed to relatives about his editorship of the high school paper. Alfred A. Knopf anxiously awaited. Willy’s father blamed his parents for having sold him a bill of goods, a mistake he would not repeat with his own children, who were raised to glower squarely at the low, unremarkable horizon that humped outside the windows of their frumpy New Jersey house.
Her mother, however, had preserved a girlish purity, which Willy happened upon when she was twelve. Her tennis game rained out, Willy came home earlier than expected. Hot-blooded salsa music pounded from the living room. Willy peeked through the doorway to find her mother in bare feet and leggings; the ancient black leotard was a little tired, and falling off her shoulders. She was switching her hips in figure eights, and snaking her arms in S’s. Eyes shut, she slithered into a full split. Wow. She could still bring both thighs to the floor. Though the choreography was eclectic—Desi Arnaz meets Twyla Tharp—she was actually a pretty hot dancer.
When Willy whistled, her mother shrieked, then blushed and fumbled to turn off the stereo at once. Willy was immediately sorry that she’d given her presence away; she should have treated herself to a longer show, slunk off, then theatrically slammed the front door a second time. Willy wanted Mama to keep her secret. Colleen O’Hara’s dreams of being a dancer had been conceived in private, and in private they remained intact. No wonder she urged Willy to play tennis just for fun. Colleen herself preserved a few minutes a day as a première danseuse, and she wanted at least the same secluded limelight for her daughter. The afternoon’s improvisation had mimed urgently to her second child: keep within you the tiny court where you are queen; be a star in the night sky of your own eyes closed. If it weren’t for me, that box of In the Beginning Was the Word would have been carted long ago to the dump, or burned gleefully as fire starter. Your father bared his heart for an instant, to have it dashed against his sleeve. Shut anything dear to you safe from the catcalls of strangers; only dance when the house is empty.
Willy and Eric disembarked at the corner of Walnut, a leafy, stable street of Second Empires and Dutch Colonials. Nothing about the humble but attractive neighborhood was intrinsically dour. Clutching Eric’s hand, Willy dragged her feet. “I should warn you about the house,” she said. “It’s brown.”
The house was brown. It was brown outside, it was brown inside. When her parents first bought the two-story Queen Anne, they spoke of replacing the chocolate wall-to-wall carpet and ripping off the cheap umber paneling that made the rooms look cheerless and small. But the very oppression of the interior steeped its residents in lassitude, and their grand renovation schemes dwindled. Faced with objectionable decor that was bothersome to revamp, it was more expedient to revamp their tastes instead. Her parents now claimed they liked brown-everything, and had invested in matching mahogany furniture and beige drapes. That redecoration was all talk was hardly surprising: they were both given to vague propositions, but never suggested cleaning out the garage this Saturday. Her parents had mumbled for years about traveling to Japan, but the only trips her father could be troubled to take were those that actively conflicted with his daughter’s tennis matches.
Willy tromped up the brown steps, shuffled over the brown porch, and poked her head in the brown door. “Hola!”
Her father dwelt on the paper in his lap a beat before looking up; she supposed it took him a moment to ready himself. Willy always seemed to drain him, and before he rearranged his features into arch remove, he looked stressed.
Crinkled snapshots of Charles Novinsky at Willy’s age looked like portraits of some brave eldest later shot down in a war. The young man’s eyes were searing and his bearing was vertical; there was no presentiment in that face of the mortars to come. It took effort to see any relation to the jaded veteran she faced now. Her father’s rich curls had thinned to a dry frizzle, as if he’d been singed. Though his complexion was naturally ruddy, he had a psoriasis condition, and shedding skin flaked his cheeks gray.
Her father adjusted his spectacles down his nose. “Say, I’ve been reading a Chomsky book that pertains to your calling. According to Noam, in the secular era sports are the opiate of the people. Seems the masses are enervated by vicarious gladiatorial contests, much the way they were once mesmerized by mumbo-jumbo in church.”
“Eric,” said Willy, “this is my contentious, curmudgeonly father, who is trying his best to offend you before he even knows your name.”
“Princeton, I hear.” They shook hands. “What possessed you to join the yahoos after earning a degree from a place like that?”
“Willy and I plan to make millions in endorsements for deodorant,” Eric tossed easily back.
They each took a seat in brown chairs, and Eric nodded at the term papers in her father’s lap. “That doesn’t look like Chomsky. What are you reading?”
Don’t get him started, Willy almost intruded, but Eric liked to get people started.
“Reading may be too dignified a word. I play little games to keep myself amused, though. My charges divide into those who think commas are states of catatonia after a car accident, and others who regard them as decorative curlicues—in which case, the more the prettier. So I sponsor home contests. This is a prizewinner.” He held up an essay. Whisked with red deletes, from three feet away the paper was pink. “Thirty-five superfluous commas on one page. A record.”
“What are you trying to do, Daddy, impress us with your powers of punctuation, or get us to feel sorry for you?”
Frankly, his keen of condescension was so familiar that she turned it off. Willy had grown up with the vague impression that their family was superior, although not in a worldly way. Theirs was a loftiness that left them outside of things. Her father had the aura of an Old Testament prophet who had tried preaching a time or two, was paid no mind, and now, spitefully, would deliver no more tidings. If that meant leaving the hordes to floods and locusts, very well.
The cornerstone of her father’s supremacy was his valiant realism. He recognized that the planet was teeming with acned adolescents all planning to be film directors, industrial magnates, and Pulitzer prize-winning foreign correspondents, and he set his students straight on the odds. Only the frail and simpleminded clung to their delusions. Chuck had insisted that his offspring grow up in the world the way it was.
Willy’s mother scuttled from the kitchen, wiping her hand on her apron before extending it to Eric. Colleen Novinsky carried herself at a forward angle, stooping with her whole body so that you always worried she was about to fall over. She clasped her hands at her waist in an attitude of perpetual supplicant. After accepting Eric’s bottle of wine with a gasp about how he shouldn’t have, she saw to their drinks with an attentiveness bordering on hysteria.
As Eric lengthened across the central recliner her parents shrank from him, edging their chairs and glancing askance. It was that freshness. Eric wasn’t brown. He floated above his seat with a faint white outline, as if snipped from a glossy magazine and pasted on Novinsky newsprint. Eric straightened his long legs and crossed his ankles, locking hands behind his head; his articulated Adam’s apple caught the lamplight.