about it.”
“Exactly.” Eric dabbed his mouth with a teachery expression, as if he’d been putting her to a test again and she’d barely passed. “I don’t believe in contingency plans. A little imagination is a dangerous thing. Picture the future where you’re foundering and before you know it this bleak landscape is framed on your living room wall. Put up travel posters. You’ll do great. I’ll do great. We’ll do great.”
He spanked rice grains off his hands. Though only a year his senior, for once Willy felt appreciably older than her boyfriend.
The National Tennis Center had a wretched reputation among players—the crowds were rambunctious and disrespectful; the stadium was plunked smack-dab under LaGuardia Airport’s flight path. Willy had long turned a deaf ear to such carping. She herself had been forced to focus through a foofooraw of wailing car alarms, plinking ice cream trucks, or thumping outdoor rock concerts in nearly every scrappy tournament she’d entered. As far as Willy was concerned, the National Tennis Center was as reverent and hushed as St. Peter’s. If Steffi Graf groused that she couldn’t concentrate there, Willy Novinsky would happily take her place.
Willy loved Flushing Meadow. She’d been a ballgirl there in the McEnroe era, and had a crush on the volatile bad boy of tennis when she was fifteen. Since then, she always ducked behind security tape to say hello to the man who still managed the ball-retrieval team, and brought him up to date on her career. Though she’d never been a contender here, familiarity with the tunnels and locker rooms, of which the public were ignorant, infused her with a proprietary sense of access. At the NTC she dared to believe, as Eric did daily with such unnatural ease, that center court was her destiny.
With amazement, Willy was led by the hand on September 7, not up switchbacking ramps to the upper tiers of rowdy proles, but to the hallowed courtside seats reserved for corporations and blue-blood families. Screwed on the backs of their chairs gleamed two plastic plaques: OBERDORF. In that it had become customary to hand on permanent U.S. Open seats in one’s will, some day these thrones could belong to Eric. Willy conceded that privilege did not seem altogether obnoxious from the standpoint of its beneficiary.
Yet Willy and Eric seemed destined to remain on opposite sides of the net. As he supported the incumbent Reagan in ’84, Eric promptly backed Stefan Edberg, the obvious favorite, who had won the U.S. Open the previous year. Eric knew she was rooting for the challenger, Larry Punt—a modestly ranked hopeful who had battled his way through the qualies into the round-of-sixteen.
“Are you being deliberately contrary?” she asked. “Every time we watch a match, you back the other guy.”
“That’s because you have such a soft spot for long shots, Wilhelm. Whenever some poor slob is ranked 4,002, or is coming back from an injury that will eventually put him out of the game forever, you take his side. Who’s being contrary?”
“Since your ranking isn’t far from 4,002 you might sympathize with the player who isn’t famous.”
“For most of these people, this is entertainment,” he murmured, leaning forward. “For you and me, this is a vicarious exercise. So it’s a question of with whom you identify. That piece of kelp out there, even if he freakishly took this match, would only get cut to ribbons in the quarters. Why go down with the no-name in your head? Make it easy on yourself, and identify with the front-runner. If you throw your mental lot in with the lowly, there’s no logical limit. You may as well imagine yourself as an aspirant ballgirl.”
“I was a ballgirl,” she said icily, tugging the empty arms of her sweater around her shoulders and jerking them in a knot. “Edberg is drab. Typical Swede. He has no personality, and his face is about as expressive as set cement.”
“Who needs personality with a volley like that?”
“Tennis should be a test of character.”
“Character, maybe. Not personality.”
“What’s the difference?”
Eric assumed a patient tone. “Personality involves frilly quirks like I-have-to-wear-my-lucky-headband. Character entails flushing all that emotional froufrou down the toilet and getting on with the job.”
She turned to Eric’s face with amazement, which had assumed the same rigid intensity that he wore on court. Eric was a great admirer of technique, the exterior game, and if the interior existed for him at all, it was to be obliterated. Presumably in Eric’s view the most exemplary tennis players didn’t, themselves, exist. But Willy was riveted by the storms of frustration, beleaguerment, and redoubled determination washing over a player’s face like island weather. To Willy, the interior game was the game—your feelings could be played like a violin, or they could play you. Eric’s solution was not to master the emotions but to make them go away. If he himself could pull off such a vanishing act, he was either a shaman, or a machine.
When she turned back to the game, Punt had been given a warning for racket abuse. The underdog was screaming at the umpire, who gazed unconcernedly at an airplane overhead.
“No class,” Eric hissed.
“It was a bad call!”
“Which wouldn’t be overturned if Edberg’s shot had landed so far wide that it bounced on our picnic basket … Christ, what a trashy outburst.”
“Punt is 5–1 down! He’s frazzled.”
“So if he can’t play tennis, he could at least behave himself. Losing all the more behooves him to be gracious.”
“Gracious defeat is always insincere, and if I were being humiliated at what I cared about most in the world in front of thousands of people, I’d blow off a little steam at the umpire myself.”
Meanwhile, Larry Punt was giving his all. He was drenched in sweat, and lunged for every return, if reliably to no avail. For Edberg was in a zone, and deep lobs drove him to his backcourt for only the one winning overhead. Willy tried to get Eric to appreciate that at least Punt didn’t roll over.
Eric shrugged. “Makes for better spectating, but doesn’t affect the result.”
“God, you sound so contemptuous … when he’s playing his guts out—”
“Quiet!” shushed a woman behind them.
“Keep it down,” Eric muttered.
“Oh, who cares what the buttinsky thinks?”
“I care,” he scolded.
“Of course you do; anything to do with what other people think and how somebody appears. All this stiff-upper-lipping tut-tut when you’re not even British—” Willy burst into tears.
“Willy! What’s with you?” Apologizing to their neighbors, Eric ushered her from the stands.
“Honey.” He wrapped his arms around her under what might have been the Open’s single spindly tree. “What’s wrong? I thought we were having a nice time.”
Now that Willy had the most to say she couldn’t talk. “All you care about is—” Her throat caught. “All you care about is—” she would have to choose single words carefully “—winning.”
She expected the usual There-there-I-care-about-you-sweetheart!
