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! but instead he laughed and smoothed her hair and said, “Oh, Willy. Not nearly as much as you do.”
Her sniffles subsided and they resumed their seats, where Willy discovered that she didn’t revile Edberg quite so virulently any longer. Yet on the subway back to Manhattan, Willy was reserved, choosing to stand and read the MTA’s Poem of the Week even when two adjacent seats became available.
“Little Miss Macho,” Eric muttered in her ear, swinging from the next strap to dig a forefinger discreetly into her ribs. “Can’t be caught sitting down.”
He meant lighten up; she couldn’t. Some bitter pill from their outing was still undissolved. “Happy?” Over the clatter of wheels, she had to shout. “The impertinent nothing was crushed. More laurels for the automaton.”
“I’m delirious with joy,” he said, flouncing into one of the seats. Eric wouldn’t be lured into another public confrontation, and grabbed a discarded New York Times.
Willy grew alarmed that in reviving the antagonism she’d gone too far, and now Eric wouldn’t come home with her. At that prospect, her face drained and broke out in a sticky sweat. The train jostled her clenched jaw, and her teeth clacked. When Eric didn’t tromp out of the car at Grand Central for his connection with the number six, she went so weak-kneed with relief that she dropped into the seat next to him, with only one stop to go. Something awful was happening. It shouldn’t have mattered so much, whether he stayed over. Willy had slept complacently alone most of her life.
“OK, I give up!” he declared, slamming the door of her apartment. “Truth is, you don’t give a rat’s ass about Larry Punt. So what’s this really about?”
Eric switched on the overhead, and in its blaze Willy felt