the law. But what gets me is these muscleheads turn forty and still expect little girls to whisper, He used to be number six! They convince every brat who’s ever hoisted a ball over the net with the help of a forklift that he’ll be swelling in a limousine before he’s twenty. Meanwhile, his parents cough up twenty thousand a year for a third-rate education. All right, I’ll give Upchuck this: for a geezer he can still play. He beat me cold today and I don’t even think I taxed him. I tried, too. But I don’t like the way he acts as if he owns you and I don’t like the way he touches you and before I get into this any deeper I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Willy discovered that she was pleased Max had won. Here, she had offered up to Eric. This is my coach; his excellence is my excellence. Take defeat at his hands as evidence of my worthiness for yours.
“So, what, Upchuck’s been schtuping you since you were twelve?” Eric snapped a breadstick.
“We didn’t meet until I was seventeen.” Willy folded her arms in front of the gummy pasta that Eric was bound to finish for her.
“Beyond statutory. A stand-up guy.”
“Exasperatingly so, if you have to know.”
“How’d you hook up with him, anyway?”
“Max was the one serendipitous result of my father’s determination that I not turn pro. Max and I were both on vacations that made good on the emptiness of the word.”
Having become the number three amateur in the New Jersey juniors by sixteen, Willy had exhausted most of the local competition but was not allowed the financing or time off from high school to participate in tournaments far afield. With the U.S. Open nearby in Flushing Meadow, in 1986 Willy had anticipated skipping her usual ballgirl stint to take a last crack at the junior title, even if that meant plowing through the qualifying rounds. Naturally this was also the summer that her father resolved to take his family on a cross-country car trip, into which Willy was summarily drafted.
Outraged at being denied the National Tennis Center, she spent the long, hot drives hunched in the backseat saying nothing. Willy particularly froze out Gert, who’d made a great show of being willing to come along as a college sophomore and had urged Willy to be, as Gert would say, mat-yure.
Willy hadn’t been ma-cher. She left the family stranded in the Mount Rushmore souvenir shop to go for a six-mile run. Her sole interest was in finding a motel with a court, and in completing the day’s loathsome sight-seeing before the light waned and it was too late to scavenge a partner. Like the rest of her high school gym class, neither Gert nor her father would play her anymore.
Chuck Novinsky was tightfisted, but limited vacancies in Nevada drove him to a luxury motel. At least The Oasis would mollify his second daughter, since it harbored three tennis courts.
The resort also hired a resident pro, a former 600-something who preyed on wealthy travelers working off their afternoon ice creams. Though Ed Sanders was going to seed from rum sours, he strutted those three baking hardcourts as if taking a second bow at the Foro Italico. As Willy later remarked to Max Upchurch, “Big prick, small pond.”
Willy skipped a canvass of the old bags and brats in the lobby and went straight to Sanders. He was practicing his serve; the sizzling topspins all landed two feet deep.
“Hey, mister.” Willy sidled to his baseline. “Game?”
“I charge sixty bucks an hour, sweetheart. Better check with your daddy first.” She was treated to the beefcake smile for free.
The Oasis was already bankrupting her father. At the additional expense of some charlatan’s worthless counsel her father would blow a gasket.
“Tell you what,” Willy proposed, tossing a Wilson hand to hand. “You win, I pay you double. I win, you pay me.”
“Okay, darling. You’re on.”
Those were the days when not a cloud of hesitation had shadowed Willy’s sunny certainty that she could take all comers. She sometimes supposed that had she sustained her adolescent sense of peerlessness by now she could be in the Top Ten. It was astonishing how far blind self-regard could take you, even if the braggadocio was arguably unfounded. For Willy had made the common error as a teenager of mistaking for excellence what was merely potential.
“I wasn’t as good as I thought,” she told Eric. “Still, playing Ed Sanders was like taking candy from a grown man.”
When the bill arrived at Boot of the Med, Willy dived for her wallet, Eric held up his hand. Apparently he would pick up checks as a kindness but not as an obligation.
“Halfway through this wham-bam-thank-you-mister match,” she resumed in the car, “a face appeared behind the fence. Just like you. Beady eyes, fingers crimped around the wires. I gave the guy a show. I was so pissed off. The junior qualies were starting in Queens, and here I was glowering out car windows at the Painted Desert.
“I’d no idea who the guy was. When he saw Sanders fork out the sixty bucks, he asked if I was tuckered out. So I put the sixty back on the line, figured I’d double it. Like fun. This time I’d been hustled. I was playing Maximilian Upchurch. He put me right in my place, which at the time was the only way to get my attention.
“Max took the sixty bucks to teach me a lesson. Then he bought me a soda and grilled me about my training. It was such a relief to find anybody who gave a damn. My parents and teachers were goading me to learn the Pythagorean theorem; I’d never had a serious conversation about my forehand. I felt like the ugly duckling who’d finally met a swan.”
Willy parked the school car at Sweetspot. Ambling, she instinctively drifted toward the courts.
“We met up in the piano bar that night,” she rambled. “Max and I were in the same boat. His wife had refused to spend one more summer schlepping to tournaments and buying his clients corn kits. She wanted a real holiday, with nothing to do with tennis. To salvage the marriage, he’d agreed.”
“My wife has no interest in tennis,” Max had explained. “Or, I take that back. She hates tennis. Which is a kind of interest, I suppose.”
Willy had stirred her Virgin Mary. “How could anyone marry a tennis coach and dislike the sport?”
He smiled, dismally. “You’re too young to understand, but it makes perfect sense. Why, it’s almost inevitable.” He reveled in her naïveté. Max told her anything, the way you confide in a dog.
“But I’d think turning against tennis would be the same as turning against you.”
“Duh,” he said.
It seemed the Upchurch’s marriage wasn’t flourishing on their edifying scenic drives, since every evening Max wolfed his dinner and rushed back to the motel to scan cable channels for Ivan Lendl. As a reprieve from Taco Heaven and Navaho beadwork, he’d loiter soulfully on public courts to side-eye local talent. But his subversion of their “vacation from tennis” into the stalking of a new junior discovery was the last straw. At the end of the couple’s stay in The Oasis, Max was free to tail the Novinsky’s Chrysler to Yellowstone, since his wife had flown back to Hartford to file for divorce.
“So when you returned to New Jersey,” Eric prodded as Willy led him to the Sweetspot courts, “Max proposed.”
“To be my coach, dickhead.”
Having plowed up their Montclair drive, Max had offered Willy a contract: he’d coach her pro bono in exchange for 20 percent of her winnings the first five years of her pro career. “You’re pretty,” he’d observed cynically, lounging against his Saab Turbo. “The money’s in sponsors. Your face would sell.” Max had appraised her clinically up and down, as if she were a head of cattle. For months after