Double Fault. Lionel Shriver
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only to slump in this carton and rustle with insects. She’d scanned only the most recent manuscript, on top, heart-breakingly protected with “Copyright(c) 1967 by Charles Novinsky” on the title page.
The End of the Story had been more of a slog. The prose was dry and spare, recalling the cutting, droll sarcasm of the father she knew. The satire described a mythical population grown so vicarious that content was extinct. An automated world whose only work was entertainment divided between the watcher and the watched. Consequently, all art was reflexive: films concerned screenwriters, TV programs followed the “real lives” of sitcom actresses, and novels, the author noted with special disgust, exclusively detailed the puerile pencil-sharpening of literary hacks. The manuscript had left off on page 166 in the middle of a sentence. Little wonder; with its theme that storytelling was dead, the narrative dripped with such self-loathing that to finish such a book would be antithetical.
“That last manuscript was depressing,” said Willy. “He’d even worked the phrase ‘a bit of a giggle’ into the text. He was smarting. I’m not sure he’s smarting anymore, which is probably what’s wrong with him.”
“You think all those failed novels explain why he’s discouraged you from playing tennis?”
“I wouldn’t be that simplistic. I’d give my parents some credit for genuinely wanting to protect me. Original sin in my family is getting your hopes up.”
“Honey?” They’d been sitting on Willy’s bed; her mother had patted her hand. Willy was seventeen, and still feuding with her father over college. “Every young person wants to be a celebrated artist, a fashion model, or a big-name sports star. All but a very, very few end up working for IBM, or teaching youngsters who themselves want to be famous that they still have to learn to spell, like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with having an ordinary life. We’d just like you to be prepared. If you set your heart on being Chris Everest—”
“Evert,” Willy corrected, twanging her racket strings with her fingernails.
“We’re just afraid you’ll get hurt.”
“You’re afraid, all right.” Willy had stood and zipped her case. “Afraid I might make it.”
She’d stomped out; but later her father had been adamant.
“I have nothing against tennis,” he said, which was a bald-faced lie. “But as for going pro, you could as well announce that instead of earning a degree you’re taking your Christmas check to Las Vegas.”
“Max thinks I’m playing with more than a Christmas check,” she returned hotly.
“A gamble is a gamble, and this is a poor bet that will only pain you when you’re older. In my day we wanted to join the circus—”
“Or write a book,” Willy spat.
His double take was steady. “Or write a book,” he repeated coolly. “And then we grew up.”
“Spare me your adulthood.”
“I would if I could, Willow.” For a moment he sounded dolorous. “But you are not throwing away a college education for a childhood hobby, and that’s final.”
“Do you think he had a point?” asked Eric.
“Now you, too?” Willy groaned. “My father didn’t have a problem with tennis when a sports scholarship covered my tuition, did he?”
“It’s just, I still don’t understand why after three years at UConn you dropped out.”
“My father didn’t want me to have credentials to rely on after I’d made a name for myself in tennis. He wanted me to have a degree for when I fell on my face. I had to drop out and turn pro. To finish college was to believe him.”
Eric smoothed her hand, uncomfortably like her mother.
“What I still can’t get over,” Willy gazed out the window at the darkening buildup of industrial New Jersey, “is he taught me to play. When I was little, we hit three times a week. We had a great time.”
“So why the hostility?”
“I could say he was mad that I’ve beaten him since I was ten. But I don’t think so. I found trouncing my father upsetting. He seemed to find it marvelous.”
The memory remained a queer color. They were playing at that lumpy macadam court nearest Willy’s house. She didn’t remember the game itself, only standing on the baseline after match point feeling dazed. Her father had come toward her in wonderment, climbing over the net instead of going around the post as if approaching an apparition that might vanish. He knelt at her feet, his voice hushed. “You have something special, Willow. I don’t know where you got it; not from me. But you be careful, and don’t let anybody take it away.”
Her mother bustling from the car broke the spell. “Chuck, whatever are you doing on the ground? Dinner’s been ready for an hour.”
Her father spread his hands. “She beat me.”
“That’s nice, dear. She’s a regular little whirlybird with that racket, isn’t she? Now, no dawdling, you two. The potatoes—”
“Colleen, you don’t understand,” he said irritably. “I didn’t let her. Ten years old, can you believe it? And I tried. I gave it my best shot.”
“Chuck,” her mother scolded. “You’ll give her a swelled head.”
Yet at the very point her father recognized that his second daughter was gifted he began to stand in her way. He found fewer afternoons after work to hit. He refused to cover her dues for the Montclair Country Club, and Willy was forced to collect balls for tips to pay her way. Half the players she fetched for didn’t really want a ballgirl, and she became something halfway between mascot and pest. Arguments over entering local junior tournaments that “interfered with her schoolwork” were incessant.
The antagonism came to a head on Willy’s sixteenth birthday. She sat before the usual sagging cake; her mother never quite went all the way in cooking, and had whipped the egg whites for the coconut icing to insufficient peak. As the whites subsided to raw slime, the icing slurped down the sides with a dispiritedness that encapsulated the Novinsky gestalt. Likewise each fallen layer was lined with a streak of dense, rubbery sad cake, as if nothing in this household was destined to rise from perpetual depression. Before her lay a single envelope, labeled Wilhemena.
She should have known better, but it was May; Willy leapt to the conclusion that inside was at last permission to attend the Vitas Gerulaitis tennis camp in Queens. When she ripped open the envelope, her face fell as noticeably as the cake.
“This way Gert gets her birthday present early,” her father blustered. “But you’re not quite old enough to go alone.”
The offer of three weeks in Europe with her dreary older sister could as well have been an all-expenses-paid to Newark. Willy mashed a bite of cake with her fork. “There are only three places I want to go in Europe,” she delivered levelly. “Roland Garros, the Foro Italico, and the All England Club—on tour. Other than that, I have no intention of spending three weeks of the best weather of the year shuffling through moldy museums with Gert.”
Conventionally her father used composure as a weapon. This time he turned crimson, knocking back his chair and barking that Willy was thankless, that at her age he’d have given his eyeteeth—
Willy had learned icy calm at his own knee. “If you can afford to send me to Europe,” she’d pushed away her uneaten cake, “you can afford to send me to tennis camp.”
Once at camp, Willy instinctively gravitated to the scholarship kids, and lied that she came from poor white trash. The fib came easily; Walnut Street constituted poverty of a kind. Yet there was something inevitable about her family’s low emotional income, and Willy didn’t know what besides bitterness she might expect from her father. His own hopes had been crushed. How could