Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ “But that’s the product of careful coaching.”

      They were standing in line at Gate 413. Willy was relieved that the bus was late. Her stomach knotting, she now wished they’d brought two bottles of wine.

      “When I was a kid my father sensed I admired him,” Willy went on, “since any little girl would. I must have been—oh, eleven, alone with my father in the car. He explained that most of his classes could barely read, so if teachers were judged by the quality of their students my father was, I quote, ‘the bottom of the barrel.’ He announced that with a weird, vicious pleasure.”

      “What’s his problem?” asked Eric as the line began to move. “Bloomfield College isn’t a great school, but it’s not disgraceful.”

      “To Chuck Novinsky it is. I didn’t understand until I was fifteen. Nobody had told me. I was pottering in the attic when I found a box of duplicate hardbacks. Unappealing cover—plain; I think it was cheap. In the Beginning Was the Word, by Charles Novinsky.”

      Eric chuckled. “A little inflated, if you don’t mind my saying so. What was it, criticism?”

      Willy glanced at her fiancé in the light streaming through the door of Gate 413. A fresh feeling came off of him that had nothing to do with having ironed his shirt for the occasion. His mental basement wasn’t knee-deep in naysaying bilge; the storage in his parents’ ritzy East Side apartment wouldn’t breathe musty disillusionment.

      “A novel,” she said sorrowfully, climbing into the bus and snuggling by a window. “Begpool Press, 1962—never heard of them.”

      “Did you read it?”

      “I had a feeling that I shouldn’t mention the books to my father. So I sneaked up to the attic with a flashlight.”

      “Was it any good?”

      “I don’t know,” she puzzled.

      Had her father’s book been any good? Naturally the novel had commented on the nature of literature, and there wasn’t a soul who wanted to read about that; likewise it celebrated the power of language, a power he now derided. The plot was playful, about a novelist whose every printed word came to life. (She loved it when a mixed metaphor gave rise to a grotesque behemoth slouching toward the narrator’s house until he frantically rewrote it.) But the prose clanked with thesaurus plunder, a whole paragraph conceived to accommodate stereotropism. Still, the slim volume seemed an eager, trusting effort and couldn’t have deserved the scathing reviews shoved down the side of the box.

      “The reviews were hideous.” Willy shuddered. “All in local papers, fly-by-night magazines. Probably by young journalists trying to make a name for themselves, and so acrobatically snide. One reviewer called In the Beginning Was the Word so awful that it was ‘a bit of a giggle.’”

      Newly curious, Willy had located a second box, where four different rubber-banded typescripts were crammed into waterlogged cardboard, their pages folded and specked with roach eggs. She’d been reluctant to paw those reams, once treasure, now trash—thousands of offbeat adjectives mined from Roget’s, 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?”

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