Double Fault. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ Oh, great.

      If Willy didn’t detest her sister she might have felt sorry for the woman. Born around the time that those typescripts would have been shoved in the attic for Roach Motels, Willy’s older sister had suffered the initial brunt of her father’s barbaric practicality. He could just as well have kept a foot on her head. From the start, Gert had been overly grown-up, with that restrained, well-spoken modesty that in a child is a little disturbing. In the early days when the girls still played together, Gert would never agree to rambunctious reenactments of Kojak chase scenes, but insisted on playing Mary Tyler Moore. In junior high, she never wanted to be a rock star, but a school-teacher. Her tennis game was safe and soft, and as soon as Willy got good Gert quit the sport without a fight. In high school, she dressed with a matronly mutedness all through the era of wacky New Wave clothes. Her garb in her twenties was still sensible, like her marriage—her husband and shoes alike would wear well, so much better than heels that were flashy and precarious. Willy’s father had succeeded: Gert was a bore. Her single pretension was to claim that she hadn’t one.

      When Gert efficiently whisked in the door (her suit was brown) she asked Willy while fussing keys into her pocketbook, “How’s tennis?”

      “Fine,” said Willy.

      That was that.

      At dinner, so assured and fluid was her fiancé’s patter that Willy wasn’t needed. Inspecting him, she had the irrational impression that she’d brought not a prospective son-in-law but a surrogate—rather than their surly, guarded, too-private second child who always made life so prickly, here was a self-possessed, engaging young adult in whose presence her parents, incredibly, laughed. At previous family mealtimes, whenever Willy launched into insider tennis scuttlebutt Gert would ask for more potatoes and her father went back to harping on how deconstructionism was blessedly kaput. But when Eric gossiped about Agassi, they all three leaned forward and asked questions (“Who’s Agassi?”). Presently her father was exploring with convincing curiosity how Eric tamed his nerves before a game, a question he had never bothered to ask his own daughter.

      Having sucked up to her mother by eating three helpings of inedibly undercooked chicken cacciatore, Eric expanded back from the table. In the pool of light at his open collar, shadows swam in his clavicle like the darting of small fish. Willy grew alarmed. Eric’s extreme features could be regarded as either striking or overdrawn. In the past she had bestowed him with a provisional handsomeness, which she was thereby free to rescind. Yet tonight, like it or not, the branched veins over his broad forearms made Willy’s mouth water as surely as an open candy dish of licorice strings. If his beauty was a present, it was one he would keep.

      “At the January ’89 Buenos Aires Davis Cup match with Argentina?” Eric opined. “Agassi was playing Martin Jaite, a heartthrob local talent. Andre was whitewashing the poor bastard, 6–2, 6–2. At 4–0 in the third set Jaite had a chance to win a game. Down 40–love, Agassi shouted to his coach, ‘Hey, Nick, watch this!’ Jaite served, and Agassi caught the ball with his left hand.”

      “Why would he do that?” Gert frowned, fascinated.

      “Twisted charity. To humiliate Jaite and offend the crowd. It worked. Then he’d the nerve to claim to journalists that the trick was ‘just something he always wanted to do.’”

      Willy’s brow creased as well. She’d tried to tell this exact same story at Thanksgiving last year. Her mother had continued clearing the table, Gert had rifled through sample questions for her next accountancy exam, and her father, far from readjusting his chair at a rapt angle, had turned absently to The New York Times. Willy had abandoned the anecdote well before she got to the punchline.

      If only to get a little attention, Willy pinged and raised her glass. “Hey. A toast. We’re getting married.”

      They were thrilled.

      When everyone went to bed, her mother pointedly directed the engaged couple to separate rooms. Willy might have staged a scene, but the chummier her fiancé became with her father (“Eric, please call me Chuck”) the more she was inclined to tolerate the arrangement.

      “Well, you charmed the bejesus out of my family,” Willy growled in the hallway.

      “They’re not so bad,” he whispered.

      “Maybe to you they’re not,” she muttered. “Good God, I’m engaged to Eddie Haskell.”

      “Willy—?”

      She didn’t kiss him good night. Willy had been nervous whether her family would like Eric. She hadn’t thought to worry that they’d like him too much.

       chapter 6

      When Willy neared Montclair, New Jersey, she dwarfed, as if mere proximity to her mother’s womb shrank her to fetal dimensions. In contrast, as Eric swept into the polished lobby on East Seventy-fourth Street and hailed the doorman by his first name, her betrothed seemed to grow taller with every step. By the time he strode in the door of his parents’ apartment she was afraid he would hit his head.

      After much shoulder-clapping and bear-hugging of his firstborn, Axel Oberdorf turned to greet the girlfriend. “Pleasure. He does bring home the lookers.” Axel winked.

      She had expected a lanky, balding version of Eric. Instead Axel (“Axe”) Oberdorf was a head shorter than his son, compact and stocky. With the stance of a linebacker, he was hard to get past. His full head of black hair matched his arms, which were matted in thick animal fur. A senior surgeon at Mt. Sinai, Axel exuded the sharp scent of a rigorous detergent, a two-layered smell of harshness masked by a cloying but insufficient perfume. He pumped Willy’s hand; his nails were short and clean. Through initial small talk, his face explored a restricted range of expressions: the self-congratulatory beam of aren’t-we-all-grand; a stolid wait-and-see, indicating a withholding of judgment that wouldn’t last; and the occasional flicker of suspicion.

      “What’ll it be, Eric? Laid in two sixes of that Pickwick Ale you said you liked. Or you on some health kick? Wheat-grass juice? Boys be glad to run out and fill special orders.” It was a small matter, but had Willy ever let on to her parents that she was partial to Pickwick Ale, they’d have gone out of their way to stock Old Milwaukee.

      Axel led the couple into his capacious living room, whose plush ivory carpet looked as if it were vacuumed three times a day. The fluffy furniture was modular, like Eric’s mind. Bright, primary-colored rectangles, cones, pyramids, and cylinders, all stripped with Velcro, could be whimsied into a variety of configurations. It was easy to picture Eric working out geometric theorems here as a child, or designing his own Rubik’s Cube with furniture. Eric’s mother ran an art gallery, and the walls were spaced with original canvases that themselves might have passed for math diagrams or magazine puzzlers—abstract impressionists mazed with triangles, Russian prints whose Cyrillic phrases challenged anyone in the room to pronounce them, and white-on-white grids more witty than beautiful. Though the room was splashed with an array of hues, not a single cushion or painting was brown.

      Eric set about building himself a chair. Willy perched on a plain cube, a poor choice. She couldn’t lean back; already jittery, she was now literally on edge.

      “So bring me up to date, my boy,” said Axe, on a big-armed throne. “What happened in Toronto?”

      “Oh, СКАЧАТЬ