Double Fault by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online

weren't a dream come true. But during practice nothing was the same. We started quarreling. I balked at his advice; I didn't like his pushing me around. I'm sure he'd told me to 'move my fat ass' before, but suddenly I got offended, and I'd stomp away in a snit. Then one morning in May…Still chilly, I guess. It was eight-thirty, late for me. I started to get up. He reached for me and mumbled, 'It's cold. Come back to bed.' That was the end."
    "You lost me."
      "It wasn't cold. Not especially. And what did I care if it was five below? It was time to practice, and he didn't give a damn anymore. I'd started questioning everything: why he chose me in Nevada, whether he really thought I was gifted or just liked my legs. His every stingy compliment sounded in retrospect like a pick-up line. I was convinced that other players were laughing at me behind my back. For years I thought that all I wanted was Max. I wanted one thing more."
      Willy reclined flat onto the court, its warmth steeping through her jeans and cotton shirt. Eric lowered himself on top of her and exhaled. "You're warning me that I better not get on the wrong side of your racket?"
      But sandwiched between Eric and number seven, Willy had her first intuition that it might be possible to have a man on one side and a court on the other. "I'm tipping you off," she murmured, "that I'd rather play tennis than have sex."
      "I'd rather play tennis," he said, tugging her shirttail from her jeans and sliding his hand up her rib cage, " then have sex." He was a math major, a calculating man; he prized a small foil packet from his watch pocket.
      "Right here?"
      Eric flipped her on top of him. "I've wanted to for years. After all, tennis is like sex, isn't it? I think that's why you like it. Thrusting across the net—the ball is just a medium, a messenger of love and loathing all rolled up in one. That antagonism—you're enemies but you need each other. Listen to the language! Long-body, sweet spot, throat of the racket. Dish and shank, stab and slice, punch and penet rate —it's pornographic!" Eric sidled her Levi's down her thighs. " Approach and hold, break, break back, stroke, regain position , and con nect —it's romantic. And we both know that libidinal high from finally finding the right partner, and how you raise each other up. You never thought you could be so good, and they never thought they could be so good, and more than caring who wins, most of all you don't want to stop…. Good God, Wilhelm." He had grasped her buttocks, one in each hand. "Your buns are about as pliant as Goodyear radials."
      Willy faced the fact that she'd always wanted to do it here as well. It was significant that she and Max had never thought to, as if they'd sensed that number seven and Max's bed were incompatible. When she wriggled from Eric to step from her jeans, being naked here felt normal. She always felt naked playing tennis, each blemish on her character laid bare: every unjustified conceit or nascent timidity, the least laziness, flagging, or despair. The body, in comparison, was a trench coat.
      In one motion Eric shed his grungy black T-shirt, and so revealed an unsuspected artistry of torso, as the sly elegance of a surprise drop-shot is covered until the last moment of opening the face. While Willy had indulged a few flings with other athletes at UConn, the dullness of their conversation had cast a pall over their anatomies, the idealized bodies prosaic and lifeless as line drawings in Gray's. With more than one Adonis she'd remained so unaroused that she'd dragged her shirt back on and trudged off to her own dorm. Willy had supposed it took some aching flaw—a belly sag, an appendectomy scar—to capture her imagination. But while Eric had no flaws to speak of, an intriguing stir across his shoulders flickered the moonlight from plane to plane, like the facets of a mirror ball, or a series of complex, interlocking ideas.
      Eric pulled his own