Free Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

exclamation, a rich, round cry she had never heard issue from that throat, Willy gaped wondrously at Eric's face. The muscles spasmed. The sharp planes of his brow and cheekbones sloughed and blurred. His countenance was almost unrecognizable; he didn't look clever, caustic, or contained . Some people would have found the contortion of his features ugly. To Willy, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and she came.

      Turnabout was fair play. If the seemly Eric Oberdorf could wake up half of 112th Street with an orgasmic roar, the volcanic Willy Novinsky could keep the lid on for one tennis game. The next day she tempted Eric into another match at Riverside. Willy insisted on the northern courts, whose surface eccentricities her boyfriend detested. To Eric, a court was an idealized graph from which the ball should take predictable trajectories if you'd got your equations right. This Oberdorf was Germanic by nature and liked order. A Novinsky had a genetic Eastern European predisposition to chaos. Willy was only delighted that overhanging branches had recently baptized number eight with a shower of purple berries, whose pits were rolling across the composition like violet ball bearings.
      Rather than click her heels at a winner or bop her forehead when she botched a gift put-away, this afternoon Willy set her face into the very impassive mask she had learned from Eric himself. No whistles of admiration, racket twirling, or knocking the frame on her shoe. Instead, Willy marched woodenly from serve to serve without one stomped foot. Stifling her running monologue, today she straightened her mouth in a line so flat that were it an EKG the patient would be dead. When Eric asked if his serve was a let she would only nod.
      "Are you upset about something?" he worried on the second changeover.
      She shook her head rigidly, though whether or not she was upset had nothing to do with getting on with the job.
      Whatever Eric seemed to want she denied him. He loved to dive for low, whistling passes, so each time he rushed the net she lobbed—exquisite topspin arcs cresting a few tantalizing inches from the tip of his racket. He'd streak to his baseline, plow back again, bloop …When he paced up his game, she dragged the points to a crawl.
      And Willy had never been more coldly conniving. Her sidespins were given a happy assist when they landed on berries. She'd sweep her racket back as if for a doozy and at the very last second bring it to a shrieking halt; dink , the ball would cough over the tape and wheeze to Eric's feet. Finally, when he'd been lulled into anticipating only junk, she'd let tear, jangling the ball into the fence. Composed and serenely mechanical, Willy dispatched the first set 6–2.
      Receiving in the second at 5–1, Willy reflected that she'd aimed only to enrage him, to teach Eric that he could be fervid once he got out of bed. Yet her methods had begun to backfire. The score was sweet enough; she needed only to break him this game, or hold the next. But instead of at last revealing his wit's end—by kicking another of her winning balls at the net, or at least shooting her a glare—Eric had started to laugh.
      His serve went wiggly and folded into her service court, as if itself doubled over in hysterics. She flattened it. He didn't even attempt to retrieve, and wiped away a tear. Willy narrowed her eyes to make them all the more steely, and disciplined her mouth to a bar. Meanwhile he had started to hoot, losing his balance and gasping for breath. At love—40, match point, he shoveled a fat, juicy floater to her midcourt. She squashed it. Barely able to get the words out through his guffaws, he said something.
      The match over, it was now permissible to speak. "What was that?" asked Willy courteously.
      This time he shouted unmistakably, "Marry me!"
      Willy cartwheeled her racket fifteen feet in the air, and caught it neatly by the grip. Oberdorf had finally