Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1997

Cover design by Stuart Bache © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008209773

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008209780

Version: 2017-04-06

Praise for Double Fault:

‘A brilliant tale of doomed love’

Observer

‘The scenes between Willy and Eric are terrific pieces of writing: the dialogue crackles with rage, frustration and bitterness’

Independent

‘That Shriver refuses to avert her gaze, much less sweeten the pill, is what makes her such an interesting writer. She does not coax, or wheedle: she challenges. She makes you think’

Daily Telegraph

‘Shriver is a truly remarkable star in the literary firmament. She has an uncanny sense of the way women subject themselves to secret, inward torture, weighing themselves down with passionate feelings they believe socially unacceptable to bring out in the open … I doubt there is any thoughtful woman who does not recognise herself somewhere in Shriver’s writing’

LISA JARDINE, Financial Times

‘The characters and situations are utterly convincing and the level of detail in the narrative provides a ghastly gossipy pleasure’

LESLEY GLAISTER

‘Shriver doesn’t care whether her characters are likeable or not: they play off one another’s strengths and weaknesses in a mesmerizing grudge match’

Saga

‘With prose as taut as a well-strung racquet, you’ll be captivated’

Marie Claire

‘Her writing is as precise and devastating as a Federer forehand’

Belfast Telegraph

‘When feminism has become the politics that dare not speak its name, it is refreshing to find an author who will bring such renewed vigour to the gender wars’

Guardian

‘Her exploration of her characters is so fearless that although readers may not sympathise with her, they’ll understand why she’s driven to destroy what she loves’

Metro

Dedication

To Jonathan

Whose real name I may use so rarely to save it for special occasions.

Dedicated in the fervent hope that we will confine this plot to paper.

Epigraph

‘Rarely do you get something if you want it too much.

There isn’t a tennis player in the world who

can’t tell when an opponent is frightened.’

TED TINLING

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

In the interests of storytelling, the tennis ranking system has been simplified in this novel. Readers curious about the complexities of national versus international rankings, or the WTA versus Virginia Slims computers, should consult the copious nonfiction on the subject. A few additional liberties have been taken, for Double Fault is not so much about tennis as marriage, a slightly different sport.

chapter 1

At the top of the toss, the ball paused, weightless. Willy’s arm dangled slack behind her back. The serve was into the sun, which at its apex the tennis ball perfectly eclipsed. A corona blazed on the ball’s circumference, etching a ring on Willy’s retina that would blind-spot the rest of the point.

Thwack. Little matter, about the sun. The serve sang down the middle and sped, unmolested, to ching into a diamond of the chain-link fence. Randy wrestled with the Penn-4. It gave him something to do.

Willy blinked. “Never look at the sun” had been a running admonition in her childhood. Typical, from her parents: avert your eyes from glory, shy from the bright and molten, as if you might melt.

A rustle of leaves drew Willy’s gaze outside the fence to her left. Because the ball’s flaming corona was still burned into her vision, the stranger’s face, when she found it, was surrounded by a purple ring, as if circled for her inspection with a violet marker. His fingers hooked the galvanized wire. He had predatory eyes and a bent smile of unnerving patience, like a lazy lion who would wait all day in the shade for supper to walk by. Though his hairline was receding, the lanky man was young, yet still too white to be one of the boys from nearby Harlem scavenging strays for stickball. He must have been searching the underbrush for his own errant ball; he had stopped to watch her play.

Willy gentled her next serve to Randy’s forehand. There was no purpose to a pick-up game in Riverside Park if she aced away the entire set. Reining in her strokes, Willy caressed the ball while Randy walloped it. As ever, she marveled at the way her feet made dozens of infinitesimal adjustments of their own accord. Enjoying the spontaneous conversation of comment and reply, Willy was disappointed when her loping backhand tempted Randy to show off. Ppfft, into the net.

This late in the first set, she often gave a game away to keep the opposition pumped. But with that stranger still ogling their match from the woods, Willy resisted charity. And she wasn’t sure how much more of this Randy Ravioli (or whatever, something Italian) she could take. He never shut up. “Ran-dee!” echoed across all ten courts when his shot popped wide. Between points Randy counseled regulars in adjoining games: “Bit too wristy, Bobby old boy!” and “Bend those knees, Alicia!” Willy herself he commended: “You pack quite a punch for a little lady.” And the stocky hacker was a treasure trove of helpful advice; he’d demonstrated the western grip on the first changeover.

She’d smiled attentively. Now up 4–0, Willy was still smiling.

The Italian’s serve had a huge windup, but with a hitch at the end, so all that flourish contributed little to the effort. More, intent on blistering pace, Randy tended to overlook the nicety of landing it in the box. He double-faulted, twice.

As they switched ends again, Willy’s eyes darted to her left. That man was still leering from behind the fence. Damn it, one charm of throwaway games in Riverside was not to be scrutinized for a change. Then, he did have an offbeat, gangly appeal … Ignoring the passerby only betrayed her awareness that he was watching.

Newly self-conscious, Willy bounced the ball on the baseline six, seven times. If her coach knew she was here he would have her head, as if she were a purebred princess who mustn’t slum with guttersnipes and so learn to talk trash. But Willy felt that amateurs kept you on your toes. They were full of surprises—inadvertently nasty dinks from misconnected volleys, or wild lobs off the frame. And many of Riverside’s motley crew exuded a nutritious exultation, losing with a shy loss for words or a torrent of gee-whiz. With Randy she was more likely to earn a huffy see ya, but she preferred honest injury to the desiccated well done and two-fingered handshake of Forest Hills.

Besides, Riverside Park was just across the street from her apartment, providing the sport a relaxing easy-come. The courts’ wretched repair recalled the shattered Montclair asphalt on which Willy first learned to play: crabgrass sprouted on the baseline, fissures crazed from the alley, and stray leaves flattened the odd return. The heaving undulation of courts four and seven approximated tennis on the open sea. Poor surface mimicked the sly spins and kick-serves of cannier pros, and made for good practice of split-second adjustment to gonzo bounces. Craters and flotsam added a touch of humor to the game, discouraging both parties from taking the outcome to heart. An occasional murder in this bosky northern end of the park ensured generously available play time.

In the second set Randy started to flail. Meanwhile their audience followed the ball, his eyes flicking like a lizard’s tracking a fly. He was distracting. When the man aped “Ran-dee!” as the Italian mishit another drive, Willy’s return smacked the tape.

“You threw me off,” she said sharply.

“It shouldn’t be so easy.” The onlooker’s voice was deep and creamy.

Abruptly impatient, Willy finished Randy off in ten minutes. When they toweled down at the net post, Willy eyed her opponent with fresh dismay. From behind the baseline Randy could pass for handsome; this close up, he revealed the doughy, blurred features of a boozer.

Emerging from his towel, Randy grumbled, “I’ve been hustled.”

“There was no money on the line,” she chided.

“There’s always something on the line,” he said brusquely, “or you don’t play.”

Leaning for his racket case, Randy grabbed his spine. “Oooh, geez! Threw my back last week. Afraid I’m a pale shadow …” Zipping up, he explained that his racket had “frame fatigue”; not much better than a baseball bat, capisce?

Her coach Max often observed, When boys win, they boast; when girls win, they apologize. “I was in good form today,” Willy offered. “And you got some pretty vile bounces.”

“How about a beer?” Randy proposed. “Make it up to me.”

“No, I’ll … stick around, practice my serve.”

“What’s left for you to practice, hitting it out?” Randy stalked off with his gear.

Willy lingered to adjust the bandanna binding her flyaway blond hair. The man behind the fence threw a sports bag over the sag in the chain-link at the far end and leapt after it.

“That was the most gutless demonstration I’ve ever seen,” he announced.

“Oh, men always make excuses,” said Willy. “Beaten by a girl.”

“I didn’t mean he was gutless. I meant you.”

She flushed. “Pardon?”

“Your playing that meatball is like a pit bull taking on a Chihuahua. Is that how you get your rocks off?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have rocks.”

The lanky man clucked. “I think you do.”

While Randy looked sexy from a court away and disillusioning face to face, this interloper appeared gawky and ungainly at a distance, his nose lumpy and outsized, his brow overhung, his figure stringy. But close up the drastic outlines gave way to a subtler, teasing smile, and elusive, restless eyes. Though his torso narrowed to a spindly waist, his calves and forearms widened with veiny muscle.

“Somebody’s got to put loudmouths in their place,” she snapped.

“Other loudmouths. You tired?”

Willy glanced at her dry tank top. “If I were, I wouldn’t admit it.”

“Then how about a real game?” He spun his racket, a solid make. He was cocky, but Willy Novinsky hadn’t turned down the offer of a tennis game for eighteen years.

At the first crack of the ball, Willy realized how lazily she’d been playing with Randy. She botched the first three warm-up rallies before reaching into her head and twisting a dial. Once it was adjusted up a notch, threads of the bedraggled net sharpened; scuffled paint at her feet flushed to a more vivid green. White demarcations lifted and seemed to hover. Fissures went blacker and more treacherous, and as it hurtled toward her the ball loomed larger and came from a more particular place.

She played guardedly at first, taking the measure of her opponent. His strokes were unorthodox; some replies came across as dumb luck. His form was in shambles; he scooped up one last-minute ball with what she could swear was a golf swing. But he lunged for everything. When she passed him his racket was always stabbing nearby, and though many a down-the-line drive was too much for him, she never caught him flat-footed on his T just glooming at it.

And there were no Ran-dee!’s. He never apologized or swore. He didn’t mutter Get it together, Jack! or, for that matter, Good shot. When her serve was long he raised his finger; at an ace he flattened his palm. In fact, he didn’t say one word for the whole match.

The game was over too soon at 6–0, 6–2. Willy strolled regretfully to the net, promising herself not to hand him excuses, but also not to gloat. Despite the lopsided score, they’d had some long, lovely points, and she hoped he would play her again. Before she’d formulated a remark striking just the right gracious yet unrepentant note, he reached across the tape, grasped Willy’s waist, and lifted her to the sky.

“You’re so light!” he extolled, lowering her gently to the court. “And unbelievably fucking powerful.” He wiped his palm on his sopping T-shirt, and formally extended his hand. “Eric Oberdorf.”

They shook. “Willy Novinsky.”

She’d been braced for the usual grumpy terseness, or an affected breeziness as if the contest were mere bagatelle, expressed in an overwillingness to discuss other matters. But grinning ear to ear, he talked only of tennis.

“So your father dangled a Dunlop-5 over your crib, right? Dragged you from the Junior Open to the Orange Bowl while the rest of us were reading ‘Spot is on TV.’ And don’t tell me—Dad’s on his way here. Since even now you’re nineteen, he still tucks you in at ten sharp. His little gold mine needs her rest.”

That she was already twenty-three was such a sore point that she couldn’t bear correcting him. “Don’t hold your breath. Daddy’s in New Jersey, waiting for me to put away childish things. Like my tennis racket.”

Which was just what she was doing, when Eric stayed her arm. “Unwind with a few rallies?”

Willy glanced at the sky, the light waning. She’d been playing a good four hours, the limit on an ordinary day. But the air as it eased from rose to gray evoked afterwork games with her father, when he’d announce that Mommy would have supper ready and Willy would plead for a few points more. On occasion, he’d relented. She was not about to become the grown-up who insists it’s time to quit. “A few minutes,” she supposed.

Eric volleyed. Tentatively she suggested, “Your backswing —take it no farther than your right shoulder.”

In five minutes, Eric had trimmed his backswing by three inches. She eyed him appreciatively. Unlike the average amateur, whose quantity of how-to books and costly half-hour sessions with burned-out pros was inversely related to his capacity to apply their advice, Eric had promptly installed her passing observation like new software. She felt cautious about coaching if it manifested itself in minutes, for turning words into motion was a rare knack. With such a trusting, able student she could sabotage him if she liked, feeding him bad habits like poisoned steak to a dog.

Zipping his cover, Eric directed, “Time we had Randy’s beer. Flor De Mayo. I’m starving.”

“I may have missed it—was that asking me out?”

“It was telling you where we’re having dinner.”

“How do you know I don’t have plans with a friend?”

“You don’t,” he said simply. “I doubt you have a lot of friends.”

“I seem that likable?” she asked sardonically.

“No one with your tennis game is likable. And no one with your tennis game spends much time holding hands in bars.”

“You’re going to change all that?” she jeered.

“As for loitering in gin mills, no. But a hand to hold wouldn’t do you a speck of harm.” Eric grabbed Willy’s athletic bag as well as his own, and strode in the twilight with both carryalls toward court three with a self-satisfied jaunt. He had correctly intuited that wherever her rackets went, Willy was sure to follow.

“So where’d ‘Willy’ come from?”

Her imprecations to consider the West Side Cafe’s pleasant outdoor tables having been resolutely ignored, they were seated snugly inside Flor De Mayo. Willy was recovering from a petty sulk that she’d been co-opted into a Cuban-Chinese greasefest. At least the restaurant was clean and not too frenetic; the white wine was drinkable.

“Would you go by ‘Wilhemena’?”

“Yikes. What were your parents trying to do to you?”

“Let’s just say it’s not a name you expect to see in lights. My older sister fared even worse— ‘Gertrude,’ can you believe it? Which they hacked barbarously down to ‘Gert.’”

“They have something against your sister?”

Willy screwed up her eyes. He was just making conversation, but she had so few opportunities to talk about anything but open-versus closed-stance ground strokes that she indulged herself. “They have something against the whole world, in which we’re generously included. But my parents bear Gert no special ill-will. Their feelings for my sister are moderate. Moderation is what she invites. In high school, she made B’s on purpose. Now she’s studying to become a CPA. The sum of this calculated sensibleness is supposed to make my father happy. It doesn’t. In my book, they both deserve what they’ve got … I’m sorry, you have no reason to be faintly interested in any of this.”

“Oh, but I am.”

Afraid he was going to add something flirty and odious, she went on quickly, “I think they scrounged ‘Wilhemena’ and ‘Gertrude’ from the nursing home where my mother works. Even as kids, we sounded like spinsters.”

Eric knocked back his beer with gusto. “You’re awfully young to worry about becoming an old maid.”

In the terms of her profession Willy was already shuffling toward her dotage; this man instinctively honed in on soft spots. “I’m not,” she fended off lightly. “It’s the implausibility of ‘Wilhemena Novinsky’ on a Wimbledon scoreboard that’s unsettling.”

“Wee-Willy-Wimbledon. ’Sgot a ring. Besides: shitty name, one more obstacle to overcome. On which you thrive, I’m sure. They did you a favor.”

All this assumed familiarity was grating, and only the more intrusive for being accurate. “If I thrive on obstacles, my parents have done me dozens of favors.”

The waiter arrived with their baked half-chickens with mountains of fried rice. Eric had ordered two plates for himself, which he arranged bumper to bumper.

“You’re going to eat all that?”

“And the remains of yours, when you don’t finish it.”

“How do—?” She gave up. He was right. She wouldn’t.

The rice was marvelous, scattered with pork and egg. The chicken lolled off the bone. “Don’t look so greedy,” said Willy. “I may finish more than you think.”

“Just promise me you won’t go puke it up afterwards.”

“I’m not that trite.”

“No tennis dad, no bulimia, and you’re not overweight,” Eric ticked off on his fingers. “Too good to be true. You must be having an affair with your coach.”

Willy was a sucker for any contest, but this was the limit. “None of your business.”

His eyes flickered; he could as well have scribbled her response on a scorecard.

“While I’m being crass …” Eric dabbed his mouth with his napkin; she couldn’t understand how he could suck up all that rice in such a mannerly fashion. She’d have predicted he’d eat like an animal. “What’s your ranking?”

There was no getting away. In tennis circles, this question arose five times a day, though it secreted far more malice than What’s your sign?

Willy placed her fork precisely beside the vinegar, then edged the tines a quarter inch, as if to indicate the incremental nature of progress in her sport. “I’m ranked 437. But that’s in the world—”

He raised his hands. “I know! I’m surprised your ranking is so high.”

“Surprised! I pasted you today!”

He laughed. “Wilhelm!” He pronounced her new name with a Germanic V. “I just meant that I don’t expect to run into a top 500 in the course of the average day. Touchy, touchy.”

“There’s not a tennis player on earth,” Willy grumbled, picking her fork back up, “who isn’t sensitive about that number. You could as well have asked on our first date how much money I make, or whether I have AIDS.”

“Is that what this is?” he asked gamely. “A date?”

“You know what I mean,” she muttered, rattled. “A ranking is … like, how valuable a person you are.”

“Don’t you think you’re giving them a little too much power?” Eric rebuked her, for once sounding sincere.

She asked sarcastically, “And who’s they?”

“They are whoever you can’t allow to beat you,” Eric returned. “And the worst capitulation is thinking just like the people who want your hide.”

“So maybe you’re my they?”

“I’m on your side.”

“I’ve only had one person on my side in my life.”

“Yourself?”

“No,” she admitted, “I am not always on my own side.” This was getting abstruse. “I mean a real person.”

“But didn’t you like it?”

“Yes.” The question made her bashful. “Can we stop talking about me for a second? Like, what do you do?”

“I graduated from Princeton in May. Math. Now I’m taking some time out to play.”

“With me?”

“Yes, but play, not toy. Playing is serious business. You of all people should know that.”

“Do you … have any brothers and sisters?” The low grade of repartee in locker rooms had left Willy rusty and obvious over dinner.

“Three brothers. My father wants to take over the world.”

She let slide the implication that a patriarch would only do so with boys. “You,” she determined, “are the oldest.”

“Good.”

What he was applauding, or should have been applauding, was her having made the effort to imagine being in anyone else’s shoes but Willy Novinsky’s for an instant. Self-absorption was a side effect of her profession. Oh, you thought about other people’s games, all right—did they serve and volley, where was their oyster of vulnerability on the court. But that was all a roundabout way of thinking about yourself.

“Princeton,” she nodded. Extending herself to him was work. “Brainy, then. You wouldn’t have two words to say to the people I know.”

“I doubt you know them, or they you. Players on the women’s tour live in parallel universes. Though they’re all pig-thick.”

“Thanks.”

“The men aren’t nuclear physicists,” Eric added judiciously.

“Your folks have money, don’t they?” The tidy table manners were a giveaway.

“Hold that against me?” Eric lifted his drumstick with his pinkie pointed, as if supping tea.

“I might resent it,” she admitted.

“Check: you’re not bankrolled by nouveaux riches climbers.” He tallied again on the rest of his fingers. “And no pushy old man, no eating disorders, and you’re not a blimp. Four out of five right answers ain’t bad.”

That Willy hadn’t denied having an affair with her coach had evidently stuck in Eric’s craw. “This is a test?”

“Aren’t I taking one, too?” he returned. “Princeton: feather in cap. Math: neither here nor there. Money: black eye.”

“You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“Technically. Plus or minus? Watch it.”

Willy said honestly, “I don’t care.”

“So why’d you ask?”

He was flustering her. “I guess I’m pig-thick, too.” She glared.

“When I asked walking down here if your name was Polish, you seemed to realize that Pole-land was in Eastern Europe and not in the Arctic Circle.”

“Stupidity may be an advantage in tennis,” Willy proposed, teasing pork bits from the rice.

“The adage runs that it’s a game you have to be smart enough to do well, and dumb enough to believe matters.” Incredibly, Eric had cleaned his first plate and was making rapid inroads on the second.

“With the money on the line, tennis matters,” Willy assured him. “No, I look at fourteen-year-olds romping on TV and think, they don’t get it, do they? How amazing they are. They don’t question being in the Top Ten of the world because they’ve no conception of how many people there are in the world. And the game is best played in a washed, blank mind-set. Nothing is in these kids’ heads but tennis. No Gulf War mop-up, no upcoming Clinton-Bush election, just balls bouncing between their ears.”

Yet Willy didn’t quite buy her own dismissal of tennis players as stupid. Yes, exquisite tennis was executed in an emptied state that most would consider not-thinking. But more accurately the demand was for faultless thinking—since to regard hesitation, rumination, and turgid indecision as a mind functioning at its best gave thinking a bad name. Supreme thought streamed wordlessly from the body as pure action. Ideally, to think was to do.

But the lag between signal and execution was also closing up in Flor De Mayo. Willy no longer heard words in her head before they spilled on the table, and so became as much the audience of her own conversation as Eric, and as curious about what she would say. There was a like fluidity to be found, then, in talk.

Clearly hoping for one more right answer, Eric inquired, “Are you going to college?”

Meaning, will go, or are going, not have gone. After knowing this guy for a few hours, Willy already had a secret. “No,” she said flatly.

He took a breath, seemed to think better of the lecture, and exhaled, preferring the remains of her fried rice. She’d left him a few baby shrimp. Something about the sheer quantity of food he consumed was magnificent.

“So which players do you admire?” he asked.

“I’m old school. Still hung up on the last generation. Connors. Navratilova.”

“She cries,” he despaired.

“So what, if she feels like crying? I bet you like Sampras.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Eric shrugged. “His strokes are impeccable.”

“He’s a robot.” Willy scowled. “Give me back McEnroe any day, and a decent temper tantrum or two. John taught the world what tennis is about: passion.”

“Tennis is about control,” Eric disagreed.

“Tennis is about everything,” Willy declared with feeling.

Eric laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But you’re right, it’s not the eyes. The tennis game is the window of the soul.”

“So what can you see about me in my game?”

“You play,” Eric replied readily, “out of love. Sampras loves himself. You love tennis.”

“I have an ego, I assure you.” She was lapping this up.

“You have something far nobler than an ego, Wilhelm,” said Eric, lowering his voice. “Which your ego, if you’re not careful, could destroy.”

Too mystical by half; Willy retreated. “Sampras—that there’s nothing wrong with his game is what’s wrong with it. Maybe more than anything, tennis is about flaws.”

He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got a future.”

“Your game is … incoherent,” Willy groped. “As if you scavenged one bit here and one there like a ragpicker.”

“Rags,” he said dryly. The bill arrived; he counted out his share and looked at her expectantly.

She stooped for her wallet, abashed by her assumption that he would pay. “I didn’t mean tattered. You made me work today.”

“My,” he said drolly. “Such high praise.”

“Praise is praise.” She slapped a ten-spot on the check. “Take what you can get.” Willy was offended in return. She doled out flattery in such parsimonious dribs, to anyone, that she had expected him to run home with the tribute and stick it under his pillow. He wouldn’t bully her into a standing ovation. He was better than she expected. Period.

Eric offered to walk Willy to her apartment, but up Broadway the air between them was stiff with grudge. “That was good food,” she said laboriously at 110th.

“You thought it would be ghastly.”

“I did not!”

“Cuban-Chinese? Beans and stuff? You whined, like, Sher, I mean, if you wanna. Vintage Capriati.”

She laughed. “OK, I thought the food would be revolting.” The air went supple. Willy strolled a few inches closer to her companion, though he’d still have to reach for her hand.

His arms swung free. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Heading up to Westbrook, Connecticut, for the weekend. I train up there.”

“Let me come see you.”

She felt protective of Sweetspot, but a visitor would serve a purpose. “Maybe.”

Eric crimped her phone numbers into the margins of his New York City tennis permit.

She lingered at her stoop for a kiss. It was not forthcoming. In the glare of the entrance light, Eric’s woodsy eyebrows shimmered with mutated stray hairs, some up to an inch and a half long. Intrigued, not really thinking, Willy reached for the longest eyebrow hair to pluck it.

He slapped her hand.

“Sorry,” he said as Willy rubbed her knuckles. He’d hit her hard. “I like those.”

Cheeks stinging, Willy studied her tennis shoes. “I guess I liked those weird hairs, too,” she mumbled. “Maybe that’s why I wanted one.”

When she glanced up again, he was pinching the same overgrown straggler; he plucked it and laid it in her palm. “Then it’s yours.”

Her fingers closed over the specimen. She didn’t know what to say. Willy didn’t go on dates.

“Eric?” It was the first time she’d ever said his name. The syllables felt ungainly on her tongue, their use a monumental concession to the young man’s existence. “I did go to college. My father made me. I quit, after my junior year, to go pro. I’m not nineteen, I’m twenty-three. I’m way behind. I have very, very little time left.”

In reward for the successful exchange, one eyebrow hair for one confession, he kissed her. Willy could only hold one broad shoulder. The other hand fisted Eric’s peculiar gift. Unaccountably, once in her apartment she would store it in a safe place.

chapter 2

Max Upchurch called sweetspot a “School of Tennis,” dismissing Nick Bollettieri’s more famous Florida academy as a camp. The education Sweetspot students received was better than perfunctory; Max couldn’t bear colossal forehands at the expense of confusing Tiananmen Square with Chinese checkers. Max eschewed Bollettieri’s reform-school trappings, dispensing with Bradenton’s sniffer-dog drug checks, five-dollar fines for chewing gum, and restrictions to one TV program per week. As far as Max was concerned, if parents wanted to pay two thousand dollars a month for their kids to pop bubbles in front of The Munsters it was no skin off his nose. Should his students turn pro they might as well get practice at the tube. Isolated in an indistinguishable string of hotels waiting for the rain to clear or their draw to come up, most journeymen on the tour spent more time watching American reruns than they did on court.

Despite Sweetspot’s unfashionable liberality, Willy was not alone in regarding Max’s operation as more elite than his competition’s in Florida. Bollettieri accepted 225 would-be champions a go; Max admitted seventy-five. Max Upchurch himself had had a distinguished career, ranked number six in the world in 1971, and making a solid contribution toward pulling the U.S. ahead of Australia playing Davis Cup. As a young aspirant in the late sixties, he’d made a name for himself behind the scenes, finagling with a handful of other infidels to drive this snooty, exclusive, stick-up-the-ass amateur sport into the crass, low-rent, anything-goes, money-mad and cut-throat Open era that was now so happily upon us.

But the biggest difference was tennis. Bollettieri’s protégés blindly cannoned from the baseline like ball machines. To Max, crash-crash was not what tennis was about. Sweetspot emphasized cunning, style, finesse. While Nick assembly-lined bruisers, Max handcrafted schemers and ballerinas. Willy’s coach believed that in every player lurked a singular tennis game struggling to get out—a game whose aberrations would prove its keenest weapons. He regarded his mission as to coax those idiosyncratic strokes from unformed players before their eccentric impulses were buried forever beneath the generic “rules” that constituted common coaching.

When Max first took Willy on at seventeen he demolished a game twelve years in the making and reconstructed it from the ground up. Willy had grown up fighting—fighting her parents; fighting her extraneous algebra homework when she was on the cusp of a breakthrough with the slice backhand; fighting the USTA for transport to junior tournaments that her father hadn’t the remotest intention of financing; and later, fighting her height, when it became crushingly apparent that she would never exceed five-three. The appetite for battle Max encouraged. He drew the line at Willy’s fighting herself. He insisted that she stop overcoming weaknesses and start playing to strengths.

All through high school, Willy had rushed forward at every opportunity, to prove a dwarf could cover the net, and she’d clobbered every ball with pleasingly improbable pace. It was Max who’d convinced her to stop defying physical fact. She was short; she should approach selectively. She was light; she’d never overpower heftier, Bollettieri blunderbusses. What Willy had going for her was that she was fast, that from scrapping with Daddy and the USTA and Montclair High School she had tremendous reserves of spite, and, scarcest of all, that she was intelligent.

Sure enough, Willy could pummel juniors into submission, but on the pro circuit she would never win a slugfest. She had a higher percentage trading on her wits. Though it took absurd restraint to keep from hauling off and slaughtering every ball—if only for the sheer sensation of hitting any object that hard without being arrested—Willy discovered delights in delicacy as well, until certain backspinning dinks slithering over the tape made her laugh out loud. Max played her a video of the Ashe—Connors Wimbledon final of ’75, where instead of belting Jimmy’s shots back laced with his own medicine Arthur deliberately slowed the points to a crawl. The long, easy returns drove Connors wild, and he’d slash them to the net or overhit. In the end, of course, the tortoise beat the hare.

In fact, Max was not coaching her in anything new at all. Players who specialized in craftiness—drops, lobs, disguises, and change-ups—were playing old-style women’s tennis, for the sport had been routinely won on guile before the advent of oversize rackets and hunky grunters like Monica Seles. Yet the standard, abandoned long enough, becomes fresh. Willy sometimes suspected that his shaping her into an icon of bygone tactics was an exercise in nostalgia—for the days when women players were lithe, limber, and ingenious; and for the days when women players were women.

Thus it was thanks to Max Upchurch that Willy didn’t spend every passing day in a state of hysteria. While she moped through another unwelcome birthday, Max had serenaded her with tales of Kathy Rinaldi, Andrea Jaeger, and Thierry Tulasne—young hopes-of-tomorrow who fizzled out as fast as they once burned brightly. “Early to rise, early to bed,” he’d assured her when she turned nineteen, and was glowering at yet another year wasted at UConn on Spanish verbs. “Tennis is for grown-ups. You won’t peak until you’re twenty-five, Will. There’s time.”

As of six weeks ago, a tarnish had mottled her memories of those first trips to Sweetspot that Willy couldn’t quite rub off. Though she and Max had agreed to go back to “normal,” when Willy stepped off Amtrak in Old Saybrook it was an older student who waved her to the car. Once again, Max hadn’t met her train, and that wasn’t normal, but one more petty reprimand.

“What do you think of Agassi taking Wimbledon?” the boy bubbled. “Nobody thought he had the goods for grass. I was sure he’d show up in, like, fuck-you orange check or something, but no …”

Desmond was so eager that he forgot to pause for the answers to his questions. Willy observed enviously how in the last two years his dark mop had bobbed nearer the roof of the car. He’d be well over six feet, and had the compact, long-limbed figure for his sport. Had she a taste for little boys, she might have helped herself to Sweetspot’s choice morsels. But Willy spent her own teenage years so virulently disdaining the likes of Desmond that cradle-robbing would amount to a post-deadline rewrite. Wistful, she admired but didn’t quite covet his naive enthusiasm, not yet seized by savvy terror.

At any rate, the envy worked more in the opposite direction. Desmond was still undistinguished from the common ruck; Willy belonged to the select stable of older pros whom Max was grooming for the tour. Many of these were handpicked from the graduating class, though a few, like Willy, were bagged on Max’s cross-country shopping trips. Willy herself had never been a Sweetspot student, and often wondered how much more advanced her game might be now if she hadn’t been marooned at Montclair High School, which didn’t even have a tennis court. Making use of the nearby public park, the school had offered one tennis gym course, for which in her sophomore year she’d maliciously signed up. That memory tweaked her now, reminding her why that Eric person had been right, that she’d never had many friends. Little wonder—she’d assaulted the lot of them with such contemptuous serves that they rarely had the luxury of losing a proper point. Toward the end of the course, with an odd-numbered enrollment, no one would play her at all, and she spent gym class pounding a ball mercilessly against the backboard, as if to break another barrier less tangible but just as impassable, it seemed, if she remained a public school student in suburban New Jersey.

They were drawing into Westbrook now, a small, tucked-away community on Long Island Sound whose property values were astronomical, but whose houses had been kept in families; the town retained its middle-class, unassuming character. Downtown, such as it was, included an ill-stocked drugstore with superlative homemade fudge, one Italian restaurant that overcooked its spaghetti, the obligatory military monument though few residents would remember to which war, and the beloved Muffin Korner, whose loose eggs, hot biscuits, and forgivably weak coffee cost $1.49. On the outskirts, where unprepossessing clapboards weathered by the shore, sturdy dowagers paddled the lapping surf in underwire swimsuits.

That Westbrook, Connecticut, was a steady, settled place may have inspired Max to select this location for Sweetspot. Pro tennis was such a roller-coaster, packing the events of what ought to have been a lifetime into perhaps ten frenzied years. It was sedative to bring students of age in an atmosphere of the reliable, the ongoing, and to coach them in the calming context of a place where tennis didn’t mean much—the public courts by the firehouse looked like landfill.

Desmond was asking her to take a look at his serve. Doubtless he was hoping that Willy would put in a good word for him with Max. Desmond was entering his last year, when his mentor would be either asking him to stay on or merely wishing him the best, and so would take incidental privileges like being trusted with a school car this evening as auspicious. Willy had the urge to warn him, bitterly, that her good word would have meant a great deal more six weeks before, but a stray grumble would ruin months of discretion. When she glanced again at Desmond’s yearning, mysteriously unwritten face, she ached. The first cut at Sweetspot was just the beginning of a cruel, sometimes savagely short process of elimination through which eagerness and even, by laymen’s standards, awesome ground strokes counted for nothing.

This counsel, too, she swallowed. Willy had heard the poor odds enough times from her father, and the remonstrance was hateful. Desmond would have to find out for himself the staggering unlikelihood that he should ever be ranked at all, much less be deciding, after his idol, whether to concede whites to the fusty All England Club.

Threading outside of town, they curled the drive of the school, whose buildings blended with Westbrook architecture: green-trimmed white clapboard Colonial Revivals, each skirted with a wide wooden porch. Below the overhangs, rockers listed with curled afghans, and wicker armchairs beckoned with quilted pillows, calling out for long, fractious games of gin rummy. Nothing about this lulling, serene laze suggested the sweat shed on these grounds except that it was two hours after the dinner bell and the porches were deserted. Any student worth his salt at eight o’clock was back on the courts.

Willy drifted into the dining hall, to spot her coach at a side table, next to the horrid Marcella Foussard. He was scraping up the last of his meal—so once again they would not be snuggling into their regular booth at Boot of the Med to pick languidly at flaccid linguine. Willy grabbed a tray, brightening her laughter. Max would see through her insipid vivacity without looking up. What a disaster. What an awful mistake, though she wasn’t certain which of them had made it.

The cafeteria betrayed that this was a sports academy and not a prep school. No vats of brick-solid cheese macaroni and liquefied kale; no lime Jell-O. Since Max had bought into high-protein theories, replacing the old saws about carbohydrates, they confronted skinless chicken breasts and lean flank steaks, undressed snow peas, and an inexhaustible mound of bananas. Facing down the bananas one more night, Desmond moaned, “You know, Agassi lives on junk food.”

Willy slid her tray next to Desmond on the side of the hall opposite from Max. She might have braved Max’s table if it weren’t for that Foussard creature, who surely spent more time on her nails—the back of her hand—than on her backhand. The hall recalled a mess in more ways than one, and Willy was frantic to get out. Shredding her chicken, she asked Desmond to hit a few after dinner. Ecstatic, Desmond chucked his flank steak merrily in the trash.

On the way out Willy forced herself to turn to Max’s table. He was watching her steadily. She wiggled two fingers. He didn’t wave back, his expression unreadable. She made a swinging motion and pointed at Desmond. Max dipped his chin a half inch, and as Willy swept through the screen door she at least had the satisfaction that with Marcella jabbering away Max had not heard a single word the silly girl said.

Sweetspot’s twenty hard and four clay courts were built right on the sound, which made them breezy. But Max believed in the strengthening of adversity. He’d situated his school in the Northeast because, he claimed, European civilization had surpassed southern cultures due to rigorous, hard winters. Cold had invigorated northerners to activity and enterprise, while tropical layabouts lounged beaches munching pomegranates. According to Max, Tahitians would never have invented tennis. But Willy was confident the whole pro-winter hoo-ha really just meant that Max hated Florida.

Stars were emerging, the glow from the powerful floods fissiparating into the salted air. The lights projected a blue halo that could be seen from miles away. Closer up, the bulbs produced a low-level collective hum, like a chorus finding its note before the song. As the floods on their four corners flickered, starting gray and warming to hot white, the court blazed with the tingling theatricality distinctive to playing at night.

“No, Desmond,” she declined when he challenged her to a match. “Let’s just hit.” The boy deflated. Later he might treasure his few offers of carefree rallies; now he craved a showdown. But Willy, for all her reputed keenness for head-to-head, tonight hankered for reprieve from a world with no choice but to vanquish or be vanquished. There had to be a haven in between.

“Why the cold shoulder?” Willy demanded. “I thought we were going to go back to the way it was.”

“I wasn’t the one who sat on the far side of the cafeteria,” Max returned coolly.

“I wasn’t the one who chose to eat in the cafeteria.”

They were in the library, which Max adopted as his lounge after lights-out. Though the kids instinctively hid their bottles in racket covers, there were no booze bans on the books; Max was treating himself to solitary bourbon.

Looking up, he closed Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm. “You expected that I would meet your train and scoop you off to Boot of the Med, where we’d order the fried calamari and Chianti and then—”

“We’d practice a few drunken overheads at midnight. Why not?” Willy’s T-shirt was limp with clammy sweat; she rubbed her arms.

“What would we talk about?”

“What we always talk about. Primpy Marcella, and your ex-wife, and … and we’d draw point diagrams on napkins before the zabaglione.” Her tone had taken a defeated turn. To Willy’s own ears, the reprise sounded ridiculous.

“Our agreement was not to ‘go back to the way we were’ but for me to ‘treat you like everyone else,’ which I had never done, from the time you were seventeen. So I could hardly go back to anything.”

“You’re always so aggressive and nasty lately.”

“I’ve always been aggressive and nasty. You used to like it. Don’t go soft on me, Will. It’s not good for your tennis.”

“Do you even care about that these days?” she entreated. “My tennis?”

“I thought it was for the sake of your goddamned tennis that we’ve had such unimpeachable relations for six weeks.”

“See? ‘Goddamned tennis’—”

Max slammed his hardback to the table. “Enough! You practice your forehand, but the bust-up is blessedly a one-time-only. It doesn’t improve with repetition, it just gets old.”

“Gets old! We haven’t discussed this since May!”

“Will.” This time he implored her. Meeting his eyes, she pondered once more how this man contrasted with the photographs of Max’s heyday twenty years ago. Many an evening she had marveled through his tour album, where his Sports Illustrated and New York Post profiles were preserved under plastic sheets. Max had maintained the same compact physique, with a dense torso whose dark hair sprang from his Lacoste shirt then as now. His face remained right-angled, and had acquired none of the fleshiness that invaded most middle-aged jowls. The beginnings of those eye crinkles were to be found in yellowed clippings. Though he’d axed the seventies sideburns, Max hadn’t even restyled his no-nonsense haircut. The before-and-after pictures were, in their strictly physical detail, almost identical. So what made him look so unmistakably forty-five?

“It’s late, I should get to bed,” she said, and at the mention of the word bed Max poured himself another finger. “I may have a visitor tomorrow. Is that all right?”

He might have wanted to ask who or why, but Max Upchurch had made millions of dollars on self-control. He shrugged. She left.

In their on-court session the following afternoon, Max didn’t refer to the evening’s tiff, and no one observing the two would have picked up on anything amiss in this fruitful, vigorous coach-client relationship. His very capacity to put sentiment aside when business required a cool head may have contributed to his looking his age, though if Willy didn’t miss her guess the faculty faintly depressed him.

But Willy knew the difference. Since May a formality had invaded their sessions. Briskness prevailed, though the tightening of the interval between drills may have only been a matter of fifteen seconds. Max no longer tucked strands into her bandanna but ordered gruffly, “Get that hair out of your face.” He was hard on her—always had been—but now his criticism was knifed with genuine derision. He seemed glad for her mistakes, and Willy submitted to his abuse with uncharacteristic meekness.

They were working on corner-to-corner backhand drives, and as Willy spotted a peaked hairline sifting across the field to their court she bent her knees lower, drew her backswing more quickly, and forced the whole of her weight onto her right foot. The ball skimmed an inch over the net, and scooted from underspin.

“That’s more like it,” Max commended, though he sounded annoyed.

She put something special on the next one. It kissed the corner and skipped at a cockeyed angle beyond Max’s racket. By the gate, the gangly Jew whistled, and Willy realized that she was showing off.

“I’m afraid we’ll be another hour!” she cried.

Willy had orchestrated this exhibition, suggesting Eric take a train that would get him into Sweetspot before her afternoon’s drills were done. Now she felt obvious, demonstrating what a real pro hits like with a real pro coach. The ensuing hour was painful, as her visitor bounced his back against the adjacent court’s fence. Rather than gawk in slack-jawed awe, he looked put out. She could as well have been a little girl oppressing a house guest with her piano études. Moreover, while she’d intended Eric’s visit to accustom Max to her new admirer, the ploy abruptly appeared tactless. From the age of five Willy had learned to control a tennis ball, and had virtually abandoned the more challenging project of managing people with the same aplomb.

Between drills, Willy bent and grasped her calves, bringing her forehead to her knees. The tension of the antagonism she’d contrived was tightening her tendons. Max rolled his eyes and flicked his finger, commanding her to the net post. Pulled hamstrings could put you out of the game for weeks; Max took no chances.

As she braced against the net post, Max kneeled at her feet and cradled an ankle on his shoulder. Gradually he stood nearly upright, which brought his groin level with her open crotch. Willy grunted at the ache in her thigh. As Max lowered her leg and prepared to lift the next, she glanced over at Eric, who was intently rewrapping his grip.

When the recital was mercifully over, she abbreviated introductions. “Max Upchurch, Eric Underwood.”

Eric’s mouth twitched.

Max skipped the so-you’re-a-friend-of-Willy’s-are-you and how-do-you-two-know-each-other and went straight to all he cared about in regard to anyone. Nodding at Eric’s racket, he squinted. “You play?”

“No, I use this to catch butterflies.” Deadpan.

Max sprang his palm against his strings. “How about a game?” The casual inflection was a lie. He had never challenged anyone to a match casually in his life.

In reply, Eric began whisking practice balls to the next backcourt, implying that Willy was to pick them up.

Willy hated watching other people play tennis. It consumed her with jealousy. Though she’d flagged minutes earlier, now she summoned a second wind, and how dare anyone abscond with her partner while she still had a stroke left in her?

Thus as the two men warmed up—Eric insolently relaxed, Max inscrutably impassive—Willy could not tell for which player she was rooting. She detested them both. This sucked: sulking cross-legged on the sidelines, the court hard and hot. As the match commenced, Willy gazed at banking seagulls overhead. However, it was impossible to screen out the familiar grunts that were Max’s version of flattery, or the pooch-puh-poom-puh-poom-puh-poom-poom-poom of a protracted point.

In that Willy’s calculation of a tennis score was automatic, neglecting to keep track of who won what took a concentration of its own. (Gentlemen did not announce the score.) She’d have expected Max to dispatch the parvenu in thirty-five minutes, though once Willy had realigned her racket strings and bounced a ball off the face five hundred times without missing, the half hour was long past and those two were still batting away. Max was moist. Eric was playing plenty of trash, but it sometimes worked. At last, after another point during which she had found a rally two courts away more compelling, she turned to find them shaking over the net, stiffly.

Willy picked herself up, dusting off her shorts, and the two gladiators ambled to their bags.

“You’re a pro,” said Max.

“Yes,” said Eric.

“Ranked?”

“972.”

Max cocked his mouth. “Ways to go.”

“I’d never picked up a racket with any seriousness until I was eighteen. My first year at Princeton I was on the basketball team.”

“Eighteen. Late.”

“As in better than never.”

They were both ignoring Willy, who was looking daggers at her new friend, the pro. She should have sensed it. At her stoop, his right palm had scratched her neck with lumpy calluses. He had not arrived at Sweetspot toting one racket but three, and as he zipped the Prince into its expensively padded case, she recognized the classic asymmetry of his arms: the right so comparatively overdeveloped that it suggested a skewed proportion of mind, as if a tennis player placed too much weight, literally, on one side of his life.

“I’ll show you the showers,” she offered. Eric didn’t respond. His motions were jagged, his manner curt. The last time he was hammered he’d been jubilant; perhaps she was to infer from this truculence that he’d won the match.

As she traipsed with her guest toward the locker rooms, Max motioned her back. “I know his strokes are rough,” he warned her quietly. “Sleazy. But underneath the junk, that kid can play.”

Trudging across the field, Eric walked ahead, indulging the naturally extreme stride of a man at least six-two. They were trapped in the estranged silence of two people who had played tennis, but not with each other. And Willy could hardly make conversation about a match she had declined to follow so belligerently that she didn’t know who had won.

“So what, we’re supposed to shovel institutional slop with a bunch of pampered, brain-dead sportsmen of tomorrow?”

“There’s an Italian place in town. Max would lend us a car.”

“Upchurch would lend you a car.” Eric kicked the ragweed.

“For a sport in which you apparently have aspirations yourself, you don’t seem to have much respect for the folks who play it.”

“You respect these people?” he asked incredulously.

“Respect may be the wrong word. But the game itself—”

“Is a pretty doable business. Sometimes you beat people at their own game not because you think it’s so all-fired marvelous but because you don’t.”

Scurrying to keep up, Willy was mesmerized by the long, loose legs eating the ground with such blithe assurance. Surely it behooved her to defend the crowd in which she ran, but for a moment Eric’s contempt was liberating. He was right, in a way. The lofty regard in which most pro players held their calling was insupportably pompous. The majority of her “colleagues” were narrow, fatuous, and catty. All they wished for Willy was defeat, and in truth she owed them nothing. Though she’d always tried to keep the sport and its practitioners separate in her head, Eric lured her with the giddy freedom of seeing even tennis itself as “a pretty doable business,” a skill she had mastered but did not master her. For Willy’s reverence for tennis was a tyranny—the more gravity she gave it, the more it crushed her when she fell short of the sport’s uncompromising standards. Any man who found the diversion ordinary would have a peculiar power.

Eric waved his hand over the manicured lawns. From this distance the school’s tidy Colonial Revivals looked contrived, self-consciously New England, precious. “This crowd makes me puke.”

“Then why would you yourself want—?”

“To whip them where it hurts most.”

“You don’t think there’s something special about someone who can play spectacular tennis?” asked Willy, nervous that to join him in denouncing this crew was not necessarily to escape being lumped in with them as well.

“I think there’s something special about the way you play tennis.” He stopped. “Or maybe I just think there’s something special about you, and fuck the tennis.”

Willy had long regarded herself and her strokes as synonymous. “Love me, love my game,” she said warily.

He conked her lightly on the back of the head with the heel of his hand. “You’re warped.”

“That waitress knows your name,” Eric charged.

“There’s not much to choose from in Westbrook.”

“Who’d you come here with?”

“Various people,” said Willy stolidly.

“Uh-huh.” He stabbed four calamari rings on the same fork and drowned them in hot sauce.

“You regard yourself as a jealous man?”

“Not especially. But when a situation calls for jealousy, I can rise to the occasion.”

The Boot of the Med subdued her. She’d had second thoughts about coming here on the drive over. The hideaway had once seemed so enchanted, despite garish red lighting and clichéd Chianti bottles fat with candle wax. Maybe she’d have better left the past undisturbed, and not disillusion herself by discovering this was a tacky dive with bad food.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting at the courts today,” Willy submitted, prepared for reassurance that he hadn’t minded.

“Just don’t let it happen again,” Eric said instead, and did not wait for the next subject to be gracefully introduced. “Overgrown boys like Max Upchurch piss me off. They go out and make scads of money doing for a living what in a sane world is leisure amusement, well, okay. They didn’t make the rules, I guess.”

Willy smiled. “Max did make the rules. He helped bully Wimbledon into Open tennis.”

“So he’s a scam artist. It’s not against the law. But what gets me is these muscleheads turn forty and still expect little girls to whisper, He used to be number six! They convince every brat who’s ever hoisted a ball over the net with the help of a forklift that he’ll be swelling in a limousine before he’s twenty. Meanwhile, his parents cough up twenty thousand a year for a third-rate education. All right, I’ll give Upchuck this: for a geezer he can still play. He beat me cold today and I don’t even think I taxed him. I tried, too. But I don’t like the way he acts as if he owns you and I don’t like the way he touches you and before I get into this any deeper I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

Willy discovered that she was pleased Max had won. Here, she had offered up to Eric. This is my coach; his excellence is my excellence. Take defeat at his hands as evidence of my worthiness for yours.

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