Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

sandwiches was considerate. Noting that her own jar was scraped to the dregs had been attentive. What was the problem? She would prefer a cad, a moocher, some heedless creep? At last Willy entertained the notion that there wasn't something wrong with niceness, but something wrong with her.
      So on their next date, shyly, Willy handed Eric a package in return. Coming up with a gift had been hard, and while the mod esty of Eric's presents was always charming, the paltriness of her own gift seemed niggardly. She kept apologizing. It was only a Sweetspot T-shirt, and maybe she'd been insensitive; Eric didn't, after all, have much time for the school. But Eric was overjoyed, and insisted on wearing it to Flor De Mayo. In fact, he wore the shirt for days after, until it was filthy and smelled. Willy didn't mind. She was proud of herself. She even wondered if all Eric's little gestures weren't meant to ingratiate himself so much as to teach her to make one back.
      Besides, through the summer Willy came to understand that her suitor's strategy was sourced not in self-abasement but conceit. Eric Oberdorf was a single-minded man who once bent on a project did not relent until its object was achieved. He did not court Willy with an eye to his own self-protection, because it never entered his head that he would fail. This proclivity for unreserved full-tilt at what he would not be denied was both winning and unsettling. Willy's experience of getting anything she wanted was always over somebody else's dead body. But Eric evidenced no signs that anyone had ever stood in his way. Simply, he was spoiled.
      If Eric boasted few former girlfriends, he was given to infatuations of other varieties. In his early teens he had thrown himself into politics, devoting himself to Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign of 1984. (To Willy's Democratic horror. Unusually for New York Jews, the Oberdorfs were Republicans. While the Clinton-Bush campaigns heated, he and Willy's electoral joustings were regularly sidetracked when Eric snidely marveled that here she was a pro tennis player and she knew who was running for president.) At fourteen, every weekday Eric had leafleted his Upper East Side neighborhood after school let out at Trinity. His homework essays had detailed how to increase defense spending, decrease taxes, and still reduce the national debt—papers that presaged Eric's aptitude at Princeton for imaginary numbers.
      Subsequently Eric had become consumed with basketball. "Rick the Slick" was apparently a legend at Trinity still. When in a stroll through Riverside he and Willy happened upon a rough-house fouron-four that lacked an eighth man, she had the opportunity to verify that Eric was no slouch at hoop. Though jostled by colossal, trash-talking homeboys tingling with fast-twitch muscle fiber, Eric racked up more points than anyone on his team. Notably, Willy had no trouble watching him swish baskets, in contrast to following his tennis match with Max. God, Eric was graceful, so precise and fleet; his head fakes were comic, though wickedly effective. Willy shouted, "Go, Slick!" and burst into spontaneous applause so many times that she embarrassed him, but she was relishing not only the game itself but her own clean feeling: pure, free-flowing adoration.
      Eric clearly excelled at whatever he put his mind to. A resultant summa cum laude assured Willy that once he concentrated on mathematics at Princeton he was adept at his equations. In fact, he emitted an arithmetic coolness even on the tennis court, where he maintained the implacable remove of a programmer entering information in his banks, and defeats were mere data, blips no less relevant than victories for the graph that he was plotting in his head.
      Fundamentally, Eric Oberdorf liked to play games. That concluded, Willy considered a more cynical view of this no-holds-barred woo. Was romance just another contest to him? If Eric was given to infatuations, was Willy one