Double Fault by Lionel Shriver Page A

such passing amusement in a string? For her boyfriend's capacity to shift energies willy-nilly from one engrossment to another was perplexing. It was inconceivable to Willy that anyone should aim to become a bankable tennis player without having nurtured the ambition from the age of five.
      Willy appreciated that Eric seemed to be going about the project with some seriousness. He played for hours every day. He trained every other morning in Gold's Gym, with light weights and eight thousand skips of rope. He had scheduled out the whole next year, as she had, with a series of successively more challenging satellite tournaments. Though his ranking sounded abysmal to a layman, Eric had managed to accumulate a handful of computer points after graduating only in May, and through his disappearances in July and August scraped up several more. The bookshelf over his bed was crammed with how-to and tennis history; his knowledge of tennis stars and statistics was encyclopedic. But despite his laudable wholehog, she was dubious whether such a capricious embrace of what for Willy had been a lifelong passion ought to be too readily rewarded.
      Accordingly, in Flor De Mayo—or Flower of Mayonnaise, as they had now dubbed their regular dive—Willy inquired how he might feel if his aspirations failed to flourish into a career. She observed what Eric, with his thorough research, would have ascertained already: that although Top Tens raked in $10 million a year, the earning curve in tennis fell off sharply. With rankings from 11 to 25, a man might pull in $1 million a year; a woman, Willy noted wrathfully, half that. From 26 to 75, a player's total income came to no more than $200,000 to $300,000, though that depended on staying in the top 75, and in tennis, standing still could wear you out. However, by 125 you could expect no more than $100,000, half of which would be consumed by economy-class airfare and overpriced hotel breakfasts. If they both didn't scramble into the top 200 neither would do much better than break even.
      Unperturbed, Eric reached for the remains of her rice. "You pay your rent, don't you?"
      "Barely. I made thirty thousand dollars last year, which included winning two satellites. Five thousand went to Max. Another five to expenses. If you factor in what I don't pay for—his coaching time, my dorm at Sweetspot—I'm in the red. How do you plan to make ends meet?"
      Eric hunted out chunks of pork. "My father."
      "What?"
      "Why look so shocked? My dad's backing me my first two years on the circuit. If I succeed, I won't need him. If I don't, I do something else. But I doubt that will prove necessary." Eric licked his fingers.
      "Don't you want to make it on your own?"
      "I never said word-one about wanting to 'make it on my own.' I said I wanted to make it. How that is achieved is of little consequence. If you're short and need to fly to Indianapolis, who hands you a ticket? Upchuck. Me, it's my father. What's the diff?"
      Willy went quiet.
      Eric lifted her chin. "The profession's rigged anyway. How do you earn computer points? By winning tournaments that award computer points. How do you get into tournaments that award computer points? By having computer points. That's not the only catch-22. How do you make a living playing tennis? By getting into the top 200. How do you get into the top 200? By devoting one hundred percent of your time to tennis, and thereby not making a living. You can't get there from here with a day job, Wilhelm. This is still an upper-class sport. I'm sorry your own father hasn't been supportive, and I'm glad, financially anyway, that you've got Max. But you won't make me feel lousy about my dad. Patronage is how it's done."
      She dropped it, eaten by a new curiosity. "Underwood? Why do you want to play tennis professionally? After an Ivy League degree in math?"
      "You wouldn't go out with a computer hacker, would you? Reason enough."
      "I'm