Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

might have staged a scene, but the chummier her fiancé became with her father ("Eric, please call me Chuck") the more she was inclined to tolerate the arrangement.
      "Well, you charmed the bejesus out of my family," Willy growled in the hallway.
      "They're not so bad," he whispered.
      "Maybe to you they're not," she muttered. "Good God, I'm engaged to Eddie Haskell."
      "Willy—?"
      She didn't kiss him good night. Willy had been nervous whether her family would like Eric. She hadn't thought to worry that they'd like him too much.

    SIX

    W HEN WILLY NEARED MONTCLAIR, New Jersey, she dwarfed, as if mere proximity to her mother's womb shrank her to fetal dimensions. In contrast, as Eric swept into the polished lobby on East Seventy-fourth Street and hailed the doorman by his first name, her betrothed seemed to grow taller with every step. By the time he strode in the door of his parents' apartment she was afraid he would hit his head.
      After much shoulder-clapping and bear-hugging of his firstborn, Axel Oberdorf turned to greet the girlfriend. "Pleasure. He does bring home the lookers." Axel winked.
      She had expected a lanky, balding version of Eric. Instead Axel ("Axe") Oberdorf was a head shorter than his son, compact and stocky. With the stance of a linebacker, he was hard to get past. His full head of black hair matched his arms, which were matted in thick animal fur. A senior surgeon at Mt. Sinai, Axel exuded the sharp scent of a rigorous detergent, a two-layered smell of harshness masked by a cloying but insufficient perfume. He pumped Willy's hand; his nails were short and clean. Through initial small talk, his face explored a restricted range of expressions: the self-congratulatory beam of aren't-we-all-grand; a stolid wait-and-see, indicating a withholding of judgment that wouldn't last; and the occasional flicker of suspicion.
      "What'll it be, Eric? Laid in two sixes of that Pickwick Ale you said you liked. Or you on some health kick? Wheat-grass juice? Boys be glad to run out and fill special orders." It was a small matter, but had Willy ever let on to her parents that she was partial to Pickwick Ale, they'd have gone out of their way to stock Old Milwaukee.
      Axel led the couple into his capacious living room, whose plush ivory carpet looked as if it were vacuumed three times a day. The fluffy furniture was modular, like Eric's mind. Bright, primarycolored rectangles, cones, pyramids, and cylinders, all stripped with Velcro, could be whimsied into a variety of configurations. It was easy to picture Eric working out geometric theorems here as a child, or designing his own Rubik's Cube with furniture. Eric's mother ran an art gallery, and the walls were spaced with original canvases that themselves might have passed for math diagrams or magazine puzzlers—abstract impressionists mazed with triangles, Russian prints whose Cyrillic phrases challenged anyone in the room to pronounce them, and white-on-white grids more witty than beautiful. Though the room was splashed with an array of hues, not a single cushion or painting was brown.
      Eric set about building himself a chair. Willy perched on a plain cube, a poor choice. She couldn't lean back; already jittery, she was now literally on edge.
      "So bring me up to date, my boy," said Axe, on a big-armed throne. "What happened in Toronto?"
      "Oh, I won," said Eric. Drizzling his beer, he was determined to drain the whole bottle into his glass. When the last drop trembled at the rim, he looked victorious.
      Axe nodded vigorously. "Good, good. Not surprised, mind you." Eric's father often left out the subject of such sentences, as it his centrality were a grammatical given.
      "It wasn't an important tournament," Eric deflected. "Chump change, meager computer points."
      "He was terrific," added Willy. "And there was more depth of field than Eric's letting on." While on Walnut Street she'd been grateful when Eric stuck up for