Prodigals (7 page)

“I don't care,” I said. “I fucked Marion last night.”

Léo looked at me. Then he laughed. Then we both laughed and drove the rest of the way to the house.

*   *   *

At lunch Fabien told an interminable story in French that I couldn't understand. No one translated. The air around the table was preoccupied. I was anxious to ask Vicky about her and Léo, so when lunch ended I insisted that we do the washing-up. Only then and gently, because I wasn't mad—I wasn't—did I ask why she hadn't told me about her and Léo.

“What about us?” she said, plopping a grape in her mouth.

“That you had a thing.”

Vicky laughed and set down the dish she was drying. “Me and Léo? A thing?” Her mouth twisted in genuine amusement. “I think I'd know.”

My relief was followed closely by annoyance and then, maybe, something like regret. I thought for a crazy moment of asking Vicky whether she would have, had Léo wanted to, but I could hardly ask her that. It wasn't jealousy I felt, after all, but the opposite. I felt—well, spurned.

Vicky and Marion went into the city that afternoon to play tennis at Marion's club, and I was once more left alone with my books and notepads on the back lawn. I tried to think about Rome, but all I could think about was Léo. What had happened to him?
Was
he crazy? Just as I was thinking, Screw Rome, this is what I should write about: the madness of Léon Descoteaux, his son Antoine appeared at my side. He announced his presence by putting his hand on my shoulder and looking down at my notes.

“Hello there,” I said.

He breathed on my face for a few seconds before turning away from the papers. “You must think we're very strange,” he said.

I looked at him appraisingly. He couldn't have been more than eleven.

“Everyone's strange,” I said.

“Are people in America this strange?”

I laughed. Lots of them were, I told him. Lots even stranger. Antoine sighed. We looked off together at the hills.

“Nobody understands my father,” he said, “but I do.”

I asked what he understood and his voice grew soft. He moved his hand to my neck so he could whisper in my ear and I felt the clamminess of his fingers on my skin.

“He doesn't believe he exists,” Antoine whispered.

“What do you mean?” I said.

He looked at me with wide, dramatic eyes. “How do you know
you
exist?”

I said I didn't really worry about it. He laughed. “Maybe you're crazy,” he said.

“Do you think I'm crazy?”

He shrugged. “You're still here.”

Léo emerged on the lawn not long after. He had a video camera on his right shoulder, the old boxy sort that a videocassette slides into, and a tennis racket in his left hand.

“I have figured out what we can do,” he said.

“What we can do…” I frowned.

“C'mon.” He beckoned me with his head and led me around to the tennis court, where, although it was only afternoon and still bright out, he flipped the breakers on the overhead lights. They glowed to life, bathing the already lit surface in a further saturation of light.

“Help me put up the net,” he said. He hesitated at the gate, then strode purposefully onto the court. We strung and cranked the net until it was taut. Léo handed me the racket. He looked into the rubber viewfinder on the video camera.

“What am I doing?” I asked.

“Playing,” he said. He had the camera pointed at me and was adjusting lens settings as he spoke.

“Against whom?”

“No one,” he said. “We'll use our imaginations. I'll tell you what to do.”

And he did. That was how it began, Léo calling out shots and movements. It seemed ages that we were on the court, Léo directing me—“To the centerline!” “Backpedal, four steps!” “Deuce court!” “Backhand slice!”—me floating across the surface, hitting imaginary shot after imaginary shot, sometimes missing too, heaving my body after a return with too much pace on it, a too-perfect location. My initial self-consciousness fell away as I played. The exertion thrilled me. My body moved naturally and fluidly, responding to Léo's instructions as its own. I served and drifted to the center of the baseline, found myself pulled left into the ad court, barely able to get the racket on a crosscourt forehand, lofting it for my opponent to put away with an overhead. At first Léo made me repeat strokes until I got them just so, but over time these repetitions became less frequent. I had to put more topspin on the ball than I was used to and Léo wanted a shorter service toss and a more open-faced stance. My body, surprising me, adjusted quickly, gave itself to him as a puppet, and when Léo called out an instruction I felt a thrill of sense pleasure run through me, like when a doctor puts a cool stethoscope to your chest.

The only times Léo stopped were to change batteries and VHS tapes. This alone marked the passage of time. My body had ceased to register it and I inhabited the moment in a way I never had before, as though a dancer in the pliant liquid of each second's unfolding. I felt alive. It is a silly phrase, we are always
alive
, but this is how I felt. It had to do with Léo's joy, I think, his excitement, his
watching
. I had never been watched like this and it was druglike, each movement attended so closely. I was bathed in sweat when I saw Marion's BMW kicking up dust in the driveway, and I felt purer and happier than I could ever remember having felt.

Marion parked and went quickly inside. Vicky approached the court with an odd look on her face.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“What
are
we doing?” I said to Léo, laughing. I felt grand. That was actually the word that came into my head.

“Making the level playing field,” he said. “This is an expression in English, no?”

“Daniel, can you come in and talk to me a minute?” Vicky said.

I looked at Léo and we shrugged at each other. He handed me a white towel and I wiped my face and arms and handed it back to him. I gave him the racket and went in with Vicky.

“What is it?” I said when we were in our room. I peeled off my shirt and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, strong and lean, glistening. I had the urge to throw Vicky down on the bed and fuck her.

“We have to leave,” she said. “Marion broke down on the drive back. She pulled off the road and almost crashed us. She said she's going crazy. She couldn't tell if she was crazy, or Léo, or both of them.” Vicky jittered and I held her with reluctant tenderness. “And then I saw you doing”—she fluttered her hands in incomprehension—“whatever the fuck you were doing when we got home.”

“We were just horsing around,” I said.

She didn't seem to hear me. “Marion was so normal before. It's Léo that made her like this. This place. It's haunted or something. Please, we need to go.”

“Léo?” I said. “He's eccentric, sure, but he's harmless, he's sweet. Isn't Marion maybe exaggerating a little?” I didn't know what I believed. The truth was I didn't care. I hoped Léo and I might continue our filming the next day and I wanted to stay on, no matter the cost. “I think Léo feels like Marion never really tried to know him.”

Vicky looked at me strangely. “What do you know about it?” I was on the verge of saying I thought I understood Léo on a pretty deep level when Vicky added, “You know what Marion told me? She said she doesn't even know if she
exists
anymore. She's losing her mind.”

I couldn't help smiling. A whisper of excitement tickled my throat and without quite meaning to I said, “How do you know
you
exist?” I said it softly. Vicky lurched in my arms, looking up at me with revulsion.

“What do you mean? I exist because I exist. Because I'm here, having this conversation with you. What the fuck are you talking about? Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.”

“Easy,” I said. “I didn't mean anything. It was a bad joke is all.”

But who was I, and who was Vicky, and if I could go back to that moment and do it all again, knowing what I do now, would I? Would I really?

Léo didn't come to dinner that night. He had locked himself in his workshop, Michel reported. Antoine grinned at me. Marion and Vicky drank wine and pushed the dinner around on their plates. No one besides me seemed to have much appetite.

I wish I could say that I gave in to Vicky and agreed to leave early the next morning, but I badgered her into staying on another day, as we'd planned. Vicky wouldn't turn toward me in bed that night, and when I woke up we were both outside on the tennis court, under the burning metal halide lights, rallying back and forth. There was no ball between us, but I was keeping up with Vicky, which was how I knew it wasn't real, and at one point I called out to her, “You look so happy!” and she said, “
You
look so happy!” and we laughed at ourselves and played on ecstatically to the flash of cameras, which caught the spindrifts of clay our feet sent up, the beads of sweat we let go in the air.

Everything was a little better in the morning. Marion was up before us and seemed fine, although Léo had yet to emerge from the workshop. The three of us, Vicky, Marion, and I, went on a drive by ourselves. Marion took us to a small restaurant in the hills, where we sat on a terrace shaded by apple trees that looked out on the rolling country. We ate lunch and drank too much wine, and Vicky and Marion told stories from the tour. I listened, vaguely. The stories all had a similar cast. A wild point in some ancient match. Drunk evenings lost to a glittering world. How dim and dickish world-class athletes could be. Mostly the last, how complacent, how spiritually lazy, you became under the habitual glare of the world's attention. I said as much and Marion said, “Ah, but sometimes don't I wish I was more like that.”

“I don't,” Vicky said, and I squeezed her arm.

When we got back in the early evening Léo had already started on dinner. He kissed Marion when she came in, and Vicky and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Marion blushed and played affectionately with his hair. The look in her eyes however is not one I have forgotten. It was the look you might give the ghost of a child you knew to be dead.

“I have watched your tape,” Léo told me when Vicky and Marion had left us to the dishes. He dried his hands on a dishrag and hugged me. He gave me a kiss on each check. “It was beautiful,” he said. He seemed for a second about to go on. But he didn't.

*   *   *

When we awoke the next morning Vicky and I were surprised to hear the sounds of heavy machinery in the yard. It was early, and we looked out the window to see a construction crew dismantling the Descoteaux's tennis court. Marion was in the kitchen preparing breakfast and humming brightly to herself. “I can't take you to the airport,” she said, “but we have it all arranged, a car service. Oh, and they called to say they have your bags, finally.”

We ate. We said our goodbyes, to the children, to Madame Lévesque, to Marion, to Léo. No one mentioned the demolition, which crashed on all around us. As we went out the door Léo handed me a padded envelope with something rattly inside.

“For you,” he said. “A surprise.”

I took it but didn't open it until Vicky and I were in the hired car on the way to the airport. Inside was an unlabeled black videocassette.

“What is it?” Vicky asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

But I did know! I
did
.

After a while Vicky turned to me and said quietly, “You have to do something for me. You have to throw away that tape without watching it. I promise you'll be happier if you do.”

I didn't say anything. We arrived in Rome. I began my explorations, my sightseeing, my note taking. Vicky came with me some days and went off on her own others. I moved around the city. I moved this way and that. I felt my legs move, my arms swing through the Roman air. I ran my fingers along the stones. No one saw any of it. Did I exist?

Even in those days it was hard to track down a VHS player, but I finally found an outfit that transferred video to DVD and I gave the proprietor my credit card to leave me alone in the room with his equipment. When I got back to the hotel I threw myself on Vicky and we had torrid sex. I couldn't remember the last time we'd fucked like that and I half expected her to look at me with gratitude when we were done, but she wouldn't meet my eye.

“What?” I said.

“You watched it,” she said.

“So?”

I couldn't lie. I could still see myself in triumph, walking onto the court, clapping my racket with my hand, getting down in a crouch, waiting for the first serve. I only thought later how remarkable that Léon Descoteaux, after all those years, had remembered every shot, every twist and lurch, with such precision. His memory of the match was perfect. By the time I thought this Vicky had flown home and our relationship had begun the rapid crumbling that would leave it scattered at our feet. I would like to say I didn't watch the video again, or many times after. That others didn't have to intervene. That I didn't have to burn the damn thing and spend years finding different ways of describing what it meant to feel “hollowed out.” I
wasn't
hollowed out, was the thing. I was brimming to the exclusion of all else with this sickly joy. And even then, when I'd burned the tape and moved on—even now—I wake up at night with the image of camera flashes hot on my retina, the tidal roar of the crowd in my ear, shifting weight lightly from side to side, gazing placidly into the eyes of my tall opponent, listening for the chair umpire to come through on the speakers high above.

That's how it begins.

 

Epithalamium

Hara had to think there were better ways to say fuck you, although it did take a certain ballsiness, what he had done, in the middle of their divorce no less, and she could see, in fact she couldn't
not
see, that the flip side of this prickishness was the quality she loved in Zeke, loved best in him perhaps, when she did love him, and she did love him—she still did—she just hated him now too. Yes, she would probably laugh about it when she stopped being angry. She was always smiling inconveniently in the throes of anger, like the very notion of fury in lives such as theirs dragged a subterranean absurdity up into daylight. But first she would milk her valid rage for the drops of acid in it, the drops with which it had become her job to dissolve Zeke's teasing, so that she could have her part in the cruelty, so that they could pretend they were hurting each other and were equal in this.