Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  “It’s not funny,” Vicky said. “She doesn’t know what to think. She’s afraid to ask him.”

  I told Vicky not to worry, but despite my jet lag and my fatigue I found it difficult to sleep. I had the impression of being awake the entire night, turning from side to side. I must have fallen asleep, though, because in the middle of the night I awoke to find Vicky gone from bed. I hadn’t heard her stir, so I got up to check our little bathroom, which was empty. A sudden fear gripped me. I saw a grisly scene: Vicky tied to a chair, gagged, camera rolling. I was not in my right mind, struggling into a pair of shorts, when I glanced out the window and saw Vicky on the tennis court, hitting imaginary ground strokes by herself in the moonlight. She moved as I had seen her move on tennis courts for many years, with the litheness of a cat and a shot that snapped so hard it looked like it could dislocate her lovely shoulders.

  My heart was heaving. First with fear, then with relief, then with a second fear that what I was witnessing was madness. I lay down for a minute to calm myself and awoke in the early morning with Vicky sleeping next to me. She was in a good mood when I nudged her awake and laughed when I told her what I’d seen.

  “You must have dreamed it,” she said and turned over to doze some more. But I hadn’t dreamed it, I was sure I hadn’t, and as Vicky fell back asleep I dressed and went out to look for scuff marks in the clay. I walked the lines of the court, but could scarcely find a stray crumble of brick. When I looked up, Léo was walking toward me with a pair of mugs.

  “Tiens,” he said, handing me a coffee. “I saw you out here, sniffing around the cage.”

  He stood at the gate. I sipped my coffee. “We say ‘court’ in English.”

  “Shall we go exploring?” he said. I thought he meant around the property and said sure, but Léo climbed into the Range Rover, coffee in hand, and motioned me up. We drove off without a word. The roads were empty in the early morning, the sun above us burning into a thin screen of cloud.

  “I thought you’d like to see the Temple of Mercury,” he said, “because of Rome.”

  I had mentioned the article at dinner and now said “Great,” as though I had any clue what he was talking about. It turned out be a temple, dating back to Roman times, at the top of a dormant volcano called Puy de Dôme. The mountaintop had a distinctive hump shape which I found familiar, and I said as much.

  “It is the end of a Tour de France stage,” Léo said. “Maybe you have seen it on TV.”

  This seemed plausible, and I said—stupidly, I later thought—that it was always a bit uncanny to see in person things you have only ever seen on TV.

  “Uncanny,” Léo said. “This means what?”

  “What does it mean?” I said. “Familiar—or almost familiar—but in an unsettling way.”

  “Ah,” said Léo.

  We were at the top of the mountain. The cool air whipped at the fabric of our shirts. The ruins of the temple lay before us, the long stone walls terracing the lava dome. Above the dark scattered rocks a broadcasting station with a tall antenna rose into the sky.

  “This is maybe how it is when people look at me,” Léo said. “Even Marion. Like instead of me she sees Léon Descoteaux. And who is that?”

  We gazed out at the Chaîne des Puys, a string of ancient volcanoes leading off into the clouds that gathered above the mountains in the distance. It felt like a moment to say something generous and true and the story of watching Léo in the U.S. Open semifinal tumbled out of me before I could stop myself. I told him I felt I had seen something special that day, something personal, perhaps even him. I said it was like watching what beauty or grace could do against power, and it made me hopeful that beauty had a chance. I had a vague idea that you could talk to French people this way.

  Léo frowned and gestured toward the temple. “You know, they used to think that Mercury, he carries the dreams from the god of dreams to the dreamer. I sometimes wonder if he ever switches the dreams along the way.”

  “Like a prank?”

  “Maybe like a prank,” Léo said. “Like say you’re Oedipus and you’re supposed to dream you fuck your mother and kill your father. But Mercury switches them and instead you kill your mother and fuck your father. Maybe you spend your life worrying you’re gay.”

  “Or you’re supposed to dream you’re the journalist. I’m supposed to be the tennis star.”

  “Maybe you dream you’re naked in front of the class,” Léo said. “Except instead of being embarrassed, you like it.”

  We drove home through a small village and stopped at a market in the town square. Léo picked out supplies for lunch and asked me about Vicky, how long we had known each other, when we’d met, and so on. The story of our meeting, which I told him, was one I’d repeated so often it now had more to do with prior tellings than anything else. I’d worked for the paper in college and had been writing a piece on classmates of particular and narrow excellence when I met Vicky. I’d interviewed a cellist with perfect pitch, a math genius who wrote equations in the fog of bathroom mirrors, a poet anthologized in her teens. Vicky was my last interview. Compared with the others she was wonderfully grounded. To judge by the first three, superlative talent came with a form of insanity. They all admitted to me in one way or another that part of them hated the distorting influence of their abilities, part of them longed for normalcy, because what struck everyone else as incredible came to them so naturally it seemed unremarkable. Vicky said this herself.

  “It doesn’t feel to me like I’m great at tennis,” she said. “It feels like I’m good, and like most of the time other people are worse. Sometimes I play someone and I’m worse, and I feel in awe of what they can do. But you rarely feel in awe of what you can do yourself.” I asked whether this came as a disappointment. She thought about it and shrugged. “If I was someone who was going to feel awe all the time, I’d probably be going to div school, not playing tennis.”

  When I told people our meeting story, I would tell them it was this down-to-earth quality that drew me to Vicky, this mature wisdom about the limits of genius and her levelheaded rejection of the romanticism people tried to attach to her talent. But although this is what I told people and what I was telling Léo now, it wasn’t true. I had already known Vicky when I interviewed her, not well but casually, and I had conceived the piece at least in part to get closer to her. I was attracted to her, and although I am ashamed to say it, I was attracted to her excellence.

  I was rambling a bit by the time Léo turned up the drive. He stopped before we came in sight of the house and turned to me.

  “What if I told you I slept with Victoria, years ago?”

  I tensed and fingered the pebbled leather on the Rover’s door. “Are you telling me that?”

  Léo looked bored, or tired. “Maybe,” he said. “If yes, what do you say?”

  I tried to follow the eddy of my feelings, to still and look at them, but all I could see was Léo, handsome and lean, looking out through the windshield, awaiting my reply. We wore the same collared tennis shirt, mine white, his red, and it felt ridiculous, the two of us sitting there, discussing this like a hypothetical. And yet that was how it seemed—hypothetical—because I could sense a gulf between what I should feel and what I did. Because how could I begrudge Vicky this handsome man, his athlete’s body, his perfect way of moving, all those years ago? Maybe she should have told me, but I couldn’t be angry with her. What I honestly felt, when Léo smiled at me, was that this brought us closer, Léo and me.

  “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.”