“And we shall explore it,” he said. “But now, come with me to the garden, please. I need to pick the lettuce and herbs for dinner.”
Léo was on his hands and knees in the dirt when Vicky spotted us and came running over.
“Léo!” she said.
“Victoria.” He rose and and kissed her cheeks. “We’re delighted you came. You look even more beautiful than I remember.”
“So you two have met,” Vicky said, blushing.
“Daniel and I are in the early stages of a promising friendship.”
I gave Vicky a baffled look.
“I’m so glad,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed and I guessed the women had opened a second bottle. “Marion told me not to bring up tennis, but I hope you’ll at least hit around with us while we’re here.”
“No,” Léo said pleasantly enough. “No, I won’t.” He smiled. “Smell these herbs. They’re for our dinner.”
First Vicky, then I, smelled the sharp, earthy thyme Léo had bunched in his hand.
* * *
I helped Léo with dinner while the women set the table. We roasted a chicken with potatoes and leeks. I assembled a salad from the garden foraging. Léo put on a Joaquín Rodrigo album and we busied ourselves in near silence. Occasionally he would ask a question or show me how he wanted something cut.
“Where were you born, Daniel?” he said at one point.
Kentucky, I told him.
“Kentucky,” he said and laughed. “This is a real place, where people come from?”
“A few,” I said. “Not many.” I told him about the rugged green country of eastern Kentucky, the low choppy mountains, the oak and hickory forests. I told him it was a bit like here.
“Like the Auvergne?” he said. “The Auvergne, you know, is a mystical place. Very strange. Full of old, secret societies.” He cut into the chicken to see whether it was cooked through. “It was the center of the Resistance, did you know? They would hide in the mountains and hills.”
I asked if that was why he’d chosen to live here.
“Of course,” he said and winked.
That night Vicky and I turned in early after dinner. We had a second-floor bedroom that looked out on the tennis court and the moonlit hills beyond. Fresh wildflowers sprouted from a vase beside our bed.
“I’m worried about Marion,” Vicky said. She lay looking up at the ceiling. I was reading next to her.
“In what sense?” I put my book down. “Your friends couldn’t be more wonderful.”
Vicky was quiet for a minute, then she said, “Marion told me some disturbing things. Léo refuses to touch her, she says. They haven’t slept together in a year.”
“That is disturbing,” I said. “Marion’s very attractive.”
“Don’t make a joke of it. She thinks Léo’s turning into a … an ascetic or something.” Vicky toyed with my arm hair, self-consciously, I thought, as though to confirm we still had this.
“That’s not all,” she said after a minute. Her voice had grown soft, so soft I could barely hear her. I leaned over and felt her damp breath in my ear. “Léo has a workshop he keeps locked, but Marion found the key when he was out on a walk…”
Vicky stopped speaking. The moon fell through the sky and through our window to pool on the tile below. I didn’t want to betray my curiosity, but this excited me. My heart beat with a hollow, winey depth.
“And?” I whispered.
“There was a video camera on a tripod. A chair. A bunch of old-looking electronic equipment she doesn’t understand. Maybe a VCR or something.”
I laughed. “What does she think? He’s some sort of abductor?”
“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?”