“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.