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?