Prodigals (6 page)

I had decided to read up on Rome. A year before, I'd written a long piece on Mexican wrestling and I'd found it easier to pick up assignments since then. This was my sixth year of freelance work, stringing together long-form nonfiction, travelogues, and the occasional trend piece. I was making just enough to get by, which meant dressing respectably, going out to dinner a few times a week, and paying nearly half the rent on our one-bedroom in Tribeca. Keeping up appearances, really. I had no savings and no prospect of any. And yet it was still a small thrill when I opened a newsstand issue to see my name in the table of contents, the words I had composed on my old battered laptop dignified by top-notch production. Friends and relatives sent notes when they'd read an article of mine, and it satisfied that old feeling, I suppose, that I was, in all my particularity, significant. I had no illusion at thirty-four that I
was
in fact, but I existed at the edge of the known world, and if I worried that I might get lost in my own head, which was always a fear, this public existence retrieved me, it located me on an objective terrain.

The anecdote with which I closed the wrestling piece came from an interview I'd conducted with an old wrestler, a man who agreed to talk to me only on terms of strict anonymity. He told me that when he gave up wrestling, he had thrown away his costume and never spoken again of his career. When I met him, he was a paunchy man in his fifties who chain-smoked and made a sibilant noise when he breathed. “The mask,” he said, “is everything. Without the mask, you never leave the ring.”

My Spanish was only conversational and the man had forbidden a translator, so I only realized what I had when I got back to New York and hired someone to translate the tapes. You can imagine my excitement. I remember a shiver running down my spine as I read the transcript. It was like hearing the echo of a thought I had never spoken aloud.

I was reading up on Rome and the Colosseum in the backyard when I saw a figure emerge from a patch of forest by the pond. It was a man, a bit above average height, wearing shorts and a cable-knit sweater like the one I had on. He had a beard and close-cropped hair, and he looked at the ground as he walked. I knew at once that it was Léon Descoteaux. His gait had the same overarticulated precision as his tennis game. I put down my book and stood.

He smiled when he got close. “You must be Daniel,” he said, surprising me. “We have been looking forward to your visit. I am Léon Descoteaux, but please call me Léo.”

We shook hands. “A pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I was a big fan of yours on the court.” He didn't respond, but I saw his jaw clench once and I followed his gaze to the pond and orchard, the hills behind them. “It's a magnificent place you have here.”

“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.

“Ken
tucky
,” 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?”

“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.