Prodigals Read online

  It was an odd moment in my life. I no longer felt young, but I didn’t feel exactly old. I felt, I suppose, that I was running out of time into which to keep pushing back the expectation that my life would simply sort itself out and come to resemble the standard model. Vicky and I had known each other from college, one of those prestigious East Coast schools whose graduates are cagey about where they went, and we had reconnected two years before. That was five years after she’d given up pro tennis and fallen, in her blithe, chipper way, into a job at a consulting firm. We were not the most natural fit, Vicky and I, but I had scaled back my ideas of romance and she must have too.

  The Descoteaux were living in the countryside of the Auvergne, not far from Clermont-Ferrand but pretty far from everywhere else. This was why Vicky hadn’t seen Marion for so long.

  “Léo has her secreted away in middle-of-nowhere France,” Vicky said. “I can’t imagine how she can stand it. She was such a party girl on the tour.”

  I said maybe it was glamorous living in exile with a tennis legend, maybe people change.

  “Not from Liberace to Thoreau,” Vicky said with her great mischievous smile. When she smiled that way, I felt, just possibly, that I could spend a life with her.

  “Léon Descoteaux,” I said and shook my head.

  I was excited about this part of our detour, I admit, the Léon Descoteaux part. It was why I had agreed to go with Vicky. I didn’t think of myself as a person especially fascinated by celebrity, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t curious to meet the guy and peek in on his private life. It would be a story I could tell people, a casual small-talk currency. Hey, did I tell you I spent a weekend at Léon Descoteaux’s place in France last month?… a while back?… when I was in my thirties?… decades ago?

  There was a more personal reason too. I was no huge tennis fan, but I watched the Slams when I could, and once, about fifteen years before, I’d seen Léon play a gutsy five-set semifinal against some Scandinavian phenomenon. Léon was at the peak of his career, number six in the world, and though it was clear that his finesse game didn’t stand a chance against this freakish Nordic power baseliner, Léon, with his becalmed court presence and upright bearing, played the Viking to a fifth set and a tiebreak too. I remember few tennis matches, but in the hours I spent watching this one I formed a bond with Léon Descoteaux and I rooted for him throughout the rest of his career. He had a slim body and moved lightly around the court with a kind of magic poise—the sort, I suppose, that you need to return a 125-mph serve. It may have been no more than this: I saw someone who moved with particular beauty or grace and the animal part of me responded. But in the story I told in my head, I admired his stoicism in the face of what seemed to me an occasion for despair. He was more skilled than his opponent but unable to compete with him physically. This hard-fought loss would be the best Léon could do, perhaps the best tennis he would ever play. So what I was watching, I felt, was someone almost without peer confront exactly the limit of his ability. Most of us don’t ever get to be sixth best in the world at anything, fair enough. But then neither do most of us have to face such an objective, historical accounting of the upper limit of our talent.

  On the plane over to France, above the dark nothing of the Atlantic before dawn, with the wing light blinking to my left and Vicky dozing against my right shoulder, I imagined that Léon and I might strike up a friendship, that after a few days I would tell him about watching the U.S. Open semifinal all those years before. I might say something like, “I fell in love with your game, Léon. I was living and dying with each of your points. And although you lost the match, I thought you played with terrific guts and poise.” I had no illusion that I would actually say this, but I was in the habit of making these little speeches in my head. The vacant ocean passed beneath us. I was awake when the world began its too-early brightening.

  * * *

  We made our transfer in Paris and I finally sacked out on the domestic flight, only to be awoken what seemed minutes later by Vicky saying, “We’re here,” with annoying cheerfulness.

  For a minute I had no idea what “here” she meant. A pall of exhaustion and physical misery enveloped my mood, and I thought suddenly that the trip had been a mistake, my fantasy of a warm friendship with Léon Descoteaux close to lunacy, and, most troubling of all, that I was following around a woman I barely knew and to whom, in the stark sobriety of daily life, I had almost made the mistake of proposing. I had these feelings about Vicky from time to time, and I think she must have had them about me too, because there were points at which we so thoroughly baffled each other that we were forced to confront the origin of our intimacy in college, when we were so young and drunk and hopeful that it was easy simply to adore other people as the mirror images of our own bright futures. There was more to me and Vicky than that, surely. But there was also a sense in which what held us together was having come to know each other before we knew ourselves and before, as a consequence, we knew how impossible it was going to be to know anybody else.

  I can be a bit moody, and I certainly have that male thing where my bad mood is the world’s problem. So a lot of what I was feeling just then, as I waited for my bags to not-arrive in Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne International, was dubious and melodramatic. I was trying to convince myself that new luggage was still being added to the carousel fifteen minutes later, when Marion showed up.

  “Victoria!” she said, spotting us and raising a hand. She was an impossibly pretty woman of some wonderful, indefinite European age, who gave off an aggressive public comfort in her body that I took to be distinctly French.

  “Marion, this is Daniel,” Vicky said once they’d embraced. Marion looked me over like a rental billed a notch or two above its class.

  “A pleasure,” she said.

  “Enchanté,” I said and felt immediately like the sort of seamy flirt who says “enchanté.”

  “Poor Daniel,” Vicky said. “He didn’t sleep on the flight over and now his bags are lost.” She rearranged my hair.

  “Mais non,” Marion said. She swept a hand across the scene. “They are all idiots here. Consanguin, you know? C’mon, we’ll give you Léo’s clothes.”

  My mood lifted as we drove beyond the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand. Marion turned onto a rural highway and in a matter of minutes the land opened out into gorgeous hilly country. It may have been this beauty, or catching a second wind, realizing that I was okay and not teetering on the brink of inward collapse, or it may just have been one of those moments when, like a flipped switch, you go from thinking the world is conspiring against you to seeing that the world doesn’t care and you are free to find your own happiness or sorrow.

  “So what will we do while you’re here?” Marion said. “You’ll want to tour around, I suppose.” She sighed. “It’s funny, we live such isolated existences. I hardly know this place.”

  “That’s not possible,” Vicky said. “You’ve been here, what, five years? What about the kids, what do you guys do?”

  “Yes, the poor kids,” Marion said. “They are too young to care. And we have a woman, Madame Lévesque. I play tennis in the city some days and Léo—who knows what Léo does.”

  We were passing fields cleared for crops, wild slivers of uncleared fields within the forests and hills. Fields with rocky outcroppings and stone farmhouses, quaint and picturesque, with linens and dresses sailing from clotheslines. It was a windy day and at points the sun would find a hole in the clouds and unload its cache of warmth on the champagne hood of Marion’s BMW.

  “What do you mean?” Vicky said, her voice as light and delicate as wind chimes.

  “Léo…,” Marion said, “is peculiar these days. He spends ages in his workshop. He’s always taking long walks in the forest. Maybe he’s crazy.”

  She laughed, so we laughed too.

  “Does he still play?” I asked.

  “No,” Marion said. She looked out the window and added softly, mostly to herself, “No, no, no.”

  W
e pulled up to their house not long after, a large but not immodest country home, tidy on the outside and nicely fixed up, built in the French farmhouse style, with peach-colored terra-cotta roof tiles, small casement windows, stone masonry. An elegant and unpretentious house set back a half mile from the road. To the right was a fenced-in tennis court with mounted lights for night play. The net wasn’t strung, but the clay surface was neatly rolled and swept.

  Marion left us in the front room with Vicky’s bags while she went to find the others. I drifted over to a desk with a visitor log and Vicky peered over my shoulder as I flipped through.

  “Is this what you expected?” I said. I didn’t mean the guestbook, but I might as well have. The last entry was from five months before, late January, and the entries from the last few years were sparse. Before that, the Descoteaux had had regular visitors. I even recognized a few names as those of tennis players famous a decade ago and a French soccer star from the good national teams at the end of the century.

  “So this is a bit more bizarre than I was anticipating,” Vicky said. She looked at me with one eye closed. “But I promise they’re sweet.” She kissed my cheek and then, unable to resist, took down a racket hanging with the coats to test its swing.

  I looked over to see a small boy peeking at us around a corner. I grinned at him.

  “Maman!” he shouted.

  A moment later two slightly larger versions of the same boy appeared, and then Marion and an older woman.

  “Ta gueule, Fabien,” one of the older boys said.

  The boys were all very handsome and might have been dressed for a photo shoot: white cotton tennis shorts, matching boat shoes, different colored but otherwise interchangeable Lacoste pullovers with little neck zippers.

  “You shouldn’t play with it in front of them,” Marion told Vicky. “Léo has forbidden tennis and predictably they desire to do nothing else.”

  “Qu’est que t’a dit?” Fabien demanded, pulling his mother’s skirt.

  “Arrête,” Marion said sharply. “The older two, Michel and Antoine, speak English, but Fabien is a beginner. N’est-ce pas, Fabien? Tu parles anglais ou quoi?”

  “Oui,” Fabien shouted. “Pussy!”

  The older boys laughed and Marion slapped Fabien awfully hard on the back of the head. “Mais vraiment. They watch too many movies,” she said.

  Madame Lévesque appeared serenely oblivious to this exchange and herded the children out after we’d said our hellos.

  “I can’t find Léo,” Marion said, “but c’mon, I’ll show you your room.”

  * * *

  By the time we settled in I’d lost any faith in my imaginary friendship with Léon Descoteaux and begun instead to imagine a prickly recluse liable to resent our being there. Marion and Vicky were off drinking wine and chatting on the garden terrace, and I had excused myself, setting up around back in a wooden chaise with my books and notepads. It was a brisk day. I was wearing a cable-knit sweater Marion had given me from Léo’s dresser. I’d found coffee in the kitchen and was finally feeling like myself again, gazing out over the lush grounds behind the Descoteaux’s house, which sloped down prettily to a pond and an orchard.

  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.

  “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 earl
y 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?”