FICTION
Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy
I
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 in 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
was thirty-four when I met Léon Descoteaux, the famous tennis player, and stayed for a few days at his home in France, where he lived with his wife and children. I was traveling with my girlfriend of the time, Vicky, and she was old friends with Léon’s wife, Marion, from when the two
By Greg Jackson
Drawings by Andrew Pope
had been on the tour together. It had been ages since Vicky had last seen Marion, and she convinced me to stop in on the Descoteaux on our way to Rome, where the uptown magazine I was on assignment with wanted me to do a travel piece. “Rome to the Maxxi.” “Beyond Trastevere.” Something like that. I was toying with the idea of proposing to Vicky and thought that if I got up the nerve Rome was the place to do it. 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
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