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? Even in those days it was hard to track down a VHS player, but I finally found an outfit that transferred video to DVD and I gave the proprietor my credit card to leave me alone in the room with his equipment. When I got back to the hotel I threw myself on Vicky and we had torrid sex. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d fucked like that and I half expected her to look at me with gratitude when we were done, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. “What?” I said. “You watched it,” she said. “So?” I couldn’t lie. I could still see myself in triumph, walking onto the court, clapping my racket with my hand, getting down in a crouch, waiting for the first serve. I only thought later how remarkable that Léon Descoteaux, after all those years, had remembered every shot, every twist and lurch, with such precision. His memory of the match was perfect. By the time I thought this, Vicky had flown home and our relationship had begun the rapid crumbling that would leave it scattered at our feet. I would like to say I didn’t watch the video again, or many times after. That others didn’t have to intervene. That I didn’t have to burn the damn thing and spend years finding different ways of describing what it meant to feel “hollowed out.” I wasn’t hollowed out, was the thing. I was brimming to the exclusion of all else with this sickly joy! And even then, when I’d burned the tape and moved on—even now—I wake up at night with the image of camera flashes hot on my retina, the tidal roar of the crowd in my ear, shifting weight lightly from side to side, gazing placidly into the eyes of my tall opponent, listening for the chair umpire to come through on the speakers high above. That’s how it begins.
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 then 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 Levesque, 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 said. 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 don’t know,” I said. But I did know! I did .
Greg Jackson ’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Granta , and VQR ,
among other publications. “Serve-and- Volley, Near Vichy” is included in his collection Prodigals , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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