One of the guests sits down at our table with her baby. She is plain and perky, with a secretarial manner and spectacles on her nose. She puts the baby in a high chair and ties a plastic bib around its neck. Then she proceeds to feed it from a bowl with a plastic spoon, addressing remarks sometimes to Amanda and sometimes to the baby. Amanda replies in her gentle, abstracted manner. She lights a cigarette and returns to our conversation, but the woman taps her on the shoulder. Excuse me, the woman says, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke around the baby. Amanda apologizes and instantly mashes her cigarette into the ashtray, where it continues to smolder, its blue ribbon of smoke curling thoughtfully upward through the vines of the pergola toward the early evening sky. The woman casts her exasperated looks. Finally, with an expression of distaste, she leans forward and takes the cigarette between the tips of her fingers, and firmly extinguishes it herself.
Jim calls. Amanda enjoyed her tennis. In fact, he hasn’t seen her enjoy something so much for years. She wants to play again, to see us broiled once more in the sun and served up as victims at her feet. To expedite her wish she has made us an offer: swimming for the children in the hotel pool, and supper at the communal table.
When we arrive, a small boy is waiting alone in the courtyard. According to the children, this is Amanda’s son. He has been standing there all afternoon, apparently, waiting for them to come. As soon as they arrive he tries to lead them away but they hesitate, a little shy. Their opposition confounds him: his white face is frozen, balked. He has been waiting for them to come, and now they are here, yet events are refusing to unfold. There is an obstruction, a blockage. It is not clear to him what the blockage is. He tries again to lead them away; again, they do not comply. His sturdy body stiffens. He has been objectified: in the face of their whims and desires he is as helpless and inflexible as a figure made of wood. Then, at last, they come, sprinting past him toward the tree swing while he runs gladly, heavily behind.
Today the courtyard is empty: it is very hot, a new kind of heat, white and dominating. Until now, people have sought the sun: today they seek the shade. There are no men with sunglasses and video cameras, no women with plastic feeding bowls, no tottering babies measuring out the parameters of their holiday with faltering steps. Where are they all? It seems they have been driven out of the open spaces, driven back by the white glare which has suddenly asserted itself, erasing the human dimension at a single stroke. In the distance we can see the swimming pool, just down the hill. It lies against the deserted green, a length of turquoise foaming with activity, like a strange human fish tank. There are so many people in it that I imagine them stacked in writhing layers all the way to the bottom. The whole community, it seems, has been displaced into this sky-colored rectangle. It teems with bodies, with inflatable rafts and rubber rings: a huge blow-up crocodile noses through the churning water. People dive in, or cannonball off the side, or haul themselves out slick and wet, like the first humans emerging from the primordial swamp. The sun bores indifferently into their wet, white backs. All around the fields lie motionless, stunned with heat.
This time Amanda is waiting for us on the tennis court. She stands at the perimeter fence, smoking and looking out at the valley. Her dog lies beside a bush, curled in its rim of shade. The court seems larger in the heat, as big and blasted as a prairie. We take our places and begin to play. For a while it is impossible to kindle a game on this featureless surface. We are too separate, too slow: there is nothing to get a purchase on. The ball is trivial and minute, coming out of the hot blankness. It is an effort, to move, to stir, to hit. Each stroke is like a reflex jerk to catch something that is falling. There is a momentary panic, a surge of adrenaline, then a slump while the ball buzzes away again. The sky pulses silently overhead. The sun presses, bears down, as though it would drive us into the earth. Amanda and Jim move indistinctly at the other end of the court. They seem tiny and remote. They win two games, but there is no succulence to their victory, no bite. We win a game, then they win another. There is a long, laboring game that goes back to deuce again and again. It is as though lassitude itself is winning. We probe blindly, like a thread probing at the eye of a needle, but the precision of success eludes us all. It is out of this formlessness, this lump of strategic clay, that the game suddenly begins to shape itself. The dull, hammering repetition of deuce begins to fashion something, a form, an entity. It attracts our notice: suddenly there is an object in our midst. We vie for possession of it, a little nonchalantly at first, for it is still featureless: it is a mere embryo, a seed. But its presence has a strange effect on Jim: he decides to leave two balls in a row for Amanda, and twice she sends them into the net. The fifth game is ours; the fight is on.
For more than an hour we play, while the hillside faintly reverberates with the cries and splashes from the swimming pool and the sound of tractors passing in the valley below, dredging the fields with dust. We are not conscious of these noises, though we hear them; nor are we crippled by heat, for we have given ourselves over to it: we have passed through its white-hot refinery, been purified, been smelted down and remade. Now we are as lithe and liberated as the leaping figures on a Grecian urn. We are as durable as clay idols fired in a kiln. Our adversaries confer, regroup, exchange wordless signs. The ball goes back and forth, charged with esoteric significance. At last Amanda and Jim defeat us, but there is sweat on their brows and a new hard light in their eyes. Their victory has been less immediately satisfying to them, but it has revealed a larger possibility of triumph, a greater conception of combat. Climbing the steps back up to the house, we agree to play again the next day at the same time.
There is someone sitting at the table under the pergola: it is Roger. He regards us with a satirical expression. When we are introduced he assumes a look of surprise that is more satirical still, as though he had met us many times before and did not expect to have to shake hands with us again now. The sun has set: the guests are back in the courtyard. They wander through the blue light; they hover and hang around, or gather in small murmuring groups, like the survivors of something. They seem intensely aware of themselves as a species. Yet their purpose seems fragile, seems vague and insubstantial, as they make their little circuits in the dusk, as though looking for something to which they can attach the thread of life and spin from it the web of an experience. From a distance their little civilization appears doomed by a lack of conviction. Unoccupied as they are, their power to superimpose intricacy on emptiness is faintly unsettling. I can imagine them turning on one another, creating gods and victims, like the children in The Lord of the Flies.
Amanda tells us of bizarre and comic incidents she has witnessed in her twelve years here, all of them so strange as to be scarcely believable: she herself, she says, can’t believe that some of these things occurred, and yet they did. I attribute her tired, abstracted manner in part to these freakish tales, for it is hard to have faith in life when you have seen its credibility strained too often. Roger, however, does not like such stories: he wants to talk of successes, of high achievers who come back every year, of celebrity guests whom he numbers among his personal friends.
The children come. They have been swimming with Amanda’s son and with his nanny, an Italian girl with long black hair and a melancholic face who strokes their heads distractedly with her painted fingernails. The boy sits on Amanda’s lap. He looks contented and gnomelike, with his quizzical little face and round body. From the maternal throne he rattles away at his nanny in Italian. In English he is halting and tongue-tied, but his Italian self trills and chatters like a bird. He is like a creature in a fairy tale, a hybrid, a composition. In him the randomness of adult fortunes is distilled into permanence. Amanda repeats her invitation to partake of the communal supper. Absolutely, says Roger, after a finely judged hesitation. His face and neck are red and rigid: he looks as though he might suddenly, violently explode. Feel free, he says, waving his hand around to take in the hotel, the grounds, the whole enterprise. Just help yourselves.