Jim helps himself too. He is reticent: he eats little. I have the sense that he accepts the food not as a tax or perk, but as a favor, to whom I do not know.
For a week we play nearly every day. It is as though we have been waiting for our life in Italy to drift off its preordained course. We are tired of creating the world for ourselves. It seems we are ready to be diverted, to err, to be blown wherever the wind takes us.
The heat wave continues: we arrive with our rackets in the furnace of afternoon, and go silently out onto the court like gladiators striding out into the glare of the amphitheater. The hotel guests have returned to England, and another set have taken their place. We no longer notice them. It is the forms of our adversaries, of Jim and Amanda standing in the asphalt distances, that preoccupy us. Jim has been quiet on the subject of our new pastime. He turns up in his tennis whites, diffident and jocular. He never pleads a prior engagement, nor examines our commitment to this new course of events. His life is built on a basis of endlessly renewing transience, of people found and then lost, of habits easily formed and as easily broken. When the game is finished he waits for someone else to suggest another meeting, and he is pleased, acquiescent, when they do.
Within the matrix of the game itself, however, it is another matter. Jim is cunning, adversarial. As I am the weakest member of the group he constructs his path to victory through my side of the court. Every ball he hits, he hits to me. He harries me until it feels like a perverse form of attention. He does not trouble himself with gentlemanly thoughts of honor: for him, a point is not more decently scored because it has been won entirely through his own efforts. The easiest way to win a point is to encourage me to make a mistake, and so that is what he does. I quickly become enraged by this strategy. It is unclear to me why the rules of a game should be so distinct from the norms of social conduct. Why should tennis consider itself outside the obligation to be polite, to be fair? In life it is unethical to profit systematically from another person’s disadvantage. But profit Jim does, and the more he does it the more enraged I become.
Then, after a while, I cease to care quite so much. I feel a delusion loosening its grip on me, the mistaken belief that a person is upright and good simply because he does not comport himself like a criminal. As Jim sends one ball after another into my domain I realize that people are by nature exploitative. It is merely that I have never been sufficiently the victim of their exploitation to know it. Now, it seems that I have a choice: to perish in the upholding of my own values, or to defend myself by any means possible. I am made to hit so many balls that the question is posed anew with unrelenting frequency. My ambivalence is exposed to a finer and finer degree, dissected and known to the last particle. Out of this flayed knowledge must I create something new; out of this final distinction between a ball that is returned and a ball that is not must the materials for survival be found.
It is unclear to me whether Jim factored in the possibility of improvement when he selected me as his victim. But I do improve: after all, I am hitting twice as many balls as anyone else, and many more than I have hit in my tennis career to date. I begin to evolve rapidly. I cease to be afraid when I hit. The ball comes flying toward me out of nothingness, and when I see it I increasingly feel the desire to impose myself on it, to create something, to manufacture some outcome. Its arrival no longer threatens me: it seems to come not out of a generalized fund of aggression but driven by needs of its own, the need to be shaped and directed, to be made articulate. It asks something of me, in its blind neediness. It wants to be possessed, turned around, sent out into the world again as my object. Jim begins to look a little surprised. All this time his eyes have watched me over the net, yellow and malevolent. Now I begin to see his face in profile, and once or twice even the back of his head as he runs to retrieve the ball from the back line. The invariable becomes the variable: he no longer always sends the ball to me. Once or twice he even winks when he places it at my feet after an absence.
We begin to win games, then sets. Once or twice Jim betrays annoyance when Amanda mishits the ball, and after that he leaves fewer to her, running to get them all himself. She doesn’t mind: for her the sport, the situation, is all, and of course the victory that is laid at her feet at the end of it, like the victim’s head laid at the feet of the watching empress. After that first time we don’t accept her offer of supper at the hotel again, for we retain sufficient memory of ourselves to know that it is not fitting, not what we have come for, to wallow in the murky tank of Englishness, feeding and drifting with our own kind in their glass prison. But one night we all go out to a restaurant in the hills, a place far up a winding road that stands in a clearing among scrubby patches of commercial forest, where the raw stubs of trees stand in amputated rows in the pink earth, next to unfelled stretches whose turn it is evident will shortly come. The restaurant is next door to a shooting range. There are men down there in visors and earmuffs, firing rifles in the last light of evening. They shoot at targets, or at clay disks hurled mechanically into the air. The loud bangs and reports resonate around the tables on the deserted terrace. We sit down. Roger is there. There are some swings in the restaurant’s garden and the children all gather there, playing in the indistinct light while the sound of guns rends the motionless air. Roger pours wine into everyone’s glasses, all except Amanda’s. Amanda does not drink alcohol. She is quiet, constrained, a little unhappy-looking. She has waited for her children to return and now they are here. She looks down to one side of her, like a Cimabue Madonna, as though she were silently corresponding with a sense of destitution, of a shortfall; as though it is only in the presence of her whole family that she realizes something is missing.
The next day we beat Jim and Amanda at tennis for the first time. Afterward Jim is curt and withdrawn. He says he isn’t feeling well today. He says he has a headache. He says he is going back to his apartment to sleep it off. On the way home the children ask whether we can do something else tomorrow. They don’t want to go to the hotel anymore. They want to go and look at paintings, like we did before. They want us all to be together, joined by a common interest, a common love.
I didn’t realize that they had these feelings. It isn’t only that the paintings are a medium of togetherness and the tennis is not. There is something else, some intrinsic value to art around which it becomes possible for the children to order their world. As for tennis, it is a game, and games extinguish their own moment for good. They are a way of killing time, and time, we now see, is our asset. We mean to invest it wisely. We mean to make it last.
When next we see Jim he is his familiar self, darkly diplomatic. He is glad we enjoyed the tennis, but he can see why we wanted to give it a rest. There’s not that much in it for the kids, he says, ruffling their hair. And after all, he supposes we can play tennis at home. He says this because he thinks that it is what we have concluded ourselves. But I can see that he is disappointed.