Around six, he started on the dinner. He’d intended to cook a version of a Catalan seafood dish that matches a firm white fish with a mixture of blood sausage and sea urchin roe, seasoned with chorizo. He had some decent chorizo from Fairway and he’d bought some Morcilla blood sausage at the place near Poughkeepsie. It wasn’t the same as Catalan Botifarra Negra, which tended to be lighter on the cloves and cinnamon, but it was the only type you could get in the States and it gave the palate the same kind of womby, cave-like background from which to fall on the sweet flesh of the bass. In place of the sea urchin roe he planned to butter-fry the oysters and scallops.
Charlie and Chloe usually drifted into the kitchen for a drink well before dinner, but they were still upstairs by the time everything was ready. Once or twice during previous visits, Matthew had heard discreet sounds of lovemaking come down through the ceiling, and he’d been vaguely listening out for them, but he hadn’t heard anything, and he supposed that was less disturbing than it would have been if he had, all things considered, though it didn’t do much to alleviate the tension inside him. The thought of telling Charlie what he’d seen that morning, while still presenting itself as his only option, had been filling him with dread. He’d have to find some way of doing it as soon as possible; preferably tonight. He didn’t want it lingering over him.
He called up but there was no reply. Feeling awkward, he went to the bottom of the stairs and called again. After a while Charlie answered groggily, “Yeah?” and Matthew told him dinner was ready.
They both made an effort to be sociable when they finally came down, but he could tell they hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, and that neither of them much wanted to eat. They sat out on the terrace with the usual candlelight and katydid chorus, but it was a lackluster affair. Charlie explained apologetically that he’d eaten too much cheese earlier, and barely picked at his food. Chloe at least made an effort but she was obviously distracted by her own thoughts.
“How’s Lily getting on at camp?” Matthew asked her.
She gave some vague answer, and he felt a bit malicious for raising the subject. Soon afterward she stood up and asked if they’d mind if she went to bed.
“Everything okay?” Charlie said.
“Yes. I’m just tired.”
She yawned and waved good night.
“Another delicious dinner, Matt. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, pleasure rising in him, in spite of himself.
Alone with Charlie, he decided he might as well get the unpleasant task over. He was racking his brains to think of some appropriate way to introduce the subject, when Charlie gave a loud yawn and said that he also was feeling tired.
“Would you mind if I hit the hay?”
“Of course not,” Matthew said, relieved.
The bulk of summer still lay ahead of him, he reflected later, in bed. All year he’d been looking forward to the long hot weeks up here. He needed them badly. He’d been counting on them to restore him, bring him out of the strange funk he’d drifted into. Was he really going to have to spoil these precious days? Because one way or another that would surely be the effect if he spilled the beans on Chloe. He hadn’t thought it through earlier, but now that he did he could see that telling Charlie was going to wreck the summer-for all three of them.
But how the hell could he not tell Charlie? Wasn’t he obliged to? Obviously it would be easier not to-just to go on as if nothing had happened-but the very fact that it would be easier seemed to confirm that what he needed to do was precisely the difficult thing. Wasn’t that his responsibility as Charlie’s cousin and friend? And would it be possible, anyway, to salvage the summer by pretending nothing had happened?
Briefly, as he posed these questions, he became aware of something minutely false in presenting the problem to himself in terms of friendship and cousinly duty: a sheen of spuriousness overlaying the formula. It wasn’t how he’d seen it this morning, after all, but somehow an emergency measure conceived purely to expunge the intolerable reality from his own mind had morphed into something more altruistic, a “duty,” and he didn’t trust altruism, or not when it fronted his own impulses. His mind stalled, overcome by the complexity of the situation. On top of the question of whether or not to tell Charlie, there was the question-possibly even more unsettling-of how this new knowledge was going to affect his own relationship with Chloe; a whole dense layer of potential damage that he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to inspect.
He thought of Charlie over at the Zendo that morning; pictured him in the lotus position, pinched fingers on his sunburned knees: being “in the moment” while Chloe was doing whatever she’d been doing back in that motel room… It occurred to him that he had actually been the one in Charlie’s “moment,” and that, far from being a state of bliss, it had been extremely painful.
It was somewhat typical of Charlie, he found himself thinking, to arrange for someone else to feel his pain.
five
Several days passed. The same routines filled them as before. But their regularity no longer had the same agreeably lulling effect on Matthew. When Chloe set off to take pictures or attend one of her classes, it was impossible to avoid the question of whether she was in fact going off to meet the man from the motel, and the thought would leave him jangling with useless emotions. Meanwhile the sight of Charlie working or meditating, or driving off in his tennis gear, formed an image of increasingly irritating innocence. Even his own pleasantly mindless activities were losing their charm, their soothing rhythms broken by gusts of crackling interference from a situation that had nothing to do with the problems he was trying to sort out.
But what was he supposed to do? The feeling that he ought to tell Charlie about the motel remained undiminished despite recurrences of that sense of something false about it, or at least something glossed-over. Yet he was finding it vastly more difficult to tell Charlie than he had foreseen. Whenever he tried, a curious, contradictory impulse would take over. Cornering Charlie in his meditation garden or down in the wine cellar, he would begin by steering the conversation to the closeness and longevity of their friendship, meaning to prepare Charlie for the necessary blow. But within moments another part of his mind would send out torrents of diversionary chatter; meaningless blather about his own life and plans-the food truck idea, or his hope of being able to afford a bigger apartment before long, or any other topic besides the one he’d intended to raise. Charlie would look at him strangely at these moments, and Matthew knew he risked appearing a little crazy, but it was always a relief to come away from him with the secret intact, the blow still undelivered.