He drove straight to Veery Road, slowing as he approached the short driveway to the A-frame. The LeBaron was in the driveway, but not the Lexus. But the comfort its absence afforded was short-lived: he found the car less than a hundred yards away, hidden behind a small commercial strip with office buildings and a wine store, where Veery Road intersected with the county road leading out of town. Evidently Chloe had decided it wasn’t safe to park right in her lover’s driveway.
Well, and so what to do? The explosive feeling had passed, leaving a kind of murkily ruminant confusion. In a dim way he’d assumed that the possession of unequivocal knowledge would spur him into some equally unequivocal action. But in fact he felt less clear than ever. The idea of going back to the house and telling Charlie he could catch his wife in flagrante if he hurried down to Veery Road was too grotesque to countenance. But to go back and say nothing seemed just as awful. Telling himself he needed to think, he circled back through town and went down to the creek, leaving the truck in the parking lot by the bridge.
The rocks near the bridge were crowded with the usual idlers and vacationers. Downstream the numbers thinned out. He spotted a promising ledge on the other side of the creek. The fast-flowing water was too wide to jump, and he rolled up the legs of his pants to cross. From the rock, looking downstream, he saw the blue-trimmed white apex of the A-frame, standing out above hedges on the other side. If he walked another fifty yards and climbed up the steep bank, he would be standing in its backyard.
Had he come here in order to do that? He hadn’t been conscious of it, but what other reason would there have been to come? And yet what could possibly be gained by placing himself there?
What do I want? he wondered. What am I looking for? Did he need to see Chloe in the house, with the man, in order to satisfy himself that his appraisal of the situation was correct? Surely that wasn’t necessary. What, then? Baffled by his own actions, he climbed off the rock and walked back upstream.
A group of Rainbows was settling in on a flat reddish slab where the water fell in combs from one level to another. At their center, unmistakable with his Dürer ringlets and the cobble-like muscles of his arms and torso, was Mr 99%. Torssen. The “Prince.” He had a baguette in his hands and was breaking off pieces to share out. He was laughing, his teeth gleaming in the morning sun, and the others were laughing too, their silver- and leather-bangled arms stretched out toward him. Some of them were pretending to plead for their morsel of bread like children, adding further to that sense they always gave off as a group, of staging and performing their own busy merriment for the benefit of others: the Babylonians, presumably, whom of course they affected at the same time not to notice. It was striking, but even more so was the almost-no, it had to be fully-conscious manner in which this charismatic breaker of bread was reproducing in his own gestures those of Christ from a thousand illustrations of the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You had to hand it to the guy, Matthew thought; he had a gift for striking a pose. His long, sinewy arms made their motion of breaking and offering the glazed loaf (it looked like one of the over-aerated “French Sticks” that the local bakery, Early to Bread, sold) with an ease and grace that seemed to source the action in some utterly natural impulse of generosity.
Matthew passed on, wondering why he felt so irritated by these harmless people, and so ill-disposed toward the ringleted man in particular.
When he drove back behind the wine store the Lexus was gone. He looked at his watch: an hour had passed since the beginning of Chloe’s “yoga.” She’d be on her way home, he realized; with Charlie’s juice. Watermelon juice! Cynical amusement brought a smile to his lips as he thought of the thin, astringent flavor of this decoction that Charlie was so fond of. It seemed a fitting gift, somehow, from his unfaithful wife.
He was such a funny mixture of weakness and strength, Charlie. Or softness and hardness. He could be ruthless, that was for sure; selfish in the extreme. But there was that hurt, vulnerable side to him too. Whenever Matthew found himself thinking too harshly of him, he would remind himself of this.
He remembered an incident from the evenings he and Charlie had shared when Matthew first came to the States. They’d been in one of the bottle-service clubs on Twenty-seventh Street that Charlie had frequented for a brief period, where he would pay five hundred dollars for a bottle of vodka and, when he was drunk enough, invite women to their table. They’d just sat down, when a silver-haired man had come over to say hello to Charlie. Charlie had seemed guarded, and when the man left, he’d downed his drink in a single gulp, baring his teeth at the burn.
“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he’d asked. “Because that’s what that guy did to me.” The incident he’d recounted to Matthew had occurred when Charlie was working as an analyst. The bank had been doing an IPO for a telecom equipment company, and the silver-haired man-a senior manager-had been pressing Charlie to join him on a junket in Las Vegas, where the company was giving a presentation to potential investors. Analysts weren’t supposed to go near these presentations, and Charlie had asked his boss to shield him from the improper pressure coming from the silver-haired guy. But instead of shielding him, the boss had made it clear that Charlie would lose a chunk of his bonus if he didn’t go. It wasn’t the bonus itself that he cared about, Charlie had said, but the year-end review. If that was bad, as it would be if he held out, he’d be finished in the business. So he’d gone to Vegas, accepted the courtesy suite at the Bellagio, the limitless Pol Roger champagne, the hospitality bag stuffed full of Hermès ties and Zegna cuff links, and in return had written a report that smoothed over the company’s liquidity problems and minimized the threats to its long-term market share posed by its rivals, and in short had let himself, as he repeated with morbid self-disgust, be “royally fucked in the ass.”
He’d never mentioned the episode again, and Matthew had forgotten it until now. It must have been the humiliation Charlie was undergoing at the moment, albeit unwittingly this time, that had brought it back.
six
In the period that followed, Matthew found himself heading off into town several times a day on some pretext or other-invented as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s-and driving around in the vague hope (or was it dread? he wasn’t quite sure) of glimpsing Chloe’s lover.
It seemed important to get some sense of the guy: some idea, as he put it to himself, of what he was “up against.” There was also the fact that being in motion like this offered the sensation of doing something about the problem without committing him to the irreversible course of actually breaking the news to Charlie. At a certain level of consciousness he was aware of something unnecessary, and possibly even a little unhealthy, in what he was doing. What difference could it make, after all, even if he did pick up some nugget of information about the guy? And yet that awareness was peculiarly thin and ineffectual. Indulging in these meandering little expeditions seemed to satisfy some sharp craving in him. He almost felt as if he were at work, in some obscure way, on the recalcitrant stuff of his own existence.
He would cruise slowly past the A-frame, and, if the LeBaron wasn’t there, would look through the parking lots around town in search of its distinctive boxy maroon outline. He saw it outside the FedEx office on one occasion, in the Millstream Inn’s parking lot on another. Twice, he saw the man himself in the Greenmarket. The second time he followed him from there to the movie rental store next door and stood behind him as he returned a DVD. His neck was sunburned reddish at the back. He wore a beige canvas cap from which his hair bunched out in wiry curls. Dark stains showed at the armpits of his faded blue T-shirt, the sweat-smell partly masked by a coriander-scented deodorant. He wasn’t obviously good-looking in the way Charlie was, but he had a certain dynamism about him, Matthew had to admit; an unrefined if not quite crude forcefulness even when he stood still, that reminded Matthew of a statue he’d seen on his trip to Europe with his father, of some artistic colossus portrayed stark-naked, with a jovial grin. His calf muscles, big as hams, were palely furred below his cargo shorts. He engaged the clerk in friendly conversation, his voice quiet but commanding, with a pleasant buzzing edge. “It’s a great little movie, you should see it,” he told her, exiting the store.