“I guess I’m comparing it to the way you described your relationship with Nikki.”
Charlie’s jaw muscle clenched a moment.
“Yeah, well, it’s definitely very different from that.”
“You used to get suspicious whenever she went out alone, right?”
“I was an idiot.”
“Though you did always, I mean…”
Matthew faltered, sensing danger.
“I did what?”
“Well, you did always maintain that your suspicions were probably justified…”
A frown crossed Charlie’s features. He was silent for a moment.
“I’ve evolved since then,” he said finally. “I think it’s important to take responsibility for your own character defects. I’ve tried to.”
He looked at his watch.
“Listen, Matt, I’m thinking I might head up to Hudson. There’s a burgundy tasting I sort of want to go to.”
“That sounds fun.”
Charlie stood up. “Well… you’re welcome to join me.”
Matthew hesitated; a car ride together might be just the thing to force him to bring this distasteful business to an end. He glanced back over at Charlie, intending to accept the invitation, but was stalled by an expression in Charlie’s eyes. They seemed to be regarding him with an odd neutrality.
“I mean, it’s kind of an invitation thing,” Charlie said, looking away. “But I’m sure it’ll be fine if you come along as my guest.”
Reflexively, though with a dim sense of being a little cowardly, Matthew grasped at the excuse to delay action once again.
“Oh. Thanks. Actually, maybe I’ll stay here. Work on my tan…”
Charlie nodded.
“I’ll see you later, then.”
He left, grabbing his keys from the countertop.
Matthew sat down at the table where Charlie had been. It struck him that it might have been tactless to mention Nikki. Not that he’d had any reason to suspect Charlie was still sore about his ex after all these years, but he did know it was a mistake to underestimate Charlie’s sensitivity in general. Stupid of me, he thought. Next time he’d go straight to the point. Say what he’d seen at the mall and let Charlie take it or leave it. No more beating about the bush.
It was five o’clock. He stood up, wondering what to do with himself. Two or three hours of solitude lay ahead of him. It should have been an appealing prospect, but it was filling him with curious apprehensiveness, as if the blank stretch of time were mined with strange perils. It seemed to him, oddly, that he was capable of doing something he might regret if he wasn’t careful, though he couldn’t imagine what form any such action might take. He considered his options.
Really he ought to get started on the project of taking stock of himself that he’d managed to avoid so far. He could have a swim, a skinny-dip even, since he had the pool to himself, and then lie in a deck chair and do some good hard thinking.
It occurred to him that, for that matter, he had the whole house to himself. He was standing by the staircase now, a flight of polished planks that seemed held in their curving succession by pure air. He’d had no occasion to go up them on this visit, but there was no particular sense that the upstairs was off-limits. He began climbing.
The air up there was different: warmer, sweeter, redolent of soaps and lotions and Chloe’s scent rather than the cooking smells and faint rawhide odor that permeated the downstairs spaces.
He didn’t have anything specific in mind. “I’ll see if they’ve done anything different to the spare room,” he said to himself, opening the first door. The blond wood sleigh bed still dominated the room but there was a new dresser next to it: deco, he guessed from its simple lines. Some fifties-looking ceramic vases had been arranged along the windowsill. Not that interesting, he thought, articulating the words as if to supply himself with some kind of harmless official motivation for moving on along the corridor.
The guest bathroom didn’t tempt him. Nor did Lily’s room, though the door was open and he was briefly nonplussed by a pair of eyes glittering in its curtained darkness: a rocking horse. The room Charlie used for an office had even less allure; almost a kind of antimagnetism, as though walled in the aura of faint tedium that Charlie’s existence, rich and privileged as it was, often seemed to give off. The master bedroom was next. He paused before opening the door, frowning. Further justification seemed required by some scrupulous inner agency before he could allow himself to proceed. Evidence, he found himself thinking. Some vital evidence that might, in spite of all indications to the contrary, exonerate Chloe, could be lying around somewhere. What if he was wrong about everything after all, and was at the point of jeopardizing, possibly even sacrificing, his two most precious relationships because of some absurd misreading of the situation? Didn’t he owe it to himself-to everyone, in fact-to go forward?
Dubious as he felt it to be, the formula enabled him to lift the old-fashioned black iron latch. Pushing the door open, he seemed to step into a tumult of scents, colors, emotions, too overwhelming to allow any action to occur other than a kind of stupefied swaying, and any observation other than that of his own reeling dizziness. The question of a search, methodical or otherwise, was gone from his mind, utterly eradicated, as if it had never been present. He took in the fact that the bed was unmade, the floor either side of it strewn with books, magazines, dissheveled bathrobes and pajamas. Laundry spilled from a basket in the adjoining walk-in closet, under racks of jackets and skirts. His eye skimmed it and in his hand a moment later was a pair of silken underwear, insubstantial as a mist-net but charged with forces that had set his heart slamming in his chest. Jesus Christ, he thought. This was not what he wanted to want. He remembered an exchange with his father: one of their very last, as it happened. Charlie, recently arrived in their household, had been overheard somewhere using the phrase “jerking off,” not at that time a common expression in the British lexicon. Later, in private, Matthew’s father had asked Matthew what it meant. Embarrassed, Matthew had explained, and his father, taken aback, had reacted with the words, “That’s something I hope you’ll never do”; an injunction that might have been forgotten had he not disappeared so soon after, but that, by virtue of its timing, had taken on the gravity of a biblical commandment, forever conjoining the activity it proscribed with a feeling of burning shame. Even allowing for the more relaxed and modern attitude Matthew had absorbed over time from more enlightened sources (and which he guessed his father himself, had he been caught less off his guard, might well have professed), the exchange had infected Matthew with an irrational disgust for the act, which, one way or another, all too often took the form of self-disgust. He tossed the garment back into the froth of Turnbull & Asser shirts and Lanvin yoga pants and walked quickly out of the room, thoroughly unnerved at the devious machinations of his own mind in bringing him up there in the first place.
Downstairs he went immediately outside to the truck and drove into town, heading straight for Veery Road. This, he realized, was what he had really been wanting to do all along.
The LeBaron was in the driveway of the A-frame. The Lexus was behind the office buildings at the end of the road. So much for the photographic expedition to Fletcher Road. It was exactly as he had foreseen. And yet, again, it gave him a jolting shock to see the imagined act made literal.
Evidently Chloe had gambled on no one taking her up on her invitation to join her out at the mailbox. Or else she’d just counted on being able to brazen it out, somehow, if they did and found she wasn’t there.
He drove back to the house-what else was there to do?-and started on the dinner. Having failed to find cartridges for his foamer that morning, he’d put white beans in a Crock-Pot of stock with two heads of garlic and a half pint of olive oil and managed to find a leg of lamb that didn’t look as if it had spent the last decade on the high seas in a refrigerated shipping container. What he had in mind was a simple gigot d’agneau aux haricots, the leg hot-roasted country-style to make the fats run gold under the crisped parchment of skin while the meat stayed tender and pink. He’d first tasted the dish at the Trumilou in Paris when he and his father had taken their trip around Europe. The combination of the tongue-thick slices of succulent meat, with the soft beans in their creamy juices, had made a powerful impression on him; both elements so robust his mouth had felt as if it were at the confluence of two big rivers of flavor, and it was one of the first dishes he had set out to master when he became a chef.