Later that night, Matthew heard a sound from the pool. He got up and looked out of the guesthouse window. Charlie was in the water, swimming the steady, head-down crawl he used for doing laps. Reaching the end he turned, plunging back the other way, his long, straight body cutting the same undeviating line through the water.
After a while he climbed out and dried off. But instead of going back to the house, he wrapped himself in a towel and sat in a deck chair, motionless. He didn’t seem to be meditating. His slumped body suggested something more along the lines of brooding.
The English couple must have left him feeling bruised, Matthew supposed. He thought perhaps he should go down and commiserate. But he wasn’t sure how welcome he would be. Charlie had been rather distant with him lately. Borderline unfriendly, in fact. The other day he’d come back from New York in an upbeat mood after a meeting with a former executive from Grameen America, the U.S. branch of the Bangladeshi bank that had pioneered microloans, and announced that he was going to adapt their approach for his own investment group. (He was no longer referring to this as a “consultancy” group, a fact Matthew had noted with the faint amusement his cousin so often provoked in him.) “It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for,” he’d told Chloe excitedly. “It puts money into exactly the kind of small-scale entrepreneurship I’ve always believed in, and it turns out to be a damn safe bet for investors.” But as soon as Matthew had started asking him questions about it, expecting to join in the conversation, he’d clammed up. And then there’d been that strange look of outright hostility at the table tonight. What had that been about? Matthew wondered. He tried to think what he could have said to provoke it. But he’d hardly spoken at all by that point in the dinner.
On the other hand, it was possible he was just imagining all of it. Maybe the look was just a general expression of irritation that happened to have caught him in its beam. And maybe, by the same token, the other episodes had equally innocent explanations. He did suffer from a certain social hypersensitivity. He’d read somewhere that it was called the “spotlight effect”: a tendency to imagine other people were paying more attention to you than they really were. It made you self-conscious; inclined to attribute critical judgments about yourself to people who in fact weren’t thinking about you at all.
Well, if that was all it was, then perhaps he should go down and talk to Charlie after all. Let him know he was on his side, whatever that English couple thought of him.
He put on some clothes and went down the path to the pool. The stars were bright, the midnight air throbbing with drums and katydids.
Charlie looked over as he opened the gate, his face lit by the pool lights.
“What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you could use some company.”
“Oh.” Charlie glanced up at the guesthouse window.
“I thought you might want to talk.”
“About what?”
The defensive tone stalled Matthew.
“I don’t know… I thought they might have upset you at dinner-the Brits.”
Charlie shrugged.
“It’s not exactly news to me, what they were saying.”
“I guess not.”
Matthew was standing by the pool, uncertain whether to sit down. After a moment Charlie said, very coolly:
“Are you sure that’s what you wanted to talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
Charlie stared at him, his smooth features unsmiling. Then he shrugged and stood up, giving a yawn.
“Just wondering.”
“What else did you think I-”
“No, nothing.” Charlie yawned again. “Sorry. I’m tired.”
“I mean, Charlie,” Matthew persevered, somewhat against his better judgment, “I’m always happy to talk about anything. You know that. Anything at all…”
Charlie smiled.
“I didn’t mean that. But thanks anyway.” He turned to go.
“Charlie-” Matthew heard himself blurt. At that moment he was as close as he ever came to telling Charlie about Chloe’s lover. He often wondered, later, how things would have turned out if he had.
Instead he broke off. In the silence that followed, Charlie turned to face him again, giving a strange look of skeptical expectation, as if Matthew were in the process of fulfilling some damning prophecy someone had made about him. It wasn’t the actively hostile look of earlier, but there was a total absence of warmth in it. Utterly bewildered, Matthew tried to think of some word or phrase to break the tension, but before he could, Charlie turned the exchange in an altogether unexpected direction.
“By the way, Matt, this is kind of awkward, but we have some friends coming and we’re going to need the guesthouse, just for a few days.”
“Oh… no problem. I’ll move my stuff into the spare room.”
“No, I mean we need that too. Also Lily’s going to be back from camp, so she’ll need her room.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I was thinking maybe if you had things you needed to do in the city, you might want to go down for a few days.”
Matthew didn’t know what to say.
“I mean… as I think I mentioned, I’ve sublet my place…”
“That’s fine. You can stay at the house. No one’ll be there. I think it’ll just be for three nights, and not for another week or so.”
“Well… okay… thanks,” Matthew said, trying not to feel aggrieved.
“Night, then,” Charlie said.
“Good night.”
Back in bed, Matthew lay awake for some time. Charlie’s willingness to send him away in order to make room for other friends surprised him, but he didn’t want to have to feel upset with his cousin. In fact, he wanted very much not to have to feel upset with him, and after a while he was able to persuade himself that from Charlie’s point of view there really wasn’t any callousness in it at all. He was just trying to solve a logistical problem.
He closed his eyes and curled up in a determined simulacrum of sleep, furiously barring his consciousness against the mass of thoughts clamoring for entry, until finally real oblivion descended.
eight
In the morning he found Charlie drinking coffee alone on the terrace. It was early, not yet seven.
“Good sleep?” Charlie asked. Tanned and relaxed in his gray T-shirt and drawstringed shorts, he seemed fully recovered from his brooding hostility of the night before. His lean legs sprawled forward, feet comfortably crossed at the ankles, tapping each other as if in mutual affection.
“Not bad.”
“Have some coffee.” Charlie nodded at the pot and looked back down at his iPad. He held the device in his left hand and scrolled with his right, dismissing current events that didn’t interest him with a flick of his forefinger, and detaining others with a lightly proprietorial jab as if to say, “Just one moment, you.”
“Chloe still asleep?” Matthew asked.
“No. She went out. She’ll be back with pastries after Early to Bread opens.”
“Where’d she go? I mean… I mean… it’s kind of early for yoga, isn’t it?”
Charlie looked up.
“She went to take pictures.”
“Ah. More mailboxes.”
“Right. She figured she ought to get out there while she still can. Lily’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Right. Of course. Make hay while the sun shines. So to speak.”
Charlie gave him another glance, and turned back down to his screen.
“I think I’ll get an early start too,” Matthew said.
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s a farmers’ market in East Deerfield… Always good to beat the crowds.”
“Well, don’t get anything for me. I’ll be in the city.”