“You won’t be coming home?”
“Yeah, but late, and I won’t be eating. There’s a dinner.”
“Anything interesting?” Matthew asked, eager to leave but at the same time anxious to ascertain where he stood with Charlie; still clinging to the hope that his cousin’s hostility might have been purely imaginary.
“What?” Charlie was looking his screen.
“Anything interesting-the dinner?”
“Oh, those Grameen people. Ex-Grameen.”
“That sounds encouraging…”
“We’re getting there.”
“Microloans, right?”
“Right.”
“What exactly is a microloan? I mean, what sort of sum?”
Charlie looked up at him.
“It varies.” He seemed on the point of getting annoyed. Bewildered, Matthew dropped it.
“Well… see you later, then.”
“See you later.”
He drove fast, making the turns without thinking. The LeBaron was in the A-frame’s short driveway, and this time so was the Lexus, squeezed in right next to it, both fenders gleaming in the morning light. The sight was strangely shocking; shattering almost. It was as if, until now, some part of him really had been clinging to a shred of hope that he’d been imagining things. He plunged on past, his head reeling.
So what? he told himself. Her business, not mine. At the same time, from some ungovernably autonomous region of his mind, other thoughts arose; crushing, and still more crushing. She didn’t care anymore if she was found out… She wanted to be found out; wanted to precipitate a crisis, upend her marriage… Or no, she wasn’t even thinking about her marriage: she’d just been in too much of a hurry to see her lover, get into his bed for an early morning fuck on this last day of easy mobility, before her daughter came back from camp. So what? So what?
He pulled out onto the county road and a garbage truck he hadn’t seen blasted its horn as it bore down, snorting into his mirror. Shaken, he made an effort to get a grip on himself. After a moment a slightly more rational explanation for the car’s presence right there in the driveway came to him: she must have simply thought she was safe from discovery at that early hour. It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it countered the suggestion of uncontrollable desire, which made its effect on him less incendiary. The pitch of his own feelings appeared to be connected with Chloe’s. If he could tell himself this was just an ordinary affair pursued out of ordinary boredom, and regulated by sensible caution, he felt he could manage this absurdly inappropriate anguish.
He was driving toward East Deerfield because he had told Charlie he was going to the farmers’ market. But he didn’t feel like going to the farmers’ market and it wasn’t as if Charlie would give a damn whether he went to the farmers’ market or not. What he felt like doing, he realized, was going back to Aurelia, back to the A-frame. The farther away he got, the more strongly he felt drawn back to it, as if distance brought out some mysterious soothing essence lodged in that triangular building that wasn’t discernible in the tumult of things he felt in its proximity. At the same time the very urgency of the desire to go back seemed reason enough to resist it. It was abundantly clear to him that he was becoming unhealthily fixated on that little house.
He turned off the county road and drove aimlessly along the winding lanes that spread through an area of old dairy farms. Some of these looked abandoned; broken barns standing open to the sky, machines rusting in tall weeds.
I should leave right away, he thought, not wait till Charlie’s guests arrive. Just make my excuses and go.
But where? His own apartment was sublet. His few friends aside from Chloe and Charlie were all dispersed for the summer. In the past he would have gravitated toward the house in Spain, near Cádiz, where his mother and her third husband spent their summers, but his mother had died two years ago, and the husband, who owned the house, hadn’t seemed interested in continuing his relationship with Matthew. He could visit his sister, he supposed. She and her partner, both social workers, lived in Bristol, a city he liked. But they were religious and the last time he’d visited, almost ten years ago, their determination to drag him off to church had got on his nerves. He could go somewhere on his own, of course, but that would mean motels and restaurants, which would eat up the meager profit he was making on his sublet; money he was counting on to help get him through the rest of the year.
The rest of the year… It was only the second week of August, but suddenly he was aware of autumn. The leaves overhanging the narrow roads were dusty and frayed. The grasses already looked dry. And still he had made no progress in the task he’d set himself, of getting to grips with the curious stalling paralysis that had taken him over.
Part of the problem was that he’d counted on being able to talk to Charlie and Chloe about it, but in their different ways they’d both made themselves inaccessible. Not that he blamed them, he assured himself, fighting off an urge to do just that. Why should they concern themselves with his private problems?
I should leave, he told himself again. Find a cheap motel on the Jersey shore and hole up for the rest of the summer.
He’d come to an area of cultivated fields, with split-rail fences dividing them. A red Dutch barn came into view as he drew level with a well-tended cornfield. It looked oddly familiar, and he realized it was the one Chloe had photographed the other day. He slowed down. There was the mailbox with the enamel-painted wild turkeys and the petunia in its clay pot. The thought that Chloe had been here with her cameras gave the little scene a poignancy that clutched at him. He stopped and got out of the truck, breathing in the warm, sweetish air. The sense of her was strong suddenly, saturating, as if he had come upon yet one more of those secret pockets of hers. He felt close to her, standing where she had stood; linked across the intervening days as if by hidden threads, like the threads at the back of a tapestry. The cornstalks were taller than he was, armed in their heavy cobs, with the yellow silks blackening where they spilled from the split sheaves. At the edge of the field, blue starry flowers-cornflowers, he supposed-stood out against the steel-green darkness of the corn. Their blue looked warm at first, but the longer he looked, the colder it seemed to grow, as if it too were an incursion from the future; a backward glance of arctic blueness from the winter ahead. He climbed into the truck and headed back toward Aurelia. It was past eight by the time he got there: Early to Bread would have opened. It occurred to him that, assuming Chloe had left, he could go and knock at the door of the A-frame; pretend he’d been sent by the owner of the house to check the furnace or look at a crack in the ceiling. The guy would have no reason not to let him inside.
But then what? he wondered, frowning in bewilderment at the scenario he’d created. Why would I want to get inside?
The Lexus was gone from the driveway when he reached the A-frame. He slowed, looking in through the blur of a screened window. A light was on. A large head moved against it.
Matthew sped away, his heart racing.
Charlie had left for New York when he got back to the house, and Chloe was out by the pool. The breakfast things were still on the stone table, and Matthew cleared them away. A half-scooped-out cheese sat on the kitchen counter, oozing from its cavity. Matthew threw it out and put the dirty plate and spoon in the dishwasher. He couldn’t help disapproving of the wastefulness of his cousin’s habits. He would pick up novelty loaves from Early to Bread on his way home from tennis, bite off a chunk, and let the rest go stale in the back of his car. Or he’d buy plastic-encased raspberries and leave them around unopened till they grew a fur of mold.