The landline rang. Matthew picked up: it was Jana, wanting to speak to Chloe. He called out to the pool and Chloe came in, putting on a pale blue shirt over her swimsuit. Matthew stood out on the terrace while she talked.
After she’d finished she came outside.
“Matt, I’m going out for the evening. Jana invited me over for a girls’ night. Bill’s away.”
“Ah. Okay.”
She stepped close to him under the grape arbor. “Sorry to be deserting you.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I hope you weren’t planning something special, for our dinner?”
“No, no.”
The truth was he’d barely taken in the fact that they’d been supposed to have dinner alone that night, so estranged had he been feeling from her.
“I’d much rather stay here with you,” she said, “but I think Jana’s having marital troubles.”
“No problem.”
She put her hand on his arm.
“You should go out somewhere too, Matthew. Have a change of scene.”
He looked at her, surprised at the sudden solicitousness.
“The bar at the Millstream’s supposed to be fun,” she said, grinning. “You should check it out. You might meet someone.”
“Hey! Who says I want to?”
Chloe laughed, her small teeth flashing white. She opened the kitchen door. “Shall we have some iced tea?”
“Sure.”
“Seriously, Matt. It would do you good,” she said, coming back with the glasses of tea on a tray.
“To pick someone up at a bar? That’s never really been my thing.”
She looked at him across the stone table, the uncluttered beauty of her face with its expression of tender attentiveness pure pleasure to behold.
“I don’t know-I remember a time when you had a new girlfriend every time we met…”
“Well, I didn’t pick them up at bars!”
“What about that blonde you met at Rucola?”
“Alison? She was eating there, at the table next to me. Not the same as a bar pickup.”
Chloe’s cell phone made a sound. She ignored it.
“Okay, but wait, there was one actual bartender, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. I met her at the Nitehawk Cinema.”
“Right. I liked her. But I preferred the blonde. I’ll tell you a secret: Charlie and I were actually hoping you might settle down with her. She seemed just right for you.”
“How so?” Matthew asked, pleased by this evidence of interest in his emotional well-being, even though it was from several years in the past.
“Well, she was cheerful and, I don’t know… easy-going. Wasn’t she from the West Coast? Charlie said he could see the two of you running some nice little café together, in Portland or somewhere. Her at the front, and-”
“Me skulking at the back?”
“No! You doing the cooking. I thought she was perfect for you.”
“I’m not sure I’d have been perfect for her, though…”
“Oh, who cares? You should only ever consider yourself when it comes to love. You think I ever cared if I was right for Charlie? No! I saw he was right for me and I pointed myself straight at him! And I’ve never regretted it.”
Matthew laughed, ignoring the urge to ask why she was cheating on him in that case, so happy was he to be talking the way they always used to; light and bantering, and coolly frank. Already he could feel her familiar, clarifying effect on him. She had a way of restoring him to himself; an intuitive understanding of his deepest nature that he’d never encountered in anyone else.
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t necessarily mean getting a date. I just mean you should go out, talk to people, see some new faces, cheer yourself up. That’s all.”
“Why? Do I seem unhappy?”
“No. Just a bit… locked up in yourself.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Well, I have been feeling a little bit… locked up. It’s been bothering me, actually.”
“Really? You should have told me.”
“Oh… I don’t want to burden you with my woes.”
“Come on! What are friends for? Tell me about it.”
“Well… it’s nothing very specific, just a sort of… stalled feeling… if that makes sense…”
“When did it start?”
“I think around the time I sold my share in that restaurant. You remember…”
“I do. You were going to invest in some other project. What happened to that?”
“I’m not sure… I think I just…” He groped for words to express the strange loss of will that had begun afflicting him. It was an elusive subject, however, a process spread over time that had never quite crossed the boundary from the possibly imaginary to the definitely real, and anyway seemed not to want words to express it so much as a kind of childish sob of anguish, which he now found himself, to his embarrassment, suddenly struggling to contain.
Chloe’s cell phone made another sound and this time she glanced at it. Picking it up from the table, she walked away, signaling she’d just be a minute. She stopped a few yards off and listened, saying nothing. Then she walked briskly farther off, passing through the apple trees to the pool, and shutting the gate behind her.
Matthew took the opportunity to pull himself together. Much as he’d been longing for the opportunity to talk like this, he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. The last thing he needed was for Chloe and Charlie to start thinking of him as an actual basket case, which would be the inevitable consequence if he gave in to this sudden mortifying impulse to weep. A dryly ironic attitude to one’s own pain was, he knew, the only safe way of discussing it.
The emotions that had ambushed him had their origins in events from long ago; he was well aware of that. They had lived inside him for almost three decades, with an undiminished power. For periods they were dormant, but when they surged up like this, they could be overwhelming, and it was only with a determined effort that he was able to subdue them, fighting them back until he had achieved the requisite counterbalancing state: an arid indifference to everything.
Several minutes had passed, and Chloe was still on the phone. He could see her in glimpses between the apple trees, pacing around the pool, and he could hear her voice, rising intermittently between long silences.
It came to him that his reaction to her infidelity had something to do with these unmastered childhood feelings. Pursuing the intuition in Dr. McCubbin’s precribed manner, he found himself forming the surprising thought that he was indeed experiencing jealousy: not from the point of view of his actual self, but the self he would become if he were ever to be freed from the grip of those ancient emotions. Because that other, freer self regarded Chloe as nothing less (a look of amusement spread on his face as he articulated this thought) than his own true wife. Charlie, at that imaginary juncture, would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. All this belonged, of course, to a purely latent version of reality.
When Chloe finally reappeared, she had put on sunglasses. She smiled as she approached the terrace, but she’d tightened into herself, gripping an elbow with one hand.
“I’m sorry that took so long.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.” She looked away, and then turned back to him.
“Actually, Matt, I have to go out for a bit. Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
She moved off quickly, as if afraid he might question her, grabbing her car keys from the kitchen table.
“We’ll finish our talk another time, right?” She was still in just her shirt and swimsuit.
“Absolutely.”
A moment later, he heard the Lexus start up and accelerate off down the driveway.
The silence of their aborted conversation reverberated in her wake. It seemed to press against him, pushing him into the house, and then out again. He went to the pool and lay on the wooden sunbed Chloe had vacated earlier. Its warm laths smelled of her suntan oil. Butterflies hovered on the zinnias and cleomes. It came to him once again that he should pack his things and leave. Chloe could drop him at the green on her way to Jana’s this evening, and he’d wait for the bus… He got up from the sunbed and climbed the rocky path to the guesthouse, trying to think of a plausible excuse for his departure.