Leafing back and forth through the pages as he lay on his bed in the guesthouse, Matthew read and reread the underlined passages, stalking his father’s shade through the thoughts and aphorisms, some of them familiar to him, some forgotten, others encountered now for the first time. He found: Incomprehensible that God should exist and incomprehensible that he should not, and: All men naturally hate each other. He found: Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is, and: It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal. And with each underlined phrase he felt at once closer to his father and more baffled by him than ever.
It was six-thirty. He had fallen asleep. The sky over the valley was lilac, with just a few dry-looking clouds. He had dreamed of the cornfield, only he was there with Chloe, and had asked her point-blank: Who is your lover? Leaning in so that her hair brushed against his face, she had said softly in his ear, I love you, and he had woken in a burst of happiness.
Through the guesthouse window he saw her floating on her back in the pool. He put on some clothes and went down.
“Hi, there,” she called. “I looked for you.”
“I fell asleep.”
“I figured. I was hoping you’d take a walk with me and Fu. Thought we might talk some more. But I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I had a dream about you,” he said impulsively.
She hung motionless on the water, her face impassive, and for a moment he wondered if he had transgressed the tacitly agreed-on limit of what could be spoken of out loud between them. But then she smiled.
“Did you? I hope it was nice.”
“It was very nice.”
“That’s good.”
He felt suddenly very close to her. God, it was good to have someone in his life he could speak to without inhibition! She didn’t ask what had happened in the dream, but her very silence seemed proof that she didn’t need to be told, and this surely confirmed that the closeness he felt was real.
That there was something abject, pitiable, in the nourishment he took from such barely discernible signs and tokens of affection, he was well aware. It didn’t trouble him, though. He’d learned long ago not to torment himself about things over which he had no control. One went through phases of strength and weakness in one’s relation to the world, and when one was in a phase of weakness, as he appeared to be now, there was no sense in pretending otherwise. That was a recipe for humiliation. With luck he would rally himself before long, and then who knew what might happen? In the part of his mind not subject to regular intrusions of rationality there was no doubt at all that his and Chloe’s destinies were inextricably linked; even that at some point-in another life, if not this one (such concepts were perfectly admissible in this part of his mind)-it had been arranged for them to be together. But in the meantime it seemed important to content himself with whatever crumbs of affection he could glean.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
“No, I should wait till I get to Jana’s. Actually, I ought to get going.”
He nodded.
“Everything go okay earlier-in town?” he asked.
“Oh… yes.” Chloe plunged forward in the water, submerging her head. Coming up, she said, “Yes, sorry I had to leave so suddenly. It was just this woman I do yoga with. She was in kind of a… crisis.”
Matthew looked at her as she shook the water out of her hair.
“Well, I hope you got her sorted, as we say in Blighty.”
“Yes, I did.” A quick smile crossed Chloe’s lips. “I got her sorted.”
“Good.”
“What about you, Matt? Are you going to go out somewhere?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should. You should go to the Millstream. It’ll do you good.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“If you think about it, you won’t do it.”
She swam over to the chrome steps and climbed out, squeezing the water from her hair.
“Go on,” she said, turning back to him. “Live a little!”
He’d half decided to go anyway, and had really only been resisting for the pleasure of Chloe’s continued attempt to change his mind.
“All right. I’ll go.”
She was upstairs getting ready to go out when he left.
“Let’s have a nightcap later on, shall we?” she called down. “I don’t plan on staying late at Jana’s.”
“Okay.”
“We can swap notes.”
He laughed.
“Yeah. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to report!”
The Millstream Inn was at the low end of town on Tailor Street, just beyond the junction with the county road. The restaurant was surprisingly crowded considering how early it was, but the bar itself had few customers. It didn’t look like much of a pickup scene, Matthew thought, sitting on a stool with a cushioned back. Too early, he supposed. He ordered a gin and tonic and gazed into space, thinking of Chloe’s remark that afternoon, about his girlfriends.
It was true that during the years when he’d been part owner of the farm-to-table restaurant, he’d had a period of relative promiscuity. It was something that happened from time to time, without any particular effort or decision on his part; just coming in like the weather. To the extent that he’d analyzed it, it was that these were phases when the outward appearance of his day-to-day existence approximated most closely to the generally held idea of what constituted a “life”: regular employment, sustained contact with numerous other people, an overall semblance of purpose. Not that this made him more attractive to women than he normally was: there was the same modest frequency of signals as there’d always been, from the same middlingly attractive women who seemed to consider him an appropriate target for their attentions. It was just that during those periods pure sexual need seemed to overcome a certain aesthetic fastidiousness, and he took whatever came his way. Alison, the blonde girl Chloe had liked so much, was plump and highly strung, with a nervous, grating laugh. Chloe’s report of Charlie picturing the two of them running some cozy café in Portland had vaguely offended him, though he sensed now that it was the West Coast part of Charlie’s fantasy, more than the choice of girl, that had hurt. The suggestion of Charlie wanting to put a few thousand miles between himself and Matthew was upsetting; particularly in the light of Charlie’s recent unfriendliness.
He finished his drink and ordered another one. A woman in her forties was looking at him.
“British, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought I detected an accent. Whereabouts?”
“London.”
“I believe I’ve heard of it.”
Matthew laughed politely.
“Going to the fireworks?” the woman asked.
It took him a moment to remember the sign he’d seen at the entrance to the town athletic fields.