“Oh… I wasn’t planning to.”
“Supposed to be a helluva show.”
“Uh-huh?”
“That’s what I heard.”
She faced him squarely from her side of the bar, apparently confident in her ability to secure his attention. She wore a pale silk blouse, open to show some cleavage. Her face had a sheen of makeup. Her glistening hair was teased into angled spears like a pineapple top.
She took a sip of her cocktail, setting the near-empty glass down before her with a deliberate air, looking at Matthew. He gave a slight smile and turned away. He was about to knock back the rest of his drink and leave when the door opened and Chloe’s lover came in.
Matthew had to remind himself, as the shock jolted through him, that the guy had no reason to know who he was. Trying to appear unflustered, he took a sip from his drink, and laid the glass back down on the bar.
Passing to the other side of the bar, the lover parked himself on a stool, greeting the bartender and extending a general smile all around. He was wearing a loose shirt of white cotton. His beard looked freshly trimmed.
Ordering a drink, he proceeded to offer himself up for conversation with a series of remarks directed at no one in particular. The remarks were cheerfully banal, but soon two guys who’d been talking quietly over beers were laughing with him, and after a while the woman in the pale blouse joined in.
“You going to the fireworks?” she asked.
“Sure am. I have my picnic blanket, my thermos… I’m told it’s quite the show.”
“Oh, it’s fabulous. I go every year.”
The lover looked around.
“Anyone else going? We oughta form a posse.”
“We’re going,” one of the two guys said.
“Game on, then! I have time to grab a little something to eat first, right?”
“Definitely.”
The man asked for a menu. Perusing it with a wistful air, he informed the bartender he would just have an appetizer, and ordered a lobster quesadilla.
“But give me a side of the shoestring fries too, would you?”
He added in a stage whisper to the woman, “My doctor told me I need to gain weight,” prompting a loud, full-throated laugh.
“You here on vacation?” the woman asked.
He nodded.
“Got me a little rental right by the creek there. Veery Road.”
“Nice!”
“The A-frame?” one of the guys asked.
“How’d you guess?”
“The owner’s a friend of ours. She has a couple other rentals in town but that’s always been the popular one.”
“Easy to see why.”
There was a younger woman, seated to the man’s left, whom he hadn’t appeared to notice, but now he turned to her, peering closely at the book in her hand. She looked up.
“Oh, I’m sorry, miss. I was just trying to see what you were reading there. I always like to know what books people around me are reading. It’s a weakness of mine. Actually more of a pathological compulsion.”
She held up the book for him to see.
“Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” he read. “Now, didn’t they make a movie out of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I believe they did. Ornella Muti played the girl, I recollect. I forget the director, but who cares about the director anyhow?”
He chuckled, and the girl smiled vaguely back.
Matthew signaled the bartender for his check. A feeling of restlessness had gripped him: an urge to move. He paid quickly, with cash. Outside, the air was rich with the day’s warmth. He saw the LeBaron in the parking lot and glanced in as he walked by; there was a folded tartan picnic blanket on the backseat and a canvas bag with a thermos in it. Climbing into the truck, he pulled out onto Tailor Street. The sidewalk was thronged with groups of people, presumably on their way to the fireworks. Traffic heading in that direction was almost at a standstill. He decided to take the back route toward the green, along the other side of the creek. Purely a practical decision, he told himself as he turned onto the county road and then again onto Veery Road. At the A-frame he slowed down. The driveway was empty and the house was dark-naturally enough, since its occupant was at the bar and Chloe on her way to Jana’s. But the urge to stop, to plant himself there, was as strong as it was when he had reason to believe someone was inside. If anything, it seemed to be even stronger. He drove on, considering this as one considers a new symptom that has just appeared, of some persistent illness.
Instead of crossing the bridge, he pulled into the stony area just beyond, where people left their cars when they swam. He was in an odd state of mind; at once very conscious of his actions, and extraordinarily detached from them, as though they were being performed by someone else. Parking the truck, he began walking back along Veery Road. Evening sunlight flowed in level rays between the hedges. It was magic hour, he realized, and the thought seemed to plunge him back again into Chloe’s aura. He felt as if he were approaching her along some ceremonial, processional route. Pink lilies with long, frilled petals burned like traffic-accident flares above the ditches. The empty-looking houses had molten red suns in their black windows. Ahead of him was the A-frame’s sharp tip, pointing up over a tall hedge. He slowed his pace. I am just walking by, he told himself. To do anything different would have required an act of will that he felt safely incapable of mustering. A feeling of extreme passivity had come over him, as though some powerful external process had gathered him into its motions. As he turned left into the short driveway, it was fully in the belief that he was just curious to observe his own feelings at a closer proximity to the place. Even as he lifted the lid from the Weber grill by the screen porch, it was still in a speculative sense; a harmless glancing out across the divide between the actual and the purely conjectural. The door key was under the lid of the grill. As he picked it up, holding it between his finger and thumb, the situation abruptly reversed itself: the same passivity that a moment before had seemed to be keeping him safely from entering the house was now drawing him inside. No strenuous act of will appeared to be required any longer, or only if he should decide to walk away. It was as if the dense materiality of the little key had sunk the object into him like a fishhook, and he was being reeled in. Already, as he approached the front door, it was the other life, in which he remained outside the house, that was becoming conjectural. This, now, was the actual.
At the same time, he was aware that ever since he had asked the bartender for the check, it had been his intention to do precisely what he was doing.
The door opened into a living area defined by a gray love seat and armchair with a low glass table in between. Beyond the armchair was a fixed wooden ladder leading to a partially enclosed loft under the narrow apex of the roof.
He shut the door behind him, putting the key on a ledge by the doorway, and stepped forward. An air conditioner clicked on.
Passing to the side of the ladder, he saw a door to a room under the loft. He pushed it open. An unmade double bed faced a wall with a narrow window. On the bed was a half-packed suitcase surrounded by piles of folded shirts and pants. Next to it was a desk with a laptop on it. Past the bedroom was a bathroom with shaving things on a shelf over the sink. Beyond, at the rear entrance to the house, was a small kitchen crowded with stainless steel pans, racks of matching utensils, a wooden knife block and some new-looking appliances.
The glass-paned back door, bolted on the inside, gave onto a stone path across a lawn that dropped off abruptly at what must have been the bank of the creek.
He didn’t appear to be afraid. Tense, but not afraid. Even if the man changed his mind about going to the fireworks or decided to come home before, he had his meal to get through first. That ought to keep him at the bar for a good twenty minutes at least, which was plenty of time.