But plenty of time for what? A vague idea of finding out who the man was had certainly been a part of what had drawn Matthew inside the house, and he looked around for some document, a rental contract perhaps, or some other official piece of paper, that might have the man’s name on it. But there was no contract or any other document visible anywhere, and he didn’t particulary want to start rummaging in the man’s things. Anyway, now that he was here, the question of who the man was didn’t seem as pressing as it had. What difference would it make, to know the man’s name, or his profession, or anything else about him? Whoever he was, he was the man Chloe loved, apparently more than her husband, and certainly more than Matthew. What could possibly make that fact any more tolerable?
Then why was he here? He wandered back into the living room and sat down in the chair, making a deliberate effort to take stock of things. In the manner Dr. McCubbin had taught him, he made himself as fully conscious of the situation he had created as he could.
What exactly am I experiencing? What do I want?
People who broke into houses usually wanted to take something, didn’t they? Or destroy something. Or leave some nasty souvenir of themselves. He didn’t seem to have any interest in any of that. What, then? Was it just the forbiddenness of being here? The feeling of having attained some secret intimacy with Chloe? Possibly. Certainly he did feel a kind of illicit closeness to her. And yet even as he acknowledged this, he became aware of a lack, an incompleteness in the feeling, and realized that even though he was here, he was still in some mysterious way longing to be here; as if inside the A-frame there should have been another A-frame, with another doorway and another key.
He stood up and went back into the bedroom. Something had been nagging at him and he had realized what it was. Half hidden under the clothes in the suitcase was a magazine that had caught his eye, though he’d barely been conscious of it. He took it out of the suitcase. It was the entertainment magazine that Chloe had asked him to pick up for her in East Deerfield earlier in the summer.
He brought it back into the living room, where the light was better, and began leafing through the glossy pages. Near the end, he came to a section headed “Bioflash.” There, occupying half the page, was Chloe’s lover, filling a doorway with his broad frame, gazing cheerfully at the camera.
Holding the page up to the waning light, Matthew began reading the article. It was one of those shamelessly flattering profiles such magazines went in for: calculated to induce envious loathing in even the most well-disposed readers. The man’s name was Wade D. Grollier. He was a filmmaker. He had been born in rural Georgia in 1978. He lived in Brooklyn with his long-term girlfriend, actress Rachel Turpin (another cheat, then!). He’d had a hit movie that Matthew had heard of, though not seen, about a scientist who creates a robot lover for his daughter. He’d won a Spirit Award, whatever that was, for Best Director. One of his close friends, a Hollywood celebrity, was quoted describing him as “an authentic American rebel.” He had spent seven weeks in Haiti after the earthquake, building shelters with his own hands. Before making movies he’d been a rock drummer and he still hung out with rock musicians. Names were given, listed with the deadpan lubriciousness that seemed to be de rigueur in these kinds of pieces.
The ignominy of having been asked to fetch this magazine for Chloe struck Matthew with a belated pang. For a moment he wondered if Chloe had been deliberately amusing herself at his expense; sending the rejected suitor (for they both knew he was that) on an errand to procure this tribute to his triumphant rival. But he quickly dismissed the thought, unwilling to believe she could have been capable of anything so petty, or so deliberately cruel.
The piece continued in the same unctuous style. Wade D. Grollier appeared to be successful modern urbanity incarnate, though at heart he was still a country boy (the piece was slavishly attentive to the formula) and admitted that despite the jet-setting life success had foisted upon him, he loved nothing better than fishing in the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River with his childhood pals. His current project was a cross-species murder mystery set in the jungles of Borneo and featuring an orangutan detective.
Finishing the article, Matthew went back into the bedroom and returned the magazine to the suitcase. As he’d predicted, knowing who the man was made no difference at all to his feelings about the situation. Nor did the discovery give him any satisfying sense of having accomplished some mission at the house.
He wandered back into the living room. Books, phone chargers, bits and pieces of clothing he hadn’t noticed before, lay here and there. None of it looked particularly interesting. On the walls were framed hiking maps of the area, showing streams and trails and tiny black individual houses among the contour lines of the green-shaded mountains. One of them had the little town of Aurelia itself in an upper corner: a dense sprinkling of black dots spread either side of what must have been Tailor Street, and he was able to trace his way across the creek and down along Veery Road to the bend that came before the A-frame, and then the A-frame itself, where he was standing. It was as though his coming here had fulfilled some already latent itinerary. The downstairs windows were darkening now, but the little loft had a skylight that was still bright. He climbed up the ladder to take a look. Behind the balustrade of carved wooden slats was a plywood floor with a rag rug on it and a rolled-up, single-width futon. The space was probably meant for a child. It clearly wasn’t being used.
He sat down on the futon. A flock of birds crossed the skylight, catching the sun on their undersides as they banked upward. Distant sounds floated over the trees: traffic, a blurred screech of feedback from a PA system. But it was peaceful all the same, up here in the apex of the A, and he felt no urgency to leave. It didn’t really seem likely that the man-Grollier, wasn’t that his name?-would come home before going to the fireworks, but even the small possibility that he might was of oddly little concern to Matthew. If anything, he noticed, it seemed to excite him fractionally. He found himself toying with the idea of unrolling the futon and staying there all night; not as a serious plan, but with the bemused interest one experiences when an unexpected fantasy lays open some wholly new realm of speculative pleasure.
He was turning over the components of this peculiar fantasy, trying to understand why it should cause this faintly pleasurable apprehensiveness, when he became aware of lights probing down the gravel of the driveway. He knelt up, peering over the balustrade through the front window. He had been in the house barely fifteen minutes! And anyway, hadn’t he heard the man say he was going straight on to the fireworks? Hadn’t he seen for himself the picnic blanket and thermos in the car? The lights approached, separating into two beams as they came around the slight curve in the short driveway. Alarm spread through him, and yet for a long moment he did nothing; merely stared into the approaching glare, surrendering to the situation with an almost luxurious helplessness, as if the inertia building inside him all these months had finally rendered him completely incapable of movement. Only by an extreme effort of will was he able to rouse himself. Grabbing the balustrade, he hauled himself to his feet and took a few steps down the ladder, trying to calculate whether Grollier would see him if he made a dash for the back door, and whether it would matter even if he did, since he didn’t know who Matthew was.
But as the lights went out, he saw that the car itself was not in fact the LeBaron, but the Lexus.
For a moment he thought he must simply be seeing things. In his mind Chloe was so firmly on her way to her cousin Jana in Lake Classon, it was impossible to accept she was here, and he stared, waiting for the hallucination to dissolve. But it was Chloe. He watched her climb out of the car and walk over to the Weber grill, lifting the lid. A puzzled look crossed her face and briefly the hope rose in him that she would leave now. But she put back the lid and, undeterred by the absence of the key, proceeded toward the front door. He stood on the ladder, unsure what to do. If he went any farther down, she would see movement through the window. Already she was almost at the door. Only as he heard the handle turn did some dim instinct of self-preservation galvanize him, drawing him back up the ladder and behind the balustrade in time to conceal himself before the door opened.