Yes, it was true that Charlie had lent him money on and off over the years since his arrival in the States. Yes, it was thanks to Charlie’s generosity that he had been able to come up with his stake in the farm-to-table restaurant. Yes, it was also true (though he hadn’t realized it was quite so obvious) that he’d hoped at some point to interest Charlie in his food truck idea. But he had always made it very clear that he intended to pay Charlie back as soon as he was in a position to, and in any case none of it was a secret, and it certainly wasn’t blackmail!
Wade himself had made the obvious objection:
“I mean, how’s that blackmail, sugar? There has to be compulsion of some kind to call it blackmail. He’d have to have some kind of hold over Charlie…”
“He does.”
“What?”
“Charlie’s guilt.”
“For what?”
“For having money. For being luckier than him. For his father giving Matthew’s father some bad investment advice a million years ago. For being, you know, a banker. For everything!”
“Yeah, but that’s not-I mean, at a stretch you could call that moral blackmail, but for actual legal blackmail there’d have to be specific information he was threatening to reveal.”
“All right, so call it moral blackmail. To me there’s no difference. He’s using Charlie’s guilt to extort money out of him. He has been for years. Basically Charlie’s been paying his rent since Matthew followed him here to the States, which I imagine he did with precisely that in mind.”
“Seriously? Paying his rent?”
“I’ve seen the checks.”
Untrue! Matthew had wanted to shout out. Unfair! There were just three or four months when Charlie covered my rent! And it was all on the record, written down on the ledger along with the other odd sums. And what the hell, he wondered as the scene replayed itself now, had she meant about me following Charlie to the States? Over the trees, as he considered this, came the unmistakable introduction to Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” It was a song Matthew happened to know well. There was a couple he used to supply in the early nineties; middle-aged hippies who’d had the track on a mix they played all the time in their Ladbroke Grove bedsit, where they’d insist he share a smoke with them whenever he visited. Nothing in the mix was really his kind of music, but he’d responded to the emotional build of “Hey Joe” and the stark economy of its tale of jealous passion. The words weren’t audible as he listened now, but he knew the simple call-and-response lyrics well enough. The gun, the shooting, then that frenzied dream of escape. Hey Joe, he heard as if from deep in his own past, where you gonna run to now? and from even deeper, saturated in some ancient sense of yearning and sun-dazzled release: I’m going way down south, way down to Mexico…
Another wobbly guitar solo stretched over the town and then “Hey Joe” gave way to the screeching bombardment of “Star-Spangled Banner.” There was a dim roar from the crowd and suddenly the blackness framed by the skylight above Matthew’s head exploded in gold and emerald starbursts with a blast that made the windows rattle.
Grollier was still in the house.
He was in a bathrobe now, sitting on the love seat again, with a beer and a lump of cold beef on a cutting board. Apparently he’d decided not to go to the fireworks after all.
Matthew gazed down on him with a sort of despairing indignation. Absurd as he knew it to be, he felt personally cheated by this change of heart; as if he’d been deliberately double-crossed. The man had as good as given his word that he was going to the display, hadn’t he? But instead here he was carving himself slices of cold beef, thick as carpet samples, and gobbling them down on crackers in between chugging at a beer!
Whatever perverse appeal it had possessed earlier, the idea of being trapped here all night had lost every trace of it, now that it appeared to have become a real possibility. It was so appalling, in fact, that it was almost a relief to have Chloe’s bizarre allegations to think about instead.
“Anyway there is something specific,” she’d said, buttoning her blouse.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Charlie had some things happen at Morgan Stanley, which he naively told Matthew about, back in the days when he still thought of him as someone he could confide in.”
“What things?”
“Oh, nothing he could get in trouble for at this point, but not the kind of thing you’d want spread around, and Matthew’s apparently aware of that. When we had those English people over the other night they were talking about the financial meltdown and making insinuations about Charlie’s career, and Matthew started leaning toward Charlie in this very overt way as if he was trying to remind him he had it in his power to make him extremely uncomfortable at that moment if he wanted to. I didn’t take it in at the time, but when Charlie told me about it later I realized I’d seen exactly what he was describing. It was very deliberate, and it was menacing. He was threatening Charlie.”
“Hm.”
“What do you mean, ‘Hm’?”
“That’s still not a real hold. I mean, if Charlie can’t get in actual trouble for whatever he did.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying, sugar, that for Charlie to be guilty enough to pay the guy’s rent for him, he’d a had to have something besides routine rich-boy guilt on his conscience. Else it just doesn’t add up. There’d have to be some kind of genuine act of darkness on Charlie’s part.”
“No. Not possible.”
“Well, then I’m flummoxed.”
“Charlie’s too decent for his own good. That’s actually the problem. He has an overdeveloped conscience.”
A smile flared on Matthew’s face as he recalled these words. Certain secrets, he had learned, came into the world with a curious immunity to being divulged. Like well-armed viruses, they gave off invincible reasons for being preserved intact at every moment of possible violation. The irony, that if he could somehow convey the truth to Chloe, all it would do would be to confirm her view of him as a blackmailer, was merely a further manifestation of this quality. All kinds of bitter ironies, as a matter of fact, seemed to have begun proliferating around him. That her apparent fear of him, unfounded as it was, would have seemed fully justified, indeed insufficiently urgent, if she’d had any idea where he was at the very moment she was describing it-was one. That the accusation of obsessive behavior she had gone on to make (“forever loitering around our house in Cobble Hill,” was how she’d put it) had come to acquire an accidental semblance of validity in recent days-was another… The litany of accusations unfurled again in his mind. “Needling” Charlie. (How could Charlie have possibly misunderstood him so badly?) Blackmailing him, for Christ’s sake! Mooching, stalking, other assertions even more bizarre… “I think he wants to move into our home up here,” she’d said at one point, “take over the guesthouse or something.” It was as if she’d somehow tuned in to his innocent appreciation of the little cabin, and out of some incomprehensible hostility inflated it into a charge of sinister covetousness…
The existence of this hostility, so out of character in the Chloe he thought he knew, was as startling to discover as it was painful. What had caused it? How had she managed to conceal it from him so perfectly, and for so long? Why bother with all the smiles and gentleness; all those tender conversations they used to have, those protestations of interest, affection, concern? Why, if she hated him?
And yet that hadn’t been the end of it either. If it had, it might have been easier for him to manage. He could have told himself she was simply two-faced; a hypocrite in whom a dissembling graciousness had become habit, no doubt from having spent too many years looking out at the world from the plinth of Charlie’s riches… But there had been more to it, and of a nature so unexpected it had left him more bewildered than ever; more pierced and shattered, and-strangest of all-more in love.