“You!” Wade cried out in startled recognition. His large head turned back to glance into the living room and up toward the loft. Facing Matthew again, he hurled himself forward, his bulky figure moving with stunning agility, hands outspread, his fingers braced as if to grab Matthew’s throat and throttle him.
ten
Cooler weather blew in that night. For the first time all summer, Matthew needed extra blankets from the cedar chest. Under their comforting weight he fell quickly asleep. In the morning the day was blue and clear, and the trees were sparkling. Locking the guesthouse door, he went down for breakfast.
Chloe and Charlie were at the stone table. They looked scrubbed and cheerful, both of them taking advantage of the lower temperature to sport new outfits. Charlie had on a seersucker suit with rolled-up sleeves. Chloe wore a leaf-patterned dress under a thin silky cardigan.
She took off her sunglasses and grinned at Matthew.
“You didn’t wait up for me!”
“Ah, no, sorry. I was tired.”
“How was your night?”
He reached for the coffeepot.
“Uneventful.”
Charlie glanced up from his iPad:
“No luck at the Millstream?”
“I told Charlie I’d sent you on a mission,” Chloe said.
“No.”
“That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “The bar there’s supposed to be pickup central.”
“Well, I didn’t see any action,” Matthew answered, pouring coffee into his cup. His hand was remarkably steady. “How were your evenings?”
“Mine was nice,” Chloe said. “I like seeing Jana on her own. I’m not crazy about Bill.”
“The guy’s an asshole,” Charlie said, tapping on his screen. “He’s a reactionary who thinks he’s a progressive, which is the worst kind of reactionary.”
There was a box of pastries from Early to Bread on the table. Someone must have driven into town.
“What about your evening, Charlie?” Matthew said.
“Exhausting. I didn’t get in till almost two.”
“He fell asleep on the Thruway!” Chloe said, putting her hand on Charlie’s arm.
“I didn’t fall asleep. I very responsibly pulled over and took a nap.”
Charlie yawned, looking at his watch.
“And now we have to hit the road again, right, Chlo?”
“Soon. By the way, Matt, we’ll be out for dinner tonight. Lily’s in a performance and it’ll probably run late.”
“Okay.”
He’d forgotten they were picking up their daughter from camp today.
He reached for a muffin from the cake box.
“How was town?” he asked casually.
Chloe shrugged.
“The usual.”
They left after breakfast. As soon as they were gone, he got into the truck and drove into Aurelia, crossing the Millstream bridge and crawling slowly past the Veery Road intersection without making the turn. A man was trimming his hedge on a ladder and a couple of kids were biking around a front yard. Otherwise nothing was going on at that end. He circled back and checked from the county road end: also quiet. This time he made the turn and drove past the house itself. Nothing: just the LeBaron waiting in the driveway and the silent house jutting above the hedges.
Back at the bridge he parked and climbed down to the creek. Despite the drop in temperature, people were out on the rocks. He made his way downstream until he came level with the back of the A-frame. Summoning the air of a harmlessly inquisitive wanderer, he scrambled up the bank opposite, which sloped up to the fence of a building supply yard. Walking alongside it, he allowed himself a few quick glances across to the other side. Nothing. The back door was closed, the glass squares in its top half reflecting blackly. The small trees flanking the path, sentinel-like presences in last night’s darkness, turned out to be dwarf pear trees, laden with small green fruit. A faux-bronze Buddha, Aurelia’s ubiquitous totem, sat in the shade of a maple, smiling. The peacefulness of the place was a little uncanny. There ought to have been some outward sign of disturbance, he felt, if only visible to himself; a crack in that trim clapboard exterior, a crooked glint in a window. But the house seemed entirely calm.
He moved on, climbing back down to the water a hundred yards farther along, where, for the benefit of anyone watching, he dabbled his feet in a pool, before turning back.
A group of Rainbows had taken possession of a rock near the bridge. One was strumming a small guitar; others had drums and tambourines. A guy with a coiled topknot was sharing a sandwich with a lean gray dog. Torssen was there, Mr. 99%, sitting off to one side with the two girls Matthew had met with Pike. He was talking, while the girls listened in silence. One of them lay with her head resting on his thigh. The other, the kittenish-faced one, was on her stomach with her head propped on her hands. Her green hair, to which she had added tints of violet and orange, stuck up in a soft thick tangle, and Torssen was absently plying his fingers through it as he spoke.
Matthew stared, wondering again what it was about the guy that provoked such hostility in him. Was it just his own jaundiced distrust of any attitude that divided the world into oppressors and the oppressed, when the only valid distinction as far as he was concerned was between oppressors and, as he put it to himself, “oppressors-in-waiting”? Or was there something more primitive and personal going on? It occurred to him, as he probed the feeling, that there was probably an element of envy in it; that this figure holding court from the throne-room of his own body, with his jesters and musicians and nubile consorts arrayed about him, might, in some sense, have been himself, had circumstances beyond his control not intervened. Not that this particular image of fulfillment had a monopoly on his capacity for envy; far from it. Depending on his mood, almost any image of success or even just average functionality had the potential to initiate a kind of looping self-interrogation; the abject sense of being confronted by some viable version of himself provoking the question of why he couldn’t become that version, which in turn would arouse the fleetingly hopeful sense that all it would take would be a determined act of self-adjustment, followed, however, almost immediately, by the recollection that this adjustment would have to take place in that tantalizing stretch of time we wander in so freely and yet can no longer alter in even the minutest degree, namely the past. Which brought him back, like some infernal Möbius strip of thought, to that condition of abject susceptibility to the lives of others…
Still, it was true that some of those lives had more obvious resonance with his own, which no doubt boosted their power over him, and this man Torssen’s was certainly one of those.
One of the girls passed Torssen a small bag and he rolled a joint, executing the ritual with the solemnity of a priest preparing a sacrament. The group smoked it openly, and the smell drifted down to Matthew on the breeze. Good stuff, he noted, remembering the spalls of dusty foliage, half oregano, he used to sell in London. Rudy, his old supplier, impinged on his thoughts, and Rudy’s wife Joan. He frowned, shutting them out, and moved on.
Back at the house, he went straight to his room and slid his suitcase out from under the bed, unzipping the lid. Inside, exactly as he had left it last night, was the plastic shopping bag he’d taken from the A-frame’s kitchen, bulging with its clutter. He peered in. There was the TAG Heuer wristwatch, the iPhone, the little cheap Tracfone, the laptop, the bulging wallet, the Sabatier knife. All present and correct. No reason why it shouldn’t have been, of course, but the need to check had been sharply urgent. He closed the lid again, slid the suitcase back under the bed and left.
In the kitchen he cooked himself an omelette of duck eggs and aged Gruyère with some leftover romesco sauce that needed eating. He was famished, but after a couple of bites he felt abruptly nauseous and tipped the rest into Fu’s bowl. Fu, who had a sixth sense for any action involving his bowl, came waddling in immediately, and guzzled the whole mess down.