As he wheeled his suitcase through the pool gate, she came out of Charlie’s meditation garden, carrying her phone.
“Oh, hi,” she said, putting the phone away. “You’re back.”
He smiled, feeling the familiar jolt of reentry as he passed from that realm of secret communion with her to the plane of ordinary conversation.
“I put the pastries on the kitchen table,” he said.
She thanked him vaguely, and offered to reimburse him.
“Don’t be silly.”
She was looking even more uncomfortable than she had before.
“Listen, Matthew…”
He tilted his head sympathetically, convinced he was finally about to hear that his story last night had forced some fundamental reappraisal of the man she was married to. But he was wrong again.
“I’ve just found out there’s a direct bus from East Deerfield at nine-thirty,” she said, speaking quickly. “I need to go in this morning anyway, so I thought maybe I should take you to that instead of the later one. How would that be? It’ll save us having to go out again in the afternoon, and it’ll also be a much quicker journey for you…”
She sounded nervous, he thought. She must have been afraid he’d be upset about being turfed out early. But he was actually relieved not to have to linger. Aside from giving him more time in New York to organize himself, it would get him out of having to confront Charlie before he left, which he’d been dreading.
“Whatever’s easiest for you.”
“We’d have to leave right away.”
“No problem. I’m all packed. I just need the key.”
She looked blank.
“To your house. I’m staying there.”
“Oh. Right. I’ll get it.”
She went ahead of him, moving briskly while he wheeled his suitcase over the lawn, and met him in the kitchen with the Cobble Hill keys.
“Charlie’s still in bed, but…”
“That’s okay. I’ll see him on Thursday.” It seemed important to maintain the fiction that he was going to be returning later in the week. “Assuming I’m allowed back…” He smiled ruefully, hoping the remark might finally get them onto the topic of last night’s row. But she didn’t respond, and as soon as they got into the Lexus she started her infuriating humming once again, the soft drone as effective a barrier to conversation as a diving bell would have been. She kept it up all the way through Aurelia and onto the county road beyond. He gazed out through the window, doing his best to ignore both the humming itself and the insensitivity it seemed to imply. Small houses straggled from the outskirts of town: dilapidated old clapboard cottages and the vinyl-sided bungalows referred to, in the optimistic American parlance, as “ranch” houses, as if they had a thousand head of cattle around the back. His mind went to his cramped apartment in Bushwick, with its living room window facing a wall, and a momentary gloom descended on him until he remembered he wasn’t going to be living there anymore. The new life he’d charted out last night seemed to be only fitfully present in his mind. He concentrated, trying to make it more real for himself.
Still humming, Chloe turned onto Route 39, the busy highway into East Deerfield. He couldn’t help feeling a little hurt by her uncommunicativeness. He’d bared his soul to her, after all, and she’d obviously been moved by what he’d told her. At the very least, he thought, she owed it to him to reveal what Charlie had had to say for himself. Had he professed any guilt about his actions? Matthew wondered. Any remorse? Not that it would make any material difference at this point, but he’d have liked to know. He stared out again, watching the familiar old landmarks reel past: gravel quarry, furniture liquidation store, Swedish Auto… As they loomed up and disappeared, he tried to impress on himself that it was the last time he’d be seeing any of them; that this phase of his life, the American phase, was over. Here were the unfinished McMansions of a residential development abandoned after the financial meltdown, plywood walls blackening under peeling skins of Tyvek. Charlie liked to point these out as an example of why bankers needed to be regulated. “Repealing Glass-Steagall,” he’d declare in that righteous way of his, “was the banking equivalent of legalizing assault weapons.” It occurred to Matthew that Charlie too had disappeared out of his life for the last time; striding out through the kitchen last night and slamming the door behind him.
“So what did Charlie have to say about what I told you?” he blurted, unable to contain himself any longer.
Chloe stopped humming. They’d reached the traffic circle outside East Deerfield and she slowed down, taking the exit for the bus station. He saw the tip of her tongue dart out to moisten her lips.
“You mean about the… thing at your school?”
“Yes.”
She paused for a long moment before answering, and kept her eyes steadily on the road as she finally spoke.
“He said you were lying.”
Matthew was too stunned to speak for a moment. It was as though Charlie had just punched him in the face.
“What?” he said.
“He said you’d made the whole thing up.”
“My god! Did you believe him?”
“No. I told him I thought that would be totally out of character for you.”
“Thank you,” he said, hugely relieved. “And what did he say to that?”
Chloe glanced in the mirror, but stared forward immediately, as if avoiding his eye. He understood: she’d been put in an extremely awkward position, effectively having to choose between himself and her husband. No wonder she’d been looking so uncomfortable earlier. Still, at least she’d had the decency to abide by her own instinct for the truth. It certainly would have been easier to go along with Charlie’s monstrous little invention. She answered him, speaking with a kind of wavering but determined firmness:
“He said you were a crook. He… he said you always had been.”
“Christ! That’s a bit desperate, isn’t it?”
“He said you’d been stealing things from him all summer…”
“You’re kidding! What things?”
She swallowed. She was gripping the steering wheel tightly, he noticed; her knuckles bright as candle flames.
“Oh, little things… A pair of cuff links. Some money from his wallet. He said he’d seen you eyeing his father’s watch by the pool one day, like you were planning to take that too.”
“I don’t believe it! Don’t you think he’d have mentioned that earlier if it was true?”
“I told you, I didn’t believe him. We had a big fight about it, in case you didn’t notice.”
Matthew nodded. They stopped at a red light. Chloe stared forward in silence. He could see the vein in her neck pulsating in sharp throbs. She’d closed her mouth and was breathing in deeply through her nose as if to steady herself. The light went green and as they moved forward she spoke again:
“He said the reason he didn’t mention it earlier was that he felt sorry for you.”
“Christ almighty!”
“Personally, I think-”
She broke off. The bus station came into view ahead, the grimy white pillars of its open hangar gleaming in the sunlight.
“You think…” Matthew prompted her.
“I think it was because he felt guilty.”
“For what he did at school?”
“Yes.”
It took a moment for the implications of this to sink in.
“Wait, you’re not saying you believe him, though, are you? You don’t actually think I stole from him, do you?”
They’d reached the bus station. She pulled in and found a space at the back of the parking lot. She seemed extremely agitated, her small upper teeth biting down on one side of her lip as she maneuvered into the space.
“Your bus is here. You’d better hurry,” she said. Her voice was breathy and he could hear a distinct tremor in it.
“I’m confused, though, Chloe… You’re not saying you think I lied or… or stole from him, are you?”