“Designated vibeswatcher too,” he added with a gummy grin. “And Shanti Sena. That’s a peacekeeper.”
Matthew smiled back:
“I like the lingo!”
“Yep. See, when you quit Babylon you gotta make your own language for your own values. I’m saying, like Babylon talks about the e-conomy and the e-go, whereas we’re all about the we-conomy and the we-go.”
“Nice.”
Two girls came by.
“Hey, now, Pike,” they said.
“Hey, now.”
They squatted down on the rock. One of them had pale green hair and a face like a kitten. The other had a lot of metal in her eyebrows and nose. They looked about eighteen. The air around them filled with a candylike fragrance.
Pike (that seemed to be the old guy’s name) told them that he and Matthew had been talking about the Family.
“I’m interested in it,” Matthew said encouragingly.
“Cool,” the one with the piercings said.
Her friend said, “Fantastic.”
Both eyed Matthew warmly, as if excited to be sitting down with some obvious Babylonian.
“I’m explaining the lingo,” Pike said, chuckling softly. His thin old legs looked awfully hairy next to the smooth limbs of the girls in their very short cut-off jeans.
“You mean like Zuzus and Wahwahs?” the green-haired girl said.
“What are those?” Matthew asked.
“Different types of tasty morsels, you could say,” Pike offered.
“Drainbows,” the other girl offered, “Hohners, Snifters.”
“All different types you find at the gatherings,” Pike put in.
“Heil Holies, Blissninnies.”
“Blissninnies!” Matthew repeated with a laugh. He was enjoying the little interlude, as much for its unexpectedness as anything else. He was about to ask the girls how they had come to join the Rainbows, when a tall, shirtless guy in a pair of ragged shorts walked barefoot slowly across their rock and the girls fell silent. He had long ringleted hair with gold glints in it, well-defined muscles and strong features that made Matthew think of Dürer’s famous self-portrait. As he passed by, Matthew saw that he had 99% inked on his left shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but a few paces beyond their rock he turned around and, looking at the girls, made a laconic beckoning motion with one hand, turning again and continuing on his way: confident, apparently, that they would get up and follow him. They did.
Pike, glancing at Matthew, gave a sort of chuckle and busied himself with his darning.
It wasn’t much of an incident, but it made an unpleasant impression on Matthew. He assumed the girls must have known the guy. But even so, that casually proprietorial gesture rankled with him. It seemed consciously insulting. The guy’s physical appearance, which had struck Matthew as extremely calculated, also rankled. No shoes, no pack or bag, no clutter of any kind; as if he were proclaiming the utter self-sufficiency of the human animal, at least in his own fine case.
It occurred to Matthew that although he’d always been drawn to these types, he’d always been slightly irked by them too, regarding their rejection of “Babylon” as a tacit admission that they lacked what it took to succeed there, but that, unlike him, they refused to accept its judgment against them. So that for one of them to present himself as somehow, a priori, a superior being was like a challenge that ought to have been answered.
“Who was that guy?” he asked.
Pike looked up from his bag.
“That’s Torssen. He just showed up last week. We call him the Prince.”
“Why’s that?”
“He likes to organize shit, I guess.”
“You mean he’s political?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“I noticed the tatt.”
“Right.”
“Is there much of a connection between you guys and Occupy?”
Pike knitted his brows.
“See, we’re historically more a spiritual thing than a political thing. It’s like a different movie, dig? Our movie’s not about protest so much as, what do you give some kid who works minimum wage at a convenience store with no hope of getting out? They gotta have something to be for, not just against.”
Matthew nodded. He had detected a definite lack of enthusiasm on Pike’s part for the “Prince,” and this endeared the old guy to him.
He smiled, suddenly amused at his own foolishness for letting something so trivial get to him. He went over the funny words in his mind, making an effort to commit them to memory. It would be something to talk about at dinner. Chloe would appreciate it. He could see that guileless involuntary smile of hers already in his mind’s eye; feel in advance the appreciative brush of her hand on his arm.
Toward the middle of July the weather grew hotter, and with the heat came a muggy humidity that made it hard to be outside, even up on the mountain.
Chloe, when she wasn’t out photographing or at one of her classes, sat in the living room with the AC on high. Charlie also went out less. It was too hot for tennis and he spent most of his time working or meditating in the pool house, which was also air-conditioned.
Then the temperatures soared even higher, spiking into the high nineties.
The three of them sat in the living room one morning playing scrabble. Matthew’s family had been avid scrabble players and Charlie had been introduced to the game when he’d gone to live with them as a teenager. He hadn’t much liked it-it hadn’t accorded with his sense of what was “cool”: a novel concept in Matthew’s old-fashioned home, but extremely important to the adolescent Charlie-and he hadn’t been very good at it either. And yet as an adult he’d incorporated it into his own household rituals when Lily learned to read. The game seemed to have a significant emotional resonance for him, and Matthew was always touched when he suggested playing. It was as if his cousin were acknowledging the ancient bond between them.
Someone had managed “sioux” and as a joke Matthew put a p at the end of it.
After a moment Chloe burst into laughter.
“I don’t get it,” Charlie said.
Chloe explained:
“Soup. He’s spelling ‘soup.’ ”
Matthew made to take the p away but Chloe said to leave it.
“It’s hilarious.”
“Well. I’m not scoring the i or the x,” Charlie said.
“Don’t be a spoilsport, Charlie,” Chloe told him quietly.
A frown crossed Charlie’s face, but he said nothing.
After the game he left for New York, where he had a late afternoon meeting. A little later Chloe said she had to go out too.
“Anything interesting?” Matthew asked.
“Oh, I need to buy a present for Charlie,” she said vaguely, and then added, “I’ve been feeling guilty about that T-shirt I bought him. It was so ungenerous compared with the bracelet he gave me. I want to get him something else.”
Matthew wished her luck. He had no idea what their financial arrangements were, but he assumed the money was all from Charlie’s side and it amused him to think of Chloe feeling guilty about underspending Charlie’s money on a present for Charlie and then assuaging that guilt by spending more. At the same time he was touched, as always, by her quietly scrupulous devotion to her husband.
Later, lying on his bed in the guesthouse, he found himself thinking about the many different ways in which you can know a person, and the many kinds of knowledge that might not help you know them at all.
In Charlie’s case, it seemed to him that the résumé more or less evoked the man. He was pretty sure that if he knew only that Charlie had become head prefect at the school they went to in London, had gone on to Dartmouth as a legacy student, had worked in banking and then hedge fund management, was currently writing a screed on socially responsible investing, played tennis avidly, and practiced some form of Zen Buddhism, the picture that would form in his mind would be pretty close to the actual Charlie he knew. But in Chloe’s case nothing he ever learned about her in the biographical sense-that she’d grown up in suburban Indianapolis, the daughter of an engineer and a music teacher, that her boyfriend before Charlie had been a medical researcher for the World Health Organization, that she had once been one of Condé Nast’s go-to photographers for fruits and berries-seemed to have any bearing at all on his actual knowledge of her.