She wasn’t secretive, exactly, but the essential elements of her nature did seem stowed in deep pockets hidden from public view-hidden even from each other, somehow.
Once, when he was up for a weekend visit, staying in the main house, he’d come down to an early breakfast to find her just returning from somewhere in the car. It turned out she’d been at Sunday mass in East Deerfield. He’d had no idea she was religious, or for that matter that she was Catholic. Their daughter had been at the house that weekend but Chloe hadn’t brought her along, which had seemed to further emphasize the very private nature of the thing.
Music too. He knew she was a discerning listener-early on they’d discovered a shared enthusiasm for the voice of Beth Gibbons, its strange vacillations between sweetness and caustic harshness. But Chloe turned out to be more than just a consumer of music. He’d happened to be passing their street in Cobble Hill one evening, just as Charlie was arriving home from work, and Charlie had invited him in for a drink. Piano music came from upstairs as they stepped in. A Beethoven sonata, he’d guessed, played by Ashkenazi or some other master of the Romantic. But the music stopped dead in the middle of a passage of complex glissandi, starting again a moment later, and he’d realized there was someone up there actually playing it. He’d asked Charlie who it was. “Oh, that’s Chlo,” he’d said, without great interest. “She’s good!” Matthew had exclaimed. Charlie had shrugged. “I think she wanted to be a pro at some time but she wasn’t quite up to it. She only plays now when there’s no one around. Or when she thinks there isn’t.”
And then, just a couple of days ago, Matthew had discovered another of these secret pockets of Chloe’s personality.
It had been a baking, breezeless afternoon. The three of them had been lazing by the pool, when he saw that Chloe was looking closely at some of the flowering shrubs that ran along one side of the fence. Beyond enjoying the occasional scent of lavender wafting from them, Matthew hadn’t taken any notice of these plantings. But as Chloe gazed steadily and purposefully along them, raising a pair of binoculars to her eyes from time to time even though the bed was only a few yards away, he’d started gazing at them too.
“What are you looking at?”
“The butterflies.”
Only then had he become conscious of the mass of wings in as many bright colors as the flowers themselves, trembling on the blossoms or hovering in the air above them.
It turned out Chloe had had the bed put in that spring and had selected the plantings specifically to attract butterflies. Handing Matthew the binoculars, she’d told him what the different plants were and which species each one attracted. Yellow potentilla for the coppers, hackberry for the checked fritillaries, purple swamp milkweed for the monarchs. At this proximity the heavy Zeiss binoculars organized the space into a succession of flat, richly lit planes in which everything looked, paradoxically, more three-dimensional than it did to the naked eye. The effect was somewhat hallucinatory, and in fact, as he lost himself among the enormously magnified wings and velvety petals in which, alongside the butterflies, huge bumblebees with bulging gold bags of pollen at their thighs were cruising, Matthew remembered long summer afternoons in his teens when he would lie in the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, tripping on Green Emeralds or some other species of acid left unsold from his morning jaunts down to the flyover at the bottom of the Portobello Road and would seem to cross from his drab existence into some realm of fantastical enchantment.
That was Chloe; full of little surprises: pockets and recesses, inlets and oubliettes, with music in them, and Sunday mass, and a garden full of butterflies.
four
The temperature fell a little. It was still too hot to eat meat, but at dinner, after three days of chilled soups and composed salads, Charlie said he needed something to get his teeth into. The next morning Matthew called the fish counter at Morelli’s to see what they had in fresh. It turned out they’d just had a delivery of line-caught striped bass from Nantucket.
“It’ll go fast,” the man said.
Charlie and Chloe had gone off a few minutes earlier; Charlie in the convertible to an early sitting at the monastery, Chloe in the Lexus to her yoga class in Aurelia. Matthew had told them he was going to spend the morning by the pool, but when he found out about the bass he fired up the pickup and set off for East Deerfield, a half-hour drive.
The striped bass had been laid out on the counter when he got there. It looked superb, the flesh a gleaming alabaster white, the thin, stippled stripe down its length a dark reddish color, as if a wounded bird had hopped across a field of snow. Nantucket striped bass fed on the sweet-fleshed baby squid that spawned off the eastern end of the island, rather than on mackerel or other oily creatures, which gave them an incomparably delicate flavor. Matthew bought two large slabs and for good measure some oysters and scallops, and had them packed in ice. Charlie had given him a credit card for buying provisions.
He was driving along the strip of gas stations and fast-food joints that led out of town when he saw a silver Lexus peel off to the right at the stoplight fifty yards ahead. As it climbed the steep access road to the mall, Chloe’s head appeared in profile at the wheel. She’d changed out of the black tank top that she’d been wearing when she left the house, into a white blouse with short puffy sleeves, but it was definitely her.
He was confused, seeing her here in East Deerfield when she’d said she was going to her yoga class in Aurelia. He supposed she must have remembered some chore she had to do in East Deerfield. But even as he articulated the thought, he was aware that it didn’t account for the change of clothing.
He was planning a stop at the mall himself to buy razors and toothpaste, and he kept his eye on the Lexus as he made the same turn. Actually there was a whole complex of malls and big-box stores up there above the town, with parking lots around them and a labyrinth of branch roads looping in between.
At the top of the access road, where Lowe’s and Walmart were signed off to the left, Chloe turned right, and although Matthew had planned to do his shopping at Walmart, he turned right also. Jumbled together in his mind as he made the turn were the thought that he could just as easily do his shopping at Target, which was in this direction, and the memory of a brief exchange he’d had with Chloe a few days ago when he’d asked if she’d found another anniversary present for Charlie and she hadn’t seemed to know what he was talking about until he reminded her that she’d felt guilty about the T-shirt. “Oh,” she’d said with a sort of brusque vagueness, “no, I didn’t find anything.” He’d dropped the subject but her obtuseness had seemed odd, and it came back to him now.
Keeping well behind, he followed Chloe past the sprawling, polygonal fortress that housed Target, Best Buy, Sears and Dick’s Sporting Goods. He was just curious, was what he told himself, though he was aware of that not being entirely the truth. If he’d stopped to analyze himself more exactingly, he would have realized that he was amusing himself with a kind of playacting of husbandly suspicion. Beyond the Sears entrance, she branched off onto a subsidiary road that led back downhill past a Wendy’s and around a hairpin bend. As Matthew rounded the bend, he saw that she’d turned off into the parking lot of a large horseshoe-shaped building.