by James Lasdun
• • •
The day was already stifling. Even in the shade of the little trees where Matthew was standing, it was intensely hot. He stared at the distant door, not knowing what else to do. From time to time he looked briefly away, as if to rest his eyes from a glare.
Twenty minutes passed; half an hour. As the sun climbed higher in the sky the saplings gave less shade. Beads of sweat began trickling down Matthew’s face and neck and under his shirt. He stood there, motionless. It seemed to him he had a responsibility to remain in sight of the door. At the same time, however, he couldn’t bear to think what might be going on behind it, so that even as he studiously faced out in that direction, his mind was just as studiously avoiding it.
A few crickets, day-shift replacements for the katydids that chorused at night, chirped in the foliage. Traffic exhaust mingled with fumes of hot grease. He heard a couple of people pause behind him as they crossed the parking lot. He didn’t turn and they continued on their way. He was barely sheltered now from the midmorning blaze.
Almost an hour had passed by the time the door opened and Chloe came out. Her hair looked damp. She was wearing her yoga pants again, and the black tank top. The sandals were back on too. She climbed into the silver Lexus, and Matthew watched her drive away.
He turned to leave, but then changed his mind. What if there really was an innocent explanation for the visit? He tried to come up with a possible scenario. Nothing he could think of seemed terribly likely, but if anyone was capable of secretly pursuing some unexpected but completely benign activity, it was Chloe.
After about fifteen minutes the door opened again and a man came out, carrying a leather duffel bag. He had a wide head, framed in collar-length hair, and a triangle of pointed beard. A stout, if firm-looking, belly swelled under his billowing blue shirt. Sturdy knees and stocky calves narrowed from his cargo shorts into a pair of blue deck shoes.
He unlocked the maroon car, threw in his bag, and drove away.
Matthew turned and climbed back over the guardrail. He felt as though he had been briefly concussed. Spots drifted on his vision; nausea swayed in his stomach.
Opening the door of the pickup, he was hit with a blast of fishy-smelling heat. In his rush earlier, he’d neglected to leave a window open and now the fish was half cooked. He threw it out and went back to Morelli’s, where the same man served him the same quantities of striped bass and shellfish as he had ordered before. From the man’s sly expression, he seemed to imagine Matthew had absentmindedly forgotten that he’d already made this exact purchase an hour and a half earlier.
• • •
Charlie was at the house when he got back, excavating a Brillat-Savarin cheese he’d brought from the city on his last visit. He had a weakness for pungent cheeses and a habit of gorging on them in private, scooping out the soft centers and leaving the hollowed rind.
“No tennis?” Matthew asked, putting the Morelli’s bag in the fridge. He was so uncomfortable he could barely bring himself to look at his cousin. His intention, to the extent that he’d formed one, had been to tell Charlie everything he’d seen at the motel, as soon as he could find a suitable moment. It was just an emergency response at this stage, not a considered plan. The urge to rid himself of the incident, obliterate it from his mind, was overwhelming, and telling Charlie seemed the best hope of accomplishing this.
Charlie yawned.
“Too hot.”
Chloe’s car crunched on the gravel outside a few minutes later—she must have been killing time so as not to be home from “yoga” too early—and she came in to the kitchen, smiling absently and waggling her fingers as she passed through into the sunken living room, where she collapsed in one of the sofas with a copy of the Aurelia Gazette.
She’d made the same kind of entrance numerous times and there hadn’t seemed anything remarkable about it. It was just a natural way of observing basic courtesies while asserting her wish to remain in her own private space. But now it seemed to Matthew steeped in guile.
“How was yoga?” he asked.
She didn’t seem to hear the question.
“Chlo—Matt’s asking how yoga was,” Charlie said.
“Oh, sorry, Matt. It was great, thanks.”
She flashed him her lovely smile and resumed her reading.
He had to admire her poise, but to have betrayed that smile of hers, which had always seemed to him the ultimate expression of her intense and innocent capacity for joy, to have sent that smile out on a mission so perfidious, was strangely upsetting.
Into his mind came another memory: the time her car hadn’t been in the yoga parking lot when Charlie had asked him to get his tennis racket, and she’d claimed to have been in some café instead, drinking a triple latte. He saw her again in his mind’s eye as she recounted it, making fun of her own enervated laziness with the same sparkling smile as she wore now, and the treachery seemed to spread like a crack into the past.
In the afternoon Charlie went out on some errand and Chloe disappeared upstairs. When Charlie came back he went up to join her, and the two of them stayed up there the rest of the day.
Matthew lay by the pool, watching the butterflies. Fu yelped periodically, wanting his walk, but Matthew was damned if he was going to offer to take him. He was going over the events of the morning, retracing the sequence from the moment he’d spotted Chloe ahead of him on the road below the mall, to her exit from the motel, and the man’s emergence a little later. The discomfort provoked by the memory of the events was as sharp as it had been during their actual occurrence, and he wished he could think about something else—his own problems, for instance; the question of how to get himself out of his rut, jump-start his career, find a less grim apartment—which were after all the things he’d come up here to address—but it appeared to be impossible. Again in his mind the events revolved: Chloe at the wheel in her white blouse; the blunt little jolt inside him as he’d realized something suspicious was going on; the hot vigil at the edge of the Wendy’s parking lot; Chloe in her summer skirt entering the motel . . . It seemed to him he had been presented with some difficult problem to which he alone could provide the solution, and which he was under an obligation to solve as quickly as possible. But instead of formulating an answer, or even groping in the direction of an answer, his mind simply repeated the little sequence yet again, so that once more he was turning up onto the access road behind Chloe, following her past Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods, climbing over the curved metal guardrail, and standing motionless under the thin trees, staring at the motel door with its glinting handle, while the fume-filled air grew hotter and hotter.
• • •
Around six, he started on the dinner. He’d intended to cook a version of a Catalan seafood dish that matches a firm white fish with a mixture of blood sausage and sea urchin roe, seasoned with chorizo. He had some decent chorizo from Fairway and he’d bought some Morcilla blood sausage at the place near Poughkeepsie. It wasn’t the same as Catalan Botifarra Negra, which tended to be lighter on the cloves and cinnamon, but it was the only type you could get in the States and it gave the palate the same kind of womby, cave-like background from which to fall on the sweet flesh of the bass. In place of the sea urchin roe he planned to butter-fry the oysters and scallops.
Charlie and Chloe usually drifted into the kitchen for a drink well before dinner, but they were still upstairs by the time everything was ready. Once or twice during previous visits, Matthew had heard discreet sounds of lovemaking come down through the ceiling, and he’d been vaguely listening out for them, but he hadn’t heard anything, and he supposed that was less disturbing than it would have been if he had, all things considered, though it didn’t do much to alleviate the tension inside him. The thought of telling Charlie what he’d seen that morning, while still presenting itself as his only option, had been filling him with dread. He’d have to find some way of doing it as soon as possible; preferably tonight. He didn’t want it lingering over him.
They both made an effort to be sociable when they finally came down, but he could tell they hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, and that neither of them much wanted to eat. They sat out on the terrace with the usual candlelight and katydid chorus, but it was a lackluster affair. Charlie explained apologetically that he’d eaten too much cheese earlier, and barely picked at his food. Chloe at least made an effort but she was obviously distracted by her own thoughts.
“How’s Lily getting on at camp?” Matthew asked her.
She gave some vague answer, and he felt a bit malicious for raising the subject. Soon afterward she stood up and asked if they’d mind if she went to bed.
“Everything okay?” Charlie said.
“Yes. I’m just tired.”
She yawned and waved good night.
“Another delicious dinner, Matt. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, pleasure rising in him, in spite of himself.
Alone with Charlie, he decided he might as well get the unpleasant task over. He was racking his brains to think of some appropriate way to introduce the subject, when Charlie gave a loud yawn and said that he also was feeling tired.
“Would you mind if I hit the hay?”
“Of course not,” Matthew said, relieved.
• • •
The bulk of summer still lay ahead of him, he reflected later, in bed. All year he’d been looking forward to the long hot weeks up here. He needed them badly. He’d been counting on them to restore him, bring him out of the strange funk he’d drifted into. Was he really going to have to spoil these precious days? Because one way or another that would surely be the effect if he spilled the beans on Chloe. He hadn’t thought it through earlier, but now that he did he could see that telling Charlie was going to wreck the summer—for all three of them.
But how the hell could he not tell Charlie? Wasn’t he obliged to? Obviously it would be easier not to—just to go on as if nothing had happened—but the very fact that it would be easier seemed to confirm that what he needed to do was precisely the difficult thing. Wasn’t that his responsibility as Charlie’s cousin and friend? And would it be possible, anyway, to salvage the summer by pretending nothing had happened?
Briefly, as he posed these questions, he became aware of something minutely false in presenting the problem to himself in terms of friendship and cousinly duty: a sheen of spuriousness overlaying the formula. It wasn’t how he’d seen it this morning, after all, but somehow an emergency measure conceived purely to expunge the intolerable reality from his own mind had morphed into something more altruistic, a “duty,” and he didn’t trust altruism, or not when it fronted his own impulses. His mind stalled, overcome by the complexity of the situation. On top of the question of whether or not to tell Charlie, there was the question—possibly even more unsettling—of how this new knowledge was going to affect his own relationship with Chloe; a whole dense layer of potential damage that he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to inspect.
He thought of Charlie over at the Zendo that morning; pictured him in the lotus position, pinched fingers on his sunburned knees: being “in the moment” while Chloe was doing whatever she’d been doing back in that motel room . . . It occurred to him that he had actually been the one in Charlie’s “moment,” and that, far from being a state of bliss, it had been extremely painful.
It was somewhat typical of Charlie, he found himself thinking, to arrange for someone else to feel his pain.
five
Several days passed. The same routines filled them as before. But their regularity no longer had the same agreeably lulling effect on Matthew. When Chloe set off to take pictures or attend one of her classes, it was impossible to avoid the question of whether she was in fact going off to meet the man from the motel, and the thought would leave him jangling with useless emotions. Meanwhile the sight of Charlie working or meditating, or driving off in his tennis gear, formed an image of increasingly irritating innocence. Even his own pleasantly mindless activities were losing their charm, their soothing rhythms broken by gusts of crackling interference from a situation that had nothing to do with the problems he was trying to sort out.
But what was he supposed to do? The feeling that he ought to tell Charlie about the motel remained undiminished despite recurrences of that sense of something false about it, or at least something glossed-over. Yet he was finding it vastly more difficult to tell Charlie than he had foreseen. Whenever he tried, a curious, contradictory impulse would take over. Cornering Charlie in his meditation garden or down in the wine cellar, he would begin by steering the conversation to the closeness and longevity of their friendship, meaning to prepare Charlie for the necessary blow. But within moments another part of his mind would send out torrents of diversionary chatter; meaningless blather about his own life and plans—the food truck idea, or his hope of being able to afford a bigger apartment before long, or any other topic besides the one he’d intended to raise. Charlie would look at him strangely at these moments, and Matthew knew he risked appearing a little crazy, but it was always a relief to come away from him with the secret intact, the blow still undelivered.
Who wants to be the bearer of such tidings? If Charlie believed him he’d be devastated. If he didn’t—and that was obviously a possibility—he would think Matthew was deliberately stirring up trouble. Either way he would almost certainly resent him. And it wasn’t just the summer that stood to be ruined as a result, but their whole, precariously reconstructed friendship, which for all its stresses and imbalances had become as important to Matthew this time around as it had been the first time.
So he prevaricated: told himself he needed more evidence before doing something so potentially destructive; that he’d perhaps misconstrued the episode at the motel; that Chloe and the man might have been transacting some perfectly legitimate business in his room; that even the seemingly undeniable element of deception—claiming she was going to yoga, changing her clothes—had some innocent explanation. He tried to convince himself that even if he found rock solid evidence of an affair, his duty was actually to protect Charlie rather than inflict pain on him. Or else that it was to find some way of quietly bringing the affair to an end: confronting Chloe, dropping a hint or just somehow making her feel he was watching her . . . All of which seemed to him equally impossible and repugnant.
What he settled on, in the end, was the formula that it was simply none of his business. None of my business, he would tell himself firmly as Chloe left the house, and the agitation started up in his heart. None of my business, as the unruffled contentment of Charlie’s demeanor prompted that sudden sharp urge to shatter it. None of my business . . . And after a while a fragile calm would descend on him.
• • •
One morning he was at the Greenmarket in Aurelia, waiting to pay, when he became aware of a presence at the next register. Before even turning he caught a familiar signal on his antennae. A direct glance confirmed it. There was the beefily built figure, the Vandyke beard, the gray-streaked dark hair falling in wiry clusters on either side of the broad, sharp-tipped chin. The untucked shirt, pink this time, was worn in the same billowing style, over knee-length breeches. It was the man from the motel.
He stared, unable to stop himself.
The man looked solidly in his forties; hale and undimmed, but with no trace of the youthful uncertainty men in their thirties still project. His blocky nose jutted. His eyes were small but lively, glancing around the store with a ready-to-be-entertained look. It didn’t surprise Matthew to hear him comment on what a gorgeous day it was to the sales clerk when his turn at the register came. What did come as a surprise was the accent: it was the self-delighting twang of a Southerner used to being found charming in the North. As his purchases crossed the scanner, Matthew observed them
closely, and with growing consternation: bread, milk, coffee, olive oil, eggs, sea salt: not the purchases of someone staying in a motel. A bag of kumquats and some bars of chocolate appeared; still more disconcerting.
“Paper or plastic?” the clerk asked.
“Oh, I think I’ll take the paper, miss. A day like this makes you want to save the planet, dudn’ it?”
He left, carrying the bag against his stomach. Matthew, who was still waiting in line, considered jettisoning his own shopping so as to drive after him, but resisted, not wanting to draw attention to himself.
As it happened the man was walking, not driving. Leaving the store, Matthew saw him at the upper exit of the parking lot. Matthew put his own shopping into the truck, and walked after him, keeping well back. After crossing Tailor Street the man cut through a passageway next to the hardware store into a quiet back alley that led past a communal vegetable garden to the bridge across the Millstream creek. Matthew followed him over the bridge, where he turned left along Veery Road, the street that ran parallel with the creek. It was a residential street of houses in large private yards with tall hedges and fruit trees and rustic split-rail fences. There was no sidewalk. The houses on the left backed onto the high bank of the creek, and it was into the driveway of one of these—a simple whitewashed A-frame with a screened-in porch—that the man now entered. He was lifting the domed black lid off a Weber grill with his free hand as Matthew reached the driveway. The same hand a moment later stuck a key in the front door of the A-frame, opening it. The maroon vintage car Matthew had seen outside the motel was parked in the driveway. It was a Chrysler LeBaron.
Matthew walked on to the end of the road, which eventually curved around to intersect with the county road, and made a left onto Tailor Street. From there he crossed to the Greenmarket parking lot and climbed back into his truck.
So, he was here. Not ten miles away in an East Deerfield motel this time, but right here in Aurelia. Staying here, it appeared; renting or borrowing that A-frame. Buying supplies for himself. Stocking up (the thought sent its own painful reverberation through Matthew) on Chloe’s favorite snack.