by James Lasdun
“Absolutely. Absolutely.”
Now he was afraid he’d misjudged Charlie’s mood after all, or else scared him off.
“I guess I’m comparing it to the way you described your relationship with Nikki.”
Charlie’s jaw muscle clenched a moment.
“Yeah, well, it’s definitely very different from that.”
“You used to get suspicious whenever she went out alone, right?”
“I was an idiot.”
“Though you did always, I mean . . .”
Matthew faltered, sensing danger.
“I did what?”
“Well, you did always maintain that your suspicions were probably justified . . .”
A frown crossed Charlie’s features. He was silent for a moment.
“I’ve evolved since then,” he said finally. “I think it’s important to take responsibility for your own character defects. I’ve tried to.”
He looked at his watch.
“Listen, Matt, I’m thinking I might head up to Hudson. There’s a burgundy tasting I sort of want to go to.”
“That sounds fun.”
Charlie stood up. “Well . . . you’re welcome to join me.”
Matthew hesitated; a car ride together might be just the thing to force him to bring this distasteful business to an end. He glanced back over at Charlie, intending to accept the invitation, but was stalled by an expression in Charlie’s eyes. They seemed to be regarding him with an odd neutrality.
“I mean, it’s kind of an invitation thing,” Charlie said, looking away. “But I’m sure it’ll be fine if you come along as my guest.”
Reflexively, though with a dim sense of being a little cowardly, Matthew grasped at the excuse to delay action once again.
“Oh. Thanks. Actually, maybe I’ll stay here. Work on my tan . . .”
Charlie nodded.
“I’ll see you later, then.”
He left, grabbing his keys from the countertop.
Matthew sat down at the table where Charlie had been. It struck him that it might have been tactless to mention Nikki. Not that he’d had any reason to suspect Charlie was still sore about his ex after all these years, but he did know it was a mistake to underestimate Charlie’s sensitivity in general. Stupid of me, he thought. Next time he’d go straight to the point. Say what he’d seen at the mall and let Charlie take it or leave it. No more beating about the bush.
It was five o’clock. He stood up, wondering what to do with himself. Two or three hours of solitude lay ahead of him. It should have been an appealing prospect, but it was filling him with curious apprehensiveness, as if the blank stretch of time were mined with strange perils. It seemed to him, oddly, that he was capable of doing something he might regret if he wasn’t careful, though he couldn’t imagine what form any such action might take. He considered his options.
Really he ought to get started on the project of taking stock of himself that he’d managed to avoid so far. He could have a swim, a skinny-dip even, since he had the pool to himself, and then lie in a deck chair and do some good hard thinking.
It occurred to him that, for that matter, he had the whole house to himself. He was standing by the staircase now, a flight of polished planks that seemed held in their curving succession by pure air. He’d had no occasion to go up them on this visit, but there was no particular sense that the upstairs was off-limits. He began climbing.
The air up there was different: warmer, sweeter, redolent of soaps and lotions and Chloe’s scent rather than the cooking smells and faint rawhide odor that permeated the downstairs spaces.
He didn’t have anything specific in mind. “I’ll see if they’ve done anything different to the spare room,” he said to himself, opening the first door. The blond wood sleigh bed still dominated the room but there was a new dresser next to it: deco, he guessed from its simple lines. Some fifties-looking ceramic vases had been arranged along the windowsill. Not that interesting, he thought, articulating the words as if to supply himself with some kind of harmless official motivation for moving on along the corridor.
The guest bathroom didn’t tempt him. Nor did Lily’s room, though the door was open and he was briefly nonplussed by a pair of eyes glittering in its curtained darkness: a rocking horse. The room Charlie used for an office had even less allure; almost a kind of antimagnetism, as though walled in the aura of faint tedium that Charlie’s existence, rich and privileged as it was, often seemed to give off. The master bedroom was next. He paused before opening the door, frowning. Further justification seemed required by some scrupulous inner agency before he could allow himself to proceed. Evidence, he found himself thinking. Some vital evidence that might, in spite of all indications to the contrary, exonerate Chloe, could be lying around somewhere. What if he was wrong about everything after all, and was at the point of jeopardizing, possibly even sacrificing, his two most precious relationships because of some absurd misreading of the situation? Didn’t he owe it to himself—to everyone, in fact—to go forward?
Dubious as he felt it to be, the formula enabled him to lift the old-fashioned black iron latch. Pushing the door open, he seemed to step into a tumult of scents, colors, emotions, too overwhelming to allow any action to occur other than a kind of stupefied swaying, and any observation other than that of his own reeling dizziness. The question of a search, methodical or otherwise, was gone from his mind, utterly eradicated, as if it had never been present. He took in the fact that the bed was unmade, the floor either side of it strewn with books, magazines, dissheveled bathrobes and pajamas. Laundry spilled from a basket in the adjoining walk-in closet, under racks of jackets and skirts. His eye skimmed it and in his hand a moment later was a pair of silken underwear, insubstantial as a mist-net but charged with forces that had set his heart slamming in his chest. Jesus Christ, he thought. This was not what he wanted to want. He remembered an exchange with his father: one of their very last, as it happened. Charlie, recently arrived in their household, had been overheard somewhere using the phrase “jerking off,” not at that time a common expression in the British lexicon. Later, in private, Matthew’s father had asked Matthew what it meant. Embarrassed, Matthew had explained, and his father, taken aback, had reacted with the words, “That’s something I hope you’ll never do”; an injunction that might have been forgotten had he not disappeared so soon after, but that, by virtue of its timing, had taken on the gravity of a biblical commandment, forever conjoining the activity it proscribed with a feeling of burning shame. Even allowing for the more relaxed and modern attitude Matthew had absorbed over time from more enlightened sources (and which he guessed his father himself, had he been caught less off his guard, might well have professed), the exchange had infected Matthew with an irrational disgust for the act, which, one way or another, all too often took the form of self-disgust. He tossed the garment back into the froth of Turnbull & Asser shirts and Lanvin yoga pants and walked quickly out of the room, thoroughly unnerved at the devious machinations of his own mind in bringing him up there in the first place.
Downstairs he went immediately outside to the truck and drove into town, heading straight for Veery Road. This, he realized, was what he had really been wanting to do all along.
The LeBaron was in the driveway of the A-frame. The Lexus was behind the office buildings at the end of the road. So much for the photographic expedition to Fletcher Road. It was exactly as he had foreseen. And yet, again, it gave him a jolting shock to see the imagined act made literal.
Evidently Chloe had gambled on no one taking her up on her invitation to join her out at the mailbox. Or else she’d just counted on being able to brazen it out, somehow, if they did and found she wasn’t there.
He drove back to the house—what else was there to do?—and started on the dinner. Having failed to find cartridges for his foamer that morning, he’d put white beans in a Crock-Pot of stock with two heads of garlic and a half pint of olive oil and managed to find a leg of lamb that didn’t look as if
it had spent the last decade on the high seas in a refrigerated shipping container. What he had in mind was a simple gigot d’agneau aux haricots, the leg hot-roasted country-style to make the fats run gold under the crisped parchment of skin while the meat stayed tender and pink. He’d first tasted the dish at the Trumilou in Paris when he and his father had taken their trip around Europe. The combination of the tongue-thick slices of succulent meat, with the soft beans in their creamy juices, had made a powerful impression on him; both elements so robust his mouth had felt as if it were at the confluence of two big rivers of flavor, and it was one of the first dishes he had set out to master when he became a chef.
He studded the joint with rosemary sprigs and rubbed it in lemon juice (in Iceland they glazed it with coffee, something he’d always meant to try), and started to prepare a fricassee of oyster mushrooms for the appetizer. The previous day he’d given a ride to a hitchhiker, a barefoot young guy who reeked of pot and was trying to sell wild mushrooms to the local stores. Matthew had asked what he had, and he’d opened the sack he was carrying, filling the truck cabin with the loamy pungency of what he assured Matthew were chanterelles, something he called “chicken of the woods,” and oyster mushrooms. The latter had looked safely unambiguous and Matthew had bought the lot.
He got a vegetable bouillon going and went down to the cellar: the recipe called for some muscadet. Being in the basement, which was very much Charlie’s domain, got him thinking of their discussion earlier, or rather of his failure, once again, to open the real subject he’d wanted to discuss. He wondered if he’d just been plain wrong about Charlie seeming uneasy when Chloe left. Either way, it was pretty obvious he wasn’t ready to hear that his wife was cheating on him, and as Matthew found what he was looking for—a 2008 Domaine de l’Ecu—and carried it back upstairs, he found himself reversing his earlier resolution to take a more direct approach, deciding once and for all (or so he hoped; he knew from past experience that these mental circlings of his had a way of defying all efforts to stop them once they started) to ignore things and just enjoy the summer.
None of my business, he told himself as he diced the shallots and began wiping clean the shelved clumps of oyster mushrooms. None of my business, as he debated whether to run out in the truck again on what would almost certainly be a fool’s errand to track down some real cane sugar in the “ethnic” aisle at the grocery store or stay put and hope the so-called brown sugar in Charlie’s pantry, which would almost certainly be white sugar sprayed with molasses, would make a not-too-calamitous substitute for cassonade.
He was aware that he could get a little obsessive at times about the finer points of his recipes. It was his own kind of Zen practice, in a sense. What all the niceties of bamboo breathing, positive versus absolute samadhi and so on were for Charlie, balanced flavors and correct technique were for him. The patient pursuit of culinary perfection was his way of escaping his own “wandering thoughts” and achieving the no-mind state of mushin. At any rate, the little mantra, None of my business, seemed to be working, and as he assembled the fricassee he felt a welcome blankness descend.
But it didn’t last long. Without warning his calm was shattered by one of those waves of apprehension that render entirely futile any notion one might have of being able to master one’s own mind. With it came an image of Chloe and her lover fucking in the A-frame, and the realization that however much he might wish to ignore what she was doing, it was going to be impossible.
Yes, it was none of his business, it was Charlie and Chloe’s business alone. And yet it was his own sense of reality that was being threatened. The geometry of his relationship with Charlie and Chloe might shift as one of them drew closer or further away, but it was permanently and excusively triangular. Inconceivable, somehow, had been the possibility of a fourth figure breaking open this shape altogether, and the intrusion of such a figure was proving remarkably difficult to accept. It was like having to believe, suddenly, in a fourth prime color, or a second moon.
• • •
Charlie returned from his wine tasting a little before eight. He came into the kitchen carrying a mixed case of burgundies and looking much happier than he had before.
“Let’s open one of these babies, shall we? What’s for dinner?”
“Gigot d’agneau.”
“Aha!”
Charlie selected a bottle from the box and uncorked it.
“I love your gigot d’agneau.”
“Thanks.”
“Here.” Charlie poured him a glass. “Cheers.”
“First time I had it,” Matthew said, “was with my dad, on our trip across Europe. It made an indelible impression on me.”
“Oh?” Charlie composed his features into a look of polite interest. It always seemed to make him nervous to hear Matthew talking about his father. Usually Matthew avoided the subject, but occasionally he felt a perverse desire to bring it up, unfurl it like an old rug and waft its mildewy odors in Charlie’s direction. He wasn’t sure why. Certainly he didn’t regard Charlie as implicated in any way in his father’s misfortunes. Not even Charlie’s father, Uncle Graham, could really be held responsible for them. True, in his informal capacity as the family’s financial advisor he had talked Matthew’s father into taking advantage of the new terms by which Lloyd’s was making it possible for middle-class investors to join its hitherto exclusively super-rich club of “names.” But there was never any suggestion that he had any inkling of the Armageddon of claims about to descend on the company, or that he stood to profit by recruiting his brother-in-law. And even if privately, irrationally, Matthew’s father did accuse his brother-in-law of all kinds of heinous treacheries and deceptions, obviously Charlie himself, a boy at the time like Matthew, had nothing to do with it.
Still, as Matthew knew from his own experience, a father’s deeds have a way of lingering in the psychic atmosphere of their offspring. Which was perhaps why Charlie was looking so uncomfortable right now. The contented air he’d come home with had left him. He gave the impression that he would have liked to remove himself from Matthew’s presence, and yet he seemed at the same time transfixed, his wine glass stalling in the air as he waited, head bowed, to hear what else Matthew might be about to bring up from the past.
But in fact Matthew had had no clear motive in bringing up his father in the first place, and, seeing Charlie’s discomfort, was as eager to move away from the subject as Charlie was.
“Anyway, it should be ready in about twenty minutes,” he said.
Charlie’s tension seemed to lessen.
“Sounds good.”
“I assume Chloe’ll be back by then . . . ?”
“I would think. Magic hour’s pretty much over.” Charlie checked his watch and looked out at the sky, from which the pink evening light had almost drained.
“I think I’ll sit outside for a bit,” he said.
He crossed the terrace and turned toward his meditation garden. Passing between tall viburnum bushes, he checked his watch again, and disappeared from view.
He was very attached to that watch, a Patek Philippe Calatrava that had belonged to his father. It had a loud tick and Matthew had often wondered how Charlie could get into any serious samadhi state with that racket going on.
• • •
Chloe came home as Matthew was putting the finishing touches to the dinner. She seemed at once fragile and elated: full of smiles and clearly wanting to share her joy, though just as clearly at a loss how to do so without giving herself away. Her solution seemed to be an exaggerated all-round friendliness. She watched Matthew with a fond smile as he finished the fricassee.
“We’re so lucky,” she said, “to know someone who cooks as well as you do, Matt.”
His heart swelled helplessly. Fu waddled in, and instead of ignoring him as she usually did, Chloe knelt down and hugged him. Rolling onto his side, he made a quiet crooning that sounded like the expression of feelings remarkably similar to Matthew’s own at that moment: a grief-suf
fused love.
“Did you get what you were looking for?” he asked.
Her look of joy faded, and he immediately regretted forcing her back into her lie.
“I think so,” she said.
He thought of asking her if he could see some of the pictures, but he didn’t quite have the nerve. Besides, he assumed she’d fob him off with some story about not having taken any digital photos, even though he knew for a fact that she always shot on both digital and film.
But a few minutes later, when Charlie came in, she took one of her digital cameras out of its case.
“Here, Charlie.” She turned on the monitor. “This is where I was.” She glanced at Matthew, and it seemed to him she must have sensed his suspicions.
Charlie scrolled through the pictures.
“Very pretty,” he commented.
“Take a look, Matt,” Chloe said. “This was your idea, don’t forget.”
She held the monitor up to Matthew. His heart gave a brief lurch, as if there might be a reason to expect anything other than what she showed him. It was just a mailbox on a country road by a cornfield, with a red and white Dutch barn in the background. The mailbox itself was an old-fashioned grooved metal canister painted in bright enamels with a picture of baby turkeys following their mother past a simple rendering of the same cornfield and barn. On the rustic wooden stand to which it was fastened, a clay flowerpot with a midnight-blue petunia plant had been set. Low sunlight, coming in gold across the cornfield, made the tangled flowers glow above the little scene, and the whole image was given an extra, jewel-like gleam by the monitor’s liquid crystal display.
“There,” she said, smiling gently at Matthew, and he felt like a jealous husband who has just been offered an acceptable alibi and finds himself pathetically grateful for it, even though he knows perfectly well he is still being lied to.
It really was as if he had become Charlie’s stand-in; a kind of surrogate cuckold, condemned to feel all the injury but deprived of any means of doing anything about it, even protesting.