by James Lasdun
He sat down on the futon. A flock of birds crossed the skylight, catching the sun on their undersides as they banked upward. Distant sounds floated over the trees: traffic, a blurred screech of feedback from a PA system. But it was peaceful all the same, up here in the apex of the A, and he felt no urgency to leave. It didn’t really seem likely that the man—Grollier, wasn’t that his name?—would come home before going to the fireworks, but even the small possibility that he might was of oddly little concern to Matthew. If anything, he noticed, it seemed to excite him fractionally. He found himself toying with the idea of unrolling the futon and staying there all night; not as a serious plan, but with the bemused interest one experiences when an unexpected fantasy lays open some wholly new realm of speculative pleasure.
He was turning over the components of this peculiar fantasy, trying to understand why it should cause this faintly pleasurable apprehensiveness, when he became aware of lights probing down the gravel of the driveway. He knelt up, peering over the balustrade through the front window. He had been in the house barely fifteen minutes! And anyway, hadn’t he heard the man say he was going straight on to the fireworks? Hadn’t he seen for himself the picnic blanket and thermos in the car? The lights approached, separating into two beams as they came around the slight curve in the short driveway. Alarm spread through him, and yet for a long moment he did nothing; merely stared into the approaching glare, surrendering to the situation with an almost luxurious helplessness, as if the inertia building inside him all these months had finally rendered him completely incapable of movement. Only by an extreme effort of will was he able to rouse himself. Grabbing the balustrade, he hauled himself to his feet and took a few steps down the ladder, trying to calculate whether Grollier would see him if he made a dash for the back door, and whether it would matter even if he did, since he didn’t know who Matthew was.
But as the lights went out, he saw that the car itself was not in fact the LeBaron, but the Lexus.
For a moment he thought he must simply be seeing things. In his mind Chloe was so firmly on her way to her cousin Jana in Lake Classon, it was impossible to accept she was here, and he stared, waiting for the hallucination to dissolve. But it was Chloe. He watched her climb out of the car and walk over to the Weber grill, lifting the lid. A puzzled look crossed her face and briefly the hope rose in him that she would leave now. But she put back the lid and, undeterred by the absence of the key, proceeded toward the front door. He stood on the ladder, unsure what to do. If he went any farther down, she would see movement through the window. Already she was almost at the door. Only as he heard the handle turn did some dim instinct of self-preservation galvanize him, drawing him back up the ladder and behind the balustrade in time to conceal himself before the door opened.
She had her phone to her ear as she came in. With her free hand she switched on the light. Afraid she might look up and see him between the wooden slats, which were carved at their edges in the shape of ornate brackets, Matthew sat clenched and unblinking.
“Wade,” she said into the phone.
He saw her pick the key from the ledge where he had left it, examine it a moment and set it down again.
“No, I’m at the house . . . Your house, Wade . . . I thought you might want to come say goodbye one more time.”
She was wearing one of her thin, patterned skirts with a short-sleeved top, tailored at the waist.
“I know. I’ll call her.”
She moved in quick steps through the room with the phone to her ear, placing her hand lightly on the love seat, the armchair, the side of the ladder. As she moved toward the back of the house, disappearing out of sight, Matthew let himself breathe again. Very carefully, he backed into the corner of the little space, as far as possible from view.
He heard her laugh.
“You know you want to, Wade . . . You know you do . . . Yes, but they never start before ten . . . I know, but this is Aurelia. All the bands in town have to do their Jimi Hendrix impressions first . . .”
Then she was directly below him, in the bedroom.
“Oh, Wade,” he heard. “You really are leaving, aren’t you? I’m looking at your suitcase . . . Yes, there’s an early bus, around six; easier than driving . . . I know . . . I know, Wade, I do too, but Lily’s coming, and anyway, I just can’t.”
She came back out of the room, closing the door.
“Be quick, then . . . Okay, but don’t feel you have to charm the entire restaurant on your way out. Anyway, did you see Matthew?”
The sound of his own name hit Matthew like an electric shock.
“Yeah, that was him . . . He did? Probably went to the fireworks . . . Well, thanks for going anyway . . . Okay, I’ll wait till you get here.”
Something her lover said made her laugh.
“I know. But he can’t help that, can he?”
She laughed again, more tenderly. “Yes, but you’re good at sizing people up. Anyway, I thought it might interest you to take a look at him . . . Okay, see you in a bit.”
Back in the living room, she turned off the overhead light and switched on a small table lamp.
Matthew watched her, trying to fathom the implications of what he’d just heard. Now she was on the love seat, facing in his direction, making another phone call.
“Jana? Hi. Listen, I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to be a little late. Some things have come up . . .”
The polite hostess smile Matthew had seen when Jana came to visit reappeared on Chloe’s face. Her small teeth showed like a row of pearls.
“Oh, that’s sweet of you . . . No, no, I definitely want to come. I’ve hardly seen you all summer . . . Thanks, Jana. I shouldn’t be too long.”
She stood up and drew the shades down over the living room windows. Sitting again, she held the phone in front of her face, adjusting her hair and rearranging the rounded collar of her blouse, opening a button to reveal a lacy edge of bra. It took Matthew a moment to realize she was using the phone as a camera to see herself. She put it away in her canvas bag, crossed her legs and waited. After a few seconds she stood up again and went toward the back of the house, returning with a lit candle in one hand and a small plate in the other, with kumquats on it, and chocolate. She placed them on the glass table, and switched off the lamp. In the candlelight the gray furnishings took on a warmer tone. She stretched, popped a kumquat into her mouth, and lay down on the love seat, closing her eyes. But she was still restless. Standing up again, she slipped her underwear off from under her skirt in a swift, practical motion. Coming around the coffee table, she sat back down—this time on the armchair— and tossed the pale garment onto the floor beside her.
Matthew looked down through the thin gaps, feeling like an animal in a cage. His mouth had gone dry. In the distance he could hear an electric guitar. Closer, katydids had begun their nighttime chorus. She had sent her lover to the bar to check him out. Why? he wondered. Am I such a mystery, even to her? Is there something in me I don’t see? The question, unanswerable as it was, sent a ripple of anxiety through him.
Headlights pierced through the shades, blading in vertically through the gaps between the balustrade, moving across Matthew’s face like a pair of scanners. A moment later the door opened and Grollier stepped inside.
He paused in the entrance, taking in the little tableau Chloe had prepared for him. In silence, he smiled at Chloe across the small room with its flickering gold light. Closing the door behind him, he moved toward her, stooping midway to pick up her discarded panties and fill his lungs with their scent.
Above them Matthew stared down through the slats in the balustrade, scarcely breathing; wanting and not wanting to see.
nine
An hour later he was still there, his limbs stiffened into position as if he’d been turned to stone, his mind a near-blank. Chloe had left, driven off to her cousin, but Grollier was still down there, sprawled naked on the love seat.
Matthew stared down at him. If what he had seen had extingu
ished any lingering hopes concerning the extent of Chloe’s involvement with this man, what he’d heard had spread a deeper, more insidious ruin. It was so disturbing, in fact, that for some time he couldn’t bring himself to summon any of it back. He was in a state of benumbed shock. Only some minor functionary of consciousness continued about its business, assessing the practicalities of the situation in a businesslike way: catching the far-off strains of someone’s imitation of a Hendrix guitar solo, observing that Grollier would have to leave soon if he was going to make it to the fireworks, noting unexcitedly that this would make his own exit from the house possible.
Grollier stretched and yawned. A smile appeared on his face and he rotated his shaggy head slowly from side to side as if in disbelief at something. Pushing down onto the love seat, he hauled himself up and padded off. Light appeared from the bedroom and Matthew heard drawers being opened and closed. He was getting dressed to go out, surmised the same detached mental functionary. Dully, Matthew projected forward; saw himself finally able to move again, slipping out of the house, driving back up the mountain, continuing with his life. The evening would take its place in the chain of significant episodes that had given his existence its singular character, and there would be no more possibility of forgetting it than there had been any of the others. At the same time it would make no practical difference to anything.
But he was mistaken about Wade getting dressed. The man was still naked when he returned to the living room, and now he began ferrying odds and ends back to the bedroom. It became apparent that he was simply continuing with his packing.
He was flying out to Indonesia tomorrow—Matthew had gleaned this from the post-coital talk—interrupting his stay at the house in order to salvage an agreement with an orangutan wrangler. Or no, not the post-coital talk: this part had actually come mid-coitus. They’d had a lull during which Wade had reiterated what appeared to have been an earlier attempt to persuade Chloe to go to Indonesia with him. She’d told him, with all too evident reluctance, that it was impossible, and the renewed sense of imminent separation had started them up again. “Don’t come,” she’d said as Wade’s groans began to indicate critical levels of excitement.
“Say something unsexy, then,” he’d muttered.
“Okay. Tell me what you thought about Charlie’s cousin.”
So that Matthew had been compelled to hear himself discussed, this time without the refuge of gaps in the conversation by way of intermittent relief. He could feel the exchange in its entirety now, pressing at him, urging him to replay it like some elaborate injury one has to relive over and over until its power to hurt runs out.
“Well, he’s a short guy,” had been Wade’s first observation.
“You said. You’re a fat guy. He can’t help it, you can, so what’s your point?”
“That’s my point, sugar. I could lose weight if I wanted to, but he’ll never gain height. That is a big old difference, not of degree, but of ontology—”
“Oh, stop it. Anyway, he isn’t that short.”
“No, but—”
“You didn’t think there was something strange about him?”
“Not that I could tell just from looking at him.”
“I think there’s something deeply strange about him.”
“You mean he has the hots for you? I wouldn’t call that strange, sugar.”
Wade had re-enveloped her in his arms at that point, face against the back of her neck, his large hand reaching around to her breasts. She’d snuggled back against him.
“No, that doesn’t bother me. Or it never used to. Now I’m not sure . . .”
“He’s getting more serious?”
“It’s almost as if he’s becoming possessive. As if he thinks we’re in an actual relationship. He’s started questioning me—asking where I’ve been, where I’m going. Also . . . Mmm.”
His other hand was moving between her legs and she broke off, given over to some large wave of pleasure.
“Also?”
She’d had to bite her lower lip, hard, before she could control her voice enough to answer.
“He’s been acting weird with Charlie,” she said as the sensation ebbed sufficiently for her to speak. “Needling him . . .”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but I doubt Charlie’s imagining it. Charlie doesn’t tend to imagine things.”
“Needling him how?”
“He keeps making these insinuations . . .”
“About?”
“Me.”
“What about you?”
“That I’m being unfaithful.”
“Well you are, sugar. You are being unfaithful.”
“But he doesn’t know.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’m careful, Wade.”
“So why’s he doing it?”
“I think he’s deliberately trying to make Charlie suffer. He knows Charlie has a tendency to get jealous.”
“But why would he want to make him suffer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. Not like there’s anything you can do about it. Right?”
“But it’s so cruel. I mean toward Charlie.”
“You’re awfully considerate of your husband.”
“I love him.”
The words, so unexpected in the circumstances, had shocked Matthew. Her ability to confound him never seemed to exhaust itself. Wade too had seemed surprised.
“You love him?” he’d said, heaving his bulk above Chloe and moving more concertedly. Her phrase had seemed to drive the two of them into suddenly more intense realms of mutual desire.
“You know I love him.”
“You love his dough, I know that.”
“Maybe, but I love him too.”
“More’n you’d love me? If I was that rich? When I’m that rich?”
“More than I’ll ever love you, Wade.”
“Jesus, you are the most . . . unfathomable . . . human being . . . I have ever . . .”
“Don’t come.”
“Met. And I grew up around Catholics.”
“That has nothing to do with it. Anyway, there’s something else.”
“About you and Charlie?”
“No, about him. Matthew.”
And Matthew had braced himself for another blow, but as it turned out neither Chloe nor Wade were able to distract themselves from the business at hand any longer, and for the next several minutes the only sounds inside the little A-frame were moans of pleasure and the occasional protest from a piece of furniture subjected to forces it hadn’t been designed to withstand. Time had seemed to thicken then, the seconds growing sticky as clay. He’d forced himself to think of dates of battles, variant recipes for choux pastry, passages from Pascal. Two errors, he’d remembered: 1. To take everything literally, 2. To take everything spiritually. Which of the two am I falling into? he’d wondered, contemplating the scene below, where Wade had just enthroned himself in the armchair and Chloe was kneeling down between his sprawled legs, positioning herself with a votive grace that reminded him of one of her butterflies as it settled on the stamen of some garish flower, slowly folding its wings; or again, as they’d moved and her face had reappeared through the next gap in the palings, cushioned sideways on the love seat with a look of rapture as she lay over its arm. Was there an erroneous sense in which this was literal? A true sense in which it was purely spiritual? Turning, she had reached up and drawn Wade down onto the floor below her, in turn lowering herself onto him with a cry of joy. There are perfections in nature to show that she is the image of God and imperfections to show that she is no more than his image. That was one his father had marked and that he, with childishly pleasurable irrationality, had written, No! next to, happily aware that nobody except his ghostly co-custodian of this mystic text could possibly have any idea what he meant.
They’d lain in silence for several minutes afterward, Chloe’s head on Wade�
��s chest as she idly fondled his detumescing member and ate a piece of chocolate, Wade’s eyes gazing upward, scanning the ceiling, the skylight, the carved wooden slats on the balustrade. For a terrifying moment it had seemed to Matthew the man had caught the glint of his eye in the candlelit darkness and was staring straight at him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The prospect of what would happen if he did had been so far beyond intolerable that Matthew could only think of it in terms of annihilation. Possibly in some court of ultimate, celestial arbitration his presence here would be found at least partly understandable, even partly creditable. (Was he not in some sense acting on Charlie’s behalf?) Certainly mitigating factors would be given their due. But no earthly judgment would get beyond the point of pure outraged horror. And there would be no mercy. He was well aware of that. No mercy at all.
Wade’s glance traveled on. But as if some unconscious agency had registered what his eye had failed to discern, he said:
“You were saying, sugar, about your friend.”
“I’m afraid of him,” Chloe had murmured. “That’s why I wanted you to see him. He scares me.”
“Ah, c’mon, sugar. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you what I think, sugar, I think you’re mixing up your own guilt about Charlie with the little dude’s fixation on you, that’s what I think.”