They were first cousins, he and Charlie; their mothers sisters from Providence, Rhode Island. Charlie’s mother had died when Charlie was thirteen. His father, at that time posted at the Dubai office of his bank, had sent Charlie to live with Matthew’s family in London. The two of them had gone to the same London private school as day boys, and for a while they’d been close: brothers in all but name. Charlie’s return to the States for college five years later would have been a wrench for both of them if things had continued as expected, but that had not been the case. Instead, calamity had struck. Matthew’s father, a well-to-do solicitor who’d become a member of Lloyd’s, had lost almost everything when the insurance giant collapsed in the late eighties. A man of unstained character until then, he’d emptied the accounts of several of his clients and disappeared out of the country, vanishing without trace and leaving a pall of bewildered shame and grief hanging like a gaseous wake over his abandoned family. In under a year, Matthew, acting out in his own singular fashion, had been expelled from school after admitting to selling drugs. As for Charlie, rather than remain in the blighted Dannecker home, he had asked his father to enroll him as a boarder for the remainder of his time at the school, and with Matthew continuing his education at a series of crammers in increasingly obscure corners of London, the boys had soon lost touch with each other. A reprisal of the friendship had never been something Matthew had considered remotely in the cards, or even especially desirable. But ten years later, circumstances had brought Matthew himself to live in the States, and after some initial reluctance he had contacted his cousin. Charlie, at that time freshly separated from his first wife and still raw from the experience, had responded with unexpected warmth, and the two had become friends again.
Still, it wasn’t the same as if they’d never had a breach. And it didn’t take much for Matthew to start wondering how dependable this newfound relationship really was.
He made an effort to shrug off Charlie’s surprise about the sublet, telling himself he was being oversensitive, and started reading an article in Vanity Fair about gourmet food trucks, a subject that happened to interest him.
The train, when it finally came, crawled morosely toward New York as if in protest at having to work at this ungodly hour. Just outside Secaucus Junction it seemed to realize it was about to relinquish any further chance of inconveniencing its passengers, and came to a complete halt for forty minutes. It was past midnight by the time Matthew arrived at Charlie’s house in Cobble Hill. Rucola would be closed. He was too tired to look for somewhere still open, let alone cook for himself. He was fastidious about food, and preferred to go to bed hungry than eat poorly.
He chained the door, kicked off his shoes, and went upstairs. It felt a bit strange, climbing the three flights to the guest room with no one else there. He’d never been alone in the house before, and had only been in the upstairs quarters once, when Charlie had first bought the place and was showing it off to him. The sleek fifties furnishings that Chloe collected seemed to look at him askance from their blond frames and Naugahyde upholstery. A baby grand in a second-floor room stood with its double-hinged lid half open, baring its antique teeth in a cringing grin.
Charlie had said they always kept the guest bed made up, but in fact it just had a folded comforter on a bare mattress. Matthew didn’t feel like hunting up a set of sheets, and went to look for somewhere else to sleep. Lily’s bed, on the floor below, was made up, but it didn’t seem right to sleep in a young girl’s bed, surrounded by dolls and furry toys. He went on down to Charlie and Chloe’s bedroom. The king-sized bed stood with its gold chenille cover and rumpled satin sheets flung back. It would do.
There was a gray marble bathroom en suite, with two sinks and a brass showerhead the size of a gong in the shower. He undressed and slid open the glass door, standing under the deluge of hot rain until he felt the grime of his journey cleansed from him.
Books on global finance, climate change, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism were stacked on one side of the bed; photography magazines and paperback novels on the other. Naked, he climbed in next to the paperbacks and magazines. As he laid his head on the pillow, he caught the smell of Chloe’s perfume. He breathed it in deeply. As always, it stirred a very specific emotion inside him; unnameable, but powerfully evocative of its wearer. A short, sheer nightdress with thin shoulder straps lay crumpled on the carpet below the mattress. He picked it up and held it against the light. A strand of Chloe’s dark hair glinted on the cream-colored silk. He let the garment slide down softly against his cheek, and filled his lungs again with the delicately scented fragrance.
In the morning he woke early and went down to the kitchen to retrieve the bracelet. The safe was in the wall behind the refrigerator. Unlocking the castors as Charlie had instructed, he hauled the appliance out of its berth. The safe’s dial protruded at eye-level from a metal door in the wall. He turned it to the numbers on the notepaper Charlie had given him. The last four digits were 1985, and when he looked again at the other numbers he realized they formed the date Charlie’s mother had died. He knew Charlie had this tender, vulnerable side, but it wasn’t always visible, and his feelings toward his cousin, which could sometimes be harsh, softened whenever he was reminded of it. The steel door clicked open, spilling cold air onto his forearm. Inside, in front of some stacked blocks of cash and four bottles of Cipro, was a flat Tiffany’s jewel box. He took it out and closed the safe, replacing the refrigerator and relocking the castors.
Curious to see what ten thousand dollars could buy, he opened the box. The bracelet was a thick cuff of gold, with Tiffany & Co inscribed along one edge. An utterly bland piece of jewelry, in Matthew’s opinion. He felt bad for Chloe, about to receive something that, with her taste, she could only find banal, but which she would obviously have to pretend to like.
He put the box in his pack and left, resetting the burglar alarm.
It was another day of clinging heat in New York. The Port Authority smelled like a dumpster. But the bus was cool inside and not too crowded, and as it headed north, the foliage along the Thruway glittered promisingly.
He picked up the article he’d been reading the evening before, on gourmet food trucks. It was a business he’d been thinking of getting into himself, some day, if he could raise the money. In London, when he was eighteen, a friend of his mother’s had taken him on at the trattoria she owned in Fulham, and taught him the rudiments of the restaurant business. Later, an acquaintance of the same woman had offered him a job in New York, where he’d learned to cook professionally, and one way or another food had been his livelihood ever since. A somewhat lean one in recent years, it had to be said. A curious lassitude had taken hold of him lately; a feeling of being adrift, and of not quite having the willpower to do anything about it. He’d had a share in a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenpoint that he’d sold three years earlier for a small profit, and he’d planned to reinvest the money in another, more promising venture, but he’d hesitated at the last moment; stayed home in a state of peculiar inertia on the morning of the final round of discussions, and the opportunity had passed. Since then, as if in obedience to some mysterious but inflexible organic law, his field of operations had been steadily dwindling. He blogged about food and made a little money off ads. A friend at a TV production company sometimes called him up to consult. He was registered with an agency that sent out chefs for private dinners, and occasionally he got a gig. But it was all beginning to feel rather remote-and not just the food business but other things too. Recently, he’d come across the coinage “meatspace,” meaning the real, as opposed to the virtual, world, and had found himself adopting it as his own private expression for what he seemed to be steadily, unaccountably, withdrawing from. Or what seemed to be withdrawing from him. Meatspace of worldly accomplishment. Meatspace of relationships. Meatspace of money. At thirty-nine he was close, in fact, to living off pure fumes of just about everything. It wasn’t something he experienced as a great hardship, but he was aware that the moment was approaching when even the fumes would run out.