The bus stopped by the village green in Aurelia, opposite the hardware store. The place was thronged: teens playing Hacky Sack, gardeners at work on the riotously blooming plantings, tourists milling around with cameras and ice creams. Behind the clapboard and brick buildings rose the round-topped mountains of the Catskills. They weren’t majestic, exactly, but they were big enough to suggest the idea of a wilderness, and to confer a bucolic air on the bustling little town. Matthew sat on a bench with his bag, waiting for Charlie.
He’d been to Aurelia several times before: weekend visits, and once over Thanksgiving. A century ago an arts colony had been founded there, and the town had been a haven for artists and musicians ever since. In their wake, these bohemians had brought an unusual combination of ragged drifters and well-heeled New York weekenders who mingled together in a curious symbiosis of mutual flattery. The weekenders were of the type who liked to think of themselves as successful members of the counterculture, and the drifters clearly enjoyed the boosted status they got from being the real thing. Some of the stores along Tailor Street-the main thoroughfare -were head shops selling tie-dyed T-shirts and drug paraphernalia, but there were also upscale realtors’ offices advertising two-million-dollar homes, as well as a couple of cafés where you could get a decent macchiato, and one good restaurant, the Millstream Inn.
After ten minutes Charlie pulled up on the road behind the green, stopping in front of the white-spired Dutch Reformed church. He was driving the convertible now, a cream-colored BMW that Chloe had driven up the day before. He was dressed in a white tennis shirt and shorts. His handsome, regular features were already a little sunburned.
“I brought you something from the juice bar,” he called out, waving a tall cup at Matthew.
Matthew took the drink and got in the car. It was a watermelon juice; cold and not too sweet.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, man. You saved my ass. Everything go okay?”
“Everything was fine.” He gave Charlie the bracelet.
“Thanks, Matt. Really appreciated.”
“No problem.”
Charlie grinned at him in the mirror:
“Were you surprised to see all that moolah in the safe?”
“I didn’t really look,” Matthew said. A momentary disappointment crossed Charlie’s face, and it occurred to Matthew that his cousin had wanted him to be impressed by the money.
“I mean, it looked like a good amount…”
“One and a half mill,” Charlie said. “Everyone was doing it after 9/11. Then the Cipro after the anthrax scare. To be honest, it seemed irresponsible not to.”
“Totally irresponsible.”
“Hey, don’t mock!”
“Sorry.”
“If the big one drops, you’ll know where to come, right?”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“I mean it.”
Leaving town, they wound up into the mountains. The warm air rushing over Matthew’s face smelled of summer. At Charlie’s road they began climbing more steeply. The road, with its hairpin twists, had been cut into the mountain in the nineties when the town first began attracting the so-called “little millionaires” of the Clinton era. The houses along it were sleek and modern, with irregular-angled decks jutting out to take advantage of the view, stone-bordered swimming pools flashing turquoise in their grounds.
Charlie’s house, on a parcel of twenty acres near the top, was an almost invisible structure in which bluestone, cedar and glass mingled with the surrounding rocks, woods and sky in an ingenious way that made you unsure, as you approached, which part of what you were looking at was natural, which man-made.
From the front there was a tremendous view all the way to the Hudson River, across what looked like virgin forest, at least in summer when the billowing foliage swallowed everything but the odd church spire.
As Charlie opened the front door, Fu, their enormous black chow, bounded over. Matthew found the dog’s slobbering friendliness hard to take, though he did his best to conceal it, letting the creature jump up against his chest in his usual overfriendly greeting, without betraying too much distaste. Charlie tried to calm the animal but Fu ignored him, mashing his wet nose and bluish-black tongue into Matthew’s chin.
“We’re having some issues with Fu,” Charlie said apologetically.
Stone floors and walls kept the air cool inside. Rawhide sofas and armchairs were grouped in the sunken living room around a carved wooden coffee table laden with Chloe’s photography books.
Off to the side, the open-plan dining room and kitchen looked out onto the terrace and lawn through a Japanese wall in which glass doors, paper panels and wood-framed bug screens could be arranged in combinations to let in different amounts of light and air. On the far side of the lawn was the pool, flanked by the pool house, with the guesthouse perched on a rock beyond.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Charlie said. “Go say hello to Chloe. She’s by the pool. Your bag’s in the guesthouse. Everything’s ready for you.”
two
Matthew hadn’t seen Chloe for a couple of months, but even if he’d seen her just a day ago, or only an hour, it would not have been a neutral event for him to see her now. It never was.
He had been trying hard, lately, to come to an accurate understanding of his feelings for her. A year or so after his father’s disappearance, his mother had sent him to a therapist: a large, somber Australian named Dr. McCubbin. The sessions at Dr. McCubbin’s office overlooking Hampstead Heath had done little to alleviate the effect on Matthew of his father’s actions, but in their own way they had been instructive. McCubbin had taught Matthew how to analyze his emotions by instilling in him the habit of asking himself: What does this feel like? Where else have I experienced this particular shade of joy or sadness? What specific associations does it have for me? He’d also taught him not to be afraid of any desire or impulse he might discover by this process. The psyche, McCubbin had shown him, was autonomous. You couldn’t alter its inclinations, however much you might want to, so there was no point in trying. You could, however, avoid being tyrannized by them, and the better you understood them, the easier this would be.
In the case of Chloe, Matthew had teased out a large number of disparate components in the general feeling of enchantment he experienced in her presence. Being several years older than her, he had to acknowledge something paternal in his attitude; a kind of protective, delightedly disapproving fondness that he imagined he might feel toward a daughter if he should ever have one. At the same time, as Charlie’s cousin and honorary brother, he felt related to her on a more equal, sibling- or in-law-like footing. Then, in the tacit arrangement by which it was always as the beneficiary of her and Charlie’s hospitality that he saw her (there was never any question of them visiting him in his dismal little one-bedroom in Bushwick), there was also something of the dependent child in his feeling toward her; or at least a projection of something parental onto her. Then too, there was that very precisely defined and circumscribed amatory interest that the medieval poets understood so welclass="underline" the attraction of the squire to his master’s lady; a matter of devotion on one side, and infinite kindness on the other, with the mutual understanding that any favors granted must be of a purely symbolic nature. More prosaically, he’d always felt a simple, friendly affection for her. She’d been a food photographer before marrying Charlie, and knew some of the people Matthew had worked with in the restaurant business in New York. She liked art and literature in the same unintellectual way as Matthew did, and shared his weakness for low-end celebrity gossip. The soft peal of her laughter as the two of them worked their way through the love lives of Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians, often to the accompaniment of Charlie’s snores, was a sound Matthew had come to associate with his evenings at their home in Cobble Hill, and it formed a significant part of the picture he’d imagined as he looked forward to their summer together in Aurelia. And then finally there was that sense of almost supernatural kinship that exists often between people who seem on the surface quite unalike but whom life conspires to link by a succession of small affinities, creating a bond that exists in a world of its own, requiring neither comment nor confirmation in this world.