He’d felt this bond since first meeting her, a decade earlier. Charlie and she had just started dating, and Charlie, whose disastrous first marriage had left him distrustful of his own judgment, had wanted to know what Matthew thought of her. The three of them met at Charlie’s old apartment in the Village. Right away Matthew could see she was in another class from the women Charlie had introduced him to previously. Her clear, structural attractiveness, her good taste in clothing that came across as a natural elegance completely unlike the overgroomed glamour of her predecessors, her quiet curiosity and absolute lack of pretension, made him extremely happy on Charlie’s behalf. Charlie, who was redecorating his apartment, had just bought some Basquiat drawings, and the three of them had started talking about art. At one point Charlie had asked Chloe what her all-time favorite painting was. She’d thought for a moment, and then, as she began to speak, Matthew had known with a strange certainty that she was going to name the one and only Old Master painting that had ever meant anything to him: Bellini’s Madonna with Saints, which his father had brought him to see in the Church of San Zaccaria when they went to Venice on a trip around Europe the year before he disappeared. “That would have to be Bellini’s Madonna with Saints,” she’d said, and the hairs had stood up on the back of Matthew’s neck. It had seemed to bring him back through the years to the moment when he’d entered the church with his father, both of them weary and surfeited from their day of sightseeing, and stood together, bound suddenly close in their silent mutual amazement at the monumental slabs of color arrayed across the painting in the form of the saints’ robes, each figure in its dissonant brilliance engulfing the two of them like some tumultuous, intensely differentiated type of joy. “We won’t forget that in a hurry,” his father had said when they finally ran out of coins for the illumination, “will we?”
Not wanting to upstage Charlie, who hadn’t heard of the picture, Matthew had restrained his reaction, merely nodding to show that he approved of Chloe’s choice. But as Charlie’s friend he’d felt overjoyed that the woman who was so obviously the right woman for Charlie was also, so to speak, the right woman for himself.
So now, as he went out through the glass doors across the bluestone terrace with its glazed urns of pink geraniums, over the freshly cut lawn and through the lines of young apple trees planted to conceal the chain-link pool fence, he was in some fantastical sense approaching an idealized composite in whom daughter, sister, cousin, mother, mistress, friend and mystical other half were all miraculously commingled.
At any rate, that was the best he could do to account for the trance-like state he seemed to enter when he was with her, in which he felt simultaneously hyper-alert-as if some benign force were commanding every resource of wit, charm, sensitivity and brilliance he possessed to stand at attention-and dazed to a point of happy unselfconsciousness.
She was sunbathing on a deck chair at the far end of the pool. As Matthew opened the gate she sat up and waved to him.
“Hello, Matt.”
“Hi, Chloe.”
She stood, putting a shirt on over her swimsuit and sliding her sunglasses up over her dark hair, which she had knotted on top: imperfectly, so that strands fell over her face.
It was a highly expressive face, constantly in subtle motion. Her large, very dark eyes seemed to register every passing nuance of feeling with warmly mirthful intelligence.
“I’m so sorry about last night,” she was saying as she came toward him, her white shirt catching flares of light from the pool.
“Oh, no problem-all my fault anyway,” he bluffed, realizing he’d forgotten to ask Charlie what reason he’d invented for Matthew’s return to New York.
They kissed on the cheek, and he caught her scent again; its bittersweet notes that seemed to him so precisely emotional he barely noticed their physical qualities at all.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, motioning to the guesthouse. “Then come have a swim.”
A second gate led to a path that climbed the outcropping of rock on which the guesthouse stood, an octagonal wooden aerie with towering black pines behind and the abyss of the vast valley dropping almost sheerly in front.
He’d stayed there before when they’d had other guests in the main house. He loved the place. Often, when things got too much for him in New York, he fantasized about asking Charlie to let him live there full-time as his caretaker. The wide-board floors scavenged from an old sawmill, the rustic wooden walls, the assortment of furniture Chloe had picked out-spindle-backed Shaker chair, bird’s-eye maple dresser, cedar blanket chest, the modern rug of overlapping green and gray squares-all appealed to him as if they’d been chosen expressly with his own tastes in mind.
He could see the pool through the window above the dresser as he unpacked his clothes. Charlie came through the far gate in his trunks, carrying an iPad. He went over to Chloe, who tilted her lips up to receive a kiss, placing her hand on his thigh. Despite his own feelings, Matthew enjoyed witnessing the flow of affection between Chloe and Charlie. He had no actual designs on Chloe, and in fact believed in her and Charlie’s marriage almost as an article of religious faith. It was something he considered absolutely right and absolutely fixed. Its very solidity was precisely the reason why he was able, as Dr. McCubbin would have put it, to “experience” his own feelings for Chloe with as much pleasure as he did, with as little guilt, and with no sense of rejection whatsoever. It was actually a very comfortable arrangement, as far as he was concerned.
Charlie sat at a table in the shade of the pool house and began working on his iPad. He’d recently been let go from a hedge fund when it was bought by a company that wasn’t interested in keeping the Green Energy Equities Division Charlie had been managing, and he was currently in the process of trying to reposition himself as some kind of ethical investing consultant. One of the things he’d told Matthew he was planning to do over the summer was write a document-an article or possibly even a short book-that would address contemporary culture from the point of view of the socially responsible investor. “I’ll be requiring your input, bro,” he’d said, and Matthew had felt flattered, and wanted.
At breakfast the next morning, Chloe was wearing the bracelet. She held out her wrist as Matthew joined her and Charlie under the grape arbor that shaded the stone terrace.
“Look what Charlie gave me.”
He feigned the surprise expected of him.