“Isn’t it nice?” she asked.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Tiffany’s. Look.” She pointed at the edge of the cuff where the name was engraved. He nodded, glancing up into her eyes and then quickly away, not wanting to be complicit in anything even gently ironic at Charlie’s expense.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked Charlie.
“Oh. It’s our wedding anniversary,” Charlie answered, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“You should have told me. I’d have brought you breakfast in bed.”
Charlie gave a vague smile and turned to his iPad, apparently uninterested in extending the harmless charade. It didn’t surprise Matthew: playfulness had never been his cousin’s strong suit.
“Well, happy anniversary,” he said, raising a cup of coffee.
Later, by the pool, it occurred to him that the two of them might want to celebrate alone.
“You two should go out tonight. I mean for a romantic dinner, by yourselves.”
“Huh…” Charlie said, looking over at Chloe.
“No, let’s just stay here,” Chloe said, not opening her eyes. “It’s so much more relaxing. Matthew can cook us all something special for dinner. Right, Matthew? We can have some nice drinks and just… relax. Don’t you think, Charlie?”
“Actually, I do.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Matthew said. “I’ll check out the Millstream’s specials and give you what you would have had if you’d gone there.”
“Great,” Chloe called out from the raft she was floating on, smiling dreamily. “Only it’ll be ten times better.”
“Nice thought, Matty,” Charlie said.
They kept a pickup truck at the house, an old Dodge, for winter storms when the steep road became too icy for even the Lexus’s four-wheel drive. Charlie had offered it to Matthew for the summer when he invited him, and he gave him the keys when they went back inside for lunch. It had minimal suspension-every dent in the road jolted up through the seat like a mule kick-but Matthew enjoyed driving around in it. It made him feel like a soldier bouncing around on some important mission in a jeep.
In this particular instance the mission, diligently transcribed from the Millstream’s website, entailed hunting down guajillo chilies, fresh Gulf shrimp, mesquite chunks for the grill, trevisano radicchio, baby artichokes and a butcher who knew how to cut flat iron steaks or would let Matthew cut his own. It took all afternoon, but between a farm stand twelve miles away in Klostville, the new All Natural Meats and Smokehouse on the road to East Deerfield, the surprisingly well run fish counter at Morelli’s Market in East Deerfield itself and a bodega off the Thruway near Poughkeepsie that Matthew had discovered on a previous visit, he managed to get what he needed.
The evening was a notable success. Charlie opened a 1973 La Lagune, and even though Matthew wasn’t much of a wine connoisseur, he had a good enough palate to appreciate the simple grandeur of the bottle. Remembering it in later days, he made the connection he’d never made before, between the word “claret” and the idea of clarity it had originally been adopted to express. It seemed to sum up the evening. Clear evening sky. Simple perfection of the dinner as he served the appetizers and then, after a pause to let the mesquite chunks burn down, the flat-iron steaks. These, though not actually from Wagyu beef, were as good as any he’d eaten, their seared crimson flesh branchingly marbled by the infraspinatus fascia that offset the fire-and-blood carnality of the shoulder muscle itself, sweetening it with rich oils. Clear, untainted friendship between the three of them: their easy happiness together as they sat around the stone table with the citronella candles flickering in silver buckets between the terra-cotta herb pots beside them, and the stars coming out in the cloudless sky.
The conversation flowed, gaining just enough of a charge from the slight tension between Charlie’s stubborn high-mindedness and the more bantering style of Matthew and Chloe to feel both relaxed and interesting. Charlie mentioned a video clip he’d watched that afternoon, of Noam Chomsky talking about the Occupy movement. Chloe rolled her eyes good-naturedly. Placing her hand over Charlie’s, she asked what Noam Chomsky had had to say about the Occupy movement, and she smiled sweetly up at him as he embarked on a long answer in which the professor’s opinions became inextricably entangled with Charlie’s somewhat rambling commentary.
“He used the word ‘dyad,’ I remember. I had to look that up.”
“What about it?”
“Oh, something about how from the point of view of corporate power the perfect social unit is the dyad consisting of you and your screen. Pretty accurate, wouldn’t you say?”
“It certainly describes you, darling,” Chloe said affectionately. She was still wearing the bracelet, swiveling it in the candlelight as if to stave off any suspicion that she might not have liked it. And maybe she really did like it after all, Matthew found himself magnanimously conceding. It was entirely possible that the aesthetic fastidiousness he attributed to her was purely a figment of his own imagination. A side effect of the unspoken sympathy between them was a frequent sense of “knowing” things about her that he couldn’t objectively vouch for, and he was quite prepared to admit that they weren’t always strictly accurate, and moreover that they tended to skew in the direction of certain qualities, such as “reserve” and “tastefulness,” that certainly oversimplified her and possibly idealized her too. The gift she’d given Charlie, for example, was neither reserved nor especially tastefuclass="underline" it was a Givenchy shark T-shirt, which Charlie was wearing under one of his white linen shirts, the top three buttons open so that it looked as though a shark were breaching up out of his chest. But it was certainly more interesting than the bland gold manacle he’d given her.
Charlie went on talking about Occupy for a while. The movement, which at that time was still gaining in strength, had interested him from the start. Once, when Matthew had gone to meet him at his old office, Charlie had insisted on dragging him off to the Zuccotti Park encampment. For two hours they’d ducked in and out of the tarp shelters and nylon tents, listening to teach-ins and strategy meetings, watching the “human microphone” in action. Charlie was taking pictures on his phone and earnestly questioning the protesters, who’d been roughing it for several weeks by then and were easily distinguishable from the tourists and visitors by their dirty clothes. The little oblong park was like a raft thrown together after some great shipwreck, Matthew had thought, with its makeshift dwellings lashed down every possible way. For him the whole phenomenon existed in a realm he had long ago placed off-limits to himself, a realm of faith in human betterment that he considered himself too tainted by experience to enter. His duty, he felt in an obscure way, was to preserve that realm from his own limitless skepticism.
Charlie, however, had no such inhibitions. The visit had made a deep impression on him, and he’d brought it up many times since, often wanting to show Matthew articles or YouTube clips on his iPad, frowning into the screen as he asked Matthew what he thought, or used him as a sounding board for his attempts to articulate what he thought.
As a banker, it had seemed necessary to him to formulate a position in regard to this movement. He seemed to want to find arguments that would place it and himself in a sympathetic relation to each other. At the same time Matthew sensed that he wanted to be able to set it in a larger context that would allow him to demonstrate its flaws and contradictions, and thereby, presumably, diminish the anxiety it seemed to arouse in him.
“I was forever trying to persuade Chloe to photograph the different encampments around the country, wasn’t I?” Charlie said now. He’d been going on about the movement for quite a while by this point. Drink made him long-winded, and he’d drunk a fair amount. “I thought it would make a great project for her. Go round the country photographing all those tent cities. Right, Chlo?”