“Right.”
“How come you weren’t interested?”
Chloe shrugged. Seeing the quick shadow of impatience cross her brow, Matthew mentioned something he had noticed earlier that day. He did it purely to change the subject, not wanting the atmosphere to be even momentarily spoiled.
“Speaking of photographic projects,” he said, “I was noticing the mailboxes up here as I drove around today. They’re so full of character, the way people decorate them with all those little hand-painted stars and flowers. I was thinking they were a kind of folk art almost… It crossed my mind that they might actually make a worthwhile project for a photographer.”
Chloe turned to him.
“That’s interesting.”
“What mailboxes?” Charlie asked. “I’ve never seen any decorated mailboxes.”
“They seem to be all over the place. Especially down the smaller roads.”
“Yes. They’re everywhere,” Chloe said.
“I hadn’t noticed.” Charlie poured himself another glass of wine.
“Sometimes you see a whole cluster of them.”
Chloe nodded. “Right. At the corner of shared driveways. The mail vans don’t go down private roads.”
“I saw a row of about fifteen all tilted together. They looked like a sort of drunken chorus line.”
Chloe laughed.
“Huh?” Charlie muttered.
“You know, I think you’re right, Matthew,” Chloe continued, looking thoughtful. “That could make an interesting project.”
She smiled warmly at Matthew. He wiped his lips with his napkin, trying to conceal the pleasure her reaction had roused in him. Actually, he was a little surprised at her enthusiasm. Having given up commercial photography after marrying Charlie, she’d become serious about pursuing it as an art, exhibiting her work in downtown galleries, and he didn’t think she’d really be tempted by that kind of purely coffee table material. He’d only raised the subject to steer the conversation away from Zuccotti Park, which had seemed to be boring her, and he’d frankly expected the idea to be politely rejected. But she appeared to be genuinely interested.
“I’ll take a drive around tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks, Matt. That was a great suggestion.”
After they’d finished eating, Chloe insisted on helping Matthew clear up. Charlie, promising he’d do it next time, sprawled into one of the Adirondack chairs with a cognac, feet up on the footstool.
“I’d like to make a toast, though,” he announced, reaching for his glass. Matthew put down the dishes he’d been about to carry in. Another effect of drink on Charlie was a tendency to make toasts and speeches that could ramble on indefinitely.
“To Chloe,” Charlie began, his voice a little slurred. “To Chloe, whom I love more than anything under the stars, I want to say… I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you for ten years of unwavering love. I want to say thank you for your… for your support… for your patience.” He paused, nodding slightly as if in private satisfaction at something unexpectedly judicious in the choice of word. “I want to say thank you for the ten happiest years of my life so far. Look, I don’t… I’ve never claimed to be a saint, but I think I’m a better person than I was, and if I am, if I’ve made any… if I’ve grown in any way as a human being I owe it to you, Chloe. You have a way of bringing out the best in people. Maybe in my case even making them better than they… better than their best. So here’s to you, my beloved wife… Here’s to the next ten years, and all the… all the next decades ahead of us. May they all be as happy as this, and full of love, and adventure, and… well, you know…” He raised his glass and drained it, and then sank back against the slats of green-painted wood.
After a moment, Chloe stepped over and leaned down, kissing him tenderly.
“I love you too, Charlie,” she said.
A look of immense contentment spread over Charlie’s sleek features. He closed his eyes. Pretty soon he started snoring. In sleep, he looked older than he did when he was awake. You noticed the thick, tawny eyebrows over the closed lids, the slight lugubrious prominence of his lower jaw, the extravagant sprawl of his limbs. You could see he was destined to become one of those kingly, leonine old men who appear in ads for golfing resorts and upscale retirement communities. Without envy, with a kind of amused inner candor, Matthew often thought of himself as a member of some troll-like, inferior species when he was in his cousin’s presence.
In the kitchen, Chloe told him Charlie had complained of feeling under the weather the previous afternoon, after taking Fu for a walk in the woods.
“I hope he didn’t get a Lyme tick,” she said, glancing out at the terrace.
“Probably just a touch of rabies,” Matthew answered. After a moment, Chloe gave a soft peal of laughter.
He loved making her laugh. It was the one bodily pleasure he was permitted with her; a harmless physical trespass. And since they seemed to find the same things funny, he did it fairly often.
“I’m going to have a swim,” she said when they’d finished the dishes. She didn’t ask Matthew to join her. He assumed she didn’t think he needed to be asked, but even if she had, he would have declined. He wouldn’t have wanted Charlie to wake from his slumber on the terrace to find him and Chloe having a midnight swim together. Not that Charlie would have thought anything of it, but he himself would have, and he was dimly conscious of a need to keep himself well back from any realm in which feelings of desire or guilt might proliferate.
He said good night and went on up the rocky path to the guesthouse, navigating the last yards by the light of the moon that had risen above the valley.
From his octagonal room he could see the still-undisturbed surface of the pool, and then the dark figure of Chloe in her white T-shirt coming to the gate. Lightning bugs flashed in the apple trees as she passed through them, making the small apples gleam. As she opened the gate he closed the curtains. He thought she might swim naked and he didn’t want there to be any suggestion in her mind, ever, that he could be spying on her. Still, his guess was that even alone, at night, she probably would have worn her swimsuit. She was rather American and modest in that way.
But closing the curtain had the effect of opening his imagination to the thought of her undressing at the pool’s edge with the moonlight on her supple body, and as he heard her plunge into the water he felt again, more strongly than ever, the sensation of lovely clarity that had pervaded the whole evening.
three
The summer thickened around them. Soon it reached that point of miraculous equilibrium where it felt at once as if it had been going on forever and as if it would never end. The heat merged with the constant sounds of insects and red-winged blackbirds, to form its own throbbing, hypnotic medium. It made you feel as if you were inside some green-lit womb, full of soft pulsations.
After breakfasting, the three of them would go their separate ways. Charlie drove off early in the convertible to play tennis. Afterward he’d take Fu for a walk in the woods, returning as often as not looking exhausted and a bit chagrined, with some tale of the ungovernable animal thundering off after a deer, or attacking a porcupine, only to get a muzzle full of quills.
In the afternoon he’d sit in the shade of the pool house with his iPad, reading articles and watching YouTube clips. If Matthew was around he’d try to interest him in whatever he was looking at. “There’s something authentic there,” was his typical opening comment, or “That’s the real thing, don’t you think?” After which, having secured Matthew’s agreement, he would come out with some deeper-level objection.
On one occasion he showed Matthew some video footage of the students on the Davis campus being pepper-sprayed by cops as they sat stoically on the ground, refusing to move.