“You can’t question their authenticity,” he said, prodding his finger at the screen. “I mean, you don’t see that kind of courage without some authentic moral conviction underwriting it. Do you?”
Matthew made his usual murmur of assent.
“But what is it?” Charlie asked. “What do they actually believe in? What do they even want? How come we don’t remember what they were protesting or demanding? Did we ever in fact know?”
Sometimes in the early evening he’d sit in his meditation garden-a small, enclosed lawn with a stone Buddha at one end-or drive up to a sitting at the nearby Zen monastery, returning for dinner looking serene and smelling of sandalwood. Now and then he had to go into New York for meetings connected with the consultancy group he was trying to set up. He left early in the morning and it was understood that Chloe and Matthew would wait to eat until he got back, which was often not before eleven or midnight. Whatever the time, he’d want to talk and drink for a couple of hours before going to bed, and they’d sit with him on the terrace listening to his analysis of the day’s meetings. He seemed eager to discuss these meetings, whether they’d gone well or badly. It seemed to bolster his sense of their importance, and with that, his belief that he was making his way back into the game he’d been ousted from earlier that year. He’d never admitted to any feelings of rejection or failure after being “let go” from his hedge fund, but Matthew knew him well enough to know it must have been a blow to his ego. Being without a recognized position in the world would have felt highly uncomfortable to him. There was nothing of the natural maverick or outsider about Charlie: he wasn’t the type to base his self-esteem on his own judgment. He needed official recognition and approval. Whether that was a sign of virtue or weakness, Matthew wasn’t sure, but he was certainly doing all he could to rebuild his career, and Matthew couldn’t help comparing himself-bogged down in this peculiar inertia of his-unfavorably with his cousin, at least in this respect.
Chloe’s routines were less predictable. Some days she did nothing but lie by the pool with a pile of magazines and her phone, ignoring both as she steeped herself in sunlight. She’d signed up for yoga and Zumba classes in town and some mornings she went off with her rolled-up mat and water canister, but often she didn’t bother. Even when she did go off for a class she was capable of changing her mind, as Matthew discovered on one occasion when Charlie, who’d left his favorite tennis racket in the Lexus, asked Matthew to grab it from the car on his way back from town, and the car had turned out not to be in the yoga studio parking lot. She’d succumbed to her own laziness as she approached the studio, she confessed later, and spent her yoga hour in a café drinking a triple latte, from which she was still visibly sparkling with caffeinated good humor.
She did seem to be pursuing the mailbox idea, however, and would drift off with her cameras, usually in the late afternoon, to catch them at magic hour.
“That was such a good idea of yours, Matt,” she said, returning from one of these expeditions.
“Well, I can’t wait to see the results.”
He thought of her driving around the country roads, making her judgments, setting up her cameras, filling her memory cards and rolls of film, all because he had casually suggested she might find these harmless things interesting, and this was as satisfying to him as if he had actually been driving around with her. The project had become another instance of that action-at-a-distance that his feelings for her thrived on, and that seemed to be all they required by way of sustenance.
As for his own routines, he took his role as chef seriously and spent much of his time driving around to farmers’ markets or checking out little specialty stores hidden on rural roads or in the immigrant neighborhoods of nearby towns. Whenever he set off he made a point of offering to do any errands that needed running. Charlie asked him to pick up some stones he’d ordered for an outdoor pizza oven he planned to build. One time Chloe asked him to get a copy of an entertainment magazine at the Barnes & Noble in East Deerfield. Occasionally she put in a request for kumquats and chocolate, her favorite snack. Otherwise it was mostly just dropping off dry-cleaning or taking the garbage to the town dump. A cleaning lady did their laundry at the house.
When he wasn’t marketing he was usually swimming or sunbathing-mostly at the pool but sometimes at one of the swimming holes in the creek, the Millstream, that ran along the back of town. The clear, cold water fell into a series of pools defined by smooth-edged boulders that grew immensely warm by midmorning. He would park the truck in the gravel lot by the bridge that connected the main part of town with some quieter residential roads. Stone steps led down under the bridge to the first of the pools and you could pick your way along the shelving stone banks to a half dozen other pools running under the backyards of the private homes on the road that ran parallel with the creek. Trees at the top of the bank made it easy enough to find shade. He’d set up with a towel and his copy of Pascal or a magazine and watch the world go by.
There were packs of noisy high schoolers, young couples staying in the nearby bed-and-breakfasts, elderly retirees with wrinkled white bodies. There was also a steady stream of Rainbow people and Deadheads who gravitated around Aurelia in the summer, camping in the woods behind the public meadow known locally as Paradise. On weekends they held late-night drumming sessions that you could hear all the way up at the house, and there were more low-key sessions, audible from the stream, that seemed to run pretty much continuously, adding their own frequency to that of the insects and birds, the pulsating dial tone of summer.
He found this latter group-the Rainbows and Deadheads-especially fascinating. They’d drift down to the water in the late afternoon in their beads and leather vests, trailing clouds of patchouli, often carrying their drums. Settling in groups on the smooth rocks, they’d preen and horse around with a mixture of childlike unselfconsciousness and highly self-conscious theatrical self-display.
He’d always had conflicting feelings about these hedonistic types. To live in that blaze of color, scent and music, moving everywhere in loose tribal groups with everyone looking out for each other (at least in theory) appealed to a deep instinct in him. In his teens, after being expelled from school, he’d hung around on the fringes of an English version of the same subculture-travelers, hippies, “freaks” as they called themselves. He had become, in a kind of perverse, retroactive justification for his expulsion, a small-scale dealer of pot and acid, and those were his customers. For a while he’d dreamed of leaving home, what remained of home, and becoming a fully fledged member of one or other of the groups. But something always held him back; some lingering attachment to respectability, but also a growing impatience with their constant petty criminality. These American counterparts struck him as more idealistic, or anyway less obviously out to rip each other off, though by this stage in his life he was too much himself to think, even jokingly, about joining them. But they interested him to observe.
One day a wizened old guy with gray hair in a red bandanna, who’d perched on the rocks next to Matthew and begun darning an embroidered shoulder bag, treated him to a rambling monologue about himself.
“I’m what we call an Early,” he said, taking Matthew’s vague nod as an invitation to talk.
“An Early?”
“Early to the vision.”
He’d joined the Rainbow Family of Living Light in the early seventies, he told Matthew, right after the first “Gathering of the Tribes,” and had been “dogging it” across the country from gathering to gathering ever since. Now, he said, he was an official “hipstorian” of the group.