We hadn’t seen my women friends again during the Festival. I’d run into Mélène on the stairs a couple of times and she kept telling me how charming she thought Mathieu was, and he confessed that he’d fallen under the spell of my adopted family; but on both sides there was something missing—some conviction, some sign of ­sincerity—as if both were telling me what I wanted to hear, not what they really thought. In Mélène I sensed caution dictated by her affection for me, and in Mathieu, reluctance to admit to me or to himself that all of it—the family, the way we lived in one another’s pockets, the ties so close he assumed they were inextricable—just weren’t his style. He didn’t want to scare me off with premature possessiveness or a totally legitimate concern that, from the very ­beginning, he’d have to share with a group of people who were themselves too involved, a still-fragile relationship
that the slightest thing, especially indiscretion, might ­compromise.

During the last weekend of the Festival, Mathieu turned gloomy; he became almost taciturn, easily distracted, less passionate in our discussions, I even caught his attention wandering during a wonderful Argentinean film that was one of the high points of the ten days, one he’d been ­looking forward to with great excitement.

On the Sunday night, as we were heading to the Latini for the last meal there, I asked him what was going on. At first he said it was the fatigue, the edginess of the past ten days, the overdose of films that were making him grumpy and irritable; then all at once he changed his mind, and ­confessed that he was leaving for Provincetown the next day, as he did every year after the Festival.

“See, I’ve got a week of holidays left, and I’ve had my reservations for two months . . . I honestly don’t want to go all that badly now, because of you, because of what’s ­happening between us, but I have to tell you I’d have ­trouble going back to Eaton’s without seeing the ocean . . . I should’ve told you ages ago, I know, but I kept putting it off. I didn’t want to spoil the Festival and I didn’t want you to freak out because of Provincetown . . . I even considered ­cancelling, but . . .”