The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  “I brought you something from the juice bar,” he called out, waving a tall cup at Matthew.

  Matthew took the drink and got in the car. It was a watermelon juice; cold and not too sweet.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you, man. You saved my ass. Everything go okay?”

  “Everything was fine.” He gave Charlie the bracelet.

  “Thanks, Matt. Really appreciated.”

  “No problem.”

  Charlie grinned at him in the mirror:

  “Were you surprised to see all that moolah in the safe?”

  “I didn’t really look,” Matthew said. A momentary disappointment crossed Charlie’s face, and it occurred to Matthew that his cousin had wanted him to be impressed by the money.

  “I mean, it looked like a good amount . . .”

  “One and a half mill,” Charlie said. “Everyone was doing it after 9/11. Then the Cipro after the anthrax scare. To be honest, it seemed irresponsible not to.”

  “Totally irresponsible.”

  “Hey, don’t mock!”

  “Sorry.”

  “If the big one drops, you’ll know where to come, right?”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “I mean it.”

  Leaving town, they wound up into the mountains. The warm air rushing over Matthew’s face smelled of summer. At Charlie’s road they began climbing more steeply. The road, with its hairpin twists, had been cut into the mountain in the nineties when the town first began attracting the so-called “little millionaires” of the Clinton era. The houses along it were sleek and modern, with irregular-angled decks jutting out to take advantage of the view, stone-bordered swimming pools flashing turquoise in their grounds.

  Charlie’s house, on a parcel of twenty acres near the top, was an almost invisible structure in which bluestone, cedar and glass mingled with the surrounding rocks, woods and sky in an ingenious way that made you unsure, as you approached, which part of what you were looking at was natural, which man-made.

  From the front there was a tremendous view all the way to the Hudson River, across what looked like virgin forest, at least in summer when the billowing foliage swallowed everything but the odd church spire.

  As Charlie opened the front door, Fu, their enormous black chow, bounded over. Matthew found the dog’s slobbering friendliness hard to take, though he did his best to conceal it, letting the creature jump up against his chest in his usual overfriendly greeting, without betraying too much distaste. Charlie tried to calm the animal but Fu ignored him, mashing his wet nose and bluish-black tongue into Matthew’s chin.

  “We’re having some issues with Fu,” Charlie said apologetically.

  Stone floors and walls kept the air cool inside. Rawhide sofas and armchairs were grouped in the sunken living room around a carved wooden coffee table laden with Chloe’s photography books.

  Off to the side, the open-plan dining room and kitchen looked out onto the terrace and lawn through a Japanese wall in which glass doors, paper panels and wood-framed bug screens could be arranged in combinations to let in different amounts of light and air. On the far side of the lawn was the pool, flanked by the pool house, with the guesthouse perched on a rock beyond.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Charlie said. “Go say hello to Chloe. She’s by the pool. Your bag’s in the guesthouse. Everything’s ready for you.”

  two

  Matthew hadn’t seen Chloe for a couple of months, but even if he’d seen her just a day ago, or only an hour, it would not have been a neutral event for him to see her now. It never was.

  He had been trying hard, lately, to come to an accurate understanding of his feelings for her. A year or so after his father’s disappearance, his mother had sent him to a therapist: a large, somber Australian named Dr. McCubbin. The sessions at Dr. McCubbin’s office overlooking Hampstead Heath had done little to alleviate the effect on Matthew of his father’s actions, but in their own way they had been instructive. McCubbin had taught Matthew how to analyze his emotions by instilling in him the habit of asking himself: What does this feel like? Where else have I experienced this particular shade of joy or sadness? What specific associations does it have for me? He’d also taught him not to be afraid of any desire or impulse he might discover by this process. The psyche, McCubbin had shown him, was autonomous. You couldn’t alter its inclinations, however much you might want to, so there was no point in trying. You could, however, avoid being tyrannized by them, and the better you understood them, the easier this would be.

  In the case of Chloe, Matthew had teased out a large number of disparate components in the general feeling of enchantment he experienced in her presence. Being several years older than her, he had to acknowledge something paternal in his attitude; a kind of protective, delightedly disapproving fondness that he imagined he might feel toward a daughter if he should ever have one. At the same time, as Charlie’s cousin and honorary brother, he felt related to her on a more equal, sibling- or in-law-like footing. Then, in the tacit arrangement by which it was always as the beneficiary of her and Charlie’s hospitality that he saw her (there was never any question of them visiting him in his dismal little one-bedroom in Bushwick), there was also something of the dependent child in his feeling toward her; or at least a projection of something parental onto her. Then too, there was that very precisely defined and circumscribed amatory interest that the medieval poets understood so well: the attraction of the squire to his master’s lady; a matter of devotion on one side, and infinite kindness on the other, with the mutual understanding that any favors granted must be of a purely symbolic nature. More prosaically, he’d always felt a simple, friendly affection for her. She’d been a food photographer before marrying Charlie, and knew some of the people Matthew had worked with in the restaurant business in New York. She liked art and literature in the same unintellectual way as Matthew did, and shared his weakness for low-end celebrity gossip. The soft peal of her laughter as the two of them worked their way through the love lives of Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians, often to the accompaniment of Charlie’s snores, was a sound Matthew had come to associate with his evenings at their home in Cobble Hill, and it formed a significant part of the picture he’d imagined as he looked forward to their summer together in Aurelia. And then finally there was that sense of almost supernatural kinship that exists often between people who seem on the surface quite unalike but whom life conspires to link by a succession of small affinities, creating a bond that exists in a world of its own, requiring neither comment nor confirmation in this world.

  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.

  “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 o
f 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 tasteful: 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.