The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  All of which implied what, exactly? Was there any difference between a lover who lived far away and had to rent a motel room to visit, and a lover who moved right in under the husband’s nose? No. Infidelity was infidelity.

  But as he drove back up the mountain he felt the encroachment of new disturbances. He found himself imagining the progression of feelings between the two lovers that must have taken place in order to bring about this development: tender exchanges about missing each other; increasingly bold proposals for how to be together more often. It seemed to him he could hear, almost as if it were taking place right there in the car, the conversation the lovers must have had, breathless with the thrill of illicit passion: I want to be with you all the time . . . I want that too . . . What if I had a place of my own up here . . . ? What if I found you somewhere in the listings . . . ? None of his business, he repeated mechanically to himself, and yet it seemed to him he could feel, on his own senses, the mounting excitement at the new intensities of passion, intimacy, danger, that such a move would bring about. And by the time he got back to the house there was no doubt in his mind that things had taken a serious turn for the worse.

  The next day at breakfast, Chloe asked Charlie what he was planning to do that morning.

  “I have a conference call. Why?”

  “There’s a preview for an estate sale at one of those mansions across the river. I thought you might want to help me pick out some things.”

  “Sorry, Chlo. I have the call scheduled. I did tell you about it.”

  “Did you? I forgot. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The preview’s on all week.” She yawned. “I think I’ll go to yoga, in that case.”

  She cleared a few things off the table and called goodbye from the kitchen.

  “Are you coming right back?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Grab me a watermelon juice, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  She left in the Lexus. The sense of something catastrophic arising inside him gripped Matthew. Some explosive force seemed to be coming at him from within. He stood up, staggering a little as he pushed back the chair. Charlie glanced up from his iPad.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m actually going to head off too. Do the shopping before it gets too hot.”

  “All right, Matt.”

  He drove straight to the Yoga Center, a barnlike wooden building down a cul-de-sac at the back of town. The Lexus wasn’t in the parking lot. He’d predicted it wouldn’t be, and yet its absence genuinely shocked him. He couldn’t quite connect Chloe with the blatantness of her lie.

  He drove straight to Veery Road, slowing as he approached the short driveway to the A-frame. The LeBaron was in the driveway, but not the Lexus. But the comfort its absence afforded was short-lived: he found the car less than a hundred yards away, hidden behind a small commercial strip with office buildings and a wine store, where Veery Road intersected with the county road leading out of town. Evidently Chloe had decided it wasn’t safe to park right in her lover’s driveway.

  Well, and so what to do? The explosive feeling had passed, leaving a kind of murkily ruminant confusion. In a dim way he’d assumed that the possession of unequivocal knowledge would spur him into some equally unequivocal action. But in fact he felt less clear than ever. The idea of going back to the house and telling Charlie he could catch his wife in flagrante if he hurried down to Veery Road was too grotesque to countenance. But to go back and say nothing seemed just as awful. Telling himself he needed to think, he circled back through town and went down to the creek, leaving the truck in the parking lot by the bridge.

  The rocks near the bridge were crowded with the usual idlers and vacationers. Downstream the numbers thinned out. He spotted a promising ledge on the other side of the creek. The fast-flowing water was too wide to jump, and he rolled up the legs of his pants to cross. From the rock, looking downstream, he saw the blue-trimmed white apex of the A-frame, standing out above hedges on the other side. If he walked another fifty yards and climbed up the steep bank, he would be standing in its backyard.

  Had he come here in order to do that? He hadn’t been conscious of it, but what other reason would there have been to come? And yet what could possibly be gained by placing himself there?

  What do I want? he wondered. What am I looking for? Did he need to see Chloe in the house, with the man, in order to satisfy himself that his appraisal of the situation was correct? Surely that wasn’t necessary. What, then? Baffled by his own actions, he climbed off the rock and walked back upstream.

  A group of Rainbows was settling in on a flat reddish slab where the water fell in combs from one level to another. At their center, unmistakable with his Dürer ringlets and the cobble-like muscles of his arms and torso, was Mr 99%. Torssen. The “Prince.” He had a baguette in his hands and was breaking off pieces to share out. He was laughing, his teeth gleaming in the morning sun, and the others were laughing too, their silver- and leather-bangled arms stretched out toward him. Some of them were pretending to plead for their morsel of bread like children, adding further to that sense they always gave off as a group, of staging and performing their own busy merriment for the benefit of others: the Babylonians, presumably, whom of course they affected at the same time not to notice. It was striking, but even more so was the almost—no, it had to be fully—conscious manner in which this charismatic breaker of bread was reproducing in his own gestures those of Christ from a thousand illustrations of the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You had to hand it to the guy, Matthew thought; he had a gift for striking a pose. His long, sinewy arms made their motion of breaking and offering the glazed loaf (it looked like one of the over-aerated “French Sticks” that the local bakery, Early to Bread, sold) with an ease and grace that seemed to source the action in some utterly natural impulse of generosity.

  Matthew passed on, wondering why he felt so irritated by these harmless people, and so ill-disposed toward the ringleted man in particular.

  When he drove back behind the wine store the Lexus was gone. He looked at his watch: an hour had passed since the beginning of Chloe’s “yoga.” She’d be on her way home, he realized; with Charlie’s juice. Watermelon juice! Cynical amusement brought a smile to his lips as he thought of the thin, astringent flavor of this decoction that Charlie was so fond of. It seemed a fitting gift, somehow, from his unfaithful wife.

  He was such a funny mixture of weakness and strength, Charlie. Or softness and hardness. He could be ruthless, that was for sure; selfish in the extreme. But there was that hurt, vulnerable side to him too. Whenever Matthew found himself thinking too harshly of him, he would remind himself of this.

  He remembered an incident from the evenings he and Charlie had shared when Matthew first came to the States. They’d been in one of the bottle-service clubs on Twenty-seventh Street that Charlie had frequented for a brief period, where he would pay five hundred dollars for a bottle of vodka and, when he was drunk enough, invite women to their table. They’d just sat down, when a silver-haired man had come over to say hello to Charlie. Charlie had seemed guarded, and when the man left, he’d downed his drink in a single gulp, baring his teeth at the burn.

  “Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he’d asked. “Because that’s what that guy did to me.” The incident he’d recounted to Matthew had occurred when Charlie was working as an analyst. The bank had been doing an IPO for a telecom equipment company, and the silver-haired man—a senior manager—had been pressing Charlie to join him on a junket in Las Vegas, where the company was giving a presentation to potential investors. Analysts weren’t supposed to go near these presentations, and Charlie had asked his boss to shield him from the improper pressure coming from the silver-haired guy. But instead of shielding him, the boss had made it clear that Charlie would lose a chunk of his bonus if he didn’t go. It wasn’t the bonus itself that he cared about, Charlie had said, but the year-end review. If that was bad, as it would be if he held out, he’d be finis
hed in the business. So he’d gone to Vegas, accepted the courtesy suite at the Bellagio, the limitless Pol Roger champagne, the hospitality bag stuffed full of Hermès ties and Zegna cuff links, and in return had written a report that smoothed over the company’s liquidity problems and minimized the threats to its long-term market share posed by its rivals, and in short had let himself, as he repeated with morbid self-disgust, be “royally fucked in the ass.”

  He’d never mentioned the episode again, and Matthew had forgotten it until now. It must have been the humiliation Charlie was undergoing at the moment, albeit unwittingly this time, that had brought it back.

  six

  In the period that followed, Matthew found himself heading off into town several times a day on some pretext or other—invented as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s—and driving around in the vague hope (or was it dread? he wasn’t quite sure) of glimpsing Chloe’s lover.

  It seemed important to get some sense of the guy: some idea, as he put it to himself, of what he was “up against.” There was also the fact that being in motion like this offered the sensation of doing something about the problem without committing him to the irreversible course of actually breaking the news to Charlie. At a certain level of consciousness he was aware of something unnecessary, and possibly even a little unhealthy, in what he was doing. What difference could it make, after all, even if he did pick up some nugget of information about the guy? And yet that awareness was peculiarly thin and ineffectual. Indulging in these meandering little expeditions seemed to satisfy some sharp craving in him. He almost felt as if he were at work, in some obscure way, on the recalcitrant stuff of his own existence.

  He would cruise slowly past the A-frame, and, if the LeBaron wasn’t there, would look through the parking lots around town in search of its distinctive boxy maroon outline. He saw it outside the FedEx office on one occasion, in the Millstream Inn’s parking lot on another. Twice, he saw the man himself in the Greenmarket. The second time he followed him from there to the movie rental store next door and stood behind him as he returned a DVD. His neck was sunburned reddish at the back. He wore a beige canvas cap from which his hair bunched out in wiry curls. Dark stains showed at the armpits of his faded blue T-shirt, the sweat-smell partly masked by a coriander-scented deodorant. He wasn’t obviously good-looking in the way Charlie was, but he had a certain dynamism about him, Matthew had to admit; an unrefined if not quite crude forcefulness even when he stood still, that reminded Matthew of a statue he’d seen on his trip to Europe with his father, of some artistic colossus portrayed stark-naked, with a jovial grin. His calf muscles, big as hams, were palely furred below his cargo shorts. He engaged the clerk in friendly conversation, his voice quiet but commanding, with a pleasant buzzing edge. “It’s a great little movie, you should see it,” he told her, exiting the store.

  Matthew watched him cross the parking lot back to his car, before leaving the place himself. What had he learned? In terms of hard information, nothing. Yet for some reason he drove away with a sense of having accomplished something, and for the rest of the afternoon he found himself reliving the little sequence: following the man once again in his mind’s eye from the Greenmarket to the rental place, standing behind him at the register, watching him return the movie. The memory of the statue he’d seen became clearer in his mind. It seemed to superimpose itself on his image of the man, supplanting his features and figure with its own more archetypal embodiment of stout-bellied vigor, striding the earth with jovially arrogant confidence. Was that how Chloe saw him? It seemed to him, in that close proximity he often felt to the current of Chloe’s feelings, that it was, and that for precisely this reason it absolved her, at least in her own mind, of hypocrisy. She had her own code of conduct: he’d always sensed that. For all her churchgoing sweetness and compassion, what motivated her wasn’t the ambition to be a “good person” in any conventional sense (Charlie was the conventional one in that respect), but simply a desire to engage with whatever offered the promise of life, energy, vitality. It was, he realized with a sort of gloomy clarity, one of the things he most admired about her.

  A few days later, after he’d been puttering around town for the better part of the morning, he caught sight of the man again, approaching on foot from the far end of Veery Road. He continued driving toward him, aware of the black hemlocks and green laurel hedges flowing backward around him as the distance closed between them. He’d been mentally planning a dinner of scallops and pork belly with a parmesan espuma as he drove around, and had realized he’d forgotten to bring any spare cartridges for his foamer when the man’s stocky figure had appeared in the distance. He was walking on Matthew’s side of the road, sensibly facing the oncoming traffic, and carrying a shiny white shopping bag with a bottle in it: champagne, Matthew saw as he drew closer and the foil top glittered. He found himself simultaneously wondering where he might be able to get hold of nitrous oxide cartridges for the espuma, picturing the man pouring a foaming glass of champagne for Chloe as they lay in bed and realizing with a sudden gush of aggression that with nothing more than a quick jerk of the steering wheel he could knock him down, run right over his thick neck and be gone before anyone knew what had happened.

  Instead, he slowed down politely and swung wide of him, receiving an appreciative nod in return.

  He felt shaken after that. He hadn’t realized he bore the guy actual hostility. The “incident,” purely imaginary as it had been, made him aware he was getting a little overwrought about the whole business.

  It seemed to him he had been given a warning: to pull back, or at least formulate a more rational, practical plan of action than this rather aimless to-ing and fro-ing.

  But a plan to do what, exactly? Aside from the desire for things to be restored to their original condition, which was hardly a realistic aim, he had no clear objective around which to build a plan.

  • • •

  That afternoon Chloe announced she was going out to photograph some more mailboxes. There was one in particular, she said, that would make a good cover for a book if she ever collected them.

  “Where’s that?” Matthew asked, adding quickly, so as to cover the tone of suspicion he’d caught in his own voice: “I mean, I was wondering if I’d seen it.”

  She smiled, gathering up her car keys.

  “Probably not. It’s on a road that doesn’t really lead anywhere.”

  Charlie, who was on his iPad at the kitchen table and hadn’t seemed to be following the conversation, said, without looking up:

  “Which road?”

  “Fletcher,” Chloe answered without hesitation. “Just past the place that sells ducks’ eggs. Why don’t you come with me and take a look? It’s very pretty. You too, Matthew, if you’d like . . .”

  Charlie grunted, “Maybe another time,” and Matthew, realizing he’d been outmaneuvered, muttered that he was a little tired.

  “Well, come down later, if you feel like it,” Chloe said, smiling at each of them. “I’ll be there till sunset.”

  As she left, Matthew saw Charlie glancing after her, and thought he caught something uneasy in his expression. He had in fact considered the possibility that Charlie had some inkling of what was going on. He happened to know that his cousin had a problem with jealousy. In those candid talks they’d had during the first months of their reunion in New York, when Charlie was still hurting from the breakup of his first marriage and glad of a willing listener, he’d confided in Matthew that one of the reasons for the breakup was that he’d driven Nikki, his wife, crazy with his suspicions. He’d wanted a kid, and when she’d said she wasn’t ready he’d taken that—by his own shamefaced admission—as evidence that she wanted to go on, in his words, “fooling around with other guys.” He’d changed since then, obviously. Under Chloe’s steadying influence the anguished, self-flagellating Charlie of those days had given way to the contented husband and father that now formed the image he presented to the world, and presumably he’d learned to ign
ore the tremors of his hypervigilant instincts. But those instincts were surely still alive in him somewhere, however much he might wish to suppress what they were telling him. And if that was the case, might he not, at some level, be actually grateful for an opportunity to talk?

  True, he’d shown no sign of interest in Matthew’s attempts so far to open the subject, but then those attempts had been so indirect that it was entirely possible Charlie hadn’t even realized what they were.

  All of which seemed to argue for a more direct approach, or at least (caution intervening once again as the decision formed to broach the topic) a less oblique one.

  “You seem,” Matthew said, perching on a kitchen stool, “really happy, you and Chloe.”

  Charlie looked up at him.

  “I’d say we’re pretty happy.”

  “You seem to have a great balance between togetherness and . . . independence.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I admire that.”

  “Well, Chloe’s always been totally her own person.”

  “I know.”

  Charlie continued looking at him, as if his curiosity had been piqued, and Matthew felt he could safely develop the point.

  “Unusually so, I’d say, compared with what I’ve noticed in other married couples.”

  Charlie seemed to mull this over.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, just that she seems to have these very strongly demarcated areas of her life that she keeps . . . private.”

  “Such as?”

  “I suppose I’m thinking of the way she goes off for her classes, or the photography. I mean, I think it’s good to have that kind of separation in a relationship. I think it’s a real strength.”

  “It seems pretty normal to me.”