The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  The landline rang. Matthew picked up: it was Jana, wanting to speak to Chloe. He called out to the pool and Chloe came in, putting on a pale blue shirt over her swimsuit. Matthew stood out on the terrace while she talked.

  After she’d finished she came outside.

  “Matt, I’m going out for the evening. Jana invited me over for a girls’ night. Bill’s away.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  She stepped close to him under the grape arbor. “Sorry to be deserting you.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I hope you weren’t planning something special, for our dinner?”

  “No, no.”

  The truth was he’d barely taken in the fact that they’d been supposed to have dinner alone that night, so estranged had he been feeling from her.

  “I’d much rather stay here with you,” she said, “but I think Jana’s having marital troubles.”

  “No problem.”

  She put her hand on his arm.

  “You should go out somewhere too, Matthew. Have a change of scene.”

  He looked at her, surprised at the sudden solicitousness.

  “The bar at the Millstream’s supposed to be fun,” she said, grinning. “You should check it out. You might meet someone.”

  “Hey! Who says I want to?”

  Chloe laughed, her small teeth flashing white. She opened the kitchen door. “Shall we have some iced tea?”

  “Sure.”

  “Seriously, Matt. It would do you good,” she said, coming back with the glasses of tea on a tray.

  “To pick someone up at a bar? That’s never really been my thing.”

  She looked at him across the stone table, the uncluttered beauty of her face with its expression of tender attentiveness pure pleasure to behold.

  “I don’t know—I remember a time when you had a new girlfriend every time we met . . .”

  “Well, I didn’t pick them up at bars!”

  “What about that blonde you met at Rucola?”

  “Alison? She was eating there, at the table next to me. Not the same as a bar pickup.”

  Chloe’s cell phone made a sound. She ignored it.

  “Okay, but wait, there was one actual bartender, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. I met her at the Nitehawk Cinema.”

  “Right. I liked her. But I preferred the blonde. I’ll tell you a secret: Charlie and I were actually hoping you might settle down with her. She seemed just right for you.”

  “How so?” Matthew asked, pleased by this evidence of interest in his emotional well-being, even though it was from several years in the past.

  “Well, she was cheerful and, I don’t know . . . easy-going. Wasn’t she from the West Coast? Charlie said he could see the two of you running some nice little café together, in Portland or somewhere. Her at the front, and—”

  “Me skulking at the back?”

  “No! You doing the cooking. I thought she was perfect for you.”

  “I’m not sure I’d have been perfect for her, though . . .”

  “Oh, who cares? You should only ever consider yourself when it comes to love. You think I ever cared if I was right for Charlie? No! I saw he was right for me and I pointed myself straight at him! And I’ve never regretted it.”

  Matthew laughed, ignoring the urge to ask why she was cheating on him in that case, so happy was he to be talking the way they always used to; light and bantering, and coolly frank. Already he could feel her familiar, clarifying effect on him. She had a way of restoring him to himself; an intuitive understanding of his deepest nature that he’d never encountered in anyone else.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t necessarily mean getting a date. I just mean you should go out, talk to people, see some new faces, cheer yourself up. That’s all.”

  “Why? Do I seem unhappy?”

  “No. Just a bit . . . locked up in yourself.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm, what?”

  “Well, I have been feeling a little bit . . . locked up. It’s been bothering me, actually.”

  “Really? You should have told me.”

  “Oh . . . I don’t want to burden you with my woes.”

  “Come on! What are friends for? Tell me about it.”

  “Well . . . it’s nothing very specific, just a sort of . . . stalled feeling . . . if that makes sense . . .”

  “When did it start?”

  “I think around the time I sold my share in that restaurant. You remember . . .”

  “I do. You were going to invest in some other project. What happened to that?”

  “I’m not sure . . . I think I just . . .” He groped for words to express the strange loss of will that had begun afflicting him. It was an elusive subject, however, a process spread over time that had never quite crossed the boundary from the possibly imaginary to the definitely real, and anyway seemed not to want words to express it so much as a kind of childish sob of anguish, which he now found himself, to his embarrassment, suddenly struggling to contain.

  Chloe’s cell phone made another sound and this time she glanced at it. Picking it up from the table, she walked away, signaling she’d just be a minute. She stopped a few yards off and listened, saying nothing. Then she walked briskly farther off, passing through the apple trees to the pool, and shutting the gate behind her.

  Matthew took the opportunity to pull himself together. Much as he’d been longing for the opportunity to talk like this, he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. The last thing he needed was for Chloe and Charlie to start thinking of him as an actual basket case, which would be the inevitable consequence if he gave in to this sudden mortifying impulse to weep. A dryly ironic attitude to one’s own pain was, he knew, the only safe way of discussing it.

  The emotions that had ambushed him had their origins in events from long ago; he was well aware of that. They had lived inside him for almost three decades, with an undiminished power. For periods they were dormant, but when they surged up like this, they could be overwhelming, and it was only with a determined effort that he was able to subdue them, fighting them back until he had achieved the requisite counterbalancing state: an arid indifference to everything.

  Several minutes had passed, and Chloe was still on the phone. He could see her in glimpses between the apple trees, pacing around the pool, and he could hear her voice, rising intermittently between long silences.

  It came to him that his reaction to her infidelity had something to do with these unmastered childhood feelings. Pursuing the intuition in Dr. McCubbin’s precribed manner, he found himself forming the surprising thought that he was indeed experiencing jealousy: not from the point of view of his actual self, but the self he would become if he were ever to be freed from the grip of those ancient emotions. Because that other, freer self regarded Chloe as nothing less (a look of amusement spread on his face as he articulated this thought) than his own true wife. Charlie, at that imaginary juncture, would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. All this belonged, of course, to a purely latent version of reality.

  When Chloe finally reappeared, she had put on sunglasses. She smiled as she approached the terrace, but she’d tightened into herself, gripping an elbow with one hand.

  “I’m sorry that took so long.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes.” She looked away, and then turned back to him.

  “Actually, Matt, I have to go out for a bit. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  She moved off quickly, as if afraid he might question her, grabbing her car keys from the kitchen table.

  “We’ll finish our talk another time, right?” She was still in just her shirt and swimsuit.

  “Absolutely.”

  A moment later, he heard the Lexus start up and accelerate off down the driveway.

  • • •

  The silence of their aborted conversation reverberated in her wake. It seemed to press against him, pushing him into the house, and then out a
gain. He went to the pool and lay on the wooden sunbed Chloe had vacated earlier. Its warm laths smelled of her suntan oil. Butterflies hovered on the zinnias and cleomes. It came to him once again that he should pack his things and leave. Chloe could drop him at the green on her way to Jana’s this evening, and he’d wait for the bus . . . He got up from the sunbed and climbed the rocky path to the guesthouse, trying to think of a plausible excuse for his departure.

  But as soon as he entered the pleasant room with its rough plank walls and pine-scented air he changed his mind. What is happening? he thought. What am I doing? He went back to the house. In the cool of the sunken living room he picked up a gigantic volume of Helmut Newton nudes. As he leafed through the long-boned, silvered figures his thoughts moved forward to the moment of Chloe’s arrival back from her lover (there was no doubt in his mind that that was where she’d gone), and he felt the impossibility of being able to step back into their briefly revived intimacy. Better not to be here at all when she returned than risk alienating her with the sullenness he was inevitably going to be radiating. He shut the book and went out to the pickup truck in the driveway, dimly aware, as he turned the key in the ignition, of having rationalized a desire he knew to be irrational.

  Town was unusually busy, with traffic backed up a quarter mile from the green. Something was going on in the athletic fields that ran down one side of the road. A stage had been erected, and there was a woman on it speaking into a microphone. As Matthew drew level, her words became briefly audible: “. . . so for those of you who have ever needed the fire company, or enjoyed the flowers on the village green, or had a relative taken care of in the Aurelia hospice . . .” Farther along, hanging over the entrance to the field, was a sign reading VOLUNTEERS DAY PICNIC AND FIREWORKS.

  The traffic eased up after the green, and he was soon crossing the bridge over the creek and turning onto the leaf-dappled twists and turns of Veery Road. The LeBaron was in the driveway. Right next to it, gleaming remorselessly in the hard sunlight, was the Lexus.

  He drove on. What now? It was three in the afternoon. He appeared to have exhausted his options. Waiting at the house for Chloe, circling back to the A-frame, packing his things and leaving: every possibility seemed to bring him up against the same intolerable reality.

  A band of schoolchildren was on the stage playing “Crazy Train” as he drove back past the athletic field. Troops of families were gathered before them, cheering them on. Apparently the town had an existence beyond supplying Charlie and Chloe with convenient places to play tennis and conduct assignations.

  Back up the mountain, he went straight to the guesthouse. At least here he felt a degree of calm. He lay on the bed, reaching for his father’s old Penguin edition of Pascal’s Pensées; this also more for purposes of talismanic comfort than any more practical aim.

  The book was part of a boxload his mother had sent him when she’d remarried and decided to get rid of his father’s things. For a long time Matthew hadn’t been able to face unpacking them, but lately he’d begun thinking about his father from the point of view not just of an abandoned child wanting to be magically reunited with him, but of an adult curious to understand him. A year ago he’d started reading through the books, hoping they might have something to offer in this regard. It turned out his father had had a habit of noting the date he’d read each volume, enabling Matthew to follow him in chronological sequence, and giving him the somewhat eerie impression of tracking down his absconded parent along a kind of trail or spoor of print.

  As a young man Gerald Dannecker’s tastes seemed to have run mostly to English comic novels, full of farcical plot twists and larky repartee. Later, after marrying and settling into his career, he’d begun to read more widely: political biography, travel, popular science. It was in the period following the Lloyd’s crash that the books by Pascal and other philosophers had begun appearing. Having never before been a marker of passages, he had begun carefully underlining pithy phrases during this period, and this gave the books a peculiarly personal aura. Alighting on the markings, which were in pencil and always very neat, Matthew would feel a tantalizing proximity to his father’s thought processes. The sense of an agitation crystallizing, dissolving, reformulating itself, was palpable. From the beginning, the question of suicide had been ominously present. In a book of Schopenhauer’s writings Matthew had found underlined: Neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it. Several months further along, in a collection of aphorisms by E. M. Cioran, the thought was still clearly on his father’s mind, and its coloration had become even more positive: Suicide is one of man’s distinctive characteristics, one of his discoveries; no animal is capable of it, and the angels have scarcely guessed its existence. In the same book, however, the underlinings had directed Matthew to stirrings of what appeared to be an entirely different impulse: There has never been a human being who has not—at least unconsciously—desired the death of another human being. Disturbed, Matthew had wondered whose death besides his own his father might have been desiring. The directors of Lloyd’s? Charlie’s father—Uncle Graham—who had talked him into becoming a “member” of that accursed organization in the first place? But before he could answer the question, it too had undergone radical twists and refinements, culminating in a passage at once so opaque and so communicative, Matthew had committed it to memory: Who has not experienced the desire to commit an incomparable crime which would exclude him from the human race? Who has not coveted ignominy in order to sever for good the links which attach him to others, to suffer a condemnation without appeal and thereby to reach the peace of the abyss?

  For at least a year after his father had disappeared, Matthew had been certain he was going to contact him, probably with some cryptic message that only Matthew would recognize as coming from him, and that only Matthew would understand. No such message had ever come, and yet as he’d read through this last sequence of books, it had begun to seem to him as if it was after all written right there in those neat pencil lines: just as cryptic as he had always imagined it would be, and at the same time just as powerfully eloquent. By the time of Pascal’s Pensées, the last in this concluding sequence, the quandary over what course of action to take seemed to have given way to a more generalized mood of reflection and speculation. Perhaps a decision had been taken and his father was merely waiting for the courage, or the right moment, to act.

  A coroner’s verdict had declared him legally dead after the obligatory seven-year period, but the declaration had been a purely administrative event in Matthew’s mind. Unlike his mother and sister, who had eagerly accepted the verdict, relieved by this final official purging of the taint of disgrace, Matthew had never been able to assign his father conclusively to the category of either the living or the dead. He thought of him as a kind of vacillating spirit moving between both worlds, and these books had done nothing to settle this uncertainty. It had always been hard for him to accept the banal criminality of his father’s deed. Emptying out his clients’ accounts! The very fact that he’d had signatory power over these accounts in the first place was proof, surely, of his absolute probity; a measure of how thoroughly out of character the deed had been. And yet the books, with their cunning and convoluted moral arguments, only made it harder to reach any kind of stable verdict. He didn’t know what to believe; wasn’t even sure what he wanted to believe. In one fantasy his father had killed himself but stolen his clients’ money first so as to make it look as if he’d just run off somewhere, and thereby spare his family the trauma of his suicide. In another, his father had reached some obscure philosophical justification for the theft and was still alive, living anonymously in some secluded place on the proceeds. Matthew even half fancied he knew where that place was. There was a turquoise house on the hillside high above the little secluded cove known as Tranqué Bay on the Caribbean island where the family had gone on holiday three winters in a row. Lying in his deck chair, his father used to gaze
up and fantasize out loud about living there. “If we ever come into any serious money,” Matthew remembered him saying, “that’s the house I shall buy.” Matthew had reminded his mother of this at the time of the investigation, and she had passed it on to the detectives from Scotland Yard. Nothing had come of it, and yet whenever he thought of his father as still living, his imagination persisted in placing him there above Tranqué Bay, enjoying the sea breeze on the carved wooden veranda that was just visible from the white sands below.

  Leafing back and forth through the pages as he lay on his bed in the guesthouse, Matthew read and reread the underlined passages, stalking his father’s shade through the thoughts and aphorisms, some of them familiar to him, some forgotten, others encountered now for the first time. He found: Incomprehensible that God should exist and incomprehensible that he should not, and: All men naturally hate each other. He found: Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is, and: It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal. And with each underlined phrase he felt at once closer to his father and more baffled by him than ever.

  • • •

  It was six-thirty. He had fallen asleep. The sky over the valley was lilac, with just a few dry-looking clouds. He had dreamed of the cornfield, only he was there with Chloe, and had asked her point-blank: Who is your lover? Leaning in so that her hair brushed against his face, she had said softly in his ear, I love you, and he had woken in a burst of happiness.

  Through the guesthouse window he saw her floating on her back in the pool. He put on some clothes and went down.

  “Hi, there,” she called. “I looked for you.”

  “I fell asleep.”

  “I figured. I was hoping you’d take a walk with me and Fu. Thought we might talk some more. But I didn’t want to wake you.”