The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  “I had a dream about you,” he said impulsively.

  She hung motionless on the water, her face impassive, and for a moment he wondered if he had transgressed the tacitly agreed-on limit of what could be spoken of out loud between them. But then she smiled.

  “Did you? I hope it was nice.”

  “It was very nice.”

  “That’s good.”

  He felt suddenly very close to her. God, it was good to have someone in his life he could speak to without inhibition! She didn’t ask what had happened in the dream, but her very silence seemed proof that she didn’t need to be told, and this surely confirmed that the closeness he felt was real.

  That there was something abject, pitiable, in the nourishment he took from such barely discernible signs and tokens of affection, he was well aware. It didn’t trouble him, though. He’d learned long ago not to torment himself about things over which he had no control. One went through phases of strength and weakness in one’s relation to the world, and when one was in a phase of weakness, as he appeared to be now, there was no sense in pretending otherwise. That was a recipe for humiliation. With luck he would rally himself before long, and then who knew what might happen? In the part of his mind not subject to regular intrusions of rationality there was no doubt at all that his and Chloe’s destinies were inextricably linked; even that at some point—in another life, if not this one (such concepts were perfectly admissible in this part of his mind)—it had been arranged for them to be together. But in the meantime it seemed important to content himself with whatever crumbs of affection he could glean.

  “Want a drink?” he asked.

  “No, I should wait till I get to Jana’s. Actually, I ought to get going.”

  He nodded.

  “Everything go okay earlier—in town?” he asked.

  “Oh . . . yes.” Chloe plunged forward in the water, submerging her head. Coming up, she said, “Yes, sorry I had to leave so suddenly. It was just this woman I do yoga with. She was in kind of a . . . crisis.”

  Matthew looked at her as she shook the water out of her hair.

  “Well, I hope you got her sorted, as we say in Blighty.”

  “Yes, I did.” A quick smile crossed Chloe’s lips. “I got her sorted.”

  “Good.”

  “What about you, Matt? Are you going to go out somewhere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should. You should go to the Millstream. It’ll do you good.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “If you think about it, you won’t do it.”

  She swam over to the chrome steps and climbed out, squeezing the water from her hair.

  “Go on,” she said, turning back to him. “Live a little!”

  He’d half decided to go anyway, and had really only been resisting for the pleasure of Chloe’s continued attempt to change his mind.

  “All right. I’ll go.”

  She was upstairs getting ready to go out when he left.

  “Let’s have a nightcap later on, shall we?” she called down. “I don’t plan on staying late at Jana’s.”

  “Okay.”

  “We can swap notes.”

  He laughed.

  “Yeah. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to report!”

  • • •

  The Millstream Inn was at the low end of town on Tailor Street, just beyond the junction with the county road. The restaurant was surprisingly crowded considering how early it was, but the bar itself had few customers. It didn’t look like much of a pickup scene, Matthew thought, sitting on a stool with a cushioned back. Too early, he supposed. He ordered a gin and tonic and gazed into space, thinking of Chloe’s remark that afternoon, about his girlfriends.

  It was true that during the years when he’d been part owner of the farm-to-table restaurant, he’d had a period of relative promiscuity. It was something that happened from time to time, without any particular effort or decision on his part; just coming in like the weather. To the extent that he’d analyzed it, it was that these were phases when the outward appearance of his day-to-day existence approximated most closely to the generally held idea of what constituted a “life”: regular employment, sustained contact with numerous other people, an overall semblance of purpose. Not that this made him more attractive to women than he normally was: there was the same modest frequency of signals as there’d always been, from the same middlingly attractive women who seemed to consider him an appropriate target for their attentions. It was just that during those periods pure sexual need seemed to overcome a certain aesthetic fastidiousness, and he took whatever came his way. Alison, the blonde girl Chloe had liked so much, was plump and highly strung, with a nervous, grating laugh. Chloe’s report of Charlie picturing the two of them running some cozy café in Portland had vaguely offended him, though he sensed now that it was the West Coast part of Charlie’s fantasy, more than the choice of girl, that had hurt. The suggestion of Charlie wanting to put a few thousand miles between himself and Matthew was upsetting; particularly in the light of Charlie’s recent unfriendliness.

  He finished his drink and ordered another one. A woman in her forties was looking at him.

  “British, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought I detected an accent. Whereabouts?”

  “London.”

  “I believe I’ve heard of it.”

  Matthew laughed politely.

  “Going to the fireworks?” the woman asked.

  It took him a moment to remember the sign he’d seen at the entrance to the town athletic fields.

  “Oh . . . I wasn’t planning to.”

  “Supposed to be a helluva show.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  She faced him squarely from her side of the bar, apparently confident in her ability to secure his attention. She wore a pale silk blouse, open to show some cleavage. Her face had a sheen of makeup. Her glistening hair was teased into angled spears like a pineapple top.

  She took a sip of her cocktail, setting the near-empty glass down before her with a deliberate air, looking at Matthew. He gave a slight smile and turned away. He was about to knock back the rest of his drink and leave when the door opened and Chloe’s lover came in.

  Matthew had to remind himself, as the shock jolted through him, that the guy had no reason to know who he was. Trying to appear unflustered, he took a sip from his drink, and laid the glass back down on the bar.

  Passing to the other side of the bar, the lover parked himself on a stool, greeting the bartender and extending a general smile all around. He was wearing a loose shirt of white cotton. His beard looked freshly trimmed.

  Ordering a drink, he proceeded to offer himself up for conversation with a series of remarks directed at no one in particular. The remarks were cheerfully banal, but soon two guys who’d been talking quietly over beers were laughing with him, and after a while the woman in the pale blouse joined in.

  “You going to the fireworks?” she asked.

  “Sure am. I have my picnic blanket, my thermos . . . I’m told it’s quite the show.”

  “Oh, it’s fabulous. I go every year.”

  The lover looked around.

  “Anyone else going? We oughta form a posse.”

  “We’re going,” one of the two guys said.

  “Game on, then! I have time to grab a little something to eat first, right?”

  “Definitely.”

  The man asked for a menu. Perusing it with a wistful air, he informed the bartender he would just have an appetizer, and ordered a lobster quesadilla.

  “But give me a side of the shoestring fries too, would you?”

  He added in a stage whisper to the woman, “My doctor told me I need to gain weight,” prompting a loud, full-throated laugh.

  “You here on vacation?” the woman asked.

  He nodded.

  “Got me a little rental right by the creek there. Veery Road.”r />
  “Nice!”

  “The A-frame?” one of the guys asked.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “The owner’s a friend of ours. She has a couple other rentals in town but that’s always been the popular one.”

  “Easy to see why.”

  There was a younger woman, seated to the man’s left, whom he hadn’t appeared to notice, but now he turned to her, peering closely at the book in her hand. She looked up.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, miss. I was just trying to see what you were reading there. I always like to know what books people around me are reading. It’s a weakness of mine. Actually more of a pathological compulsion.”

  She held up the book for him to see.

  “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” he read. “Now, didn’t they make a movie out of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I believe they did. Ornella Muti played the girl, I recollect. I forget the director, but who cares about the director anyhow?”

  He chuckled, and the girl smiled vaguely back.

  Matthew signaled the bartender for his check. A feeling of restlessness had gripped him: an urge to move. He paid quickly, with cash. Outside, the air was rich with the day’s warmth. He saw the LeBaron in the parking lot and glanced in as he walked by; there was a folded tartan picnic blanket on the backseat and a canvas bag with a thermos in it. Climbing into the truck, he pulled out onto Tailor Street. The sidewalk was thronged with groups of people, presumably on their way to the fireworks. Traffic heading in that direction was almost at a standstill. He decided to take the back route toward the green, along the other side of the creek. Purely a practical decision, he told himself as he turned onto the county road and then again onto Veery Road. At the A-frame he slowed down. The driveway was empty and the house was dark—naturally enough, since its occupant was at the bar and Chloe on her way to Jana’s. But the urge to stop, to plant himself there, was as strong as it was when he had reason to believe someone was inside. If anything, it seemed to be even stronger. He drove on, considering this as one considers a new symptom that has just appeared, of some persistent illness.

  Instead of crossing the bridge, he pulled into the stony area just beyond, where people left their cars when they swam. He was in an odd state of mind; at once very conscious of his actions, and extraordinarily detached from them, as though they were being performed by someone else. Parking the truck, he began walking back along Veery Road. Evening sunlight flowed in level rays between the hedges. It was magic hour, he realized, and the thought seemed to plunge him back again into Chloe’s aura. He felt as if he were approaching her along some ceremonial, processional route. Pink lilies with long, frilled petals burned like traffic-accident flares above the ditches. The empty-looking houses had molten red suns in their black windows. Ahead of him was the A-frame’s sharp tip, pointing up over a tall hedge. He slowed his pace. I am just walking by, he told himself. To do anything different would have required an act of will that he felt safely incapable of mustering. A feeling of extreme passivity had come over him, as though some powerful external process had gathered him into its motions. As he turned left into the short driveway, it was fully in the belief that he was just curious to observe his own feelings at a closer proximity to the place. Even as he lifted the lid from the Weber grill by the screen porch, it was still in a speculative sense; a harmless glancing out across the divide between the actual and the purely conjectural. The door key was under the lid of the grill. As he picked it up, holding it between his finger and thumb, the situation abruptly reversed itself: the same passivity that a moment before had seemed to be keeping him safely from entering the house was now drawing him inside. No strenuous act of will appeared to be required any longer, or only if he should decide to walk away. It was as if the dense materiality of the little key had sunk the object into him like a fishhook, and he was being reeled in. Already, as he approached the front door, it was the other life, in which he remained outside the house, that was becoming conjectural. This, now, was the actual.

  At the same time, he was aware that ever since he had asked the bartender for the check, it had been his intention to do precisely what he was doing.

  • • •

  The door opened into a living area defined by a gray love seat and armchair with a low glass table in between. Beyond the armchair was a fixed wooden ladder leading to a partially enclosed loft under the narrow apex of the roof.

  He shut the door behind him, putting the key on a ledge by the doorway, and stepped forward. An air conditioner clicked on.

  Passing to the side of the ladder, he saw a door to a room under the loft. He pushed it open. An unmade double bed faced a wall with a narrow window. On the bed was a half-packed suitcase surrounded by piles of folded shirts and pants. Next to it was a desk with a laptop on it. Past the bedroom was a bathroom with shaving things on a shelf over the sink. Beyond, at the rear entrance to the house, was a small kitchen crowded with stainless steel pans, racks of matching utensils, a wooden knife block and some new-looking appliances.

  The glass-paned back door, bolted on the inside, gave onto a stone path across a lawn that dropped off abruptly at what must have been the bank of the creek.

  He didn’t appear to be afraid. Tense, but not afraid. Even if the man changed his mind about going to the fireworks or decided to come home before, he had his meal to get through first. That ought to keep him at the bar for a good twenty minutes at least, which was plenty of time.

  But plenty of time for what? A vague idea of finding out who the man was had certainly been a part of what had drawn Matthew inside the house, and he looked around for some document, a rental contract perhaps, or some other official piece of paper, that might have the man’s name on it. But there was no contract or any other document visible anywhere, and he didn’t particulary want to start rummaging in the man’s things. Anyway, now that he was here, the question of who the man was didn’t seem as pressing as it had. What difference would it make, to know the man’s name, or his profession, or anything else about him? Whoever he was, he was the man Chloe loved, apparently more than her husband, and certainly more than Matthew. What could possibly make that fact any more tolerable?

  Then why was he here? He wandered back into the living room and sat down in the chair, making a deliberate effort to take stock of things. In the manner Dr. McCubbin had taught him, he made himself as fully conscious of the situation he had created as he could.

  What exactly am I experiencing? What do I want?

  People who broke into houses usually wanted to take something, didn’t they? Or destroy something. Or leave some nasty souvenir of themselves. He didn’t seem to have any interest in any of that. What, then? Was it just the forbiddenness of being here? The feeling of having attained some secret intimacy with Chloe? Possibly. Certainly he did feel a kind of illicit closeness to her. And yet even as he acknowledged this, he became aware of a lack, an incompleteness in the feeling, and realized that even though he was here, he was still in some mysterious way longing to be here; as if inside the A-frame there should have been another A-frame, with another doorway and another key.

  He stood up and went back into the bedroom. Something had been nagging at him and he had realized what it was. Half hidden under the clothes in the suitcase was a magazine that had caught his eye, though he’d barely been conscious of it. He took it out of the suitcase. It was the entertainment magazine that Chloe had asked him to pick up for her in East Deerfield earlier in the summer.

  He brought it back into the living room, where the light was better, and began leafing through the glossy pages. Near the end, he came to a section headed “Bioflash.” There, occupying half the page, was Chloe’s lover, filling a doorway with his broad frame, gazing cheerfully at the camera.

  Holding the page up to the waning light, Matthew began reading the article. It was one of those shamelessly flattering profiles such magazines went in for: calculated to induce envious loathing in even the most
well-disposed readers. The man’s name was Wade D. Grollier. He was a filmmaker. He had been born in rural Georgia in 1978. He lived in Brooklyn with his long-term girlfriend, actress Rachel Turpin (another cheat, then!). He’d had a hit movie that Matthew had heard of, though not seen, about a scientist who creates a robot lover for his daughter. He’d won a Spirit Award, whatever that was, for Best Director. One of his close friends, a Hollywood celebrity, was quoted describing him as “an authentic American rebel.” He had spent seven weeks in Haiti after the earthquake, building shelters with his own hands. Before making movies he’d been a rock drummer and he still hung out with rock musicians. Names were given, listed with the deadpan lubriciousness that seemed to be de rigueur in these kinds of pieces.

  The ignominy of having been asked to fetch this magazine for Chloe struck Matthew with a belated pang. For a moment he wondered if Chloe had been deliberately amusing herself at his expense; sending the rejected suitor (for they both knew he was that) on an errand to procure this tribute to his triumphant rival. But he quickly dismissed the thought, unwilling to believe she could have been capable of anything so petty, or so deliberately cruel.

  The piece continued in the same unctuous style. Wade D. Grollier appeared to be successful modern urbanity incarnate, though at heart he was still a country boy (the piece was slavishly attentive to the formula) and admitted that despite the jet-setting life success had foisted upon him, he loved nothing better than fishing in the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River with his childhood pals. His current project was a cross-species murder mystery set in the jungles of Borneo and featuring an orangutan detective.

  Finishing the article, Matthew went back into the bedroom and returned the magazine to the suitcase. As he’d predicted, knowing who the man was made no difference at all to his feelings about the situation. Nor did the discovery give him any satisfying sense of having accomplished some mission at the house.

  He wandered back into the living room. Books, phone chargers, bits and pieces of clothing he hadn’t noticed before, lay here and there. None of it looked particularly interesting. On the walls were framed hiking maps of the area, showing streams and trails and tiny black individual houses among the contour lines of the green-shaded mountains. One of them had the little town of Aurelia itself in an upper corner: a dense sprinkling of black dots spread either side of what must have been Tailor Street, and he was able to trace his way across the creek and down along Veery Road to the bend that came before the A-frame, and then the A-frame itself, where he was standing. It was as though his coming here had fulfilled some already latent itinerary. The downstairs windows were darkening now, but the little loft had a skylight that was still bright. He climbed up the ladder to take a look. Behind the balustrade of carved wooden slats was a plywood floor with a rag rug on it and a rolled-up, single-width futon. The space was probably meant for a child. It clearly wasn’t being used.