The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  Charlie went on talking about Occupy for a while. The movement, which at that time was still gaining in strength, had interested him from the start. Once, when Matthew had gone to meet him at his old office, Charlie had insisted on dragging him off to the Zuccotti Park encampment. For two hours they’d ducked in and out of the tarp shelters and nylon tents, listening to teach-ins and strategy meetings, watching the “human microphone” in action. Charlie was taking pictures on his phone and earnestly questioning the protesters, who’d been roughing it for several weeks by then and were easily distinguishable from the tourists and visitors by their dirty clothes. The little oblong park was like a raft thrown together after some great shipwreck, Matthew had thought, with its makeshift dwellings lashed down every possible way. For him the whole phenomenon existed in a realm he had long ago placed off-limits to himself, a realm of faith in human betterment that he considered himself too tainted by experience to enter. His duty, he felt in an obscure way, was to preserve that realm from his own limitless skepticism.

  Charlie, however, had no such inhibitions. The visit had made a deep impression on him, and he’d brought it up many times since, often wanting to show Matthew articles or YouTube clips on his iPad, frowning into the screen as he asked Matthew what he thought, or used him as a sounding board for his attempts to articulate what he thought.

  As a banker, it had seemed necessary to him to formulate a position in regard to this movement. He seemed to want to find arguments that would place it and himself in a sympathetic relation to each other. At the same time Matthew sensed that he wanted to be able to set it in a larger context that would allow him to demonstrate its flaws and contradictions, and thereby, presumably, diminish the anxiety it seemed to arouse in him.

  “I was forever trying to persuade Chloe to photograph the different encampments around the country, wasn’t I?” Charlie said now. He’d been going on about the movement for quite a while by this point. Drink made him long-winded, and he’d drunk a fair amount. “I thought it would make a great project for her. Go round the country photographing all those tent cities. Right, Chlo?”

  “Right.”

  “How come you weren’t interested?”

  Chloe shrugged. Seeing the quick shadow of impatience cross her brow, Matthew mentioned something he had noticed earlier that day. He did it purely to change the subject, not wanting the atmosphere to be even momentarily spoiled.

  “Speaking of photographic projects,” he said, “I was noticing the mailboxes up here as I drove around today. They’re so full of character, the way people decorate them with all those little hand-painted stars and flowers. I was thinking they were a kind of folk art almost . . . It crossed my mind that they might actually make a worthwhile project for a photographer.”

  Chloe turned to him.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “What mailboxes?” Charlie asked. “I’ve never seen any decorated mailboxes.”

  “They seem to be all over the place. Especially down the smaller roads.”

  “Yes. They’re everywhere,” Chloe said.

  “I hadn’t noticed.” Charlie poured himself another glass of wine.

  “Sometimes you see a whole cluster of them.”

  Chloe nodded. “Right. At the corner of shared driveways. The mail vans don’t go down private roads.”

  “I saw a row of about fifteen all tilted together. They looked like a sort of drunken chorus line.”

  Chloe laughed.

  “Huh?” Charlie muttered.

  “You know, I think you’re right, Matthew,” Chloe continued, looking thoughtful. “That could make an interesting project.”

  She smiled warmly at Matthew. He wiped his lips with his napkin, trying to conceal the pleasure her reaction had roused in him. Actually, he was a little surprised at her enthusiasm. Having given up commercial photography after marrying Charlie, she’d become serious about pursuing it as an art, exhibiting her work in downtown galleries, and he didn’t think she’d really be tempted by that kind of purely coffee table material. He’d only raised the subject to steer the conversation away from Zuccotti Park, which had seemed to be boring her, and he’d frankly expected the idea to be politely rejected. But she appeared to be genuinely interested.

  “I’ll take a drive around tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks, Matt. That was a great suggestion.”

  After they’d finished eating, Chloe insisted on helping Matthew clear up. Charlie, promising he’d do it next time, sprawled into one of the Adirondack chairs with a cognac, feet up on the footstool.

  “I’d like to make a toast, though,” he announced, reaching for his glass. Matthew put down the dishes he’d been about to carry in. Another effect of drink on Charlie was a tendency to make toasts and speeches that could ramble on indefinitely.

  “To Chloe,” Charlie began, his voice a little slurred. “To Chloe, whom I love more than anything under the stars, I want to say . . . I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you for ten years of unwavering love. I want to say thank you for your . . . for your support . . . for your patience.” He paused, nodding slightly as if in private satisfaction at something unexpectedly judicious in the choice of word. “I want to say thank you for the ten happiest years of my life so far. Look, I don’t . . . I’ve never claimed to be a saint, but I think I’m a better person than I was, and if I am, if I’ve made any . . . if I’ve grown in any way as a human being I owe it to you, Chloe. You have a way of bringing out the best in people. Maybe in my case even making them better than they . . . better than their best. So here’s to you, my beloved wife . . . Here’s to the next ten years, and all the . . . all the next decades ahead of us. May they all be as happy as this, and full of love, and adventure, and . . . well, you know . . .” He raised his glass and drained it, and then sank back against the slats of green-painted wood.

  After a moment, Chloe stepped over and leaned down, kissing him tenderly.

  “I love you too, Charlie,” she said.

  A look of immense contentment spread over Charlie’s sleek features. He closed his eyes. Pretty soon he started snoring. In sleep, he looked older than he did when he was awake. You noticed the thick, tawny eyebrows over the closed lids, the slight lugubrious prominence of his lower jaw, the extravagant sprawl of his limbs. You could see he was destined to become one of those kingly, leonine old men who appear in ads for golfing resorts and upscale retirement communities. Without envy, with a kind of amused inner candor, Matthew often thought of himself as a member of some troll-like, inferior species when he was in his cousin’s presence.

  In the kitchen, Chloe told him Charlie had complained of feeling under the weather the previous afternoon, after taking Fu for a walk in the woods.

  “I hope he didn’t get a Lyme tick,” she said, glancing out at the terrace.

  “Probably just a touch of rabies,” Matthew answered. After a moment, Chloe gave a soft peal of laughter.

  He loved making her laugh. It was the one bodily pleasure he was permitted with her; a harmless physical trespass. And since they seemed to find the same things funny, he did it fairly often.

  “I’m going to have a swim,” she said when they’d finished the dishes. She didn’t ask Matthew to join her. He assumed she didn’t think he needed to be asked, but even if she had, he would have declined. He wouldn’t have wanted Charlie to wake from his slumber on the terrace to find him and Chloe having a midnight swim together. Not that Charlie would have thought anything of it, but he himself would have, and he was dimly conscious of a need to keep himself well back from any realm in which feelings of desire or guilt might proliferate.

  He said good night and went on up the rocky path to the guesthouse, navigating the last yards by the light of the moon that had risen above the valley.

  From his octagonal room he could see the still-undisturbed surface of the pool, and then the dark figure of Chloe in her white T-shirt coming to the gate. Lightning bugs flashed in the apple trees as she passed through the
m, making the small apples gleam. As she opened the gate he closed the curtains. He thought she might swim naked and he didn’t want there to be any suggestion in her mind, ever, that he could be spying on her. Still, his guess was that even alone, at night, she probably would have worn her swimsuit. She was rather American and modest in that way.

  But closing the curtain had the effect of opening his imagination to the thought of her undressing at the pool’s edge with the moonlight on her supple body, and as he heard her plunge into the water he felt again, more strongly than ever, the sensation of lovely clarity that had pervaded the whole evening.

  three

  The summer thickened around them. Soon it reached that point of miraculous equilibrium where it felt at once as if it had been going on forever and as if it would never end. The heat merged with the constant sounds of insects and red-winged blackbirds, to form its own throbbing, hypnotic medium. It made you feel as if you were inside some green-lit womb, full of soft pulsations.

  After breakfasting, the three of them would go their separate ways. Charlie drove off early in the convertible to play tennis. Afterward he’d take Fu for a walk in the woods, returning as often as not looking exhausted and a bit chagrined, with some tale of the ungovernable animal thundering off after a deer, or attacking a porcupine, only to get a muzzle full of quills.

  In the afternoon he’d sit in the shade of the pool house with his iPad, reading articles and watching YouTube clips. If Matthew was around he’d try to interest him in whatever he was looking at. “There’s something authentic there,” was his typical opening comment, or “That’s the real thing, don’t you think?” After which, having secured Matthew’s agreement, he would come out with some deeper-level objection.

  On one occasion he showed Matthew some video footage of the students on the Davis campus being pepper-sprayed by cops as they sat stoically on the ground, refusing to move.

  “You can’t question their authenticity,” he said, prodding his finger at the screen. “I mean, you don’t see that kind of courage without some authentic moral conviction underwriting it. Do you?”

  Matthew made his usual murmur of assent.

  “But what is it?” Charlie asked. “What do they actually believe in? What do they even want? How come we don’t remember what they were protesting or demanding? Did we ever in fact know?”

  Sometimes in the early evening he’d sit in his meditation garden—a small, enclosed lawn with a stone Buddha at one end—or drive up to a sitting at the nearby Zen monastery, returning for dinner looking serene and smelling of sandalwood. Now and then he had to go into New York for meetings connected with the consultancy group he was trying to set up. He left early in the morning and it was understood that Chloe and Matthew would wait to eat until he got back, which was often not before eleven or midnight. Whatever the time, he’d want to talk and drink for a couple of hours before going to bed, and they’d sit with him on the terrace listening to his analysis of the day’s meetings. He seemed eager to discuss these meetings, whether they’d gone well or badly. It seemed to bolster his sense of their importance, and with that, his belief that he was making his way back into the game he’d been ousted from earlier that year. He’d never admitted to any feelings of rejection or failure after being “let go” from his hedge fund, but Matthew knew him well enough to know it must have been a blow to his ego. Being without a recognized position in the world would have felt highly uncomfortable to him. There was nothing of the natural maverick or outsider about Charlie: he wasn’t the type to base his self-esteem on his own judgment. He needed official recognition and approval. Whether that was a sign of virtue or weakness, Matthew wasn’t sure, but he was certainly doing all he could to rebuild his career, and Matthew couldn’t help comparing himself—bogged down in this peculiar inertia of his—unfavorably with his cousin, at least in this respect.

  Chloe’s routines were less predictable. Some days she did nothing but lie by the pool with a pile of magazines and her phone, ignoring both as she steeped herself in sunlight. She’d signed up for yoga and Zumba classes in town and some mornings she went off with her rolled-up mat and water canister, but often she didn’t bother. Even when she did go off for a class she was capable of changing her mind, as Matthew discovered on one occasion when Charlie, who’d left his favorite tennis racket in the Lexus, asked Matthew to grab it from the car on his way back from town, and the car had turned out not to be in the yoga studio parking lot. She’d succumbed to her own laziness as she approached the studio, she confessed later, and spent her yoga hour in a café drinking a triple latte, from which she was still visibly sparkling with caffeinated good humor.

  She did seem to be pursuing the mailbox idea, however, and would drift off with her cameras, usually in the late afternoon, to catch them at magic hour.

  “That was such a good idea of yours, Matt,” she said, returning from one of these expeditions.

  “Well, I can’t wait to see the results.”

  He thought of her driving around the country roads, making her judgments, setting up her cameras, filling her memory cards and rolls of film, all because he had casually suggested she might find these harmless things interesting, and this was as satisfying to him as if he had actually been driving around with her. The project had become another instance of that action-at-a-distance that his feelings for her thrived on, and that seemed to be all they required by way of sustenance.

  As for his own routines, he took his role as chef seriously and spent much of his time driving around to farmers’ markets or checking out little specialty stores hidden on rural roads or in the immigrant neighborhoods of nearby towns. Whenever he set off he made a point of offering to do any errands that needed running. Charlie asked him to pick up some stones he’d ordered for an outdoor pizza oven he planned to build. One time Chloe asked him to get a copy of an entertainment magazine at the Barnes & Noble in East Deerfield. Occasionally she put in a request for kumquats and chocolate, her favorite snack. Otherwise it was mostly just dropping off dry-cleaning or taking the garbage to the town dump. A cleaning lady did their laundry at the house.

  When he wasn’t marketing he was usually swimming or sunbathing—mostly at the pool but sometimes at one of the swimming holes in the creek, the Millstream, that ran along the back of town. The clear, cold water fell into a series of pools defined by smooth-edged boulders that grew immensely warm by midmorning. He would park the truck in the gravel lot by the bridge that connected the main part of town with some quieter residential roads. Stone steps led down under the bridge to the first of the pools and you could pick your way along the shelving stone banks to a half dozen other pools running under the backyards of the private homes on the road that ran parallel with the creek. Trees at the top of the bank made it easy enough to find shade. He’d set up with a towel and his copy of Pascal or a magazine and watch the world go by.

  There were packs of noisy high schoolers, young couples staying in the nearby bed-and-breakfasts, elderly retirees with wrinkled white bodies. There was also a steady stream of Rainbow people and Deadheads who gravitated around Aurelia in the summer, camping in the woods behind the public meadow known locally as Paradise. On weekends they held late-night drumming sessions that you could hear all the way up at the house, and there were more low-key sessions, audible from the stream, that seemed to run pretty much continuously, adding their own frequency to that of the insects and birds, the pulsating dial tone of summer.

  He found this latter group—the Rainbows and Deadheads—especially fascinating. They’d drift down to the water in the late afternoon in their beads and leather vests, trailing clouds of patchouli, often carrying their drums. Settling in groups on the smooth rocks, they’d preen and horse around with a mixture of childlike unselfconsciousness and highly self-conscious theatrical self-display.

  He’d always had conflicting feelings about these hedonistic types. To live in that blaze of color, scent and music, moving everywhere in loose tribal groups with eve
ryone looking out for each other (at least in theory) appealed to a deep instinct in him. In his teens, after being expelled from school, he’d hung around on the fringes of an English version of the same subculture—travelers, hippies, “freaks” as they called themselves. He had become, in a kind of perverse, retroactive justification for his expulsion, a small-scale dealer of pot and acid, and those were his customers. For a while he’d dreamed of leaving home, what remained of home, and becoming a fully fledged member of one or other of the groups. But something always held him back; some lingering attachment to respectability, but also a growing impatience with their constant petty criminality. These American counterparts struck him as more idealistic, or anyway less obviously out to rip each other off, though by this stage in his life he was too much himself to think, even jokingly, about joining them. But they interested him to observe.

  One day a wizened old guy with gray hair in a red bandanna, who’d perched on the rocks next to Matthew and begun darning an embroidered shoulder bag, treated him to a rambling monologue about himself.