The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  “I’m what we call an Early,” he said, taking Matthew’s vague nod as an invitation to talk.

  “An Early?”

  “Early to the vision.”

  He’d joined the Rainbow Family of Living Light in the early seventies, he told Matthew, right after the first “Gathering of the Tribes,” and had been “dogging it” across the country from gathering to gathering ever since. Now, he said, he was an official “hipstorian” of the group.

  “Designated vibeswatcher too,” he added with a gummy grin. “And Shanti Sena. That’s a peacekeeper.”

  Matthew smiled back:

  “I like the lingo!”

  “Yep. See, when you quit Babylon you gotta make your own language for your own values. I’m saying, like Babylon talks about the e-conomy and the e-go, whereas we’re all about the we-conomy and the we-go.”

  “Nice.”

  Two girls came by.

  “Hey, now, Pike,” they said.

  “Hey, now.”

  They squatted down on the rock. One of them had pale green hair and a face like a kitten. The other had a lot of metal in her eyebrows and nose. They looked about eighteen. The air around them filled with a candylike fragrance.

  Pike (that seemed to be the old guy’s name) told them that he and Matthew had been talking about the Family.

  “I’m interested in it,” Matthew said encouragingly.

  “Cool,” the one with the piercings said.

  Her friend said, “Fantastic.”

  Both eyed Matthew warmly, as if excited to be sitting down with some obvious Babylonian.

  “I’m explaining the lingo,” Pike said, chuckling softly. His thin old legs looked awfully hairy next to the smooth limbs of the girls in their very short cut-off jeans.

  “You mean like Zuzus and Wahwahs?” the green-haired girl said.

  “What are those?” Matthew asked.

  “Different types of tasty morsels, you could say,” Pike offered.

  “Drainbows,” the other girl offered, “Hohners, Snifters.”

  “All different types you find at the gatherings,” Pike put in.

  “Heil Holies, Blissninnies.”

  “Blissninnies!” Matthew repeated with a laugh. He was enjoying the little interlude, as much for its unexpectedness as anything else. He was about to ask the girls how they had come to join the Rainbows, when a tall, shirtless guy in a pair of ragged shorts walked barefoot slowly across their rock and the girls fell silent. He had long ringleted hair with gold glints in it, well-defined muscles and strong features that made Matthew think of Dürer’s famous self-portrait. As he passed by, Matthew saw that he had 99% inked on his left shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but a few paces beyond their rock he turned around and, looking at the girls, made a laconic beckoning motion with one hand, turning again and continuing on his way: confident, apparently, that they would get up and follow him. They did.

  Pike, glancing at Matthew, gave a sort of chuckle and busied himself with his darning.

  It wasn’t much of an incident, but it made an unpleasant impression on Matthew. He assumed the girls must have known the guy. But even so, that casually proprietorial gesture rankled with him. It seemed consciously insulting. The guy’s physical appearance, which had struck Matthew as extremely calculated, also rankled. No shoes, no pack or bag, no clutter of any kind; as if he were proclaiming the utter self-sufficiency of the human animal, at least in his own fine case.

  It occurred to Matthew that although he’d always been drawn to these types, he’d always been slightly irked by them too, regarding their rejection of “Babylon” as a tacit admission that they lacked what it took to succeed there, but that, unlike him, they refused to accept its judgment against them. So that for one of them to present himself as somehow, a priori, a superior being was like a challenge that ought to have been answered.

  “Who was that guy?” he asked.

  Pike looked up from his bag.

  “That’s Torssen. He just showed up last week. We call him the Prince.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He likes to organize shit, I guess.”

  “You mean he’s political?”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “I noticed the tatt.”

  “Right.”

  “Is there much of a connection between you guys and Occupy?”

  Pike knitted his brows.

  “See, we’re historically more a spiritual thing than a political thing. It’s like a different movie, dig? Our movie’s not about protest so much as, what do you give some kid who works minimum wage at a convenience store with no hope of getting out? They gotta have something to be for, not just against.”

  Matthew nodded. He had detected a definite lack of enthusiasm on Pike’s part for the “Prince,” and this endeared the old guy to him.

  He smiled, suddenly amused at his own foolishness for letting something so trivial get to him. He went over the funny words in his mind, making an effort to commit them to memory. It would be something to talk about at dinner. Chloe would appreciate it. He could see that guileless involuntary smile of hers already in his mind’s eye; feel in advance the appreciative brush of her hand on his arm.

  • • •

  Toward the middle of July the weather grew hotter, and with the heat came a muggy humidity that made it hard to be outside, even up on the mountain.

  Chloe, when she wasn’t out photographing or at one of her classes, sat in the living room with the AC on high. Charlie also went out less. It was too hot for tennis and he spent most of his time working or meditating in the pool house, which was also air-conditioned.

  Then the temperatures soared even higher, spiking into the high nineties.

  The three of them sat in the living room one morning playing scrabble. Matthew’s family had been avid scrabble players and Charlie had been introduced to the game when he’d gone to live with them as a teenager. He hadn’t much liked it—it hadn’t accorded with his sense of what was “cool”: a novel concept in Matthew’s old-fashioned home, but extremely important to the adolescent Charlie—and he hadn’t been very good at it either. And yet as an adult he’d incorporated it into his own household rituals when Lily learned to read. The game seemed to have a significant emotional resonance for him, and Matthew was always touched when he suggested playing. It was as if his cousin were acknowledging the ancient bond between them.

  Someone had managed “sioux” and as a joke Matthew put a p at the end of it.

  After a moment Chloe burst into laughter.

  “I don’t get it,” Charlie said.

  Chloe explained:

  “Soup. He’s spelling ‘soup.’ ”

  Matthew made to take the p away but Chloe said to leave it.

  “It’s hilarious.”

  “Well. I’m not scoring the i or the x,” Charlie said.

  “Don’t be a spoilsport, Charlie,” Chloe told him quietly.

  A frown crossed Charlie’s face, but he said nothing.

  After the game he left for New York, where he had a late afternoon meeting. A little later Chloe said she had to go out too.

  “Anything interesting?” Matthew asked.

  “Oh, I need to buy a present for Charlie,” she said vaguely, and then added, “I’ve been feeling guilty about that T-shirt I bought him. It was so ungenerous compared with the bracelet he gave me. I want to get him something else.”

  Matthew wished her luck. He had no idea what their financial arrangements were, but he assumed the money was all from Charlie’s side and it amused him to think of Chloe feeling guilty about underspending Charlie’s money on a present for Charlie and then assuaging that guilt by spending more. At the same time he was touched, as always, by her quietly scrupulous devotion to her husband.

  Later, lying on his bed in the guesthouse, he found himself thinking about the many different ways in which you can know a person, and the many kinds of knowledge that might not help you know them at all.

  In Char
lie’s case, it seemed to him that the résumé more or less evoked the man. He was pretty sure that if he knew only that Charlie had become head prefect at the school they went to in London, had gone on to Dartmouth as a legacy student, had worked in banking and then hedge fund management, was currently writing a screed on socially responsible investing, played tennis avidly, and practiced some form of Zen Buddhism, the picture that would form in his mind would be pretty close to the actual Charlie he knew. But in Chloe’s case nothing he ever learned about her in the biographical sense—that she’d grown up in suburban Indianapolis, the daughter of an engineer and a music teacher, that her boyfriend before Charlie had been a medical researcher for the World Health Organization, that she had once been one of Condé Nast’s go-to photographers for fruits and berries—seemed to have any bearing at all on his actual knowledge of her.

  She wasn’t secretive, exactly, but the essential elements of her nature did seem stowed in deep pockets hidden from public view—hidden even from each other, somehow.

  Once, when he was up for a weekend visit, staying in the main house, he’d come down to an early breakfast to find her just returning from somewhere in the car. It turned out she’d been at Sunday mass in East Deerfield. He’d had no idea she was religious, or for that matter that she was Catholic. Their daughter had been at the house that weekend but Chloe hadn’t brought her along, which had seemed to further emphasize the very private nature of the thing.

  Music too. He knew she was a discerning listener—early on they’d discovered a shared enthusiasm for the voice of Beth Gibbons, its strange vacillations between sweetness and caustic harshness. But Chloe turned out to be more than just a consumer of music. He’d happened to be passing their street in Cobble Hill one evening, just as Charlie was arriving home from work, and Charlie had invited him in for a drink. Piano music came from upstairs as they stepped in. A Beethoven sonata, he’d guessed, played by Ashkenazi or some other master of the Romantic. But the music stopped dead in the middle of a passage of complex glissandi, starting again a moment later, and he’d realized there was someone up there actually playing it. He’d asked Charlie who it was. “Oh, that’s Chlo,” he’d said, without great interest. “She’s good!” Matthew had exclaimed. Charlie had shrugged. “I think she wanted to be a pro at some time but she wasn’t quite up to it. She only plays now when there’s no one around. Or when she thinks there isn’t.”

  And then, just a couple of days ago, Matthew had discovered another of these secret pockets of Chloe’s personality.

  It had been a baking, breezeless afternoon. The three of them had been lazing by the pool, when he saw that Chloe was looking closely at some of the flowering shrubs that ran along one side of the fence. Beyond enjoying the occasional scent of lavender wafting from them, Matthew hadn’t taken any notice of these plantings. But as Chloe gazed steadily and purposefully along them, raising a pair of binoculars to her eyes from time to time even though the bed was only a few yards away, he’d started gazing at them too.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The butterflies.”

  Only then had he become conscious of the mass of wings in as many bright colors as the flowers themselves, trembling on the blossoms or hovering in the air above them.

  It turned out Chloe had had the bed put in that spring and had selected the plantings specifically to attract butterflies. Handing Matthew the binoculars, she’d told him what the different plants were and which species each one attracted. Yellow potentilla for the coppers, hackberry for the checked fritillaries, purple swamp milkweed for the monarchs. At this proximity the heavy Zeiss binoculars organized the space into a succession of flat, richly lit planes in which everything looked, paradoxically, more three-dimensional than it did to the naked eye. The effect was somewhat hallucinatory, and in fact, as he lost himself among the enormously magnified wings and velvety petals in which, alongside the butterflies, huge bumblebees with bulging gold bags of pollen at their thighs were cruising, Matthew remembered long summer afternoons in his teens when he would lie in the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, tripping on Green Emeralds or some other species of acid left unsold from his morning jaunts down to the flyover at the bottom of the Portobello Road and would seem to cross from his drab existence into some realm of fantastical enchantment.

  That was Chloe; full of little surprises: pockets and recesses, inlets and oubliettes, with music in them, and Sunday mass, and a garden full of butterflies.

  four

  The temperature fell a little. It was still too hot to eat meat, but at dinner, after three days of chilled soups and composed salads, Charlie said he needed something to get his teeth into. The next morning Matthew called the fish counter at Morelli’s to see what they had in fresh. It turned out they’d just had a delivery of line-caught striped bass from Nantucket.

  “It’ll go fast,” the man said.

  Charlie and Chloe had gone off a few minutes earlier; Charlie in the convertible to an early sitting at the monastery, Chloe in the Lexus to her yoga class in Aurelia. Matthew had told them he was going to spend the morning by the pool, but when he found out about the bass he fired up the pickup and set off for East Deerfield, a half-hour drive.

  The striped bass had been laid out on the counter when he got there. It looked superb, the flesh a gleaming alabaster white, the thin, stippled stripe down its length a dark reddish color, as if a wounded bird had hopped across a field of snow. Nantucket striped bass fed on the sweet-fleshed baby squid that spawned off the eastern end of the island, rather than on mackerel or other oily creatures, which gave them an incomparably delicate flavor. Matthew bought two large slabs and for good measure some oysters and scallops, and had them packed in ice. Charlie had given him a credit card for buying provisions.

  He was driving along the strip of gas stations and fast-food joints that led out of town when he saw a silver Lexus peel off to the right at the stoplight fifty yards ahead. As it climbed the steep access road to the mall, Chloe’s head appeared in profile at the wheel. She’d changed out of the black tank top that she’d been wearing when she left the house, into a white blouse with short puffy sleeves, but it was definitely her.

  He was confused, seeing her here in East Deerfield when she’d said she was going to her yoga class in Aurelia. He supposed she must have remembered some chore she had to do in East Deerfield. But even as he articulated the thought, he was aware that it didn’t account for the change of clothing.

  He was planning a stop at the mall himself to buy razors and toothpaste, and he kept his eye on the Lexus as he made the same turn. Actually there was a whole complex of malls and big-box stores up there above the town, with parking lots around them and a labyrinth of branch roads looping in between.

  At the top of the access road, where Lowe’s and Walmart were signed off to the left, Chloe turned right, and although Matthew had planned to do his shopping at Walmart, he turned right also. Jumbled together in his mind as he made the turn were the thought that he could just as easily do his shopping at Target, which was in this direction, and the memory of a brief exchange he’d had with Chloe a few days ago when he’d asked if she’d found another anniversary present for Charlie and she hadn’t seemed to know what he was talking about until he reminded her that she’d felt guilty about the T-shirt. “Oh,” she’d said with a sort of brusque vagueness, “no, I didn’t find anything.” He’d dropped the subject but her obtuseness had seemed odd, and it came back to him now.

  Keeping well behind, he followed Chloe past the sprawling, polygonal fortress that housed Target, Best Buy, Sears and Dick’s Sporting Goods. He was just curious, was what he told himself, though he was aware of that not being entirely the truth. If he’d stopped to analyze himself more exactingly, he would have realized that he was amusing himself with a kind of playacting of husbandly suspicion. Beyond the Sears entrance, she branched off onto a subsidiary road that led back downhill past a Wendy’s and around a hairpin bend. As Matthew rounded the bend, h
e saw that she’d turned off into the parking lot of a large horseshoe-shaped building.

  He drove on past, pulling in to a Laundromat a hundred yards farther on, and doubling back. Driving slowly past the turnoff, he realized it was the rear entrance to the East Deerfield Inn, a motel you would normally access from the main road down below.

  She was getting out of the Lexus as he passed. In place of the yoga pants she’d been wearing when she left the house, she had on a summer skirt. She must have changed her clothing on the way here, he thought, glimpsing her in his mirror. She’d known in advance she was coming, which meant that the business about going to yoga was a premeditated lie.

  The playacting sensation had worn off by now, giving way to the less amusing knowledge that he was in fact spying on her. He considered going home and forcing himself not to think about it. But he doubted whether that would be possible, and anyway it occurred to him that, however distasteful it might be, he was under an obligation of friendship to stick around. A double obligation, in fact: one to Chloe in case her presence here turned out to have an innocent explanation, and one to Charlie in case it didn’t.

  He had an idea that he might be able to see down into the motel court from the Wendy’s parking lot on the road above it, beyond the hairpin turn, but when he got there he saw that there was a guardrail around the lot that made it impossible to get close enough to the embankment. All he could see was a slice of the building’s flat roof with its bric-a-brac of vents and turban-like fans.

  He had no choice but to get out of the truck. Assuming the confident air of someone on legitimate business, he climbed over the guardrail. A stand of thin trees beyond it led to the edge of the embankment, which fell away steeply, giving a view into the motel parking lot. The ground under the trees was littered with old wrappings of burgers and fries. Truck-sized blocks of yellowish stone formed a retaining wall at the bottom of the slope.

  Chloe was walking across the parking lot, carrying a canvas bag. Reaching a door on the left arm of the building, with some kind of vintage maroon car parked outside it, she knocked once. The door opened, and she stepped inside.