The Fall Guy

by James Lasdun

  “What about your evening, Charlie?” Matthew said.

  “Exhausting. I didn’t get in till almost two.”

  “He fell asleep on the Thruway!” Chloe said, putting her hand on Charlie’s arm.

  “I didn’t fall asleep. I very responsibly pulled over and took a nap.”

  Charlie yawned, looking at his watch.

  “And now we have to hit the road again, right, Chlo?”

  “Soon. By the way, Matt, we’ll be out for dinner tonight. Lily’s in a performance and it’ll probably run late.”

  “Okay.”

  He’d forgotten they were picking up their daughter from camp today.

  He reached for a muffin from the cake box.

  “How was town?” he asked casually.

  Chloe shrugged.

  “The usual.”

  They left after breakfast. As soon as they were gone, he got into the truck and drove into Aurelia, crossing the Millstream bridge and crawling slowly past the Veery Road intersection without making the turn. A man was trimming his hedge on a ladder and a couple of kids were biking around a front yard. Otherwise nothing was going on at that end. He circled back and checked from the county road end: also quiet. This time he made the turn and drove past the house itself. Nothing: just the LeBaron waiting in the driveway and the silent house jutting above the hedges.

  Back at the bridge he parked and climbed down to the creek. Despite the drop in temperature, people were out on the rocks. He made his way downstream until he came level with the back of the A-frame. Summoning the air of a harmlessly inquisitive wanderer, he scrambled up the bank opposite, which sloped up to the fence of a building supply yard. Walking alongside it, he allowed himself a few quick glances across to the other side. Nothing. The back door was closed, the glass squares in its top half reflecting blackly. The small trees flanking the path, sentinel-like presences in last night’s darkness, turned out to be dwarf pear trees, laden with small green fruit. A faux-bronze Buddha, Aurelia’s ubiquitous totem, sat in the shade of a maple, smiling. The peacefulness of the place was a little uncanny. There ought to have been some outward sign of disturbance, he felt, if only visible to himself; a crack in that trim clapboard exterior, a crooked glint in a window. But the house seemed entirely calm.

  He moved on, climbing back down to the water a hundred yards farther along, where, for the benefit of anyone watching, he dabbled his feet in a pool, before turning back.

  A group of Rainbows had taken possession of a rock near the bridge. One was strumming a small guitar; others had drums and tambourines. A guy with a coiled topknot was sharing a sandwich with a lean gray dog. Torssen was there, Mr. 99%, sitting off to one side with the two girls Matthew had met with Pike. He was talking, while the girls listened in silence. One of them lay with her head resting on his thigh. The other, the kittenish-faced one, was on her stomach with her head propped on her hands. Her green hair, to which she had added tints of violet and orange, stuck up in a soft thick tangle, and Torssen was absently plying his fingers through it as he spoke.

  Matthew stared, wondering again what it was about the guy that provoked such hostility in him. Was it just his own jaundiced distrust of any attitude that divided the world into oppressors and the oppressed, when the only valid distinction as far as he was concerned was between oppressors and, as he put it to himself, “oppressors-in-waiting”? Or was there something more primitive and personal going on? It occurred to him, as he probed the feeling, that there was probably an element of envy in it; that this figure holding court from the throne-room of his own body, with his jesters and musicians and nubile consorts arrayed about him, might, in some sense, have been himself, had circumstances beyond his control not intervened. Not that this particular image of fulfillment had a monopoly on his capacity for envy; far from it. Depending on his mood, almost any image of success or even just average functionality had the potential to initiate a kind of looping self-interrogation; the abject sense of being confronted by some viable version of himself provoking the question of why he couldn’t become that version, which in turn would arouse the fleetingly hopeful sense that all it would take would be a determined act of self-adjustment, followed, however, almost immediately, by the recollection that this adjustment would have to take place in that tantalizing stretch of time we wander in so freely and yet can no longer alter in even the minutest degree, namely the past. Which brought him back, like some infernal Möbius strip of thought, to that condition of abject susceptibility to the lives of others . . .

  Still, it was true that some of those lives had more obvious resonance with his own, which no doubt boosted their power over him, and this man Torssen’s was certainly one of those.

  One of the girls passed Torssen a small bag and he rolled a joint, executing the ritual with the solemnity of a priest preparing a sacrament. The group smoked it openly, and the smell drifted down to Matthew on the breeze. Good stuff, he noted, remembering the spalls of dusty foliage, half oregano, he used to sell in London. Rudy, his old supplier, impinged on his thoughts, and Rudy’s wife Joan. He frowned, shutting them out, and moved on.

  Back at the house, he went straight to his room and slid his suitcase out from under the bed, unzipping the lid. Inside, exactly as he had left it last night, was the plastic shopping bag he’d taken from the A-frame’s kitchen, bulging with its clutter. He peered in. There was the TAG Heuer wristwatch, the iPhone, the little cheap Tracfone, the laptop, the bulging wallet, the Sabatier knife. All present and correct. No reason why it shouldn’t have been, of course, but the need to check had been sharply urgent. He closed the lid again, slid the suitcase back under the bed and left.

  In the kitchen he cooked himself an omelette of duck eggs and aged Gruyère with some leftover romesco sauce that needed eating. He was famished, but after a couple of bites he felt abruptly nauseous and tipped the rest into Fu’s bowl. Fu, who had a sixth sense for any action involving his bowl, came waddling in immediately, and guzzled the whole mess down.

  What now? Swim? Walk? Read? Think more about this hamstrung existence of his? The latter activity had become a little beside the point, he realized. He supposed he should try to take stock of the immediate situation; start processing what had happened and preparing himself for what was to come. But it was hard to get any lasting purchase on it. Thinking about it was like trying to handle a blob of mercury that broke into slithering beads as you touched it. It was like trying to take stock of a dream, or some strange hallucination.

  He’d drifted into the living room, and was sitting on one of the rawhide sofas. George’s words came back to him from the time they’d talked in the kitchen. Absently, he dug a hand down behind the rawhide seat. Almost immediately he found an iPod Mini. For the next several minutes he distracted himself with a methodical search of the deep, faintly oily crevices of the two sofas. By the time he was finished he’d found several Scrabble letters, close to forty dollars in change and bills and a gold-and-quartz Montblanc fountain pen. He considered leaving it all on the kitchen table for Charlie and Chloe to find when they got back with their daughter, with a note explaining where he’d discovered it, but realized this would raise the question of why he’d been poking around in their sofa in the first place. Mildly amused by the predicament, he stuffed the whole lot back down into the crack. For a moment he felt rather noble and honorable doing this. But then he felt hypocritical, as though it had just been an act for the benefit of some invisible observer, and he dug it out again, all but the Scrabble pieces. Why pretend he was anything other than he was? he thought. A teenage delinquent turned fully fledged adult criminal. In which case he might as well start acting like one.

  The atmosphere of those grubby, forlorn years came back to him; ages fourteen to seventeen, running his little business with his scales and baggies out of the tiny bedroom in the West Kensington flat he’d moved into with his mother and sister. One incident in particular asserted itself through the drift of memory. It wasn’t an incident he thoug
ht about often: it was so bizarre it had a quality of having happened to a third party, and when he did think of it, he could hardly connect it to himself. Dr. McCubbin would no doubt have been highly interested in it, but he hadn’t discussed it with McCubbin; not because he was embarrassed, but because even by then it had already sealed itself off from him, existing more as an article of faith than a living memory.

  He’d gone to the flat of his supplier, Rudy, in Hounslow. Rudy had apparently forgotten he was coming and didn’t have the goods, which he kept in a garage in Hatton Cross. He’d told Matthew to wait while he fetched them, saying he’d be back in an hour. Joan, his wife, offered Matthew a cup of tea. She was a gaunt woman with long, platinum-white hair and white-polished fingernails. The two of them sat together at the kitchen table with its porcelain donkey centerpiece, in the paniers of which sat little glass cruets of condiments.

  They hadn’t been alone before and didn’t have much to say to each other. Joan asked about his school and he told her about his crammer in Holborn. They discussed the unusually sunny weather. A silence descended on them. Then Joan looked at him—he never forgot the placid calm in her pale blue, crow’s-footed eyes—and said, “Would you like to fuck me, Matthew?” He was startled, and yet the words immediately acquired a kind of fatefulness, as if in some part of himself he had long been expecting them. He remembered walking down a corridor behind her, his forefinger linked with hers, thinking: So this is how it’s going to happen. In the bedroom she took off her top and went to the far side of the bed, kneeling on the gold-brown carpet in her bra and skirt. She lit a menthol cigarette. He hesitated in the doorway, unsure what he was supposed to do. There was a mirror etched with Betty Boop on one wall, and paintings of a woodland scene in each of the four seasons on another. In the corner was a built-in white closet. “Come here,” she said. He went over and she unzipped his fly, taking him in her mouth and putting his hands on her breasts, holding her cigarette off to the side. When he was hard she took off her skirt and bra and lay on the bed. “Is this your first time?” she asked. He nodded. She stubbed out her cigarette and raised her knees. “Take off my panties.” He remembered the thinness of her thighs as he slid her underwear down; the scant black wisps of her pubic hair. He remembered trying to kiss her as he lowered himself onto her, and the abruptness with which she turned her head away, muttering, “None of that.” She brought him into her and they went at it missionary-style for a bit. “Very nice,” she said, and then turned over, lighting another cigarette and thrusting her thin behind at him. “Now hit me. Smack me.” Bewildered—at fifteen he was very innocent in these matters— he gave her a tentative smack. “Go on, I like it,” she told him. “Harder. Harder.” After a while she said, “Now do me again. Put it in.”

  Rudy was in the kitchen when they went back, sitting at the table with another man, a soft-looking guy in his forties, with an unshaven double chin. It was this part of the experience that was so strange: so charged and yet so blank. Everyone acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Nobody asked where he and Joan had been or what they’d been doing. Rudy introduced the other man to Matthew as his new business partner, Don, who’d given him a lift back from Hatton Cross. Joan put the kettle on and made another cup of tea while Rudy weighed out the grass and hash and counted off the acid tabs, and Matthew paid him.

  That was all, and nothing ever happened with Joan again. But a peculiar feeling had lingered with Matthew as he left, a sort of confused dread, and for a long time his mind had gone compulsively back over the experience, itemizing every detail, and often recapturing small objects or words he’d overlooked before, but always sensing there was still some large thing that he’d missed.

  Later, in his twenties, he’d surmised that Rudy and possibly the other man had been watching through the closet keyhole or some hidden hole in the wall, or maybe through the Betty Boop mirror. Still later, he’d recalled an earlier visit where he’d gone into the room they called the lounge, and had seen, without taking any particular notice of it, a home movie projector on the cocktail cabinet, and it occurred to him that he’d possibly been filmed. But oddly enough even when he interpolated these conjectures back into the memory, they did nothing to diminish its aura of mystery, or reduce the sense of vague dread it still aroused in him.

  It was only recently, a year or so ago, that he’d remembered the last part of it, or what he hoped was the last part of it. Without any obvious trigger it had come to him one morning in New York, that Joan had also told him to burn her with the lighted cigarette, and that he had done it: stabbed the red ember, in response to her gasped commands, against her scarred white buttocks. It had seemed a momentous new fact to have discovered, or rediscovered, about himself, full of potential illumination. And yet it too had proved oddly enigmatic, yielding little usable self-knowledge, and adding to his confusion.

  Only now, for the first time, did it occur to him that its real meaning might be less in the nature of illumination than of prophecy. For was it not, in its masque-like way, a foretelling of last night’s culminating gesture: the same hand, a quarter century older, thrust out in an almost identical motion, the same bewildered shock at the unexpected weapon in its grasp, as though Joan had reached down through time and placed it there; the same sense of irresistible necessity drawing from him an act of violence as savage and surprising to him as if he had been given a lightning bolt to wield?

  • • •

  He took the spoils from the sofa back up to the guesthouse and put them in the suitcase with Grollier’s things. The suitcase had seemed the safest hiding place for the moment. Nobody was going to stumble on its contents by accident. He’d be in New York in a few days, assuming his luck held (though “luck” didn’t seem quite the word), and there’d be plenty of places to get rid of everything. The Montblanc pen he could sell when the time was right, along with Grollier’s watch. The rest could be bagged and dumped in trash cans across the city, or thrown in the river.

  He swam laps for an hour before going to bed that night, forcing himself up and down the length of the pool. Shivering, he ran up to the guesthouse and took a long, hot shower. There was a moment, as he lay in darkness, in which he could feel the proximity of tumultuous thoughts that, if engaged, would almost certainly rule out any possibility of sleep. But he’d managed to exhaust himself sufficiently that fatigue soon got the better of him, and he was asleep by the time Charlie and Chloe got back from Connecticut with their daughter.

  • • •

  A child’s voice singing a Lady Gaga song rang out from the kitchen as he went down for breakfast the next morning.

  Lily had been at music camp. She played the violin and clarinet, and mimicked a range of English and American pop divas uncannily well, complete with cheeky glottal stops and tremulous melisma. When she wasn’t making music, however, she was a quiet, watchful girl, with something of Charlie’s distrustful air, as if she thought you might be trying to get something out of her.

  She broke off the song as Matthew came in, and gave him a friendly, if somewhat impersonal, greeting. He kissed her on the forehead and realized he should have brought a present for her. At one time she’d treated him as a family member, unselfconsciously jumping onto his lap with a book for him to read to her, but in the past couple of years she’d become more reserved.

  “How was camp?” he asked.

  “It was good.”

  “That camp is something else,” Chloe said. “The show they put on was like Broadway and the Lincoln Center combined. They even served little tubs of ice cream in the intermission.”

  Matthew smiled. “I’ve always wondered what I missed out on, not going to camp.”

  “You never went to camp?” the girl asked.

  “We didn’t have camp in England.”

  “But it’s so much fun!”

  “That’s probably the reason.”

  Chloe laughed and Lily, taking the cue, gave a polite chuckle. That was another thing about her; a h
abit of doing whatever her mother did: echoing her gestures, acquiescing in her moods and wishes; sometimes with a strange sort of cringing eagerness, as if she weren’t quite certain about her mother’s approval. There was no obvious reason for this: Chloe treated her with impeccable kindness and patience, and yet the effect of her daughter’s behavior was to suggest something faintly strained in her own. It was the only aspect of Chloe that Matthew had ever found remotely troubling, and he preferred not to think about it.

  The morning passed unremarkably. After breakfast Chloe and Lily went off to a Zumba class. Charlie worked upstairs in his office. Matthew sat on the terrace with his father’s Pascal. From time to time he checked for news on his computer, an old Toshiba netbook with a cracked screen. He’d brought it down because the Wi-Fi only reached the guesthouse erratically. There was still nothing.

  After lunch he joined the family by the pool, lying in the shade while Chloe and Lily splashed in the water and Charlie floated around in his inflatable armchair. The citrusy scent of some shrubs that had started flowering for the second time that summer drifted on the breeze. Heat rose from the flagstones edging the pool. He gazed out at the three figures, noting his own calmness, again with that odd, though not disagreeable, feeling of detachment from himself. A fantasy took shape in his mind, in which time stalled in a kind of endlessly looping eddy and all the pleasant sensations of this moment, the warmth and soft sounds and gentle motions, simply burbled on forever like some changeless screen saver.

  But by the late afternoon he was beginning to feel restless again. A part of him wanted this lull to last forever, but another part of him, he realized, was impatient for it to break. He stood up.

  “I should get some things for dinner.”

  Chloe looked at him, shading her eyes.

  “Can’t we make do with what we have in the refrigerator?”

  “I need nectarines. I want to make a cobbler.”