The Fall Guy

eight

In the morning he found Charlie drinking coffee alone on the terrace. It was early, not yet seven.

“Good sleep?” Charlie asked. Tanned and relaxed in his gray T-shirt and drawstringed shorts, he seemed fully recovered from his brooding hostility of the night before. His lean legs sprawled forward, feet comfortably crossed at the ankles, tapping each other as if in mutual affection.

“Not bad.”

“Have some coffee.” Charlie nodded at the pot and looked back down at his iPad. He held the device in his left hand and scrolled with his right, dismissing current events that didn’t interest him with a flick of his forefinger, and detaining others with a lightly proprietorial jab as if to say, “Just one moment, you.”

“Chloe still asleep?” Matthew asked.

“No. She went out. She’ll be back with pastries after Early to Bread opens.”

“Where’d she go? I mean… I mean… it’s kind of early for yoga, isn’t it?”

Charlie looked up.

“She went to take pictures.”

“Ah. More mailboxes.”

“Right. She figured she ought to get out there while she still can. Lily’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Right. Of course. Make hay while the sun shines. So to speak.”

Charlie gave him another glance, and turned back down to his screen.

“I think I’ll get an early start too,” Matthew said.

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s a farmers’ market in East Deerfield… Always good to beat the crowds.”

“Well, don’t get anything for me. I’ll be in the city.”

“You won’t be coming home?”

“Yeah, but late, and I won’t be eating. There’s a dinner.”

“Anything interesting?” Matthew asked, eager to leave but at the same time anxious to ascertain where he stood with Charlie; still clinging to the hope that his cousin’s hostility might have been purely imaginary.

“What?” Charlie was looking his screen.

“Anything interesting-the dinner?”

“Oh, those Grameen people. Ex-Grameen.”

“That sounds encouraging…”

“We’re getting there.”

“Microloans, right?”

“Right.”

“What exactly is a microloan? I mean, what sort of sum?”

Charlie looked up at him.

“It varies.” He seemed on the point of getting annoyed. Bewildered, Matthew dropped it.

“Well… see you later, then.”

“See you later.”

He drove fast, making the turns without thinking. The LeBaron was in the A-frame’s short driveway, and this time so was the Lexus, squeezed in right next to it, both fenders gleaming in the morning light. The sight was strangely shocking; shattering almost. It was as if, until now, some part of him really had been clinging to a shred of hope that he’d been imagining things. He plunged on past, his head reeling.

So what? he told himself. Her business, not mine. At the same time, from some ungovernably autonomous region of his mind, other thoughts arose; crushing, and still more crushing. She didn’t care anymore if she was found out… She wanted to be found out; wanted to precipitate a crisis, upend her marriage… Or no, she wasn’t even thinking about her marriage: she’d just been in too much of a hurry to see her lover, get into his bed for an early morning fuck on this last day of easy mobility, before her daughter came back from camp. So what? So what?

He pulled out onto the county road and a garbage truck he hadn’t seen blasted its horn as it bore down, snorting into his mirror. Shaken, he made an effort to get a grip on himself. After a moment a slightly more rational explanation for the car’s presence right there in the driveway came to him: she must have simply thought she was safe from discovery at that early hour. It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it countered the suggestion of uncontrollable desire, which made its effect on him less incendiary. The pitch of his own feelings appeared to be connected with Chloe’s. If he could tell himself this was just an ordinary affair pursued out of ordinary boredom, and regulated by sensible caution, he felt he could manage this absurdly inappropriate anguish.

He was driving toward East Deerfield because he had told Charlie he was going to the farmers’ market. But he didn’t feel like going to the farmers’ market and it wasn’t as if Charlie would give a damn whether he went to the farmers’ market or not. What he felt like doing, he realized, was going back to Aurelia, back to the A-frame. The farther away he got, the more strongly he felt drawn back to it, as if distance brought out some mysterious soothing essence lodged in that triangular building that wasn’t discernible in the tumult of things he felt in its proximity. At the same time the very urgency of the desire to go back seemed reason enough to resist it. It was abundantly clear to him that he was becoming unhealthily fixated on that little house.

He turned off the county road and drove aimlessly along the winding lanes that spread through an area of old dairy farms. Some of these looked abandoned; broken barns standing open to the sky, machines rusting in tall weeds.

I should leave right away, he thought, not wait till Charlie’s guests arrive. Just make my excuses and go.

But where? His own apartment was sublet. His few friends aside from Chloe and Charlie were all dispersed for the summer. In the past he would have gravitated toward the house in Spain, near Cádiz, where his mother and her third husband spent their summers, but his mother had died two years ago, and the husband, who owned the house, hadn’t seemed interested in continuing his relationship with Matthew. He could visit his sister, he supposed. She and her partner, both social workers, lived in Bristol, a city he liked. But they were religious and the last time he’d visited, almost ten years ago, their determination to drag him off to church had got on his nerves. He could go somewhere on his own, of course, but that would mean motels and restaurants, which would eat up the meager profit he was making on his sublet; money he was counting on to help get him through the rest of the year.

The rest of the year… It was only the second week of August, but suddenly he was aware of autumn. The leaves overhanging the narrow roads were dusty and frayed. The grasses already looked dry. And still he had made no progress in the task he’d set himself, of getting to grips with the curious stalling paralysis that had taken him over.

Part of the problem was that he’d counted on being able to talk to Charlie and Chloe about it, but in their different ways they’d both made themselves inaccessible. Not that he blamed them, he assured himself, fighting off an urge to do just that. Why should they concern themselves with his private problems?

I should leave, he told himself again. Find a cheap motel on the Jersey shore and hole up for the rest of the summer.

He’d come to an area of cultivated fields, with split-rail fences dividing them. A red Dutch barn came into view as he drew level with a well-tended cornfield. It looked oddly familiar, and he realized it was the one Chloe had photographed the other day. He slowed down. There was the mailbox with the enamel-painted wild turkeys and the petunia in its clay pot. The thought that Chloe had been here with her cameras gave the little scene a poignancy that clutched at him. He stopped and got out of the truck, breathing in the warm, sweetish air. The sense of her was strong suddenly, saturating, as if he had come upon yet one more of those secret pockets of hers. He felt close to her, standing where she had stood; linked across the intervening days as if by hidden threads, like the threads at the back of a tapestry. The cornstalks were taller than he was, armed in their heavy cobs, with the yellow silks blackening where they spilled from the split sheaves. At the edge of the field, blue starry flowers-cornflowers, he supposed-stood out against the steel-green darkness of the corn. Their blue looked warm at first, but the longer he looked, the colder it seemed to grow, as if it too were an incursion from the future; a backward glance of arctic blueness from the winter ahead. He climbed into the truck and headed back toward Aurelia. It was past eight by the time he got there: Early to Bread would have opened. It occurred to him that, assuming Chloe had left, he could go and knock at the door of the A-frame; pretend he’d been sent by the owner of the house to check the furnace or look at a crack in the ceiling. The guy would have no reason not to let him inside.

But then what? he wondered, frowning in bewilderment at the scenario he’d created. Why would I want to get inside?

The Lexus was gone from the driveway when he reached the A-frame. He slowed, looking in through the blur of a screened window. A light was on. A large head moved against it.

Matthew sped away, his heart racing.

Charlie had left for New York when he got back to the house, and Chloe was out by the pool. The breakfast things were still on the stone table, and Matthew cleared them away. A half-scooped-out cheese sat on the kitchen counter, oozing from its cavity. Matthew threw it out and put the dirty plate and spoon in the dishwasher. He couldn’t help disapproving of the wastefulness of his cousin’s habits. He would pick up novelty loaves from Early to Bread on his way home from tennis, bite off a chunk, and let the rest go stale in the back of his car. Or he’d buy plastic-encased raspberries and leave them around unopened till they grew a fur of mold.

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 again. 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.”

“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.”

“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.

He sat down on the futon. A flock of birds crossed the skylight, catching the sun on their undersides as they banked upward. Distant sounds floated over the trees: traffic, a blurred screech of feedback from a PA system. But it was peaceful all the same, up here in the apex of the A, and he felt no urgency to leave. It didn’t really seem likely that the man-Grollier, wasn’t that his name?-would come home before going to the fireworks, but even the small possibility that he might was of oddly little concern to Matthew. If anything, he noticed, it seemed to excite him fractionally. He found himself toying with the idea of unrolling the futon and staying there all night; not as a serious plan, but with the bemused interest one experiences when an unexpected fantasy lays open some wholly new realm of speculative pleasure.

He was turning over the components of this peculiar fantasy, trying to understand why it should cause this faintly pleasurable apprehensiveness, when he became aware of lights probing down the gravel of the driveway. He knelt up, peering over the balustrade through the front window. He had been in the house barely fifteen minutes! And anyway, hadn’t he heard the man say he was going straight on to the fireworks? Hadn’t he seen for himself the picnic blanket and thermos in the car? The lights approached, separating into two beams as they came around the slight curve in the short driveway. Alarm spread through him, and yet for a long moment he did nothing; merely stared into the approaching glare, surrendering to the situation with an almost luxurious helplessness, as if the inertia building inside him all these months had finally rendered him completely incapable of movement. Only by an extreme effort of will was he able to rouse himself. Grabbing the balustrade, he hauled himself to his feet and took a few steps down the ladder, trying to calculate whether Grollier would see him if he made a dash for the back door, and whether it would matter even if he did, since he didn’t know who Matthew was.

But as the lights went out, he saw that the car itself was not in fact the LeBaron, but the Lexus.

For a moment he thought he must simply be seeing things. In his mind Chloe was so firmly on her way to her cousin Jana in Lake Classon, it was impossible to accept she was here, and he stared, waiting for the hallucination to dissolve. But it was Chloe. He watched her climb out of the car and walk over to the Weber grill, lifting the lid. A puzzled look crossed her face and briefly the hope rose in him that she would leave now. But she put back the lid and, undeterred by the absence of the key, proceeded toward the front door. He stood on the ladder, unsure what to do. If he went any farther down, she would see movement through the window. Already she was almost at the door. Only as he heard the handle turn did some dim instinct of self-preservation galvanize him, drawing him back up the ladder and behind the balustrade in time to conceal himself before the door opened.

She had her phone to her ear as she came in. With her free hand she switched on the light. Afraid she might look up and see him between the wooden slats, which were carved at their edges in the shape of ornate brackets, Matthew sat clenched and unblinking.

“Wade,” she said into the phone.

He saw her pick the key from the ledge where he had left it, examine it a moment and set it down again.

“No, I’m at the house… Your house, Wade… I thought you might want to come say goodbye one more time.”

She was wearing one of her thin, patterned skirts with a short-sleeved top, tailored at the waist.

“I know. I’ll call her.”

She moved in quick steps through the room with the phone to her ear, placing her hand lightly on the love seat, the armchair, the side of the ladder. As she moved toward the back of the house, disappearing out of sight, Matthew let himself breathe again. Very carefully, he backed into the corner of the little space, as far as possible from view.

He heard her laugh.

“You know you want to, Wade… You know you do… Yes, but they never start before ten… I know, but this is Aurelia. All the bands in town have to do their Jimi Hendrix impressions first…”

Then she was directly below him, in the bedroom.

“Oh, Wade,” he heard. “You really are leaving, aren’t you? I’m looking at your suitcase… Yes, there’s an early bus, around six; easier than driving… I know… I know, Wade, I do too, but Lily’s coming, and anyway, I just can’t.”

She came back out of the room, closing the door.

“Be quick, then… Okay, but don’t feel you have to charm the entire restaurant on your way out. Anyway, did you see Matthew?”

The sound of his own name hit Matthew like an electric shock.

“Yeah, that was him… He did? Probably went to the fireworks… Well, thanks for going anyway… Okay, I’ll wait till you get here.”

Something her lover said made her laugh.

“I know. But he can’t help that, can he?”

She laughed again, more tenderly. “Yes, but you’re good at sizing people up. Anyway, I thought it might interest you to take a look at him… Okay, see you in a bit.”

Back in the living room, she turned off the overhead light and switched on a small table lamp.

Matthew watched her, trying to fathom the implications of what he’d just heard. Now she was on the love seat, facing in his direction, making another phone call.

“Jana? Hi. Listen, I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to be a little late. Some things have come up…”

The polite hostess smile Matthew had seen when Jana came to visit reappeared on Chloe’s face. Her small teeth showed like a row of pearls.

“Oh, that’s sweet of you… No, no, I definitely want to come. I’ve hardly seen you all summer… Thanks, Jana. I shouldn’t be too long.”

She stood up and drew the shades down over the living room windows. Sitting again, she held the phone in front of her face, adjusting her hair and rearranging the rounded collar of her blouse, opening a button to reveal a lacy edge of bra. It took Matthew a moment to realize she was using the phone as a camera to see herself. She put it away in her canvas bag, crossed her legs and waited. After a few seconds she stood up again and went toward the back of the house, returning with a lit candle in one hand and a small plate in the other, with kumquats on it, and chocolate. She placed them on the glass table, and switched off the lamp. In the candlelight the gray furnishings took on a warmer tone. She stretched, popped a kumquat into her mouth, and lay down on the love seat, closing her eyes. But she was still restless. Standing up again, she slipped her underwear off from under her skirt in a swift, practical motion. Coming around the coffee table, she sat back down-this time on the armchair- and tossed the pale garment onto the floor beside her.

Matthew looked down through the thin gaps, feeling like an animal in a cage. His mouth had gone dry. In the distance he could hear an electric guitar. Closer, katydids had begun their nighttime chorus. She had sent her lover to the bar to check him out. Why? he wondered. Am I such a mystery, even to her? Is there something in me I don’t see? The question, unanswerable as it was, sent a ripple of anxiety through him.

Headlights pierced through the shades, blading in vertically through the gaps between the balustrade, moving across Matthew’s face like a pair of scanners. A moment later the door opened and Grollier stepped inside.

He paused in the entrance, taking in the little tableau Chloe had prepared for him. In silence, he smiled at Chloe across the small room with its flickering gold light. Closing the door behind him, he moved toward her, stooping midway to pick up her discarded panties and fill his lungs with their scent.

Above them Matthew stared down through the slats in the balustrade, scarcely breathing; wanting and not wanting to see.