The Fall Guy

nine

An hour later he was still there, his limbs stiffened into position as if he’d been turned to stone, his mind a near-blank. Chloe had left, driven off to her cousin, but Grollier was still down there, sprawled naked on the love seat.

Matthew stared down at him. If what he had seen had extinguished any lingering hopes concerning the extent of Chloe’s involvement with this man, what he’d heard had spread a deeper, more insidious ruin. It was so disturbing, in fact, that for some time he couldn’t bring himself to summon any of it back. He was in a state of benumbed shock. Only some minor functionary of consciousness continued about its business, assessing the practicalities of the situation in a businesslike way: catching the far-off strains of someone’s imitation of a Hendrix guitar solo, observing that Grollier would have to leave soon if he was going to make it to the fireworks, noting unexcitedly that this would make his own exit from the house possible.

Grollier stretched and yawned. A smile appeared on his face and he rotated his shaggy head slowly from side to side as if in disbelief at something. Pushing down onto the love seat, he hauled himself up and padded off. Light appeared from the bedroom and Matthew heard drawers being opened and closed. He was getting dressed to go out, surmised the same detached mental functionary. Dully, Matthew projected forward; saw himself finally able to move again, slipping out of the house, driving back up the mountain, continuing with his life. The evening would take its place in the chain of significant episodes that had given his existence its singular character, and there would be no more possibility of forgetting it than there had been any of the others. At the same time it would make no practical difference to anything.

But he was mistaken about Wade getting dressed. The man was still naked when he returned to the living room, and now he began ferrying odds and ends back to the bedroom. It became apparent that he was simply continuing with his packing.

He was flying out to Indonesia tomorrow-Matthew had gleaned this from the post-coital talk-interrupting his stay at the house in order to salvage an agreement with an orangutan wrangler. Or no, not the post-coital talk: this part had actually come mid-coitus. They’d had a lull during which Wade had reiterated what appeared to have been an earlier attempt to persuade Chloe to go to Indonesia with him. She’d told him, with all too evident reluctance, that it was impossible, and the renewed sense of imminent separation had started them up again. “Don’t come,” she’d said as Wade’s groans began to indicate critical levels of excitement.

“Say something unsexy, then,” he’d muttered.

“Okay. Tell me what you thought about Charlie’s cousin.”

So that Matthew had been compelled to hear himself discussed, this time without the refuge of gaps in the conversation by way of intermittent relief. He could feel the exchange in its entirety now, pressing at him, urging him to replay it like some elaborate injury one has to relive over and over until its power to hurt runs out.

“Well, he’s a short guy,” had been Wade’s first observation.

“You said. You’re a fat guy. He can’t help it, you can, so what’s your point?”

“That’s my point, sugar. I could lose weight if I wanted to, but he’ll never gain height. That is a big old difference, not of degree, but of ontology-”

“Oh, stop it. Anyway, he isn’t that short.”

“No, but-”

“You didn’t think there was something strange about him?”

“Not that I could tell just from looking at him.”

“I think there’s something deeply strange about him.”

“You mean he has the hots for you? I wouldn’t call that strange, sugar.”

Wade had re-enveloped her in his arms at that point, face against the back of her neck, his large hand reaching around to her breasts. She’d snuggled back against him.

“No, that doesn’t bother me. Or it never used to. Now I’m not sure…”

“He’s getting more serious?”

“It’s almost as if he’s becoming possessive. As if he thinks we’re in an actual relationship. He’s started questioning me-asking where I’ve been, where I’m going. Also… Mmm.”

His other hand was moving between her legs and she broke off, given over to some large wave of pleasure.

“Also?”

She’d had to bite her lower lip, hard, before she could control her voice enough to answer.

“He’s been acting weird with Charlie,” she said as the sensation ebbed sufficiently for her to speak. “Needling him…”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I mean, I haven’t seen it myself, but I doubt Charlie’s imagining it. Charlie doesn’t tend to imagine things.”

“Needling him how?”

“He keeps making these insinuations…”

“About?”

“Me.”

“What about you?”

“That I’m being unfaithful.”

“Well you are, sugar. You are being unfaithful.”

“But he doesn’t know.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I’m careful, Wade.”

“So why’s he doing it?”

“I think he’s deliberately trying to make Charlie suffer. He knows Charlie has a tendency to get jealous.”

“But why would he want to make him suffer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. Not like there’s anything you can do about it. Right?”

“But it’s so cruel. I mean toward Charlie.”

“You’re awfully considerate of your husband.”

“I love him.”

The words, so unexpected in the circumstances, had shocked Matthew. Her ability to confound him never seemed to exhaust itself. Wade too had seemed surprised.

“You love him?” he’d said, heaving his bulk above Chloe and moving more concertedly. Her phrase had seemed to drive the two of them into suddenly more intense realms of mutual desire.

“You know I love him.”

“You love his dough, I know that.”

“Maybe, but I love him too.”

“More’n you’d love me? If I was that rich? When I’m that rich?”

“More than I’ll ever love you, Wade.”

“Jesus, you are the most… unfathomable… human being… I have ever…”

“Don’t come.”

“Met. And I grew up around Catholics.”

“That has nothing to do with it. Anyway, there’s something else.”

“About you and Charlie?”

“No, about him. Matthew.”

And Matthew had braced himself for another blow, but as it turned out neither Chloe nor Wade were able to distract themselves from the business at hand any longer, and for the next several minutes the only sounds inside the little A-frame were moans of pleasure and the occasional protest from a piece of furniture subjected to forces it hadn’t been designed to withstand. Time had seemed to thicken then, the seconds growing sticky as clay. He’d forced himself to think of dates of battles, variant recipes for choux pastry, passages from Pascal. Two errors, he’d remembered: 1. To take everything literally, 2. To take everything spiritually. Which of the two am I falling into? he’d wondered, contemplating the scene below, where Wade had just enthroned himself in the armchair and Chloe was kneeling down between his sprawled legs, positioning herself with a votive grace that reminded him of one of her butterflies as it settled on the stamen of some garish flower, slowly folding its wings; or again, as they’d moved and her face had reappeared through the next gap in the palings, cushioned sideways on the love seat with a look of rapture as she lay over its arm. Was there an erroneous sense in which this was literal? A true sense in which it was purely spiritual? Turning, she had reached up and drawn Wade down onto the floor below her, in turn lowering herself onto him with a cry of joy. There are perfections in nature to show that she is the image of God and imperfections to show that she is no more than his image. That was one his father had marked and that he, with childishly pleasurable irrationality, had written, No! next to, happily aware that nobody except his ghostly co-custodian of this mystic text could possibly have any idea what he meant.

They’d lain in silence for several minutes afterward, Chloe’s head on Wade’s chest as she idly fondled his detumescing member and ate a piece of chocolate, Wade’s eyes gazing upward, scanning the ceiling, the skylight, the carved wooden slats on the balustrade. For a terrifying moment it had seemed to Matthew the man had caught the glint of his eye in the candlelit darkness and was staring straight at him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The prospect of what would happen if he did had been so far beyond intolerable that Matthew could only think of it in terms of annihilation. Possibly in some court of ultimate, celestial arbitration his presence here would be found at least partly understandable, even partly creditable. (Was he not in some sense acting on Charlie’s behalf?) Certainly mitigating factors would be given their due. But no earthly judgment would get beyond the point of pure outraged horror. And there would be no mercy. He was well aware of that. No mercy at all.

Wade’s glance traveled on. But as if some unconscious agency had registered what his eye had failed to discern, he said:

“You were saying, sugar, about your friend.”

“I’m afraid of him,” Chloe had murmured. “That’s why I wanted you to see him. He scares me.”

“Ah, c’mon, sugar. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what I think, sugar, I think you’re mixing up your own guilt about Charlie with the little dude’s fixation on you, that’s what I think.”

“I don’t feel any guilt.”

“My point precisely,” Wade had answered with a chuckle.

Chloe had stood up then, and begun getting dressed.

“He’s blackmailing Charlie,” she’d said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

Wade’s astonishment was almost as great as Matthew’s own. At first Matthew thought she was joking or exaggerating for effect, but as she spoke on, it became apparent that she really did think he’d been blackmailing Charlie! He didn’t know whether to weep or laugh at the absurdity of it. As he’d listened to the strange warpings and distortions of reality that made up her tale, the urge to interrupt and proclaim his innocence, to stand up on the gallery and shout out the truth, had been almost overwhelming.

Yes, it was true that Charlie had lent him money on and off over the years since his arrival in the States. Yes, it was thanks to Charlie’s generosity that he had been able to come up with his stake in the farm-to-table restaurant. Yes, it was also true (though he hadn’t realized it was quite so obvious) that he’d hoped at some point to interest Charlie in his food truck idea. But he had always made it very clear that he intended to pay Charlie back as soon as he was in a position to, and in any case none of it was a secret, and it certainly wasn’t blackmail!

Wade himself had made the obvious objection:

“I mean, how’s that blackmail, sugar? There has to be compulsion of some kind to call it blackmail. He’d have to have some kind of hold over Charlie…”

“He does.”

“What?”

“Charlie’s guilt.”

“For what?”

“For having money. For being luckier than him. For his father giving Matthew’s father some bad investment advice a million years ago. For being, you know, a banker. For everything!”

“Yeah, but that’s not-I mean, at a stretch you could call that moral blackmail, but for actual legal blackmail there’d have to be specific information he was threatening to reveal.”

“All right, so call it moral blackmail. To me there’s no difference. He’s using Charlie’s guilt to extort money out of him. He has been for years. Basically Charlie’s been paying his rent since Matthew followed him here to the States, which I imagine he did with precisely that in mind.”

“Seriously? Paying his rent?”

“I’ve seen the checks.”

Untrue! Matthew had wanted to shout out. Unfair! There were just three or four months when Charlie covered my rent! And it was all on the record, written down on the ledger along with the other odd sums. And what the hell, he wondered as the scene replayed itself now, had she meant about me following Charlie to the States? Over the trees, as he considered this, came the unmistakable introduction to Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” It was a song Matthew happened to know well. There was a couple he used to supply in the early nineties; middle-aged hippies who’d had the track on a mix they played all the time in their Ladbroke Grove bedsit, where they’d insist he share a smoke with them whenever he visited. Nothing in the mix was really his kind of music, but he’d responded to the emotional build of “Hey Joe” and the stark economy of its tale of jealous passion. The words weren’t audible as he listened now, but he knew the simple call-and-response lyrics well enough. The gun, the shooting, then that frenzied dream of escape. Hey Joe, he heard as if from deep in his own past, where you gonna run to now? and from even deeper, saturated in some ancient sense of yearning and sun-dazzled release: I’m going way down south, way down to Mexico…

Another wobbly guitar solo stretched over the town and then “Hey Joe” gave way to the screeching bombardment of “Star-Spangled Banner.” There was a dim roar from the crowd and suddenly the blackness framed by the skylight above Matthew’s head exploded in gold and emerald starbursts with a blast that made the windows rattle.

Grollier was still in the house.

He was in a bathrobe now, sitting on the love seat again, with a beer and a lump of cold beef on a cutting board. Apparently he’d decided not to go to the fireworks after all.

Matthew gazed down on him with a sort of despairing indignation. Absurd as he knew it to be, he felt personally cheated by this change of heart; as if he’d been deliberately double-crossed. The man had as good as given his word that he was going to the display, hadn’t he? But instead here he was carving himself slices of cold beef, thick as carpet samples, and gobbling them down on crackers in between chugging at a beer!

Whatever perverse appeal it had possessed earlier, the idea of being trapped here all night had lost every trace of it, now that it appeared to have become a real possibility. It was so appalling, in fact, that it was almost a relief to have Chloe’s bizarre allegations to think about instead.

“Anyway there is something specific,” she’d said, buttoning her blouse.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Charlie had some things happen at Morgan Stanley, which he naively told Matthew about, back in the days when he still thought of him as someone he could confide in.”

“What things?”

“Oh, nothing he could get in trouble for at this point, but not the kind of thing you’d want spread around, and Matthew’s apparently aware of that. When we had those English people over the other night they were talking about the financial meltdown and making insinuations about Charlie’s career, and Matthew started leaning toward Charlie in this very overt way as if he was trying to remind him he had it in his power to make him extremely uncomfortable at that moment if he wanted to. I didn’t take it in at the time, but when Charlie told me about it later I realized I’d seen exactly what he was describing. It was very deliberate, and it was menacing. He was threatening Charlie.”

“Hm.”

“What do you mean, ‘Hm’?”

“That’s still not a real hold. I mean, if Charlie can’t get in actual trouble for whatever he did.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, sugar, that for Charlie to be guilty enough to pay the guy’s rent for him, he’d a had to have something besides routine rich-boy guilt on his conscience. Else it just doesn’t add up. There’d have to be some kind of genuine act of darkness on Charlie’s part.”

“No. Not possible.”

“Well, then I’m flummoxed.”

“Charlie’s too decent for his own good. That’s actually the problem. He has an overdeveloped conscience.”

A smile flared on Matthew’s face as he recalled these words. Certain secrets, he had learned, came into the world with a curious immunity to being divulged. Like well-armed viruses, they gave off invincible reasons for being preserved intact at every moment of possible violation. The irony, that if he could somehow convey the truth to Chloe, all it would do would be to confirm her view of him as a blackmailer, was merely a further manifestation of this quality. All kinds of bitter ironies, as a matter of fact, seemed to have begun proliferating around him. That her apparent fear of him, unfounded as it was, would have seemed fully justified, indeed insufficiently urgent, if she’d had any idea where he was at the very moment she was describing it-was one. That the accusation of obsessive behavior she had gone on to make (“forever loitering around our house in Cobble Hill,” was how she’d put it) had come to acquire an accidental semblance of validity in recent days-was another… The litany of accusations unfurled again in his mind. “Needling” Charlie. (How could Charlie have possibly misunderstood him so badly?) Blackmailing him, for Christ’s sake! Mooching, stalking, other assertions even more bizarre… “I think he wants to move into our home up here,” she’d said at one point, “take over the guesthouse or something.” It was as if she’d somehow tuned in to his innocent appreciation of the little cabin, and out of some incomprehensible hostility inflated it into a charge of sinister covetousness…

The existence of this hostility, so out of character in the Chloe he thought he knew, was as startling to discover as it was painful. What had caused it? How had she managed to conceal it from him so perfectly, and for so long? Why bother with all the smiles and gentleness; all those tender conversations they used to have, those protestations of interest, affection, concern? Why, if she hated him?

And yet that hadn’t been the end of it either. If it had, it might have been easier for him to manage. He could have told himself she was simply two-faced; a hypocrite in whom a dissembling graciousness had become habit, no doubt from having spent too many years looking out at the world from the plinth of Charlie’s riches… But there had been more to it, and of a nature so unexpected it had left him more bewildered than ever; more pierced and shattered, and-strangest of all-more in love.

“You really do not like this character, do you?” Wade had said.

Chloe had paused then, her face stilling as if the question had sent her unexpectedly inward. After a moment she’d replied quietly:

“I do like him, actually. In some ways I feel very close to him. That’s partly why I’m so confused. There’s some kind of strange connection between us. I’ve always felt that. I often have dreams about him, not sexual but intimate. As if we’d known each other in another life. It makes me want to help him.”

“Really? Because he sounds kind of irredeemable the way you describe him.”

Chloe grinned.

“Nobody’s irredeemable, Wade, not even you.”

Grollier had laughed.

“You’re a piece of work, sugar. You really are.”

“I’ll see you in a week,” she’d said, leaning down to kiss him goodbye.

At the door she’d turned back.

“By the way, you forgot to lock up before.”

“I did?”

“You should be careful. There are some sketchy characters in town. Every summer there’s a break-in somewhere. ’Bye, Wade.”

“Bye, sugar. I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too.”

Meatspace, he thought now. It had been like a forcible induction into the meatspace of the real.

Wade blew out the candles and carried his dishes into the kitchen, dumping them with a clatter in the sink and then noisily urinating in the bathroom. After that he slid the bolt on the back door open and shut again, returned to the darkened living room to lock the front door and finally retired into the bedroom. The bedroom light snapped off and after a creak or two of bedsprings there were no further indications of movement.

Meatspace… Or not an induction, exactly, since it had left Matthew more confirmed than ever in his wariness of that particular realm. But a vision of it at its most vividly carnal, glistening with the redness of betrayed intimacy, of deep bonds being torn asunder, every fiber bleeding.

Outside, the fireworks were going off in steady succession. He could see them through the skylight: white chrysanthemums flaring blue at their tips, sequined purses spilling golden coins, the slam of each explosion reverberating off the mountains.

Meatspace… And yet even in the midst of it, to have heard her affirm precisely the most hoped-for, uncertain, purely speculative of those bonds; the ones linking her not to Charlie but to himself! As if we’d known each other in another life… The words rose in his agitated spirit once again like some immensely soothing substance. He was right. He hadn’t been imagining things. There was something real, objective, fueling the compulsions that had drawn him into this strange situation.

The thought, however, intoxicating as it was, brought him back to the more prosaic question of how he was going to get himself out of this strange situation. He’d realized at this point that whatever difficulties might be entailed in leaving while Wade was still in the house, it was not going to be possible to spend the whole night crouched up here in the loft. For one thing, his bladder was already uncomfortably full and it was inconceivable that he was going to be able to delay emptying it until the morning. For another, the boards creaked, and sooner or later Wade was going to hear something.

His first thought was to wait till the small hours, when Wade could be presumed fast asleep, then scramble down the ladder, unlock the front door and run. Even with the noisy boards, it seemed a reasonably safe plan. It was no distance from the ladder to the door, which would take only a second or two to unlock. Even if Wade did wake up, there’d be time to disappear into the shadows of Veery Road before he got to the door.

But as Matthew started focusing on the details, dangers he hadn’t considered began to present themselves. What if Wade called the cops, or tried to rouse the neighborhood? The fireworks would be long over by then, and there’d be no crowds in which to lose himself. By the same token, he wouldn’t be able to drive off unnoticed even if he made it to the truck. No: better to get out while people were still around.

The explosions of the fireworks, which were coming thick and fast now, merged with their own echoes to form a continuous roaring. The display must have been approaching its climax. This was the moment to do it. Immediately, without giving himself a chance to reconsider, he unfolded his stiffened limbs and let himself down the ladder. The living room was almost pitch-dark, but he’d seen the ledge where he’d placed the key. He found the ledge without difficulty, and ran his hand along it. But there was no key there. He checked the floor below-maybe it had fallen after Chloe picked it up-but it wasn’t there either. Wade must have put it somewhere else when he locked up, or else taken it with him into the bedroom. He’d have to leave through the back door instead. Restraining an impulse to run, he crept quietly toward the rear of the house. Bursts of blue light in the sky gave a flickering glimpse of the back door and he was able to position his hand directly on the bolt without fumbling for it. He slid it back and grabbed the door handle. But the handle wouldn’t turn. He tried again, twisting as hard as he could: to no avail. In the next flash of blue he saw that the round black knob had its own small keyhole at the center. For a few seconds of panicked alertness he searched frantically for a key-over the doorframe, under the doormat, behind the sink. He was groping along the counter when he heard a voice directly behind him:

“Mister, I have a gun pointed at you. Don’t move.”

He closed his eyes.

“Don’t move, okay? I see you move, I’m going to have to shoot you. You got that? You can nod your head.”

Matthew nodded. He felt oddly unafraid, calm almost, as though experiencing some peculiar natural law whereby fear diminished in proportion to the closeness of its object, vanishing entirely at the point of convergence.

“Now. You’re going to hear me look for my phone, which should take all of about four seconds, and then call the police, but I’ll be pointing my weapon at you while I do that and I will shoot you if you move a muscle. It’s a semiautomatic Ruger, just so you know, single-action, so really, don’t make any kind of a move. Okay?”

Matthew nodded again, but less in acknowledgment of Grollier’s question this time, than of his own sense of what was going to happen. It didn’t frighten him at all. In a way, it was a relief. He thought-such was the strange lucidity inside him-of the words from his father’s Pascal: All men seek happiness. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves. He’d often dreamed of being placed in a situation where survival was simply not an option; where the small part of him still obstinately clinging to the little knot of pain and unhappiness that made up most of his existence would finally have no choice but to defer to the other, larger part, that craved only oblivion. It seemed very clear that he was there at last. Only a little courage was required.

Slowly, conscious of having long ago brought to mind every argument in favor and every objection against, he began turning toward his executioner. “Mister, I told you,” he heard, “do not fucking move!”

There was something unexpected in the tone; an aggrieved, almost querulous note. On completing the turn, Matthew saw why. Wade, who was naked again, had been bluffing. His hand was empty.

The two of them peered at each other in the flickering blackness for several seconds.

“You!” Wade cried out in startled recognition. His large head turned back to glance into the living room and up toward the loft. Facing Matthew again, he hurled himself forward, his bulky figure moving with stunning agility, hands outspread, his fingers braced as if to grab Matthew’s throat and throttle him.