The Fall Guy

two

Matthew hadn’t seen Chloe for a couple of months, but even if he’d seen her just a day ago, or only an hour, it would not have been a neutral event for him to see her now. It never was.

He had been trying hard, lately, to come to an accurate understanding of his feelings for her. A year or so after his father’s disappearance, his mother had sent him to a therapist: a large, somber Australian named Dr. McCubbin. The sessions at Dr. McCubbin’s office overlooking Hampstead Heath had done little to alleviate the effect on Matthew of his father’s actions, but in their own way they had been instructive. McCubbin had taught Matthew how to analyze his emotions by instilling in him the habit of asking himself: What does this feel like? Where else have I experienced this particular shade of joy or sadness? What specific associations does it have for me? He’d also taught him not to be afraid of any desire or impulse he might discover by this process. The psyche, McCubbin had shown him, was autonomous. You couldn’t alter its inclinations, however much you might want to, so there was no point in trying. You could, however, avoid being tyrannized by them, and the better you understood them, the easier this would be.

In the case of Chloe, Matthew had teased out a large number of disparate components in the general feeling of enchantment he experienced in her presence. Being several years older than her, he had to acknowledge something paternal in his attitude; a kind of protective, delightedly disapproving fondness that he imagined he might feel toward a daughter if he should ever have one. At the same time, as Charlie’s cousin and honorary brother, he felt related to her on a more equal, sibling- or in-law-like footing. Then, in the tacit arrangement by which it was always as the beneficiary of her and Charlie’s hospitality that he saw her (there was never any question of them visiting him in his dismal little one-bedroom in Bushwick), there was also something of the dependent child in his feeling toward her; or at least a projection of something parental onto her. Then too, there was that very precisely defined and circumscribed amatory interest that the medieval poets understood so well: the attraction of the squire to his master’s lady; a matter of devotion on one side, and infinite kindness on the other, with the mutual understanding that any favors granted must be of a purely symbolic nature. More prosaically, he’d always felt a simple, friendly affection for her. She’d been a food photographer before marrying Charlie, and knew some of the people Matthew had worked with in the restaurant business in New York. She liked art and literature in the same unintellectual way as Matthew did, and shared his weakness for low-end celebrity gossip. The soft peal of her laughter as the two of them worked their way through the love lives of Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians, often to the accompaniment of Charlie’s snores, was a sound Matthew had come to associate with his evenings at their home in Cobble Hill, and it formed a significant part of the picture he’d imagined as he looked forward to their summer together in Aurelia. And then finally there was that sense of almost supernatural kinship that exists often between people who seem on the surface quite unalike but whom life conspires to link by a succession of small affinities, creating a bond that exists in a world of its own, requiring neither comment nor confirmation in this world.

He’d felt this bond since first meeting her, a decade earlier. Charlie and she had just started dating, and Charlie, whose disastrous first marriage had left him distrustful of his own judgment, had wanted to know what Matthew thought of her. The three of them met at Charlie’s old apartment in the Village. Right away Matthew could see she was in another class from the women Charlie had introduced him to previously. Her clear, structural attractiveness, her good taste in clothing that came across as a natural elegance completely unlike the overgroomed glamour of her predecessors, her quiet curiosity and absolute lack of pretension, made him extremely happy on Charlie’s behalf. Charlie, who was redecorating his apartment, had just bought some Basquiat drawings, and the three of them had started talking about art. At one point Charlie had asked Chloe what her all-time favorite painting was. She’d thought for a moment, and then, as she began to speak, Matthew had known with a strange certainty that she was going to name the one and only Old Master painting that had ever meant anything to him: Bellini’s Madonna with Saints, which his father had brought him to see in the Church of San Zaccaria when they went to Venice on a trip around Europe the year before he disappeared. “That would have to be Bellini’s Madonna with Saints,” she’d said, and the hairs had stood up on the back of Matthew’s neck. It had seemed to bring him back through the years to the moment when he’d entered the church with his father, both of them weary and surfeited from their day of sightseeing, and stood together, bound suddenly close in their silent mutual amazement at the monumental slabs of color arrayed across the painting in the form of the saints’ robes, each figure in its dissonant brilliance engulfing the two of them like some tumultuous, intensely differentiated type of joy. “We won’t forget that in a hurry,” his father had said when they finally ran out of coins for the illumination, “will we?”

Not wanting to upstage Charlie, who hadn’t heard of the picture, Matthew had restrained his reaction, merely nodding to show that he approved of Chloe’s choice. But as Charlie’s friend he’d felt overjoyed that the woman who was so obviously the right woman for Charlie was also, so to speak, the right woman for himself.

So now, as he went out through the glass doors across the bluestone terrace with its glazed urns of pink geraniums, over the freshly cut lawn and through the lines of young apple trees planted to conceal the chain-link pool fence, he was in some fantastical sense approaching an idealized composite in whom daughter, sister, cousin, mother, mistress, friend and mystical other half were all miraculously commingled.

At any rate, that was the best he could do to account for the trance-like state he seemed to enter when he was with her, in which he felt simultaneously hyper-alert-as if some benign force were commanding every resource of wit, charm, sensitivity and brilliance he possessed to stand at attention-and dazed to a point of happy unselfconsciousness.

She was sunbathing on a deck chair at the far end of the pool. As Matthew opened the gate she sat up and waved to him.

“Hello, Matt.”

“Hi, Chloe.”

She stood, putting a shirt on over her swimsuit and sliding her sunglasses up over her dark hair, which she had knotted on top: imperfectly, so that strands fell over her face.

It was a highly expressive face, constantly in subtle motion. Her large, very dark eyes seemed to register every passing nuance of feeling with warmly mirthful intelligence.

“I’m so sorry about last night,” she was saying as she came toward him, her white shirt catching flares of light from the pool.

“Oh, no problem-all my fault anyway,” he bluffed, realizing he’d forgotten to ask Charlie what reason he’d invented for Matthew’s return to New York.

They kissed on the cheek, and he caught her scent again; its bittersweet notes that seemed to him so precisely emotional he barely noticed their physical qualities at all.

“Make yourself at home,” she said, motioning to the guesthouse. “Then come have a swim.”

A second gate led to a path that climbed the outcropping of rock on which the guesthouse stood, an octagonal wooden aerie with towering black pines behind and the abyss of the vast valley dropping almost sheerly in front.

He’d stayed there before when they’d had other guests in the main house. He loved the place. Often, when things got too much for him in New York, he fantasized about asking Charlie to let him live there full-time as his caretaker. The wide-board floors scavenged from an old sawmill, the rustic wooden walls, the assortment of furniture Chloe had picked out-spindle-backed Shaker chair, bird’s-eye maple dresser, cedar blanket chest, the modern rug of overlapping green and gray squares-all appealed to him as if they’d been chosen expressly with his own tastes in mind.

He could see the pool through the window above the dresser as he unpacked his clothes. Charlie came through the far gate in his trunks, carrying an iPad. He went over to Chloe, who tilted her lips up to receive a kiss, placing her hand on his thigh. Despite his own feelings, Matthew enjoyed witnessing the flow of affection between Chloe and Charlie. He had no actual designs on Chloe, and in fact believed in her and Charlie’s marriage almost as an article of religious faith. It was something he considered absolutely right and absolutely fixed. Its very solidity was precisely the reason why he was able, as Dr. McCubbin would have put it, to “experience” his own feelings for Chloe with as much pleasure as he did, with as little guilt, and with no sense of rejection whatsoever. It was actually a very comfortable arrangement, as far as he was concerned.

Charlie sat at a table in the shade of the pool house and began working on his iPad. He’d recently been let go from a hedge fund when it was bought by a company that wasn’t interested in keeping the Green Energy Equities Division Charlie had been managing, and he was currently in the process of trying to reposition himself as some kind of ethical investing consultant. One of the things he’d told Matthew he was planning to do over the summer was write a document-an article or possibly even a short book-that would address contemporary culture from the point of view of the socially responsible investor. “I’ll be requiring your input, bro,” he’d said, and Matthew had felt flattered, and wanted.

At breakfast the next morning, Chloe was wearing the bracelet. She held out her wrist as Matthew joined her and Charlie under the grape arbor that shaded the stone terrace.

“Look what Charlie gave me.”

He feigned the surprise expected of him.

“Isn’t it nice?” she asked.

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Tiffany’s. Look.” She pointed at the edge of the cuff where the name was engraved. He nodded, glancing up into her eyes and then quickly away, not wanting to be complicit in anything even gently ironic at Charlie’s expense.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked Charlie.

“Oh. It’s our wedding anniversary,” Charlie answered, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“You should have told me. I’d have brought you breakfast in bed.”

Charlie gave a vague smile and turned to his iPad, apparently uninterested in extending the harmless charade. It didn’t surprise Matthew: playfulness had never been his cousin’s strong suit.

“Well, happy anniversary,” he said, raising a cup of coffee.

Later, by the pool, it occurred to him that the two of them might want to celebrate alone.

“You two should go out tonight. I mean for a romantic dinner, by yourselves.”

“Huh…” Charlie said, looking over at Chloe.

“No, let’s just stay here,” Chloe said, not opening her eyes. “It’s so much more relaxing. Matthew can cook us all something special for dinner. Right, Matthew? We can have some nice drinks and just… relax. Don’t you think, Charlie?”

“Actually, I do.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Matthew said. “I’ll check out the Millstream’s specials and give you what you would have had if you’d gone there.”

“Great,” Chloe called out from the raft she was floating on, smiling dreamily. “Only it’ll be ten times better.”

“Nice thought, Matty,” Charlie said.

They kept a pickup truck at the house, an old Dodge, for winter storms when the steep road became too icy for even the Lexus’s four-wheel drive. Charlie had offered it to Matthew for the summer when he invited him, and he gave him the keys when they went back inside for lunch. It had minimal suspension-every dent in the road jolted up through the seat like a mule kick-but Matthew enjoyed driving around in it. It made him feel like a soldier bouncing around on some important mission in a jeep.

In this particular instance the mission, diligently transcribed from the Millstream’s website, entailed hunting down guajillo chilies, fresh Gulf shrimp, mesquite chunks for the grill, trevisano radicchio, baby artichokes and a butcher who knew how to cut flat iron steaks or would let Matthew cut his own. It took all afternoon, but between a farm stand twelve miles away in Klostville, the new All Natural Meats and Smokehouse on the road to East Deerfield, the surprisingly well run fish counter at Morelli’s Market in East Deerfield itself and a bodega off the Thruway near Poughkeepsie that Matthew had discovered on a previous visit, he managed to get what he needed.

The evening was a notable success. Charlie opened a 1973 La Lagune, and even though Matthew wasn’t much of a wine connoisseur, he had a good enough palate to appreciate the simple grandeur of the bottle. Remembering it in later days, he made the connection he’d never made before, between the word “claret” and the idea of clarity it had originally been adopted to express. It seemed to sum up the evening. Clear evening sky. Simple perfection of the dinner as he served the appetizers and then, after a pause to let the mesquite chunks burn down, the flat-iron steaks. These, though not actually from Wagyu beef, were as good as any he’d eaten, their seared crimson flesh branchingly marbled by the infraspinatus fascia that offset the fire-and-blood carnality of the shoulder muscle itself, sweetening it with rich oils. Clear, untainted friendship between the three of them: their easy happiness together as they sat around the stone table with the citronella candles flickering in silver buckets between the terra-cotta herb pots beside them, and the stars coming out in the cloudless sky.

The conversation flowed, gaining just enough of a charge from the slight tension between Charlie’s stubborn high-mindedness and the more bantering style of Matthew and Chloe to feel both relaxed and interesting. Charlie mentioned a video clip he’d watched that afternoon, of Noam Chomsky talking about the Occupy movement. Chloe rolled her eyes good-naturedly. Placing her hand over Charlie’s, she asked what Noam Chomsky had had to say about the Occupy movement, and she smiled sweetly up at him as he embarked on a long answer in which the professor’s opinions became inextricably entangled with Charlie’s somewhat rambling commentary.

“He used the word ‘dyad,’ I remember. I had to look that up.”

“What about it?”

“Oh, something about how from the point of view of corporate power the perfect social unit is the dyad consisting of you and your screen. Pretty accurate, wouldn’t you say?”

“It certainly describes you, darling,” Chloe said affectionately. She was still wearing the bracelet, swiveling it in the candlelight as if to stave off any suspicion that she might not have liked it. And maybe she really did like it after all, Matthew found himself magnanimously conceding. It was entirely possible that the aesthetic fastidiousness he attributed to her was purely a figment of his own imagination. A side effect of the unspoken sympathy between them was a frequent sense of “knowing” things about her that he couldn’t objectively vouch for, and he was quite prepared to admit that they weren’t always strictly accurate, and moreover that they tended to skew in the direction of certain qualities, such as “reserve” and “tastefulness,” that certainly oversimplified her and possibly idealized her too. The gift she’d given Charlie, for example, was neither reserved nor especially tasteful: it was a Givenchy shark T-shirt, which Charlie was wearing under one of his white linen shirts, the top three buttons open so that it looked as though a shark were breaching up out of his chest. But it was certainly more interesting than the bland gold manacle he’d given her.

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

“How come you weren’t interested?”

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

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

Chloe turned to him.

“That’s interesting.”

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

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

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

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

“Sometimes you see a whole cluster of them.”

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

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

Chloe laughed.

“Huh?” Charlie muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I love you too, Charlie,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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