The Fall Guy

three

The summer thickened around them. Soon it reached that point of miraculous equilibrium where it felt at once as if it had been going on forever and as if it would never end. The heat merged with the constant sounds of insects and red-winged blackbirds, to form its own throbbing, hypnotic medium. It made you feel as if you were inside some green-lit womb, full of soft pulsations.

After breakfasting, the three of them would go their separate ways. Charlie drove off early in the convertible to play tennis. Afterward he’d take Fu for a walk in the woods, returning as often as not looking exhausted and a bit chagrined, with some tale of the ungovernable animal thundering off after a deer, or attacking a porcupine, only to get a muzzle full of quills.

In the afternoon he’d sit in the shade of the pool house with his iPad, reading articles and watching YouTube clips. If Matthew was around he’d try to interest him in whatever he was looking at. “There’s something authentic there,” was his typical opening comment, or “That’s the real thing, don’t you think?” After which, having secured Matthew’s agreement, he would come out with some deeper-level objection.

On one occasion he showed Matthew some video footage of the students on the Davis campus being pepper-sprayed by cops as they sat stoically on the ground, refusing to move.

“You can’t question their authenticity,” he said, prodding his finger at the screen. “I mean, you don’t see that kind of courage without some authentic moral conviction underwriting it. Do you?”

Matthew made his usual murmur of assent.

“But what is it?” Charlie asked. “What do they actually believe in? What do they even want? How come we don’t remember what they were protesting or demanding? Did we ever in fact know?”

Sometimes in the early evening he’d sit in his meditation garden-a small, enclosed lawn with a stone Buddha at one end-or drive up to a sitting at the nearby Zen monastery, returning for dinner looking serene and smelling of sandalwood. Now and then he had to go into New York for meetings connected with the consultancy group he was trying to set up. He left early in the morning and it was understood that Chloe and Matthew would wait to eat until he got back, which was often not before eleven or midnight. Whatever the time, he’d want to talk and drink for a couple of hours before going to bed, and they’d sit with him on the terrace listening to his analysis of the day’s meetings. He seemed eager to discuss these meetings, whether they’d gone well or badly. It seemed to bolster his sense of their importance, and with that, his belief that he was making his way back into the game he’d been ousted from earlier that year. He’d never admitted to any feelings of rejection or failure after being “let go” from his hedge fund, but Matthew knew him well enough to know it must have been a blow to his ego. Being without a recognized position in the world would have felt highly uncomfortable to him. There was nothing of the natural maverick or outsider about Charlie: he wasn’t the type to base his self-esteem on his own judgment. He needed official recognition and approval. Whether that was a sign of virtue or weakness, Matthew wasn’t sure, but he was certainly doing all he could to rebuild his career, and Matthew couldn’t help comparing himself-bogged down in this peculiar inertia of his-unfavorably with his cousin, at least in this respect.

Chloe’s routines were less predictable. Some days she did nothing but lie by the pool with a pile of magazines and her phone, ignoring both as she steeped herself in sunlight. She’d signed up for yoga and Zumba classes in town and some mornings she went off with her rolled-up mat and water canister, but often she didn’t bother. Even when she did go off for a class she was capable of changing her mind, as Matthew discovered on one occasion when Charlie, who’d left his favorite tennis racket in the Lexus, asked Matthew to grab it from the car on his way back from town, and the car had turned out not to be in the yoga studio parking lot. She’d succumbed to her own laziness as she approached the studio, she confessed later, and spent her yoga hour in a café drinking a triple latte, from which she was still visibly sparkling with caffeinated good humor.

She did seem to be pursuing the mailbox idea, however, and would drift off with her cameras, usually in the late afternoon, to catch them at magic hour.

“That was such a good idea of yours, Matt,” she said, returning from one of these expeditions.

“Well, I can’t wait to see the results.”

He thought of her driving around the country roads, making her judgments, setting up her cameras, filling her memory cards and rolls of film, all because he had casually suggested she might find these harmless things interesting, and this was as satisfying to him as if he had actually been driving around with her. The project had become another instance of that action-at-a-distance that his feelings for her thrived on, and that seemed to be all they required by way of sustenance.

As for his own routines, he took his role as chef seriously and spent much of his time driving around to farmers’ markets or checking out little specialty stores hidden on rural roads or in the immigrant neighborhoods of nearby towns. Whenever he set off he made a point of offering to do any errands that needed running. Charlie asked him to pick up some stones he’d ordered for an outdoor pizza oven he planned to build. One time Chloe asked him to get a copy of an entertainment magazine at the Barnes & Noble in East Deerfield. Occasionally she put in a request for kumquats and chocolate, her favorite snack. Otherwise it was mostly just dropping off dry-cleaning or taking the garbage to the town dump. A cleaning lady did their laundry at the house.

When he wasn’t marketing he was usually swimming or sunbathing-mostly at the pool but sometimes at one of the swimming holes in the creek, the Millstream, that ran along the back of town. The clear, cold water fell into a series of pools defined by smooth-edged boulders that grew immensely warm by midmorning. He would park the truck in the gravel lot by the bridge that connected the main part of town with some quieter residential roads. Stone steps led down under the bridge to the first of the pools and you could pick your way along the shelving stone banks to a half dozen other pools running under the backyards of the private homes on the road that ran parallel with the creek. Trees at the top of the bank made it easy enough to find shade. He’d set up with a towel and his copy of Pascal or a magazine and watch the world go by.

There were packs of noisy high schoolers, young couples staying in the nearby bed-and-breakfasts, elderly retirees with wrinkled white bodies. There was also a steady stream of Rainbow people and Deadheads who gravitated around Aurelia in the summer, camping in the woods behind the public meadow known locally as Paradise. On weekends they held late-night drumming sessions that you could hear all the way up at the house, and there were more low-key sessions, audible from the stream, that seemed to run pretty much continuously, adding their own frequency to that of the insects and birds, the pulsating dial tone of summer.

He found this latter group-the Rainbows and Deadheads-especially fascinating. They’d drift down to the water in the late afternoon in their beads and leather vests, trailing clouds of patchouli, often carrying their drums. Settling in groups on the smooth rocks, they’d preen and horse around with a mixture of childlike unselfconsciousness and highly self-conscious theatrical self-display.

He’d always had conflicting feelings about these hedonistic types. To live in that blaze of color, scent and music, moving everywhere in loose tribal groups with everyone looking out for each other (at least in theory) appealed to a deep instinct in him. In his teens, after being expelled from school, he’d hung around on the fringes of an English version of the same subculture-travelers, hippies, “freaks” as they called themselves. He had become, in a kind of perverse, retroactive justification for his expulsion, a small-scale dealer of pot and acid, and those were his customers. For a while he’d dreamed of leaving home, what remained of home, and becoming a fully fledged member of one or other of the groups. But something always held him back; some lingering attachment to respectability, but also a growing impatience with their constant petty criminality. These American counterparts struck him as more idealistic, or anyway less obviously out to rip each other off, though by this stage in his life he was too much himself to think, even jokingly, about joining them. But they interested him to observe.

One day a wizened old guy with gray hair in a red bandanna, who’d perched on the rocks next to Matthew and begun darning an embroidered shoulder bag, treated him to a rambling monologue about himself.

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

“An Early?”

“Early to the vision.”

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

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

Matthew smiled back:

“I like the lingo!”

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

“Nice.”

Two girls came by.

“Hey, now, Pike,” they said.

“Hey, now.”

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

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

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

“Cool,” the one with the piercings said.

Her friend said, “Fantastic.”

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

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

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

“What are those?” Matthew asked.

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

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

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

“Heil Holies, Blissninnies.”

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

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

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

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

“Who was that guy?” he asked.

Pike looked up from his bag.

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

“Why’s that?”

“He likes to organize shit, I guess.”

“You mean he’s political?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“I noticed the tatt.”

“Right.”

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

Pike knitted his brows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a moment Chloe burst into laughter.

“I don’t get it,” Charlie said.

Chloe explained:

“Soup. He’s spelling ‘soup.’ ”

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

“It’s hilarious.”

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

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

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

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

“Anything interesting?” Matthew asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you looking at?”

“The butterflies.”

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

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

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