The Fall Guy

four

The temperature fell a little. It was still too hot to eat meat, but at dinner, after three days of chilled soups and composed salads, Charlie said he needed something to get his teeth into. The next morning Matthew called the fish counter at Morelli’s to see what they had in fresh. It turned out they’d just had a delivery of line-caught striped bass from Nantucket.

“It’ll go fast,” the man said.

Charlie and Chloe had gone off a few minutes earlier; Charlie in the convertible to an early sitting at the monastery, Chloe in the Lexus to her yoga class in Aurelia. Matthew had told them he was going to spend the morning by the pool, but when he found out about the bass he fired up the pickup and set off for East Deerfield, a half-hour drive.

The striped bass had been laid out on the counter when he got there. It looked superb, the flesh a gleaming alabaster white, the thin, stippled stripe down its length a dark reddish color, as if a wounded bird had hopped across a field of snow. Nantucket striped bass fed on the sweet-fleshed baby squid that spawned off the eastern end of the island, rather than on mackerel or other oily creatures, which gave them an incomparably delicate flavor. Matthew bought two large slabs and for good measure some oysters and scallops, and had them packed in ice. Charlie had given him a credit card for buying provisions.

He was driving along the strip of gas stations and fast-food joints that led out of town when he saw a silver Lexus peel off to the right at the stoplight fifty yards ahead. As it climbed the steep access road to the mall, Chloe’s head appeared in profile at the wheel. She’d changed out of the black tank top that she’d been wearing when she left the house, into a white blouse with short puffy sleeves, but it was definitely her.

He was confused, seeing her here in East Deerfield when she’d said she was going to her yoga class in Aurelia. He supposed she must have remembered some chore she had to do in East Deerfield. But even as he articulated the thought, he was aware that it didn’t account for the change of clothing.

He was planning a stop at the mall himself to buy razors and toothpaste, and he kept his eye on the Lexus as he made the same turn. Actually there was a whole complex of malls and big-box stores up there above the town, with parking lots around them and a labyrinth of branch roads looping in between.

At the top of the access road, where Lowe’s and Walmart were signed off to the left, Chloe turned right, and although Matthew had planned to do his shopping at Walmart, he turned right also. Jumbled together in his mind as he made the turn were the thought that he could just as easily do his shopping at Target, which was in this direction, and the memory of a brief exchange he’d had with Chloe a few days ago when he’d asked if she’d found another anniversary present for Charlie and she hadn’t seemed to know what he was talking about until he reminded her that she’d felt guilty about the T-shirt. “Oh,” she’d said with a sort of brusque vagueness, “no, I didn’t find anything.” He’d dropped the subject but her obtuseness had seemed odd, and it came back to him now.

Keeping well behind, he followed Chloe past the sprawling, polygonal fortress that housed Target, Best Buy, Sears and Dick’s Sporting Goods. He was just curious, was what he told himself, though he was aware of that not being entirely the truth. If he’d stopped to analyze himself more exactingly, he would have realized that he was amusing himself with a kind of playacting of husbandly suspicion. Beyond the Sears entrance, she branched off onto a subsidiary road that led back downhill past a Wendy’s and around a hairpin bend. As Matthew rounded the bend, he saw that she’d turned off into the parking lot of a large horseshoe-shaped building.

He drove on past, pulling in to a Laundromat a hundred yards farther on, and doubling back. Driving slowly past the turnoff, he realized it was the rear entrance to the East Deerfield Inn, a motel you would normally access from the main road down below.

She was getting out of the Lexus as he passed. In place of the yoga pants she’d been wearing when she left the house, she had on a summer skirt. She must have changed her clothing on the way here, he thought, glimpsing her in his mirror. She’d known in advance she was coming, which meant that the business about going to yoga was a premeditated lie.

The playacting sensation had worn off by now, giving way to the less amusing knowledge that he was in fact spying on her. He considered going home and forcing himself not to think about it. But he doubted whether that would be possible, and anyway it occurred to him that, however distasteful it might be, he was under an obligation of friendship to stick around. A double obligation, in fact: one to Chloe in case her presence here turned out to have an innocent explanation, and one to Charlie in case it didn’t.

He had an idea that he might be able to see down into the motel court from the Wendy’s parking lot on the road above it, beyond the hairpin turn, but when he got there he saw that there was a guardrail around the lot that made it impossible to get close enough to the embankment. All he could see was a slice of the building’s flat roof with its bric-a-brac of vents and turban-like fans.

He had no choice but to get out of the truck. Assuming the confident air of someone on legitimate business, he climbed over the guardrail. A stand of thin trees beyond it led to the edge of the embankment, which fell away steeply, giving a view into the motel parking lot. The ground under the trees was littered with old wrappings of burgers and fries. Truck-sized blocks of yellowish stone formed a retaining wall at the bottom of the slope.

Chloe was walking across the parking lot, carrying a canvas bag. Reaching a door on the left arm of the building, with some kind of vintage maroon car parked outside it, she knocked once. The door opened, and she stepped inside.

The day was already stifling. Even in the shade of the little trees where Matthew was standing, it was intensely hot. He stared at the distant door, not knowing what else to do. From time to time he looked briefly away, as if to rest his eyes from a glare.

Twenty minutes passed; half an hour. As the sun climbed higher in the sky the saplings gave less shade. Beads of sweat began trickling down Matthew’s face and neck and under his shirt. He stood there, motionless. It seemed to him he had a responsibility to remain in sight of the door. At the same time, however, he couldn’t bear to think what might be going on behind it, so that even as he studiously faced out in that direction, his mind was just as studiously avoiding it.

A few crickets, day-shift replacements for the katydids that chorused at night, chirped in the foliage. Traffic exhaust mingled with fumes of hot grease. He heard a couple of people pause behind him as they crossed the parking lot. He didn’t turn and they continued on their way. He was barely sheltered now from the midmorning blaze.

Almost an hour had passed by the time the door opened and Chloe came out. Her hair looked damp. She was wearing her yoga pants again, and the black tank top. The sandals were back on too. She climbed into the silver Lexus, and Matthew watched her drive away.

He turned to leave, but then changed his mind. What if there really was an innocent explanation for the visit? He tried to come up with a possible scenario. Nothing he could think of seemed terribly likely, but if anyone was capable of secretly pursuing some unexpected but completely benign activity, it was Chloe.

After about fifteen minutes the door opened again and a man came out, carrying a leather duffel bag. He had a wide head, framed in collar-length hair, and a triangle of pointed beard. A stout, if firm-looking, belly swelled under his billowing blue shirt. Sturdy knees and stocky calves narrowed from his cargo shorts into a pair of blue deck shoes.

He unlocked the maroon car, threw in his bag, and drove away.

Matthew turned and climbed back over the guardrail. He felt as though he had been briefly concussed. Spots drifted on his vision; nausea swayed in his stomach.

Opening the door of the pickup, he was hit with a blast of fishy-smelling heat. In his rush earlier, he’d neglected to leave a window open and now the fish was half cooked. He threw it out and went back to Morelli’s, where the same man served him the same quantities of striped bass and shellfish as he had ordered before. From the man’s sly expression, he seemed to imagine Matthew had absentmindedly forgotten that he’d already made this exact purchase an hour and a half earlier.

Charlie was at the house when he got back, excavating a Brillat-Savarin cheese he’d brought from the city on his last visit. He had a weakness for pungent cheeses and a habit of gorging on them in private, scooping out the soft centers and leaving the hollowed rind.

“No tennis?” Matthew asked, putting the Morelli’s bag in the fridge. He was so uncomfortable he could barely bring himself to look at his cousin. His intention, to the extent that he’d formed one, had been to tell Charlie everything he’d seen at the motel, as soon as he could find a suitable moment. It was just an emergency response at this stage, not a considered plan. The urge to rid himself of the incident, obliterate it from his mind, was overwhelming, and telling Charlie seemed the best hope of accomplishing this.

Charlie yawned.

“Too hot.”

Chloe’s car crunched on the gravel outside a few minutes later-she must have been killing time so as not to be home from “yoga” too early-and she came in to the kitchen, smiling absently and waggling her fingers as she passed through into the sunken living room, where she collapsed in one of the sofas with a copy of the Aurelia Gazette.

She’d made the same kind of entrance numerous times and there hadn’t seemed anything remarkable about it. It was just a natural way of observing basic courtesies while asserting her wish to remain in her own private space. But now it seemed to Matthew steeped in guile.

“How was yoga?” he asked.

She didn’t seem to hear the question.

“Chlo-Matt’s asking how yoga was,” Charlie said.

“Oh, sorry, Matt. It was great, thanks.”

She flashed him her lovely smile and resumed her reading.

He had to admire her poise, but to have betrayed that smile of hers, which had always seemed to him the ultimate expression of her intense and innocent capacity for joy, to have sent that smile out on a mission so perfidious, was strangely upsetting.

Into his mind came another memory: the time her car hadn’t been in the yoga parking lot when Charlie had asked him to get his tennis racket, and she’d claimed to have been in some café instead, drinking a triple latte. He saw her again in his mind’s eye as she recounted it, making fun of her own enervated laziness with the same sparkling smile as she wore now, and the treachery seemed to spread like a crack into the past.

In the afternoon Charlie went out on some errand and Chloe disappeared upstairs. When Charlie came back he went up to join her, and the two of them stayed up there the rest of the day.

Matthew lay by the pool, watching the butterflies. Fu yelped periodically, wanting his walk, but Matthew was damned if he was going to offer to take him. He was going over the events of the morning, retracing the sequence from the moment he’d spotted Chloe ahead of him on the road below the mall, to her exit from the motel, and the man’s emergence a little later. The discomfort provoked by the memory of the events was as sharp as it had been during their actual occurrence, and he wished he could think about something else-his own problems, for instance; the question of how to get himself out of his rut, jump-start his career, find a less grim apartment-which were after all the things he’d come up here to address-but it appeared to be impossible. Again in his mind the events revolved: Chloe at the wheel in her white blouse; the blunt little jolt inside him as he’d realized something suspicious was going on; the hot vigil at the edge of the Wendy’s parking lot; Chloe in her summer skirt entering the motel… It seemed to him he had been presented with some difficult problem to which he alone could provide the solution, and which he was under an obligation to solve as quickly as possible. But instead of formulating an answer, or even groping in the direction of an answer, his mind simply repeated the little sequence yet again, so that once more he was turning up onto the access road behind Chloe, following her past Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods, climbing over the curved metal guardrail, and standing motionless under the thin trees, staring at the motel door with its glinting handle, while the fume-filled air grew hotter and hotter.

Around six, he started on the dinner. He’d intended to cook a version of a Catalan seafood dish that matches a firm white fish with a mixture of blood sausage and sea urchin roe, seasoned with chorizo. He had some decent chorizo from Fairway and he’d bought some Morcilla blood sausage at the place near Poughkeepsie. It wasn’t the same as Catalan Botifarra Negra, which tended to be lighter on the cloves and cinnamon, but it was the only type you could get in the States and it gave the palate the same kind of womby, cave-like background from which to fall on the sweet flesh of the bass. In place of the sea urchin roe he planned to butter-fry the oysters and scallops.

Charlie and Chloe usually drifted into the kitchen for a drink well before dinner, but they were still upstairs by the time everything was ready. Once or twice during previous visits, Matthew had heard discreet sounds of lovemaking come down through the ceiling, and he’d been vaguely listening out for them, but he hadn’t heard anything, and he supposed that was less disturbing than it would have been if he had, all things considered, though it didn’t do much to alleviate the tension inside him. The thought of telling Charlie what he’d seen that morning, while still presenting itself as his only option, had been filling him with dread. He’d have to find some way of doing it as soon as possible; preferably tonight. He didn’t want it lingering over him.

He called up but there was no reply. Feeling awkward, he went to the bottom of the stairs and called again. After a while Charlie answered groggily, “Yeah?” and Matthew told him dinner was ready.

They both made an effort to be sociable when they finally came down, but he could tell they hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, and that neither of them much wanted to eat. They sat out on the terrace with the usual candlelight and katydid chorus, but it was a lackluster affair. Charlie explained apologetically that he’d eaten too much cheese earlier, and barely picked at his food. Chloe at least made an effort but she was obviously distracted by her own thoughts.

“How’s Lily getting on at camp?” Matthew asked her.

She gave some vague answer, and he felt a bit malicious for raising the subject. Soon afterward she stood up and asked if they’d mind if she went to bed.

“Everything okay?” Charlie said.

“Yes. I’m just tired.”

She yawned and waved good night.

“Another delicious dinner, Matt. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, pleasure rising in him, in spite of himself.

Alone with Charlie, he decided he might as well get the unpleasant task over. He was racking his brains to think of some appropriate way to introduce the subject, when Charlie gave a loud yawn and said that he also was feeling tired.

“Would you mind if I hit the hay?”

“Of course not,” Matthew said, relieved.

The bulk of summer still lay ahead of him, he reflected later, in bed. All year he’d been looking forward to the long hot weeks up here. He needed them badly. He’d been counting on them to restore him, bring him out of the strange funk he’d drifted into. Was he really going to have to spoil these precious days? Because one way or another that would surely be the effect if he spilled the beans on Chloe. He hadn’t thought it through earlier, but now that he did he could see that telling Charlie was going to wreck the summer-for all three of them.

But how the hell could he not tell Charlie? Wasn’t he obliged to? Obviously it would be easier not to-just to go on as if nothing had happened-but the very fact that it would be easier seemed to confirm that what he needed to do was precisely the difficult thing. Wasn’t that his responsibility as Charlie’s cousin and friend? And would it be possible, anyway, to salvage the summer by pretending nothing had happened?

Briefly, as he posed these questions, he became aware of something minutely false in presenting the problem to himself in terms of friendship and cousinly duty: a sheen of spuriousness overlaying the formula. It wasn’t how he’d seen it this morning, after all, but somehow an emergency measure conceived purely to expunge the intolerable reality from his own mind had morphed into something more altruistic, a “duty,” and he didn’t trust altruism, or not when it fronted his own impulses. His mind stalled, overcome by the complexity of the situation. On top of the question of whether or not to tell Charlie, there was the question-possibly even more unsettling-of how this new knowledge was going to affect his own relationship with Chloe; a whole dense layer of potential damage that he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to inspect.

He thought of Charlie over at the Zendo that morning; pictured him in the lotus position, pinched fingers on his sunburned knees: being “in the moment” while Chloe was doing whatever she’d been doing back in that motel room… It occurred to him that he had actually been the one in Charlie’s “moment,” and that, far from being a state of bliss, it had been extremely painful.

It was somewhat typical of Charlie, he found himself thinking, to arrange for someone else to feel his pain.