The Fall Guy

seven

At the beginning of August Chloe’s cousin Jana and her husband Bill rented a house on Lake Classon, a half hour’s drive from Aurelia. They arranged to visit one afternoon, along with another couple who were staying with them.

It was a hot, clear day. They brought their swim things and everyone splashed around in the pool for a while, drinking cocktails.

Jana taught psychology at a college in New Jersey. She had a round face, nothing like Chloe’s, and plump thighs that she wrapped in a towel as soon as she got out of the water. She seemed in awe of her beautiful cousin, nodding enthusiastically at everything she said. Chloe, smiling her hostess smile, asked after family members.

Bill, gray-haired, with a small snub of a nose that looked like a baby’s, was a political consultant. He and Charlie floated off on inflatable armchairs into a corner, where Matthew heard them comparing different news networks’ coverage of the Libor scandal.

The couple they’d brought along turned out to be English. Hugh was a writer of some kind, teaching for a term at Jana’s college. He seemed good-natured if somewhat abstracted, his eyes partially obscured by thick round glasses. Not shy exactly, but quiet, and rather serious, and apparently oblivious to the heat, judging from the thick tweed jacket he’d arrived in. George, as the woman called herself, owned a vintage clothing shop in London. She was tall and bony, with blades of straight black hair, and spoke in what seemed a cultivated cockney accent, her thin mouth accentuated by bright lipstick. For a while the two of them and Matthew gravitated together, swapping stories of the expat life.

“I was going out of my effing box by about March this year,” George said. “I thought winter was finally ending. And then the blizzards began! It was fun for about fourteen seconds, then you realize all it is is just piles of useless white gunk that just sit there getting covered in dog shit and soggy fags.”

“That’s why people go to Florida,” Hugh said. “Snowbirds, I believe they call them.”

“Yuck. Florida? Yuck.”

“Or the Caribbean,” Matthew said, pronouncing it in the American way.

“Caribbean?” George mimicked. “Don’t give me that! You’re as bloody English as I am!”

“All right, Caribbean.”

“Do you know it?” Hugh asked.

“A little.”

“I’m curious to go there but I’m told it’s mostly been ruined.”

“We used to go to one of the smaller islands when I was a boy,” Matthew said. “Apparently it hasn’t been developed much even now. There’s still no airport.”

“Oh, yes? Which one is that?”

Matthew hesitated.

George immediately splashed water at him.

“You don’t want to tell us, do you! He doesn’t want to tell us. Thinks we’ll cause an airport to be built and fill the place with Eurotrash.”

Matthew, who had been thinking exactly that, grinned and told them the name.

“Never heard of it,” George said. “Must be crap!”

She swam off, laughing.

“I should start the grill,” Matthew said, not wanting Hugh to feel obliged to linger. To his surprise, Hugh said he’d help.

“I think I’ll get dressed, though, first.”

Matthew waited while Hugh changed in the pool house, emerging in his jacket and trousers and a pair of heavy brown brogues.

A silence fell on them as they went out through the pool gate and crossed the lawn toward the grill. Matthew, feeling he was in some sense the host, decided it was up to him to break it. He asked Hugh what books he’d written.

“You’re not supposed to ask writers that,” Hugh said, smiling.

“Oh. Why not?”

“Because nine times out of ten you won’t have heard of any of them, which leaves you feeling like an idiot and the writer feeling like a failure.”

Matthew laughed. “Sorry!”

“But the answer is books on social history. I wrote one on the British slave trade. One on the Sheffield radicals.”

“I’m not sure I-”

“Oh, no one’s heard of them. They were part of the working-class anti-slavery movement at the end of the eighteenth century.”

“Interesting.”

“Another one on Chartist strikes and insurrections…”

They reached the grill area, off to the side of the terrace. Matthew opened a sack of charcoal and tipped the lumps into an aluminum chimney. Hugh sat down on the pile of flat stones Charlie was planning to use for his pizza oven. (They’d lain there untouched since Matthew had carried them over from the truck two weeks ago.)

“So… revolution,” Matthew said cautiously. “That’s your basic subject?”

“Well, exploitation, primarily. I think it’s a more complex phenomenon than people realize. But yes, revolt also. What about you? What’s your-”

“Restaurant business,” Matthew said. But, not wanting to get into a conversation about his ailing career, he added quickly, “Am I allowed to ask if you’re working on something now?”

Hugh shrugged, his large shoulders conveying a sort of burdened but stolid patience. He was surprisingly-considering his sensitive-looking eyes-thickset and stocky. His steel-tinged brown hair hung in a pudding bowl and looked as if it had been hacked into that shape by a pair of blunt gardening shears. His skin was mealy and pale.

“Oh, I always have a few little projects on the go. There’s a more cultural-historical sort of book I’m thinking of calling The Last Taboo, about money-how it affects the consciousness of people who have it, or work with it.”

“Like my cousin Charlie?” Matthew said, lighting the paper under the charcoal.

Hugh nodded. “I was certainly curious to meet him.”

“Not that he’s your average money person, though,” Matthew put in, a little defensively. He’d formed the idea that Hugh must be some kind of rearguard Marxist. He had a vague sense of the glamour socialism still possessed among the more cultured of his former compatriots; that it was far from being a dirty word, as it was in America.

“In fact he sees himself pretty much in opposition to the archetype.”

Hugh smiled-amiably enough:

“That’s good.”

“Where does the taboo part come in?”

Hugh thought for a moment.

“Put it this way, it’s the only subject left that celebrities don’t talk about in their memoirs. Their own money, I mean. They’ll come clean about all the things that used to be taboo-sexual proclivities, drug habits, petty crime-brag about them, in fact. But they don’t talk about their money and we don’t expect it of them. It’s the one subject that’s still off-limits. Probably because unlike sex and drugs it’s inextricably connected to the one source of guilt and shame that actually has some objective validity, namely the sense that you’ve stolen another person’s labor-cheated them out of their own bodily and mental exertions. All those other forms of shame are basically just masks for this one, in my view: ways of not thinking about the one thing we all know in our hearts to be unequivocally wrong.”

Matthew nodded, fanning the chimney with an old copy of the Aurelia Gazette. He wasn’t sure he understood what Hugh was getting at, but he was enjoying the sensation, rare these days, of being taken for an educated man of the world. It wasn’t how he thought of himself, exactly. His shambles of an education had seen to that, and he tended to be on his guard whenever the talk took an intellectual turn. But this thoughtful compatriot, with his worn old jacket and out-of-season shoes, put him at his ease.

They chatted on until the others came over from the pool, and for the next hour Matthew was in and out of the kitchen, busy with the dinner. Charlie and Chloe had made it clear they wanted a casual, no-frills barbecue, which was fine with him, but he was damned if he was going to serve up store-bought hamburger buns or ketchup, so there was all that to see to as well as getting the grill rack brushed and oiled and heated to the right temperature. As he was taking the brioche dough out of the fridge, George appeared in the kitchen.

“So what exactly is your gig here, then?” She perched tipsily on a stool. “Are you the English butler or something?”

Matthew explained that he was here as Charlie’s cousin and old friend but also happened to be the designated chef.

She chuckled.

“So democratic, the American class system. Right?”

He made a noncommittal sound and began shaping the brioche buns.

“No, but seriously, what is your racket?”

“You mean in general?”

“Yeah, whatever…”

“Not much right now,” Matthew said. Then, not wanting to come off as a complete nonentity, he told her about his plan for a gourmet food truck.

“How Brooklyn! What would you make?”

“I’m thinking maybe pupusas.”

“What the fuck is a pupusa?”

Matthew explained, adding, “It probably wouldn’t work in England.”

“You’d have to call it a pupusa buttie…”

He smiled. “Anyway, it’s strictly a pipe dream till I figure out how to get my hands on a truck.”

“And how much would that set you back?”

“Forty, fifty grand, for anything halfway decent.”

“Fuck!”

“Right.”

“Better hit up your cousin Charlie! Or have a dig around in one of those sofas; probably a few grand in change right there.” She lowered her voice: “What’s he make all his dosh from anyway?”

“Banking.”

“Oh, right, Jana said.”

“Plus he inherited a few million.”

She snorted. “I inherited my mum’s microwave.”

“That’s more than I got.”

“Really? You sound posh.”

“No more than you, I’ll bet.”

“Ooh! I’ll have you know that behind this mockney is a genuine cockney. My Auntie Becca was known as the Pearly Queen of Bethnal Green.”

Matthew laughed, warming to her despite her jagged manner. She slid off her stool, waving magenta-nailed fingers at him and swaying a little as she clopped away.

At dinner, after he’d served up the burgers, he found himself seated next to her at the stone table. She was vehemently disagreeing with Bill about an opinion he’d just offered concerning a well-known TV host.

“Rubbish! He’s a prat, Bill. He’s a talking colostomy bag, not a journalist. And definitely not ‘evenhanded.’ ”

“Oh, I think he’s pretty evenhanded,” Bill retorted with a bland smile. He didn’t seem terribly enamored of his houseguest.

“Crap! He’s about as evenhanded as a fucking… lobster.”

“A lobster. That’s good, George.”

After they’d finished eating, Matthew slipped away and did some cleaning up in the kitchen. When he went back outside the atmosphere had changed. George was talking loudly while the others sat listening in various attitudes of discomfort. She’d flagged a little during dinner, but now she was blazing away again. Apparently she’d just remembered, again, that Charlie was a banker, and found that she was compelled by her conscience to go on the attack.

“I’m having a go at you, Charlie,” she was saying with a grin. “But face it, you’re no different, really, from some Mafia boss or Mexican drug lord up here on your mountaintop, are you? Actually, you’re worse-”

Bill cleared his throat.

“It’s okay, Bill” she said, “I’m just having a go at our host. It’s very English of me, I know, but Charlie doesn’t mind, do you, Charlie?”

“Be my guest.”

“Ha. No, but seriously, you actually are worse than a Mafia boss or a Mexican drug lord, Charlie, because they at least risk getting killed or locked up for robbing defenseless people of their life’s savings and stealing their houses, whereas you’re not only allowed to rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses, you are positively encouraged to rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses. In fact, the more you rob people of their life’s savings and steal their houses, the bigger your year-end bonus, right? And of course if it all goes pear-shaped, you and your chums in your six-thousand-dollar power suits can just get together with your other chums at the Treasury Department in their six-thousand-dollar power suits and arrange for an eighty-billion-dollar bailout, paid for of course by the very people you’ve spent the last decade robbing and stealing from. Right, Charlie?”

Charlie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Chloe was looking at him, as if waiting for him to defend himself. But he said nothing.

Jana, who’d been darting glances at her hosts, said, “That’s kind of a not very nuanced way of looking at the situation, don’t you think, George?”

“We’ve been watching a lot of Occupy footage,” Bill put in, more dryly.

“Charlie’s totally a supporter of Occupy,” Chloe said. “Tell them, Charlie…”

Charlie frowned. Catching the look, Bill continued:

“Well, no, that wasn’t my point. I mean, I give credit to Occupy for bringing their issues into the mainstream, but at this juncture I also think they need to leave off what basically amounts to little more than tomfoolery and let the grown-ups deal with what happens to be-”

“The grown-ups?” George interrupted. “The grown-ups?”

“-with what happens to be a highly complex situation-”

“Daylight robbery is not complex, and who the fuck are the grown-ups?”

“What I’m trying to say is blaming the bankers for the inevitable problems that occur from time to time in a free market is like blaming your stomach when you overeat. It’s just facile. It’s singling out a small group of mostly honest and decent people, and turning them into scapegoats for the consequences of wanting to have cars and houses and easy credit for everyone instead of just, you know, the lucky few. What I’m saying is we’re all implicated.”

“Bollocks. How am I implicated when Charlie here sweet-talks some little old lady into signing up for a mortgage she can’t afford and then runs off and sells that mortgage on to some thicko pension fund manager, knowing that the little old lady and all the other little old ladies he’s sweet-talked in similar honey-tongued fashion are going to default, and the pension fund is going to go pear-shaped, and all the pensioners are going to be living off thin gruel for the rest of their days? How am I implicated in that, pray tell? What do you think, Charlie?”

Again Charlie abstained from comment. His back was straight, his mouth slightly open. Looking at him, Matthew realized it was his meditating posture. Not the full lotus, of course, but the erect spine, the centering of the body mass on the abdominal triangle-the tanden, as Matthew had seen it called in the Zen books lying around the house-the belly breathing, regulated so as to achieve mushin, no mind. It was a technique, as far as Matthew understood, for reducing other people to mere disturbances in the visual field.

Charlie did break his silence, however, a little later. George had moved on to the subject of the banks short-selling mortgage-backed securities even as they were aggressively marketing those same securities to their clients, a practice she seemed to consider worthy of a whole new palette of disgust-effects. While she was in full cry, Charlie muttered something that, perhaps because he’d been so quiet until then, caused her to stop midsentence.

“Pardon?”

“You’re talking about Goldman Sachs,” Charlie said. “I worked for Morgan Stanley. They didn’t do that. “

“Oh!” George said brightly. “In that case I owe you a massive fucking apology, don’t I? Here, darling…” Leaning across the table, she planted a big kiss on Charlie’s lips and sat back, laughing.

The gesture briefly dissolved the tension at the table.

But then Hugh spoke. He’d been drinking steadily all through dinner, and Matthew had assumed he was more or less in a stupor. But that didn’t appear to be the case. Quite the reverse, if anything.

“Not that Morgan Stanley was a model of rectitude, exactly…” he said.

“I wasn’t-” Charlie began. Chloe looked at him expectantly but he broke off, seeming to decide in favor of stoical endurance over further argument.

“I’ve read quite a bit about them,” Hugh said. “It’s a subject that interests me.”

“Uh-oh, Charlie,” George said. “Now Hughie’s having a go at you. This time you’re really in trouble!”

Chloe poured herself a glass of wine and looked out across the dark valley, seeming to absent herself. Political debate, with its tedious moral one-upmanship, had never seemed to interest her much, and this too was something Matthew admired in her. It was a kind of cleanness, he’d always thought; a refusal to join in the demeaning parlor game of judging and being judged. No doubt this English couple would dismiss it as the complacency of the overprivileged, but he knew her better than that: she’d have been the same Chloe rich or poor; taking whatever life offered, without guilt, and without envy. He was very certain of that.

“No, but I find it all very intriguing,” Hugh said. “We tend to see subcultures like Wall Street or Silicon Valley as monolithic entities but in fact they’re fascinatingly diverse. Goldman Sachs, as far as I understand it, got its sort of über-predator edge by recruiting purely on the basis of how clever and hungry applicants were. They filled their ranks with all these high-IQ but completely ruthless young blokes out of projects in the Bronx who’d never had any inhibitions about grabbing whatever they could. Morgan Stanley was more old school, wasn’t it? You had to have connections to get a decent job there, which made the whole operation a bit, well, no offense, Charlie, but a bit less sharp. The only reason they weren’t short-selling those securities was that no one there saw the crash coming. Isn’t that right? Not that being slower off the mark made them any more ethical-then or now, by all accounts. Didn’t they just handle the Facebook IPO?”

“I wasn’t there,” Charlie said. “I left in 2005.”

“Ah. But now when was Eliot Spitzer’s thing, the Global Settlement? 2003, wasn’t it?”

A guarded look appeared on Charlie’s face.

“Around then.”

“Eliot Spitzer!” Bill said, rolling his eyes.

Hugh ignored him:

“And didn’t Morgan Stanley get the biggest fine of any of them?”

“It’s possible,” Charlie muttered.

“I’m fairly certain they did. That’s been their racket for quite a while, hasn’t it? Getting their analysts to sex up the profile of companies on the verge of going public?”

George broke in: “Is that what you did, Charlie? Were you an analyst?”

In a breathy voice, Jana said, “I think we should give Charlie a break, already!”

“Me too,” said Bill.

“I’m curious, though,” George pressed. “Were you?”

Matthew happened to turn toward Charlie just then. He was thinking it was high time someone mentioned Charlie’s long-established interest in ethical investment, and was intending to mention it himself. But as he caught Charlie’s eye, a look of anger, hatred almost, flashed across Charlie’s features. It was gone before anyone but Matthew could notice it, but it shocked him. He dropped his glance immediately.

“Yes, I was a telecom analyst,” Charlie said quietly to George.

“Really?”

“Come on, guys,” Jana said. “Let it go.”

There was a silence, long and uncomfortable. In it, the distant sound of drumming wafted in on a breeze.

“What’s that?” Jana asked.

Matthew answered:

“The Rainbow people.”

“Who are they?”

“Bums in war paint,” Bill declared.

“Actually, they’re interesting,” Matthew said. Seeing an opportunity to atone for whatever he’d done to upset his cousin, he began talking about his encounters with the Rainbow people at the creek. He’d already told Charlie and Chloe the story of his meeting with Pike and the two girls, but Chloe pressed him to repeat it, laughing again as he described the wizened old guy with his embroidered bag. She, at least, seemed grateful to him for steering the conversation away from banking.

“Tell them about those words they use,” she said, smiling at him. “They have their own vocabulary for everything.”

He rattled off as many of the words as he could remember. Hugh took out a notebook and asked him to repeat them.

“That’s priceless,” he said, writing them down. “Absolutely priceless.”

“Now Hughie’s going to write an article about them,” George said, “and everyone’s going to think we spent our time in America living in a fucking teepee!”

A more relaxed conversation developed. Charlie brought out liqueurs and Bill produced some medical-grade pot. The moon rose from behind the mountain, newish, and bright enough that even its dark part had discernible substance and shape. By the time the party broke up everyone was behaving as if nothing untoward had happened.

Later that night, Matthew heard a sound from the pool. He got up and looked out of the guesthouse window. Charlie was in the water, swimming the steady, head-down crawl he used for doing laps. Reaching the end he turned, plunging back the other way, his long, straight body cutting the same undeviating line through the water.

After a while he climbed out and dried off. But instead of going back to the house, he wrapped himself in a towel and sat in a deck chair, motionless. He didn’t seem to be meditating. His slumped body suggested something more along the lines of brooding.

The English couple must have left him feeling bruised, Matthew supposed. He thought perhaps he should go down and commiserate. But he wasn’t sure how welcome he would be. Charlie had been rather distant with him lately. Borderline unfriendly, in fact. The other day he’d come back from New York in an upbeat mood after a meeting with a former executive from Grameen America, the U.S. branch of the Bangladeshi bank that had pioneered microloans, and announced that he was going to adapt their approach for his own investment group. (He was no longer referring to this as a “consultancy” group, a fact Matthew had noted with the faint amusement his cousin so often provoked in him.) “It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for,” he’d told Chloe excitedly. “It puts money into exactly the kind of small-scale entrepreneurship I’ve always believed in, and it turns out to be a damn safe bet for investors.” But as soon as Matthew had started asking him questions about it, expecting to join in the conversation, he’d clammed up. And then there’d been that strange look of outright hostility at the table tonight. What had that been about? Matthew wondered. He tried to think what he could have said to provoke it. But he’d hardly spoken at all by that point in the dinner.

On the other hand, it was possible he was just imagining all of it. Maybe the look was just a general expression of irritation that happened to have caught him in its beam. And maybe, by the same token, the other episodes had equally innocent explanations. He did suffer from a certain social hypersensitivity. He’d read somewhere that it was called the “spotlight effect”: a tendency to imagine other people were paying more attention to you than they really were. It made you self-conscious; inclined to attribute critical judgments about yourself to people who in fact weren’t thinking about you at all.

Well, if that was all it was, then perhaps he should go down and talk to Charlie after all. Let him know he was on his side, whatever that English couple thought of him.

He put on some clothes and went down the path to the pool. The stars were bright, the midnight air throbbing with drums and katydids.

Charlie looked over as he opened the gate, his face lit by the pool lights.

“What’s up?”

“I was wondering if you could use some company.”

“Oh.” Charlie glanced up at the guesthouse window.

“I thought you might want to talk.”

“About what?”

The defensive tone stalled Matthew.

“I don’t know… I thought they might have upset you at dinner-the Brits.”

Charlie shrugged.

“It’s not exactly news to me, what they were saying.”

“I guess not.”

Matthew was standing by the pool, uncertain whether to sit down. After a moment Charlie said, very coolly:

“Are you sure that’s what you wanted to talk about?”

“What do you mean?”

Charlie stared at him, his smooth features unsmiling. Then he shrugged and stood up, giving a yawn.

“Just wondering.”

“What else did you think I-”

“No, nothing.” Charlie yawned again. “Sorry. I’m tired.”

“I mean, Charlie,” Matthew persevered, somewhat against his better judgment, “I’m always happy to talk about anything. You know that. Anything at all…”

Charlie smiled.

“I didn’t mean that. But thanks anyway.” He turned to go.

“Charlie-” Matthew heard himself blurt. At that moment he was as close as he ever came to telling Charlie about Chloe’s lover. He often wondered, later, how things would have turned out if he had.

Instead he broke off. In the silence that followed, Charlie turned to face him again, giving a strange look of skeptical expectation, as if Matthew were in the process of fulfilling some damning prophecy someone had made about him. It wasn’t the actively hostile look of earlier, but there was a total absence of warmth in it. Utterly bewildered, Matthew tried to think of some word or phrase to break the tension, but before he could, Charlie turned the exchange in an altogether unexpected direction.

“By the way, Matt, this is kind of awkward, but we have some friends coming and we’re going to need the guesthouse, just for a few days.”

“Oh… no problem. I’ll move my stuff into the spare room.”

“No, I mean we need that too. Also Lily’s going to be back from camp, so she’ll need her room.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I was thinking maybe if you had things you needed to do in the city, you might want to go down for a few days.”

Matthew didn’t know what to say.

“I mean… as I think I mentioned, I’ve sublet my place…”

“That’s fine. You can stay at the house. No one’ll be there. I think it’ll just be for three nights, and not for another week or so.”

“Well… okay… thanks,” Matthew said, trying not to feel aggrieved.

“Night, then,” Charlie said.

“Good night.”

Back in bed, Matthew lay awake for some time. Charlie’s willingness to send him away in order to make room for other friends surprised him, but he didn’t want to have to feel upset with his cousin. In fact, he wanted very much not to have to feel upset with him, and after a while he was able to persuade himself that from Charlie’s point of view there really wasn’t any callousness in it at all. He was just trying to solve a logistical problem.

He closed his eyes and curled up in a determined simulacrum of sleep, furiously barring his consciousness against the mass of thoughts clamoring for entry, until finally real oblivion descended.