The Fall Guy Read online

  “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 he
r 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.

  eight

  In the morning he found Charlie drinking coffee alone on the terrace. It was early, not yet seven.

  “Good sleep?” Charlie asked. Tanned and relaxed in his gray T-shirt and drawstringed shorts, he seemed fully recovered from his brooding hostility of the night before. His lean legs sprawled forward, feet comfortably crossed at the ankles, tapping each other as if in mutual affection.

  “Not bad.”

  “Have some coffee.” Charlie nodded at the pot and looked back down at his iPad. He held the device in his left hand and scrolled with his right, dismissing current events that didn’t interest him with a flick of his forefinger, and detaining others with a lightly proprietorial jab as if to say, “Just one moment, you.”

  “Chloe still asleep?” Matthew asked.

  “No. She went out. She’ll be back with pastries after Early to Bread opens.”

  “Where’d she go? I mean . . . I mean . . . it’s kind of early for yoga, isn’t it?”

  Charlie looked up.

  “She went to take pictures.”

  “Ah. More mailboxes.”

  “Right. She figured she ought to get out there while she still can. Lily’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “Right. Of course. Make hay while the sun shines. So to speak.”

  Charlie gave him another glance, and turned back down to his screen.

  “I think I’ll get an early start too,” Matthew said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There’s a farmers’ market in East Deerfield . . . Always good to beat the crowds.”

  “Well, don’t get anything for me. I’ll be in the city.”

  “You won’t be coming home?”

  “Yeah, but late, and I won’t be eating. There’s a dinner.”

  “Anything interesting?” Matthew asked, eager to leave but at the same time anxious to ascertain where he stood with Charlie; still clinging to the hope that his cousin’s hostility might have been purely imaginary.

  “What?” Charlie was looking his screen.

  “Anything interesting—the dinner?”

  “Oh, those Grameen people. Ex-Grameen.”

  “That sounds encouraging . . .”

  “We’re getting there.”

  “Microloans, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What exactly is a microloan? I mean, what sort of sum?”

  Charlie looked up at him.

  “It varies.” He seemed on the point of getting annoyed. Bewildered, Matthew dropped it.

  “Well . . . see you later, then.”

  “See you later.”

  He drove fast, making the turns without thinking. The LeBaron was in the A-frame’s short driveway, and this time so was the Lexus, squeezed in right next to it, both fenders gleaming in the morning light. The sight was strangely shocking; shattering almost. It was as if, until now, some part of him really had been clinging to a shred of hope that he’d been imagining things. He plunged on past, his head reeling.

  So what? he told himself. Her business, not mine. At the same time, from some ungovernably autonomous region of his mind, other thoughts arose; crushing, and still more crushing. She didn’t care anymore if she was found out . . . She wanted to be found out; wanted to precipitate a crisis, upend her marriage . . . Or no, she wasn’t even thinking about her marriage: she’d just been in too much of a hurry to see her lover, get into his bed for an early morning fuck on this last day of easy mobility, before her daughter came back from camp. So what? So what?

  He pulled out onto the county road and a garbage truck he hadn’t seen blasted its horn as it bore down, snorting into his mirror. Shaken, he made an effort to get a grip on himself. After a moment a slightly more rational explanation for the car’s presence right there in the driveway came to him: she must have simply thought she was safe from discovery at that early hour. It wasn’t much of a comfort, but it countered the suggestion of uncontrollable desire, which made its effect on him less incendiary. The pitch of his own feelings appeared to be connected with Chloe’s. If he could tell himself this was just an ordinary affair pursued out of ordinary boredom, and regulated by sensible caution, he felt he could manage this absurdly inappropriate anguish.

  He was driving toward East Deerfield because he had told Charlie he was going to the farmers’ market. But he didn’t feel like going to the farmers’ market and it wasn’t as if Charlie would give a damn whether he went to the farmers’ market or not. What he felt like doing, he realized, was going back to Aurelia, back to the A-frame. The farther away he got, the more strongly he felt drawn back to it, as if distance brought out some mysterious soothing essence lodged in that triangular building that wasn’t discernible in the tumult of things he felt in its proximity. At the same time the very urgency of the desire to go back seemed reason enough to resist it. It was abundantly clear to him that he was becoming unhealthily fixated on that little house.

  He turned off the county road and drove aimlessly along the winding lanes that spread through an area of old dairy farms. Some of these looked abandoned; broken barns standing open to the sky, machines rusting in tall weeds.

  I should leave right away, he thought, not wait till Charlie’s guests arrive. Just make my excuses and go.

  But where? His own apartment was sublet. His few friends aside from Chloe and Charlie were all dispersed for the summer. In the past he would have gravitated toward the house in Spain, near Cádiz, where his mother and her third husband spent their summers, but his mother had died two years ago, and the husband, who owned the house, hadn’t seemed interested in continuing his relationship with Matthew. He could visit his sister, he supposed. She and her partner, both social workers, lived in Bristol, a city he liked. But they were religious and the last time he’d visited, almost ten years ago, their determination to drag him off to church had got on his nerves. He could go somewhere on his own, of course, but that would mean motels and restaurants, which would eat up the meager profit he was making on his sublet; money he was counting on to help get him through the rest of the year.

  The rest of the year . . . It was only the second week of August, but suddenly he was aware of autumn. The leaves overhanging the narrow roads were dusty and frayed. The grasses already looked dry. And still he had made no progress in the task he’d set himself, of getting to grips with the curious stalling paralysis that had taken him over.

  Part of the problem was that he’d counted on being able to talk to Charlie and Chloe about it, but in their different ways they’d both made themselves inaccessible. Not that he blamed them, he assured himself, fighting off an urge to do just that. Why should they concern themselves with his private problems?

  I should leave, he told himself again. Find a cheap motel on the Jersey shore and hole up for the rest
of the summer.

  He’d come to an area of cultivated fields, with split-rail fences dividing them. A red Dutch barn came into view as he drew level with a well-tended cornfield. It looked oddly familiar, and he realized it was the one Chloe had photographed the other day. He slowed down. There was the mailbox with the enamel-painted wild turkeys and the petunia in its clay pot. The thought that Chloe had been here with her cameras gave the little scene a poignancy that clutched at him. He stopped and got out of the truck, breathing in the warm, sweetish air. The sense of her was strong suddenly, saturating, as if he had come upon yet one more of those secret pockets of hers. He felt close to her, standing where she had stood; linked across the intervening days as if by hidden threads, like the threads at the back of a tapestry. The cornstalks were taller than he was, armed in their heavy cobs, with the yellow silks blackening where they spilled from the split sheaves. At the edge of the field, blue starry flowers—cornflowers, he supposed—stood out against the steel-green darkness of the corn. Their blue looked warm at first, but the longer he looked, the colder it seemed to grow, as if it too were an incursion from the future; a backward glance of arctic blueness from the winter ahead. He climbed into the truck and headed back toward Aurelia. It was past eight by the time he got there: Early to Bread would have opened. It occurred to him that, assuming Chloe had left, he could go and knock at the door of the A-frame; pretend he’d been sent by the owner of the house to check the furnace or look at a crack in the ceiling. The guy would have no reason not to let him inside.

  But then what? he wondered, frowning in bewilderment at the scenario he’d created. Why would I want to get inside?

  The Lexus was gone from the driveway when he reached the A-frame. He slowed, looking in through the blur of a screened window. A light was on. A large head moved against it.

  Matthew sped away, his heart racing.

  • • •

  Charlie had left for New York when he got back to the house, and Chloe was out by the pool. The breakfast things were still on the stone table, and Matthew cleared them away. A half-scooped-out cheese sat on the kitchen counter, oozing from its cavity. Matthew threw it out and put the dirty plate and spoon in the dishwasher. He couldn’t help disapproving of the wastefulness of his cousin’s habits. He would pick up novelty loaves from Early to Bread on his way home from tennis, bite off a chunk, and let the rest go stale in the back of his car. Or he’d buy plastic-encased raspberries and leave them around unopened till they grew a fur of mold.