The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  “I’m sorry?” Sam said.

  “Too many people, too few tables.” She made it sound like she was talking to someone who was slightly, but obviously, slow. “You’ll have to share.”

  “Share?”

  “Yes. Share. There will be someone else at your table.”

  Sam wasn’t sure he was ready to talk to anyone over dinner. He thought about staying in his room, but remembered all at once that it was wallpapered with Beth. At least, it was wallpapered with a paper that Beth had thought was hilarious when they’d been there, an expensive, formal-looking gold-and-red-wine-flocked repeating pattern of a knight on a horse, his helmet on, lance pointed resolutely toward the ground. She had been hopelessly reduced to giggles at the sight of it. “It should say ‘the can’t-get-it-up suite’ right on the door. Who the hell would pick something like that?” She laughed.

  It hadn’t been anything of the sort back then, Sam thought humourlessly, but it would be now.

  He pictured having dinner with an elderly man travelling on business, a group of insurance brokers, a couple with a small and food-throwing child. Any one of them would be better, he thought, than a long and hungry night surrounded by Beth and the knights of the limp lance.

  When he came downstairs, though, the waiter led him through the dining room and out into the windowed veranda that surrounded two sides of the building, each holding rows of single tables.

  The waiter stopped at a table where a woman was already sitting.

  “I …” Sam started, turning toward a waiter who was already pulling a chair out for him. Then he stopped.

  “I’m Peggy,” the woman said. She was tanned, with very white teeth. He could tell because she was smiling. A small woman, at least, smaller than Beth, wearing a sleeveless light top that showed off strong shoulders.

  He sat down. “I’m Sam.”

  Sam thought that he could beat her to the punch, ask first before she got around to asking why a single guy was at a place packed with couples and families.

  “I’m exorcising demons,” she answered, making a strange, almost feathery motion with her fingers, her hand turned backwards toward the rest of the room, held up over her shoulder. “Well, not really. We were supposed to get married here.”

  She looked across at Sam, at the expression on his face.

  “No, I mean my fiancé and I. We had the place booked and everything. I did it all online: banquet services, the dessert options, the menus. Date picked and deposit made. I could only get the deposit back as a credit note.” She looked at the glass as if she were seeing something different. “I guess I wanted to see what it was like in real life, in case I didn’t ever get the chance again.”

  Drinks arrived, and, fascinated, Sam found himself asking what happened.

  “Things didn’t work out. Kind of suddenly, really.”

  “I know what that’s like,” Sam said.

  Then he explained why he was there, and Peggy seemed to understand the idea much better than either Mitch or Kevin had. It even seemed to make sense to her.

  “I have a friend who does that all the time with guitar players,” she said, smiling again. “When she breaks up with one, she just goes out with another. Except I’m not sure she actually plans it that way.”

  Sam felt his face breaking into a smile, realizing that, for months, he’d become unaccustomed to smiling.

  Peggy had scallops — Sam splurged and had the lobster. He even wore the silly plastic bib and didn’t worry about the mess or about the fact the menu said only “market price.” An hour and a half later, they were still talking, and separate checks eventually came without prompting, the waiter placing the two folders on the edge of the table and drifting out of sight. Outside, the sky had lighted to orange with the sunset, then faded into purple.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Sam asked, bold and slightly red-cheeked after three glasses of the house wine.

  “I thought I might go for a walk on the beach. Want to come along?”

  The words felt like a hammer on tin, and Sam waited for the inevitable arrival of Beth — and waited. Then waited a little more. He saw Peggy looking at him across the table, curious.

  “I’d love to,” he replied.

  They had dinner together after spending the day together, and then did the same the next day, the same table each time. Sam found himself wishing he hadn’t bothered travelling anywhere else, wishing that he had more time.

  It had only been a few days, but Sam could already draw up Peggy’s face in his head with his eyes closed, the slope of her cheekbones, even the way her hands flew around when she was talking excitedly.

  The third night, they both had lobster, both wearing the bibs, neither one embarrassed by the way they looked. They were still in the restaurant after everyone else had left, the wait staff changing the other tables over for breakfast.

  Peggy reached across the table and took just the tips of his fingers in her hand. He felt an electric surge running through his arm, a hollow, eager ache.

  “This has been just great,” she said.

  It was a feeling that he doubted he would ever be able to forget.

  Three Days

  Arthur Simmons thought about just staying put this time and urinating in the bed. Wondered if that would be going too far.

  He’d been in bed for two full days already. This morning would mark the third morning that no one had come, and no one had even called to check on him.

  He looked over at the phone, a flat 1970s push-­button, cream-coloured, silent, sitting on the table beside the bed. It wouldn’t take much effort to call, he thought, neither for me nor for them. But he had resisted. Art was following the rules he’d set for himself from the very beginning: wait. Wait for someone else to make the first move. Wait, for as long as it took.

  He was taking short, shallow breaths, aware that breathing more deeply would start another round of coughing. He’d heard somewhere that, once you got old, you could easily cough hard enough to crack a rib, and he believed it. Every time the coughing started, he felt like an old bellows with its handles being pumped too hard: air rushing out, rattling back in again, shaking things loose and starting the whole cycle all over again. Each coughing spell was exhausting, and afterwards, he would feel as if he was unable to lift his arms. He stayed as still as he could, breathing flatly through his nose. It had started as a cold on Sunday. By Monday, he could feel the weight of it shifting into his chest, settling there, and he knew he was really sick, the kind of illness that is more a forced march than a nuisance.

  It was five o’clock on a late June morning, a Thursday, and there had already been light outside at four-thirty — he could see it edging in through the blinds in thin stripes, the night lightening to a pale grey.

  Would wetting the bed make the point any more clearly? Would it make them pay any more attention if they ever got around to finding him?

  He imagined the feel of brief, welcome warmth, while the rest of the day would be clammy, the room filled with the particularly sharp stink of old man’s urine.

  Arthur would get up to go to the bathroom, but that was the only time he’d been getting up, shuffling slowly down the hall, and stopping to lean against the wall when the coughing overtook him. He would stop afterwards to get a drink of water from the sink and, at the same time, hate himself for that small weakness. But that was it, the only times he’d move from the bed. He hadn’t been downstairs to the kitchen, hadn’t picked up the phone to call anyone. Outside, there might well be mail waiting for him in the mailbox, a handful of flyers and one or two bills. They could stay there, he thought. He wanted every hour to count, each minute on the clock to be a precise measure of guilt.

  There had been six others in his family, three brothers, three sisters, but they had all died. All their wives and husbands were gone, too. A dead generation. Was that too harsh? Should he be thinking they’ve “passed”? Or maybe that Salvation Army saying, “promoted to Glory?”

 
But they weren’t promoted to anywhere, he thought. They’d just winked out, there one day, packed up and gone the next. Perhaps it would be closer to say they were fired into purgatory.

  It was a thought he kept coming back to: the fact that everything they had been, everything they had done, was just gone, too. He was it: the last, the final custodian, the keeper of all the information. Memories? Facts? Experience? All gone, he thought. All wasted. Trapped in the last remaining memories of someone who couldn’t even find anyone who cared enough to stop and listen.

  There wasn’t any prize for being the survivor, Art thought. But he didn’t miss his siblings, not any of them. Not Anne with her ability to go stomping off righteously after the slightest provocation, her chin firmly in the air and ready to hold onto the slight for years. Nor Heather, whose skill at winning any argument had left the rest of her siblings unwilling to talk to her about any important topic, let alone engage in debate. But he did miss the things they’d done together. Summers in Maine, for example, sailing small boats on the Eggemoggin Reach near Mount Desert Island. Rowing to any one of the small, empty islands along the reach to dig through ancient shell middens for arrowhead fragments or wandering the beaches collecting sand dollars.

  Art could remember heading out through the roiling tidal currents with his mother in the family canoe, his brother Mark in the middle, Art in the bow, pulling hard past one of the big houses on the shore, a Rockefeller relative or something with a great barn of a boathouse down on the shore, a seaplane nestled up at the top of the boathouse ramp like a stiff-winged bird waiting to be startled into instant motion, into uncatchable escape. Art could remember his mother saying that the salt water was riskier canoeing, but better for the canoe, especially in the several places where beaching the craft had chipped the dark green paint away. “Salt water won’t help,” she had said, “but it won’t rot the canvas, either.” He could remember the taste of that salt, too, licking it off the back of his hand, his left hand, the hand that most often took the bottom grip on the canoe paddle. He remembered the day as being dark, glowering, the water particularly choppy. But all his reference points were gone: his mother, dead twenty years now, and Mark buried six years later after four long months of cancer fingering ungently through his bones.

  There was no one left to ask about it, Art thought. Realizing — again — that his version of the experience was now the truth. It could have been sunny that day, he thought. I could have gotten it wrong. His mother might only have told him about the seaplane. The doors to the boathouse might have been tightly closed, the rest of it he might’ve made up in his head. It might not have been the Rockefellers at all, although he knew for certain they’d had summer homes there.

  Arthur did get things wrong sometimes: several times, years earlier, he’d told his brothers and sisters about something he remembered, only to be met with blank stares, incomprehension.

  “You have the most vivid imagination.” That would have to have been Eleanor, who, if nothing else, was always certain that her version was absolutely, impeccably right.

  Now, Art thought, she would have been the right one to be the survivor — but she’d gone, and left quick, too. One morning, she’d called a nearby friend, another retired and widowed woman who’d arrived in a rush to find every single coffee maker in the house taken apart and laid out on the counter — glass percolator, French press, filter drip. Every piece, laid out in order like a mechanic’s tear-down manual, as if she were trying to figure out just exactly how each of them worked. It was a startling combination of scientific rigour and absolute bewilderment.

  “All I want is a cup of coffee,” the normally prim Ellie had told her friend. “And I don’t care what the fuck you have to do to make it.”

  Two months later, she was dead, too, also cancer, tumours cropping up in her brain and everywhere else like weeds filtering up through a lawn, travelling along unseen, unmarked tangles of underground roots.

  “It wasn’t anywhere until it was everywhere,” her doctor told Art on the phone, at the same time managing to make it sound like the doctor felt he had been the victim of a particularly horrible magic trick. Eleanor had no kids: her executor was her family lawyer, who sent Art his sister’s ashes in a plain brown-paper-wrapped package.

  Second last to go was John. Art and John stopped even sending Christmas cards after Ellie’s death. Art had never seen the point in the first place, and with John, it was as if hearing about Eleanor’s ashes ending up with Art was the last straw.

  “You’re not the oldest,” John protested in one last distant and tinny-sounding bitter phone call. “You’re not even the oldest one left.”

  At that moment, Art suddenly found himself wanting to remind John that, when they had shared a room during the family’s summers in Maine, John had always been the one who had been frightened by the big summer thunderstorms coursing up the reach. So scared in fact that one night, in the middle of a heavy storm poised almost directly overhead, Art had woken up to find that John had climbed into his bed, so that, rolling over, Art could see the whites of John’s wide-open eyes with every flare of lightning.

  Reminding John of that over the phone had seemed like the best response, but at the same time, it was something held out of bounds by unwritten family rules. There were things they all knew, but just never said.

  Like the fact that their brother Mark had been, for the briefest of periods, a bedwetter. Everyone in the family had one or more memories of their mother hauling great bundles of sheets and blankets out of Mark’s room in the middle of the night, an event that always seemed overlarge and overwrought by the rush and the fact it always occurred around two or three in the morning. Mark, as always, managing to be the centre of attention again.

  John had dodged all the big threats: cancer and heart disease and stroke had all kept their distance, islands of cholesterol had no doubt floated benignly through his veins without ever successfully blocking anything. In his seventies, though, John had stepped on the upturned tines of a rock rake while gardening. He became living — and eventually dying — proof of the difficulty of cleansing deep puncture wounds and had died of blood poisoning after a full week in hospital.

  John had kids — three of them, but only two were in the country to sit next to his bed as the infection grew, making his foot enormous and multicoloured, draining horribly, and then growing massive again. As he moved in and out of consciousness, the two adult children made careful and quiet funeral plans at his bedside while the third, a son, wrestled with airline schedules and business commitments and managed to get back just before John slipped into a final coma. John’s first and last words to his travelling son? “You’ve put on a bit of weight.”

  Ellie had no children — Anne and Mark had two, Heather one, Ian and John both had three.

  Art had two children as well, a boy and a girl. In total, he calculated, everyone’s children came out to one short of the total number of parents, a family destined to be in slow decline.

  Maybe it’s pneumonia, Art thought, feeling the gentle rattle in his chest every time he breathed. The default killer of scores of the elderly, up there with congestive heart failure on a scorecard of the most likely causes. His brother Ian had soldiered on through multiple sclerosis and skin cancer and the loss of both a kidney and a lung — with his shirt off, the scars looked as though he had been inexpertly repaired by amateurs — but it was pneumonia that had finally won the battle.

  At the end, Ian had become a fiery wraith of himself, a leathery leftover puppet strung together with sinew and tendons that looked more and more like fat, braided rope as everything else melted away. Art had gone to visit him, the last time with Ian bending up toward him urgently from his hospital bed as if he had something critical to impart, eyes wide and intense.

  “You win,” he finally managed to say, and Art was pretty certain that Ian was smiling when he said it. It was hard to tell: Ian’s face was pulled tight by that time, stretched over his skull as if it
were drying on a board for taxidermy. But Art was convinced from the sound of his voice that the smile was real. Ian died a day later, stopping breathing only when it seemed that everything left of his body had already consumed itself to ash.

  Arthur noticed the light behind the blinds had brightened, hardened.

  It would have been nice to open the blinds, maybe even open the bedroom window, too, Art thought. See a bit of the sun. Get a little fresh air in: Art wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling that the room might smell bad — stale, or even worse. You get used to something and it’s just normal, he thought. But every now and then, he’d catch a hint of a smell of something off — the kind of smell that would then flit away from his senses, as if concentrating on it only served to make it more discreet. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to air the place out, he thought.

  But that would mean getting up and, in the process, losing the high ground. First I’d be opening the windows, then I’d be creeping downstairs to make a sandwich, he thought. Then the whole effort would be lost. Hunger’s a funny thing, Art thought. He had been hungry, but the feeling had faded. Now, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to eat even if he tried.

  Instead, Art lay on his back in bed in the half-light of the room, watching the dust dance in one thin band of sunlight that was coming through a hall window and reaching all the way through the door into his bedroom. There were only a handful of days, he thought, on either side of the summer solstice when the sun was in the right place to actually make the straight line and reach the room. He’d noticed it before: the same kind of strange, poignant, meaningless marker as when, all too frequently it seemed, he’d glance at a clock and see the digital numbers all line up: 11:11.

  He wondered who would be the first to call, or the first to show up.

  Would it be Patrick or Jane? They’d both become more and more uninterested as the years had gone by: Patrick, busy enough with a family of his own, and Jane, a health care consultant, on the road more often than not.