The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  By the time I’d taken in the microwave, the sectional sofa, the hayfield bathroom, the collection of New Age CDs (which Tony referred to as “classical music”), and those perfectly focused, unpeopled photographs, I’d decided that if I ever wanted to do myself in and couldn’t find a suitably dreary motel room in Boston, I’d head out to Chicago and end it all in Tony’s pale-blue living room.

  But underneath my lack of respect for my brother’s taste in furniture and despite his condescending attitude toward me, I liked him, and for as long as I could remember, I’d felt compelled to try and save him—from what I’m not sure. Probably the very things I admired about him.

  Now I shifted the phone to my other ear and listened to him rustling paper and clanging silverware as he set out his solitary midnight microwaved dinner. I admitted to him that I’d been lying about our mother’s “rumors” and apologized for my joke about killing Arthur. There was a hole in the afghan, through which I’d distractedly stuck my penis. I wrapped the blanket around me more modestly and tried a different tone of voice. “So you’re wondering if you should go through with the wedding,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to,” he shouted.

  “Okay, well, how do you feel about Loreen?”

  “Don’t give me that ‘how do you feel’ nonsense, Patrick. What difference does it make how I feel? I got engaged, didn’t I? Draw your own conclusions.”

  I was at my parents’ house when Tony presented Loreen with an engagement ring, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I thought back to that night as I listened to him shoveling food into his mouth and rambling on about the dangers of confusing facts with feelings.

  It was a rainy Sunday evening in November, more than a year earlier. Loreen’s birthday was in three days, and Tony had flown to Boston to surprise her with a diamond. Arthur and I drove out to my parents’ house in the suburbs, at my mother’s insistence. “Surprises are such fun,” Rita had said. “Even you might enjoy yourself, Patrick.”

  I knew something was up as soon as we walked into the house. My mother was standing in the kitchen, nervously wringing a dry dish towel over the sink and humming something that sounded a lot like “Put the Blame on Mame.” She had on a severe dark-blue pleated skirt, a starched white shirt, and penny loafers. Her face was heavily made up, and her red hair was even stiffer than usual. She looked a lot like a brilliant, troubled lesbian math teacher I’d had in junior high. She started complimenting Arthur the minute we walked in the door. From the enthusiastic way she hugged him and completely ignored me, I knew she was hiding something. Then I heard my father, Ryan, and Tony shouting at each other in the basement.

  Arthur looked at me over Rita’s shoulder and rolled his eyes. I hadn’t yet taken him for a visit when there wasn’t a battle or a scene of some sort.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s going on, Patrick. Why does there always have to be something ‘going on’? A little political discussion, that’s all. You know how your father loves to shoot off his big mouth.”

  My mother grabbed Arthur’s hand, dragged him into the family room, and incoherently started to tell him that she’d rented Yentl the night before and still couldn’t get over the beauty of Barbra Streisand’s Semitic profile. The last time he’d visited, Arthur had been regaled with tales of a wonderful bar mitzvah she’d been to forty years earlier.

  I left them and wandered downstairs.

  Not long after Tony had moved out of his subterranean apartment, Ryan and his wife had separated and my older brother had moved in. The one finished room, next to the garage, was strewn with Tony’s rejects from his basement bachelor-pad days and odds and ends from Ryan’s childhood bedroom. Tony’s round king-sized bed with built-in stereo was covered with twin-bed-sized sheets imprinted with racing cars and tugboats.

  My father, Ryan, and Tony were furiously pacing around in concentric circles, shouting back and forth. Ryan was guzzling from a massive can of Australian ale, and my father, dressed in a powder-blue suit that was too outdated for even O’Neil’s Men’s Shop to think of selling, was sucking on a cigarette.

  I made eye contact with my father, opened my mouth, and was instantly cut off.

  “The last thing we need around here is more input, Patrick, so don’t even ask what’s going on. Where’s that tall friend of yours?”

  My parents, my brothers, and I are all short. The closest we ever come to functioning successfully as a family is in discussing someone else’s height in disparaging tones. “Arthur’s upstairs,” I said. “He and Rita are debating the Old Testament.”

  “You treat that guy like dirt,” my father said, “leaving him up there with your mother. She could go on for hours, chewing his ear off.”

  Tony turned to me. “I’ll tell you what’s going on, Patrick. What’s going on is they already told her.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said, appalled. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was so happy to be taken into someone’s confidence, I jumped at the chance to side with him. “Told who what, by the way?”

  “They told her,” he repeated, his palms pleading to the ceiling.

  “These two and the one upstairs invited Loreen over here for dinner two weeks ago and told her I was going to propose to her.”

  My father and Ryan began shouting in unison, insisting that it had slipped out, that it had been an accident. “He talks as if we planned it,” my father said to me. He turned to Ryan. “Tell your brother what happened. I’m too upset to get into it.”

  Since Ryan had moved back into my parents’ house, he’d gained forty pounds and lost a considerable amount of hair on the top of his head. He was spilling out of a gray jogging suit with a peculiar hooded jacket and matching pants with red stripes down the legs. Ryan had always been a lovable teddy bear of a person, with one of the kindliest dispositions I’d ever run into. Unfortunately, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd about thirty-five years ago—my parents—and all his good intentions were merely paving his private road to hell.

  He looked at me warmly and said, “I’m sorry about the turmoil, Pat. But you’re going to love the dinner we’re having. I bought a huge ham, one of those smoked things you send away for in the mail? They sent it special delivery. It just got here yesterday morning.” He took a swallow from his beer, and then his face crumpled. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Arthur isn’t going to be upset about having ham, is he?”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “Could we get to the story here?” Tony asked.

  “All right already,” Ryan said, clearly offended. “Reenie was over here for dinner two weeks ago. Nothing special; the poor kid needs a good meal every once in a while. Anyway, I went into the kitchen to check on the roast beef, and apparently your father let the whole thing slip.”

  “Him?” Tony asked. “I thought you said it was your mother who let it slip.”

  Tony dressed exclusively in navy-blue pin-striped suits, which made him look especially broad-shouldered and authoritative, almost as if there were a gun tucked under his arm. He appeared particularly dashing that day, in a dangerous way, and I felt like telling him he had nothing to worry about. Whether Loreen knew or didn’t know, he was a shoo-in.

  “It was your mother,” my father said. “She’s got that big mouth, and she never pays attention to what she’s saying. In the store the other day, she tells this customer—”

  “Snap out of it,” Tony said, “and get back on track.”

  My father glared at him but obeyed. “Loreen was talking something about rings, rings—I don’t know—some story about a ring. I adore that girl, but I can’t follow her conversation half the time. But your mother, who probably wasn’t listening, thought she was talking about this ring, and she said, ‘Oh, did Tony go and tell you about the engagement ring and spoil the surprise?’
We never did figure out what the hell Loreen was talking about.”

  “You know, I’ll bet she was talking about Ring-Dings,” Ryan said, “because when I came back from the kitchen she was finishing a story about one of her diet people going on a chocolate binge. Come to think of it, she didn’t even look surprised.”

  Loreen was a nutritionist at a weight-loss clinic in a shopping mall in a neighboring suburb. The whole incident sounded highly implausible. “Well,” I said, “there’s not much you can do to change it, Tony. The surprise is spoiled, but so what?”

  “The surprise isn’t the only thing that’s spoiled,” Tony bellowed.

  There was another bout of shouting, which was brought to a dead stop by the sound of the doorbell. “That must be Reenie,” Ryan said, tilting back his head to finish off his beer. “Reenie” was a diminutive Ryan had invented for Loreen. Tony called his girlfriend by her full name, when he called her anything at all.

  My brothers and my father looked at one another in a conspiratorial way, and I felt as though I was missing a crucial element of the plot. Ryan put down his beer can, my father stubbed out his cigarette, and Tony shrugged himself into his suit jacket.

  “Ryan’s going to be my best man,” Tony told me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I thought I’d tell you now, Pat, just so there’s no hard feelings later. Don’t forget, I was his. If I could have two, you’d be the other one.”

  The three of them walked upstairs, mumbling and gesturing, and I was left standing in the basement, thoroughly confused. I hadn’t heard another word about the ring or the Ring-Dings or much of anything to do with the engagement itself until Tony’s midnight call.

  * * *

  “I don’t know why,” I said to him now, “but I don’t think the fact of your engagement says a whole lot.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s what we’re stuck with, isn’t it? We have to deal with reality here.”

  “Tony, come on,” I said. “Are you in love with Loreen, or aren’t you? That’s all that matters.” Even as the words were leaving my mouth, I saw a band of other considerations and obligations marching my brother down the aisle to the altar. Surely no one in the real world ever bases his decisions on intangible concepts like love.

  “I love Loreen, of course I do.” From the sound of his voice, I’d have guessed his chin was resting despondently on his chest. “And let’s face it, Patrick, it’s much easier to go through with the thing.”

  “Easier to go through with it? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand you.” Of course I did understand him, only too well. The fact that I stayed with Arthur was not entirely unrelated to the fact that it was the easy thing to do.

  Then it dawned on me. I tossed off the afghan and sat up on the edge of the sofa. The ancient springs groaned. In the blue light, my skin looked morbidly pale, and I shivered with cold and excitement and the promise of some really absorbing gossip. “You’re seeing someone else,” I said. I tried to keep my voice level, but I must have let a bit of enthusiasm slip in.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Tony shouted, “why do you always have to think the worst of people? I’m out here miserable and lonely, eating a frozen chicken dinner that’s probably going to kill me, if I’m lucky. I call you for a little talk, and you have to assume the worst. I don’t think you like people very much. You know that? You didn’t use to be this way. You used to have a more generous view of humanity. Now you want to believe that everyone runs on lust and greed and hunger for power.”

  It was a fair assessment of his own philosophy, but I apologized. “It was a passing thought,” I said.

  “And is that so terrible, even if it is true? Is that such a terrible thing?”

  “Who said terrible?”

  “You implied it. It isn’t as if I was looking for trouble, you know. It isn’t as if I was hunting someone down in a singles bar. I was at a training seminar in New York four months ago. She was staying at the same hotel for a business meeting. The elevator stopped at the twenty-sixth floor, and she got on. What can I tell you? We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Lawyer. Big shot, too. She has an office in the Sears Tower. I wouldn’t tell this to just anyone, Pat, but she makes about five times what I do.” He let out a huge sigh. I heard him scraping food off a plastic plate and then the sound of a garbage disposal crunching bones. “If you want to know the truth,” he said, “the worst of it is I think I’m in love with Vivian.”

  There’s something about names with a lot of v’s in them that has always grated on my nerves. But he’d said it so slowly, with so much care and suppressed feeling, I felt my chest swell with love for my poor, handsome brother. Nothing warms my heart more than a heterosexual man struggling to show emotion. His declaration of love and the tone of his voice made me feel as if the ground had shifted beneath the house or the wind had suddenly blown in from another part of the world. Something, I knew, was about to happen, though I couldn’t have said what. I looked around the living room, at all the worn, cozy furniture Arthur had inherited from his folks and the watercolor landscapes his mother had painted, almost as if I were seeing it all for the first time. Or possibly the last. One thing I had to say about living with Arthur: even if I didn’t have a life of my own, I did have furniture.

  A plane taking off from Logan flew over the house. The windows rattled, but then it was miles away and the room was once again filled with the sound of saxophones. I was tempted to rush into the bedroom to make sure Arthur was still there. I sometimes worried that he might suddenly disappear, especially when I’d been spending a lot of time fantasizing about leaving him.

  “Frankly, Tony,” I said, “I envy you. I really do.”

  “Envy? What’s there to envy? I’m ready to jump out the window.”

  “You’re in love.” I was desperately envious of people who could throw back their heads and say, without equivocating, that they were in love, that hopeless, helpless state of being.

  “Love, sure, but what’s the point? I’m engaged. Next thing you know, I’ll be married. I can’t call off the wedding. There’s absolutely no way I can do that. Your parents would have me assassinated. That’s for starters. Don’t torture me by talking about love. Vivian and I have a lame-duck relationship. There’s nothing I can do about it.” He turned on a faucet and, over the sound of rushing water, asked, “Is there?”

  There was such a pleading tone in his voice, I knew he was really desperate. He was at the end of his rope.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I crept back into the bedroom. Arthur was asleep, snoring lightly with his hands folded on his chest. I lay down on the air mattress on the floor beside our king-sized bed and pulled the blankets up over my face. I’d been sleeping on an air mattress for over a year now because the bed had been giving me backaches. Arthur, a confirmed hypochondriac himself, never questioned a health complaint.

  “Everything okay?” Arthur slurred.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “What did he want at this hour?”

  “Just gossip.”

  Arthur prized a good night’s sleep more than anything in life. It was the one thing I never tried to deprive him of. Besides, Arthur was above gossip. Tony’s news would be of passing interest at most.

  “That family,” he mumbled. “Poor Patrick. Good night, sweetheart. I’m crazy about you, you know.” He made a loud kissing noise and began to snore again.

  My family was quite right; I wasn’t worthy of Arthur, not for a second. That wasn’t the reason I spent half my waking time thinking about leaving him, but I figured it might do as a convenient excuse sometime in the future. I sat up and reached for a T-shirt. Light was coming through the venetian blinds in blue bands, casting shadows all across the room. I leaned over and gazed at Arthur’s face. He was thirty-nine years old and had an unwrinkled complexion that looked almost childlike. I was eight years younger, but my face looked like a scrotum by comparison. His youthful ap
pearance could only be explained by the sweetness of his nature. He was handsome in a solid, shapeless way and had brown eyes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a golden retriever. I felt a rush of tenderness for him and looked down at him fondly, something I often did when he was asleep.

  Then he stopped snoring, gave a snort, and became still. With his mouth open and his hands folded on his chest, he looked suddenly like a corpse. I stared at him for a moment and got up to close the blinds more tightly. The room went dark. I shuddered as I flopped back onto my mattress. Not, I’m sorry to say, at the thought of Arthur being a corpse, but at the thought of my choosing to sleep in the room beside someone who looked like one.

  Two

  Over the next few days, Tony called me several times. His second midnight call came as less of a surprise than his first, and he sounded a good deal more relaxed, almost as if he’d spent a few hours getting sentimental with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He’d recently become a fan of New Age music, possibly to make the transition from blank hotel rooms and elevators to his blank apartment even smoother. I could hear the numbing tinkling of “MoonSlide,” one of his favorites, tinkling in the background. A little drunk, he was probably sprawled out on the sectional sofa in his living room.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he said, “and it seems to me I didn’t tell you very much about Vivian last night.”

  “No,” I said. “I suppose you didn’t.”

  “I should have told you more, Pat. I want you to get the right idea about her. She’s not some flighty kid who’s interested in me because she knows I’m not available. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am. She’s got brains, in addition to everything else.” He paused long enough to sigh and then said, “You believe me, don’t you?”