I handed the notebook back to him and leaned my forearms on my cluttered desk. I like to keep the top of my desk a mess so I can shuffle through papers as a stall tactic when pressed for information. “Those places you’ve written down,” I said, “are what we in the business call ‘cheap motels.’ You might spend a weekend there, but not with your wife.”
“No?”
“Trust me.”
He looked at his list with new interest. I hadn’t met his wife, but I imagined her to be one of those well-meaning, hopelessly drab Cambridge academic wives. You saw them walking around the Square dressed in crocheted shawls, peasant skirts, and knee socks, with mandalas on leather cords around their necks. I took down a book of classy New England inns and lovingly picked out the most attractive and expensive of the bunch. Mrs. Fields would be comfortable there. She’d fit right in with the dried-flower arrangements in the bathrooms and the white tufted bedspreads.
“This is your place, Professor,” I said. “Very quiet. Romantic, but in a tasteful way, if you know what I mean.”
What I meant was, the place was so suffocatingly cozy, he’d have the perfect excuse for falling asleep on the far side of the canopy bed at nine-thirty without touching his wife. Sex was about as appropriate in one of those places as it was in a telephone booth.
“A little pricey, isn’t it?”
Needless to say, the hotel he’d picked out in Bermuda was one of the most expensive on the island. “Think of it this way: it’s half the price of the place in Bermuda, and this includes breakfast. A huge meal a wild animal couldn’t finish.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
I told him I’d make reservations and, just to let him know I wasn’t as dumb as he thought, said I would mail a confirmation for this one to his home.
He gathered up his briefcase and his tweed sport coat and stood up. He was staggeringly tall. His arms seemed to hang down unusually low, as if he’d been observing the behavior of gorillas for too long. Perhaps Zayna was attracted to his mind. “And you’ll check on the other reservation?” he whispered.
“No problem,” I mouthed silently.
Five
As soon as Fields was safely out of the office, I dialed New York. Jeffrey was an old college chum, with whom I’d been especially chummy for the past year and a half. We were having an affair, though that term suggests something too established and committed for either one of us. “Fooling around” was more the way I’d describe what he and I did, even though I got nervous sometimes thinking that maybe what I really wanted was to fall madly in love with him.
Or at least with someone.
I was planning to visit him that weekend, and since he rarely called me at work, I assumed something had come up and he wanted to cancel. We had a loose arrangement in which neither of us could complain of disappointment at anything the other did.
“So let me guess,” I said as soon as he picked up the phone. “You’ve fallen for someone, and you’d like me to vaporize, at least for this weekend.” Jeffrey was a painter, who made a meager living doing illustrations for medical textbooks. He worked at home, always with loud jazz blasting on his stereo and his window shades drawn tight. I figured I could afford to joke with him about having met someone else, since he rarely left his apartment.
He groaned, an exaggerated, unconvincing attempt at sounding contrite. An essential part of being a good liar, one of my few talents, is being able to spot a bad one. “Don’t make me feel worse than I do,” he said. “It’s just that I haven’t accomplished anything all week and I have a deadline on Monday. I wouldn’t be any fun to be with, Patrick, I swear. You don’t mind, do you?”
It wasn’t within my rights to mind, so I told him I didn’t. “I can spend the weekend house hunting with Arthur, which is probably what I should be doing anyway. I think he’s beginning to suspect I have a mean case of cold feet.”
“We wouldn’t want him to think that.”
“No,” I said, “we wouldn’t.” I couldn’t tell if his tone had been sarcastic, meaning he was unacceptably jealous of Arthur, or serious, meaning (unacceptably) that he wasn’t. “I can come down in two weeks, if that sounds all right.”
“That’s fine. I mean, it’s a long way off, but I guess we’ll both survive. Give my best to Arthur.”
“Sure,” I said. He and Arthur were always sending messages of goodwill back and forth, even though they didn’t much care for each other. As far as Arthur knew, Jeffrey was just my good friend. Arthur and I had a strictly monogamous relationship, which I interpreted somewhat loosely as meaning I could do whatever I wanted as long as it was in the realm of “safe” sex and Arthur never found out about any of it. Sharon Driscoll, my best friend and mentor at the travel agency, had been influential in making me believe that telling the truth and lying convincingly are more or less the same thing.
I went back to trying to find a room for Professor Fields. I felt fatigued. It really is exhausting to spend eight hours doing a job with no redeeming political or social value. Arthur often tried to make me feel better about my profession by telling me there was something noble in having one of those jobs about which it could be said, “Well, someone has to do it,” but the way I looked at it, the world would be better off if no one dirtied his hands in the travel industry. Tourism is destroying the environment and culture of entire continents, not to mention the perspectives of a lot of silly people who honestly believe they’re gaining an understanding of the world by sitting in an air-conditioned bus for six days, speeding through China.
I certainly didn’t plan to spend the rest of my life booking reservations, but it wasn’t as if I had a wealth of other options to choose from. Unlike my younger brother, I was born a bit too soon to be genuinely comfortable with computers or to admit that there are real advantages to having an MBA. I’m pretty much grounded on the wasteland between capitalism and idealism, incapable of either changing the world or making money. I had expected to spend my life teaching school, but that had lasted only three years. One thing I learned from the experience is that it’s dangerous to tempt vengeful fate by making long-term plans. Tony’s wedding was an obvious example of the pitfalls of that practice.
* * *
In my early twenties, I sincerely believed the world would be a better place if teenagers could only learn to love literature. It really was an audacious notion, since, it occurs to me now, I didn’t love literature all that much myself in those days. I read in a steady, random fashion, choosing whatever books I happened to find at stoop sales or on top of friends’ coffee tables. It was Arthur who gave some direction to my reading and made me realize it was all right for me to admit that, despite my upbringing, I’d read and enjoyed (even if I hadn’t entirely understood) a certain three-thousand-page French novel about cookies. In his married life, Arthur had earned a doctorate in English literature. His field was Restoration comedy, just the thing—along with a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan—for his repressed-homosexual incarnation.
I’d inherited my love of reading from my father. He was constantly moving his eyes from left to right across a page of print, although he made little distinction between, say, The Naked and the Dead and the label on a soup can; both served the purpose of blocking out my mother and the rest of his surroundings.
My mother viewed reading with suspicion and often tried to discourage it, possibly because my father did so much of it. During adolescence, the only way I was able to read in peace was to lock myself in the bathroom and pretend I was masturbating.
As soon as I graduated from an overrated college isolated in the woods of New York State, I moved to Cambridge to look for a teaching job. Jeffrey and I, who were just pals at the time, had talked about moving to Manhattan together, but I decided I’d rather live in a city where my accent was easily understood. Half my time at college had been spent dodging words with the letter r in them so I wouldn’t have to repeat or translate, as if I were speaking a foreign language. I figured I’d have enoug
h trouble in the classroom without the added problem of a language barrier.
It took me a long time to find a teaching position. For one thing, I was underqualified (I had no teaching certificate and little experience), and for another, I have red hair. People tend to regard redheads with a fair degree of suspicion, especially when it comes to working with children.
What I had going for me was principally a handsome, if slightly outdated, suit I’d snatched from the racks of my parents’ store. I think it was the suit that finally secured me a part-time teaching position at a snazzy private day school near the city. I taught two classes of ninth-grade English for several months, and then, thanks to the unexpected suicide of a staff member, I was offered a full-time position.
At the time I thought I was Socrates, but when I analyze the situation, I realize I was a mediocre teacher. I often lost patience with my students, and there were days when I was so fantastically bored, I’d blank out or fly into a rage just to keep myself awake. I wasn’t very good with discipline, either. I was probably too close to my students’ age to command their respect and not tall enough to inspire fear. And despite my vague idealism about teaching, I didn’t much care for the profession as a whole. Every time I walked into the teachers’ room, I’d choke on the clouds of cigarette smoke and the overwhelming stench of unacknowledged countertransference.
In looking back, however, I think it was probably none of these factors that made me leave teaching so much as it was a feeling of grave social inferiority to most of my students. Late in my third year of teaching, I finally realized what my students had obviously known all along: no matter how much I thought I had to teach them, no matter how much they did or didn’t learn under my tutelage, no matter how many homework assignments they missed or how many books they didn’t read, they would very probably, thanks to nothing more than family connections and social standing, end up doing something with their lives a lot more satisfying and financially rewarding than teaching the likes of them. The curiously sympathetic condescension with which the students had been treating me since the day I arrived began to make sense to me.
Once I’d accepted this reality, I lost almost all my interest in teaching and gave my notice. The fact that I, never a serious athlete, was waist deep in the humiliation of having to co-coach the soccer team was unrelated.
Arthur thought my action precipitate, but my friend Sharon, a burned-out teacher herself, approved. She’d left her job at a similar school but a lot more spectacularly. She ended up screaming and swearing at her students and walked out of the classroom, coatless and into a blizzard. Sharon was the one who got me the job at Only Connect. She had me hired as her personal assistant. Later, when our friendship was jeopardized by our work, she talked the owner into promoting me to my own, well-hidden desk.
I was thrilled with the travel job for a long time, and I wasn’t all that bad at it. Coming from a family of salesmen had taught me a thing or two. After teaching, I felt a relief in doing something that seemed irresponsible. I felt more adult than I’d ever felt as a teacher; I could gossip openly with my co-workers, flirt with the customers, wear tight pants to work, drink at lunch, and swear on the phone. There was nothing about the actual day-to-day grind of teaching that I missed.
Gradually, however, I did come to miss the notion, however foolish, that by going to your job and putting in your time, you could make a tiny fraction of the world a better place. I didn’t miss the Friday-afternoon headaches endemic to the teaching profession, but I did miss hanging on to the idea that I was contributing. Or at least trying to contribute. At the agency, the most I did was send people off to various parts of the world to hasten their chances of skin cancer and amoebic dysentery.
Sharon, my mentor in the field, saw things very differently. She thought of herself as a foot soldier in a people’s revolution against big business. She was extraordinarily good at what she did, and mostly what she did, sometimes for twelve or more hours a day, was try to figure out creative ways for people to get around the rules and regulations of the airlines and hotel chains so they could afford to take the vacations they wanted. She once told me that her original plan after leaving teaching was to move to San Diego and help Mexicans enter the country illegally. When those plans fell through, she vowed that she’d turn any job into an equally antiestablishment venture. She always impressed me as being deliriously happy with her career—if ridiculously overworked—and so were her devoted clients. She had a cult following and brought so much business into the office that the owner let her do whatever she wanted, even though her compulsive bending of the rules set a bad example for everyone else who worked these.
Six
Sharon came into my office shortly after noon. The two of us ate lunch together whenever she had a break in her schedule, which wasn’t all that often. Most days she stayed at her desk, plotting, without going out. I was still searching through hotel books, desperately trying to come up with something resembling a bed for Fields. I’d called more than a dozen hotels and guesthouses, but they were all booked to capacity for Memorial Day weekend. Sharon put her feet up on my desk and started to poke at a callus on her big toe. She wore Roman-style leather sandals twelve months of the year, no matter what the weather. They drew a lot of attention during a snowstorm, not that Sharon needed them to stand out in a crowd. She was close to six feet tall and had straight dark hair so long she could sit on it if she lifted her delicate chin to the ceiling.
“Get those hams out of my sight,” I said, looking down at her feet.
She pulled a piece of skin off her toe and tossed it into the wastebasket. “Bad morning?”
“Disastrous. I botched a hotel reservation for Memorial Day. Bermuda. Harvard professor. No rooms available, two hundred and four people on the hotel wait list, he came in three months ago to book it. I’ve had it. I really should kill myself now so I don’t have to face the consequences.”
She gave me one of her disapproving looks, a sort of disgusted, impatient frown. Sharon had an unusually animated face. She was an avid cardplayer and had taught herself to use her expressive eyes and the corners of her mouth to her advantage. “You really didn’t learn anything working with me, did you, Patrick? All those months, and you didn’t learn a thing. What would I do in this situation?”
“I don’t know. I suppose you’d lie.”
“I wouldn’t say I’d lie; I’d say I’d try a tactic. Everything’s a tactic when you get down to it. You tell the truth, it’s a tactic; you don’t tell the truth, another tactic. In this case, all you have to do is type up a fake hotel voucher with the words ‘Confirmed’ and ‘Guaranteed’ printed in red and underlined about fifty times. Five minutes’ work at the most. He’ll probably get a room anyway, and if he doesn’t, you just make up a story.”
“What kind of story?”
She opened the huge straw bag she always carried slung over her shoulder and pulled out a pack of Luckies. “You tell me,” she said, banging the pack against her wrist. “Go ahead, just off the top of your head.”
I hated being quizzed by Sharon and having my basically honest nature judged as lack of imagination. “I’m not sure. I suppose I could always tell him the computer ate his reservation. Something like that.”
“No good. No one believes that story anymore. And I hope you’re not still using computer excuses. Computer excuses went out in 1985.” She had an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips and was fiddling with an orange disposable lighter that wasn’t working. I could tell she was getting irritated. Impatience was one of Sharon’s virtues. “I stopped using computer excuses years ago. They’re too common. Human error is a much safer option, but you have to be specific. Tell him there was some kind of convention or big group booked into the hotel, a planeload of models doing a shoot for Ralph Lauren, something like that. Harvard professors are unbelievably impressed with vacuous, pop-culture glamour. Tell him the hotel was in the middle of a corporate takeover and the new management inherited this group fr
om the old management and no one was sure exactly how many rooms they needed. Tell him they intentionally overbooked by fifty rooms.”
“Better say forty-seven,” I told her. “It sounds more convincing.”
“Good idea.” She tossed the lighter into the wastebasket and snapped her fingers at me. I reached into my desk and passed her a book of matches.
“Thanks,” she said. “Tell him we had three other people confirmed at the hotel that night and they all got turned away. It always helps if they don’t feel like the only one who got shut out. Tell him we’re filing a class action suit in small claims court for breach of contract, something like that. Throw around a lot of litigationy-sounding words. He isn’t a law professor, is he?”
“Zoology.”
“Zoology? Is this the jackass with the teenage girlfriend he’s trying to pass off as his niece?”
I nodded.
She blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “Oh, come on, Patrick, you’re wasting my time. Someone in his situation is never going to complain, no matter what happens. Don’t even bother with the fake voucher. You can stick him anywhere. I know a great motel down there no one books. One of the few murders in Bermuda’s history was committed in a room at this dump. It’s always available.” She reached across the desk, grabbed the hotel book out of my hand, and slammed it shut. “Let’s get out and get some lunch. I’ve got a hell of an afternoon ahead of me, and I need to store up some energy.”
* * *
It was after one o’clock by the time we left the office. The sky had turned a foreboding shade of gray, and the air felt seasonably cooler. Both were signs that delighted me.
“This feels about the right temperature,” I said, checking out the cloud cover. “The normal average for today is forty degrees. If it cools off tonight, we should just about hit it, maybe a few degrees below.”
The Easy Way Out Page 5
