* * *
Although our dream house was close to the noise and traffic of Mount Auburn Street, it was set off in a tiny, tranquil neighborhood that seemed removed from the rest of the city. E. turned off the main street and onto a narrow road so rutted with potholes he had to slow to a crawl. We crossed an abandoned railroad track, wound around a complex of three or four Victorian brick buildings used by the maintenance crew of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and entered a dead-end lane lined with a half-dozen shabby, asphalt-shingled houses. At the end of the lane, off to one side and surrounded by a stand of scruffy fir trees, was a clapboard Greek Revival cottage with a bracketed canopy over the front door and a For Sale sign hanging on the picket fence. It was painted a wonderfully garish shade of yellow and stuck out from the houses around it like a daffodil in a junkyard. It appealed to me so immediately, looking so secluded and cozy, my spirits sank in defeat.
E., who obviously sensed that something was up, turned around in his seat and said, “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Loud,” I said.
“Patrick loves loud,” Arthur revealed.
E. led us through the rooms on the first floor, all low-ceilinged and sunny, with cheerful white walls. Arthur was walking more and more slowly, mesmerized by the charm of the place. Max slobbered around after him, sitting at his feet and looking up with adoration every time he stopped to admire some particularly appealing feature—the rough planking on the floors, the polished woodwork around the windows, the obsolete fireplace.
There were three small bedrooms on the second floor, the largest of which looked out across the rolling backyard to a twelve-foot stucco wall that divided the property from the cemetery. The wall was covered with ancient, ropy vines, and the branches of the trees in the cemetery hung over into the yard.
“Now, there’s a view that isn’t going to change anytime soon,” E. commented, his arms draped over our shoulders as we stared out the window. “And that cemetery is a bird sanctuary. In the spring and summer they have bird-watching walks every morning at sunrise.”
“Sign me up,” I said. I tried to make the idea sound loathsome, but I was up at dawn anyway, and it crossed my mind that it might be nice to learn a thing or two about birds before they were all killed off by heat and pollution.
The owners had left a note saying they’d gone out for a few hours and advising us to stay as long as we liked. They’d drawn up a plan of the backyard, detailing the beds of perennials and the genera of the numerous trees. I wandered down from the second floor and sat at the kitchen table, gazing out the windows to the peaceful yard, trying to keep my promise to Arthur and look at things with an open mind.
I hated to admit that E. had been right, but I hadn’t yet seen anything I could reasonably object to. Unfortunately, our real estate agent knew his business.
When Arthur and E. came down to the kitchen, I was carefully slicing a pear from the bowl in the center of the table.
“I like this place a lot,” Arthur said. “And you know what, Eh’en, I think Patrick likes it, too.”
“He does,” I said. “But let’s get down to the systems here.”
“All brand-new. New furnace, new plumbing, new wiring throughout. Gas heat. Even a burglar alarm system.”
“There’s the rub,” I said. “Arthur isn’t good with those kinds of things. He’d have the police out here every time he opened the door.”
“I’ll learn,” Arthur said. He was fiddling with a panel of switches against one wall, flicking the lights on and off. Max was at his feet, gazing up, transformed by love, oblivious of the light show.
All the electricity went off and then back on. “You’d better be careful,” I told Arthur. “You break it, you buy it.”
He hit another switch, and an icy breeze came pouring out of a vent over my head.
I reached up my hand. “What’s that?”
“Must be the central air conditioning,” E. said. “Did I forget to mention they put in central air, too?”
Arthur sat down at the table opposite me. “Think you could stand to live here, Patrick?” he asked.
“It isn’t unimaginable,” I said, and in truth, it wasn’t. Optimally, I’d be living there alone, but that hadn’t been the question. I cut up the rest of the pear and passed the slices around. It was then I noticed that Arthur and E. were both trying to suppress narrow, self-satisfied grins of victory.
Eight
I called my parents’ store the following week to try and get some information about the wedding. Ryan answered the phone, sounding typically distressed and addled. My older brother has the vocal inflections of a man suffering from chronic stomach cramps.
“O’Neil’s Men’s Shop, may I . . . It’s under the counter, Rita. May I . . . In the drawer, in the drawer under the counter, with all the other receipts. Well, where else would I put it? I’m sorry, can I help you with something? Well, it’s definitely under there. Just look around. Hello?”
I said, “I’m trying to find a pair of leather pants with a sixty-two-inch waist.”
“Patrick. She’s driving me crazy today. She’s got some lunatic idea about reorganizing the filing system, and the whole place is in an uproar. You don’t know how lucky you are you stayed out of this business. How’s it going?”
“Better than ever.” Complaining to Ryan was definitely a case of carrying coals to Newcastle.
“Oh, good, good. I’m glad to hear it. How’s my buddy Arthur?”
“Breathing, last time I checked.”
“Great,” he said, in his earnest, vague way. Most often, Ryan paid little attention to what was being said to him or going on around him. Ever since he and his wife had split up, he’d retreated more and more into his own world, the boundaries of which seemed to be closing in on him. Ryan’s life was beginning to look to me like something out of a TV movie, one of those stories in which an adult kidnapping victim gets chained up in someone’s basement and is forced to serve dinner to his captors.
My suspicion was that my older brother was scarred by his name, not that it was anyone’s fault. Ryan is my mother’s maiden name, and she named my brother in honor of her dying father. Ryan O’Neil is a perfectly solid name, and no one had any reason to suspect that just when our Ryan was coming of age, a handsome young actor named Ryan O’Neal would be the hottest thing in Hollywood. Every time my brother was introduced to a roomful of people, there was a flurry of amusement and interest, which usually evolved into a discussion of how talented and good-looking the other Ryan O’Neal was, and left a trace of disappointment that it was only my well-meaning brother who’d joined the company.
“How’s business today?” I asked.
“Pathetic,” he whispered. “Not a customer since ten o’clock this morning.”
“Maybe it’s the season.”
“You’re right about that,” he said loudly, with a forced gaiety that was obviously intended for my parents. “We’re having that big spring sale soon, and we’ll be bouncing off the walls.”
O’Neil’s Men’s Shop had never exactly been a threat to Filene’s, but when I was growing up, my parents had done a fairly booming business in the thriving downtown section of the suburb where we lived. About ten years earlier, a shopping mall was built in a neighboring town, and O’Neil’s, along with the other downtown shops, had begun sliding downhill. When Tony was still living in the basement of my parents’ house, he’d help out at the store from time to time, especially when my father was in the hospital. As soon as he moved to Chicago, my parents, for reasons that defy comprehension, had convinced Ryan to give up his modestly successful sales job with an athletic-shoe company. They lured him into O’Neil’s by playing up my father’s bad health and the amount of work that was left in my mother’s lap during his frequent hospitalizations. Now they always talked about the store in glowing terms when Ryan was within earshot. He thought their optimism was genuine and was unflappably upbeat around them so he wouldn’t be the one to let on that their business was
dying.
I said, “I’m calling to try and get some info on this wedding shower for Loreen and your brother.”
“Oh, we’re counting down the days,” he said.
“Me, too. What is the countdown, by the way?”
“To tell you the truth, Pat, I don’t know. Hold on while I get the boss.”
He called out to my mother and began arguing with her about some misplaced order forms. I heard Rita say, “Stop acting like a child, Ryan; you’re thirty-six years old.” She grabbed the phone. “What is it now, Patrick?”
“Just calling to say hello,” I told her. “I’m at work, so I really can’t gossip for too long.” I began to tap at the keys of my computer to intimidate her. O’Neil’s had not entered the computer age. “How’s business?”
“Terrible,” she whispered. “I’m pretending to organize some nonexistent filing system just to look busy. Your father doesn’t do a thing but read the paper. If you’d come here to work, Ryan wouldn’t feel so isolated. He keeps telling me he wishes you’d come work with us.”
It was one of her standard comments. My mother and I were always knocking heads about the store. She’d designated me as the son who could or should have made something of himself, preferably—who knows why?—an anesthesiologist. At the same time, she was convinced that I refused to work at the store because I thought I was better than my brothers. By becoming a teacher and then a travel agent, I was a disappointment because I hadn’t lived up to what she saw as my potential and a threat because someday I might. Trying to figure out the logic of wanting yet another person working in a store that did no business made me feel as if my brain was going to explode, but I was fishing for information, so I held my tongue. “Listen, I had a dream about Tony and Loreen last night, and I woke up and realized I didn’t even know when the shower was going to be.”
“Well, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it, dear. You’re not invited anyway.”
“I know. I just wanted to make sure I buy a present on time. And before you send out the wedding invitations and everything.”
“Wedding invitations? My God! What’s the sudden interest, Patrick? You haven’t had any curiosity about this wedding for the past twelve months, and now you’re asking me about wedding invitations. Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?”
“Because you have a suspicious nature, that’s why.”
“That must be it, then.” She sighed and scolded Ryan loudly, accusing him of acting like a three-year-old. Nonchalantly, she asked me if I’d heard from that brother of mine lately.
“Tony? I haven’t heard from him in months. He never calls anymore. My phone bills are so high, I can’t afford to call him. Is he still living in Chicago?”
“This is odd,” she said. “I talked to him a couple of days ago, and he told me the two of you had had a nice conversation within the past week. One of you must be confused.”
Tony had sworn me to secrecy about his phone calls. “Come to think of it,” I said, “you’re right. I guess it slipped my mind.”
“Slipped your mind? He said you talked for over an hour. Why the secrecy?”
“Well, why did you ask, if you knew the answer?”
“I asked a question, you lied.”
“When you come right down to it, Rita, the question was a lie, too.” My family was held together by a network of intricately woven deceptions. It meant very little to be caught in a lie, because, as in this case, the exposure usually revealed someone else’s lie. “I’d say we’ve reached an impasse.”
“We have indeed. How’s Arthur?” she accused.
“Managing.”
“If you mean he’s managing to put up with your treatment of him, I wouldn’t make it sound so casual. It can’t be an easy job.”
“All right, all right, let’s call a truce. I’m having a lot of trouble at work today.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick. I got carried away. I’m cracking under the pressure of trying to keep all my sinking ships afloat—the store, your father, Ryan. It’s not an easy job. I’m beginning to feel like I’m sinking myself. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” She suddenly sounded so weary and sad, I regretted calling and even bringing up the subject of the wedding. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you out here for dinner. We haven’t talked in a while. We can go out to a restaurant and have a friendly chat.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, dear. Why not?”
“It’s not the norm, you have to admit.”
My parents were now, and always had been, inseparable. They only spent time apart when my father was in the hospital, which probably explains why he had so much surgery. The mystery of why two people who clearly disliked each other as intensely as they did would choose to spend so much time in tandem had plagued my brothers and me. Finally, Tony came up with the theory that they couldn’t be apart for long because each was afraid the other might be having a good time. As long as they were together, each could make sure the other was miserable.
“I didn’t know you were so concerned with norms, dear. Just plan on Thursday night after work. And bring along the information you’ve got on the honeymoon. I want to go over the details with you.”
“Loreen’s taking care of the honeymoon,” I said. And there isn’t going to be one, I thought.
“I know. But there are a few little extras I’d like to spring for.”
Loreen had planned a trip to a health spa near Palm Springs. She’d told me she could use it as a tax write-off, since she’d be learning new menu ideas and exercise techniques for her diet clients. In addition to being attractive and soft-spoken, Loreen was extremely practical. I’d never heard of anything that sounded more unbearable than a week in the desert in July, eating eggless omelets and taking aerobics classes around the clock. If I were Tony, I’d have canceled the wedding just to get out of the trip. I agreed to bring the information to dinner and let Rita take a look at it.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now we’re friends again. The answer to your inquiry is that the shower isn’t until June. You’ve got plenty of time to buy a teacup or something. And you’ll know about the wedding invitations when you get one in the mail. What are you and Arthur doing for fun these days? Or aren’t you planning to tell me about the house?”
“House?” Obviously Tony had been in a particularly talkative mood during their phone conversation.
“I don’t see why you’d want to keep something like that a secret, dear. I hope you were at least planning to send me your new address.”
“The house is a possibility,” I said. “Nothing definite.”
“Your father and I were delighted to hear about it. I hate to say it, but that Arthur is the best thing that ever happened to you. You should be thankful for the day you met him. You’re not planning to jinx the deal, are you?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Well, just remember, it isn’t every day someone buys you a house.”
“I’m putting up some of the down payment, Rita. He’s not buying it for me; we’re buying it together.”
“Good. As long as you admit that someone’s buying it. Tony is all excited about it. I kept asking him about the wedding, but all he wanted to talk about was this house.”
“That Tony,” I said. “Always thinking of someone else.”
Nine
Arthur and I had words on the way to the movies that night. Arthur and I always had words when he was driving. Years earlier, we’d had a couple of friends who lived in a house out in the suburbs. We’d had to give them up over the driving issue. If I drove the fifteen miles, Arthur accused me of being overly controlling. If he drove, we fought so much about his driving, the evening invariably turned into a nightmare. It was part of Arthur’s fear of being criticized. He wanted to be accepted by me, and everyone else, one hundred percent, even if that meant my sitting quietly in the passenger seat and watching him plow head-on into
a sixteen-wheeler.
Arthur is the single worst driver I’ve ever met. When I cornered him with accusations that he was a menace on the road, he reminded me that he’d never had an accident. My theory was that when people saw Arthur coming, big body hunched over the steering wheel, face practically pressed against the windshield, vein in his forehead throbbing, bald head gleaming, they got out of the way fast. Arthur braked at green lights. He alternated between running stop signs and coming to a dead halt in the middle of intersections. He had a mortal fear of passing anyone, and he slowed nearly to a stop when anyone passed him. His driving was so indecisive, I was sometimes amazed he could summon up the will to push his foot down on the accelerator with enough force to move the car forward.
“You’re in the wrong lane,” I told him as we crawled down Memorial Drive, far to the left. “We have to make a right turn there at the bridge, and if we miss it, we end up miles out of the way.”
Arthur said nothing. He had on the pair of black-framed glasses he used only for driving and was peering out the window as if trying to see through a sandstorm. He was still wearing the suit he’d worn to work that day, and he looked impressive. No one would ever accuse Arthur of being handsome in a traditional way, although he did have his physical assets. Personally, I’ve never understood my friends’ mania for attaching themselves to handsome men and beautiful women. After a month and a half of any relationship, you get so accustomed to your lover’s face, you don’t really see it anyway—handsome, hideous, or anything in between. Long after you’ve stopped being able to appreciate your lover’s looks, people on the streets are turning somersaults, making outrageous passes at him, and hating you for being the lucky toad who ended up with Adonis. An ordinary-looking Joe (or Arthur) is a much more sensible choice.
The Easy Way Out Page 8
