The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  I had my elbow stuck out the window and was leaning my head in my hand, looking at the lights of Boston across the expanse of the Charles River. “You should start pulling over now,” I said.

  “I’m driving, Patrick,” he said calmly. “You can drive when you’re driving, but I’m driving now. Not to mention that this is my car. I think I’m capable of driving my own car by my own self. Check to see if there’s anyone on my right, so I can inch over, will you?”

  I craned my neck. There was a steady stream of cars passing us on the right, at twice our speed. “Don’t try it,” I said. “You should have been in that lane for miles now. You should have switched lanes back at the Hyatt. Before the Hyatt.”

  “No lectures, thank you.”

  He tried to edge into the right lane by giving the wheel random little jerks. The cars whizzing past honked and swerved. “You’re going to kill us!” I shouted.

  We missed the turn.

  “Damn,” he said under his breath. He relaxed into his seat, brushed back his nonexistent hair, and adjusted his glasses. “Oh, well, how was work today, sweetheart?”

  “Arthur,” I said, “we’re going to have to go miles out of our way. We’re late already because it took you so long to get out of the driveway back home. We’re not going to get a space anywhere near the theater, and we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. Let’s not even bother to try.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But I’ll tell you something, Patrick: someone at my office saw this movie and said it was lousy. We’re probably better off missing it.” He rolled down his window and stuck out his hand. “It’s nice and cool tonight,” he said, “just the way you like it. Maybe we should be buying a house in northern Minnesota.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t wanted to see the movie anyway. It was one of those tiresome thrillers about a psychopathic killer whose reign of terror over a big, polluted city is ultimately brought to an end by a team of two mismatched cops who become buddies and end up saving each other’s lives in a scene heavily laden with homoerotic overtones. Lots of cars rolling over and bursting into flames and tough-guy dialogue about assholes. But when Arthur and I were discussing what movie to see that night, I’d tried to use it as a bargaining chip so we wouldn’t end up at a festival of early Burt Reynolds comedies.

  The breeze blowing in through the windows was cool and damp. A thin, late-winter fog hovered over the city, which looked far away. The thought of crossing the river and entering the traffic and noise of downtown Boston was exhausting, and I was suddenly delighted the trip had been canceled. I pushed the recline button on my seat and shut my eyes. Arthur slipped one of his homemade tapes into the player, and an ancient recording of Richard Tauber singing selections from German operettas came on.

  Arthur and I had distinctly different musical tastes. My idea of auditory heaven would be living in a smoky cocktail lounge where Ben Webster was forever playing lush ballads. Arthur didn’t care much for jazz. Spontaneity and improvisation of any sort made him nervous. The only music he ever listened to was reassuring light opera and Mozart symphonies, those models of absolute perfection. Out of deference to Arthur’s feelings, I listened to my tapes long after he was asleep, and to my great surprise, I’d grown to appreciate his ancient recordings of operettas. All those warbling sopranos and tenors fighting to be heard over the crackling of surface noise struck me as terribly poignant. There was a purity and innocence about the sound, which I loved and identified with those parts of Arthur I most admired—Arthur the gentle, loving soul fighting to be heard above the rumbling injustice of fascist dictatorships and the INS.

  Now that the movie had been ruled out as a possibility, I relaxed back into my seat and concentrated on Tauber singing a waltz aria from The Merry Widow. Arthur began to tell me about one of his clients. He was working on the case of a student from Singapore whose visa had run out; he was about to be sent back home. The complicating factor was that he’d tested positive for HIV. If sent back, he faced being ostracized by family and friends and finding health care that was, for his particular problems, vastly inferior to what he was likely to find in Boston. “And as if all that isn’t bad enough,” Arthur said, “the poor guy gets separated from his American lover for an indefinite period of time. The case is breaking my heart.”

  Most of the cases Arthur related to me were heartbreaking. The recurring subplot in many of them was the threatened breakup of familial or lover relationships. This theme was so pervasive, I sometimes had to remind myself that Arthur was a lawyer and not a family therapist.

  In one way or another, Arthur was always trying to keep people together.

  Somewhere in the middle of this story, I realized he’d probably planned the whole evening right from the start. He’d never intended to see any movie, which was why he’d agreed to my choice so swiftly. Knowing how much I distrusted his driving, he’d used it to achieve his end.

  I sat up in my seat with a familiar panic gripping me and lowered the volume on the tape player. Arthur was behind the wheel, and I was the passenger. When you’re the passenger, there’s nothing you can do but go along for the ride. Wherever Arthur wanted to go, I would be taken, which was very likely no place any more exotic than home.

  Arthur turned the car around and we headed back, west along the river, with a full moon above us and the stunted skyline of Boston to one side. Once again I let myself be lulled by the night. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much who was driving, as long as Arthur didn’t get us killed. All that lilting, graceful music issuing from the speakers was beginning to put me into a trance.

  We passed the turn to our street.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I want to take another look at our house.” Arthur had been referring to the house near the cemetery as “ours” for the past few days, an attempt at subliminal manipulation, which, however unsubtle, was perhaps having some effect on me. I’d begun to think of the place as the Yellow Fever, but I’d begun to think of it often. “Beatrice said we should get an idea of the house and the neighborhood at different hours of the day.”

  Arthur’s dragging Beatrice into the negotiations was not a good sign. He always used her as the voice of professional sanity and rationality, although I sometimes suspected he made up half her quotes himself. “In other words,” I said, “you had it all planned that we’d miss the movie and come out here instead.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, don’t be so suspicious. Life isn’t a constant battle. We’re out driving anyway, we missed the movie, and it seemed like it might be a nice thing to do.”

  He reached over and put his hand on my knee and looked at me sweetly through the lenses of the black-framed glasses, glinting now with the light of passing traffic. With his big body and bald head, Arthur had never really looked young, but he had that smooth complexion and those kind eyes, which gave his face an ageless, angelic quality. I couldn’t decide if Arthur had manipulated this trip or if I was merely being churlish. No one could make me doubt my own perceptions more effectively than Arthur.

  * * *

  The house was dark except for a light in the living room window, shining through the branches of one of the fir trees. In a few months, virtually every window would be shaded in leafy privacy. Even at night, the yellow was so bright, the walls of the house seemed to be glowing.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like sitting in there now, sleepy and secure, the house filled with music, but the fantasy quickly became confused with an image of Tony and Vivian curled up on a sectional sofa, listening to La Traviata.

  “Remember the summer we went to Nova Scotia, Patrick? Remember the house we rented?”

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “Doesn’t this house remind you a little of that one?”

  “A little,” I told him. The similarity had crossed my mind a few times already and contributed to a vague sense of peacefulness that overtook me when I thought about the place.

  Early on in our relationship, Arthur and I h
ad taken a ferry to Nova Scotia. We drove along the Canadian coast with no clear destination for several days and ended up in a tiny fishing village. There, we rented a cottage on the edge of a cliff perched out over the ocean. It was a weatherbeaten, faded-yellow place with sloping floors and warped paneling and sulfurous drinking water that was pumped up from a well and was either poisonous or wonderfully healthy. We spent three weeks in the house, reading our way through a huge stack of books and listening to Arthur’s tapes. The mornings were foggy and the days clear and mild, always with a salty breeze blowing the curtains into the house. We rarely left the porch, which stuck out, almost treacherously, over the water. In the afternoon, when the wind shifted, we’d wrap ourselves in blankets and read until the late, orange twilight. All night long, we could hear the sound of distant foghorns and the rushing of the tide, and sometimes the moonlight was so bright and so blue, I found it frightening.

  I suppose it was on that trip that a slight, almost imperceptible shift in our relationship occurred. Some bond between us was cemented, and I began to think of Arthur, along with my need for an income, my family, and the mole on my right shoulder, as a part of my life. We often talked about how happy we’d been during those three quiet weeks. Increasingly, though, it had all begun to sound to me like my longing for a cooler, greener world, one that no longer existed and could never be wished back into existence.

  As we sat in the car in front of the house, we discussed a particularly lovely morning we’d spent in that other house, over a thousand miles away, and when Arthur asked if I didn’t agree that this city house was a deal too good to pass up, I agreed that it was, thinking about Nova Scotia and that trip we’d been on years before, my brother’s passionate relationship with a woman I’d never met, and Rita’s cautionary words about my jinxing the deal on the house.

  “If we’re going to make an offer, we should make it soon.”

  “Probably the sooner the better,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” Arthur said.

  “At the latest.”

  Arthur was beaming. “I don’t think you’ll regret this, Patrick. I really don’t.”

  I did regret it, the minute I realized what I’d said. We drove off down the narrow street, and as soon as the house was out of sight, I turned up the volume on the tape player and concentrated on the fact that in a little more than a week I’d be on the shuttle headed to New York.

  Part

  • • •

  2

  Ten

  The day before our dinner date, I called my mother to confirm our plans. Rita told me that she’d invited my father, and Ryan, who otherwise would have been stuck home alone, had decided to come, too. I should have known the dinner would evolve into a group project, but I was disappointed anyway. I’d imagined that my mother and I would have an easier time of discussing Tony’s wedding without the rest of the crowd. To get revenge, I lied and told her I’d invited Sharon.

  “Sharon?”

  “You remember Sharon. You and your husband came for dinner once when I lived at her house.”

  “Believe me, I haven’t forgotten Sharon. That would be like forgetting the Statue of Liberty. She was wearing sandals and a sundress in February. Five minutes after we walked in the door, she cornered me and asked if I’d ever regretted marrying your father. As if it isn’t obvious. Why would you invite her?”

  “Well, why would you invite Ryan and Dad?”

  “I hope you’re not comparing them to that woman, Patrick. Please. If you have to invite someone, why don’t you invite Arthur? At least he doesn’t talk as much.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “she decided not to come.”

  “I’m sorry the idea of having dinner with us was so unappealing to her. Just make sure you’re on time. If Ryan doesn’t eat by eight, his blood sugar goes crazy, the poor slob. He inherited your father’s health. Have you signed any papers about this house deal?”

  “Nearly,” I said.

  “Nearly? What are you waiting for, dear?”

  I told her I was having trouble finding a pen and quickly hung up. Arthur had already made an offer on the house, and we were waiting to hear if it was accepted. Arthur and I were both nervous about the outcome, although for different reasons.

  * * *

  The next evening, I was held up at the office by an emergency involving one of the other agents.

  Grace was an ex-nurse, a frail, somewhat timid woman in her late thirties, who seemed to be constitutionally incapable of contradicting anyone. No matter what ridiculous vacation scheme a person came in with, Grace would cheerfully say, “I think that sounds wonderful. I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful time,” and send them off. She refused to warn people about food poisoning, political unrest, or potential health and safety hazards, theorizing that it wasn’t fair to upset them and ruin their vacations. “Oh, don’t worry about the water,” I’d heard her say countless times. “I’m sure it’s fine. Why worry about water? Just enjoy yourself.”

  It was hard to imagine Grace enjoying herself under any circumstances. She had absolutely no personal experience with travel, because she was terrified of every form of transportation except the swan boats that glided across the pond on Boston Common. She enrolled frequently in fear-of-flying seminars, but never dredged up the courage to take the flight to Hartford that constituted graduation. I loved being around her; she made me feel adventurous.

  This particular crisis concerned the plight of a fifty-three-year-old, recently divorced woman who’d come in looking for a trip to a warm island where she could relax in the sun, be completely safe and unchallenged, and forget the rest of the world and all her personal traumas. Bermuda would have been the most obvious choice, but Grace, inexplicably, had sent her to a small resort town in Jamaica known primarily for its liberal attitudes toward nude sunbathing and drug use. The client had called around four-thirty that afternoon, demanding that she be put on the next plane back to civilization so she could file a lawsuit against Only Connect. She’d arrived in the town on a broken-down school bus, and as soon as her feet hit the dirt road, she was accosted by a mob of men trying to sell her ganja, nose candy, LSD, magic mushrooms, and aloe vera massages. Accompanied by a team of Rastafarians, she landed at her hotel—a glorified campground—in time to see “a bunch of filthy drug addicts” washing off in an outdoor communal shower. Once she’d closed the door to the wobbly shack that Grace had described as a “private villa,” she heard a scrambling noise from above. She looked up and saw a mongoose chasing a rat across the beams near the ceiling.

  After lambasting her with insults and accusations for a full five minutes, the customer told Grace she’d call back in an hour, expecting arrangements to have been made for her immediate departure from the island.

  Now Grace was sitting at her desk awaiting the second call, pale and prim, mumbling something that sounded vaguely like an affirmation. She had her hair pulled back in a bun and was wearing a tidy blue dress with a white lace collar. Very possibly, Jane Eyre would have ended up looking like Grace if she’d gone off to work at Bitternutt Lodge in Ireland instead of marrying Rochester. There was no way Grace could fly the woman out of Jamaica in the next forty-eight hours. There were several large resort hotels not too far away, but they were all booked to capacity. Even if the customer did agree to stay for a week, she’d have to spend at least two nights in the shack. Between sobs, Grace was blaming Sharon for the situation. Sharon had a special affection for this particular town and recommended it often. She herself spent at least two weeks there every year and had had two of the most passionate love affairs of her life at that very campground. She was perched on the edge of Grace’s desk, smoking and frowning, listening to her accuser with no visible remorse.

  “I send people there all the time,” she finally said, “and they love it. But I don’t suggest it for everyone. I wouldn’t suggest you go there, for example. Don’t blame the place, blame your own bad judgment, Grace. The whole thing doesn’t mak
e sense to me; how can these people she’s complaining about be ‘dirty drug addicts’ and be taking a shower? And I’d like to know how she managed to find the only working telephone in the whole town.”

  The boss had gotten word of the threatened lawsuit. He was pacing around, chewing his lips. Tim was a lean, nervous wreck of a human being. He had his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, and he clearly wasn’t cut out for the frantic pace of the business world. There were always rumors circulating around the office that he was being treated for some nervous disorder or other, but I doubt any of them was true. Still, he dashed around the little rooms that made up the agency, sweating through his shirts, tugging on his lips, desperately trying to keep everyone happy and in line. He was intimidated by Sharon, which was probably for the best, as she had much better business instincts than he did.

  Grace had asked me to stand by her until she finished with the second call, so I felt obliged to hang around. It was after six and the office was closed by the time the call came. Grace answered with a barely audible hello. “We’re all deeply sorry about this, Ruth,” she began, “but the fact is, you’re going to have to spend tonight in the villa. Yes, just tonight, that’s all. One night. And maybe tomorrow night, too.”

  Tim looked to Sharon for help, and she grabbed the phone.

  “Is this Ruth? Ruth, this is Sharon Driscoll. I’m Grace’s supervisor here. It sounds like you’re having some trouble adjusting.” She winked at me. “Put them on the defensive” was one of Sharon’s mottoes. “Who? Ruth Bourne? You’re kidding. I didn’t know it was that Ruth. How was that hotel in Seattle? Sure, I send everyone there; they all love it. If it wasn’t for me, that hotel would have gone out of business years ago. Did you mention my name? And did you get treated like royalty? Good. What was in the fruit basket? Why didn’t you come to me for this trip? Yeah, but I wouldn’t have been too busy for you. So what’s going on down there?” She motioned us all out of the office and told us to shut the door on the way.