The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

Twenty-nine

  I was plagued by Tony’s advice for the next several days, possibly because I knew it was sound. I thought hard about whether or not I should visit Jeffrey. I thought about it when I was at the office, at home, at the movies, the gym, the grocery store, the dry cleaners, and strapping myself into my seat on the shuttle to New York.

  As soon as I stepped out of the terminal at La Guardia, the overbaked, smoggy city air assaulted me, a reminder that I’d actually arrived. The sky was a sick shade of yellow, as if the whole of New York had come down with a mean case of hepatitis. I sat down on a bench in the sun, wondering if I should take a bus or a taxi into town or get on the next flight home. The seat was so hot it felt as if the plastic would stick to my ass when I got up, assuming I ever gathered enough energy to move again. All the weekends over the past year and a half I’d made this trip into the city piled up in front of me like an overwhelming heap of time wasted on distractions. I sat plastered against the bench, sweating and miserable, contemplating the picture Tony had painted of my life: crumbs on one side, table scraps on the other. Some smorgasbord!

  When I finally pulled myself together, I walked back into the terminal and bought a ticket for the next flight to Boston. I called Jeffrey and told him I was at La Guardia.

  “Right on time,” he said. “When should I expect you?”

  “Maybe in a few months, Jeff. I’m heading back to Boston.”

  “Back to Boston? What are you talking about, Patrick? Didn’t you just arrive?”

  “I did. But I shouldn’t be here. I’ve got too much to take care of at home.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to really try and settle down with Arthur once and for all?”

  “Either that or leave him,” I said.

  * * *

  It was still early evening when I got to the apartment. Arthur had told me he was going to dinner and a movie with Beatrice that night. I rummaged through the refrigerator to try and find something to eat, but all I came up with was a pint of chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream, apparently a secret vice of Arthur’s. The living room and the bedroom were both in a state of chaos, with Arthur’s clothes and newspapers scattered around the floor and draped over the furniture. Perhaps on those weekends when I went to New York, Arthur spent all his time eating junk food and living in squalor. There was something reassuring about the thought.

  I collapsed in a stupor in the hammock, rocking gently and sipping a canned daiquiri. The porch looked out to a kind of courtyard formed by the fenced-off yards of the houses surrounding ours. At certain times of day, the sounds from the apartments behind us were drawn out of the windows by breezes from the river and echoed loudly off the building walls. There was a couple living somewhere back there who existed in a state of constant warfare. I was never able to determine which building their voices came from, so the whole echoing courtyard took on, at certain times, the atmosphere of a battleground. That night they were fighting in their usual circle of drunken insults and accusations. “Because I know it’s true,” the woman shouted. “How can you deny it when I know it’s true? Go ahead, just try to tell me I’m not right, go ahead.” I imagined the two of them living isolated from the rest of the world, snug and cozy in their apartment, tearing each other to shreds. There was something in the naked passion of their exchanges that horrified and fascinated me. I listened for a while, then turned on my bossa nova tape and tried to read a futuristic novel about a world gone haywire.

  And then, as the sun set behind the circle of buildings around me, and the tape played over the screaming of the couple, and all that heavy, polluted air pressed down on me, I was consumed by a wave of nostalgic reminiscence. I remembered a night years earlier, a similarly hot night although it was probably sometime in July. Arthur and I were just getting to know each other then, and we decided to spend the evening on a sightseeing cruise around Boston Harbor. There may have been dinner served on board, and there may have been a jazz band, but what I remembered most vividly was a brief moment when we went to the deserted bow of the boat to see the lights in the distance. The air had turned suddenly cool, and we put on sweatshirts and looked out at the hot city shimmering in the distance. As I lay sweltering in the hammock, I thought back to that time when the midsummer heat wave had been a passing spell of weather, not a harbinger of doom, and when standing on the bow of a boat with Arthur had filled me with calm optimism. I felt such an intense longing for a cool breeze to come circulating around my body now, I nearly burst into tears. I opened up my novel again and read for a few more minutes. Then my arm flopped down and the book fell from my grasp and over the side of the hammock and dropped three stories to the ground below.

  I fell asleep.

  When I woke, the sky had grown dark and the windows of the houses all around me were lit with pale yellow light. The tape had shut off. Crickets were chirping, and the air was filled with the faint murmur of television sets from all the open windows. I looked at my watch and discovered it was after ten; I’d been asleep for hours. I was groggy from having napped in the heat for too long. I was afraid I might topple over the rail and suffer the same fate as my book if I tried to get out of the hammock, so I lay there, trapped and sweating.

  A light clicked on in the kitchen, and I heard Arthur say, “We’ve got beer and coffee, and I can make you some iced tea. Your choice, dear.”

  “Iced tea,” Beatrice said. “I told Mitchell I’d be back before ten, but I suppose he and Brad will survive.” She sneezed.

  “Does Mitchell get jealous when you go out with me?”

  “Don’t be idiotic, Arthur. Mitchell is above jealousy, guilt, pettiness, all useless emotions. And certainly in this case . . .” I heard her walk across the kitchen floor and open the door to my bedroom. “I’ve always liked this little room. What does he do with all these statues?”

  “He collects them. Catholic memorabilia. I call it the chapel.” Arthur had never called my room “the chapel” in front of me. Perhaps he had secret, condescending nicknames for me, too.

  Anyone in my position with a molecule of decency in his bones would have announced his presence immediately. Excluded from that category, I gripped the edges of the hammock and tried to prevent it from rocking. The light from the kitchen window spread out across the chipped porch floor just to the edge of the railing, and I felt safely hidden in shadows.

  “So he’s been sleeping in here?” Beatrice asked. She slammed the door shut.

  “For a couple of weeks now.”

  “Well, that makes sense, given his concerns about buying the house. I must say, though, I wouldn’t call it a good sign.”

  “I know, dear. Give me credit for being able to figure out some things on my own. Once we get into the new house, everything will fall in place. These reservations of his are just a passing fancy.” Ice cubes rattled. “Tell me if this is too sweet.”

  The iced tea wasn’t sweet enough. Beatrice wanted two more tablespoons of sugar. They debated sitting out on the porch, but fortunately, Beatrice had always considered the porch structurally unsound. I was getting the same kind of voyeuristic thrill out of listening to their conversation that I get from leafing through someone’s bedside diary, but of course what I was really waiting for was more discussion of me. I had to suffer through a long, dry conversation about the film they’d just seen, including an analysis of the legal and psychological accuracy of the script. They moved on to a novel about divorce Beatrice had recommended and Arthur had hated. I was about to doze off again, when Beatrice posed one of her typically blunt questions, exactly the kind of thing I was waiting to hear. Why, she asked Arthur, was I always running off to New York? Did he think there was a chance I might be having an affair?

  “I really couldn’t tell you,” Arthur said mildly.

  “Please don’t make it sound as if it isn’t your business to know.”

  “I’m not so sure it is.”

  “Oh, Arthur.” She sighed and ice rattled. “That comment is so you.”
/>   “Why is it that whenever you describe a particular behavior as being so me, you mean it as an insult?”

  “Let’s not change the subject. I’ll lavish pity on you later, if you want it. You really don’t care if Patrick is having an affair?”

  “If he is having an affair, it doesn’t look to me as if it’s posing any threat to our relationship. If he wants to play around a little, and he watches out for himself, why should I care?”

  If I’d known Arthur would take such a liberal view of things, I might have saved myself a good deal of sneaking around behind his back, not that I didn’t enjoy it.

  “Maybe I’m having an affair, too,” Arthur added.

  I was astonished to realize the possibility had never crossed my mind.

  “Oh. Well. Are you?” The possibility had obviously never crossed Beatrice’s mind, either.

  “I flirt with someone at work. Stewart, the other homosexual at the office. Someone to have lunch with when you’re unavailable. It’s all very harmless.”

  “You’re being too casual about this, Arthur. I don’t believe anyone can be so casual about the infidelity of someone they claim to love.”

  If Arthur responded to her comment, I wasn’t able to hear it. Perhaps he’d shrugged or made some gesture with his hand or perhaps he was thinking it over and sipping his tea. Whatever was going on in the kitchen, I felt as if I’d come across an entry in the diary I didn’t want to read. I could guess what Beatrice’s next question was going to be. I climbed out of the hammock as quietly as I could. “Well, Arthur,” she said, as I crawled along the porch floor, “do you love Patrick?” Whatever the answer to that question was, I didn’t want to hear it. I made it to the back staircase before Arthur had a chance to speak, and in less than a minute, I was out the door and on my bike.

  * * *

  The night was still hot, and a swampy smell was blowing up from the polluted river. I pedaled along the path by the water. The branches of the sycamore trees lining Memorial Drive were batting back and forth in the warm wind, and the flowers of the dogwood trees were shedding petals all over the sidewalk.

  I locked my bike to a lamppost in front of Sharon’s house and was about to make my way through the tangled bushes to the front door when I noticed a blue Chevy parked in the street. I peered in the window: Stacy’s safety seat in the back and a couple of empty cans of Ryan’s Australian ale. I looked up at the house, but the windows were so blocked from view by the overgrown bushes, I couldn’t tell if there were any lights on. I got back on my bike and pedaled toward home.

  Thirty

  When I got to Only Connect Monday morning, Fredrick, our hedonist receptionist, was sitting at the front desk dressed in a conservative pin-striped suit, white shirt, and wing-tip shoes. He was eating a dry bagel in an uninspired, dubious sort of way and casually leafing through a computer magazine.

  I would have been less shocked if he was sitting there naked, especially since he’d been decked out in an outfit resembling red silk pajamas the last time I’d seen him. I was eager to find out the meaning of this transformation, but Fredrick, who was a master at self-deprecation, was more sensitive to even a hint of an insult than anyone I’d met. As I stood at his desk leafing through my call-back slips, I casually mentioned that he looked nice and asked if he was growing a goatee.

  “Not a goatee,” he said. “A whole new life. I have an interview at the Harvard Business School this afternoon.”

  “A whole new life,” I sighed. Nothing sounded more appealing or remote.

  I’d left Sharon’s on Friday night determined to go home and tell Arthur everything—about Jeffrey, about sleeping in the back bedroom, and most of all, about my intense desire to pilot a kamikaze flight over the yellow house. The confession should have been easy, especially since it now appeared he knew it all anyway. But as I was biking home along the river, I stopped to look back at the moon. It was a perfectly formed, bright crescent sliver hovering just above the tops of the sycamores. I was transfixed by the sight but ultimately distracted by the more earthly lure of a shadowy figure leaning against a nearby tree. One furtive thing led to another, and by the time I got home, Arthur was sound asleep. I studied his quiet, peaceful face and went back to my own room in defeat.

  * * *

  Late that Monday afternoon, Fredrick buzzed my intercom and told me that a Mrs. Arrow was on the phone for me. Whenever she called the office, my mother gave a name taken from the label of one of the cheap shirts in her counter at O’Neil’s, because she was convinced I’d lose my job if I received too many personal calls.

  She was phoning, she told me, to invite me to the house for dinner the following week. “Your father survived another year of deteriorating health, so Ryan’s throwing a chicken in the oven and turning on the gas. I’m going to buy a cake, providing James isn’t diagnosed with diabetes between now and then. I thought you and poor Arthur might like to join us.”

  “I can’t answer for poor Arthur, but I suppose I should come.”

  “Don’t sound so excited, dear; you might have a stroke.”

  “You don’t have any suggestions for a present, do you?”

  “I’m afraid not. Maybe his cardiologist could give you some ideas.”

  I found the comment a little stinging, even for Rita, and I began to wonder if she was still angry at me about the speech I’d delivered on the subject of Tony and Loreen’s marriage. “You sound a little off,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine. What about you? Aren’t you fine?”

  “On top of the world.”

  “Good, I thought you would be.” She paused, and I heard the new cash register beeping a protest to whatever she was doing to it. “It’s that brother of yours,” she finally said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Tony.”

  “I’m talking about Ryan, the one person in the family we could rely on to be sweet and good-natured and kind and gentle. I don’t know what’s happened, but all of a sudden he has an answer for everything. I wouldn’t dare contradict anything he says, half of which is totally off the wall. He even looks different. Frankly, dear, I blame you for introducing him to that woman.”

  “Sharon?”

  “Unless there’s another one I don’t know about. I suppose he’ll be moving in with her next. He practically lives there as it is. He spent Friday night there and almost didn’t make it back in time to pick up Stacy on Saturday. And instead of bringing my granddaughter here to spend some time with your father and me, he took her right back to Cambridge. They went to your office to watch Sharon work and then went for a walk around a cemetery. In other words, what every four-year-old girl loves to do on a Saturday afternoon. Poor Elaine must have had a fit when she heard about it.”

  I was so thrilled by this news, I had an urge to slam down the phone and run to congratulate Sharon. But I didn’t want her to think I was sitting around gossiping about her, even though she probably would have appreciated it. “I’m sure Ryan knows what he’s doing,” I said. “Don’t forget he’s an adult.”

  “Sure he’s an adult, a married adult. He’s going to lose visitation rights if he doesn’t watch out. And this morning he announces he’s taking a day off later in the week so he can go to Boston to have some kind of fancy haircut. Thirty-five years he’s been getting his hair cut at that horrible place down the street, and all of a sudden he has to go into Boston to get a haircut. Just between you and me, there isn’t enough hair there to worry about one way or the other.” I was about to attempt a defense of my brother, when she inhaled sharply and said, in a voice softened by regret, “I suppose I should be happy for him, shouldn’t I? Well, I know it doesn’t sound it, Patrick, but I’m trying.” She reminded me to be on time for the birthday dinner and hung up.

  * * *

  Later in the day, I went into Sharon’s office to see for myself if her weekend with Ryan had made any visible changes. She was leaning back in her chair, with her bare feet
up on her desk, talking on the phone and drinking some iced beverage from one of the most absurdly large plastic cups I’d ever seen.

  No visible changes.

  Her office was a vast octagonal room with long windows that looked out to the alley in front of the house. The floor and the desk were covered with brochures and tickets and travel guides and stacks of old newspapers. The man who came into the agency twice a week to clean refused to enter Sharon’s office. She’d accused him of disarranging her filing system because he’d once made the mistake of emptying her wastebasket.

  I sat down in front of her desk and picked up a copy of a letter she was writing to an airline. “Enclosed please find an unused ticket and death certificate for my client, Mr. B. Trembley. Please issue a full refund to his bereaved widow, B. Trembley. As the passenger died en route to the airport, it wasn’t possible to cancel reservations.” Et cetera.

  This was a classic Sharon letter, a version of which I’d written many times in the years I was her assistant. Sooner or later, someone at the FAA was bound to catch on to the fact that her clients had an astonishingly high mortality rate. I put aside the letter and started to leaf through a tour guide to Bermuda, one with glossy pictures of the island, all pink beaches and flawless blue skies. Maybe all that pink and blue induced a regression to babyhood, which accounted for the island’s popularity among heavy drinkers and honeymooners.

  As I sat looking through the pictures, I began to catch some of what Sharon was saying. It sounded, unimaginably, as if she was telling her client that he was past the deadline for the cheapest airfare and there was nothing she could do for him. I sat up and took notice.

  “I know I did it once,” she said, “and the way I see it, you should be grateful I did. But I can’t do it again and put my reputation on the line. Let’s face it: if you’d called me on time, I wouldn’t have to cheat and lie to get you a cheap fare. You realize you’re asking me to cheat and lie so you can save a buck.”