The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

“Let’s try to talk about something pleasant for a change,” my mother said. This was clearly her theme for the evening.

  Ryan appeared in the doorway from the kitchen with a tray of carefully arranged crackers and a bright-orange ball of cheese. “Poor Ryan,” my mother said, “slaving in the kitchen night and day.”

  “Ryan’s the cook and Tony’s the handyman,” my father said. “Remember the time Tony paneled the basement, Rita?”

  “It’s branded into my memory, dear. Right up there with Pearl Harbor and the day we got married. Where are the drinks, Ryan? Loreen’s been waiting for the past hour. Thank God there aren’t any alcoholics around here, or we’d all have the d.t.’s.”

  She looked at Loreen and laughed sweetly, as if she’d made a friendly compliment, but Loreen said nothing.

  “I thought I’d wait for Patrick and Arthur to show up,” said Ryan. “What will you guys have?”

  Arthur stood. He looked absurdly, almost impossibly large, hunched over in the tiny room. “We can get our own,” he said. “You don’t have to wait on us, Ryan.”

  “Ryan loves to do this,” my father said. “Make them one of those things Tony mixed for Loreen last Christmas. Wasn’t that good, honey? What was that drink called?”

  “The Pink Squirrels?” Ryan asked.

  “I don’t want a Pink Squirrel,” I said. “And neither does Arthur.” If I didn’t make a stand now, he’d be offering us cream puffs next. “We’ll have a couple of beers.”

  “Coming right up.”

  “Ryan looks a little different to me,” Arthur said. “Has he been losing weight?”

  “It’s that new girlfriend of his,” my father said. He’d turned his attention back to the TV and was flipping channels again.

  “I didn’t know he had a new girlfriend,” Loreen said, the blue lights flickering across her face.

  My mother leaned across Loreen and glared at my father. “Do you think we could stick with one channel, Jimmy? The flashing lights are about to give me a seizure. And she isn’t a girlfriend, sweetie, she’s just a friend of his.”

  “One he spends every night with,” my father said.

  Arthur picked up a copy of Modern Maturity from a stack by the rocker and began to leaf through it.

  “Does anyone else find it a little close in here?” I asked. “Maybe we could open one of the windows.”

  The airless room had become stifling and seemed to be shrinking besides. If I leaned back in the recliner, my feet would have been resting on Loreen’s lap and my head sticking out a window. I loosened my tie, but the suggestion of changing the air was turned down on the grounds that my father shouldn’t be subjected to a draft.

  “Let’s discuss something happy for a change of pace,” Rita said.

  Newly bold Loreen, however, wasn’t so easily put off. She was as heavily made up as she had been at the travel agency, but some of the natural color of her cheeks was seeping through her foundation. She pushed at her big hairdo defiantly, adjusted the fake pearls, and said, “I’d think Ryan’s new girlfriend would be a happy thing to discuss. Is she coming to dinner tonight?”

  “Let’s hope not,” my father said.

  Loreen inched away from him and turned toward Arthur. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” she said. “It must be more than a year now. How have you been?”

  “He’s buying a house,” my father said. “Didn’t Tony tell you?”

  “Tony?” she asked, as if he’d mentioned a stranger. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Well, he is. And Patrick’s chipping in for it, too. Everyone’s settling down. It’s what parents live for, hon. Now Rita and I can . . .”

  His voice trailed off into silence.

  “We’ll have to have you over for dinner,” Arthur said. “It’s not a mansion, but I’m sure you’d like it. It’s right next to a cemetery.”

  Ryan came in with the drinks and served them around the room. “We went to that cemetery the other day. Beautiful place. I don’t much go for walking around on top of dead people, though.”

  “It’s better than having dead people walk around on top of you,” Loreen said.

  Considering that Ryan lived in the basement, I found the comment a little sharp. Arthur looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. If anyone else had made the connection, they let it pass. Ryan took a seat on the floor by the TV and proposed a toast to my father’s health, a proposal that was ignored. An advertisement for a diet milkshake came on the TV, my father cranked up the volume, and we all watched intently.

  “Now, Reenie, honey,” my father said, “what do you think of those things? From a professional standpoint, I mean. Any good?”

  All eyes turned expectantly to Loreen. She shrugged and took a sip of her drink. “I don’t know much about it. I think I mentioned to Patrick that I’m getting a little tired of the diet business. I’m planning to apply for a nursing program, possibly physician’s assistant.”

  Arthur had been revived, either by the beer or by the mention of education, and he told Loreen he knew someone who was currently enrolled in a nursing program at Boston University. The two of them began chatting about the merits of various Boston-area schools, while my parents and Ryan and I looked on helplessly, with nothing to contribute. After a time, my father reminded Loreen that she should be looking into programs in Chicago, and my mother hastily suggested we get to the presents.

  “Good idea,” Ryan said. “I’m dying to see what you think of mine, James.”

  “Which one’s yours, honey?” My father patted Loreen’s knee. “I’ll save the best for last.”

  “It’s the shirt wrapped in the green foil.” She laughed, a little drunkenly, and said, “Aw, shucks, there goes the surprise.”

  “That’s all right, dear; he’ll have forgotten by the time he gets to it. Why don’t you open that one that looks like a rifle, Jimmy?”

  “That’s mine,” Ryan told Arthur.

  My father tore off the wrapping paper and pulled out an ebony walking stick with a brass handle in the shape of a duck’s head.

  “What a good idea,” my mother said. “He needs a cane.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a cane,” Ryan said.

  “I might not be in the best of health,” my father said, “but I’m not so far gone I need a walker, Ryan.”

  Rita reached under the sofa and pulled out a paper bag. “Here, Jimmy. I meant to wrap it, but between one thing and the other, I didn’t get the chance.”

  He opened the bag and took out a small plastic tub with a lid. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s for your pills!” Rita said. “You can keep them all organized in this. I got it at that health food store downtown. How that place stays open is beyond me. And talk about filthy! Everything in big dirty bins. I scrubbed my hands as soon as I got back to the store. You can arrange it any way you want. You can put a different pill in each section or all the pills for one day in each section.”

  “Patrick, yours must be the one wrapped in newspaper,” my father said.

  I tried to answer, but I was having trouble breathing. I could have sworn the walls were beginning to close in.

  “Aren’t those adorable,” Rita said as my father unwrapped the pajamas. “Those are like the ones you wore when you had the gallstones out, Jimmy. You must have picked them, Arthur.”

  “Patrick got them on his own.”

  My father had the presents stacked up on the floor by his feet. “Where’s the IV drip and the headstone?” he asked.

  “I thought we were going to have a nice time tonight,” my mother said. “Let’s not ruin it.”

  Loreen’s present was wrapped in shiny green paper with a gold felt ribbon tied around it. My father held up the package for inspection. “Isn’t this beautiful? Look at this wrapping job. I hope Tony paid for half of it,” my father said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Loreen said.

  My father was unwrapping the present as if he’d been trained by a bomb squad. When he finally opened the
box, he held it out at arms’ length, awestruck. “Oh, my God, will you look at that. That is really beautiful. Look at that, will you? Of course, it’ll probably look like hell on me. Everything does. A shirt like this shirt needs someone with broad shoulders to fill it out, someone like Tony.”

  “Does he have broad shoulders?” Loreen asked. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I can’t really remember.”

  “How long has it been?” Ryan asked innocently.

  “Ryan,” my mother said, “let’s try to focus on the positive.”

  “That again,” my father said. “You should have given out sedatives at the door.”

  Loreen wiped at the front of her dress as if she’d spilled her drink on it and began to laugh. “You could have put them in the pill container,” she said. She threw her head back and let out a high-pitched shriek of laughter. My mother joined in in the false way of someone laughing at a joke she doesn’t understand.

  Arthur had his hands clamped on the arms of his chair, trying to get the rocker to rock. My mother’s accompaniment to Loreen’s hysterics gradually faded, and she looked over at my father. He shrugged and turned on the TV volume once again. Ryan lifted himself up from the floor and announced dinner in ten minutes, and I hastily followed him into the kitchen.

  “Should we offer her a drink of water?” I asked.

  He held a finger to his lips to silence me and listened. “I think she’s calming down,” he said quietly. “What brought that on?”

  “She knows something’s up.”

  “The poor kid. Hey, Pat, are you all right?”

  I was hanging on the edge of the counter, trying to establish normal breathing after nearly passing out in the tomb. “I’ll be fine in a minute. What happened to the oxygen out there?”

  Ryan handed me a can of beer. He went to the oven and lifted out a roasting pan with three chickens in it. “Look at this,” he said proudly. “Perfectly done. I should open up a restaurant. I should get out of that store and open up a nice little restaurant down the Cape someplace. I think I could be happy doing something like that.” He stopped and looked at me. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what I just said? I’m beginning to talk like Sharon, aren’t I?”

  “Speaking of Sharon . . .”

  “Let’s speak of Sharon, Pat. She’s my favorite topic of conversation these days. You know, introducing the two of us was one of the best things you ever did for me. Did I thank you for that?”

  “It has nothing to do with me. I think you’ve been a good influence on her. She’s mending her ways at the office.”

  He looked up from the chickens, beaming. “You think so? She says she’s going to stop cheating and risking her neck for those clients. She says I convinced her, but the funny thing is, I didn’t really say anything to her.”

  He took the dripping chickens out of the pan and placed them on a blue-and-white platter and started to arrange orange slices and watercress around them in a floral pattern. “Have you talked with her today?” he asked.

  “No. I expected her to be here.”

  He was grinning. Very quietly, he closed the door to the tomb. I had an insane, fleeting notion he was going to tell me he and Sharon were getting married.

  He told me that at Sharon’s suggestion, he’d contacted his old boss at New Balance and, after getting his fancy haircut, had gone in to talk with him about the possibility of being rehired. He was so pleased with himself as he reported this, he practically dumped the chickens on the floor. Nothing was settled yet, but he was feeling hopeful. “And that’s only the beginning, Pat.” He was done with the orange slices and was arranging a ring of roasted potatoes around the edge of the blue platter, looking very much as if he were going to burst from excitement. “I called Elaine last night,” he finally said.

  “Elaine?”

  “I had a calm conversation with her for the first time in years. We’re going to get together next week and talk.”

  “What do you mean, talk? Don’t you talk every time you pick up Stacy?”

  “Sure. ‘Hi, how are you?’ That kind of thing. But next week the two of us are going out to a nice restaurant to have a rational conversation. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest. It’s what you suggested back in March.” He tilted the finished platter toward me and swept his hand over his work. “Almost looks good enough to eat, doesn’t it?”

  “But what about Sharon?” I asked.

  “I’m telling you, Patrick, if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have even dared suggest it. She was delighted. And you know what? I think Elaine sounded happy about it, too. Well, almost happy. We’ll wait and see.”

  Ryan was grinning, pleased with himself, pleased with his chicken, his potatoes, Sharon, and even me. I tried to work up some anger toward him, but there was a look of such innocent happiness on his face, I couldn’t. It wasn’t in his nature to hurt anyone. He probably believed Sharon was delighted with the news. I congratulated him and helped him carry the plates of perfectly presented food into the dining room.

  * * *

  Loreen was immeasurably calmer after her fit of hilarity. The half-bottle of wine she finished off might have helped. She and Arthur continued their discussion of graduate schools, and it was clear from the way Arthur was looking at me across the table that Loreen was impressively informed and displaying a good deal more intelligence than he’d given her credit for.

  But if anyone had had any doubts about Loreen’s intelligence, they were dispelled shortly after Ryan brought the cake in from the kitchen, with seven candles glowing. All the lights were off in the dining room, and Loreen and Arthur made a discordant attempt at singing “Happy Birthday.” When no one had joined in by the second line, their voices faded to mumbles.

  Ryan set the cake in front of my father. “Make a wish, James, and blow out the candles.”

  “With my emphysema, that’s the last thing I need. You do it, Reenie, honey. Make a wish that you get all the presents you want at the shower. It won’t be long now.”

  Loreen laughed and lifted her glass. “Didn’t I tell you?” she asked. “I guess I must have forgotten. I’ve decided to postpone the shower.”

  Arthur turned to me, without expression.

  “Postpone?” my father asked.

  “Yeah, delay, put off. Postpone.”

  My father looked over to my mother, but she was staring off into space blankly.

  “It’s an inconvenient time for a couple of my girlfriends,” Loreen said, “so I thought we might just put it off for a bit. And, you know, I’m waiting to hear from Tony.”

  Then she leaned across the table and blew out the candles in a single breath.

  Part

  • • •

  6

  Thirty-two

  “I’m not going to hound you about this, Patrick, but please don’t get sympathetic. No sympathy and no anger on my behalf. I’d be a lot happier if you told me I’d been a fool all along and left it at that.”

  Sharon and I were in the alley behind the travel agency, picking through a barrel of trash. Over the weekend, Sharon had spent hours cleaning out her files and had inadvertently thrown away a ticket to Brazil she’d written months earlier and at a significantly reduced fare. If she issued another one now, or applied for a lost-ticket refund, the airline would very probably catch on to what she’d done. So far we hadn’t turned up anything promising, although we’d gone through most of the barrels already.

  I’d told Sharon, as soon as I got into the office that morning, that Ryan had informed me about his intended meeting with Elaine. She’d immediately dragged me out into the alley. Even though I was brimming over with sympathy, I knew better than to offer my condolences.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I at least say I’m surprised,” I said now. “It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Ryan would do.”

  “What? Go back to his wife?” She pulled an envelope out of a trash bag and looked at it hopefully. “That’s exactly the kind of thing Ryan wou
ld do. I guess I was just too stupid to see it coming. I underestimated his craving for predictability. That’s the problem with getting tangled in a relationship. If that’s what it was. Or falling in love, for that matter. Not that I did. You can never tell what’s going on in the other fool’s head.”

  She took her Luckies out of the pocket of her skirt, shook one out for herself, and passed the pack to me. I declined the offer. “Oh, go on, Patrick. I know you steal them from me sometimes. You don’t believe I’d think less of you for smoking, do you? Or for trying to keep it secret. You’d be amazed at how many secret vices I have.”

  She lit my cigarette and sat on a milk crate, with her feet up on a pile of newspapers.

  “What I meant about Ryan,” I said, “is I’m surprised he spent so much time with you if he had her in the back of his mind all along.”

  “You can’t even blame him for that. We never did sleep together, you know. We played poker, watched TV. We got cuddly on the sofa a few times. A couple of hugs and kisses. Not exactly the kind of thing I’m used to. My approach is usually more direct. I must be getting old. I made the mistake of letting him take the initiative. Look, Patrick, I’m not stupid, you know. It isn’t as if I had any illusions about your brother, but I did think something was going on between us. I suppose he thought we were just good friends. So there’s the problem. I was living in one fantasy, and he was living in another. The only time love works is when two people are deceiving themselves in the exact same way.”

  “We still don’t know what Elaine is going to say.”

  “Irrelevant. Getting Ryan on the rebound was one thing, but I have to draw a line somewhere.”

  She had a coughing fit, looked at her cigarette with disgust, and threw it to the ground. I was beginning to get pleasantly dizzy from mine, a feeling intensified by the early-morning humidity and the stench of trash from all the barrels heaped up around us. “We’re never going to find that ticket,” I said.

  “You see what happens? You try to change your life, and you end up in an alley, fighting the rats for the last remaining shreds of your old self. Believe me, I’ll find the ticket.”