The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  I did care, but I was fairly certain I knew.

  He let out one of his mournful sighs and began tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth, making peculiar little clicking noises. When he’d pulled himself together, he said, “I’ve been in Boston, Pat. I’ve been making the final plans for the wedding. Don’t yell at me, okay? I know I’m taking the easy way out, but what can you do? Loreen and I are going to get married after all, and that’s it, there’s nothing else to say.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me, Tony. You had a choice to make, and you made it.”

  He started clicking his tongue again, and I realized he was probably trying to prevent himself from saying too much or even crying. “Your father called me the night she put off the goddamned shower. He talked to me for almost two hours. Fortunately, he was paying. Two solid hours, can you believe it? Have you ever talked to him for more than a few minutes?”

  “Not that I can remember. What’s he like?”

  “A sad case, Patrick. One of the loneliest people I’ve ever talked to, but not a bad guy, in the end. I don’t remember half of what he told me, and frankly, I wouldn’t care to repeat the half I do remember. All this stuff about his life, your mother. Basically, a two-hour rant about how unhappy he is, as if that’s supposed to make me want to go ahead and marry Loreen.”

  It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that my father’s strategy had worked.

  “Anyway, I listened and listened, and then I told him I couldn’t stand to hear any more, that I was sorry for him but he’d obviously just made a lot of bad choices. Then he said, ‘Well, maybe I did, but where would you be if I hadn’t?’ So what could I say to that, Pat? Where would we be? I figured I owed it to him.”

  “To marry Loreen?”

  “No, but at least to go to Boston and talk to her. He paid for the plane ticket. That’s where I made my mistake. I should have bought it myself.

  “I didn’t know what I was going to say to her until I saw her at the airport. I guess your father must have told her what time I was coming in. She was standing there waiting for me, and I swear I almost lost it as soon as I saw her. She had on a rain bonnet, one of those cheap things you get at K Mart. Clear plastic, with little blue dogs printed all over it. She always looks like she stepped out of a magazine, and that night she had to go wear that goddamned hat. I don’t even think it was raining. Do you know the kind of hat I mean?”

  “I have a pretty good idea. I think your mother used to wear one when we were kids.”

  “Really? I thought there was something familiar about it. Well, maybe that explains it. She looked exactly like your mother standing there. She looked so wounded standing there, I started to apologize. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I told her everything, even about Vivian.”

  “You did?”

  “Not all of it, but most of it. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to make everything right for her.”

  I rifled through the stash of facile, hopeful comments I kept on hand, but not much seemed to make any sense. If he’d really wanted to set everything right, he’d obviously made precisely the wrong move. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that he’d never intended to break off the engagement in the first place. His affair with Vivian was a passing flirtation with love, with freedom from all the bad choices my parents had made a generation earlier; but the pull back was too strong. I should have read all Tony’s tough-guy talk and bravado as a smoke screen sooner, just as Ryan had undoubtedly done.

  “Who knows, Tony?” I’d finally said, choosing the easy way out myself. “Maybe you really are in love with her.”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe I will be. Ryan says no one’s in love when they get married.”

  Later in the conversation, he asked me if I’d moved into the house yet. I told him I wasn’t moving after all, that Arthur had bought the place himself and I was staying on at the apartment until the building was sold and I was forced out.

  “So that’s it? Arthur’s out of the picture?” he asked. “Just like that? God, it sounds sad, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I am sad,” I told him, “but I can’t really say I’m sorry.”

  He kept silent for a moment and then changed the subject. We made some inconsequential small talk, and a few minutes later he announced he was tired and had to get to bed. The one good thing about having decided to marry Loreen, he said, was that now he was getting some sleep. “Sometimes twelve hours a night,” he added.

  Over the next six weeks, our phone calls fell off. Tony called less frequently and then only during the day, when we were both at work. I left him a few messages, but he never returned my calls. When we did talk, he sounded more and more the way he had before he met Vivian and had a clear idea of who he was. He dropped his voice down about another octave and put some of the gravel back into it. He bragged to me about the branch office of an insurance company in Louisville he’d observed for two weeks and then shut down completely. “Bunch of lazy bums sitting around doing nothing all day, Pat. They’re out now. One computer the size of a phone book replaced the entire crowd.”

  He berated me for booking flights on foreign airlines, told me my politics were unsound, insisted that my environmental concerns were ninety percent sentimentality. A few times he asked me how things were in my personal life and then warned me not to get too personal. Vivian had cut off all communication with him, and he told me he was getting over her. His life was beginning to fall back into place.

  After all the talk over the last few months, I was losing him again. Perhaps he was angry at me for not helping him find a way out of his dilemma, or perhaps he was angry at me for finding a way out of my own, or maybe I simply knew more about his life than he now wanted me to know. Whatever it was, some door between us slammed shut, and I had the feeling it wouldn’t open again, unless sometime in the future he wanted to discuss the possibility of divorce.

  One evening in early July I called him to ask a question about the honeymoon. Late sunlight was slanting in through the living room windows. His hello was hesitant, and his voice was feeble, as if he’d just woken up. I could hear Puccini playing in the background, the volume loud. I felt as if I’d broken in on some private misery, and without saying hello, I hung up the phone as gently as I could. We hadn’t spoken since.

  * * *

  We were barely out the doors of the church before Sharon was lighting up a cigarette. She’d been playing with a pack of Luckies for the last ten minutes of the ceremony. She shook out the match and tossed it to the ground. “Listen, Rita,” she said, her hand on my mother’s shoulder, “you have to keep reminding yourself that Tony made his own decision. He decided to go through with it, and he did. And there is a chance he actually might be happy. Who knows?”

  “We’ll keep it in mind,” my father said. He was eyeing her cigarettes hungrily. When she offered him the pack, my mother said, “Oh, go ahead, Jimmy. You don’t need my permission to dig your own grave.”

  Although Ryan and Sharon were not officially living together, Ryan did spend most of his time in Cambridge now. The night Tony had flown into Boston, Ryan went back to Sharon’s house, as he said he would. I never heard the details of what transpired, but Ryan wasn’t seen for three days, and when he surfaced again, he jump-started a new life for himself.

  Within a week, Ryan invited my parents to Sharon’s house for an elaborate meal he and Sharon had prepared. He announced then that he was leaving the store in the fall and going to work at New Balance. Sharon began telling my father how he could reorganize the business, sell the property, retire with a fortune, and take my mother on a round-the-world cruise. My father claimed he thought Sharon was insane (“All that hair’s eating up her brain,” he liked to say), but the two of them had struck up an odd kind of friendship. They shared cigarettes and insults, and for all the ways in which she challenged him, I think Sharon loved my father, saw a lot of herself in him.

  Sharon wore leather sa
ndals and a yellow sundress to the wedding. The dress barely made it down to the middle of her thighs. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a thick ponytail. I watched her looking across the scorched lawn of the church to where Ryan was being photographed with the bride and groom beside a statue of a minor saint. “Who’d have guessed Ryan would look so good in a tuxedo?” she said.

  “You should have seen him when he got married,” Rita said.

  My father nudged her with his elbow, and she quickly amended her comment. “I guess we all looked better six years ago,” she said.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Davis came out of the church, holding hands, they gave my parents a nod and a perfunctory smile and moved on. Sharon looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Your daughter looked great today,” she called out. “Which one of you does she take after?”

  They were forced to stop. Ignoring Sharon completely, they made a few comments about the weather to my parents. They kept their hands clasped tightly throughout the brief conversation, and when they walked off, my mother said, “They certainly weren’t overly friendly.”

  “Unhappy people usually aren’t,” Sharon said. “No offense, Jim.”

  My mother watched them crossing the brown lawn. “They seem happy to me,” she said wistfully.

  * * *

  The reception was held in a function room at the hotel near the shopping mall where I’d had dinner with my parents and Ryan months before. The room was one of those blank brown boxes with sliding accordion walls and absurdly decorative gold light fixtures. It was so sealed off from the outside world, it should have been depressing. But the fact that there were no windows came as a relief. The air conditioning was turned up high enough to cool down the city of Miami. Half the women draped sweaters over their shoulders as soon as the icy chill hit them.

  I was seated at a table with a group of distant cousins and their spouses and their noisy kids. Most of them lived out in the suburbs, and despite the fact that I mentioned several times that I was a brother of the groom, few of them seemed to know who I was.

  It was clear to me that the seating arrangement had been chosen so the only other single person in the room and I would be paired up. She was a former co-worker of Loreen’s from the diet center, a short, round woman named Benny. She was silent throughout the meal, ate nothing, and drank so much wine, the waiter had a hard time keeping up with her. When the dancing began, she looked out at the floor for a few minutes, then turned to me and said, “Excuse me, Patrick. I think I have to go vomit.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder whom she would have been teamed up with if Arthur and I were still together.

  * * *

  In that sealed-off room, immune to sunlight and weather, it was hard to tell what time of day it was. As the afternoon wore on, the smell of alcohol and perfume and coffee and flowers made me slightly dizzy. I began to feel I was floating off, far away from the crowds of laughing couples in their bright summer clothes. The band was starting to sound as if it were playing in a distant room.

  At the head table, Loreen was leaning across Tony, talking to the maid of honor, Mr. and Mrs. Davis were holding a private conversation, and the photographer was desperately trying to get my parents to sit close enough together so he could get them both in the same picture. Ryan and Sharon were standing still on the dance floor. Ryan had his arms around Sharon’s shoulders, talking to her and laughing. Her head was tilted back, and she was blowing smoke up to the ceiling.

  I left my table and wandered out into the hotel lobby. The place was deserted, and the sunlight streaming through the tall windows was so bright after the darkness of the function room, I was nearly blinded. I headed for the men’s room but was sidetracked by the sight of a bank of phone booths behind the reception desk. There’s something about the claustrophobic privacy of phone booths I can’t resist. I went into one and closed the door. A yellow light went on overhead, and a fan began to rattle. I inserted my money, dialed a number, let it ring once, and hung up.

  * * *

  When I got back from Bermuda, I kept planning to call Arthur, explain myself, apologize, try to save some trace of dignity, but I wasn’t able to do it. I often rode my bicycle out past the yellow house, but only late at night, when I was certain Arthur would be sleeping soundly. The stalemate might have gone on indefinitely. Then we bumped into each other.

  It was late on a warm night in the middle of June. Harvard Square was jammed with students and tourists, strolling arm in arm, listening to the street performers set up in the doorways of the closed shops. I was sitting on the steps of the Brattle theater, looking down at the crowds passing in the street. A young woman was on the sidewalk below, strumming a banjo and singing “La Vie en Rose.” She had a string of Christmas tree lights wound through her hair. A cool breeze blew down the street. I looked up in the direction of the wind and saw Arthur standing at the edge of the crowd, eating an ice cream cone. He was staring at me, expressionless. It had been only about three weeks since I’d seen him last, but across the crowd, he looked to me like someone I’d known a very long time ago.

  I climbed down off the steps and went to him and said hello.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “Nice night, isn’t it? Out roaming around?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose so. What about you?”

  “I’m waiting for a friend to get out of the movie. Something I’ve already seen.”

  He told me he had half an hour to kill. We walked through the crowds and turned down toward the river. We sat on the edge of a fountain behind the Kennedy School. Arthur took off his shoes and socks and stuck his feet into the cool water.

  “Arthur,” I said, pointing to his feet, “that’s so unlike you.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I hope you realize I’m a lot angrier with you than I’m letting on right now. The fact is, things are going reasonably well for me at the moment, so I’m in a generous mood. You’d be amazed how attractive you suddenly become to people as soon as they hear you’ve been left standing at the altar. You should try it sometime.”

  “The friend at the movies?” I asked.

  “Someone I work with.”

  “Stewart,” I said, remembering the name from his conversation with Beatrice.

  “That’s right. Are you still at the apartment?”

  I nodded. “With any luck, the economy won’t turn around for a while and the house won’t sell.”

  “Enjoying all that space?”

  I stuck my feet into the fountain beside his and admitted that I was.

  “Lonely?” he asked.

  “I suppose so.” I’d left the apartment precisely because the newly spacious rooms seemed too empty. “Not you, I gather.”

  “No,” he said, “not really. I know what I want, Patrick, so it’s not as if I have to spend a lot of time by myself trying to figure out a plan for the future.”

  I could have asked him how things were going at the house, but I didn’t want to bring up the subject. We sat at the fountain a little while longer, listening to the splashing of the water and the hum of traffic on Memorial Drive and the indistinct roar of a crowd on a playing field somewhere in the distance.

  We walked back to the theater in silence. As I started to wander off, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sure we’ll be friends again sometime, Patrick, but let’s not rush it, all right?”

  Later that night, as I was biking along the path by the river, I saw him walking with his arm around a tall, gray-haired man. I couldn’t make out their faces, and I’m certain they didn’t see me, but as I sped past, I heard Arthur laughing.

  * * *

  Sitting in the phone booth in the lobby of the hotel, I longed to call him, perhaps because there really wasn’t anyone I was closer to, no matter how distant we were now. But it was too soon to try and be friends. I missed him, but what I’d told Tony was true, too. I wasn’t really sorry.

  I left the phone booth and took the elevator to the top floor of the hotel. There was a swim
ming pool on the roof, enclosed under a high glass dome. The heat and the humidity and the intensity of the sunlight assaulted me as soon as I stepped into the bright greenhouse. I saw a bar at the far end of the pool, and I made my way there, crossing the slippery AstroTurf in my polished shoes. Two people were in the pool, a woman lying on a huge floating sponge and a man hanging on to the side, both inert, prostrate in the heat. I took off my jacket and put on a pair of sunglasses and ordered a glass of soda water.

  Everything outside was baking under the sun: the housing and condo developments dotting the suburban landscape, the roads and cloverleafs, and the monolithic shopping mall across the highway, surrounded by the moat of the parking lot, with hundreds of cars shimmering in the sunlight, reflecting the glare back up into the white sky.

  I’d had enough of the wedding, of the cake and the dancing couples and my poor forlorn brother. I couldn’t face another minute of it. I stayed at the pool drinking water and staring out at the sweltering world, terrified and mesmerized by the sight of it, all that harsh glass and steel and the strangely delicate glistening of the heat waves.

  Late in the day, the sun began to turn orange as it dropped lower on the horizon. I stared off into the distance, past the shopping mall and the tangle of roads, to the hills south of Boston. A bank of dark clouds seemed to be rolling in. Somewhere out there, it was raining.

  By the time I walked out of the hotel, the breeze had picked up and clouds had dimmed some of the sun’s glare. The flags in front of the hotel were snapping in the wind. If anything, the heat was more oppressive than ever as the humidity built; but a storm was definitely moving in, a bank of dark clouds bringing with them violence and electricity and the promise of relief.

  The author would like to thank the following for their assistance: the Writers’ Room at the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, Dorset Colony House, the Ragdale Foundation, and George Hodgman.

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster.