He listened to my story with mild, lawyerly interest, asked an occasional question to clarify the sequence of events, and did a good deal of nodding and throat-clearing. I was sitting at the kitchen table, clipping my fingernails over a wastebasket, and I knew his main interest was in making sure the clippings didn’t end up on the floor. When I finished relating the details, he put the plates down on the table, cleared away the wastebasket, and sighed. “That family. I don’t know how you turned out so normal, Patrick. It must be my influence. Just joking, sweetheart. Well, there’s only one thing that matters here: does Tony love Loreen or doesn’t he?”
“Oh, please, Arthur, life isn’t like that. There are too many complicating factors, too many variables and obligations to consider.”
“Such as?”
“My parents.”
He picked up the newspaper and sank his fork into his eggs. “What do they have to do with it?”
“They want him to marry Loreen. They seem to like her.”
“Well, don’t hold that against them. They like me, too. Now, here’s a house that sounds interesting. In Cambridge. Two bedrooms, a fireplace, and hardwood floors throughout. Wood stove. I wonder if Eben has a listing for it.”
“What about central air conditioning? That’s what we should be looking for. Wood stoves are obsolete. A few more greenhouse years, and fireplaces will be, also. And anyway, I feel bad for Tony. It sounds as if he was roped into this thing.”
Arthur put down the paper and his fork and looked at me critically. He had on a gray suit and a white shirt, and he looked particularly wise and formidable. In a business suit, Arthur’s large, oddly shapeless body took on broad and imposing definition. Arthur has a soft, rather plain face, distinguished mainly by his deep-set eyes, a chin with a cleft so deep you could hide a dime in it, and fascinatingly large ears. His head is almost completely bald, except for a monkish ring of hair, which he keeps stylishly trimmed and which makes him look a little like Thomas Merton. In many ways, the most striking of Arthur’s features is a bulging prolapsed vein that runs down his forehead to his right temple and throbs when he’s considering something seriously.
All in all, his impressive cranium makes you think there must be a preternaturally large brain inside, just dying to get out and take over the world. It’s hard to look at Arthur and not feel intellectually inferior, an advantage for his clients and a real problem for his lover. Once, years earlier, I’d made some vague hints that I might like to get my own apartment. He’d responded by saying, “You can’t do that.” I was so accustomed to believing everything he said, I took his words as literal truth and dropped the subject.
“I hope you’re not planning to get involved in this, Patrick. It’s exactly the kind of intervention that’s going to make you unhappy, and it won’t accomplish a thing.”
“Don’t forget, he’s my baby brother.”
“Your baby brother is almost thirty. He can solve his own problems. And between you and me, sweetheart, how much can it matter? Tony’s a Republican.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “You’re an only child.” Relevant or not, it always helps to pull an irrefutable fact out of nowhere when you’re losing an argument. I picked up the salt shaker and started to slide it back and forth between my hands across the slick surface of the table. The kitchen table was one of the few contributions I’d made to the apartment, a chrome-and-Formica greasy-diner special I’d bought at a junk sale years earlier.
“Maybe you should get a little more involved in our situation with the house instead of your brother’s life.” He looked over at me, his vein throbbing, and I could tell he was making a mental calculation. “The other day,” he said, “Eben asked me if I thought you were really serious about buying a house. You’ve found something wrong with everything he’s shown us for the past two months.”
“True,” I said. “And it’s lucky for you I have, or we’d be stuck with a loser now and we’d both be broke. Anyway, I’m not sure I trust Eben or Evan or whatever his name is.”
“Let’s not start.”
“Those perfect teeth of his make me nervous.”
He frowned at my plate. “Aren’t you finishing your eggs?”
“I’ve lost my appetite. Do you want them?”
“No, but I’d like you to stop playing with that salt shaker and finish them. You had a cold for a week last month. You don’t eat enough; you don’t take care of yourself.”
No matter how old I got, Arthur would always be eight years older, a fact he took as license to use a parental tone whenever he got frustrated. I usually countered by acting like an adolescent. I began tossing the salt shaker with a lot more enthusiasm. “Don’t get like that with me, Arthur. You know that tone won’t get you anywhere.”
He cut me off by asking if I wanted to go to a movie that night. Arthur knew I could always be stopped dead in my tracks by the suggestion of going to a movie with him. There wasn’t much I liked better than sitting beside Arthur in a dark theater, sharing a vat of popcorn and disagreeing about everything related to the film. I’d tried to cure myself of the pleasure I took in it, but nothing seemed to help. If every major film studio in the world suddenly went bankrupt, I might, finally, be able to leave Arthur.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked. Arthur, whose idea of a light read is The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and who claims to have never once turned on a TV set, has a real fondness for insipid, life-affirming comedies. The flabbiest, most badly acted of these could send him into storms of hilarity. I prefer something with a lot of action and corpses.
“Your choice,” he offered.
“Forget it,” I said, getting hold of myself. “I have to go to the gym after work.”
“You can skip your routine for one night.”
“Impossible.” It was one thing to be stuck in a passionless domestic relationship and quite another to be out of shape and stuck in a passionless domestic relationship. Arthur kept himself fit with a brisk daily walk, fifty push-ups, and one hundred perfectly executed sit-ups.
“We could go to a late show,” he said.
“That wouldn’t work, either. You wouldn’t get your eight and a half hours of sleep and your whole day tomorrow would be ruined and dozens of people would get deported and it would all be my fault because I wouldn’t finish my eggs.”
“No connection,” he said and opened up the paper again.
I knew better, so I started eating.
“And something else,” Arthur finally said from behind his paper. “You shouldn’t criticize Eben because he has perfect teeth.”
“It’s not just the teeth,” I said. “It’s what they represent: the prep school, the sailing lessons, the boxer shorts, the whole package. Didn’t he say he plays tennis?” Except in the case of lesbians, playing tennis is usually little more than a crass display of social ambition.
“I wouldn’t know,” Arthur said, obviously determined not to play along. He was charmed by our real estate agent, a tennis player with a wife and a family and the kind of legally binding security that Arthur longed for. “And you’d better eat more slowly, Patrick, or you might find yourself at work on time this morning.”
Four
My office was in Harvard Square, and I bicycled there most mornings, even in winter. Bicycling through bad weather and driving a pre-1975 Volvo are two particularly Cantabrigian affectations. I liked to pedal a circuitous route to the office, winding in and out of the back streets of Cambridgeport, studying the triple-decker houses and brick apartment buildings, trying to imagine how different my life would be if I lived alone in one of them. Happier, I tended to think, although I was never able to come up with any concrete images of what my happiness might look like.
The neighborhood, wedged between Harvard and MIT, was surprisingly untouched by either towering institution. The old working-class Irish families who’d lived there for a couple of generations mixed peacefully with recently emigrated Haitians and Jamaicans and an increas
ing number of young professional couples who drifted across the river from Boston in search of a backyard. Most of the buildings were reasonably small, most of the streets were tree-lined, and in summer, cool breezes blew up from the river. Although I’m loath to wax rhapsodic about anyone or anything, I sometimes laughed aloud at my good luck in living there.
On a mild, cloudless morning a few days after Tony’s distressing fourth call, I bicycled to work in a light cotton sweater. In the short time it took me to make the trip, I broke out in a sweat, another clear indication that the planet was rapidly reaching the boiling point. Arthur analyzed my greenhouse-effect obsession as a displacement of my anxiety about AIDS, which might have been true but didn’t explain why we’d had a heat wave at Thanksgiving. Given the opportunity, I’ll always believe the worst-case scenario. I’m not an especially optimistic person. I wasn’t brought up on optimism. The closest thing to optimism I heard as a child was my father’s reassuring statement in times of crisis that the situation could be worse. “And don’t forget,” he’d usually add, “you can always kill yourself.”
When I arrived at the office, I hoisted my bicycle to my shoulder and carried it into the building. The owner encouraged employees to bring bicycles and pets to work, to give the agency a more relaxed, collegiate atmosphere.
The travel agency was located in a small house in a back alley several blocks from Harvard. It was a dusty, ramshackle building with paint peeling off the walls and plaster chipping from the ceiling. Drafty without being well ventilated and old without any antique charm, the agency had an established reputation among the Cambridge intellectual crowd: Harvard professors, hippies who’d become civil rights lawyers and therapists, and New Age birdbrains of all sorts. I think the shabby conditions of the place somewhat mitigated the trivial, bourgeois nature of travel in our clients’ minds. And then there was our name, Only Connect Travel, a reminder that the owner, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy, had read Howards End. The staff was made up of a bunch of overqualified individuals with advanced degrees and, in more than one case, a substantial private income. Everyone in our office either had done something more substantive or at least gave the impression of being capable of doing something more substantive. The travel industry is a real haven for burned-out teachers and social workers and est trainers. I was one of the burned-out teachers. Technically, I suppose I was one of the burned-out travel agents, too, but I couldn’t afford to quit.
Fredrick, the receptionist, handed me a stack of pink call-back slips and looked at his watch. “Late again,” he said wearily. “Always, always late.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But at least I’m earlier than I was yesterday.”
“Please don’t apologize, Patrick. I couldn’t care less. I was just making a casual observation.”
Fredrick—it never occurred to me or anyone else in the office to call him Fred—was a recent Harvard graduate, a stout, pleasantly bored young man with a passion for Charlotte Brontë and French pastry. His hair color varied wildly from week to week, and his eyelids were remarkably heavy and oily. There was much discussion around the office about whether or not he wore mascara. He was far from the most efficient receptionist we’d ever had, but apparently the boss felt that having someone at the front desk reading Villette compensated for the fact that he often neglected to answer the phone.
I liked Fredrick, mostly because he never bothered me about my own inefficiency and was the only person I’d ever met who could wear pedal pushers and a bow tie at the same time and somehow look dashing. I was fascinated by his sexual interests, which were as varied as his wardrobe and his hair color. I’d once asked him if he considered himself a bisexual. “Basically,” he’d said confidentially, “I fall in love with anyone who’ll stay in the room after I’ve taken my clothes off.”
I apologized once again for being late. He shrugged, adjusted his bow tie, and remembered that there was a client waiting to see me in my office. “He got here a while ago,” he said.
“Oh?” I had a list a mile long of clients I had no desire to see.
“Fifteen minutes ago. Tall, long arms. Talks so soft you can’t hear a thing he says.”
Worse news than I’d feared. Dr. Fields, a Harvard professor, had come in months earlier to plan a trip I still hadn’t done any work on. I lifted my bike to my shoulder and carried it into my office grudgingly.
My desk was in a small, narrow room at the rear of the house, probably part of the pantry when the place was lived in by a single family. I loved my office, mainly because it was so aesthetically unappealing that I was left in relative peace. I had a sagging bookcase laden with heavy rate tariffs and hotel books, and a rack of outdated brochures was nailed to the wall. Fields was sitting in front of my desk, studying a hotel guide and jotting in a tiny notebook.
“Sorry I’m late, Professor,” I said as I dumped my bike against a wall. “I have a sick dog at home, and I didn’t want to leave him.” Fields was a zoology professor, so I thought he’d take to an animal excuse.
I swept a stack of papers off my chair and sat down. I love to sit behind my desk and at least appear as if I have all the answers.
“I was just in the neighborhood,” Fields whispered, “and I thought I’d drop by and see how the reservations are coming.”
Fields was a pathological passive-aggressive type. His particular act of hostility was to talk so softly I had to sit on the edge of my seat and strain my ears to hear what he was saying. I’d tried asking him directly to speak up, told him I was hard of hearing, and forced him to repeat every sentence he uttered. Finally, I’d discovered a solution that worked.
“Oh, thank you,” I said loudly. “I got it on sale at Filene’s. I wasn’t sure about the fit, but twenty-five dollars for an all-cotton sweater, how can you go wrong?”
Fields smiled condescendingly. He had a long, craggy face and one of those unkempt, stained beards so popular among fifty-year-old Harvard professors with marital problems. “Very nice,” he said softly. “But I asked about the reservations.”
Better, but not good enough. “That’s what I thought,” I said, “but in fact, it doesn’t show the dirt at all. And it’s one-hundred-percent washable.” I shrugged and folded my hands on my desk. “What brings you in this morning?”
“Did you get the hotel reservations?” he asked in a normal tone of voice.
“Yes,” I said. “They haven’t sent in the confirmation slip yet, but I’m expecting it any day.”
“I’m beginning to get worried, Patrick. You’re sure it’s all confirmed?”
“Quite sure,” I said. “I can’t imagine why they haven’t sent the slip.”
He looked at me suspiciously, but I knew he wouldn’t call my bluff. We had an understanding.
Fields had come in in January to book a trip to Bermuda for Memorial Day weekend. He told me he was taking his niece, Zayna Carmine, out of obligation to his sister, whose husband had just divorced her. I thought nothing of it at first, and then he told me, in his moronic whisper, that I wasn’t to cross-reference the plane reservations in any way, that Zayna’s ticket was to be paid in cash, and that I was to assign seats for them on different parts of the plane, “in case of a crash.” I wasn’t to call him at home or office, and I wasn’t to send any information on the trip through the mail. Whenever he did call me, it was from a phone booth, with traffic noise in the background. I imagined him standing in a rest stop on the Mass Pike in a long coat and sunglasses. To confirm my suspicions, I called Harvard student information and asked if they had a listing for Zayna Carmine. I was promptly given a telephone number, which I didn’t write down.
I honestly wouldn’t have cared if he was traveling with a donkey he planned to sodomize on the lawn of the Houses of Parliament. But I resented his effort to hide the obvious, as if I couldn’t read the signs, would care, or was likely to be indiscreet. Half the leisure-travel industry has something to do with illicit sex—what made him think he was so special? I’d managed to get
him seats on the plane, but the hotel was another story. He wanted to stay at an exclusive resort—basically a pink stucco drinking club for wealthy anti-Semites—and each time I called the place, I thought about Fields boozily chasing Zayna around a king-sized bed, lost heart, and hung up. If the trip came together at this point, it would be a miracle.
“Now, I really could try to get a child’s fare for Zayna,” I said, “if you think your niece could pass for under twelve.”
“Doubtful.” He laughed. “She’s very mature for her age.”
Equally doubtful, I’d have guessed. Mature college students are the ones who know their place. Zayna’s place was not with a married zoology professor in any case, and certainly not under a moon-gate arch in Bermuda.
I looked at the call-back slips Fredrick had handed me. There were three from a divorced man who was trying to give meaning to his life by planning a trip to swim with dolphins, two from Tony’s fiancée (I was booking their honeymoon at a health spa in California), and one from my friend Jeffrey in New York. I crumpled up the first five and tossed them into the wastebasket. Jeffrey’s I impaled on my message stick.
“Is there something else I can help you with?” I asked, hoping to make him think I’d helped him with anything at all so I could get rid of him and call Jeffrey.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said quietly. “I’m thinking of taking my wife on a little trip after Bermuda.” He pulled on his nasty beard and flipped through his notebook. “I wanted the name of an inn less than an hour from Boston. I wrote down some places while I was sitting here waiting for you for the past forty-five minutes. Maybe you could tell me if any of them is particularly nice?”
Not surprisingly, his handwriting was so minuscule it looked as if it had been written with a strand of hair. I squinted. From a business standpoint, the advantage of booking a tryst trip is that it’s usually preceded or followed by a guilt-induced vacation with a spouse. Fields’s suggestion was one of the more token efforts I’d encountered in a while.
The Easy Way Out Page 4