The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  “Listen to yourself,” Sharon said. “‘Normal,’ ‘average.’ Is that what you aspire to? I hate ‘normal.’ I hate ‘average.’ I wish it was twenty below. I wish it was ninety-eight in the shade. Let’s break a few records here,” she shouted, flinging back her head.

  I caught the alarmed glance of a young woman walking past with a loaf of French bread tucked under her arm. “I wish I had your outlook,” I said softly.

  Sharon was wearing a billowing green plaid poncho and a pair of khaki stretch pants that didn’t quite cover her ankles. Despite her height, her wide shoulders and large hands, Sharon had very thin ankles, a feature I found almost unbearably touching. She walked with a delicate, halting step that was quite unexpected, given all her other extravagant gestures and great, expansive movements.

  When I worked as Sharon’s assistant, most of my time was spent falsifying documents to prove the outlandish stories she invented, either to save money for her clients or to prevent them from discovering her mistakes. I typed medical excuses from phony doctors; letters from invented hotel managers apologizing for not honoring reservations that she, in fact, had never made; even death certificates. Sharon had a typesetter friend in the Square who would print up counterfeit obituaries for particularly sticky refund situations. I became an expert at erasing the dates and fares on plane tickets into illegible smudges and, short of supplying a written script, making sure every passenger had his story straight.

  Sharon would sit tilted back in her chair, chain-smoking and eating egg salad sandwiches, instructing some confused and enthralled couple who’d come in intending to buy a simple ticket. “Okay, now,” she’d say. “If they stop you at the gate and question you, just tell them your mother died and you have to get on this flight even though you don’t have a reservation. Can you cry on cue? No? That could be a problem. How about this: You’re terrified of flying and you had a bad flight west, so you went to a fortune-teller in Bolinas and she told you you had to take this flight and none other. Come to think of it, I know a great palm reader in Bolinas, if you’re interested. You can act nervous, can’t you? Just bite your lips and tug at your hair a lot. We haven’t used this excuse this month, have we, Patrick?”

  I was responsible for taking notes on what she was telling people, to make sure we didn’t have passengers with the same story on the same flight.

  “Now, I’m counting on you to pull this off,” she’d tell her clients. “If you get caught with this ticket, I’m out of business. Just so you’ll know the kind of risk I’m taking for you.”

  Miraculously, no one ever did get caught. Sharon’s charisma made people feel they were acting in an important piece of guerrilla street theater. She was the director and the star, and none of the bit players wanted to let her down. So many people benefited from her creative maneuvering, it would have been churlish to point out the role self-aggrandizement played in her practices.

  I’d met Sharon eight years earlier, shortly after moving to Cambridge, on a snowy day in late January. I was driving a dilapidated Chevy Nova through an intersection on Mount Auburn Street, when Sharon ran a stop sign and plowed into the car’s rear end. The Nova spun around, jumped the curb, and hit a tree. It wasn’t as spectacular an accident as it sounds—it was a small tree—but it did attract a crowd. Sharon rushed from her car with a lit cigarette in her hand. Once she’d established that I was unharmed, she began telling me how I could collect from my insurance company, Chevrolet, and the city of Cambridge—and then sell the wreck to a junkyard. I was still strapped into my seat, slightly dazed. I remember looking out the window through the falling snow at Sharon, dressed in sandals and bell-bottoms that were too short, rummaging in her bag for her business card. “Boy,” she said sincerely, “you’re lucky I’m the one who hit you instead of some jerk.”

  I didn’t think to question the logic of her comment until much later, and by that time we were good friends. I was living on the top floor of her house when I met Arthur. She was indirectly responsible for our meeting, a fact for which she’s never entirely forgiven herself.

  As we made our way through the lunchtime crowd in Harvard Square, I told Sharon I needed her advice. When it came to relationships or life management, Sharon was one of the most perceptive people I knew—mostly, I suspect, because she was rarely in a relationship herself and paid no attention at all to managing her own life.

  “You know my advice,” she said. “Leave him and take the rug in the living room.”

  “It’s not about Arthur.” Unlike most of my friends, Sharon did not feel that I was lucky to have reliable Arthur as my lover. “It’s a family crisis.”

  “Oh, good. Did Ryan shoot them both or just your father?”

  “It’s about the other one.”

  I insisted we walk out of Harvard Square to a greasy pizza and submarine sandwich shop on Broadway, across from the public library. It was pointless to try and talk to Sharon in a restaurant in the Square itself; she was always running into clients who’d demand advice on their travel plans, or friends, like me, who had some personal problem they wanted to discuss with her. We cut through Harvard Yard, past all the depressing libraries of Sharon’s alma mater.

  Like both my parents and neither of my brothers, I often give the false impression of being emaciated. (For years I was buoyed up by a one-night stand’s comment that I looked better out of clothes than in. Later, I realized it was intended as an insult to my wardrobe, not a compliment to my body.) Side by side, Sharon and I exaggerated each other’s physical extremes. We once went on a travel agent’s junket to Brazil and shared a room. Everyone else on the trip thought we were lovers. We took great pleasure in sitting around the hotel pool in our respective bikinis, keeping our companions horrified.

  As we slowly traversed the paths through the campus, I told Sharon about my phone conversation with Tony. She’d met my younger brother once, at a dinner she and I gave when we were roommates. Upon hearing that Tony was planning to attend a business school, she went into a vituperative rant against MBAs and then suggested to him that if he wanted to really make money he should move to northern California and grow marijuana. Every few hundred yards, Sharon would stop, lean against my shoulder, and adjust the straps on her sandals.

  “I have to take these in to be repaired,” she’d say. “Go ahead with your story; I’m listening.”

  Sharon was the one person I knew who could carry around extra weight as if it were a luxurious fur coat she had draped over her shoulders. She was probably more than ten pounds outside the “ideal” range on even the most generous weight-to-height charts, but it was all smoothly and evenly distributed and perfectly proportioned. She never made any excuses for her size and often took delight in flaunting it by wearing tight-fitting slacks or skimpy sundresses with pinched waistlines. The result was oddly, almost disconcertingly sensual, as if she were the manifestation of natural appetites and others the product of self-denial and some puritanical persecution of the flesh. Still, she smoked far too much and often seemed winded when, as now, she walked too far too quickly. It was obvious she was stopping to catch her breath, not adjust the straps on her beloved sandals.

  When we got to the sandwich shop, I held the door open for her, and she swept into the place in the loud way she had of entering rooms. She was barely inside before she was pulling her poncho over her head, shaking out her curtain of dark hair, and dramatically proclaiming that she was about to pass out from hunger. There were no other customers, but the owners, a couple of swarthy, quarrelsome brothers, looked up from their newspapers as if they’d been simultaneously jabbed with pins. The younger of the two, an astonishingly handsome man in a rugged, potbellied sort of way, immediately began to make eyes at Sharon. There were two types of men who were particularly drawn to Sharon: wiry, energetic hippies with tangled hair who wanted to be mothered by her, and dark Mediterranean men with piercing eyes who had something else entirely in mind.

  The shop was a filthy little place, with fluores
cent lights and dreary blue walls encrusted with layers of grease and cigarette smoke. I often had lunch there; the food was acceptable and the prices were amazingly low. Neither of the brothers had ever acknowledged me, but now, seconds after we walked in the door, they were fighting over the privilege of making Sharon’s sandwich, advising her on whether to have french fries or onion rings, and calling her “babe” and “angel.” Both terms struck me as inappropriate.

  “Don’t listen to him, angel,” the younger, handsome one said. “He’ll help your friend. I’ll tell you what you want.”

  “Believe me,” Sharon told him, “I never have any trouble figuring out what I want.”

  “I like the sound of that. What did you have in mind?”

  “Lunch,” she said, flirtatiously bored.

  “Lunch is a great place to start. I’ll tell you what you want to have.”

  “How about this: I’ll tell you what I want, and you tell me if you know how to make it. After I’ve tasted it, I’ll tell you if you were right or not.”

  The younger one jabbed his brother with his elbow. “You see,” he said. “I like this. She knows what she wants. That’s good.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” Sharon said. “I know what you want, too, so let’s just get to the meal.”

  * * *

  We took our food to a table by the storefront window, and I watched as Sharon bit into her sandwich. Her sparring with the handsome brother had resulted in a grilled meat special. The grease from the steak and the cheese was soaking through the bread in an appealing stain. I had a dry tuna sandwich that looked anemic by comparison.

  “Oh, God, this is good,” she said, shaking her fingers out as if she couldn’t contain her pleasure. Sharon’s enthusiasm for the things she liked—good food, all travel, poker, and Jeopardy—was one of her most endearing qualities. I tend to withhold enthusiasm, for fear of having the things I really care about taken from me.

  “I think he’d be happy to cook for you anytime.”

  “Sure, as long as his wife’s out of town. I know the type, and I’m not impressed. Believe me, Patrick, I am not impressed at all.” She took a great swallow of orange soda. “So you want me to tell you what I think about this garbage with that fascist brother of yours? I’ll tell you, but remember you asked. Stay away from it.”

  Sharon was not known for her laissez-faire attitudes toward others, and I was disappointed by her response. “But, Sharon,” I said, “he got roped into the engagement. Don’t forget that.”

  “People his age don’t get roped into relationships, Patrick. They make it look as if they do, so they don’t have to accept responsibility for them, that’s all. And in any case, it’s none of your business.”

  “Well, there’s a consensus on that point. Arthur said the same thing.” Sharon considered Arthur stuffy, pedantic, and suffocatingly boring, even though she shared his point of view on almost every imaginable subject.

  “He did? Oh. He did, really? That’s too bad. I hate to agree with him on anything. But let me tell you something else: the only reason you want to help your brother is because you can’t seem to help yourself. You can’t leave Arthur, so you have to save your brother from getting stuck in some dead marriage. If you’d leave Arthur and move back in with me, none of this Tony business would matter to you in the slightest.”

  “You’re forgetting,” I said, “that Arthur and I have been so happy together lately, we’re about to buy a house. So let’s not get on that topic.”

  “Fine with me. By the way, are you still sleeping on the floor?”

  I nodded, and she raised her eyebrows and took a huge bite of her sandwich. She gave a thumbs-up to the handsome brother and returned to her lunch, ignoring me.

  “It’s my back,” I said. “Conventional mattresses give me backaches, so I sleep on the floor.” When Arthur and I first lived together, we shared a double bed. Arthur liked to wind his big body around mine, and I always felt protected and warmed by him. Then, after a couple of years, warm turned to hot, and we got a bigger mattress. Then I developed an allergic reaction to our sheets and started sleeping in a mummy-style sleeping bag. Unfortunately, I was always rolling off the far side of the bed. Then my back problems began, and now I was on the floor. “It’s actually a very common problem.”

  “Absolutely. I know lots of people who live with someone who sleeps on the floor beside their bed. In most cases, though, the someone is named Fido. By the way, still having trouble with insomnia?”

  I wrapped up the uneaten portion of my sandwich and tossed it into the dented metal trash can by the door. It landed with a thud that sounded as if a piece of the ceiling had fallen in. The conversation was not going the way I’d hoped. For once, I’d wanted to talk with Sharon about a troubled relationship other than my own. I felt cheated, foolish, and disloyal. I had a sudden urge to call Arthur and try to make plans to go to a movie with him. There was no way to win with Arthur. Every time someone told me how wonderful he was, I felt compelled to point out his many faults, and every time Sharon ventured to say a word against him, I wanted to cradle him in my arms. I was angry that she had the effrontery to insult Arthur and question the sense of our buying a house together; only I was allowed to do that.

  I snapped open a can of diet soda. “I happen to have a lot on my mind,” I said. “That’s why I have trouble sleeping. I’m in way over my head at work, for example.”

  She mopped at her mouth with a wad of napkins and then started to scrub at the grease on her hands. “And you think I’m not? I’ve got a lot on my mind, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sleep. Actually, I had trouble dragging my body out of bed on Sunday. I didn’t get up until four in the afternoon. I suppose I needed the rest.”

  Behind the counter, a small yellow plastic radio sat on a shelf against the wall. The handsome brother was standing on a chair and spinning the dial from one crackling station to the next. He finally settled on a Muzak station playing an upbeat version of “The Shadow of Your Smile.” I looked over at Sharon, swamped with regret. We hadn’t spent any time together in over two weeks, and I hadn’t bothered to ask her a single question about herself. Even in my most self-absorbed moments, I try to take a genuine interest in my friends; but with Sharon, one of my best friends, I often lapsed. It’s easy to ignore a person’s frailties when they’re manifested only in her ankles. Besides, there was a part of me that was frightened by the thought of being around when the fortress of Sharon’s defenses came crashing down.

  She tossed her napkin on top of the uneaten portion of her sandwich.

  “It wasn’t so delicious after all?” I asked.

  “After the fourth bite, it was all downhill. The fifth bite is the real test of food. Remember that. The fifth bite, the third date, the fourth fuck, and the sixth year of marriage. Everything else is inconsequential.” She gathered her hair together and hooked it behind her ears with her fingers, a gesture that reminded me of a girl who’d sat in front of me in third grade. Sharon was thirty-seven, but in certain of her facial expressions, and in much of her loud bravado, the ten-year-old in her was very close to the surface. I asked her how things were going with her new housemate, and she shrugged.

  “Roberta? She’s driving me insane. I don’t know why I let her move in.”

  “Well, why did you?”

  “I felt bad for her. She’s a friend of some friend’s husband’s friend, and she was desperate.

  “Divorced?”

  “Separated. She’ll never get divorced. All she talks about is how much she hates her husband, a sure sign she’ll be with him for life. She keeps telling me how lucky I am to be alone, and how I obviously did the right thing in deciding to never get married, as if I spent the past ten years turning down proposals. You should meet her. It’s an exquisite experience.”

  In the eight years I’d known Sharon, she hadn’t been involved in a single romantic relationship that had lasted more than two months. There were an ample number of men who expressed an
interest, and an equal number who became obsessed with her and ended up calling the house at three in the morning or sitting out in front of her house in their cars. She always tossed them off (after the third date or fourth fuck, I suppose) with a ludicrous objection: “He uses deodorant.” “He wears earmuffs.” “He’s used the word ‘lifestyle’ four times since we met.” “He said I have nice feet.” She had passionate love affairs on her travels, but those lasted only for the duration of the trips. Her severe single status had been a social liability for most of her late twenties and early thirties; she was always attending weddings and baby showers, anniversary parties and housewarmings, for a whole cast of close friends who liked to assure her that she was “next.” Now, however, everyone she knew was breaking off a relationship, settling a divorce, haggling over custody of a child, a house, or a dog. Her bachelorhood, once a slight embarrassment to her friends, had become, in their eyes, a sign of emotional stability and strength of character. The fact that it might also be lonely was usually skipped over.

  Sharon owned a Victorian house in Cambridge, an enormous wreck of a place she’d bought before the real estate boom, with money she claimed to have won playing poker. She was always hosting one or two relationship runaways in her extra bedrooms. She was the Jane Addams of the Cambridge divorce court crowd.

  “What happened to the salesman?” I asked. The month before, the owner of a furniture showroom in Newton had been in hot pursuit.

  “Boring,” she said, and tossed him off with a flick of her hand. “You meet a man who’s past a certain age, and all he wants to talk about is his bitch ex-wife and his needy widowed mother. I spent an entire evening with him a couple weeks ago, and he didn’t ask a single question about me. Not one. Just an endless gush about himself. And his ‘needs.’ I managed to get a scrap of information about my life into the conversation, but I practically had to use dynamite. Finally, I just held up my hands and said, ‘This has been one of the most boring nights of my life.’ ”