The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  Grace, Tim, and I went to the reception desk and listened to Fredrick yawn his way through a tale of a torrid love affair he was having with a sixty-three-year-old Catholic priest. Ten minutes later, Sharon emerged, calm and smoking. “You should have told me who it was. Ruth’s completely insane, but if you know how to talk to her, she’s fine.”

  “Did she say anything about the lawsuit?” Tim asked.

  “Grow up, Tim. There’s not going to be any lawsuit. She’s staying. I gave her the name of this guy I know pretty well. I told her to look him up and tell him I sent her. He’ll introduce her around, and I guarantee she won’t set foot on American soil until June.”

  Eleven

  I was close to an hour late in leaving the office, and the traffic out to the suburbs was predictably heavy. I was driving my Yugo, a red piece of rusting metal I’d bought two years earlier against the strong objections of Tony, Arthur, Sharon, and two friends who owned one. My theory is that all cars are worthless junk, a danger to your well-being and the health of the entire planet, so it’s best to spend as little money on them as possible. I thought it was a brilliant purchase. The Yugo hadn’t given me any trouble at all, and I loved cutting off the old Volvos that dominate the streets of Cambridge in such a small, ugly, cheap red car. It made me feel powerful.

  It was one of those early evenings in late March that inspire deep longing. The trees along the side of the highway were mostly bare, and the air was fragrant with the smells of approaching spring—some combination of mud and rotting leaves. I loved knowing that, at least for the next month or so, the northern hemisphere was still tipped comfortably away from the sun. I kept the windows rolled down so I could stick my hand out from time to time to make sure there wasn’t a sudden surge in temperature. Late days in spring often make me yearn for baseball games and high school days. The yearning makes no sense at all, since I’ve never watched even a single baseball game, and all through high school I was friendless and miserable. I spent most of my youth and adolescence sitting in movie theaters and reading true-crime books about parents killing their children or children killing their parents. I had a passing interest in a variety of solitary athletic pursuits—biking, running, swimming, and calisthenics—mostly, I suspect, because they suppressed hormonal urges I found confusing.

  Ryan, Tony, and I are close in age, but we never spent much time together once we got to high school. Ryan had a thoroughly undistinguished career as a left fielder on the intramural baseball team and played drums in a rock band that never made it out of the bass player’s garage. Sometimes, when distracted, Ryan still drummed on tabletops or on the dashboard of a car. I don’t think he ever entirely gave up his dreams of being a rock star, although it was hard to tell what Ryan dreamed about. I had trouble believing he dreamed at all.

  Tony, of course, had the most active social life of the three of us; starting in junior high, he had a steady stream of girlfriends calling the house and cruising the neighborhood in hopes of catching sight of him. At the dinner table, he and my father would have long, explicit battles about Tony’s involvement with his latest “slut,” whom my father, in fishing for details, would invariably accuse of being pregnant or having a venereal disease. Tony would accuse my father of taking his frustrations out on him, knock back his chair, and leave the table in a melodramatic huff. My mother would worry over Tony’s unfinished meal and chastise my father for talking about sex in front of her, while Ryan complimented the food and reached for thirds. I usually took solace in the basement, where I’d smoke pot and assume some ersatz yoga position that quickly degenerated into masturbation.

  However miserable I’d felt in high school, I at least hadn’t felt responsible for causing anyone else’s misery, a definite advantage to being without friends or lovers. Perhaps that was why I was secretly hoping that the offer Arthur and I had made on the yellow house would be turned down: we wouldn’t be stuck owning the place, and no one would be to blame for Arthur’s disappointment except the greedy owners.

  * * *

  My parents’ store was on the ground floor of a two-story brick building that they owned. The top floor held the dusty offices of a grotesquely fat divorce lawyer and the dentist my brothers and I had been sent to as children. (The latter had recently been indicted on charges of a Medicare scam that involved treating people for nonexistent gum diseases.) On one side of O’Neil’s was a jewelry store, which, according to my father, had not made a sale since the day the nearby shopping mall opened, and on the other was a barbershop that had been converted into something called Samurai Death Martial Arts Institute. Samurai Death was one of four martial arts institutes that had opened up in town in the past decade. They heightened my feeling of being in strange, hostile territory, where everyone was capable of smashing blocks of concrete with their bare hands.

  The window display at O’Neil’s hadn’t changed significantly in almost a decade. Two androgynous mannequins wearing unconvincing wigs and ill-fitting green suits were standing in limp-wristed parody of a fashion model pose. Surrounding this hapless couple were stacks of sun-bleached work clothes, underwear from another generation, and clunky black shoes. Occasionally, my mother would haphazardly toss a pile of new gym uniforms or socks into the stew. A Boston TV station had recently done a special on the demise of the downtown areas of suburbs. Repeated shots of O’Neil’s windows flashed across the screen. I was heartbroken, but my parents claimed to be thrilled (at least in front of Ryan) with what they considered free publicity.

  I locked the Yugo against the roving bands of Samurai Death squads and rapped on the glass door. Ryan came forth, grinning and apologizing, a ring of keys in his hands. He ushered me in with a warm hug. He was spilling out of a white dress shirt and a pair of gray flannel trousers. “Nice material,” he said, fingering the lapels of my black sport jacket. “You obviously don’t shop here.” He forced out a laugh and tossed a limp hank of hair out of his eyes by snapping back his head.

  Ryan had inherited my father’s dark, handsome coloring and my mother’s strong chin and jawline. Feature for feature, he was a lot more striking than either Tony or I, but in the last few years he’d taken on the neglected look of a person who had long since given up on the idea of having a sex life. His black hair had receded unevenly from his temples and brow. A good haircut would have done wonders for him, but out of loyalty, he insisted on going to a local barber who snipped away artlessly and left an archipelago of hair clumps scattered across his skull.

  I straightened out his tie and tucked in his shirttails. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Ryan, this outfit doesn’t do you any favors. Couldn’t you find anything more attractive on the racks around here?”

  “I don’t need favors, Pat, I need miracles, something this store doesn’t specialize in.”

  “Any business today?”

  He shrugged. “We always get some. It’s a big week for socks. How’s Arthur? You should have invited him to this dinner to liven things up a little. I better go dig out your parents. They’re probably in back, fighting.”

  He wandered down the center aisle, tugging at his shirt until he’d disarranged it.

  The store was long and narrow, cluttered to an almost incomprehensible degree from the linoleum floor to the high, pressed-tin ceiling. There were tables on either side of the center aisle, stacked with shirts and sweaters and pants in no particular order. Customers generally had to stand by helplessly while Ryan sifted through the piles in search of their size. The racks of suits against the wall were hidden behind racks of sport jackets that were hidden behind racks of winter coats, making almost everything more or less inaccessible. Ryan worked up front, while my mother kept to her station behind a glass display case at the rear. Rita’s counter contained the more expensive dress shirts, tie clasps, cuff links, handkerchiefs, a few bulky watches, and a selection of striped ties of a medium width that was never exactly out of fashion and certainly never in. Because Rita was so eager to look busy, she spent most of her
time polishing and shining the glass. She’d amassed a collection of cleaners that included virtually every product put out by Amway, Procter & Gamble, and Dow Chemical.

  My father generally stayed out of the front of the store altogether. Eight years earlier, he’d cleared a space behind the dressing rooms, from which he rented formal wear. I think it was the only money-making square footage in the place, although my mother claimed he’d opened it up simply to get away from her.

  My parents still had a loyal following of customers, but most of them were getting on in years and had less and less need for new clothes as they retired, got sick, shrunk down a size, and returned to clothes they’d worn in the 1940s. Someone under the age of sixty-five did occasionally come in, but it was rarely to buy anything more expensive than a gym uniform or a package of briefs.

  Each time I entered the store, I was swept away by nostalgia and dread. The smell of all that denim and polyester and accumulated dust hit me in the face the way a blast of heat from the engine of an idling car hits you on a hot summer day. The truth is, I loved my parents’ store and had since I was a child. I loved to go there after school and play in the piles of clothes stacked in the dark storeroom. On Saturdays, the busiest days in that era when the earth was cooler and my parents ran a thriving business, I was allowed to help out in front, talk to customers, and operate the cash register. Now the image of myself as the eager, helpful little boy in tie and jacket—a miniature mock-up of my father—made me cringe. But then I had loved being a dutiful son. Neither Ryan nor Tony had had the slightest bit of interest in the store, yet they were the ones who ended up working there. Sometimes I worried that what would make me happiest would be to step into Ryan’s arch-supported shoes and take over the family business. During slow periods at the travel agency, I often fantasized about going into O’Neil’s with a work crew, cleaning it from top to bottom, chucking out all the old merchandise, and snazzing things up.

  My mother came out from the back room, her head tilted to one side as she screwed in an earring. “Late again, Patrick,” she said without looking at me.

  “Problems at work,” I told her.

  She took her position behind the glass case and looked at me doubtfully. “I’ve never known anyone who has as many problems as you do. How do I look, dear?”

  She had on a white blouse and a gray flannel skirt, a feminized version of Ryan’s outfit, and she looked particularly short and uncharacteristically defenseless. Rita dressed for work in sedate, slightly mannish outfits that complemented the severe and rigid sides of her personality, those I liked the least. Her hair, which had been a dark and glamorous red, was now tinted some shade dangerously close to orange. She’d worn it in the same style forever—shoulder-length, brushed off her face, and held in place with a plastic headband.

  Age and worry over my father, the store, and her three sons had deepened the lines in her face and given her the tough look of the hardworking and slightly contemptuous.

  “You look very nice,” I said.

  “Oh, good. I don’t know why I trust your opinion, but I do. Listen, Patrick, I have a favor to ask. I can count on you, can’t I?”

  “It depends on the favor.”

  She sighed, disappointed. “The whole point of a favor is that you do it, you don’t question it.”

  “I’m not going to agree to just anything, Rita.”

  She frowned. I was standing in front of her counter, trying to organize the ties according to color. “Don’t mess that up,” she scolded. “I won’t be able to find anything. All I want you to do is go along with the suggestions I make for the honeymoon. No matter what I say, your father will disagree with me, but you might carry some weight, since you’re the travel professional.”

  “I promise to listen to your plans; how’s that?”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  Ryan came out of the back room, snapping open a beer can. My father trailed behind.

  “You’re going to drink that now and spoil your dinner?” my father asked. “What sense does that make?”

  “Stop bossing him around, Jimmy. You treat him like a child.”

  Ryan winked at me and took a swallow from the can.

  “Where’s the funeral, Patrick?” my father asked.

  “Black is fashionable,” Ryan said.

  “Well, it just goes to show. And I thought we were on the cutting edge here. Get rid of the plaids, Rita; black is the big color for spring.”

  Twelve

  I drove to the restaurant—an eatery in the lobby of the hotel beside the shopping mall—with my mother in the passenger seat, nervously clutching the dashboard, and Ryan and my father packed into the miniature back seat. My father is thin and short, but, particularly in cars, he tends to sit with his arms stretched over the back of the seat and his knees spread, thus taking up twice as much space as his body requires. In the past five years he’d been operated on for bleeding ulcers, kidney stones, and gallstones. (“Marry a man,” my mother liked to say, “and end up with a rock quarry.”) He’d spent almost as much time in the hospital as he had at home. He’d developed emphysema the year before and supposedly given up cigarettes, though he occasionally lit up.

  “What the hell,” he’d say optimistically, “I can always kill myself if it gets too bad.” He was almost seventy. Despite the weariness brought on by his bad health, he’d retained a certain dashing appearance. His sunken cheeks and the lines around his eyes added more drama to his face. Only his neck, which was terribly thin, showed the ravages of his various illnesses.

  He was still attractive enough to make mildly suggestive comments to comely relatives and waitresses without looking completely ridiculous. But when he did flirt, he did so with the hostility of an aging handsome man who’s bitter for not having taken full advantage of his looks in his youth.

  “Jesus Christ, Patrick,” he said as I drove through a tangle of prefab housing projects and condo villages, “it’s so cramped back here, it’s like riding in a coffin.”

  “Please,” my mother said.

  “I think this is perfect for Patrick,” Ryan said, still knocking back his beer. “It’s bohemian.”

  I tried to change the subject by mentioning that I’d been giving some thought to the store lately.

  “And you’re coming to give your brother a hand,” my mother stated flatly.

  “No.”

  “We could use the help, Pat.”

  “You see, your brother is asking you to come work with him. I’m glad you’re speaking up for yourself, Ryan.”

  “I’ve been thinking the way to increase business might be to specialize. Target a particular customer, one who doesn’t get what he needs at the mall. I thought it might be a good idea to try specializing in large sizes.”

  “Clothes for fat people?” my father asked me, appalled.

  “James!” My mother’s backward glance clearly indicated she was offended on Ryan’s behalf.

  “Well, heavy, also tall and broad-shouldered. Big-boned people.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Patrick, the store is crowded enough as it is. The last thing we need in there is a lot of fat people pushing through the racks.”

  “Well, maybe we should critique your body next, James.” She turned toward me. “For someone who claims to have no interest in the store, you certainly have a lot of ideas.”

  “I’ve never said I have no interest in the store.”

  “No, you don’t say it, you just refuse to work there, you refuse to offer your brother a little support. It isn’t as if that travel nonsense is getting you anywhere. Click, click, click on the computer all day. You just think you’re better than Ryan, that’s all.”

  Ryan objected, and my mother apologized to both of us, though the cutting tone in her voice hung in the air. There was a tremendous amount of anger between my mother and me, although usually we kept it just under the surface. In addition to everything else, I don’t think she ever completely forgave me for being homosexual. She too
k it personally, as something I’d schemed to draw attention to the flaws in her child rearing. The fact that she’d welcomed Arthur into her life so graciously made me suspect she’d figured out I was unhappy in the relationship, or at least reassuringly unsatisfied.

  We were stopped at a red light and had fallen silent. It was a tense silence that was gobbling up all the oxygen. Directly in front of us was an absolutely blank housing development that could have been anywhere in the country, a handful of gray ranches clustered together on the dusty plateau of a reclaimed hazardous-waste site, not a tree or a shrub or a blade of grass in sight. Looking at it, I felt the odd vertigo that sometimes overtakes me in shopping malls, airports, and other characterless spots. I snapped on the radio and immediately snapped it off.

  “Green light,” my mother said. “If you take your next left, dear, I’ll show you a shortcut.”

  I thanked her and went straight.

  The business of Ryan’s marriage wasn’t all that fueled my resentment and anger toward my mother. From time to time, some warm and generous side of her nature showed through her sarcasm and her critical outcries. She’d make a kindhearted joke or offer a tender compliment. It usually happened in those rare moments when she was apart from my father, and when it did, I was reminded of the fact that there was a whole side to her personality that she’d allowed to be subsumed. At those moments, I felt that my brothers and I had been cheated.

  * * *

  The maître d’ apologized for not having anything near the windows and compensated by seating us toward the back of the restaurant at an especially large table with its own fake Tiffany lamp hanging above. The only view from the fabulous windows was of the traffic on Route 128. Why anyone would want to sit there I couldn’t imagine, unless it was the allure of possibly catching sight of a grisly accident. The hotel catered to businessmen working at computer firms outside Boston, and the restaurant seemed to be designed to serve them vast amounts of food as quickly as possible. There were several “bars” in the middle of the dark-green room—hors d’oeuvres, soup, salad, and dessert—where you could graze until you burst. Bloated, exhausted businessmen were wandering around in a daze, carrying plates loaded down with marinated vegetables and meatballs and steamed rolls.