The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  I came to a dead stop in front of a florist shop with a sign in the window that read: ONLY FIFTEEN DAYS LEFT. I peered through the glass. There were no indications that the place was going out of business, they weren’t running a time-limited sale, and it wasn’t fifteen days from any holiday I’d ever heard of. It could only be a warning of imminent doom. I’d been in the shop several times; the owner was a bearded prima donna who was unfailingly condescending to his customers, as if they couldn’t possibly appreciate plants and flowers as much as he did. He was at the counter now, pruning a ficus tree, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was unlikely he’d have inside information about the end of the world, but you can never be sure. I headed down the street, contemplating the final days of human existence in such a thoroughly pessimistic mood that I decided to walk straight to work, thus managing to get to the office almost exactly on time.

  Fredrick was just setting up shop at the reception desk, organizing Xerox copies of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia and unloading a bag of brioches. He had on a bright-orange sport jacket and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words NO ONE KNOWS I’M A LESBIAN. He looked at his watch, a Rolex given to him by his priest, and lazily said, “A miracle. He’s on time.”

  “Not so unusual. I go through periods of competence every once in a while.”

  “Well, here’s a challenge for you.” He handed me a message slip. “Mr. Whisper. Sounded like he was calling from a phone booth in the subway. I couldn’t make out most of it, but it had something to do with his hotel reservations in Bermuda.”

  “That again,” I said and crumpled up the paper.

  * * *

  As the day wore on, I found myself with a nagging desire to get all my work in order, just so things would be settled on the day of reckoning, fifteen days thence. While doing this, I made the horrifying discovery that Professor Fields’s reservations were in even worse shape than I’d imagined. The airline had canceled Fields and niece Zayna from their flight to Bermuda because I hadn’t called in their ticket numbers the week before. It was exactly the kind of detail that was always getting me in trouble. In fact, I was so thoroughly negligent about the trip, I hadn’t bothered to issue the tickets at all. Now Fields had no hotel and no flight reservations. I called the airline and was told that the plane was so overbooked as it was, I shouldn’t pin any hopes on the wait list. In a similar situation, I decided, Sharon would secretly engineer the breakup of the relationship between Fields and Zayna before the departure date, thereby eliminating the whole reason for the trip. But that would have taken more time than I was willing to devote to it. When I did mention the dilemma to Sharon, she just shrugged and said, “Fake ticket, Patrick. What’s the big deal? People at the gate are so distracted, you could hand them a tea bag and they’d let you on.”

  I knew she was being particularly dismissive because she didn’t approve of my visit to New York. She saw my sexual dalliance with Jeffrey as a way of letting off steam, and she’d have preferred that I take her advice, let my frustration boil over, and leave Arthur.

  I had serious doubts myself about my relationship with Jeffrey, but I wasn’t able to give it up. The two of us had been friends for twelve years, the bond between us being a similar lack of self-esteem. We’d picked each other out as kindred spirits when we were freshmen in college. Ours was a happily celibate romance that consisted primarily of each telling the other how much better he was than he thought.

  Around the time I got involved with Arthur, Jeffrey hooked up with a ridiculous person named Kyle Thurman, an aspiring actor. Kyle was not without talent, but I was fairly certain he was too much of a narcissist to appreciate Jeffrey. I myself was narcissistic enough to secretly believe that, given the timing of the relationship, Jeffrey had latched onto Kyle in reaction to my entanglement with Arthur. I was against Kyle from the start—among other things, he was infuriatingly indolent in the way that handsome men so often are—but I had just enough restraint to hold my tongue. My friendship with Jeffrey dimmed during the years of his love affair. The strain of pretending to like a friend’s lover is enough to kill any friendship. We saw each other less and less and eventually lost touch completely for more than a year. Then, two years earlier, I got a tearful call. Kyle had moved out. I was surprised he was capable of such decent behavior, but Jeffrey was devastated. I went to New York to console him, thrilled that at last I had the perfect opportunity to tell him exactly what I’d thought of his lover all along. That took a couple of hours, and then I got around to one of those standard ego-boosting talks, the one about how handsome and sexy and bright and appealing he was and how Kyle didn’t know how lucky he’d been for three years.

  And then, just to prove I meant what I’d said, I tore his clothes off.

  We spent the rest of the weekend making up for lost time. He told me his sex life with Kyle had been largely a triumph of style over substance, and I confessed that if my life with Arthur were on videotape, I’d fast-forward through the sex scenes. In a funny way, nothing much seemed to change in our friendship, and we never really discussed the new turn our relationship had taken. I suppose this betrayal of Arthur was deeper than the emotionless, often anonymous, flings I’d had from time to time in the past, but I rationalized by telling myself that having this New York escape was what made it so easy for me to stay with Arthur, so everyone benefited in the end.

  * * *

  My day at the travel agency was going disastrously, and I decided to do my clients and myself a favor and leave early. It was pouring down rain by the time I left; all the drains on the dirty Cambridge streets were clogged, and water was washing up over the sidewalks. I caught a cab to the airport. The rain was driving against the windshield so forcefully, the driver didn’t even bother to turn on the wipers. I always worry about air safety when I board a plane, but never so much as when I was about to visit Jeffrey.

  I took a seat by one of the huge plate-glass windows in the airport lounge and watched the mechanics in their orange slickers, messing with the plane. They were laughing, some doubled over as if they’d just played a riotous practical joke, like leaving a gasket off one of the engines.

  The man sitting next to me was deeply engrossed in a paperback but was biting the skin around his thumbnail, obviously a nervous wreck. He was one of those hip young executives with a leather backpack and an expensive haircut. He caught me looking at him and smiled anxiously. “Lousy weather for flying, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said calmly. “We’ll be above this storm in a few minutes.” I love talking people out of their irrational fears, especially when they’re fears I share. I launched into a lengthy discussion of airline safety records, crash statistics, and weather reports, the kinds of facts and figures only a true neurotic who thought he could influence fate with acts of memory would bother to learn. My companion, however, seemed marginally reassured; at least he stopped biting his thumb. He had a severe, elongated face shaped almost like the sole of a shoe.

  “Reading anything good?” I asked, pointing to his book.

  “Great,” he said. “John O’Hara. Have you read him?”

  “I practically live on him. Which is this?”

  He held up a copy of Appointment in Samarra.

  I jumped out of my seat and ran to the nearest phone.

  “Sweetheart,” Arthur said. “Shouldn’t you be heading off to the airport soon?”

  “I’m at the airport,” I said. “The ceiling was leaking onto my computer, so I was forced to leave the office early. Listen, Arthur, I just wanted to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I was supposed to do the shopping this week, and I forgot all about it. I’m just too keyed up about Tony and that whole situation. There’s no orange juice at home, and there’s no bread, and I’m pretty sure the milk has gone bad.”

  “Aw, well, it’s sweet of you to warn me. I’ll pick some up on my way home tonight.”

  “I know, I know, but you don’t understand. The po
int is, I was supposed to do the shopping and I didn’t. I let you down. I had a job to do and I didn’t do it. You would have done it. You wouldn’t leave me in the house for a weekend with no food. I just don’t deserve you, Arthur. I never have.”

  “Calm down, will you? We’re talking about a loaf of bread here.”

  Of course that wasn’t what I was talking about, but fortunately, Arthur didn’t know it. “And I still haven’t filled out that mortgage application.”

  “You can do it when you get home.”

  “And you slept so late this morning I didn’t get a chance to ask you if you have plans for the weekend.”

  “I’m going to the movies tomorrow night with Beatrice and Mitchell. They’ve taken pity on me and are going to make dinner, too.”

  “Beatrice probably thinks I’m a jerk.” Suddenly, it mattered to me very much what Arthur’s ex-wife thought of me.

  “She likes you, Patrick. Why would she think you’re a jerk?”

  For one thing, she was uncannily perspicacious. It was Beatrice, for example, who’d informed Arthur that he was gay. “Never mind, Arty. Any other plans?”

  “Reading, laundry, the Sunday papers. Gilbert and Sullivan. I think I’ll listen to Pinafore this week. That has that gorgeous aria ‘Sorry her lot who loves too well.’ The one you love so much.”

  I could picture him padding around the house in his robe and slippers, reading Dickens, planning more good deeds, while I flung Jeffrey around his living room. “Oh, Arthur,” I said, “it sounds so lonely. Why don’t you call someone tonight and make plans?”

  “I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend. What flight are you taking?”

  “The five-thirty. If it crashes, claim my body before my parents get to it.”

  “There isn’t going to be any crash. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Just have a good time. Say hello to Jeffrey for me.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll see you Sunday, sweetheart.”

  “Bye.” My throat was constricting. “I love you, Arthur,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “I said I love you.”

  “You’re slurring your words, Patrick. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. Speak up.”

  “Never mind. Just have a good weekend.”

  I hung up the phone and headed back to my seat. I’d go to Barney’s and buy him an expensive sweater, then head over to the Strand to see if they had a particularly nice edition of The Seven Storey Mountain.

  * * *

  Jeffrey’s self-image was so low, he’d entered college with the intention of going on to med school and becoming a surgeon. But painting was the only thing he showed any interest in when I first met him, and I like to compliment myself by claiming that I was the one who convinced him to drop out of premed in his junior year. True, he ended up with one of those liberal arts degrees that are about as useful as a humidifier in New Orleans, but he was at least doing what he loved. He worked on huge canvases, brushing on layer after layer of paint so the finished product was a densely textured swamp of color. His paintings were strangely beautiful and, from the bits of information he let slip, had drawn attention from a few galleries. He lived in a vast, two-bedroom apartment at Broadway and 103rd Street, a place he’d inherited from a throng of disappearing roommates. The name on the lease was Tyson Trill. Not one person who’d lived there in the twelve years Jeffrey had been in residence had ever met Tyson Trill, although there were elaborate, fanciful stories abounding and a very small navy-blue blazer in the hall closet, said to belong to the tiny mystery tenant. Like everyone else I knew in New York who lived in a sunny two-bedroom apartment, Jeffrey paid under five hundred dollars.

  He’d always been a molelike person, reclusive and quiet, but the threat of AIDS and then the disappearance of Kyle had driven him even deeper into his hermetic existence. But Jeffrey’s agoraphobia suited him. He had his painting, his money-making career as a medical illustrator. He read any book written before the First World War and had a huge collection of used jazz records, scattered throughout his apartment in some crazy order that only he could decipher. Although I wasn’t in love with Jeffrey—perhaps because I wasn’t in love with Jeffrey—I couldn’t get enough of his scrawny body.

  Sixteen

  It was raining hard when we landed, and I decided to go to hell with myself and splurge on a cab into town. But at Ninety-sixth Street I was overcome by a fit of parsimoniousness and had the driver pull over. I saved about fifty cents, and by the time I got to Jeffrey’s block, I was drenched. I let myself into the building, took the elevator to the third floor, and entered his apartment as quietly as possible. I stood in the narrow hallway by the front door, shook the water out of my hair, and took off all my clothes. Then, thinking better of it, I put on my T-shirt. I made my way through the cluttered living room, stepping over piles of records, and stood to the side of his open bedroom door. I could hear him opening and closing drawers. “Guess who?” I called out and stepped into the doorway.

  Kyle was sitting on the floor, rummaging through the bottom drawer of Jeffrey’s bureau. He looked up at me for one disinterested second and then went back to what he was doing.

  “Patrick, isn’t it?” he asked blandly.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is. Hi. How are you?”

  “Oh, pretty swell.”

  Jeffrey came up behind me, holding a kettle. “Patrick,” he said, “you’re early. And practically nude.”

  “The rain. I got wet, and I had to take my clothes off.”

  “Apparently,” Kyle said.

  “Well, this is a coincidence,” Jeffrey said. He held up the kettle. “I’m just making coffee.”

  “Milk, no sugar, in mine,” Kyle said. “And don’t make the coffee too strong. You always make it too strong. I’m on stage for ninety minutes tonight, and it won’t do if I piss down my leg.”

  “I’ll do my best. Patrick?”

  “No milk, lots and lots of sugar, please.”

  “Well, that should be easy enough. You two remember each other, don’t you?”

  Kyle grinned without looking up, and I mumbled something about Kyle being unforgettable.

  “Oh, and there’s a robe in the closet,” Jeffrey said. “It’s blue, hanging on the back of the door.”

  I knew the robe well; I’d worn it at some point on almost every one of my recent visits.

  “I’m glad to see you’re still getting some use of that,” Kyle said. “I gave it to you for your birthday four years ago. I’m happy you didn’t throw it away.”

  “Throw it away?” Jeffrey laughed as if we were discussing using a Van Gogh for dart practice.

  * * *

  Jeffrey and Kyle took seats side by side on the sofa in the living room, a stack of records and magazines between them. I sat facing them in a bentwood rocker that Kyle had given Jeffrey once upon a time. The coffee was absurdly weak, infuriatingly so. There’s nothing I like more than strong, sweet coffee heated to just below the boiling point. When I began seeing Jeffrey on a regular basis, I taught him my secret method for brewing coffee, a process that involves paper towels, jelly jars, ice cubes, and eggshells. Arthur had never been able to get it right, but Jeffrey had caught on immediately. It was discouraging to think that he’d give it up so quickly, just for the sake of pleasing Kyle.

  The whole setup felt uncomfortably like times when I’d visited the happy couple in New York a few years back. Kyle was relating some story about a repertory company he had recently joined, while Jeffrey stared off into space with an entirely unreadable expression. I suppose he didn’t want to offend Kyle or me by acknowledging the presence of either of us. One of his paintings was hanging over the sofa, a broad field of grays and reds. The two of them fit under it perfectly.

  Jeffrey’s legs were splayed out in front of him. He was wearing a pair of ratty, paint-splattered sneakers, the closest he came to arty affectation, and a soiled blue sweatshirt. He liked to sit slumped down in chairs and sofas, but
this position looked painful.

  “Straighten up, Jeff,” I said. “You’re going to ruin your back.”

  He looked up at me, slightly alarmed, I thought, by the intimacy of the scolding.

  Jeffrey had a narrow face with large, crooked features and wonderfully fat lips. He had a headful of dark, tangled hair, which he cut himself into an uneven, caveman mop. I loved his shaggy, sloppy looks and the casually neglectful way he presented himself.

  Kyle was another story. I hadn’t seen him in at least two years, and I had to admit he was a lot more memorable-looking than I’d remembered. He was solid and tall, and his attractively dark face was all angles and shadowy little hollows. Age had added character to his eyes in the form of crow’s-feet and faint dark circles. A decade of drug addiction or alcoholism, and he’d have a wonderfully expressive face.

  I kept wrapping the robe around my legs more modestly, not that it really mattered much at that point, trying to listen to Kyle. I wished I could snap my fingers, disappear into a hole in the floor, and wind up back in Cambridge, where I belonged, filling out my mortgage application and being frustrated with Arthur.

  Kyle’s mouth finally stopped moving, and since it was obvious Jeffrey’s wasn’t about to kick into motion, I hesitantly took a turn. “So, Kyle,” I said, “what plays are you doing with the new company?”

  “None you’ve heard of,” he said. The tone implied the fault was all mine.

  “You’re probably right.” I sighed. Although I wouldn’t admit it to my best friend, I’ve never seen a play I’ve enjoyed quite so energetically as I enjoy even those movies I don’t much like.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s Dennis now.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He looked out the window. “My name is now Dennis.”

  I turned to Jeffrey for help, but he only shrugged. Kyle picked an album cover off the sofa and whacked him on the head with it. “Don’t give that look, Jeff. I’m not embarrassed about it anymore. It’s just a fact.” He turned to me. “My agent and I decided ‘Kyle Thurman’ was associated with some questionable things I did early on that I’d rather forget about. So, beginning with this new company, I’m Dennis Stone. Anyway, the ‘Kyle Thurman’ sounded too invented.”