The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  I offered to look at her ticket to see if there was some way I could tinker with it so she could take a later flight.

  “That’s a great idea,” Tony said. “Patrick knows every sleazy trick in the book. Show him the ticket, hon.”

  Vivian turned down the offer graciously. “I have to get back anyway. And you two should have some time alone to talk.”

  We got into the elevator and they stood facing me, with their backs to the glass wall, all that scenery wasted. As we descended, Vivian spoke to Tony in a soft voice, so quiet I could make out the whispering sounds but none of the words. Her curls were brushing against his face, and he reached out and gently held her hair back. The gesture was so intimate, I turned away.

  Eighteen

  “What is it?” Tony asked. “What is that brings two people together, gets them to the same spot at the same exact moment? How is it that Vivian and I each decided to go up to the top floor at exactly the right moment? Is it fate, luck? What the hell is it, Patrick?”

  I shrugged and finished my drink.

  At Tony’s insistence, we’d gone back to his hotel room and he’d mixed a couple of Bloody Marys. I’d gulped mine as if it were a good strong cup of coffee. The drink was basically a tumblerful of vodka and ice, with a splash of tomato juice thrown in as an afterthought to legitimize drinking it at such an early hour. The alcohol had wasted no time in knocking off a substantial number of brain cells, and I was feeling pleasantly dazed and disoriented, happy to be in the secure confines of the hotel. I was sitting on the top of the desk, between a pile of damp towels and a silver bucket. There was an empty champagne bottle in the bucket, floating in a pool of melted ice. The sheets on the lake-sized bed were tangled into knots, and the pillows were scattered about the gray room as if my brother and Vivian had been playfully tossing them at each other before she departed. Tony was at the window, looking out with his arms spread against the glass. The sight of all that blue sky in the background made me feel as if we were in the stateroom of some elegant airship.

  On the elevator up from the lobby, I’d had a chance to look at Tony more closely and assess the toll exacted by his stressful bout with love. He’d aged noticeably since the last time we’d been together, more than a year earlier. He’d always had a narrow face, but now his cheeks had sunken in so that his mouth seemed to protrude in an almost simian way. There were dark circles under his limpid brown eyes, and his hair was greasy and, for him, unusually long around the ears. At age seventeen, Tony had begun going to a barber once a week to have his hair trimmed. He was the only man of my generation I knew of who indulged in this ritual. He was one of the most impeccably groomed and manicured people I’d ever met. His face was always so scrubbed and shiny, I sometimes wondered if he didn’t go for professional facials. This fanatical personal hygiene routine was obviously part of his campaign to take rigid control of his life, make the most of what he had, and attempt to get as far from O’Neil’s Men’s Shop as he could. Ironically, everything he did made his physical resemblance to my father more striking.

  It was almost a relief to see him looking a bit disheveled, the antiseptic cleanliness of his face replaced by a kind of dissipated sensuality. His lips were fuller and redder, as if they’d been rubbed raw from kissing Vivian too passionately.

  “You want to hear the scariest thing?” he asked, his back still to me. “As I was leaving my room to go up there to that window the morning Vivian and I met, I thought: Maybe I should call Loreen first. Then I decided to wait. If I had called her, I never would have met Vivian. Maybe we’d all be better off.”

  “Speaking of calling Loreen . . .”

  “I haven’t in almost two weeks I’m a coward, Patrick.”

  I was feeling rather cowardly myself. I’d tried to bring up the topic of the dinner conversation with our parents but had stalled midsentence each time. “Is there any more vodka?” I asked.

  “For someone who didn’t want any booze, you downed that pretty quick.”

  He took my glass and went to the bar he’d set up at the sink in the bathroom. He had on a dark-green shirt with black stripes and a pair of baggy khakis. It was the first time in a while I’d seen him in anything other than a conservative, freshly pressed suit. But this casual outfit didn’t hang on him quite right. He had the sleeves of the shirt rolled up over his wrists and the top buttons undone, but he still looked like a spy trying too hard to blend in with the rest of the crowd.

  “What are you doing in New York anyway?” he asked.

  “Nothing too exciting.”

  “Business?”

  I was about to toss off the whole subject with a noncommittal yes, but I was suddenly overcome with a longing to tell him about Jeffrey, partially because I couldn’t stand having him believe my relationship with Arthur was so cozy and partially because I didn’t want him to think he had the exclusive rights to infidelity. “I was visiting a friend,” I said, as ambiguously as possible.

  He looked over his shoulder at me as he unscrewed the cap on the vodka bottle. “A friend?”

  “Something like that. You and I probably have a lot more in common than you’d like to think.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “Tell me about . . . him, I suppose, isn’t it?”

  I began a rambling, incoherent description of my flight to New York two days earlier. When I got to the point of actually mentioning Jeffrey, loyalty to Arthur took over. “Look,” I said, “let’s not get into it. It’s too complicated, and besides, it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Not to me, but I can think of at least one person it might make a difference to. Especially if you and Arthur are buying a house together. You’re not backing out of that, are you?” He handed me my drink.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I have to live somewhere.”

  “Good. Just plain, simple settling down with someone looks awfully good to me right now. And I might as well tell you, Pat, I slipped up and mentioned the house when I was talking with your mother. I wanted to have something hopeful to say to her, and that was the first thing that sprang to mind. They would have found out sooner or later.”

  “Don’t bother getting defensive, Tony. I know all about it, and I’m in no position to complain. I wouldn’t think of complaining and jeopardizing our beautiful new friendship.”

  The words sounded a good deal more harsh and sarcastic than I’d intended, but I didn’t know how to take them back.

  “Don’t make jokes,” Tony said. “It means a lot to me. I haven’t always been a good friend to you when you needed one. Vivian pointed that out to me. So I especially appreciate all the help you’ve been.”

  His voice was so quietly, even grimly sincere, it seemed like as good a time as any to start confessing my own slips.

  “I’m afraid I might have been more help than you bargained for. The fact is, I told your parents about Vivian.”

  Tony took a seat in the chair by the window and calmly put his glass on the floor.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “At least I think it was an accident. Anyway, I don’t know, but I told them.”

  “You told them about Vivian,” he said, as if he was trying to understand what the words meant. He pushed the sleeves of his shirt up almost to his biceps. “What did they do?”

  “The usual. They blamed each other and started fighting.”

  He shook his head and took a long drink of his Bloody Mary. “Have you ever heard of anything sadder in your life than those two?”

  “You’re not angry?”

  He shrugged it off as if it was of little importance. “In some ways I suppose it’s easier than me telling them myself. Your father must be going nuts. Taking it out on her, I’ll bet.”

  “Probably.”

  “She’s taking it out on him.”

  “Probably.”

  “What a life. As if I don’t have enough on my mind, I have to worry about them, too. I thought moving out to Chicago would help. I guess I should have kept going
. Hawaii, maybe. Let’s face it, Patrick: I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m not saying I’d change anything, but Vivian’s turned my life upside down. She’s either the best thing that ever happened to me or the worst.”

  “She seems nice,” I said, a comment so hopelessly bland, Tony merely frowned.

  “I’ve even started to question my job. I’m down here for two weeks trying to eliminate half the staff of an insurance company out in Queens. I spent three days in one office going over some lady’s job with her, trying to figure out what the fuck it is she’s been doing forty hours a week every week for the past twenty years. ‘Writing reports,’ she tells me. It turns out she’s been writing a meaningless daily report on an insignificant procedural detail and mailing it off to a person at the home office in Detroit who’s been dead since 1967. Finding that kind of dead wood and getting rid of her usually makes my day. Like cleaning the grout in the bathroom. But this time I couldn’t do it. She’s two years away from retirement. I let the poor slob slide by. ‘Keep up the good work,’ I told her. I must be going soft.”

  He looked down and felt his stomach, possibly to see how soft he was getting. I wanted to say something reassuring, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t really looking for comfort. Part of what was good about his relationship with Vivian was that it was making him squirm. He just had to have faith it would come out all right in the end.

  We sat in silence, and I watched the clouds drift across the clear sky in the window behind him and played with the empty champagne bottle.

  “You know,” Tony finally said, “I wish Ryan was here. Do you get to see much of him?”

  I told him I’d invited Ryan to dinner, although I didn’t mention Sharon, since Tony had always taken a grim view of her.

  “If Ryan was here, we’d do some tourist crap like go to the Statue of Liberty or take a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan. It might be fun.”

  I reminded him that Ryan was prone to motion sickness.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “That wife of his put the idea in his head because she didn’t want him going out fishing with that friend of his that has the boat, the retarded one. Ryan always had the strongest stomach of the bunch of us. He should have been a nurse. Either that or a cook in some place like a nursing home or a hospital for hopelessly deformed children. He’s always happiest taking care of people. Remember the diet?”

  “The diet” was one of the more memorable events of our childhood, although we rarely spoke about it.

  When I was about eight, my father began suffering the ill health that was to plague him ever since. He came home from a series of hospital tests and announced that he had high blood pressure. “The doctor told me it’s probably your cooking that’s killing me,” he said to Rita.

  My mother was doubtful. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  He tossed a piece of paper at her that outlined a complicated program of dietary rules. “I have to follow this,” he said, “assuming I want to live.”

  For the next few weeks, religiously, he kept to a regimen of salt-and fat-restricted meals, which my mother grudgingly cooked for him. His diet became the sole topic of his conversation. Everyone who came into the store was treated to a detailed description of his daily intake and the willpower he was exerting in following his doctor’s orders. Congratulations rolled in, and he began to enjoy a certain self-righteous martyrdom.

  I suppose it was the praise that finally set Rita off and made her go on the same diet. To do him one better, she decided to limit her intake even more. It became a kind of contest between them to see who could be the purest and eat the least. They both began to lose weight; after two weeks they were gaunt. The dinner table conversation grew unbearably tense, my father smoking and my mother drinking cup after cup of black coffee, each proclaiming an absence of hunger and no interest in food. The meals my mother prepared for the rest of us grew increasingly Spartan, until we were practically living on Pepsi and saltines.

  Then late one afternoon, I came home and the whole house smelled of roasting meat. Ryan, who was about thirteen, was standing in the kitchen, tearing up lettuce and whistling. That night he brought an immense pot roast to the table and carved thick slabs for himself and Tony and me, and we ate voraciously. My mother burst into tears and started to mumble incoherent apologies. Both she and my father broke their fast. “The diet” was never mentioned by either one of them again. Ryan’s pot roast was such a success, he cooked the family meals regularly until he married.

  Tony looked out the hotel window mournfully. “When you come down to it, we owe Ryan a lot. He was always taking care of us when we were kids. Now his life has turned to shit, down in the cellar.”

  “And getting worse,” I said. “His wife wants a divorce.”

  “That’s good news! I never liked that little bitch. Who’d guess that someone that short could be that pushy?”

  “That isn’t the point. Ryan loves her. He’s all broken up about this. It’s not as if he’s out meeting new people all the time.”

  “I just had a crazy thought, Patrick. You don’t think he and Loreen . . .”

  “Do yourself a favor and don’t finish that sentence.”

  “You’re right; that would be too much to hope for. Now that you’ve met Vivian, Pat, now that you’ve met her, do you blame me?”

  “But, Tony,” I said, “I never did.”

  Part

  • • •

  4

  Nineteen

  As soon as I returned to Cambridge, Arthur began reminding me, in a number of subtle ways, about the mortgage. I kept finding loan application forms, ads for mortgage companies, Arthur’s bankbook, or the real estate section of the newspaper on the kitchen counter, on the floor of the bathroom, on top of the stereo, and in other places where ordinarily he didn’t leave things. It wasn’t Arthur’s way to make direct demands.

  I was feeling virtuous that my days of fooling around with Jeffrey were at an end, so I didn’t see any need to rush. Every day, I carried the papers to work in my knapsack, but each time I took them out, to read through the fine print, I’d develop such a severe case of eyestrain, I had to put them aside.

  Then one night at the beginning of the second week in April, I came home from the gym while Arthur was out for his evening walk. I rarely had the place to myself at that hour, and I tossed my body onto the sofa, drinking in the luxury of being temporarily alone. Very quickly, however, I made the mistake of using my solitude to wander around the apartment, following a trail of clues Arthur had left behind and trying to piece together his evening. A roasting pan was soaking in the kitchen sink, filled with soapy water and grease, and on the counter was a plate of chicken, broccoli, carrots, and mashed potatoes, all set for me to pop in the oven and reheat. On top of the desk in the living room was a stack of envelopes and an open checkbook. He’d obviously spent a substantial amount of time writing checks to worthy causes and paying off bills, some of them mine. There was a pile of literature from Amnesty International on the arm of the sofa and a copy of The Magic Mountain spread open on the floor, with corrections of the translation he’d penciled into the margins years earlier.

  Beside this tome was a pad of legal paper, on which Arthur had sketched a floor plan of the yellow house. In each of the rooms, he indicated where various pieces of furniture would go—brown sofa, red chair, glass-fronted bookcase. The smallest of the three bedrooms he’d designated as “P.’s Place.” This box he’d crowded with amusing little drawings of crucifixes, candles, and stick figures with halos over their heads. Everything was roughly sketched, but he’d clearly spent a lot of time decorating the room that was to be my study.

  I might have been able to ignore the indications of Arthur’s goodwill, kindness, generosity, intelligence, and optimism scattered all over the apartment—the chicken dinner, the charitable contributions, the reading material on the plight of the exploited multitudes, the improved Thomas Mann—but I couldn’t get
past that lovingly drawn depiction of my room, with all its tacky religious paraphernalia. It struck me as so unthinkably tender, I collapsed back onto the sofa and spent the next hour reliving the day Arthur and I had met, exactly the kind of fond, maudlin ruminating I usually manage to avoid. The miserable result was that by the time Arthur came home from his walk, I was sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen humming “When first my old, old love I knew” from Trial by Jury and filling out the mortgage application.

  * * *

  Arthur and I had met six years earlier at a cookout, late in the afternoon on a hot Sunday at the end of June.

  I spent the week before that fateful cookout shut up in my room in the turret on the top floor of Sharon’s house, nursing a mean case of poison ivy. I have no idea where I got it—I’d never had it before and haven’t had it since—but after the last day of school that year, I broke out in a shockingly ugly rash that covered my body from my hairline to my ankles. I was so miserably uncomfortable, and so embarrassed about my appearance, that I took to my bed for six days, moving only enough to turn the pages of a nine-hundred-page novel I was reading about sex in suburbia. Sharon initially indulged me by carrying her TV and video machine up to my bedroom and bringing home tapes after work. But by the Sunday of the cookout, she was disgusted with my malingering. Her theory was that my poison ivy was psychosomatically induced—a manifestation of my doubts about teaching, a physical collapse to celebrate the end of classes.

  She was possibly right, but school was only part of the problem. I was also recovering from a period of foolish romantic entanglements that were typical of the kinds of relationships I kept falling into in my early twenties.

  I had only one serious lover before Arthur. He was Warren, a generous, opinionated bully I met shortly after moving to Boston. He designed computer programs for a living, but it soon became apparent to me that he was, at heart, a frustrated psychiatrist. The sentence he uttered most often in the endless year we were involved was: “Sure that’s what you said, Patrick; now let me tell you what you meant.” I was foolish and narcissistic enough to always listen to his interpretations and believe them. Worse still, I was flattered by his frantic jealousy. My only defense is that I was young. It took me several years of my own romantic betrayals to figure out that jealous accusations of infidelity are most often thinly veiled confessions of the same. Warren was a short man, so aggressively homely he was attractive. I don’t know how to describe his face except to say that it looked as if someone had stuck a lot of mismatched features onto a yam, glued a clump of hair on top, thrown his hands up in disgust, and said, “Ah, to hell with it; it’ll have to do.” But what he lacked in beauty, Warren made up for in swaggering, self-assured sexual energy, which I, and an astonishing number of other fools, found irresistible.