Warren and I had one of those embattled relationships that inexperienced twenty-two-year-olds, jaded forty-year-olds, and, for all I know, computer programmers of any age are likely to mistake for true love. It consisted mainly of a lot of angry phone calls, shouting and name-calling sessions, biweekly breakups followed by thrilling reconciliations. We had no shared interests—for an entire year I avoided asking what a data base was, for fear he’d tell me—except a fondness for arguing.
Still, when Warren decided to be charming, it was easy to forget he was ever anything else, and the relationship might have gone on for some time if he hadn’t moved to Texas, a state with a climate I could never tolerate.
After Warren, I began a series of brief, depressing involvements with people I didn’t really know and wasn’t all that fond of. These usually dragged through a month or two of tense, quiet dinners, long, boring walks, and unhappy mornings waking up beside someone I might or might not ever see again, depending on whether one or the other of us found something better to do before the upcoming Saturday night.
The last of these entanglements was a three-month-long parody of romantic love with a nonentity whose name I could never remember. This meaningful relationship ended when I phoned him one night, got a busy signal, and decided he wasn’t worth the effort of redialing. The feeling was obviously mutual, as I never heard from him again. I’d been more remorseful about setting mousetraps than I was about ending it with what’s-his-name, but I was nearly overwhelmed by the pointlessness of the whole three months I wasted on him. It made me realize how desperate I was for the illusion of love.
A few weeks later, I developed poison ivy and went on strike.
On the Sunday of the cookout, Sharon threatened that if I didn’t get out of bed and go with her, she’d take back her TV. So I smeared a layer of calamine lotion, put on long pants and a T-shirt, and went off.
The cookout was in Cambridgeport, in the backyard of a married couple Sharon had recently sent trekking in Nepal. He was a corporate lawyer, and she had started a company that gave expensive seminars in “Writing” to illiterate businessmen. They were the usual Cambridge success story: a couple of ex-radicals who had grown tired of pounding the pavements in peasant blouses and love beads and had plunged into the world of capital gains and designer shower curtains with stunning enthusiasm.
When I was growing up, Cambridge was a city filled with smoky coffeehouses, folksingers, revival movie theaters, and cheap rooming houses where hippies slept dormitory-style on mattresses on the floor. Every disparaging comment about the place I ever heard from my parents only strengthened my determination to live there. But by the time I did, things had changed. The rooming houses were replaced with hundred-dollar-a-night hotels, and the folksingers were either cleaned up and recording for a major label or dressed in suits and selling software in the suburbs. As for the hippies, most of them were standing around that landscaped backyard, sipping Campari.
“I think I’ll sit out in the car,” I told Sharon. We walked through the gate and were immediately crushed by a mob of people carrying infants in expensive papoose packs. Outdoor speakers were blasting reggae (the only safe choice for all-white, politically correct gatherings), and there was a table set up against the back fence, with bowls of guacamole and other highly spiced foods from a variety of hot third world countries.
“You don’t think I belong here, do you?” Sharon asked. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in the direction of a baby. “Just mingle for half an hour and then we’ll leave, I promise.”
She was ushered off by someone who wanted to tell her about his thrilling trip to Ecuador, and I knew we were in for the long haul. I went to sit in a folding chair set in the shade of a hedge of rosebushes. If I hadn’t already been convinced that my appearance was frightening, the treatment I received at the party would have done the trick. Kids kept coming up to me and staring with their mouths open, until their parents rushed over and carried them off.
From my shady seat, I had a clear view of the gate leading from the street to the yard. I was keeping count of the number of babies being hauled in, a sure sign of the population crisis. Then I noticed Arthur, or rather a tall, balding man with strikingly large ears, wearing a peculiar pair of sunglasses with tiny round lenses. Unlike the dozen or so people who’d come in in the time I’d been watching, he had a great deal of difficulty opening the gate, a fact I found especially odd since all the task required was a simple push. When he finally stumbled in, he looked around in confusion, as if he didn’t know anyone there or had expected to find a lawn sale. Wearing a pair of baggy khaki shorts that came down below his knees and a long-sleeved white shirt, he was standing with a slight stoop, almost as if he was apologizing for his height. There was something in his posture and perplexed expression that gave him a comical appearance I liked immediately.
A woman followed him into the yard, spoke to him briefly, handed over the baby she was carrying, and went into the crowd, calling out boisterous hellos. Arthur began to bounce the baby in his arms as he made his way over to the empty seat beside me. He sat down, cooing and clucking.
“Sweet, isn’t he?” he asked, smiling at me.
The baby, who was about seven months old, had a beautifully delicate face but was wearing a bored, detached expression, as if he might have preferred to be at home reading Henry James. He was dressed in a pink bonnet trimmed in white lace, a rose sundress, and frilly white ankle socks. “What’s his name?” The “his” stuck in my throat.
“Robin,” Arthur cooed. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t your name Robin?”
This was a baby headed for a gender crisis if ever I’d seen one: girl’s clothes and an androgynous name. I could imagine the way they’d decorated his bedroom. But Arthur was staring at him with such open adoration, I was touched. “My name’s Arthur, by the way. Arthur Egger.”
I introduced myself, and to my amazement, Arthur shifted the baby to his left shoulder and stuck out his hand. It seemed unnecessarily generous, considering my condition.
“I hate to ask you this,” he said, “but would you mind holding little Robin here for a second. I have to take off these sunglasses. I don’t like to wear sunglasses in the shade. Eyestrain.”
I took Robin into my arms, and he gazed at me suspiciously, as if he was trying to figure out what, exactly, I was. Fortunately, he was too well behaved to complain. Arthur put his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and looked at me with his enormous, kind brown eyes. He had a bemused expression, a gentle so-what’s-new look I’d later learn was as close as he ever came to flirting. I passed Robin back, and he said, “Boy, he’s heavier than you’d think, isn’t he? It’s a good thing I saw my chiropractor this week.”
“Back problems?” I asked. I like to discover the weaknesses in people I find appealing.
“Originally I was seeing him for neck problems. But now we’re working on my back and knees. Lately, though, my ankles seem to be bothering me.”
“Ah, well.” A clear case of hypochondria if ever I’d heard one, and a pretty bad one, too. “Soon it’ll be your toes, and then that should be the end of it, no?”
“He’s making fun of us, Robin.”
I was making fun of Arthur, but I’d have loved to take on Robin.
Arthur told me he’d just finished law school at Boston University and was supposed to be spending the summer studying for the bar exam. “But so far, all I’ve done is read Dickens. Have you read Bleak House?”
Hesitantly, I confessed I hadn’t. I was relieved to see he wasn’t put off by my ignorance. (While Arthur was fairly proud of his intelligence, he had an astonishing tolerance for stupidity in others. Many of his friends were, like me, intellectual lightweights who gathered at his feet, entranced by the breadth of his knowledge and the scope of his reading.) He began discussing the book with such genuine fondness and unpretentious delight—almost as if the author and most of the characters were close friends—that I was enthralled. He made me feel I was a ge
nius for not having read the novel; now I had all the pleasure of reading it for the first time still in front of me. When I told him I taught school, he became enthusiastic and complimentary, and suggested a number of books for my students. I was drawn to him, baby, wife, and all. He exuded some air of calm even as he shifted Robin from shoulder to shoulder, gurgled and made faces, and went without a pause from discussing Dickens and Jane Austen to talking incomprehensible baby babble. He was lightly flushed from the heat and looked completely self-confident in a shy, casual way I admired enormously.
Finally, Robin’s mother came over and lifted him out of Arthur’s arms. “Thanks for holding her,” she said. “You don’t know how much trouble you saved me. Imagine trying to work this crowd with a baby. She’s an angel, isn’t she?”
“She?” Arthur looked amazed. “I thought you said he.”
“Dressed like this?” Robin had turned around in her mother’s arms and was looking wistfully at Arthur, reaching out her pudgy hands.
“I guess I didn’t notice,” Arthur said. “I just liked holding him. Her.”
When the woman had wandered off, Arthur explained that the mother, whom he’d never met before, had approached him and asked him to hold her baby for half an hour. He shrugged, modest but obviously pleased with himself. “She said I looked trustworthy.”
“I suppose this is the kind of thing that happens to you all the time, people trusting you with their kids, their wallets, their secrets?”
“I wouldn’t say all the time. But it happens.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t you trust me?”
I thought about it for a moment and decided he was one of the most trustworthy people I’d ever met. “I’m not sure what I have to trust you with,” I said.
He looked at me oddly, as if he was surprised or perhaps distressed by my comment, one that I’d intended flirtatiously. It’s relatively easy for me to flirt with people I assume to be disinterested, unavailable, or repulsed. I took his look as a sign that he was getting bored with my company and decided to go on the offensive. I’ve found it often helps to start insulting someone when he’s obviously wearying of you.
I asked him who in this dreary crowd he knew. The hosts were his neighbors, he told me, and they’d invited him. But only out of pity because his wife had recently divorced him.
I pointed out Sharon, who was holding court with a crowd of laughing people on the far side of the lawn. She was standing in a flower bed, crushing petunias beneath her sandals. I told him we were housemates. “I’ll introduce you,” I said. “She knows lots of people to fix you up with.”
Arthur gave me another of his odd, questioning looks, as if he wasn’t quite sure what I meant, and then our conversation died. He sat calmly, with his hands folded in his lap and a bemused look on his face. It was just after six, that still, scorching time of the day when the sun seems to blaze with a final show of intensity. The music had stopped, and the crowd in the yard had begun to thin. The remaining guests looked limp, despondent, resigned to the heat. I felt suddenly relaxed, as if Arthur and I were set apart from the remains of the crowd, floating in the cool shade of the rosebushes. I don’t know how long we sat in silence—probably no more than fifteen minutes—but in that time, I felt a kind of brotherly intimacy with him. Then there was a burst of wild laughter from inside the house. Two sunburned children in matching Day-Glo orange outfits ran across the lawn, someone turned on the music again, and the spell was broken. By the time Sharon came to announce she was ready to leave, I was hesitant to go.
“In case you were wondering,” I told him, “this is poison ivy. I don’t usually look like this.”
He cocked his head to one side and smiled vaguely.
“This rash,” I said, pointing. “It’s poison ivy.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I guess I didn’t really notice.”
I should have taken all the things I liked about Arthur as warning signs—his vagueness, his complete lack of interest in physical appearances, his hypochondria. But what did I know? I was charmed by him, by his calm and sincerity and some air of innocence I couldn’t quite pinpoint. One week later, I made dinner for Arthur and a woman who’d briefly lived in Sharon’s house following her divorce. I thought the evening went remarkably well; the two of them left together, and I was fairly certain I had a matchmaking career ahead of me. When Arthur returned the invitation, I assumed Tina would be there, tossing the salad. But it was just the two of us. After an awkward, silent dinner, he made an elaborately pained confession about the reason for his divorce and then knocked over a lamp as he made an awkward lunge in my direction.
The first time we were having sex, Arthur’s phone rang. He apologized, got out of bed, and spent fifteen minutes earnestly answering questions from a telemarketing company about which brand of frozen vegetables he preferred. When he got back into bed, he seemed confused, as if he couldn’t remember what we’d been doing.
I suppose neither one of us was ever passionately attracted to the other, which, at least at the beginning, didn’t seem to matter so much. I liked Arthur. I liked him passionately. I admired him passionately. I had a passionate desire to please such a kind and admirable person. I suppose I must have figured that if I added it all up, the grand total would equal love.
The Peter Principle—the theory which contends that employees in a hierarchy are promoted until they’re in a position in which they’re incompetent—may or may not have validity in the business world, but it certainly applies to love relations. Arthur and I should have stayed in that patch of shade by the rosebushes forever, awkwardly flirting with each other and falling prey to misunderstandings and lost opportunities. Instead we moved on to dinner dates, sex, cohabitation, mutual dependency, with an inevitability that took on a life of its own.
Now we were negotiating buying a house together. Jeffrey was right: I did want a home, some safe and reliable shelter from heat and disease and the madness of the whole dying world. I suppose what I was most confused about was how much I was willing to pay for it.
Twenty
Sometime in that second week in April, the weather took a decided turn for the worse, and spring began to strangle the East Coast. We had a dose of unseasonable weather, which the TV meteorologists were euphemistically referring to as a “warming trend.” I discovered that if I switched the stations at exactly the right moment, I could catch the weather report on all three local networks. One moronic weatherman outdid the next, smiling and rhapsodizing about what was clearly an environmental crisis. “Let’s all get out there and enjoy the sun!” was the general attitude.
TV meteorologists have always struck me as a particularly insipid breed, with their apologies for each passing rain shower, even in the middle of a drought, and their apparent assumptions that everyone worships the sun, that big carcinogen in the sky. I called the TV stations to complain, but got surprisingly little response. One person I spoke with had the audacity to explain that normal temperatures are determined on the basis of thirty-year averages; once the greenhouse eighties were averaged in, our current heat wave would be nothing out of the ordinary. “In other words,” he said cheerfully, “this is perfectly normal weather.”
Arthur set up the furniture on the back porch, and we took to eating breakfast and dinner there on especially mild days. One Tuesday morning, we were sitting in the balmy breeze drinking coffee, going through our newspaper-scanning routine. I was summarizing a recent story about a wholesome, happily married, devoutly religious, outspokenly right-wing suburban minister who’d been arrested on child molestation charges. It was a pretty run-of-the-mill item, which I was forced to embellish with a few invented lurid details. I looked up at Arthur in the middle of a riff about sex in the sacristy and saw, in the bright morning sunlight, that the sparse hair around his temples and over his big ears was peppered with gray. I’d never noticed this before, and I was so shocked I dropped the paper. The graying was far from unattractive; if anything, it made for a particularly dashing effect. What stu
nned me was the realization that Arthur was visibly aging after all.
He had on the cotton sweater I’d bought him in New York after leaving Tony’s hotel. (Because Jeffrey and I were calling it quits, my original plan to go to Barney’s had seemed beyond the call of duty, and I’d stopped instead at a street vendor in Times Square and bought this “Ralph Lauren Original” for seven dollars.) It was a bright shade of blue, which seemed to be draining his complexion of color. On closer inspection of his face, it appeared that Arthur’s chin might be sagging, too. I couldn’t understand why I’d never seen these developments before. Even now, the hair and the chin looked to me more like disguises than actual physical changes.
He smiled at me with his wide, kind smile and cocked his head to the side inquiringly. Shaken, I picked up the newspaper and went on with my report. It wasn’t until later in the day, when I was having lunch with Sharon, that I was stopped short by the realization that I, too, had obviously aged in the time I’d known him, had deteriorated physically and become more bitter and pessimistic as well. I realized that no one else would ever see that younger person, and if Arthur and I separated, I’d lose that part of myself forever.
The Easy Way Out Page 17