The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  “If you’d let me show you how to do it,” Ryan shouted, “I’d show you.”

  My father gave him a shove. “Keep your hands off it. You’ll break it, and there goes the whole investment.”

  “Don’t treat him like a child, Jimmy. It’s possible he knows how to work it.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  They all looked up together.

  “A miracle,” my father said, “just when we needed it.”

  “Don’t tell me you got fired,” Rita said.

  “Fired?”

  “Well, what else would you be doing here in the middle of the day?”

  Ryan straightened up, grinning. He brushed a hank of hair off his forehead and hiked up his pants. “Did Sharon tell you we’re going to a Celtics game tomorrow night?”

  “As if Ryan isn’t having enough problems right now, he needs to start going to basketball games with that woman. I didn’t know they allowed bare feet in the Boston Garden.”

  “Sandals,” I corrected.

  “Bare feet, sandals. You can still see the toes, which is what I find so attractive. I don’t suppose you know anything about cash registers, Patrick. They just delivered this one, and we can’t figure out how to open it.”

  “Isn’t there a manual? Didn’t they tell you how to use the thing?” I was sometimes exasperated by their inability to deal with the modern world, possibly because I was so bad at it myself.

  “Some baldy came in here this morning and spent two hours giving a lecture,” my father said. “Your mother went into a coma after one minute, and I fell asleep after two. The machine does everything except what you want it to. Your mother’s idea, by the way. What we need it for, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “For the future, Jimmy. Maybe you’ve heard of the future, progress, advancement? Well, welcome to the eighties, dear, or the nineties, or whatever decade this is.”

  “So what are you doing out here anyway, Pat?” Ryan asked. “You want a beer? Take your jacket off and relax.”

  I turned down the beer and tossed my jacket onto the glass counter. The jacket was black linen, a little too stylish for me, but I’d found it on sale at a used-clothing store and bought it, rationalizing that I needed a new image. Seeing it on the counter, next to all those ugly ties and hideous polyester shirts that were my heritage, I felt embarrassed for wearing it into the store.

  “I don’t like the look on your face,” Rita said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got bad news.”

  “I’m going to try and be very rational,” I said.

  “Well, don’t go out on a limb for our sakes, dear.”

  I looked over at my parents and my older brother, huddled around the new cash register. Ryan was randomly pecking at the keys on the register, and every time he hit one, it beeped, as if to say, “Keep your hands off.” My father had on a strikingly ugly suit, and the collar of his shirt was hanging loose around his scrawny neck. What had been anger at their machinations all morning suddenly turned into uncertainty. But as I’d driven all that way and had already taken the afternoon off, I started in:

  “You have to stop pushing this wedding. I told you Tony is in love with someone else. Loreen is a wreck, and she’s going to get hurt. She’s hurt already. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a nervous breakdown. She came to the agency today and asked me if something was wrong.”

  “What did you say?” my father asked.

  “I told her everything was fine, that Tony was overworked. I lied, in other words.”

  “At least you did something right,” my father said. “It sounds true enough to me. Tony is overworked. And Loreen was at the house two weeks ago, and she looked fine. Did any of the rest of you think Loreen looked like she was ready for the nuthouse?”

  “It’s this thing that’s going to send me to the mental hospital,” Ryan said. “It beeps every time I hit a button.”

  “And furthermore,” my father said, “as far as I know, Tony hasn’t asked anyone to cancel any wedding plans. So, in other words, the groom is going through with the marriage, the bride is going through with the marriage, and so are the best man and the maid of honor, her parents, your mother and me, assuming we both live, the ushers, the bridesmaids, the priest, the altar boys, the photographer, the band, and the chump who’s serving the roast beef at the reception.”

  “I told you they were serving chicken,” my mother said. “I talk and talk and talk, and he never listens to a word I say. I don’t know why I bother; he never was a listener.”

  Ryan looked perplexed by this irrelevant outburst, but my father merely ignored it and went on. “So everyone is going through with the damned thing except Patrick. And excuse me for saying so, Pat, but if it comes to that, your presence is not one hundred percent essential to the event.”

  “So you don’t care that Tony is marrying someone he isn’t really in love with?” I asked.

  “He’s marrying someone he got engaged to,” my father said. “Beyond that, I really wouldn’t know.”

  Quietly, my mother said, “And let’s hope, Patrick, for everyone’s sake, that you don’t know anything beyond that, either.” She pulled her half-glasses out of the breast pocket of her sport jacket, adjusted them on the tip of her nose, and peered down at the cash register. The tone of distress in her voice silenced me.

  My father was scrutinizing me closely. He had a pen between his fingers, which he was holding as if it were a cigarette, unconsciously revealing his constant longing for his old habit. “What are you doing out of work in the middle of the day?” he asked me. “Don’t forget they’re damned nice to you at that job.”

  My older brother leapt to my defense. “Don’t make it sound like they’re doing him a favor by keeping him on. They pay him a so-so salary, and he works hard despite what he tells you.”

  “Oh, really?” my father asked. “And I suppose you heard all this from that Sharon?”

  “Among other things.”

  The door opened, and a tall woman in a long green coat entered the store. She stood at the front, looking around uncertainly, and for a fleeting moment I saw the catastrophic mess of the place through her eyes. Surely my parents could be keeping things a little neater and running them more efficiently. It hadn’t mattered so much years earlier, but now people were more accustomed to the sterile organization of shopping malls and franchises.

  “Is she on stilts,” my father asked, “or is that an optical illusion?”

  “She’s not that tall, Jimmy. Go see if you can help her, Patrick, while we figure this thing out. If she wants to pay cash, tell her to go somewhere else.”

  The woman, who did tower over me, was looking for a suit for her husband, something he could wear to her nephew’s wedding and then use for less formal events. I asked her a few relevant questions and then examined her own outfit carefully. In a suburban men’s store, it’s the taste of the wife or girlfriend that really counts; rarely will a man admit to having an opinion on what he’s wearing, and even then the woman makes the final decision. Shopping is not a manly pursuit. I pushed through the racks as if I were looking for a particular item and finally pulled out a gray pin-striped suit in light wool. I didn’t have a clue how long it had been in the store, but it was a smart, standard cut, reasonably priced, and if there were moth holes in it, at least they weren’t immediately visible. The woman was dressed in a late-sixties, Republican-cloth-coat getup, so I pointed out the quality of the suit’s material, its enduring, conservative lines, and the bargain price. If she’d spoken of her husband with any hint of sexual boasting (“His shoulders are so broad, I can’t find anything to fit him”), I’d have brushed down the front of the pants to plant a subliminal message. With men, the trick was to act as bored and nonchalant as possible, take an “Aw, what the hell, make your wife happy and buy the frigging thing” attitude, and then knock ten dollars off the ticket price as an act of wholesome male bonding.

  The woman seemed interested and asked if I could put the suit aside
until she brought her husband in. I told her we could hold it for twenty-four hours, neglecting to mention that we’d probably been holding it for a decade. I hung the thing up behind the cash register and told Ryan to keep an eye out for the woman’s return.

  Rita said, “‘I’ll be back with my husband’ translates into: ‘I wouldn’t buy this rag if it was the last piece of clothing on the planet.’ ”

  “I think she liked it.”

  “Well, you always were a good salesman, which is why I think you should come work for us, which also happens to be the most decent thing you could do. . . .”

  She began to rattle off her standard speech about why I should come to work at the store, but there was a good deal more nervous chatter in it than conviction. I heard some of what she was saying, but not all. My dealings with the tall customer had left me feeling refreshed, almost as if I’d temporarily earned back some family position I hadn’t had for years. My determination to say something helpful on my brother’s behalf strengthened, until finally I cut Rita off.

  “You have to stop pressuring Tony to get married,” I said. “You’re ruining his life and Loreen’s as well.” I stood back from the counter, and without really looking at anyone, told them about Loreen’s visit, and how, if we were on the subject of decency, it was worth mentioning that setting up Loreen in a loveless marriage was not the decent thing to do. “What do you think their life together is going to be like?”

  “I suppose you know?” my father asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I can imagine.” And then, aloud, I did try to imagine it, Tony waking up every morning next to someone he didn’t love, growing resentful and hostile, thinking of the opportunity he’d missed and the love he’d wasted, all for the sake of fulfilling an obligation that he never should have had in the first place. And if they honestly believed Tony deserved the punishment, then what about Loreen? She was the innocent bystander here, blissfully walking into a trap that was going to keep her a prisoner for years.

  “She’ll go through with the wedding,” I said, “even though she knows something’s wrong, because she loves Tony, but every day she’ll wake up, knowing something’s missing from her life, that there’s nothing but emptiness under all the emptiness. She’ll be devoured by longing for something genuine, love or passion or a kiss that’s a kiss, knowing all along she’s never going to get it from her husband.

  “They’ll buy a house and have some kids, and she’ll take up shopping or drinking or compulsive TV-watching, trying to fill in the gaps, knowing she’s made a horrible mistake but getting less and less able to do anything about it, to break free, start all over.” I felt as if something inside me had snapped, and I easily could have gone on this way for hours, describing the life of misery that I imagined for Tony and Loreen.

  Eventually, of course, I had to stop to catch my breath, and when I did, I realized that my confused and misguided soliloquy had lasted too long already. I felt ridiculous, as if I’d been overheard talking in my sleep. Thinking that it was time to apologize or simply leave, I reached over to pick up my jacket and caught a glimpse of my mother. Her face was ashen, and her lips were trembling, and her eyes, peering out over the tops of her half-glasses, were filled with tears. She cried almost as infrequently as I did, and I hated to think that my outburst might have made her so unhappy. I turned away nervously.

  As I was slipping on my jacket, I saw very suddenly and very plainly that I hadn’t been talking about Tony and Loreen at all. The whole long, rambling speech had been a thinly veiled description of what I’d observed and imagined about my parents’ marriage, about the misery of their lives together and the unhappiness of their day-to-day existence.

  Ryan was staring at me with a hard, admonishing gaze, and my father was watching my mother very closely, waiting for the dam to burst.

  I mumbled an apology, a hasty “I’m sorry,” and my father said, “I should think you would be.”

  He walked over to my mother, and with more tenderness than I could remember ever hearing in his voice, he said, “I think the lecture is over, Rita. Let’s go to that dump around the corner and get a late lunch.” He draped a cardigan sweater over her shoulders. Rita took off her glasses, smoothed back the stiff contours of her hairdo, gathered up her purse, and headed down the center aisle of the store. My father hobbled after her, a wraithlike figure held together by keloids and covered up with a cheap suit.

  * * *

  Once the door had swung closed and dusty silence had settled over the store again, Ryan shook his head and said, “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “I don’t know what you think your duty is here, but whatever it is, I’d say you went beyond the call of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t even know what I was saying until I’d stopped.”

  “I guess that happens sometimes.”

  He was still playing with the cash register, tapping at the keys, apparently with more success now, as the thing had stopped beeping. There was a look of confidence on his face, and without turning away from his task, he told me he’d enjoyed the dinner.

  “I’m glad you liked Sharon.”

  “She’s a nice kid.”

  When, I wondered, was the last time someone had referred to Sharon as a kid? “Pretty,” I said, testing him, “don’t you think?”

  “Pretty eyes. Not contact lenses, are they? I didn’t think so; she doesn’t seem like the type. I think I’ve almost got this wrapped up here.” He hit a few more keys on the register and stood back as the cash drawer sprang open.

  “Why didn’t you do that earlier,” I said, “if you knew how to open it?”

  He shrugged and put on a blue windbreaker. “Gave your parents something to think about this morning. Let’s close up shop for a few minutes. Three hours in this place, and your eyes start to cross.”

  * * *

  The buildings in the center of town had either been abandoned, which added an air of desperation to the streets, or been given a budget face-lift with new bricks and larger windows, which was even more grim. It had been years since I’d walked these streets with Ryan, probably when we were in high school, and as I trudged along beside him, I felt an odd kind of regret about all the time that had passed with so little communication between us. Ryan was the first person in my family I’d told I was gay. He and I went for a drive after supper one night when I was home from college on vacation, and I mentioned it to him in a casual, offhand way. I suppose I chose to tell him first because I knew he wouldn’t be upset, or at least wouldn’t let on if he was. When he reacted with his typical kindness and his concern for nothing more than my happiness, I think I was a little disappointed. Perhaps I’d wanted to try out my defensive arguments on him. In any case, I never thanked him for being so understanding at a time when I needed him to be, and of course it was too late to do it now. Ryan often suffered from his abundance of kindness.

  Aside from the martial arts studios, the only businesses flourishing in town were the twenty-four-hour convenience stores and the fast-food outlets, and the streets were filthy with refuse from these: Styrofoam cups and plastic bags and cellophane wrappers and all manner of garish, unnecessary cardboard and paper wrapping. We walked along in silence, until Ryan suggested we go into a fast-food restaurant and get some coffee. We took seats in a plastic booth and drank out of our Styrofoam cups, and Ryan said to me, “As your older brother, Patrick, I have a piece of advice for you: Stay out of this wedding. Mind your own business and look at your own life. I’m not so interested in all the details, but I think you should try to take a bit more charge of your own problems. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”

  “The world is full of good ideas,” I said. “That’s what’s so sad, Ryan.”

  Part

  • • •

  5

  Twenty-four

  Arthur and Beatrice met when they were in college, were married shortl
y after graduation, and might have stayed together for a lifetime of connubial bliss if it hadn’t been for Beatrice’s realization and immediate acceptance of the fact that her husband was a homosexual. Beatrice had abundant insight and boundless compassion and didn’t flaunt either as a sign of her moral superiority. When she spelled it all out for Arthur, he was shocked, not that he had reason to be; sometime in graduate school, years before Beatrice’s revelation, he’d begun wandering through the reeds at the Fenway, taking immensely long breaks in certain bathrooms at Lamont Library, and spending more than a few afternoons a week in a Boston movie house that was open twenty-four hours a day but advertised no film on the marquee. At the time, he felt about his covert sexual doings as a somnambulist might feel about his midnight strolls, and it never occurred to him that they might have some relation to the rest of his life. I think Arthur was relieved that Beatrice had figured him out for himself, although he seemed a little hurt that she actually wanted a divorce.

  If Arthur and Beatrice were no longer in love with each other, they were at least melded together in that inexplicable way people often become so in bad early marriages. They spoke on the phone at least once a week, met for lunch twice a month, and frequently quoted each other in conversation. Arthur and I got together with Beatrice and her new husband several times a year, usually for dinner and an evening at Symphony Hall. Beatrice took a lot of interest in me, although I was sometimes concerned that she thought of me as Arthur’s new wife, particularly when she passed along recipes and advice on nonpolluting cleansers. (Beatrice herself employed a variety of illegal aliens, referred to her by Arthur, to clean house and cook the family meals.) She and I rarely spent time together alone, but when we did, she had a bad habit of lecturing me about Arthur, as if to prove that no matter what, she knew more about him than I ever would.

  I liked Beatrice. She knew her own faults and never hesitated to point them out. She had an acerbic, unsentimental way with Mitchell, her new husband, and Bradford, their genius five-year-old son, but left no doubt that she adored them both.