The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

“What do we do now?” he asked. “We can’t drive.”

  This provoked an absurdly serious debate between the two on whether or not we should leave the car and actually walk to Harvard Square. I finally reminded them that it was less than a mile away.

  “But Daddy has bad knees,” Stacy informed me.

  “That’s right, honey, I do. And Sharon shouldn’t walk too far because she smokes too much.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that, Ryan. Now we have to walk so I can prove my lung capacity.”

  “I meant it as a compliment, kiddo.”

  * * *

  It took almost ten minutes for Ryan to unstrap Stacy from her car seat and dig a stroller, a bag of sweaters, two blankets, a box of cookies, and jug of apple juice from the trunk. Sharon and I watched from the sidewalk as Ryan handed the picnic items to Stacy and she loaded them into her stroller.

  “I hope someone sees me pushing a baby carriage down Memorial Drive,” Sharon said. “That would really confuse them. Especially if there’s nothing in it but sweaters and apple juice.”

  Sharon and I walked along the river as Ryan played tag with Stacy ahead of us. The ribbons on Stacy’s dress blew out behind her in the warm wind, and she ran with the jerky, halting steps of a wind-up toy. “Can you explain to me,” Sharon said, “how it is that Ryan knows how to be such a good father and doesn’t have a clue about how to be a son? Cute together, aren’t they?”

  “You and Ryan are kind of cute together, now that you mention it.”

  Sharon leaned against my shoulder and adjusted the straps of her sandals. “If there’s one thing in life I’ve never wanted to be, it’s ‘cute.’ ”

  “I meant it as a compliment, kiddo.”

  “Yeah? Try ‘tough broad’ next time.”

  I thought to make some gratuitously flattering comment, but it was impossible to get away with those kinds of palliatives with Sharon. She always made sure compliments blew up in your face. “I wonder what Elaine will think when Stacy tells her she spent the afternoon with a woman friend of her father’s.”

  “I haven’t met her,” Sharon said. “You’d know better than I would. But to tell you the truth, Patrick, I’m not interested in hearing about her, so don’t tell me.”

  “Does Ryan talk about her much?”

  “No, of course not. He’s much too polite to bore me with horror stories about his ex-wife. Or almost ex. The only time her name even comes up is when I mention it. I’m trying to convince him he should meet with her before he signs any papers.”

  We walked along in silence, watching the bicyclists and the skaters pass. Sharon took off her sweater and tossed it into the stroller. There was a green-and-white tent set up near the footbridge over the river, and the faint sounds of banjo music were blowing down to us on the wind, along with paper cups and empty soda cans. A crowd had gathered in front of the tent, lying on blankets on the grass. Ryan had Stacy in his arms now and was whispering into her ear. He turned around and pointed to the tent. “Love-in,” he mouthed.

  “Come on, Sharon,” I said. “What do you really think of Ryan?”

  She’d stopped and was bent over, lighting a cigarette, her hands cupped elaborately around her mouth. She raised her eyes as if there was something in my tone she found objectionable. She shook out the match and stood up. “You know how much tolerance I have for jerks, Patrick. None. I wouldn’t be spending time with him if I didn’t like him. I expected him to be sweet but boring. So he’s a little of both, but not too much of either. And I like the kid a lot, too. She could do without some of that lace, but she’s got a lot of potential.”

  * * *

  We found a place on the grass near the tent, and Ryan spread a blanket, stretched out on his stomach, and fell asleep. Sharon was besieged by several groups of friends and clients, who, spotting her, had to introduce her to the people they were with. Sharon had the kind of strong personality and striking appearance people loved to show off to their friends, as if it was an accomplishment to be accepted into her inner circle. They’d come and sit by her, and she’d pummel them with questions about themselves until they’d wander off, grinning and pleased. “The real key to success in life,” she’d once told me, “is to ask people questions about their lives until you’re blue in the face. Start with ‘How are you?’ and keep going until they pass out with amazement at how fascinating they are.” It also had the effect of never giving anyone the chance to ask her a thing about herself, a fact she never mentioned. She had Stacy in her lap, braiding her hair, and she introduced her to some people as her sister, to others as her illegitimate daughter, and to others still as her young friend. Her introductions of Ryan and me were equally capricious and farfetched. “Let ’em guess” was another in Sharon’s endless list of mottoes to live by.

  Ryan had on a pair of uncharacteristically tight blue jeans—faded and with a hole in one knee—and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt with a pocket over the right breast. The combination of tight pants and baggy shirt was more flattering than most of his outfits, and the blue of the T-shirt brought out a light in his eyes I’d never really noticed before. When he woke from his nap, I asked him where he’d got his outfit.

  “Nice, isn’t it? I got it at some dump Sharon took me to. Some place with a lot of skinheads milling around, buying rags.”

  “Used-clothing warehouse near MIT,” Sharon translated. “I told him I wasn’t going to a Celtics game with someone in a leisure suit. This is the right look for him.”

  “Except the pants are so tight I can hardly breathe,” Ryan said. “They squeeze in the fat pretty well, though. Look at this.” He grabbed at his stomach. “You’d never guess it was there, would you?”

  “I told him he should take up smoking,” Sharon said. “It’s done wonders for my figure.”

  * * *

  We stayed on the riverbank for hours, listening to the music and sopping up the warm, weak sunshine. Late in the afternoon, the sky began to grow milky with high clouds and the wind shifted and blew with a faint chill. We gathered up our blankets and sweaters. Ryan insisted we take a cab back to the car.

  I helped them load everything into the trunk and strapped Stacy into her car seat and kissed her on the top of her head.

  “I’ll walk home from here,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Pat. We’ll give you a lift.”

  “It’s three blocks, Ryan. I’ll make it.”

  I hated the thought of leaving them and going back to the apartment. I’d felt happy and even optimistic throughout the entire afternoon. Maybe they were in love with each other. Maybe optimism emerged from love, before love turned to bitterness and boredom. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my pants and headed down the street glumly.

  Ryan’s car sped past, and I saw Stacy waving out the back window. Then they screeched to a stop and backed up at about fifty miles an hour; obviously, Sharon was driving. Ryan had his head out the window. “Get in, Pat. We decided to drive up to Gloucester and get some fried clams at a place Sharon’s always raving about.”

  I started to explain to them why I couldn’t go along—Arthur, the house, cleaning.

  “Just shut up and get in.”

  I ran around to the other side of the car and leapt into the back seat. Sharon stomped on the gas pedal, and we sped off.

  Twenty-eight

  On the last day of April, a warm, sunny Thursday less than a week after the outing with Sharon and my brother, Fredrick buzzed my intercom and told me I had a call from “a Jeffrey something-or-other.”

  I hadn’t heard from Jeffrey in more than six weeks. I missed him—often at first, intermittently as time went on. Since he’d gone back with KyleSandyDennis, I’d worked hard at extinguishing the longing I felt for him from time to time, mostly by reminding myself that Jeffrey had done me a bad turn: for a year and a half I’d assumed and worried that I was using him for sex, and then he went and turned the tables on me.

  I picked up on his line, determined not to give in to the exci
tement I felt at the mention of his name, and said, “Kyle did another name change and left you again. Am I right?”

  “What is this, Patrick? I don’t even get a ‘Hi, how are you?’ ”

  “We’ve been friends for over a decade, Jeffrey. It’s too late to start wasting time on polite conversation.”

  “And you think I’d only call if I was in trouble. Has it occurred to you I might be calling with some good news, or just to say hello?”

  I told him I didn’t consider anything impossible, but the goodnews option wasn’t the first one to cross my mind.

  “That is why I’m calling,” he said. “Remember that painting over my sofa—I mentioned I might have a buyer the last time you were here? Well, I sold it. I thought I’d use some of the money to call my oldest friend. You can congratulate me now.”

  I did congratulate him, and enthusiastically, too. If there was anyone who needed a career boost, not to mention an extra fifteen hundred dollars, it was Jeffrey. It wasn’t as if I wanted to carry a grudge against him, especially since it served me no useful purpose I could think of. The sound of his voice had melted away a substantial amount of my resentment, and as we talked on about the painting, I tried to come up with as many encouraging remarks as I could without going overboard.

  “So,” I said after a while, “Kyle’s still Dennis, and you’re happy in your happy home: is that it more or less?”

  “We decided I should call him Sandy. I was always getting confused between Dennis and Kyle. Not that it matters much what I call him anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “I asked him to move out two weeks ago.”

  “You did?”

  “I did.”

  “And did he?”

  “It’s my apartment, Patrick. Of course he did.”

  “I hope this doesn’t mean you’re getting assertive.”

  “Only in some areas.” He recited a detailed list of all the petty annoyances and irritating personality quirks that had forced him to ask Kyle to move. But the list was a little too long, the annoyances too petty, and the sound of the speech a little too rehearsed. When he got down to mentioning that Kyle swept the kitchen floor six times a day and liked to eat English muffins in bed, as if these were serious character flaws, I knew Richard Burton had once again walked out on my friend. I listened a bit longer, agreeing wherever I could.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I couldn’t stand to live with someone whose toes are always cold. It’s so inconsiderate. The least he could have done is wear socks to bed.”

  “You know, I suggested that, Pat. He acted as if it was an insult.”

  “You didn’t have any choice. You’re too good for him. You always were. Listen, didn’t I tell you that the last time you two had a falling-out? You could have anyone you want, Jeffrey.”

  I didn’t see anything pathetic in the fact that Kyle had walked out on Jeffrey a second time, but the fact that Jeffrey felt he had to cover it up—and for me, of all people—struck me as a bit sad. The sunlight slanting in the tiny window behind me had moved across my desk in the time we’d been on the phone and was now yellowing a newspaper lying on the floor. Jeffrey had been trying to talk himself into happiness over Kyle’s departure for more than half an hour. I reminded him that if he spent all of his money from the painting on a single phone call to me, he’d end up hating me.

  “I’d never hate you, Patrick. Talk to me for a few more minutes. You haven’t told me anything about your life.”

  “I didn’t want to depress you. What do you want to know?”

  “Anything at all. You must have some news. For example, when do you think you might come down to New York for a visit?”

  I suppose there’s something hopeful in the ability of human beings to adapt to almost any situation with relative ease, but I was a little disappointed to find myself abandoning all pretense that I’d moved on in my life and telling Jeffrey I’d love to come and stay with him the next week.

  * * *

  When May began with a spell of suffocating, totally unseasonable heat and humidity, I decided to give in to the climatic changes and try to adapt. Years earlier, when snow was still a fact of life in the Northeast, Sharon had given me a pair of cross-country skis she’d found at a garage sale. Her theory was that if you stopped fighting against the weather extremes of New England, it was possible to enjoy them. I was never able to figure out the complicated system of waxing that would have made the skis of use to me, but the mere fact of having them hidden in the back of some closet in the basement made me look forward to every predicted blizzard with an eagerness I’d never felt before.

  So during that first miserable week of May, I spent over a hundred dollars on a hammock for the back porch of the apartment. Any movie I’d seen set in a subtropical climate featured at least one happy individual prostrate in a hammock, sipping an iced alcoholic beverage, sweating like a beast, and smoking cigarettes. I hung it from the porch posts so it was suspended above the railing. If I rocked gently, I could swing out over the weed-choked backyard three stories below. It wasn’t much more comfortable than any of the other furniture in the house, but I found all that air circulating around my body surprisingly reassuring. I would come home after work, climb cautiously into the thing, and induce a tropical torpor by reading An Outcast of the Islands, drinking canned piña coladas, smoking cigarettes I pilfered from Sharon, and listening to a tape of Stan Getz playing bossa nova. Arthur was horrified by the precarious positioning of the hammock and told me he was delighted there was no similarly dangerous place to hang it at “our house.”

  “Our house” came up in Arthur’s conversation regularly. At best, I changed the subject, and at the worst, I snapped at him, reminding him that the place wasn’t ours yet. Arthur had started to collect boxes in preparation for the big move. He’d met with the current owners twice. He was getting lessons from them on how to maintain the garden and the flowering trees. I’d managed to come up with credible excuses for missing both meetings. I couldn’t face going out to the house with Arthur, although I often bicycled there by myself and sat on the sidewalk opposite, staring at the yellow walls, alternately trying to imagine what it was going to be like living there and what the neighborhood would look like if the house suddenly burst into flames and was reduced to a pile of ashes.

  I’d been sleeping in the back bedroom more frequently now and discovered that my insomnia had virtually disappeared. I still went through the charade of putting sheets on the air mattress every night and crawling under the covers, but as soon as I heard Arthur snoring, I crept out.

  * * *

  Arthur and I were having dinner on the back porch one night, when I told him I was planning to go to New York the upcoming weekend. I was in the hammock, swinging out over the railing with a plate of sandwiches resting on my chest.

  “I wish you’d stop that swinging, sweetheart, at least while I’m eating. I’m getting a little seasick.” He reached out and brought the hammock to a stop. “You know, I was under the impression you and Jeffrey had had a falling-out. You haven’t visited in a while.”

  I told him that Jeffrey and Kyle had had a brief reprise of their old relationship and that I hadn’t felt like stepping into the middle of their ardor. “You know what it’s like to sleep in someone’s guest room and hear the hosts ripping down the curtains and knocking over lamps while they’re fucking.”

  This struck him as hilariously funny. “No one does that kind of thing, sweetheart. I don’t know where you get your ideas about passion.” He laughed and went back to his sandwich and his newspaper, and I started rocking the hammock again.

  * * *

  As the weekend approached, I found myself getting increasingly anxious. I was excited at the prospect of ripping down Jeffrey’s curtains, but the idea of the trip itself—packing, flying, trekking into the city, and wandering back home—exhausted me. I’d had a similar reaction when I was standing in line to see Lawrence of Arabia for the eighth time an
d realized I just couldn’t face another viewing of the film, masterpiece or not. It was one thing when having an affair with Jeffrey had simply been a matter of deceiving Arthur; now the stakes seemed higher, and I had a vague sense that I was deceiving myself somehow.

  Out of desperation, I called Tony late one night, and after a lot of moronic chitchat about a trip to Paris I had no intention of taking, I told him about the latest turn of events in my love life. He listened with a surprising degree of interest and shocked me by asking for explicit details. When I was finished, he said, “You’re wasting your time with this guy, Patrick.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. I sighed and looked up from the brown velvet sofa at all the furniture in the living room, which was about to be packed up and carted off. “Which guy do you mean?”

  “Both of them. Are you in love with the loser in New York?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “What about Arthur?”

  “Well . . . that one’s more complicated.”

  “Let’s face it, Pat: you’ve got table scraps on one side and crumbs on the other.”

  “Which side is the table scraps?” Of the two options, that sounded the more promising.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re just trying to piece together a life, and it won’t work out. A little bit of this and a little of that, but the whole mess is never going to add up to enough.”

  “You’re sounding awfully sensible.”

  “The voice of experience. It’s what I thought I could do with Loreen: have a half-assed marriage in Chicago, a couple of things going on the side, and everything would be fine. Then I fell in love and fucked up all my plans. Don’t go to New York, Patrick. Isn’t that the advice you’d give me?”

  “I guess it is.” The big puffy cushions on the sofa were beginning to flop down around my face. I rearranged them and thought about his advice. “And if I did suggest you stay home,” I said, “would you listen to me?”

  “Nah. I’d go to New York anyway.”