The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  Her head was tilted back, and her hair was hanging down to the floor. She put her cup on her desk, looked over at me, and winked. “You’re asking me that question? How would I know? Well, take a bus, if that’s how you feel about it.” There was a long pause, during which she held the phone away from her ear. “When you’ve thought it over, call me back and I’ll accept an apology.” Then she made an obscene hand gesture at the phone and hung up.

  “Don’t look surprised, Patrick. I’m calling it the new me. Haven’t you heard I’ve changed my ways?”

  “Of course not. I don’t know if I can stand anyone else changing her ways today.”

  “Fredrick? Sad, isn’t it. Business school. I’m sure his decision has something to do with sex. As for me, I’m tired of risking my job for the sake of a lot of jerks who don’t even appreciate me. It’s all part of the show for them. And believe me, sticking to the rules is going to be like having a whole new career. You know how I love challenges.”

  “How long has this been in effect?”

  “Since this morning. Give me that letter you were just reading.” I passed her the Trembley refund request. She rolled it into a ball, threw it in the wastebasket, and dumped some of her drink on it. “He can die by his own hand.”

  She got up from behind her desk and, as if to prove to me how serious she was about her resolve, began to poke through the stacks of paper flung into the various corners of the room.

  I swiveled around in my chair to follow the path of her cleaning binge. “Do you mind me asking what brought this on?”

  “A lot of things coming together at once. But Ryan was the catalyst. I give him credit for that. He came in here with Stacy this weekend to watch me work. I was talking to some clients about how I could get them a package to Mexico for two hundred dollars—a wild exaggeration to begin with—and right in the middle of going through the yellow pages to find out where they could rent a wheelchair, I looked over at Ryan and I felt like a complete fool. I knew he was right; all this work I do for people is a pathetic plea for acceptance. In the end, the clients don’t care one way or the other and I’ve taken all the risks, and I’d be much better off looking for acceptance and love somewhere else.” She tossed a bulging folder marked “Doctors’ Stationery—Newton, Wellesley, and Needham” into the wastebasket.

  “Ryan said all that?”

  “Not exactly. But you know how sane he is. He just sat there grinning in that sad way of his, and I could tell what was going through his mind.”

  The extreme heat of the weekend had broken, but the day was still warm. Inexplicably, Sharon was wearing a heavy sweater and a pair of woolen slacks, and her face was beaded with sweat. How someone who paid no attention to what she put on in the morning had so effectively transformed Ryan’s wardrobe was a mystery.

  Her effort at going clean was a noble one, but the office was so magnificently disorganized, it would probably take weeks to set things right and throw out all the phony letters and bad tickets and falsified hotel vouchers. After ten minutes of pushing papers, she sat down on the edge of her desk and lit a cigarette. She tossed back her long hair and pulled her feet under her.

  “I almost stopped by your house on Friday night,” I said. “I happened to be in the neighborhood around midnight.”

  “Midnight? You should have come in,” she said. “I had an all-night poker game. You can count poker as one of your brother’s previously undiscovered talents. He won a hundred and forty dollars. I won five hundred and seventeen. Not one of my better nights.”

  “What time did the game break up?”

  “Early morning. Ryan had to rush out to pick up Stacy. We went out to Watertown, and I took him to see your new house.”

  “I don’t own it yet. Did he say anything about it?”

  She shrugged. “He liked it. But he didn’t make any rash comments. Too sane. Too sane to get involved, Patrick.” She rummaged through her huge straw bag and passed me a strip of pictures. “Kind of cute, if you don’t look at me,” she said.

  There were four pictures of Sharon, Ryan, and Stacy. The three of them were squeezed into a tiny photo booth, laughing and jockeying for position in front of the lens. Only in the final frame was there any sense of order. There, Stacy was sitting on Sharon’s lap and Ryan had his arm around Sharon’s shoulder. The three had calmed down considerably but were still smiling. Sharon was staring into the camera, her piercing, pretty eyes defiant. But it was Ryan who seemed to dominate the photo, with his broad grin and outstretched arms.

  I got up to hand her the photos and instead found myself embracing her.

  “Watch out for the cigarette,” she said. “What’s all this about?”

  “Nothing,” I told her. “I just like the picture, that’s all.”

  Thirty-one

  I’d been fairly certain Arthur would turn down the invitation to attend my father’s birthday dinner, but to make absolutely sure, I told him my mother was cooking. Arthur once ate a meal Rita had cooked in a Crock-Pot and was sick for a week. The rest of us were fine. I think we’d grown used to her culinary eccentricities over the years, the way some pilgrims adapt to drinking water straight out of the Ganges. After she and my father had abandoned their crash diets and Ryan proved himself to be the real cook in the family, my mother became much more interested in kitchen appliances than food. Another insomniac, she stayed up watching television until 3:00 A.M. most nights, calling 800 numbers to buy the specially priced vegetable slicers and dicers, bread-baking machines, hamburger presses, sandwich makers, and the deadly Crock-Pots. The one familial courtesy that was extended without question or fail was never discussing her cooking.

  Food poisoning or not, Arthur accepted the invitation and claimed he was looking forward to the occasion. “But why?” I asked. “You can’t stand my family.”

  “I think that’s unfair, Patrick. I’ve always found them amusing.”

  I wanted to tell him the circus was in town next week if he was so hot for entertainment. I wasn’t eager for him to come along because I knew my family would fall all over him, riddle him with compliments, and thank him for buying me a house.

  What worried me was that Arthur knew that, too, and that was why he was insisting on going. Now that the closing on the house was less than two weeks away, he probably figured I needed one final push to get me to the lawyer’s office.

  * * *

  That Sunday, Arthur dressed in one of his pin-striped suits and a navy-blue tie with chartreuse pigs printed on it. Beatrice had given it to him to replace the one the cleaner had ruined. The frivolous tie was definitely not his style, but in a strange way, it looked just right on him and drew attention, not to itself, but to the conservative lines of everything else he was wearing, the way a rhinestone earring can sometimes draw attention to a man’s most masculine features. He did look imposing in his suit, tall and solid and, with his high forehead and throbbing vein, kind and intelligent, too. It was easy to see why he stood out in the presence of my short family and intimidated my parents and Ryan into fawning servitude.

  I was standing in our bedroom, adjusting my collar in front of the mirror, when I caught sight of his reflection. He had the sleeves of his jacket hitched up and was playing with his cuff links. His face was tight with concentration. There was something in his look, in his big ears and his cleft chin and that Thomas Merton ring of hair encircling his head, that brought back a memory of another time in our relationship, when things had been much different and much simpler.

  I went to him and patted the shoulders of his jacket and put my arms around him and mumbled something into his chest. He reached up and put his hands around my head. I pressed my body against his, made a grab at his behind, and, too late, realized I was barking up the wrong tree. Panic overtook me, and I tried to apply the brakes. I pretended I’d reached around him to straighten out his belt. But we weren’t reading each other’s signals. We fell onto the bed in a heap. I attempted to heave his body off mine, but all those hou
rs in the gym hadn’t paid off. I might as well have been trying to bench press a thousand pounds. And then my will to resist melted, and instinct, routine, and gravity took over, and it was like sliding downhill to the edge of a cliff. We fumbled with each other’s clothes, underclothes, and bodies, and when, a few minutes later, the whole episode came to its inevitable conclusion, I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me by the impact of desire and disappointment colliding head-on in the no-man’s-land of our relationship, where love was a matter of fondness and passion had never existed.

  Arthur got up from the bed and removed his shoes and socks. “Well, I feel better,” he said and went to take a shower.

  * * *

  I still hadn’t wrapped the present I’d bought for my father, so I had to relent and let Arthur drive to the suburbs while I sat in the passenger seat, fumbling with scissors and masking tape and the Sunday Times. Arthur had one of his Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs playing loudly, and he was whistling as we crawled along the highway.

  “I still think your present is a little tasteless,” he told me.

  I’d been unable to come up with any ideas for a gift. My father had no hobbies or interests that I knew of, he considered all music noise, and his reading tastes were so broad it was impossible to buy him a book. Inspired by my mother’s comment about the cardiologist, I’d wandered into a medical supply store and ended up buying him a pair of hospital pajamas, the kind that tie up the back.

  “I’m not saying it’s a fun present,” I told Arthur, “but one of these days it’ll come in handy, just watch.”

  “It’s a hostile gesture, Patrick, considering his health problems.”

  I pondered this possibility for a moment and decided he was right. “I suppose I am angry at him. Sometimes I think he’s faking all this sickness.”

  “How do you fake a kidney stone, sweetheart?”

  “Well, I haven’t worked all the bugs out of my theory yet.”

  “No one gives your father credit. I think there’s a kind, sweet man hiding somewhere under the surface there.” He looked over at me and smiled. He took one hand off the steering wheel cautiously and put it on my knee. “I enjoyed this afternoon,” he said. “We should do it more often. Don’t you think?”

  I’d just finished wrapping the gift, and it looked remarkably ugly, covered in the front page of the newspaper. I kept turning it over in my hands, thinking that if Arthur and I had many more sexcapades like that afternoon’s, I’d be the one using the hospital pajamas when I had my nervous breakdown. I probably hesitated too long before saying, obligingly, “Yes, I suppose we should.”

  My parents’ house is a small ranch that was built at the height of the housing boom of the mid-fifties. As far as I can tell from photos, it was always a fairly ugly structure: lots of clashing horizontal and vertical siding panels, little stone walls that serve no purpose at all, wrought-iron decorations to draw attention to its architectural flaws, and, of course, a garage at least as big as the rest of the house. Over the years, my parents had put a new porch on the front, a “mud room” on the side, a porch off the mud room, and a deck off the porch. They’d blasted a hole in the side of the house and installed a massive and elaborately sectioned picture window. They’d cut down every tree in the yard, complaining that the trees attracted birds, and were contemplating having all the grass replaced with macadam. “I hate weeds,” my father said. The crowning glory had been having the whole unsightly mess encased in red vinyl siding. The house was in a development of identical houses, each of which had, over the years, been made uglier in its own unique way and then landscaped into a surrealist fantasy.

  But critical as I was of the houses, I think I still believed that these were the natural habitat of human beings and that everything else was merely an imitation.

  * * *

  Ryan let us in the front door and stood back, wiping his hands on a white towel he had tucked into his pants. “Look at this Arthur,” he said to me. “Here’s a man who knows how to dress. What an outfit!”

  “See if you can get him to work at the store,” my mother said, coming in from the kitchen. “He’d be a real asset. Oh, Arthur, that tie is absolutely stunning. Pigs! Tall people can get away with wearing anything. It’s not fair. Let me see the label.” She flipped up the tie. “Too expensive for our cheap customers. After all these years, it’s a shame you haven’t been able to influence Patrick’s choice of clothes.”

  “I haven’t been trying,” Arthur said. He winked at me.

  “Leave Patrick alone,” Ryan said. “I think he looks great.”

  I thanked my older brother and returned the compliment. He was wearing an outfit similar to the one Sharon had picked out for him at the used-clothing store. The blue jeans were unripped but equally tight. He’d apparently gone to the expensive barber my mother had mentioned, and inexplicably, the new cut made him look as if he’d grown hair.

  “You’d better take off your jacket,” my mother said to Arthur. “We have to keep the heat on in here so Jimmy doesn’t catch a cold and get carted off to the emergency ward before we serve the cake.”

  Arthur passed his jacket to Ryan, and my mother began to rhapsodize about the fit of his shirt.

  She herself had on one of those fake-Adolfo red wool suits that became popular in the mid-eighties, probably based on the theory that anyone was bound to look better in them than Nancy Reagan did. In this case it was true, and I complimented her, even though she was paler than usual and clearly exhausted.

  “I look like hell,” she said. “Pardon the expression. Everyone’s out in the family room, so we might as well join them.”

  “Everyone?” I asked as she led us through the kitchen.

  “The birthday boy and Loreen.”

  “I didn’t know Loreen was coming.”

  My mother stopped at the kitchen table and let out a long, weary sigh. “Oh, God. To tell you the truth, I didn’t, either.” She adjusted her red plastic headband nervously, pushing the stiff hair off her face. “Your father invited her. But let’s try to have a nice dinner, shall we?”

  “It certainly smells good,” Arthur said.

  Rita reached way up and patted his face gently. “Poor Arthur,” she sighed, and then looked toward me.

  * * *

  The family room was a cramped box at the back of the house, with two small windows and a surprisingly low ceiling recently redone in swirled and sparkling plaster. The walls were covered with gruesome chocolate-colored paneling and the floor had dark-green wall-to-wall carpeting. The decor was “colonial style,” which meant, in this case, not too much more than garish red slipcovers imprinted with eagles, and knotty-pine end tables.

  To their credit, both my parents hated the look of the room and called it “the tomb” when company wasn’t present. But they could never figure out exactly what made it so unattractive and were helpless to correct the problem. They’d always kept the television in the tomb and, as a consequence, had spent most of their married life sitting in the darkest, ugliest, and most claustrophobic room in the house.

  My father and Loreen were seated on either end of the sofa, with their eyes glued to the TV set. Over the years, successive television sets had grown in size, and the present screen took up almost an entire wall. Loreen and my father were pressed against the cushions of the sofa as if they were trying to retreat from a stalking beast. My father had the remote control in hand and was zooming through the channels with the sound off. “Leave it up to Tony to have us install the cable,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Tony, the whole bunch of us would be living in the ice age.”

  My father never had a good word for Tony until Loreen was within earshot, and then, at a loss, he had to resort to these absurd compliments.

  Loreen had on a beige dress with lace sewn primly into the collar, and she looked her most lovely and fragile, although perhaps a little thinner than when she’d come to my office. Her eyes were huge. I bent down to kiss her, and she turned her che
ek up with cool detachment. “How are you?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer or say hello, just smiled vaguely and looked away. This cold shoulder was so uncharacteristic, I didn’t realize quite what she’d done until a few minutes later.

  My mother made Loreen scoot over so she was practically in my father’s lap and then dropped herself onto the far end of the sofa. “You can put that present with the others, on top of the TV, Patrick. You and Arthur shouldn’t have bothered.”

  I threw myself into a reclining lounger across from the sofa. “Happy birthday, Dad,” I said.

  “Don’t take the most comfortable chair in the room,” he said. “Arthur, don’t let him get away with that. Doesn’t Loreen look beautiful tonight? Have you ever seen a more beautiful complexion than this?” He held his fingers under her chin and tried to tilt her face up to the light. Loreen resisted. My father’s shirt collar was sagging, his complexion was sallow, and next to him, Loreen did look as glowing and fresh as the face of a model on a box of soap powder.

  “Happy birthday, Jim,” Arthur said. He sat down in a black rocker with an eagle decal on the back. The chair was so tightly wedged into a corner, it might as well have been nailed to the floor. “You don’t look a day older.”

  “More of Arthur’s impeccable manners,” Rita said.

  My father frowned away the compliment and the insult and turned his attention back to Loreen. “Look at these pearls. They’re something, aren’t they. Tony gave her these.”

  “They’re not real pearls,” Loreen corrected. It was the first thing she’d said since Arthur and I had come in. She articulated each word carefully, and her voice had none of its usual soft apology. I looked over at my mother for explanation, but she was absorbed in drumming her fingers across her knees.

  “No one wears real pearls, honey,” my father said. “Everything’s fake. I read in the paper the other day that some places, the thieves cut your head off with a chain saw to get your jewelry. Right on the street.”