The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  “They’re tearing the place apart,” Ryan said. “You’d better get in there and stop them.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” I said. “How do you feel about Sharon anyway?”

  “I’ve only known her about a month and a half. You know as well as I do I like her. She’s changed my life, I suppose. All you have to do is look at me to see that.”

  “But what about romance? Are you telling me you don’t have any romantic feelings for her?”

  “Patrick, I have romantic feelings for Cybill Shepherd, too. What good does it do me? And you know, I didn’t go running back to Elaine, like you accused me of doing. I didn’t go out to dinner with her thinking we were going to work everything out. Maybe before I met Sharon, I would have, just because I’d been locked up in that basement for so long I didn’t know there was anything else out there for me. But I still had to check things out, talk things over with her. So maybe secretly I thought she’d fall all over me again, but right when we sat down and started talking, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. It’s not as if Sharon gave me a chance to say any of this. She went off like a gun the minute she walked in the door.” He lifted his arm and rotated his wrist, trying to catch the light from the streetlamp in his watch. “I can’t see a thing. It’s bad enough I’m losing my hair, but now my eyesight, too. What time is it anyway?”

  I told him it was almost nine-thirty.

  “I guess he should be here soon. Poor Tony; I don’t envy him.”

  I reminded him things had worked out for poor Tony. “And what do you mean, he should be here soon?”

  “His flight. It’s due in sometime around ten.”

  I looked over at him in the street light. He was still wearing his sweet, kindly expression, a mild, dumbfounded smile on his face. I supposed he was contemplating the volcano issue, but it was hard to tell. Maybe the events of the past two months had driven him mad.

  “Tony is coming to Boston?” I asked.

  “You didn’t know that? I thought you were on to everything, Pat. If it’s all right with you, I’d just as soon leave. You’re going to be looking at this place for the rest of your life, so I don’t see why you have to sit here now.”

  It took a few more minutes to coax the details out of him. According to his information, my father had called Tony the night of his birthday and spent an hour and a half talking to him. He’d convinced Tony to come east and discuss the wedding with Loreen, and he’d even offered to pay for the ticket. “I don’t understand why Tony didn’t tell you about this,” he said. “Maybe he was embarrassed.”

  “Where’s he staying?” I asked.

  “He’s staying with your parents. He’s renting a car and driving in, and then he and Loreen are meeting tomorrow.”

  Lack of sleep and nourishment were beginning to have a wonderful hallucinogenic effect on me. I asked Ryan if I could take the wheel for the drive back to my apartment, and as soon as we’d switched seats, I gunned the engine and made a U-turn up over the lawn of the new house, nearly taking a few of the precious bushes.

  “Headlights!” Ryan shouted.

  I switched them on and put my foot to the floor and we roared down the potholed street and across the railroad tracks.

  Ryan grabbed hold of the dashboard. “For Christ’s sake, Patrick, slow down, will you? You’re going to snap an axle. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me, kiddo. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. And I’d like you to promise to do something for me, Ryan. A favor.”

  “Whatever it is, I’ll do it, providing I live.”

  “In about two minutes, you’ll be safely driving again. And what I’d like you to do is go back to Sharon’s house and go up to her room and have a talk with her. You can just walk right in. One of the advantages of having a friend who doesn’t lock her doors.”

  “Well, of course that’s what I’m going to do. Why do you think I wanted to get away from that house back there?”

  “And whatever opinion you happen to have about yourself, just remember: in Sharon’s eyes, you’re a volcano.”

  Thirty-seven

  Although Tony never booked his reservations through my office, we’d discussed air travel enough for me to know he was accruing frequent flier mileage on a particular airline. Furthermore, he’d had a brief but hot and heavy affair with a stewardess within the past year and a half, and he took that airline every chance he got, hoping she might be working on his plane. My knowledge of airline schedules corroborated Ryan’s prediction of Tony’s arrival time. I had half an hour to get to the airport.

  I pulled over at my street, yanked the bike out of Ryan’s trunk, tossed it into the backyard, and jumped into my Yugo. There was so much adrenaline pumping through my system, I probably could have run out to the airport a lot quicker, but I didn’t want to push my luck.

  The night had turned murky and humid, as if the sky were saturated with moisture. As I sped down Memorial Drive, I opened all my windows and cranked up the volume on a heavy-metal radio station. The sky was filled with planes circling the city, locked into holding patterns, suspended above by the strange laws of aerodynamics, enemies of gravity and logic. At any given moment, there are more than a hundred thousand people in airplanes, cutting through the atmosphere miles above the surface of the planet, leaning back in their seats eating peanuts, watching movies, reading magazines, making love. A vast city scattered across the sky. My brother was up there, safely removed from all his troubles, out of reach of my parents, Loreen, and me.

  I crossed the river and got onto the highway that wrapped around the city and entered the Callahan Tunnel, all in record time. The yellow and green lights of the tunnel flashed across the dark windshield. There was little traffic, and I pressed the accelerator to the floor, imagining that the damp tiled walls were collapsing behind me and I was escaping disaster by mere seconds.

  * * *

  Three people were in the lounge awaiting the arrival of the flight from Chicago: A tall woman with long, straight brown hair was leaning against a wall, with her arms folded tightly across her chest, and a fat man in a blue windbreaker and a baseball cap was gazing out the window, his back to me. The third person, sitting on the far side of the lounge, staring off into space and tapping the arm of her chair, was my mother. I approached her slowly from behind and put my hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up and smiled. “News travels fast, doesn’t it, dear? Tony promised your father he wouldn’t mention to you that he was coming in tonight.”

  “Ryan told me.”

  “Ah, yes, the new and improved Ryan.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “I suspect he’s at home, sleeping. Unless he has some secret life I don’t know about, a possibility I wouldn’t rule out.”

  I wasn’t as shocked to discover her sitting there in that lounge—even though it had never crossed my mind that she might be there—as I was to see her alone. As far as I knew, she never drove anywhere by herself, and the fact that she’d driven all this way alone and late at night seemed almost heroic, in a twisted sort of way. She had on a navy-blue skirt and a light-blue sweater and a string of pink beads. Her hair was held in place by a purple plastic band that clashed peculiarly with her stiff orange hair. Alone, she looked particularly short and slight, and older, too. She’d put on a thick layer of face powder and bright-red lipstick, and her eyebrows were absurdly dark and heavy. This Kabuki makeup had gone out of style decades earlier, and I realized suddenly, as if it had never occurred to me before, that her life would have been very different if she’d had a daughter.

  Her raincoat was folded on the seat beside her; she’d driven out here prepared for anything. She picked it up carefully, set it down in her lap, and motioned for me to sit.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” she asked, watching the tall woman leaning against the wall.

  The woman was rubbing her upper arms nervously and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. She looked troubled
, possibly dazed. “She might have been,” I said. “She might be again. But something’s going on. In her present condition, I’d have to say no, not pretty.”

  “That’s what I’d say. I’ve been watching her for the past half hour now, and I’d say she was pretty once upon a time. Whoever she’s meeting on this plane, she has mixed feelings about him. She has something to reveal. I’d guess she’s meeting her husband, who’s been away on business for two weeks.”

  “And she’s met someone else in the meantime,” I suggested.

  “You would think that, Patrick. Actually, that’s what I thought, too. Although she doesn’t look too happy about it. She could be pregnant by this other person. Not bad guesses for someone who never exercises her imagination, are they?”

  “Not at all. You should get out more often. When’s the plane due?”

  “Not for another hour. They said there was fog in Chicago, which probably means the wings fell off.” She adjusted the band in her hair and then lightly pushed at the skin around her cheekbones with her fingertips, as if she was trying to tighten it. “Excuse me for saying so, dear, but you don’t look well. Were you just running?”

  “It’s been a long day. Actually, it feels like it’s been three long days.”

  “I suppose the answer is obvious, but do you mind if I ask you what you’re doing here?”

  Sitting alone with her in the quiet lounge, I felt much less at odds with her. She seemed so small and defenseless, I wished there were something I could do to protect her. I figured the closest I could come would be to tell her the truth, and I did.

  “In other words,” she said, “you’ve come to head him off at the pass.”

  “You could put it that way. And you?”

  “Head him off at the pass; what else? I wanted to see him before your father got to him.”

  She widened her eyes as she said this, as if she was trying to impress me with the significance of her words, but I wasn’t sure what she’d meant.

  “Oh, Patrick,” she sighed. “And I count on you to understand everything.” She paused, looked around, and then inclined her head toward me and nearly whispered, “I’ve come to tell Tony, before he sees your father, that as far as I’m concerned, and I’m only speaking for myself, as if I would dare speak for anyone else, that he should do exactly what he wants to do about this wedding—it’s his life. Marry Loreen, don’t marry Loreen, marry the lawyer in Chicago, move to Shanghai, join the priesthood. But if he does come right out and ask me for my opinion, I plan to tell him I’d rather walk to Los Angeles barefoot than see him marry someone he doesn’t love.”

  I was dumbfounded by her speech and by the sudden shift in her opinion, and my face must have given it away. “You look like you need a drink,” she said. She told me she’d seen a cocktail lounge on the way in and suggested we go there and kill some time. As we walked down the quiet hallway, she took my arm, a warm, conspiratorial gesture that was entirely unlike her.

  * * *

  The cocktail lounge was one of those excruciatingly dark and silent places designed to make nervous fliers feel as if they’ve entered a bunker where they can store up invulnerability for their flights. The only other customers were two men in business suits slumped over the bar, obviously plastered.

  We went to the back and sat on either side of a low metal table with a candle in the middle and a little bowl with four greasy peanuts in it. My mother arranged herself in the chair carefully, as if she was settling in for a long time. She put her raincoat neatly on the empty seat beside her and folded her hands on her lap. She looked weary and stooped. As we’d walked along in the bright lights of the airport terminal, I’d noticed the gray roots of her hair pushing out the orange.

  A waitress, emaciated and exhausted, tottered over on high heels. She put napkins in front of us and stood silently beside the table, waiting for our order. She had black rubber bangle bracelets on her right arm, halfway up to her elbow. “I think I’ll have a Rob Roy,” my mother said, eyeing her critically.

  She rarely drank, and I was surprised at the ease with which she’d produced this order.

  The waitress looked at me dully. “You?”

  “The same,” I said, “whatever it is.”

  “That outfit isn’t good for her,” my mother said, watching the waitress depart. “A miniskirt with those heels and those toothpick legs is definitely not what she should be wearing. Why do people insist on drawing attention to their worst features? Look at that Sharon—”

  “It’s probably a uniform,” I interrupted. “What she needs is a whole new job.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said.

  “Let’s not get started, Rita.”

  She looked away from me. “I didn’t say that to be critical. I suppose you took it that way out of habit. That must be partially my fault. I was trying to be helpful.”

  We watched the waitress standing at the bar, playing with her bracelets and talking to the businessmen. She clicked over to us on her spike heels, the twin drinks sliding on her tray. “One for you,” she said condescendingly, “and, let’s see, one for you. Anything else, I’ll be right over there.”

  I found the drink pleasantly sweet and strong, and the first sip sent a flush of blood to my face. I pulled my sweater over my head and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. Rita picked up her glass, the napkin wrapped around the bottom, took a measured swallow, and sighed deeply again.

  “You know,” I said, “it might not be any of my business, but if you’re in the mood to tell me why you changed your mind about Tony, I’d be willing to listen.”

  “I didn’t change my mind. I’ve thought it was a mistake for him to marry Loreen since I heard about this other girl. Vivian, isn’t that it? I just didn’t have the courage to say it. You act one way all your life, and it’s not so easy to turn things around all of a sudden. Believe me, I was thrilled when she made that announcement about the engagement at dinner the other night. When your father convinced Tony to come out here and talk with her, I figured I had to do something.”

  She looked over at the two drunks slumped on their barstools. Her eyes were shining from the alcohol. “Patrick,” she said quietly, still looking away from me, “I was twenty-one when I married your father, a complete innocent. I didn’t know a thing about life or love, any of it, and he knew less. I’m not proud to say we both made a big mistake, but in my heart I know we did. I’m not saying we don’t love each other, because I wouldn’t say that, even if I thought it was true, which I don’t think.

  “Anyway, it’s a horrible thing to get close to sixty and look behind you and see a mountain of regrets piling up. It’s enough to make even me think twice. I saw Tony’s marriage as one more I was tossing on the heap, and I thought, admittedly at the last moment, that maybe, for once in my life, I could try to do something I actually might look back at with pride.” She finished off her drink and wiped at her mouth delicately. “I could possibly stand another of those.”

  I called the waitress over and ordered another round of drinks, even though the first had made me bleary. We sat in silence, waiting for her to bring them, and when she did, I foolishly clinked my mother’s glass, as if this were a cheerful celebration. I hated listening to her talk about her life like this, partially because I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to help. I asked her if she’d ever thought about getting a divorce.

  “Oh, only every day of my life,” she said. “But I’ve always thought of it as something I might have done, never as something I might still do. The first time it crossed my mind, it already seemed too late.”

  The candle was burning down in the amber ball on the table between us. I picked it up and sloshed the melted wax against the sides of the glass. We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the drunks at the bar and to the faint, bland music in the background. Once or twice we passed some comment on the waitress, who’d taken a seat at a table near us and was picking at her fingernail polish.

  “You know, maybe I sh
ouldn’t bring this up, but I can’t keep my big mouth shut,” she said. “I was very upset that day you came into the store and made your horrible speech about Tony and Loreen’s marriage and how awful life was going to be for them.”

  “I know you were upset,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to apologize for a long time now.”

  “It isn’t a question of apologizing. It was obvious you weren’t talking about the two of them, and it upset me, that’s all. I hate thinking that you view your own life that way. Especially since you don’t seem to be doing anything to change it.”

  If I’d been just a bit more drunk, I might have let myself slide off my seat and onto the floor. Since I practically grew up in a confessional booth, I was familiar with the elation that follows being absolved of sin. I was delighted to hear that she’d misinterpreted what I’d said that day in the store. I was so delighted, in fact, that I didn’t give much more thought to the way she had interpreted my reckless speech. She had her head tilted over to one side and was unscrewing an earring.

  “If you really believe that’s what the future holds for you, you ought to do something about it now, while you still have the chance. Take it from one who knows a thing or two about mistakes, Patrick.” She took out her earring and dropped it into the glass ashtray in the middle of the table.

  Looking over at her as she wearily removed her other earring, I kept thinking about Fields’s reservations to Bermuda. I could rewrite the tickets in her name, and she and my father could take them and go off on a second honeymoon tomorrow, make a new beginning for themselves. But as soon as I tried to find the words to suggest it to her, I knew it was a foolish notion and that they could no more do that than get a divorce.