The Easy Way Out

by Stephen McCauley

  “We should keep an eye on the time,” she finally said. “With our luck, we’ll probably miss him.”

  I checked my watch. We’d been sitting at the table for close to an hour, and Tony’s flight was about to arrive. I finished off my drink quickly and paid the bill.

  * * *

  By the time we got to the lounge, the two people who’d been standing there earlier were lost in a small, noisy crowd. The plane had landed and was pulling up to the gate, its lights flashing. There must have been a downpour while we sat having cocktails, for the big window in front of us was streaked with rain.

  “I guess we just made it,” I said.

  But Rita stopped walking and gripped my arm.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Turn around, Patrick.”

  “What do you mean, turn around?”

  “Trust me: just turn around.”

  But old habits die hard, and I didn’t trust her. I looked into the crowd of people in the waiting lounge and saw Loreen standing by the gate. She was wearing a long raincoat with a belt pinched in tight at her narrow waist; a plastic bonnet covered her big hairdo. “I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s she doing here?”

  “I suppose she must be heading him off at the pass,” she said, “like the rest of us. She just happened to get here at the right time.”

  We turned around and left quickly.

  Thirty-eight

  I didn’t realize it then, but much later it occurred to me that I must have been quite drunk by the time my mother and I walked out of the airport. Whatever a Rob Roy is, it packs a fairly solid alcohol-and-sugar punch. I hadn’t eaten much of anything that day, and I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in close to a week. My judgment was surely clouded, although I may be trying to make excuses for what I did.

  Even if I was under the influence, I knew better than to speed and run the risk of being pulled over by a cop. I’d already racked up a couple of moving violations that year, and adding a drunk-driving charge to the offenses would have cost more than I could afford. I suppose spending a couple of weeks in jail would have solved some of my problems, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. I drove carefully through the tunnel and then along Storrow Drive on the Boston side of the river. The sky was still full of planes circling overhead, but otherwise the city looked different to me. The buildings seemed less imposing and the lights less dramatic. I scanned the radio for a late-night jazz station but couldn’t come up with anything. It was almost midnight, right around the time I’d first heard from Tony, almost three months before.

  I didn’t know what he was going to say to Loreen when he stepped off the plane, if he’d be shocked to see her or if he’d been the one to tell her to come pick him up. If my mother’s suspicions were correct, he’d apologize for having been so distant, complain about his job, maybe confess sorrowfully to a case of the last-minute jitters, and then tell her he loved her and start the ball rolling once again.

  It was all out of my hands, and as I cautiously navigated my way home to Cambridge, I wasn’t even that interested in finding out what happened.

  Back at the airport, I’d taken my mother’s keys and walked up to the top floor of the parking garage to get her car for her. She was a good deal more steady on her feet than I was, but I was feeling unusually chivalrous. As I was driving the big, boxy car down the endless series of circular ramps, growing increasingly dizzy, I thought about her words to me back at the cocktail lounge. And it hit me then that she’d been right about what I’d said in the store that day: I hadn’t been talking about Loreen and Tony at all, and I hadn’t been talking about my parents. I’d been talking about myself, describing my own life and my pessimistic, unhappy fantasies of what the future was likely to hold if I kept on course. By the time I’d reached the ground floor of the garage, aided considerably by power brakes and steering, the past three months had fit together and I knew exactly what it was I had to do.

  * * *

  It was long past one o’clock when I entered the apartment. I was in that odd euphoric state that accompanies fasting, sleep deprivation, and natural disasters. I could have passed out on the floor of the hallway or started to repaint the exterior of the house. Arthur was in bed, snoring after what must have been a fierce night of packing. The boxes in the living room were stacked high, all carefully marked and labeled, taped and tied up with twine. The moving truck would be pulling up in front of the house in five days.

  I went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the king-sized mattress and looked down at Arthur. His face was lit up in the bands of pale light coming in through the blinds from either the moon or the streetlamp. He looked so calm and innocent, I felt miserable for ever having blamed him for any of my own disappointments.

  I shifted my weight on the bed. He woke and looked at me through one eye. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said thickly.

  I bent down and kissed him on his lips. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Late,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “I’m glad you did. I was worried about you. I was very worried. Then I fell asleep. Where were you?”

  “Dentist. You should go back to sleep.”

  He pulled the sheets around him more tightly and buried his head under a pillow. I curled up next to him, reached out, and pulled his body in toward mine. He made a quiet, contented groan. I wanted to stay like that for a long time, our bodies huddled together comfortably.

  “I’m determined to make things better for both of us,” I whispered to him.

  “They’re fine as they are,” he mumbled.

  “But they’re going to be getting better, sweetheart. I’m suddenly turning optimistic.”

  When I got up to leave the room, he asked me where I was going.

  “I have to pack,” I told him.

  “At this hour?”

  “Better late than never.”

  Before I’d even shut the door behind me, I could hear him snoring softly.

  * * *

  I suppose I really did take the coward’s way out, but I’ve always thought there was something courageous in risking the label of coward, so I was able to rationalize a certain amount of valor into my actions. I should have stayed and talked things over with him, helped him make arrangements, deal with paperwork and plans, but I was afraid that if I did, I’d start to doubt myself once again and go back on my resolve. I was convinced I was doing the right thing, even if I was going about it in the wrong way.

  * * *

  The following morning, long before Arthur was awake, I was sitting in the back seat of a taxi, heading out to Logan once again. I had one small suitcase at my feet, stuffed with a couple of black sport coats and some bathing suits and six tubes of sunscreen. The roads were virtually empty, and the morning was clear and windless. Good flying weather, assuming there was such a thing as good flying weather. I was so sure that what I was doing was the best thing for both of us, I didn’t worry even for a moment about the plane bursting into flames at takeoff.

  The night before, as I was driving home, I’d stopped in at Only Connect, made a few entries in my computer, erased Professor Fields’s name from his ticket, and hastily filled in my own with a thick red pen. I wrote him a check and mailed it to his office, along with a note telling him I was sorry it hadn’t worked out with Zayna. “Anyway,” I wrote, “you’d hate Bermuda. No animals and too much sun.”

  As Sharon would have predicted, the gate agent scarcely looked at my ticket when I handed it to him. He wished me a good trip, a nice day, a happy life, and let me pass.

  The plane was filled to capacity with happy honeymoon couples dressed in amazingly similar pastel outfits. They were all best friends before we’d reached cruising altitude. In a couple of years they could hold a reunion on a divorce junket to the Dominican Republic. I certainly didn’t belong in their midst, but I felt so blessedly invisible, it hardly mattered. After I’d gorged myself
on a plate of microwaved eggs and had a couple of glasses of champagne, I fell into a sound sleep and didn’t wake up until a steward shook my shoulder and told me we’d landed ten minutes earlier.

  * * *

  If I’d known how much I was going to love Bermuda, I probably would have gone sooner. I spent ten days on the island, sealed in my deluxe room at the Pink Sands Beach Club (or the Sandy Club at Pink Beach or wherever I was), with the drapes drawn and the air conditioning on Ultra Cool. I ordered up books from the gift shop, alcoholic punch from the bar, and two huge meals a day from room service. I made great friends with the housekeeper after assuring her that she didn’t need to bother changing my sheets every day. She and I played gin rummy, and she told me the gossip about all the other people staying on my floor, what kind of underwear they’d brought, and what they kept in the drawers of their night tables. When the sun went down, I would put on a sport jacket, move out to the balcony off my room, and sit in the balmy breeze, watching the lights of Hamilton across the harbor. I spent hours watching a closed-circuit television station that broadcast a propaganda loop about the culture, history, and astonishing beauty of Bermuda, and by the time I was ready to fly home, I almost believed I’d seen the island.

  * * *

  When I got back to Cambridge, Arthur had moved. Except for the small room at the back of the house and the Formica-top table in the kitchen, the entire apartment was empty. I looked through all of the deserted rooms to see if he’d left a note or a message of any kind for me, but the place was brilliantly clean, as if a whole crew had come in and scoured out all traces of Arthur’s ten-year occupancy.

  It must have been something about the sterile cleanliness of the place, with its meticulous finality, that set me off. I went into the back bedroom, curled up on my mattress, and burst into tears. I hadn’t cried in such a long time, the novelty of the experience thrilled me. I lay there for well over an hour, trying to think of everything I could to make myself sob louder. When I was finally finished, I had a throbbing headache. I walked out to the empty living room and sat on the floor in a corner, waiting for another weeping spell to strike. But the more I looked around the empty room, the more I liked it. I’d never realized before quite how spacious it was. And without all the dusty antiques and overstuffed chairs, I discovered I was better able to breathe.

  Part

  • • •

  7

  Thirty-nine

  My younger brother was married on a Saturday in mid-July when record-breaking heat was forecast and the radio was issuing warnings about the potential health hazards of outdoor activities such as jogging, walking, and inhaling. Just another pleasant summer afternoon in the brave new world. Since returning from Bermuda, I’d made a diligent and reasonably successful effort to give up listening to hourly weather reports and keeping an exact count of how many degrees above normal the temperature was at any given moment of the day. But the ferocity of this heat wave had made it to the front page of the newspaper, and I couldn’t ignore it altogether. By eleven that morning, when the wedding party and the guests were gathering outside the church, the sky was a blank white dome, and everything under it seemed to be gasping and melting. The grass in front of the church was scorched brown, the trees were drooping, the air was soupy, and the macadam of the parking lot was soft and gummy underfoot.

  “Watch yourself,” I said as I helped Rita from the passenger seat of her air-conditioned car. “It’s deadly out here.”

  She stepped into the furnace and calmly brushed down the wrinkles of her dress. “Did you think this was going to be a fun day, Patrick?”

  “I suppose you’d prefer rain?” my father asked. He stepped out into the staggering heat, adjusted his tie, and looked up into the glare of the sun. “Well, maybe it is a little warm.”

  He was happily accepting responsibility for the events of the day and was determined to put everything in the best light.

  The church itself was not air-conditioned, and despite the ceiling fans whirling on high, the relief from the sun offered by the stained-glass windows, and the slight breeze stirred up by one hundred overdressed guests fanning themselves with prayer cards, two women grew faint during the service and had to be helped out by the ushers.

  It came as a pleasant surprise that one of the stricken was not the mother of the groom. Then again, I suppose Rita must have had a lot more on her mind than the heat. She and my father sat side by side in the pew in front of me, and I heard them whispering to each other throughout the ceremony. He asked her for his eyeglasses, she asked him to repeat something the priest had said, he loudly accused her of making too much noise, and, in a harsh whisper, she claimed that he was disrupting the service.

  The parents of the groom had chosen disturbingly similar outfits, light-blue suits and white shirts. My mother’s outfit at least had a skirt to distinguish it from my father’s, but she was wearing something around her neck that looked a lot like a man’s tie. Sitting down, they were the same height, and from my vantage point, they could have been twins, or a crazed brother-and-sister team who’d lived too much of their adult lives under the same roof and blurred the lines of their identities.

  I lost most of my consciousness after the first twenty minutes of the mass. The heat and the drone of the priest’s voice and some overpowering atmosphere of collective boredom conspired against me. I heard an elderly relative breathing heavily behind me, possibly snoring, and then my brain shut down. It wasn’t until Tony and Loreen were officially declared man and wife that I came to again. I saw my mother grab hold of my father’s arm, as if to steady herself. Her body began to tremble, and she sobbed so loudly that a disconcerting silence fell over the gathered crowd for what was probably ten seconds but felt like an hour. Loreen’s parents were across the center aisle from us, and they glanced over to see who was keening. Mrs. Davis recoiled when she spotted my mother. No one in our family knew exactly how much they did or didn’t know about Loreen’s bumpy ride to the altar, but neither of the bride’s parents was going out of his or her way to be friendly. My father glared at them, put a protective arm around Rita’s shoulder, and whispered something into her ear. She gave him a little shove, as if to push him away.

  Sharon was sitting beside me, and she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Look how cute! They’re fighting!”

  Of course I had no idea what my father had said, but I thought there was something tender and loving in his rejected attempt to console Rita. Maybe he was just feeling he could afford to be generous, since the wedding had turned out as he’d wanted. I hoped he hadn’t been so tactless as to make some comment to my mother about their own wedding day.

  * * *

  Despite everything, Loreen did make a beautiful bride, all springy curls and satin skirts and lace sleeves. She was carrying a bouquet of pink and white roses. The flowers were wilting in the heat, making her look all the more lovely by comparison. Somehow or other, she seemed to have shut down her sweat glands for the morning. Perhaps she was wearing too much makeup for the garish, hot sunlight, but when it came to cosmetics, you had to trust Loreen. She knew what she was doing, and she had obviously prepared herself for the photographic record of the wedding, not the wedding itself. Years thence, no matter what happened in the course of her marriage, she’d look like a beauty queen in her photo album.

  As man and wife walked down the aisle out of the church, Loreen held on to Tony’s arm tightly, as if she’d just brought a sinner to God and was carrying her convert out into the light of day, her head high, her back straight. As she passed by my pew, she nodded and smiled, but it was impossible to tell if it was love or simple victory that was blazing in her eyes.

  Tony wasn’t faring quite as well. He had the fixed, frozen expression of a man in a mild state of shock. He could easily have been a passenger on a transatlantic flight who realizes, halfway to Paris, that he’s left the oven on or the back door unlocked, forgotten to feed the goldfish or pick up the baby at the day care center. H
e’d lost more weight since I saw him at the hotel in New York, and he looked shriveled and deflated. But Tony was handsome, and the circles around his eyes made him appear hungry and desperately romantic. He had the kind of fierce and haunted face that would be irresistible in the soft light of a hotel cocktail lounge, and thirty years down the road, it would be indistinguishable from my father’s.

  As the happy couple passed, his eyes were so deep-set and far-away, it seemed possible he’d slipped off into a fantasy world where none of this was happening, where Vivian was holding on to his arm and a two-hundred-pound soprano was singing her deathbed aria before the curtain went down.

  * * *

  I might have known more about what was going through my brother’s mind, but we were scarcely speaking to each other anymore. The evening I returned from Bermuda, Tony had made his final midnight call to me. It was early June then, one of those cool, humid nights in Cambridge when the air is salty and still. Earlier that evening I’d found a wicker chair on the street, and I was sitting in it, with a sheet wrapped around my body, when the phone rang. I was reading the newspaper, a task I was discovering took a lot more time without the help of Arthur.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Tony asked. He sounded close to frantic. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over a week now.”

  “I was going to call you tonight,” I said. “I decided to take a vacation. I went to Bermuda for a few days.”

  “Bermuda? What the hell was it, a honeymoon?”

  “Not that exactly. Something like it, I suppose. What about you? What have you been up to?”

  He seemed indignant that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t apprised of the latest developments in his life. “Haven’t you been talking to your parents?” he asked.

  “Not recently,” I said.

  “Well, why not? Don’t you care what’s going on with me?”