The Easy Way Out (2 page)

“I'm sorry, Patrick,” he said. “Do you want me to hang up?”

I pretended to think it over for a few seconds and then, always magnanimous, said, “Don't bother, I'm awake now.”

I was actually delighted to hear from Tony. He almost never called me anymore, and when he did, I was just dumb enough to be flattered by the attention. Tony is exactly the kind of loud, right-wing bully I feel obliged to take a stand against on principle but from whom I secretly crave approval. He's taller than me, broad-shouldered, and at the time of the call, he was living a thousand miles
from home. He's never been quiet about the fact that he views my life with mild disdain; I'm not as handsome as he is, I'd gone from teaching school to being a travel agent (“an even bigger loser profession”), I hadn't supported a single winning candidate since the day I registered to vote, and my sex life was considered reprehensible by every candidate who did win. For my part, I consider myself smarter than Tony, but I suspect he has more common sense. In any case, he only called when he had a problem he wanted to discuss (usually something profoundly meaningful, like a lost airline ticket or a hotel reservation botched by his secretary), and I loved feeling like an older brother, with age and experience and some advice worth listening to.

He didn't say anything for a minute, and then, irritably, he asked, “So what's been going on?”

“Don't expect me to supply the news,” I told him. “You're the one who dialed the phone.”

“I guess that's true,” he said and then lapsed into silence.

Since late January, my mother had been calling me with unusual and disturbing frequency and feeding me a lot of unfinished sentences that had something to do with Tony. “That brother of yours,” she'd say dolefully.

“What's wrong with Tony?” I'd ask. It had to be Tony. Ryan, my older brother and only other sibling, was generally referred to as either “the saint” or “that poor slob.”

“Who said there was anything ‘wrong'? Why does there always have to be something ‘wrong'? My God, Patrick. I was just wondering if Tony . . . Oh, never mind; you wouldn't understand.”

Whether I'd understand or not, I was eager to fill in some of the blanks for myself, but I knew I'd have to play along with that brother of mine if I wanted to get any information out of him. Like my father, Tony could be astonishingly circumspect, a trait I admired as a sign of masculinity and lack completely. I reveal my most intimate secrets to any innocent bystander who'll listen.

I told Tony I was planning a trip to Egypt in May, a travel agent's junket, and that I was thinking about buying a new car. Both intimate secrets were lies, but Tony loves to give advice on automotives, and I always try to make him think I live a glamorous, globe-hopping life.

He made a disparaging comment about the Egyptian military and launched into a nonsensical tirade against all foreign cars.

I was lying on the antique sofa in the living room, naked under a scratchy afghan. It was early in March, and winter, which had been regrettably mild that year, was doing me the favor of lingering on in
the form of chilly nights. The air felt icy and sharp, and the living room was filled with faint blue light from either the moon or the streetlamp below. Through the tangle of hideous Swedish ivy leaves blocking the front windows, I could see the lights of Boston off in the distance, and I let myself sink into a kind of romantic lassitude. I reached behind me and turned on the late-night jazz station to heighten the effect. A tortured saxophone rendition of “Ill Wind” came on. Quickly, I lost track of Tony's political rant and imagined myself in some far-off, suffocatingly polluted city. Maybe it was Cairo. I was dragged back to reality by the sound of my brother shouting at me for seeking out consumer magazines, in which American-made products often ranked poorly.

“All right, all right,” I said. It was a ridiculous charge. I shop the same way I choose lovers—impulsively and with a sense of desperation. Then, hoping to get to a more interesting topic, I told him I'd been hearing some rumors about him from Rita, our mother.

“You and your gossip,” he said. Tony liked to gossip more than anyone I knew, but he considered it effeminate and only felt safe doing it with me. “What rumors?”

Arthur had been awakened by the phone, and he looked in on me to make sure it wasn't someone calling about a friend's hospitalization or plunging T cell count. He was wearing his pervert outfit: a boyish blue-plaid bathrobe and a pair of black socks pulled up almost to his knees. He gave me one of his worried, compassionate looks, the kind that always makes me want to knock his block off. Not that I would ever have knocked Arthur's block off. For one thing, he's over six feet tall and outweighs me by a good fifty pounds.

“Everything's fine,” I barked. “Go back to sleep.” And then, instantly regretting my tone, I added gently, “It's Tony.” He nodded and lumbered on to the bathroom.

“That Arthur?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

“Honest to God, Patrick, I don't know how that poor guy puts up with you, I really don't.”

Every member of my family showed his reluctant acceptance of my homosexuality by constantly pointing out to me that I was unworthy of my lover.

“Listen, pal,” I said. “I've been hearing some rumors from your mother that you're having doubts about this wedding.”

She hadn't told me anything of the kind, but I knew all the sighing over Tony had to have something to do with the wedding. I had my
own theories about Tony's pending marriage, and most of them revolved around the word “doubts.” Among other things, I thought Tony was unworthy of his fiancée, she was unworthy of him, he wasn't in love with her, and neither one of them was ready for marriage.

“Sure I'm having doubts. Who doesn't have doubts? I'll probably have doubts ten years after we're married. Are you telling me you don't have any doubts about Arthur?”

“None,” I said. I heard the toilet flush and watched as Arthur padded back to the bedroom. “And if you give me a gun, I'll prove it.”

He sighed wearily.

“Anyway, I'm not the one getting married in July,” I said.

“That's obvious, Patrick.”

A tiny bell sounded in the background in Chicago, and I heard my brother rustling paper. I could picture Tony sitting in his sterile apartment, pulling a frozen dinner out of the microwave at midnight, and I felt sorry I'd used the flippant tone that had marked our relationship for at least a decade, especially since I sensed he was calling in some distress. It often happens that people in my family call me when they're at the end of their ropes. I'm the family stand-in for a priest, since they all know I'll never marry.

For the past three years, Tony had been living in Chicago and working for a consulting firm that advises mid-sized companies on the best ways to replace employees with complicated computer systems. He spent a substantial amount of time racking up miles on his frequent flier programs, traveling to cities in different corners of the country. He'd once confessed to me that although he liked living out of a suitcase in the cheerless hotel rooms he admired for being “spotless,” he often woke up mornings with no clear idea of where he was.

From what I could gather, Tony's job consisted largely of ingratiating himself with a staff of low-level employees, convincing them to confide in him about the work they did, and then figuring out the best way to drop them from the payroll. His job struck me as morally objectionable, but it suited his personality perfectly. He could be effortlessly charming and had always had a mania for efficiency. Tony had never been keen on dealing with the emotional complexity and unpredictability of human beings. He liked things neat and tidy.

According to my mother, and the hints he himself dropped from time to time, Tony was doing quite well financially, certainly better
than either Ryan or me. I'd always imagined that Tony would end up working for the CIA, but I suppose they don't pay enough. Immediately after graduating from a small college outside Boston, Tony had enrolled in one of the many business schools that sprang up in the area shortly after Ronald Reagan began his eight-year nap in the White House. He set up an apartment in the basement of my parents' house and made a few desultory attempts at helping out in O'Neil's Men's Shop, the clothing store my parents owned and had been pushing into bankruptcy for thirty years.

The day he graduated from business school, he announced that he'd found a job in Chicago, and was gone within a week. My parents were too stunned to raise any objections about his leaving the family store, which was probably why he slipped out of town with so little effort.

He'd driven west with all his belongings loaded into the trunk of his American-made car. Left behind were his weight set, his Heather Locklear posters, his motorcycle, and his girlfriend of several years, Loreen Davis. He was twenty-five then, and for all his bluster, it was his first real brush with independence. I could only imagine his reaction to the freedom and loneliness that confronted him when he moved into his own place, and I imagined all that had at least as much to do with his decision to get engaged as any genuine feelings he had for Loreen.

The problem wasn't that he and Loreen were a mismatched couple; in my opinion, the problem was that they weren't a couple at all. As far as I could tell, their only shared interest was Tony.

Arthur and I had visited Tony in Chicago during a mercilessly ill-advised cross-country train trip. His tenth-floor apartment was one of those depressing cinder-block boxes done up like a showroom in a furniture warehouse: all characterless couches, thick beige wall-to-wall carpeting, and closets with folding louvered aluminum doors. Tony had always been a fanatic about cleanliness, so the place didn't even have the advantage of being dirty. The bathroom had a liquid soap dispenser, matching towels, and some weird contraption shaped like a mushroom, which kept the air smelling, in theory, of new-mown grass. Put a strip of paper around the toilet seat, and you'd swear you were a paying guest in one of the nicer Best Western motels off the Jersey Turnpike. The final note of desperation was the artwork, photographs of dandelions gone to seed, snow-covered trees, and sailboats on Lake Michigan, which Tony had taken himself
and had mounted in pastel mats and metal frames. From my observations, no hobby attracts more lonely single men than landscape photography.

By the time I'd taken in the microwave, the sectional sofa, the hayfield bathroom, the collection of New Age CDs (which Tony referred to as “classical music”), and those perfectly focused, unpeopled photographs, I'd decided that if I ever wanted to do myself in and couldn't find a suitably dreary motel room in Boston, I'd head out to Chicago and end it all in Tony's pale-blue living room.

But underneath my lack of respect for my brother's taste in furniture and despite his condescending attitude toward me, I liked him, and for as long as I could remember, I'd felt compelled to try and save him—from what I'm not sure. Probably the very things I admired about him.

Now I shifted the phone to my other ear and listened to him rustling paper and clanging silverware as he set out his solitary midnight microwaved dinner. I admitted to him that I'd been lying about our mother's “rumors” and apologized for my joke about killing Arthur. There was a hole in the afghan, through which I'd distractedly stuck my penis. I wrapped the blanket around me more modestly and tried a different tone of voice. “So you're wondering if you should go through with the wedding,” I said. “Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“I want to,” he shouted.

“Okay, well, how do you feel about Loreen?”

“Don't give me that ‘how do you feel' nonsense, Patrick. What difference does it make how I feel? I got engaged, didn't I? Draw your own conclusions.”

I was at my parents' house when Tony presented Loreen with an engagement ring, and it wasn't a pretty sight. I thought back to that night as I listened to him shoveling food into his mouth and rambling on about the dangers of confusing facts with feelings.

It was a rainy Sunday evening in November, more than a year earlier. Loreen's birthday was in three days, and Tony had flown to Boston to surprise her with a diamond. Arthur and I drove out to my parents' house in the suburbs, at my mother's insistence. “Surprises are such fun,” Rita had said. “Even you might enjoy yourself, Patrick.”

I knew something was up as soon as we walked into the house. My mother was standing in the kitchen, nervously wringing a dry
dish towel over the sink and humming something that sounded a lot like “Put the Blame on Mame.” She had on a severe dark-blue pleated skirt, a starched white shirt, and penny loafers. Her face was heavily made up, and her red hair was even stiffer than usual. She looked a lot like a brilliant, troubled lesbian math teacher I'd had in junior high. She started complimenting Arthur the minute we walked in the door. From the enthusiastic way she hugged him and completely ignored me, I knew she was hiding something. Then I heard my father, Ryan, and Tony shouting at each other in the basement.

Arthur looked at me over Rita's shoulder and rolled his eyes. I hadn't yet taken him for a visit when there wasn't a battle or a scene of some sort.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Nothing's going on, Patrick. Why does there always have to be something ‘going on'? A little political discussion, that's all. You know how your father loves to shoot off his big mouth.”

My mother grabbed Arthur's hand, dragged him into the family room, and incoherently started to tell him that she'd rented
Yentl
the night before and still couldn't get over the beauty of Barbra Streisand's Semitic profile. The last time he'd visited, Arthur had been regaled with tales of a wonderful bar mitzvah she'd been to forty years earlier.