The Easy Way Out (21 page)

Jeffrey slouched back with the weak coffee and sat opposite me on the sill, our knees touching. His hair had fallen into his eyes. He looked awkward and gangly and uncomfortable, and one of his ears was bright red. “I know you don't like Kyle, Pat. I thought you'd start ranting at me for not taking more of a stand against him. He shows up, and I fall all over myself trying to help out. He's moving back in.”

“If that's what you want . . .”

“He's got his faults. But underneath it all, I don't know. What I really want is something solid, like you and Arthur have. I guess you'd call it a home. Isn't that why the two of you stay together? So you'll have a home?”

“Actually, I'm in it for the money. But maybe you and I could still get together every once in a while. No one would have to know. . . .”

“Forget it, Pat. I'm not having Kyle—Dennis—”

“Sandy.”

“Whatever—moving in here, with me planning to sneak around behind his back. And if you and Arthur are buying this house together, it might be a good idea to turn over a new leaf yourself.”

The rain was falling in a tropical downpour now, coming down so hard it was almost impossible to see the street below. “Maybe I should head back to Boston tomorrow morning,” I said.

“No, stay. Dennis is tied up all weekend anyway. If we're going back to being just friends, we might as well practice.”

Seventeen

I
t rained the rest of the night and most of Saturday. Jeffrey and I stayed in his apartment, reading and listening to noisy Afro-Cuban jazz. I was more in the mood for one of Tony's New Age CDs, Deep Soup or Seadreamscapes, that tinkling, melancholy sound like something you might listen to in a bomb shelter, waiting in peaceful hopelessness for the end of the world.

I suppose I must have been upset that Jeffrey and Kyle were getting together again, but I spent almost the entire weekend thinking about Arthur and not about Jeffrey at all. I was dreading the thought of going back to Boston knowing that my weekend visits to New York were a thing of the past. It was easy for Jeffrey to talk about turning over new leaves when he and Kyle hadn't seen each other for almost two years, but it was a little late in the afternoon for Arthur and me to attempt some kind of about-face. Not to mention that Arthur was unwilling to admit that there were any problems to begin with. When he'd come home and excitedly announced that our offer on the yellow house had been accepted, I began to get extremely apprehensive, as if I'd made some move I couldn't back out of. I was so desperate to talk the matter over with someone, I'd even thought of confiding in Tony. Fortunately, he had been out of touch, so I was
able to keep my anxiety bottled up. The only hope I had left now was that, assuming I sent in the mortgage application, the bank would turn us down.

By Sunday morning the rain had cleared. I woke up in Jeffrey's narrow bed, far away from him, and listened to cans and paper blowing down the sidewalk and against the buildings three stories below. I love the sound of trash blowing along the street in New York. There's something intimate and soothing about it, the Manhattan equivalent of chirping birds. I peered out the dirty window beside his bed. The sun was flickering in and out of lofty cirrus clouds, and the sky was a sharp blue. I slipped out of bed, put on my jeans, a striped dress shirt, a pair of Jeffrey's paint-splattered sneakers, and a black sport coat, and quietly left the apartment.

The air felt improbably fresh and sweet, as if all that poisonous acid rain had washed the sky clean. Tilting my face to the sun, I headed south on Broadway, with the dusty, warm wind blowing my jacket open. I put on round sunglasses, a pair of Arthur's, which I'd swiped from him for the weekend, the very pair he'd been wearing the day we met.

I love the quiet, day-after-the-bomb atmosphere of New York early on Sunday mornings. There was a young couple kissing under the marquee at the Metro theater, newspapers and plastic bags blowing around their feet. Taxis sped past. I imagined that each was carrying an exhausted lone rider heading home after a night-long tryst. One of my most treasured fantasies of romantic love was getting into a taxi and speeding away from my beloved.

I began to feel swamped with melancholy as I walked along. Dust blew into my eye, and I stopped under the awning of a bagel shop, took off Arthur's sunglasses, and tried to dislodge it. Tears would have done the job nicely, but that physiological phenomenon was such a rare occurrence with me, I might just as well have been waiting for it to snow.

As I continued walking down Broadway, I engaged in one of my favorite mind-filling activities: I pretended I was on the Oprah Winfrey show. Getting on a talk show is one of the great ambitions of American life, right up there with giving an Academy Award acceptance speech and being Jackie Onassis. In this case, the topic of the day was Returning to a Monogamous Relationship After Breaking Off a Clandestine Affair.

I was telling Oprah that, yes, the affair had been exciting for a
while, I did enjoy it. But then I realized I just couldn't handle the deception. All the lies were making me feel like a worthless human being. I couldn't reveal the most intimate facts of my life to the person I really cared most about, who, as it turned out, was the person I'd spent the past two years deceiving. So I broke off the affair, told my lover we couldn't go on anymore. And I'd written a best-selling self-help book entitled
Realignments,
and now, in addition to being deliriously happy, I was rich. Life was one big Hallelujah Chorus.

By the time I got through taking questions from the audience and listening to the other numskulls on the panel, I was practically to Times Square. The sun was shining brightly but without much heat, and I decided to walk to my favorite Manhattan hotel and treat myself to a ride in one of their glass elevators. It was a free thrill I'd come upon when I was looking for a bathroom in Times Square a few years earlier. I'd gone to ride the elevators at least half a dozen times since, and often passed along the sightseeing tip to customers at Only Connect. Bored with Oprah and feeling otherwise inspired, I switched the channel and hopped onto the panel of the Donahue show, where the topic was Fun in New York on Five Dollars a Day.

*   *   *

The hotel was one of those sleek cement-and-glass monstrosities that were going to make a spectacular implosion in about a decade. Starting on street level, there were five floors of vast, empty lobbies, designed, I suppose, so the house detectives could screen out the real deadbeats before they got to the verdant restaurants and lounges on the main floor and opened fire into the crowds. The whole hotel revolved around the dizzying valley of an atrium, that marvelous architectural invention, currently as ubiquitous in hotels as beds. This atrium was, to be fair, quite spectacular, soaring up fifty stories, with full-sized trees growing in the lobby and ivy plants trailing down from the upper reaches. Soon we'd all be living in these climate-controlled domes, where weather and fresh air were entirely beside the point.

There were few people milling around the street entrance and no line at the bank of elevators. I stepped into an elevator and punched the button for the top. The little cubicle lurched upward through several floors, and then the main lobby and the restaurants and all those potted trees were beneath me. The overdressed guests and the bellhops pushing clothes racks and the waiters bustling about with
trays on their shoulders grew smaller, a colony of tiny, scurrying people, moving about meaninglessly. I pressed my body flat against the glass wall, daring it not to do its job and send me flying through space.

At the top floor, the elevator stopped. Instead of rocketing immediately back to the lobby, as I usually did, I decided to get out.

The carpeted hallways were quiet, with the muted, buzzing sounds of heating systems and distant vacuum cleaners. I leaned out over the railing as far as I could, trying to see the restaurant below, but the place had been suicide-proofed, and the view straight down was limited.

At the far end of the hallway was an immense round window that looked out to a maze of building tops and scraps of blue sky. There was a row of backless leather seats in front of it, from which you could safely watch the murders and muggings on the streets below. A man and a woman were seated there now, sunken into the leather cushions, kissing passionately. I stood back from them at a safe distance, partially hidden by a concrete pillar. The man was in his shirtsleeves, and the woman had on a long raincoat; there was a single suitcase at their feet. It must have been she who was leaving, while he stayed on. Perhaps they'd met that weekend and she was returning to her husband. I could make out only their silhouettes against the bright sunlight streaming in the window. Quietly, I stepped in closer. I usually hate being enlisted as an audience for strangers' lovemaking or public displays of rage, but I was transfixed by the sight of these two, so oblivious to their surroundings and that window right in front of them.

And then some shadow passed over me, and I leaned against the pillar, weakened by longing and by the realization that there wasn't anyone in my life now—there never had been anyone in my life—to drag up to the top of this hotel and clutch at passionately in the quiet hallways. I came only for the view and the fleeting thrill of the nausea the elevators produced. I was so completely undone by this thought, I slid my back down the column until I was squatting on the floor. I envied these two desperately and wanted to run away, but I couldn't even avert my eyes.

After a time—I wasn't sure how long exactly—the woman stood and adjusted her coat. She had thick, dark curls, and she flung them off her face with a toss of her head. The man, his back to me, was slumped in the seat, with his head in his hands. “You'll be back in a week,” the woman said, wiping at her eyes. “Only seven days.”

And then she looked over at me, startled, perhaps, by my ridiculous posture. Her lover turned to follow her gaze.

He shaded his eyes. “Patrick?” he asked. “Is that you?”

*   *   *

Vivian was catching a plane back to Chicago, an eleven o'clock flight, and she was already running late. Tony had to stay on in the city for another week to finish up a job. This was the hotel where they'd met eight months earlier, in an elevator as they both were headed for this very spot. Didn't I remember that I had told Tony about the view from this window? They'd both been staying at the hotel that week, but if it hadn't been for my travel advice, they might never have met.

The three of us were standing in front of the low leather seats. They had their arms around each other's waist and were leaning shoulder to shoulder. Tony was talking in a quiet, hushed tone that I'd never heard him use before.

Vivian was older than my brother and slightly taller; she had an air of dignity about her that made me think she was more worldly and—despite his bravado—self-assured than Tony. She had all that glamorous, curly dark hair and those fashionable puffy lips, but she was hardly the beauty-queen type that Tony usually went for. Her coat was rumpled and she had a network of fine lines encircling her mouth. There was something in the way she was looking at me, as if we were old friends or at least knew each other well, and in the way she was leaning against Tony, almost as if she were propping him up, that made me feel she was drawing me into an alliance with her, one in which we were both committed to protecting my younger brother from himself. She hadn't said much more than hello, but it seemed to me, as Tony babbled on nervously, that she and I were having a silent conversation, one in which she was sizing me up.

She interrupted Tony in the middle of his long-winded description of their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. “I'd better get going,” she said. “If there's any traffic, I'll miss my plane.” She picked up her suitcase and carried it to the elevators.

I offered to look at her ticket to see if there was some way I could tinker with it so she could take a later flight.

“That's a great idea,” Tony said. “Patrick knows every sleazy trick in the book. Show him the ticket, hon.”

Vivian turned down the offer graciously. “I have to get back anyway. And you two should have some time alone to talk.”

We got into the elevator and they stood facing me, with their
backs to the glass wall, all that scenery wasted. As we descended, Vivian spoke to Tony in a soft voice, so quiet I could make out the whispering sounds but none of the words. Her curls were brushing against his face, and he reached out and gently held her hair back. The gesture was so intimate, I turned away.

Eighteen