The Easy Way Out (31 page)

We started walking again, and I looked over at Arthur and watched the light rain sliding down his impressive forehead. He returned to the discussion of the Sydney opera house, a building at a much safer distance than the yellow house.

He was right; I did know it was supposed to rain that night, but
I'd forgotten about it when we left the apartment. Maybe I
was
projecting my own reservations onto him. I could never be sure with Arthur. As we walked along in the rain, I began to feel chilled.

A couple of years earlier, in what must have been a fit of despair, I went to Arthur and told him I thought we should go to a couples counselor. He was kneeling on the floor in front of the stereo, making an opera tape—a birthday present for me, as it later turned out. He gave me an annoyed look.

“Why would we want to do that, Patrick?”

I suppose I hadn't thought the whole thing through very much, and all I could come up with was an apologetic and far too mildly stated confession that I wasn't especially happy and that I had a feeling something in our relationship wasn't working.

“You don't see me unhappy, do you?” he'd said, as if I'd made some horrible accusation.

“I don't know,” I said. “I suppose not.”

“Well, all right then.” He went on to explain, the vein in his forehead throbbing, that when one person in a relationship is unhappy and the other person isn't, then the person who is unhappy must be the one with the problems. Going to a couples counselor would make about as much sense as putting both legs in traction after breaking one ankle.

I knew there was a hole in his argument somewhere, but it sounded rational enough to make me drop the subject.

I set about trying to make myself happier. It was shortly after that that I started sleeping with Jeffrey. While it certainly wasn't a perfect solution, it did brighten up some of my days, and it was a lot cheaper than analysis.

Now, as we walked along, I wanted to stop under one of the dripping trees and simply confess outright that I was uncertain about buying the house. But I was afraid he'd talk me out of my doubts or turn them around somehow, and the rain was streaming down his monkish face and I felt miserable about not having remembered to bring an umbrella. I listened to something he was saying about the opera house and invented a statistic to refute his argument.

Twenty-five

A
t one in the morning, I was tossing back and forth on my rubber air mattress, so overcome with anxiety I was hoping the thing would explode. That might release some tension or stop Arthur's snoring, or maybe eject me through the ceiling and out into the night air.

Finally, I got up and went to my room behind the kitchen. I folded a huge stack of laundry, dusted a few of my plastic religious icons, lit some votive candles, flung myself onto the bed, and tried to read a long magazine article about the death of planet Earth. At one time, the room must have been a storage closet, for it was always cool and damp, and there was a faint odor of mildew, which I'd come to like. I had the bed wedged into the corner by the drafty window that looked out to the back of the house. Sometime after midnight, the light drizzle Arthur and I had been caught in turned to a more steady downpour, and I could hear water plopping onto the floor of the porch as it seeped through the cracks in the roof. I got through two nightmarish pages of the magazine piece but had to put it aside; I was too distracted and morose to follow its apocalyptic arguments.

The phone was sitting on the floor beside the bed, its push-button face making suggestions. In the past, I'd used the extension in my bedroom primarily to call Jeffrey, and now it was staring up at me, a reminder that I hadn't spoken to him in over a month. I dialed his
number, let it ring once, and then hung up. With my luck, Sandy-KyleDennis would answer and know who it was even if I kept silent. Not that he would have cared especially, but only a lonely insomniac or a drunk would be calling an ex-boyfriend at one in the morning, and I wasn't ready for Kyle to slap either label on me.

I decided instead to call another lonely insomniac, Tony. I heard opera blasting in the background before I heard his hesitant “Hello,” and I shouted at him to lower the volume. He dropped the phone and graciously turned off the music. At least Vivian had him housebroken.

“What were you listening to?” I asked.

“An opera. The tragic one.”

“That narrows down the field.”

“Something's going on with Vivian, Pat. The other night she had me listen to some opera about a bunch of nuns getting their heads chopped off, and last week when I was away on business she went to see a movie the two of us had made plans to see together. She hasn't said anything, but I can tell there's something wrong. We haven't had sex in almost two days.”

Two days. I was on the verge of tears. “She's probably upset she hasn't been invited to the wedding yet. Why don't you just call Loreen and start the ball rolling, for Christ's sake?”

“I talked with her earlier tonight. I called her planning to say something, but I ended up talking as if nothing was wrong. The pathetic thing is, I think she bought it. Does that give you an idea of how sad this situation is? She didn't even mention that she'd been in to see you. I should have settled things and broken her heart months ago—before I knew how rotten it feels to have your heart broken. And do you want to hear something really horrifying?”

“I'm all ears.”

“The only reason I called was because I was talking to your father tonight and he sounded so miserable when I mentioned Loreen's name, I felt I owed it to him to call my fiancée. Vivian's right: I should get to a shrink.”

“I spent the night with two of them. I can give you their number if you want.”

“Who's this, that ex-wife of Arthur's? I don't like the sound of her.”

“You don't like the sound of anyone. She and her husband invited us over for champagne. Our mortgage came through.”

“No kidding? I'm glad someone's life is going well.”

I suddenly felt so offended by the comment, by his apparent need to think that everything was going well for me, I wanted to leap through the phone and strangle him. “My life is not going well!” I shouted.

“Take it easy, will you? How am I supposed to know your life isn't going well if you don't tell me about it?”

Perhaps it was the late hour or the quiet dark of the house, or maybe the closing date on the house was making me desperate and all my buried discontent was floating to the surface. Whatever it was, I started confessing my doubts about the house to Tony and then, much more alarmingly, some of my doubts about my relationship with Arthur.

My brother was so quiet on the other end of the line, I gratefully assumed he'd fallen asleep. Finally, he said, as if making a painful confession himself, “I might as well tell you right now, Patrick, and I hope you don't get pissed off: I never liked Arthur.”

“Now you tell me! I thought Arthur was the one person you
did
like. For the past six years, all I've heard from you is how wonderful he is.”

“Well, what did you expect? That's what you always say about somebody's wife or husband or whatever he is. I'm not saying he's a monster, but he thinks he knows everything, and you can't get him to tell you what he really thinks of people. I can't prove anything, so don't tell him I told you, but ever since you two came out here and I let him drive my car, it hasn't been running the same.”

“I warned you about that.”

“I know, but I had no idea he was as bad as you claimed. The minute I saw him pull out of the garage at two miles an hour, with the emergency flashers and the wipers on, I knew that relationship was burned meat loaf.”

“Well, whatever it is, we're about to sign a thirty-year mortgage.”

“Don't be an idiot, Patrick. If you don't want the house, don't buy it. It's that simple.”

“Simple, sure. But it's already too far along to stop.”

“A bullet through the head's the only thing that's final. And I don't care how much deposit money you'd lose; it still has to be better than losing the rest of your life and all the money you're going to pour into the dump. Between you and me, what kind of person would buy a yellow house?”

“I'm not sure that's the best way to judge character. Anyway, he's a good person, Tony.”

“I don't doubt it. It's too bad everything he does drives you crazy, that's all. Love and pity, man, it's a bad combination.”

There was something in the conversation that was beginning to sound familiar, although I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Whatever it was, talking with Tony about Arthur made me feel more calm and relieved than I'd felt in weeks. After we'd hung up, I went back to the magazine article about the end of the world and read it enthusiastically. The pessimistic account of the death of all recognizable forms of life on the planet had a soothing effect on me. Shadows from the votive candles were flickering across the ceiling, and the sound of the rain leaking through the porch roof was almost romantic. I began to get happily drowsy and pulled a heavy blanket over me. When Arthur had suggested I make this tiny room my own, we'd agreed that no matter how much time I spent there, I would always sleep in our bedroom. But tonight, perhaps encouraged by my talk with Tony, I let myself drop off in the candlelight and slept, without interruption, until morning.

Twenty-six

I
n my years at Only Connect, I developed several theories on the nature and psychology of travel, the central hypothesis of them being that happy individuals at peace with themselves do not travel. Or at least don't like to travel. Of all the great travelers in history, the overwhelming majority took to the roads to avoid extreme malaise and, nine times out of ten, some degree of sexual panic. Travel, as a vocation, has consistently attracted almost as many guilt-ridden cross-dressers, repressed homosexuals, and tormented pedophiles as the religious orders.

Of course a one-week trip to the Bahamas can't really be called travel, in the grand tradition, and in that sense, Only Connect was more a vacation factory than a travel agency. Unfortunately, most people don't like to vacation, either. Young professionals need something to brag about at cocktail parties, so they go on vacations. The majority would rather spend their time off at the movies. If it weren't for the demands of upward mobility, Only Connect would be out of business.

Most people are afraid to fly but ashamed to admit it because it's considered lower-class to distrust air travel. If Lindbergh had come from a family of sharecroppers, people would still be crossing the Atlantic in ocean liners. As for hotels, those nonplaces are intrinsically depressing and unwholesome. Paying outrageous sums for the
privilege of staying in them and having your life dictated by a staff of desk clerks, bellhops, housekeepers, and waitrons is an exercise in self-degradation.

All of which made my new vocation of talking people out of going away so gratifying. It wasn't only the Party's Over desperadoes who could be set on the right path; with a few probing questions and the proper attitude, anyone could be convinced to do what he really wanted to do: stay at home. “So you and your wife want to go to a romantic island? Are you really trying to tell me the romance has gone out of your marriage? How long have you been feeling this way?” “You want a seat at the back of the plane? In other words, you're tormented by the fear that the plane is going to crash. Why not take a nice long drive to Hartford instead? Rio will be there ten years from now.”

If, however, I'd wanted to talk Professor Fields out of his trip to Bermuda, I should have begun at the beginning. By mid-April it was too late to do anything but make a genuine effort to get him seats on the plane. Then, too, my attitude toward the man had taken an unexpected turn: during his last whispered call, sometime shortly after Arthur and I heard about the mortgage, I began to feel a twinge of empathy for him. He'd called to make more inquiries about the nonexistent hotel reservation and the decor of the nonexistent hotel room and the size of the nonexistent bed, and there was something in his hushed voice and his pathetic, suppressed excitement that touched me. Obviously he was trapped in a passionless marriage and was trying to make some breathing space for himself by taking this ill-fated trip with Zayna. Memorial Day weekend was probably the only thing he'd had to look forward to in years, discounting the occasional visit to a zoo. As for Zayna, if she wasn't genuinely in love with him, she was pursuing her academic goals to the best of her abilities, and I couldn't very well begrudge either motivation.