The Easy Way Out (5 page)

I fought my way through the hideous Swedish ivy plants—Arthur has a fondness for houseplants and pets—and opened one of the front windows a crack. A cold, damp breeze blew in, bringing with it a faint smell of the Charles River. The apartment was in Cambridge-port, a few short blocks from the river and about half a mile from Harvard Square. I stood in front of the open window and shivered happily. I was convinced the planet was about to expire from heat exhaustion, and I couldn't get enough cold weather. I'd been trying to store it up all winter to keep in reserve against the coming spring and summer, those two seasons I'd recently grown to detest.

Conveniently located though it was, the building we lived in was badly in need of paint and had never been properly insulated. But Arthur had been a tenant for over ten years, so the rent we paid was stupendously low. The building had been owned by a ninety-year-old woman, one of those squat Sicilian widows with more stamina than a Latin American soccer team. She'd lived in the suburbs with
her daughter and took the bus to Cambridge once a week to do little projects around the house: chop down trees, shovel snow, pour a new cement walk, shore up the foundation. She'd worshiped the ground stalwart Arthur trod and hated everyone else who lived in the building. Out of deference to her favorite, she pretended I didn't exist. But shortly before Christmas, she'd had a stroke while doing some rewiring in the basement, and the suburban daughter and her husband had nailed a For Sale sign onto the front of the house before her corpse was loaded into the ambulance. Arthur had immediately contacted a real estate agent, and we'd been house hunting since.

I took the pants, sneakers, gym shorts, and several pairs of woolen socks I'd draped over the backs of chairs and flung onto the bookcases and heaped them up in the middle of the floor with the newspapers and the latest issue of
Weatherwise
magazine. I got a trash bag from the kitchen, loaded it with the refuse, and dragged it to the room behind the kitchen, which Arthur had designated as mine when I moved in. It was a tiny room with a narrow, drafty window that looked out to the back porch and the yards of the houses that surrounded us. I had a daybed with about a dozen pillows, a small desk, and a telephone. There were piles of books scattered around—the true-crime thrillers I read on the sly, my collection of books longer than eight hundred pages, which I kept for times of extreme anxiety—and the grotesque religious knickknacks that Arthur had quietly suggested I might like to store “out back” to make the room feel more homey. I can't see a glow-in-the-dark plastic religious icon without buying it. All those crass little figures strike me as funny and comforting. Arthur had informed me the statues were my way of dismissing the church as laughable while covering my tracks in case I was wrong. I found this, like many of Arthur's insights into my personality, condescending and accurate.

It wasn't an especially attractive room, but it was as close to a life of my own as I'd had in the six years Arthur and I had been sharing quarters. There was access to a stairway in the back hall, and if I'd been that kind of snake, I could have carried out all kinds of indiscretions right there behind the kitchen. I, however, was the kind of snake who preferred to carry out his indiscretions elsewhere.

I arranged my clothes in neat piles on the floor, paid off a couple of overdue insurance bills, stripped off my underwear, threw myself onto the daybed, and dialed my friend Jeffrey in New York. His machine answered, so I went to take a shower.

Three

A
n hour later, I told Arthur about the content of Tony's several calls. He was standing at the stove scrambling four eggs for our breakfast, waiting for the toast to pop up. Arthur has a completely healthy, wholesome attitude toward food. He knows what he likes and what he needs to keep himself fit and functioning efficiently. He rarely indulges in empty calories or packaged foods with a shelf life of more than two years. I've never known him to go without three solid meals a day. He has one cup of coffee with breakfast and one at 11:15
A.M.
, doesn't eat between meals or snack before bed. Unfortunately, his attitude toward sex is similarly well balanced.

He listened to my story with mild, lawyerly interest, asked an occasional question to clarify the sequence of events, and did a good deal of nodding and throat-clearing. I was sitting at the kitchen table, clipping my fingernails over a wastebasket, and I knew his main interest was in making sure the clippings didn't end up on the floor. When I finished relating the details, he put the plates down on the table, cleared away the wastebasket, and sighed. “That family. I don't know how you turned out so normal, Patrick. It must be my influence. Just joking, sweetheart. Well, there's only one thing that matters here: does Tony love Loreen or doesn't he?”

“Oh, please, Arthur, life isn't like that. There are too many complicating
factors, too many variables and obligations to consider.”

“Such as?”

“My parents.”

He picked up the newspaper and sank his fork into his eggs. “What do they have to do with it?”

“They want him to marry Loreen. They seem to like her.”

“Well, don't hold that against them. They like me, too. Now, here's a house that sounds interesting. In Cambridge. Two bedrooms, a fireplace, and hardwood floors throughout. Wood stove. I wonder if Eben has a listing for it.”

“What about central air conditioning? That's what we should be looking for. Wood stoves are obsolete. A few more greenhouse years, and fireplaces will be, also. And anyway, I feel bad for Tony. It sounds as if he was roped into this thing.”

Arthur put down the paper and his fork and looked at me critically. He had on a gray suit and a white shirt, and he looked particularly wise and formidable. In a business suit, Arthur's large, oddly shapeless body took on broad and imposing definition. Arthur has a soft, rather plain face, distinguished mainly by his deep-set eyes, a chin with a cleft so deep you could hide a dime in it, and fascinatingly large ears. His head is almost completely bald, except for a monkish ring of hair, which he keeps stylishly trimmed and which makes him look a little like Thomas Merton. In many ways, the most striking of Arthur's features is a bulging prolapsed vein that runs down his forehead to his right temple and throbs when he's considering something seriously.

All in all, his impressive cranium makes you think there must be a preternaturally large brain inside, just dying to get out and take over the world. It's hard to look at Arthur and not feel intellectually inferior, an advantage for his clients and a real problem for his lover. Once, years earlier, I'd made some vague hints that I might like to get my own apartment. He'd responded by saying, “You can't do that.” I was so accustomed to believing everything he said, I took his words as literal truth and dropped the subject.

“I hope you're not planning to get involved in this, Patrick. It's exactly the kind of intervention that's going to make you unhappy, and it won't accomplish a thing.”

“Don't forget, he's my baby brother.”

“Your baby brother is almost thirty. He can solve his own problems. And between you and me, sweetheart, how much can it matter? Tony's a Republican.”

“You wouldn't understand,” I said. “You're an only child.” Relevant or not, it always helps to pull an irrefutable fact out of nowhere when you're losing an argument. I picked up the salt shaker and started to slide it back and forth between my hands across the slick surface of the table. The kitchen table was one of the few contributions I'd made to the apartment, a chrome-and-Formica greasy-diner special I'd bought at a junk sale years earlier.

“Maybe you should get a little more involved in our situation with the house instead of your brother's life.” He looked over at me, his vein throbbing, and I could tell he was making a mental calculation. “The other day,” he said, “Eben asked me if I thought you were really serious about buying a house. You've found something wrong with everything he's shown us for the past two months.”

“True,” I said. “And it's lucky for you I have, or we'd be stuck with a loser now and we'd both be broke. Anyway, I'm not sure I trust Eben or Evan or whatever his name is.”

“Let's not start.”

“Those perfect teeth of his make me nervous.”

He frowned at my plate. “Aren't you finishing your eggs?”

“I've lost my appetite. Do you want them?”

“No, but I'd like you to stop playing with that salt shaker and finish them. You had a cold for a week last month. You don't eat enough; you don't take care of yourself.”

No matter how old I got, Arthur would always be eight years older, a fact he took as license to use a parental tone whenever he got frustrated. I usually countered by acting like an adolescent. I began tossing the salt shaker with a lot more enthusiasm. “Don't get like that with me, Arthur. You know that tone won't get you anywhere.”

He cut me off by asking if I wanted to go to a movie that night. Arthur knew I could always be stopped dead in my tracks by the suggestion of going to a movie with him. There wasn't much I liked better than sitting beside Arthur in a dark theater, sharing a vat of popcorn and disagreeing about everything related to the film. I'd tried to cure myself of the pleasure I took in it, but nothing seemed to help. If every major film studio in the world suddenly went bankrupt, I might, finally, be able to leave Arthur.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked. Arthur, whose idea of a light read is
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
and who claims to have never once turned on a TV set, has a real fondness for insipid, life-affirming comedies. The flabbiest, most badly acted of these could
send him into storms of hilarity. I prefer something with a lot of action and corpses.

“Your choice,” he offered.

“Forget it,” I said, getting hold of myself. “I have to go to the gym after work.”

“You can skip your routine for one night.”

“Impossible.” It was one thing to be stuck in a passionless domestic relationship and quite another to be out of shape and stuck in a passionless domestic relationship. Arthur kept himself fit with a brisk daily walk, fifty push-ups, and one hundred perfectly executed sit-ups.

“We could go to a late show,” he said.

“That wouldn't work, either. You wouldn't get your eight and a half hours of sleep and your whole day tomorrow would be ruined and dozens of people would get deported and it would all be my fault because I wouldn't finish my eggs.”

“No connection,” he said and opened up the paper again.

I knew better, so I started eating.

“And something else,” Arthur finally said from behind his paper. “You shouldn't criticize Eben because he has perfect teeth.”

“It's not just the teeth,” I said. “It's what they represent: the prep school, the sailing lessons, the boxer shorts, the whole package. Didn't he say he plays tennis?” Except in the case of lesbians, playing tennis is usually little more than a crass display of social ambition.

“I wouldn't know,” Arthur said, obviously determined not to play along. He was charmed by our real estate agent, a tennis player with a wife and a family and the kind of legally binding security that Arthur longed for. “And you'd better eat more slowly, Patrick, or you might find yourself at work on time this morning.”

Four

M
y office was in Harvard Square, and I bicycled there most mornings, even in winter. Bicycling through bad weather and driving a pre-1975 Volvo are two particularly Cantabrigian affectations. I liked to pedal a circuitous route to the office, winding in and out of the back streets of Cambridgeport, studying the triple-decker houses and brick apartment buildings, trying to imagine how different my life would be if I lived alone in one of them. Happier, I tended to think, although I was never able to come up with any concrete images of what my happiness might look like.