The Easy Way Out (6 page)

The neighborhood, wedged between Harvard and MIT, was surprisingly untouched by either towering institution. The old working-class Irish families who'd lived there for a couple of generations mixed peacefully with recently emigrated Haitians and Jamaicans and an increasing number of young professional couples who drifted across the river from Boston in search of a backyard. Most of the buildings were reasonably small, most of the streets were tree-lined, and in summer, cool breezes blew up from the river. Although I'm loath to wax rhapsodic about anyone or anything, I sometimes laughed aloud at my good luck in living there.

On a mild, cloudless morning a few days after Tony's distressing fourth call, I bicycled to work in a light cotton sweater. In the short
time it took me to make the trip, I broke out in a sweat, another clear indication that the planet was rapidly reaching the boiling point. Arthur analyzed my greenhouse-effect obsession as a displacement of my anxiety about AIDS, which might have been true but didn't explain why we'd had a heat wave at Thanksgiving. Given the opportunity, I'll always believe the worst-case scenario. I'm not an especially optimistic person. I wasn't brought up on optimism. The closest thing to optimism I heard as a child was my father's reassuring statement in times of crisis that the situation could be worse. “And don't forget,” he'd usually add, “you can always kill yourself.”

When I arrived at the office, I hoisted my bicycle to my shoulder and carried it into the building. The owner encouraged employees to bring bicycles and pets to work, to give the agency a more relaxed, collegiate atmosphere.

The travel agency was located in a small house in a back alley several blocks from Harvard. It was a dusty, ramshackle building with paint peeling off the walls and plaster chipping from the ceiling. Drafty without being well ventilated and old without any antique charm, the agency had an established reputation among the Cambridge intellectual crowd: Harvard professors, hippies who'd become civil rights lawyers and therapists, and New Age birdbrains of all sorts. I think the shabby conditions of the place somewhat mitigated the trivial, bourgeois nature of travel in our clients' minds. And then there was our name, Only Connect Travel, a reminder that the owner, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy, had read
Howards End.
The staff was made up of a bunch of overqualified individuals with advanced degrees and, in more than one case, a substantial private income. Everyone in our office either had done something more substantive or at least gave the impression of being capable of doing something more substantive. The travel industry is a real haven for burned-out teachers and social workers and est trainers. I was one of the burned-out teachers. Technically, I suppose I was one of the burned-out travel agents, too, but I couldn't afford to quit.

Fredrick, the receptionist, handed me a stack of pink call-back slips and looked at his watch. “Late again,” he said wearily. “Always, always late.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But at least I'm earlier than I was yesterday.”

“Please don't apologize, Patrick. I couldn't care less. I was just making a casual observation.”

Fredrick—it never occurred to me or anyone else in the office to
call him Fred—was a recent Harvard graduate, a stout, pleasantly bored young man with a passion for Charlotte Brontë and French pastry. His hair color varied wildly from week to week, and his eyelids were remarkably heavy and oily. There was much discussion around the office about whether or not he wore mascara. He was far from the most efficient receptionist we'd ever had, but apparently the boss felt that having someone at the front desk reading
Villette
compensated for the fact that he often neglected to answer the phone.

I liked Fredrick, mostly because he never bothered me about my own inefficiency and was the only person I'd ever met who could wear pedal pushers and a bow tie at the same time and somehow look dashing. I was fascinated by his sexual interests, which were as varied as his wardrobe and his hair color. I'd once asked him if he considered himself a bisexual. “Basically,” he'd said confidentially, “I fall in love with anyone who'll stay in the room after I've taken my clothes off.”

I apologized once again for being late. He shrugged, adjusted his bow tie, and remembered that there was a client waiting to see me in my office. “He got here a while ago,” he said.

“Oh?” I had a list a mile long of clients I had no desire to see.

“Fifteen minutes ago. Tall, long arms. Talks so soft you can't hear a thing he says.”

Worse news than I'd feared. Dr. Fields, a Harvard professor, had come in months earlier to plan a trip I still hadn't done any work on. I lifted my bike to my shoulder and carried it into my office grudgingly.

My desk was in a small, narrow room at the rear of the house, probably part of the pantry when the place was lived in by a single family. I loved my office, mainly because it was so aesthetically unappealing that I was left in relative peace. I had a sagging bookcase laden with heavy rate tariffs and hotel books, and a rack of outdated brochures was nailed to the wall. Fields was sitting in front of my desk, studying a hotel guide and jotting in a tiny notebook.

“Sorry I'm late, Professor,” I said as I dumped my bike against a wall. “I have a sick dog at home, and I didn't want to leave him.” Fields was a zoology professor, so I thought he'd take to an animal excuse.

I swept a stack of papers off my chair and sat down. I love to sit behind my desk and at least appear as if I have all the answers.

“I was just in the neighborhood,” Fields whispered, “and I thought I'd drop by and see how the reservations are coming.”

Fields was a pathological passive-aggressive type. His particular act of hostility was to talk so softly I had to sit on the edge of my seat and strain my ears to hear what he was saying. I'd tried asking him directly to speak up, told him I was hard of hearing, and forced him to repeat every sentence he uttered. Finally, I'd discovered a solution that worked.

“Oh, thank you,” I said loudly. “I got it on sale at Filene's. I wasn't sure about the fit, but twenty-five dollars for an all-cotton sweater, how can you go wrong?”

Fields smiled condescendingly. He had a long, craggy face and one of those unkempt, stained beards so popular among fifty-year-old Harvard professors with marital problems. “Very nice,” he said softly. “But I asked about the reservations.”

Better, but not good enough. “That's what I thought,” I said, “but in fact, it doesn't show the dirt at all. And it's one-hundred-percent washable.” I shrugged and folded my hands on my desk. “What brings you in this morning?”

“Did you get the hotel reservations?” he asked in a normal tone of voice.

“Yes,” I said. “They haven't sent in the confirmation slip yet, but I'm expecting it any day.”

“I'm beginning to get worried, Patrick. You're sure it's all confirmed?”

“Quite sure,” I said. “I can't imagine why they haven't sent the slip.”

He looked at me suspiciously, but I knew he wouldn't call my bluff. We had an understanding.

Fields had come in in January to book a trip to Bermuda for Memorial Day weekend. He told me he was taking his niece, Zayna Carmine, out of obligation to his sister, whose husband had just divorced her. I thought nothing of it at first, and then he told me, in his moronic whisper, that I wasn't to cross-reference the plane reservations in any way, that Zayna's ticket was to be paid in cash, and that I was to assign seats for them on different parts of the plane, “in case of a crash.” I wasn't to call him at home or office, and I wasn't to send any information on the trip through the mail. Whenever he did call me, it was from a phone booth, with traffic noise in the background. I imagined him standing in a rest stop on the Mass Pike in a long coat and sunglasses. To confirm my suspicions, I called Harvard student information and asked if they had a listing for Zayna Carmine. I was promptly given a telephone number, which I didn't write down.

I honestly wouldn't have cared if he was traveling with a donkey he planned to sodomize on the lawn of the Houses of Parliament. But I resented his effort to hide the obvious, as if I couldn't read the signs, would care, or was likely to be indiscreet. Half the leisure-travel industry has something to do with illicit sex—what made him think he was so special? I'd managed to get him seats on the plane, but the hotel was another story. He wanted to stay at an exclusive resort—basically a pink stucco drinking club for wealthy anti-Semites—and each time I called the place, I thought about Fields boozily chasing Zayna around a king-sized bed, lost heart, and hung up. If the trip came together at this point, it would be a miracle.

“Now, I really could try to get a child's fare for Zayna,” I said, “if you think your niece could pass for under twelve.”

“Doubtful.” He laughed. “She's very mature for her age.”

Equally doubtful, I'd have guessed. Mature college students are the ones who know their place. Zayna's place was not with a married zoology professor in any case, and certainly not under a moon-gate arch in Bermuda.

I looked at the call-back slips Fredrick had handed me. There were three from a divorced man who was trying to give meaning to his life by planning a trip to swim with dolphins, two from Tony's fiancée (I was booking their honeymoon at a health spa in California), and one from my friend Jeffrey in New York. I crumpled up the first five and tossed them into the wastebasket. Jeffrey's I impaled on my message stick.

“Is there something else I can help you with?” I asked, hoping to make him think I'd helped him with anything at all so I could get rid of him and call Jeffrey.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said quietly. “I'm thinking of taking my wife on a little trip after Bermuda.” He pulled on his nasty beard and flipped through his notebook. “I wanted the name of an inn less than an hour from Boston. I wrote down some places while I was sitting here waiting for you for the past forty-five minutes. Maybe you could tell me if any of them is particularly nice?”

Not surprisingly, his handwriting was so minuscule it looked as if it had been written with a strand of hair. I squinted. From a business standpoint, the advantage of booking a tryst trip is that it's usually preceded or followed by a guilt-induced vacation with a spouse. Fields's suggestion was one of the more token efforts I'd encountered in a while.

I handed the notebook back to him and leaned my forearms on
my cluttered desk. I like to keep the top of my desk a mess so I can shuffle through papers as a stall tactic when pressed for information. “Those places you've written down,” I said, “are what we in the business call ‘cheap motels.' You might spend a weekend there, but not with your wife.”

“No?”

“Trust me.”

He looked at his list with new interest. I hadn't met his wife, but I imagined her to be one of those well-meaning, hopelessly drab Cambridge academic wives. You saw them walking around the Square dressed in crocheted shawls, peasant skirts, and knee socks, with mandalas on leather cords around their necks. I took down a book of classy New England inns and lovingly picked out the most attractive and expensive of the bunch. Mrs. Fields would be comfortable there. She'd fit right in with the dried-flower arrangements in the bathrooms and the white tufted bedspreads.

“This is your place, Professor,” I said. “Very quiet. Romantic, but in a tasteful way, if you know what I mean.”

What I meant was, the place was so suffocatingly cozy, he'd have the perfect excuse for falling asleep on the far side of the canopy bed at nine-thirty without touching his wife. Sex was about as appropriate in one of those places as it was in a telephone booth.

“A little pricey, isn't it?”

Needless to say, the hotel he'd picked out in Bermuda was one of the most expensive on the island. “Think of it this way: it's half the price of the place in Bermuda, and this includes breakfast. A huge meal a wild animal couldn't finish.”

“I suppose you're right.”

I told him I'd make reservations and, just to let him know I wasn't as dumb as he thought, said I would mail a confirmation for this one to his home.

He gathered up his briefcase and his tweed sport coat and stood up. He was staggeringly tall. His arms seemed to hang down unusually low, as if he'd been observing the behavior of gorillas for too long. Perhaps Zayna was attracted to his mind. “And you'll check on the other reservation?” he whispered.

“No problem,” I mouthed silently.

Five

A
s soon as Fields was safely out of the office, I dialed New York. Jeffrey was an old college chum, with whom I'd been especially chummy for the past year and a half. We were having an affair, though that term suggests something too established and committed for either one of us. “Fooling around” was more the way I'd describe what he and I did, even though I got nervous sometimes thinking that maybe what I really wanted was to fall madly in love with him.