The Easy Way Out (24 page)

“She?” Arthur looked amazed. “I thought you said he.”

“Dressed like this?” Robin had turned around in her mother's arms and was looking wistfully at Arthur, reaching out her pudgy hands.

“I guess I didn't notice,” Arthur said. “I just liked holding him. Her.”

When the woman had wandered off, Arthur explained that the mother, whom he'd never met before, had approached him and asked him to hold her baby for half an hour. He shrugged, modest but obviously pleased with himself. “She said I looked trustworthy.”

“I suppose this is the kind of thing that happens to you all the time, people trusting you with their kids, their wallets, their secrets?”

“I wouldn't say all the time. But it happens.” He smiled. “Wouldn't you trust me?”

I thought about it for a moment and decided he was one of the most trustworthy people I'd ever met. “I'm not sure what I have to trust you with,” I said.

He looked at me oddly, as if he was surprised or perhaps distressed by my comment, one that I'd intended flirtatiously. It's relatively easy for me to flirt with people I assume to be disinterested, unavailable, or repulsed. I took his look as a sign that he was getting
bored with my company and decided to go on the offensive. I've found it often helps to start insulting someone when he's obviously wearying of you.

I asked him who in this dreary crowd he knew. The hosts were his neighbors, he told me, and they'd invited him. But only out of pity because his wife had recently divorced him.

I pointed out Sharon, who was holding court with a crowd of laughing people on the far side of the lawn. She was standing in a flower bed, crushing petunias beneath her sandals. I told him we were housemates. “I'll introduce you,” I said. “She knows lots of people to fix you up with.”

Arthur gave me another of his odd, questioning looks, as if he wasn't quite sure what I meant, and then our conversation died. He sat calmly, with his hands folded in his lap and a bemused look on his face. It was just after six, that still, scorching time of the day when the sun seems to blaze with a final show of intensity. The music had stopped, and the crowd in the yard had begun to thin. The remaining guests looked limp, despondent, resigned to the heat. I felt suddenly relaxed, as if Arthur and I were set apart from the remains of the crowd, floating in the cool shade of the rosebushes. I don't know how long we sat in silence—probably no more than fifteen minutes—but in that time, I felt a kind of brotherly intimacy with him. Then there was a burst of wild laughter from inside the house. Two sunburned children in matching Day-Glo orange outfits ran across the lawn, someone turned on the music again, and the spell was broken. By the time Sharon came to announce she was ready to leave, I was hesitant to go.

“In case you were wondering,” I told him, “this is poison ivy. I don't usually look like this.”

He cocked his head to one side and smiled vaguely.

“This rash,” I said, pointing. “It's poison ivy.”

“I'm sorry to hear it. I guess I didn't really notice.”

I should have taken all the things I liked about Arthur as warning signs—his vagueness, his complete lack of interest in physical appearances, his hypochondria. But what did I know? I was charmed by him, by his calm and sincerity and some air of innocence I couldn't quite pinpoint. One week later, I made dinner for Arthur and a woman who'd briefly lived in Sharon's house following her divorce. I thought the evening went remarkably well; the two of them left together, and I was fairly certain I had a matchmaking career ahead of me. When Arthur returned the invitation, I assumed Tina would be
there, tossing the salad. But it was just the two of us. After an awkward, silent dinner, he made an elaborately pained confession about the reason for his divorce and then knocked over a lamp as he made an awkward lunge in my direction.

The first time we were having sex, Arthur's phone rang. He apologized, got out of bed, and spent fifteen minutes earnestly answering questions from a telemarketing company about which brand of frozen vegetables he preferred. When he got back into bed, he seemed confused, as if he couldn't remember what we'd been doing.

I suppose neither one of us was ever passionately attracted to the other, which, at least at the beginning, didn't seem to matter so much. I liked Arthur. I liked him passionately. I admired him passionately. I had a passionate desire to please such a kind and admirable person. I suppose I must have figured that if I added it all up, the grand total would equal love.

The Peter Principle—the theory which contends that employees in a hierarchy are promoted until they're in a position in which they're incompetent—may or may not have validity in the business world, but it certainly applies to love relations. Arthur and I should have stayed in that patch of shade by the rosebushes forever, awkwardly flirting with each other and falling prey to misunderstandings and lost opportunities. Instead we moved on to dinner dates, sex, cohabitation, mutual dependency, with an inevitability that took on a life of its own.

Now we were negotiating buying a house together. Jeffrey was right: I did want a home, some safe and reliable shelter from heat and disease and the madness of the whole dying world. I suppose what I was most confused about was how much I was willing to pay for it.

Twenty

S
ometime in that second week in April, the weather took a decided turn for the worse, and spring began to strangle the East Coast. We had a dose of unseasonable weather, which the TV meteorologists were euphemistically referring to as a “warming trend.” I discovered that if I switched the stations at exactly the right moment, I could catch the weather report on all three local networks. One moronic weatherman outdid the next, smiling and rhapsodizing about what was clearly an environmental crisis. “Let's all get out there and enjoy the sun!” was the general attitude.

TV meteorologists have always struck me as a particularly insipid breed, with their apologies for each passing rain shower, even in the middle of a drought, and their apparent assumptions that everyone worships the sun, that big carcinogen in the sky. I called the TV stations to complain, but got surprisingly little response. One person I spoke with had the audacity to explain that normal temperatures are determined on the basis of thirty-year averages; once the greenhouse eighties were averaged in, our current heat wave would be nothing out of the ordinary. “In other words,” he said cheerfully, “this is perfectly normal weather.”

Arthur set up the furniture on the back porch, and we took to
eating breakfast and dinner there on especially mild days. One Tuesday morning, we were sitting in the balmy breeze drinking coffee, going through our newspaper-scanning routine. I was summarizing a recent story about a wholesome, happily married, devoutly religious, outspokenly right-wing suburban minister who'd been arrested on child molestation charges. It was a pretty run-of-the-mill item, which I was forced to embellish with a few invented lurid details. I looked up at Arthur in the middle of a riff about sex in the sacristy and saw, in the bright morning sunlight, that the sparse hair around his temples and over his big ears was peppered with gray. I'd never noticed this before, and I was so shocked I dropped the paper. The graying was far from unattractive; if anything, it made for a particularly dashing effect. What stunned me was the realization that Arthur was visibly aging after all.

He had on the cotton sweater I'd bought him in New York after leaving Tony's hotel. (Because Jeffrey and I were calling it quits, my original plan to go to Barney's had seemed beyond the call of duty, and I'd stopped instead at a street vendor in Times Square and bought this “Ralph Lauren Original” for seven dollars.) It was a bright shade of blue, which seemed to be draining his complexion of color. On closer inspection of his face, it appeared that Arthur's chin might be sagging, too. I couldn't understand why I'd never seen these developments before. Even now, the hair and the chin looked to me more like disguises than actual physical changes.

He smiled at me with his wide, kind smile and cocked his head to the side inquiringly. Shaken, I picked up the newspaper and went on with my report. It wasn't until later in the day, when I was having lunch with Sharon, that I was stopped short by the realization that I, too, had obviously aged in the time I'd known him, had deteriorated physically and become more bitter and pessimistic as well. I realized that no one else would ever see that younger person, and if Arthur and I separated, I'd lose that part of myself forever.

When I mentioned all this to Sharon, she laughed. “You're missing a crucial point here,” she said. “In fact, you're missing
the
crucial point.”

“What's that?”

“You're unhappy! You aren't getting what you want out of this relationship, and that's what's killing your optimism and making you bitter. And frankly, it's probably what's speeding Arthur's aging process, too.”

“I'm happy enough,” I said. “At least I think so. I'm certainly as happy as anyone else in my family.”

“I'll be the judge of that,” Sharon said, “after I've met Ryan.”

*   *   *

Arthur suggested that we have the dinner with Ryan and Sharon on the back porch, providing the mild weather held. I vetoed the idea. If Ryan caught a cold while having dinner at my apartment, my parents would never forgive me. As it was, they'd called several times to grill me with questions about what I intended to feed Ryan and why I'd invited him to my apartment all of a sudden when I hadn't done so for several years.

“He likes a nice healthy meal,” Rita informed me. “He can't digest all that spicy food you live on. He's got enough problems without adding an ulcer to it.”

“You don't get an ulcer from spicy food,” my father said on the extension. “You get it from constant stress and anxiety, like if you live with someone who's always driving you up the wall.”

“That poor slob is so upset about this divorce, he can't take much more. Why not give him a rain check? Have him over to see the new house. By then he'll be through with the divorce.”

Since talking with Tony in New York, I'd been looking forward to seeing Ryan. I realized that I never spent any time with him and, in a certain way, I'd almost written him off as a hopeless case. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Sharon might be a good friend for him, encourage him to stand up for himself and, if nothing else, at least tell Elaine how he'd felt about her all the lost years of their separation.

“Why's that Sharon coming?” my father asked. “You're not trying to set something up, are you?”

“Oh, my God!” Rita cried. “Even Patrick isn't that heartless, Jimmy. Give the kid some credit for something.”

It was unclear to me why they were so upset about the dinner until, at the end of one conversation, my father said, “I hope you're not planning to talk about Tony at this banquet.”

“Tony?”

“Remember him? Your younger brother, the one who's getting married?”

“I suppose his name might come up.”

“You see, Rita, I told you,” my father said. “Didn't I tell you? That's what this whole thing is about. He's trying to get everyone lined up against Loreen.”

“And I suppose that's my fault—is that what you're saying?”

“Well, you didn't try to stop it, did you? At least I had a man-to-man talk with Ryan and told him not to go.”

“The last time I checked, Jimmy, it would have been impossible for me to have a man-to-man talk with anyone.”

As usually happened when they were on a conference call, they began having their own private battle. Once I had the gist of their conversation, I hung up. It was unlikely they'd notice for a good five minutes, not until my father's strength had waned and the fight ground to a halt.

Tony had phoned twice since our meeting in New York, to report that my parents had made five calls to him in less than a week. But instead of hammering at him about Vivian, as Ryan and I had suspected they'd do, they were trying a different tactic. They were smothering him with daily praise for Loreen, how lovely and sweet and naive she was, how eagerly she was planning for this wedding, and how many thousands of dollars' worth of nonrefundable deposits she'd laid out thus far. The other woman had never been mentioned. Tony assured me that he'd steeled himself for an attack against Vivian, but he was totally unprepared for this assault. Every time he said Loreen's name, his voice dropped to a whisper, almost as if he felt he was causing her greater misery by discussing her.

“Can you imagine how desperate your parents must be to be going on like this?” he asked. “They're in this wedding up to their necks. Who knows what they'd do if I backed out of this.”

“Have you talked with Loreen since you got back?” I'd asked.