The Easy Way Out (30 page)

If Arthur and Beatrice were no longer in love with each other, they were at least melded together in that inexplicable way people often become so in bad early marriages. They spoke on the phone at least once a week, met for lunch twice a month, and frequently
quoted each other in conversation. Arthur and I got together with Beatrice and her new husband several times a year, usually for dinner and an evening at Symphony Hall. Beatrice took a lot of interest in me, although I was sometimes concerned that she thought of me as Arthur's new wife, particularly when she passed along recipes and advice on nonpolluting cleansers. (Beatrice herself employed a variety of illegal aliens, referred to her by Arthur, to clean house and cook the family meals.) She and I rarely spent time together alone, but when we did, she had a bad habit of lecturing me about Arthur, as if to prove that no matter what, she knew more about him than I ever would.

I liked Beatrice. She knew her own faults and never hesitated to point them out. She had an acerbic, unsentimental way with Mitchell, her new husband, and Bradford, their genius five-year-old son, but left no doubt that she adored them both.

Two days after Arthur and I received official word that our mortgage had been approved, Beatrice invited us to her house for a celebratory glass of champagne. Beatrice was big on celebratory glasses of champagne, at least where Arthur was concerned, and Mitchell was a wine enthusiast. They lived about eight blocks from us. I was always happy to visit, partially because even a Philistine like me could appreciate that anything Mitchell poured from a bottle was of exceptional quality, and partially because we could see them without facing the dilemma of trying to decide which of us was going to drive the car.

Arthur dressed with care that night, as he usually did when he spent time with Beatrice and Mitchell, and reminded me that I might want to wear something other than dirty blue jeans. “After all,” he said, “we are having champagne.”

Arthur suffered from the divorced man's affliction of wanting his current significant other to look good in the eyes of his ex-wife.

*   *   *

Beatrice and Mitchell owned a large town house in mid-Cambridge, one of those bright, cheerful places with too many skylights and too few interior walls. It was light and airy and air-conditioned, but they should have bought a place that was better able to accommodate their extensive library. Arthur's bookish influence on his first wife was evident: she still owned all the books he'd given her in the course of their marriage and had chosen for a second husband a psychiatrist whose real passion was Victorian novels. She
let us into the town house, enthusiastically congratulating us and blowing her nose. I don't think I'd ever once met Beatrice when she didn't have a head cold, possibly because she saw a lot of children in her therapy practice. “Are you thrilled about the house?” she asked me.

“Speechless,” I said.

The full implications of securing a mortgage had not yet hit me. I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it, but I did notice that I'd been walking around in a kind of daze since Arthur had made the happy announcement. His excitement left me even more ambivalent.

“The speechless stage will pass, believe me,” Beatrice said. “You should have seen me before we bought this place. I was more nervous than when Arthur and I got divorced. Oh, Arthur, look at that tie. There's a stain right here.” She started to rub at the spot and then tossed down the tie in disgust. “I keep telling you to take your things to the cleaner across from your office.”

“I did, dear. That's where the spot came from. It was fine when I brought it in.”

Arthur and Beatrice expressed their fondness for each other by trading gentle insults, almost as if they were an old married couple. She led us into the living room and, between sneezes, told Arthur she'd read the novel he'd suggested and had hated it. As a way of maintaining intimacy, each read every book the other recommended; but, possibly to keep a safe distance between them, they always disagreed volubly about the books' merits. Most surprising of all was that neither of them noticed the pattern.

Beatrice was taller than I and had dark hair cut in an outdated but functional wash-and-wear shag. To her credit, she was not the type for wasting time in front of a mirror with a blow dryer and a styling brush. Her nose was constantly red from her sneezing, and she always wore baggy cotton skirts, their pockets stuffed with tissues and men's handkerchiefs. Sharon told me that the one healthy fact of my relationship with Arthur was that Beatrice and I didn't look alike. Beatrice and Arthur, however, could have been siblings. They had similar square, solid frames, protuberant ears, and kind eyes.

Bradford was sitting on the living room floor, pulling books off the bottom shelf of the bookcase that took all of one of the few existing walls. Without looking up at us, he started to mumble some barely coherent comments about how we'd interrupted him in the middle of what he was doing.

As might be expected from two mental health professionals, Beatrice and Mitchell had produced a precocious, furiously neurotic child.

Beatrice looked at us and shrugged. “Bradford, how about leaving the books alone and saying hello to Arthur and Patrick?”

“I happen to be in the middle of something, Mom. As you can see?”

“He's arranging all of the books in the house according to height.”

“According to color!” Bradford cried. “I'm arranging them all by color.”

“By color,” Beatrice corrected, blowing her nose. “Height was last week. Next I suppose it'll be weight.”

When she left to get her husband, Arthur poked me in the arm and pointed to Bradford, grinning fondly. Arthur's ability to get along with children extended from this oddball all the way to Stacy, my miraculously normal niece. Arthur admired Bradford's intelligence; I was dumbfounded by his neuroses. His bedroom was as orderly as the Library of Congress, with toys lined up according to height and clothes neatly folded and grouped in matching colors.

To highlight his peculiar demeanor, Bradford had inherited his father's gigantic frame and bad eyesight. As difficult as it is to admit, there was something about this big, bespectacled, compulsively organizational child I found unnerving. No doubt he would grow into a handsome overachiever and discover the cures for cancer, AIDS, and the common cold, but if he ended up murdering student nurses, I for one wouldn't be shocked to read about it in the newspaper. Arthur always knew how to engage him in stimulating conversation. He tossed a pillow on the floor and took a seat beside Einstein.

“Would you be willing to reveal your system for arranging the colors?” Arthur asked.

“Yes; it's a very simple alphabetical arrangement. If you'll look on that bookshelf behind you, you'll see that the black ones are first, then the blue, then the green, the orange, the red, and the yellow. Those are the basic categories.”

“Hey, Brad,” I said, “what about the browns?”

“I'm putting the browns together on a bookshelf in the other room, off by themselves.”

Obviously there was something of major scatological significance in this, and I was eager to pursue it. Arthur must have noticed my face lighting up and quickly asked Bradford about his kindergarten comrades.

*   *   *

Arthur's replacement was fifteen years older than Beatrice, gray-haired and bearded. He had the easy, sincere geniality of a man who was either completely at peace with himself and the world or was dipping into the Xanax jar too regularly. Based on the evidence at hand, I was certain it was the former. I'd never once seen him lose his patience with either his wife or his child, and he treated me with good-natured disregard that acknowledged we had little in common and would never be friends but still allowed for pleasant conversation over dinner. What I liked best about Mitchell was the slightly depraved gleam in his eyes, an especially fascinating feature in a man obsessed with the life and work of Lewis Carroll.

The doctors came into the living room, she with a tray of glasses, he with a rotund bottle of champagne, both grinning joyously. Arthur stood, hands were shaken all around, and Beatrice dragged her son up from the floor as Mitchell expertly worked the cork out of the bottle. Bradford demanded a glass for himself, and his father poured him a token splash, though not enough, unfortunately, to stunt the kid's growth. Mitchell proposed an upbeat toast about the house, and we went through the embarrassing ritual of clinking glasses.

I drank, not quite convinced by my own participation. I appreciated Beatrice and Mitchell's generosity in being happy for us, but I found it a little overdone. Arthur put his arm around me and pulled me to him, and I nearly spilled my champagne down the front of my shirt. His show of affection was too sudden for my taste. We'd had words on the walk over from our apartment, and I was still angry. What had started out as a simple disagreement about the acoustical problems of the opera house in Sydney—a subject of enormous relevance to our lives—had become a fierce argument about Australian politics, something neither one of us knew or cared a thing about. I didn't need Mitchell's or Beatrice's degree to figure out that the whole fight was the result of sublimated something or other. My choice would have been to skip the champagne and keep arguing.

Arthur's displays of affection around Beatrice and Mitchell always made me uneasy anyway. I had a sneaking suspicion they were related to the success of Beatrice's second marriage. Then, too, there was something about Arthur's displays of affection that made me uneasy in general. I always wanted to shrug them off, like a sweater that's comfortable but offers no warmth.

When Bradford, who was looking slightly tipsy and off balance,
demanded food, Mitchell and Arthur went to the kitchen to feed him, and I was left standing in the middle of the living room floor with Beatrice. She scrutinized me closely for a minute, blew her nose, and pointed to a low, benchlike sofa jutting out into the middle of the room. “Let's sit down,” she said. “If I have another sip of this I'll be on the floor. I shouldn't be drinking with this cold anyway. You know, my mother used to claim she loved champagne, couldn't get enough champagne. Whenever we went to anyone's house on holidays, she made a big show of telling everyone how much she loved champagne, as if she lived on it. It was very embarrassing. Half my childhood, my father could barely afford to feed us, and she'd be going on about champagne. There was something truly pathetic in it. Now tell me what's worrying you most about buying the house.”

I drained off my glass, thinking how to answer, anticipating her lecture. As soon as I opened my mouth, she cut me off and said, “You're worried you're making a mistake? Isn't that it?”

“Well, I suppose there's—”

“And what worries you even more is that Arthur seems to have no worries at all.”

“He doesn't really—”

“Oh, don't believe it for a minute, Patrick. That's just his way. He's a nervous wreck about the house, too. I know he is. I'm sorry, did I interrupt?”

“No, not at all, I was just—”

“Arthur's way is to pretend he's absolute about every move he makes and always above reproach. That's why he's always so nice to everyone. He doesn't want to give you anything to call him on or point a finger at. It's very cowardly of him and very clever. You have to confront him, ask him outright about his own doubts. Here,” she said, “let me refill your glass.”

“I'm not exactly—”

“What? Good at direct confrontation? I could have told you that. I'd guess you function better in the deceive-and-escape mode. Am I right?”

“You—”

“I'm sorry I'm talking so much, Patrick. You probably think it's unprofessional of me. Well, it is. But after all, this is a social call.”

She pulled a rumpled handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. I saw an opening in the conversation and tried to make use of it to change the subject. I was interested in hearing what she had to
say, but there's something physically exhausting about having your sentences finished for you. I started to talk about the weather, the unseasonable warmth we'd been having that spring, how it was a sure sign of global disaster, hot air trapped in the atmosphere, building and building until all life was suffocated by it.

She waved the handkerchief at me dismissively and stuffed it back into her pocket. “We'll file that comment under ‘interesting association.' You're probably uncomfortable I'm talking so much about Arthur. Well, what else am I supposed to do with twenty years' worth of observations? When's the closing on this house?”

“About six weeks.”

“All right. So there's still time to be direct. Clear the air now. Get Arthur to talk about his own concerns, and you'll feel a lot better. What do you think of that?”

“I—”

She sprang to her feet. “Damn, they're coming back already. I thought Bradford was hungrier than that. Just remember, Patrick, anytime you want to talk, you can call me.”

*   *   *

It began to drizzle lightly as we walked home. Arthur looked up into the dark sky. “Why didn't you tell me it was going to rain?” he asked. “I mean, you know the weather reports for every day for the next six months, sweetheart, and if you'd told me it was going to rain, I would have brought an umbrella and we'd both be dry instead of drenched. Life would be simpler.”

Now was obviously a good time to start taking Beatrice's professional advice. “You know what I was just wondering, Arthur? I was just wondering if you were having any reservations about the two of us buying this house together.”

He stopped under the branches of an old maple tree sprouting on the edge of the sidewalk and looked at me with amused incredulity. “If I'm not mistaken, sweetheart, my ex-wife would call that projection. You're the one having doubts, so you assume I must be. It's a classic example, in fact. I'll have to mention it to Beatrice next time we have lunch.”