The Easy Way Out (38 page)

But if anyone had had any doubts about Loreen's intelligence, they were dispelled shortly after Ryan brought the cake in from the kitchen, with seven candles glowing. All the lights were off in the dining room, and Loreen and Arthur made a discordant attempt at singing “Happy Birthday.” When no one had joined in by the second line, their voices faded to mumbles.

Ryan set the cake in front of my father. “Make a wish, James, and blow out the candles.”

“With my emphysema, that's the last thing I need. You do it, Reenie, honey. Make a wish that you get all the presents you want at the shower. It won't be long now.”

Loreen laughed and lifted her glass. “Didn't I tell you?” she
asked. “I guess I must have forgotten. I've decided to postpone the shower.”

Arthur turned to me, without expression.

“Postpone?” my father asked.

“Yeah, delay, put off. Postpone.”

My father looked over to my mother, but she was staring off into space blankly.

“It's an inconvenient time for a couple of my girlfriends,” Loreen said, “so I thought we might just put it off for a bit. And, you know, I'm waiting to hear from Tony.”

Then she leaned across the table and blew out the candles in a single breath.

Part

• • •

6

Thirty-two

“I
'm not going to hound you about this, Patrick, but please don't get sympathetic. No sympathy and no anger on my behalf. I'd be a lot happier if you told me I'd been a fool all along and left it at that.”

Sharon and I were in the alley behind the travel agency, picking through a barrel of trash. Over the weekend, Sharon had spent hours cleaning out her files and had inadvertently thrown away a ticket to Brazil she'd written months earlier and at a significantly reduced fare. If she issued another one now, or applied for a lost-ticket refund, the airline would very probably catch on to what she'd done. So far we hadn't turned up anything promising, although we'd gone through most of the barrels already.

I'd told Sharon, as soon as I got into the office that morning, that Ryan had informed me about his intended meeting with Elaine. She'd immediately dragged me out into the alley. Even though I was brimming over with sympathy, I knew better than to offer my condolences.

“I hope you don't mind if I at least say I'm surprised,” I said now. “It doesn't seem like the kind of thing Ryan would do.”

“What? Go back to his wife?” She pulled an envelope out of a trash bag and looked at it hopefully. “That's exactly the kind of thing Ryan would do. I guess I was just too stupid to see it coming. I
underestimated his craving for predictability. That's the problem with getting tangled in a relationship. If that's what it was. Or falling in love, for that matter. Not that I did. You can never tell what's going on in the other fool's head.”

She took her Luckies out of the pocket of her skirt, shook one out for herself, and passed the pack to me. I declined the offer. “Oh, go on, Patrick. I know you steal them from me sometimes. You don't believe I'd think less of you for smoking, do you? Or for trying to keep it secret. You'd be amazed at how many secret vices I have.”

She lit my cigarette and sat on a milk crate, with her feet up on a pile of newspapers.

“What I meant about Ryan,” I said, “is I'm surprised he spent so much time with you if he had her in the back of his mind all along.”

“You can't even blame him for that. We never did sleep together, you know. We played poker, watched TV. We got cuddly on the sofa a few times. A couple of hugs and kisses. Not exactly the kind of thing I'm used to. My approach is usually more direct. I must be getting old. I made the mistake of letting him take the initiative. Look, Patrick, I'm not stupid, you know. It isn't as if I had any illusions about your brother, but I did think something was going on between us. I suppose he thought we were just good friends. So there's the problem. I was living in one fantasy, and he was living in another. The only time love works is when two people are deceiving themselves in the exact same way.”

“We still don't know what Elaine is going to say.”

“Irrelevant. Getting Ryan on the rebound was one thing, but I have to draw a line somewhere.”

She had a coughing fit, looked at her cigarette with disgust, and threw it to the ground. I was beginning to get pleasantly dizzy from mine, a feeling intensified by the early-morning humidity and the stench of trash from all the barrels heaped up around us. “We're never going to find that ticket,” I said.

“You see what happens? You try to change your life, and you end up in an alley, fighting the rats for the last remaining shreds of your old self. Believe me, I'll find the ticket.”

“What if you created a monster,” I said, “and Ryan turns out to be a pig like Tony and me after all?”

“Ryan's not a pig, and neither are you. I'll withhold judgment on Tony. I just hate being everyone's best friend. Christ, with my luck, they'll do me the honor of naming me godmother of their next kid. There's a depressing thought.” She wrapped her arms around her
waist and shuddered. “You know, I'm not such a fool, Patrick. It's just that I enjoyed spending time with him. Who'd have guessed he'd be one of the few men I've met who didn't want to be mothered by me. Then again, it probably wouldn't have worked out in bed.”

“No,” I said, “probably not.”

“What are you talking about? Ryan's a sensualist. And believe me, there's nothing better than a sensualist who's been locked up in a basement for three years. A volcano waiting to erupt.”

Of all the possible ways I could think of to describe Ryan, sexual volcano was not one. However, I usually trusted Sharon's instincts. She leaned over her legs and clasped her hands under her knees. Her hair fell over her shoulders and around her face. She looked like a little girl not chosen for a softball team, alone in a corner of the playground.

“The worst of it is that all my friends will shower me with sympathy even though they'll secretly be thrilled.” She pushed herself to her feet, kicked over the milk crate she'd been sitting on, and began to poke through another trash barrel. “They're all in some kind of relationship, and there isn't a happy couple among them. But they come and visit me and we sit around and talk and they look at the big empty house and as they're driving home beside the person they've committed their life to and would like to have assassinated, they think: Well, at least I've got
someone.
I'm the perfect friend, Patrick. I talk and act like I'm on top of the world, so you don't have to take care of me, but one look at me and you get to feel superior. Don't think I don't know it. Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Just a little. Maybe it's the cigarette. What about Roberta—is she onto any of this?”

“Oh, sure. Somehow or other she figured it all out. She told me I was lucky it didn't work out. I got so pissed off I told her she had to move.”

“There's a positive step.”

“We'll see if she actually goes or not. What about you? Have you started packing yet?”

I looked over at her mournfully but didn't say a word.

The closing was less than a week away, and Arthur had stacked the living room with boxes and packing materials. I found the sight so depressing, I avoided that end of the house altogether. The most I'd been able to do was fold a couple of shirts.

I'd pretty much given up on sleep. After the birthday dinner, I'd gone out on my bike around 2:00
A.M.
and spent much of the rest of
the night riding along the river in the cool dark, down past MIT to the Museum of Science, across the bridge into Boston, along the shadowy Esplanade, and out to Watertown and Newton. I was beginning to find the late-night hours more appealing than the day, cooler and softer and free from the deadly glare of the sun.

Loreen's announcement had shaken me. I realized that for months I'd been languishing in fantasies of ways to help Tony disentangle himself from his engagement, while he was taking no action at all. Then, from the least expected quarter, he'd been saved. He was getting out of the marriage and could look forward to a happy lifetime of servitude to Vivian.

Now that his problem was solved, I saw much more clearly that by spending so much energy thinking about my brother's dilemma, I'd missed the chance to resolve my own, and I was stuck.

When, after an hour of picking through the trash, I found the discarded ticket to Brazil, I was tempted to stick it in my back pocket and use it myself.

Thirty-three

C
ompared with most of my other troubles, my problems at Only Connect were so specific and concrete, I found them almost comforting. I still hadn't heard a word from the airline sales representative about Professor Fields's reservations, but I did manage to find zoologist and niece a suitable room at an outrageously expensive hotel right on the beach. The fact that it wasn't the hotel we'd been discussing for months was irrelevant. Most of the hotels in Bermuda are so similar in appearance and in name—Pink Sands Beach Club, Beach Club of Pink Sands, Pink Club at Sandy Beach, Sandy Club at Pink Beach—he wouldn't know the difference. There was some comfort in knowing, too, that the date of his departure would arrive, he'd go out to the airport and get on the plane or be turned away, and that would be the end of that—with the possible complication that he might try to have me fired if he didn't get on.

For a solid week, Fields had been calling me several times a day, obviously in a last-minute panic. I'd told Fredrick to inform him I was in meetings, no matter when or how many times he phoned.

“But he sounds frantic,” he told me. “And believe me, I know what it's like to be frantic. He's even started speaking in a normal tone of voice.”

“That
is
bad news. I'll get to him next week, I promise.”

Ordinarily I would have gone into conference with Sharon about a final-hour solution, but she had worries of her own.

On the Tuesday after the birthday dinner, just four days away from Fields's departure date, I broke down and called Gary Bolton to try and pressure him to clear two seats. It was early in the morning—one of the nastiest side effects of my recent bout of severe insomnia was that I'd begun to show up at the office on time—and he was eating, as he had been last time we spoke. Grape-Nuts, from the sound of it. I thought there was something particularly disturbing about the fact that Gary seemed to eat only crunchy food, as if he were used to gnawing bones and chewing glass.

“I've been feeling a little out of touch lately,” I told him, “and I thought I'd just check in and see how things are going. I was afraid you'd forgotten me.”

“Not very likely,” he said blandly. “You redheads are a rare bunch.” Then he started choking on whatever it was he was eating. “Tell me this,” he said between coughs. “What would you give me for a couple of seats to Bermuda on Memorial Day weekend?”

“Whatever money can buy.”

“Not the answer I was hoping for, but I suppose everything has its price.” He posed a few more leering questions, none of which I responded to. “You're no fun, Patrick. Cute kid, but no fun at all. I might as well tell you anyway. I got your friends their seats on that plane. I'd hate to tell you what I had to do to get them, but I'd love to demonstrate sometime.”

Since rolling out of bed that morning, I'd had a headache, a low-grade crusher that was making a joke of my already laughable mental acuity—but at the sound of his words it dispersed, the way a heat wave can vanish in a matter of seconds with a blast of blessed Canadian air. Why, I wondered, had I been so critical of a man as kind and generous as good old Gary? I really was much too hard on people, and sooner or later I was going to have to do something about it. I thanked him so profusely, I was afraid I'd start hyperventilating. We chatted a few more minutes, going over old times, and I accepted a dinner invitation for two weeks thence. I'd wait until Fields was back from Bermuda, then call Gary and tell him I'd been hit by another bus.