The Easy Way Out (41 page)

Before we walked out the front door, Ryan went to the foot of the staircase and called up, “I taped
Jeopardy
for you. It's in the machine and all rewound. Did you hear me?”

There was no answer from above. “Fine,” he said. “Good for her,” and we left.

Thirty-six

“I
don't get it,” he said. He was driving through the traffic in Harvard Square, blowing his horn at the inconsiderate pedestrians. “Is there something I'm missing here? I mean, I come in in a good mood, dinner in hand, tape her favorite show . . .”

“I think there's something you're missing here,” I said. “Sharon is very fond of you, Ryan.”

“If that's any example of her fondness, thank Christ I'm not on her bad side. Which way do we turn now?”

“Just keep taking lefts, and we'll get there.” I'd talked him into driving past the yellow house so I could get my nightly glimpse of the place. I wanted to burn an image of the exterior into my brain; that way I'd have a realistic picture of what it looked like once I was trapped inside. “Anyway, the point is, she's very fond of you.”

“You just said that.”

“Hasn't it crossed your mind that maybe she has a crush on you? You've spent an awful lot of time together these past couple of months.”

He pulled up to a red light and braked hard and looked over at me with a pleased, incredulous grin. “A crush? I didn't know we were back in junior high.”

“Well, maybe you're not far off. But the point is, you mean
something to her, and you can't expect her to be thrilled when she spends two months making you feel good about yourself so you can go running back to Elaine.”

“Patrick, for someone who's known Sharon as long as you have, you really don't know her at all. I've heard about some of the guys she's been with. If there's one thing I'm not, it's her type.”

“Of course you're not her type. Maybe you noticed that nothing's worked out with her type. That's why she's so stuck on you. You're a decent person, Ryan. And I happen to know Sharon thinks of you as a sexual volcano.”

“Volcano! If I'm a volcano, I give new meaning to the term ‘inactive.' ”

We'd turned off the main street and were winding our way past the cemetery buildings to the sheltered neighborhood with the yellow house. As we went over the railroad tracks, the beams from the car's headlights bounced into the trees. Ryan was nervously concentrating on the road, but he was smiling.

He pulled over to the side of the street and killed the engine. Every light was on in the house, and I could see the owners scurrying from room to room, obviously packing up for the big move. Arthur had met with them a couple of times, but I knew nothing about them. I had no idea why they were selling the house or where they were moving—they could have been bankrupt, for all I knew—but watching them racing around, taking down pictures and books, I envied them and what I imagined was their upcoming freedom.

“They're tearing the place apart,” Ryan said. “You'd better get in there and stop them.”

“Don't change the subject,” I said. “How do you feel about Sharon anyway?”

“I've only known her about a month and a half. You know as well as I do I like her. She's changed my life, I suppose. All you have to do is look at me to see that.”

“But what about romance? Are you telling me you don't have any romantic feelings for her?”

“Patrick, I have romantic feelings for Cybill Shepherd, too. What good does it do me? And you know, I didn't go running back to Elaine, like you accused me of doing. I didn't go out to dinner with her thinking we were going to work everything out. Maybe before I met Sharon, I would have, just because I'd been locked up in that basement for so long I didn't know there was anything else out there for me. But I still had to check things out, talk things over with her.
So maybe secretly I thought she'd fall all over me again, but right when we sat down and started talking, I knew that wasn't what I wanted. It's not as if Sharon gave me a chance to say any of this. She went off like a gun the minute she walked in the door.” He lifted his arm and rotated his wrist, trying to catch the light from the streetlamp in his watch. “I can't see a thing. It's bad enough I'm losing my hair, but now my eyesight, too. What time is it anyway?”

I told him it was almost nine-thirty.

“I guess he should be here soon. Poor Tony; I don't envy him.”

I reminded him things had worked out for poor Tony. “And what do you mean, he should be here soon?”

“His flight. It's due in sometime around ten.”

I looked over at him in the street light. He was still wearing his sweet, kindly expression, a mild, dumbfounded smile on his face. I supposed he was contemplating the volcano issue, but it was hard to tell. Maybe the events of the past two months had driven him mad.

“Tony is coming to Boston?” I asked.

“You didn't know that? I thought you were on to everything, Pat. If it's all right with you, I'd just as soon leave. You're going to be looking at this place for the rest of your life, so I don't see why you have to sit here now.”

It took a few more minutes to coax the details out of him. According to his information, my father had called Tony the night of his birthday and spent an hour and a half talking to him. He'd convinced Tony to come east and discuss the wedding with Loreen, and he'd even offered to pay for the ticket. “I don't understand why Tony didn't tell you about this,” he said. “Maybe he was embarrassed.”

“Where's he staying?” I asked.

“He's staying with your parents. He's renting a car and driving in, and then he and Loreen are meeting tomorrow.”

Lack of sleep and nourishment were beginning to have a wonderful hallucinogenic effect on me. I asked Ryan if I could take the wheel for the drive back to my apartment, and as soon as we'd switched seats, I gunned the engine and made a U-turn up over the lawn of the new house, nearly taking a few of the precious bushes.

“Headlights!” Ryan shouted.

I switched them on and put my foot to the floor and we roared down the potholed street and across the railroad tracks.

Ryan grabbed hold of the dashboard. “For Christ's sake, Patrick, slow down, will you? You're going to snap an axle. What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing's wrong with me, kiddo. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. And I'd like you to promise to do something for me, Ryan. A favor.”

“Whatever it is, I'll do it, providing I live.”

“In about two minutes, you'll be safely driving again. And what I'd like you to do is go back to Sharon's house and go up to her room and have a talk with her. You can just walk right in. One of the advantages of having a friend who doesn't lock her doors.”

“Well, of course that's what I'm going to do. Why do you think I wanted to get away from that house back there?”

“And whatever opinion you happen to have about yourself, just remember: in Sharon's eyes, you're a volcano.”

Thirty-seven

A
lthough Tony never booked his reservations through my office, we'd discussed air travel enough for me to know he was accruing frequent flier mileage on a particular airline. Furthermore, he'd had a brief but hot and heavy affair with a stewardess within the past year and a half, and he took that airline every chance he got, hoping she might be working on his plane. My knowledge of airline schedules corroborated Ryan's prediction of Tony's arrival time. I had half an hour to get to the airport.

I pulled over at my street, yanked the bike out of Ryan's trunk, tossed it into the backyard, and jumped into my Yugo. There was so much adrenaline pumping through my system, I probably could have run out to the airport a lot quicker, but I didn't want to push my luck.

The night had turned murky and humid, as if the sky were saturated with moisture. As I sped down Memorial Drive, I opened all my windows and cranked up the volume on a heavy-metal radio station. The sky was filled with planes circling the city, locked into holding patterns, suspended above by the strange laws of aerodynamics, enemies of gravity and logic. At any given moment, there are more than a hundred thousand people in airplanes, cutting through the atmosphere miles above the surface of the planet, leaning back in their seats eating peanuts, watching movies, reading magazines, making
love. A vast city scattered across the sky. My brother was up there, safely removed from all his troubles, out of reach of my parents, Loreen, and me.

I crossed the river and got onto the highway that wrapped around the city and entered the Callahan Tunnel, all in record time. The yellow and green lights of the tunnel flashed across the dark windshield. There was little traffic, and I pressed the accelerator to the floor, imagining that the damp tiled walls were collapsing behind me and I was escaping disaster by mere seconds.

*   *   *

Three people were in the lounge awaiting the arrival of the flight from Chicago: A tall woman with long, straight brown hair was leaning against a wall, with her arms folded tightly across her chest, and a fat man in a blue windbreaker and a baseball cap was gazing out the window, his back to me. The third person, sitting on the far side of the lounge, staring off into space and tapping the arm of her chair, was my mother. I approached her slowly from behind and put my hand on her shoulder.

She looked up and smiled. “News travels fast, doesn't it, dear? Tony promised your father he wouldn't mention to you that he was coming in tonight.”

“Ryan told me.”

“Ah, yes, the new and improved Ryan.”

“Where's your husband?”

“I suspect he's at home, sleeping. Unless he has some secret life I don't know about, a possibility I wouldn't rule out.”

I wasn't as shocked to discover her sitting there in that lounge—even though it had never crossed my mind that she might be there—as I was to see her alone. As far as I knew, she never drove anywhere by herself, and the fact that she'd driven all this way alone and late at night seemed almost heroic, in a twisted sort of way. She had on a navy-blue skirt and a light-blue sweater and a string of pink beads. Her hair was held in place by a purple plastic band that clashed peculiarly with her stiff orange hair. Alone, she looked particularly short and slight, and older, too. She'd put on a thick layer of face powder and bright-red lipstick, and her eyebrows were absurdly dark and heavy. This Kabuki makeup had gone out of style decades earlier, and I realized suddenly, as if it had never occurred to me before, that her life would have been very different if she'd had a daughter.

Her raincoat was folded on the seat beside her; she'd driven out
here prepared for anything. She picked it up carefully, set it down in her lap, and motioned for me to sit.

“Do you think she's pretty?” she asked, watching the tall woman leaning against the wall.

The woman was rubbing her upper arms nervously and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. She looked troubled, possibly dazed. “She might have been,” I said. “She might be again. But something's going on. In her present condition, I'd have to say no, not pretty.”

“That's what I'd say. I've been watching her for the past half hour now, and I'd say she was pretty once upon a time. Whoever she's meeting on this plane, she has mixed feelings about him. She has something to reveal. I'd guess she's meeting her husband, who's been away on business for two weeks.”

“And she's met someone else in the meantime,” I suggested.

“You
would
think that, Patrick. Actually, that's what I thought, too. Although she doesn't look too happy about it. She could be pregnant by this other person. Not bad guesses for someone who never exercises her imagination, are they?”

“Not at all. You should get out more often. When's the plane due?”