The Easy Way Out (8 page)

“No good. No one believes that story anymore. And I hope you're not still using computer excuses. Computer excuses went out in 1985.” She had an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips and was fiddling with an orange disposable lighter that wasn't working. I could tell she was getting irritated. Impatience was one of Sharon's virtues. “I stopped using computer excuses years ago. They're too common. Human error is a much safer option, but you have to be specific. Tell him there was some kind of convention or big group booked into the hotel, a planeload of models doing a shoot for Ralph Lauren, something like that. Harvard professors are unbelievably impressed with vacuous, pop-culture glamour. Tell him the hotel was in the middle of a corporate takeover and the new management inherited this group from the old management and no one was sure exactly how many rooms they needed. Tell him they intentionally overbooked by fifty rooms.”

“Better say forty-seven,” I told her. “It sounds more convincing.”

“Good idea.” She tossed the lighter into the wastebasket and snapped her fingers at me. I reached into my desk and passed her a book of matches.

“Thanks,” she said. “Tell him we had three other people confirmed at the hotel that night and they all got turned away. It always helps if they don't feel like the only one who got shut out. Tell him we're filing a class action suit in small claims court for breach of contract, something like that. Throw around a lot of litigationy-sounding words. He isn't a law professor, is he?”

“Zoology.”

“Zoology? Is this the jackass with the teenage girlfriend he's trying to pass off as his niece?”

I nodded.

She blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “Oh, come on, Patrick, you're wasting my time. Someone in his situation is never going to complain, no matter what happens. Don't even bother with the fake voucher. You can stick him anywhere. I know a great motel down there no one books. One of the few murders in Bermuda's history was committed in a room at this dump. It's always available.” She reached across the desk, grabbed the hotel book out of my hand, and slammed it shut. “Let's get out and get some lunch. I've got a hell of an afternoon ahead of me, and I need to store up some energy.”

*   *   *

It was after one o'clock by the time we left the office. The sky had turned a foreboding shade of gray, and the air felt seasonably cooler. Both were signs that delighted me.

“This feels about the right temperature,” I said, checking out the cloud cover. “The normal average for today is forty degrees. If it cools off tonight, we should just about hit it, maybe a few degrees below.”

“Listen to yourself,” Sharon said. “‘Normal,' ‘average.' Is that what you aspire to? I hate ‘normal.' I hate ‘average.' I wish it was twenty below. I wish it was ninety-eight in the shade. Let's break a few records here,” she shouted, flinging back her head.

I caught the alarmed glance of a young woman walking past with a loaf of French bread tucked under her arm. “I wish I had your outlook,” I said softly.

Sharon was wearing a billowing green plaid poncho and a pair of
khaki stretch pants that didn't quite cover her ankles. Despite her height, her wide shoulders and large hands, Sharon had very thin ankles, a feature I found almost unbearably touching. She walked with a delicate, halting step that was quite unexpected, given all her other extravagant gestures and great, expansive movements.

When I worked as Sharon's assistant, most of my time was spent falsifying documents to prove the outlandish stories she invented, either to save money for her clients or to prevent them from discovering her mistakes. I typed medical excuses from phony doctors; letters from invented hotel managers apologizing for not honoring reservations that she, in fact, had never made; even death certificates. Sharon had a typesetter friend in the Square who would print up counterfeit obituaries for particularly sticky refund situations. I became an expert at erasing the dates and fares on plane tickets into illegible smudges and, short of supplying a written script, making sure every passenger had his story straight.

Sharon would sit tilted back in her chair, chain-smoking and eating egg salad sandwiches, instructing some confused and enthralled couple who'd come in intending to buy a simple ticket. “Okay, now,” she'd say. “If they stop you at the gate and question you, just tell them your mother died and you have to get on this flight even though you don't have a reservation. Can you cry on cue? No? That could be a problem. How about this: You're terrified of flying and you had a bad flight west, so you went to a fortune-teller in Bolinas and she told you you had to take this flight and none other. Come to think of it, I know a great palm reader in Bolinas, if you're interested. You can act nervous, can't you? Just bite your lips and tug at your hair a lot. We haven't used this excuse this month, have we, Patrick?”

I was responsible for taking notes on what she was telling people, to make sure we didn't have passengers with the same story on the same flight.

“Now, I'm counting on you to pull this off,” she'd tell her clients. “If you get caught with this ticket, I'm out of business. Just so you'll know the kind of risk I'm taking for you.”

Miraculously, no one ever did get caught. Sharon's charisma made people feel they were acting in an important piece of guerrilla street theater. She was the director and the star, and none of the bit players wanted to let her down. So many people benefited from her creative maneuvering, it would have been churlish to point out the role self-aggrandizement played in her practices.

I'd met Sharon eight years earlier, shortly after moving to Cambridge,
on a snowy day in late January. I was driving a dilapidated Chevy Nova through an intersection on Mount Auburn Street, when Sharon ran a stop sign and plowed into the car's rear end. The Nova spun around, jumped the curb, and hit a tree. It wasn't as spectacular an accident as it sounds—it was a small tree—but it did attract a crowd. Sharon rushed from her car with a lit cigarette in her hand. Once she'd established that I was unharmed, she began telling me how I could collect from my insurance company, Chevrolet, and the city of Cambridge—and then sell the wreck to a junkyard. I was still strapped into my seat, slightly dazed. I remember looking out the window through the falling snow at Sharon, dressed in sandals and bell-bottoms that were too short, rummaging in her bag for her business card. “Boy,” she said sincerely, “you're lucky I'm the one who hit you instead of some jerk.”

I didn't think to question the logic of her comment until much later, and by that time we were good friends. I was living on the top floor of her house when I met Arthur. She was indirectly responsible for our meeting, a fact for which she's never entirely forgiven herself.

As we made our way through the lunchtime crowd in Harvard Square, I told Sharon I needed her advice. When it came to relationships or life management, Sharon was one of the most perceptive people I knew—mostly, I suspect, because she was rarely in a relationship herself and paid no attention at all to managing her own life.

“You know my advice,” she said. “Leave him and take the rug in the living room.”

“It's not about Arthur.” Unlike most of my friends, Sharon did not feel that I was lucky to have reliable Arthur as my lover. “It's a family crisis.”

“Oh, good. Did Ryan shoot them both or just your father?”

“It's about the other one.”

I insisted we walk out of Harvard Square to a greasy pizza and submarine sandwich shop on Broadway, across from the public library. It was pointless to try and talk to Sharon in a restaurant in the Square itself; she was always running into clients who'd demand advice on their travel plans, or friends, like me, who had some personal problem they wanted to discuss with her. We cut through Harvard Yard, past all the depressing libraries of Sharon's alma mater.

Like both my parents and neither of my brothers, I often give the false impression of being emaciated. (For years I was buoyed up by a one-night stand's comment that I looked better out of clothes than in. Later, I realized it was intended as an insult to my wardrobe, not
a compliment to my body.) Side by side, Sharon and I exaggerated each other's physical extremes. We once went on a travel agent's junket to Brazil and shared a room. Everyone else on the trip thought we were lovers. We took great pleasure in sitting around the hotel pool in our respective bikinis, keeping our companions horrified.

As we slowly traversed the paths through the campus, I told Sharon about my phone conversation with Tony. She'd met my younger brother once, at a dinner she and I gave when we were roommates. Upon hearing that Tony was planning to attend a business school, she went into a vituperative rant against MBAs and then suggested to him that if he wanted to really make money he should move to northern California and grow marijuana. Every few hundred yards, Sharon would stop, lean against my shoulder, and adjust the straps on her sandals.

“I have to take these in to be repaired,” she'd say. “Go ahead with your story; I'm listening.”

Sharon was the one person I knew who could carry around extra weight as if it were a luxurious fur coat she had draped over her shoulders. She was probably more than ten pounds outside the “ideal” range on even the most generous weight-to-height charts, but it was all smoothly and evenly distributed and perfectly proportioned. She never made any excuses for her size and often took delight in flaunting it by wearing tight-fitting slacks or skimpy sundresses with pinched waistlines. The result was oddly, almost disconcertingly sensual, as if she were the manifestation of natural appetites and others the product of self-denial and some puritanical persecution of the flesh. Still, she smoked far too much and often seemed winded when, as now, she walked too far too quickly. It was obvious she was stopping to catch her breath, not adjust the straps on her beloved sandals.

When we got to the sandwich shop, I held the door open for her, and she swept into the place in the loud way she had of entering rooms. She was barely inside before she was pulling her poncho over her head, shaking out her curtain of dark hair, and dramatically proclaiming that she was about to pass out from hunger. There were no other customers, but the owners, a couple of swarthy, quarrelsome brothers, looked up from their newspapers as if they'd been simultaneously jabbed with pins. The younger of the two, an astonishingly handsome man in a rugged, potbellied sort of way, immediately began to make eyes at Sharon. There were two types of men who were particularly drawn to Sharon: wiry, energetic hippies with
tangled hair who wanted to be mothered by her, and dark Mediterranean men with piercing eyes who had something else entirely in mind.

The shop was a filthy little place, with fluorescent lights and dreary blue walls encrusted with layers of grease and cigarette smoke. I often had lunch there; the food was acceptable and the prices were amazingly low. Neither of the brothers had ever acknowledged me, but now, seconds after we walked in the door, they were fighting over the privilege of making Sharon's sandwich, advising her on whether to have french fries or onion rings, and calling her “babe” and “angel.” Both terms struck me as inappropriate.

“Don't listen to him, angel,” the younger, handsome one said. “He'll help your friend. I'll tell you what you want.”

“Believe me,” Sharon told him, “I never have any trouble figuring out what I want.”

“I like the sound of that. What did you have in mind?”

“Lunch,” she said, flirtatiously bored.

“Lunch is a great place to start. I'll tell you what you want to have.”

“How about this: I'll tell you what I want, and you tell me if you know how to make it. After I've tasted it, I'll tell you if you were right or not.”

The younger one jabbed his brother with his elbow. “You see,” he said. “I like this. She knows what she wants. That's good.”

“Don't get carried away,” Sharon said. “I know what you want, too, so let's just get to the meal.”

*   *   *

We took our food to a table by the storefront window, and I watched as Sharon bit into her sandwich. Her sparring with the handsome brother had resulted in a grilled meat special. The grease from the steak and the cheese was soaking through the bread in an appealing stain. I had a dry tuna sandwich that looked anemic by comparison.

“Oh, God, this is good,” she said, shaking her fingers out as if she couldn't contain her pleasure. Sharon's enthusiasm for the things she liked—good food, all travel, poker, and
Jeopardy
—was one of her most endearing qualities. I tend to withhold enthusiasm, for fear of having the things I really care about taken from me.

“I think he'd be happy to cook for you anytime.”

“Sure, as long as his wife's out of town. I know the type, and I'm not impressed. Believe me, Patrick, I am not impressed at all.” She
took a great swallow of orange soda. “So you want me to tell you what I think about this garbage with that fascist brother of yours? I'll tell you, but remember you asked. Stay away from it.”

Sharon was not known for her laissez-faire attitudes toward others, and I was disappointed by her response. “But, Sharon,” I said, “he got roped into the engagement. Don't forget that.”

“People his age don't get roped into relationships, Patrick. They make it look as if they do, so they don't have to accept responsibility for them, that's all. And in any case, it's none of your business.”

“Well, there's a consensus on that point. Arthur said the same thing.” Sharon considered Arthur stuffy, pedantic, and suffocatingly boring, even though she shared his point of view on almost every imaginable subject.

“He did? Oh. He did, really? That's too bad. I hate to agree with him on anything. But let me tell you something else: the only reason you want to help your brother is because you can't seem to help yourself. You can't leave Arthur, so you have to save your brother from getting stuck in some dead marriage. If you'd leave Arthur and move back in with me, none of this Tony business would matter to you in the slightest.”