The Easy Way Out (12 page)

“Your father and I were delighted to hear about it. I hate to say it, but that Arthur is the best thing that ever happened to you. You should be thankful for the day you met him. You're not planning to jinx the deal, are you?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Well, just remember, it isn't every day someone buys you a house.”

“I'm putting up some of the down payment, Rita. He's not buying it for me; we're buying it together.”

“Good. As long as you admit that someone's buying it. Tony is all excited about it. I kept asking him about the wedding, but all he wanted to talk about was this house.”

“That Tony,” I said. “Always thinking of someone else.”

Nine

A
rthur and I had words on the way to the movies that night. Arthur and I always had words when he was driving. Years earlier, we'd had a couple of friends who lived in a house out in the suburbs. We'd had to give them up over the driving issue. If I drove the fifteen miles, Arthur accused me of being overly controlling. If he drove, we fought so much about his driving, the evening invariably turned into a nightmare. It was part of Arthur's fear of being criticized. He wanted to be accepted by me, and everyone else, one hundred percent, even if that meant my sitting quietly in the passenger seat and watching him plow head-on into a sixteen-wheeler.

Arthur is the single worst driver I've ever met. When I cornered him with accusations that he was a menace on the road, he reminded me that he'd never had an accident. My theory was that when people saw Arthur coming, big body hunched over the steering wheel, face practically pressed against the windshield, vein in his forehead throbbing, bald head gleaming, they got out of the way fast. Arthur braked at green lights. He alternated between running stop signs and coming to a dead halt in the middle of intersections. He had a mortal fear of passing anyone, and he slowed nearly to a stop when anyone passed him. His driving was so indecisive, I was sometimes amazed he could
summon up the will to push his foot down on the accelerator with enough force to move the car forward.

“You're in the wrong lane,” I told him as we crawled down Memorial Drive, far to the left. “We have to make a right turn there at the bridge, and if we miss it, we end up miles out of the way.”

Arthur said nothing. He had on the pair of black-framed glasses he used only for driving and was peering out the window as if trying to see through a sandstorm. He was still wearing the suit he'd worn to work that day, and he looked impressive. No one would ever accuse Arthur of being handsome in a traditional way, although he did have his physical assets. Personally, I've never understood my friends' mania for attaching themselves to handsome men and beautiful women. After a month and a half of any relationship, you get so accustomed to your lover's face, you don't really see it anyway—handsome, hideous, or anything in between. Long after you've stopped being able to appreciate your lover's looks, people on the streets are turning somersaults, making outrageous passes at him, and hating you for being the lucky toad who ended up with Adonis. An ordinary-looking Joe (or Arthur) is a much more sensible choice.

I had my elbow stuck out the window and was leaning my head in my hand, looking at the lights of Boston across the expanse of the Charles River. “You should start pulling over now,” I said.

“I'm driving, Patrick,” he said calmly. “You can drive when you're driving, but I'm driving now. Not to mention that this is my car. I think I'm capable of driving my own car by my own self. Check to see if there's anyone on my right, so I can inch over, will you?”

I craned my neck. There was a steady stream of cars passing us on the right, at twice our speed. “Don't try it,” I said. “You should have been in that lane for miles now. You should have switched lanes back at the Hyatt. Before the Hyatt.”

“No lectures, thank you.”

He tried to edge into the right lane by giving the wheel random little jerks. The cars whizzing past honked and swerved. “You're going to kill us!” I shouted.

We missed the turn.

“Damn,” he said under his breath. He relaxed into his seat, brushed back his nonexistent hair, and adjusted his glasses. “Oh, well, how was work today, sweetheart?”

“Arthur,” I said, “we're going to have to go miles out of our way.
We're late already because it took you so long to get out of the driveway back home. We're not going to get a space anywhere near the theater, and we'll miss the beginning of the movie. Let's not even bother to try.”

“Maybe you're right. But I'll tell you something, Patrick: someone at my office saw this movie and said it was lousy. We're probably better off missing it.” He rolled down his window and stuck out his hand. “It's nice and cool tonight,” he said, “just the way you like it. Maybe we should be buying a house in northern Minnesota.”

The truth was, I hadn't wanted to see the movie anyway. It was one of those tiresome thrillers about a psychopathic killer whose reign of terror over a big, polluted city is ultimately brought to an end by a team of two mismatched cops who become buddies and end up saving each other's lives in a scene heavily laden with homoerotic overtones. Lots of cars rolling over and bursting into flames and tough-guy dialogue about assholes. But when Arthur and I were discussing what movie to see that night, I'd tried to use it as a bargaining chip so we wouldn't end up at a festival of early Burt Reynolds comedies.

The breeze blowing in through the windows was cool and damp. A thin, late-winter fog hovered over the city, which looked far away. The thought of crossing the river and entering the traffic and noise of downtown Boston was exhausting, and I was suddenly delighted the trip had been canceled. I pushed the recline button on my seat and shut my eyes. Arthur slipped one of his homemade tapes into the player, and an ancient recording of Richard Tauber singing selections from German operettas came on.

Arthur and I had distinctly different musical tastes. My idea of auditory heaven would be living in a smoky cocktail lounge where Ben Webster was forever playing lush ballads. Arthur didn't care much for jazz. Spontaneity and improvisation of any sort made him nervous. The only music he ever listened to was reassuring light opera and Mozart symphonies, those models of absolute perfection. Out of deference to Arthur's feelings, I listened to my tapes long after he was asleep, and to my great surprise, I'd grown to appreciate his ancient recordings of operettas. All those warbling sopranos and tenors fighting to be heard over the crackling of surface noise struck me as terribly poignant. There was a purity and innocence about the sound, which I loved and identified with those parts of Arthur I most admired—Arthur the gentle, loving soul fighting to be heard above the rumbling injustice of fascist dictatorships and the INS.

Now that the movie had been ruled out as a possibility, I relaxed back into my seat and concentrated on Tauber singing a waltz aria from
The Merry Widow.
Arthur began to tell me about one of his clients. He was working on the case of a student from Singapore whose visa had run out; he was about to be sent back home. The complicating factor was that he'd tested positive for HIV. If sent back, he faced being ostracized by family and friends and finding health care that was, for his particular problems, vastly inferior to what he was likely to find in Boston. “And as if all that isn't bad enough,” Arthur said, “the poor guy gets separated from his American lover for an indefinite period of time. The case is breaking my heart.”

Most of the cases Arthur related to me were heartbreaking. The recurring subplot in many of them was the threatened breakup of familial or lover relationships. This theme was so pervasive, I sometimes had to remind myself that Arthur was a lawyer and not a family therapist.

In one way or another, Arthur was always trying to keep people together.

Somewhere in the middle of this story, I realized he'd probably planned the whole evening right from the start. He'd never intended to see any movie, which was why he'd agreed to my choice so swiftly. Knowing how much I distrusted his driving, he'd used it to achieve his end.

I sat up in my seat with a familiar panic gripping me and lowered the volume on the tape player. Arthur was behind the wheel, and I was the passenger. When you're the passenger, there's nothing you can do but go along for the ride. Wherever Arthur wanted to go, I would be taken, which was very likely no place any more exotic than home.

Arthur turned the car around and we headed back, west along the river, with a full moon above us and the stunted skyline of Boston to one side. Once again I let myself be lulled by the night. Perhaps it didn't matter so much who was driving, as long as Arthur didn't get us killed. All that lilting, graceful music issuing from the speakers was beginning to put me into a trance.

We passed the turn to our street.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I want to take another look at our house.” Arthur had been referring to the house near the cemetery as “ours” for the past few days, an attempt at subliminal manipulation, which, however unsubtle,
was perhaps having some effect on me. I'd begun to think of the place as the Yellow Fever, but I'd begun to think of it often. “Beatrice said we should get an idea of the house and the neighborhood at different hours of the day.”

Arthur's dragging Beatrice into the negotiations was not a good sign. He always used her as the voice of professional sanity and rationality, although I sometimes suspected he made up half her quotes himself. “In other words,” I said, “you had it all planned that we'd miss the movie and come out here instead.”

“Oh, sweetheart, don't be so suspicious. Life isn't a constant battle. We're out driving anyway, we missed the movie, and it seemed like it might be a nice thing to do.”

He reached over and put his hand on my knee and looked at me sweetly through the lenses of the black-framed glasses, glinting now with the light of passing traffic. With his big body and bald head, Arthur had never really looked young, but he had that smooth complexion and those kind eyes, which gave his face an ageless, angelic quality. I couldn't decide if Arthur had manipulated this trip or if I was merely being churlish. No one could make me doubt my own perceptions more effectively than Arthur.

*   *   *

The house was dark except for a light in the living room window, shining through the branches of one of the fir trees. In a few months, virtually every window would be shaded in leafy privacy. Even at night, the yellow was so bright, the walls of the house seemed to be glowing.

I tried to imagine what it would be like sitting in there now, sleepy and secure, the house filled with music, but the fantasy quickly became confused with an image of Tony and Vivian curled up on a sectional sofa, listening to
La Traviata.

“Remember the summer we went to Nova Scotia, Patrick? Remember the house we rented?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

“Doesn't this house remind you a little of that one?”

“A little,” I told him. The similarity had crossed my mind a few times already and contributed to a vague sense of peacefulness that overtook me when I thought about the place.

Early on in our relationship, Arthur and I had taken a ferry to Nova Scotia. We drove along the Canadian coast with no clear destination for several days and ended up in a tiny fishing village. There, we rented a cottage on the edge of a cliff perched out over the ocean.
It was a weatherbeaten, faded-yellow place with sloping floors and warped paneling and sulfurous drinking water that was pumped up from a well and was either poisonous or wonderfully healthy. We spent three weeks in the house, reading our way through a huge stack of books and listening to Arthur's tapes. The mornings were foggy and the days clear and mild, always with a salty breeze blowing the curtains into the house. We rarely left the porch, which stuck out, almost treacherously, over the water. In the afternoon, when the wind shifted, we'd wrap ourselves in blankets and read until the late, orange twilight. All night long, we could hear the sound of distant foghorns and the rushing of the tide, and sometimes the moonlight was so bright and so blue, I found it frightening.

I suppose it was on that trip that a slight, almost imperceptible shift in our relationship occurred. Some bond between us was cemented, and I began to think of Arthur, along with my need for an income, my family, and the mole on my right shoulder, as a part of my life. We often talked about how happy we'd been during those three quiet weeks. Increasingly, though, it had all begun to sound to me like my longing for a cooler, greener world, one that no longer existed and could never be wished back into existence.

As we sat in the car in front of the house, we discussed a particularly lovely morning we'd spent in that other house, over a thousand miles away, and when Arthur asked if I didn't agree that this city house was a deal too good to pass up, I agreed that it was, thinking about Nova Scotia and that trip we'd been on years before, my brother's passionate relationship with a woman I'd never met, and Rita's cautionary words about my jinxing the deal on the house.