The Easy Way Out (16 page)

For a moment, I forgot about Tony. I forgot why I was at the restaurant in the first place, and why I'd been so angry. For a moment, I forgot to be angry at all. The four of us nearly collapsed with laughter at the unfortunate businessman's unfortunate clumsiness, and I felt welcomed back into my family. In that passing moment of hilarity and familial acceptance, Tony's situation was no concern of mine.

Then the moment passed.

“And I'll tell you something else, Patrick,” my mother said. “That brother of yours is going to be very happy. Loreen adores him, and he loves her—as much as he's capable of loving anyone other than himself.”

“Of course they'll be happy,” my father said. “Not that Tony deserves to be happy.”

“Now, now. Everyone deserves to be happy, Jimmy.”

The bad food had given me a stomachache and the laughing had made me dizzy, and I could feel myself floating off, the way I sometimes float off when the dentist injects too much Novocain. I opened the folder for the honeymoon plans and explained the health-spa trip. My mother made notes on a napkin about changing around the flights and the hotel arrangements and adding a side trip to San Jose so the happiest couple in America could visit some elderly cousin of hers. I
sat and listened to it all complacently, lacking the energy even to be outraged. When my father began to object, I backed up my mother's ideas. The waiter cleared off the plates and asked if anyone wanted dessert. Ryan said he wanted a piece of baked Alaska but he wasn't going to have it. One piece, my mother assured him, wasn't going to kill him. Ryan resisted. My father ordered the baked Alaska for himself but told the waiter to put the plate in front of Ryan. My father gave some signal to my mother, and she took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and coyly handed one over. “I hope you realize,” she said, “that this is it for the rest of the week.” The dessert came, and Ryan spooned it down, talking about the World Series and his plans to take his daughter to Disney World the following fall. The hair on the front of his head kept slipping down and falling into his eyes. My father put on my mother's half-glasses and started to total up the bill. “Lousy and expensive,” he said. “My favorite combination.”

“I wish Arthur had come,” my mother said, applying lipstick. “Why didn't you invite him, Patrick?”

“I didn't want to, that's why.”

“Well, don't take that tone. You don't know how lucky you are to have someone like Arthur.”

“Oh? How lucky is that?” I could feel myself choking again: my father in my mother's glasses, my mother with my father's cigarettes, Ryan up to his neck in baked Alaska.

“Look around you, Patrick. I'd say you're pretty lucky. Now he's even buying this house.”

“We're buying it together.”

“You know what I mean. And to be perfectly frank, dear, it isn't only the house. There are other reasons I'd stay close, if I were you.”

“What's-their-name's son,” my father said, as if he'd picked up a coded message from her.

“They've been our neighbors for the past thirty years, and he doesn't even know their names. Callahan. Bill and Frances Callahan. Their son is in the hospital again. Pneumonia,” Rita said significantly.

“AIDS?” I asked.

My mother looked around to make sure no one had heard me and then closed her eyes and shrugged.

“The poor bastard,” Ryan said.

“The point I'm trying to make,” my mother said, “is that it's a scary world out there. Wouldn't you agree?”

“I would.”

“And in a scary world, you'd better hang on to what you've got,” my father said. When they weren't fighting, they had an eerie way of finishing each other's sentences.

Their voices had softened, and I was touched at this hesitant attempt to express genuine concern. Clearly, they'd discussed the plight of their neighbors' son and its possible relevance to my life. They'd never mentioned AIDS to me or asked any direct questions. Since they never discussed anything of importance directly, it wasn't surprising. From time to time, one or the other would pointedly ask if I'd seen
Nightline
or read “that article” in the
Boston Globe
Sunday magazine, usually an indication that the topic had been AIDS. If I had been more responsible and mature, I suppose I would have brought the topic up with them myself and made some reassuring comments about the fact that I take vitamins, exercise, and practice safe sex. But I'm not better at honest discourse than either of them.

My mother took a little mirror out of her purse and pulled the conversation in another direction. “Not everyone manages to stay with someone for as long as you two have remained friends.” She inclined her head meaningfully in Ryan's direction.

Ryan's face seemed to have dropped, and I wondered if he'd caught the significance of my mother's comment. I gazed across the horrid dining room and felt the kind of hopelessness I sometimes feel when the temperature soars over ninety and there's no hint of relief in the weather report. My mother asked me something about the Yellow Fever house, while my father complained that the coffee was giving him indigestion.

“There's one last thing I'd like to say,” I blurted out, ignoring them both.

My parents stopped talking, and Ryan smiled hesitantly and expectantly.

“There isn't going to be any honeymoon to rearrange or marriage to meddle with or anything else. There isn't going to be any wedding this July. Tony's in love with someone other than Loreen, someone other than himself.”

My father looked at me skeptically, and Ryan gave me a disapproving glance. The traffic was rushing past the huge windows across the room in a blur of lights. A drop of sweat fell from my armpit and rolled down the side of my body. I felt stranded on the island of our wide, round table. “Her name,” I said, “is Vivian.”

Then, thinking I was making a stand for my two brothers and myself, I told them the rest of what I knew.

My mother dropped her napkin onto her plate, my father shook his head in disgust, and Ryan excused himself and left the table.

“We all know who's to blame for this, Rita, don't we?”

“Oh, sure, let's hear it,” my mother said. “Let's begin.”

I could tell by the way they were sitting up in their chairs they were indeed about to begin. I got up to go to the bathroom, thinking I could wash my hands of the whole messy affair.

Thirteen

I
n the men's room, I turned on the tap full force and splashed my face with cold water. It was a cavernous bathroom, with gold faucets shaped like sea serpents, scalloped sink bowls, marbled mirrors, and floor-to-ceiling gray tiles, all gleaming in the bright light. There was an unpleasantly strong chemical smell in the air, reassuring the clientele, I suppose, that we wouldn't catch anything from the toilet seats. Over the sound of the rushing water and the piped-in Muzak, I heard a magnificently loud sigh emerge from one of the stalls. I turned off the taps, looked into the mirror over the sink, and called out into the void. “Ryan? Is that you?”

There was no response, but the sighing stopped. I went over to one of the stalls and knocked on the metal door. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I'm fine, Pat, I'm fine. I've just had a rough week, that's all. I'll see you back at the table.”

“Come out and talk to me, will you?”

“Is there anyone else out there?”

I assured him the coast was clear, and when he emerged, his face pale and puffy, I put my arm around his shoulder. “What is it?”

“It's nothing, Pat. Nothing. One Big Nothing.”

Ryan was such an unlikely candidate for an existential crisis, I
knew he had to be referring to something specific. “I hope you don't feel responsible for this Tony situation.”

He pulled away from me. “Tony? That's none of my business. It's Elaine. I might as well tell you, since you're going to find out sooner or later anyway. She's seeing some new guy, someone she's getting serious about.”

I felt my shoulders drop. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“I first heard about it from Stacy, but I didn't pay much attention. The poor kid even told me the bastard's name. Not that I know he's a bastard; he's probably a nice person.”

He went to the sink and washed his face. “Christ, will you look at me,” he said, water rolling down his cheeks. “Fat, homely. Look at the bags under these eyes. I guess it's time I joined one of those goddamned gyms. That'd be a laugh, wouldn't it?” He wiped his face with a handful of stiff paper towels, straightened his jacket, and turned to me, shaking his head wearily. “She wants a divorce.”

I leaned against the wall for support and tried to think of some consoling words. My mind felt emptied out, and all those gleaming tiles were beginning to make my vision blur. “Let's go for a walk,” I finally suggested. “These tiles are corroding my soul.”

“What about them?” he asked, motioning toward the dining room with his head.

“They'll be fine,” I said. “They're fighting.”

*   *   *

Elaine Moody was the first real love of Ryan's life. She was a plump, pixieish legal secretary, with a voice that could easily have belonged to an eight-year-old. Her face was so open, round, and plain, her features sometimes looked as if they'd been drawn on the bottom of a paper plate with a thin crayon. Her mother had died when she was fourteen, and her father, when last seen, was drinking himself to death in a furnished room in Portland, Maine. Elaine was the youngest of seven children and determined to be the survivor of a bad lot. She'd put herself through college by working long shifts at a variety of thankless jobs, and eventually she'd secured a position as the indispensable secretary to the head of a small law firm in downtown Boston.

She and Ryan had glowed in each other's presence. My brother couldn't keep his shy hands off her. No one didn't get misty at their wedding. Even Tony, who considered Elaine too bossy and ambitious, admitted that he'd felt a sentimental ache as the two walked down the aisle.

The whole time Ryan was dating Elaine, Rita and James would smugly say of her, “She's no dope, you know,” mostly because they felt reasonably assured, despite evidence to the contrary, that she was. Her voice and her pink cheeks had misled them. But after the marriage, Elaine proved that she really was no dope, especially when it came to my parents. She wasn't interested in playing the dutiful daughter-in-law and wasn't interested in watching her husband devote his life to filial obligations. Ryan had confided to me on several occasions that he'd felt torn between Elaine and my parents. When it became obvious that Tony was leaving town, Elaine lobbied strenuously and wisely for Ryan to stay out of the business, hang on to his job with the athletic-shoe company, and not take on my father's illnesses as his own problems. Ryan wasn't able to follow her advice. The birth of Stacy was the final blow. Elaine, my parents argued, was trying to keep them from seeing their grandchild. That she was continuing to work after the baby's birth was proof that she wasn't devoted to her own child and was just trying to make Ryan feel inadequate as a provider. “But what can you expect,” they'd say, “coming from that kind of family. It's not that she wants to be like this; she just can't help it.”

Ryan began making secret visits to my parents with Stacy and got increasingly haggard and unhappy. Then, three years after he got married, one year after Stacy was born, six months after Tony packed off to Chicago, “the saint” moved into the recently vacated basement of my parents' house.

*   *   *

We walked out of the bathroom and across the hotel lobby and into the cool night. What little snow there had been that winter had melted from the ground, but there were still patches of filthy ice in the corners of the parking lot. Ryan wrapped his sport coat around himself more tightly. “What a life,” he sighed.

“I don't want to criticize, Ry, but didn't you think something like this might happen? It's been almost three years you two haven't been together.”

“I'd say it's obvious I wasn't thinking at all, Pat. I've been coasting for three years. Let's go stand over there by the highway and watch the lights.”

The parking lot was up on a bluff, looking over Route 128. Benches arranged carefully around the edge provided, like the dining room, a glorious view of the cars whizzing by and the gargantuan shopping mall glowing in the distance like a newly landed alien spacecraft.
We sat down on a bench and watched the light show for a while. I had to admit there was something exciting about all that speed and noise almost within reach.

“I've been living in a dream,” Ryan said. “The only time I ever see Elaine is when I go to pick up Stacy, and I guess I read the signals wrong. I must have thought as long as we shared Stacy, it would all work out. What a joke. You know how much I love Stacy, Pat, don't you? You don't think I was using her, do you?”