The Easy Way Out (23 page)

I was feeling virtuous that my days of fooling around with Jeffrey were at an end, so I didn't see any need to rush. Every day, I carried the papers to work in my knapsack, but each time I took them out, to read through the fine print, I'd develop such a severe case of eyestrain, I had to put them aside.

Then one night at the beginning of the second week in April, I came home from the gym while Arthur was out for his evening walk. I rarely had the place to myself at that hour, and I tossed my body onto the sofa, drinking in the luxury of being temporarily alone. Very quickly, however, I made the mistake of using my solitude to wander around the apartment, following a trail of clues Arthur had left behind and trying to piece together his evening. A roasting pan was soaking in the kitchen sink, filled with soapy water and grease, and on the counter was a plate of chicken, broccoli, carrots, and mashed potatoes, all set for me to pop in the oven and reheat. On top
of the desk in the living room was a stack of envelopes and an open checkbook. He'd obviously spent a substantial amount of time writing checks to worthy causes and paying off bills, some of them mine. There was a pile of literature from Amnesty International on the arm of the sofa and a copy of
The Magic Mountain
spread open on the floor, with corrections of the translation he'd penciled into the margins years earlier.

Beside this tome was a pad of legal paper, on which Arthur had sketched a floor plan of the yellow house. In each of the rooms, he indicated where various pieces of furniture would go—brown sofa, red chair, glass-fronted bookcase. The smallest of the three bedrooms he'd designated as “P.'s Place.” This box he'd crowded with amusing little drawings of crucifixes, candles, and stick figures with halos over their heads. Everything was roughly sketched, but he'd clearly spent a lot of time decorating the room that was to be my study.

I might have been able to ignore the indications of Arthur's goodwill, kindness, generosity, intelligence, and optimism scattered all over the apartment—the chicken dinner, the charitable contributions, the reading material on the plight of the exploited multitudes, the improved Thomas Mann—but I couldn't get past that lovingly drawn depiction of my room, with all its tacky religious paraphernalia. It struck me as so unthinkably tender, I collapsed back onto the sofa and spent the next hour reliving the day Arthur and I had met, exactly the kind of fond, maudlin ruminating I usually manage to avoid. The miserable result was that by the time Arthur came home from his walk, I was sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen humming “When first my old, old love I knew” from
Trial by Jury
and filling out the mortgage application.

*   *   *

Arthur and I had met six years earlier at a cookout, late in the afternoon on a hot Sunday at the end of June.

I spent the week before that fateful cookout shut up in my room in the turret on the top floor of Sharon's house, nursing a mean case of poison ivy. I have no idea where I got it—I'd never had it before and haven't had it since—but after the last day of school that year, I broke out in a shockingly ugly rash that covered my body from my hairline to my ankles. I was so miserably uncomfortable, and so embarrassed about my appearance, that I took to my bed for six days, moving only enough to turn the pages of a nine-hundred-page novel I was reading about sex in suburbia. Sharon initially indulged me by carrying her TV and video machine up to my bedroom and bringing
home tapes after work. But by the Sunday of the cookout, she was disgusted with my malingering. Her theory was that my poison ivy was psychosomatically induced—a manifestation of my doubts about teaching, a physical collapse to celebrate the end of classes.

She was possibly right, but school was only part of the problem. I was also recovering from a period of foolish romantic entanglements that were typical of the kinds of relationships I kept falling into in my early twenties.

I had only one serious lover before Arthur. He was Warren, a generous, opinionated bully I met shortly after moving to Boston. He designed computer programs for a living, but it soon became apparent to me that he was, at heart, a frustrated psychiatrist. The sentence he uttered most often in the endless year we were involved was: “Sure that's what you
said,
Patrick; now let me tell you what you
meant.
” I was foolish and narcissistic enough to always listen to his interpretations and believe them. Worse still, I was flattered by his frantic jealousy. My only defense is that I was young. It took me several years of my own romantic betrayals to figure out that jealous accusations of infidelity are most often thinly veiled confessions of the same. Warren was a short man, so aggressively homely he was attractive. I don't know how to describe his face except to say that it looked as if someone had stuck a lot of mismatched features onto a yam, glued a clump of hair on top, thrown his hands up in disgust, and said, “Ah, to hell with it; it'll have to do.” But what he lacked in beauty, Warren made up for in swaggering, self-assured sexual energy, which I, and an astonishing number of other fools, found irresistible.

Warren and I had one of those embattled relationships that inexperienced twenty-two-year-olds, jaded forty-year-olds, and, for all I know, computer programmers of any age are likely to mistake for true love. It consisted mainly of a lot of angry phone calls, shouting and name-calling sessions, biweekly breakups followed by thrilling reconciliations. We had no shared interests—for an entire year I avoided asking what a data base was, for fear he'd tell me—except a fondness for arguing.

Still, when Warren decided to be charming, it was easy to forget he was ever anything else, and the relationship might have gone on for some time if he hadn't moved to Texas, a state with a climate I could never tolerate.

After Warren, I began a series of brief, depressing involvements with people I didn't really know and wasn't all that fond of. These
usually dragged through a month or two of tense, quiet dinners, long, boring walks, and unhappy mornings waking up beside someone I might or might not ever see again, depending on whether one or the other of us found something better to do before the upcoming Saturday night.

The last of these entanglements was a three-month-long parody of romantic love with a nonentity whose name I could never remember. This meaningful relationship ended when I phoned him one night, got a busy signal, and decided he wasn't worth the effort of redialing. The feeling was obviously mutual, as I never heard from him again. I'd been more remorseful about setting mousetraps than I was about ending it with what's-his-name, but I was nearly overwhelmed by the pointlessness of the whole three months I wasted on him. It made me realize how desperate I was for the illusion of love.

A few weeks later, I developed poison ivy and went on strike.

On the Sunday of the cookout, Sharon threatened that if I didn't get out of bed and go with her, she'd take back her TV. So I smeared a layer of calamine lotion, put on long pants and a T-shirt, and went off.

The cookout was in Cambridgeport, in the backyard of a married couple Sharon had recently sent trekking in Nepal. He was a corporate lawyer, and she had started a company that gave expensive seminars in “Writing” to illiterate businessmen. They were the usual Cambridge success story: a couple of ex-radicals who had grown tired of pounding the pavements in peasant blouses and love beads and had plunged into the world of capital gains and designer shower curtains with stunning enthusiasm.

When I was growing up, Cambridge was a city filled with smoky coffeehouses, folksingers, revival movie theaters, and cheap rooming houses where hippies slept dormitory-style on mattresses on the floor. Every disparaging comment about the place I ever heard from my parents only strengthened my determination to live there. But by the time I did, things had changed. The rooming houses were replaced with hundred-dollar-a-night hotels, and the folksingers were either cleaned up and recording for a major label or dressed in suits and selling software in the suburbs. As for the hippies, most of them were standing around that landscaped backyard, sipping Campari.

“I think I'll sit out in the car,” I told Sharon. We walked through the gate and were immediately crushed by a mob of people carrying
infants in expensive papoose packs. Outdoor speakers were blasting reggae (the only safe choice for all-white, politically correct gatherings), and there was a table set up against the back fence, with bowls of guacamole and other highly spiced foods from a variety of hot third world countries.

“You don't think
I
belong here, do you?” Sharon asked. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in the direction of a baby. “Just mingle for half an hour and then we'll leave, I promise.”

She was ushered off by someone who wanted to tell her about his thrilling trip to Ecuador, and I knew we were in for the long haul. I went to sit in a folding chair set in the shade of a hedge of rosebushes. If I hadn't already been convinced that my appearance was frightening, the treatment I received at the party would have done the trick. Kids kept coming up to me and staring with their mouths open, until their parents rushed over and carried them off.

From my shady seat, I had a clear view of the gate leading from the street to the yard. I was keeping count of the number of babies being hauled in, a sure sign of the population crisis. Then I noticed Arthur, or rather a tall, balding man with strikingly large ears, wearing a peculiar pair of sunglasses with tiny round lenses. Unlike the dozen or so people who'd come in in the time I'd been watching, he had a great deal of difficulty opening the gate, a fact I found especially odd since all the task required was a simple push. When he finally stumbled in, he looked around in confusion, as if he didn't know anyone there or had expected to find a lawn sale. Wearing a pair of baggy khaki shorts that came down below his knees and a long-sleeved white shirt, he was standing with a slight stoop, almost as if he was apologizing for his height. There was something in his posture and perplexed expression that gave him a comical appearance I liked immediately.

A woman followed him into the yard, spoke to him briefly, handed over the baby she was carrying, and went into the crowd, calling out boisterous hellos. Arthur began to bounce the baby in his arms as he made his way over to the empty seat beside me. He sat down, cooing and clucking.

“Sweet, isn't he?” he asked, smiling at me.

The baby, who was about seven months old, had a beautifully delicate face but was wearing a bored, detached expression, as if he might have preferred to be at home reading Henry James. He was dressed in a pink bonnet trimmed in white lace, a rose sundress, and
frilly white ankle socks. “What's his name?” The “his” stuck in my throat.

“Robin,” Arthur cooed. “Isn't that right? Isn't your name Robin?”

This was a baby headed for a gender crisis if ever I'd seen one: girl's clothes and an androgynous name. I could imagine the way they'd decorated his bedroom. But Arthur was staring at him with such open adoration, I was touched. “My name's Arthur, by the way. Arthur Egger.”

I introduced myself, and to my amazement, Arthur shifted the baby to his left shoulder and stuck out his hand. It seemed unnecessarily generous, considering my condition.

“I hate to ask you this,” he said, “but would you mind holding little Robin here for a second. I have to take off these sunglasses. I don't like to wear sunglasses in the shade. Eyestrain.”

I took Robin into my arms, and he gazed at me suspiciously, as if he was trying to figure out what, exactly, I was. Fortunately, he was too well behaved to complain. Arthur put his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and looked at me with his enormous, kind brown eyes. He had a bemused expression, a gentle so-what's-new look I'd later learn was as close as he ever came to flirting. I passed Robin back, and he said, “Boy, he's heavier than you'd think, isn't he? It's a good thing I saw my chiropractor this week.”

“Back problems?” I asked. I like to discover the weaknesses in people I find appealing.

“Originally I was seeing him for neck problems. But now we're working on my back and knees. Lately, though, my ankles seem to be bothering me.”

“Ah, well.” A clear case of hypochondria if ever I'd heard one, and a pretty bad one, too. “Soon it'll be your toes, and then that should be the end of it, no?”

“He's making fun of us, Robin.”

I was making fun of Arthur, but I'd have loved to take on Robin.

Arthur told me he'd just finished law school at Boston University and was supposed to be spending the summer studying for the bar exam. “But so far, all I've done is read Dickens. Have you read
Bleak House
?”

Hesitantly, I confessed I hadn't. I was relieved to see he wasn't put off by my ignorance. (While Arthur was fairly proud of his intelligence, he had an astonishing tolerance for stupidity in others.
Many of his friends were, like me, intellectual lightweights who gathered at his feet, entranced by the breadth of his knowledge and the scope of his reading.) He began discussing the book with such genuine fondness and unpretentious delight—almost as if the author and most of the characters were close friends—that I was enthralled. He made me feel I was a genius for not having read the novel; now I had all the pleasure of reading it for the first time still in front of me. When I told him I taught school, he became enthusiastic and complimentary, and suggested a number of books for my students. I was drawn to him, baby, wife, and all. He exuded some air of calm even as he shifted Robin from shoulder to shoulder, gurgled and made faces, and went without a pause from discussing Dickens and Jane Austen to talking incomprehensible baby babble. He was lightly flushed from the heat and looked completely self-confident in a shy, casual way I admired enormously.

Finally, Robin's mother came over and lifted him out of Arthur's arms. “Thanks for holding her,” she said. “You don't know how much trouble you saved me. Imagine trying to work this crowd with a baby. She's an angel, isn't she?”