The Easy Way Out (34 page)

I told him that Jeffrey and Kyle had had a brief reprise of their old relationship and that I hadn't felt like stepping into the middle of their ardor. “You know what it's like to sleep in someone's guest room and hear the hosts ripping down the curtains and knocking over lamps while they're fucking.”

This struck him as hilariously funny. “No one does that kind of thing, sweetheart. I don't know where you get your ideas about passion.” He laughed and went back to his sandwich and his newspaper, and I started rocking the hammock again.

*   *   *

As the weekend approached, I found myself getting increasingly anxious. I was excited at the prospect of ripping down Jeffrey's curtains,
but the idea of the trip itself—packing, flying, trekking into the city, and wandering back home—exhausted me. I'd had a similar reaction when I was standing in line to see
Lawrence of Arabia
for the eighth time and realized I just couldn't face another viewing of the film, masterpiece or not. It was one thing when having an affair with Jeffrey had simply been a matter of deceiving Arthur; now the stakes seemed higher, and I had a vague sense that I was deceiving myself somehow.

Out of desperation, I called Tony late one night, and after a lot of moronic chitchat about a trip to Paris I had no intention of taking, I told him about the latest turn of events in my love life. He listened with a surprising degree of interest and shocked me by asking for explicit details. When I was finished, he said, “You're wasting your time with this guy, Patrick.”

“You're probably right,” I said. I sighed and looked up from the brown velvet sofa at all the furniture in the living room, which was about to be packed up and carted off. “Which guy do you mean?”

“Both of them. Are you in love with the loser in New York?”

“No, I guess not.”

“What about Arthur?”

“Well . . . that one's more complicated.”

“Let's face it, Pat: you've got table scraps on one side and crumbs on the other.”

“Which side is the table scraps?” Of the two options, that sounded the more promising.

“It doesn't matter. You're just trying to piece together a life, and it won't work out. A little bit of this and a little of that, but the whole mess is never going to add up to enough.”

“You're sounding awfully sensible.”

“The voice of experience. It's what I thought I could do with Loreen: have a half-assed marriage in Chicago, a couple of things going on the side, and everything would be fine. Then I fell in love and fucked up all my plans. Don't go to New York, Patrick. Isn't that the advice you'd give me?”

“I guess it is.” The big puffy cushions on the sofa were beginning to flop down around my face. I rearranged them and thought about his advice. “And if I did suggest you stay home,” I said, “would you listen to me?”

“Nah. I'd go to New York anyway.”

Twenty-nine

I
was plagued by Tony's advice for the next several days, possibly because I knew it was sound. I thought hard about whether or not I should visit Jeffrey. I thought about it when I was at the office, at home, at the movies, the gym, the grocery store, the dry cleaners, and strapping myself into my seat on the shuttle to New York.

As soon as I stepped out of the terminal at La Guardia, the overbaked, smoggy city air assaulted me, a reminder that I'd actually arrived. The sky was a sick shade of yellow, as if the whole of New York had come down with a mean case of hepatitis. I sat down on a bench in the sun, wondering if I should take a bus or a taxi into town or get on the next flight home. The seat was so hot it felt as if the plastic would stick to my ass when I got up, assuming I ever gathered enough energy to move again. All the weekends over the past year and a half I'd made this trip into the city piled up in front of me like an overwhelming heap of time wasted on distractions. I sat plastered against the bench, sweating and miserable, contemplating the picture Tony had painted of my life: crumbs on one side, table scraps on the other. Some smorgasbord!

When I finally pulled myself together, I walked back into the terminal and bought a ticket for the next flight to Boston. I called Jeffrey and told him I was at La Guardia.

“Right on time,” he said. “When should I expect you?”

“Maybe in a few months, Jeff. I'm heading back to Boston.”

“Back to Boston? What are you talking about, Patrick? Didn't you just arrive?”

“I did. But I shouldn't be here. I've got too much to take care of at home.”

“Does this mean you're going to really try and settle down with Arthur once and for all?”

“Either that or leave him,” I said.

*   *   *

It was still early evening when I got to the apartment. Arthur had told me he was going to dinner and a movie with Beatrice that night. I rummaged through the refrigerator to try and find something to eat, but all I came up with was a pint of chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream, apparently a secret vice of Arthur's. The living room and the bedroom were both in a state of chaos, with Arthur's clothes and newspapers scattered around the floor and draped over the furniture. Perhaps on those weekends when I went to New York, Arthur spent all his time eating junk food and living in squalor. There was something reassuring about the thought.

I collapsed in a stupor in the hammock, rocking gently and sipping a canned daiquiri. The porch looked out to a kind of courtyard formed by the fenced-off yards of the houses surrounding ours. At certain times of day, the sounds from the apartments behind us were drawn out of the windows by breezes from the river and echoed loudly off the building walls. There was a couple living somewhere back there who existed in a state of constant warfare. I was never able to determine which building their voices came from, so the whole echoing courtyard took on, at certain times, the atmosphere of a battleground. That night they were fighting in their usual circle of drunken insults and accusations. “Because I know it's true,” the woman shouted. “How can you deny it when I know it's true? Go ahead, just try to tell me I'm not right, go ahead.” I imagined the two of them living isolated from the rest of the world, snug and cozy in their apartment, tearing each other to shreds. There was something in the naked passion of their exchanges that horrified and fascinated me. I listened for a while, then turned on my bossa nova tape and tried to read a futuristic novel about a world gone haywire.

And then, as the sun set behind the circle of buildings around me, and the tape played over the screaming of the couple, and all that heavy, polluted air pressed down on me, I was consumed by a wave
of nostalgic reminiscence. I remembered a night years earlier, a similarly hot night although it was probably sometime in July. Arthur and I were just getting to know each other then, and we decided to spend the evening on a sightseeing cruise around Boston Harbor. There may have been dinner served on board, and there may have been a jazz band, but what I remembered most vividly was a brief moment when we went to the deserted bow of the boat to see the lights in the distance. The air had turned suddenly cool, and we put on sweatshirts and looked out at the hot city shimmering in the distance. As I lay sweltering in the hammock, I thought back to that time when the midsummer heat wave had been a passing spell of weather, not a harbinger of doom, and when standing on the bow of a boat with Arthur had filled me with calm optimism. I felt such an intense longing for a cool breeze to come circulating around my body now, I nearly burst into tears. I opened up my novel again and read for a few more minutes. Then my arm flopped down and the book fell from my grasp and over the side of the hammock and dropped three stories to the ground below.

I fell asleep.

When I woke, the sky had grown dark and the windows of the houses all around me were lit with pale yellow light. The tape had shut off. Crickets were chirping, and the air was filled with the faint murmur of television sets from all the open windows. I looked at my watch and discovered it was after ten; I'd been asleep for hours. I was groggy from having napped in the heat for too long. I was afraid I might topple over the rail and suffer the same fate as my book if I tried to get out of the hammock, so I lay there, trapped and sweating.

A light clicked on in the kitchen, and I heard Arthur say, “We've got beer and coffee, and I can make you some iced tea. Your choice, dear.”

“Iced tea,” Beatrice said. “I told Mitchell I'd be back before ten, but I suppose he and Brad will survive.” She sneezed.

“Does Mitchell get jealous when you go out with me?”

“Don't be idiotic, Arthur. Mitchell is above jealousy, guilt, pettiness, all useless emotions. And certainly in this case . . .” I heard her walk across the kitchen floor and open the door to my bedroom. “I've always liked this little room. What does he do with all these statues?”

“He collects them. Catholic memorabilia. I call it the chapel.” Arthur had never called my room “the chapel” in front of me. Perhaps he had secret, condescending nicknames for me, too.

Anyone in my position with a molecule of decency in his bones would have announced his presence immediately. Excluded from that category, I gripped the edges of the hammock and tried to prevent it from rocking. The light from the kitchen window spread out across the chipped porch floor just to the edge of the railing, and I felt safely hidden in shadows.

“So he's been sleeping in here?” Beatrice asked. She slammed the door shut.

“For a couple of weeks now.”

“Well, that makes sense, given his concerns about buying the house. I must say, though, I wouldn't call it a good sign.”

“I know, dear. Give me credit for being able to figure out some things on my own. Once we get into the new house, everything will fall in place. These reservations of his are just a passing fancy.” Ice cubes rattled. “Tell me if this is too sweet.”

The iced tea wasn't sweet enough. Beatrice wanted two more tablespoons of sugar. They debated sitting out on the porch, but fortunately, Beatrice had always considered the porch structurally unsound. I was getting the same kind of voyeuristic thrill out of listening to their conversation that I get from leafing through someone's bedside diary, but of course what I was really waiting for was more discussion of me. I had to suffer through a long, dry conversation about the film they'd just seen, including an analysis of the legal and psychological accuracy of the script. They moved on to a novel about divorce Beatrice had recommended and Arthur had hated. I was about to doze off again, when Beatrice posed one of her typically blunt questions, exactly the kind of thing I was waiting to hear. Why, she asked Arthur, was I always running off to New York? Did he think there was a chance I might be having an affair?

“I really couldn't tell you,” Arthur said mildly.

“Please don't make it sound as if it isn't your business to know.”

“I'm not so sure it is.”

“Oh, Arthur.” She sighed and ice rattled. “That comment is so
you.”

“Why is it that whenever you describe a particular behavior as being so
me,
you mean it as an insult?”

“Let's not change the subject. I'll lavish pity on you later, if you want it. You really don't care if Patrick is having an affair?”

“If he is having an affair, it doesn't look to me as if it's posing any threat to our relationship. If he wants to play around a little, and he watches out for himself, why should I care?”

If I'd known Arthur would take such a liberal view of things, I might have saved myself a good deal of sneaking around behind his back, not that I didn't enjoy it.

“Maybe I'm having an affair, too,” Arthur added.

I was astonished to realize the possibility had never crossed my mind.

“Oh. Well. Are you?” The possibility had obviously never crossed Beatrice's mind, either.

“I flirt with someone at work. Stewart, the other homosexual at the office. Someone to have lunch with when you're unavailable. It's all very harmless.”

“You're being too casual about this, Arthur. I don't believe anyone can be so casual about the infidelity of someone they claim to love.”

If Arthur responded to her comment, I wasn't able to hear it. Perhaps he'd shrugged or made some gesture with his hand or perhaps he was thinking it over and sipping his tea. Whatever was going on in the kitchen, I felt as if I'd come across an entry in the diary I didn't want to read. I could guess what Beatrice's next question was going to be. I climbed out of the hammock as quietly as I could. “Well, Arthur,” she said, as I crawled along the porch floor, “
do
you love Patrick?” Whatever the answer to that question was, I didn't want to hear it. I made it to the back staircase before Arthur had a chance to speak, and in less than a minute, I was out the door and on my bike.