The Easy Way Out (35 page)

*   *   *

The night was still hot, and a swampy smell was blowing up from the polluted river. I pedaled along the path by the water. The branches of the sycamore trees lining Memorial Drive were batting back and forth in the warm wind, and the flowers of the dogwood trees were shedding petals all over the sidewalk.

I locked my bike to a lamppost in front of Sharon's house and was about to make my way through the tangled bushes to the front door when I noticed a blue Chevy parked in the street. I peered in the window: Stacy's safety seat in the back and a couple of empty cans of Ryan's Australian ale. I looked up at the house, but the windows were so blocked from view by the overgrown bushes, I couldn't tell if there were any lights on. I got back on my bike and pedaled toward home.

Thirty

W
hen I got to Only Connect Monday morning, Fredrick, our hedonist receptionist, was sitting at the front desk dressed in a conservative pin-striped suit, white shirt, and wing-tip shoes. He was eating a dry bagel in an uninspired, dubious sort of way and casually leafing through a computer magazine.

I would have been less shocked if he was sitting there naked, especially since he'd been decked out in an outfit resembling red silk pajamas the last time I'd seen him. I was eager to find out the meaning of this transformation, but Fredrick, who was a master at self-deprecation, was more sensitive to even a hint of an insult than anyone I'd met. As I stood at his desk leafing through my call-back slips, I casually mentioned that he looked nice and asked if he was growing a goatee.

“Not a goatee,” he said. “A whole new life. I have an interview at the Harvard Business School this afternoon.”

“A whole new life,” I sighed. Nothing sounded more appealing or remote.

I'd left Sharon's on Friday night determined to go home and tell Arthur everything—about Jeffrey, about sleeping in the back bedroom, and most of all, about my intense desire to pilot a kamikaze flight over the yellow house. The confession should have been easy,
especially since it now appeared he knew it all anyway. But as I was biking home along the river, I stopped to look back at the moon. It was a perfectly formed, bright crescent sliver hovering just above the tops of the sycamores. I was transfixed by the sight but ultimately distracted by the more earthly lure of a shadowy figure leaning against a nearby tree. One furtive thing led to another, and by the time I got home, Arthur was sound asleep. I studied his quiet, peaceful face and went back to my own room in defeat.

*   *   *

Late that Monday afternoon, Fredrick buzzed my intercom and told me that a Mrs. Arrow was on the phone for me. Whenever she called the office, my mother gave a name taken from the label of one of the cheap shirts in her counter at O'Neil's, because she was convinced I'd lose my job if I received too many personal calls.

She was phoning, she told me, to invite me to the house for dinner the following week. “Your father survived another year of deteriorating health, so Ryan's throwing a chicken in the oven and turning on the gas. I'm going to buy a cake, providing James isn't diagnosed with diabetes between now and then. I thought you and poor Arthur might like to join us.”

“I can't answer for poor Arthur, but I suppose I should come.”

“Don't sound so excited, dear; you might have a stroke.”

“You don't have any suggestions for a present, do you?”

“I'm afraid not. Maybe his cardiologist could give you some ideas.”

I found the comment a little stinging, even for Rita, and I began to wonder if she was still angry at me about the speech I'd delivered on the subject of Tony and Loreen's marriage. “You sound a little off,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine. What about you? Aren't you fine?”

“On top of the world.”

“Good, I thought you would be.” She paused, and I heard the new cash register beeping a protest to whatever she was doing to it. “It's that brother of yours,” she finally said.

“Maybe we shouldn't talk about Tony.”

“I'm talking about Ryan, the one person in the family we could rely on to be sweet and good-natured and kind and gentle. I don't know what's happened, but all of a sudden he has an answer for everything. I wouldn't dare contradict anything he says, half of which
is totally off the wall. He even looks different. Frankly, dear, I blame you for introducing him to that woman.”

“Sharon?”

“Unless there's another one I don't know about. I suppose he'll be moving in with her next. He practically lives there as it is. He spent Friday night there and almost didn't make it back in time to pick up Stacy on Saturday. And instead of bringing my granddaughter here to spend some time with your father and me, he took her right back to Cambridge. They went to your office to watch Sharon work and then went for a walk around a cemetery. In other words, what every four-year-old girl loves to do on a Saturday afternoon. Poor Elaine must have had a fit when she heard about it.”

I was so thrilled by this news, I had an urge to slam down the phone and run to congratulate Sharon. But I didn't want her to think I was sitting around gossiping about her, even though she probably would have appreciated it. “I'm sure Ryan knows what he's doing,” I said. “Don't forget he's an adult.”

“Sure he's an adult, a married adult. He's going to lose visitation rights if he doesn't watch out. And this morning he announces he's taking a day off later in the week so he can go to Boston to have some kind of fancy haircut. Thirty-five years he's been getting his hair cut at that horrible place down the street, and all of a sudden he has to go into Boston to get a haircut. Just between you and me, there isn't enough hair there to worry about one way or the other.” I was about to attempt a defense of my brother, when she inhaled sharply and said, in a voice softened by regret, “I suppose I should be happy for him, shouldn't I? Well, I know it doesn't sound it, Patrick, but I'm trying.” She reminded me to be on time for the birthday dinner and hung up.

*   *   *

Later in the day, I went into Sharon's office to see for myself if her weekend with Ryan had made any visible changes. She was leaning back in her chair, with her bare feet up on her desk, talking on the phone and drinking some iced beverage from one of the most absurdly large plastic cups I'd ever seen.

No visible changes.

Her office was a vast octagonal room with long windows that looked out to the alley in front of the house. The floor and the desk were covered with brochures and tickets and travel guides and stacks of old newspapers. The man who came into the agency twice a week
to clean refused to enter Sharon's office. She'd accused him of disarranging her filing system because he'd once made the mistake of emptying her wastebasket.

I sat down in front of her desk and picked up a copy of a letter she was writing to an airline. “Enclosed please find an unused ticket and death certificate for my client, Mr. B. Trembley. Please issue a full refund to his bereaved widow, B. Trembley. As the passenger died en route to the airport, it wasn't possible to cancel reservations.” Et cetera.

This was a classic Sharon letter, a version of which I'd written many times in the years I was her assistant. Sooner or later, someone at the FAA was bound to catch on to the fact that her clients had an astonishingly high mortality rate. I put aside the letter and started to leaf through a tour guide to Bermuda, one with glossy pictures of the island, all pink beaches and flawless blue skies. Maybe all that pink and blue induced a regression to babyhood, which accounted for the island's popularity among heavy drinkers and honeymooners.

As I sat looking through the pictures, I began to catch some of what Sharon was saying. It sounded, unimaginably, as if she was telling her client that he was past the deadline for the cheapest airfare and there was nothing she could do for him. I sat up and took notice.

“I know I did it once,” she said, “and the way I see it, you should be grateful I did. But I can't do it again and put my reputation on the line. Let's face it: if you'd called me on time, I wouldn't have to cheat and lie to get you a cheap fare. You realize you're asking me to cheat and lie so you can save a buck.”

Her head was tilted back, and her hair was hanging down to the floor. She put her cup on her desk, looked over at me, and winked. “You're asking me that question? How would I know? Well, take a bus, if that's how you feel about it.” There was a long pause, during which she held the phone away from her ear. “When you've thought it over, call me back and I'll accept an apology.” Then she made an obscene hand gesture at the phone and hung up.

“Don't look surprised, Patrick. I'm calling it the new me. Haven't you heard I've changed my ways?”

“Of course not. I don't know if I can stand anyone else changing her ways today.”

“Fredrick? Sad, isn't it. Business school. I'm sure his decision has something to do with sex. As for me, I'm tired of risking my job for the sake of a lot of jerks who don't even appreciate me. It's all part of the show for them. And believe me, sticking to the rules is going to
be like having a whole new career. You know how I love challenges.”

“How long has this been in effect?”

“Since this morning. Give me that letter you were just reading.” I passed her the Trembley refund request. She rolled it into a ball, threw it in the wastebasket, and dumped some of her drink on it. “He can die by his own hand.”

She got up from behind her desk and, as if to prove to me how serious she was about her resolve, began to poke through the stacks of paper flung into the various corners of the room.

I swiveled around in my chair to follow the path of her cleaning binge. “Do you mind me asking what brought this on?”

“A lot of things coming together at once. But Ryan was the catalyst. I give him credit for that. He came in here with Stacy this weekend to watch me work. I was talking to some clients about how I could get them a package to Mexico for two hundred dollars—a wild exaggeration to begin with—and right in the middle of going through the yellow pages to find out where they could rent a wheelchair, I looked over at Ryan and I felt like a complete fool. I knew he was right; all this work I do for people is a pathetic plea for acceptance. In the end, the clients don't care one way or the other and I've taken all the risks, and I'd be much better off looking for acceptance and love somewhere else.” She tossed a bulging folder marked “Doctors' Stationery—Newton, Wellesley, and Needham” into the wastebasket.

“Ryan said all that?”

“Not exactly. But you know how sane he is. He just sat there grinning in that sad way of his, and I could tell what was going through his mind.”

The extreme heat of the weekend had broken, but the day was still warm. Inexplicably, Sharon was wearing a heavy sweater and a pair of woolen slacks, and her face was beaded with sweat. How someone who paid no attention to what she put on in the morning had so effectively transformed Ryan's wardrobe was a mystery.

Her effort at going clean was a noble one, but the office was so magnificently disorganized, it would probably take weeks to set things right and throw out all the phony letters and bad tickets and falsified hotel vouchers. After ten minutes of pushing papers, she sat down on the edge of her desk and lit a cigarette. She tossed back her long hair and pulled her feet under her.

“I almost stopped by your house on Friday night,” I said. “I happened to be in the neighborhood around midnight.”

“Midnight? You should have come in,” she said. “I had an all-night poker game. You can count poker as one of your brother's previously undiscovered talents. He won a hundred and forty dollars. I won five hundred and seventeen. Not one of my better nights.”

“What time did the game break up?”

“Early morning. Ryan had to rush out to pick up Stacy. We went out to Watertown, and I took him to see your new house.”

“I don't own it yet. Did he say anything about it?”

She shrugged. “He liked it. But he didn't make any rash comments. Too sane. Too sane to get involved, Patrick.” She rummaged through her huge straw bag and passed me a strip of pictures. “Kind of cute, if you don't look at me,” she said.

There were four pictures of Sharon, Ryan, and Stacy. The three of them were squeezed into a tiny photo booth, laughing and jockeying for position in front of the lens. Only in the final frame was there any sense of order. There, Stacy was sitting on Sharon's lap and Ryan had his arm around Sharon's shoulder. The three had calmed down considerably but were still smiling. Sharon was staring into the camera, her piercing, pretty eyes defiant. But it was Ryan who seemed to dominate the photo, with his broad grin and outstretched arms.

I got up to hand her the photos and instead found myself embracing her.