The Easy Way Out (4 page)

O
ver the next few days, Tony called me several times. His second midnight call came as less of a surprise than his first, and he sounded a good deal more relaxed, almost as if he'd spent a few hours getting sentimental with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He'd recently become a fan of New Age music, possibly to make the transition from blank hotel rooms and elevators to his blank apartment even smoother. I could hear the numbing tinkling of “MoonSlide,” one of his favorites, tinkling in the background. A little drunk, he was probably sprawled out on the sectional sofa in his living room.

“You know, I've been thinking about this all day,” he said, “and it seems to me I didn't tell you very much about Vivian last night.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose you didn't.”

“I should have told you more, Pat. I want you to get the right idea about her. She's not some flighty kid who's interested in me because she knows I'm not available. She's a hell of a lot smarter than I am. She's got brains, in addition to everything else.” He paused long enough to sigh and then said, “You believe me, don't you?”

I thought it over and told him honestly that I didn't have any reason not to believe him. Actually, Vivian's personality was of considerably less interest to me than the fact that my younger brother cared so much that I approve of her. It was the first sign I'd had from
him in a long time that he cared about my opinion on much of anything.

Of all the members of my family, Tony had responded most negatively to the fact of my homosexuality. When I broke the news to him, almost ten years earlier, he told me that he was gravely disappointed. Up to that point, we'd been fairly good friends.

“It's not that I care how you throw your life away,” he'd said then, “but I'm in trouble with a couple of girls I've been seeing, and I was planning to introduce you to one of them and have you get her off my back. Now that you tell me this nonsense, I have to figure some other way out.”

Our relationship fell off into a more or less polite acquaintance in which we traded a lot of harmless, but freighted, insults. I tried to convince myself that if he was so narrow-minded, it didn't really matter to me. But seeking his approval was a challenge I hadn't been able to give up entirely. His apparent fondness for Arthur was paltry, unwelcome compensation.

I settled back, basking in the flattery of his sudden respect for me, and listened to him ramble on about Vivian's virtues, most of which seemed to revolve around her toughness and her ability to see through his macho defenses. My brother had always gone out with frail, submissive women he could hold in thrall. Judging from the way he was talking about Vivian now, he'd obviously figured out that he, like most aggressive men and all dogs, wanted nothing so much as to be put in his place by a strong and unyielding master.

“If she told me to go out right now and swim across Lake Michigan, I'd do it, Pat. I'd chop through the ice and swim.”

“Sounds like love to me,” I said, a little put off by the quaver in his voice. “How about if she asked you to cancel your wedding plans? Has that possibility come up?”

“No,” he said. “It hasn't. Do you think that's a bad sign? You don't think it means she's not really interested in me, do you?”

“Really, Tony, I wouldn't know.”

Tony had, since adolescence, affected the deep, hypermasculine voice of a lubricious radio announcer and spoke mostly in staccato sentence fragments: “Big deal!” “So what?” “My ass”—that kind of thing. On the subject of Vivian he spoke in a lovesick whisper that involved a lot of swooning. Of course I'd always rather hear about someone's miseries than about their happy love affairs—nothing kills a person's sense of humor faster than a good marriage or a satisfying
sex life—but I couldn't get around the pleasure of having him choose me as the earpiece for his oozy confessions of adoration.

I became obsessed with his dilemma. I suppose it appealed to both the cynic and the romantic in me (not that there was much difference between the two), because it involved both a new, tempestuous love and an old, failed one. I'd come up with a number of ideas to help him get out of marrying Loreen. Most, however, were overdone scenarios involving sudden trips to the other side of the planet, the kind I sometimes concocted for myself when I fantasized about leaving Arthur. I tried mentioning a few of them to him, but I could tell he wasn't taking my ideas seriously.

“Why the hell would I want to move to Australia?” he asked.

“I guess you wouldn't,” I said. “I just think you'd feel a lot better if you came to some kind of decision.”

“I came to a decision. Unfortunately, the cord on the electric radio won't reach to the bathtub.”

It occurred to me after I'd hung up that my sensitivity to the subject of decisions probably had as much to do with my own situation as it had to do with Tony's. Arthur and I lived on the top floor of a three-family house that had recently been put up for sale, and Arthur, who'd inherited a small but not insignificant sum of money when his father died, was adamant about buying a place of our own. The closer he came to his fortieth birthday, the harder it was for him to write a rent check. In the course of my working life, I'd amassed a fortune of four thousand dollars, which I was contributing to the down payment. It was a fairly minimal contribution, but at least it gave me veto power I'd thus far managed to exercise over every potential purchase.

When I first moved into Arthur's apartment, the idea of living with him hadn't seemed all that threatening. It's true, I did begin having an affair with someone the night before I dragged my few belongings to his place, but that was an error in judgment I don't like to dwell on, especially since the affair lasted only two weeks. Arthur and I were tenants at will in a rented apartment, and his name was the one on the lease. I lived with the reassuring illusion that I could pack up and sneak out any old midnight I chose. No matter how often I'd thought about moving to Brisbane, it wasn't until the subject of buying a house came up that the walls had really started to close in on me.

Not that I didn't love Arthur; for all I knew, I did. I might not have been willing to swim across Lake Michigan for him, but we'd
been living together for six years, and despite my joke with Tony about the gun, I rarely thought about murdering him. Our relationship had developed into the kind of benign domestic dependency that takes love for granted and accepts as inevitable a certain level of boredom, discontent, and suppressed rage.

At its worst moments, my relationship with Arthur reminded me of a particularly annoying toothache I'd had a few years back. The pain had been so minor and sporadic it didn't seem worth a trip to the dentist, despite the fact that something was clearly wrong with one of my molars. I'd almost wished for one night of blinding pain that would justify having the thing pulled, just as I sometimes wished Arthur would turn grossly malicious, violent, or psychotic, making a break in our relations inevitable.

As it was, though, I worried that sneaking out in the middle of the night was the only way I'd be able to leave Arthur, assuming that was what I really wanted to do. He was the most aggressively kind man I'd ever met. When I dared to criticize him for an offense as minor as putting too much vinegar in the salad dressing, he'd pout for hours. Discussing dissatisfaction with our relationship would probably send me into such a frenzy of guilt I'd end up pledging lifelong commitment. It was much easier to think of ways to help my brother reach a decision than it was to come up with my own.

*   *   *

Tony's third call was more of the loopy, sentimental same, with the addition of an embarrassing bit of rhapsodizing about the charming way Vivian lined up the shoes in her closet. But during his fourth, he nonchalantly told me something about his engagement to Loreen that convinced me he couldn't go through with the wedding and that I had to help him get out of it.

“And the irony of the whole thing,” he said, “is I knew I shouldn't be marrying Loreen, even before I met Vivian, even before I gave her the ring.”

“That doesn't make any sense, Tony,” I reminded him, eager to be the voice of logic. “If you felt that way, why did you do it?”

“Because I couldn't get out of it. Don't tell me you don't know what was going on the night I proposed.”

I confessed I didn't. He let out one of his mammoth sighs and proceeded to tell me, as if it was something of little consequence he was tired of repeating, that to begin with, my father had been the one to suggest he give Loreen a ring for her birthday.

“To tell you the truth, Pat, I didn't think it was such a hot idea
right from the start, but I was desperate to try and come up with a present. You know how bad I've always been at buying gifts. I figured I might as well. Anyway, shopping for a ring was less humiliating than trying to pick out a dress for her. I spent a fortune on the thing, my first mistake.”

According to the running tab I was keeping, it was far from his first, but I made an encouraging grunt, and he went on:

“Even before I had the box in my hand, I was terrified someone was going to steal it. I was convinced of it. I started having trouble at work, sleeping, you name it. It got worse as soon as I picked the damned thing up from the jeweler. It became an obsession. I'd go from carrying it with me all the time to keeping it under the mattress to trying to rig up a hiding place in the tank of the toilet.”

Tony's apartment was such a tight, solid cell, it was hard to figure out how oxygen could get in, never mind a thief.

“The funny thing was, all that worrying made me think I was doing the right thing by proposing. I figured I must have really cared about her to care so much if the ring got stolen. And then, on the plane to Boston, I started talking to this woman sitting next to me and she ruined my life.”

“That's what you get for flirting the night you're going to propose.”

“It wasn't flirting. She was one of those types you used to hang out with in high school: know-it-all genius with a face like a horse. I told her why I was going to Boston and said something about how relieved I'd be to deliver the ring and get it out of my hands since I was living in constant fear that someone was going to steal it. She was sitting there with a calculator, and without even looking up, she said, ‘Maybe you're
hoping
someone will steal it.' And that was it, Pat, that was all she said, but I looked over at her and I knew she was absolutely right. I wanted that ring out of my life. If the window on the plane had opened up, I would have chucked it out. By the time we landed in Boston, I'd decided to put off the engagement. I went to one of those airport shops and bought Loreen an expensive clock radio for a birthday present. I told your parents I planned to postpone the whole thing, that I just wasn't sure. The two of them went completely nuts, locked themselves in the bathroom and started fighting. Half an hour later, they told me they'd already spilled the beans. So what was I supposed to do? Loreen arrives all dolled up, Ryan has this fancy meal prepared, your father has on a suit, for Christ's sake. . . .”

Tony's call waiting clicked. A few minutes later, he came back on and said, “It's her,” and cut me off. I had no idea which “her” it was, and the uncertainty left me reeling. I settled down on my air mattress and spent the better part of the night grinding my teeth, doing scissor kicks, and trying to find exactly the right position for my head on the pillow. For years, I'd been convinced that my parents had played a major role in disrupting Ryan's happy marriage, and now it seemed they were engineering an unhappy one for Tony. Fortunately for me, there was no sign of homosexual marriages becoming legal in the near future.

The top sheet of my bed had had a hole near the foot when I'd crawled under the covers, and by the next morning the thing looked like the Shroud of Turin. I peeled it off my body and quietly stole out of the bedroom. Arthur wasn't awake and wouldn't be for at least another hour. He required a good deal more sleep than I did, largely because he was so much more productive. Arthur was a lawyer for the Immigration Rights Project. He spent his days helping the tired, the sick, the hungry, the poor, the politically oppressed secure legal access to the land of opportunity. Russian Jews, Salvadoran rebels, Cuban queers, Romanians, Albanians, and tax-poor Irishmen. Not an easy job by anyone's standards, and even I wasn't about to grudge him a good night's sleep. I found my job as a travel agent exhausting, too, but in an entirely different way.

I went into the living room. Some twisted, proprietary impulse led me to scatter my belongings, clothes and books and magazines, all over the house, particularly in those rooms where Arthur spent a lot of time. I found it almost impossible to look at his favorite reading chair without feeling compelled to strip off some article of clothing and drape it over the seat. Arthur is tidy, though not compulsively so. We'd squabbled about clutter until Arthur's ex-wife, a psychologist, had come up with the endearing suggestion that I could be as messy as I wanted from 8:00
P.M.
on, as long as the house was clean when Arthur got up in the morning. Of course it was a ridiculous idea, but I went along with it because I was fond of Beatrice and I like being told what to do by people who have no real power over me. I'm not a slob by nature. I'd taken up being sloppy in my early twenties, thinking it gave me personality, the way some people take up macramé or cocaine. Now that I was stuck with it, I realized it was an inconvenient and time-consuming personality disorder, about as appealing as psoriasis.

Sunlight was streaming through the bay of dirty windows, flooding
the living room with hazy yellow light. The place looked wonderfully inviting, as it had ever since I'd heard the building was up for sale. When Arthur's father died two years earlier, his mother, who'd been bitten by the Georgia O'Keeffe bug, had given up their apartment in Brooklyn Heights and moved to New Mexico to paint. Arthur was an only child, and he'd inherited all the family furniture. Our place was filled with it. The living room was decorated with glass-fronted bookcases, mahogany chests, several overstuffed chairs complete with antimacassars and footstools, lamps with rosy silk shades, and the excessively heavy brown velvet sofa on which I spent a good deal of my free time. The place looked like a hybrid of a library in a men's club and a Victorian bordello. The chairs and the sofa had been worn down to a comfortable sheen by the indeterminable hours Arthur and his parents had spent in them reading weighty books—the kind of thing they did to amuse themselves on a Sunday afternoon. Most of the springs in the seats were shot and the arms broken down. I suppose none of the furniture was worth anything, but every time I walked into the room I was struck by the fact that I, who'd grown up in a house where JFK memorial plates were the only artwork, actually lived in what looked to me like antique splendor. What I hadn't taken into account was how depressing antique splendor can be. There were days when the overstuffed chairs seemed to be puffing themselves up. More than once, when I'd fallen asleep reading on the sofa, I'd dreamed about those brown velvet cushions falling on my face and snuffing out my life.