The Easy Way Out (17 page)

“I think you're a good father.”

“Time got away from me, that's what happened. Three days, three years, who knew? I guess I was pretending we were still a couple. I certainly haven't had any interest in anyone else. I knew Lainie went out on dates sometimes, but I never worried about it. I thought of her the same way I always had, so I figured she felt the same way about me. Living in a dream. I always have been a sap.” He paused and caught his breath. “The lights are nice, aren't they? Kind of like Christmas.”

“All those cars,” I said. “All that pollution.”

“Oh, come on, try to look on the bright side. It's good about this house you're getting. You know I always liked that Arthur. Tony's life sounds all fucked up, mine too, but you're doing all right now. Try to enjoy it a little, Pat. You don't know when everything might change.”

I wanted to tell him I was desperately, eagerly waiting for anything to change, but I was afraid it might make him more unhappy.

“Poor Loreen,” he said. “She's a sweet kid. She doesn't deserve this. I guess that's the whole point—no one deserves what they get in life, and no one gets what they deserve. Everybody's barreling along in the passing lane, except for the saps like me, driving at the speed limit.”

It sounded to me more as if he'd been in reverse for three years. “Do you plan to fight this divorce?” I asked.

He slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket and shrugged. “Who knows? If she wants out she wants out. To tell you the truth, I've been in that basement so long, I don't have a whole lot to offer her anymore.”

“Don't be such a defeatist,” I said, even though I could see his point. The fact that he'd lasted in the basement as long as he had made Elaine's request for a divorce seem entirely justified. “You could at least tell her how you feel about her.”

I had a sad feeling that even if Elaine wasn't exactly the right
person for Ryan, she was his only chance before he sank too deeply into his subterranean life.

He got up from the bench wearily. “I don't know, Pat. I've still got some pride, you know. We better go inside,” he said, “and make sure Romeo and Juliet haven't killed each other.”

Fourteen

“Y
ou see,” Sharon said, rolling a cigarette between her thumb and index finger, “that's what I've been telling you all along. Ryan is afraid your parents will literally kill each other if he's not around to protect them from themselves. That's why he's stuck in that dungeon.”

“Let's not go overboard here.”

“Frightening,” she said. “Imagine a man of thirty-six . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she blew a column of smoke rings up to the ceiling. “Really frightening.”

Sharon was stretched out on the nubby blue sofa in her living room, her bare feet against one armrest, her head against the other, her dark hair hanging down to the floor. I was sitting behind her in a rocking chair—a piece of rusting metal porch furniture that had no business being indoors—and although I could see Sharon's face and she couldn't see mine, I felt like the patient in our exchange. I often felt like a patient in my discussions with Sharon. The living room had twelve-foot ceilings and was barely furnished. The walls and the tall, elegant windows were completely bare. Sharon found the idea of curtains laughable. “Let 'em look” was another of her mottoes.

It was early evening, almost a week after the family dinner. I'd taken Sharon to see the yellow house, hoping she'd soften her strong
objections once she saw the place. She'd conceded that from a purely-architectural point of view it was appealing, but she'd stuck to her advice to forget buying and to move back in with her. Only after we'd returned to her house did I dare confess that Arthur and I had made an offer and put down a thousand dollars two days before. She'd merely frowned her disapproval, almost as if I was too hopeless to bother with.

We'd gone into the kitchen to get drinks, and I started to tell her about the dinner at the restaurant. As soon as Sharon opened the refrigerator, her housemate, Roberta, had clomped down from the second floor.

Sharon looked at me and groaned, rather blatantly, I thought, and Roberta immediately took center stage. She was dressed in a worn turquoise satin nightgown with lace shoulder straps and a pair of green flip-flops held together with duct tape. Her hair was done in a Bride of Frankenstein frizz and tied back with a filmy scarf. As she bustled around the kitchen, talking frantically and preparing a brew of thick coffee, she gave off the scent of some heavy and expensive perfume.

After a second of penetrating eye contact, she said, “You must be the famous Daniel. I'm delighted to meet you.”

Sharon raised a single eyebrow. “This is Patrick,” she said. “I don't know any Daniels. My entire life, I've never known anyone named Daniel, Berta.”

“Oh?” She contemplated this for a moment. “My mistake,” she said, as if there had been some doubt. “I'm sure Sharon's told you all about me, Patrick.”

“I haven't,” Sharon said.

“Please don't believe a word of what she's said. Ben's worse than she could possibly describe.” Her laugh was desperate but good-humored and added to her air of faded glamour. “Did she tell you what I said to him as I was leaving him? Well, it's a classic. I was walking out the door, this was a month and a half ago, the night I found out I could move in here, thanks to Sharon, my guardian angel. So, I was walking out the door with my huge suitcase, and Ben said to me, ‘Berta, you've turned me off women for the rest of my life.' So I just looked at him and I said, ‘Well, Ben' ”—here she clutched at her throat and swallowed hard as if to control an incipient fit of hilarity—“‘well,' I said, ‘I figured that was the least I could do for my sex.'” She held up her hand: No applause, please. “And then
I just strolled out.” This said, she doubled over laughing, as Sharon and I watched in silence. She composed herself and filled a tall thermos with her coffee.

“What do you do for a living, Daniel? Patrick!” She stomped her foot and repeated my name three times. “Now I'll never forget it again for as long as I live. You were saying?”

“I work with Sharon.”

“How nice. Married?”

“Homosexual.”

“Oh, good. I'd love you to meet Ben sometime and see if you think he's gay. You and Sharon have the right idea. Stay single and you'll never be lonely.”

“I'm not single,” I told her.

“I am lonely,” Sharon said flatly.

I was taken aback by this sudden confession, but Roberta ignored it. “Believe me, kiddo, you don't know lonely until you've tried living with Ben. You live with someone, and you get weak. You're strong. I envy you, I really do.” She stepped up behind Sharon and gave her a hug, a sort of consolation prize.

Roberta supervised a lab at a biochemical firm in Waltham. According to Sharon, she made a huge salary and was much sought after in her field. I imagined that every person working under her had heard the famous exit line at least several times.

A few minutes later, the phone rang and Roberta grabbed for it. “What do you want?” she said. She winked at Sharon and me as if we were finally about to see the performance we'd bought tickets for. One of the lace straps had slid off her shoulder and lay slack against her thin, freckled arm. “I can't, Ben, it's out of the question. Because I have plans. Plans! You've heard the word before, haven't you? Well, I've got them. I'm dressed and about to go out the door. That's none of your business. And what if it was a date? As a matter of fact, it is. Absolutely not. He's standing right here. I will. I intend to. Same to you.” She slammed down the phone. “See what I mean?” she asked no one in particular. She slid the strap over her shoulder and smiled at me warmly. “Fortunately, Ben's a very small word in my vocabulary these days.” She gathered up her thermos and headed off to her bedroom.

“Now tell me you'd want to live with that,” Sharon said as we listened to Roberta's flip-flops clacking against the stairs.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Sharon upstaged, and I found it worrisome. I counted on Sharon to stand out in any crowd. “I'm not
sure. There's something appealing about her, I suppose. Have you met Ben?”

“Met him? He practically lives here. He's one of those handsome liberated men; nice chest, no brains. Some kind of crackpot shrink: Heal the Inner Child—that level of sophistication. So understanding about everything, he bleeds empathy every time I sneeze. Roberta claims he doesn't take her career seriously because he wants her to have a baby. Of course, he's so sensitive, he'd probably end up breast-feeding the kid himself. I'd get rid of Berta in a minute if she wasn't so pathetic.”

I'd nodded in agreement, but I hadn't seen anything especially pathetic about Roberta.

*   *   *

Sharon's house was a grand old Victorian summer cottage with a turret, a wide wraparound porch, and elaborate little brackets and gingerbread on every corner. It was at the top of a hill on a quiet one-way street in one of the better neighborhoods in Cambridge. All the houses around it had recently been spruced up in some drastic way, painted in elaborate San Francisco style or divided and converted to condos. Hers was the peeling gray wreck gentrification had forgotten. Sharon took care of the place in big expensive projects: a lawn service came twice a season to cut back the trees and hack through the weeds, a window-washing service blasted the grime off the huge windows every couple of years, a general contractor cleaned out the gutters annually. The small details of regular maintenance were left undone. Pine trees, rhododendrons, forsythia, and lilac bushes had all but taken over the porch and the windows on the first floor.

The inside of the house, too, was showing signs of wear, specifically the wear of all those housemates moving in and out over the years. Paint was chipped from around the doorframes, and there were deep nicks in the walls made by bed frames and bureaus and bookcases as they were carried up and down stairs. Five of the balusters supporting the staircase railing had been knocked out.

The living room, where we were sitting discussing Ryan, was dimly lit by two tiny wall lamps on either side of the mantelpiece and by the flickering television. Sharon had been smoking heavily, and a blue haze hung in the air above our heads. Most of the rooms in the vast house had grown dusty from lack of use. Sharon claimed she preferred not to clutter the place with furniture, so people could dance when she threw parties. In fact, she rarely entertained, and
when she did, the events usually ended early and abruptly after she wandered off to bed unannounced, leaving the guests to depart in confusion.

I was telling Sharon about the dinner during the commercial breaks of
Jeopardy.
Sharon, like Ryan, was an avid watcher, a fanatic, even. I was fairly certain she was intellectually capable of achieving almost anything she set her mind to, but she seemed to have only one clear ambition: to appear as a guest on the show. She claimed she'd never be allowed on because she was informed enough to send the network into bankruptcy. She did know the answers (or the questions, or whatever the silly format demanded) to almost everything. She'd rant at the contestants and then, as soon as a commercial came on, hit the mute button on her remote and engage in conversations with me as if there'd been no interruptions.

“What did the sharks say when you were driving them home?” she asked.

“Who knows? They were fighting, one in the back seat, one in the front. I couldn't make out the content.”

“Probably just as well. Poor Ryan. Those battles must drive him crazy.”

“I guess. Although he's used to them by now. I tried to call Tony and confess that I'd let Vivian out of the bag, but he doesn't seem to be around. Maybe he's moved in with her.”

“Unlikely.”

She clicked on the volume of the TV and grew increasingly agitated as some poor soul answered everything incorrectly. “Idiot,” she mumbled. “Did you hear that, Patrick? ‘Where is Mozambique?' Ha! Where's your brain? Please.” The idiot in question was a delightful little nubbin of a human being with a Fu Manchu mustache and, apparently, the intelligence of an Easter egg. He kept leaping on his buzzer even though he didn't seem to have a clue about the answers. Sharon sat up on the sofa, stubbed out her cigarette, and tossed back her hair. “If I could only get on this show, I could retire. I'd move to Oregon, grow dope, and watch the rest of the world implode. Mozambique! What kind of a world are we living in? And did you catch that other genius? ‘Who are Leopold and Loeb?' Try Lerner and Loewe, moron. And she's a teacher, Patrick. Did you catch that? She thinks Leopold and Loeb wrote the score to
Camelot.
That's priceless, absolutely priceless.”

“Unbelievable,” I said, shaking my head. My guess would have been Rodgers and Hammerstein, a fact I didn't reveal.