The Easy Way Out Read online

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN McCAULEY’S

  THE EASY WAY OUT

  “The Easy Way Out is the best kind of contemporary fiction. Stephen McCauley captures not only how we live, but how we love, and even how we get through the day. The Easy Way Out manages to be miraculously both a joyous and important book.”

  —Wendy Wasserstein

  “Delightfully eccentric characters. . . . A gentle, quirky, and very funny novel.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “McCauley has a good time with his settings, describing them with great visual and psychological accuracy. . . . Droll and astute. . . . Stephen McCauley casts an astute eye on relationships. . . . How easy to take for granted the tremendous technical accomplishment of Stephen McCauley’s sparkling fiction.”

  —Boston Globe

  “McCauley is a writer with near-perfect balance: he is as funny as he is smart. He manages to deliver every joke that comes within shouting distance of his characters while never once ignoring or trivializing the complexity of their inner lives.”

  —Mirabella

  “McCauley’s witty, frequently epigrammatic style . . . is redolent of Oscar Wilde. . . . The Easy Way Out is engaging, satisfying . . . appealing.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “A sweet, sad, and funny novel . . . full of McCauley’s characteristic sly charm and gentle humor.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A daffy, often sage, touchingly wistful tale.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “This beautifully written, heartbreaking book . . . is an eloquent depiction of the compromises lovers and families make to keep relationships alive. . . . Its considerable drama arises from the clever, revealing dialogue and the reader’s intense involvement with the sharply drawn characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Funny and painful. . . . The Easy Way Out is an engaging novel.”

  —Houston Post

  “What a joy it was to curl up with the new McCauley and find it every bit as beguiling as his first. The Easy Way Out weaves its way deftly through the tangled web of modern allegiances, heaping irony upon irony, yet never once losing its remarkable generosity of spirit. The people we meet here are as exasperatingly human as our own friends and families. No one tells of the heart quite like Stephen McCauley.”

  —Armistead Maupin

  “It’s not easy to write a character who has the power to charm. . . . Stephen McCauley has that skill.”

  —Time

  “Few writers today capture the emotional texture and endlessly shifting tensions of daily life as well as McCauley. . . . McCauley unabashedly writes to tell stories. . . . It’s enormously hard to do it as well—and with as much humanity—as McCauley has done. The characters in The Easy Way Out stay with the reader throughout the day and after the book is done. . . . We ache for them as they face difficult choices, and we learn with them that life offers no easy way out.”

  —Boston Phoenix

  “McCauley’s wry takes on relationships of convenience are literary Toblerone: dark, rich, pointed, and slightly nutty. . . . McCauley has an eye for the comedy of modern life and a genius for rendering even the most tangential character.”

  —Details

  “Stephen McCauley is a master at relationships. . . . The Easy Way Out is an infectious tale packed with wit and humor, and with characters who are so likable and so human that it’s hard to part ways when the book ends. . . . It is a powerful, truthful, and salient book with a wondrously benevolent spirit.”

  —Milwaukee Journal

  “You’re in for a very ‘good read. . . .’ The Easy Way Out is a hybrid—a sometimes serious work that is more often than not very, very funny. It may be just the tonic to get you through disastrous vacations, lost loves, and a world not so much warmed by toxic fumes as by the human heart.”

  —Lambda Book Report

  Books by Stephen McCauley

  The Object of My Affection

  The Easy Way Out

  The Man of the House

  True Enough

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  Simon & Schuster

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  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Stephen McCauley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover June 1992

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover design by Jeanne M. Lee

  Front cover illustration by Izhar Cohen

  McCauley, Stephen.

  The easy way out / by Stephen McCauley.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  [PS3563.C33757E27 1992b]

  813'.54—dc20

  92-42590

  CIP

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-2230-3 (eBook)

  For Luppus

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part 2

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part 3

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part 4

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Part 5

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Part 6

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Part 7

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Part

  • • •

  1

  One

  Four and a half months before his wedding, my younger brother called me from Chicago at one in the morning. I’d been having a nagging problem with insomnia for about five years, so I was always thrilled to hear the phone ring, the smoke alarm sound, a picture fall from the wall, or anything that gave me an excuse to get out of bed. On that particular night, I’d been thrashing under the covers since the end of the late news, scratching my armpits and bouncing my legs, all quietly enough to leave my lover Arthur’s sleep undisturbed. At the sound of the phone I leapt up, ran into the living room, tripped over a pile of clothes and picked up the receiver. As soon as I heard Tony’s voi
ce, I mumbled something about having been asleep. With my younger brother, I try to grab the advantage immediately.

  “I’m sorry, Patrick,” he said. “Do you want me to hang up?”

  I pretended to think it over for a few seconds and then, always magnanimous, said, “Don’t bother, I’m awake now.”

  I was actually delighted to hear from Tony. He almost never called me anymore, and when he did, I was just dumb enough to be flattered by the attention. Tony is exactly the kind of loud, right-wing bully I feel obliged to take a stand against on principle but from whom I secretly crave approval. He’s taller than me, broad-shouldered, and at the time of the call, he was living a thousand miles from home. He’s never been quiet about the fact that he views my life with mild disdain; I’m not as handsome as he is, I’d gone from teaching school to being a travel agent (“an even bigger loser profession”), I hadn’t supported a single winning candidate since the day I registered to vote, and my sex life was considered reprehensible by every candidate who did win. For my part, I consider myself smarter than Tony, but I suspect he has more common sense. In any case, he only called when he had a problem he wanted to discuss (usually something profoundly meaningful, like a lost airline ticket or a hotel reservation botched by his secretary), and I loved feeling like an older brother, with age and experience and some advice worth listening to.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, and then, irritably, he asked, “So what’s been going on?”

  “Don’t expect me to supply the news,” I told him. “You’re the one who dialed the phone.”

  “I guess that’s true,” he said and then lapsed into silence.

  Since late January, my mother had been calling me with unusual and disturbing frequency and feeding me a lot of unfinished sentences that had something to do with Tony. “That brother of yours,” she’d say dolefully.

  “What’s wrong with Tony?” I’d ask. It had to be Tony. Ryan, my older brother and only other sibling, was generally referred to as either “the saint” or “that poor slob.”

  “Who said there was anything ‘wrong’? Why does there always have to be something ‘wrong’? My God, Patrick. I was just wondering if Tony . . . Oh, never mind; you wouldn’t understand.”

  Whether I’d understand or not, I was eager to fill in some of the blanks for myself, but I knew I’d have to play along with that brother of mine if I wanted to get any information out of him. Like my father, Tony could be astonishingly circumspect, a trait I admired as a sign of masculinity and lack completely. I reveal my most intimate secrets to any innocent bystander who’ll listen.

  I told Tony I was planning a trip to Egypt in May, a travel agent’s junket, and that I was thinking about buying a new car. Both intimate secrets were lies, but Tony loves to give advice on automotives, and I always try to make him think I live a glamorous, globe-hopping life.

  He made a disparaging comment about the Egyptian military and launched into a nonsensical tirade against all foreign cars.

  I was lying on the antique sofa in the living room, naked under a scratchy afghan. It was early in March, and winter, which had been regrettably mild that year, was doing me the favor of lingering on in the form of chilly nights. The air felt icy and sharp, and the living room was filled with faint blue light from either the moon or the streetlamp below. Through the tangle of hideous Swedish ivy leaves blocking the front windows, I could see the lights of Boston off in the distance, and I let myself sink into a kind of romantic lassitude. I reached behind me and turned on the late-night jazz station to heighten the effect. A tortured saxophone rendition of “Ill Wind” came on. Quickly, I lost track of Tony’s political rant and imagined myself in some far-off, suffocatingly polluted city. Maybe it was Cairo. I was dragged back to reality by the sound of my brother shouting at me for seeking out consumer magazines, in which American-made products often ranked poorly.

  “All right, all right,” I said. It was a ridiculous charge. I shop the same way I choose lovers—impulsively and with a sense of desperation. Then, hoping to get to a more interesting topic, I told him I’d been hearing some rumors about him from Rita, our mother.

  “You and your gossip,” he said. Tony liked to gossip more than anyone I knew, but he considered it effeminate and only felt safe doing it with me. “What rumors?”

  Arthur had been awakened by the phone, and he looked in on me to make sure it wasn’t someone calling about a friend’s hospitalization or plunging T cell count. He was wearing his pervert outfit: a boyish blue-plaid bathrobe and a pair of black socks pulled up almost to his knees. He gave me one of his worried, compassionate looks, the kind that always makes me want to knock his block off. Not that I would ever have knocked Arthur’s block off. For one thing, he’s over six feet tall and outweighs me by a good fifty pounds.

  “Everything’s fine,” I barked. “Go back to sleep.” And then, instantly regretting my tone, I added gently, “It’s Tony.” He nodded and lumbered on to the bathroom.

  “That Arthur?” Tony asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

  “Honest to God, Patrick, I don’t know how that poor guy puts up with you, I really don’t.”

  Every member of my family showed his reluctant acceptance of my homosexuality by constantly pointing out to me that I was unworthy of my lover.

  “Listen, pal,” I said. “I’ve been hearing some rumors from your mother that you’re having doubts about this wedding.”

  She hadn’t told me anything of the kind, but I knew all the sighing over Tony had to have something to do with the wedding. I had my own theories about Tony’s pending marriage, and most of them revolved around the word “doubts.” Among other things, I thought Tony was unworthy of his fiancée, she was unworthy of him, he wasn’t in love with her, and neither one of them was ready for marriage.

  “Sure I’m having doubts. Who doesn’t have doubts? I’ll probably have doubts ten years after we’re married. Are you telling me you don’t have any doubts about Arthur?”

  “None,” I said. I heard the toilet flush and watched as Arthur padded back to the bedroom. “And if you give me a gun, I’ll prove it.”

  He sighed wearily.

  “Anyway, I’m not the one getting married in July,” I said.

  “That’s obvious, Patrick.”

  A tiny bell sounded in the background in Chicago, and I heard my brother rustling paper. I could picture Tony sitting in his sterile apartment, pulling a frozen dinner out of the microwave at midnight, and I felt sorry I’d used the flippant tone that had marked our relationship for at least a decade, especially since I sensed he was calling in some distress. It often happens that people in my family call me when they’re at the end of their ropes. I’m the family stand-in for a priest, since they all know I’ll never marry.

  For the past three years, Tony had been living in Chicago and working for a consulting firm that advises mid-sized companies on the best ways to replace employees with complicated computer systems. He spent a substantial amount of time racking up miles on his frequent flier programs, traveling to cities in different corners of the country. He’d once confessed to me that although he liked living out of a suitcase in the cheerless hotel rooms he admired for being “spotless,” he often woke up mornings with no clear idea of where he was.

  From what I could gather, Tony’s job consisted largely of ingratiating himself with a staff of low-level employees, convincing them to confide in him about the work they did, and then figuring out the best way to drop them from the payroll. His job struck me as morally objectionable, but it suited his personality perfectly. He could be effortlessly charming and had always had a mania for efficiency. Tony had never been keen on dealing with the emotional complexity and unpredictability of human beings. He liked things neat and tidy.

  According to my mother, and the hints he himself dropped from time to time, Tony was doing quite well financially, certainly better than either Ryan or me. I’d always imagined that Tony would end
up working for the CIA, but I suppose they don’t pay enough. Immediately after graduating from a small college outside Boston, Tony had enrolled in one of the many business schools that sprang up in the area shortly after Ronald Reagan began his eight-year nap in the White House. He set up an apartment in the basement of my parents’ house and made a few desultory attempts at helping out in O’Neil’s Men’s Shop, the clothing store my parents owned and had been pushing into bankruptcy for thirty years.

  The day he graduated from business school, he announced that he’d found a job in Chicago, and was gone within a week. My parents were too stunned to raise any objections about his leaving the family store, which was probably why he slipped out of town with so little effort.

  He’d driven west with all his belongings loaded into the trunk of his American-made car. Left behind were his weight set, his Heather Locklear posters, his motorcycle, and his girlfriend of several years, Loreen Davis. He was twenty-five then, and for all his bluster, it was his first real brush with independence. I could only imagine his reaction to the freedom and loneliness that confronted him when he moved into his own place, and I imagined all that had at least as much to do with his decision to get engaged as any genuine feelings he had for Loreen.

  The problem wasn’t that he and Loreen were a mismatched couple; in my opinion, the problem was that they weren’t a couple at all. As far as I could tell, their only shared interest was Tony.

  Arthur and I had visited Tony in Chicago during a mercilessly ill-advised cross-country train trip. His tenth-floor apartment was one of those depressing cinder-block boxes done up like a showroom in a furniture warehouse: all characterless couches, thick beige wall-to-wall carpeting, and closets with folding louvered aluminum doors. Tony had always been a fanatic about cleanliness, so the place didn’t even have the advantage of being dirty. The bathroom had a liquid soap dispenser, matching towels, and some weird contraption shaped like a mushroom, which kept the air smelling, in theory, of new-mown grass. Put a strip of paper around the toilet seat, and you’d swear you were a paying guest in one of the nicer Best Western motels off the Jersey Turnpike. The final note of desperation was the artwork, photographs of dandelions gone to seed, snow-covered trees, and sailboats on Lake Michigan, which Tony had taken himself and had mounted in pastel mats and metal frames. From my observations, no hobby attracts more lonely single men than landscape photography.