The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley Read Free Book Online

eating.
    â€œAnd something else,” Arthur finally said from behind his paper. “You shouldn’t criticize Eben because he has perfect teeth.”
    â€œIt’s not just the teeth,” I said. “It’s what they represent: the prep school, the sailing lessons, the boxer shorts, the whole package. Didn’t he say he plays tennis?” Except in the case of lesbians, playing tennis is usually little more than a crass display of social ambition.
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” Arthur said, obviously determined not to play along. He was charmed by our real estate agent, a tennis player with a wife and a family and the kind of legally binding security that Arthur longed for. “And you’d better eat more slowly, Patrick, or you might find yourself at work on time this morning.”

Four

    M y office was in Harvard Square, and I bicycled there most mornings, even in winter. Bicycling through bad weather and driving a pre-1975 Volvo are two particularly Cantabrigian affectations. I liked to pedal a circuitous route to the office, winding in and out of the back streets of Cambridgeport, studying the triple-decker houses and brick apartment buildings, trying to imagine how different my life would be if I lived alone in one of them. Happier, I tended to think, although I was never able to come up with any concrete images of what my happiness might look like.
    The neighborhood, wedged between Harvard and MIT, was surprisingly untouched by either towering institution. The old working-class Irish families who’d lived there for a couple of generations mixed peacefully with recently emigrated Haitians and Jamaicans and an increasing number of young professional couples who drifted across the river from Boston in search of a backyard. Most of the buildings were reasonably small, most of the streets were tree-lined, and in summer, cool breezes blew up from the river. Although I’m loath to wax rhapsodic about anyone or anything, I sometimes laughed aloud at my good luck in living there.
    On a mild, cloudless morning a few days after Tony’s distressing fourth call, I bicycled to work in a light cotton sweater. In the shorttime it took me to make the trip, I broke out in a sweat, another clear indication that the planet was rapidly reaching the boiling point. Arthur analyzed my greenhouse-effect obsession as a displacement of my anxiety about AIDS, which might have been true but didn’t explain why we’d had a heat wave at Thanksgiving. Given the opportunity, I’ll always believe the worst-case scenario. I’m not an especially optimistic person. I wasn’t brought up on optimism. The closest thing to optimism I heard as a child was my father’s reassuring statement in times of crisis that the situation could be worse. “And don’t forget,” he’d usually add, “you can always kill yourself.”
    When I arrived at the office, I hoisted my bicycle to my shoulder and carried it into the building. The owner encouraged employees to bring bicycles and pets to work, to give the agency a more relaxed, collegiate atmosphere.
    The travel agency was located in a small house in a back alley several blocks from Harvard. It was a dusty, ramshackle building with paint peeling off the walls and plaster chipping from the ceiling. Drafty without being well ventilated and old without any antique charm, the agency had an established reputation among the Cambridge intellectual crowd: Harvard professors, hippies who’d become civil rights lawyers and therapists, and New Age birdbrains of all sorts. I think the shabby conditions of the place somewhat mitigated the trivial, bourgeois nature of travel in our clients’ minds. And then there was our name, Only Connect Travel, a reminder that the owner, who had a Ph.D. in philosophy, had read Howards End. The staff was made up of a bunch of overqualified individuals with advanced degrees and, in more than one case, a