The Easy Way Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

than a good marriage or a satisfyingsex 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.
    â€œWhy the hell would I want to move to Australia?” he asked.
    â€œI guess you wouldn’t,” I said. “I just think you’d feel a lot better if you came to some kind of decision.”
    â€œI 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’dbeen 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