The Easy Way Out Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, floodingthe 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