The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley

Author:Stephen McCauley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Sometime in that second week in April, the weather took a decided turn for the worse, and spring began to strangle the East Coast. We had a dose of unseasonable weather, which the TV meteorologists were euphemistically referring to as a “warming trend.” I discovered that if I switched the stations at exactly the right moment, I could catch the weather report on all three local networks. One moronic weatherman outdid the next, smiling and rhapsodizing about what was clearly an environmental crisis. “Let’s all get out there and enjoy the sun!” was the general attitude.

TV meteorologists have always struck me as a particularly insipid breed, with their apologies for each passing rain shower, even in the middle of a drought, and their apparent assumptions that everyone worships the sun, that big carcinogen in the sky. I called the TV stations to complain, but got surprisingly little response. One person I spoke with had the audacity to explain that normal temperatures are determined on the basis of thirty-year averages; once the greenhouse eighties were averaged in, our current heat wave would be nothing out of the ordinary. “In other words,” he said cheerfully, “this is perfectly normal weather.”

Arthur set up the furniture on the back porch, and we took to eating breakfast and dinner there on especially mild days. One Tuesday morning, we were sitting in the balmy breeze drinking coffee, going through our newspaper-scanning routine. I was summarizing a recent story about a wholesome, happily married, devoutly religious, outspokenly right-wing suburban minister who’d been arrested on child molestation charges. It was a pretty run-of-the-mill item, which I was forced to embellish with a few invented lurid details. I looked up at Arthur in the middle of a riff about sex in the sacristy and saw, in the bright morning sunlight, that the sparse hair around his temples and over his big ears was peppered with gray. I’d never noticed this before, and I was so shocked I dropped the paper. The graying was far from unattractive; if anything, it made for a particularly dashing effect. What stunned me was the realization that Arthur was visibly aging after all.

He had on the cotton sweater I’d bought him in New York after leaving Tony’s hotel. (Because Jeffrey and I were calling it quits, my original plan to go to Barney’s had seemed beyond the call of duty, and I’d stopped instead at a street vendor in Times Square and bought this “Ralph Lauren Original” for seven dollars.) It was a bright shade of blue, which seemed to be draining his complexion of color. On closer inspection of his face, it appeared that Arthur’s chin might be sagging, too. I couldn’t understand why I’d never seen these developments before. Even now, the hair and the chin looked to me more like disguises than actual physical changes.

He smiled at me with his wide, kind smile and cocked his head to the side inquiringly. Shaken, I picked up the newspaper and went on with my report.

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