The Easy Way Out Read Free

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 himselfand had mounted in pastel mats and metal frames. From my observations, no hobby attracts more lonely single men than landscape photography.
    By the time I’d taken in the microwave, the sectional sofa, the hayfield bathroom, the collection of New Age CDs (which Tony referred to as “classical music”), and those perfectly focused, unpeopled photographs, I’d decided that if I ever wanted to do myself in and couldn’t find a suitably dreary motel room in Boston, I’d head out to Chicago and end it all in Tony’s pale-blue living room.
    But underneath my lack of respect for my brother’s taste in furniture and despite his condescending attitude toward me, I liked him, and for as long as I could remember, I’d felt compelled to try and save him—from what I’m not sure. Probably the very things I admired about him.
    Now I shifted the phone to my other ear and listened to him rustling paper and clanging silverware as he set out his solitary midnight microwaved dinner. I admitted to him that I’d been lying about our mother’s “rumors” and apologized for my joke about killing Arthur. There was a hole in the afghan, through which I’d distractedly stuck my penis. I wrapped the blanket around me more modestly and tried a different tone of voice. “So you’re wondering if you should go through with the wedding,” I said. “Is that it?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œWe don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
    â€œI want to,” he shouted.
    â€œOkay, well, how do you feel about Loreen?”
    â€œDon’t give me that ‘how do you feel’ nonsense, Patrick. What difference does it make how I feel? I got engaged, didn’t I? Draw your own conclusions.”
    I was at my parents’ house when Tony presented Loreen with an engagement ring, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I thought back to that night as I listened to him shoveling food into his mouth and rambling on about the dangers of confusing facts with feelings.
    It was a rainy Sunday evening in November, more than a year earlier. Loreen’s birthday was in three days, and Tony had flown to Boston to surprise her with a diamond. Arthur and I drove out to my parents’ house in the suburbs, at my mother’s insistence. “Surprises are such fun,” Rita had said. “Even you might enjoy yourself, Patrick.”
    I knew something was up as soon as we walked into the house. My mother was standing in the kitchen, nervously wringing a drydish towel over the sink and