The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley

matter of fact,” he said quietly. “I’m thinking of taking my wife on a little trip after Bermuda.” He pulled on his nasty beard and flipped through his notebook. “I wanted the name of an inn less than an hour from Boston. I wrote down some places while I was sitting here waiting for you for the past forty-five minutes. Maybe you could tell me if any of them is particularly nice?”
    Not surprisingly, his handwriting was so minuscule it looked as if it had been written with a strand of hair. I squinted. From a business standpoint, the advantage of booking a tryst trip is that it’s usually preceded or followed by a guilt-induced vacation with a spouse. Fields’s suggestion was one of the more token efforts I’d encountered in a while.
    I handed the notebook back to him and leaned my forearms onmy cluttered desk. I like to keep the top of my desk a mess so I can shuffle through papers as a stall tactic when pressed for information. “Those places you’ve written down,” I said, “are what we in the business call ‘cheap motels.’ You might spend a weekend there, but not with your wife.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œTrust me.”
    He looked at his list with new interest. I hadn’t met his wife, but I imagined her to be one of those well-meaning, hopelessly drab Cambridge academic wives. You saw them walking around the Square dressed in crocheted shawls, peasant skirts, and knee socks, with mandalas on leather cords around their necks. I took down a book of classy New England inns and lovingly picked out the most attractive and expensive of the bunch. Mrs. Fields would be comfortable there. She’d fit right in with the dried-flower arrangements in the bathrooms and the white tufted bedspreads.
    â€œThis is your place, Professor,” I said. “Very quiet. Romantic, but in a tasteful way, if you know what I mean.”
    What I meant was, the place was so suffocatingly cozy, he’d have the perfect excuse for falling asleep on the far side of the canopy bed at nine-thirty without touching his wife. Sex was about as appropriate in one of those places as it was in a telephone booth.
    â€œA little pricey, isn’t it?”
    Needless to say, the hotel he’d picked out in Bermuda was one of the most expensive on the island. “Think of it this way: it’s half the price of the place in Bermuda, and this includes breakfast. A huge meal a wild animal couldn’t finish.”
    â€œI suppose you’re right.”
    I told him I’d make reservations and, just to let him know I wasn’t as dumb as he thought, said I would mail a confirmation for this one to his home.
    He gathered up his briefcase and his tweed sport coat and stood up. He was staggeringly tall. His arms seemed to hang down unusually low, as if he’d been observing the behavior of gorillas for too long. Perhaps Zayna was attracted to his mind. “And you’ll check on the other reservation?” he whispered.
    â€œNo problem,” I mouthed silently.

Five

    A s soon as Fields was safely out of the office, I dialed New York. Jeffrey was an old college chum, with whom I’d been especially chummy for the past year and a half. We were having an affair, though that term suggests something too established and committed for either one of us. “Fooling around” was more the way I’d describe what he and I did, even though I got nervous sometimes thinking that maybe what I really wanted was to fall madly in love with him.
    Or at least with someone.
    I was planning to visit him that weekend, and since he rarely called me at work, I assumed something had come up and he wanted to cancel. We had a loose arrangement in which neither of us could complain of disappointment at anything the other did.
    â€œSo let me guess,” I said as soon as he picked up the phone. “You’ve fallen for someone, and you’d like me to vaporize, at least