Irony & Pity: What Ann Beattie means when she says "That was easy"

Among the early stories in Ann Beattie's "The New Yorker Stories," i.e., the ones in her first collection (Distortions), I think the story Vermont is the best prelude to the kind of stories we most associate with Beattie: a fairly large and complexly interrelated set of characters, mismarried and mismatched, complicated relations of love and friendship, each of the characters eccentric though not pathologically so, most of them apparently well educated but somewhat adrift in their careers - in this story one of the couples leaves NYC to visit friends in Vermont, then later they decide to give up careers and move to Vermont, refurbishing a rundown house; the woman's ex and his new girlfriend, much younger and not a country girl, pay a weekend visit, which is fraught with unspoken tension and edged with remorse. At the end of the tense weekend, as the ex and girlfriend head back to the city, Beattie ends story abruptly with : "That was easy." - a typically funny, unexpected Beattie line - you can see why her stories are all copyrighted to her "company," Irony & Pity Inc. Many of Beattie's stories involve travel, and actually quite a few I think involve a modern version of pastoral, leaving the city for some kind of rural peace and grace, that proves every bit as elusive and illusory to her characters as it did to Shakespeare's. Looking back at this story from a 35-year vantage, it's interesting to think about the chart of evolution of Beattie's characters - in more recent stories her characters gather for very fine country dinners; they no longer sleep on spare mattresses - and in a way, though her stories do not seem autobiographical in particular, the arc of her writing is a sketch for the arc of her life, and therefore of the lives of so many in her (our) generation.