Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  Teddy was studying him quizzically. “Odd train of thought.”

  “Happens more and more these days,” Lincoln admitted, not really wanting to go into what had steered him down this particular path. Grabbing the pitcher, he held it up. “Want any more?”

  “God, no. I’ve got half a buzz on already and it’s not even noon.”

  Inside, Mickey lay stretched out on the sofa. He’d turned on a college football pregame show with the sound down low. A good, long nap was clearly on the horizon.

  Lincoln held up the pitcher. “Finish this off?”

  “Why not?”

  He poured what was left into Mickey’s glass. “Mind if I ask a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “When you pulled in earlier? You just kind of sat there and stared off into the distance for a minute. The look on your face made me wonder what you were thinking about.”

  Mickey was silent so long, his eyes on the TV, that Lincoln wondered if he meant not to answer, but he finally said, “She’s more real here for some reason.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lincoln said. “And I’m pretty sure Teddy feels the same way. What do you think happened to her, Mick?”

  He shook his head, still looking at the TV. “All I know is she’s gone.”

  “Gone as in …?”

  Only then did he turn to look at Lincoln. “Gone as in long.”

  Teddy

  Teddy worked awhile longer, until the sun, directly overhead now, made it uncomfortably warm. He was shoving the manuscript pages into his shoulder bag when Lincoln, now dressed in chinos, a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and loafers, came back out onto the deck. Teddy noticed him glance down the slope toward Troyer’s place, and saw his expression darken, even though the neighbor and his woman had gone inside. “Where you off to?” Teddy ventured.

  “Edgartown,” Lincoln said. “You’re welcome to join me.”

  But he was fidgeting with his keys, obviously anxious to leave. If he’d really wanted company, he would’ve extended the invitation sooner. “I’ll pass, but thanks. What’s Mick up to?”

  “Fast asleep on the sofa,” Lincoln chuckled. “One arm behind his head, under the cushion.”

  “He always slept like that,” Teddy smiled. “He’s changed the least of any of us, don’t you think?”

  “Is that a good or a bad thing?”

  “Beats me,” Teddy admitted, though he’d meant the observation as a compliment. Earlier, seeing Mickey astraddle his Harley had occasioned a surge of … what? Affection? Yes, but more than that. Something more selfish. Like, how bad could things really be if Mickey was still alive and kicking, still his old confident self, oblivious to politics and current events, giving them shit about their musical taste. Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists? That it hasn’t been replaced by a reality we’re less fully committed to? “I don’t think any of us has changed very much, actually.”

  “We all got old,” Lincoln pointed out. “Be honest. Can you imagine playing rock and roll until two in the morning—at our age?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Teddy said. “I’m often up at two. And again at four.”

  Lincoln chuckled at that, though Teddy could tell his thoughts had drifted away. He was studying the Troyer place again, as if it posed some sort of riddle. But after a moment he snapped out of it. “If you get hungry, there’s deli meat and cheese for sandwiches in the fridge.”

  “Okay,” Teddy said. “Would you happen to have a bicycle around?”

  “There’s one in the shed. I’ll unlock it.”

  “Thanks. I might go for a ride.” When his friend started down the steps, Teddy said, “Lincoln?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I might need to leave the island early.”

  Lincoln cocked his head. “Everything okay?”

  “Remember those … spells I used to have?”

  “You’re still having them?”

  “Not often. I haven’t had one in a while, in fact. I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing them, and sometimes I can head them off. Not always, though.”

  Lincoln nodded. “What’s it feel like? When they come on.”

  “Depends. Sometimes it’s gradual, like a migraine aura. Colors intensify. Everything feels slightly off. Other times—wham, all at once.” Yesterday, when he’d hallucinated Jacy on the Oak Bluffs pier, he wondered if it might be one of those episodes, but apparently not. More likely he’d been experiencing a tremor, a small adjustment of his emotional tectonic plates brought on by a change in the routine he counted on to maintain his equilibrium. “They can be pretty weird. Sometimes I even have these … premonitions? About what’s going to happen next?”

  “We should go to the track, then,” Lincoln suggested.

  Which dislodged a pleasant memory. The four of them. A Saturday night. Senior year. Mickey’s band was supposed to play, but at the last minute the gig got canceled and they were all at loose ends, so they’d piled into Teddy’s beater and driven to the dog track in Bridgeport, the sleaziest, most depressing place any of them had ever stepped foot, including Mickey, who as a musician had a fardeeper experience of disreputable venues. All night long they’d lost, bet after bet, until the last race when Jacy, attracted by the ridiculously long odds, bet an exacta composed of the two longest shots in the field. The prohibitive favorite came out of the gate like a shot. Normally, race over. But on the first turn the dog suddenly went down in the dirt, howling—in the stands you could hear the poor thing shrieking, its leg having snapped like a twig. Teddy remembered feeling faint at the sight. There was far worse on the news each night, boys his age being sliced to ribbons in the jungle, but this animal’s awful, caterwauling misery was only fifty yards away, and the proximity was sickening. What finally drew his attention back to the race was seeing Jacy climb up onto the table for a better view. On the backstretch her two long shots were somehow in the lead, in the wrong order, but still. “Run!” she was screaming at the top of her lungs, “run, you motherfuckerrrrrrrrr!”

  Lincoln was grinning now. “I can still see all those geezers watching her jumping up and down, practically drooling.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a bra,” Teddy said. “And those old coots? Same age as we are now.”

  “True,” Lincoln said sadly.

  “How much did she win?” Teddy said. “Do you remember?”

  Lincoln shook his head. “I don’t. Hundreds, probably. Anyway, a lot for back then.” Here he paused. “Do you take anything?”

  “Some pills for anxiety. I don’t like to take them, though. They make me stupid.”

  “I’m sorry, Teddy. I thought all that was in the past. But do what you need to. Mickey will understand.”

  “I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Sometimes exercise does the trick.”

  He’s going to glance at the Troyer place again, Teddy thought, and sure enough, Lincoln did. Did it qualify as a premonition when you’ve known someone for forty-five years?

  Odd, Teddy realized, once Lincoln had left, that he should also be thinking about Tom Ford across the decades. Proximate and remote causes. Don’t give too much credit to the former, Tom had warned them. The deeper and longer something remained buried, the more power it had when it finally rose to the surface. So it had been with Ford himself, in the closet all those years. A secret that, when finally brought out into the light, was lethal to its keeper.

  Teddy put on sunglasses. In the distance the ocean was impossibly blue.

  VANCE, TEDDY THOUGHT, pedaling out of the gravel drive and onto the road. That’d been Jacy’s fiancé’s name. Either that or Lance. Or maybe Chance. He’d been two years older. If memory served, his and Jacy’s parents were best friends and belonged to the same country club. All very Greenwich, Connecticut. They hadn’t started dating until the summer between her sophomore and junior years, mostly, at least in the beginning, as a favor to Jacy’s parents. She’d been smoking a lot of
dope and protesting the war, and they feared she was running completely wild. Vance, who’d just graduated from Dartmouth, was headed for Duke law school in the fall. A straight arrow, he wore his hair short and parted at the side, and evidently had missed the memo about never trusting anyone over thirty. He called every man his parents’ age “sir,” and every woman “ma’am.” For sure, he and Jacy made an odd couple, and everyone had been pretty surprised to learn they’d become engaged by the end of that summer.

  What he and Lincoln and Mickey found even stranger was that Jacy didn’t seem to miss him when he was in Durham, nor did she visit him there as other engaged Thetas often did their fiancés. He called her several times a week, but did she ever call him? His name never came up in conversation unless one of her sorority sisters mentioned him, which they frequently did—not-so-subtle reminders that she was spoken for and should behave accordingly. In her fiancé’s absence the Thetas took seriously their duty to guard their sister’s virtue. For some reason, though she couldn’t go on dates, she was permitted to hang out with the Musketeers on weekends when Mickey’s band performed, even to sing with them on songs that required a female vocalist. She did a particularly mean Grace Slick.

  Why had the Thetas trusted them? Teddy wondered as he pedaled his borrowed bike down the dirt road past Troyer’s place. Had they really seemed so harmless? Was that how Jacy herself had characterized them to her sorority sisters so they would relax their vigilance? Did the fact that there were three of them somehow render them less dangerous than a lone ranger would’ve seemed? Or did it all come down to class? Jacy might be wild, but she wouldn’t throw away a future with a real catch like Vance—Lance? Chance?—not for a fucking hasher. Had that been the thinking?

  Only Jacy’s roommate, a girl named Christine, the house president, had acted suspicious, and the night they all returned from the dog track she’d been waiting for them in the front room. On the drive back from Bridgeport, flush with Jacy’s winnings, they’d hit bars in Milford, New Haven and Madison, and by the time they arrived at Minerva they were all giddy with drink.

  “So what’s the deal here?” Christine said when they staggered in the front door, four abreast, elbows interlocked, as if they’d been off to see the wizard.

  As hashers, Teddy and Lincoln and Mickey entered through the back, so when the house president demanded to know what the deal was, Teddy’s first thought had been that she was talking just to them, putting them in their place. But no, it was Jacy she was addressing. “Are you doing all three of these clowns, or what?”

  Mickey stiffened at this, but Jacy stepped in front of him and got right in the other girl’s face. “Nooooo,” she said, “but what a great fucking idea!”

  Christine took a step back, ostentatiously fanning away the alcohol fumes. “Your fiancé would be absolutely heartbroken if he could see you now,” she said.

  “And wouldn’t you love to comfort him!” Jacy said, poking the girl in the chest with her index finger.

  “Hey,” Christine objected, slapping her hand away. “I’m not the slut here.”

  “Too true!” Jacy told her. “Watch and learn, bitch.” Then, turning to her terrified companions, she said, “And just where do you think you’re going?”

  Though she’d failed utterly at shaming Jacy, Christine was having better luck with Teddy, Lincoln and Mickey, all of whom had begun backing toward the open door.

  “Come here,” Jacy ordered, so of course they obeyed, lining up in front of her, as if this were a military exercise and she meant to inspect their uniforms.

  She kissed them in order, Lincoln first, full on the lips, then Teddy, her breath somehow sweet despite all the beer, and finally Mickey, whose knees buckled. With alcohol, sure, but not only alcohol. “Steady, big fella,” she told him, and in his mind’s eye Teddy could still see the goofy grin that bloomed across Mickey’s face.

  “Disgusting,” Christine said. “Forgive me if I don’t stick around for the blow jobs.”

  Later, back in the car, Teddy’s keys dangling from the ignition, all three friends had sat in silence, stunned into sobriety by Jacy’s kisses. Mickey spoke first. “Okay, we draw straws,” he said. “I don’t see any way around it. One of us is going to have to murder the prick.”

  “Fine,” Lincoln said, seemingly for the sake of argument, “but then what? There’s still three of us and only one of her.”

  “Good point,” Mickey conceded. “And you know what? If there were three of her, I’d want all three.”

  Had it really happened like that? Teddy wondered. The clarity of this memory made him dubious. Could something that happened so long ago be that vivid now? Or had he and Mickey and Lincoln burnished the memory’s details by recalling it so fondly over the years?

  At the State Road T-intersection, Teddy faced a choice. Turn left and he’d be headed toward Menemsha, a quaint fishing village where he could eat greasy fried clams out of a paper boat. Right meant the Gay Head cliffs, the one place on the island he should avoid at all costs. Why risk it? he thought, even as he turned right.

  Lincoln

  The newspaper office, located on a quiet, tree-lined street, was locked up tight, and why not? Labor Day had come and gone, and the Vineyard Gazette was a sleepy weekly newspaper, not the New York Times. Served him right, Lincoln thought, returning to his curb-parked rental. Instead of chasing phantoms in Edgartown he belonged back in Chilmark, doing the job he’d come here to do, though the more he thought about it, the more he feared the whole trip was misbegotten.

  The case he’d made to Anita for coming to the island in person was so persuasive that Lincoln had ended up persuading himself. It had been almost a decade since they’d visited, and who knew what kind of damage ten years’ worth of seasonal renters had inflicted? Did it just need a little sprucing up? A fresh coat of paint? Or something more serious, like a new roof? How could they settle on a listing price without seeing firsthand what needed to be done?

  Yet what the trip was really about—and part of him had known this from the start—was his need to say goodbye to the Chilmark house. He owed his mother that much, surely. Nor, if he was honest, was this all. He had, it seemed, unfinished business here, the precise nature of which continued to elude him, though it seemed to involve his friends. Because no sooner had the idea of coming to the island in person occurred to him than he’d invited Teddy and Mickey to join him. And if the three of them were there, how could Jacy not be, at least in spirit? It was her ghostly presence that made the symmetry between this weekend and the one on Memorial Day back in 1971 inescapable.

  Whose idea had that weekend been? Strange that Lincoln couldn’t recall how it had come about. Had his mother suggested it? It always pleased Trudy whenever he and his friends visited, so maybe. Or had it been one of those group decisions? As graduation neared, it had dawned on all of them that everything was about to change. Jacy would marry her straight-arrow fiancé in June. Mickey had already contacted his draft board and completed his physical; he’d be reporting for basic training in a matter of weeks. Teddy, still in his Thomas Merton phase and protected by his high draft number, was considering divinity school. Minerva had been their refuge, and now they were about to lose both it and one another. Had they been comparing notes and realized none of them had plans for the holiday weekend and thought, Hey, why not spend it together? Also possible.

  What didn’t make sense about either of these scenarios was that by then he and Anita had become serious, were even talking about maybe getting married, though given how broke they were, and that their futures—his draft status, her heading off to law school—were so up in the air, marriage didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Still, they kept returning to the possibility over and over. They’d both enjoyed their relatively carefree undergraduate lives, but they were also anxious to get started on more serious adult postgraduate ones. Those last few months at Minerva, Lincoln had spent less and less time with Teddy and Mickey, choosing instead to study with Anita in he
r library carrel (though they often ended these study sessions by turning the lights off and groping each other in the dark). On weekends, when Mickey’s band generally played, they remained behind in the front room of the Theta house and watched old Perry Mason reruns on TV. “If you’re this boring now,” Mickey had observed, “what are you going to be like at fifty?”

  Boring, maybe, but if they were ever to get married, they needed to start saving, or Lincoln did, anyway. Toward that end Lincoln had even considered, albeit briefly, returning to Dunbar after graduation to await the call-up that might or might not come later in the year. He could have his old bedroom, wait tables at the country club and put the money he would’ve spent on rent in the bank. His mother would love having him around, and Wolfgang Amadeus always liked having somebody else handy to share his many opinions with. But spending twelve whole months in Dunbar had been too dispiriting to contemplate seriously, as was the idea of him and Anita being apart for so long.

  Instead they’d come up with a geographical compromise that was somehow both practical and borderline insane. Lincoln would take a job at an upscale resort in Scottsdale where the tips would be good enough to make paying rent doable if he could find a roommate or two. Mornings he could take some real estate courses, and if he didn’t get called up, maybe he’d begin an MBA at nearby ASU. Anita, who’d been admitted to Stanford, would instead attend law school in Tucson. Two hours away seemed about right, distance-wise. Any closer would be torture, really. Anita was from a large, devout Catholic family, which meant that in an era of free love Lincoln had somehow managed to fall for one of the few girls in America who still believed in abstinence before marriage. (Though he shared no such conviction, Lincoln would discover that his Church of God upbringing had prepared him admirably to withstand sexual deprivation.)