Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  How ironic that in the end Anita herself had proved to be the elusive third path. In her, though Dub-Yay would never admit it, he’d finally met his match. Even more astonishing was that he didn’t really seem to mind all that much. It was as if he’d been waiting his whole life for a woman capable of swatting him off his perch. “I do worry about you, Son,” he said one day after Anita had put her foot down about something, “overmatched as you are by that woman. I don’t see how this ends well.”

  “Did it end well for you, Dad?” Lincoln inquired.

  “Your mother was a fine woman, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Which had made Lincoln feel very small indeed, because that was what he’d been getting at. That his father had bullied his mother into becoming the docile, obedient woman that his own contentment seemed to require. That getting her to surrender her own Catholic faith hadn’t shamed him in the least; on the contrary, he was proud to have converted an idolater.

  In this one respect, at least, by converting to Catholicism and thereby repudiating his father’s arrogance and moral certainty, he could plausibly congratulate himself that he’d behaved honorably. But had he? Had he truly spurned the Gospel according to W.A. Moser or just tweaked the man’s manipulative techniques by using them more subtly? Maybe Anita was telling the truth when she claimed she didn’t regret not going to Stanford, but so what? The point was he hadn’t really encouraged her to do what was clearly in her own self-interest. Why hadn’t he put in a genuine good-faith effort? Well, love was part of it. They hadn’t, either of them, wanted to be apart for a whole year. But hadn’t he also feared that if she went to Palo Alto, she might never rejoin him? That at Stanford she’d find someone more worthy of her than he was? Which in turn made him wonder if it had been fear that caused Dub-Yay to renege on his promise to go with Trudy to Chilmark after Lincoln’s graduation. Had he sensed that if his wife ever returned to the place she’d loved as a girl, she might just stay there? That she might remember who she’d been before they met, before he’d made her into who he wanted her to be?

  THE DEEPER PUZZLE, of course, was what all this had to do with Jacy. Anita’s suggestion that he’d invited his friends to the Chilmark house because he’d been trying to decide whether it was herself or Jacy that he was in love with echoed in his mind. He didn’t want it to be true, and he didn’t believe it was, at least not literally. Unless he’d gotten this all wrong, the actual purpose of that final Vineyard get-together had been to set his mind at ease about the choice he’d made months before, perhaps on the night they’d all returned from the dog track and Jacy brashly kissed them there in the Theta house. He still recalled palpably how that kiss made him feel—both lost and free, terrified and exhilarated. And later, when Mickey joked about murdering her fiancé, he’d felt something dark and reptilian stir inside him, though he tried his best to deny it. No, of course they wouldn’t murder her fiancé. All they were doing was acknowledging that if any girl in the world was worth killing for, Jacy was the one. And yet …

  In the weeks and months that followed, as the exhilaration of Jacy’s kiss began to fade, his sense of being untethered by it actually grew, as did his fear that if he somehow ended up with Jacy he would be truly lost, unknown to himself or at least to the person he’d always believed himself to be. It was not long after this kiss that he and Anita started going out, and part of the reason they became so serious, so fast, was that with her Lincoln knew he wouldn’t feel lost and that whatever reptilian thing in him that Jacy had stirred into wakefulness could go back to sleep. In choosing Anita, he’d felt like he was not just declaring his love for her but also testifying as to the man he intended one day to become, as well as to the kind of life he meant to live. Strange that his mother, who knew Jacy only from his glancing descriptions, had advised him not to rule her out. If Anita was right, apparently part of him hadn’t wanted to, either.

  A block up the street, a middle-aged woman with a canvas tote over her shoulder was striding purposefully toward him. When she arrived at the Vineyard Gazette, this woman would, he felt certain, climb the porch steps, unlock the door and let herself in. If he was wrong, he told himself, he would take it as a sign that he was also wrong about this new reptilian stirring in his brain that had caused him to Google Troyer.

  But already the woman was digging in her bag for her keys.

  Teddy

  Teddy had forgotten how steep State Road got near the Gay Head cliffs. By the time the lighthouse at the tip of the promontory came into view, he was exhausted and breathless. At the edge of the parking area sat an empty bicycle rack. His bike didn’t have a lock, but it was old and its fenders rusty. Hard to imagine anyone swiping it. Nearby, an enormous coach marked CHRISTIAN TOURS idled, empty except for its driver, who was eating a sandwich outside the open door.

  Up the slope stood the same cluster of gray-shingled shacks that Teddy recognized from 1971, still selling cheap souvenirs and sunscreen, overpriced T-shirts, sandals and pashmina scarves. Also postcards of the famous red-clay cliffs. Jacy had bought one that day, so he bought another now. Maybe he’d send it to Brother John with a note: Headed your way. Cue up the Marx Brothers. At the small takeout restaurant atop the cliffs, he ordered a clam roll and a diet soda and took them out onto a patio where half a dozen picnic tables were chock-full of seniors, several of the men wearing loud Bermuda shorts and dark socks under their sandals. He made a mental note to tell Mickey.

  Seeing Teddy with his clam roll and no place to sit, a woman who looked to be in her early seventies waved him over. “Come join us,” she said, her accent deeply southern. Her companions dutifully scooted down to make room. “Where you been hidin’?” she asked. For some reason she was wearing a green visor, as if expecting a poker game to break out any minute and she meant to deal the first hand. “I don’t think we even met yet.”

  “No, I don’t believe we have,” Teddy said, sliding onto the bench across from her.

  “Oh,” she said, registering his accent and drawing the appropriate inference. “You’re not with the tour. You looked like you might be one of us.”

  “Now, Ruthie,” said the fellow at her chubby elbow, no doubt her husband, “don’t go insultin’ the man. You don’t even know his name yet.”

  “I’m Teddy,” he said, offering his hand.

  “How’d you get all sweaty?” the woman seated next to him wanted to know, leaning ever so slightly away from him.

  Back in Chilmark, there hadn’t seemed to be much point in taking a shower before a long bike ride. “Well, I didn’t come here on an air-conditioned bus.”

  “So, how’d you come?”

  “On a bicycle.”

  “Where from?”

  “Chilmark.”

  “You pedaled up that big hill?” said a large man wearing a John Deere cap. “See, now that’s just showin’ off.”

  “All downhill on the way back, though,” Teddy pointed out.

  “We were just talkin’ about the election,” the woman called Ruthie said abruptly. “We got us a Bush, two Rubios, three Cruzes, a Carson and a Trump. Where you at, Teddy?”

  “None of the above, I’m afraid.”

  “Lock her up,” said the woman’s husband, grinning broadly now, as if he’d just made a joke.

  “A Trump?” Teddy said. “Isn’t yours a Christian tour?”

  “He claims he is a Christian,” the man said. “Maybe he just don’t wear it on his sleeve like them others.”

  “So, where does he wear it, then?” John Deere wondered.

  “No place visible to the naked eye,” said the woman next to Teddy, leaning even farther away from him now.

  “Speakin’ of naked,” said another old crone. “Is it true what the bus driver said? That the beach down below is nudist?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Used to be when?”

  “The seventies.”

  “Everybody used to run around half naked back then.”

  “This was
both halves,” Teddy said around a bite of clam roll.

  “Damn,” said a woman who’d been silent to this point. “How do you get down there?”

  “You got sex on the brain, Wilma.”

  “It’s gotta go somewhere.”

  When a horn sounded out in the parking lot, people at the other tables began gathering up their trash. These benches didn’t push back, so it took a while for the older folks to extricate themselves. “Our driver’s got us on a real tight schedule,” Ruthie said. “Keeps threatenin’ to leave and go back home without us.”

  “Well,” Teddy offered, “there are worse places to get stranded.”

  “Anyhow, nice talkin’ to you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to like people up north, but so far they’ve all been nice. Not like home, but nice.”

  “Nantucket’s next,” said the man who’d suggested locking Hillary up. “Basically the same thing as here, or so they tell us.”

  Teddy smiled innocently. “Right. Like Georgia and Alabama.”

  “Actually, those two are nothing alike,” said John Deere, sounding as if he must be from one or the other.

  “I believe that was Teddy’s point,” said Ruthie, and just that quickly her veil of sociability fell away. “I believe he was having some fun at our expense, Roger. After we were nice enough to make room for him.” Give her credit, too. She met Teddy’s eye and didn’t look away. “Don’t make like that wasn’t what you were doing, either, because I know better.”

  “Plus, you smell,” said the woman sitting next to him.

  Along one shingled wall of the restaurant there were separate rubber barrels for trash, aluminum cans and paper, but the old people just shoved everything into the nearest receptacle until there was no more room, then moved on to the others and filled those up. When they were gone, a waitress came out of the restaurant and surveyed the situation. She regarded Teddy as if the mess were something he might’ve prevented. “Not my people,” he assured her. He was still a bit unnerved by how quickly the whole table had turned on him.

  “Assholes,” she said.

  “Christians,” Teddy clarified.

  The woman shrugged, evidently willing to split the difference.

  Ruthie had been right, though, Teddy had to admit: he had been making fun of them. Gentle fun, but still. No doubt they’d feared running into snobs here in New England and he’d proved them right. Theresa, at St. Joe’s, had more than once accused him of elitism. “You think people don’t catch on, but they do.”

  “What do they catch on to, exactly?” he’d inquired, genuinely curious.

  “That you take a dim view of people in general and them in particular. And yourself most of all.”

  “I’m supposed to think better of myself? Wouldn’t that make me more of a snob?”

  “No, you’re supposed to cut everybody some slack.”

  She had a point. Though outwardly courteous, he was sometimes privately and, it seemed, transparently judgmental. When their metaphorical bus tooted, the people he took a dim view of quickly gathered their belongings, like these Christians had done, and moved on, relieved to be shut of him.

  There was, however, an upside. Right now, for instance, he had the whole patio to himself, and from it the most stunning views on the island, sparkling blue water and cloudless sky stretching all the way to Cuttyhunk. He’d stopped sweating, and the breeze, which atop the cliffs seemed to come from several different directions at once, lifted his hair pleasantly, like a lover’s caress, only the lover herself missing.

  Finished with his clam roll, he deposited the paper boat and napkins in the trash bin, then went over to the fence that discouraged dimwits from attempting to climb down the cliffs. Peering over the rim, he was immediately overcome by vertigo, the white surf below impossibly far away. What jellied his knees, though, had less to do with height or distance than the swift collapse of time.

  MONDAY MORNING OF Memorial Day weekend had found all of them hungover and out of sorts. In truth, Jacy hadn’t seemed quite herself since the moment she stepped off the ferry, though she insisted nothing was wrong. They’d assumed it must have something to do with the wedding, now mere weeks away. Maybe she and her asshole fiancé had been quarreling. As the weekend progressed, her mood had improved a little, though to Teddy her mind still appeared to be elsewhere.

  Mickey’s own sour mood that morning had been predictable. As usual he’d drunk more than the others the night before, so he had the worst hangover, but there’d also been an incident the previous afternoon. A guy named Mason Troyer, whose parents owned the house down the hill, had showed up uninvited with his townie girlfriend. They knew him from previous visits and didn’t much like him. He was invariably boorish and unpleasant to be around, but Mickey hated to dismiss out of hand anyone who could be relied on to procure quality weed. At some point Troyer had gone inside to use “the head,” as he called it, and when he didn’t return, Mickey, suspicious, had followed him indoors. Good thing, too, because Troyer had cornered Jacy in the kitchen, where he had one hand on her ass and the other on her braless right breast.

  “Come over here a minute,” Mickey told him, as if he meant to whisper a secret in Troyer’s ear.

  “Why?” said Troyer, irked. In order to do so he’d have to unhand the girl he’d gone to so much trouble to corral.

  “Because I just said to,” Mickey explained.

  When Troyer reluctantly unhanded her, Jacy scooted away. “Everything’s cool, Mick,” she said, though clearly she was relieved to get rescued. “Just let it go.”

  “She’s with you?” Troyer said, raising both hands in surrender, as if Mickey were holding a gun on him. “Sorry, man. How the fuck was I supposed to know?”

  To Teddy and Lincoln, who were still out on the deck with Troyer’s girlfriend, the first indication that something might be amiss indoors was a thunderous crash that rattled the glass in the deck’s sliding door. When Troyer had finally come out from behind the kitchen island, hands still in the air, he’d been met with an uppercut from Mickey that according to Jacy had lifted him clean off his feet. Overnight Mickey’s right hand had swollen to twice its normal size.

  Lincoln, too, had been in a crappy mood, but that happened from time to time. Even at their raucous Friday afternoon hasher parties, with some of the prettiest girls at Minerva crowded into the front room of their apartment, the music on so loud the walls vibrated, Lincoln would disappear and Teddy would find him stretched out in his bedroom reading, with the door shut, as if he’d just remembered that he had a religious vocation and had promised to avoid temptations of the flesh. Teddy hadn’t known what to make of all this until he met Lincoln’s father, a deeply strange man, who also, for reasons both religious and philosophical, distrusted the pleasure principle. His only unalloyed enjoyment seemed to be golf, though he claimed to derive no enjoyment from that, either. According to Wolfgang Amadeus Moser, anybody with half a brain could see that golf had nothing to do with fun. It was about the value of repetition and discipline, which, when learned, could be used to master other disorderly impulses that derived from Man’s fallen condition. Lincoln seemed to realize how odd his father was, even as he appeared blind to the possibility that any of this peculiarity had rubbed off on himself.

  Anyway, after waking up that morning, they’d gone into town for pancakes, and when they returned to Chilmark, Mickey immediately sacked out on the couch and fell asleep. Lincoln retreated to his bedroom, so he could call Anita, who from what they could gather wasn’t thrilled that he was spending the holiday weekend with them instead of her. Despite her intelligence and beauty, Teddy suspected that deep down Anita, too, was pretty conventional. What she seemed to offer Lincoln was help in mastering any disorderly impulses that golf and W.A. Moser hadn’t already brought under control.

  Coming out onto the deck where Teddy was reading, Jacy, clearly frustrated with all three of them, said, “Here’s the deal. We could stick around and listen to Mickey snore, or th
e two of us could drive out to Gay Head and you could show me those cliffs I keep hearing about. We’ll be back before they even know we left.”

  After she purchased her postcard, they bought ice-cream cones from a nearby stand and brought them over to this exact scenic overlook. Mounted along the fence were several coin-operated binoculars that brought the more distant sections of the cliffs up close, the shutter clacking down abruptly when your time was up. They’d happily fed coins into the slot until they both ran out. “Question,” she said, and Teddy was surprised to see that her eyes were moist.

  “Yeah?”

  Staring out to sea, she said, “How come everything has to be so fucked up?”

  He shrugged. “You mean, like the war?”

  “Yeah, that. And everything else. After this weekend who knows if we’ll ever see each other again.”

  “Of course we will,” Teddy said, though the same thought had crossed his mind.

  She looked like she had more to say, but decided not to. “Don’t mind me,” she said, forcing a smile. Turning to face him, she noticed a small drip of sun-melted ice cream on his shirtfront and dabbed at it with her napkin, a gesture so intimate that his heart started pounding. “How do you get down to the beach?”

  Teddy told her there was a trail. “It’s clothing optional down there, though.”

  “Yeah?” she said, brightening. “Cool!”

  The dirt path that ran between the road and the cliff edge was bordered on both sides by tall grass and beach-plum bushes. Teddy surrendered himself to the warm sun that was now almost directly overhead, the pounding of the nearby surf and a heady mix of excitement and sheer terror that intensified the closer they got to the beach. Was it possible the question that had haunted his young life—never far from his mind, no matter how desperately he tried to banish it—was about to get answered?