“You’re selling the place?” Teddy had asked, surprised.
“We haven’t decided yet,” Lincoln explained, the statement feeling oddly true, as if he and Anita had somehow agreed to sell without exactly deciding to. It hadn’t been his intention to say anything to Teddy or Mickey about putting the house on the market, because they’d want to know why and he didn’t really want to go into it. As a successful commercial realtor, he’d always made more money than they did, not that he’d ever lorded this over them. And why would he? Teddy clearly defined success differently, and it never would’ve occurred to Mickey to define it in the first place. Was it shame at having come so close to financial ruin that he was feeling? He didn’t want to think so, but what else could it be? In the Christmas cards and e-mails he exchanged with Teddy and Mickey since the 2008 crash, he hadn’t let on that anything was amiss. If they were paying attention, they probably knew that Las Vegas was the epicenter of the subprime financial storm, but since he’d given them no hint that he himself was in jeopardy, they’d no doubt assumed he was okay. Even now that it looked like the agency had finally turned a corner, he had no desire for them to know how close he’d come to going under. Not that they would’ve secretly gloated. On the contrary, they’d have felt terrible for him. Still, the membrane separating sympathy from pity could be paper-thin, and Lincoln—here again his father’s son—wanted no part of the latter.
Later in the evening, recalling Martin’s dark hints about Troyer, Lincoln had Googled him, and the asshole did indeed have a colorful island history: numerous entries in the Vineyard Gazette and Martha’s Vineyard Times for DUI, failures to appear in court when summoned, repeated noise complaints from neighbors. But there were darker stories, too. In the late nineties, an accusation of sexual harassment by an unnamed woman that was settled out of court before it could come to trial, and another woman had been granted a restraining order against him. When Troyer promptly violated it, he’d been jailed, and by the time he got out, she’d left the Vineyard. During Lincoln’s search, other websites popped up, promising more details for a fee, but for the moment he decided against going down that particular rabbit hole.
Now, lying in bed, the early morning light streaming in the window, he remembered something else.
Anita’s voice was thick with sleep when she picked up. “Is everything okay?”
“Crap,” he said, realizing why she was groggy. “I forgot about the time difference.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “My alarm was about to go off anyway. What’s up?”
“Mason Troyer. Do you remember the day—”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, ‘yeah’? I haven’t told which—”
“The afternoon he came over when you were gone?”
“Right. Remind me what happened, exactly?”
“There was something we needed, and you were going to drive into Vineyard Haven. But then it occurred to you they might have it at the little store in Chilmark, and they did. So instead of being gone an hour, you were back in like fifteen minutes.”
“When I came in, you two were in the kitchen,” he said, the incident coming into focus now. They’d been standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Something about their stiff, awkward postures had reminded him of Freeze Tag, the children’s game where everybody’d run around until somebody yelled “Freeze!” and they’d have to stop in their tracks. That’s what his wife and Troyer had looked like, standing there with the table between you—as if his unexpected return had frozen them.
“He claimed he’d come over because he wanted to make an offer on the house,” Anita was saying, “but something felt off. I mean, you no sooner drove off than he was there at the door. Like he’d been watching the house and waiting for you to leave.”
“He didn’t—”
“No, he didn’t touch me or anything. And the conversation itself was benign. But he still gave me the creeps. It was more like he was weighing possibilities in his head. Risk-assessment stuff. Trying to gauge how strong I was, how much trouble I’d give him. What I remember most is how happy I was to hear your tires on the gravel outside. And he looked startled, that’s for sure. Like he was as surprised as I was that you were back so soon, which he wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t watched you leave.”
“How come you didn’t tell me any of this then?”
“I almost did, but by the time he left I’d convinced myself I must’ve been imagining things.”
“You did precisely what we warned our daughters never to do.”
“God, you’re right. We always told them to trust their instincts.” They were both silent for a long beat. “So, what’s this about, Lincoln?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Are you expecting trouble?”
“He won’t come around, not if he sees Mickey.” There was that day in the kitchen when the asshole cornered Jacy, and Mickey made short work of him, a crisp uppercut to the chin, right on the button. They’d heard the thunderous crash out on the deck.
“Promise me you won’t mess with him?” Anita said.
“I don’t even intend to return his call,” he told her. If he dropped by, Lincoln would deal with it. Martin was probably right. Troyer no doubt wanted to make a direct offer and screw the realtor out of his commission.
“Did the guys get in okay?”
“Teddy arrived yesterday afternoon. Mickey’s due any time now.”
“Give them my love.”
“Why don’t you hop on a plane? You could be in Woods Hole in time to catch the last ferry. The boys would love to see you.”
“I’d love to see them, but I have to be in court bright and early on Monday. And later today I’m driving to Arizona to check on Wolfgang Amadeus, remember?”
“Choosing my father over me, eh?”
“Don’t guilt me, buster. This is your job I’m doing.”
Yes, and dealing with his father fell to her far too often. What he’d told Teddy yesterday was true, though. If good outcomes were what you were after, Anita was the ideal person for the job.
Hanging up, he massaged his temples with his thumbs. Had he really dreamed about Troyer last night? Somewhere between his thumbs a dark thought was coalescing.
IN THE SHOWER, he made a mental list of things that required his attention after Teddy and Mickey left on Monday. The place was beginning to look shabby, inside and out. Too many of the exterior shingles had transitioned from weathered to warped, and the interior walls all needed a fresh coat of paint. The wooden deck railings were going punky with rot. Anita had instructed him to make a cellphone video of every room in the house so she didn’t have to rely on his own assessment. In her opinion he was, like most men, blind to what was right in front of his face. Lincoln supposed she was right, but in his view too many gender insults were getting lobbed in his direction of late. Whenever he was foolish enough to generalize about women, he himself could count on a chorus of outrage from his wife and daughters. So how was it that men remained fair game? More to the point, if Martin was right and the place was a teardown, the video he’d been told to make would be a waste of time. For that matter, so would a paint job and new shingles.
He was toweling off when he heard a low, throaty rumbling outside and felt the floor vibrate under his bare feet. Knowing what this heralded, he quickly pulled on gym shorts and a T-shirt and hollered to Teddy, who was out on the deck working on some manuscript.
The big Harley shuddered into silence just as Lincoln emerged. Mickey—dressed in jeans, cowboy boots and a leather jacket—pulled off his helmet and just sat there, staring off into deep space, his expression uncharacteristic, unreadable. Longing, Lincoln speculated, or regret? Whatever, it vanished so quickly when Mickey noticed him standing there that Lincoln wondered if he’d imagined it.
“Face Man,” Mickey said, breaking into his old, familiar grin.
“Big Mick on Pots,” Lincoln responded as he stepped gingerly across the gravel in his bare feet.
Their old nicknames—avatars of younger selves—were a long-established ritual of greeting.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Mickey said, frowning. “You’re all bent over like some old man.”
“Stiff lower back,” Lincoln admitted. “I straighten up as the day goes on.”
They shook hands, Mickey still astride the Harley like he was deciding whether or not to stay. The screen door squeaked open on its rusty hinge as Teddy, dressed in a bathing suit, flip-flops and a threadbare Minerva sweatshirt, came through.
“Tedioski,” said Mickey, who had at least one nickname for everybody he knew. Others for Teddy included Teduski and Tedmarek. “So, come over here and let me have a look at you. You’re not wearing socks with your sandals, anyway.”
“You thought I would be?”
“I figured this could be the year.”
“You look the same,” Teddy said. “Or at least the sixty-six-year-old version of the same. Are you able to get off that thing, or do you just sit there looking like Brando?”
Slipping out from under his backpack, he handed it off to Lincoln, who was surprised by its weight. “What’s in here? Rocks?”
“Vodka, tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, vodka, celery and vodka,” Mickey informed him, swinging a big leg over the Harley to release the kickstand. “We had a gig last night. I didn’t get home till three.”
When he wedged his helmet under the bike’s seat, Teddy rapped it with his knuckles. “You’ve started wearing one of these at last.”
“It’s the law,” he said. “Also, there’s this.” He parted his longish rocker hair to reveal a long, angry pink scar.
“Jesus,” said Teddy, the blood draining out of his face.
Mickey chuckled, all too aware of Teddy’s lifelong horror of bodily affliction. “Anyway,” he sighed, shouldering his pack again, “it’s Bloody Mary time.” He regarded Lincoln dubiously. “You think you can make it back inside, old man, or do we need to carry you?”
“Good to see you, too, Mick,” Lincoln told him. “I can’t think of why, but it is.”
Mickey clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on. It’s the abuse you miss.”
“That must be it.”
At the door they heard a metallic groaning behind them and turned just as Mickey’s Harley lost its purchase in the gravel and tipped over. His freed helmet rolled lopsidedly down the grade, coming to rest at their feet. “Be like that,” Mickey said, addressing the unruly bike, then went inside.
Teddy picked up the helmet, raised an eyebrow at Lincoln, then hung it on the nearby lamppost.
Lincoln held the door wide open. “Let the games begin.”
“SWEET, ROLLICKIN’ JESUS,” Mickey said, peering down the slope. He’d taken off his leather jacket and was sitting with his boots up on the railing. “Is that a naked woman down there?”
All three were drinking Bloody Marys. Mickey had rooted around in the kitchen cabinets until he found a pitcher to mix them in. Where had the pitcher come from? Lincoln wondered. That was the thing about renters who could afford Chilmark in July and August. Once they discovered the place didn’t have something they required, they just drove into town and bought it, then nine times out of ten left it behind. The kitchen was full of bizarre gadgets Lincoln couldn’t even guess the purpose of. Several summers ago, back when Keurig coffee makers were brand-new, some August renters had purchased one and just left it there on the counter along with a list of suggested upgrades that included a Bose radio, a cell-phone-charger dock, a Wi-Fi router and a video-game console. Lincoln had been for ignoring the list, but Anita immediately went online, bought every single item and had everything delivered to the management company that handled their rentals.
Lincoln assured Mickey that, no, his eyes weren’t deceiving him, though it was unclear whether this was the same naked woman he’d seen yesterday. They were about the same build—big breasted, thick in the middle—but the other had been a blonde, hadn’t she? This one’s hair—at least the hair on her head—was darker, though maybe it was just the hour of the day, the angle of the sun.
“No wonder you were out here grading papers,” Mickey said to Teddy, who was now sitting with his back to the scene below, the manuscript beneath his chair, out of harm’s way.
“I’m editing a book, not grading papers,” he clarified.
“You’ll have to explain the difference to me sometime when there’s nothing more interesting going on. Binoculars, is what we need right now.”
Down the slope another door banged, and Troyer, again naked himself, came out onto the deck. He said something to the woman—they were too far away to hear what—but her laughter wafted up the slope on the breeze.
“Okay, never mind the binoculars,” Mickey said, angling his chair so he wouldn’t have to look. “Tell me that’s not the same jerk-off from back in the day. The fuck was his name? The guy who groped Jacy?”
“Mason Troyer.”
“Right. Troyer.”
“He owns the place now. His folks died a while back.”
“For rich people, they were pretty nice,” Teddy recalled.
“What do you mean, ‘for rich people’?” Mickey snorted. “There’s some law that says they can’t be nice?”
Teddy munched his celery stalk thoughtfully. “I believe there is, actually. And those particular people were in violation.”
“Ah, here we go,” Mickey sighed. “Will this be one of your lectures from 1969, Mr.Marx? Or do you have new material?”
“Outside of a dog,” Teddy said, wiggling his eyebrows and puffing on an imaginary Groucho cigar, a whole other Marx than the one Mickey alluded to, “a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
The Troyers had been nice folks, Lincoln recalled. They seemed as baffled as everyone else that they’d somehow managed to produce a bad seed like Mason.
“Okay, impress me,” Mickey said to Teddy. “What’re you listening to?”
“Mostly alt rock.”
“Like what?”
“The Decemberists. Belle and Sebastian. Mumford and Sons.”
“Faggot music.”
“We’re using that term now?” Teddy said. “College-educated guys like us?”
Mickey ignored this protest. “That’s hipster shit. People who listen to crap like that drink pumpkin-spice lattes. Come on. What else? You must listen to some real music.”
Teddy shrugged. “Some singer-songwriters. Tom Waits. Leonard Cohen. Josh Ritter. The Boss, of course.”
“Okay,” Mickey conceded. “These I can respect.”
“Who’s the Boss?” Lincoln said.
Both men stared at him.
“The thing is,” Mickey said to Teddy, “I never know when he’s kidding. Can you tell?”
“Not when the subject’s music,” Teddy admitted.
“Okay, your turn.” Mickey was now pointing at Lincoln with his celery stick. “I assume you’re still devoted to Montovani.”
“Don’t start.”
“Teduski. What do you want to bet he’s got a Montovani Pandora station?”
“What’s a Pandora station?” Lincoln said.
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“I am, actually.”
“Let me see your phone,” Mickey said.
“No.”
“Give it here. This is serious. Don’t make me take it away from you.”
Lincoln sighed, handed it over.
Mickey scrolled through the icons. “Here we go,” he said. “Pandora. My God, this is terrifying. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Nat King Cole.”
Teddy was beet red now, his shoulders shaking.
“And yep. Here it is. I knew it. Johnny Fucking Mathis. Chances are …,” he crooned, “ ’cause I wear that silly grin …”
Lincoln grabbed the phone back and slipped it into his pocket.
“Please tell me you and Anita never had sex after listening to Johnny Mathis. Because I’ve always had this image of her
as a classy lady.”
From down the slope came a whoop of female hilarity. Reluctantly, all three turned to look. Troyer seemed to be nuzzling the naked woman’s midriff. At least that’s what they hoped he was nuzzling.
Mickey rose to his feet and grabbed his leather jacket. “I gotta go inside,” he said. “That’s making me queasy.”
“Why do you think I’ve got my back to it?” Teddy said.
At the sliding door, Mickey said, “You guys didn’t make plans for tonight, right? There’s a band playing down on Circuit Ave that I keep hearing good things about.”
“If we must,” Lincoln sighed.
When the door slid closed behind him, Lincoln, in spite of himself, peered down the slope again. Troyer had taken a seat now, and the woman had rolled over on her stomach.
“Question,” he said when Teddy retrieved his manuscript from under his chair and prepared to go back to work. “Do you remember that history class we both took at Minerva?”
“Civil War and Reconstruction,” Teddy replied without hesitation, as if for some inexplicable reason he too had been thinking about that very class. “Professor Ford.”
“First day of class he gave us the final-exam question.”
Teddy nodded. “What caused the war.”
In addition to the regular blackboards, there’d been a large portable one on which, as the semester progressed, they’d listed possible causes, some proximate, some remote. Though he’d been pretty sure Ford disagreed, Lincoln had ended up arguing that it was fought over economics—the industrial North versus the agrarian South. Teddy had argued that it had been fought over slavery, a moral issue. Both their theses, now that Lincoln thought about it, had been predictable. Which begged a question: had his and Teddy’s characters already been formed? At the time, college had appeared to offer an endless smorgasbord of possibilities and it felt like they were engaged in the act of becoming. Had that been an illusion? Had they already, by that point, become?
Teddy was grinning. “Remember how pissed off we were at the end? After we turned in our finals, we went to see him and demanded to know what the right answer was? What he thought caused the war?”
Lincoln had forgotten this, but the details now came flooding back. “And he just smiled and asked us what we thought had caused the Vietnam War. The whole point of the course had been for us to examine one war in light of the other, and neither of us ever made that connection. He should’ve flunked us both.”
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