He nodded.
“But … the Troyers were summer people.”
“True. They lived in Wellesley, I think. Mason got into some kind of trouble junior year. Got a girl pregnant was the rumor. Anyhow, senior year his parents sent him to live with a family here on the island.” Now Coffin was the one who looked uncomfortable. “Mason’s what kids these days call a real douchebag. But he’s no murderer, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Sorry, Mr.Coffin, but you sound a little like the woman who worked the snack bar on the ferry. None too sure.”
The other man’s face darkened again. “Oh, I’m pretty sure, Lincoln. I’m pretty damn sure.”
Lincoln had a thought. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the name of that island family he lived with that year, would you?”
“I’m not likely to forget,” he said. “Their name was Coffin.”
Teddy
Theresa answered on the first ring. “Teddy Novak,” she said. “As I live and breathe. Hold on while I go outside. The movers are here.”
When she came back on the line, he admitted, “I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”
“Are you disappointed?” Could it be mirth he detected in her voice? Bitterness? “Were you hoping to just leave a message?”
Bitterness, then. When he didn’t immediately respond, she said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t very nice. It’s possible I’ve been nursing a grievance or two.”
“That’s why I called, as it happens. To apologize.”
“Okay, but what for?” More challenge than curiosity in the question.
He chuckled. “Now that is sort of unkind.”
“Explain.”
“Well, how long have we known each other? I’ve probably messed up any number of times. If I guess wrong about why you’re mad at me, I get to keep apologizing.”
“Then you better think hard. This is Double Jeopardy, where the questions are harder, the dollar values are doubled and scores can really change.”
This was why he’d called her, actually. Not to apologize, though he knew he’d have to. They’d always communicated obliquely, their statements wry codes, and rich with cultural references. She was fun, in other words. “I’ll take relationships for two hundred, Alex.”
“Art.”
“Nah, I know very little about art.”
“Art Fleming,” she clarified. “The original host of Jeopardy! Nobody remembers him anymore.” She sounded genuinely rueful about this, as if to concede that being forgotten was a destiny shared by most human beings. “What’s that sound?”
“The wind.” It had picked up enough to blow an empty plastic cup left behind by the Christians off the picnic table and up against the chain-link fence. His shirt, drenched with sweat earlier, was now dry as a bone. He angled himself differently, against the breeze. “Is this any better?”
“A little. Are you still on Nantucket?”
“Martha’s Vineyard,” he corrected. “Bad idea, as it turns out. This trip.”
“How so?”
“Memory lane is vastly overrated. I should’ve stayed in Syracuse. I could’ve given you a hand with your move.”
She made a loud, rasping noise. “That was Beulah the Buzzer signaling an incorrect response. The movers are doing everything. I’m not lifting a finger. So if that’s what you called to apologize for, I’ll have to dock you.”
“Objection, Your Honor. The fact that you don’t need me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have offered.”
“Point taken, but objection overruled. How are your friends? Washington? Mackey?”
“Lincoln and Mickey.” He smiled. Clearly she was making these mistakes on purpose; small acts of retribution. “Different. The same.”
“Well …”
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” he told her, expecting to hear Beulah the Buzzer again, but instead there was only silence. “I guess what I really called to say is that you deserved more than I was able to give.”
“Why, I wonder. I’ve been wondering, actually.”
“I can’t really explain, except to say that it had nothing to do with you.”
“You mean that I’m black?”
“No!” Teddy told her. “Of course not.”
“Oh, please. A simple no I could accept, but spare me the of course not.”
“You really think that of me?”
“Well, in the absence of data, imagination has to work overtime,” she said. “So if it wasn’t me, then what? I mean, I heard the rumors, so—”
“I’m not gay, Theresa.”
“I kind of hoped you were, to tell you the truth, because then it really wouldn’t have been about me.”
“No, it was more … I don’t know … call it the habit of a lifetime. I guess I’m risk averse.”
“Okay, fine. But when did that start? And where? And why?”
“When? Nineteen seventy-one. Where? Right here. This island.” This exact spot, though he wasn’t about to go into that.
“Which leaves only why.”
“You could probably guess.”
“Yeah, but I’ve worn myself out guessing. How about you just tell me?”
He took a deep breath. This, of course, was why he’d really called her.
AFTER HE AND JACY RETURNED to Chilmark, Teddy turned off the ignition and they just sat for a minute, listening to the ticking engine cool. When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the strong undertow of the waves, their come-hither pull coaxing him out to sea. Why hadn’t he just let them?
Finally Jacy said, “Do the guys know?”
Teddy shook his head. He thought she’d cried herself out on the beach, but he saw now that her eyes were full again.
“Well,” she said, “they won’t hear it from me.”
“No?”
She took his hand. “Of course not.”
“I’m not sure I can go in there,” he admitted.
“But you can’t very well stay out here.”
That much was true. “What should I say about …”
“About what?”
About us, he wanted to say, but of course that would be wrong. There was no us and there never would be. “They’ll want to know where we’ve been.”
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and put on a game face. “How about I do the talking?”
They found Mickey out on the deck, drinking a beer left-handed and flexing the fingers of his swollen right hand.
“Where’ve you two been?” he said.
“Gay Head,” Jacy informed him.
“You went without us?” It was the first time all weekend that they weren’t a foursome.
“You were asleep,” she reminded him. “Lincoln was on the phone.”
“What’d you do there?”
Could he tell they’d been swimming? Teddy wondered. They’d driven back to Chilmark with the windows down. Jacy’s hair had been windblown dry. After dressing they’d brushed the sand off their legs and ankles.
“I bought a postcard,” she said, taking it out of the back pocket of her cutoffs and showing him. As if it were proof of something. “We had ice cream.”
“Did you bring us any?”
“Cones,” she explained. “They would’ve melted.”
As Jacy responded to Mickey’s questions, Teddy found himself regarding her with new eyes. She wasn’t lying, exactly, but her poise was unsettling. Where had she learned to dissemble so convincingly? Had she ever used this talent on him? Back at Minerva, had she slipped off with Mickey at some point? Or Lincoln? Was Teddy not first but last to feel her naked body against his? That he should entertain such a possibility, even in passing, filled him with shame and disgust. These, then, were the so-called wages of sin. Having betrayed his friends’ trust, he now suspected them of having already betrayed him, the people he knew and loved best suddenly strangers, the old familiar world grown strange, uncertain. He’d written a paper on the effects of sin in one of Tom Ford’s classes. At the time it hadn’t occurred to him that one day he w
ould know firsthand whereof he spoke.
“Where’s Lincoln?” Jacy was saying.
Mickey made a you have to ask? face.
Jacy sighed. “Again?”
Mickey shrugged. “Yeah, but seriously. Show of hands. Who here really expects him to end up anything except pussy-whipped?”
Jacy glanced at her watch. “Assuming we’re still going to Menemsha, we need to get a move on.” For their last evening, they’d planned a cookout. Burgers and brats on the grill, cold potato salad, even some deli-bought cheesecake for after. Schlep it all down to west-facing Menemsha Beach, where they could watch the sun go down.
“I think there’s been a change of plan,” Mickey told her. “We’ve only got the one vehicle, and there’s no way we get the four of us plus the grill and the charcoal and the beer and the food in that little piece-of-shit Nova.”
“We could make two trips,” offered Teddy, whose piece of shit the Nova was.
Mickey shrugged again. “Talk to Lincoln.”
“I thought the whole idea was to watch the sunset,” Jacy said.
“Watch it from here,” Mickey said.
“Right,” Jacy said, gesturing toward the horizon. “The sun might set in the south tonight. It doesn’t usually, but who knows?”
“If you’re going inside,” Mickey said, when Teddy took a step in that direction, “grab me another cold one. And put some music on.”
Inside, Teddy could hear Lincoln’s voice, muted, through his closed bedroom door, but otherwise it was quiet. It came to him then that he could just walk out the front door, get into his piece-of-shit Nova and drive away. Onto the ferry in Vineyard Haven and off the island. After this weekend, what was the likelihood that he’d ever see any of these people again?
Instead, he put on some Crosby, Stills & Nash, something that under normal circumstances Mickey would never permit. If you went near the stereo, he’d say, “Get away from there before you hurt yourself.”
Grabbing three beers from the fridge, he returned to the deck, where Jacy was trying to get Mickey to let her look at his hand. “Git,” he told her, hiding it under his armpit. “Away. From me.”
“It’s broken, Mickey.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital and get an x-ray.”
“Jace,” he said. “It’s fine. Leave it alone, okay?”
“All right, be like that,” she told him. “I’m gonna go inside and write my postcard. Let me know when you men have decided how everything’s going to happen.”
When the door slid closed behind her, Mickey raised a questioning eyebrow. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Us is my impression,” Teddy said, recalling what she’d said earlier about everything being fucked up. “Men. We ignore women when they’re right and we start wars and generally screw things up.”
“We are as God made us,” Mickey replied, draining the last of his beer. “I’ll take one of those, unless you plan to drink all three.”
Teddy, who’d forgotten he was holding them, handed one over.
“Mind twisting off the cap?”
Teddy did, and Mickey took it. “You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You look funny. You’re acting funny.”
“She’s right, you know,” Teddy said, anxious to change the subject. “You should get that x-rayed.”
“I will,” he said, flexing his fingers again and wincing, “but …”
“But what?”
Here he met and held Teddy’s eye. “But it’s my decision. Not hers. Not yours.”
“Are we still talking about your hand?”
“No, I guess we’re not,” he admitted. When they’d met his ferry on Friday evening, the first words out of his mouth had been, “We’re not going to talk about it, hear me? The fucking war isn’t going to ruin our last weekend together.”
They’d reluctantly agreed, but the war had put a damper on things anyway, or so it seemed to Teddy. Sure, they’d enjoyed one another’s company—gone to the beach and into Edgartown for lunch and strolled through the Camp Meeting Ground in Oak Bluffs, imagining a day when they might all invest in one of its gingerbread cottages. They’d studiously avoided the evening news and kept their conversations light, but Vietnam seemed to hover in every silence. Unless Teddy was mistaken, it had added velocity and torque to the blow that had lifted Mason Troyer off his feet. And if that was true, then what was Mickey’s grotesquely swollen hand but another manifestation of that misbegotten conflict? The injury, sustained in a minor hostility, in idyllic Chilmark, no less, brought into focus the specter of far greater, perhaps even fatal, injury in a genuine war zone. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, it might also have been the war that drove Jacy out of the arms of her hawkish boyfriend and into Teddy’s that afternoon.
They sat quietly for a while, until Mickey said, “You and Jacy?”
Teddy immediately felt faint. But, If he asks, he thought, why not tell him? What difference could it possibly make now?
But no, Mickey’s mind was apparently elsewhere. “You both need to be more like Lincoln,” he said. “Whatever I decide, and whatever happens as a result of that decision, is on me, not you. He’s figured that out. You two haven’t.”
“Whatever happened to all for one and one for all?” The question, of course, was one Teddy might well have asked himself. At Gay Head, when it seemed that Jacy might be his and his alone, he’d forsworn all for one without blinking.
Mickey sighed. “There is no all. Just millions of ones.”
_________
WORRIED THAT the crushing disappointment of Gay Head might trigger one of his spells, Teddy had decided on a brisk walk before dinner. The exercise wouldn’t prevent an episode, but it might delay its arrival and thereby allow him to get through the evening. If he woke up in the middle of the night in a flop sweat, he could curl up into the fetal position and ride it out. No one would have to know, and by morning the worst would be over. And it would explain what Mickey had seen as his “funny” behavior after returning from Gay Head. As he hiked among Chilmark’s rolling hills, however, his spirits, already at low ebb, plummeted even deeper. It came to him that the whole weekend had been a mistake, a misguided attempt to preserve something already lost. Clearly the friendship that had served them all so well had played itself out. When they graduated from Minerva, they’d somehow, without meaning to, graduated from one another. Maybe, he told himself, it was just as well. At least the evening wouldn’t become maudlin. Thank God for Mickey in this respect. He would never permit straightforward testimonials or unironic declarations of affection. For him, simply that they’d come together for one last weekend spoke volumes. Perhaps because Teddy was born of parents who made their living talking, he’d never really understood the peculiarly male conviction that silence conveyed one’s feelings better than anything else, but maybe tonight it would. Get through the evening, he commanded himself. That was what mattered. Tomorrow they would all board the ferry and go their separate ways and that would be that. They all, he felt certain, were feeling the same way.
But evidently not. Returning from his walk, Teddy was surprised to discover that his friends’ spirits had markedly improved. Lincoln had finally emerged from his room and confessed to what they’d suspected was true: Anita hadn’t wanted him to spend the weekend with them on the island. Now that it was nearly over, though, she’d relented, not only forgiving him but even telling him to enjoy himself on their last night together. After an hour alone in her room, Jacy also seemed to be in a better mood. She apologized to Mickey for being so pissy earlier, an apology he accepted by giving her a hug and promising to have his hand checked out as soon as he got home. Then, their fellowship restored, he ordered “Tedioski” to “Please, for the love of God, put some real fucking music on.” By which he meant Creedence. All weekend long they’d been listening to “Suzie Q” on a seemingly endless loop, Fogerty’s distorted guitar
solo overstaying its welcome, but Teddy put it on again and they all got to work. While Lincoln fired up the grill, Mickey stocked the Igloo full of cold beer and dragged it out onto the deck with his good hand so they wouldn’t have to keep running back and forth to the fridge. Jacy set the picnic table and Teddy opened a bag of potato chips and some onion dip to tide them over until the real food came. At one point, when Mickey went inside to pee and Lincoln was busy flipping burgers, Jacy came over and gave Teddy’s shoulder a squeeze. “Try to have a good time, okay? Our last night?” she said, and something about her tone suggested that would be heavy lifting for her as well.
Then after they ate and ferried the dirty dishes inside, everyone seemed content to sit on the deck as darkness descended, the music on low, talking quietly about things that didn’t matter—those that did being off-limits, as they had been all weekend. Teddy, who’d eaten little, could feel the salutary effects of his long walk begin to dissipate. Whatever this part of their lives had been about, it was all but over. There would be no debriefing, no attempts to articulate what they’d meant to one another these last four years. He kept hoping that Jacy would let Lincoln and Mickey in on her change of heart regarding the wedding, because that would’ve been worth celebrating. But she said nothing, causing Teddy to wonder if she’d changed her mind back again. And if he himself, or rather her disappointment in him, was why.
At some point in the evening the wind shifted, and though the beach was a good half mile away, they could hear the surf pounding, and when the moon rose out of the waves, it was suddenly, for Teddy at least, all too much. Going inside, he closed the bathroom door and studied his face in the mirror to see if the desolation and hopelessness he was feeling might be written there. Was it obvious to his friends that after tonight he had little real interest in what lay ahead? Probably Lincoln and Mickey were questioning Jacy right now, wanting to know if something “funny” had happened out at Gay Head. She’d probably tell them that he was just down in the dumps, that of the four of them he was the only one at loose ends. Lincoln was heading west with Anita. Mickey would be reporting for boot camp. She herself was getting married. Yes, Teddy was thinking about divinity school after his internship at the Globe, but only because he couldn’t think of what else to do. Ever the generalist, his major, weeks after graduation, remained undecided.
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