The smile she returned was Jacy’s, to a T.
THEY’D AGREED TO MEET at the restaurant adjacent to the ferry landing in Woods Hole, but he wasn’t sure she’d show up. Their hasty plan was hatched yesterday afternoon when Lincoln was on the phone with Anita, and Teddy, in one of his periodic funks, had gone for a walk.
But a lot had happened since then, and Mickey wouldn’t have blamed her for having second thoughts. “Since when have we started keeping secrets from each other?” he’d asked her, the question not entirely rhetorical. She and Teddy had snuck off to Gay Head earlier in the day, and to judge by his demeanor when they returned, something must’ve happened there. Poor Teddy. They were all hopelessly in love with her, but he seemed the furthest gone. Had he lost his composure and confessed his feelings, begged her not to marry Vance? Had she then clipped his wings? She would’ve done so gently, of course, because Mickey suspected Teddy was her favorite. On the other hand, if he’d violated their unspoken pact, well, didn’t he kind of have it coming?
Thinking this, he immediately felt guilty. After all, if their pact was unspoken, who could say they even had one? He’d always assumed that that’s what all for one and one for all amounted to—a coded agreement that they’d never go behind one another’s backs in pursuit of Jacy’s affections, which was all the more convenient since she was engaged to someone else entirely. If it existed at all, their understanding amounted to little more than a noncompete clause that there would be no need to ever enforce. Yet in a sense they had been competing, even when they were together, and if Jacy was going to marry someone not named Mickey, he preferred it wouldn’t be to someone named Lincoln or Teddy. A shameful admission, but there it was, and unless he was mistaken his friends felt the same way. Vance probably was a complete asshole, and Jacy certainly deserved better, but Mickey had accepted the idea that they would get married as one of the many things in life he was powerless to alter, like his father’s death or his own lottery number. But if Jacy were to end up with either Teddy or Lincoln, well, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to that.
Anyway, it was possible that after last night’s all-for-one singing and boozing she’d thought better of their planned assignation and hopped on a bus to New York City, as she’d originally intended. In fact, looking around the restaurant and not seeing her, he felt both crushing disappointment and—hey, relief. But then a young woman in a big floppy hat and dark glasses, sitting by herself on the deck, waved to him.
Going outside, he pulled up a chair opposite her. “Is that supposed to be a disguise?” She looked like a hippie version of Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
Jacy narrowed her eyes theatrically. “Were they suspicious?”
Mickey shook his head. Lincoln and Teddy had dropped him off at the entrance to the Steamship Authority lot in Falmouth, where they said their awkward guy-goodbyes.
“I wish you’d listen to reason,” Teddy told him. “Hell, I’d go to Canada with you if it’d keep you out of Vietnam.”
Mickey, moved by the offer, had deflected it with humor, assuring both friends that he was really more worried about them than himself, especially Lincoln, given how pussy-whipped he already was and not even engaged yet. With Mickey gone, he’d be without a male role model.
To which Teddy said, “Thanks a lot.”
In the end, Lincoln had refused to allow either a joke farewell or the offer of a handshake, saying only “Come here” and pulling Mickey into a tight embrace, whispering, “Good luck, man,” which meant that Teddy had to hug him, too.
Once they drove off, Mickey, feeling like a heel for deceiving them, retrieved his car and drove back to Woods Hole.
“So,” he told Jacy. “Explain what we’re doing here, because I don’t understand.”
“All in good time,” she said. “Let me see your hand.”
He flexed his fingers for her, trying not to wince. “It’s better today. Not so swollen.”
She just shook her head and gave him her why-are-men-so-full-of-shit smile, one of his favorites, though he loved them all.
Her Bloody Mary looked like just the thing, so when the waitress came by he ordered one, too. “I’m assuming we have time?” he said.
Jacy nodded. “I got nowhere to be.”
“I thought you were spending a day or two with Kelsey in New York.”
“So I lied.”
When the truth is found, Mickey thought. “Next you’ll be telling me you aren’t getting married.”
“An excellent prediction!”
He tried not to beam at this news, but he could feel he was. “Does Vance know this?”
“Not yet, but he won’t be surprised.”
“How about your parents?”
“They’ll be shocked.” Now she was beaming.
“So what happened?”
Jacy sighed. “We couldn’t decide where to live. I was thinking Haight-Ashbury. His idea was Greenwich, midway between our parents’ houses.”
“You could’ve compromised. I keep hearing that’s what marriage is all about.”
She shook her head. “Vance laid down the law. Which, if you’re a woman, is what marriage is about.”
The ferry, loaded up again, sounded its horn and pulled away from the slip, island-bound people waving from the upper deck. When the waitress brought Mickey’s Bloody Mary, he swilled a third of it and felt his hangover instantly recede. “Teddy said he’d go with me to Canada, if it’d keep me out of the war.”
“Poor Teddy,” she said, looking away now, her eyes glistening.
“Did something weird happen at Gay Head yesterday?”
“We went skinny-dipping.”
“Yeah? Whose idea was that?”
“Mine,” she said, meeting his eyes now, and there was a challenge in this admission. Was it some sort of a test? Don’t ask, he thought, but of course he had to. “Did anything else happen?”
She was still looking directly at him. “That was it.”
Well, he thought, that would explain Teddy’s funk. He’d looked guilty, but he was really just broken-hearted. No wonder they’d had to coax him into singing “Chances Are” with them on the deck. His own slim chances had just been rendered null and void, whereas Mickey’s own were now magically revived.
“Anyway,” Jacy said. “You can’t go to Canada with him.”
“No?”
“It’s out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going there with me.”
“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN to Bar Harbor?” she wanted to know two days later. She’d lapsed into silence an hour earlier, and Mickey sensed she didn’t want him to fill it in with chatter. It was possible, he thought, that the gravity of what they were doing—running off to Canada without money or even a real plan for what they’d do when they got there—might finally be dawning on her. He’d been expecting the next words out of her mouth to be Okay, turn the car around. This was a dumb idea.
Since leaving Woods Hole, they’d made it halfway up the coast of Maine, with the Atlantic always on their right, sometimes only a hundred yards off, then disappearing completely for an hour or more. When he’d pointed out that there were more direct routes into Canada, she said, “Your days of going anywhere directly are over,” a statement he took to be metaphorical, though its meaning still eluded him. She’d promised to answer the question he’d posed back in Woods Hole (What are we doing?), as well as a host of others that had occurred to him since (Shouldn’t you call your parents so they don’t worry? Shouldn’t you let Vance know the wedding’s off? What about Lincoln and Teddy? Why all the secrecy?). But every single one had gone unanswered. Something seemed to be troubling her, but all he could get out of her was that he’d understand everything in the fullness of time.
“When would I have visited Bar Harbor?” he snorted.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Where’d your parents take you on vacation when you were a kid?”
“We went to the lake.”
&
nbsp; “Which lake?”
“See, that’s the thing, poor little rich girl. When I was a kid I thought there was just the one. We’d go for a week in August. Sometimes two, if we were flush. Everybody from the neighborhood vacationed there.”
She squinted at him. “So … when you went on vacation, you saw the same people you saw the rest of the year? On the street where you lived?”
“People stop and stare,” Mickey warbled, “they don’t bother me … ’cause there’s nowhere on this earth that I would rather be …”
How long would it be before she understood, he wondered—this thing, his life before Minerva, that he was forever trying and failing to explain. Even Teddy and Lincoln—neither of whom came from money, though Lincoln’s family was pretty comfortable—seemed to have a hard time grasping why he clung to certain ideas so stubbornly. They’d been incredulous, for instance, when he chose to remain in the kitchen scrubbing pots when he could’ve been a face man swanning around in the dining room. How did one explain the Acropolis, a West Haven diner and his real first job—yeah, scrubbing pots—where Nestor, the owner, paid him under the table? Just a few hours after school and a few more on weekends. Each day an abundance of pots and pans awaited him on the long drainboard where they’d been sitting, crusting up, since lunch. Over the next two hours he’d slowly plow through them, imagining what that Fender Stratocaster he’d had his eye on for a while would feel like slung over his shoulder, the frets along its sleek neck smooth beneath his callused fingers. Aware that his parents wouldn’t approve of a job after school when he was supposedly getting his grades up, he told them he’d joined a Catholic Youth study group, not the kind of lie that he judged would keep him out of heaven. But back then his old man was suspicious of everything that came out of Mickey’s mouth, and one day when he finished up in back, he found Michael Sr. seated at the counter, eating a piece of cheesecake. When he indicated the vacant stool next to him, Mickey slid onto it. “You want a soda?” his father said. “You look all sweaty.” When the Coke arrived, his father said, “So what’s this all about?”
“A guitar,” Mickey confessed.
“You already got a guitar.”
“This is a better one.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. Dangerous territory, this. “The one we got you last Christmas isn’t good enough?” An off-brand Nu-Tone, with a bowed neck and raised frets that buzzed and barked.
“Think of it … as a tool,” Mickey explained, pleased to locate an analogy his old man might accept. A man’s no better than his tools was one of his favorite sayings.
“Okay,” his father said, willing, for the moment, to concede the point, “but there’s this other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“You lied to your mother.”
This was his father in a nutshell. Whenever Mickey got caught doing something he shouldn’t, it was always his mother he was disappointing, not both of them. As if his father had long ago written him off as a lost cause.
“You told her you were in study hall or some horseshit. Sorry,” he added, because the waitress had appeared just then to warm up his coffee.
“You gonna tell Mom about that cheesecake?” Mickey said. Because his father’s last visit to the doctor had revealed both high blood pressure and elevated blood-sugar levels. Since he’d been instructed to lose weight, sweets were no longer on his diet, except for Sunday mornings when they made a special trip to Wooster Street for Italian pastries.
His father appealed to the waitress, who looked like she might be a diabetes candidate herself. “Do you believe the mouth on this kid?”
“These days, they all got ’em,” she replied, winking at Mickey.
“His is gonna be the death of him,” his father said, slapping a twenty on the counter.
Outside in the car, Mickey said, “So I can keep the job?”
“For now,” his father said, “granted your mother agrees. Is Nestor treating you right?”
“Yeah, he’s okay.”
“He’d better be. I got a piece of broken PVC pipe in the trunk that’d fit in his ear just perfect. You like the work? The only reason I ask is I’ve never known you to wash a dish at home.”
Mickey started to say no, that washing pots was just a means to an end, but then realized that wasn’t quite true. Yeah, that pile of pots was always dispiriting to contemplate when he first walked in, but he actually kind of liked working through them at his own pace, and he liked the feeling of being finished even more, of having accomplished a task, even if that task was mindless and left you smelling like a dishcloth that had been marinating in bacon grease. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“Good,” his father said. “I don’t ever want to hear about you doing a half-assed job. That PVC pipe would fit in your ear, too, capisce?”
This was what Lincoln and Teddy—never mind Jacy—couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around. They suspected he stayed in the kitchen because he had something against rich girls, didn’t like the idea of having to be nice to them. But he really just liked it in the back of the house. The cooks reminded him of his mother’s friends in West Haven, and he even liked the long stainless-steel drainboard, the industrial-strength sprayer above the sink and the always-humid air, all of which took him back to the Acropolis and the thrill of that first Stratocaster he’d bought with the money he earned there. To Mickey, the Theta house’s kitchen felt a little like a church, or rather how he imagined church was supposed to feel but never did, at least not to him. He’d enjoyed Minerva, but unlike Lincoln and Teddy he’d never truly believed he belonged there. Sure it was better than West Haven, but that didn’t mean he had to love it. He also was slowly coming to understand that his father’s greatness, what made the man worth emulating, was his ability to love what he’d been given, what had been thrust upon him, what he had little choice but to accept.
He would’ve liked to explain all this to Jacy now. The questions she asked him about his earlier life always suggested genuine interest, though he could also tell that, for her, it was like studying a foreign language. She was able to recognize cognates and build a small, pragmatic vocabulary, but to become really fluent she’d have to immerse herself. And what Greenwich, Connecticut, girl would want to immerse herself in West Haven, with its construction workers and overweight cops and preening bodybuilders? While he liked that she was curious, his answers didn’t seem to lead to real understanding, just more questions. (Why hadn’t his parents taken him to Bar Harbor? Okay, maybe they couldn’t afford to stay for very long or at the nicer places, but couldn’t they at least go?) Even with him as a guidebook, she remained a tourist. Not that he blamed her. What did it matter if she really didn’t speak his language fluently? At Minerva he’d learned to speak a dialect closer to hers than his own, right? It wasn’t like they couldn’t communicate. If a gap remained, over time they would bridge it.
“So, Bar Harbor was your family’s regular summer spot?”
“Not every year. Sometimes we went to the Berkshires. Or the Cape. Or Nantucket.”
“Just the three of you?”
“Occasionally we’d go with another couple. Usually somebody from Donald’s firm.”
Mickey was about to ask who Donald was when he remembered Jacy always referred to her parents by their given names. Donald and Vivian. Don and Viv.
August on Nantucket versus a week at the lake. That was the gap they needed to bridge for this to work. Not a gap, a chasm. Still, he supposed it might’ve been wider. He might’ve been poorer, she even richer. He might’ve been black. Yet the gap was real and not nothing. Love might help, assuming that’s what they were feeling. In fact, wasn’t love the so-called answer?
And there was another gap. Running off to Canada instead of reporting for duty, after the solemn promise he’d made his father. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he’d told her back in Woods Hole.
“But it’s the right thing,” she insisted. “You must see that. This war is crazy. Not to mention immo
ral.”
True enough, and it was also true that his father would understand, at least in part. “Marrying your mother was the smartest thing I ever did,” he was fond of saying when she wasn’t around to hear it. He would surely recognize the power of his own feelings for Jacy. But although the man was dead, Mickey could also picture the two of them perched on stools at the Acropolis, his father scarfing down forbidden cheesecake. So what’s all this about? he would ask. Not another fucking guitar, I hope.
A girl, Mickey would reply.
Okay, sure, his father would agree. That’s fine, but there’s this other thing.
What other thing?
This war.
It’s stupid, Dad.
They’re all stupid. That’s not the point.
What is?
The point is, if you don’t go, somebody goes in your place, capisce? Look around right here, this diner. Half a dozen guys your age in here. A couple right over there in that booth. Which one should go in your place? Point him out to me, because I can’t tell.
The point is nobody should go.
Yeah, but somebody will. Some poor bastard is going.
And you think it should be me.
No. In fact, I’d go in your place, if they had any fucking use for a middle-aged pipefitter with a bum ticker.
And he would’ve, too. Mickey was sure of it. More than anything else, he wished that his father was alive for Jacy to meet. Because then she’d have understood what she was asking him to do.
I’m sorry, Pop. I’ll try to make it up to you.
Except it’s not between me and you. It’s between you and you.
“So,” Mickey said, “do you want to spend tonight in Bar Harbor?”
“God, no,” Jacy told him. “I hate the fucking place.”
THEY SPENT THAT NIGHT in a run-down motel on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, not far from the Canadian border. Jacy, still in her Audrey Hepburn disguise, waited in the car while Mickey went inside to register, just as she had the night before. “They couldn’t care less,” he assured her, “it’s 1971.” Free spirit that she was, it seemed out of character for her to worry about what strangers might think. Was it possible he’d misjudged her? He’d always assumed she and Vance were having sex, but he didn’t know it for a fact. Was it possible Jacy was secretly chaste? There were plenty of girls like that in West Haven—especially the Italian ones from the neighborhood, girls who talked a good game and let on that there’d be sex galore, maybe even tomorrow, except tomorrow never came. It was hard to imagine that Jacy was one of these, but there was no telling. Nor, he reminded himself, did it necessarily follow that her decision not to marry Vance meant that she’d leap right into bed with him.
Chances Are Page 24