Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357)

by O'Nan, Stewart

  The hardest part was wondering what he could have done differently. With no recourse and so much time to himself, he mulled over the past like a blown putt, but couldn’t isolate one crucial misstep. It was his whole life, the sum total of his shortcomings, that had brought him here. He could blame the company and the banks for being greedy and overextending themselves, putting the country at risk and then socking away the TARP money, and in his most constipated inner rages did, but, like his time with Wendy, the scale of his latest failure seemed an indictment of him, the timid underachiever, and he was glad his mother wasn’t alive to see it.

  She’d spent the last decade of her life alone, on a fixed income, fretting over every penny, reminding him so often that several times he offered to help, only to discover, as her executor, that between distributions from annuities and dividends she was making twice what he and Marion were taking home. Now, faced with dwindling resources and a constant assault of bills, he resorted to stopgap measures she would have disapproved of, paying bills late, or paying with credit cards, then paying just the minimum on the cards so each month their balance rose. Every day he dreaded the mail. Some bills had to be paid promptly—the mortgages, their health and home and auto insurance. The gas and electric had more slack, the water and sewer, the garbage pick‑up, the bundled cable, internet and phone. Even when they didn’t spend anything, the money was draining away. After a life dedicated to making the numbers come out right, he felt he was betraying himself.

  Marion’s view was that it was just money and not a true barometer of their personal worth, which was healthy but not helpful. While she did most of their discretionary spending, the checkbook was solely his province. Before heading out to the supermarket, she asked how he wanted her to pay. Beyond that, she didn’t want to know how bad things were, a luxury he couldn’t afford and which he naturally resented. When he tried to discuss it with her, they invariably ended up fighting over the kitchen. “Then take it back,” she said. “Rip it all out and take it back, I don’t care anymore.” He was a reasonable man, he had no defense against her anger or her tears. His goal wasn’t to make her as unhappy as he was, and so, for the sake of peace, he broke off and carried on with his crooked bookkeeping as if the problem were his alone.

  Odds of surviving going over the Falls

  without a barrel:

  1 in 1,500,000

  The sign by the ticket window said that due to weather conditions the lower observation deck was closed.

  “What do you think?” Art asked, though they both knew he wanted to. Why pretend her vote was the tiebreaker? It wasn’t just politeness, Marion thought. He needed her to be as excited as he was.

  “We’ve waited this long,” she said.

  While they were still dry, they had their picture taken in front of a false backdrop of the Falls in summer, the green islands inviting. She tried to smile, but was tired, and the shot on the monitor captured a put-upon hardness around her mouth.

  “That’s worth at least thirty dollars,” he said.

  “Look who’s talking, Mr. Blinky.”

  “The other one’s better anyway.”

  They moved on, receiving a translucent yellow poncho the thickness of a trash bag, then waiting in a cramped hallway for the elevator. She was too hot, and had Art hold her rose while she pulled off her jacket. Her back hurt from standing. Inwardly she cursed whoever came up with this crazy layout. She was trying to be supportive but could feel her patience waning. There were so many things she could be getting done at home.

  Machinery whirred and whined inside the walls. A settling clank, and finally the doors rolled open, releasing a cold breeze and a line of tourists wearing the same ponchos. None of them looked wet and none of them was smiling.

  “Step right in,” the operator said.

  Marion expected a deep freight elevator capable of taking several dozen adults, but it was average-sized, no bigger than those at the hotel. The operator squeezed in as many people as she could before closing the doors, making Marion worry about its maximum occupancy.

  “Welcome to Journey Behind the Falls,” the operator recited, uninterested. “The shaft we’re traveling in descends a hundred and twenty feet through solid rock. It took one hundred skilled workmen three years to complete, at a cost of over one million dollars. Since then, more than forty million visitors have stood where you’re standing, including Princess Diana, President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. As you exit, you’ll see signs directing you to the two viewing portals on your right and the observation deck on the left. Please watch your step, as the tunnel floors can be slippery when wet.”

  Her spiel was timed to keep them occupied until the elevator reached the bottom. The first thing they saw when the doors rolled open was the line to return to the surface—twice the length of the one upstairs.

  The air was dank and frigid, and the dimly lit tunnel echoed with footsteps. The walls were whitewashed, the ceiling low and rounded, the lights caged. It reminded her of the antiquated tube stations of London, designed for not just smaller crowds but, seemingly, smaller people. There was no guide, only tourists like themselves wandering around in the dark. With their hoods on, their faces shadowed, they looked like monks filing through the catacombs.

  She let Art lead. They followed a sign to the Cataract Portal, cached in a dungeonlike dead end. Where the window was supposed to look out onto the Falls, the opening was plugged with ice, a blob of frozen marshmallow oozing into the room.

  On the other side of a low fence meant to stop them from getting too close sat a massive black metal and glass contraption wired to a conduit on the wall.

  “Must be one of the lights that makes the colors,” he said.

  “Not tonight it won’t,” she said.

  “It’s weird. You’d think they’d have some kind of deicing system to keep them clear.”

  “You’re thinking like an American. It’s Canada—they like ice.”

  The Great Falls Portal was the same, a solid block. She couldn’t stifle her laughter in time. It was like paying to look inside someone’s freezer.

  He wasn’t amused.

  “I’m sorry, I think it’s funny.”

  “I think it’s a rip-off,” he said, as if it were personal.

  “Come on, don’t be like that.”

  “How long did we stand in line? They should have told us. We could have done something else instead of waiting an hour to see nothing.”

  Here was the brittle, rigid Art that emerged more frequently since he’d been laid off, always lurking just beneath the cheerful veneer. His mother had been the same way, affecting a patrician calm, then breaking into self-righteous tirades when the smallest thing went wrong—tipped juice boxes or overcooked steaks. They shared a sense of entitlement and a selective paranoia, as if the world were conspiring against them. Marion was hurt and angry too, but knew the world wasn’t to blame. They’d had their share of good luck, more than most couples, especially after the mistakes they’d made. She didn’t hold hers above his or vice versa. Like the world, no one was perfect. Forget Wendy Daigle, forget Karen. If Marion was disappointed in anyone it was herself. She’d promised not to give up on him, but at moments like this she was convinced she’d be happier alone, and felt selfish.

  “Do you want to leave?” she asked. “Should we not bother with the observation deck?”

  “It’s closed, supposedly.”

  “There’s got to be something open down here.”

  “You’d think so, but you’d think a portal would actually let you look at something too.”

  “I hate it when you get like this,” she said, and turned away.

  “I’m not ‘like this’—this is like this. I don’t know why you’re mad at me.”

  The walls added a hollow echo to his words. People were coming, and they broke off, as if they could continue this later.

  The tunnel was so narrow that groups had to pass in and out single file. She followed behind him, walking with the
rose down at her side like a riding crop. She knew exactly why she was mad at him—because he was being petty and cynical, making her defend the stupid tourist trap he’d chosen and that she had no interest in in the first place; because he’d goaded her into doing exactly what she didn’t want to do, which was fight with him; because he was acting childish, making her take on the mother’s role—but as happened so often after a flare‑up, once she stepped free of the arena and had a minute to reflect, she felt chastened, instantly regretful, as if she’d forgotten that keeping the peace between them was her job. Years of refereeing the children’s disputes, and then her patients’ and her staff’s, had left her incapable of steamrolling an opponent, no matter how deserving. If she couldn’t extend that fairhandedness to her husband, what kind of person was she? He was entitled to his disappointment. Besides her, it was all he had. He wasn’t good on his own, and she worried that once she was gone, it might swallow him.

  The line for the elevator had grown.

  “Is it worth checking out the observation deck?” she asked a woman near the end.

  “I guess,” she said. “It’s not worth sixteen dollars.”

  “Can you see the Falls?”

  “It’s crowded but you can see them.”

  “Thank you,” Marion said.

  On the way they discovered a plaque on the wall with a light right above it. MIRACLE AT NIAGARA, the header read. The picture below showed a half-naked boy sprawled on a life ring being hauled onboard the Maid of the Mist. In July of 1960 seven-year-old Roger Woodward and his seventeen-year-old sister had gone for a boat ride with a neighbor on the upper Niagara River. The motor flooded and the boat capsized in the rapids. While onlookers watched, the current swept the three toward Horseshoe Falls. The sister swam for Terrapin Point and was rescued by two men from New Jersey. The neighbor went over the Falls and was killed. Roger, wearing only a bathing suit and a life jacket, suffered just a mild concussion. To this day Roger Woodward was still the only person not in a barrel to survive a plunge over the falls.

  “I thought it was going to be about us,” Art said.

  “Not everything can be about us,” Marion said. “Thank God.”

  As they went along the hall, the other plaques commemorating Nikola Tesla and President Truman and Niagara’s status as a honeymoon venue were less interesting, yet, as if it were a condition of their truce, they dutifully stopped at each one to poke fun at the canned, shallow history. Like the fake backdrop upstairs and the elevator operator’s spiel, the plaques were a way to decorate the empty space they had to cross—a welcome distraction, since by then they’d run out of small talk.

  TO OBSERVATION DECK, a sign with a helpful arrow prompted, though there was nowhere else to go. They were getting close. Traffic was passing them, purposeful families bent on seeing everything in a single day. As if swept up in their excitement, they fell in behind them. After several blind turns, they entered a tunnel filled with piercing outside light and the thrashing of falling water. Ahead, bunched at the end, silhouetted by the glare, their fellow tourists mingled like faceless shades.

  They emerged squinting into the world. To the right, the Falls dropped frothing from directly above, shedding waves of spray which caked the cliff face with built‑up ice the glacial blue of windshield wiper fluid and fringed the opening with gnarled, waxy stalactites. The rainbow, like the sky. seemed bigger here, brighter, right on top of them. Once the clump in front had taken their fill of pictures, she and Art squeezed up to the railing that prevented them from going down a short flight of iced-over stairs.

  The observation deck proper lay below, a circle the size of a helipad ringed by snowcapped posts like tuffets. It jutted invitingly toward the gorge, overlooking the old powerhouse, its long roof a perfect slab of white. In the summer the view would be spectacular, she thought, that much closer to the edge, but this was interesting too. Downstream, though there were no footprints on it, as their driver had suggested, the ice bridge stretched to the American side, the capsized floes piled high in the middle like freshly calved icebergs, dotted with gulls. Beyond the scrim of mist that hid the base of the Falls, only a green, rushing strip of river showed, quickly disappearing under the lip of the bridge. She remembered the cup she’d seen at the top going over and pictured herself trapped like an air bubble beneath the ice, sealed off, an old childhood nightmare contracted from a bad movie, laughable, especially now, when she was trying to sort out her real fears. Celia, in her own jaded way, was right. She was the only person who could hurt herself, just as she was the only one who could help herself. Daydreaming did nothing.

  Beside her, Art snapped away, all of his bitching forgotten. That he could be so easily placated confounded her. Suddenly they were supposed to be having fun.

  “Good thing we didn’t go back up,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Softly spoken, it was an apology, as if he were ashamed of losing his patience. “I still don’t know why they gave us ponchos.”

  “Maybe if it’s windy. You’d definitely need them in the summer.”

  “It might actually be worth it then.”

  “It would be, with the portals. Without them, I’ll go ten, no more.”

  “I’ll say twelve.”

  “I think you’re being generous. Did you get enough pictures?”

  “More than enough.”

  They drank in a last look and shouldered their way through the crowd and into the darkness again. On the way back they passed people taking shots of the plaques.

  The line was even longer. She didn’t recall the operator mentioning any restrooms, and tried to put the idea out of her mind, just as she tried not to think of tonight’s dry run, or tomorrow, or the long ride home. She imagined the boy, Roger Woodward, struggling to swim against the current. She thought she knew the dread and panic of being swept inexorably toward the edge, except that sometime in these past few months, whether to preserve her strength or her sanity, she’d stopped fighting. Now she was just floating, waiting to go over. What happened after that was beyond her control. Unlike Art, she didn’t expect to be rescued.

  Odds of a marriage proposal being accepted:

  1 in 1.001

  The sideshow delights of Clifton Hill would have to wait. By the time they rode the glass elevator up the stalk of the Skylon Tower, the sun was setting. The gorge lay in blue shadow, the escarpment stretching to the west a shimmering gold. Their camera wouldn’t capture its lambent brilliance or the sheer scale, but he took a couple of shots anyway. Below, as with the flick of a switch, the string of lights that defined the parkway came on. Traffic was stopped on the Rainbow Bridge, everyone trying to get home, the buses stuck at customs.

  He’d planned on them enjoying a leisurely lunch in the revolving restaurant as they had as newlyweds, but it was almost five. They only had time for a quick drink. At the hostess stand, Marion handed him her rose and asked him to order her a glass of Chardonnay, leaving him to secure a window table. The few available faced north, away from the Falls. The room took an hour to do a complete revolution. He chose the table that would come around the soonest, hoping there’d be some sunset left.

  He saved her the chair that would have the best view. Once he was settled, a waitress materialized at his side, as if she’d been watching him. He ordered and looked out over the neon theme park architecture of Clifton Hill and the snowy grid of the city, in the distance the dark expanse of Lake Ontario. The motion of the room was subtly disorienting, the windowsill inching past, as though he were standing still. To the east, night was already falling, and he felt a twinge of urgency.

  All day he’d been carrying the box in his pocket, alert for the perfect moment. Now he pulled it out, opening it below the tabletop like a cellphone. He could place it beside her rose so she’d find it when she returned, but thought that too passive. He needed to give it to her, to formally ask her to be his again. If he was too sudden, the element of surprise might work against him, especially after what happened
in the tunnels. He didn’t want her to feel ambushed. She’d say the ring was too much, that they couldn’t afford it—objections more practical than emotional, as if their life now was just about money, or the lack of it.

  The first time he’d asked her he was making two hundred a week working for a nonprofit and living in a roach-infested studio over a TV repair shop in Slavic Village. They’d been dating nearly a year, but she had a nice apartment in University Circle with her old college roommates, trust fund babies who called in sick to their temp jobs, cruised the clubs for older men, and considered him boring and unworthy of her, the best-looking of the three. He wanted to ask her to move in with him to show her he was serious and get her away from them. He knew what she made, and studied the classifieds, canvassing real estate agencies in neighborhoods he judged safe—all without consulting her.

  To make his case, he chose Shanghai Garden, a Friday night staple, where they could eat for less than twenty dollars and take home a doggie bag with tomorrow’s lunch. They sat in the back, where an oversized angelfish roamed an otherwise empty tank like a lonely ghost. He waited till they’d finished to ask her.

  “What do you mean you’ve been looking?” she asked. “Like actually looking at apartments?”

  “Not actually looking looking, just trying to see how much it would be.”

  “Wait wait wait wait wait,” she said, holding up both hands. “You. Are out looking. For an apartment. For us.”