“No, I’m saying that if he doesn’t open up to you, it’s because he’s his father’s son and guys like them just don’t. They come at everything on a slant, especially emotions. If he hasn’t told you he loves you, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t.”
“Yeah, but it also doesn’t mean he does.”
Again he noticed her mangled fingernails. “Okay if I ask you a personal question?”
“I guess.”
“What’s hardest for you right now?”
“You know I’m a junkie, right?”
“I know you have a problem with opioids.”
“Like I said, a junkie. He wants me to quit. I want to quit. But the thing is, there are just too many fucking hours in the day.”
“I understand that, actually.” She looked as if she might want to ask what he meant, but decided not to.
“Also, no matter what anybody tells you, junkies are junkies because drugs turn bad times into good times, and who the fuck doesn’t want to have those? Anyhow, I think he’s going to give up on me soon, and then it won’t matter.”
Teddy snorted at this. “If you think he’s ever going to give up on you, then you really don’t know him.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
Her tone of voice was infuriating, but instead of letting on that she was pissing him off, Teddy said, “So, tell me what you’re good at.”
“I’m good at something?”
“You’re a fine singer.”
“I’m an okay singer.”
“Is that what you’d like to do for the rest of your life?”
She shrugged. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering if you might not be selling yourself short. A lot of people do.”
“Kinda feels like we might be talking about you now.”
Ah, he thought. Mickey was right. She was smart.
“Okay,” she said, “so what’re you good at?”
He thought about it. “I guess I’d have to say repairing what’s broken.”
“Like what?”
“Lots of stuff. As a kid I fixed things at home. Toasters. Radios. Whatever went on the fritz.”
“That must’ve pleased your parents.”
“Not really. They were high-school English teachers. They looked down at people who knew practical things.”
“What do you fix now?”
“Other people’s books.”
“Why don’t you write one of your own if you’re so good at it?”
“See? You’ve gone right to the heart of the matter. My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to. I appear to have taken his advice.”
At this she offered a sly smile. “I wouldn’t wait much longer. You don’t look so hot.”
“That’s true, but I don’t always look as bad as I do right now.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“I don’t suppose you know how to swing a hammer?”
She looked at him as if he’d said something in Swahili. “Like, at a nail?”
“Yes, exactly like that.”
“Not really.”
“Would you like to learn?”
“Not really.” But he could tell she was intrigued. “Why?”
“I was just thinking about what you said earlier. All those hours you have trouble filling. I read somewhere that physical labor is a good distraction for a troubled mind.”
“This would be a paying gig?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, I get it. You think if I’m here, away from my regular dealers, I won’t be able to score?”
“No.” Though, yes, that thought had crossed his mind.
“Because I could score on this island in about two seconds flat.”
“You’ll be too busy.”
“Also, just so you know? If we work together, you’re more likely to end up a junkie than I am to get straight.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Also, I’m not something you can repair, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Which of course he had been. “I suppose you’re right. Still, all those empty hours, and I’ve got a ton more stories.”
“You’re actually serious?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s fucking crazy, is why not.”
“You don’t have to say anything now. Just think about it. I’ll give you my cell number and you can call me later if you’re interested.” But he knew he was going to find out right then. If she was interested, she’d give him her number; if not, she’d say she could get his from her father.
She took out her phone. “Go.”
She was a two-thumbed, smart-phone typist, a trick Teddy had yet to master.
Then, “I might as well give you mine.” Reciting her number, she paused on the last digit. “You’re not going to turn out to be some pervert, are you?” He must’ve blanched at this, because she made another face and said, again in her mother’s voice, “I’m fucking kidding, Teddy. Jesus Christ.”
“Oh,” he said. “Gotcha.”
“Did he tell you about his heart murmur?”
“Your father? No.”
“Then neither did I.”
* * *
—
“ABOUT MICKEY’S STORY?” Lincoln said. Vehicles and foot passengers were still streaming off the ferry. “How much of it do you think is true?”
“Every word,” Teddy told him. “He was pretty clear about being all done lying.”
“Oh, I don’t think he was lying,” Lincoln said. “I’m just trying to understand. I mean, think about it. Jacy’s mother did everything she could to keep Andy’s existence a secret from her, and look at how that worked out. Why would Jacy turn around and do the same thing by putting her own daughter up for adoption and keeping her a secret from Mickey?”
“Maybe for some of the same reasons her mother did?” Teddy ventured, even though the same question had bedeviled him. “To keep her safe? To give her the best chance at a good life? She had to figure that she herself probably wasn’t going to be around to watch her daughter grow up. The alternative to adoption would be entrusting her infant daughter to a father who would probably continue being a hand-to-mouth musician playing in crummy bars like Rockers because that was the only life he knew or wanted.”
“You don’t think Mickey would’ve risen to the occasion if he knew he had a kid?”
“Actually, I do,” Teddy said. “I’m not saying she did the right thing, or was even thinking clearly. But she wasn’t just sick, she was desperate. She probably thought she was witnessing not just her own decline but Mickey’s as well. He told us himself that he was a complete mess.”
Lincoln didn’t dispute any of this, but he didn’t look convinced.
“Also,” Teddy said, “it might be argued that doing to your children what was done to you is the oldest story in the world.”
“Oh, I understand it in the abstract,” Lincoln conceded. “But the Jacy we knew wasn’t cruel. I’ve tried to, but I just can’t quite hear her ever telling Mickey that she wished she’d let him go to Vietnam.”
“Maybe what made it conceivable was knowing she’d prevented any such thing,” Teddy offered, straining to provide the kind of explanation that a man like Lincoln, who was uncomfortable with mystery, might find satisfying. He came from a family where questions had clear, obvious answers, delivered with breathtaking confidence. At Minerva, he’d felt cheated when Tom Ford declined to provide a clear-cut answer to the Civil War question they’d spent all semester debating. Even now, at sixty-six, he sought transparency in all things, even the human soul.
The last of the vehicles had rolled off the ferry now, and the drivers of those heading on board were starting their engines.
/> “Here’s something else that’s hard to imagine,” Lincoln said, climbing in behind the wheel and pulling the door shut behind him. “Us never meeting. Can you picture that?”
“No,” Teddy admitted. “Not really.”
“It is weird, though,” Lincoln said, turning the key in the ignition, “because what were the odds?”
Indeed. They all might’ve gone to different colleges and spent their lives in—how had Jacy’s mother put it?—“blissful ignorance” of one another’s existence.
“Kind of makes you wonder. If there was such a thing as do-overs, if we all had a bunch of chances at life, would they all be different?” When the car in front of him began inching forward, Lincoln put his in gear. “Or would they play out exactly the same?”
To Teddy’s way of thinking—and he’d thought about it a lot—this depended on which end of the telescope you were looking through. The older you got, the more likely you’d be looking at your life through the wrong end, because it stripped away life’s clutter, providing a sharper image, as well as the impression of inevitability. Character was destiny. Seen this way, every time Teddy went up for that fateful rebound, Nelson, being Nelson, would undercut him, and Teddy, ever Teddy, would hit the boards precisely how he had back then. Viewed from afar, even chance appeared to be an illusion. Mickey’s number in the draft lottery would always be 9, Teddy’s always 322. Why? Because…well, that’s just how the story went. Nor, as the ancient Greeks understood, was it possible to interrupt or meaningfully alter this chain of events once the story was underway. If Teddy had been the man Jacy thought he was when she tried to seduce him at Gay Head, not much would’ve changed, because she was already Jacy. The ataxia, part of her DNA from conception, would’ve found her even if she hadn’t been living a life of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom. That’s what it had felt like when Teddy picked up the Minerva alumni magazine and learned of Tom Ford’s death—like the fix was in, right from the start. Of course Tom would move to San Francisco when he retired, and there, free for the first time to be himself, would contract AIDS and die, Teddy feared, alone.
But this was the wrong end of the telescope. Okay, sure, maybe looking at things through the proper end also resulted in distortion by making distant things seem closer than they really were, but at least you were looking in the direction your life was heading. It wasn’t in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter. If free will turned out to be an illusion, wasn’t it a necessary one, if life was to have any meaning at all? More to the point, what if it wasn’t? What if you were presented with meaningful choices, maybe even a few that were capable of altering your trajectory? Okay, say that sometimes it did feel like the fix was in, but what if that fix was only partial? What made the contest between fate and free will so lopsided was that human beings invariably mistook one for the other, hurling themselves furiously against that which is fixed and immutable while ignoring the very things over which they actually had some control. Forty-four years ago, on this very island, with mountains of evidence to the contrary staring them in the face, Teddy and his friends had all agreed that their chances were awfully good. Sure they were fools, by any objective measure, but hadn’t they also been courageous that night? What were people supposed to do when confronted with a world that couldn’t care less whether they lived or died? Cower? Genuflect? If there was a God, he had to be choking with laughter. Stack the deck against them, and instead of blaming him, these damned fools that he’d created, supposedly in his own image, would rather blame themselves.
By the time Lincoln’s ferry was out of sight, Teddy had the pier pretty much to himself. It was almost lunchtime, and he realized he was hungry. There was no need to rush back to Chilmark, so he strolled up the street to the tavern where he and Lincoln drank beer when he’d arrived on the island only four days ago. It felt like an eternity. Out on the deck, he ordered a bowl of chowder. It was too early to drink beer, but being in no hurry he ordered one anyway. When he finished, he would drive up island to where several months’ worth of tasks awaited him. He was looking forward, he realized, to every single one of them. Maybe, before getting started, he’d call Theresa. Let her know what had happened and that he’d not only survived but was feeling better about things than he had in a very long while. He might even tell her he was thinking about starting that book Tom Ford advised him not to write until he had to. It probably wouldn’t be any good, but if it wasn’t, perhaps he’d be able to fix it. He’d spent the last decade fixing other people’s botched jobs, so why not one of his own? For years now he’d believed he had no further urgent business with this world, or it with him. But it could be he was wrong.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Howard and the “Choir Practice” crew at Offshore Ale, as well as to Susan Catling and Hilary Wall at the Vineyard Gazette. And, as always, thanks to Nat and Judith, to Emily and Kate, to Gary and everyone at Knopf. And, need I say it, none of these books gets written without Barbara.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Russo lives with his wife, Barbara, in Portland, Maine.
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