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.