Chances Are Read online

  Fearing that one of those might be in the offing, he’d seriously considered declining Lincoln’s invitation and paying a visit to the monastery instead. Brother John was always glad to see him, and he had a complete set of Marx Brothers movies, which Teddy suspected were probably more therapeutic than prayer and fasting combined. He knew for certain, though, that over the years the monastery had seen him through some rough patches, maybe even kept him out of the loony bin. Lately, however, he’d begun doubting the efficacy of his periodic retreats. When he was younger, they had provided a contrast to his life out in the world. Yet over the years a secular monasticism had crept into his everyday life, so the two worlds weren’t quite so different anymore.

  No doubt about it, this trip to the island—in the company of old friends and recollected youth—was risky, a potential threat to his hard-won equilibrium. Jesus, sixty-six years old. He’d hoped that by now he wouldn’t have to be so vigilant, that given enough time the madness—because that’s what his spells amounted to—would ebb. After all, diminishment seemed to be the order of the day. Wouldn’t you think the spirit, unshackled at last from so many of the body’s youthful imperatives and bolstered by the wisdom of experience, would finally become ascendant? Wasn’t memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?

  But it was only for the weekend, and he would likely survive. Its pleasures would be modest enough. Morning walks among Chilmark’s rolling hills. Afternoon bike rides. Beer and white wine chilling in the fridge, though he’d do well to go light on alcohol. Lincoln might want to sneak in nine holes of golf at some point. On Saturday night Mickey apparently meant to drag them to some joint in Oak Bluffs to hear a local blues band, but otherwise it didn’t seem that much had been planned. Time would pass quickly. There was nothing to fear, as the saying went, but fear itself.

  Still, best to keep vigilant, so instead of going outside and watching the distant island grow until it filled reality’s frame, he would put those forty-five minutes to good use. The manuscript he was editing was deeply flawed. Even when accepting the book for publication, he’d known he would come to regret the decision; that even if he could mitigate its flaws, the book would do little to advance Seven Storey Books, his beleaguered small press, which, as the name suggested, specialized in religious and “spiritual” titles, roughly half a dozen a year. The venture had been birthed a decade earlier when a colleague named Everett asked Teddy to look at a monograph he was having trouble finding a publisher for. When Teddy read it, he immediately saw why. The book was poorly organized, with its most original and compelling chapter buried in the middle, and like most academics, Everett wasn’t a gifted stylist. Still, it was smart in its curious fashion, and what was wrong with it struck Teddy as fixable.

  “Tell me how,” Everett had pleaded when so informed. He was coming up for tenure that year at St.Joseph’s, their small Catholic college, and his case was hardly strong. By his own admission he was a mediocre teacher, though his students seemed to think he’d have to improve significantly to achieve mediocrity. He’d avoided serving on committees the past four years by claiming he was writing a book. If it didn’t get published …

  But here was the problem: the book might be fixable, but Teddy doubted Everett was the man for the job. There were technical flaws, lots of them, and those could be addressed easily enough, but what was really wrong was deeply rooted in his colleague’s education and experience, the classes he’d taken and avoided, his natural aptitudes, his blind spots. In a word, his character. Teddy felt this was far more often the case than writers realized. Sure, he could point out the more glaring lapses in judgment and maybe give Everett a few tips, and if he followed Teddy’s advice and worked hard, by this time next year the book would be better, if probably still not good enough. And anyway, what difference did it make? The guy didn’t have a year. Nine months from now he’d be out on his ass.

  “Give it to me for a month,” Teddy suggested. It was then the end of July and he had no plans for August. Worse, he’d noticed his personal barometric pressure dropping of late. He needed a task, something that would require his full attention for thirty days but no longer.

  “Give it to you?” said Everett.

  “Right,” Teddy said. “Download it onto a disk.”

  Everett’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I can’t pay—”

  “I don’t want your money,” Teddy assured him.

  “Then what do you want?”

  That, strangely enough, was the exact question Teddy had been asking himself most of his adult life and for which he’d found no compelling answer. The first person to ask it, though, had been his academic adviser at Minerva College, who’d wanted to know what Teddy intended to major in. Unable to decide, he opted for general studies, a curriculum designed not so much to answer the question as to postpone it. According to the registrar, by the time Teddy graduated he’d taken more courses in more academic disciplines than any student in Minerva College’s history. Tom Ford, his favorite professor there, had told him not to worry about that, but of course Tom had been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Referring to himself as “the last of the generalists,” he was the chair of the humanities program, where he taught a class in Great Books, but he also taught “special topics” classes in English, philosophy, history, art and even the sciences. Mostly he invented classes he wished had been offered when he’d been an undergraduate. Teddy had taken so many of them that Mickey joked that he was the only Minerva student who was majoring in Ford. Not until his senior year did Teddy catch wind of how poorly his mentor was regarded by his colleagues. He’d never advanced beyond the rank of associate professor, because he not only never published anything himself but also took a dim view of anyone who did. Their books, he claimed, were proof of how little they knew, how narrow the sphere of their knowledge was. More than anyone, it was Tom Ford who’d given Teddy permission to indulge his curiosity without expecting it to pay dividends in terms of professional success. Someday, he wrote at the bottom of one of Teddy’s essays, you might actually write something worth reading. My advice would be to put that day off as long as possible.

  The idea that he might write a book worth reading had appealed to Teddy, and he imagined that if he followed Tom’s advice and example, then one day the right subject would present itself. Except somehow it never did. The problem was that no single interest felt more urgent than the next, and a good case could always be made for both. Maybe for him the right subject didn’t exist, or, conversely, they all were right, which ironically amounted to the same thing. Over time he came to suspect that what he lacked was an obsession, and apparently there was no cure for that. Had he been a horse, his trainer would’ve put blinders on him, narrowed his field of vision. Intellectual curiosity, moreover, was not the same as talent, and he gradually came to understand that his own particular aptitude was for fixing things. From an early age he’d possessed an intuitive grasp of how and why things went off the rails, as well as how to get them back on again. He enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together. Whereas most people hated assigned tasks, especially complex ones, Teddy in fact enjoyed them. For this reason, the notion of fixing Everett’s botched job was appealing.

  It had taken him the whole month of August. Once finished, he slipped the manuscript into Everett’s department mailbox on a Friday afternoon; on Monday morning, when Teddy arrived on campus, Everett was sitting on the floor outside Teddy’s office, staring off into the middle distance with the book in his lap. When he looked up, Teddy could see the man was crestfallen. At the sweeping changes Teddy had wrought? At how little of himself remained in the text? Probably both. “Wow,” Everett said. “I really suck, don’t I?”

  Standing over him, Teddy felt surprisingly little empathy. He’d agreed to fix the book and he’d done so. Was he expected to shield its author from self-knowledge as well? “How about you come into my office, Everett,” he said. “You’re scaring the kids.”

  Insi
de, the man slumped into the chair provided for students, and on his face was the same mixture of bewilderment, fear and anger that Teddy associated with undergraduates who wanted their grades explained. To complete the picture, Everett said what they always did: “It was really that bad?”

  “Well—”

  “No, I mean … you did an amazing job,” he said, riffling the manuscript’s pages. “Your title is much better than mine. The whole thing’s a lot better. It’s just … I don’t know … not mine anymore.”

  “Of course it is,” Teddy assured him.

  Everett looked up hopefully. “Yeah?”

  “Send it out.”

  “To publishers? I’m not sure I can.”

  “You did before.”

  “I know, but they’ll think—”

  “They’ll think you revised it. That’s what it needed. Revision. It’s what we tell our students, right? Revise, revise, revise.”

  “I guess,” Everett said, though Teddy couldn’t tell whether he was agreeing that, yes, he also told his students this, or if it was finally occurring to him that the advice might actually be true. “Anyway,” he went on, “I owe you …”

  Teddy waited for him to complete his thought—a bottle of wine? dinner at a good restaurant? a horsewhipping?—but he seemed unable to. Finally, he got to his feet and just stood there with his manuscript over the wastebasket, and for a moment Teddy thought he meant to chuck it in. “You know, it’s funny,” he said, though you needed only to glance at the man to know that whatever he said next wouldn’t be funny at all. “When I got my PhD, I thought I was all done feeling like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Inadequate.”

  “You’ll feel better when it’s published,” Teddy told him.

  “You think?”

  “Yes, I do. Your name will be on the cover. You’ll get your tenure. That’s what matters, right?” Okay, it wasn’t what Tom Ford thought mattered, but he’d been an outlier, even back in the seventies. As anachronistic then as Teddy was now.

  By the end of the week Everett seemed to have gotten over his dejection at least enough to take Teddy’s advice and resubmit the book. Unfortunately, it came back by return mail with a note from the publisher saying that, having already rejected the book, they were unwilling to reconsider their decision. In the ensuing weeks half a dozen others followed suit, and Everett was crestfallen all over again. “I feel awful,” he told Teddy. “After all your hard work.”

  Teddy felt bad, too, though for him there was a silver lining. As he saw it, even if The God Project (Teddy’s title) never saw the light of day, the month he spent whipping it into shape hadn’t been wasted. He’d discovered something about himself. He’d both enjoyed fixing what was wrong with the book at the macro level and also the micro work of editing, the phrase-to-phrase, comma-to-comma fine-tuning that most people found brain scalding. Tom Ford, who’d encouraged Teddy to consider a career in journalism, also told him that in addition to being a good writer, he possessed excellent diagnostic and editorial skills. Until now he hadn’t had anything to apply them to.

  Later that same autumn Teddy went to a college fund-raiser held in the ballroom of a large downtown hotel, the sort of event where faculty are encouraged to mingle with influential alums and donors. The featured speaker was St.Joseph’s new president, Theresa Whittier, an attractive middle-aged woman of clearly mixed race, whom Teddy had not yet met. The first ever layperson to lead the college, she’d been hired to come to grips with its finances, which for decades had been in a slow but relentless decline. In her brief remarks she told her audience that she’d spent the first two months of the semester getting feedback from faculty, staff and alumni about bold new initiatives the college might undertake without—and here she got a laugh—breaking what was left of the bank. Institutions, she claimed, were like individuals. They got into ruts.

  Copy that, Teddy thought. He’d come to the event in the hopes of getting out of a rut of his own. His daily routine of teaching classes and holding office hours, going out for long walks in the late afternoon, opening a bottle of wine in the early evening and finishing it over a solitary dinner, then settling in for the rest of the evening with a novel or an old movie on TV, was comfortable, even pleasurable, if unexciting, the even keel he’d always sought. Lately, though, several friends, noting how often he turned down social invitations, had begun asking if he was depressed. Was it his imagination, or did these inquiries trail an implied criticism? Were these people suggesting that in his shoes they’d certainly be depressed? Or were they genuinely concerned? Was he depressed?

  Okay, but in the entire history of the world, name a single person whose spirits were ever lifted by attending a fund-raiser. As he stood in the coat-check line at the end of the evening, trying to think of one, Teddy felt a tap on his shoulder, and when he turned around, there stood Theresa Whittier. “Okay,” she said, “so what’s your big idea?”

  He’d had three glasses of wine, so he said, without hesitation, “Seven Storey Books, a small publishing house that specializes in smart books on religious topics.”

  “And you are?”

  Teddy took out and showed her the lanyard he’d put in his jacket pocket as soon as he was admitted to the ballroom.

  “I thought I’d met all the regular faculty, Teddy.”

  “I’m irregular faculty,” he explained.

  “What? Like seconds in a clothing store?” she asked, an eyebrow arched.

  “Sort of. Adjunct faculty.”

  “Ah, right. The dirty little secret of the academy. A series of one-year appointments?”

  “Depending on need.”

  The eyebrow arched again. “You don’t seem bitter.”

  “I don’t have to attend department meetings. What’s that worth?”

  “Point taken. So, describe these books we’re going to publish.”

  “Theology aimed at the layman. Nothing too heavy. The intersection of faith and good works. Memoir.”

  “Like Merton.”

  He nodded. “Maybe the occasional novel. Even a book of poems, if it’s the right book of poems.”

  “And who would know whether it is or isn’t?”

  “Me. Actually, I have a book in mind for our first title. It’s called The God Project.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “I’ll drop it by your office.”

  “Work up a budget while you’re at it.”

  When her coat came, he held it out for her to slip on. “Been a while since anyone’s done that,” she noted, sliding her arms through the sleeves.

  “You’re not offended, I hope?” Because these days nearly everything offended someone.

  “No,” she smiled, “but holding the door might be overdoing it.”

  “Right. Gotcha, no door.”

  The following week she sent for him. “Okay,” she said, handing back The God Project manuscript.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, St.Joe’s will fund Seven Storey Books, with you as its general editor.”

  “Wow.”

  “I spoke with your author,” Theresa went on, grinning now. “He’s regular faculty. I gather you roughed him up a bit with your critique?”

  “There was a good book in there. I just helped him find it.”

  She seemed to accept this explanation without necessarily buying it. After discussing some practical details and procedures, she told him he could get to work setting up the press. When they shook hands, she regarded him quizzically and said, “You’re an odd man, Teddy.”

  He considered telling her that this was a fairly odd thing to say about anyone she’d met so recently. “In what respect?”

  “Is it your usual MO, going through life with your badge in your pocket? Not wanting people to know who you are?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So I’ve gathered. When I made inquiries, nobody seemed to really know you. I believe the phrase was, ‘He keeps to himself.’ ”

  �
��And you think maybe I’m a serial killer?”

  “No, I’m just wondering if Seven Storey Books will end up biting me on the keister.”

  “I hope not,” he said, trying as best he could to match her rueful smile and to not look at the keister in question.

  “Me too,” Theresa said, playfully. “Because if it does, mine will not be the only keister bit.”

  That night, halfway through a bottle of chardonnay, he recalled her remark. Was he odd? If so, had he always been, or was it a recent development, the result of having lived alone for so long? Was this oddness obvious to everybody? If so, why was someone pointing it out only now?

  Teddy also remembered that at the door to Theresa’s office, when they shook hands, hers had been warm. And when she turned around to go back to her desk, he’d noted there was nothing wrong with her keister. What was odder? he wondered. For him to have noticed these things? Or to have acknowledged, even in the moment, that he would not act on them?

  He also wondered if she too was eating alone.

  FOR AN ACADEMIC TITLE The God Project had done well, winning a small but significant award and bringing the college some welcome attention. Also, an onslaught of manuscript submissions. To Teddy, it seemed that almost as many people were writing books about faith as were reading them. Most of the submissions were dreck, but a few small gems were mixed in. No new Thomas Merton, of course, but then he hadn’t expected there would be. What flagged during those early years, even as the press’s reputation grew, was Teddy’s enthusiasm. Gradually, he came to understand that he was unlikely ever again to replicate the experience of The God Project. Most writers weren’t desperate enough to just hand over their book and let Teddy revise it, free of authorial griping and interference. Having written the damn thing, they tended to think of it as theirs. Moreover, the possibility that they themselves sucked, no matter how richly warranted, never seemed to occur to them, as it had to poor Everett. Indeed, many were arrogant dickweeds who refused to accept criticism, no matter how carefully and sympathetically couched. They openly flouted Teddy’s most reasonable suggestions, and a few even called him names for making them. Mostly, though, they were like the author of the book he was editing on the ferry, hopelessly trapped, without realizing it, in a contemporary idiom that was ill suited to their timeless subject matter. What this particular guy was writing about, whether he knew it or not, was sin and redemption, but those words had gone out of fashion, so he refused to use them. The books Teddy had been publishing for the last decade weren’t bad, but neither were they the kind of books Tom Ford would’ve approved of. They weren’t urgent or necessary. They flowed with the cultural current, never against it, because the men and women who wrote them weren’t on fire.