Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) Read online

  The Odds

  ALSO BY STEWART O’NAN

  FICTION

  Emily, Alone

  Songs for the Missing

  Last Night at the Lobster

  The Good Wife

  The Night Country

  Wish You Were Here

  Everyday People

  A Prayer for the Dying

  A World Away

  The Speed Queen

  The Names of the Dead

  Snow Angels

  In the Walled City

  NONFICTION

  Faithful (with Stephen King)

  The Circus Fire

  The Vietnam Reader (editor)

  On Writers and Writing , by John Gardner (editor)

  SCREENPLAY

  Poe

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Stewart O’Nan, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from “Wheel of Fortune,” words and music by Bennie Benjamin and George David Weiss. Copyright © 1951 (renewed) Claude A. Music Co. and Abilene Music, Inc. All rights on behalf of Claude A. Music Co. administered by Chappell & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  O’Nan, Stewart.

  The odds : a love story / Stewart O’Nan.

  p. cm.

  EISBN: 9781101554357

  I. Title.

  PS3565.N316O33 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2011033330

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Carla Bolte • Set in Simoncini Garamond

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  The wheel of fortune

  goes spinning round

  Will the arrow point my way?

  Will this be the day?

  O wheel of fortune

  don’t pass me by

  Let me know the magic of

  a kiss and a sigh

  While the wheel is spinning, spinning, spinning

  I’ll not dream of winning

  fortune or fame

  While the wheel is turning, turning, turning

  I’ll be ever yearning

  for love’s precious flame

  O wheel of fortune

  I’m hoping somehow

  if you’ll ever smile on me

  please let it be now.

  —Dinah Washington

  The Odds

  Table of Contents

  Odds of a U.S. tourist visiting Niagara Falls: 1 in 195

  Odds of being killed in a bus accident: 1 in 436,212

  Odds of a vehicle being searched by Canadian customs: 1 in 384

  Odds of a U.S. citizen being an American Express cardholder: 1 in 10

  Odds of a married couple reaching their 25th anniversary: 1 in 6

  Odds of getting sick on vacation: 1 in 9

  Odds of vomiting on vacation: 1 in 6

  Odds of a married couple making love on a given night: 1 in 5

  Odds of seeing a shooting star: 1 in 5,800

  Odds of the sun coming up: 1 in 1

  Odds of surviving going over the Falls in a barrel: 1 in 3

  Odds of a couple taking a second honeymoon to the same destination: 1 in 9

  Odds of a U.S. citizen filing for bankruptcy: 1 in 17

  Odds of surviving going over the Falls without a barrel: 1 in 1,500,000

  Odds of a marriage proposal being accepted: 1 in 1.001

  Odds of a 53‑year-old woman being a grandmother: 1 in 3

  Odds of Heart playing “Crazy on You” in concert: 1 in 1

  Odds of a black number coming up in roulette (European): 1 in 2.06

  Odds of a couple making love on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 1.4

  Odds of being served breakfast in bed on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 4

  Odds of a jazz band playing “My Funny Valentine” on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 1

  Odds of a married woman having an affair: 1 in 3

  Odds of a lover proposing on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 17

  Odds of winning an Olympic gold medal: 1 in 4,500,000

  Odds of a couple fighting on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 5

  Odds of the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series: 1 in 25,000

  Odds of a divorced couple remarrying: 1 in 20,480

  Odds of a U.S. tourist visiting Niagara Falls:

  1 in 195

  The final weekend of their marriage, hounded by insolvency, indecision, and, stupidly, half secretly, in the never-distant past ruled by memory, infidelity, Art and Marion Fowler fled the country. North, to Canada. “Like the slaves,” Marion told her sister Celia. They would spend their last days and nights as man and wife as they’d spent the first, nearly thirty years ago, in Niagara Falls, as if, across the border, by that fabled and overwrought cauldron of new beginnings, away from any domestic, everyday claims, they might find each other again. Or at least Art hoped so. Marion was just hoping to endure it with some grace and get back home so she could start dealing with the paperwork required to become, for the first time in her life, a single-filing taxpayer.

  They told their daughter Emma they were taking a second honeymoon.

  “Plus they’re doing another open house here, so…” Marion, on the other line, qualified.

  They weren’t good liars, they were just afraid of the truth and what it might say about them. They were middle-class, prey to the tyranny of appearances and what they could afford, or dare, which was part of their problem. They were too settled and practical for what they were doing, uncomfortable with desperate measures. They could barely discuss the plan between themselves, as if, exposed to light and air, it might evaporate.

  With Jeremy, it was enough to say they wanted to see t
he new casino, a Frank Gehry knockoff featured on the covers of Sunday travel sections and in‑flight magazines. He was impressed with the rate they’d gotten. Art had dug around online to find a bargain.

  “Your father the high roller,” Marion joked.

  The Valentine’s Getaway Special, it was called: $249, inclusive of meals and a stake of fifty Lucky Bucks toward table games.

  They took the bus because it was part of the package, but now, burrowing through a dark wind tunnel of blowing snow somewhere on the outskirts of Buffalo, surrounded by much younger couples—including, frozen zoetropically in the light of oncoming cars, a fleshy pair in Harley gear necking directly across the aisle—they both wished they’d driven.

  They’d already made their separate cases at home, so there was no sense going over it again. Art, ever the math major, always bringing matters back to the stingy reality of numbers, had pointed out it would save them fifty dollars in gas, not to mention parking, which Marion thought absurd, and typical. They were so far beyond the stage where fifty dollars might help—like this ridiculous gamble, betting their marriage, essentially, on the spin of a wheel—yet he clung to his old a‑penny-saved‑is‑a‑penny-earned bookkeeping, forgetting the ledger he was tending was drenched in red. Taking the bus represented yet another loss of control, giving themselves up to the hand of fate, or at least a sleep-deprived driver. The only reason she went along with it—besides not wanting to fight—was that she wouldn’t have to worry about Art tailgating people the whole way in this weather, though of course she didn’t say that.

  The bus, additionally, was supposed to provide them with cover, as if in gray middle age they weren’t invisible enough. From the beginning Art had conceived of the trip as a secret mission, a fantastic last-ditch escape from the snares of their real life, and while Marion refused to believe in the possibility, as at first she’d refused to believe the severity of their situation, she also knew they’d run out of options. The house had been on the market over a year now without a nibble. They would lose it—had already lost it, honestly. The question was, how much would it cost them?

  Everything, barring a miracle. Art had already crunched the numbers, and after a necessary period of denial, Marion had conceded them, which was why they were barreling north on I‑90, Lake Erie a black void beyond the window.

  Art just wanted to get there. The Indians gym bag on his lap with the leering, bucktoothed Chief Wahoo made him nervous, as if the banded packets of twenties fitted inside like bricks were stolen. He wouldn’t be able to relax until he’d locked them in the safe, along with the ring he’d managed to keep a secret from Marion. In love he wasn’t frugal, despite what she might say. In another mad surrender to extravagance, for seventy-five more dollars a night, he’d reserved one of the bridal suites on the top floor overlooking the Falls, and despite their guaranteed late arrival, he was afraid the front desk might have lost or ignored his request and given their room away.

  Beside him, Marion lowered her mystery and massaged her neck as if she had a crick in it.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  It was the only bus of the day, but since he’d made the arrangements he was responsible, just as it was his fault the traffic was bad and the weather ugly, and that night had fallen.

  “I’m a little peckish,” he seconded. As in everything this weekend, he wanted them to be on the same side, the two of them against the world.

  “What time is our reservation?”

  “The earliest I could get was seven-thirty.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Just past six. It’s only another twenty miles.”

  “I should have grabbed a breakfast bar. I still need to iron my dress. I hope they have one.”

  “They should.”

  “Should be like a wood bee,” she said.

  It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut‑in twins, each other’s best and, most often, only audience. While they’d performed this exchange hundreds of times over the years, en route to graduations, weddings and funerals, and her skepticism was an old routine, delivered lightly, almost without thought, tonight, because he was on a mission to recapture, by one dashing, reckless gesture everything they’d lost, he took it personally. He liked to believe that when he first met her, when she was completely foreign and even more inscrutable, a solemn blonde sociology major freshly graduated from Wooster with granny glasses and a tennis player’s shapely legs, a girlish love of James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg, a cedar chest full of pastel sweaters and a shelf crowded with naked neon-haired troll dolls, she had believed in things—luck, goodness, the inexhaustible possibilities of life—and that her disappointment now was a judgment not of the world but of him and their life together. If the room didn’t have an iron, he would call down to the front desk and go get it himself if necessary. They might be broke come Monday morning, and filing for divorce, but he would never stop trying to provide for her happiness, as impossible as that was.

  She addressed her mystery again, tilting it to the beam of light from the overhead console. She read two or three a week, the pile of cracked and yellowing paperbacks on her nightstand dwindling as the one on the marble-topped table by the front door grew until it was time to trade them in at the Book Exchange. “I’m reading,” she’d say when his hand was advancing under the covers, and he would retreat.

  Across the aisle, in flickering montage, the biker couple clutched at each other like plummeting skydivers, and Art was aware of the space separating him from her. He slipped his hand from atop the gym bag and dropped it to her blue-jeaned thigh, a middle-school move. He squeezed the yielding loaf of her leg, smoothed, patted. It had been weeks since they’d made love, and the last time had been a disappointment, perfunctory on her part, workmanlike on his. He’d had to lobby her for it, imagining ecstasy, the two of them communing, the sweet plenty of her body wiping his mind clean of worry, and then, in the middle, it felt like a chore, and he’d struggled to finish, grudgingly picturing the overly rouged girl who did the traffic on the morning news. Tonight, with the Falls roaring below their window, he would prove that while they’d reached the age where passion sometimes flagged, his love for her was as strong as ever. Didn’t she see? The money, the house, none of it mattered. Since they’d met, with the exception of those few torturous months he’d long since repudiated, she was all he wanted. Mawkish as it sounded, he could say it with a straight face: as long as they had each other, they were rich.

  Marion stayed his hand, covering it with her own, and kept reading. With nowhere to focus his attention, he was always needy on vacation, just as he’d been following her around the house all fall since he’d lost his job. He was eager—too eager, really—and normally she could divert him with a list of chores. She put him in charge of the leaves, checking on him surreptitiously from the bathroom window as she would Emma and Jeremy when they were teenagers, glad to have an hour to herself. One of her worries about this weekend was how much time they would spend alone together. At home she could busy herself running errands and making supper, messing around on Facebook and watching TV, and hide behind her mystery in bed. Here he would want more of her, as if this really was a second honeymoon.

  To her it was the exact opposite. With every passing mile she was returning to a place where thirty years ago she’d been a different and certainly a better person—if naïve and a bit silly, then relatively untouched by the larger sorrows of life, several of which, later on, were the result of her own decisions, choosing desire over duty only to discover she was wrong about everything, including who she was. The idea of that younger, blameless Marion chastened her, as if once they arrived she would have to meet with her and formally review her regrets once more.

  She didn’t care about the money. She was sad
about the house, and sorry for Art, but the children were gone and they could live anywhere. Secretly, as horrible as it sounded, she was actually looking forward to moving into a smaller place and starting over, or so she told herself, because sometimes, alone in the car at a stoplight or on the toilet with the door closed, she was subject to moments of trancelike blankness, staring straight ahead at nothing while biting the inside of one cheek as if trying to solve an impossible problem.

  She wasn’t in love with him, or not the way she thought she should be. She wasn’t in love with Karen anymore, if she’d ever really been. She wasn’t in love with anyone, especially not herself. At some point, after menopause had robbed her of that bodily need, she’d convinced herself that the great movements in her life were in the past and succumbed to the inertia of middle age—prematurely, it seemed. While Art saw the divorce as a legal formality, a convenient shelter for whatever assets they might have left, from the beginning she’d taken the idea seriously, weighing her options and responsibilities—plumbing, finally, her heart—trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the ghost of Wendy Daigle out of the equation.

  How much easier it would be if Wendy Daigle was dead. But Wendy Daigle wasn’t dead. Against every reasonable measure of justice, Wendy Daigle was living with her second husband in Lakewood, just the other side of Cleveland, on a cul‑de‑sac, in a tan raised ranch with an aboveground pool in the backyard and a homemade hockey net in the driveway. Their e‑mail and phone were unlisted, but Marion had the license number of her Suburban written in tiny print at the bottom of the very last page of her old address book, where, occasionally, it would remind her of what a fool Art had thought she was.

  She’d lost her spot on the page and read the same sentence again, sighed and kneaded the bunched muscles of her neck.

  “Want a neck rub?” Art offered.

  “I’m just tired of sitting.” She shifted and went back to her book, ignoring him again.

  These little rebuffs, he would never get used to them. Years ago he’d come to accept that no matter how saintly he was from then on, like a murderer, he would always be wrong, damned by his own hand, yet he was always surprised and hurt when she turned him down. Gently, perhaps, but flatly, straight to his face, dismissing him as if he were a servant, his assistance no longer needed. As he was telling himself he had no right to feel slighted, his glance lighting on, then flitting away from the biker couple, from the front of the bus came a bang like a bomb going off—his first thought not a car but that phantom bugaboo, terrorists—the seismic impact jerked them forward, and, sickeningly, as if on a pivot, the entire rear end began to slide, and then, as the driver overcorrected, trying to bring it back, broke loose.