That Old Cape Magic (13 page)

“There was something wrong with the little Browning girl, wasn’t there? Peter’s sister.”
“Asthma, I believe. Something respiratory. The sea air was supposed to be good for her, but she ended up dying. And then of course Steven in Vietnam.”
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your friend Steven Browning dying in Vietnam.”
“Mom, he’s Peter. And anyway, how in the world would you know what happened to him or his sister? We never went back there. We never saw any of them again.”
“We exchanged addresses before we left, don’t you remember? Steven wanted to keep in touch. He wrote you several letters, but you refused to write back. We got Christmas cards for a couple of years. The mother wrote when the little girl died, and then later about Steven. You were gone by then.”
“Why would you remember all this, Mom?”
“Why shouldn’t I remember things?”
“It’s unlike you. Especially people like the Brownings. You and Dad looked down your noses at them.”
He expected her to deny this accusation, but she didn’t, which meant she either hadn’t really heard it or preferred not to. Maddening, the way she blithely shopped among his conversational offerings, as if she were at a fruit bin looking for an unbruised pear. “Wait till you’re my age and memory is all you have.”
It was on the tip of Griffin’s tongue to say that, based on this conversation, he wasn’t sure she had even that.
“Happy memories in particular you hold on to.”
“That was a happy memory? That vacation?”
“Well, it wasn’t
un
happy The wheels hadn’t come off yet for your father and me. He hadn’t started the cheating yet.”
“Of course he had. You both had.”
“Not the really nasty, vindictive stuff. We were still in love, despite everything.”
“That’s how you remember it?”
“That’s how it
was
.”
“I need to get back to the wedding, Mom.”
“You haven’t told me what you think.”
“About what?”
“About the North Shore, though I have to admit your Canal idea is growing on me.”
“Why would you care, Mom? Could you answer me that?”
“Because if you put him on the North Shore, you can scatter me on the South.”
“Mom, we’ve had a lot of ridiculous conversations over the years, but this is one for the record books.”
“Remember how I taught you to bodysurf?”
“Peter Browning taught me to bodysurf. Him and his dad.”
“No. They all knew how, and you were embarrassed because you didn’t. You were scared to try. Your father was frightened of the undertow, so it was up to me.”
“Gotta go, Mom.”
“I’d just feel better if the Cape was between us, me on one side and him on the other.”
By the time Griffin returned to the tent he’d missed the bride and groom’s first dance. Kelsey was now dancing with her father, clearly for the first time ever, and her new husband with his mother.
“What now?” Joy said.
He told her about his mother’s insistence about where all the ashes should go. “I think she’s losing her mind. She’s rewriting history. Inventing memories.”
Under the table he felt Joy take his hand, perhaps in sympathy for having to deal with his mother, but more likely because Laura and Andy had joined the others on the makeshift dance floor, where they looked like what they were, two young people who’d waited what had seemed like forever to find each other. Now they clung tightly together in the understanding of how lucky they were, that in another equally plausible scenario they wouldn’t have met, still be alone, still looking. It was hard to take your eyes off them, and for Griffin the pleasure of watching them would have been pure and fully sufficient if Sunny hadn’t also been in his line of sight. He tried not to look at him, at least not directly, tried not to think of him as the boy standing by himself at that long-ago birthday party, pretending not to be alone. But somehow that opened the door to another unpleasant, totally unrelated thought. Was it possible his mother was right, that Peter Browning had been killed in Vietnam? Griffin felt something like panic rise at the possibility, a physical sensation at the back of his throat. But really, it was highly unlikely, he told himself. The son of two teachers, he’d have gone to college and gotten a deferment, as Griffin himself had done. By the time his own deferment ran out, the war was over, and it would have worked out the same way for Peter. His mother had sounded certain on the phone, but then she always did, never more so than when she was dead wrong. If somebody asked her tomorrow what the Browning boy’s name was, she’d answer
Steven
, and she’d be sure about that, too. Was it really possible that she remembered sitting up all night in that cottage trying to comfort him? When had she ever done anything like that? And they definitely hadn’t gone to the Blue Martini that night. What she was remembering was that that’s where she and his father had planned to go before he screwed things up. But asthma for Peter’s sister sounded right, and he supposed she might have died. But had Peter actually written to him, as his mother claimed? That was how it went with all her recollections. She’d get just enough details right to make you doubt your own memory, but in the end her stories never tracked. They played out like his still-unread student story, the one now with missing pages.
When the DJ segued from the first slow dance into an earsplitting Bon Jovi tune, the lesbians, howling with laughter, as if this were the best joke yet, leapt from their chairs and skipped, their arms windmilling, onto the dance floor. “I hope you don’t imagine you’re going to be allowed to sit here on your hands, mister,” Joy shouted, rising from her chair. Across the table, Marguerite was prodding stolid Harold to his feet as well.
“Okay, but hold on a minute,” Griffin said. Because if Marguerite succeeded in dragging Harold out for a dance, and he and Joy went, too, that would leave Sunny sitting there with the stroke victim, and he couldn’t bear for that to happen.
But then their beautiful daughter appeared and took Sunny by both hands and was pulling him to his feet. He was shaking his head no, saying no, he was fine, but Laura wasn’t about to let go, so he had no choice but to be led onto the dance floor, where they joined Andy and the lesbians and the bride and groom and all the other fits and misfits.
“I know. She’s wonderful,” Joy said, reading his mind, as they, along with Marguerite and Harold, joined everyone in the crowded center of the throbbing tent. “You worry too much, you know that?” she said, nodding at Sunny, who was holding his own with the other young people. A little stiff, maybe, but better than Griffin would have predicted. He’d unbuttoned his suit jacket and lowered his tie enough to unbutton the top button of his shirt. He probably would never do anything with abandon. Dancing was too much like instant messaging, and Sunny would always fear spontaneity. But he felt the music, you could tell, and he even had some moves. Had he anticipated this moment and taken lessons, studying fun much as he’d studied political science and molecular biology at Stanford, practicing, as he’d done as a boy at home, how to tell Griffin they had a lovely home?
Griffin suspected that what Joy really meant when she said he worried too much was that he had too little faith—in the world, in her, in himself, in their good lives—and sometimes got important things wrong as a result. Searching for evidence of a fundamentally crappy world, he glanced back at table seventeen, expecting to see the stroke victim sitting there forlorn and abandoned. But the groom’s parents had come over and were wheeling their son’s old math teacher to their side of the tent. Griffin couldn’t tell whether the frozen grimace on the man’s face represented joy or pain, but decided, arbitrarily, on the former.
The dance floor was now an official frenzy. Everyone under the age of thirty was shouting the song’s refrain: “Oh-oh! We’re halfway there!”—pumping the air in unison with defiant fists—“Oh-oh! Livin’ on a prayer!”
Halfway there
. Was this what it came down to, Griffin wondered, his own fist now pumping in solidarity with those younger than he. Was this the pebble in his shoe these last long months, the desire to be, once again, just halfway there?
Later, back at the B and B, he and Joy made love. It had been a while, and by the time they finished, the panic Griffin had felt after his mother’s phone call had dissipated. Sex always had that effect on him—the release it offered—and he was grateful for it and also that his mother hadn’t called just then. He made a mental note to call her tomorrow and firm up his plans to pay her a visit, maybe even see if she wanted to come to the Cape for a few days later in the summer. How long had it been since she visited? More than a decade, surely. That would give her something to look forward to. Unless he was mistaken, there’d been something panicky in her own voice tonight, though she’d tried to disguise it. Why should she care, really, where he scattered his father’s ashes? He’d asked her and, naturally, received no answer. Of course, assisted-living facilities were table seventeens for the elderly, where virtual strangers were thrust into proximity by neither affection nor blood nor common interest, only by circumstance: age and declining health. No wonder she was going batty. With no one to say otherwise, she seemed to be revising her life so as to please herself. If so, fine. He didn’t object. Except that she seemed to be revising his as well and expecting him to sign off on it.
Looking over at his sleeping wife, he felt another surge of almost painful affection, like the one he’d felt in the tent when Laura had validated their marriage, their love, with her great generosity and kindness. Joy was by nature a modest woman, quick to cover up, but sex always loosened her a little in this respect. She lay naked next to him now, lovely. Her body had thickened over the years, but it was still fine, and he desired her even more now than he had when they were younger and the sexual experience more intense. He watched her breathe for a minute, studied the trace of a smile on her lips, its source only in part their lovemaking. Back at the reception tent, when they finally decided to call it a night, Laura had detached herself from her friends, all of whom still crowded the dance floor, and come over to whisper in her mother’s ear that Andy had proposed during that first dance while they’d been watching. It took Griffin’s breath away to think that in the very moment of her great happiness, his daughter had remembered Sunny Kim and come to fetch him into the festivities. And he felt certain that he’d never in his entire life done anything so fine.
As he lay there, growing drowsy, he became aware of sounds on the other side of the wall, as of a headboard, first gently nudging, then bumping, then roundly thumping the wall. Harold and Marguerite? Listening, he thought he could hear a woman’s voice, muffled but enthusiastic to the point of ecstasy. Was it even remotely possible that Harold could bring a woman—any woman—to such a climax? He doubted it. Halfway through the reception, he’d gone up to the hotel in search of the gents and had seen Harold sitting alone in the four-seater bar, watching a ball game. Feeling sorry for Marguerite, as he had the night before, he’d danced with her a couple times, and she’d given him her business card, making him promise that if he came to L.A. to write a movie and needed to buy flowers for some gorgeous actress, he’d come to
her
shop. And she’d know if he didn’t, she warned, don’t think she wouldn’t. It had been a great wedding, hadn’t it? Marguerite hated to think what it was costing Kelsey’s parents. Her one regret about the trip was that she and Griffin had never figured out what that sign in the restaurant meant, which they definitely would’ve if he hadn’t been such a party pooper and left early.
Suddenly Griffin was laughing so hard the bed shook, waking Joy in the process. “What?” she said, pulling the sheet up over her bare breasts, ten minutes of sleep sufficient to restore her customary modesty.
“I’ll tell you in the morning,” he said. “I just thought of something. Go back to sleep.”
What he’d remembered was Sunny’s strange toast:
Here stop and spend a social hour in harmless mirth and fun. Let friendship reign. Be just and kind and evil speak of none
. He’d thought at the time that the words were familiar, and now he knew why, picturing the sign on the back bar at the Olde Cape Lounge, plain as day but for the spacing.
Griffin lay there in the dark, grinning. The sounds of lovemaking continued on the other side of the wall, and at some point it dawned on him that it had to be the lesbians, and shortly after that he was asleep.

PART TWO

Coastal Maine

(Second Wedding)

8
Bliss

How quickly it had all fallen apart. Even a year later, most of it spent in L.A., the speed of what happened after Kelsey’s wedding took Griffin’s breath away.
For the first time in what seemed like forever he’d slept through the night and awakened to a sense of profound well-being, his funk, or whatever the hell it was, having finally fled. The morning breeze billowing the chintz curtains smelled of the sea, reminding Griffin of their honeymoon in Truro. Later in the morning they’d drive there, and this, too, made him happy. Joy was usually an early riser, but last night’s sex, together with too much to drink, had made her lazy and content as well. When he touched her bare shoulder she purred like a cat, which might mean she was amenable to a reprise of last night’s intimacy, though it was also possible she was just enjoying the special indulgence of sleeping in after the long, grueling semester. Or remembering that Laura was now engaged. Before Griffin could make up his mind which it was he’d drifted off again.
It was almost ten-thirty when he felt Joy get out of bed and heard the shower thunk on in the bathroom. The long, languid summer, two and a half glorious months without classroom responsibilities, stretched out before him, all the more real, he supposed, for beginning here on the Cape. Two days ago he’d been hoping he might spend them writing whatever Sid—the poor bastard—had to offer, but that wasn’t going to happen. So be it. After last night’s conversation with his mother, he was thinking again about taking another run at “The Summer of the Brownings.” The little girl’s death, whether or not she was right about that, would give the story some added weight. He’d cut back big-time on the characters based on his parents, unwelcome intruders that they were. Asserting his authorial prerogative, he’d reduce the story to its essence: an innocent summer friendship set against the backdrop of a terrible reality both boys are aware of but can’t quite acknowledge directly. This new strategy would force Peter into the narrative foreground, not a bad idea, either. He might even weave in some harbingers of Vietnam.
He was busy revising the story in his head when his cell phone commenced buzzing on the nightstand like a fly on its back. He usually turned the damn thing off before going to bed, but last night he’d apparently forgotten.
“Griff,” said Tommy. “What’s happening today, locusts?”
“No clue,” Griffin said, though sun was leaking through the chintz curtains. “What’re you doing up so early?”
“I’ve
been
up,” he said. “Anymore, I pee three times a night, at least. Don’t tell me you’re spared this, because I hate you already.”
“Why?”
“Same old reason. The woman you’re married to. All my life I’ve been a good woman shy of true happiness. It’s tragic, really.”
Neither man said anything for an awkward beat. In the next room the shower thunked off.
“Anyway, Sid gets planted later this morning.”
“That’s not wasting any time.”
“As per Jewish custom. We have Jews out here, remember? Also Negroes and Hispanics. You forget, living there in pale New England.”
The bathroom door opened, and Joy came out, toweling her hair dry.
Who?
she mouthed. Griffin could tell from her smile that she expected it to be Laura.
Tommy
, he mouthed back, and she quickly covered up, as if his cell were equipped with a streaming-video camera.
“There’s going to be a big memorial do in a couple of weeks, though,” Tommy was saying, and he rattled off the names of half a dozen stars and directors, all former Sid clients, who’d already committed to attend. “You think you’ll come?”
“I don’t see why not. Once I get my grades turned in, I’m a free man.”
“Why don’t you and Joy come out for a week. Hell, two weeks. We’ll have some laughs.”
Joy was now bent over the small pad of B and B stationery, scribbling something.
“I’m working on this thing right now that’s going nowhere,” Tommy continued. “You can read it and tell me what’s wrong. If you’re nice I might even let you fix it. And Joy will hit it off with this woman I’m seeing. It’ll be like old times.”
Joy tore the page off the tablet and showed it to him:
Don’t commit me
.
“Sounds like fun,” he said. “Joy’s shaking her head no, but I’ll work on her.”
At which her face clouded over and she returned to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Just this quickly last night’s magic, the sense of well-being it had engendered, evaporated.
Half an hour later they were in the car, having checked out of the B and B. They’d lolled in bed too long to take advantage of the second
B
. Even the giant coffee urn had been cruelly removed from the dining room by the time they’d both showered and dressed. The apologetic owner said they could leave one car there, drive the other to Truro, then pick it up on the way back. Joy disliked Griffin’s roadster, which felt unsafe compared with her SUV, and her hair would be a lost cause by the time they arrived, but she gave in grudgingly when he observed there wasn’t much point in having a convertible if you weren’t going to put the top down on a bright summer day on the Cape.
“That was Route 6,” she remarked when he drove beneath it. The divided highway was the most direct route to the Outer Cape.
“Are we in some kind of hurry?” His plan had been to take two-lane 6A, a much more scenic drive that hugged the shoreline. If they happened on a likely spot, they’d stop and scatter his father’s ashes.
“No,” Joy said, “we’re certainly not.”
The day was warm, but the emotional temperature had plummeted.
“Can I use your phone? I forgot to put mine on the charger last night. It’s running on juice.”
Running on fumes? Because she forgot to juice the phone? Griffin opened his mouth, then closed it again, handing her his phone without comment. After last night’s festivities, it was far too early to call Laura, but he held his tongue about that, too.
“Hi, sweetie,” Joy said, after several rings, “did I wake you? Oh, I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you again how thrilled we are.”
With the top down, Griffin could hear his daughter’s voice but not what she was saying. Probably going over again what Andy had said last night, how he’d asked, the whole play-by-play. It was the kind of conversation she and her mother delighted in, and Joy, glum a moment before, was smiling now, the world made right again. Griffin told himself not to be bitter.
“We’re on our way to Truro,” she was saying. “No, just for tonight. I need to get back, and now it’s looking like your dad may be going to L.A., so…” A beat, then: “No, he’s fine.” Another pause. “Please be careful driving home.” She hung up and returned his phone to the cup holder.
“If you really need to get back, we don’t have to go to Truro,” Griffin ventured. “It was your idea.”
“I know whose idea it was.”
Griffin couldn’t understand how they’d gotten there so quickly but they were clearly on the cusp of a serious falling-out, like the one that had sent him off to Boston and the Cape by himself. The thing to do, obviously, was to avoid hostilities. The day was drop-dead gorgeous, and with a little patience and forbearance there was no reason they couldn’t reclaim the better emotional place they’d found the night before. In a couple hours they’d be at the inn where they’d honeymooned, and all would be well. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it?
“It’s just that your story has some continuity problems,” he said, deciding that he’d push this far and no further. Because if Joy really wanted to have this out, better to do it now.
“It’s not a story. Or a screenplay. It’s my job. My life.”
“Our lives.”
When she didn’t say anything to this, he continued. Impossible, really, to stop, once you’d started. Still, best to be conciliatory. “All I meant was, if you’re too busy at work to go to L.A., fine. But if you’re really that busy, why are we going to Truro?
That’s
what I’d like to understand.” Okay, the emphasis maybe wasn’t entirely conciliatory.
“No, that’s what you
don’t want
to understand.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what you’re determined
not
to understand couldn’t be simpler. It makes no sense to go all the way to L.A. unless we stay a week. I can’t afford that much time away right now.
Your
semester’s over. I’m happy for you. But I’m still flat out. I have two new staff to hire and a new boss to train. The day will come when he can spare me for a week, but not now. Truro is one day. I wouldn’t be working on the weekend anyway. So tomorrow I’ll miss
half of
one day. Not a whole week. You can pretend that doesn’t make sense, but it does.”
Which it did, as far as it went. “Fine,” he said. “Now I understand.”
“And I really hate it when you do that.”
“When I ask you to explain something? I’m not entitled to understand your thinking?”
“No, I hate it when you talk to me in script metaphors. My ‘story isn’t tracking.’ It has ‘continuity problems.’ Like I’m making things up. Like we’re still in L.A. Like you wish we’d never left. Like you regret the life we have.”
Of course he knew better than to say what came next, though it wasn’t the words themselves. If he’d delivered the line with a good-natured, self-deprecating grin, all would have been well. That’s probably what he was trying for, but he could feel the tight grimace on his features when he said, “Aren’t you going a little ‘over the top’?”
Before Joy could respond, his cell vibrated in the cup holder, and irritation morphed instantly into full-blown rage.
“What
, Mom?” he said through tightly clenched teeth. “What? What? What?”
It took a while, but they finally found where they’d honeymooned. It was smaller than Griffin remembered but otherwise unchanged, except that it was no longer an inn. An elderly woman in a straw hat was weeding the mulch around some new plantings on the front lawn. She looked up when she heard the car door shut and struggled to her feet as he approached. “It’s hell getting old,” she said, shading her eyes with one hand, scout fashion. “I’d like to ride in a car like that once more before I die.”
“You just might be the woman of my dreams,” Griffin said.
“Who’s that, then?” she wondered, indicating Joy.
“My wife. She hates it.”
“Her hair, right?”
He nodded.
“Attractive woman. What can an old lady do for you?”
“This used to be an inn,” he told her, aware that this might not be news to her. “My wife and I stayed here on our honeymoon. Thirty-four years ago.”
“I’ve owned it almost that long,” she said, turning to regard it. “Bought it with my husband. Then the rat-bastard up and died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re
sorry?”
She turned back to look him over. She had the palest, most piercing blue eyes he’d ever seen, full of kindness but even more full of intelligence. He’d hate to have to lie to her for a living. She looked in Joy’s direction. “So what’s wrong?”
“We’ve been arguing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re
sorry?” he said. “Can you recommend an inn here in Truro?”
She shook her head. “Between here and Provincetown there isn’t much but motels. Borderline sleazy, most of them. You want something nice, you’d best head back toward Wellfleet. Couple of good inns there.”
“Thanks. We’ll take your advice.”
“Do that.”
“If you don’t mind my saying, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman of your generation use the term
rat-bastard
before.”
“I used to be a writer. Still love words, the sound of them.
Fart-hammer
is my new favorite, though I can’t seem to find a sentence to put it in.”
“What did you write?”
“Biography, mostly. A poem or two, when the fit was on me. ‘Strange fits of passion I have known…’”
“‘And I will dare to tell, / But in the Lover’s ear alone, / What once to me befell,’” he continued. But if his ability to finish the stanza impressed the old woman, she gave no sign. “My parents were both English professors,” he explained, stifling the urge to tell her that one of them happened to be in the trunk of the car. “I’m another, actually. And a writer, too.”
“Hah!” she said. “No wonder your wife’s in tears.”
It was true. Joy was crying. She hadn’t been when he got out of the car, but now she was. Silently, but not trying to hide the fact, either.
“Go to her,” the woman suggested.
“I can’t stay here?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
Back in the car he took a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me about it, Joy? I know you called him back when I was in the shower.” He’d seen it listed on the phone’s recent calls list.
She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about, and he was grateful for that. She wiped her tears on the back of her wrist, and for a moment they just sat there. The old woman had gone back to her weeding, though Griffin had the distinct impression she hadn’t forgotten about them.
Finally, Joy said, “We can talk about it if you want. But first call your mother back.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s your mother. Because you yelled at her. Because she’s old. Because you’ve only got one.”
That night Griffin’s insomnia returned with a vengeance, payback, apparently, for the previous night’s blissful sleep. Joy, to her credit, had tried to head the argument off. “We don’t have to do this,” she said after he called his mother back, leaving a brief apology on her machine for barking at her and promising to call again later in the week to discuss a visit. “There’s no need. Nothing happened.”
But she seemed to know they’d quarrel, and that the argument would be the most intense and bitter and wounding of their marriage. They’d finally quit out of exhaustion sometime after midnight, and since then he’d lain awake listening for the clock on the nightstand, which buzzed faintly every time the minute hand changed over. Amazing, really, how many bad thoughts you could cram into the sixty seconds between buzzes.
The day he found Joy sobbing in the shower, some part of him had known Tommy had to be involved. Even back when he and Elaine were still married and they were a foursome traipsing off to Mexico, Griffin knew about his friend’s crush on Joy. Out on the balcony of their resort hotel, working through some crucial scene, he would look up from the typewriter and see Tommy staring down at the pool below, and he could tell it was Joy he was looking at, not his own wife. Nor was his partner much interested in disguising the fact. “Lucky fellow,” he’d say before they went back to work. It had been part of the narrative of their long friendship that Griffin was born fortunate. Raised by two college professors, he’d gone to good schools that without exception identified him as gifted. Tommy, who was several years older, had grown up in a series of foster homes, knocked around rough urban public schools, his dyslexia undiagnosed, and was thought by everybody, including himself, to be dumb and lazy. First the army, then the community college where he’d met Elaine, after that some studio gofer work. “We’re both lucky,” Griffin would respond with a sweeping gesture that included their lovely young wives, the pool deck below with its palm trees and swim-up bar, the ocean just beyond the pink patio walls, the portable typewriter that provided them with all of this. “Yeah, sure,” Tommy always replied, “but there’s luck and then there’s luck.”