That Old Cape Magic (24 page)

Griffin took them.
When he reached the door, she said, “You wanted to know if Brian makes me happy?”
He wasn’t sure he did, but nodded anyway.
She started to say something, then stopped, and when she finally spoke he had the distinct impression it wasn’t what she’d started to say. “He doesn’t make me
un
happy.”
“Well,” he said, his heart sinking, “that’s something, I guess.”
Did she call after him as the door swung shut? He paused in the corridor but heard no further sound from inside the room. In fact, in that instant the whole world was still.
Down the hall Laura and Andy came out of another examination room and told him they didn’t want him driving anywhere, but he said he was fine, just exhausted, and offered to take them back to the Hedges, but Laura said they’d wait for her mother. Outside, he took the urn from Joy’s SUV and left the keys in the cup holder as instructed. After popping the trunk of his rental car, he paused, half expecting his mother to object, but it had been a long day and apparently even ghosts slept, so he slipped his father’s urn into the wheel well opposite hers. Then he got into the car, rolled the window down and just sat there. The magazine with “The Summer of the Brownings” was still on the dashboard. The evening hadn’t provided the right moment to give it to Joy, and he doubted tomorrow would either. He could leave it in her SUV, he supposed, but then decided not to. He was suddenly just too tired to walk back across the hospital lot.
The night air was rich with the sea, and he breathed it in deeply, thinking how good it would feel to fall asleep right here. Again it occurred to him how different Maine was from the Cape. What would’ve happened if he and Joy had honeymooned here, as she’d wanted to, instead of Truro? Would they have drawn up a different accord? He was nodding off when he heard shouts coming from the direction of the hospital.
Lord
, he thought,
what now?
But it was just the idiot twins, Jared and Jason, expanding the search for their stepmother. In the voice of the man they still imagined to be their father, they shouted in marine unison, “Dot! Where are you, dot damn it!”
By the time he got back to the B and B, the clock on the nightstand said 12:07. He undressed in the dark, as quietly as possible, and slipped between the sheets in stages so as not to wake the woman who now shared his bed. They’d been together for several months, but it still felt strange—and never more so than tonight—to be with a woman who wasn’t Joy. When she stirred he expected her to ask how things had gone at the rehearsal, if she’d missed anything good, but she didn’t and her breathing quickly became regular again. A minute later he was asleep himself.
Then he was wide awake again and listening, for what he wasn’t sure. According to the clock it was just after one. The window closest to the bed had been cracked open a couple inches, and in the unnaturally still Maine night he heard the thunk of a car trunk below. Someone stealing his urns was his first, lunatic thought.
Struggling out of bed, he padded barefoot over to the window and saw a taxi idling in the circular drive. Its driver pulled a suitcase from the trunk and handed it to his fare, a well-dressed young man who gave him some money. Apparently surprised by his generosity, the driver said, “Hey, thanks, pal,” and when the young man turned toward the inn, Griffin smiled, realizing it was Sunny Kim who’d just arrived.
There was stirring behind him now. “Jack? Is everything okay?” Her husky voice was low and intimate in the dark.
Yes, he told her. Everything was fine.
“Good,” said Marguerite.

11
Plumb Some

The night of his daughter’s wedding Griffin had a particularly vivid (no doubt alcohol-and anxiety-induced) dream in which he was driving over the Sagamore Bridge in a pouring rain that made the surface slick and treacherous. The bridge went on forever, and his was the only vehicle on it. Harve, for some reason, was in the backseat, instructing him.
You’re never too old to learn to drive
, he was saying, in the same tone of voice he used when telling Griffin how to play golf.
You just have to keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road
.
Griffin explained that he already knew how to drive, but Harve paid no attention.
It’s not complicated
, he went on.
Just the two things to remember: hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Hell, I taught my three daughters to drive, then both my sons. If those two can learn, so can you
.
Harve
, Griffin said,
listen to me. I already—
Car!
his father-in-law shouted, pointing in alarm, and Griffin hit the brake. Immediately the car’s rear end lost traction and came around, which meant, according to the dream’s curious logic, that he was now facing Harve, who was sitting in the backseat and saying,
Both hands on the wheel
. Griffin braced for impact against one of the bridge’s stone buttresses, but when it came, it was surprisingly gentle, like a boat nosing into a dock.
I just wanted to test your reflexes
, Harve explained.
Without good reflexes you’ re just an accident waiting to happen
.
When Griffin got out to inspect the damage, he saw that the trunk had popped open and both his parents’ urns had ruptured. The trunk was full of their mingled ash, about a hundred urns’ worth, it looked like, and the rain was turning it all to mud.
Now you’ve done it
, said Harve, who’d materialized at his elbow.
How you going to figure out who’s who?
Rather than contemplate the problem, Griffin woke up.
It was raining out, less hard than in his dream but definitely coming down. The soft dream-collision had been occasioned in the real world by Marguerite getting out of bed. Not quite ready to face a new day, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Marguerite adored weddings and after yesterday’s she would be, he feared, in one of her best and brightest moods, and he wasn’t sure he could confront either it or her just yet. He sensed her standing there, observing him, probably suspicious, but eventually he heard the bathroom door open and close, and when the shower rumbled on moments later he realized he’d been holding his breath.
“Well,
I
think it was a lovely wedding,” she told him fifteen minutes later, her first words of the day, as if he’d expressed a contrarian view in his sleep. She was toweling off unself-consciously at the foot of the bed. It was amazing, really, how different she was from Joy, how confident and secure she was in her own naked, glistening skin. Even fully dressed, she always managed to convey that she was patiently waiting for someone to suggest a skinny-dip. Maybe her body wasn’t what it once was, but she remained confident there were men around who desired it and probably would be for quite some time. “Are you going to shower,” she said, “or did you have something else in mind?” That was the other thing. Marguerite loved sex, as fervently as you loved something you’d been denied when you were young and which you were now making up for.
“Shower,” he said, because they had a long drive ahead of them and a task at the end of it—the scattering, finally, of his parents’ ashes—that was unpleasant enough to have wormed its way into his dreams. “How about tonight?”
She was right, though, Griffin thought as he stepped under the burst of hot water. The wedding had been lovely—and, like all events that involved months of intricate planning, over surprisingly quickly. It had gone off without further melodrama, a well-earned blessing, all agreed, after the catastrophic rehearsal. Despite the scratches on her forearms, Laura had been, just as he’d promised her, a heartbreakingly beautiful bride. Drawing on some reserve of optimism that hadn’t been there the night before, she’d given herself over fully to richly deserved joy. Only once, just minutes before the ceremony was to commence, did she allow herself to express any fear. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were lining up at the end of the corridor for the procession, and she and Griffin were cloistered in a small anteroom. He’d told her how lovely she was and how proud he and Joy were of her, and she’d told him he looked very L.A. (he’d found a pair of very dark glasses to cover his still-hideous but not-quite-so-swollen left eye). But when Pachelbel’s Canon leaked into the room, she took a deep breath, looped her arm through his and said, “I don’t want you and Mom to get old.”
It was, of course, her familiar fear—that he and her mother would divorce—now mutated. Either that or, after yesterday, Harve and the various humiliations of old age were on her mind.
After much discussion her grandfather, battered but unbowed, had been allowed to attend the wedding. His doctors were understandably reluctant. Harve’s physical injuries were relatively minor, but the trauma he’d suffered in the hedge wasn’t insignificant, especially for someone his age. At the hospital he’d exhibited signs of confusion and agitation, though the former, according to his children, was normal and the latter occasioned by the possibility he wouldn’t get his way. The physicians finally gave in, on the condition that someone would attend him at all times.
That someone was the redoubtable Dot (damn it!), who’d finally been located down in Portland, where she’d checked into an airport motel with every intention of catching the first flight back to California in the morning. But the family, one sibling after another, had pleaded for her return, and then finally Harve himself got on the phone and told her that she was indispensable to the day’s proceedings, a fairly transparent lie, it seemed to Griffin, but apparently the very one she wanted to hear, and so the twins had been dispatched to Portland to fetch her back up the coast. At the ceremony she seemed to be in reasonably good spirits, and Griffin kept expecting her to come over and apologize for telling him to fuck off, especially since he was the only one in the family who’d showed her the slightest kindness or consideration during what he’d already come to think of as the Ordeal of the Hedge, but she rather pointedly kept her distance, as if to suggest that by correctly diagnosing and sympathizing with her plight he’d assumed responsibility for it.
The ceremony had been performed by a Unitarian minister, a friend of Andy’s family, and Joy needn’t have worried about there being too many religious overtones, because this fellow seemed utterly unencumbered by liturgical obligation. He clearly fancied himself a comedian, though, and used those parts of the service that might otherwise have been given over to prayer to relive the more memorable moments of the rehearsal dinner, which he himself had not attended but obviously had been briefed on. While the smattering of nervous laughter that his attempts at humor occasioned couldn’t have been terribly gratifying, he’d soldiered on, his faith in his own comic talent apparently as deep and unshakable as his belief in the Almighty. When he described for the edification of those who’d been present that the bride’s grandfather had had to be removed from a Venus-flytrap hedge by means of a chain saw, Harve, hearing himself alluded to, loudly asked, his voice still raspy from yesterday’s bellowing, “Who the hell
is
this guy?”
Griffin’s fatherly duties kept him centered and focused during the ceremony itself, though the reception, which made fewer demands on his time, proved more of a challenge. Laura had chosen “Teach Your Children Well,” he hoped unironically, for their father-daughter dance. They were joined by Andy and his mother, who seemed not to have anticipated this tradition and were rigid with fear during its execution. Before long the floor was crowded with dancers, a statistically improbable percentage sporting gauzy bandages. As the wine began to flow and everyone began to relax and have a good time, Griffin felt increasingly adrift. He and Joy had agreed beforehand they wouldn’t dance together, fearing their daughter might break down at the sight of them. Joy, her middle finger made obscene by a large, gleaming metal splint, had already excused herself, saying the stitches in her side hurt, but Griffin suspected she felt it inappropriate to dance with Ringo at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there was more. Something about their body language was different today, and he wondered if they’d had words. That possibility would have cheered him had he not sensed there was a greater distance between Joy and him as well, as if their brief, unguarded intimacy at the emergency room had frightened her enough that she was determined not to risk it again.
That morning he’d suggested to Marguerite that they shouldn’t be too much of a couple, either. Knowing how much she loved to dance, he allowed that it would probably be okay if they boogied to a couple of fast numbers, but no slow, clingy stuff. If he worried about cramping her style, he needn’t have. Recognizing Sunny Kim from last year’s leftover table with a squeal of delight, she immediately dragged him out there and didn’t let him go until they’d hoofed it through three long tracks. After that she danced with Andy, with all of his groomsmen and even with Ringo, who sported an impressive hematoma on his forehead and moved, Griffin was pleased to see, like a man in a truss. When she’d exhausted all these partners, she set upon the Unitarian comic, whose expression suggested he’d become a man of the cloth as a hedge against precisely this sort of social necessity. On the dance floor he looked everywhere but at Marguerite’s chest, unintentionally providing the very comedy that had eluded him during the wedding ceremony. When she wasn’t dancing, Marguerite took refuge at the table presided over by Kelsey and her husband (“Aunt Rita? What’re
you
doing here?”), getting a recap of the couple’s first year of wedded bliss.
Her defection left Griffin—who had it coming, of course—too often alone at the long head table. Laura (he could tell) coerced her bridesmaids to dance with him, and out of a similar sense of duty he’d asked Andy’s mother, who said, no, no, she really couldn’t, as if the single dance ticket she’d been issued at the door had already been redeemed by her son. Joy’s sisters had their husbands to deal with and they didn’t like him besides, so he steered clear there. Joy herself was going from table to table, making sure people had what they needed and were enjoying themselves, a duty he begrudged her until it occurred to him that it was his as well, so he started at the other end of the room and did the same thing, as slowly as possible, lest he be forced to return to the nearly abandoned head table.
His sense that something wasn’t right intensified as the evening wore on, though he had no idea what the hell might be wrong. Everybody seemed to be having a good time, especially the young people, Laura and Andy’s college friends, which was as it should be. The only person more disconnected to the proceedings was poor Harve. After successfully lobbying to attend, he dozed through the exchange of vows and then much of the reception, though at one point he struggled to his feet and gyrated his hips with the prettiest of Laura’s bridesmaids, occasioning thunderous applause from everyone but Dot, who thrust him forcefully back into his chair. The boy who’d punched Andy (and his own mother) in the groin the night before—Griffin still had no idea who the little fucker was—recognized Jason and once again attempted his signature move, but the MP saw it coming and put the palm of his hand on the kid’s forehead and let him swing away, and this, too, everyone seemed to think was funny.
Gradually Griffin came to understand that he was waiting for another moment of grace, like the one at last year’s wedding when Laura pulled Sunny Kim onto the dance floor. The night before, in the emergency room with Joy, he’d sensed the proximity of just such a moment, but the twins had interrupted and it was lost, though at the time it hadn’t worried him. If he didn’t force it, he told himself, the moment would come of its own volition, probably at some point during the wedding. Maybe even heralded by that old Bon Jovi song. What was it called? “Livin’ on a Prayer”? He checked with the DJ, who said it was definitely on the playlist, but it didn’t play, and still didn’t, and when some of the guests with small children began to gather them up and bid farewell to the bride and groom, he realized it wasn’t going to.
Feeling his emotions come untethered and rise dangerously toward the surface, he left the wedding tent, whispering to Marguerite that he needed to visit the gents. Inside the hotel he found Sunny Kim sitting alone in the small, dark bar, drinking in the only place where the booze wasn’t free.
“Do you enjoy single-malt scotch?” he asked when Griffin slid onto the bar stool next to him.
Even in the dim light, he could see the young man’s eyes were full. “I do,” he admitted, although hard liquor was probably the last thing he needed right then.
Sunny ordered him a very expensive one. “I love fine scotch,” he said, “but I can’t drink it without remembering my father.” Was this, Griffin wondered, to explain his liquid eyes? “What would he have thought about such extravagance? He didn’t believe in excess.”
“Are you sure?” Griffin said. “Not being able to afford something isn’t the same as disapproving of it.”
“True,” Sunny admitted. “It’s also true that I never really knew him.”
“He’d have been proud of you,” Griffin assured him, because he hadn’t meant to suggest any such thing. “Hell, we’re not even related and I’m proud of you.”
Which clearly pleased the young man, though his smile vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by confusion. “Laura’s uncles? Jason and … Jared?”
Griffin chuckled. Back in the tent he’d noticed the twins had taken a shine to Sunny, introducing him to all the pretty girls, most of whom they hadn’t been introduced to themselves.
“They mock their father,” he said.
Sunny hadn’t been at the rehearsal, of course, but Griffin suspected that even if he’d witnessed the collapse of the wheelchair ramp and the ensuing Ordeal of the Hedge, none of that would’ve been as profoundly inexplicable and unsettling to him as their treatment of Harve. “It’s hard for them to express love,” he explained. “Being men. And idiots.”