That Old Cape Magic (3 page)

Chapter One
.
Then an interesting thing happened. Whereas before he’d been anxiously awaiting Claudia’s return, he now hoped she’d stay away. He’d always believed this would be—what?—a collaboration, in the best sense. She’d do the actual writing, of course, but he’d be right there to share notes and ideas, to make sure she didn’t lose her focus. And wasn’t that what all dissertations really were, collaborations? Otherwise, why
have
an adviser? But now he thought,
Fuck it
. He was making good progress, staying up late at night, neglecting, truth be told, his own teaching responsibilities. He’d hit his scholarly stride, and Claudia’s return would break it. Maybe he’d surprise her in Atlanta during spring break, he told himself. But when the break came he decided to work through it (just as well, Griffin’s mother said, since Claudia wasn’t in Atlanta anyway and never had been), figuring that if all went well, he’d have a draft before the end-of-semester crunch. She could help him revise it while familiarizing herself with his conclusions and methods, because of course she was the one who’d have to defend them (though he’d be there to throw her a rope if she needed one).
All might have been well, except in April he’d come down with a toxic dose of the flu. At one point he awakened shivering and curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor with no memory of how he’d gotten there, though the commode testified eloquently as to why he’d needed to. Was he hallucinating or had Claudia called the day before, wondering how the dissertation was coming along? Had she laughed at him when he reported it was almost done?
Eventually the flu ran its course, but he never fully recovered his strength or the weight he’d lost as a result of vomiting and skipping meals, but guess what? He’d finished, and
wasn’t he proud
? Only when Claudia actually returned in late August, just when he’d concluded she was gone for good, did the enormity of what he’d done come down on him like an anvil. Not so much the dishonesty of it, but rather that this could have been
his book
. It was quite possibly the best thing he’d ever written. Any good university press would be happy to have it, maybe even a mainstream trade publisher. It was possible that real money, as opposed to the bogus scrip universities routinely printed, redeemable only in the academic commissary, might change hands. But there was an obvious problem. How could he claim the work as his own when it was supposed to be Claudia’s? He could argue she hadn’t written any of it, and everyone who’d ever taught her would believe him, but that would mean he’d stolen her idea. He’d already signed off on the fact that it was
her
idea when he and two other colleagues approved the proposal.
“Mom,” Griffin had protested at this point, “you can’t know all this. And don’t tell me Dad confided it, either. They aren’t the kind of things he’d admit to anybody, especially not you.” After all, he’d just spent the last twenty-four hours with his father, who hadn’t dropped a single hint, even an oblique one, about any of this.
Another woman might have taken umbrage at his
especially not you
, but his mother didn’t even slow down. “Pipe down,” she said gleefully. “I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. Claudia was
blackmailing
him.
“Well, not in the conventional sense,” she conceded. “It’s more like emotional blackmail.” Since they’d returned from Amherst, Claudia had taken to wondering out loud what his colleagues would think if they knew what he’d done. Had he always been so dishonest, she wanted to know, or was this something new? Was what he’d done a firing offense? Would the scandal make the front page of the
Chronicle of Higher Education
?
“But that’s an absurd threat,” Griffin felt compelled to inject. “She couldn’t expose him without exposing herself.”
“True,” she said, “but he’s terrified anyway.”
“He didn’t look scared to me.”
“Trust me.”
“But Mom, the story doesn’t track. Any undergraduate fiction workshop would tear it apart.” Well, okay, maybe not completely. It was more disjointed and inconsistent than unbelievable, and Griffin suspected he knew why. The academy was a small world, and his mother had friends, and friends of friends, everywhere. She’d no doubt been following her ex-husband’s year at UMass, or trying to, through half a dozen spies. She’d glean small bits of information from a wide variety of sources and stitch these into a single narrative as best she could, drawing inferences, pretending, as she always did, to be privy to everything.
Nor did she appreciate him suggesting she wasn’t. “Undergraduate workshop,” she snorted. “Right. Now
there’s
a test.”
“Okay,” Griffin conceded. “I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’re saying. I’m just—”
But she waved him off. “Do you want to hear the best part or not?”
“The blackmail wasn’t the best part? There’s more?”
She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Get this. The whole time he was in Amherst?”
He waited until it was clear she had no intention of going on without a specific invitation. He had to go on record as wanting to know what she had to tell him, which, unfortunately, he did.
“What, Mom? The whole time in Amherst what?”
“The
whole time
your father was in Amherst,” she said triumphantly, “he never even made it to the Cape. Not once.”
In retrospect, his mother had been right about at least one thing. She’d given his father’s marriage another year. Not a full year, either, she insisted, an academic year. And that’s exactly how long it had lasted. The following May, Claudia had departed for good, and shortly after that his father had left the university to take a position as acting department chair at a small branch of the state university of Illinois. “He’s in a downward spiral,” his mother had reported. “In fact he’s circling the drain.” From there he’d become the dean of faculty at a small Christian college in Oklahoma, where he served until failing health forced him to retire.
And now, Griffin thought ruefully, he was in the trunk of his car.

3
The Great Truro Accord

By the time Griffin arrived in Provincetown it had warmed up, so he went to a café with an outdoor patio. In the foyer he noticed a stack of real-estate guides, so he grabbed one and leafed through it while he waited for his eggs. The listings, he quickly determined, were either mind-bogglingly expensive or little more than shacks. Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift. The old categories apparently still applied. Which begged a question. If he hadn’t given up screenwriting to move back East and become a college professor, would
they
have had the money? Hard to say. He’d made a lot more money in L.A., but they’d spent a lot more, too. It had been one of the great mysteries of his parents’ marriage that nothing they did or didn’t do seemed to change their overall economic outlook all that much. Near the back of the guide, looking completely out of place, was a full-page ad for a high-end assisted-living community near Hyannis, which sent a chill up his spine. His mother knew he was on the Cape. Was it possible their conversation had awakened the old dormant passion? He could easily imagine her Googling the assisted-living options here (like hell Google wasn’t research). It was even possible that out in Indiana she was at that very moment looking at the same image that he was studying here in Provincetown. A creepy scenario, and so utterly plausible that when his cell phone rang, he was surprised to see it was Joy and not his mother.
“Where are you?” his wife demanded, sounding almost as annoyed as his mother had been earlier, though to her credit she’d at least said hello before wanting to know just how far he’d strayed from her expectation.
“Provincetown,” he informed her. “I woke up early.”
“If you don’t start sleeping soon, I want you to see somebody.”
There was real concern in her voice now, for which he was grateful. It was true he hadn’t been sleeping well, waking up for no apparent reason in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. The usual end-of-semester pressure, no doubt. He’d already had his standard academic-anxiety dream, the one where he arrived at his classroom only to find a note on the door saying his class was now meeting in another building across campus. When he arrived there, same deal. And no matter how he hurried to catch up, his students were always receding at the end of an impossibly long corridor. All of it would probably disappear when he turned in his grades.
“Guess who I’m having breakfast with?” he said, anxious to change the subject.
“Who?”
“Al Fresco,” he said. It was an old joke, no doubt summoned to the front of his brain by being on the Cape and eating outdoors. His parents always made sure their summer rental had either a patio or porch so they could have breakfast outside and read the paper “with Al,” ignoring Griffin’s pleas to finish so they could go to the beach. He and Joy had used Al Fresco back in their L.A. days, but it wasn’t that great a joke and had naturally fallen into disuse.
Still, he was a little hurt when Joy said, “Al who?”
“I don’t know about yours,” he told her, “but my day’s begun poorly.”
“I know,” Joy said, sounding exhausted now. “She called here, too. The semester’s officially over, I guess.”
Griffin had put off introducing Joy to his parents for as long as possible, explaining that they were involved in a particularly acrimonious divorce. “But I
am
going to meet them, right?” she’d inquired, already suspicious. “I mean, they
are
your parents.” He suggested, “How about at the wedding?” and she’d laughed, thinking he was joking. Down the years she’d gotten on well enough with his father, though he could never quite seem to place her, even when she was standing next to his son. Living two thousand miles apart, they saw each other infrequently, of course, but each time they met, his father acted more delighted and charmed than seemed natural. “Is it my imagination,” Joy said after their second meeting, “or had he forgotten me entirely?” Griffin told her not to take it personally. At the end of each semester his father still didn’t know his students’ names, except the two or three prettiest girls.
His mother was a different story. Though polite, she’d never made a secret of her low opinion of Griffin’s choice of a mate. “Where did she do her graduate work?” was the first thing she’d wanted to know when Griffin called to say he was engaged. For her there was no greater barometer of personal worth. Moreover, when she asked people this question, they generally asked her back, and she got to say her doctorate was from Yale; if they didn’t ask, she told them anyway. In Joy’s case, she’d been expecting UCLA or Southern Cal. Griffin had anticipated this question, of course, and reminded himself there was no reason to be embarrassed to answer it, though naturally he was. He’d taken a deep breath and explained that Joy had gone directly to work after getting her undergraduate degree and that she had a good job, one she enjoyed. “Yes, but what sort of person doesn’t do graduate work?” His mother inflected the word
person
ever so slightly, as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t go to graduate school might belong to neither gender, or perhaps to both. Poor Joy had spent the first decade of their marriage trying to get her mother-in-law to think better of her, the next trying to fathom why that wasn’t happening and the one after that pretending it didn’t matter. Of late she seemed to favor getting an unlisted phone number.
On their honeymoon, she’d paid him an unintentional compliment by asking if there was any chance he’d been adopted. Back then he bore little physical resemblance to either parent, though over the last two decades that had changed. His hair had thinned in the exact same pattern as his father’s, and his nose, delicate when he was a younger man, had started to dominate his face as well. He’d kept in reasonably good shape by jogging and playing tennis, and he didn’t weigh much more than he had when they married, but the weight had subtly begun redistributing itself, his torso becoming noticeably concave (again like his father’s), as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. With the exception of the small mole that bisected her left eyebrow and had appeared on his own in his thirties, his mother’s genetic gifts were more temperamental, if no less disturbing for that, and Joy had conceded long ago that there was no chance he’d been adopted. “That’s your mother talking,” she was fond of observing whenever he was unkind or snobbish, especially about someone in her own family.
“She wants me to visit,” Griffin told her now.
“Of course she does.”
“She doesn’t like her new place.”
“Of course she doesn’t.”
“She’s going to live forever.”
“No, but she’ll make it seem like forever.”
The first thing he’d done when arriving at the restaurant was to wash his shirtsleeve in the men’s room. Though he thought he’d done a good, thorough job, he could smell it again. “When she called, I pulled over onto the shoulder, and a gull took a shit on me.”
But Joy had lost interest in the subject, just as she often did with stories at what he considered their most vivid and interesting point. “Have you called your daughter yet?”
Your
daughter, rather than
our
, usually meant that in Joy’s opinion he was shirking some important parental duty. “She doesn’t get here until this afternoon, right?”
“She’s been on the Cape since yesterday. She’s in the wedding party, remember?”
Well, now that he thought about it, he did. “I’ll call her when I get to the B and B,” he promised.
“Good. She could use some reassuring.”
“About what?”
“She can’t understand why we’re arriving in separate cars. Explain that to her, will you? Then she can explain it to me.”
Griffin sighed. He’d succeeded in deflecting Joy from her purpose by complaining about his mother, but now they’d circled back. Best to get it over with and apologize. “I should’ve waited for you,” he admitted, pausing a beat before adding, “Boston wasn’t much fun without you.” And, when she still didn’t say anything, “I meant to spite you and ended up spiting myself… Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I hope you aren’t waiting for me to humble myself further, because that’s all I’ve got for you.”
“No,” she said. “That should do it.”
By the time Griffin drove back down the Cape and checked into the B and B, it was nearly noon. He brought his travel bag and satchel up to the room, leaving the trunk empty except for his father’s ashes. He’d passed a couple of peaceful, secluded spots, but there’d been a brisk breeze, and he feared that when he opened the urn a strong gust might come up and he’d be wearing his father. Also, he’d feel less self-conscious saying a few words in his memory if there was someone besides himself to hear them, so he decided to wait for Joy.
His father had died of a massive embolism the previous September, and the circumstances were nothing if not peculiar. He’d been found in his car in a plaza on the Mass Pike. Like most rest stops, this one had a huge parking lot, and his father’s car was on the very perimeter, far from other vehicles. It was unclear how long it had been there before someone noticed him slumped over in the passenger seat, his head resting against the window. Except for the trickle of blood, dried and crusty, below his left nostril, he might have been taking a nap. But why wasn’t he behind the wheel? The glove box was open. Had he been rummaging around in it, looking for something? On the backseat the road atlas was open to Massachusetts, with Griffin’s phone number scrawled on the top of the page. The key was in the ignition in the ON position. The car had apparently run out of gas there in the lot.
“Must’ve been coming to see you,” the young cop said when Griffin arrived on the scene to identify his father.
“It’s possible,” Griffin told him.
“He didn’t mention it, though? Coming to visit?”
Griffin said no, that it’d been a good six months since he’d seen him and almost as long since they’d spoken on the phone.
“That normal?”
He wasn’t sure what this fellow was getting at. Normal for them, or normal for other adult fathers and sons?
“I mean, you didn’t get along?” the cop said. He seemed less suspicious than saddened to consider the possibility that over time his relationship with his own dad might similarly devolve.
“We got along fine.”
“It just seems … I don’t know. What do you make of the fact that he was in the passenger seat?”
“I have no idea,” Griffin said, though that wasn’t true. The inference to be drawn was inescapable. He’d been in the passenger seat because someone else had been driving. All his life he’d stopped for pretty hitchhikers, a habit that had infuriated Griffin’s mother. “Better me than somebody else,” he always argued, lamely. “The next guy might be a pervert.” (At this she’d roll her eyes. “Yeah, right. The
next
guy.”) The other possible explanation was that he’d talked one of his coeds into making the trip with him. Though he’d retired the year before, the university still allowed him to teach one seminar each fall. More than once he’d let on to Griffin that girls at Christian schools like this one were often interested in exploring a more secular approach to life and love, if this could be done discreetly. Boys their own age offered neither experience nor discretion. It
had
been a woman, possibly a young woman, Griffin learned from the cop, who’d made the anonymous call to the state police about the man slumped over in his car in the rest-stop parking lot.
It was unconscionable he’d waited so long to dispose of his father’s ashes, Griffin thought as he unpacked, hanging his suit in the closet and placing his shaving kit in the tiny bathroom. He should have made a special trip to the Cape last fall. His father had left a will but no instructions on where he wished to spend eternity. But on the drive back home from the turnpike plaza, Griffin had come to what had seemed an obvious conclusion. His father hadn’t been on his way to see him and Joy, since if he’d meant to pay them an unannounced visit he would’ve gotten off the pike at the previous exit. No, he was headed for the Cape. Griffin advanced that theory to his mother when he called to tell her what had happened. “His suitcase was packed with summer clothes,” he told her. “He had two big tubes of sunblock.”
She hadn’t answered right away, which made him wonder if she was trying to compose herself. “I could have told him he’d never make it” was all she said before hanging up.
The B and B had a large wraparound porch, so Griffin brought his satchel full of student papers down and set up shop in a rocking chair in the sun, where he sat trying to remember how that famous Shakespeare sonnet about death went. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun …” was as far as he’d gotten when his cell vibrated, Joy calling him back.
“I forgot to ask,” she said. “Did Sid get ahold of you?”
“No,” he said, sitting up straight. Sid was his agent back in L.A., in his late eighties and still a legend in the business, despite his shrinking client list. Griffin sincerely hoped he was calling about a job. Money had been worrying him of late. Joy, who kept the books and wrote the checks, insisted they were fine, but if Laura got engaged, as she’d been warning them might happen soon, maybe even this weekend, there’d be a wedding to pay for, and a quick studio rewrite would be just what the doctor ordered. “When did he call?”
“Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned your grades in yet. It sounded like he meant for you to drop everything, hop on a plane and drop into the Universal lot by parachute.”
Joy, since they moved to Connecticut, had little patience with Sid, whose ongoing, albeit sporadic presence in their lives she considered vestigial, an appendix that was liable one day to rupture. He was also one of those Angelenos who never took time zones into account when telephoning. Four in the afternoon—seven back East, about the time Griffin and Joy usually sat down to eat—was when he took the bottle out of his desk drawer, unscrewed the cap and poured, then started calling people. She might have been less peeved, Griffin thought, if Sid was calling with work, but mostly he just wanted to reminisce about old Hollywood—Bogart and Mitchum and Lancaster and Holden—until nostalgia morphed into anger that the town was now overrun by “bitches,” his term for the current generation of young male stars, action-movie pretty boys pretending, not very convincingly, to be tough guys. “Not a one of ’em could take Renée Zellweger in a fair fight,” he was fond of observing. “You did the right thing getting out when you did, kid. Who needs it?”