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 track
ing.’ 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.”
At what point had his feelings for her been reciprocated? This Joy had refused to tell him, asking what difference could it possibly make, so he’d spent the long night scrolling back through their marriage, especially the times he’d behaved badly. There’d been a fair number, he had to admit. Had his wife already fallen for Tommy the day she told Griffin she hated jazz? Probably not, but the seed might well have been sown that early. It was also around this time, he recalled, that Tommy had been desperately trying to locate his birth mother. “Why, for Christ sake?” he’d asked him one drunken night, hoping to diminish his friend’s need for something that was bound to disappoint him. “Don’t you realize how fortunate you are?”
“Jack,” Joy said, cautioning him.
“No, look at the man.” Griffin appealed directly to her here. “He has no baggage. He moves about the world a free man. He possesses large, untapped reserves of the very ignorance that bliss was invented to reward.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but the thing is, she’s out there somewhere. And she’s older now. Things change. What if she’s wishing she never gave me up? What if she wants to tell me how sorry she is?”
“That’s what you don’t understand about parents,” Griffin explained. “They don’t apologize. We apologize. Take this last weekend.” Again he turned to Joy, who, knowing what was coming, looked away. “We’re summoned to Sacramento, right? It’s the twins’ birthday. The rest of the family’s going to be there so of course we have to be the
re, too. It’s Momma Jill making the pitch. On and on. When she finally lets her voice fall, we explain that we can’t—”
“Who explained?” Joy interrupted.
“They’re your parents,” Griffin pointed out.
Tommy and Joy exchanged a suffering look.
“Explain,” Griffin continued, “that we’re under deadline on this script—”
“Yet again,” Joy added.
“So,” Griffin said. “End of discussion? Hardly. Now it’s Poppa Jarve’s turn—”
“You promised you weren’t going to do that anymore,” Joy said, still gazing off into the distance. Griffin had recently taken to calling him (never to his face) not Harve but Jarve, so he wouldn’t be the only one in the family whose name didn’t begin with a J. Joy had found that funny at first but quickly changed her mind, claiming it was mean-spirited.
“And we have to go through the whole thing all over again.”
“Who has to?”
“Because to Harve, what you and I do for a living isn’t real work.”
“He does have a point,” Tommy said, raising his margarita so they could clink glasses.
“But we stand firm and—”
Tommy and Joy, together, this time. “Who stands firm?”
“So now, because we can’t go to Sacramento, everybody’s feelings are hurt.”
“We could’ve gone,” Joy corrected. “We chose not to.”
“But that’s my point,” Griffin said. “We’re adults. Shouldn’t we be able to choose? Every night this week you’ve been on the phone apologizing. First to your father, then your mother, then your sisters, then your father again.” He turned his attention back to Tommy now. “This is why our ancestors came to America. To ditch their symbolic parents. To become grown-ups in their own right.”