“You mean just the two of us, or could our daughter come, too?”
“Unfair.”
It was Laura, her face a thundercloud, who’d spoken next, from the backseat. “You’re fighting,” she said, and Griffin, whose own backseat memories were still raw and vivid, felt a chill.
So, again, the headline? JOY WAS RIGHT. And nothing that followed in the fine print made that headline less than true. His wife, like Tommy, was a big-picture person. They both saw the whole, the entire structure, while Griffin tinkered with the characters’ gestures and dialogue, the smaller moment-to-moment truths of story and daily life, the tiny burrs under the narrative saddle. It was Joy’s ability to see the big picture that was responsible, he knew, for the fact she seldom harbored misgivings. She always knew in broad strokes what she wanted. It had been the same when they finally moved back East. Their Connecticut country house was the first place their realtor showed them, ten miles inland from the coast, an easy twenty-minute commute to the college. Large, rambling, inconvenient, full of character, on three acres and surrounded on three sides by woods, it was the house she’d been dreaming of since Truro. It had everything she wanted but the benign ghost. Yes, it had seemed more than they could afford and needed a lot of work, but she took it all in and judged correctly that it could be done, a room at a time if necessary, and so they’d done it, or rather hired it done, finally finishing last spring. Maybe if Griffin had done the work himself—if he’d been that kind of man, the kind Harve was—he might have felt the same sense of pride and accomplishment Joy got from being more involved, studying the magazines, choosing fixtures, riding herd on the contractors.
Why then, especially now, question the wisdom of the Great Truro Accord? Did he believe there was something fundamentally unfair or unwise about it? No, of course not. It wasn’t like he’d grown weary of their good life, their good marriage. That would be serious. Though he had to admit, despite Joy’s best efforts, he sometimes thought of the house as hers, not theirs, almost as if they’d divorced and she’d gotten it in the settlement. It was hers for the simple reason that it made her happy. She had what she wanted. Was it possible that her contentment was the true cause of his funk? Her ability to still want what she wanted so long ago? This was a failing?
It was almost as if his parents, who’d many years ago lost the argument over which set of parents he and Joy would end up imitating, were now whispering to him that they’d been right all along.
By the time Griffin finished his martini and ordered a prime rib, the two bar stools on his right freed up and a middle-aged couple took them. The woman, in her late forties, was all dolled up and taking in the Olde Cape Lounge as if it were just too wonderful for words and she meant to commit its every detail to loving memory. Her dress was cut low in front, revealing a body that, though thickened, remained somehow hopeful. Her companion, who looked a few years older, had a plunging neckline of his own, his maroon, long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to reveal a vast expanse of gray chest hair. He carried his sizable gut proudly, as if he imagined it might be the very thing that made him irresistible to women like the one he was with. In L.A. he’d have been cast as a lower-echelon mafioso, an expendable foot soldier, second-act fodder. Having arrived at the bar a full five seconds ago, he was annoyed the bartender was still shaking some other patron’s drink.
The woman was squinting at the sign above the bar. “What’s that say?”
“Beats me. Or it would if I gave a shit.”
“What kind of word is smirt?” She leaned forward to peer around him at Griffin. “Can you read that?”
Griffin confessed he couldn’t.
Her companion met his eye and shrugged, as if to suggest there was no accounting for what interested broads. You wanted a mystery to solve, you could start right there. “It’s like a proverb … a saying,” he told her. “It don’t mean nothin’.”
“It’s got to mean something. It’s like in The Da Vinci Code,” she said. “Everything means something.” She was leaning forward again to speak to Griffin. “He’s not a reader,” she explained. Then, to her companion, “I think it’s some kind of spell. Maybe to ward off evil spirits.”
“Bartenders is what it wards off,” he said. “I’m gonna go find the can. If our friend down there ever heads in this direction, order me a Maker’s. Get yourself whatever.”
“A cosmopolitan,” the woman said, scrunching up her shoulders with pleasure at the idea, the front of her dress gapping as she did. Griffin noticed, and she noticed him notice, with gratitude, unless he was mistaken. Something about her expression gave him to understand that she didn’t usually dress so provocatively. Tonight was special, and she meant for things to go well with the man who’d just abruptly abandoned her. Better than well, in fact. Though as a general rule they didn’t. “We’re going to figure out what that says,” she told Griffin, scrunching up her shoulders again. “You and me.”
How, he couldn’t help wondering, did you get to be this woman’s age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn’t so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness. Probably her companion believed the sign had no meaning because this absolved him from making an effort to decode it and insulated him from failures of both intelligence and imagination. Easier to cleave to the card counter’s arithmetic, which meant at least you weren’t a sap.
“That prime as good as it looks?” the man said when he returned from the gents. When Griffin said it was, he looked him over frankly, as if trying to decide whether he could be trusted to second a motion that he himself had just made. Apparently so, because when the bartender set down his second Maker’s, he said, “You could give us a couple of them prime ribs, I guess.”
“We’re going to eat here?” the woman said. Clearly, she hadn’t gotten all dressed up to eat at the bar.
The man rotated on his stool so he could survey the restaurant. The bar had been set up for diners, but a piano player was noodling show tunes in the main dining room, and that seemed to be what the woman had in mind. “This ain’t a bad spot.”
“It’s not that—”
“You’d rather wait another half hour so you can eat there?” He was indicating the nearest table, five feet away, where an elderly couple looked up from their fish, surprised to find themselves at the end of a large, hairy-chested stranger’s index finger, a negative example.
“Could we look at a menu, at least?” the woman said, staring at her cosmo, embarrassed.
He leaned back on his stool so she could have a clear, unobstructed view of Griffin’s food. “What about that don’t look good to you?”
“Fine,” she said without looking.
“Two menus,” the man told the bartender. “We don’t want to do nothin’ rash.”
When Griffin glanced in the back-bar mirror, the young Asian man he’d noticed earlier looked away. Had he, too, overheard the bickering couple?
Finishing up quickly, Griffin paid his tab, hoping he could slip away without the woman telling him no, he couldn’t leave, not yet, not until they’d figured out what the sign said. But he was lucky. As he slid off his stool, the bartender arrived with their two big slabs of bloody beef. He told himself not to look at her, but did anyway, just a quick glance, enough to see that she was quietly crying.
Outside, it had clouded over, the dark sky low and ugly, and as he unlocked the car door a fat raindrop hit him on the forehead. By the time he got the convertible’s top up, cold rain was leaping off the hood. He turned the key in the ignition, then turned it off again, thinking about the woman inside and also about Joy, about a morning, years ago, when he’d come upon her in the shower. He’d driven into campus and was parking in the faculty lot when he remembered he’d left a stack of graded papers on his
desk back home. He’d stayed up late to finish them, having foolishly promised to return them today. When he got back, he could hear the upstairs shower from the kitchen. Grabbing the papers, he poked his head in to say goodbye again, in case she’d heard him come in and was wondering why he’d returned.
She stood in the shower stall facing the spray, her forehead resting on the tile beneath the nozzle and most of the water pounding the glass door behind her. Though her shoulders were quaking violently, it wasn’t immediately apparent that she was sobbing. To Griffin it seemed impossible that she could be. When he’d left her at the breakfast table less than fifteen minutes before, everything had seemed fine. What could have occurred in the interim to provoke such sorrow? If something had happened to Laura she’d be frantically trying to reach him at the office, so that couldn’t be it. The life they’d dreamed of in Truro had finally come to full fruition. What was there to grieve about?
What came to Griffin, standing there, was that he wasn’t supposed to be witnessing this. Whatever heartbreak his wife was giving vent to now had been fully present half an hour ago, but she’d waited for him to leave. Nor, after he did, had she broken down there in the kitchen. She’d gone upstairs and taken off her robe and nightgown and gotten into the shower, where the evidence of her sorrow would be washed away immediately. How long did he stand there in the doorway, rooted to the spot, staring in stunned disbelief, before quietly backing out of the room, getting back in the car and returning to campus?
How good it would feel, Griffin thought, to go back inside the Olde Cape Lounge and coldcock the woman’s companion, knock him clean off his bar stool, bloody his fucking nose. Here she was, trying valiantly to be happy, and this asshole wouldn’t let her.
Instead he took out his cell and dialed Sid’s number. He’d called him half a dozen times that afternoon, always getting the answering machine. It was now eight-thirty, only five-thirty on the West Coast, but again the machine picked up. There was no point in leaving another message, so he hung up and scrolled down his contacts list, stopping at Tommy’s name. A moment later his old writing partner was on the line.
“Griff,” Tommy said, as if he’d been expecting the call. You through screwing around back there, shoveling snow? You coming back to work? That’s what Griffin expected him to say, not “Jesus, I was so sorry to hear about Sid.”
“Hear what about Sid?” But even as he asked, Griffin suddenly knew why today’s calls hadn’t been answered.
“I almost called you,” Tommy told him. “The poor bastard woke up dead, is what I heard. His housekeeper found him.”
Griffin looked out across what had been the parking lot and was now a lake. It was astonishing, really, how hard it was raining.
“What the hell’s that noise?” Tommy wanted to know. “Are you under attack or something?”
“It’s hailing,” Griffin said, realizing only as he said so that it was true. Semitranslucent pellets the size and shape of cold capsules were dancing off the hood of the convertible.
“Yeah, but who lives like that?” Tommy demanded. “I mean, voluntarily.”
“I can’t believe it,” Griffin said. “Sid called me yesterday. Left a message on my machine. I’ve been trying to reach him all day.”
“Come out for the service, why don’t you? You were one of his favorites. I could be wrong, but I’ve got this feeling he didn’t really have anybody.”
Sid had been Tommy’s agent, too, but his new partner, the one he’d briefly teamed up with after Griffin left, had been represented by one of the big agencies, and Tommy had moved on.
“Besides, it’d be good to see you. You want, I’ll introduce you to my guy. Bring Joy. We’ll all do something, go someplace we can’t afford and misbehave. Like the old days.”
He was tempted to tell Tommy that the old days were long gone, that he and Joy never misbehaved anymore, that the woman he was remembering didn’t exist. That day in the shower had been an anomaly, and he was grateful for that. His wife had every single thing she wanted, and he couldn’t remember the last time she’d changed her mind. And Griffin himself? If the woman Tommy remembered didn’t exist anymore, then probably he didn’t, either.
But of course he said none of this. They left it that Tommy would call when he found out details. Griffin hung up, but the phone rang before he could turn the key in the ignition, and Griffin, thinking Tommy must have forgotten to tell him something, picked up.
“I just want you to know you’re not fooling anybody,” his mother said.
“What are you talking about, Mom?”
“You’re going to scatter his ashes there, aren’t you? That’s why you were thinking about him.”
“Mom—”
“You always were sneaky. Even as a kid.”
And then she was gone, the line dead.
God, Griffin thought, it was raining hard. As if all the grief in the world were coming down from the sky.
6
Laura and Sunny
Griffin was worried that he and Joy would be among the first to arrive, but dozens of people were already milling around, drinking mimosas on the hotel’s back porch. From there a vast expanse of manicured lawn sloped a good hundred and fifty yards to the water’s edge.
“You made it,” Laura said, then she and her mother went into their customary clinch, hugging as if one of them had been in grave danger and they’d feared they might never see each other again. Actually, Joy’s journey the evening before had been harrowing. Unbeknownst to Griffin, cloudbursts of the sort he’d experienced in the parking lot of the Olde Cape Lounge had pummeled the entire region. Three different times she’d been forced to pull off the turnpike, and her car was a lunar landscape of hailstone pock-marks. Farther out the Cape, Laura and her friends had also gotten pounded. First bird shit, then torrential rain and hail. Suddenly Griffins everywhere were coming under attack (as Tommy had put it) from above. What next, frogs? He checked the sky, but it was a cloudless blue.
“You look—” Joy started to say “great,” Griffin could tell.
“—like Snow White,” Laura finished.
Which she did. Her bridesmaid’s dress might have been on loan from the Magic Kingdom. She also looked as happy as Griffin had ever seen her. His daughter had spent a long time between boyfriends, searching for Mr. Right with no interest at all in Mr. Right Now, which had made Joy proud. Griffin supposed he was proud, too, but he’d also been worried. As a girl she’d once flirted with the idea of a religious vocation, and he’d wondered if her willingness to put off intimacy might be a vestige of that romantic and utterly perverse impulse. But more likely it was exactly what Joy thought it was, a brave refusal to settle that was at long last paying off. She’d gone to a lot of her college friends’ weddings, and this was the first where she had someone of her own. She seemed to think she’d soon be engaged, and Griffin couldn’t imagine what he’d do, how he and Joy would console her, if that didn’t happen.
“Andy actually likes it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Men. No taste and plenty of it.”
“Speaking of Andy, where is he?” Joy said.
“Around,” their daughter sighed. “He disappears.”
Which gave Griffin pause. Was the boy naturally shy, or did he already understand that disappearance would become a necessary survival skill if he married into Laura’s family? He hadn’t met the rest of them yet but had probably heard stories, and of course he’d already overheard scores of half-hour phone conversations between Laura and her mother. If he turned out to be the one, Griffin would have to take him aside and validate his instincts.
“Tough duty for him,” Joy said, with genuine sympathy, since Andy wouldn’t know anyone at this particular wedding.
“He’s fine,” Laura said, turning to Griffin now. “Everybody loves him.” The hug she gave him was very different from the one she’d just given her mother. His assumed he was fine, maybe even indestructible, and he was glad if that’s how he seemed to her, though he had
to admit that it puzzled him, too. “I’m sorry about Sid, Daddy. Will you go out for the funeral?”
“Maybe. Tommy’s going to call when he hears—”
“There’s the boy,” Laura said, her face suddenly radiant, all thoughts of mortality evaporating. She’d spied her boyfriend halfway down the lawn, talking to one of the groomsmen under the big tent that had been erected for the reception. The wedding ceremony itself would take place by the water under an ornate arch. A hundred and fifty or so folding chairs had been set up there—yesterday, by the look of it, since several hotel employees were busy wiping them down with towels.
“By the way,” Laura said, looking at the card that Joy had picked up in the hotel foyer. “I’m really sorry about table seventeen. I wasn’t consulted.”
“The leftover table?” Griffin guessed.
She nodded. “You aren’t going to know anybody,” she said, then was visited by a happy thought. “Actually, that’s not true. You’ll know Sunny Kim.”
“Little Sunny?” Joy said.
“He’s about six-two now and very good-looking. Anyway, I should get back to the bridal party. I’ll tell A-boy you’re here.”
They watched her go, tripping down the lawn in her Snow White dress. Joy took Griffin’s hand. “Have you ever seen anyone so happy?” There was a certain wistfulness in her expression as she watched her daughter and this new boy she’d chosen, as if she knew all too well he could turn out to be Mr. Wrong and end up breaking Laura’s large, generous, trusting heart. Or maybe, Griffin thought, it was the knowledge that what was just now filling that heart to overflowing could in the end leak away, and that in thirty-four years, love’s urgency, if not love itself, might have dissipated.
While she studied their daughter, he studied her, trying to decide which it might be.
Then Sunny Kim emerged onto the porch, where he squinted into the bright sunlight. He hadn’t looked so tall the night before, but of course at the Olde Cape Lounge he’d been sitting down.