That Old Cape Magic (15 page)

Thus far, Griffin had held his own. He’d always wielded superior rhetorical skills
(Do you ever win an argument with this guy?)
and over the last decade he’d honed them further in the classroom. But admit it, he wasn’t on his game. He never should’ve allowed their dispute to expand beyond her and Tommy, and even to his own ears, his voice, though he was careful not to raise it, sounded shrill, almost desperate. Usually, by this point Joy would have become frustrated and given in, yet the quarrel ground on. It was like a poker game where the wagering suddenly accelerated, each player raising instead of calling, then raising again, until all the blue chips were in the center of the table, more than either could afford to lose, or, maybe, in this case, to win. His father’s death, she kept insisting, was the true source of his current malaise, and her steadfast refusal to surrender this causal linkage had thrown him off his stride. Truth be told, the chronology did give him pause, because the idea of returning to L.A.
had
taken root not long after his father’s car was found at the turnpike rest stop. Since then he’d become more aggressive about looking for film work, checking with Sid every couple of weeks to see if he’d heard of any assignments he might be right for. He never made those calls when Joy was around, but of course they’d showed up on their long-distance bill, and she’d put two and two together. And he couldn’t really blame her for being angry that he’d sent up a trial balloon with the dean of faculty before broaching the subject with her. Why had he done that? Because he’d been pretty sure she’d hate the idea, maybe even veto it preemptively. So he’d gone ahead without her.
Reluctantly, Griffin was forced to entertain the possibility that he was in the wrong. Maybe her case against him wasn’t airtight, but it was fundamentally sturdy, whereas his defense against her accusations was merely skillful, artifice teetering on the head of a pin. Panicking, he’d tried to retreat to more solid ground. If he had a few secrets about phone calls to his agent and conversations with his dean, what about the whopper she’d been keeping all these years?
He
wasn’t the one who’d fallen in love with somebody else;
she
had. And indeed it was this knowledge, the details of it, that kept playing on a loop through his brain, like a pivotal scene in a script (yes, Joy would hate the metaphor, but there you were) that was out of kilter, jeopardizing the whole.
INT. TASTEFUL B&B ROOM: NIGHT.
A man (mid-fifties, slender and moderately good-looking despite his receding hairline) is peering out the window, but his haggard face is reflected back at him in the glass. A woman his age, beautiful but despondent, is seated on the four-poster bed, her head in her hands. Clearly, they’re arguing and have been for some time.

HUSBAND

Is it over? Can you at least tell me that much?

WIFE
(looking up in disbelief)

Over? Can’t you see it never even started?

HUSBAND

Okay, say I believe you and you never—

WIFE

Say
you believe me?

HUSBAND
(ashamed of himself)

Even if it never… My question is, are you afraid to see him again? Is that why you won’t go to L.A.?

WIFE

I don’t know …Maybe.
He turns to face her now. Neither speaks for a long beat.

HUSBAND

Explain something to me. How come you get to be disappointed with our life and I don’t?

WIFE
(shaking her head)

Don’t you see? I’m
not
disappointed. That’s why I’m not willing to risk what we have. We’re talking about something that happened a long time ago. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I let my feelings get the better of me, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry yours got hurt. But
I chose you
. Aren’t the last two decades proof?
But he still can’t believe she was in love with someone else, ever.

HUSBAND
(petulant)

Proof you love your daughter.

WIFE

I do love our daughter.

HUSBAND
(bitter)

Plus, how would you explain to Harve and Jill and Princess Grace of Morocco that you loved somebody new? That would mean you changed your mind about something, and nobody in your family ever does that.
CLOSE ON THE HUSBAND. He knows better than to continue in this vein, but he can’t help himself.

HUSBAND (CONT’D)

What is it your father always says? Nobody’s ever disproved the domino theory?

WIFE

At least we’re finally addressing the real subject.

HUSBAND
(incredulous)

Which is?

WIFE

Our parents.

HUSBAND

Hey,
my
parents couldn’t be more out of the picture. They have been right from the start.

WIFE
(
so
sad)

Can’t you see, you’ve got it all wrong. You always blame
my
parents for intruding into our lives. You think I’m spared when you take your parents’ phone calls in the den with the door closed.

HUSBAND

Let me see if I understand this. Are you really saying my parents are the reason you fell in love with Tommy?
ON THE WOMAN NOW. She’s on her feet, facing him, gaining confidence. In all their married lives, she’s never so openly confronted him before.

WIFE

I’m saying that out of sight isn’t out of mind. You think you don’t let your mother into your life—into
our
lives—but you blame
her
when a bird craps on you. Think about that. You believe your father’s gone because he died, but he
isn’t
gone. He’s haunted you this whole year. Right now he’s in the trunk of your car, and you can’t bring yourself to scatter his ashes. Do you think maybe that
means
something?
Griffin came to a stop sign, or what he assumed was a stop sign—something octagonal, possibly red. He listened for the approach of an oncoming vehicle, but there was no sound, nothing except the tolling of that far-off buoy. He took a left, recalling, or seeming to, that this would take him through the village and down to the harbor. But that was somehow wrong, because almost immediately the road was lined on both sides by dark, ghostly trees instead of houses, which meant he was heading away from the harbor. Never mind. It didn’t have to be the harbor, or even saltwater. All that had seemed to matter yesterday, but not today. The important—no, critical—thing was to dispose of the man and, in doing so, win the only winnable part of yesterday’s argument. That was the crux of Joy’s case. That
his
parents, despite their physical absence, had intruded on their marriage as much as hers had, that he perversely wanted them to. If he could prove her wrong about this, then maybe her whole argument would collapse.
Outside of town the fog was, if possible, even thicker, and Griffin’s hair was now as wet as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. Turning on the wipers helped a little, but his headlights, even on low beams, just made matters worse. Every quarter mile or so he’d pass a mailbox that marked a narrow dirt road where he could turn around and head back into town, but for now, not wanting to appear indecisive even to himself, he was content to keep moving forward. A minute later he passed beneath a highway—Route 6, he guessed—which explained why he hadn’t come to the shore yet. In another mile or two, if this road was reasonably straight, he’d reach the National Seashore on the Atlantic side. Hard to imagine a more remote stretch, especially at this hour of the morning and in this weather. No chance he’d be interrupted there.

WIFE

You want this to be about one day—the day you found me so brokenhearted—but it isn’t. You’re unhappy every day, and it’s getting worse. You’re a congenitally unhappy man.

HUSBAND
(choking back his emotions)

I’m never happy? I wasn’t happy last night?

WIFE

Okay, last night, for a few short hours, you were. But you always retreat, Jack. It’s like you’re afraid it won’t last. Like if you admit to being happy, someone will steal it from you.

(A BEAT, while he considers this)

Yes, there was a time when my heart went out to Tommy, and yes it got broken. But I mended it. I mended my heart.
ON THEIR REFLECTION IN THE GLASS. His, in the F.G., goes OUT OF FOCUS as hers comes in.

WIFE

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to mend yours, because God knows I’ve tried. I’m exhausted from trying.

HUSBAND
(looking gut-shot)

Maybe you should stop.

WIFE
(heartsick, looking away)

I have. That’s what you’ve noticed these last few weeks. Me stopping.
FADE OUT.
Congenitally
unhappy. The word was not hers, of course. In thirty-four years he’d never known her to use it until yesterday. But Tommy loved it, even though Griffin always had to correct his spelling—
congental
or
congentle—
on the page. (“Think of genitals,” he’d advised, to which Tommy had responded, “I don’t like to think of genitals. I’d rather spell it wrong.”) No doubt he’d used the word yesterday when Griffin was in the shower and she called him back to explain why she wouldn’t be coming along to L.A. Griffin could imagine how the conversation had gone, Joy confiding how their marriage was deteriorating, how they seldom made love anymore, how his ambient discontent had deepened to the point of pathology, how he’d been driving around for the better part of a year with his dad’s ashes in the trunk of his car. And Tommy—because in the end he was Griffin’s friend—advising her not to be hasty. “This shit ain’t new, kiddo. The guy’s always been a congenital malcontent. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Remember the famous house categories, back when you guys were looking? Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift? Tell me that isn’t Griff all over. This is the man you married when you could’ve married me, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.”
Griffin couldn’t help but smile at this imagined conversation, how he didn’t come off very well even when he himself held the reins of invention. But it was true that back then he’d adopted his parents’ mantra. Tommy and Joy had made relentless fun of him, even after he explained that he’d just been riffing on how his parents had classified at a glance every single property in the fat Cape real-estate guide, that
his
use of these same categories was meant to be ironic. But Tommy hadn’t bought any of that. “Explain irony to me,” he said. “I went to school, but that’s a concept I never really understood. Ironic guys like you confuse me especially.”
When the trees fell away on both sides of the road, Griffin heard surf pounding nearby, though he knew how deceptive the sound could be. One summer (before the Brownings or after?) his parents had rented a place with a second-story deck, from which you could see the ocean beyond the dunes, a good quarter-mile away. Each night he fell asleep in profound stillness, only to awaken to crashing waves right outside his window, as if during the night the turning tide had breached the dunes. But when he rose and joined his father on the deck, the ocean was right where it had been the day before. His father had explained it, how the wind had changed during the night, now pulling the sound toward them instead of pushing it away, and this made sense, the way science always does, because you know it’s supposed to. But the next morning, when Griffin again awoke to the same thunder, the explanation felt inadequate to the experience. The sound was just too close, too loud, and again he expected to find the lower rooms of their rental cottage flooded. Only repetition—the same thing happening night after night—had diminished and finally banished the magic.
But the beach
was
near. He could smell the salt, and this close to the shore, the fog had begun to dissipate. Squinting, he was able to make out a line of rolling dunes and beyond it a pale yellow orb, like a lamp with a forty-watt bulb covered by a sheet, near where he imagined the horizon to be. For a while the road he was on paralleled the shore, then abruptly ended in a large dirt parking lot. A lone pickup truck was parked there, probably some intrepid fisherman trying to get a jump on the blues.
A weathered boardwalk ran between the dunes, at the end of which Griffin slipped off his sandals. Looming ahead was some sort of structure—a building on the beach, maybe, or a ship at anchor?—but he couldn’t tell which until he got closer and the ghostly shape resolved itself into a restaurant with a large wraparound deck and a ship’s mast growing up through the roof. A rear door stood wide open, and he could hear someone moving around inside. The owner, probably, someone swamping the place out before the other employees arrived. Possibly even a thief. If whoever it was saw him and demanded to know what he was up to, what would he do? Raise his father’s urn by way of explanation? He hurried along before any such embarrassment could come to pass.
Almost immediately he could tell his plan was deeply flawed. From the boardwalk the waves looked to be breaking about knee-high, but now he saw it was more like waist-high. The restaurant had become just a gray silhouette in the mist behind him, and he was reluctant to go much farther up the beach. After all, the building marked the entrance to the parking lot, and if he allowed it to disappear completely, how would he find his car again? What he’d been hoping for, he realized, was a stone jetty or a pier, something that jutted into the water, something he could walk out on and, at the far end of, release the ashes into the churning sea. But there was nothing of the sort, which meant he’d have to wade out into the surf, submerge the urn and open it into the undertow. That would require dexterity, timing and, he feared, a good measure of luck. The lid was secured by two flimsy-looking metal clasps that would probably fly open if he got hit by a big wave before he was ready. It’d be more sensible to dig a hole at the water’s edge, pour the ashes in and cover them over. Later, when the tide came in, the push and pull of the waves would mingle the ash with sand and water, and his father would at last become part of the grit of the world. How different was that, really, from pouring the contents of the urn off the end of a dock or over the side of a boat?
Well, it
was
different. Plus, now that he looked more carefully, he saw the tide was already in. The water might not come any farther up the beach.