That Old Cape Magic (18 page)

“Joy,” he said, getting out of the car and giving her the best smile he could muster, “you look terrific.”
Which she did. She’d lost some weight, which showed most flatteringly on her face. Her eyes, though, revealed the strain of the last year, and a wave of guilt washed over him, its undertow jellying his knees. He could tell she was registering the physical changes in him as well, and these, he knew, were even more pronounced. What he’d been wondering since leaving the inn was whether they would embrace. He didn’t want to presume anything and reminded himself to react, not initiate, though now the moment arrived and his wife of thirty-five years was in his arms before he
could
react. Then just as quickly she stepped back before he could even evaluate what kind of hug it had been. This, he told himself, was probably how the next twenty-four hours would go. One moment moving on to the next with a terrible efficiency, before it could be really taken in. Dear God, how would he ever get through it?
“You look tired,” Joy told him. “Was it a rough flight?”
“Not particularly,” he said. “The sleeping thing’s gotten worse.” He actually hadn’t meant to tell her that, but three decades’ worth of intimacy was a hard habit to break. Was he trying to elicit sympathy?
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It’s been a little better the last couple weeks,” he lied. Actually it was worse, but having received the sympathy he’d elicited he now felt unworthy of it.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“I’ve got an appointment as soon as I get back,” he said, another lie. How many more would he have to tell to balance out the first true statement?
“It’s been a rough year,” she said, quickly adding, “Your mother, I mean,” lest he conclude she meant their being apart.
That first heart attack, back in August, had done serious damage, and the surgery necessary to repair it, the heart specialist had explained, was not without risk, especially for a woman her age. Without the operation she’d have only a year or two, maybe as little as six months. The upside of the surgery, assuming she didn’t suffer a stroke on the operating table, was significant. Years, they were talking, maybe a decade. “That idiot must think I’m enjoying my life, if he imagines I want another decade,” she told Griffin when they were alone. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. “That’s that, then,” she said after a moment’s silence, meeting his eye with what looked for all the world like satisfaction, as if this were the very news he’d been hoping for.
“It’s okay,” he said now, trying to help Joy out. “I knew what you meant.”
“Where’s … ?”
“In the trunk,” Griffin admitted, feeling himself flush.
Only when Joy regarded him as if he’d lost his mind did he realize she wasn’t asking about the whereabouts of his mother’s ashes. “Oh, you mean … sorry,” he said, flushing even deeper now. “She’s back at the inn.”
“You could’ve brought her to the dinner, Jack.”
And, incredibly, he again thought she was talking about his mother. Jesus! Was it going to be like this all night? Would he misread everything anybody said? “She thought it’d be easier on everybody if she skipped the rehearsal.”
Joy regarded him doubtfully. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Sure,” he said, feeling anything but.
“A couple of things, before we go in,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Daddy’s in a wheelchair now.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“He fell last month. He says it’s temporary, but Dot says no.”
“Dot?”
“Jack. He remarried. You know that.”
“I forgot, I guess.” Though it all came back to him now. Joy’s sisters had been furious. Marriage? At their father’s advanced age? It was beyond ridiculous. Joy had had to talk them out of boycotting the wedding.
“Also, he doesn’t make sense all the time.”
“That’s okay, neither do I,” Griffin said. Obviously.
“He does all right in familiar surroundings, but—”
“I’ll be aware.”
“Just so you know—regarding us?—I’ve warned everybody to be on their best behavior. They’ve all agreed to be civil.”
Back in the fall, when Joy’s family found out they’d separated and were probably headed for divorce, emotions had run high. Her twin brothers, Jared and Jason, had promised to do Griffin bodily harm when next they met. One of them (their voices, too, were identical) had somehow gotten his cell number and called him up, drunk, in the middle of the night. “I always knew you were a fucking asshole,” he said without bothering to identify himself.
“Jeez,” said Griffin, who at three in the morning was watching an old movie. By this time he wasn’t living with Tommy anymore but rather in his own tiny efficiency apartment. Most nights he didn’t even pull the bed out of the sofa. “Always? I wish you’d said something.”
“You better hope I never see you again,” the caller continued, music and barroom laughter in the background.
Griffin knew it had to be either Jared or Jason, but which? “Oh, I do, Jason,” he said, taking a flier.
“It’s not Jason, it’s Jared.”
“Yeah, but same deal.”
The other man was quiet for a minute. “What did my sister ever do to you? Why are you treating her like this?”
“Listen, Jared—”
“Because you don’t fucking deserve her.”
“I agree.”
“Yeah, well… you just better hope I never see you again,” he repeated. Griffin’s ready concurrence had apparently thrown him off track, and he was now trying to get back on as best he could.
“Where are you these days? Just so I know where not to go.”
“I’m stationed in Honolulu.”
“Okay, then. That’s easy enough.”
“I got a leave coming up, though. How about I fly to L.A. and kick your ass?”
“I’m going to hang up now, Jared.”
“You’re probably thinking I don’t know where you live, but I can find out. Don’t think I can’t.”
“I live on Bellwood Terrace. The Caprice. Apartment E-217.”
“I have my ways.”
“Good night, Jared.”
He hadn’t heard from either twin since, but was happy to hear they’d agreed to a truce during the wedding.
“I told them if they didn’t chill, they couldn’t come, and they both promised,” Joy went on. “I just hope you can tell them apart when you see them, because it pisses them both off when people get it wrong. Especially now that Jason’s out of the service and has some hair.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
“There’ll be lots of kids. Try not to look like you hate them.”
Yes, by all means
, his mother chimed in, startling him.
Pretend
.
Shut up, Mom
.
“And you know about the ceremony, right? That there’s a minister? Nothing in your face, but God will be invoked.”
“Which?”
The Protestant one. The god of gated communities and domino theories. Jesus. With a
J,
like the rest of them
.
Best to ignore her, Griffin decided. Telling her to shut up had never worked in life, either. “You don’t have to worry about me, Joy. I’ll behave.”
“I know you will,” she said. “I just …”
“What?”
“Well, I guess I wish we could’ve found a way to …”
“Keep it together one more year?”
“But we didn’t, did we?”
“My fault, not yours.”
She looked off into the distance, her eyes filling, then gathered herself. “There’s one question I have to ask.”
“Shoot.”
She took his hand lightly. “Are you going to be able to write these checks? Tonight and tomorrow?”
“I said I would.” Though in truth he was a little worried. He’d taken twenty-five K out of his retirement, hoping that would do the trick and trying not to panic as the guest list grew. Last week he’d taken out another ten just to be sure.
“You also said you weren’t working.”
What he’d actually said was that writing assignments had been few and far between since he and Tommy had been fired off the cable picture, and of course there was his mother. After the first heart attack, he’d returned to Indiana several times, trying to make his visits coincide with her major transitions—from the hospital to a rehab facility, then back home with hospice volunteers and, finally, to the hospice wing of the hospital and full nursing care.
In January he’d picked up a couple of film-school classes, adjunct status, so the pay was for shit, but it was something. He had a new agent, Tommy’s, but all she’d come up with was a quickie dialogue rewrite. This he’d done on his own. Since he’d moved out of Tommy’s place, they’d seen little of each other. They occasionally met for a drink, but Tommy always made some excuse to call it an early night. Griffin knew his old friend was at a loss to understand why Griffin didn’t just tuck his tail between his legs and go home and beg Joy’s forgiveness, as husbands in his circumstance invariably did, if they had any brains. “You
want
to end up alone?” he asked one night. “Is that it?” No, it wasn’t, but Griffin was hard-pressed to articulate what it was, exactly.
“I just don’t want any embarrassment for Laura,” Joy was saying. “I can help if—”
“No, I should be fine,” he told her. “Mom actually left some money.” Though this wasn’t true, either, really. Her insurance had just about covered the hospital and nursing-home expenses, the cost of cremation. He’d sold a few of her books and given the rest away. Her laptop and printer and a few pieces of furniture had netted a couple grand. His father had left the world in about the same financial condition. Not much to show for a life, he couldn’t help thinking, though Thoreau would have been pleased. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
“Were you able to get Dad’s ashes from my office?”
“Yes, but can we do that later?”
“Of course.”
Laura was waiting for them in the hotel foyer, her eyes full, Andy at her side. The expression on the young man’s face was frank puzzlement, and Griffin couldn’t imagine why until it dawned on him that halfway across the parking lot, without realizing it, he’d taken Joy’s hand.
“Daddy,”
his daughter said, choking on the word, and Griffin was glad he could think of nothing to say because he was incapable of the slightest utterance.
“I don’t have a doubt in the world about that boy,” Laura assured him as they entered the maze.
She and Andy had just parted as if it would be an eternity before they saw each other again, and she now turned to wave goodbye one last time before her fiancé and her mother disappeared from sight. His daughter’s idea that the two of them go for a stroll in the maze seemed to surprise neither Joy nor Andy, and that made Griffin apprehensive. Had they all thought further about Griffin’s presence at the wedding and decided against it? Did Laura plan to explain this to him among the tall yews, far from witnesses, in case he objected or broke down in tears? But of course he knew better than that, so he took a deep breath and told himself to relax. Laura’s need for a private, father-daughter moment wasn’t about him or the myriad ways he’d failed her and her mother since Kelsey’s wedding. She was just a bride, and fatherly reassurance was part of the program. Enjoy it. Who knew how long it would be before his presence was deemed necessary again?
“Andy’s terrific, darlin’,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder and feeling a wave of gratitude when she allowed herself to be drawn toward him. “It’s hard to imagine anyone more smitten, except for your old man, of course.” He meant this to elicit a smile, but it seemed to make his daughter even more thoughtful, and for a time they were quiet, turning first left, then right, then left again among the hedges, until he was good and lost.
“I guess the one I worry about is me,” she finally said. “What if I end up hurting him?”
“Why would you do that?” he said, feeling another wave of guilt. Would his daughter have harbored such self-doubt this time last year, or was it his doing?
A park bench had been thoughtfully placed near what Griffin guessed must be the far end, and here they took a seat. It was darker in the maze, very little of the remaining daylight penetrating its black branches, and Griffin was visited by a childish, irrational fear that they wouldn’t be able to find their way out. Laura would miss her wedding and that, too, would be his doing. He took her hand, unsure whether he meant to dispense comfort or receive it.
“Do you ever feel like you’re not who people think you are?” she said. “Like you’re pretending to be this person that people like? And the worst part is they all believe you?”
“Only every day,” he admitted. “Unless I’m mistaken, that feeling’s what people mean by original sin. Only sociopaths are spared. Trouble is, if you take it to heart you’ll never do anything, never pursue any happiness, for fear of hurting people.”
“I should ignore it?”
“Everybody else does.”
She seemed only partially convinced. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Grandma lately,” she said.
That surprised him, and he paused before responding, half expecting his mother, who was, after all, right over the hedge, in easy shouting distance, to offer her own two cents’ worth. Perhaps the maze had confounded her. “Any idea why?”
She shrugged. “Seeing her like that last December, I guess. All the tubes and the oxygen. She looked so tiny and all wasted away.”
How well he remembered. It had been December when she visited, just a couple weeks from the end. By then, mentally and emotionally exhausted, Griffin had checked into an extended-stay motel near the hospital. The doctors had warned him that patients like his mother sometimes lived on for months after being put on morphine, but it seemed to him that his mother was dying as she’d lived, on the academic calendar. He doubted she’d begin another semester.
The day of Laura’s unexpected visit had been a particularly difficult one. Several times during the night his mother had been awakened by nurses taking her vitals and talking noisily in the corridor outside her room. As a result she’d been irritable all morning, convinced she’d not been given her morphine, though both the duty nurse and her chart testified otherwise. At midday Griffin had gone back to his motel to shower and eat something. When he returned, he discovered that his mother had a visitor, her first, not counting himself. A woman was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, her back to the doorway, holding his mother’s hand. Joy, he thought, and felt some ice dam in his heart break apart at the possibility. Back in November she’d called him in L.A. to say she had to fly to Sacramento the following week. She could stop in Indiana going or coming back if he needed her to. He’d wanted desperately to say yes, but he heard himself say no, he had things under control. When he asked if everything was okay in California, she said yes, that it was just some family stuff she had to attend to. And not his family anymore, was her clear implication, which he had to admit he had coming.