That Old Cape Magic (4 page)

Who needed him?
was the better question, according to Joy. Why couldn’t he understand that they’d moved on?
Toward the end of their conversations Griffin always reminded him that he was still a dues-paying member of the Guild and that if the right gig came along, especially in the summer … but before he could finish, Sid always interrupted. “My advice?” he said, as if he’d just extended such an offer. “Don’t lower yourself. You’ve got respectable, grown-up work now.” Joy had usually finished eating and was loading the dishwasher by the time Griffin managed to get off the phone.
This sounded different, though, and Griffin immediately felt the adrenaline rush, his mind racing in that old, calculating, savvy L.A. way he’d all but forgotten. If Sid was so worked up, it had to be a feature film, maybe one that had already gone into production with a horseshit script. Wouldn’t
that
be sweet. Some A-list actor had probably come on board at the last second and to accommodate this dickhead’s busy schedule they’d agreed to start shooting early. That would explain why they were coming to Griffin, who worked faster than anybody.
It took him about a second to invent this scenario and another to check it for holes, of which there were several. The most obvious was that nobody out there remembered whether he was fast or slow, because, face it, nobody remembered
him
. Still, it was a pretty entertaining sequence of events, sort of like imagining a woman totally out of your league falling in love with you. It could happen and, in fact, already had. Back when they met, every man he knew had been in love with Joy, who was not just beautiful but genuine, a quality in short supply everywhere and especially in Southern California.
Okay, so suppose for the moment that Griffin was right. Sid had found him something. A feature film. Everything would immediately go at warp speed. He’d have the fucked-up script in his hands by this evening, Sid would negotiate the deal over the weekend and Griffin would be on a plane to L.A. by Monday. Or to wherever they were shooting. It’d be a laptop gig. Late nights. Chinese (probably Thai, now) ordered in. Early wake-up calls. Pay commensurate. Just like the good old days.
“Universal?” Could that be right? Who did he know at Universal?
“No, I was just using Universal as an example.”
“But it’s a gig?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Joy said, clearly impatient. “It sounded like work. You can find out when you call him back.”
“But what did he say, exactly?”
“We didn’t talk. He just left a message on the machine. I called back and left
him
a message to call your cell.”
“Then why didn’t he?” Not that he really needed Joy to explain. He hadn’t called back because he had a list of names in front of him and probably had already penciled through Griffin’s. At this all-too-plausible explanation Griffin’s heart sank, though it, too, was flawed. Why leave an urgent message to call back if you were already moving on?
“You’re asking me?”
“No, just thinking out loud.”
“Have you called Laura yet?”
“Joy. I will, okay? Right now, in fact.”
Hanging up, he scrolled down his phone’s contacts list, pausing at LAURA before continuing to SID. Half a dozen times over the last year he’d come close to deleting Sid’s entry, but he’d been right not to, he thought, smiling. After four rings his agent’s machine picked up, inviting him to leave a message. Strange. Even with the three-hour time difference, he should’ve been in the office by now, or if not Sid himself, then Darlice, his longtime assistant. Had business slowed to the point where he’d had to let her go? Sid’s speed dial had once been a who’s who of Hollywood royalty, but one by one, according to Tommy, his important clients had moved on. Still, Sid answering his own phone? Impossible. It then occurred to Griffin that Tommy might know what Sid was offering. His old writing partner always prided himself on knowing whatever was in play. He was tempted to give him a call, except that every time he did the first thing Tommy wanted to know was whether he’d given up on “going straight” yet. To his way of thinking, screenwriting was a lot like stealing, and he’d warned Griffin that moving to Connecticut would be like Butch Cassidy’s going to Bolivia. When Griffin argued that he could just as easily write screenplays in New England and deliver them by e-mail attachment, Tommy just laughed and said, “You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”
Before he could make up his mind, he received another incoming call, and MOM was the warning displayed on the screen. What in the world did she want now, he wondered, letting it go to voice mail. There was a roof over the porch where he sat, but he leaned forward and scanned the sky anyway.
Laura answered on the first ring, sounding groggy, though it was nearly one in the afternoon. “Hold on,” she said, and he could hear her telling Andy, her boyfriend, to go back to sleep. “There,” she said, coming back on the line. “I’m out on the balcony. Last night we all stayed up to watch the sun rise. Alcohol may have been involved.”
“You should take it easy,” he said, immediately regretting it. Why on earth should she? She and her friends were still in their twenties, an age when you could both work and play hard, before it all started catching up with you. It would be years, at least a decade or two, before any of them started greeting the sunrise for a whole different set of reasons. “How’s Andy?”
“Great. Wonderful.” As if the words had not yet been invented to describe just how great, how wonderful. But then her tone immediately became serious. “What’s up with you and Mom?”
Laura had spent much of her adolescence terrified that one day he and Joy would split up. Most of her friends’ parents had divorced, traumatizing their youth, so, she reasoned, what was to prevent the same thing from happening to her? He and Joy seldom argued, but when they did, the first thing they had to do afterward was console their daughter. Telling her they both loved her, loved her more than anything, wouldn’t do the trick. No, what she wanted to hear was how much they loved each other. Nor, at twenty-six, had she outgrown this old anxiety. Just last year she’d confessed to Joy that she still had the occasional nightmare about getting a phone call from one or the other of them to say they were calling it quits.
“Nothing’s the matter, sweetheart. Your mother just got tied up with some meetings.”
She was quiet for a moment, and he expected further grilling, but instead she said, “Are you still going to Truro after the wedding?”
“Why would I go to Truro?”
“Not you,” she said. “The two of you.”
“Which two?” Perhaps because his mother had recently established a beachhead in his consciousness, his first thought was that Laura meant him and
her
.
“You and
Mom
, of course,” she said. “Is there someone else?”
Griffin assured her there wasn’t.
“Well, she said you discussed it.”
Griffin scrolled back through the last week’s worth of conversations with Joy, many of which, truth be told,
had
been at cross-purposes. But “Truro” did provoke the faintest of recollections, though far too smooth and slippery to grasp. “It’s possible,” he conceded. “But I might have to fly to L.A. right after the wedding. Sid may have found something for me.”
“Sid,” she repeated. “That man frightens me to this day. Remember how he used to pretend to be a dog and bark at me?”
Griffin chuckled. He hadn’t thought about that in years: Sid, down on his hands and knees, at eye level with a terrified Laura, barking and growling and refusing to quit, even after Griffin had picked her up and turned away from him as you would from an actual dog. And Sid, ignoring him, continued barking up at Laura, too much of a Method actor to stand up.
“Why would a grown man do something like that to a child?” she wanted to know, as if it was one of those childhood riddles that growing up hadn’t solved.
“I don’t think he knew any other children,” Griffin told her. “He was probably as scared of you as you were of him.” Which, oddly enough, had been his own parents’ clichéd wisdom to him about real dogs.
Laura, still reliving the experience, wasn’t interested in explanations. “And after we moved here—did I ever tell you this?—he called one night when you and Mom were at a party somewhere, and he just barked into the phone. I’d have been like fifteen, and it
still
scared the shit out of me.”
She giggled then, confusing Griffin until he realized Andy had joined her on the balcony and was making
ruff-ruff noises
. “Sounds like this would be a good time to let you go,” he said.
“Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight? We’re all going to this martini-and-tapas bar in Hyannis.”
“What time?”
“Nine.”
“I’ll be in bed by then. Asleep, probably.”
He’d intended this as a joke, half hoping she’d say, “Oh,
Daddy,”
and talk him into coming along, but she apparently took him seriously, maybe even deciding that being asleep by nine was appropriate for a man his age. “Okay, then,” she said, “but we’ll see you in the morning? You and Mom will be attending the wedding
together?”
She was joking now, he was pretty sure.
“Unless she meets someone along the way.”
“Goodbye
, Daddy.”
Hanging up, he remembered what the Truro thing was all about. By way of apology for the end-of-semester cock-up, Joy had suggested they drive out to the Cape after the wedding and see if the inn where they’d honeymooned still existed, maybe check in for a day or two. It’d be kind of romantic, she said, threading her fingers through his. There’d been a time when that particular gesture would have meant romance right then. Lately, it had come to mean that she might be amenable to the idea in a week or so, under the right circumstances, if he played his cards right, if he didn’t do anything between now and then to fuck things up. Which had made him grumpy enough to go to Boston without her.
The afternoon had grown pleasantly warm and, having slept poorly the night before, Griffin soon nodded off, the first of his student portfolios unread in his lap. A breeze awakened him an hour later, manuscript pages strewn all over the porch. Several had blown up against the railing, one slipping between the slats and impaling itself on a rosebush. After he’d retrieved the scattered pages and put them in order, three were still missing. He found one a block away, stuck to a telephone pole like a flyer for a lost pet. The other two were probably on their way to Nantucket. Jesus, he thought, his resemblance to his father wasn’t just physical. He’d been famous for losing student work, whole stacks of research papers going missing at once. “If you don’t want to read them, don’t assign them,” Griffin remembered his mother always saying when yet another batch disappeared without a trace and his father was forced to ask his students to resubmit their work. “I’d set the whole weekend aside to read them,” he said, feigning (she was certain) disappointment.
Griffin’s mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn’t? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions
(How long did you work on this?)
and then answering them herself
(Not long, one hopes, given the result)
. But such industry was possible, his father always countered, only because her courses were about a third the size of his own. Only the bravest, most ambitious English majors took her classes, which she explained was evidence of her rigor and he cited as proof that she was a bitch on wheels.
His father’s larger, more diverse classes made that laudable attention to detail impractical, or so he claimed. At the end of each paper he would affix a large letter grade and a general reaction like “Good” or “Could be better,” unless the student was a pretty young woman, in which case he’d suggest she come see him during office hours. With his male students, many of whom were athletes, he had an unspoken understanding. He would give them one letter grade higher than they deserved, and in exchange they were to leave him alone. His students enjoyed his affable, slightly distracted manner in the classroom, as well as his fondness for bad jokes and that he kept up on the issues of campus life, which other professors considered beneath them. He generally liked them, too, though at the end of the semester he wouldn’t have been able to pick a single one out of a police lineup, where, according to Griffin’s mother, most of them belonged. By contrast, she knew her students well enough to dislike them as individuals, for their intellectual laziness, their slovenly dress, their conventional instincts, their religious upbringing. They mostly disliked her, too, though a few wrote her after they graduated to thank her for the tough discipline she’d instilled. She always shared these notes with his father, remarking how little editing they required by comparison to the moronic screeds (often beginning
Yo, Prof Griff)
his former athletes sometimes sent him.
Griffin, now entering his second decade of teaching, feared that as a teacher he’d inherited the worst attributes of both parents. He was popular, like his father, but then screenwriting courses always were. His students appreciated that he had real experience, that several of his and Tommy’s screenplays had been produced and that, if pressed, he could tell them cynical Hollywood stories. He liked them personally far more than he expected to. Except for the scholarship kids, they were the children of entitlement and privilege, but it turned out that just meant lots of books and music around the house, plenty of piano lessons and travel to shape their personalities. Their politics were mostly liberal, like their parents’. All that was fine, but by temperament he was more like his mother than he cared to admit. He offered his students far more comment and advice than they wanted, and the vast majority paid it exactly no attention whatsoever, given that their subsequent efforts were riddled with the same mistakes. Lately, he’d begun to wonder if his father’s indolence might in the end be more beneficial. Informed that his work “could be better,” a student of his might actually pause to reflect on how, whereas Griffin’s detailed analyses of various shortcomings simply caused the heavily edited pages to become airborne. This screenplay with the missing pages (airborne ahead of schedule) was typical. Its narrative, he felt certain, cohered about as well without them. It would take him a good half an hour to explain why, labor that was probably for his own edification anyway.