That Old Cape Magic (8 page)

The words, somehow foreign and familiar at the same time, sort of reminded him of
The Canterbury Tales
, which he’d read long ago in college.
Pen, hand, ends, devil
and
no
were all recognizable words and should have been helpful in deciphering the whole, but somehow they weren’t. Though devoid of meaning,
smirt
particularly appealed to him. When Laura was a little girl, she compiled long lists of words she loved, based purely on how they looked and sounded, as well as others she hated. On which list, he wondered, would
smirt
have appeared?
“A couple martinis and it’ll make sense,” the bartender said when he noticed Griffin studying the sign.
“Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
“How about Grey Goosely?”
“Done.”
In the mirror that ran the length of the bar Griffin noticed an Asian man in his mid-to-late twenties. Wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit and a handsome tie, he also appeared to be studying the sign. When his eyes met Griffin’s in the mirror, he smiled and nodded, as if to say,
Okay, got it. How about you?
Griffin hoped his own look in return might be interpreted as,
Yeah, sure, me too
, then feigned interest in his cell phone until his drink arrived, unwilling to enter into conversation with some lonely tourist whose English might be marginal. As if on cue, the phone vibrated with an incoming e-mail, Joy writing to say that her meetings had run long, but she was finally on the road and she would stop for something to eat. Expect her around ten. Which was pure, unadulterated smirt. No way, on a Friday evening, with I-95 summer traffic heading for the Cape, would she get in before eleven.
And speaking of smirt, he himself had hoped to accomplish just two things today—get a good start on those portfolios and scatter his father’s ashes—and he’d managed neither. Not scattering the ashes was more disconcerting, and he really should’ve done the deed, wind or no wind. Why drive the length of Cape Cod, out and back, with your old man in the wheel well and
not
do such a simple thing? He supposed the Cape itself and the memories it had evoked since he crossed the Sagamore were part of it. And whether he cared to admit it or not, the unexpected phone call from his mother (and being doused with birdsmirt) had rattled him. But was there some further reluctance, some unconscious, unacknowledged scruple, at work? Some reason
not to
put his father to rest?
He supposed it was possible. Joy noticed his bouts of insomnia had begun right about the time his father was found on the Mass Pike, and claimed the two had to be related, as well as to what she described as his recent funk. He didn’t know what to call it, only its name was
not
Professor William Griffin. He had been restless, though, give Joy that much, and Sid’s call, together with Griffin’s inability to reach him, had intensified that. Trying to reread “The Summer of the Brownings” hadn’t helped, either. Suddenly it was as if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyhood self were all clamoring for attention.
This was profoundly silly. After all, his parents hadn’t played a dramatic role in his life since the seventies. That’s what heading west instead of east for college, and later going to film school, had been about, and staying in L.A. and marrying a girl who hadn’t done graduate work. Like Huck Finn he’d lit out for the Territories at his first real opportunity. The problem seemed to be that you could put a couple thousand miles between yourself and your parents, and make clear to them that in doing so you meant to reject their values, but how did you distance yourself from your own inheritance? You couldn’t prevent your hair from thinning or your nose from taking over the center of your face. Even worse, what if he hadn’t rejected his parents’ values as completely as he’d imagined? Joy maintained, for example, that he was inclined to locate happiness not in the present, as she did, but in some vague future. “And this reminds us of whom?” she often wanted to know. But was this his nature, as she implied, or just nurture? When he was growing up, his family had lived in a different house every year, renting from professors who were away on sabbatical. That was the reason he hadn’t ever had a really good friend until Peter Browning. The Griffins were never in one place, nor he in one school, long enough. Often they hadn’t completely unpacked their boxes from one move before they had to repack them for the next. University living, his parents called it, as if it were superior in all respects to how other people lived, “trapped” in a single house.
No doubt about it, they were born renters, his parents. And the houses of senior faculty were gracious and the rents cheap, at least until word got around how careless Griffin’s parents were with other people’s possessions. One professor returning from a European sabbatical would find that her china service for ten had become a service for seven, another that his favorite Queen Anne chair, now missing a leg, had been relocated to the damp basement. “When we left for Paris,” they’d say, “there was a blender on the kitchen counter.” To which Griffin’s mother would reply, “Oh,
that
piece of crap,” as if to suggest that its owner owed them a debt of gratitude for putting the offending appliance out of its misery. One year they’d nearly burned down a colleague’s house by starting a grease fire in a cast-iron skillet and trying to put it out with cold water. The worst had been the year they’d gotten a beautiful old Victorian rent free. The only thing the elderly professor who owned it had asked of them was to make sure the pipes didn’t burst during a cold snap. If it got below zero, she reminded them, they should leave the kitchen faucet running when they went to bed. She seemed fixated on that scenario, actually, calling twice from Italy to make sure the pipes were okay, because she’d heard the winter was brutally cold. “She doesn’t even realize she’s projecting, the frigid bitch,” Griffin’s mother remarked after hanging up. “Pipes my ass,” his father added. “What she wanted to impress on us was that she’s in Tuscany while we’re stuck in fucking Indiana.” But that very night an arctic clipper had blown in, the pipes burst, and by morning the whole first floor was underwater.
Eventually, people either refused to rent to the Griffins or required huge deposits and locked away anything of value in a closet. That last tactic didn’t work, though, because a locked closet was both an affront and a challenge, and his father’s one physical skill was as a picker of cheap padlocks. By the time Griffin was in junior high, his parents were reduced to renting damp, drafty, decrepit dumps on fraternity row, and even these they managed to leave the worse for wear. “Houses are nothing but trouble,” they told him over and over, every time something went wrong, though even as a boy he understood the more commonly held view was that houses were fine, it was the
Griffins
that meant trouble.
The way his parents saw it, renting allowed them to remain flexible, so if a job came along at Swarthmore or Sarah Lawrence they wouldn’t be saddled with an unsellable house in the Mid-fucking-west. And, of course, the money they saved by renting would then be available for a down payment when the right property on the Cape finally came along. Except they never managed to actually save. Indeed, they exhibited the professional humanist’s utter cluelessness where money was concerned. They bought on impulse, often things that required assembly, saying,
how hard could it be
, then finding out. Bookshelves invariably had at least one shelf where the unfinished side faced up, its rough edge facing out. When you pulled open the upper-right-hand drawer of a desk, its lower-left-hand one opened in noisy sympathy. They gravitated to failed technologies like eight-track tapes and Beta recorders.
This carelessness was amplified in automobiles. His father specialized in rear-end collisions in the parking lots of grocery stores and shopping malls. The crashes all occurred without warning. The first sign that anything was amiss came with the impact itself, followed by the shriek of metal twisting, the shattering of glass and a moment of deep silence before his father, studying the rearview mirror, would say, “Where the hell did
he
come from?” Griffin, as a kid, had actually been in the car for most of these accidents, never seatbelted that he could remember, and in childhood often had a stiff neck. “Do you realize that sixteen-year-old boys on learner’s permits get better rates than we do?” his mother complained to their insurance agent. “Sixteen-year-old boys have fewer collisions,” the man told her. The cop who’d talked to him at the turnpike rest stop had noted that his father’s dented trunk was secured by a bungee cord, testimony to a recent accident, and Griffin had to explain that it would’ve been far more unusual if the trunk had
not
been mangled, and also that the accident in question probably hadn’t been that recent. His father had been the sort of man who considered the bungee cord a permanent solution, at least as permanent as the car itself. “He was an English professor,” he explained.
For the first several years of their marriage, with the Great Truro Accord temporarily on hold, Griffin and Joy had lived almost as nomadically as his parents, moving from apartment to apartment, as people often did in L.A. if they were young and worked in “the industry.” Sometimes they changed apartments to be closer to the ocean, other times to be closer to work. Or a new complex offering better amenities—a nicer pool, or Jacuzzi, or tennis courts—would open up. Once they’d even moved to be closer to a favorite restaurant. “This place is so much better,” they agreed after each move, settling into their new surroundings. “Why didn’t we think to do this sooner?” They didn’t have or want a lot of possessions, and friends like Tommy and his wife, Elaine, always helped with the moves, which was sort of fun, and of course they returned the favor. There were no trick knees yet, no stiff lower backs. Every other weekend, it seemed, there’d be a housewarming party somewhere. Back then, Joy also enjoyed feeling footloose and fancy-free, spending their money in restaurants and running off to Mexico when Griffin and Tommy landed a lucrative gig. She and Elaine were good friends, and they loved lounging around the pool while “the boys” banged away toward their deadline at the portable typewriter set up on the balcony above.
But then Tommy and Elaine split up, and overnight things began to change. Little stuff, mostly. For instance, Joy had always worn her hair straight and long, which Griffin loved, but one day he came home and found her shorn and styled. “I can blow it dry,” she explained. “Ten minutes and I’m done.” He doubted it could possibly take that long. Then, other things. Instead of keeping one or two bras on hand for when they visited her parents, Joy’s top drawer was suddenly crammed full of them, and when he asked about this she replied that she couldn’t very well go through her whole life braless, could she? A rhetorical question, apparently. Not long after this she told him, “I woke up yesterday morning, and for some reason I was thinking about Truro.” Remembered, “for some reason,” that the life they were now living wasn’t what they’d planned. Okay, it had been fun, she admitted, but was all this moving around and jaunting off to Mexico natural? (Again, rhetorical.) The whole time she was growing up, she reminded him, not counting the place they rented in Maine, her family had lived in just two houses, the one in Syracuse and the other, after her father got transferred, in Orange County. “It’s time we stopped pretending to be your parents,” she concluded, “and started pretending to be mine.”
If this included a gated community in Sacramento, Griffin wasn’t so sure. Still, until Joy put it into words, it hadn’t occurred to him that this was what they’d been doing. He’d always assumed that the way they lived was, if anything, a repudiation of his parents. Certainly that was how
they
viewed it. Their son
choosing
to live on the West Coast? Who wrote television scripts instead of books? Who’d chosen a profession where you didn’t get summers off? Why, he didn’t even own a decent tweed jacket. But okay, point taken. Yet, even if their nomadic ways
were
an unconscious reflection of his parents’ behavior, did that mean that it was now time to start consciously reflecting Joy’s? Worse, he suspected that his wife’s just happening to remember the Great Truro Accord “for some reason” wasn’t entirely credible. Her whole family loved to interfere in their lives, and he sensed their shadowy presence behind the string of changes. Was it her sisters—one newly overweight, the other newly religious—who’d convinced her it was time to start wearing a bra again, to get a more “grown-up” hairstyle? For years now Jill, whom Joy talked to on the phone every other day or so, had been wondering out loud, “Do you kids think you’ll ever settle down?” Or, as her father, who gravitated to sports metaphors, put it, “What’s your endgame, is what I’d like to know.”
Griffin assumed that the true subject here was children. Joy’s sisters had started their families right after they married (or, in Jane’s case, according to his arithmetic, a couple months before), whereas he and Joy were pushing thirty without a breeding time line. But maybe it wasn’t just about kids. “You aren’t a real adult until you have a mortgage you can’t afford,” Harve liked to observe. “That’s when you find out if you can hit the long ball or if you’re just hoping to draw a walk.”
Harve could speculate and philosophize all he wanted, but in one respect, real estate, the terms of the Great Truro Accord actually worked in Griffin’s favor. Joy hadn’t forgotten her dream house. Far from it. But that house simply didn’t exist, at least not in Southern California, and even if it had, given the breathtaking home prices in and around L.A., they wouldn’t be able to afford it. He would’ve sworn they were in complete agreement about this, but suddenly the whole house issue was on the table in a new and unexpected way. The outrageous cost of real estate here, Joy now argued, was actually a reason to buy something as soon as possible, even if it was a crappy tract house in the Valley (Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift!). Harve agreed, not that Griffin cared. Every year they didn’t enter the market put them that much farther behind the eight ball (Jesus, now a pool metaphor). It would be different, Joy conceded, if they’d been putting money aside toward a down payment, but here too they’d been imitating Griffin’s parents by