That Old CapeMagic

1 A Finer Place

Though the digital clock on the bedside table in his hotel room read 5:17, Jack Griffin, suddenly wide awake, knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. He’d allowed himself to drift off too early the night before. On the heels of wakefulness came an unpleasant realization, that what he hadn’t wanted to admit yesterday, even to himself, was now all too clear in the solitary, predawn dark. He should have swallowed his petulance and waited the extra day for Joy.

It had been their long-established habit to flee the campus as soon as Griffin taught his last class. Usually, they hopped on the Freedom Trail (his term for I-95), drove to New York and treated themselves by checking into a good hotel. During the day he would evaluate his small mountain of student portfolios while Joy shopped or otherwise amused herself, and then, evenings, they’d catch up on movies and go to restaurants. The whole thing reminded him of the early years of their marriage back in L.A. It cost a small fortune, but there was something about spending money they didn’t really have that made him optimistic about more coming in-which was how it had worked in L.A.-and it got him through the portfolios.

This year Kelsey’s Cape Cod wedding had royally screwed up their plans, making New York impractical, though he’d been willing to substitute Boston. But Joy, assuming that thanks to the wedding all the usual bets were off, had messed things up further by scheduling meetings on the day after his last class. “Just go,” she said when he expressed his annoyance at the way things were working out. “Have a boys’ night out in Boston and I’ll meet you on the Cape.” He’d squinted at this proposal. Didn’t you need more than one to have a boys’ night out? Or had Joy meant it to be singular, one boy celebrating his boyness? Was that how she’d understood the phrase all her life, as singular? Joy’s relationship to the English language was not without glitches. She was forever mixing metaphors, claiming that something was “a tough line to hoe.” Row to hoe? Line to walk? Her sisters, Jane and June, were even worse, and when corrected all three would narrow their eyes dangerously and identically. If they’d had a family motto, it would have been You Know Perfectly Well What I Mean.

In any event, his wife’s suggestion that he go on without her had seemed less than sincere, which was why he decided to call her bluff. “All right,” he said, “that’s what I’ll do,” expecting her to say, Fine, if it means that much to you, I’ll reschedule the meetings. But she hadn’t said that, even when she saw him packing his bag, and so he’d discovered a truth that other men probably knew already-that once you’d packed a bag in front of a woman there was no possibility of unpacking, or of not going and taking the damn bag with you.

Worse, Joy, who preferred to watch movies on DVD rather than in a theater, as they were meant to be seen, had given him a list of films he was forbidden to see without her, and of course these were the only ones worth seeing. He’d spent an hour looking through the restaurant guides provided by the hotel, but couldn’t decide on one, or even on what kind of food he wanted. Griffin had no trouble making these sorts of decisions when she was around, but for some reason, when he had only himself to please, he often couldn’t make up his mind. He told himself this was just the result of being married for thirty-four years, that part of the decision-making process was imagining what his wife would enjoy. Okay, but more and more he found himself stalled, in the middle of whatever room he happened to be standing in, and he realized that this had been, of course, his father’s classic pose. In the end Griffin had ordered room service and watched a crappy made-for-TV movie, the kind he and Tommy, his old partner, had been reduced to writing that last year or two in L.A. before he’d gotten his teaching gig and moved back East with Joy and their daughter, Laura. He’d fallen asleep before the first commercial, confident he could predict not only the movie’s outcome but also half its dialogue.

In order not to dwell on yesterday’s mistakes, he decided to put today in motion by calling down to the bell captain for his car. Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, he’d checked out of his Back Bay hotel. The whole of Boston fit neatly into the rectangle of his rearview mirror, and by the time the Sagamore Bridge, one of two that spanned the Cape Cod Canal, hove into view, the sky was silver in the east, and he felt the last remnants of yesterday’s prevarications begin to lift like the patchy fog he’d been in and out of since leaving the city. The Sagamore arched dramatically upward in the middle, helping to pull the sun over the horizon, and though the air was far too cool, Griffin pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and put the convertible’s top down, feeling truly off the reservation for the first time since leaving home in Connecticut. There was something vaguely thrilling about not being where his wife thought he was. She liked to know what people were up to, and not just him. She called Laura most mornings, her brain still lazy with sleep, to ask, “So… what’s on the agenda for you today?” She also phoned both of her sisters several times a week and knew that June was having her hair done tomorrow morning and that Jane had put on five pounds and was starting a diet. She even knew what new folly her idiot twin brothers, Jared and Jason, were engaged in. To Griffin, an only child, such behavior was well over the line that separated the merely inexplicable from the truly perverse.

Zipping along Route 6, Griffin realized he was humming “That Old Black Magic,” the song his parents had sung ironically-both university English professors, that’s how they did most things-every time they crossed the Sagamore, substituting Cape for black. When he was growing up, they’d spent part of every summer on the Cape. He could always tell what kind of year it had been, money-wise, by where and when they stayed. One particularly prosperous year they’d rented a small house in Chatham for the month of August. Another year, when faculty salaries were frozen, all they could afford was Sandwich in June. His parents had been less wed to each other than to a shared sense of grievance over being exiled eleven months of every year to the “Mid-fucking-west,” a phrase they didn’t say so much as spit. They had good academic careers, though perhaps not the stellar ones that might have been predicted, given their Ivy League pedigree. Both had grown up in the Rust Belt of western New York State, his mother in suburban Rochester, his father in Buffalo, the children of lower-middle-class, white-collar parents. At Cornell, where they’d both gone on scholarship, they’d met not only each other but also the kind of friends who’d invited them home for holidays in Wellesley and Westchester and for summer vacations in the Hamptons or on the Cape. They told their parents they could earn more money there, which was true, but in fact they’d have done anything to avoid returning to their parents’ depressing upstate homes. At Yale, where they did their graduate work, they came to believe they were destined for research positions at one of the other Ivys, at least until the market for academics headed south and they had to take what they could get-the pickings even slimmer for a couple-and that turned out to be a huge state university in Indiana.

Betrayed. That was how they felt. Why go to Cornell, to Yale, if Indiana was your reward? But they’d had little choice but to hunker down and make the best of their wretched timing, so they dove into teaching and research and committee work, hoping to bolster their vitae so that when the academic winds changed they’d be ready. They feared the Princeton and Dartmouth ships had probably sailed for good, but that still left the Swarthmores and Vassars of the world as safe if not terribly exciting havens. This much, at least, was surely their due. And before going up for promotion and tenure (or “promotion and tether,” in their parlance) in the Mid-fucking-west, they’d each had opportunities-she at Amherst, he at Bowdoin-but never together. So they stayed put in their jobs and their marriage, each terrified, Griffin now suspected, that the other, unshackled, would succeed and escape to the kind of academic post (an endowed chair!) that would complete the misery of the one left behind. To make their unhappy circumstances more tolerable, they had affairs and pretended to be deeply wounded when these came to light. His father had been a genuine serial adulterer, whereas his mother simply refused to lag behind in this or anything else.

Of course all of this was adult understanding. As a boy, the reluctant witness to his parents’ myriad quarrels and recriminations, Griffin had imagined that he must be the one keeping them together. It was his mother who eventually disabused him of this bizarre notion. At his and Joy’s wedding reception, actually. But by then they had finally divorced-even spite, apparently, was not eternal-and she’d narrowly won the race to remarry. In an ecumenical mood, she ventured outside the English department for her second husband, a philosopher named Bart, whom she’d quickly dubbed “Bartleby.” At the reception, half in her cups, she’d assured Griffin, “Good heavens, no, it wasn’t you. What kept us together was ‘That Old Cape Magic.’ Remember how we used to sing it every year on the Sagamore?” She then turned to Bartleby. “One glorious month, each summer,” she explained. “Sun. Sand. Water. Gin. Followed by eleven months of misery.” Then back to Griffin. “But that’s about par for most marriages, I think you’ll find.” The I think you’ll find, he understood, was of course meant to suggest that in her view, his own marital arithmetic was likely to be much the same. For a moment it seemed as if Bartleby might offer an observation of his own, but he apparently preferred not to, though he did sigh meaningfully.

Griffin was about to respond when his father reappeared with Claudia, his former graduate student and new wife. They’d disappeared briefly after the ceremony, to quarrel or make love, he had no idea. “I swear to God,” his mother said, “if he buys that child a house on the Cape-and I do mean anywhere on the Cape -I may have to murder him.” Her face brightened at a pleasant thought. “You might actually prove useful,” she told Bartleby, then turned back to Griffin. “Your stepfather collects locked-room murder mysteries. Death by curare, that sort of thing. You can figure something out, can’t you? Just make sure I’m in full view of everyone in the drawing room when the fat cow hits the deck, writhing in excruciating pain.” She knew perfectly well, of course, that Griffin ’s father didn’t have the money to buy Claudia (who was more zaftig than fat) or anyone else a house on the Cape, of course. She’d made sure of that by beggaring him in the divorce settlement, but the possibility-what of, that he might purchase a winning Lotto ticket?-still clearly worried her.

To Griffin, now fifty-seven, roughly the same age his parents had been when he and Joy married, the Cape place-names were still magical: Falmouth, Woods Hole, Barnstable, Dennis, Orleans, Harwich. They made a boy of him again and put him in the backseat of his parents’ car, where he’d spent much of his boyhood, unbelted, resting his arms on the front seat, trying to hear what they, who never made any attempt to include him in their conversations, were talking about. It wasn’t so much that he was interested in their front-seat conversations as aware that decisions that impacted him were being made up there, and if privy to these hatching plans he might offer an opinion. Unfortunately, the fact that his chin was resting on the seat back seemed to preclude this. Most of what he overheard wasn’t really worth the effort anyway. “Wellfleet,” his mother might say, studying the road atlas. “Why haven’t we ever tried Wellfleet?” By the time Griffin was a high school freshman, which marked the last of their Cape vacations, they’d rented just about everywhere. Each summer, when they handed over the keys at the end of their stay, the rental agent always asked if they wanted to book it for next year, but they always said no, which made Griffin wonder if the perfect spot they were searching for really existed. Perhaps, he concluded, just looking was sufficient in and of itself.

While he roamed the beach unattended, full of youthful energy and freedom, his parents spent sunny afternoons lying on the sand with their “guilty pleasures,” books they’d have been embarrassed to admit to their colleagues they’d ever heard of. They were on vacation, they claimed, not just from the Mid-fucking-west but also from the literary canon they’d sworn to uphold. His mother’s taste ran to dark, disturbing thrillers and cynical spy novels. “That,” she would say, turning the book’s last page with evident satisfaction, “was truly twisted.” His father alternated between literary pornography and P. G. Wodehouse, enjoying both thoroughly, as if Naked Lunch and Bertie Wooster Sees It Through were intended as companion pieces.

The only thing they both read-indeed, studied as intently as each year’s Modern Language Association job listings-was the real-estate guide. Unwilling to give the other a first look, they always picked up two copies as soon as they arrived and wrote their names on the covers so they’d know which was which and whose fault it was if one got lost. A house here was part of their long-range, two-part plan to escape the Mid-fucking-west. First they would find real jobs back East, where they’d locate a suitable apartment to rent. This would allow them to save money for a house on the Cape, where they’d spend summers and holidays and the occasional long weekend, until of course they retired-early if they could swing it-and lived on there full-time, reading and writing op-eds and, who knew, maybe even trying their hand at a novel.

A single day was usually all it took for each of them to plow through the hundreds of listings in the fat real-estate guide and place each into one of two categories-Can’t Afford It or Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift-before tossing the booklet aside in disgust, because everything was more expensive this year than last. But the very next day his father would set Jeeves aside and take another look. “Page twenty-seven,” he’d say, and Griffin ’s mother would set down her Ripley and rummage for her copy in the beach bag. “Bear with me, now,” he’d continue. Or, “Some things would have to go right”-meaning a big merit raise or a new university-press book contract-“but…” And then he’d explain why a couple of the listings they’d quickly dismissed the day before just maybe could be made to work. Later in the month, on a rainy day, they’d go so far as to look at a house or two at the low end of the Can’t Afford It category, but the realtors always intuited at a glance that Griffin’s parents were just tire kickers. The house they wanted was located in a future only they could see. For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly un-romantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year’s infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they’d settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin ’s parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge.

What he’d do, Griffin decided, was take Route 6 all the way to Provincetown, have a late breakfast there, then poke back up the Cape on tacky old 28. He wondered if it would still be lined with flea markets, as it had been when he was a kid. His father, an avid collector of political ephemera and an avowed Democrat, could never pass one without stopping to make sure there wasn’t an old Wendell Willkie campaign button its owner didn’t know the value of lying at the bottom of a cardboard box. Republican artifacts were another of his guilty pleasures. “All your father’s pleasures are guilty,” his mother claimed, “and deserve to be.” Of course Route 28 would take twice as long, but there was no hurry. Joy wouldn’t arrive until evening, probably late, and the sooner he got to the B and B where she’d booked a room for the wedding, the sooner he’d feel compelled to open the trunk of the convertible, which contained, in addition to his travel bag and his bulging satchel, the urn bearing his father’s ashes, which he’d pledged to scatter over the weekend. He wasn’t sure that disposing of cremated midwestern academics in Massachusetts waters was strictly legal, and would have preferred that Joy be there for moral support (and as a lookout). Still, if he happened upon a quiet, serene and deserted spot, he might just do the deed by himself. Hell, maybe he’d dump the portfolios in as well-an idea that made him smile.

Pilgrim Monument had just appeared on the horizon when his cell phone vibrated in the cup holder, and he pulled over to answer it. In the last nine months, since his father’s death, he’d been in several minor but costly fender benders, so this seemed safer than talking and driving at the same time, though there wasn’t as much room on the shoulder as he would’ve hoped for. A truck roared by, too close for comfort, but no one else was coming. He’d just have to make it quick.

He assumed the caller, at this hour, had to be Joy, but it wasn’t. “Where are you?” his mother wanted to know. Lately, she didn’t bother saying hello or identifying herself. In her opinion he was supposed to know who it was, and thanks to her tone of perpetual annoyance and aversion to preamble, he usually did.

“Mom,” he said, not all that anxious to testify to his present whereabouts. “I was just thinking about you.” A lone gull, perhaps concluding that he’d pulled over to eat something cheesy, circled directly overhead and let out a sharp screech. “You and Dad both, actually.”

“Oh,” she said. “Him.”

“I’m not supposed to think about Dad?”

“Think about whomever you want,” she said. “When did I ever pry into your thoughts? Your father and I may not have agreed on much, but we respected your intellectual and emotional privacy.”

Griffin sighed. Anymore, even his most benign comments set his mother off, and once she was on a roll it was best just to let her finish. Their respect for his privacy had been, he knew all too well, mostly disinterest, but it wasn’t worth arguing over.

“I have my own thoughts, thank you very much,” she continued, implying, unless he was mistaken, that he wouldn’t want to know what these were, either. “And they are full and sufficient. I can’t imagine why your father should be occupying yours, but if he is, don’t let me interfere.”

The circling gull cried out again, even louder this time, and Griffin briefly covered the phone with his hand. “Did you call for a reason, Mom?”

But she must’ve heard the idiot bird, because she said, her voice rich with resentment and accusation, “Are you on the Cape?”

“Yes, Mom,” he admitted. “We’re attending a wedding here tomorrow. Why, should I have alerted you? Asked permission?”

“Where?” she said. “What part?”

“Near Falmouth,” he was happy to report. The upper Cape, in her view, was strictly for people who didn’t know any better. You might as well live in Buzzards Bay, drive go-carts, play miniature golf, eat clam chowder thickened with flour, wear a Red Sox hat.

“Marriage,” she sneered, what he’d told her apparently now registering. “What folly.”

“You were married twice yourself, Mom.”

When Bartleby died several years back, she’d hoped there might be a little something in it for her, at least enough to buy a small cottage near one of the Dennises, maybe. But an irrevocable trust let his rapacious children take everything, and they’d been unrepentant in their greed. “You made our father’s final years a living hell,” one of them had had the gall to tell her. “Did you ever hear such nonsense?” she’d asked Griffin. “Did they even know the man? Could they imagine he’d ever been happy? Was there ever a philosopher who wasn’t morose and depressed?”

“The bride’s Kelsey,” Griffin told her. “From L.A., remember?”

“Why would I know your California friends?” This was no innocent question. Though she wouldn’t admit it, his mother was still resentful of the years he and Joy and then Laura had spent out West, out of her orbit. And she’d always considered his screen-writing a betrayal of his genetic gifts.

“Not our friend. Laura’s.” Though it was entirely possible, now that he thought about it, they’d never met. It had always been Griffin ’s policy not to inflict his parents on his wife and daughter, who’d really gotten to know her grandmother only after they moved back East.

“How does it look?”

“How does what look?”

“The Cape. You just told me you were on the Cape, so I’m asking how it looks to you.”

“Like always, I guess,” he said, not about to confess that his heart had started racing on the Sagamore Bridge, that he still loved something that she and her hated husband also loved.

“They say it’s too crowded now. I guess we had the best of it. You, me, the man occupying your thoughts.”

“Again, what were you calling about, Mom?”

“Fine,” she said. “Change the subject. I need you to bring me some books, and I’ll e-mail you the titles. I assume you’ll be visiting at some point? Or have I seen the last of you?”

“Are these books I’ll be able to find? For instance, are they in print, or is this yet another fool’s errand you’ve designed for me?” Since Bartleby’s death, Griffin had become the man in his mother’s life, and she enjoyed nothing more than setting him the sort of impossible task, especially of the academic variety, that would’ve been easy if he’d done with his life what she’d intended instead of what he himself had preferred.

“Just because you can’t find what I ask for doesn’t mean it’s a fool’s errand. You belong to a generation that never learned basic research skills, who can’t even negotiate a card catalog.”

“They don’t have those anymore,” he said, for the pleasure of hearing her shudder.

Which she denied him. “You think typing a word into Google and pressing Go is research.”

There was, he had to admit, some truth to this. Back in his screenwriting days, he’d always happily delegated research to Tommy, who was genuinely curious if easily distractible. Confronted with his own ignorance, Griffin preferred to just make something up and move forward, whereas his partner, not unreasonably, preferred making sure their narrative had a sturdy, factual foundation. “You do know that when the cameras roll they’re going to be pointing at something in the real world, right?” he’d asked. To which Griffin would reply that the cameras were never going to roll if they kept getting bogged down in background.

“The things I require are all at Sterling,” his mother continued. “I still have privileges there, you know.”

It was entirely possible, Griffin knew, this was the real reason she’d called: to remind him of who she was, who she’d been, that she still had privileges at the Yale library. She might not actually need any books.

“There are some journal articles, too. Those you can just photocopy. The library offered to provide that service, but it would be cheaper for you to do it. I’m not made of money, as you know.”

As he had excellent reason to. Her TIAA-CREF retirement and university insurance covered a good chunk of her assisted-living facility, but Griffin made up the difference.

“You can pick them up on your way here. Are we talking June, this impending visit?” she wondered. And clearly they’d better be.

“I can come for a couple of days near the end of the month, if you need me to.”

“Not until then?”

“I haven’t even turned in my final grades yet. The trunk of my car’s full of student portfolios.” Not to mention Dad’s ashes, he almost added.

“You actually read them?”

“Didn’t you read yours?”

“We had no portfolios, your father and I,” she reminded him. “We had exams. Our students wrote papers with footnotes. We taught real courses with real content.” Their metaphorical cameras had also been pointed, in other words, at something that actually existed. “Assigned readings. Rigor, it was called.”

A car blew by, its Dopplering horn loud enough to startle him. “Are you sure I’m qualified to do your photocopying? What if I screw up?”

“So, what were you thinking… about your father and me?”

For a moment he considered telling her he feared he was becoming his father, that this was what his recent bouts of indecision, not to mention the fender benders, might be about. But of course it would anger his mother, and prolong the conversation, if he suggested he was more like his father than her. “I thought you didn’t want to pry, Mom. Isn’t that what you just said, that my thoughts are my own?”

“They are, of course. Still, as a personal favor, couldn’t you arrange to think about your father and me separately?”

“I was remembering how happy you both got on the Sagamore Bridge, how you sang ‘That Old Cape Magic’?” And how miserable you both were in the same spot going the other direction. “As if happiness were a place.”

But she wasn’t interested in this particular stroll down memory lane. “Speaking of unhappy places, when you visit, I want you to look at this new one I’m at.” Her third assisted-living facility in as many years. The first was connected to the university and full of the very people she’d been trying to escape. The second was home to mid-fucking-western farmwives who read Agatha Christie and couldn’t understand why she turned up her nose at the Miss Marples they thrust at her, saying, “You’ll like this one. It’s a corker!”

“I mean really look at it,” his mother continued. “It’s certainly not what we imagined.”

“What did we imagine, Mom?”

“Nice,” she said. “We imagined it would be nice.”

Then she was gone, the line dead. The whole conversation had been, he knew from experience, a warning shot across his bow. And his mother was, after her own fashion, considerate. She never badgered him during the last month of the semester. A lifelong academic, she knew what those final weeks were like and gave him a pass. But after that, all bets were off. The timing of today’s call suggested she’d been on his college’s Web site again and knew he’d taught his last class. He knew it was a mistake to get her a laptop for her birthday even as he bought it, but in her previous facility she’d been accused of hogging the computer in the common room. Also of hogging the attentions of the few old men there, a charge she waved away. “Look at them,” she snorted. “There isn’t enough Viagra in all of Canada.” Though she did admit, as if to foreshorten ruthless interrogation on this subject, that there was more sex in these retirement homes than you might imagine. A lot more.

He supposed it was possible she really did need the books from Sterling. At eighty-five, her physical health failing, she was still mentally sharp and claimed to be researching a book on one of the Brontës (“You remember books, right? Bound objects? Lots and lots of pages? Print that goes all the way out to the margins?”). But he made a mental note to check her list to make sure he couldn’t find them in his own college library.

When a semi roared by, he noticed a foul odor and wondered what in the world the trucker was hauling. Only when he turned the key in the ignition did he see the viscous white glob on his shirtsleeve. The gull had shit on him!

His mother had made him a stationary target, and this was the result.

2 Slippery Slope

By the time Griffin ’s parents got divorced, each claiming they should’ve cut the cord sooner, that they’d made each other miserable for too long, he was in film school out West, and he’d thought it was probably for the best. But neither had prospered in their second marriages, and their careers suffered, too. Together, or at least voting together, they’d been a force to reckon with in English department politics. Singly, often voting against each other, they could be safely ignored, and the worst of their enemies now sniped at both with impunity. Of the two, his mother seemed to fare better at first. Openly contemptuous of the young literary theorists and culture critics when she was married to Griffin ’s father, she’d reinvented herself as a gender-studies specialist and became for a time their darling. One of her old “guilty pleasures,” Patricia Highsmith, had become respectable, and his mother published several well-placed articles on her and two or three other gay/lesbian novelists. Panels on gender were suddenly all the rage, and she found herself chairing several of these at regional conferences, where she hinted to her large and largely lesbian audiences that she herself had always been open, in both theory and practice, as regards her own sexuality. And perhaps, he supposed, she was. Bartleby, who’d begun their marriage preferring not to argue and ended it preferring not to speak at all, remained philosophical when these innuendos were reported back to him. Griffin had assumed his mother was exaggerating his withdrawal from speech, but a few months before his unexpected death (going to the doctor was something else he preferred not to do), he’d paid them a quick visit and they’d all gone out to dinner and the man hadn’t spoken a word. He didn’t seem to be in a bad mood and would occasionally smile ruefully at something his wife or Griffin said, but the closest he came to utterance was when a piece of meat lodged in his windpipe, turning his face the color of a grape until a passing waiter saw his distress and Heimliched him on the spot.

But his mother’s self-reinvention, a bold and for a time successful stroke, had ultimately failed. When the university, mostly at her suggestion and direction, created the Gender Studies Program, she of course expected to be named as its chair, but instead they’d recruited a transgendered scholar from, of all places, Utah, and that had been the last straw. From then on she taught her classes but quit attending meetings or having anything to do with departmental politics. Unless Griffin was mistaken, her secret hope was that her colleagues, noticing her absence, would try to lure her back into full academic life, but that hadn’t happened. Even Bartleby’s passing had elicited little sympathy. While she continued to publish, run panels and apply for chairperson positions at various English departments, her file by this time contained several letters suggesting that while she was a good teacher and a distinguished scholar, she was also divisive and quarrelsome. A bitch, really.

Despite deep misgivings, Griffin had accepted the university’s invitation to attend his mother’s retirement dinner. (Joy had volunteered to go as well, but he insisted on sparing her.) There happened to be a bumper crop of retirees that year, and each was given the opportunity to reflect on his or her many years of service to the institution. He found it particularly disconcerting that his mother was the last speaker on the program. He supposed it was possible the planners were saving the best, most distinguished retirees for last, though more likely they shared his misgivings about what might transpire, and putting her last represented damage control. When it was finally her turn, his mother rose to a smattering of polite applause and went to the podium. That she was wearing an expensive, well-tailored suit only deepened apprehension. “Unlike my colleagues,” she said directly into the microphone, the only speaker of the evening to recognize that fundamental necessity, “I’ll be brief and honest. I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is a distinctly second-rate institution, as are the vast majority of our students, as are we.” Then she returned to her seat and patted Griffin ’s hand, as if to say, There, now; that wasn’t so bad, was it? What she actually said in the stunned silence was, “Here’s something strange. For the first time in over a decade, I wish your father were here. He’d have enjoyed that.”

His father had fared even worse after the divorce. He, too, had attempted reinvention by attaching himself to the new American Studies major. He’d always been at least as interested in politics and history as literature, and the university had been willing to lend half of him to American Studies provided his colleagues in English had no objections (they certainly didn’t). His new office was one floor down in the Modern and Classical Languages Building, and Claudia, a big strapping graduate student, had offered to help him move his seventy or so boxes of books and periodicals. A lot of bending over was required and she wasn’t wearing a bra. Though he hadn’t really noticed her before, he did now, and his colleagues noticed him notice, remarking that it was clear which half of him was moving down to American Studies and which was remaining behind in English. Griffin was pretty sure his father had little desire to remarry and probably wouldn’t have but for the university ban on faculty-student fraternizing. Which was absurd. It wasn’t like Claudia was an undergraduate. She was twenty-nine, a grown-up (even by American university standards) who didn’t need any institutional protection, though several of her male professors wanted to know who would protect them from her. What Claudia did need, according to many in the department, was help, a lot of it, in completing her degree. She’d narrowly passed her doctoral prelims on the second and final attempt, one of her examiners abstaining, after which it took her a full academic year to come up with an acceptable dissertation topic, and like a prize heifer at a county fair, she had to be led (by his father) every step of the way. To Griffin, she indeed had a bovine quality. A full head taller than his father, she had wide hips and full breasts that always seemed to be in motion beneath the loose blouses she favored.

And so it was that this distinguished senior professor woke up one morning to the realization that while his wife had retooled herself as an adventurous gender specialist, he’d reinvented himself as a fool. Naked Lunch, Griffin ’s mother remarked, had finally won the day, showing poor Jeeves the door. Which may have been why, when an old graduate-school friend, who was now a dean at the University of Massachusetts, called to ask if he’d consider a one-year appointment replacing a professor who’d fallen ill, he eagerly accepted. Griffin ’s mother, of course, had been apoplectic with fury when she heard. Amherst, after all, was-what-two hours from the Cape? He and the fat cow would be able to spend weekends there, or even on the Vineyard or Nantucket, while she was stuck in the Mid-fucking-west with a mute for company. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it, which she determined, according to Griffin ’s father, by trying really, really hard.

He and Claudia were gone a full year, returning to the university only at the last possible moment, on Labor Day weekend. Griffin, just then between scripts, had flown to Indiana for a couple days. He hadn’t seen his father once during his Amherst stint, and he looked as if he must’ve spent the whole time in a TB ward. He’d aged a good ten years. Always slender and concave chested, he was now rail thin, with shrunken cheeks, and his hair had receded. Apparently to compensate, he wore what strands remained long on the back and sides, making him look like a Dickensian gravedigger. By contrast, Claudia had become even more zaftig. During Griffin ’s brief visit, she found numerous opportunities to insinuate her lush body near his, pillowing her unfettered breast against his arm or, if he happened to be sitting, the back of his head, gestures his father appeared not to notice.

They’d returned with excellent news, his father said. Claudia had finished her dissertation, and to celebrate they’d gotten married. He smiled bravely in relating this, while Claudia’s bovine version was of a different sort altogether. Their marriage had to remain a secret for now, he explained, until she’d defended her dissertation and she had her degree in hand. Griffin wasn’t sure he followed the logic of all this, but it wasn’t any of his business, so he agreed not to breathe a word to anyone, especially his mother. Which was why he was surprised when he met her and Bart for lunch in the faculty dining room and the first words out of her mouth were: “So, did your father tell you he’s married?”

In fact, she was full of information. No, his father wasn’t ill, though she agreed he did look like death warmed over. What he was, she claimed, was exhausted, and why wouldn’t he be? During his year at UMass, he’d not only taught all his classes but also researched and-get this-actually written Claudia’s dissertation. When Griffin asked her how she could possibly know this, since neither his father nor Claudia was likely to have confided it to anyone, she just gave him a look. “And that’s not even the best part,” she continued. “She wasn’t even with your father.” When his mother dropped this bomb, Griffin glanced over at Bartleby Though he hadn’t yet gone completely mute, he shrugged, as if to say, Don’t look at me; I just live here.

Claudia, his mother went on, had gone with his father to Amherst, that much was true. But she hadn’t stayed long. The tiny house they’d rented was almost twenty miles from the university, and since they only had one car, Claudia either had to go in to campus or else be stranded there in the boonies until he got home. “Work on your dissertation,” his father had suggested. Indeed, he may have rented this particular house in order to give her little alternative but to buckle down. Her response, apparently, delivered in her thick-as-molasses, blasé fashion, was “All day long?”

In mid-October there’d been a cold snap, and after several days of frigid drizzle she’d announced to Griffin ’s father one morning that she meant to go to Atlanta to visit a friend for a while. Even her pussy was frostbit, she claimed, to which he replied he’d have no way of knowing. Why didn’t they discuss things later that evening when he returned? But by then she was gone.

His mother admitted to being a bit vague about exactly when he discovered this “friend” wasn’t in fact a woman and also that he (and now Claudia) wasn’t in Atlanta but in Charleston. Apparently she’d been trying to throw him off track-and here Griffin’s mother chortled-as if he came from a long line of tough cops and private eyes and was the sort of guy who’d give immediate chase and never give up, whereas in actuality what he’d done was sigh deeply and say to himself, So… she’s gone, then.

That Claudia planned to remain gone for a good long while was obvious since she’d taken all her clothes, not just enough for a short trip. She took everything, in fact, except the materials she’d assembled, with his help, for her dissertation. These she left stacked impressively in the center of the dining room table, along with a sparse outline he briefly studied before wadding it up. In another man this gesture might have suggested he was through with her, that he’d seen and understood both the muddled writing on the page and the clearer writing on the wall. Unfortunately, all Griffin’s father had seen was a more sensible approach to the research and writing of his fiancée’s dissertation, so he took out a legal pad and started sketching out how things would proceed if the project were his and not Claudia’s. That way, he reasoned, when she returned in a week or two (he still hadn’t drawn the necessary inference from the empty clothes closet), she’d find that instead of having fallen behind, she was actually ahead. The once murky, bloated purpose statement was now a detailed, workable template, thoughtfully divided into manageable segments and subdivided into bite-sized pieces that required only mastication, a series of cuds that even the bovine Claudia could chew. Granted, this was something she should’ve been able to do for herself, but so what? It could be their secret. She’d be so grateful her frozen pussy would thaw.

This, according to Griffin ’s mother, was how the whole nightmare had begun, as an intellectual exercise in avoidance. That first night, when he’d come home, found her gone and substituted his own outline for hers, he’d have been mortified if anyone had suggested he might actually write any part of his fiancée’s dissertation. But a week went by and she hadn’t returned, and then another, and the materials still sat there on the table (though he’d moved them to one side to make room for his take-out meals), and he just hated for her to fall further and further behind. Of course Claudia, again according to Griffin ’s mother, had predicted all of this. She might be dumb as a plastic Jesus, but she was shrewd. After all, how smart did a woman have to be to get the best of a man so ruled by his pecker? Anyone with an ounce of self-respect would have tossed her dissertation stuff right into the fireplace, or at least shoved it into a dark closet. Instead Griffin’s father had allowed it to sit there accusingly-yes, accusing him, not her-until one day, over mu shu pork eaten directly from the carton, a thought occurred to him, as of course it would: Maybe just a short intro. Where’s the harm?

Because he’d been complicit, if only subconsciously, from the start. Hadn’t he made sure that the subject of Claudia’s dissertation was one that also greatly interested him? Hadn’t he known all along that he’d have to hold her hand through every last page? How different was actually writing the thing? Wasn’t it really just a question of efficiency? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how your father’s mind works, how he rationalizes,” his mother warned when Griffin objected. She understood all too well. Once he’d started down that slippery slope, he was a lost man. Writing the intro, he reconnected to the source material, making long, excited notes on cards for the body of the essay, its principal thrust and supporting arguments, until sometime during the holidays he slipped a fresh piece of paper into his IBM Selectric and typed: Chapter One.

Then an interesting thing happened. Whereas before he’d been anxiously awaiting Claudia’s return, he now hoped she’d stay away. He’d always believed this would be-what?-a collaboration, in the best sense. She’d do the actual writing, of course, but he’d be right there to share notes and ideas, to make sure she didn’t lose her focus. And wasn’t that what all dissertations really were, collaborations? Otherwise, why have an adviser? But now he thought, Fuck it. He was making good progress, staying up late at night, neglecting, truth be told, his own teaching responsibilities. He’d hit his scholarly stride, and Claudia’s return would break it. Maybe he’d surprise her in Atlanta during spring break, he told himself. But when the break came he decided to work through it (just as well, Griffin’s mother said, since Claudia wasn’t in Atlanta anyway and never had been), figuring that if all went well, he’d have a draft before the end-of-semester crunch. She could help him revise it while familiarizing herself with his conclusions and methods, because of course she was the one who’d have to defend them (though he’d be there to throw her a rope if she needed one).

All might have been well, except in April he’d come down with a toxic dose of the flu. At one point he awakened shivering and curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor with no memory of how he’d gotten there, though the commode testified eloquently as to why he’d needed to. Was he hallucinating or had Claudia called the day before, wondering how the dissertation was coming along? Had she laughed at him when he reported it was almost done?

Eventually the flu ran its course, but he never fully recovered his strength or the weight he’d lost as a result of vomiting and skipping meals, but guess what? He’d finished, and wasn’t he proud? Only when Claudia actually returned in late August, just when he’d concluded she was gone for good, did the enormity of what he’d done come down on him like an anvil. Not so much the dishonesty of it, but rather that this could have been his book. It was quite possibly the best thing he’d ever written. Any good university press would be happy to have it, maybe even a mainstream trade publisher. It was possible that real money, as opposed to the bogus scrip universities routinely printed, redeemable only in the academic commissary, might change hands. But there was an obvious problem. How could he claim the work as his own when it was supposed to be Claudia’s? He could argue she hadn’t written any of it, and everyone who’d ever taught her would believe him, but that would mean he’d stolen her idea. He’d already signed off on the fact that it was her idea when he and two other colleagues approved the proposal.

“Mom,” Griffin had protested at this point, “you can’t know all this. And don’t tell me Dad confided it, either. They aren’t the kind of things he’d admit to anybody, especially not you.” After all, he’d just spent the last twenty-four hours with his father, who hadn’t dropped a single hint, even an oblique one, about any of this.

Another woman might have taken umbrage at his especially not you, but his mother didn’t even slow down. “Pipe down,” she said gleefully. “I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet. Claudia was blackmailing him.

“Well, not in the conventional sense,” she conceded. “It’s more like emotional blackmail.” Since they’d returned from Amherst, Claudia had taken to wondering out loud what his colleagues would think if they knew what he’d done. Had he always been so dishonest, she wanted to know, or was this something new? Was what he’d done a firing offense? Would the scandal make the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education?

“But that’s an absurd threat,” Griffin felt compelled to inject. “She couldn’t expose him without exposing herself.”

“True,” she said, “but he’s terrified anyway.”

“He didn’t look scared to me.”

“Trust me.”

“But Mom, the story doesn’t track. Any undergraduate fiction workshop would tear it apart.” Well, okay, maybe not completely. It was more disjointed and inconsistent than unbelievable, and Griffin suspected he knew why. The academy was a small world, and his mother had friends, and friends of friends, everywhere. She’d no doubt been following her ex-husband’s year at UMass, or trying to, through half a dozen spies. She’d glean small bits of information from a wide variety of sources and stitch these into a single narrative as best she could, drawing inferences, pretending, as she always did, to be privy to everything.

Nor did she appreciate him suggesting she wasn’t. “Undergraduate workshop,” she snorted. “Right. Now there’s a test.”

“Okay,” Griffin conceded. “I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’re saying. I’m just-”

But she waved him off. “Do you want to hear the best part or not?”

“The blackmail wasn’t the best part? There’s more?”

She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Get this. The whole time he was in Amherst?”

He waited until it was clear she had no intention of going on without a specific invitation. He had to go on record as wanting to know what she had to tell him, which, unfortunately, he did.

“What, Mom? The whole time in Amherst what?”

“The whole time your father was in Amherst,” she said triumphantly, “he never even made it to the Cape. Not once.”

In retrospect, his mother had been right about at least one thing. She’d given his father’s marriage another year. Not a full year, either, she insisted, an academic year. And that’s exactly how long it had lasted. The following May, Claudia had departed for good, and shortly after that his father had left the university to take a position as acting department chair at a small branch of the state university of Illinois. “He’s in a downward spiral,” his mother had reported. “In fact he’s circling the drain.” From there he’d become the dean of faculty at a small Christian college in Oklahoma, where he served until failing health forced him to retire.

And now, Griffin thought ruefully, he was in the trunk of his car.

3 The Great Truro Accord

By the time Griffin arrived in Provincetown it had warmed up, so he went to a café with an outdoor patio. In the foyer he noticed a stack of real-estate guides, so he grabbed one and leafed through it while he waited for his eggs. The listings, he quickly determined, were either mind-bogglingly expensive or little more than shacks. Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift. The old categories apparently still applied. Which begged a question. If he hadn’t given up screenwriting to move back East and become a college professor, would they have had the money? Hard to say. He’d made a lot more money in L.A., but they’d spent a lot more, too. It had been one of the great mysteries of his parents’ marriage that nothing they did or didn’t do seemed to change their overall economic outlook all that much. Near the back of the guide, looking completely out of place, was a full-page ad for a high-end assisted-living community near Hyannis, which sent a chill up his spine. His mother knew he was on the Cape. Was it possible their conversation had awakened the old dormant passion? He could easily imagine her Googling the assisted-living options here (like hell Google wasn’t research). It was even possible that out in Indiana she was at that very moment looking at the same image that he was studying here in Provincetown. A creepy scenario, and so utterly plausible that when his cell phone rang, he was surprised to see it was Joy and not his mother.

“Where are you?” his wife demanded, sounding almost as annoyed as his mother had been earlier, though to her credit she’d at least said hello before wanting to know just how far he’d strayed from her expectation.

“ Provincetown,” he informed her. “I woke up early.”

“If you don’t start sleeping soon, I want you to see somebody.”

There was real concern in her voice now, for which he was grateful. It was true he hadn’t been sleeping well, waking up for no apparent reason in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. The usual end-of-semester pressure, no doubt. He’d already had his standard academic-anxiety dream, the one where he arrived at his classroom only to find a note on the door saying his class was now meeting in another building across campus. When he arrived there, same deal. And no matter how he hurried to catch up, his students were always receding at the end of an impossibly long corridor. All of it would probably disappear when he turned in his grades.

“Guess who I’m having breakfast with?” he said, anxious to change the subject.

“Who?”

“Al Fresco,” he said. It was an old joke, no doubt summoned to the front of his brain by being on the Cape and eating outdoors. His parents always made sure their summer rental had either a patio or porch so they could have breakfast outside and read the paper “with Al,” ignoring Griffin’s pleas to finish so they could go to the beach. He and Joy had used Al Fresco back in their L.A. days, but it wasn’t that great a joke and had naturally fallen into disuse.

Still, he was a little hurt when Joy said, “Al who?”

“I don’t know about yours,” he told her, “but my day’s begun poorly.”

“I know,” Joy said, sounding exhausted now. “She called here, too. The semester’s officially over, I guess.”

Griffin had put off introducing Joy to his parents for as long as possible, explaining that they were involved in a particularly acrimonious divorce. “But I am going to meet them, right?” she’d inquired, already suspicious. “I mean, they are your parents.” He suggested, “How about at the wedding?” and she’d laughed, thinking he was joking. Down the years she’d gotten on well enough with his father, though he could never quite seem to place her, even when she was standing next to his son. Living two thousand miles apart, they saw each other infrequently, of course, but each time they met, his father acted more delighted and charmed than seemed natural. “Is it my imagination,” Joy said after their second meeting, “or had he forgotten me entirely?” Griffin told her not to take it personally. At the end of each semester his father still didn’t know his students’ names, except the two or three prettiest girls.

His mother was a different story. Though polite, she’d never made a secret of her low opinion of Griffin ’s choice of a mate. “Where did she do her graduate work?” was the first thing she’d wanted to know when Griffin called to say he was engaged. For her there was no greater barometer of personal worth. Moreover, when she asked people this question, they generally asked her back, and she got to say her doctorate was from Yale; if they didn’t ask, she told them anyway. In Joy’s case, she’d been expecting UCLA or Southern Cal. Griffin had anticipated this question, of course, and reminded himself there was no reason to be embarrassed to answer it, though naturally he was. He’d taken a deep breath and explained that Joy had gone directly to work after getting her undergraduate degree and that she had a good job, one she enjoyed. “Yes, but what sort of person doesn’t do graduate work?” His mother inflected the word person ever so slightly, as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t go to graduate school might belong to neither gender, or perhaps to both. Poor Joy had spent the first decade of their marriage trying to get her mother-in-law to think better of her, the next trying to fathom why that wasn’t happening and the one after that pretending it didn’t matter. Of late she seemed to favor getting an unlisted phone number.

On their honeymoon, she’d paid him an unintentional compliment by asking if there was any chance he’d been adopted. Back then he bore little physical resemblance to either parent, though over the last two decades that had changed. His hair had thinned in the exact same pattern as his father’s, and his nose, delicate when he was a younger man, had started to dominate his face as well. He’d kept in reasonably good shape by jogging and playing tennis, and he didn’t weigh much more than he had when they married, but the weight had subtly begun redistributing itself, his torso becoming noticeably concave (again like his father’s), as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. With the exception of the small mole that bisected her left eyebrow and had appeared on his own in his thirties, his mother’s genetic gifts were more temperamental, if no less disturbing for that, and Joy had conceded long ago that there was no chance he’d been adopted. “That’s your mother talking,” she was fond of observing whenever he was unkind or snobbish, especially about someone in her own family.

“She wants me to visit,” Griffin told her now.

“Of course she does.”

“She doesn’t like her new place.”

“Of course she doesn’t.”

“She’s going to live forever.”

“No, but she’ll make it seem like forever.”

The first thing he’d done when arriving at the restaurant was to wash his shirtsleeve in the men’s room. Though he thought he’d done a good, thorough job, he could smell it again. “When she called, I pulled over onto the shoulder, and a gull took a shit on me.”

But Joy had lost interest in the subject, just as she often did with stories at what he considered their most vivid and interesting point. “Have you called your daughter yet?”

Your daughter, rather than our, usually meant that in Joy’s opinion he was shirking some important parental duty. “She doesn’t get here until this afternoon, right?”

“She’s been on the Cape since yesterday. She’s in the wedding party, remember?”

Well, now that he thought about it, he did. “I’ll call her when I get to the B and B,” he promised.

“Good. She could use some reassuring.”

“About what?”

“She can’t understand why we’re arriving in separate cars. Explain that to her, will you? Then she can explain it to me.”

Griffin sighed. He’d succeeded in deflecting Joy from her purpose by complaining about his mother, but now they’d circled back. Best to get it over with and apologize. “I should’ve waited for you,” he admitted, pausing a beat before adding, “ Boston wasn’t much fun without you.” And, when she still didn’t say anything, “I meant to spite you and ended up spiting myself… Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“I hope you aren’t waiting for me to humble myself further, because that’s all I’ve got for you.”

“No,” she said. “That should do it.”

By the time Griffin drove back down the Cape and checked into the B and B, it was nearly noon. He brought his travel bag and satchel up to the room, leaving the trunk empty except for his father’s ashes. He’d passed a couple of peaceful, secluded spots, but there’d been a brisk breeze, and he feared that when he opened the urn a strong gust might come up and he’d be wearing his father. Also, he’d feel less self-conscious saying a few words in his memory if there was someone besides himself to hear them, so he decided to wait for Joy.

His father had died of a massive embolism the previous September, and the circumstances were nothing if not peculiar. He’d been found in his car in a plaza on the Mass Pike. Like most rest stops, this one had a huge parking lot, and his father’s car was on the very perimeter, far from other vehicles. It was unclear how long it had been there before someone noticed him slumped over in the passenger seat, his head resting against the window. Except for the trickle of blood, dried and crusty, below his left nostril, he might have been taking a nap. But why wasn’t he behind the wheel? The glove box was open. Had he been rummaging around in it, looking for something? On the backseat the road atlas was open to Massachusetts, with Griffin ’s phone number scrawled on the top of the page. The key was in the ignition in the ON position. The car had apparently run out of gas there in the lot.

“Must’ve been coming to see you,” the young cop said when Griffin arrived on the scene to identify his father.

“It’s possible,” Griffin told him.

“He didn’t mention it, though? Coming to visit?”

Griffin said no, that it’d been a good six months since he’d seen him and almost as long since they’d spoken on the phone.

“That normal?”

He wasn’t sure what this fellow was getting at. Normal for them, or normal for other adult fathers and sons?

“I mean, you didn’t get along?” the cop said. He seemed less suspicious than saddened to consider the possibility that over time his relationship with his own dad might similarly devolve.

“We got along fine.”

“It just seems… I don’t know. What do you make of the fact that he was in the passenger seat?”

“I have no idea,” Griffin said, though that wasn’t true. The inference to be drawn was inescapable. He’d been in the passenger seat because someone else had been driving. All his life he’d stopped for pretty hitchhikers, a habit that had infuriated Griffin ’s mother. “Better me than somebody else,” he always argued, lamely. “The next guy might be a pervert.” (At this she’d roll her eyes. “Yeah, right. The next guy.”) The other possible explanation was that he’d talked one of his coeds into making the trip with him. Though he’d retired the year before, the university still allowed him to teach one seminar each fall. More than once he’d let on to Griffin that girls at Christian schools like this one were often interested in exploring a more secular approach to life and love, if this could be done discreetly. Boys their own age offered neither experience nor discretion. It had been a woman, possibly a young woman, Griffin learned from the cop, who’d made the anonymous call to the state police about the man slumped over in his car in the rest-stop parking lot.

It was unconscionable he’d waited so long to dispose of his father’s ashes, Griffin thought as he unpacked, hanging his suit in the closet and placing his shaving kit in the tiny bathroom. He should have made a special trip to the Cape last fall. His father had left a will but no instructions on where he wished to spend eternity. But on the drive back home from the turnpike plaza, Griffin had come to what had seemed an obvious conclusion. His father hadn’t been on his way to see him and Joy, since if he’d meant to pay them an unannounced visit he would’ve gotten off the pike at the previous exit. No, he was headed for the Cape. Griffin advanced that theory to his mother when he called to tell her what had happened. “His suitcase was packed with summer clothes,” he told her. “He had two big tubes of sunblock.”

She hadn’t answered right away, which made him wonder if she was trying to compose herself. “I could have told him he’d never make it” was all she said before hanging up.

The B and B had a large wraparound porch, so Griffin brought his satchel full of student papers down and set up shop in a rocking chair in the sun, where he sat trying to remember how that famous Shakespeare sonnet about death went. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun…” was as far as he’d gotten when his cell vibrated, Joy calling him back.

“I forgot to ask,” she said. “Did Sid get ahold of you?”

“No,” he said, sitting up straight. Sid was his agent back in L.A., in his late eighties and still a legend in the business, despite his shrinking client list. Griffin sincerely hoped he was calling about a job. Money had been worrying him of late. Joy, who kept the books and wrote the checks, insisted they were fine, but if Laura got engaged, as she’d been warning them might happen soon, maybe even this weekend, there’d be a wedding to pay for, and a quick studio rewrite would be just what the doctor ordered. “When did he call?”

“Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned your grades in yet. It sounded like he meant for you to drop everything, hop on a plane and drop into the Universal lot by parachute.”

Joy, since they moved to Connecticut, had little patience with Sid, whose ongoing, albeit sporadic presence in their lives she considered vestigial, an appendix that was liable one day to rupture. He was also one of those Angelenos who never took time zones into account when telephoning. Four in the afternoon-seven back East, about the time Griffin and Joy usually sat down to eat-was when he took the bottle out of his desk drawer, unscrewed the cap and poured, then started calling people. She might have been less peeved, Griffin thought, if Sid was calling with work, but mostly he just wanted to reminisce about old Hollywood-Bogart and Mitchum and Lancaster and Holden-until nostalgia morphed into anger that the town was now overrun by “bitches,” his term for the current generation of young male stars, action-movie pretty boys pretending, not very convincingly, to be tough guys. “Not a one of ’em could take Renée Zellweger in a fair fight,” he was fond of observing. “You did the right thing getting out when you did, kid. Who needs it?”

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.

It was so disheartening to contemplate, especially on such a lovely afternoon, that he stuffed it and all the others back in his satchel. When he redialed Sid’s number, it again went directly to voice mail. How disappointed was Joy going to be, he wondered, if there wasn’t time to go to Truro before he flew out to L.A.? Probably not very, he decided. It was nice she considered the idea romantic, but Truro, if she actually thought about it, was more likely to expand their recent conflict than to shrink it. Where they would honeymoon had been the first real disagreement of their relationship. She had favored the coast of Maine, where as a girl she’d vacationed with her family. Every summer they rented the same rambling, ramshackle old house, not far from where her mother grew up. It was drafty and creaky, its floors so pitched that if you dropped a Parcheesi marble off the kitchen table, you’d end up chasing it around the living room. But the place was familiar and had scads of room for her parents, the five kids and their weekend visitors. Joy had many fond memories of family dinners and evening excursions to a nearby amusement park, of all-day Monopoly and Clue tournaments when it rained. Even after her father got transferred and the family moved out West, they returned to Maine each July, never mind that its beaches were rocky and its water too frigid to swim in. Joy had even suggested the same house might be available for their honeymoon. Which begged Obvious Question Number One: why had Griffin talked her into the Cape instead? Given the opportunity to imitate a happy marriage-and there was no denying that Joy’s parents had one-why choose to follow his own parents’ miserable version?

Still, they’d been happy in Truro, hadn’t they? It wasn’t like he’d bullied her. They discussed, finally agreed, and it had been fine. They spent the whole time making love and excitedly mapping out the rest of their lives. It was there, walking hand in hand among the Truro dunes, that Joy first talked about the sort of house she dreamed of them owning one day. It seemed to be a cross between the Syracuse house she grew up in and the summer rental in Maine: old, inconvenient, graceful, full of character, a house that had a rich history before you showed up and might even harbor a benign ghost or two. That Joy believed in ghosts was one of the more endearing things he’d learned about her on their honeymoon. She was certain the Syracuse house had been haunted. The whole family-even Jared and Jason, her much younger brothers-had sensed the ghost’s presence; it was, they all agreed, a woman. Only her father was immune, but he didn’t count, she explained, because he never noticed anything.

The exuberant clarity with which she envisioned not just her dream house but also their futures back East was infectious. Griffin concurred with all of it, and why not? It would be nice to leave Los Angeles eventually, to live a saner, quieter life away from the clogged freeways and the ambient noise of what passed for culture there. He didn’t think he’d write screenplays forever, he told her, or maybe even for very much longer. He enjoyed the work, but it was hardly literature he and Tommy were writing. For some time now he’d been thinking he might try his hand at something more serious, a novel or collection of stories. But that, unfortunately, wouldn’t be nearly so lucrative, which meant they’d have to start saving; and when they made the break he’d probably have to teach. He’d been talking along these lines for a while when it occurred to him that he was lying. He hadn’t actually been toying with the idea of writing fiction for “some time,” and in fact it hadn’t occurred to him until he heard the words coming out of his mouth. Odder still, what he heard himself proposing was a life not all that different from his parents’. What had possessed him? Why give up screen-writing, something he was good at, even if it wasn’t serious work they might approve of? And who knew if he could write anything that was. But never mind, he told himself. He wasn’t so much lying as dreaming, and what was wrong with that? Wasn’t Joy doing the same thing? He’d only meant to suggest there was more to him, or might be more at some future date, than was now apparent, that she needn’t fear growing bored with him, because of course he’d change and grow. They both would.

But to Joy his dreaming might have sounded more like a promise. “A professor’s house, then,” she said, excited, when he mentioned teaching. That meant a library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and comfortable chairs for reading, a big OED on its own stand, a small stereo for quiet, contemplative music. There’d be no “family room,” at least not like the one in her parents’ house, with its “entertainment center,” fake mahogany shelves lined with bric-a-brac purchased on cruises and at gift shops in state parks. The total absence of books in their home was the first thing Griffin had commented on, and he could tell she’d been embarrassed and hurt by the observation, though she’d gotten over it quickly. It reassured him, in Truro, to know that there was room for him in Joy’s dream house, that she intended it to be not just hers but theirs, a natural extension of who they were, of their marriage and, one day, of their family. And it thrilled him to know that in the important arena of values, she’d sided with him over her parents.

Griffin didn’t dislike them exactly, but they had little in common. Harve had taken early retirement and they’d recently moved from Orange County to a gated community in a suburb of Sacramento, where they filled their lazy days with golf and tennis and bridge and visits from Jane and June-who lived nearby, on purpose, if you could imagine that-and their children. Jill (Jilly-Billy, Harve called her) had never had any interest in working outside the home. Ever since Griffin and Joy announced their engagement, her parents were forever badgering them to visit more, saying that even the twins, Jared and Jason, both in the service, got home more often. They seemed not to understand that Sacramento wasn’t a suburb of L.A., that Griffin often wrote under deadline, that writing was a job like any other. Even more inexplicable to Harve was Griffin ’s aversion to golf, which Harve insisted was the sport of kings. “The prosecution rests,” Griffin told him, but it went right over his head. Griffin would love the game, Harve insisted, if he’d just give it a chance. After they were married, Joy’s first big gift to Griffin-at the suggestion of her father, who helped her pick them out, Griffin later learned-was an expensive set of clubs. The idea, she explained, was that the two of them could bond, and perhaps even find other commonalities, on the golf course. For a while Griffin dutifully took lessons, but he was a halfhearted student who never could master what Harve referred to as “the first damn rule of golf,” which was to keep your head down when you swung. “I’ll watch where it goes,” he barked every time Griffin topped the ball off the tee. “Just remind yourself in your backswing … If I look up, all I’m going to see is a bad shot.” The problem was that on those rare occasions Griffin did manage to keep his head down through impact, when he finally looked up, he always saw his father-in-law, two big paws shading his eyes, squinting down the fairway and saying, “Now where the hell did that go?”

But they weren’t bad people and did try to establish a relationship. Unlike Griffin ’s parents, Harve and Jill were duly impressed that he worked in the movies, though the former had a hard time grasping precisely what had to be written before filming started. Once, all four had gone to see a movie he and Tommy had written. Harve, who was hard of hearing, sat next to Griffin and asked loud questions throughout, ignoring his wife’s attempts to shush him. Every time one of the characters got off a good line, Harve said, “You wrote that?” as if he’d always assumed actors provided their own dialogue, much like a carpenter might be expected to bring his own hammer. Griffin replied that, yes, he’d written the line, or Tommy had. “How about that boat?” Harve said when one roared by, pulling a water-skier, in the background of the shot. “You didn’t write that part? Then what’s it doing there?” In other words, how could a real boat appear, unintended, in what Griffin insisted was a product of the imagination?

His own parents at least understood that films were scripted. Unfortunately, to their way of thinking, this didn’t qualify as “real writing,” an odd opinion, he thought, to be advanced by people who wrote academic criticism. Once, he’d made the mistake of telling them how much he and Tommy stood to make on a quick rewrite of a horror movie, which prompted a lengthy discourse on America ’s skewed values, whereby critical-care nurses were paid less than supermarket butchers. Griffin agreed about the nurses, but his parents also seemed to imply that the exorbitant fees he and Tommy earned for writing crappy movies were what prevented scholars from being paid fairly for their jargon-riddled articles and university-press books. Which begged Obvious Question Number Two: why was he more resentful of Harve and Jill, who really wanted to understand how he made his living, than his own parents, who had never, to his knowledge, seen a single film he had anything to do with? Was pigheaded disinterest grounded in quasi-morality somehow more admirable than rapt thickheadedness?

The Great Truro Accord. That was how, in the years to come, Griffin jokingly referred to the future he and Joy mapped out on their honeymoon. At the time, deeply in love and drunk on sex, it had seemed they agreed about everything, as if they’d spend the rest of their lives excitedly finishing each other’s sentences. Still, it wasn’t just the love and sex. They really had agreed. They both wanted a family-okay, maybe not immediately, but someday. And when they had a family, of course they’d need a house, and there was nothing wrong with the one Joy dreamed of. And so what if Griffin had surprised himself by floating that trial balloon of one day turning his talents to something more worthy and real? Maybe it felt like a lie at first, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the lie hadn’t tapped into some deeper, subconscious truth. After all, he’d gotten into screenwriting, at least in part, to thumb his nose at his parents and their insufferable pretensions. But what about him? What did Griffin himself really want? After telling Joy he might want to write a novel one day, he’d discovered he actually did. Moving back East made sense, too. Why live in L.A. if you weren’t working in the industry?

Okay, maybe it should have been the Great Coastal Maine Accord, and perhaps, early in their marriage, he’d used his superior rhetorical skills to gain an advantage when he might have been more generous, more considerate of her desires. Sure, the time line had always been a bone of contention, and you couldn’t say Joy hadn’t been a model of patience. But when you looked at the original accord, as he’d been doing lately, the thing that jumped out at you was that Joy didn’t have much to complain about. She’d gotten everything she wanted, hadn’t she? They had Laura. He’d quit screenwriting. They’d moved back East. She’d gotten her house.

But he had to admit there was something they hadn’t agreed on, something the Great Truro Accord hadn’t even addressed. With respect to their families, Griffin had hoped to invoke a simple, equitable policy: a plague on both their houses. Have as little to do with Harve and Jill, and with William and Mary, as decency permitted. And he was more than willing to make the first gesture. He had no intention of inflicting his parents on Joy or, when the time came, on their children. Was a little reciprocity too much to hope for?

What he’d failed to comprehend in Truro was stark in its simplicity. Joy loved her family. Maybe she didn’t share their politics or their values, but she loved them still. Whenever they visited Harve and Jill in Sacramento, which he only did under protest, she slipped effortlessly into the old family routines, doing the complex ballet of kitchen and dining room with her mother and sisters, with children always underfoot, not to mention singing along with the songs on the oldies station that they made fun of back in L.A., banishing him to the family room to watch sports he didn’t care about with Harve and the idiot twins.

Perhaps because Jason and Jared were both marines and because their father was so full of bellow and bluster, it had taken Griffin a while to understand the gender dynamic that ran just under the surface at these family gatherings: it was the women who charted every course, who made every decision. As military cops, the twins were enforcers of rules, but in civilian life they were trained to await instructions, and so was their father. When the dining room table was cleared, the dishes and pans washed and stacked, the dreadful board games came out-Monopoly, Clue and Life; Scrabble they refused to play because Griffin always won-and they were called back to the table whether or not the sporting broadcast had finished. They grumbled, of course, as men do, wanting to know why they couldn’t be left in peace, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them to decline the invitation, which, to their credit, they recognized as a command. It was over these ratty, faded board games, many of them held together with Scotch tape along the center fold, that all the old family stories, many of which originated in that old Maine summer rental, got trotted out and told at a decibel level that sent only-child Griffin out onto the patio in search of quiet, though he knew full well that this made him seem standoffish.

At the conclusion of these endless visits, he always found a jazz station on the car radio for the trip back to L.A., during which he and Joy seldom spoke. It wasn’t the silence of argument so much as simple reentry. The drive was a long one, and just as well, too. Griffin could feel her exchanging-reluctantly, he sometimes felt-one suit of emotional clothes for another, one life for another. But the silence could and sometimes did morph into argument. One Thanksgiving at Harve and Jill’s, not long after they were married, having exhausted all the board games, they’d played Twenty Questions, and Joy’s sister Jane had stumped everyone at the table for the better part of an hour, Harve stubbornly refusing to give up. Finally, though, everyone else pleaded with her to surrender her fictional identity, which turned out to be Princess Grace of “ Morocco.”

That evening, when they pulled into the garage of their rented condo in Brentwood, Joy was still fuming because Griffin, instead of laughing along with the rest of the family at Jane’s goof, shook his head in disbelief, got up from the table and left the room, as if her mistake had been intentional or malicious and such bizarre mistakes could be assigned a moral value. Now, four hours later, when he turned off the ignition and started to get out of the car, Joy remained seated. When he asked if she meant to stay the night in the garage, she said, “I hate jazz.”

“Apropos of?” he asked.

“Apropos of I want you to know I hate jazz.”

She later told him it wasn’t really true. She liked jazz. She just for some reason felt the need to tell him she didn’t. Something had gotten into her, she said. She had no idea what.

4 The Summer of the Brownings

In addition to his students’ work, Griffin ’s satchel also contained a long, unfinished story, “The Summer of the Brownings,” its precomputer pages yellowed and curled. A couple years after they were married, it had been his first attempt to implement that provision of the Great Truro Accord by trying to write something other than a screenplay. He’d come across the story when he was cleaning out his filing cabinets at the college in order to make room for the few things of his father’s that he wanted to keep. His father’s last years were spent in a small, cramped, university-owned flat, and most of the furnishings weren’t even his. There were lots of scholarly journals and books, including a pristine copy of Claudia’s dissertation, published by a good university press, that she’d proudly signed. Griffin found his father listed on the acknowledgments page, along with the other members of her doctoral committee. The book’s stiff spine suggested that the book hadn’t been opened, much less read. Of course if his father had written it, as his mother alleged, there would’ve been no need to. In a token gesture of revenge Griffin had given it away with the rest of his father’s library, keeping as mementos only a few of the P. G. Wodehouse and Henry Miller books he remembered him reading on Cape Cod beaches. He’d almost missed, in the recesses of a dark closet, the dozen shoe boxes full of campaign buttons and other political trinkets his father had continued to collect down the years, and he kept these as well. “Scoff all you want,” he remembered him telling his mother when he stopped at flea markets. “You won’t be laughing when we sell the whole collection and use it for a down payment on a house.”

Was it worth anything now? Griffin supposed it might be and made a mental note to inventory the items and have them valued, but then he’d shoved the shoe boxes into the back of the filing cabinet and hadn’t thought about them since. The only real surprises among his father’s effects were a couple VHS tapes of movies Griffin and Tommy had written. He couldn’t remember sending them himself, so had his father bought them? Or had a colleague, noticing the screenplay credit, given them to him as a gift? They had been viewed, but by whom?

“The Summer of the Brownings” had an interesting provenance. The writers had gone on strike that year, as they were forever doing, and he’d used the work stoppage to write it. “You’re shitting me,” Tommy said when Griffin explained what he was doing. Why not write a spec script, he argued, which every other screenwriter would be doing, because then they’d have something they could sell once the strike was over. Be in the driver’s seat for once, instead of having to take the first horseshit assignment they got offered. Griffin told him to go ahead and start something if he wanted, but he knew Tommy wouldn’t. He relied on Griffin for direction and wouldn’t even know where to begin.

The story was about the summer he was-what-twelve? He and his parents had gone to the Cape, as usual. He couldn’t remember exactly where, only that it was pretty remote and they’d stayed only two weeks, which meant they weren’t flush. Their tiny, shingled cottage (Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift!) was set back from the highway in a stand of scrub pines along with eight or ten others arranged in a horseshoe around a brown, hard-packed children’s play area. To get to the water you had to cross the macadam road, then walk down a winding dirt road past million-dollar beach homes (Can’t Afford It!), between rolling, grassy dunes for a good half mile. Only one other cottage was occupied, so it must have been early in the season, probably the last half of June, because he recalled it had been warm.

“At least they’re over on the other side,” his father said, indicating the two children playing outside that cottage. His parents never made any secret of the fact that they loathed children, and that the whole compound was organized around a rusty swing set and jungle gym they took as an evil omen indeed. Even before they were finished unpacking the car, Griffin, changing into his bathing suit in the tiny upstairs bedroom under the eaves, heard his mother say, “Good God, here they come.” And sure enough, the whole family from across the way was trooping through the playground, clearly intending to welcome the newcomers. Griffin hurried down to meet them.

They were the Brownings, they said; the mother and father were both teachers from somewhere in western Massachusetts and roughly the same age as Griffin ’s parents. The kids were a boy, Peter, and also a little girl. Mr. Browning wondered if they were thinking about buying the cottage, indicating the FOR SALE sign leaning up against the porch. “God, no!” Griffin ’s father replied with a shudder. While the cottages were identical, the Brownings apparently took no offense, even though they themselves were part owners of the one they occupied, they explained, along with two other couples that taught at their school. The cottages were all individually owned, looked after in the off-season by a local caretaker, but most were rented for at least a month or two in the summer, and there was always a nice mix of people.

“You must be teachers, too,” Mr. Browning said, indicating the institutional decal on the rear window of the Griffins’ car.

“University professors, actually,” his mother said, clearly anxious to set them straight on this score.

Mrs. Browning, a tall, beautiful, olive-skinned woman, touched her husband’s elbow then, saying they were heading to the beach, and since their boys were about the same age, would Griffin like to come?

“Go on,” his parents said in unison.

That was the beginning. By the end of the day he and Peter Browning had become fast friends. Every morning, when his parents were reading the newspaper (his father drove into town early to pick it up, along with fresh pastries, though he kept forgetting he was supposed to get a box of Griffin’s favorite cereal, too) and having breakfast with Al Fresco, they’d hear the Brownings’ screen door creak open on its unoiled hinge and Peter would shout across the playground, “Can you come over?”

“Have fun,” his parents said, by which they meant, Leave us in peace.

Except, wait, that wasn’t true, at least not at the beginning. On their second day, when Griffin was again invited, midmorning, to go to the beach, his mother had said no, that he should stay with them. They’d be going to the beach themselves, right after lunch. So off the Brownings had trudged, a big cooler swinging between the adults, the little girl (why couldn’t he remember her name?) skipping on ahead, Peter shouldering a big mesh laundry bag full of towels and colorful beach toys and looking devastated as he waved goodbye. When Griffin wanted to know why he hadn’t been allowed to go along, his mother explained that people like that always wanted something in return for kindnesses, and she had no intention of playing that game.

Two interminable hours later, Griffin and his parents, not nearly so well provisioned, emerged from among the dunes, and he glimpsed the Brownings a hundred yards down the beach to the left. “Go right, go right, go right,” his father said, nudging him forcefully in the other direction and pretending not to notice the entire family standing up and waving. “They teach junior high,” his mother explained when Griffin asked why they weren’t being more friendly. “Do you know what that means?” He didn’t, but understood he was supposed to. Was it that people who taught, say, kindergarten didn’t associate with people who taught seventh grade, who didn’t socialize with people who taught high school, who didn’t mix with college professors? It had to be something like that, he decided.

Fortunately, though he had no idea why, his parents changed their minds about the Brownings wanting something, and the next day he was allowed, indeed encouraged, to go with them while his parents finished breakfast with Al. They never budged until after lunch (they hated eating on the beach, and his father’s pale skin was susceptible to sunburn), by which time most families with bratty kids were packing up, and they’d have a long stretch of sand to themselves. Without Griffin to nag them, they usually emerged from among the dunes midafternoon with their towels and books and a couple folding beach chairs and not much else. The Brownings typically set up camp to the left, which meant that his parents headed to the right. That embarrassed him, especially the day the Brownings (intentionally?) changed things up by making their camp right where his parents usually sat, so when they arrived at their usual time they took a couple of steps toward them before noticing, then quickly reversed course. Griffin saw the look that passed between Peter’s parents and felt himself glow hot with shame.

“Aren’t they tired of you yet?” his mother asked over breakfast one morning near the end of their first week, as if to suggest that she couldn’t imagine what was taking them so long.

If the Brownings were tired of Griffin, they gave no sign. Mrs. Browning always had enough sandwiches and Cokes in the cooler for everyone when they went to the beach. Of Italian descent, she introduced him to exotic new foods: fatty, spiced ham and hard salami, marinated mushrooms and artichokes, blistering hot cherry peppers, and a mouthwatering macaroni salad that tasted like nothing that came from the supermarket deli where his mother shopped. And in the evening, back at the cottages, there were always extra hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken on the grill. (Griffin ’s father never grilled outdoors, not even on vacation, not since the year the flame from the smoking briquettes climbed up the stream of lighter fluid and torched his eyebrows.) Nor did the Brownings seem to mind that his parents took advantage of the free babysitting, driving into town most nights for dinner, just the two of them. “You should let us return the favor some night,” Griffin ’s mother suggested, her insincerity clear even to him. “Give you and your husband a vacation from the kids.”

“We think of it as vacation with the kids,” Mrs. Browning said, and he saw the remark land, but it was only a glancing blow.

“If you pass someplace that sells ice on your way back, you could pick up a bag or two for the cooler,” Mr. Browning told Griffin ’s father. “Save me a trip in the morning.” But they must not have passed anyplace that did, and the Brownings didn’t ask any other favors.

Griffin had had friends before, but never one all to himself, and never one he liked as much. Peter was good at things. He knew how to bodysurf, something Griffin had long wanted to do but was too afraid to try. His father, who was prone to minor injury, was so afraid of riptides that he refused to even go into the water. His mother liked to swim, but she’d sidle gracefully through the waves until she was out beyond where they broke so she could do her languid crawl. Peter, a wave aficionado, showed Griffin how to get the maximum ride out of the smaller waves and later, when he grew bolder, how to keep the larger ones from bouncing him on his head. Despite being several inches shorter, the boy was a natural athlete and could beat Griffin at anything that involved hand-to-eye coordination, though he generously explained his victories as owing to genetics. “My dad’s good at sports”-he shrugged, as if that didn’t really amount to much-“so I am, too.” The heredity angle, of course, contained a veiled insult, and Griffin was pretty sure Peter and Mr. Browning, after watching his father’s daily struggles to unfold his beach chair, had sized him up as physically ungifted. “Your dad’s quite a reader, I see,” Peter’s father remarked one day, perhaps searching for a compliment that would have some basis in reality, and Griffin nodded, again glowing with shame.

By the end of their two weeks together, he and Peter had developed an intimacy that was wholly foreign to his experience and made him wonder if this was what love was like. It wasn’t a sexual feeling, though it constricted his heart with a strange, purposeless urgency he didn’t comprehend. When he wasn’t with Peter, he needed to talk about him and, no surprise, his parents tired of this subject quickly, especially when Griffin began to lobby them about renting one of these same cottages next summer, so he and Peter could be together again. Having already sounded him out about the owners’ rotation, he knew that the Brownings would be on the Cape in July. Please, please, he begged, couldn’t they book a cottage right now? If they couldn’t afford the whole month, at least take it for the first two weeks of July, so they’d all arrive together. Otherwise, Peter might develop some new summer friendship before Griffin could get there.

The reason he was so certain his attraction to Peter wasn’t sexual was that his feelings for the boy’s mother were precisely that. When Mrs. Browning wore a two-piece bathing suit, he had to lie on his stomach in the hot sand to conceal his erection. He didn’t let on to Peter, of course, not even daring to say something innocent like “Your mom’s really pretty,” but somehow he seemed to know anyway. Was it possible Peter harbored similar feelings for his own mother? Did that happen? Mr. Browning also noticed Griffin’s admiration, but instead of being annoyed or even angry, as Griffin imagined he might be, all he did was smile, as if he understood his wife’s charms all too well and couldn’t blame the boy for being taken with them. In fact, his kindness so shamed Griffin that for a day or two he tried his best to banish any dirty thoughts (as he’d characterized them) about Mrs. Browning, but it was no use. One afternoon, lying on her stomach in the warm sand, she untied her bathing suit top to take full advantage of the sun and then fell asleep. The waves were perfect that day, but Griffin told Peter he was tired of bodysurfing, whereas in truth he was intoxicated by the possibility that when Peter’s mother woke up she might momentarily forget the untying and rise up, bare-breasted. She didn’t, of course, but again Griffin felt that his friend knew what he was up to.

Had he ever again felt quite so sick at heart as at the end of their Cape vacation that summer? Not in adult life, surely. During the first of their two weeks he’d fallen in love, however improbably, with the whole Browning family, and every day, even the rainy ones, was radiant. During the second week, though, everything pivoted, as each passing day moved relentlessly toward the conclusion of their stay. The thought of leaving the Cape and never seeing Peter or any of the Brownings again engendered in Griffin a dark, complex emotion every bit as powerful as love. Part of it he recognized as despair, a panicked anxiety that left him breathless and weak, certain that things would never again return to normal or, worse, that normal was no longer enough, that his previous life amounted to starvation. But there was something else that scared him even more than despair: the desire to… what? To harm himself. To hurt even worse than he was already hurting. To ensure that whatever had been broken was beyond repair. Though there was a word for it-perversity-he didn’t know it yet, wouldn’t for many years. He knew only the feeling, but that was full and sufficient.

The evening before the Griffins were to leave, the Brownings invited him over for hamburgers and ice cream. Mr. Browning had some sparklers they were saving for their own last night, but since their new friend and his parents were departing, they’d decided to break them out early. Wanting desperately to accept their invitation, he instead told Peter that he and his parents were going out for a fancy dinner at the Blue Martini. It was very expensive, he said, but his parents had promised him he could order whatever he wanted, no matter what it cost, so he’d have to say no to the hamburgers. The look of disappointment on his friend’s face provided a kind of bitter satisfaction.

It was true his parents had planned a fancy dinner out, but for just the two of them, and their surprise and annoyance when he told them what he’d done was pleasurable as well. “Why?” his mother said. “It’s your last night with Steven. For the last two weeks it’s been nothing but Steven this and Steven that.”

“Peter,” he’d corrected her-shouting at her, really, and not caring if this meant trouble. “His name is Peter.”

She studied him for a long beat. “Why are you acting like this?” she said, but her tone suggested that she knew perfectly well, as if she’d been wondering when this side of his personality would reveal itself. “You’re only hurting yourself,” she told him. “You know that, don’t you?”

But of course that part was a bluff. He wasn’t hurting only himself. He was hurting her and his father, ruining their plans, and also disappointing Peter and the rest of the Brownings. That was the beauty of the thing, indeed its only beauty: the equitable sharing of unendurable loss and disappointment. There was another part of him, of course, that wanted to be talked out of this new, terrifying strategy, to subdue this vengeful, self-defeating emotion, and if his mother had tried harder to persuade him to, she might have succeeded. But she just gave him a wry smile and said, “If that’s the way you want to be.”

“That’s the way I want to be,” he said, feeling something rip inside, because it wasn’t what he wanted, but rather what he needed. Later, he heard his father call the restaurant and cancel their reservation. They went instead to a family seafood place, where they ate at a weathered picnic table, their dinners served in paper boats.

“I loath fried seafood,” his mother said, pushing her scallops away.

“This wasn’t what I had in mind, either,” his father said bitterly.

“We could’ve gone to the Blue Martini anyway,” his mother said.

“Yeah, but what would be the point?”

Two weeks earlier Griffin wouldn’t have understood the question, but now he did. Indeed, what was the point of anything? He’d never asked himself such a question before. After dinner, as darkness fell, they took a long drive with no particular destination in mind, as they sometimes did their last night on the Cape, breathing it all in, filling their lungs with the salt air, as if they could carry it back with them to breathe in the Mid-fucking-west. No one spoke. By the time they returned to the cottages it was pitch-dark except for the dancing sparklers in front of the Brownings’ cottage. Griffin paused when he climbed out of the car, waiting for Peter’s disembodied voice to call him over, so he once more could say no and derive that same perverse satisfaction, but no invitation came.

Upstairs-in his tiny bedroom under the eaves-he undressed in the dark and crawled into bed. From his window he saw five distinct sparkler tracks writing their ghostly script, but how could that be, with only four Brownings? Was one of them waving two sparklers at once? In the last twenty-four hours several other cottages had become occupied. Had the Brownings already found someone to replace him? Feeling his throat constrict at this cruel possibility, he pulled the shade down. But even with his eyes clamped tightly shut, he could still see the Brownings’ joyous sparklers etching their collective happiness on the night.

It had been the stuff of good fiction, Griffin knew, but he’d somehow managed to mess it up in the telling, and when the writers’ strike ended sooner than expected he’d pretended disappointment when in truth he was relieved. The story was already too long, but he had no idea how to end it, to resolve the conflict he’d never managed to clearly articulate. He’d hoped to capture what it felt like to be impossibly happy and miserable at the same time, to be held in the grip of powerful new emotions you couldn’t understand. But when he read over what he’d written, it all felt wrong. He wanted readers to fall in love with the Brownings, as he had, but as written they felt like a TV sitcom family, especially Peter. In the story, the two friends had taken long walks on the beach, just as Griffin and Peter had done in real life, straying so far that their parents became tiny specks among the dunes before disappearing altogether, leaving them alone and content in the world, talking about everything under the Cape Cod sun. Unfortunately, Griffin couldn’t for the life of him remember a single conversation they’d had, and when he tried to invent one it sounded, well, invented, an adult writer giving adolescence either too much credit or too little. He’d discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages-young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.

Nor was it just the details of this friendship that he couldn’t bring to mind. Peter’s sister… there’d been something wrong with her, hadn’t there? Griffin vaguely remembered the little girl having episodes of some sort when she got tired or overexcited, but episodes of what? Not being able to breathe? Somehow that didn’t seem right, but there’d been something. He remembered seeing the child feverish and curled in her mother’s lap, and a look passing between her parents that contained both fear and sadness, a detail that hadn’t made it into the story. Nor had Peter’s father. In real life the man had been ambiguously fascinating. He’d had a very large head, Griffin recalled, and while he wasn’t exactly ugly-Griffin’s own father was better looking-he wondered how Mr. Browning possibly could’ve won a woman as beautiful as Peter’s mother. But he did have a kind of physical grace, a sureness of movement. There seemed to be a connection between what he meant to do and what he did. Griffin couldn’t imagine him ever standing in the center of a room unsure of his next step, his own father’s signature gesture. Peter hadn’t been scared of him, but was always respectful, as if he knew all too well that his father, for all his kindness, wasn’t someone to cross. How, then, had he become so two-dimensional in Griffin ’s story, a surrogate for Wisdom, the voice of adult Truth?

Even more embarrassing, he wasn’t even sure he’d gotten himself right. Griffin kept imagining studio notes: Who is this kid? What does he want? Or worse, the ubiquitous Why are we “rooting” for him?

“The kid’s gay, right?” Tommy said. “That’s where you’re heading?”

Griffin hadn’t wanted to show him the story, but Tommy was insistent.

“And at the end he’ll commit suicide?”

“No,” Griffin told him, dispirited, “nothing like that.”

“Because that’s where it seems like you’re going, unless the little fucker’s going to get unreal lucky and bang the other kid’s mother.”

“No,” Griffin admitted, “not that, either.”

Of course it was possible that Tommy was still pissed at him for working on this piece of shit when they could have been writing a spec script. Because now the strike was over, and they were broke, they’d have to take the first crappy assignment they could get, just as he’d predicted. But he did seem genuinely puzzled by the story. “You gotta feel sorry for the poor fucking kid, though,” he admitted. “I mean, those asshole parents…”

That, Griffin felt, was the most dispiriting thing about it. Tommy hadn’t said it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. The only characters in the story that rang true, felt real, were the kid’s parents. Griffin hadn’t really intended to include them, except as devices. They were only there because a kid that age wouldn’t be alone. Parents of some sort were necessary, and generic ones would’ve done just fine. Instead, it had all gushed out, the stuff he’d only half understood at the time-how glad the fictional parents were that their son had been temporarily adopted by this other family. Not glad for him, not pleased that he’d found a friend, but for themselves. Because now they could have a leisurely breakfast on the deck with Al (yes, he’d used Al Fresco), spend their long afternoons reading on the beach without being pestered to come into the water and then, in the evening, go someplace nice for dinner.

Curious to revisit the story after so long, Griffin had stuck it in the satchel with his students’ work. Who knew? Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he remembered. Actually being on the Cape as he reread it might help him see the ending that had eluded him in L.A. If so, and if Sid wasn’t calling about a script, he’d revise it over the summer. Unfortunately, in the lazy afternoon warmth on the B and B’s porch, Griffin found it difficult to fully enter its fictional world. Part of the problem was that his earlier assessment seemed to be correct: the story just wasn’t very good. But what puzzled him even more was why he’d tried to write it in the first place. Would he have done so but for the Great Truro Accord? He doubted it. Some stories, even ones buried deep in memory and the subconscious, had a way of burrowing up into the light, of demanding conscious attention, until you had little choice but to write them. But “The Summer of the Brownings” hadn’t been like that. He’d remembered them only when the strike loomed and he was casting about for something he might work into a story or novella. But why write either? Why had he been so willing, even anxious, to concede there was something wrong with the life he and Joy were living? What was so wrong with being young and free? With running off to Mexico on impulse? With turning their cars over to an endless parade of envious valets? That’s what living in L.A. was, if you could afford it, and they could. It was unfair to blame Joy, of course. It wasn’t like she’d tricked him. If anything, he’d tricked himself. In a moment of weakness, besotted by love, he’d imagined himself a different sort of writer from the one he knew himself to be. Joy had simply reacted to his enthusiasm. All she’d done was love him, the man he was, the man he’d been fool enough to believe he might become.

Maybe nobody was to blame, but the end result of the exuberant, love-inspired Great Truro Accord was that he and Joy were now out of plumb. Plumb. Griffin couldn’t help smiling. He hadn’t thought of that term in years. One summer he’d worked as a carpenter’s assistant on a road-construction crew that built concrete footers. That whole July and August, in the blistering Midwest heat, he’d worked with the same two guys, Louie and Albert. Where conversation was concerned, they’d been minimalists. “Are we plumb?” Albert would ask after a good hour of silence. “We were a minute ago,” Louie would respond, placing his level on the two-by-four in question, cocking his head to look at the bubble. “We’re plumb some,” he’d tell his partner, shrugging, which Griffin understood meant close enough. “We’re not building a skyscraper.” As they explained it to Griffin, a half bubble off in a foundation was no big deal unless you were going up thirty stories. Of course, half a bubble, factored over thirty floors, was no small thing. That, he now realized, was how he’d been feeling two days ago when he’d packed that bag and headed to Boston alone-thirty floors up and half a bubble off. Plumb the last time they checked, but now, suddenly, plumb some.

Stories worked much the same way, Griffin thought, shoving “The Summer of the Brownings” back into his satchel. A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation. That was the problem with most of the scripts in his satchel. Griffin knew that much without even reading them. They would end unconvincingly because of some critical misstep at or near the beginning. Over the next few days, despite his lack of enthusiasm for the task, he’d carefully examine every one of his students’ rickety narratives, figure out exactly where they went wrong and how to go about fixing them, should their authors want to. They wouldn’t, though. He knew this because he himself didn’t want to revise “The Summer of the Brownings.” As far as he was concerned, if the error was somewhere in the foundation, in some awkward place you couldn’t get at with the tools at hand, it could just stay a half bubble off. Better to forget it and start something new.

He really did hope Sid had something for him.

5 Smirt

That evening Griffin went to a steak house not far from the B and B. The Olde Cape Lounge had a frozen-in-amber fifties feel, but it was mobbed, the line of people waiting for tables stretching out the door. There was, however, a vacant stool at the bar, so he climbed aboard and squinted at the sign above the back bar, which read, in ornate Gothic letters:

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 meaning to save rather than actually saving. Maybe money did talk, as people claimed, but all it said to them was goodbye. Her parents, she said, were not only ready to help but anxious to. (They’d discussed this? When?) “They want to,” Joy said, exasperated, when Griffin categorically refused. “They loaned money to both my sisters, and they want to do the same for us. They don’t understand our reluctance.”

His own parents understood perfectly. His mother was particularly adamant that borrowing money from Harve and Jill was a bad idea. “Good God,” she said. “Imagine owing money to people like them.”

“That’s a bit harsh, Mom, given that you’ve only met them once,” he chided her, but thinking as he did so how strange it was that he always ended up defending Joy’s parents to his own, an impulse he otherwise kept under control. He had, in fact, imagined vividly what indebtedness to her parents would mean. In practical terms, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Fourth of July invitation would have to be accepted. Nor would paying back the loan nullify such obligations. Worse was the attendant symbolism, because accepting their money would be a tacit admission that they needed it, and Harve would brag about “helping them out” long into the future. Griffin was pretty sure he made better money than Joy’s father ever had, but accepting this loan would cede to him the high economic moral ground. Harve could lay claim to a kind of fiscal virtue, and Griffin himself would become, by implication, the wastrel who needed assistance. This was, of course, an ungenerous view of his in-laws’ motives, one he didn’t go into with his mother. “They mean well,” he told her, damning them with faint praise. Though even this, his mother thought, was overly generous. “Boorish know-nothings” was how she remembered them from that single meeting. “Proud of their ignorance.”

“Maybe you just know different things.”

“Did you or did you not tell me they belong to a country club, that they live in a gated community?”

Which was his mother in top form. Catch her in one unkindness and she’d quickly hopscotch to another. Attempting to corner her was like trying to put a cat in a bag; there was always an arm left over and, at the end of it, claws.

“Call your father,” she advised. “He and I may not agree on much, but I’m certain he’d never want to owe money to anyone who plays golf. Bartleby would agree, too, if he ever said anything.”

Actually, he happened to know that his father himself had taken up golf after Claudia left him. His doctor at the time, himself an avid player, had suggested it as a way to relax-strange advice, Griffin thought, since the sport had pretty much the opposite effect on him, though that probably had less to do with the game than that he usually played it with Harve.

In lieu of offering to loan them the money herself-had Griffin actually imagined she might?-his mother continued to explain why he’d be wise to reject the offer of someone who had. “Remember your Thoreau,” she counseled. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

“That’s all well and good, Mom, but Joy’s talking location, location, location.”

“Then save. When you have enough for a down payment on a crappy three-bedroom ranch out there, you’d have enough for a real house back East, maybe even a place on the Cape. I could visit you there. I’ve missed you.”

Now this was a surprising admission, and Griffin immediately tested its sincerity. “You could visit us now in L.A. ”

“That’s all right. I can wait.”

Save and wait. For a while at least, that’s what they decided to do. Dear God, he remembered thinking. Was he actually going to follow his mother’s advice? But in this case it made sense, didn’t it, to scale back and get real? Okay, maybe not Thoreau real, but real enough. For instance, there was no law that said screenplays had to be written on the balconies of expensive Mexican hotels (though in Tommy’s opinion there should’ve been). If they could rein in their spendthrift ways (yeah, Harve was right, they did spend too much and get too little for their money), Griffin made more than enough for them to live on. Joy, who worked part-time in the UCLA admissions office, didn’t make a fortune, but if they opened a savings account and deposited her earnings automatically and treated the money therein as sacred, in two or three years they’d have a tidy sum. If it wasn’t tidy enough, they could revisit the idea of a loan from her parents. By then maybe he’d be ready to quit screen-writing, which was, let’s face it, a young man’s game. He’d already been at it far longer than they planned in Truro.

If it weren’t for Tommy, who’d be lost without him and needed time to get back on his feet after the meltdown of his marriage, he would’ve already said goodbye to the whole twisted life. Feature-film deals were getting harder and harder to make, and Griffin hated that the deals always seemed more important than the work that resulted from them. He could and often did riff on the subject. The “juice,” the creative surge, was all front-loaded. Talking up the deal, you were excited and the producer was excited and the young studio exec was fucking beside himself with excitement. Why? Because nobody had ever made a movie like this before. It was beyond quirky, it was fucking unique. It was fucking better than unique, it was one of a kind. Just go away and write it, the exec would tell them, because this was a can’t-miss idea. In fact, there was almost no way to fuck it up. After two years, a new producer and fifteen drafts (only three paid for) based on fifteen conflicting sets of notes, what you had, if you were lucky and the whole thing hadn’t been put in turnaround, was yet another standard-issue piece of shit that lacked a single compelling reason to shoot it, which was, Tommy was fond of pointing out, the best reason to think it would be. Fuck it, Griffin thought. Another two or three years, and he was out.

Joy accepted his assurance, but for the record she expressed several explicit objections to his (or his mother’s?) strategy to save, scale back on spending and patiently bide their time. For one thing it flew directly in the face of human nature in general and their own in particular. The best way to save for the house they wanted back East, she (or her father?) argued, was to buy one here. They wouldn’t even have to save (something they’d never demonstrated much skill at), because the house itself would do the saving for them. It would appreciate in value, and when the time came to sell, the profit they made would provide the down payment on the house they wanted. Also, it was all well and good for Griffin to rail against the business of screenwriting and claim he was burning out, but there wasn’t ever going to be a good time to quit. Ten years from now Tommy would still be lost without him, and they’d always be in the middle of a project, unable to walk away. Even Tommy, ever the cynic, agreed with her. When it came to quitting, to getting the hell out, screenwriters were like stockbrokers. You could hate the job all you wanted but it remained lucrative, which fact hit home when you seriously considered the other options. Plus, he reminded Griffin, deep down, fucked up as it was, you loved it. A Stockholm syndrome kind of love, maybe, but real enough for all that.

And Joy had one further objection, this one more personal than practical. If they followed his plan, it was she, not Griffin, who’d have to explain to her parents why they’d decided not to accept their generous offer of help. She did it, though, calling home over the Fourth, when the family always gathered for a patriotic celebration. This year Jason and Jared were both home on leave, and the family had been especially disappointed when Griffin and Joy had begged off, pleading, as always, a deadline. No, she told them, they weren’t ready to take the house plunge quite yet. They appreciated the offer, they’d talked it through, but this was what they’d decided. Maybe next year, or the year after that…

Harve, at least, had shrugged it off. Hey, his son-in-law was proud-okay, hardheaded-but, hell, he could understand that, maybe even admire it a little. Just so long as his little girl understood the money wasn’t going anywhere. In the end, he assured her, Griffin would come around, and when he did, she could just let him know, and he’d write the check. Jill, though, was more perceptive. “I can’t help feeling Jack doesn’t like us,” she confessed to her daughter. (“Don’t be ridiculous,” Harve bellowed from the next room. “Why wouldn’t he like us?” followed by Jared and Jason, who shared a talent for mimicry and used it to devastating effect on their father, “Why wouldn’t he like us?”) Griffin had listened in on his wife’s half of the conversation and her patient attempt to dispel her mother’s misgivings (“No, no, that’s not true, Mom. He’s just afraid we won’t be able… I know, I know… He doesn’t mean anything by it… Of course he does, and so do I… Of course I’m happy…”). After Joy finally hung up, she was quiet, staring out the window at the courtyard below, where a young woman was shrieking with delight as two young men tossed her into the pool. Griffin turned off the radio, which had been playing jazz.

He now had to admit that Joy had been right about all of it. It had taken him close to another decade to quit screenwriting and find a suitable academic position back East at a college that was adding a screenwriting component and a film series to their creative-writing major. He and Joy saved for a while, but not enough, and, just as she’d predicted, they raided the house account in emergencies. So in the end, when Joy got pregnant, he’d had to give in and accept the loan from her parents. He’d hated it even then, but it was the right thing to do. They bought a nice, modest house (though his mother Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift) at an immodest price in the Valley, and it was the equity from its eventual sale that paid for Joy’s dream house in Connecticut. It had also been the home of Laura’s childhood, and whenever she was in Southern California she drove by the old neighborhood to make sure it was still there, still being cared for.

But Griffin couldn’t help remembering how, at the closing, as he signed his way through the mountain of paperwork, there’d been a little voice in the back of his head-his mother’s? his father’s? his own?-noting that he and Joy were no longer “flexible,” that if something better came along it’d be tough to pull up stakes and go. But of course he’d been right about a few things, too. Even after the loan had been repaid in full, Harve continued to remind them about what had given them their start, that they should’ve taken the money sooner. Jill scolded him when he went on like this, but Griffin could tell she, too, was proud of the part they’d played in making her daughter and son-in-law home owners, and of course she subscribed to Harve’s view that Joy and Griffin had had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into adulthood. “These two would still be hippies if it wasn’t for us, Jilly-Billy,” Harve chortled.

Actually, his father-in-law’s boasting and the endless I-told-you-so’s had bothered Griffin less than he’d imagined they would, and to Harve’s credit, when Griffin repaid the loan, he hadn’t wanted to take the money. Jane and June and their husbands had never paid him back, he admitted, not that he’d wanted them to. That Griffin was even offering to was repayment enough. But Griffin had insisted, hoping against hope that the absence of debt would buy them some freedom.

“Could we spend Christmas in Baja?” he asked Joy, driving back to L.A. after a particularly brutal Thanksgiving in Sacramento. Laura, then four, had been sick the whole trip. She’d been running a fever even before they left L.A., but no, even a sick child was no excuse.

“Baja,” Joy repeated. “Why would we want to go to Mexico for Christmas?”

“Okay, then you decide. Anywhere but Sacramento. Someplace where nobody will say, ‘How’s that house of ours? Tell me that’s not the best decision you ever made.’”

She stared out the passenger-side window for a good mile before responding. “If we were going to visit your parents, mine would understand.”

“I don’t want to visit my parents,” he said. “God forbid.”

“So?”

“I guess what I don’t understand is why we can’t have one holiday with just us.”

“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.

• • •

Kelsey Apple, the bride, had been Laura’s best friend through middle school, back in L.A. Laura’s had been the more dominant personality, or so it had seemed to Griffin. Wherever she was, that’s where Kelsey had to be, and whatever she had was what Kelsey wanted, including Griffin and Joy for her parents. Her own were dour and dull, her father some sort of bean counter for a movie studio, her mother religious. “It’s so weird being in your house,” Kelsey once told Laura. “Your parents, like, actually talk to each other. You can tell they still have sex.”

When Griffin accepted the teaching position back East, they feared Laura would be devastated to leave her L.A. life and friends, but it was Kelsey who’d come unglued at the news. “You can’t,” she told Laura matter-of-factly as they walked home from school, as if that declaration meant the end of the discussion. That evening after dinner, Mrs. Apple had called the Griffins to say that Kelsey had pitched the mother of all fits and locked herself in her room. Could Laura maybe come over and reassure her that their moving to Connecticut wouldn’t mean the end of the girls’ friendship, that they could still write and even talk on the phone? Joy had gone along with Laura for moral support and also ended up talking to Kelsey through her locked bedroom door, a conversation that quickly devolved into a negotiation. Of course Kelsey and Laura wouldn’t lose touch, and of course they could talk on the phone each and every week, and of course Laura wasn’t going to go out and find a new best friend and replace her. And next summer (Joy had to promise this, too, not just Laura) Kelsey could come visit them in their new home and stay as long as she wanted. Leaving no stone unturned, Kelsey then insisted both her parents join them in the crowded hallway, grant their permission and promise they’d somehow find money for the trip. Only then did she open the door and embrace her friend. “I’d still rather you wouldn’t,” she told Laura, clearly suffering buyer’s remorse now that the deal had finally been struck. Walking home Laura confided to Joy that she was just as happy to be moving far away, that Kelsey’s friendship, always needy, was becoming impossible.

New England was different, though, and she found it tough sledding in her new high school. The cliques were long established, and since Laura wasn’t the type to crash them, she spent most of her free time babysitting and wishing she had a best friend again, even a needy one. Kelsey visited for two weeks that summer, and after that first year’s separation both girls seemed profoundly happy together. Kelsey had a boyfriend now, Robbie, but he was from her mother’s church and he thought he might become a minister, so in some respects it was a lot like not having a boyfriend. She told Laura she was thinking she’d break up with him as soon as she got back to L.A., though then again maybe she’d wait until she had someone to replace him. The following summer, when she visited again, Kelsey was still with Robbie, who now was pretty sure, at least when they were necking in the backseat of his parents’ car, that he didn’t have a vocation after all. It wasn’t until junior year that Laura got a boyfriend, the son of one of Griffin ’s colleagues, and this ended her isolation, because being a couple allowed them access into the same social circles where they’d been unwelcome as singles.

That was also the year of college applications, and Kelsey frequently called to ask what schools Laura had visited the weekend before, which had impressed her the most, how she was leaning. She wanted desperately to apply back East herself, but her parents said she had to stay in California, in the state university system. Private schools were out of the question. Which they would have been for Laura but for the generous tuition-reimbursement program offered by Griffin ’s college.

By the fall of her senior year Laura had settled on Skidmore College. Jonathan, her boyfriend, applied there as well, though not early admission as Laura had and expected him to. His parents wanted him to keep his options open, he explained, but she was worried there might be more to it, that maybe those options weren’t just academic. Worse, what if that wasn’t really his parents’ idea but his own? Griffin didn’t say anything, though he feared she might be right. Jonathan’s father struck him as a careerist who was using his present position as a stepping stone to a better one at a research university. He’d even asked him for a letter of recommendation earlier that year, stressing the necessity for secrecy. If Griffin was right-and he was reasonably confident of his ability to recognize academic snobbery and ambition when he saw it-then the apple hadn’t fallen very far from the tree. Laura was deeply in love with Jonathan, though, and while he undoubtedly cared for her, she was afraid that maybe he wasn’t quite as much in love with her as she with him. The harder she tried to find out, the more elusive and distant he became. When she got the good news about Skidmore, he was happy for her, but she thought maybe he was also relieved to know that her decision had been made, that she wouldn’t be able to wait and see where he was going. When he applied to eight schools and got in everywhere except Skidmore, Laura tearfully confessed to her mother that she suspected he’d withdrawn his application there. “You should give Kelsey a call,” Joy had suggested, hoping to cheer her up. “See how things are shaping up for her.”

Laura said she would but never did. She’d told Kelsey too much about Jonathan and didn’t want to confess the extent of her broken heart. In fact, they didn’t talk until late that spring, when her friend called with exciting news. She hadn’t called earlier, she explained, because she was waiting to hear what kind of financial package her favorite school would offer, but she’d just learned today that she, too, would be enrolling at Skidmore. The other reason she hadn’t called was that she’d been down in the dumps since Christmas, when she’d spent the holidays wondering whether to break up with Robbie, only to have him break up with her. All that backseat groping had caused him to backslide into the church. He’d confessed to his pastor that he was pretty sure he and Kelsey would have sex soon (she told Laura his optimistic anxiety on that score was entirely unwarranted), and the pastor had said that breaking up was definitely the right thing to do. So for now she was dating a boy who was really more of a friend, someone there was no danger of getting serious about. Laura knew him, actually. Did she remember Sunny Kim? Probably not, but he remembered Laura and was always asking about her.

Of course Laura did remember both Sunny and his family. Mr. Kim was an engineer who’d thrived since arriving in America. Mrs. Kim didn’t work outside the home and in fact seldom left it. Griffin remembered Sunny, the oldest of their half-dozen children, as a well-mannered boy, prematurely adult and serious. He wasn’t allowed to play sports or join clubs. When school let out Mrs. Kim was always there at the curb with a wagonful of well-behaved little Kims, the two youngest still strapped into car seats. Years before, Joy and Kelsey’s mother had invited Mrs. Kim to join their car pool, since the three families lived within a few blocks of one another. But she’d declined, saying in fractured but earnest English that transportation was her duty and her husband wouldn’t approve of her sharing it. She wasn’t unfriendly, though, and seemed, if not tempted by their offer, at least grateful for it. Determined to raise their children as Koreans, the Kims apparently feared all American influences, as if Southern California culture itself were rooted in decadence and corruption, which-admit it-didn’t exactly make them fools. That Sunny also wasn’t allowed to ask girls out made Laura guiltily glad, because she knew he had a crush on her.

It was interesting that later, when they finally relaxed a bit and let Sunny date, he chose (or was it his mother?) the daughter of one of the women who’d been kind to Mrs. Kim so long ago. Laura suspected that the real reason he dated Kelsey was that he knew she and Laura were still friends. Sometimes they’d talk for a good half hour on the phone and then, just before hanging up, Kelsey would say, as if in afterthought, “Oh, Sunny says hi,” and Laura would realize that he’d been there all along, waiting patiently to be acknowledged, for his name to be introduced into the record, anxious not to be completely forgotten. When Kelsey headed east to join Laura at Skidmore, Sunny enrolled at Stanford, where he’d earned a full scholarship. “Do you think Sunny’s gay?” Kelsey inquired idly one day, as if this happy possibility had just occurred to her. They’d dated throughout senior year, and Sunny, though always attentive and eager to please, had never even tried to kiss her. She hadn’t wanted him to, exactly, but still. Now, at Stanford, he apparently wasn’t dating.

“No,” Laura told her, “Sunny’s not gay.”

What he was, at Stanford, was poor. He had the scholarship, sure, but he also worked two part-time jobs. His father, a stereotypical Asian workaholic, had fallen ill that summer and had to have an operation. Afterward, he’d gone back to his job too soon and gotten sick again, a pattern that was to recur during Sunny’s college years. “Is it okay if I give Sunny your e-mail address?” Kelsey asked one day during their spring semester. He’d been writing her every week, long e-mail letters that made her feel guilty about the brief ones she sent in return, so guilty that she’d solved the problem by responding only to every second or third letter, and it would be good to have someone to share the burden. “Besides,” she told Laura, “he keeps asking about you.”

Laura said that of course it was okay, but for some reason Sunny didn’t write. Probably, she decided, he was just as shy as he’d been in middle school, always standing awkwardly off on the periphery of things, never willing to put himself forward. So after a couple weeks she wrote him instead, asking how he was, how his classes were going, whether there was a girl in his life yet. By evening he’d responded-good, fine and no. But he was very happy to hear from her. Yes, Kelsey had given him her address, though he hadn’t been sure she’d remember him after so many years. Still, since she’d been so kind, would she mind if he wrote her occasionally and promised not to do it too often? He knew how busy she must be, and of course she wouldn’t be under any obligation to reply.

“Excellent!” Kelsey said when Laura told her about all this. “Now he’s yours, which is only fair. I dated him. This is the least you can do.”

And so the two began a correspondence. Every couple weeks Laura would receive a newsy e-mail and wait a few days before writing back, not wanting to give him the wrong impression, though in fact she did enjoy hearing about his family, his classes, his part-time jobs. Gradually she learned to read between the lines, factoring in Sunny’s modesty (he wasn’t doing “okay” in his classes, but brilliantly), his optimism (his father’s condition wasn’t likely to “improve soon,” but rather would continue its decline), his stoicism (he was friendly with several of his professors, meaning he had no other friends). His classes had many attractive and intelligent girls, he admitted, but most were spoken for and, besides, his mother was determined that when the time came he should marry a Korean girl and bring her to this country. For this precise purpose she’d kept in touch with friends from the old country who had daughters roughly Sunny’s age. He wasn’t in favor of this plan, he confessed, but until such time as he should fall in love with a girl who loved him back, he saw no reason to bring his mother un-happiness by refusing to consider the possibility of a Korean wife.

Laura’s e-mails to Sunny were far less circumspect. She was enjoying college and doing well, but she confided to him that she and Kelsey were going through a rough patch in their friendship. Kelsey had originally suggested they room together, and her feelings were hurt when Laura, who was still ambivalent about her being there, said they should probably be meeting new people. To her surprise, though, Kelsey proved more adept at making friends than she was, and by the end of September she had a new boyfriend and had pledged a sorority. Laura began to sense that the shoe of neediness was now inexplicably on the other foot. At the beginning of the spring semester, when Kelsey asked if she wanted to pledge her sorority, Laura said she didn’t think so, but the way Kelsey just shrugged and said “Fine” made her wonder if she wasn’t relieved.

Laura also confessed to Sunny that she was still in love with Jonathan, who’d gone off to a midwestern university. Worse, his father had published a well-reviewed book that won him a job at an Ivy League school, and the family had moved, which meant she wouldn’t be seeing him even on vacations. Most of the boys she’d met at Skidmore were wealthy city brats majoring in alcoholism who saw no reason to waste time on a girl who wasn’t going to put out, not when the next girl would. Kelsey is lucky to have you for a friend, Sunny wrote back. And you are right not to give in to social pressure. You’re too special. That made her feel guilty, detailing her own brokenheartedness to a boy who she suspected was himself brokenhearted over her.

Much as Sunny liked to write long e-mails, he had little use for instant messaging. Most of her college friends-Kelsey in particular-were on IM every night with a dozen friends all over the country. Laura, wary of the habit, tried to stay off-line except on weekends. Sunny agreed that it wasted time, but he had another reservation, too. I like to think about what I say, he explained. When I speak impulsively, I sometimes say foolish things. She’d noted, of course, that his communications were formal to the point of stylistic stiffness, that he never contracted words or used slang or made grammatical errors, but she’d attributed this to the combination of his brilliance and cultural upbringing. Eventually she began to suspect that he not only wrote carefully but also revised again and again. The reason he didn’t write more often (as he’d done with Kelsey) was that every letter had to be perfect. It was the instant in instant messaging that frightened him, and himself he distrusted. You need to loosen up, Laura wrote him. So what if you say something dumb? It’s just me. We’re friends. I say dumb things all the time.

No, he wrote back in his next long letter. You never say dumb things.

One Sunday night Laura awoke before dawn, as she often did on days when she had a big exam or presentation. She’d forgotten to turn her computer off the night before, and now noticed that Sunny was online. She’d put him on her IM buddy list, but until that moment he’d never actually used it.

Sunny, is that you? In California it was 2:00 a.m., not so very late for a college student, but still.

Then, after a long beat: Laura?

How are you?

An even longer beat, then: A terrible thing has happened. My brother has been arrested.

Laura watched the blinking cursor and had just about concluded that he wasn’t going to say anything more when words started flying onto the screen in a torrent. His brother and a friend had broken into a house in Beverly Hills. A girl they’d met at a club lived there and told them no one would be home. She was angry with her parents, who’d left for Europe without her, fobbing her off on an aunt in Brentwood for a whole month. She’d given Sunny’s brother the security code and told him to take everything. Except it turned out she didn’t really live there, that the people who did weren’t her parents and weren’t in Europe, that the code she’d given them didn’t even have the right number of digits. Sunny’s parents had had to borrow money against their house to get his brother out of jail. The story had been in the newspaper, the family disgraced. Sunny was afraid his father, his health precarious as always, might now take his life for the shame of it. His mother was talking about moving back to Korea. She wanted Sunny to leave Stanford immediately and come home.

Your brother has disgraced himself, not you, not your family, Laura wrote. If you leave Stanford I’ll never forgive you.

Again, she watched the blinking cursor for a long time. Finally, he came back. You are right, of course. May I tell my mother you said this?

I hope you will.

Please don’t tell Kelsey

Of course I won’t, she promised. Hey, you know what? I’m proud of you. You wrote a spontaneous message. It contained actual mistakes, a misspelling, even. You can rest easy, though. You didn’t say anything foolish.

He wrote back, The thing I wanted to write but did not… that was the foolish thing.

Laura didn’t have to ask what that thing was.

“I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to judge me too harshly,” Sunny told Joy when she asked what he was doing in D.C. The day had turned hot, and Griffin took off his sport coat and loosened his tie. Guests were now gathered on the lawn, waiting for the wedding party to emerge from the hotel. Sunny had walked with them to the last row of folding chairs when Joy waved him over, giving her a graceful kiss on the cheek and shaking Griffin ’s hand with firm forthrightness, though neither gesture should have been particularly surprising. The kid had graduated from Stanford, after all, then gone to law school at Georgetown, so there was no reason for him to be shy or awkward anymore. “I’ve become two terrible things,” he said with a wry grin. “A lawyer and a lobbyist.”

Though not so very terrible, of course. Under cross-examination Sunny confessed that he worked for a liberal law firm that handled public-interest litigation. He himself was one of its immigration specialists.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at the restaurant last night,” Griffin said.

“I should’ve introduced myself,” Sunny told him. “I was pretty sure it was you, but when I didn’t see Mrs. Griffin…”

The last time Griffin had seen him was at Laura’s thirteenth birthday party. Joy had had to banish him from the kitchen, where he wanted to be put to work. “You’re a guest,” she told him. “Join the others and have fun.” The one thing the poor boy had no clue how to do.

“I wish it would get dark,” Griffin recalled telling Joy. “I can’t bear to watch this.”

As instructed, Sunny had joined the others on the patio but seemed to have little in common with the other boys, who’d congregated, as boys will, near the food, strutting and joking and pushing and checking out the giggling girls who’d cleverly staked out the punch bowl. Sunny had positioned himself in the middle, as if he represented a third gender, smiling broadly at nothing in particular, his head bobbing arrhythmically to the horrible boy-band music, pretending, Griffin was sure, to enjoy himself.

In fact, watching the kid reminded Griffin of his first boy-girl party at a similar age. He should’ve known how to behave, since his parents were forever throwing parties back then, though of course those were for adults only. He was expected to make a brief appearance after the guests started arriving and then to disappear, which was why, he supposed, he never learned the requisite skills. His first junior-high party had been a nightmare. Not only did all the other kids know one another, it also seemed like they’d been going to parties like this for years. Griffin remembered positioning himself where he could see the clock and will it to move. At one point, after he and the others had filled their paper plates with food at the buffet table and eaten standing up, a few parents hovering around, everyone, it seemed, began trooping downstairs into the rec room, where music was playing on a portable record player. Griffin was still on the stairs when the lights went out. It had taken his eyes a minute or two to adjust, and when they finally did he discovered, to his mortification, that all the other kids were couples necking in the dark. One boy he knew had his hand under a girl’s shirt. “What are you doing down here?” came a voice in the dark, and he’d known with terrible certainty that he was the one being addressed.

“I didn’t know…,” he’d stammered.

“Yeah, well, now you do.”

And there’d been snickers, lots of them, to help propel him back up the stairs.

Poor kid, Griffin remembered thinking as he regarded Sunny. He must be suffering just like that.

“Why don’t you go somewhere, then,” Joy told him. “You’re making me more nervous than he is.”

He’d gladly taken her advice and gone out for a drink with Tommy, returning just as the party was breaking up. Sunny Kim, still smiling, was among the last to leave, and he shook Griffin ’s hand solemnly. “It was a wonderful party,” he said. “You have a lovely home.”

“What kind of thirteen-year-old says, ‘You have a lovely home’?” he asked Joy later, as they were cleaning up. In his mind’s eye he could see the poor kid practicing the line until his parents were sure he’d got it right.

“We do have a lovely home,” Joy pointed out. “And he did have a good time. Quit worrying. They’re just kids. They have to figure these things out.”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “They already have it all figured out. Who’s cool, who’s not, who’s in, who’s out. Nobody had to teach them, either.”

Sunny’s parents lived in a modest stucco ranch on the other side of Shoreham Drive, in a mixed-race neighborhood where single-level houses, wedged in tightly together, were cheaper and sported carports rather than garages. On the Griffins’ side of Shoreham, the homes, while not extravagant, were more likely to be larger split-levels with attached garages, with real lawns instead of what on the other side was euphemistically described as “desert landscaping.” Every second or third house on Griffin ’s block had a pool. And the neighborhood was white, of course. How much of this had Sunny’s mother prepared him for before allowing him to attend Laura’s party? How, he now wondered, had he been invited in the first place? Had Joy insisted, or had Laura done it on her own? He was the smartest kid in her class, and had been since grade school. His name was always coming up in conversation, though usually the subject was honors and awards, not romance. “Did somebody dance with him at least?”

“Yes,” his wife told him, clearly annoyed now. “Laura did. And Kelsey.”

What was vague in Griffin ’s recollection was the exact chronology of all this. By that birthday party he and Joy must have already been making plans to leave L.A., hadn’t they? Was it that very night that had firmed his resolve to look seriously for a teaching position back East? No, that was a trick of memory, surely. Yet he did seem to remember not liking Laura’s friends, especially that cluster of boys, and one in particular who, smirking, had elbowed another and pointed to Sunny Kim standing alone on the patio. But there’d been other factors. The old days, wild and free, finally seemed to be over. Even Griffin had to admit it. Laura’s birth was part of that, but by then he’d begun to suspect there was something wrong with Tommy, whose second, short-lived marriage had quickly ended up on the rocks and who now was drinking more heavily. Griffin was pretty sure the drinking was more effect than cause, and Tommy admitted as much but claimed it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. All of which put a strain on their writing partnership. They’d always been good at different things. Tommy, smooth and personable and quick-witted, loved to pitch ideas. He always saw a story in terms of its overall structure, leaving Griffin to write the dialogue, make sure the scenes were alive and the narrative tracked. But now, with Tommy viewing things through a prism of empty vodka bottles, Griffin found himself doing more and more of the work, not really even trusting Tommy to do the pitch without him.

Just as troubling, Joy seemed actually to be settling into their “lovely home.” Now he was the one reminding her of the Great Truro Accord, that the idea had always been to sell the Valley house and use the equity for a down payment back East. Finally, in the second decade of their marriage, he was beginning to understand that his wife’s natural inclination was toward contentment. Their present house and their life in L.A. had grown on her. She adored Laura so completely that their daughter seemed like the only thing that had ever been missing from their lives. And though she never said so, he also suspected she wasn’t sure she wanted to be so far away from her family, on the other side of the country. It was this, of course, that he truly resented. There’d been a time when Harve and Jill had themselves talked of returning to the East, but Harve was now talking about investing in a planned community called Windward Estates (Breakwind Estates, Griffin had immediately dubbed it), where they could map out their entire future in advance. On special occasions they could still entertain the family in the big common areas that centered around a mammoth pool and clubhouse, while they downsized into a smaller house that Jill wouldn’t have to work so hard to maintain. Later, they could downsize further into a condo, then into the attached assisted-living facility, then into the best nursing home money could buy, all right there in Breakwind.

He’d described all this to his son-in-law on the phone with great enthusiasm. “What if you buy in and then change your mind?” Griffin asked.

“We won’t,” Harve said. “Not once it’s made up. Haven’t you figured this out about us yet?”

Actually, he had.

It was possible Griffin was misremembering, but it seemed to him now that the need to break free of Joy’s family, to make the Great Truro Accord work for him instead of against him, began to crystallize in his mind the night of Laura’s birthday party, when Sunny Kim told him they had a lovely home. He knew that if he wasn’t careful he was going to be trapped in that lovely home for the duration. Had he and Joy argued later that night? He couldn’t recall. He’d recently received an offer to teach screenwriting in a fledgling film program in the Cal State system. Had Joy encouraged him to consider it, in order to give up screenwriting (as they’d always planned) but stay in California (as they hadn’t)?

What did it matter? They’d done what they’d done, and it was all a long time ago. Little Sunny Kim now stood before them, a grown man. Laura had become a radiant young woman. His longtime agent and friend, who’d once terrorized their daughter with his canine antics, had woken up dead. Jesus.

A few yards from the ceremonial arch, a perspiring string quartet stopped abruptly, mid-Pachelbel, on some invisible signal, and began a somnambulant rendition of the “Wedding March.” Everyone turned to watch the wedding party descend the porch, two by two, and wind down the sloping lawn. Andy, Laura’s boyfriend, had been commissioned to handle the photography, and he trotted halfway up to catch each bridesmaid and groomsman as they passed.

“Laura’s friend is nice,” Griffin overheard Sunny tell Joy. “I think she’s in love.”

“There she is,” she whispered to Griffin when Laura appeared on the porch, radiant and squinting into the sun, on the arm of a burly groomsman half a head shorter than she. Partway down the lawn she snagged a stiletto heel on the uneven ground, nearly rolling an ankle, and Griffin saw Sunny flinch, but she quickly righted herself and told her escort (unless Griffin’s long-distance lip-reading was mistaken) that she was a klutz and always had been.

When Kelsey emerged on her father’s arm, Joy took Griffin ’s hand and said, “Oh, my. Look how beautiful she is.”

“Yes,” Sunny Kim agreed, but he wasn’t looking at the bride.

7 Halfway There

Each of the large round tables in the reception tent was set up for twelve, but table seventeen had only eight actual “leftovers.” The resulting gaps in the seating were an additional impediment to conversation among these strangers. Well, not complete strangers. Griffin was surprised to recognize the unhappy couple from the Olde Cape Lounge. The woman was dressed more modestly today, and her face immediately lit up when she saw him, as if his unexpected presence was further evidence that the world was a marvelous place, that it offered genuine miracles on a daily basis. Her companion seemed to have forgotten him completely. (“We met where?… Oh, right, that fuckin’ place.”) He’d worn a tie for the ceremony but took it off now in the tent, unbuttoning the top two buttons on his shirt as if to allow his chest hair to breathe. The table’s extreme distance from the bridal party wasn’t lost on him, though he seemed cheered by its proximity to the tent’s back flap, on the other side of which the caterers were scurrying. “Maybe we’ll get fed first, at least,” he grunted in Griffin ’s direction, mistakenly concluding, just as he had the night before, that they were natural allies in an otherwise hostile world.

“We’re Marguerite and Harold,” the woman announced when everyone was seated and Sunny Kim suggested they all say something about themselves, where they lived and their relationship to the bride or groom. Marguerite owned a shop called Rita’s Flower Cart in the San Fernando Valley, not far from where Griffin and Joy had lived. She’d moved to California, she said, after she and her husband decided to call it quits. Only when Harold interrupted to say, again mostly to Griffin, “Don’t ever think a woman will go away just because you divorce her,” did he realize this was the ex-husband she’d alluded to. And only when she said she’d bought a house right around the corner from the bride’s parents and described it a little did he and Joy realize that it was their old house. They’d moved to Connecticut before the closing, so they’d never met the buyer.

At any rate Marguerite and the Apples had become such good friends that Kelsey now referred to her as Aunt Rita. Harold, she told the table, hooking her arm through his, lived in Boston (“Quincy,” he corrected) and worked in law enforcement (“Private security”), so when she heard the wedding was going to be on Cape Cod, where the groom’s parents had a house, she called Harold “out of the blue”-without even thinking about it, really, the phone just suddenly in her hand-and asked if he wanted to go to a wedding in June, to which he’d replied, “As long as it’s not ours.” That sporty riposte had reminded Marguerite that one of the things she’d always liked about Harold was his “dry sense of humor.” So she’d flown out a few days early, and they’d spent the time getting re-acquainted, and it had been, she said, scrunching up her shoulders as she’d done the evening before when she decided on a cosmo, really kind of romantic. She turned to Harold, clearly hoping he wouldn’t correct her here as well. “Yeah, well, sex was never the problem,” he conceded.

“I bet I know what was,” Joy murmured, loud enough for Griffin, on her left, to hear and possibly Sunny, on her right, too, though he gave no sign of it. As Marguerite was talking, a bottle of champagne was brought for toasts, and Sunny uncorked it and poured full flutes (ladies first, to Harold’s clear chagrin), shorting Harold just a bit with the last of the bottle. Intentionally, Griffin hoped, but thought probably not.

A precedent had apparently been set for the women at the table to speak for the men, and Joy went next. As she talked, Griffin found himself thinking how different it would’ve been if he was the one giving the synopsis. He had no intention of correcting her, à la Harold, but he did feel a stirring of guilty sympathy for him. Joy explained that their daughter, Laura, was the maid of honor and had been best friends with Kelsey, the bride, since they were girls, and of course she and Griffin had been friends with the Apples when they lived in L.A. This last bit struck him as more convenient than true. Sure, they’d all been friendly enough but never actually socialized, he and Joy having had little in common with Kelsey’s accountant father and evangelical mother, though Joy had been willing to suffer her religiosity given that the girls were best friends.

But never mind L.A. It was how Joy characterized their present lives, though factually accurate, that really rankled him. Griffin, she told the group, was a college English professor (“We’ll have to watch our grammar, then, won’t we?” said Marguerite, again scrunching up her shoulders), making no mention of his screen-writing career. Okay, granted, he was partly to blame, since normally he preferred not to bring that up. People immediately wanted to know what movie stars you knew and whom you had to know to gain entry into such a glitzy profession. They also were curious about what movies Griffin had written, and then he’d have to admit that only one or two of his and Tommy’s really stood up. Toward the end they’d been reduced to writing low-budget, made-for-TV movies, so better, really, not even to open the door.

Yet in this instance it seemed that Joy wasn’t so much acting in deference to his wishes as simply stating what she considered to be the facts. As part of a past they’d by mutual consent put behind them, screenwriting was no longer germane. Which was now also why Sid’s call had initially slipped her mind. It was even possible she thought Sid’s death meant not just the end of Sid but of Griffin ’s screenwriting career, the last dangling thread neatly snipped. He was now only one thing, a professor of English at a very good liberal arts college, whereas before he’d been two. She herself was the assistant dean of admissions, she informed them, and this, though it was the precise, unembellished truth, annoyed him as well. After all, he was tenured and she wasn’t, but to hear her tell it, anybody would have thought she outranked him. That sort of petty caviling was worthy of his mother, of course, and all the more unworthy of him, because Joy hadn’t meant it that way at all. Still, he was relieved when his wife let her voice fall, and the attention shifted to the two hefty lasses across the table.

They were from Liverpool, and their accents nearly impenetrable. Their spirits were extraordinarily high, even for the present occasion, and so far they’d giggled enthusiastically at everything anybody said, as if prior to taking their seats they’d been informed that the other guests at this table were all professional comedians. Griffin ’s experience of lesbians was largely limited to the academic variety-a grim, angry, humorless lot-so he was unprepared for these girls’ good cheer. They demonstrated that British habit of turning simple, declarative statements into questions and then waiting a beat, as if for a response. They’d known the bride for years and years, hadn’t they? Ever since she’d come to Norwich, to the University of East Anglia, that is, where she hadn’t known a soul, had she? But they’d gotten her sorted quick enough. That first Friday afternoon after class they’d pulled her out of the residence hall by force and hauled her down to their favorite pub for a pint, and then introduced her to all the other good pubs and also their chooms (Their what? Griffin thought. Oh, right, their chums), and when the holidays came round they’d dragged her home to meet their mums and dads, and it had all been ever so much foon, hadn’t it? Still, you could’ve knocked them down with a feather when they got invitations to the wedding, because they hadn’t neither of them ever come over to the States before, had they?

By the time the girls finished, they were holding hands, which Marguerite apparently took for a show of moral support between foreigners, because she asked if either of them was married or engaged. “Booth of us,” one of them replied, giving her partner’s hand a squeeze, “to each oother,” as if to admit that their sexual preference might be a local custom that hadn’t yet made its way across the pond. Apropos of nothing but her own embarrassment at not recognizing them as a couple, Marguerite then remarked she’d always wanted to go to England but never had, the reason being-and here she elbowed Harold-that nobody’d ever been nice enough to take her. “Women,” Harold said, turning again to Griffin. “They just never can give it a rest.”

Marguerite nudged him, noticing he’d already drained most of his champagne. “That’s for the toasts.”

“Complete this sentence and win a prize,” Harold told her. “Give… it… a…”

Having no women to speak for them, the final two-Sunny and a man in a wheelchair-had no alternative but to plead their own cases. The latter had a lopsided smile, if that’s what it was and not a grimace, that bespoke a recent stroke. During the previous introductions he’d stared steadfastly at his cutlery as if he expected the utensils to become dangerously animated. There was a vacant chair, complete with place setting, on either side of him, suggesting that everyone had concluded his condition might be contagious. In a loud, braying voice he announced that he was the groom’s sixth-grade math teacher, which cracked the lesbians up more than anything anybody’d said so far. “Animal House,” Griffin whispered to Joy, who, no surprise, didn’t get the reference. Though she enjoyed movies, even their most iconic moments left no lasting impression on her, and she’d always considered his own ability to quote such scenes verbatim as rather perverse.

Which left Sunny, who managed to say only his name and that he lived in Washington, D.C., before the DJ chose that moment to conduct a sound check of his nearby equipment. Harold swiveled in his chair to watch, a clear indication that he couldn’t care less who Sunny was or what he’d done to be stranded at the misfit table. A loud peal of laughter from the front of the tent attracted the attention of the lesbians, who stood to applaud something, Griffin couldn’t tell what, and the man in the wheelchair resumed staring at his knife and fork. The Griffins, of course, didn’t need to be introduced to Sunny, which left only Marguerite to give him her undivided attention. “Go on,” she said. “I want to hear all about you,” and if Griffin hadn’t already decided to like her, he would have then. But the best man had risen to give the first of the afternoon’s strained comic toasts, and Sunny, ever good-natured, turned his chair around to watch and listen.

By the time they were invited to raise their glasses in a toast to the bride and groom, Harold’s glass was empty. Perhaps to emphasize this fact, after everyone else had drunk to the toast, Sunny rose to his feet, his glass held high, and proposed a toast of his own for table seventeen. “Here stop and spend a social hour in harmless mirth and fun,” he intoned, grinning, for some reason, at Griffin and then Marguerite. “Let friendship reign. Be just and kind and evil speak of none.” After which they all leaned forward to clink glasses, and Griffin found the ting of Harold’s empty flute against all the other full ones particularly rewarding.

“What an odd toast,” Joy whispered. “Do you suppose it’s Korean?”

“I don’t think so,” Griffin said. It felt not only familiar but recently so. He could feel the dim memory spooling toward the front of his brain, but then his cell phone vibrated and it was gone. “Again?” Joy said in disbelief when he showed her who it was.

“I’ll take it outside,” he said, getting to his feet. “Mom, hold on, okay?”

It took him a minute to get out of the tent, and when he put the phone to his ear, he realized that his mother, unaccustomed to being told to wait, had been talking the whole time. “Mom, I haven’t heard a word of this. Is everything all right?”

“Of course everything’s all right.”

“Then-”

“Have you done it yet?”

“Done what?”

“Put your father in the drink.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Scattered his ashes. Laid him to rest.”

“Not yet, no.”

“I think you should put him on the bay side. He was that kind of man, don’t you think? Wordsworth was his favorite poet. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’ and all that nonsense, which all boiled down to being afraid of the surf. He hated being tossed about, feeling the power of something greater than himself.”

The music from inside the tent ratcheted up now, and Griffin turned his back (as if that would help) and covered his other ear with his hand (which did help, but not much).

“What is that awful racket?” his mother wanted to know.

“Music. I’m at the wedding, Mom.”

“What wedding? You told me you were there to scatter your father’s ashes.”

“I told you several things. You remembered one of them.”

“Somewhere on the North Shore, I think. Maybe Sandwich.”

“That’s barely on the Cape,” Griffin said. “You hated Sandwich. We might as well put him in the Canal.”

“I don’t know who you mean by we. I’m simply making a suggestion. The decision is yours.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and should have hung up right then. Instead he asked, “Do you remember the Browning family? From the Cape?”

“Don’t tell me you ran into them.”

Which was surprising. He hadn’t expected the name to register, and that it did immediately made him curious. “Are we talking about the same people? I must’ve been eleven or twelve and-”

“Twelve. They were in the cottage across the way. There was a horrible muddy playground in the center of things, and they were diagonal. Near Orleans, wasn’t it? Anyway, I wouldn’t put your father there. Think North Shore. Find some calm, brackish water and pour him in. He’d prefer it. Actually, the Canal isn’t such a bad idea-”

“Mom, about the Brownings-”

“You abandoned your father and me the entire two weeks. All we heard about was Steven Browning. Your father thought it meant you were gay.”

“Peter,” he corrected her, annoyed that both Tommy and his father had leapt to the same erroneous conclusion. Was loneliness in a twelve-year-old so difficult to diagnose?

“Don’t you remember how you melted down that last night when we insisted you spend it with us?”

“You insisted?”

“And the tantrum you threw at the restaurant? The Dry Martini? No, that’s not right. The Something Martini, it was called. Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how I sat up with you all night, trying to console you?”

“You’re making this up, right?”

“And the next morning you refused to get in the car. God, what a little pill you were.”

“There was something wrong with the little Browning girl, wasn’t there? Peter’s sister.”

“Asthma, I believe. Something respiratory. The sea air was supposed to be good for her, but she ended up dying. And then of course Steven in Vietnam.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your friend Steven Browning dying in Vietnam.”

“Mom, he’s Peter. And anyway, how in the world would you know what happened to him or his sister? We never went back there. We never saw any of them again.”

“We exchanged addresses before we left, don’t you remember? Steven wanted to keep in touch. He wrote you several letters, but you refused to write back. We got Christmas cards for a couple of years. The mother wrote when the little girl died, and then later about Steven. You were gone by then.”

“Why would you remember all this, Mom?”

“Why shouldn’t I remember things?”

“It’s unlike you. Especially people like the Brownings. You and Dad looked down your noses at them.”

He expected her to deny this accusation, but she didn’t, which meant she either hadn’t really heard it or preferred not to. Maddening, the way she blithely shopped among his conversational offerings, as if she were at a fruit bin looking for an unbruised pear. “Wait till you’re my age and memory is all you have.”

It was on the tip of Griffin ’s tongue to say that, based on this conversation, he wasn’t sure she had even that.

“Happy memories in particular you hold on to.”

“That was a happy memory? That vacation?”

“Well, it wasn’t unhappy The wheels hadn’t come off yet for your father and me. He hadn’t started the cheating yet.”

“Of course he had. You both had.”

“Not the really nasty, vindictive stuff. We were still in love, despite everything.”

“That’s how you remember it?”

“That’s how it was.”

“I need to get back to the wedding, Mom.”

“You haven’t told me what you think.”

“About what?”

“About the North Shore, though I have to admit your Canal idea is growing on me.”

“Why would you care, Mom? Could you answer me that?”

“Because if you put him on the North Shore, you can scatter me on the South.”

“Mom, we’ve had a lot of ridiculous conversations over the years, but this is one for the record books.”

“Remember how I taught you to bodysurf?”

“Peter Browning taught me to bodysurf. Him and his dad.”

“No. They all knew how, and you were embarrassed because you didn’t. You were scared to try. Your father was frightened of the undertow, so it was up to me.”

“Gotta go, Mom.”

“I’d just feel better if the Cape was between us, me on one side and him on the other.”

By the time Griffin returned to the tent he’d missed the bride and groom’s first dance. Kelsey was now dancing with her father, clearly for the first time ever, and her new husband with his mother.

“What now?” Joy said.

He told her about his mother’s insistence about where all the ashes should go. “I think she’s losing her mind. She’s rewriting history. Inventing memories.”

Under the table he felt Joy take his hand, perhaps in sympathy for having to deal with his mother, but more likely because Laura and Andy had joined the others on the makeshift dance floor, where they looked like what they were, two young people who’d waited what had seemed like forever to find each other. Now they clung tightly together in the understanding of how lucky they were, that in another equally plausible scenario they wouldn’t have met, still be alone, still looking. It was hard to take your eyes off them, and for Griffin the pleasure of watching them would have been pure and fully sufficient if Sunny hadn’t also been in his line of sight. He tried not to look at him, at least not directly, tried not to think of him as the boy standing by himself at that long-ago birthday party, pretending not to be alone. But somehow that opened the door to another unpleasant, totally unrelated thought. Was it possible his mother was right, that Peter Browning had been killed in Vietnam? Griffin felt something like panic rise at the possibility, a physical sensation at the back of his throat. But really, it was highly unlikely, he told himself. The son of two teachers, he’d have gone to college and gotten a deferment, as Griffin himself had done. By the time his own deferment ran out, the war was over, and it would have worked out the same way for Peter. His mother had sounded certain on the phone, but then she always did, never more so than when she was dead wrong. If somebody asked her tomorrow what the Browning boy’s name was, she’d answer Steven, and she’d be sure about that, too. Was it really possible that she remembered sitting up all night in that cottage trying to comfort him? When had she ever done anything like that? And they definitely hadn’t gone to the Blue Martini that night. What she was remembering was that that’s where she and his father had planned to go before he screwed things up. But asthma for Peter’s sister sounded right, and he supposed she might have died. But had Peter actually written to him, as his mother claimed? That was how it went with all her recollections. She’d get just enough details right to make you doubt your own memory, but in the end her stories never tracked. They played out like his still-unread student story, the one now with missing pages.

When the DJ segued from the first slow dance into an earsplitting Bon Jovi tune, the lesbians, howling with laughter, as if this were the best joke yet, leapt from their chairs and skipped, their arms windmilling, onto the dance floor. “I hope you don’t imagine you’re going to be allowed to sit here on your hands, mister,” Joy shouted, rising from her chair. Across the table, Marguerite was prodding stolid Harold to his feet as well.

“Okay, but hold on a minute,” Griffin said. Because if Marguerite succeeded in dragging Harold out for a dance, and he and Joy went, too, that would leave Sunny sitting there with the stroke victim, and he couldn’t bear for that to happen.

But then their beautiful daughter appeared and took Sunny by both hands and was pulling him to his feet. He was shaking his head no, saying no, he was fine, but Laura wasn’t about to let go, so he had no choice but to be led onto the dance floor, where they joined Andy and the lesbians and the bride and groom and all the other fits and misfits.

“I know. She’s wonderful,” Joy said, reading his mind, as they, along with Marguerite and Harold, joined everyone in the crowded center of the throbbing tent. “You worry too much, you know that?” she said, nodding at Sunny, who was holding his own with the other young people. A little stiff, maybe, but better than Griffin would have predicted. He’d unbuttoned his suit jacket and lowered his tie enough to unbutton the top button of his shirt. He probably would never do anything with abandon. Dancing was too much like instant messaging, and Sunny would always fear spontaneity. But he felt the music, you could tell, and he even had some moves. Had he anticipated this moment and taken lessons, studying fun much as he’d studied political science and molecular biology at Stanford, practicing, as he’d done as a boy at home, how to tell Griffin they had a lovely home?

Griffin suspected that what Joy really meant when she said he worried too much was that he had too little faith-in the world, in her, in himself, in their good lives-and sometimes got important things wrong as a result. Searching for evidence of a fundamentally crappy world, he glanced back at table seventeen, expecting to see the stroke victim sitting there forlorn and abandoned. But the groom’s parents had come over and were wheeling their son’s old math teacher to their side of the tent. Griffin couldn’t tell whether the frozen grimace on the man’s face represented joy or pain, but decided, arbitrarily, on the former.

The dance floor was now an official frenzy. Everyone under the age of thirty was shouting the song’s refrain: “Oh-oh! We’re halfway there!”-pumping the air in unison with defiant fists-“Oh-oh! Livin’ on a prayer!”

Halfway there. Was this what it came down to, Griffin wondered, his own fist now pumping in solidarity with those younger than he. Was this the pebble in his shoe these last long months, the desire to be, once again, just halfway there?

Later, back at the B and B, he and Joy made love. It had been a while, and by the time they finished, the panic Griffin had felt after his mother’s phone call had dissipated. Sex always had that effect on him-the release it offered-and he was grateful for it and also that his mother hadn’t called just then. He made a mental note to call her tomorrow and firm up his plans to pay her a visit, maybe even see if she wanted to come to the Cape for a few days later in the summer. How long had it been since she visited? More than a decade, surely. That would give her something to look forward to. Unless he was mistaken, there’d been something panicky in her own voice tonight, though she’d tried to disguise it. Why should she care, really, where he scattered his father’s ashes? He’d asked her and, naturally, received no answer. Of course, assisted-living facilities were table seventeens for the elderly, where virtual strangers were thrust into proximity by neither affection nor blood nor common interest, only by circumstance: age and declining health. No wonder she was going batty. With no one to say otherwise, she seemed to be revising her life so as to please herself. If so, fine. He didn’t object. Except that she seemed to be revising his as well and expecting him to sign off on it.

Looking over at his sleeping wife, he felt another surge of almost painful affection, like the one he’d felt in the tent when Laura had validated their marriage, their love, with her great generosity and kindness. Joy was by nature a modest woman, quick to cover up, but sex always loosened her a little in this respect. She lay naked next to him now, lovely. Her body had thickened over the years, but it was still fine, and he desired her even more now than he had when they were younger and the sexual experience more intense. He watched her breathe for a minute, studied the trace of a smile on her lips, its source only in part their lovemaking. Back at the reception tent, when they finally decided to call it a night, Laura had detached herself from her friends, all of whom still crowded the dance floor, and come over to whisper in her mother’s ear that Andy had proposed during that first dance while they’d been watching. It took Griffin ’s breath away to think that in the very moment of her great happiness, his daughter had remembered Sunny Kim and come to fetch him into the festivities. And he felt certain that he’d never in his entire life done anything so fine.

As he lay there, growing drowsy, he became aware of sounds on the other side of the wall, as of a headboard, first gently nudging, then bumping, then roundly thumping the wall. Harold and Marguerite? Listening, he thought he could hear a woman’s voice, muffled but enthusiastic to the point of ecstasy. Was it even remotely possible that Harold could bring a woman-any woman-to such a climax? He doubted it. Halfway through the reception, he’d gone up to the hotel in search of the gents and had seen Harold sitting alone in the four-seater bar, watching a ball game. Feeling sorry for Marguerite, as he had the night before, he’d danced with her a couple times, and she’d given him her business card, making him promise that if he came to L.A. to write a movie and needed to buy flowers for some gorgeous actress, he’d come to her shop. And she’d know if he didn’t, she warned, don’t think she wouldn’t. It had been a great wedding, hadn’t it? Marguerite hated to think what it was costing Kelsey’s parents. Her one regret about the trip was that she and Griffin had never figured out what that sign in the restaurant meant, which they definitely would’ve if he hadn’t been such a party pooper and left early.

Suddenly Griffin was laughing so hard the bed shook, waking Joy in the process. “What?” she said, pulling the sheet up over her bare breasts, ten minutes of sleep sufficient to restore her customary modesty.

“I’ll tell you in the morning,” he said. “I just thought of something. Go back to sleep.”

What he’d remembered was Sunny’s strange toast: Here stop and spend a social hour in harmless mirth and fun. Let friendship reign. Be just and kind and evil speak of none. He’d thought at the time that the words were familiar, and now he knew why, picturing the sign on the back bar at the Olde Cape Lounge, plain as day but for the spacing.

Griffin lay there in the dark, grinning. The sounds of lovemaking continued on the other side of the wall, and at some point it dawned on him that it had to be the lesbians, and shortly after that he was asleep.