That Old Cape Magic (7 page)

—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: