That Old Cape Magic

by Richard Russo

  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.