Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

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?