Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

“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.