Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

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.”