Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

The last time Griffin had seen him was at Laura’s thirteenth birthday party. Joy had had to banish him from the kitchen, where he wanted to be put to work. “You’re a guest,” she told him. “Join the others and have fun.” The one thing the poor boy had no clue how to do.

“I wish it would get dark,” Griffin recalled telling Joy. “I can’t bear to watch this.”

As instructed, Sunny had joined the others on the patio but seemed to have little in common with the other boys, who’d congregated, as boys will, near the food, strutting and joking and pushing and checking out the giggling girls who’d cleverly staked out the punch bowl. Sunny had positioned himself in the middle, as if he represented a third gender, smiling broadly at nothing in particular, his head bobbing arrhythmically to the horrible boy-band music, pretending, Griffin was sure, to enjoy himself.

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)?