Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

Griffin couldn’t imagine why she’d want to return to the Olde Cape Lounge-when he’d left her there with Harold last year, she’d been in tears-but if that’s what she wanted it was fine with him. Spending the evening around there made sense, making the morning’s drive to Logan and their flight back to L.A. that much easier.

Because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find it again, they decided to look for the restaurant first, then book a room nearby. He meant to avoid the B and B where he and Joy had stayed, which he remembered (correctly) as being about half a mile down the road from the restaurant, but thought (incorrectly) there’d be someplace to turn back onto Route 28 before he got there. “Oooh, that looks nice,” Marguerite said when they passed the B and B, so Griffin, unwilling to explain why he’d have preferred anywhere else, turned around and went back. The same woman who’d checked him in last summer did so again, though if she recognized him as repeat business-no reason she should, given his massive dark glasses-she gave no sign. When she showed them to the same room he and Joy had occupied, he considered asking for a different one but decided not to. Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

Exhausted by the day’s emotion and the long drive down from Maine, they took a nap before dinner. Marguerite awoke from hers refreshed and buoyant, while Griffin was slow and groggy, his already low spirits having ebbed even further. And why, for God’s sake? His daughter was successfully married and halfway to Paris by now. The checks he’d written weren’t going to bounce and, thanks to Marguerite, his parents were finally at rest. By rights he should’ve been ready to celebrate. Was he coming down with something? That would make sense. Like his parents before him, he often got sick whenever he could afford to, like at the end of the academic term. Back when he was writing movies with Tommy, he’d hand a just-finished script to their producer and sneeze in the same motion. So maybe.

In any event, for Marguerite’s sake, he meant to soldier through whatever this was. In the bathroom he swallowed a couple of ibuprofen (vowing not to call them I-be-hurtin’s anymore, even to himself) for the headache he felt gathering behind his eyes, and took a shower, hoping it might wake him up.

“Let’s dress up,” Marguerite suggested when he emerged.

“It’s not a very fancy place,” Griffin reminded her.

“Us,” she replied. “We’ll be fancy.”

And Griffin, knowing she was about to scrunch up her shoulders again, purposely looked away.

“Oh, good,” she said twenty minutes later when they slipped onto bar stools. “They’ve still got that funny sign.”

The Olde Cape Lounge was as mobbed as before, and the hostess had warned them it would be a good hour before they got a table. Marguerite seemed to enjoy being overdressed. Her outfit wasn’t one Griffin had seen before, but it was very Marguerite, showing plenty of skin, the kind designed to make Unitarian comedians perspire.

“How does it go again?” she said, squinting at the sign.

“Drink a couple of these and it’ll make sense,” the bartender said, setting down her cosmo and Griffin ’s martini. A communal joke, apparently, since this was a different bartender from the one last year. “You know there’s a law against spouse abuse in this state,” he told her and nodded at Griffin, who’d slid his dark glasses down his nose so he could look at the sign.

“But he’s not my husband,” she said.

“My mistake,” the man said. “In that case, do whatever you want.”

“I can’t remember how you’re supposed to read it,” Marguerite said when the bartender was gone.

At just such a juncture Griffin ’s mother would usually chime in, wanting to know where this bimbo had done her graduate work, but she was mum. In fact, now that he thought about it, she hadn’t voiced a single opinion since they’d left Chatham. Was it possible that by scattering her ashes they’d silenced her? Forever ? That possibility, while remote, should have raised his spirits, but somehow it didn’t.

“Ignore the spaces,” he told her, putting his hand on the small of her back, where the skin was warm, almost feverish. “Let the words form themselves.” He was more determined than ever to show this generous woman the good time she’d earned. It wasn’t like she was hard to make happy. All she wanted was a little fun. “Where do you find such good-hearted women?” was how Tommy put it after they’d met, and he was right. Even after being married to Harold, Marguerite didn’t understand unkindness as an option, its myriad perverse satisfactions as foreign to her as the sign she was now laboriously translating (“Here… stop… and”) from English into, well, English. Next year, if they were still together and they were back at the Olde Cape Lounge, he’d have to teach her how to read the sign all over again, this despite the fact that the gist of it was her own personal philosophy of life in a nutshell.

But tomorrow she’d get him over the Sagamore Bridge and onto a plane and back to L.A. and… then what? When he tried imagining what would come next for them he couldn’t, though of course that had less to do with her than himself. It was his own future, with or without Marguerite, that refused to take shape. With the help of his new agent he could continue chasing low-end screenwriting assignments, teach a night class or two and cobble together a kind of living. But that hardly amounted to a future, or for that matter a life. The only good work he’d done in L.A. was “The Summer of the Brownings,” and he’d been paid for that in contributor’s copies. Not even a check there, never mind a future. Quit , he told himself. Stop thinking. Get through tonight without moping .

“Be… just… and… kind… and… devil…”

“And evil,” he corrected her.

“Oh, right,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “Speak of no one.”

None , Griffin started to say, then stopped himself. “Words to live by.”

“And that old poop Harold said it didn’t mean anything.” She gave Griffin a kiss on the cheek, a kiss that might have been Harold’s, the gesture seemed to imply, if only he’d played his cards right. Marguerite enjoyed public displays of affection almost as much as the affection itself. Yet another contrast with Joy, who after their wedding had never kissed him except in private. He still recalled the keen disappointment he’d felt early in their marriage when it became obvious she wasn’t about to kiss or embrace him in front of her parents. Marguerite felt no such compunctions. She’d have kissed him (or Harold before him) in front of the pope, and the kiss would have been long and full of tongue. “Why do I feel guilty about being here and not calling him?”

“Harold? Now that is a mystery.”

She shrugged and went back to studying the sign, as if her translation had not unearthed all its secrets. “Imagine that boy figuring it out all by himself,” she said, then turned to face him. “It’s a shame he’s so in love with her.”

Griffin was pretty sure he’d never mentioned Sunny Kim’s lifelong devotion to Laura, which meant Marguerite had done some figuring out of her own. “He’ll be fine,” he said, draining the last of his martini and trying to sound more certain on this score than he felt. He considered telling her about Sunny’s own marriage plans but decided not to, afraid that in the telling he’d betray his own misgivings.

“I know. He’s smart and good-looking and he’s a lawyer,” she said. “It’s just a shame you can’t say yes to one person without saying no to another.”