Okay, maybe it should have been the Great Coastal Maine Accord, and perhaps, early in their marriage, he’d used his superior rhetorical skills to gain an advantage when he might have been more generous, more considerate of her desires. Sure, the time line had always been a bone of contention, and you couldn’t say Joy hadn’t been a model of patience. But when you looked at the original accord, as he’d been doing lately, the thing that jumped out at you was that Joy didn’t have much to complain about. She’d gotten everything she wanted, hadn’t she? They had Laura. He’d quit screenwriting. They’d moved back East. She’d gotten her house.
But he had to admit there was something they hadn’t agreed on, something the Great Truro Accord hadn’t even addressed. With respect to their families, Griffin had hoped to invoke a simple, equitable policy: a plague on both their houses. Have as little to do with Harve and Jill, and with William and Mary, as decency permitted. And he was more than willing to make the first gesture. He had no intention of inflicting his parents on Joy or, when the time came, on their children. Was a little reciprocity too much to hope for?
What he’d failed to comprehend in Truro was stark in its simplicity. Joy loved her family. Maybe she didn’t share their politics or their values, but she loved them still. Whenever they visited Harve and Jill in Sacramento, which he only did under protest, she slipped effortlessly into the old family routines, doing the complex ballet of kitchen and dining room with her mother and sisters, with children always underfoot, not to mention singing along with the songs on the oldies station that they made fun of back in L.A., banishing him to the family room to watch sports he didn’t care about with Harve and the idiot twins.
Perhaps because Jason and Jared were both marines and because their father was so full of bellow and bluster, it had taken Griffin a while to understand the gender dynamic that ran just under the surface at these family gatherings: it was the women who charted every course, who made every decision. As military cops, the twins were enforcers of rules, but in civilian life they were trained to await instructions, and so was their father. When the dining room table was cleared, the dishes and pans washed and stacked, the dreadful board games came out-Monopoly, Clue and Life; Scrabble they refused to play because Griffin always won-and they were called back to the table whether or not the sporting broadcast had finished. They grumbled, of course, as men do, wanting to know why they couldn’t be left in peace, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them to decline the invitation, which, to their credit, they recognized as a command. It was over these ratty, faded board games, many of them held together with Scotch tape along the center fold, that all the old family stories, many of which originated in that old Maine summer rental, got trotted out and told at a decibel level that sent only-child Griffin out onto the patio in search of quiet, though he knew full well that this made him seem standoffish.
At the conclusion of these endless visits, he always found a jazz station on the car radio for the trip back to L.A., during which he and Joy seldom spoke. It wasn’t the silence of argument so much as simple reentry. The drive was a long one, and just as well, too. Griffin could feel her exchanging-reluctantly, he sometimes felt-one suit of emotional clothes for another, one life for another. But the silence could and sometimes did morph into argument. One Thanksgiving at Harve and Jill’s, not long after they were married, having exhausted all the board games, they’d played Twenty Questions, and Joy’s sister Jane had stumped everyone at the table for the better part of an hour, Harve stubbornly refusing to give up. Finally, though, everyone else pleaded with her to surrender her fictional identity, which turned out to be Princess Grace of “ Morocco.”
That evening, when they pulled into the garage of their rented condo in Brentwood, Joy was still fuming because Griffin, instead of laughing along with the rest of the family at Jane’s goof, shook his head in disbelief, got up from the table and left the room, as if her mistake had been intentional or malicious and such bizarre mistakes could be assigned a moral value. Now, four hours later, when he turned off the ignition and started to get out of the car, Joy remained seated. When he asked if she meant to stay the night in the garage, she said, “I hate jazz.”
“Apropos of?” he asked.
“Apropos of I want you to know I hate jazz.”
She later told him it wasn’t really true. She liked jazz. She just for some reason felt the need to tell him she didn’t. Something had gotten into her, she said. She had no idea what.
4 The Summer of the Brownings
In addition to his students’ work, Griffin ’s satchel also contained a long, unfinished story, “The Summer of the Brownings,” its precomputer pages yellowed and curled. A couple years after they were married, it had been his first attempt to implement that provision of the Great Truro Accord by trying to write something other than a screenplay. He’d come across the story when he was cleaning out his filing cabinets at the college in order to make room for the few things of his father’s that he wanted to keep. His father’s last years were spent in a small, cramped, university-owned flat, and most of the furnishings weren’t even his. There were lots of scholarly journals and books, including a pristine copy of Claudia’s dissertation, published by a good university press, that she’d proudly signed. Griffin found his father listed on the acknowledgments page, along with the other members of her doctoral committee. The book’s stiff spine suggested that the book hadn’t been opened, much less read. Of course if his father had written it, as his mother alleged, there would’ve been no need to. In a token gesture of revenge Griffin had given it away with the rest of his father’s library, keeping as mementos only a few of the P. G. Wodehouse and Henry Miller books he remembered him reading on Cape Cod beaches. He’d almost missed, in the recesses of a dark closet, the dozen shoe boxes full of campaign buttons and other political trinkets his father had continued to collect down the years, and he kept these as well. “Scoff all you want,” he remembered him telling his mother when he stopped at flea markets. “You won’t be laughing when we sell the whole collection and use it for a down payment on a house.”
Was it worth anything now? Griffin supposed it might be and made a mental note to inventory the items and have them valued, but then he’d shoved the shoe boxes into the back of the filing cabinet and hadn’t thought about them since. The only real surprises among his father’s effects were a couple VHS tapes of movies Griffin and Tommy had written. He couldn’t remember sending them himself, so had his father bought them? Or had a colleague, noticing the screenplay credit, given them to him as a gift? They had been viewed, but by whom?
“The Summer of the Brownings” had an interesting provenance. The writers had gone on strike that year, as they were forever doing, and he’d used the work stoppage to write it. “You’re shitting me,” Tommy said when Griffin explained what he was doing. Why not write a spec script, he argued, which every other screenwriter would be doing, because then they’d have something they could sell once the strike was over. Be in the driver’s seat for once, instead of having to take the first horseshit assignment they got offered. Griffin told him to go ahead and start something if he wanted, but he knew Tommy wouldn’t. He relied on Griffin for direction and wouldn’t even know where to begin.
The story was about the summer he was-what-twelve? He and his parents had gone to the Cape, as usual. He couldn’t remember exactly where, only that it was pretty remote and they’d stayed only two weeks, which meant they weren’t flush. Their tiny, shingled cottage (Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift!) was set back from the highway in a stand of scrub pines along with eight or ten others arranged in a horseshoe around a brown, hard-packed children’s play area. To get to the water you had to cross the macadam road, then walk down a winding dirt road past million-dollar beach homes (Can’t Afford It!), between rolling, grassy dunes for a good half mile. Only one other cottage was occupied, so it must have been early in the season, probably the last half of June, because he recalled it had been warm.