5 Smirt

That evening Griffin went to a steak house not far from the B and B. The Olde Cape Lounge had a frozen-in-amber fifties feel, but it was mobbed, the line of people waiting for tables stretching out the door. There was, however, a vacant stool at the bar, so he climbed aboard and squinted at the sign above the back bar, which read, in ornate Gothic letters:

The words, somehow foreign and familiar at the same time, sort of reminded him of The Canterbury Tales, which he’d read long ago in college. Pen, hand, ends, devil and no were all recognizable words and should have been helpful in deciphering the whole, but somehow they weren’t. Though devoid of meaning, smirt particularly appealed to him. When Laura was a little girl, she compiled long lists of words she loved, based purely on how they looked and sounded, as well as others she hated. On which list, he wondered, would smirt have appeared?

“A couple martinis and it’ll make sense,” the bartender said when he noticed Griffin studying the sign.

“Promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“How about Grey Goosely?”

“Done.”

In the mirror that ran the length of the bar Griffin noticed an Asian man in his mid-to-late twenties. Wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit and a handsome tie, he also appeared to be studying the sign. When his eyes met Griffin ’s in the mirror, he smiled and nodded, as if to say, Okay, got it. How about you? Griffin hoped his own look in return might be interpreted as, Yeah, sure, me too, then feigned interest in his cell phone until his drink arrived, unwilling to enter into conversation with some lonely tourist whose English might be marginal. As if on cue, the phone vibrated with an incoming e-mail, Joy writing to say that her meetings had run long, but she was finally on the road and she would stop for something to eat. Expect her around ten. Which was pure, unadulterated smirt. No way, on a Friday evening, with I-95 summer traffic heading for the Cape, would she get in before eleven.

And speaking of smirt, he himself had hoped to accomplish just two things today-get a good start on those portfolios and scatter his father’s ashes-and he’d managed neither. Not scattering the ashes was more disconcerting, and he really should’ve done the deed, wind or no wind. Why drive the length of Cape Cod, out and back, with your old man in the wheel well and not do such a simple thing? He supposed the Cape itself and the memories it had evoked since he crossed the Sagamore were part of it. And whether he cared to admit it or not, the unexpected phone call from his mother (and being doused with birdsmirt) had rattled him. But was there some further reluctance, some unconscious, unacknowledged scruple, at work? Some reason not to put his father to rest?

He supposed it was possible. Joy noticed his bouts of insomnia had begun right about the time his father was found on the Mass Pike, and claimed the two had to be related, as well as to what she described as his recent funk. He didn’t know what to call it, only its name was not Professor William Griffin. He had been restless, though, give Joy that much, and Sid’s call, together with Griffin ’s inability to reach him, had intensified that. Trying to reread “The Summer of the Brownings” hadn’t helped, either. Suddenly it was as if his dead parent, his living one, his old profession and his boyhood self were all clamoring for attention.

This was profoundly silly. After all, his parents hadn’t played a dramatic role in his life since the seventies. That’s what heading west instead of east for college, and later going to film school, had been about, and staying in L.A. and marrying a girl who hadn’t done graduate work. Like Huck Finn he’d lit out for the Territories at his first real opportunity. The problem seemed to be that you could put a couple thousand miles between yourself and your parents, and make clear to them that in doing so you meant to reject their values, but how did you distance yourself from your own inheritance? You couldn’t prevent your hair from thinning or your nose from taking over the center of your face. Even worse, what if he hadn’t rejected his parents’ values as completely as he’d imagined? Joy maintained, for example, that he was inclined to locate happiness not in the present, as she did, but in some vague future. “And this reminds us of whom?” she often wanted to know. But was this his nature, as she implied, or just nurture? When he was growing up, his family had lived in a different house every year, renting from professors who were away on sabbatical. That was the reason he hadn’t ever had a really good friend until Peter Browning. The Griffins were never in one place, nor he in one school, long enough. Often they hadn’t completely unpacked their boxes from one move before they had to repack them for the next. University living, his parents called it, as if it were superior in all respects to how other people lived, “trapped” in a single house.

No doubt about it, they were born renters, his parents. And the houses of senior faculty were gracious and the rents cheap, at least until word got around how careless Griffin ’s parents were with other people’s possessions. One professor returning from a European sabbatical would find that her china service for ten had become a service for seven, another that his favorite Queen Anne chair, now missing a leg, had been relocated to the damp basement. “When we left for Paris,” they’d say, “there was a blender on the kitchen counter.” To which Griffin ’s mother would reply, “Oh, that piece of crap,” as if to suggest that its owner owed them a debt of gratitude for putting the offending appliance out of its misery. One year they’d nearly burned down a colleague’s house by starting a grease fire in a cast-iron skillet and trying to put it out with cold water. The worst had been the year they’d gotten a beautiful old Victorian rent free. The only thing the elderly professor who owned it had asked of them was to make sure the pipes didn’t burst during a cold snap. If it got below zero, she reminded them, they should leave the kitchen faucet running when they went to bed. She seemed fixated on that scenario, actually, calling twice from Italy to make sure the pipes were okay, because she’d heard the winter was brutally cold. “She doesn’t even realize she’s projecting, the frigid bitch,” Griffin ’s mother remarked after hanging up. “Pipes my ass,” his father added. “What she wanted to impress on us was that she’s in Tuscany while we’re stuck in fucking Indiana.” But that very night an arctic clipper had blown in, the pipes burst, and by morning the whole first floor was underwater.

Eventually, people either refused to rent to the Griffins or required huge deposits and locked away anything of value in a closet. That last tactic didn’t work, though, because a locked closet was both an affront and a challenge, and his father’s one physical skill was as a picker of cheap padlocks. By the time Griffin was in junior high, his parents were reduced to renting damp, drafty, decrepit dumps on fraternity row, and even these they managed to leave the worse for wear. “Houses are nothing but trouble,” they told him over and over, every time something went wrong, though even as a boy he understood the more commonly held view was that houses were fine, it was the Griffins that meant trouble.

The way his parents saw it, renting allowed them to remain flexible, so if a job came along at Swarthmore or Sarah Lawrence they wouldn’t be saddled with an unsellable house in the Mid-fucking-west. And, of course, the money they saved by renting would then be available for a down payment when the right property on the Cape finally came along. Except they never managed to actually save. Indeed, they exhibited the professional humanist’s utter cluelessness where money was concerned. They bought on impulse, often things that required assembly, saying, how hard could it be, then finding out. Bookshelves invariably had at least one shelf where the unfinished side faced up, its rough edge facing out. When you pulled open the upper-right-hand drawer of a desk, its lower-left-hand one opened in noisy sympathy. They gravitated to failed technologies like eight-track tapes and Beta recorders.