WIFE

You want this to be about one day-the day you found me so brokenhearted-but it isn’t. You’re unhappy every day, and it’s getting worse. You’re a congenitally unhappy man.

HUSBAND

(choking back his emotions)

I’m never happy? I wasn’t happy last night?

WIFE

Okay, last night, for a few short hours, you were. But you always retreat, Jack. It’s like you’re afraid it won’t last. Like if you admit to being happy, someone will steal it from you.

(A BEAT, while he considers this)

Yes, there was a time when my heart went out to Tommy, and yes it got broken. But I mended it. I mended my heart.

ON THEIR REFLECTION IN THE GLASS. His, in the F.G., goes OUT OF FOCUS as hers comes in.

WIFE

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to mend yours, because God knows I’ve tried. I’m exhausted from trying.

HUSBAND

(looking gut-shot)

Maybe you should stop.

WIFE

(heartsick, looking away)

I have. That’s what you’ve noticed these last few weeks. Me stopping.

FADE OUT.

Congenitally unhappy. The word was not hers, of course. In thirty-four years he’d never known her to use it until yesterday. But Tommy loved it, even though Griffin always had to correct his spelling-congental or congentle-on the page. (“Think of genitals,” he’d advised, to which Tommy had responded, “I don’t like to think of genitals. I’d rather spell it wrong.”) No doubt he’d used the word yesterday when Griffin was in the shower and she called him back to explain why she wouldn’t be coming along to L.A. Griffin could imagine how the conversation had gone, Joy confiding how their marriage was deteriorating, how they seldom made love anymore, how his ambient discontent had deepened to the point of pathology, how he’d been driving around for the better part of a year with his dad’s ashes in the trunk of his car. And Tommy-because in the end he was Griffin ’s friend-advising her not to be hasty. “This shit ain’t new, kiddo. The guy’s always been a congenital malcontent. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Remember the famous house categories, back when you guys were looking? Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift? Tell me that isn’t Griff all over. This is the man you married when you could’ve married me, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Griffin couldn’t help but smile at this imagined conversation, how he didn’t come off very well even when he himself held the reins of invention. But it was true that back then he’d adopted his parents’ mantra. Tommy and Joy had made relentless fun of him, even after he explained that he’d just been riffing on how his parents had classified at a glance every single property in the fat Cape real-estate guide, that his use of these same categories was meant to be ironic. But Tommy hadn’t bought any of that. “Explain irony to me,” he said. “I went to school, but that’s a concept I never really understood. Ironic guys like you confuse me especially.”

When the trees fell away on both sides of the road, Griffin heard surf pounding nearby, though he knew how deceptive the sound could be. One summer (before the Brownings or after?) his parents had rented a place with a second-story deck, from which you could see the ocean beyond the dunes, a good quarter-mile away. Each night he fell asleep in profound stillness, only to awaken to crashing waves right outside his window, as if during the night the turning tide had breached the dunes. But when he rose and joined his father on the deck, the ocean was right where it had been the day before. His father had explained it, how the wind had changed during the night, now pulling the sound toward them instead of pushing it away, and this made sense, the way science always does, because you know it’s supposed to. But the next morning, when Griffin again awoke to the same thunder, the explanation felt inadequate to the experience. The sound was just too close, too loud, and again he expected to find the lower rooms of their rental cottage flooded. Only repetition-the same thing happening night after night-had diminished and finally banished the magic.

But the beach was near. He could smell the salt, and this close to the shore, the fog had begun to dissipate. Squinting, he was able to make out a line of rolling dunes and beyond it a pale yellow orb, like a lamp with a forty-watt bulb covered by a sheet, near where he imagined the horizon to be. For a while the road he was on paralleled the shore, then abruptly ended in a large dirt parking lot. A lone pickup truck was parked there, probably some intrepid fisherman trying to get a jump on the blues.

A weathered boardwalk ran between the dunes, at the end of which Griffin slipped off his sandals. Looming ahead was some sort of structure-a building on the beach, maybe, or a ship at anchor?-but he couldn’t tell which until he got closer and the ghostly shape resolved itself into a restaurant with a large wraparound deck and a ship’s mast growing up through the roof. A rear door stood wide open, and he could hear someone moving around inside. The owner, probably, someone swamping the place out before the other employees arrived. Possibly even a thief. If whoever it was saw him and demanded to know what he was up to, what would he do? Raise his father’s urn by way of explanation? He hurried along before any such embarrassment could come to pass.

Almost immediately he could tell his plan was deeply flawed. From the boardwalk the waves looked to be breaking about knee-high, but now he saw it was more like waist-high. The restaurant had become just a gray silhouette in the mist behind him, and he was reluctant to go much farther up the beach. After all, the building marked the entrance to the parking lot, and if he allowed it to disappear completely, how would he find his car again? What he’d been hoping for, he realized, was a stone jetty or a pier, something that jutted into the water, something he could walk out on and, at the far end of, release the ashes into the churning sea. But there was nothing of the sort, which meant he’d have to wade out into the surf, submerge the urn and open it into the undertow. That would require dexterity, timing and, he feared, a good measure of luck. The lid was secured by two flimsy-looking metal clasps that would probably fly open if he got hit by a big wave before he was ready. It’d be more sensible to dig a hole at the water’s edge, pour the ashes in and cover them over. Later, when the tide came in, the push and pull of the waves would mingle the ash with sand and water, and his father would at last become part of the grit of the world. How different was that, really, from pouring the contents of the urn off the end of a dock or over the side of a boat?

Well, it was different. Plus, now that he looked more carefully, he saw the tide was already in. The water might not come any farther up the beach.

WIFE

Is it possible you haven’t scattered your father’s ashes because you need him in some way?

HUSBAND

(stern, cold)

Need him? My father? I didn’t need him alive. Why would I need him dead?

He took a deep breath, kicked his sandals aside and, gripping his father with both hands, entered the surf.

Driving back to Wellfleet, completely soaked, Griffin noticed what had been shrouded in fog when he was coming from the other direction. There, arranged in a horseshoe just as he remembered them, were the cottages where he and his parents and the Brownings had stayed that summer. At first, he wasn’t sure he trusted his eyes. That he should stumble on the place now seemed beyond improbable, as if the physical world were suddenly and mysteriously linked to his own psychic necessity. Having passed the entrance, he pulled onto the shoulder and backed up, his tires grinding on the gravel in the stillness.