9 Rehearsal

The rugged Maine coastline was stunning, Griffin had to admit, the light so pure it almost hurt. He couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if his parents had fallen in love with this part of the world instead of the Cape. Certainly it would have been more affordable, but that begged an obvious question: would they really have wanted something they could afford? After all, much of the Cape ’s allure was its shimmering elusiveness, the magical way it receded before them year after year, the stuff of dreams. Coastal Maine, by contrast, seemed not just real but battered by reality. Where Cape Cod somehow managed to give the impression that July lasted all year, Maine reminded you, even in lush late spring, of its long, harsh winters, of snowdrifts that rotted baseboards and splintered latticework, of relentless winds that howled in the eaves and scoured the paint, leaving gutters rusted white with salt. Even the people looked scoured, or so it seemed to Griffin as he drove down the peninsula toward the Hedges, the resort hotel where Laura’s wedding would take place tomorrow. Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift, his mother informed him, in answer to his unspoken question.

Since her death last winter, she’d become even more talkative than when alive, ever anxious to share her opinions with Griffin, especially, but not exclusively, during his long, insomniac nights. Proximity-she now rode in the left wheel well of his rental car-also made her chatty. With any luck this would soon end. The plan was to drive down to the Cape after the wedding, find a resting place for both his parents. He’d had many months to think it over, but he still had no better plan than the one she’d proposed this time last year, to scatter his father on one side and his mother on the other. Maybe that would shut her up. Fat chance, she snorted.

All of Joy’s family and most of the other guests were staying at the Hedges so they wouldn’t be tempted to drive after drinking too much at the reception. Griffin had been offered a room there, too, but given the separation and the fact that he was bringing a guest, he thought it might be better to stay someplace nearby. When he suggested this, neither Joy nor Laura had objected, so he’d booked a room at a small inn half a mile up the peninsula.

It hadn’t started out as a separation, at least not in the legal sense. After Wellfleet, they’d agreed that Griffin would go to L.A. for the summer and write the made-for-cable movie with Tommy, who had a spare room in his condo and was glad to have someone to help with expenses for a couple months. The time apart would do him and Joy good. Absence had been known to make other hearts grow fonder, so why not theirs? Though in truth they barely discussed what was happening, Wellfleet having drained them of words. When they got home, he’d simply gone online and booked a flight to L.A.

“And I tell our daughter what?” Joy asked, as he stuffed two large suitcases with what he’d need for the summer.

“Tell her I’ll be home as soon as we deliver the script.”

“We’ve never lied to her.”

“That’s a lie?”

The following morning he’d driven to campus to finish reading the kids’ portfolios and put his academic life in some semblance of order. There was a summer program at the college, and his office would probably be used by visiting faculty. He put his father’s urn in the locked bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, promising himself he’d deal with it when he returned. Later that same day when he tossed the suitcases into the trunk, Joy noticed the urn was gone. “In your office?” she said when he told her what he’d done. “Why there?” she asked.

“I didn’t think it was fair for you to have to look at it every day,” he said, registering her sad, defeated smile. He understood-how could he not?-that this sort of “consideration” was at the crux of what was between them, but he was at a loss how to do things differently.

In L.A. the work had not gone well. It was clear from the start that he and Tommy didn’t view the material the same way. “Look,” his friend said. “You’re making too much of this. It’s Welcome Back, Kotter, except at college. The kids are smarter than their professor. They’re educating him. That’s where the laughs come from.” Never having taught, he seemed not to understand how arbitrary and artificial, how downright contrary to reality, this concept was. In the old days they’d been able to read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences, but more than a decade had passed and they’d lost the knack. Worse, Joy was now between them. Tommy seemed to know that not all was well in their marriage, but not much more. Griffin, who kept expecting to be cross-examined about what the hell was going on, didn’t know what to make of it when he wasn’t. It could mean Tommy didn’t have to because Joy, when she called him from Wellfleet, had already explained the situation in detail, but the opposite inference-that his friend was mostly in the dark but was respecting their privacy-was just as likely. To find out Griffin would have to ask, and this he refused to do.

After he’d been in L.A. for a couple weeks, Tommy finally said, “So, you’re not going to call her?”

“She knows how to reach me,” Griffin responded, both surprised and genuinely appalled by the bitterness and childish petulance in his voice. He’d been telling himself he hadn’t called her because he had no idea what to say. But the truth was uglier. What he was waiting for, he realized, was for Joy to blink, and with each passing day it became increasingly apparent that she wasn’t going to. In Wellfleet she’d told him as much, that his unhappiness had exhausted her, that it would be a relief not to have to deal with it anymore. Okay, if that was what she wanted.

Except for the proscribed subject of Griffin ’s marriage and not being able to hit their work stride, he and Tommy did all right. They both by nature were respectful, so they seldom crowded each other, and their mutual affection hadn’t waned. After that one remark about not calling Joy, Tommy made it a point to mind his own business, and Griffin returned the favor. His friend started drinking around five in the afternoon, just a glass of wine, no hard stuff anymore, but didn’t stop until he called it a night and went to bed. His color wasn’t good, and his paunch, while not large, was oddly asymmetrical, like it might contain a large fibroid cyst. For his part Tommy pretended not to notice that Griffin seldom slept for more than three or four hours. He himself got up to pee half a dozen times every night and sometimes poked his head into the living room, where Griffin would be watching television with the sound down. They were, that is, careful, as if consideration and not honesty was the bedrock of true friendship.

In this fashion the summer limped along. When Griffin arrived, they’d moved Tommy’s desktop from the guest bedroom to the dining room, and it was here they convened each morning. Tommy always brought in a pot of coffee from the kitchen, and Griffin would print out two sets of the last couple of days’ worth of work, which for continuity’s sake they always read over before beginning a new scene. One morning Griffin looked up from his pages to see Tommy studying him with a mixture of sadness and irritation. “Griff,” he said, “do us both a favor. Go home.”

“Another week and a half and we’ll have a draft.”

“Fuck the draft. You’re miserable. And you’re hurting that woman.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know her. And what about your daughter?”

Laura, in fact, was not taking it well. She’d called him twice in L.A., wanting to know what was going on. What she’d worried about most of her life was finally happening, even as she and Andy were planning their own wedding. He’d tried to comfort her, saying that he and her mother hadn’t decided anything yet, but the only thing that would really comfort her was for him to go home and resume his old life, to pretend nothing had happened in Wellfleet.