But they weren’t bad people and did try to establish a relationship. Unlike Griffin ’s parents, Harve and Jill were duly impressed that he worked in the movies, though the former had a hard time grasping precisely what had to be written before filming started. Once, all four had gone to see a movie he and Tommy had written. Harve, who was hard of hearing, sat next to Griffin and asked loud questions throughout, ignoring his wife’s attempts to shush him. Every time one of the characters got off a good line, Harve said, “You wrote that?” as if he’d always assumed actors provided their own dialogue, much like a carpenter might be expected to bring his own hammer. Griffin replied that, yes, he’d written the line, or Tommy had. “How about that boat?” Harve said when one roared by, pulling a water-skier, in the background of the shot. “You didn’t write that part? Then what’s it doing there?” In other words, how could a real boat appear, unintended, in what Griffin insisted was a product of the imagination?
His own parents at least understood that films were scripted. Unfortunately, to their way of thinking, this didn’t qualify as “real writing,” an odd opinion, he thought, to be advanced by people who wrote academic criticism. Once, he’d made the mistake of telling them how much he and Tommy stood to make on a quick rewrite of a horror movie, which prompted a lengthy discourse on America ’s skewed values, whereby critical-care nurses were paid less than supermarket butchers. Griffin agreed about the nurses, but his parents also seemed to imply that the exorbitant fees he and Tommy earned for writing crappy movies were what prevented scholars from being paid fairly for their jargon-riddled articles and university-press books. Which begged Obvious Question Number Two: why was he more resentful of Harve and Jill, who really wanted to understand how he made his living, than his own parents, who had never, to his knowledge, seen a single film he had anything to do with? Was pigheaded disinterest grounded in quasi-morality somehow more admirable than rapt thickheadedness?
The Great Truro Accord. That was how, in the years to come, Griffin jokingly referred to the future he and Joy mapped out on their honeymoon. At the time, deeply in love and drunk on sex, it had seemed they agreed about everything, as if they’d spend the rest of their lives excitedly finishing each other’s sentences. Still, it wasn’t just the love and sex. They really had agreed. They both wanted a family-okay, maybe not immediately, but someday. And when they had a family, of course they’d need a house, and there was nothing wrong with the one Joy dreamed of. And so what if Griffin had surprised himself by floating that trial balloon of one day turning his talents to something more worthy and real? Maybe it felt like a lie at first, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the lie hadn’t tapped into some deeper, subconscious truth. After all, he’d gotten into screenwriting, at least in part, to thumb his nose at his parents and their insufferable pretensions. But what about him? What did Griffin himself really want? After telling Joy he might want to write a novel one day, he’d discovered he actually did. Moving back East made sense, too. Why live in L.A. if you weren’t working in the industry?
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.