“And we have to go through the whole thing all over again.”
“Who has to?”
“Because to Harve, what you and I do for a living isn’t real work.”
“He does have a point,” Tommy said, raising his margarita so they could clink glasses.
“But we stand firm and-”
Tommy and Joy, together, this time. “Who stands firm?”
“So now, because we can’t go to Sacramento, everybody’s feelings are hurt.”
“We could’ve gone,” Joy corrected. “We chose not to.”
“But that’s my point,” Griffin said. “We’re adults. Shouldn’t we be able to choose? Every night this week you’ve been on the phone apologizing. First to your father, then your mother, then your sisters, then your father again.” He turned his attention back to Tommy now. “This is why our ancestors came to America. To ditch their symbolic parents. To become grown-ups in their own right.”
“I’m not saying we’d start some heavy relationship, my mother and I,” Tommy tried to explain. “I’d just like to know if she’s alive or dead… if she’s, you know, okay.”
“Isn’t that her job?” Griffin said, getting worked up on his friend’s behalf. “To wonder if you’re okay?”
Now Tommy appealed to Joy. “Do you ever win an argument with this guy?”
“Let… me…think,” Joy said, leaning toward Tommy so he could rub her neck, pausing just a comic half beat before saying, as if it had never occurred to her before, “Why, no.”
Later that same night, though, when he and Joy were in bed, the discussion had turned more serious. “Why shouldn’t he yearn for his biological mother?”
Okay, Griffin conceded, it made perfect sense that he should. But what made such yearning possible was that he didn’t know the woman. He expected Joy to object to his cynicism, but instead she snuggled up against him and said, “We hurt their feelings, my parents’. That’s why I apologized.”
Who said she never won any arguments?
Another buzz, another minute.
Joy had known about Tommy’s crush on her, of course. How could she not? She just hadn’t expected ever to feel the same way about him, she told Griffin. One day she just woke up and realized she did. But what day? When?
After Laura, was Griffin ’s best guess. It was the birth of their daughter, together with Tommy’s divorce, that really changed the dynamic of their lives. It was then that he’d finally given in and accepted Harve and Jill’s offer of a loan. Which guaranteed, Griffin complained to Tommy, that he and Joy were now officially hitched to the parental sled. They’d have little choice but to obey every summons to Sacramento. Tommy took Joy’s side, of course. What could be more natural than for her to want their daughter to know her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins? She simply wanted Laura to grow up with the kind of family memories she herself cherished. Who wouldn’t? (Griffin, for one, but he understood his orphan friend’s question to be rhetorical.) Tommy, who desperately wanted a family, and Joy, who had one-they’d made an effective tag team. “Look,” she said, “we’re talking about a weekend every other month. I’m no fonder of their gated community than you are, but taking their money doesn’t mean we have to start voting Republican or something. Sacramento ’s purely logistical. Where else is the family supposed to gather if not at my parents’? Our apartment?” Plus, she went on, the timing was right. Vietnam had been over for years. They were in their late twenties now, and it was time to start applying a salve to all those never-trust-anyone-over-thirty generational wounds.
“Hey, talk to your old man,” Griffin said, because it was Harve who always brought up the war, Harve who stubbornly refused to admit it had been a mistake, Harve who loved to pronounce that the domino theory “had never been disproved,” as if the war’s detractors had failed at this, too. Besides, he thought but didn’t say, no such reconciliation was needed where his parents were concerned. As old-school lefty intellectuals, it never would’ve occurred to either of them that Asian adventurism could be anything but monumental folly. Better yet, they lived on the other side of the country, still completely involved with the continuing psychodrama of their own screwed-up lives. They neither demanded nor particularly encouraged visits. They’d never feigned any interest in children, and a grandchild was unlikely to alter that. When Griffin called to tell her Joy was pregnant, all his mother said was “So she finally got her way, then.” She. Unbelievable. By that point they’d been married for-what, seven years? And his mother still didn’t call his wife by name, just the feminine pronoun. Who could be expected to remember and use the names of people who hadn’t done graduate work? On the rare occasions when either of his parents phoned, Griffin always took the call in the den behind a closed door. “You don’t have to do that,” Joy would remind him when he emerged again, ten or fifteen minutes later, usually in a foul mood.
“No reason to inflict them on you,” he’d reply, and she’d let it go because, of course, the intended implication was all too clear. A plague on both their houses was the bargain he’d tried to drive back in Truro, and he meant to keep up his end, even if she didn’t.
The entire time Joy was pregnant, nobody had been more solicitous of her than Tommy. In honor of little Enrique (he was convinced it would be a boy) he’d quit drinking-to clean up his act, he claimed, to be worthy of his godson. Griffin remembered vividly the first time he held the baby, how reluctantly he’d handed Laura back, then turned to him and said, “Mr. Lucky.” And how right he was. Griffin had known it the moment he took his daughter from the nurse at the hospital, sensing in her ferocious, squirming little body reason enough for his own existence.
But here was the thing. Tommy had known it all along, as Joy swelled and waddled, whereas Griffin, God help him, when he looked at his pregnant wife, kept hearing his mother’s disembodied voice: So she finally got her way, then.
Yeah, it must have been around then, he decided, and who could blame her? How could Joy not feel affection for a man who’d happily drunk mineral water during her pregnancy so she wouldn’t be the only one abstaining from alcohol? Tommy’d called the house right after Griffin left for work that morning, Joy explained, and not even to speak to her, that was the ironic part. He’d heard about some writing gig he thought Griffin might be interested in. But then he’d asked her how things were going, and she’d just broken down. Her mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and was beginning treatments that week, and now here she was on the other side of the country, with Laura growing up fast, becoming a young woman before she’d gotten her fill of her as a child, and, well, hearing Tommy’s voice on the line had made her realize that he, not Griffin, was the one she’d really wanted to talk to about everything, Tommy who would understand the sense of loss coming at her from all directions. He’d been, it came home to her as she sobbed there in the shower, her best friend. He might have been more if she’d allowed it. Maybe she should have.
Buzz. Griffin watched the alarm clock’s minute hand turn over.
At six, he rose and slipped quietly into a pair of shorts, an old polo shirt and sandals. He was pretty sure Joy was awake, too, that she’d slept no more and no better than he had, so he wasn’t surprised when she spoke.
“Do you really have to do this now? Have you looked outside?”
“I won’t be long. Go back to sleep.”
Outside, Wellfleet was lost in dense, liquid fog. She was right, of course. The sensible thing would be to wait for it to burn off, but he was determined to disprove without further delay the most ludicrous of the charges his wife had leveled against him. By mid-morning they’d be back in Falmouth to pick up Joy’s car and head back to Connecticut, to the life they’d managed to undermine so thoroughly.