Nor did she appreciate him suggesting she wasn’t. “Undergraduate workshop,” she snorted. “Right. Now there’s a test.”
“Okay,” Griffin conceded. “I’m not saying there’s no truth to what you’re saying. I’m just-”
But she waved him off. “Do you want to hear the best part or not?”
“The blackmail wasn’t the best part? There’s more?”
She arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Get this. The whole time he was in Amherst?”
He waited until it was clear she had no intention of going on without a specific invitation. He had to go on record as wanting to know what she had to tell him, which, unfortunately, he did.
“What, Mom? The whole time in Amherst what?”
“The whole time your father was in Amherst,” she said triumphantly, “he never even made it to the Cape. Not once.”
In retrospect, his mother had been right about at least one thing. She’d given his father’s marriage another year. Not a full year, either, she insisted, an academic year. And that’s exactly how long it had lasted. The following May, Claudia had departed for good, and shortly after that his father had left the university to take a position as acting department chair at a small branch of the state university of Illinois. “He’s in a downward spiral,” his mother had reported. “In fact he’s circling the drain.” From there he’d become the dean of faculty at a small Christian college in Oklahoma, where he served until failing health forced him to retire.
And now, Griffin thought ruefully, he was in the trunk of his car.
3 The Great Truro Accord
By the time Griffin arrived in Provincetown it had warmed up, so he went to a café with an outdoor patio. In the foyer he noticed a stack of real-estate guides, so he grabbed one and leafed through it while he waited for his eggs. The listings, he quickly determined, were either mind-bogglingly expensive or little more than shacks. Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift. The old categories apparently still applied. Which begged a question. If he hadn’t given up screenwriting to move back East and become a college professor, would they have had the money? Hard to say. He’d made a lot more money in L.A., but they’d spent a lot more, too. It had been one of the great mysteries of his parents’ marriage that nothing they did or didn’t do seemed to change their overall economic outlook all that much. Near the back of the guide, looking completely out of place, was a full-page ad for a high-end assisted-living community near Hyannis, which sent a chill up his spine. His mother knew he was on the Cape. Was it possible their conversation had awakened the old dormant passion? He could easily imagine her Googling the assisted-living options here (like hell Google wasn’t research). It was even possible that out in Indiana she was at that very moment looking at the same image that he was studying here in Provincetown. A creepy scenario, and so utterly plausible that when his cell phone rang, he was surprised to see it was Joy and not his mother.
“Where are you?” his wife demanded, sounding almost as annoyed as his mother had been earlier, though to her credit she’d at least said hello before wanting to know just how far he’d strayed from her expectation.
“ Provincetown,” he informed her. “I woke up early.”
“If you don’t start sleeping soon, I want you to see somebody.”
There was real concern in her voice now, for which he was grateful. It was true he hadn’t been sleeping well, waking up for no apparent reason in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. The usual end-of-semester pressure, no doubt. He’d already had his standard academic-anxiety dream, the one where he arrived at his classroom only to find a note on the door saying his class was now meeting in another building across campus. When he arrived there, same deal. And no matter how he hurried to catch up, his students were always receding at the end of an impossibly long corridor. All of it would probably disappear when he turned in his grades.
“Guess who I’m having breakfast with?” he said, anxious to change the subject.
“Who?”
“Al Fresco,” he said. It was an old joke, no doubt summoned to the front of his brain by being on the Cape and eating outdoors. His parents always made sure their summer rental had either a patio or porch so they could have breakfast outside and read the paper “with Al,” ignoring Griffin’s pleas to finish so they could go to the beach. He and Joy had used Al Fresco back in their L.A. days, but it wasn’t that great a joke and had naturally fallen into disuse.
Still, he was a little hurt when Joy said, “Al who?”
“I don’t know about yours,” he told her, “but my day’s begun poorly.”
“I know,” Joy said, sounding exhausted now. “She called here, too. The semester’s officially over, I guess.”
Griffin had put off introducing Joy to his parents for as long as possible, explaining that they were involved in a particularly acrimonious divorce. “But I am going to meet them, right?” she’d inquired, already suspicious. “I mean, they are your parents.” He suggested, “How about at the wedding?” and she’d laughed, thinking he was joking. Down the years she’d gotten on well enough with his father, though he could never quite seem to place her, even when she was standing next to his son. Living two thousand miles apart, they saw each other infrequently, of course, but each time they met, his father acted more delighted and charmed than seemed natural. “Is it my imagination,” Joy said after their second meeting, “or had he forgotten me entirely?” Griffin told her not to take it personally. At the end of each semester his father still didn’t know his students’ names, except the two or three prettiest girls.
His mother was a different story. Though polite, she’d never made a secret of her low opinion of Griffin ’s choice of a mate. “Where did she do her graduate work?” was the first thing she’d wanted to know when Griffin called to say he was engaged. For her there was no greater barometer of personal worth. Moreover, when she asked people this question, they generally asked her back, and she got to say her doctorate was from Yale; if they didn’t ask, she told them anyway. In Joy’s case, she’d been expecting UCLA or Southern Cal. Griffin had anticipated this question, of course, and reminded himself there was no reason to be embarrassed to answer it, though naturally he was. He’d taken a deep breath and explained that Joy had gone directly to work after getting her undergraduate degree and that she had a good job, one she enjoyed. “Yes, but what sort of person doesn’t do graduate work?” His mother inflected the word person ever so slightly, as if to suggest that anyone who didn’t go to graduate school might belong to neither gender, or perhaps to both. Poor Joy had spent the first decade of their marriage trying to get her mother-in-law to think better of her, the next trying to fathom why that wasn’t happening and the one after that pretending it didn’t matter. Of late she seemed to favor getting an unlisted phone number.
On their honeymoon, she’d paid him an unintentional compliment by asking if there was any chance he’d been adopted. Back then he bore little physical resemblance to either parent, though over the last two decades that had changed. His hair had thinned in the exact same pattern as his father’s, and his nose, delicate when he was a younger man, had started to dominate his face as well. He’d kept in reasonably good shape by jogging and playing tennis, and he didn’t weigh much more than he had when they married, but the weight had subtly begun redistributing itself, his torso becoming noticeably concave (again like his father’s), as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. With the exception of the small mole that bisected her left eyebrow and had appeared on his own in his thirties, his mother’s genetic gifts were more temperamental, if no less disturbing for that, and Joy had conceded long ago that there was no chance he’d been adopted. “That’s your mother talking,” she was fond of observing whenever he was unkind or snobbish, especially about someone in her own family.