The woman was squinting at the sign above the bar. “What’s that say?”
“Beats me. Or it would if I gave a shit.”
“What kind of word is smirt?” She leaned forward to peer around him at Griffin. “Can you read that?”
Griffin confessed he couldn’t.
Her companion met his eye and shrugged, as if to suggest there was no accounting for what interested broads. You wanted a mystery to solve, you could start right there. “It’s like a proverb… a saying,” he told her. “It don’t mean nothin’.”
“It’s got to mean something. It’s like in The Da Vinci Code,” she said. “Everything means something.” She was leaning forward again to speak to Griffin. “He’s not a reader,” she explained. Then, to her companion, “I think it’s some kind of spell. Maybe to ward off evil spirits.”
“Bartenders is what it wards off,” he said. “I’m gonna go find the can. If our friend down there ever heads in this direction, order me a Maker’s. Get yourself whatever.”
“A cosmopolitan,” the woman said, scrunching up her shoulders with pleasure at the idea, the front of her dress gapping as she did. Griffin noticed, and she noticed him notice, with gratitude, unless he was mistaken. Something about her expression gave him to understand that she didn’t usually dress so provocatively. Tonight was special, and she meant for things to go well with the man who’d just abruptly abandoned her. Better than well, in fact. Though as a general rule they didn’t. “We’re going to figure out what that says,” she told Griffin, scrunching up her shoulders again. “You and me.”
How, he couldn’t help wondering, did you get to be this woman’s age and still believe, as she apparently did, that everything meant something? She was obviously one of those people who just soldiered on, determined to believe whatever gave them comfort in the face of all contrary evidence. And maybe that wasn’t so dumb. The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness. Probably her companion believed the sign had no meaning because this absolved him from making an effort to decode it and insulated him from failures of both intelligence and imagination. Easier to cleave to the card counter’s arithmetic, which meant at least you weren’t a sap.
“That prime as good as it looks?” the man said when he returned from the gents. When Griffin said it was, he looked him over frankly, as if trying to decide whether he could be trusted to second a motion that he himself had just made. Apparently so, because when the bartender set down his second Maker’s, he said, “You could give us a couple of them prime ribs, I guess.”
“We’re going to eat here?” the woman said. Clearly, she hadn’t gotten all dressed up to eat at the bar.
The man rotated on his stool so he could survey the restaurant. The bar had been set up for diners, but a piano player was noodling show tunes in the main dining room, and that seemed to be what the woman had in mind. “This ain’t a bad spot.”
“It’s not that-”
“You’d rather wait another half hour so you can eat there?” He was indicating the nearest table, five feet away, where an elderly couple looked up from their fish, surprised to find themselves at the end of a large, hairy-chested stranger’s index finger, a negative example.
“Could we look at a menu, at least?” the woman said, staring at her cosmo, embarrassed.
He leaned back on his stool so she could have a clear, unobstructed view of Griffin ’s food. “What about that don’t look good to you?”
“Fine,” she said without looking.
“Two menus,” the man told the bartender. “We don’t want to do nothin’ rash.”
When Griffin glanced in the back-bar mirror, the young Asian man he’d noticed earlier looked away. Had he, too, overheard the bickering couple?
Finishing up quickly, Griffin paid his tab, hoping he could slip away without the woman telling him no, he couldn’t leave, not yet, not until they’d figured out what the sign said. But he was lucky. As he slid off his stool, the bartender arrived with their two big slabs of bloody beef. He told himself not to look at her, but did anyway, just a quick glance, enough to see that she was quietly crying.
Outside, it had clouded over, the dark sky low and ugly, and as he unlocked the car door a fat raindrop hit him on the forehead. By the time he got the convertible’s top up, cold rain was leaping off the hood. He turned the key in the ignition, then turned it off again, thinking about the woman inside and also about Joy, about a morning, years ago, when he’d come upon her in the shower. He’d driven into campus and was parking in the faculty lot when he remembered he’d left a stack of graded papers on his desk back home. He’d stayed up late to finish them, having foolishly promised to return them today. When he got back, he could hear the upstairs shower from the kitchen. Grabbing the papers, he poked his head in to say goodbye again, in case she’d heard him come in and was wondering why he’d returned.
She stood in the shower stall facing the spray, her forehead resting on the tile beneath the nozzle and most of the water pounding the glass door behind her. Though her shoulders were quaking violently, it wasn’t immediately apparent that she was sobbing. To Griffin it seemed impossible that she could be. When he’d left her at the breakfast table less than fifteen minutes before, everything had seemed fine. What could have occurred in the interim to provoke such sorrow? If something had happened to Laura she’d be frantically trying to reach him at the office, so that couldn’t be it. The life they’d dreamed of in Truro had finally come to full fruition. What was there to grieve about?
What came to Griffin, standing there, was that he wasn’t supposed to be witnessing this. Whatever heartbreak his wife was giving vent to now had been fully present half an hour ago, but she’d waited for him to leave. Nor, after he did, had she broken down there in the kitchen. She’d gone upstairs and taken off her robe and nightgown and gotten into the shower, where the evidence of her sorrow would be washed away immediately. How long did he stand there in the doorway, rooted to the spot, staring in stunned disbelief, before quietly backing out of the room, getting back in the car and returning to campus?
How good it would feel, Griffin thought, to go back inside the Olde Cape Lounge and coldcock the woman’s companion, knock him clean off his bar stool, bloody his fucking nose. Here she was, trying valiantly to be happy, and this asshole wouldn’t let her.
Instead he took out his cell and dialed Sid’s number. He’d called him half a dozen times that afternoon, always getting the answering machine. It was now eight-thirty, only five-thirty on the West Coast, but again the machine picked up. There was no point in leaving another message, so he hung up and scrolled down his contacts list, stopping at Tommy’s name. A moment later his old writing partner was on the line.
“Griff,” Tommy said, as if he’d been expecting the call. You through screwing around back there, shoveling snow? You coming back to work? That’s what Griffin expected him to say, not “Jesus, I was so sorry to hear about Sid.”
“Hear what about Sid?” But even as he asked, Griffin suddenly knew why today’s calls hadn’t been answered.
“I almost called you,” Tommy told him. “The poor bastard woke up dead, is what I heard. His housekeeper found him.”
Griffin looked out across what had been the parking lot and was now a lake. It was astonishing, really, how hard it was raining.
“What the hell’s that noise?” Tommy wanted to know. “Are you under attack or something?”
“It’s hailing,” Griffin said, realizing only as he said so that it was true. Semitranslucent pellets the size and shape of cold capsules were dancing off the hood of the convertible.
“Yeah, but who lives like that?” Tommy demanded. “I mean, voluntarily.”
“I can’t believe it,” Griffin said. “Sid called me yesterday. Left a message on my machine. I’ve been trying to reach him all day.”