Feeling his emotions come untethered and rise dangerously toward the surface, he left the wedding tent, whispering to Marguerite that he needed to visit the gents. Inside the hotel he found Sunny Kim sitting alone in the small, dark bar, drinking in the only place where the booze wasn’t free.
“Do you enjoy single-malt scotch?” he asked when Griffin slid onto the bar stool next to him.
Even in the dim light, he could see the young man’s eyes were full. “I do,” he admitted, although hard liquor was probably the last thing he needed right then.
Sunny ordered him a very expensive one. “I love fine scotch,” he said, “but I can’t drink it without remembering my father.” Was this, Griffin wondered, to explain his liquid eyes? “What would he have thought about such extravagance? He didn’t believe in excess.”
“Are you sure?” Griffin said. “Not being able to afford something isn’t the same as disapproving of it.”
“True,” Sunny admitted. “It’s also true that I never really knew him.”
“He’d have been proud of you,” Griffin assured him, because he hadn’t meant to suggest any such thing. “Hell, we’re not even related and I’m proud of you.”
Which clearly pleased the young man, though his smile vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by confusion. “Laura’s uncles? Jason and… Jared?”
Griffin chuckled. Back in the tent he’d noticed the twins had taken a shine to Sunny, introducing him to all the pretty girls, most of whom they hadn’t been introduced to themselves.
“They mock their father,” he said.
Sunny hadn’t been at the rehearsal, of course, but Griffin suspected that even if he’d witnessed the collapse of the wheelchair ramp and the ensuing Ordeal of the Hedge, none of that would’ve been as profoundly inexplicable and unsettling to him as their treatment of Harve. “It’s hard for them to express love,” he explained. “Being men. And idiots.”
Sunny nodded seriously.
“Otherwise they aren’t bad fellows,” Griffin said. “They’d be good to have on your side in a fight. Of course”-he pointed to his eye-“if you’re with them there’s a much better chance there’ll be a fight.”
“I made the mistake of telling them I don’t have to be back in Washington until Monday. They want me to go with them to Bar Harbor tomorrow. Do you think I shouldn’t?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Just remember they act first, think later, and then neither clearly nor deeply. Have you ever thought of getting a tattoo, Sunny?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I ask because if you go drinking with them, you could wake up with one.” And it would say Laura.
Sunny must have been thinking along these same lines, because after a moment, he said, “I’m getting married myself later this year.”
“No kidding? Congratulations.” They clumsily clinked glasses. “You want to tell me about her?”
“Yes.” But then, for a long moment, he didn’t. “She’s Korean,” he finally said. “From a fine family. She’s been very patient waiting for me to ask for her hand.”
“Will the wedding be here?”
“No, in Seoul. I’ve invited Laura and… Andrew, but of course I’ll understand if they can’t come. It’s a long trip and very expensive. I’m hoping we’ll get together later. Andrew’s never been to Washington.”
“You’ll live in the U.S., then?”
“Yes, of course. My mother’s here, my brothers, and my work’s important, too.”
“Yes, it is.”
He seemed pleased to be given this vote of confidence, but troubled, too. “Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?”
“Good question. It’s a problem that predates Lou Dobbs, and it’s probably not just us in the States.”
“No, but we’re not responsible for other countries.”
“Are we responsible for this one, as individuals? Isn’t that a lot to ask?”
“Yes. But I do believe we are responsible.”
Griffin nodded, surprised to discover that despite raising the question he agreed with Sunny’s response. Also that he’d finished his scotch.
“She’s very happy,” Sunny said, as if this leap from political and philosophical discussion to deeply personal were perfectly natural.
Love, Griffin thought, smiling. Only love made such a leap possible. Only love related one thing to all other things, putting all your eggs into a single basket-that dumbest yet most courageous and thrilling of economic and emotional strategies. “I think she is,” he said, almost apologetically. His daughter was happy and deserved to be. Yet, sitting here in the dark, quiet bar with Sunny Kim, Griffin couldn’t help wondering if the worm might already be in the apple. A decade from now, or a decade after that, would Laura suddenly see Sunny differently? Griffin knew no finer, truer heart than Laura’s, but even the best hearts, as her mother could testify, were notoriously unruly. Would some good, unexpected thing happen in his daughter’s life, something that caused her very soul to swell with pride and joy, whereupon she’d realize that the man she wanted to tell first and most wasn’t who she’d married today but the one who’d loved her since they were kids and who once, in the middle of the night, had trusted her enough to share his family’s shame? Would she understand that such trust and intimacy do not-indeed cannot-exist apart from consequence and obligation? Would she understand then what she didn’t yet suspect, that remembering Sunny Kim at the moment of her own great happiness at Kelsey’s wedding last year had been kind and generous, yes, of course, but also an unwitting acknowledgment of something yet hidden from her?
And what of Andy? Would he one day come upon his wife unawares, her good heart broken, and just know, as Griffin had, even though he’d tried not to, that there was someone else? Sensing the power of jealousy to wound deeply and maybe even destroy, would Andy bury that knowledge, as Griffin had, even before he knew for sure what it was? And later, after Laura at great cost had done all any woman could do to rule what was by nature unrulable, would her husband then resent her because the wound to his own heart, neither acknowledged nor treated, hadn’t healed?
Griffin did not want to believe that any of this would come to pass. In fact, he refused to.
“Thank you,” Sunny said, finishing his own scotch.
“What for?”
“For the honest conversation. A rare thing.”
“And thank you, for the drink. A rare scotch.”
“It’s not my business,” Sunny said, “but will you and Mrs. Griffin try again?”
Griffin could tell from Sunny’s worried, almost frightened expression that he wasn’t asking out of curiosity, or probably even affection, though of course these, too, were present. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Griffin that his daughter wasn’t the only one who’d played an important part in Sunny’s life. He and Joy also had. Sure, Sunny’d gone to Stanford and then to Georgetown, but before that he’d crossed Shoreham Drive from his parents’ immigrant neighborhood to where the Griffins and Kelsey and her parents lived. Just a few blocks if you were talking real estate, but much farther in all other respects. Griffin could see him at thirteen, all dressed up for Laura’s party, waiting at the Shoreham Drive intersection for the light to change. And at their “lovely home,” he’d fallen in love (if he wasn’t already) with Laura, yes, but also with her parents, who didn’t unduly burden their child with obligations, who laughed and looked at each other in a way that his own parents never did. Was it Kelsey who’d observed back then that it was clear Laura’s parents still had sex? Sunny would’ve sensed that, too. Hell, he’d have seen it with his own hungry, adolescent eyes. Joy had never been more beautiful than she was then, in her late thirties, and when Sunny compared Laura’s parents with his rigid little mother and chronically ill father, he would’ve felt envy and shame in equal measure. He’d fallen in love with them, Griffin realized, much as Griffin had fallen in love with the Brownings on Cape Cod: thoroughly, uncritically. Had the nation itself been part of his seduction? America, like the Cape, that finer place, with its myriad implicit promises and gifts, chief among them the permission to dream? Who better than Sunny Kim to ask why America blamed its ills on the most recent of its dreamers, whether legal or illegal? By now, Griffin thought, Sunny must be coming to the reluctant understanding that such dreams embodied a paradox, that they, like love itself, were at once real and chimerical.