That Old Cape Magic

a large wraparound porch, so Griffin brought his satchel full of student papers down and set up shop in a rocking chair in the sun, where he sat trying to remember how that famous Shakespeare sonnet about death went. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun …” was as far as he’d gotten when his cell vibrated, Joy calling him back.
    “I forgot to ask,” she said. “Did Sid get ahold of you?”
    “No,” he said, sitting up straight. Sid was his agent back in L.A., in his late eighties and still a legend in the business, despite his shrinking client list. Griffin sincerely hoped he was calling about a job. Money had been worrying him of late. Joy, who kept the books and wrote the checks, insisted they were fine, but if Laura got engaged, as she’d been warning them might happen soon, maybe even this weekend, there’d be a wedding to pay for, and a quick studio rewrite would be just what the doctor ordered. “When did he call?”
    “Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned your grades in yet. It sounded like he meant for you to drop everything, hop on a plane and drop into the Universal lot by parachute.”
    Joy, since they moved to Connecticut, had little patience with Sid, whose ongoing, albeit sporadic presence in their lives she considered vestigial, an appendix that was liable one day to rupture. He was also one of those Angelenos who never took time zones into account when telephoning. Four in the afternoon—seven back East, about the time Griffin and Joy usually sat down to eat—was when he took the bottle out of his desk drawer, unscrewed the cap and poured, then started calling people. She might have been less peeved, Griffin thought, if Sid was calling with work, but mostly hejust wanted to reminisce about old Hollywood—Bogart and Mitchum and Lancaster and Holden—until nostalgia morphed into anger that the town was now overrun by “bitches,” his term for the current generation of young male stars, action-movie pretty boys pretending, not very convincingly, to be tough guys. “Not a one of ’em could take Renée Zellweger in a fair fight,” he was fond of observing. “You did the right thing getting out when you did, kid. Who needs it?”
    Who needed him?
was the better question, according to Joy. Why couldn’t he understand that they’d moved on?
    Toward the end of their conversations Griffin always reminded him that he was still a dues-paying member of the Guild and that if the right gig came along, especially in the summer … but before he could finish, Sid always interrupted. “My advice?” he said, as if he’d just extended such an offer. “Don’t lower yourself. You’ve got respectable, grown-up work now.” Joy had usually finished eating and was loading the dishwasher by the time Griffin managed to get off the phone.
    This sounded different, though, and Griffin immediately felt the adrenaline rush, his mind racing in that old, calculating, savvy L.A. way he’d all but forgotten. If Sid was so worked up, it had to be a feature film, maybe one that had already gone into production with a horseshit script. Wouldn’t
that
be sweet. Some A-list actor had probably come on board at the last second and to accommodate this dickhead’s busy schedule they’d agreed to start shooting early. That would explain why they were coming to Griffin, who worked faster than anybody.
    It took him about a second to invent this scenario and another to check it for holes, of which there were several. The most obvious was that nobody out there remembered whether he was fast or slow, because, face it, nobody remembered
him
. Still, it was a pretty entertaining sequence of events, sort of like imagining a woman totally out of your league falling in love with you. It could happenand, in fact, already had. Back when they met, every man he knew had been in love with Joy, who was not just beautiful but genuine, a quality in short supply everywhere and especially in Southern California.
    Okay, so suppose for the moment that Griffin was right. Sid had found him something. A feature film. Everything would immediately go at warp speed. He’d have the fucked-up script in his hands by this evening, Sid would negotiate the deal over the weekend and Griffin would be on a plane to L.A. by Monday. Or to wherever they were shooting. It’d be a laptop gig. Late nights. Chinese (probably Thai, now) ordered in. Early wake-up calls. Pay commensurate. Just like the good old days.
    “Universal?” Could