That Old Cape Magic

found a jazz station on the car radio for the trip back to L.A., during which he and Joy seldom spoke. It wasn’t the silence of argument so much as simple reentry. The drive was a long one, and just as well, too. Griffin could feel her exchanging—reluctantly, he sometimes felt—one suit of emotional clothes for another, one life for another. But the silence could and sometimes did morph into argument. One Thanksgiving at Harve and Jill’s, not long after they were married, having exhausted all the board games, they’d played Twenty Questions, and Joy’s sister Jane had stumped everyone at the table for the better part of an hour, Harve stubbornly refusing to give up. Finally, though, everyone else pleaded with her to surrender her fictional identity, which turned out to be Princess Grace of “Morocco.”
    That evening, when they pulled into the garage of their rented condo in Brentwood, Joy was still fuming because Griffin, instead of laughing along with the rest of the family at Jane’s goof, shook his head in disbelief, got up from the table and left the room, as if her mistake had been intentional or malicious and such bizarremistakes could be assigned a moral value. Now, four hours later, when he turned off the ignition and started to get out of the car, Joy remained seated. When he asked if she meant to stay the night in the garage, she said, “I hate jazz.”
    “Apropos of?” he asked.
    “Apropos of I want you to know I hate jazz.”
    She later told him it wasn’t really true. She liked jazz. She just for some reason felt the need to tell him she didn’t. Something had gotten into her, she said. She had no idea what.

4
The Summer of the Brownings
    I n addition to his students’ work, Griffin’s satchel also contained a long, unfinished story, “The Summer of the Brownings,” its precomputer pages yellowed and curled. A couple years after they were married, it had been his first attempt to implement that provision of the Great Truro Accord by trying to write something other than a screenplay. He’d come across the story when he was cleaning out his filing cabinets at the college in order to make room for the few things of his father’s that he wanted to keep. His father’s last years were spent in a small, cramped, university-owned flat, and most of the furnishings weren’t even his. There were lots of scholarly journals and books, including a pristine copy of Claudia’s dissertation, published by a good university press, that she’d proudly signed. Griffin found his father listed on the acknowledgments page, along with the other members of her doctoral committee. The book’s stiff spine suggested that the book hadn’t been opened, much less read. Of course if his father had written it, as his mother alleged, there would’ve been no need to. In a token gesture of revenge Griffin had given it away with the rest of his father’s library, keeping as mementos only a few of the P. G. Wodehouse and Henry Miller books he remembered himreading on Cape Cod beaches. He’d almost missed, in the recesses of a dark closet, the dozen shoe boxes full of campaign buttons and other political trinkets his father had continued to collect down the years, and he kept these as well. “Scoff all you want,” he remembered him telling his mother when he stopped at flea markets. “You won’t be laughing when we sell the whole collection and use it for a down payment on a house.”
    Was it worth anything now? Griffin supposed it might be and made a mental note to inventory the items and have them valued, but then he’d shoved the shoe boxes into the back of the filing cabinet and hadn’t thought about them since. The only real surprises among his father’s effects were a couple VHS tapes of movies Griffin and Tommy had written. He couldn’t remember sending them himself, so had his father bought them? Or had a colleague, noticing the screenplay credit, given them to him as a gift? They had been viewed, but by whom?
    “The Summer of the Brownings” had an interesting provenance. The writers had gone on strike that year, as they were forever doing, and he’d used the work stoppage to write it. “You’re shitting me,” Tommy said when Griffin explained what he was doing. Why not write a spec script, he argued, which every other screenwriter would be doing, because then they’d have something they could sell once the strike was over. Be in the driver’s seat for once, instead of having to take