That Old Cape Magic

leaving them alone and content in the world, talking about everything under the Cape Cod sun. Unfortunately, Griffin couldn’t for the life of him remember a single conversation they’d had, and when he tried to invent one it sounded, well, invented, an adult writer giving adolescence either too much credit or too little. He’d discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages—young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.
    Nor was it just the details of this friendship that he couldn’t bring to mind. Peter’s sister… there’d been something wrong with her, hadn’t there? Griffin vaguely remembered the little girl havingepisodes of some sort when she got tired or overexcited, but episodes of what? Not being able to breathe? Somehow that didn’t seem right, but there’d been something. He remembered seeing the child feverish and curled in her mother’s lap, and a look passing between her parents that contained both fear and sadness, a detail that hadn’t made it into the story. Nor had Peter’s father. In real life the man had been ambiguously fascinating. He’d had a very large head, Griffin recalled, and while he wasn’t exactly ugly—Griffin’s own father was better looking—he wondered how Mr. Browning possibly could’ve won a woman as beautiful as Peter’s mother. But he did have a kind of physical grace, a sureness of movement. There seemed to be a connection between what he meant to do and what he did. Griffin couldn’t imagine him ever standing in the center of a room unsure of his next step, his own father’s signature gesture. Peter hadn’t been scared of him, but was always respectful, as if he knew all too well that his father, for all his kindness, wasn’t someone to cross. How, then, had he become so two-dimensional in Griffin’s story, a surrogate for Wisdom, the voice of adult Truth?
    Even more embarrassing, he wasn’t even sure he’d gotten himself right. Griffin kept imagining studio notes:
Who is this kid? What does he want?
Or worse, the ubiquitous
Why are we “rooting” for him?
    “The kid’s gay, right?” Tommy said. “That’s where you’re heading?”
    Griffin hadn’t wanted to show him the story, but Tommy was insistent.
    “And at the end he’ll commit suicide?”
    “No,” Griffin told him, dispirited, “nothing like that.”
    “Because that’s where it seems like you’re going, unless the little fucker’s going to get unreal lucky and bang the other kid’s mother.”
    “No,” Griffin admitted, “not that, either.”
    Of course it was possible that Tommy was still pissed at him for working on this piece of shit when they could have been writing aspec script. Because now the strike was over, and they were broke, they’d have to take the first crappy assignment they could get, just as he’d predicted. But he did seem genuinely puzzled by the story. “You gotta feel sorry for the poor fucking kid, though,” he admitted. “I mean, those asshole parents …”
    That, Griffin felt, was the most dispiriting thing about it. Tommy hadn’t said it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. The only characters in the story that rang true, felt real, were the kid’s parents. Griffin hadn’t really intended to include them, except as devices. They were only there because a kid that age wouldn’t be alone. Parents of some sort were necessary, and generic ones would’ve done just fine. Instead, it had all gushed out, the stuff he’d only half understood at the time—how glad the fictional parents were that their son had been temporarily adopted by this other family. Not glad for
him
, not pleased that he’d found a friend, but for themselves. Because now they could have a leisurely breakfast on the deck with Al (yes, he’d used Al Fresco), spend their long afternoons reading on the beach without being pestered to come into the water and then, in the evening, go someplace nice for dinner.
    Curious to revisit the story after so long, Griffin had stuck it in the satchel with his students’ work. Who knew? Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he remembered. Actually being on the Cape as he reread it might help him see the ending that had eluded him in L.A. If so, and if Sid wasn’t calling about a script, he’d revise it