That Old Cape Magic

Thoreau,” she counseled. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”
    “That’s all well and good, Mom, but Joy’s talking location, location, location.”
    “Then save. When you have enough for a down payment on a crappy three-bedroom ranch out there, you’d have enough for a real house back East, maybe even a place on the Cape. I could visit you there. I’ve missed you.”
    Now
this
was a surprising admission, and Griffin immediately tested its sincerity. “You could visit us now in L.A.”
    “That’s all right. I can wait.”
    Save and wait. For a while at least, that’s what they decided to do.
Dear God
, he remembered thinking. Was he actually going tofollow his mother’s advice? But in this case it made sense, didn’t it, to scale back and get real? Okay, maybe not
Thoreau
real, but real enough. For instance, there was no law that said screenplays had to be written on the balconies of expensive Mexican hotels (though in Tommy’s opinion there should’ve been). If they could rein in their spendthrift ways (yeah, Harve was right, they did spend too much and get too little for their money), Griffin made more than enough for them to live on. Joy, who worked part-time in the UCLA admissions office, didn’t make a fortune, but if they opened a savings account and deposited her earnings automatically and treated the money therein as sacred, in two or three years they’d have a tidy sum. If it wasn’t tidy enough, they could revisit the idea of a loan from her parents. By then maybe he’d be ready to quit screen-writing, which was, let’s face it, a young man’s game. He’d already been at it far longer than they planned in Truro.
    If it weren’t for Tommy, who’d be lost without him and needed time to get back on his feet after the meltdown of his marriage, he would’ve already said goodbye to the whole twisted life. Feature-film deals were getting harder and harder to make, and Griffin hated that the deals always seemed more important than the work that resulted from them. He could and often did riff on the subject. The “juice,” the creative surge, was all front-loaded. Talking up the deal, you were excited and the producer was excited and the young studio exec was fucking beside himself with excitement. Why? Because nobody had ever
made
a movie like this before. It was beyond quirky, it was fucking unique. It was fucking better than unique, it was one of a kind. Just go away and write it, the exec would tell them, because this was a can’t-miss idea. In fact, there was almost no way to fuck it up. After two years, a new producer and fifteen drafts (only three paid for) based on fifteen conflicting sets of notes, what you had, if you were lucky and the whole thing hadn’t been put in turnaround, was yet another standard-issuepiece of shit that lacked a single compelling reason to shoot it, which was, Tommy was fond of pointing out, the best reason to think it would be. Fuck it, Griffin thought. Another two or three years, and he was out.
    Joy accepted his assurance, but for the record she expressed several explicit objections to his (or his mother’s?) strategy to save, scale back on spending and patiently bide their time. For one thing it flew directly in the face of human nature in general and their own in particular. The best way to save for the house they wanted back East, she (or her father?) argued, was to buy one here. They wouldn’t even
have
to save (something they’d never demonstrated much skill at), because the house itself would do the saving for them. It would appreciate in value, and when the time came to sell, the profit they made would provide the down payment on the house they wanted. Also, it was all well and good for Griffin to rail against the business of screenwriting and claim he was burning out, but there wasn’t ever going to be a good time to quit. Ten years from now Tommy would still be lost without him, and they’d always be in the middle of a project, unable to walk away. Even Tommy, ever the cynic, agreed with her. When it came to quitting, to getting the hell out, screenwriters were like stockbrokers. You could hate the job all you wanted but it remained lucrative, which fact hit home when you seriously considered the other options. Plus, he reminded Griffin, deep down, fucked up as it was, you loved it. A Stockholm syndrome kind of love, maybe, but real enough for all that.
    And Joy had one further objection, this one more personal than practical. If