That Old Cape Magic

allies in an otherwise hostile world.
    “We’re Marguerite and Harold,” the woman announced wheneveryone was seated and Sunny Kim suggested they all say something about themselves, where they lived and their relationship to the bride or groom. Marguerite owned a shop called Rita’s Flower Cart in the San Fernando Valley, not far from where Griffin and Joy had lived. She’d moved to California, she said, after she and her husband decided to call it quits. Only when Harold interrupted to say, again mostly to Griffin, “Don’t ever think a woman will go away just because you divorce her,” did he realize this was the ex-husband she’d alluded to. And only when she said she’d bought a house right around the corner from the bride’s parents and described it a little did he and Joy realize that it was their old house. They’d moved to Connecticut before the closing, so they’d never met the buyer.
    At any rate Marguerite and the Apples had become such good friends that Kelsey now referred to her as Aunt Rita. Harold, she told the table, hooking her arm through his, lived in Boston (“Quincy,” he corrected) and worked in law enforcement (“Private security”), so when she heard the wedding was going to be on Cape Cod, where the groom’s parents had a house, she called Harold “out of the blue”—without even thinking about it, really, the phone just suddenly in her hand—and asked if he wanted to go to a wedding in June, to which he’d replied, “As long as it’s not ours.” That sporty riposte had reminded Marguerite that one of the things she’d always liked about Harold was his “dry sense of humor.” So she’d flown out a few days early, and they’d spent the time getting re-acquainted, and it had been, she said, scrunching up her shoulders as she’d done the evening before when she decided on a cosmo, really kind of romantic. She turned to Harold, clearly hoping he wouldn’t correct her here as well. “Yeah, well, sex was never the problem,” he conceded.
    “I bet I know what was,” Joy murmured, loud enough for Griffin, on her left, to hear and possibly Sunny, on her right, too, though he gave no sign of it. As Marguerite was talking, a bottle of champagne was brought for toasts, and Sunny uncorked it andpoured full flutes (ladies first, to Harold’s clear chagrin), shorting Harold just a bit with the last of the bottle. Intentionally, Griffin hoped, but thought probably not.
    A precedent had apparently been set for the women at the table to speak for the men, and Joy went next. As she talked, Griffin found himself thinking how different it would’ve been if he was the one giving the synopsis. He had no intention of correcting her, à la Harold, but he did feel a stirring of guilty sympathy for him. Joy explained that their daughter, Laura, was the maid of honor and had been best friends with Kelsey, the bride, since they were girls, and of course she and Griffin had been friends with the Apples when they lived in L.A. This last bit struck him as more convenient than true. Sure, they’d all been friendly enough but never actually socialized, he and Joy having had little in common with Kelsey’s accountant father and evangelical mother, though Joy had been willing to suffer her religiosity given that the girls were best friends.
    But never mind L.A. It was how Joy characterized their present lives, though factually accurate, that really rankled him. Griffin, she told the group, was a college English professor (“We’ll have to watch our grammar, then, won’t we?” said Marguerite, again scrunching up her shoulders), making no mention of his screen-writing career. Okay, granted, he was partly to blame, since normally he preferred not to bring that up. People immediately wanted to know what movie stars you knew and whom you had to know to gain entry into such a glitzy profession. They also were curious about what movies Griffin had written, and then he’d have to admit that only one or two of his and Tommy’s really stood up. Toward the end they’d been reduced to writing low-budget, made-for-TV movies, so better, really, not even to open the door.
    Yet in this instance it seemed that Joy wasn’t so much acting in deference to his wishes as simply stating what she considered to be the facts. As part of a past they’d by mutual consent put behind them, screenwriting was no longer germane. Which was now alsowhy Sid’s call had initially slipped her mind. It was even