That Old Cape Magic

Laura suddenly see Sunny differently? Griffin knew no finer, truer heart than Laura’s, but even the best hearts, as her mother could testify, were notoriously unruly. Would some good, unexpected thing happen in his daughter’s life, something that caused her very soul to swell with pride and joy, whereupon she’d realize that the man she wanted to tell first and most wasn’t who she’d married today but the one who’d loved her since they were kids and who once, in the middle of the night, had trusted her enough to share his family’s shame? Would she understand that such trust and intimacy do not—indeed cannot—exist apart from consequence and obligation? Would she understand then what she didn’t yet suspect, that remembering Sunny Kim at the moment of her own great happiness at Kelsey’s wedding last year had been kind and generous, yes, of course, but also an unwitting acknowledgment of something yet hidden from her?
    And what of Andy? Would he one day come upon his wife unawares, her good heart broken, and just
know
, as Griffin had, even though he’d tried not to, that there was someone else? Sensing the power of jealousy to wound deeply and maybe even destroy, would Andy bury that knowledge, as Griffin had, even before heknew for sure what it was? And later, after Laura at great cost had done all any woman could do to rule what was by nature unrulable, would her husband then resent her because the wound to his own heart, neither acknowledged nor treated, hadn’t healed?
    Griffin did not want to believe that any of this would come to pass. In fact, he refused to.
    “Thank you,” Sunny said, finishing his own scotch.
    “What for?”
    “For the honest conversation. A rare thing.”
    “And thank you, for the drink. A rare scotch.”
    “It’s not my business,” Sunny said, “but will you and Mrs. Griffin try again?”
    Griffin could tell from Sunny’s worried, almost frightened expression that he wasn’t asking out of curiosity, or probably even affection, though of course these, too, were present. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Griffin that his daughter wasn’t the only one who’d played an important part in Sunny’s life. He and Joy also had. Sure, Sunny’d gone to Stanford and then to Georgetown, but before that he’d crossed Shoreham Drive from his parents’ immigrant neighborhood to where the Griffins and Kelsey and her parents lived. Just a few blocks if you were talking real estate, but much farther in all other respects. Griffin could see him at thirteen, all dressed up for Laura’s party, waiting at the Shoreham Drive intersection for the light to change. And at their “lovely home,” he’d fallen in love (if he wasn’t already) with Laura, yes, but also with her parents, who didn’t unduly burden their child with obligations, who laughed and looked at each other in a way that his own parents never did. Was it Kelsey who’d observed back then that it was clear Laura’s parents still had sex? Sunny would’ve sensed that, too. Hell, he’d have seen it with his own hungry, adolescent eyes. Joy had never been more beautiful than she was then, in her late thirties, and when Sunny compared Laura’s parents with his rigid little mother and chronically ill father, he would’ve felt envy and shamein equal measure. He’d fallen in love with them, Griffin realized, much as Griffin had fallen in love with the Brownings on Cape Cod: thoroughly, uncritically. Had the nation itself been part of his seduction? America, like the Cape, that finer place, with its myriad implicit promises and gifts, chief among them the permission to dream? Who better than Sunny Kim to ask why America blamed its ills on the most recent of its dreamers, whether legal or illegal? By now, Griffin thought, Sunny must be coming to the reluctant understanding that such dreams embodied a paradox, that they, like love itself, were at once real and chimerical.
    “I don’t know if we will or not,” he at last said, embarrassed by Sunny’s personal stake in their marriage and by the larger questions that any marriage—a public institution, after all—in fact begged, no matter the circumstances. And even more embarrassed by his own passivity. Having squandered last year’s moment of grace, he’d waited today for another and felt cheated when it didn’t come. “I don’t know if she wants to, or even how to ask her,” he said. “She’s done pretty well this year without me.”
    “Do