Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

Though the digital clock on the bedside table in his hotel room read 5:17, Jack Griffin, suddenly wide awake, knew he wouldnt be able to get back to sleep. Hed allowed himself to drift off too early the night before. On the heels of wakefulness came an unpleasant realization, that what he hadnt wanted to admit yesterday, even to himself, was now all too clear in the solitary, predawn dark. He should have swallowed his petulance and waited the extra day for Joy.

It had been their long-established habit to flee the campus as soon as Griffin taught his last class. Usually, they hopped on the Freedom Trail (his term for I-95), drove to New York and treated themselves by checking into a good hotel. During the day he would evaluate his small mountain of student portfolios while Joy shopped or otherwise amused herself, and then, evenings, theyd catch up on movies and go to restaurants. The whole thing reminded him of the early years of their marriage back in L.A. It cost a small fortune, but there was something about spending money they didnt really have that made him optimistic about more coming in-which was how it had worked in L.A.-and it got him through the portfolios.

This year Kelseys Cape Cod wedding had royally screwed up their plans, making New York impractical, though hed been willing to substitute Boston. But Joy, assuming that thanks to the wedding all the usual bets were off, had messed things up further by scheduling meetings on the day after his last class. Just go, she said when he expressed his annoyance at the way things were working out. Have a boys night out in Boston and Ill meet you on the Cape. Hed squinted at this proposal. Didnt you need more than one to have a boys night out? Or had Joy meant it to be singular, one boy celebrating his boyness? Was that how shed understood the phrase all her life, as singular? Joys relationship to the English language was not without glitches. She was forever mixing metaphors, claiming that something was a tough line to hoe. Row to hoe? Line to walk? Her sisters, Jane and June, were even worse, and when corrected all three would narrow their eyes dangerously and identically. If theyd had a family motto, it would have been You Know Perfectly Well What I Mean.

In any event, his wifes suggestion that he go on without her had seemed less than sincere, which was why he decided to call her bluff. All right, he said, thats what Ill do, expecting her to say, Fine, if it means that much to you, Ill reschedule the meetings. But she hadnt said that, even when she saw him packing his bag, and so hed discovered a truth that other men probably knew already-that once youd packed a bag in front of a woman there was no possibility of unpacking, or of not going and taking the damn bag with you.

Worse, Joy, who preferred to watch movies on DVD rather than in a theater, as they were meant to be seen, had given him a list of films he was forbidden to see without her, and of course these were the only ones worth seeing. Hed spent an hour looking through the restaurant guides provided by the hotel, but couldnt decide on one, or even on what kind of food he wanted. Griffin had no trouble making these sorts of decisions when she was around, but for some reason, when he had only himself to please, he often couldnt make up his mind. He told himself this was just the result of being married for thirty-four years, that part of the decision-making process was imagining what his wife would enjoy. Okay, but more and more he found himself stalled, in the middle of whatever room he happened to be standing in, and he realized that this had been, of course, his fathers classic pose. In the end Griffin had ordered room service and watched a crappy made-for-TV movie, the kind he and Tommy, his old partner, had been reduced to writing that last year or two in L.A. before hed gotten his teaching gig and moved back East with Joy and their daughter, Laura. Hed fallen asleep before the first commercial, confident he could predict not only the movies outcome but also half its dialogue.

In order not to dwell on yesterdays mistakes, he decided to put today in motion by calling down to the bell captain for his car. Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, hed checked out of his Back Bay hotel. The whole of Boston fit neatly into the rectangle of his rearview mirror, and by the time the Sagamore Bridge, one of two that spanned the Cape Cod Canal, hove into view, the sky was silver in the east, and he felt the last remnants of yesterdays prevarications begin to lift like the patchy fog hed been in and out of since leaving the city. The Sagamore arched dramatically upward in the middle, helping to pull the sun over the horizon, and though the air was far too cool, Griffin pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and put the convertibles top down, feeling truly off the reservation for the first time since leaving home in Connecticut. There was something vaguely thrilling about not being where his wife thought he was. She liked to know what people were up to, and not just him. She called Laura most mornings, her brain still lazy with sleep, to ask, So whats on the agenda for you today? She also phoned both of her sisters several times a week and knew that June was having her hair done tomorrow morning and that Jane had put on five pounds and was starting a diet. She even knew what new folly her idiot twin brothers, Jared and Jason, were engaged in. To Griffin, an only child, such behavior was well over the line that separated the merely inexplicable from the truly perverse.

Zipping along Route 6, Griffin realized he was humming That Old Black Magic, the song his parents had sung ironically-both university English professors, thats how they did most things-every time they crossed the Sagamore, substituting Cape for black. When he was growing up, theyd spent part of every summer on the Cape. He could always tell what kind of year it had been, money-wise, by where and when they stayed. One particularly prosperous year theyd rented a small house in Chatham for the month of August. Another year, when faculty salaries were frozen, all they could afford was Sandwich in June. His parents had been less wed to each other than to a shared sense of grievance over being exiled eleven months of every year to the Mid-fucking-west, a phrase they didnt say so much as spit. They had good academic careers, though perhaps not the stellar ones that might have been predicted, given their Ivy League pedigree. Both had grown up in the Rust Belt of western New York State, his mother in suburban Rochester, his father in Buffalo, the children of lower-middle-class, white-collar parents. At Cornell, where theyd both gone on scholarship, theyd met not only each other but also the kind of friends whod invited them home for holidays in Wellesley and Westchester and for summer vacations in the Hamptons or on the Cape. They told their parents they could earn more money there, which was true, but in fact theyd have done anything to avoid returning to their parents depressing upstate homes. At Yale, where they did their graduate work, they came to believe they were destined for research positions at one of the other Ivys, at least until the market for academics headed south and they had to take what they could get-the pickings even slimmer for a couple-and that turned out to be a huge state university in Indiana.

Betrayed. That was how they felt. Why go to Cornell, to Yale, if Indiana was your reward? But theyd had little choice but to hunker down and make the best of their wretched timing, so they dove into teaching and research and committee work, hoping to bolster their vitae so that when the academic winds changed theyd be ready. They feared the Princeton and Dartmouth ships had probably sailed for good, but that still left the Swarthmores and Vassars of the world as safe if not terribly exciting havens. This much, at least, was surely their due. And before going up for promotion and tenure (or promotion and tether, in their parlance) in the Mid-fucking-west, theyd each had opportunities-she at Amherst, he at Bowdoin-but never together. So they stayed put in their jobs and their marriage, each terrified, Griffin now suspected, that the other, unshackled, would succeed and escape to the kind of academic post (an endowed chair!) that would complete the misery of the one left behind. To make their unhappy circumstances more tolerable, they had affairs and pretended to be deeply wounded when these came to light. His father had been a genuine serial adulterer, whereas his mother simply refused to lag behind in this or anything else.