The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “There isn’t anyone else,” she added quietly, just in case he was indeed wondering but was afraid to ask.

  “I know that,” Jonathan said, matter-of-factly. How did he know that so definitively? Maybe he didn’t think she could do better, which could very well be true. Or that she’d never be so foolish as to risk losing what they had by giving in to a fleeting, primal urge.

  “This is about Dahlia,” he said plainly.

  How was it that Jonathan was already psychoanalyzing something that he never saw coming and had barely had a full five minutes to process?

  “Cass—she’s your first friend to get divorced and it’s making you freak out about us. You need to be happy with what you have. Dahlia is gay—it’s not a case of your parents all over again. And I don’t even understand what you mean by a separation. Should I sleep in the spare room? Get an apartment on the West Side? Have you thought this through? Because it sounds ludicrous. Do you love me? Because I love you. And last time I checked, people who love each other and don’t have real problems stay together. Yes, we bicker sometimes. If you think you’re going to find someone else and the two of you will never fight, good luck.”

  “Hear me out, Jonathan, please.” She was nearly shrieking, with the shrillness that she normally found distasteful in others. “I do love you. This isn’t about not appreciating my life or because of Dahlia. I don’t think it’s the craziest thing in the world to live apart for a time. We are not the same couple we used to be. We argue about the stupidest things. We have less sex. We don’t laugh as much. Can you honestly think of the last romantic date we’ve had? You are totally wrapped up in your job, and I’m totally out of sorts being unemployed for the first time in my adult life. We both know that what we went through two years ago did a number on us. And your mother hates me. Well, that part hasn’t changed, but it’s wearing on me. Before we bring some innocent little person into the world, wouldn’t we be wise to make sure this is it for us? That we are each other’s happy ending? You know that thing where people have a kid to save a marriage. Well, this is the opposite—we’re going to save the marriage before we have a kid. As a child of divorce, I can tell you with certainty that—”

  “Cass,” he said, interrupting her. “What about—?” Jonathan tilted his head over to Puddles and started rubbing his back protectively.

  Crap, she hadn’t thought of Puddles. And why was Jonathan coming around so quickly anyway? Maybe bringing up Puddles was his way of quashing the entire notion. Neither of them could live without Puddles; ergo, there could be no separation. She felt a momentary sense of relief, but found herself soldiering on. The voice speaking was not her own, or rather it didn’t feel controlled by her brain. It wasn’t even her heart that was guiding her tongue, because that part of her was wishing she would stop hurting Jonathan. Somewhere, a disembodied voice found the strength to continue.

  “We’ll figure that out—we can trade off. Don’t you ever wonder sometimes if we really know each other?”

  Jonathan raised an eyebrow.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  This was her chance to come clean about the origins of their relationship. The way she’d honed in on him like a sharpshooter at target practice. Not once, but twice.

  “I, I just—” she started.

  “And how am I supposed to get to know you better by living apart?” he asked, interrupting her incomplete thought. “Where are you going, by the way?”

  “Tonight, a hotel. Tomorrow . . . I will figure out the rest.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” he asked.

  “It’s true we’ll be living apart, but we’ll still speak. Maybe even more than we do now—at least about the important stuff. Let’s do this for six months. If at the end, we both decide that we’re happier together than apart, that we need each other, we will get back together and appreciate each other more than ever. And start a family. The break will be the best gift to our child because we’ll be so sure of our commitment to each other. And if not, we’ll . . . we’ll . . . you know.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “It’ll be a gap year. But half!”

  “How delightful,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, a device he rarely used. “Will you go to Europe? Backpack perhaps? However will you spend this precious time before you have to buckle down and be an actual adult? The possibilities are endless.”

  “Fine, poor choice of words. I didn’t mean a gap year like for eighteen-year-olds.” She knew she sounded pedantic and condescending, but her tone, much like what she was saying, was out of her control. What she and Jonathan needed was to metaphorically stretch. And then the word occurred to her.

  “It’ll be like an intermission.”

  “It’s idiotic is what it is. Don’t treat our life like it’s the script from one of your shitty plays.” He reached for his pants, draped over their dresser, and retrieved the little folded cookies in their sealed wrappers. And just like that, she watched their fortunes get tossed into the trash.

  act two

  INTERMISSION

  10. JONATHAN

  IT WAS HARD to look at the beads of sweat rolling down the ravines of Jerry’s hairy chest, but then again it was harder to look away. The tiny white towel wrapped around his boss’s waist was quite rapidly coming undone, and since eye contact was really impossible in this situation, the chest was the safest landing spot.

  “Son, marriage is complicated,” his boss said, raising his thick pointer finger in the air. “You’ll see. Life is full of surprises.” Two Jerry-isms for the price of one, Jonathan thought, though he really shouldn’t be nasty. It was awfully considerate of his boss to take him out for a “manly day,” as Jerry had put it. Jerry rarely took time away from the office, so it was particularly touching when he’d swept into Jonathan’s office insisting they play squash and have lunch at his racquet club.

  Jonathan nodded. The towel gap widened. How much longer were they going to shvitz for? A similar lobster lunch to the one Cass had had designs on at the Cosmo, before she took off, awaited him and Jerry in the storied, wood-paneled dining room located three floors up in the University Club. Jonathan hated to be so unappreciative, but he couldn’t easily accept other people’s kindness these days. It felt like pity, and that took the pleasure out of every nice gesture.

  “Ginny’s going to call Cass. We’ve been together for thirty-nine years. Four kids. We’ve been through it all. Affairs, hers and mine, my gambling thing, her drinking. Trust me, there’s nothing you can say that’ll shock me.”

  That’s for sure, Jonathan thought wistfully. His marriage was falling apart because of purported snoring, his disapproval of Luna, and Cass’s boredom from a few months of being unemployed. In a word, minutiae, tiny little pecks that grate at the surface of every relationship but don’t penetrate into any real danger zone. Irritations a more complacent person than his wife could overlook. His current working theory: Cass was having a third-of-her-life crisis and he was the closest target in sight. Well, technically their marriage was the target, but it sure felt personal. Why else would Cass have concocted this ridiculous experiment? He hadn’t seriously ever doubted that she loved him, but he didn’t exactly give it thought on a regular basis. They were in love when they got married, got along decently well (a hell of a lot better than his parents ever did) and had their whole lives together to look forward to. Fifty-plus years, at least, if he considered what they used to write on those wedding napkins. There was nothing to overthink or worry about, though apparently his wife felt differently. Could it all boil down to something as simple as that book people still talked about—Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus? Because it sure felt like it.

  In any case, compared to Jerry and Ginny, he and Cass were milquetoast. Milquetoast on a garden leave. Actually, it wasn’t at all like the rules of a garden leave, where ex-employees were forbidden from meeting with any competitors. Be
cause they were expressly allowed to see other people.

  “I mean, that makes sense, right?” Cass had said, while she haphazardly threw her belongings into their monogrammed luggage an hour after she announced she wanted a break. The J stitched into the leather caught his eye—at least a part of him would be with her during the break. One swooping letter. The heel of one of her shoes was poking into her sweater pile and he resisted the urge to hand her a shoe bag. And to show her the Tumi’s inner pockets for accessories. “How can we know if we’re happier together or apart if we don’t try other things? I just want to be realistic. And I want you to be happy and fulfilled as well.” He had wanted to call bullshit on that part, but didn’t.

  Cass was actually asking him to help design the parameters of the separation. She didn’t want to take full responsibility for it—to make the call, so to speak. It reminded him of the way the lesser analysts at Winstar made stock suggestions to Jerry. “This would be a great buy,” they said, followed up with, “but the investment committee should do a full study.” By asking for his input, Cass was making him a coconspirator. Well, he wasn’t so foolish as to become an architect of this plan. It was demoralizing enough to be a signatory.

  “This whole thing is your idea. You can decide.” That’s what he said in return. She only nodded slightly, which he believed meant, Yes—we can see other people. Or, At least I may.

  “Thanks, Jerry,” Jonathan said, wiping sweat from his brow. “But I’m not sure that’ll be much help. Cass has to work out these issues by herself.”

  “I’m sure it’s a phase. They all act crazy from time to time. You say the word if you want Ginny involved. Let’s eat, shall we?” Jerry rose and the terry towel fell to the floor. In a heap on the wet tile, it looked no bigger than a hand towel. Jonathan looked away to save Jerry the embarrassment; Cass might have laughed. She could be kinder than anyone on the planet at times, and then, all of a sudden, exhibit a mean streak. And if he was honest with himself, knowing she had the capacity to be hurtful, he was just relieved whenever someone else was on the receiving end and he was more than happy to tune it out. To think that Cass had suggested they didn’t really know each other well . . . Absurd. It was true he couldn’t always predict what Cass was going to do, but that was because one of her personality traits was unpredictability! What nonsense could she have been referring to? That he didn’t know she used to want to be an astronaut? He knew all about her childhood obsession with Sally Ride. That she thought she might be lactose intolerant?

  “Whoops,” Jerry said, snatching the towel up and quickly assembling it back as a cover-up, which was ambitious given the girth of his waistline. God, this was a painfully awkward moment, the kind of “detail of the day” he might have shared with Cass during a commercial break when they were in bed watching TV at the end of the night.

  “A good woman can be very useful, don’t forget it,” Jerry added.

  Ginny coordinated the Winstar Christmas party; Ginny invited the analysts’ wives for lunch; Ginny made sure Jerry’s clothes were dry-cleaned (or she told someone to make sure they were). Jonathan wasn’t looking for a personal assistant or another mother, and thank God, because Cass wasn’t likely to fill either of those roles.

  Jonathan tightened his own towel around his waist, looking down at the shiny gold wedding band sandwiched between the puffy flesh of his overheated ring finger. He hadn’t taken off the ring, even with the gap. Especially with the gap. Because that would give the whole stupid experiment a level of gravitas that he just wasn’t willing to allocate to it. Besides, he was still pretty convinced the gap, or the more euphemistically put “intermission,” would be a hell of a lot shorter than six months. They were only two weeks in so far and Cass was calling or texting from Los Angeles every day to “check on him.” It didn’t seem guilt-driven. It felt like pretext, with her trivial news reports following the cursory “How are you?” (Puddles is probably running low on treats. I saw Jerry on CNBC. Alexi is a psycho exerciser.) On April Fool’s Day, he almost thought he’d get a singing telegram decrying the entire thing a cruel joke.

  He saw the separation’s end playing out in one of two ways. Either Cass would come charging back to him within the month, blaming her erratic behavior on the hormonal effects of going off the pill or on Percy’s death. Or she’d invent some legitimate reason for her behavior, like he never told her she was beautiful anymore or he paid more attention to the stock market than to her. He’d rapidly apologize (because, after all, that would be the easiest way out of this nonsense) and they could bury this episode along with the other unpleasantness they’d weathered since getting married. How else could this intermission play itself out? Cass had said they would take six months to assess how they felt. “That’s only two quarters,” she’d added, trying to put it in his language. He wasn’t an idiot—he knew what six months was. Still, it was hard to tell how literally she meant the time frame. Would they come together at the end of September to weigh the pros and cons? Would each of them write on a piece of paper TOGETHER or APART and then open the other’s simultaneously? Would they flip a coin? He repeated it to himself. Flip. A. Coyne. How fitting.

  They wouldn’t get to that point anyway. The separation would terminate much sooner, most likely with Cass realizing the single world wasn’t as great as she’d remembered it. It was chock-full of disappointment and uncertainty, two things he knew his wife wasn’t fond of.

  When she was packing up her things, the trio of skinny wedding bands she wore stacked like the stories of a shiny skyscraper remained on her finger. He kept his gaze on the tiny tower adorning her left hand while she stuffed jeans, T-shirts and other essentials into her suitcase. When she told him during their engagement that she wanted three thin bands instead of a single eternity band, he’d chalked it up to a style preference. Now he wondered if the idea of an eternity band just wasn’t for his wife. Eternal. It was a scary word. Throughout the first week of Cass’s departure, he thought those rings had made it with her onto the plane. But when he was looking for his anchor cufflinks the other day and opened the safe he barely touched, there they were, along with a yellow sticky note that said in a messy scrawl, “Thanks for understanding. C.”

  When did he ever say he understood? It was an absurd presumption of hers, not unlike her asking him to help write the ground rules for their separation. To make matters worse, she had thoughtlessly affixed the note to the only photograph they kept in there, of Peanut. The single image documenting the only roadblock in their marriage to date. Well, until this. At that moment he had almost yanked off his ring, but stopped himself.

  “Yes, I’m starved,” Jonathan lied, rising to join his boss. That reminded him of the last text he’d received from Cass: Are you eating okay? Like he was a child and not her equal.

  11. CASS

  SO FAR THE traffic was the thing she regretted the most about her rash decision to split from Jonathan. The most superficial aspect, anyway. But there was so much gridlock, no matter what time of day. Going to the bank was an hour-and-a-half odyssey; the gym a three-hour time drain. Nobody had forced her to move to L.A., although leaving New York for the West Coast after a winter with four major snowstorms just made good sense. But the Northeast was thawing and she could have found a studio downtown, maybe in the Village or Chelsea, and lived out the gap a twenty-minute subway ride away from Jonathan. It certainly would have made the transporting of Puddles much easier. But she knew she’d sense his aura at every street corner, imagine his shadow overtaking hers on the concrete sidewalks. New York City was littered with places of significance to them: the checkered-tablecloth Italian restaurant where they first exchanged I love yous, the Pret A Manger where they had their first real fight (tainting all other Pret A Mangers), the subway platform where they drunkenly interrogated a homeless man about his panhandling tactics. The distance, the three thousand miles requiring a five-hour plane ride, it all felt necessary. Alexi had inadverte
ntly planted the seed when she’d suggested a visit. Visit . . . six-month stay . . . what was the difference really when Cass offered to pay more than half of the rent moving forward? Alexi’s roommate, Bridget, had barely landed upright, she got tossed out so quickly. And then there was the prospect of a job on the West Coast. Cass looked on the theater message boards and saw the position at LA-PAC she’d been contacted about had been filled. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t another opening for her—she’d already emailed her HR contact and he’d asked her to come in.

  One would think after almost six years of cohabitation, Cass would have jumped at the chance to live alone. And there were parts of her that yearned to eat ice cream straight from the freezer without feeling someone else’s eyes boring into her back. She wanted to poop with the door open, pick her nose, masturbate on the couch and rediscover all the other perks that came with living alone. But she was doing her best to treat her separation from Jonathan like a scientific experiment. For the control group to be reliable, she had to cohabit. The other big parameter was the length. Six months felt appropriate. Even the happiest of married couples would relish a couple of months of not having to share the bathroom vanity or turn off the TV when the other fell asleep. But half a year was enough time to miss someone, to get to the place where you actually wanted to see the toothpaste without its cap replaced or the milk left on the counter for the zillionth time, because those things symbolized your partner’s presence. Even though she’d surprised herself by asking for the break, the rapidness with which she’d suggested the time frame led her to believe she’d been working out the details subconsciously for some time.