The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “I came as soon as I heard, which was only twenty minutes ago. Cass—why didn’t you call me?” He looked searchingly at his wife, confused beyond all measure. She’d stumped him before with her peculiar ways, but never to this extreme.

  “I texted and called you as soon as I checked into the hospital,” Cass said. “When I didn’t hear back, I figured I must not get service in here. You know how hospitals are. Bunkers.”

  Bunkers? What a strange choice of word. More like bonkers. This situation, anyway.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of Cass,” Jonathan said, turning to Jemima. In case she was too tired to pick up on his signal, he added, “Go home and get some sleep.”

  She nodded at Jonathan and made a big show of kissing Cass on both cheeks, reminding her to text if she needed anything at all. “I’m always here for you,” she whispered audibly.

  When it was just the two of them, Jonathan dragged over Jemima’s vacated chair and took a seat on the edge. He leaned close to Cass, debated reaching for one of her hands. The only noise between them for a full thirty seconds was the hum of the monitor next to the bed.

  “Cass, you did not contact me. If I didn’t respond to you right away, you would have asked Henry or Jem to reach me. What the hell is going on?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, her voice containing a threatening saccharine note. “I mean, you had that big client to land. I would never want my health or this miscarriage to get in the way of your ascendant career.”

  He froze. There was a trap here. Or rather the trap had already been laid, and he’d gotten himself stuck but good.

  There was no other option but to say what Cass predicted he would: “You told me to go on the trip. I never would have otherwise.” Suddenly he felt like the failure in San Francisco had been Cass’s doing, even if it wasn’t actually possible. Or was it karma?

  “You shouldn’t have even asked,” she said, mock sweetness dropped. Now she was all ice, her voice a jagged edge chipping at him. He pushed his back up against the seat, away from Cass.

  “I didn’t ask,” he finally whispered.

  “You hemmed and hawed about how to tell Jerry you’d have to cancel. I’m not an idiot. You were asking for permission to go. So I gave it to you. I didn’t know that I would hemorrhage and my blood pressure would drop so low that I’d pass out.”

  “Cass, please, I’m begging you. I’m stupid. I didn’t get it. I really thought you wanted me to go. I felt like things were under control, and if you wanted me to stay, you would have come right out and said it. It was dumb, now I see that, but I swear I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you intentionally. I thought that a part of you wanted to be alone. This, this thing that happened to us, it’s made me feel like the enemy. Please forgive me. Do you forgive me?”

  He reached toward her again, brushed some escaped hair from her bun to the side. I’m not a mind reader, he added in his head.

  “I’m very tired. We’ll discuss it later,” she said, closing her eyes as a means of shutting him out.

  But they didn’t discuss it. Once Cass was discharged the next day, they moved around each other on tiptoe, as shadows overlapping. For the first week, Cass had a wall around her. She was frigid. She was scary. Their home had a carpet of eggshells. He slipped out in the mornings for work, came home and ate a quiet dinner in front of the TV. They slept on their sides facing away from each other, the eyes in the back of Cass’s head boring into him, wishing him bad dreams, a rotten day.

  Then, a shift. Perhaps tired of the silence, Cass moved on to hurting him by being overly kind, a mind-fuck he couldn’t begin to dissect. She said things like: “Would you mind terribly if I didn’t pick up the dry cleaning until tomorrow?” “I hope you like the new brand of yogurt I bought. If not, I’ll get the Chobani first thing.” “I recorded that World War II documentary you mentioned wanting to see a few months ago.” Things they’d never said to each other before. Niceties that felt like expletives.

  After a month of this dance, Cass opened the door to the shower while he was shaving and said to him, “I’m so sorry for all this. I overreacted. Please forgive me. I love you.”

  And he did. She came into the shower, they kissed and fondled each other; sex was still off-limits for medical reasons for another few weeks.

  But it was too late.

  Two days after Cass got home from the hospital, he succumbed to Marielle. Even though it happened in a sad Courtyard Marriott a few blocks from their office, it was the most exciting sex he’d had in ages. Though he tried to suppress it later, he knew that he had pictured Cass watching the whole thing, the anger he felt toward his wife fueling his erection. He’d always said Cass was his power source.

  When Cass told him she wanted this intermission, his first thought was that there had to be someone else. There could be no other reason to upend a perfectly good marriage. But he didn’t dare ask. No, that question was firmly off-limits for him after the treason he’d committed. Luckily, his wife volunteered on her own that she was not cheating on him, and he believed her. Cass was many things, but dishonest wasn’t one of them. He was the one with the secret. Secrets, actually. How ironic that Cass said she worried Jonathan didn’t really know her when it was him that was really the mystery to her. His secrets fueled his eagerness to start a family with Cass. That would move them firmly into the next phase of their lives, when they’d be so tethered by their little angel that any transgressions that came to light would be forgiven, or maybe even forgotten.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  JORDYN AND MICHAEL’S wedding went off without a hitch. The bride stunned in a creamy strapless gown with a sweeping train, his brother was dashing in a crisp navy suit. Hydrangeas everywhere, like white and lavender clouds. Extraordinary lobster bisque and a decadent coconut cream cake were the talk of the town. Other than his own hangover the day after the welcome drinks, even Jonathan navigated the weekend relatively well. Having Puddles along was a great excuse to dodge unwanted conversations, though he felt surprisingly at ease among the guests. There were a lot of people from Exeter whom he recognized, but as Michael was three years younger, Jonathan didn’t have to worry about running into his own classmates and their misperceptions from all those years ago when he nearly lost his chance to graduate. Yet another secret.

  His father pulled him aside unexpectedly during the rehearsal dinner and walked him toward the bar. The two men stood at exactly the same height, but it was hard to remember the last time they’d had this kind of direct eye contact.

  “Nice party,” Christopher said, gesturing toward the one long table glowing with the light of paper lanterns strung above. “Al didn’t spare any expense.”

  Jordyn’s father, Alfred Smythson, was a managing partner at Ropes & Gray, one of the oldest and most respected law firms in Boston. He easily made two million dollars a year. The implicit comparison to his and Cass’s own wedding was absurd. There was no way Dick, who claimed he was too insolvent to make child-support payments (he probably was), could have put on some grand affair.

  “It’s nice,” Jonathan conceded, wondering where this tête-à-tête was headed.

  “Your mother told me about you and Cass. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. It’s hard when two people come from different backgrounds. There is resentment. See how seamless this all is?” His father gestured again to the opulence of the setting: the glow from the candlelit tables, the soft hue from the purple flowers casting everything and everyone in a flattering light. Jonathan noted the pearls cascading from the ladies’ necks, all shades of white. He had the urge to yank one of them hard enough to break the string, to watch the guests scramble on their hands and knees to gather the loose beads, on a mission to secure the precious orbs that so perfectly symbolized their tribe. His tribe, he corrected himself, though less so since he’d married Cass.

  “Mom doesn’t e
ven like Jordyn,” Jonathan said, in the mood to be combative, which arguably his father deserved. “What you’re saying has nothing to do with why Cass and I are taking a break. She didn’t grow up on food stamps either, by the way. You always treat her like she was raised in a trailer by drug addicts.”

  Christopher didn’t deny it.

  “Besides, isn’t it a hell of a lot more impressive when someone pulls themselves up by their bootstraps? Most people at this wedding were born with silver spoons in their mouths.” As if on cue, a waiter passed by with a gleaming tray of cutlery to reset the tables for dessert.

  “That’s not quite right, Jonathan. You overgeneralize as usual.”

  You’re being such an asshole. That’s what Jonathan would have said to Cass, privately, if she were there. He’d pretend she was his father and reenact the argument for her and she’d play along, allowing him the catharsis he needed, to say the things he really wanted to. Instead of engaging further in a conversation with his father that could only go from bad to worse, Jonathan stalked off angrily, returning to his seat next to his little sister.

  There were so many more things he could have added, like, “I can see how great being cut from the same cloth has worked for you and Mom,” and reference one of the million muffled arguments he’d heard during his childhood. Or, “At least Cass and I met spontaneously as opposed to submitting to the country club version of an arranged marriage.” Or, just to really throw them off-kilter: “Surprise, I have hard evidence to refute our family’s double Mayflower lineage.” But he didn’t, because what good would it do to dredge up the past or to compare his romantic run-in with Cass in Midtown to the merger of pedigrees planned by the Coynes and the DeWalts, his maternal grandparents? And the ill-fated pregnancy was still a secret between him and Cass. He stabbed at the tarte Tatin that had been served in his absence with the tiny fork.

  “You okay?” Katie asked, eyeing him with worry. His sister was only twenty-two, the product of that fateful conversation between his parents Jonathan overheard as a child. She was a newly minted Hamilton College graduate, building a cupcake business with a friend from high school. Unlike the boys, Betsy kept Katie home for high school, the reasons for this choice never fully articulated. Katie desperately wanted to go to Exeter as well, but instead she attended Field Preparatory in Brookline—a fine school, but not on the level of Exeter. Wallace said it was because their father was more likely to keep it in his pants if there was a child living at home. But perhaps the most proximate cause was that his parents had had to pull significant strings at Exeter after the incident and they had run dry of political capital by the time it was Katie’s turn.

  “I’m fine,” Jonathan said, kissing his sister on the forehead. “Talk to me about cupcakes.”

  “We’re experimenting with a fermented pumpkin flavor for fall. I’ll send you a care package if you promise to give some honest feedback. But I’d rather talk about you and Brett Eddison. I saw you guys leaving together the other night. I’ve heard snippets of what’s going on with you and Cass from Mom.”

  “Nothing happened with Brett. She drove me to the hotel because I had too much to drink. I promise to fill you in on the rest, but not tonight. I’ll be waiting for those cupcakes.”

  “They’re packaged in mason jars, tied with the cutest ribbons. We have our hashtag printed on the box: #letthemeatcupcakes. Clever, right? You need to post with that tag, okay?” Katie rattled on and on, and Jonathan thought, Oh, to be young again. Though by her age he was already wracked with guilt, questioning who he was after he’d acted toward a classmate in a way he hadn’t known he was capable of.

  “Anyway, if your billionaire boss feels like investing his dough in a sweet cupcake business, let me know. And, yes, the puns were intended.”

  Jonathan rolled his eyes and squeezed Katie’s elbow. He loved his little sister so much and wanted nothing more than for her to have a perfect future. If his dad’s whoring around was the reason for Katie’s existence, well, maybe it was worth it.

  She went on, beaming. “Jerry Winston would just be a backup plan anyway. We applied to be on Shark Tank.”

  We love that show, Jonathan almost responded. But who was we? With their separation, he and Cass had lost use of a basic pronoun.

  “Thinking about doing a peppermint-nutmeg for Christmas. You’re going to be here for Christmas, right? What about Thanksgiving? Would this have been a Cass’s family year or an ‘us’ year? I’m playing around with a savory stuffing cupcake that you’ve got to try.”

  The holidays. He hadn’t given those any thought yet. This Thanksgiving was technically a Michigan year, but unless Cass came to her senses by their separation’s expiration date, he’d be up in Boston with his family.

  “I really don’t know my plans yet, Katie. I’m operating more on a getting-through-the-day mode at this point.”

  17. CASS

  TWENTY-TWO WORDS.

  That was the sum total of what she and Jonathan exchanged during the Puddles handoff. Like a tersely written play, devised to create maximum tension, the script read:

  Scene: LAX. A Crowded Baggage Claim Area. Announcements Booming Overhead.

  Jonathan: His stomach seems better. Hands dog crate to Cass.

  Cass: Good. What time is your flight? She looks up at a clock on the wall, which reads 3:30. There is audible ticking.

  Jonathan: Six.

  Cass: Ahh.

  Jonathan: How are you? Looks past her as he asks.

  Cass: Well. You?

  Jonathan: Fine.

  An announcement for a flight to Houston booms overhead.

  Cass: Don’t miss your flight. She plants a painfully awkward kiss on his cheek and walks off with Puddles. Jonathan watches her go.

  Curtain falls.

  She played the scene a hundred times in her mind before it actually happened, tried on three different outfits, and popped two Advil to soothe a mounting headache. Coffee, she had decided that morning. That was what she wanted them to get to. A chance to talk for an hour, where they’d be laughing midsentence when Jonathan would look at his watch and realize he had to rush for his flight. They’d continue over text until he boarded. Less than three months earlier, they were having sex somewhat regularly, discussing a last-minute Hamptons rental for the summer, reminding each other to see the dentist like septuagenarians. How could they not sit for a while to catch up? She’d have to ask for coffee. Jonathan’s ego would prevent him from being the one to suggest it, and that was perfectly understandable. There was a Peet’s in Terminal 3, one terminal over from where they were meeting.

  So what went wrong?

  Jonathan striding toward her, carrying Puddles, looked nothing like the way she’d imagined. She’d expected to see her put-together husband, who typically didn’t dare step outside without a collared shirt and a pair of driving loafers. Instead he cut a grim figure, clad in a faded T-shirt and ill-fitting shorts. He looked exhausted, hadn’t even shaved that morning. Most distressing of all was the fact that he didn’t smile when he saw her or go in for a hug. She really should have gone ahead and made the sign that said “Puddles Coyne” like the ones the limo drivers hold at baggage claim. That would have made Jonathan laugh, lightened the mood. Her own husband was making her nervous, which was absurd because she was nearly certain that if she told him she wanted to fly back with him, he’d be overjoyed. At least she was fairly confident of that fact. Now she reconsidered. Perhaps she had pushed too far asking for time apart, as Dahlia and Alexi had gently suggested.

  She had taken care with her appearance: mirrored aviators held back her blow-dried hair, and she chose flattering skinny jeans and a slim-fit white tee adorned with a turquoise necklace. She didn’t normally take pains to look good when it was just the two of them alone. This was one of the things about marriage she was already missing. It seemed like Jonathan was deliberating showing Cass how li
ttle he cared about the airport rendezvous, although that was too Machiavellian for her husband. Not to mention that he wasn’t one to express himself through sartorial choices. Still, it made her freeze, this reality that was so far from her expectations, and that set everything off on a different path than what she’d planned. So, instead of coffee, they exchanged twenty-two words, and she was back in her car within fifteen minutes. Puddles whimpered the entire way home. She told herself it was because her sweet Choodle was exhausted from the trip and not because he was missing Jonathan, or worse, upset from seeing his owners treat each other like hostile strangers.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “I HATE MY job,” Cass said, pausing Candy Crush. “For starters, it’s only three days a week and the pay is pitiful. And while it’s been fun keeping you company on auditions, I can’t be your stage mom much longer.”

  Alexi looked up from her Instagram feed.

  “Already sick of being my manager, huh?” she asked, raising a sculpted eyebrow. They were in the waiting room of yet another casting call and Alexi had been given number 122.

  “I love being your manager. I just wish you’d sometimes get called within the first three hours of waiting.”

  “Me too. Isn’t your job at LA-PAC pretty much what you were doing back in New York?” Alexi asked.

  “Not really,” Cass said, sighing. “I’ve been given almost no responsibility. The job I was meant to interview for was filled by this heinous woman named Greta and I’ve become her de facto gofer. I have to exchange Puddles again soon and was kind of banking on at least one positive thing happening before I see Jonathan again. Never mind me, though. Let’s run through your lines.”

  Cass moved to shut down their conversation—again. She hated the whiny undertones of her complaints and was more than aware of how incomprehensible everything about her situation seemed to outsiders. Alexi must have some urge to settle down, whether she outright admitted it or not, and Cass was camping out in her apartment on some indulgent soul-searching mission while a great guy waited for her back home. At least that’s how Alexi must see things. She could unburden herself to her, confess everything about stalking Jonathan in college, then in New York City. Explain just how wretched she felt for using Google as a private eye to learn about his interests, the cost of his apartment, what his family was like. How her actions made her a fraud though she did really love her husband, but how could she take the next steps and have a baby with him if he didn’t even know the truth about her? How she feared Jonathan existed on a higher plane than she did and that she had never deserved him in the first place?