The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “Excuse me,” she said when she was within striking range. Both men looked up at her, a mix of bemusement and curiosity on their faces. “I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m a friend of your daughter’s. Well, not really a friend; she works for me. She’s lovely.”

  “Which daughter?” Marty asked, smiling at his cousin. “I have five, so you’ll need to be more specific. Though I’m guessing you’re referring to Camille.”

  Flustered, Cass felt heat rise to her cheeks.

  “Luna,” she said. “I know Luna.”

  “Ahh. My wayward child,” Marty said. “Have a seat, won’t you? I’d love to hear how my Luna is doing. We don’t speak all that often.” He motioned for Eli to slide over. Cass reluctantly took a seat next to the silver fox.

  She noticed Marty signal something to the waitress and a moment later a glass of champagne was placed in front of her.

  “Um, thank you. I guess you probably know that Luna works as a—well—she’s part of a group of students called the PhD Housekeepers. It’s really quite admirable how she supports herself. Anyway, she’s really amazing, and I just wanted to tell you—”

  Eli snorted with laughter and spoke up for the first time.

  “Marty, your kids will do just about anything to say ‘fuck you’ to you, won’t they? Does the ice queen know her princess is scrubbing floors and bleaching toilets in her spare time?”

  The ice queen equaled Bella Criss, apparently. Luna’s mom and star of Lover’s Lane, a soap opera from days past that Cass’s mother watched with a passionate commitment she applied to nothing else in life.

  Marty jostled the single oversized ice cube in his scotch.

  “I know all about this crazy thing of hers. Kid’s got a perfectly good trust fund, but won’t touch it. She says she wants to earn her own success. And I say, what’s the problem with taking and earning at the same time? Think about it, Eli. Remember how we grew up? Can you imagine us ever declining a handout? We were polishing shoes for dimes outside the R train at her age, for chrissakes.”

  He turned his attention back to Cass, who was busy processing this unexpected bit of common ground between her and the famous movie producer.

  “Unless Luna moved back to L.A. without telling me, in which case I want NYU to refund my tuition, you must live in New York. What’s your story?”

  Plates overflowing with appetizers arrived before she could answer. Potato skins, tomato-and-mozzarella salad, fried calamari with a trio of dipping sauces, and generously stuffed mushrooms.

  “Take some,” Marty said to her, and it felt like it wasn’t an option to say, Sorry, I don’t like sharing. She reached for a mushroom, though the waistband of her leather skirt was digging into her abdomen after her last licks of dessert. Marty took a potato skin, fully loaded, and popped it whole into his mouth.

  “Go on,” he said, his mouth overflowing with bacon bits and cheddar.

  “Well, I used to work for Percy Zimmerman at PZA. It’s a—it was—a Broadway marketing and advertising firm. Now it’s been sold. After he died I took a hiatus from work and moved out to L.A. I’m staying with my friend Alexi, who is an amazing actress by the way.” She pointed out their table. Alexi, JuJu and Zandra waved in synchronization at Eli and Marty like Charlie’s Angels. “I’ve just started to work part-time at LA-PAC.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “I knew Percy. Brilliant guy. Such a shame.” He threw another potato skin down the hatch with his thick fingers. Cass noted Eli using a knife and fork to cut a mushroom. She wasn’t sure which form of eating she found less offensive.

  “You knew Percy?” Cass exclaimed. “He was my mentor, like family to me.”

  “We were at Brooklyn College together. You know, Eli and I could use some help in our publicity department. Ever try your hand at movie campaigns?”

  “Nope. I’ve only worked in theater. But I’d be curious.” Cass felt her heart accelerate. Just as she had walked out of work on Friday, she’d received an email from Greta aggressively shooting down her suggestion of converting the position to a full-time job.

  “Call my office tomorrow,” he said. “We want to bring you in for an interview, don’t we, Eli?”

  “We certainly do,” Eli agreed. He had that same smug, amused look on his face as before. Cass wanted to wipe it away with her napkin.

  “That would be amazing,” she said instead, with a smile—but not her real one.

  18. JONATHAN

  “SO?” JONATHAN ASKED, looking at his wife. She bore an expression he didn’t recognize. It had only been four weeks since he’d last seen her, but she was already feeling something like a stranger. After all, he’d thought he knew all her faces, but this one, a mild pout with her tongue running along the edge of her front teeth, was new to him. “Are you happy so far? Figuring things out?”

  He had appropriated the decision to separate from his wife with pretty much everyone else by this point, but back with the instigator, he was stuck with the truth. His wife had abruptly left him the day they were meant to try for a baby and there wasn’t an obvious way to sugarcoat that. He’d clearly missed some signals leading up to this. While he did leave his wife to recover alone from the D&C (and perhaps didn’t tend to her enough after Percy passed away), what should he say about the alleged erosion of their chemistry and the myriad unknown infractions he’d committed to get to this place? Cass didn’t know about Marielle, who thankfully was back in Paris as of last year due to an expired work visa, so that couldn’t be it. If anything, his greatest sin was overestimating Cass’s ability to just be happy, expecting their relationship to progress on some predictable path to familial bliss.

  “Happy is a stretch,” his wife now said, and her face morphed into something more familiar. It was her look of deep contemplation, though he preferred seeing it when the variables were Italian or Thai, Bridgehampton or Montauk. “I do miss you. A lot. You should know that. The other day I saw this caption in the newspaper. It had a picture of this young woman, maybe thirty at most, and the caption read: Julia Gray, founder of the eighty-year-old Mason Button Factory, shown in her office. I showed it to someone at work and they totally didn’t get it.”

  He smiled quickly, though it took him a second longer than he would have liked to get the misprint. Cass was quick—her mind like a plane on a runway, moving faster than he thought possible. It wasn’t feasible to stay a step ahead of her. Just keeping in tandem was an achievement.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  He sipped his airport coffee, horribly sweet after he’d dumped in two packets of sugar purely to find a use for his twitchy hands. He wasn’t going to waste this chance, though. Last time they met up, at LAX, he’d wanted to ask her to sit with him for a while. Instead, he stood there like a stone pillar, dressed like a bum, barely able to hand over Puddles with a steady arm. He hadn’t planned to ask her to come back just then. That kind of outright overture was overly simplistic. He knew Cass hadn’t picked herself up and gone to California just because she wanted him to beg her to return.

  “I miss you too,” he said. “Jemima did her god-awful impression of Americans the other day—you know, the one where she mixes Southern and Canadian—and I so badly wanted you to be there.”

  “Ugh, I hate that accent,” Cass said, and she attempted to mimic it, which was even funnier—an impression of an impression. They laughed in unison. These were the essential bits of them. When you boiled their marriage down to its elements, the valuable parts that would collect in the beaker were these shared jokes, six years in the making. That’s what he’d miss most. The rest, the detritus of a commingled life, would just evaporate if they didn’t reconcile. At least that’s how Jonathan saw it.

  He went on, moved by the groupings of travelers around him exchanging emotion-packed greetings and good-byes.

  “It’s lonely in the apartment too. I shouldn’t say this, but when
you first moved out, I had a fleeting thought that it’d be nice to have my bachelor pad back. I still have my La-Z-Boy in storage. But I don’t even have it in me to leave the toilet seat up, you trained me so well.”

  “Hmm,” she said, and her irises floated upward.

  “How’s Dahlia? Have you spoken to her?”

  Even though Cass had denied it, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that Dahlia’s divorce was the catalyst for their intermission. Yes, Harris was acting like a prick, but to be evenhanded about the whole thing, it was disingenuous of Dahlia to have married him in the first place. Though maybe she had loved him. What the hell did he know about lesbians, other than his certainty that the dynamics of the Bloomsteins’ bitter divorce should have nothing to do with him and Cass. He wondered: If Dahlia and Harris resolved their acrimony, would Cass come floating back to him like a balloon drifting into the hands of a greedy toddler? He bit his lip in anticipation of her report on them.

  “Disaster. He hired the toughest attorney that some dickhead at his firm recommended and who is known to just eviscerate the other party. Both the boys are in therapy. And she’s got no money—I think she found her lawyer in the phone book. We should really help—” Cass started to say, but the hand she brought to her mouth showed that she caught herself. There wasn’t a “we” at the moment, not the kind that would underwrite Dahlia’s divorce proceedings, and his wife knew it.

  “How’s work?” she asked. Clever Cass with her return to neutral territory.

  “Busy. Jerry’s been really tense lately. I’m assuming it has something to do with our Chinese investors. The economy there is turning to shit and we may have a big redemption. Your mom called our apartment, by the way. Did you not tell Donna what’s going on?”

  Cass dropped the coffee stirrer in her hand.

  “Shit, did you say something?”

  “No, just told her to call your cell. Did she?”

  “Not yet. I’ll call her.”

  “Puddles is definitely going to miss you,” he said, playing the card he didn’t want to play. It sure was nice when we were a family. Cue the Norman Rockwell painting. Shit, he was better than that.

  “Actually, I thought he seemed sad this month. I bet he’ll be happy to be back in his home.”

  It’s your home too, he thought.

  “He likes the dog walker. I mean, Maurice isn’t a film major at NYU, and I’m not sure he even finished high school, but Puddles doesn’t seem to mind.”

  He thought she’d be pissed about his dig at Luna, but instead she interrupted with far more surprising news.

  “Actually, speaking of Luna, I went in for a job interview at her father’s company. I met him randomly at a restaurant.”

  He must have looked pretty crestfallen because Cass added quickly, “You knew I was hating that temp job at the performing arts center. I needed a real job, even if it’s just going to be for a short time.”

  His face relaxed and he listened to Cass retell about meeting Marty Spiegel while the aspiring actresses looked on. Then he caught an earful about the insane mangos at the Malibu farmer’s market. It was like his wife was describing a girls’ trip she’d taken, only she wasn’t coming home. And while he knew he should press her to open up and have a real conversation about what was happening between them, he let their chat idle in the superficial. How could he not when any real reckoning between them would be impossible without his coming forward with the things he had always held back from her?

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  FOR THE FIRST time since her departure, when he jerked off, he didn’t think about Cass.

  He never used to fantasize about his wife before she left him. He either inserted himself into whatever scene he was watching on YouPorn, or he imagined getting blown by the hard-nippled chick with the see-through shirts who worked a few floors below him. But Cass was all that could get him hard since she left, the anger he felt toward her manifesting itself in blood rushing to his penis.

  And then, unexpectedly, Brett popped into his mind while he was showering after a workout. It was only the day after he’d seen Cass at the airport, and while his wife had looked damn good, it was Brett he saw when he felt himself getting hard. She was wearing the same dress she’d had on at Michael’s party. Sweet Brett, who had stood by him when the going got tough for him at seventeen. Pretty Brett, who had looked so poised and together even when the vodka martini splotched her dress. Big-chested Brett, whose pillowy breasts would spill from his hands when he reached under her shirt at the movies. In his replay of the night on the Vineyard, instead of her dropping him back at his hotel, she came up to his room. Her body was what he remembered it to be: tight, tan, calf muscles as rounded as tennis balls. But her chest was even bigger, tits as big as grapefruits busting out of a lace bra.

  When he finished, he stepped out of the shower and dried off quickly. Laptop in hand, still dripping, he opened Facebook and found her. There was a message function somewhere. He diddled around for a few minutes looking for it, letting himself get distracted by the Red Sox game in the background so that he might have time to reconsider. A commercial came on and he forged ahead. Why shouldn’t he? He and Cass had been more than civil at the airport and he believed his wife that she genuinely missed him, but she’d done nothing to convince him she was ready to come home. If anything, she sounded almost giddy about her adventures on the West Coast.

  Brett— It was great to see you on the Vineyard. I never did properly thank you for the ride. If you’re ever in New York, please let me know. —Jonathan

  Postscript: I just jerked off to you in the shower.

  He was about to send it when he realized he wasn’t Jonathan to her. He shortened to Jon (holy symbolism) and sent, promising himself that he wouldn’t look to see if she’d responded for at least one day. A fresh beer in hand, he settled onto the couch to watch the rest of the game.

  Ding.

  Jon! So glad to hear from you. No worries about the ride. As it happens I’ll be in New York in two weeks and would love to get together.

  Ding.

  Whoops. Forgot to include my cell number.

  She closed with a smiley face emoji with blush.

  Thoughtful Brett. Stable Brett. Funny how those qualities were becoming turn-ons.

  He jerked off again.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  MOST IF NOT all stories are like onions. Not only are they layered, but when you remove their fragile protective skin, they make you cry.

  That’s certainly how Jonathan felt about what happened to him in high school. Well, not to him, exactly. Just what happened. There, that was better.

  It was fall of his senior year at Exeter. He was busy with college applications, crew and dating Brett Eddison, a sophomore on the track team and a girl he’d vaguely known on the Vineyard since he was little. In a nutshell, things were great, not that he knew how much he stood to lose at the tender age of seventeen. Brett was his first real girlfriend. Not his first lay, but his first relationship.

  Life had been a bit of a blur since the summer ended. Part of the problem was the uncertainty of everything. He knew he was moving on from the comfortable home he’d known for the past three years—one that was happier and easier to navigate than the actual home he’d shared with his warring parents, whose only place of agreement was that he should become exactly the type of child the neighbors would envy them for. College loomed and he understood he might experience the big-fish/small-fish dilemma that often plagued high school’s favored sons. Harvard was his next likely stop. His father and grandfather were alums, both made generous annual donations and, as he kept reminding himself, he had the grades for it too. The crew didn’t hurt either.

  Daniel Rubia-Mendez was a rookie on the heavyweight team. An unlikely Exeter student, an oddball especially for crew, he was a scholarship kid from the Bronx. His f
ather, who passed away when Daniel was in middle school, had been in the navy. Loved boats more than life itself. With what money he had after he got out of the military and from his job as a security guard at the public school Daniel attended, Emilio Mendez managed a down payment on a small cottage with a river view in the Hudson Valley. And it was there that he taught Daniel how to row. It took. Daniel had a natural ability and his father looked into scholarship opportunities for his son, who was also a gifted student.

  Jonathan learned all this about Daniel after the fact. In late October, when everything went down, all he knew of the new kid was his first name. And yes, he did notice he looked different than the other rowers, but he couldn’t have cared less about it.

  The tradition at Exeter was for the senior athletes to haze the newcomers. How aggressively wasn’t specified, and after the incident it became a matter of debate. One to one they got assigned by the team captain, and Jonathan was assigned to Daniel. The freshmen knew what was coming to them—some would wake up with shaved legs, others with warm pee (or worse) on their blankets; the more nefarious plans involved fake love letters to the hot girls on campus or snapping inappropriate photos that got photocopied and dispersed in the dining hall. It was very boys-will-be-boys and the school looked the other way.

  It wasn’t quite true that Jonathan didn’t know anything about Daniel. He and Brett worked together on the Exonian. She was responsible for writing reviews of the arts performances on campus, and since he was just a freshman, Daniel was assigned the tedious task of fact-checking. Brett had mentioned the kid in passing a few times. That frosh rower Daniel is unbelievably smart . . . Daniel’s the most responsible of the new staffers . . . Daniel said something really funny last night . . . Daniel is probably going to be editor in chief by the time he’s a junior.

  Why he was jealous of this freshman was incomprehensible to him. Brett exhibited no signs of attraction to the younger boy; if anything her affection for him was something like a protective older sister. Daniel wasn’t particularly good-looking, his clothes were all wrong, and no sophomore girl would trade a senior for a freshman to save her life. On the crew team, none of the upperclassmen paid him any attention; he was just another newbie to be hazed and then ignored for the rest of the year.