He offered a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I wouldn’t give it another thought. It’s perfectly routine for the SEC to monitor funds as large as ours to make sure we’re in compliance with the latest regulations. It’s nothing, trust me.”
“Thanks, Jonathan,” Laurel said, rising and smoothing the fabric of her dress. “I feel so much better.”
“No problem. Come back to me if you hear anything else—I want to be able to put your mind at ease, that’s all. On another subject, how’s being a newlywed?”
“Pretty great,” she said, an ear-to-ear grin filling her pretty face. “I can’t believe all that stupid stuff we fought about during the wedding planning. We’re so happy.”
“Nice,” he said, but he was already far gone in so many ways.
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
HE ATE ABOUT fifty spiced macadamia nuts waiting for Brett at the bar of ABC Kitchen, Cass’s voice trailing his hand’s journey from bowl to mouth repeatedly. Do you know how many germs that thing has?
Brett was running late. Her flight was delayed due to winds in Boston and she wanted to stop at the hotel quickly to drop her bags. They volleyed texts back and forth to each other like a Ping-Pong ball and he almost mistakenly wrote to Cass, I’m at the bar. Can’t wait to see you, when, interspersed with his Brett exchange, his wife wrote that she needed to put off picking up Puddles by a few days because she was going to London for work.
The restaurant was loudly buzzing with hip people, dating hopefuls and clusters of women in low-cut tops toasting with overpriced cocktails, sharing small plates. He thought he’d left this life behind him five years ago when he and Cass exchanged vows. Jonathan hadn’t quite run screaming from the single life, rather he’d comfortably concluded that phase of his life and welcomed the next one with open arms. Now he was back for more, dressed in a close-fitting blazer, dark jeans and driving loafers all picked out by Cass at Barneys.
Brett breezed in, floated like a ghost from his past up to the bar and planted a very non-apparition-like kiss on his cheek. She smelled like the ocean near his family’s beach house, salty and crisp, hitting his senses hard with déjà vu.
“This is so nice,” she said, hopping on the bar stool next to him. Under the trendy pendant lamp hanging directly overhead, she looked different than Jonathan remembered from the Vineyard—probably on account of his being sober now. He could see the ways the past decade-plus reflected itself on her body—the child she bore stretching her once taut belly into something softer; her worship of the sun freckling her nose in tiny patches; and her teeth, once an army of perfectly straight white soldiers, yellowed ever so slightly from years of morning coffee. Even her eyebrows, which used to stand like pointy tents, had given way to gravity. He was suddenly strongly aware of his own body: wilting, caving, softening so he was roly-poly in the middle with no child to blame it on, hair still thick as a shag rug but meeting his forehead a quarter inch too far back, skin a pasty white from exposure to little else besides the fluorescent lighting in his office. He could go on and on.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked. “Our table isn’t ready yet.”
“You mean they gave it away because I was late,” she said, raising her eyebrows back up to their former arches. He was able to catch a glimpse of a younger her when she did it. “I’m really sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. I’m just happy to see you.”
“Me too. And yes, I’ll have a drink. Any white wine will do. I’m going to run to the ladies’ room really quickly and then I want to hear everything.”
She slipped off her seat and headed toward the back of the restaurant, leaving her cell phone behind, trusting or careless. Cass kept hers glued to her person at all times—a third hand. A new text message lighted Brett’s screen.
Mom: Are you wearing a dress?
He couldn’t help himself—he read the conversation from bottom up.
Mom: Have fun tonight!
Brett: He’s married and I’m a recent divorcée with a child. Don’t get too excited.
He scratched his head. Brett wasn’t wearing a dress. She was in black pants and a sleeveless tank, though to be fair she was fresh off a plane. He was tempted to take the phone and respond, Don’t worry, Brett looks great. Which was true, despite everything he’d noticed this evening. His tastes had evolved to where thinking about the private school girls who trolled the streets of his neighborhood in their short plaid skirts, skinny limbs like asparagus stalks, made him feel pervy. Now what he found sexy were the horizontal slices on a woman’s forehead and the glint of a lone silver hair. Jonathan recalled his father saying Meredith Baxter-Birney was gorgeous, back when Family Ties was all the rage, and how all he could think was—how can you say that when Mallory is on-screen at the same time? Now, he got it.
While seeing the reality of his and Brett’s outing distilled to a blunt three-line text exchange was excruciating, he needed sex, a warm body in his bed, and even if his stomach was pillowy, at least Brett would remember the way he looked in high school. He didn’t have to worry about impressing her like some blind date appraising his every move. Having settled down before the age of the dating apps, he was far too circumspect now to cozy up to the idea of sexting and swiping and finding a girl to screw in ten minutes based on her global positioning. Somehow a call girl felt more straightforward.
“Did I miss anything?” Brett asked, slipping the cell phone back into her purse.
“Not at all. And our table’s ready.”
They shared pasta with pine nuts and pesto, lobster fra diavolo, chocolate cake with cinnamon ice cream. Head-on they tackled the weather, the Patriots, Tom Hanks’s latest and New York City museums, and avoided anything with a trace of soreness for either of them. Expertly they skidded along the superficial like ice skates on a freshly cleaned rink.
In the lobby of her hotel, he hesitated briefly just before kissing her on the lips. She received his overture happily, applying gentle pressure when she kissed him back, but didn’t invite him upstairs. Back uptown, his favorite nighttime doorman Vlad gave him a generous pat on the back. When he went to brush his teeth minutes later, he saw the carbon copy of Brett’s mouth that her lipstick had imprinted on his.
21. CASS
THERE ARE CERTAIN dreams so delicious that if you happen to wake up in the thick of one, you try your hardest to fall back asleep, hoping against all hope that you’ll be able to slip into the very same story line again before the alarm clock blares. Cass had a lot of those dreams in the months before Percy announced he was sick, after which wakefulness seized her like a plague. Now that she wasn’t sleeping, she didn’t know what was better—to dream in rich fantasy only to wake up to a life of mundane reality, or to lie awake but not have to confront such a striking contrast.
Jonathan rarely remembered his dreams, but her nocturnal self was prone to especially vivid imagery that left her confused about what was true and what was imagined. A millisecond before her eyes blinked open, she could be in Italy making pasta with a famous chef who also happened to be her lover; or she was back in her hometown, but this time she was in one of the area’s few large brick colonials hosting a party where all the kids who’d thought they were better than her were tending bar and lugging tubs of ice; or she was in Thailand, alone, seeking adventure, but her wallet got lost and found by a handsome stranger. These black-and-white adventures, which felt colorful beyond measure even if scientifically they weren’t, were always a welcome departure.
The important thing with a good dream was to be okay when the fog of it wore off and reality set its claws into you. By the time you made your morning coffee, the dream should be forgotten and your actual life, staring back at you from your Google calendar in thirty-minute increments, shouldn’t seem like a terrifying alternative. Now it didn’t matter. She slept in short, stubby bursts that left no time for a v
irtual getaway.
Many people have “the one that got away.” That person they can’t resist stalking on social media, who they fantasize about running into when they’re all dolled up, and who—and this really would have been terrible for Cass—appears to them regularly in dreams. It pleased Cass immensely that she had no such person, notwithstanding that period of time when Jonathan was beyond her grasp. For starters, it meant she hadn’t let anyone slip through her fingers. Whoever was important in her life had stayed put until she felt ready to move on. She even included her father in this roundup. He’d removed himself from her life in all the ways that counted—because showing up for the ceremonial bullshit did not count—but she’d made no effort to reel him back in. Ergo, he didn’t signify a genuine loss. Most importantly, when she walked down the aisle at her wedding and saw Jonathan at the other end, she could honestly say she’d never imagined anyone else in his place.
Because of this, when the issues Cass had with her marriage began to creep up everywhere she looked—Jonathan’s sweaty gym towel on their bedspread, the fact that he listened to the TV louder than she liked, his need to run the air-conditioning all year long, his ability to compartmentalize the stress at work better than she could—she was truly taken aback. She did her best to beat down her grievances like a game of Whac-A-Mole, because, after all, they had to be inconsequential. Two years ago, when she thought they were about to start a family, she had zero reservations at the nuclear level. Her only concern was her place at work—she wanted that creative director title badly, to see the promotion printed on her business cards and in her email signature, to blast it to the universe via her LinkedIn profile, and Percy, whom she loved beyond measure, was kind of an ass when it came to family matters. He and Emmet never had children and he’d snigger about a waddling pregnant lady in the elevator and voice his doubts privately to Cass when another employee asked to leave early for something child-related. When the baby was taken from her, and she and Jonathan orbited around each other like meteors that would explode on impact, her only consolation was the professional advancement that would follow. Otherwise, she was ready to see Jonathan wearing one of those baby backpacks, strolling down Madison Avenue with a to-go coffee cup, she slinging a chic diaper bag over her shoulder and pulling Puddles by the leash. Let the world envy them: a couple in love, with offspring. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the grass is always greener, unless you were Cass and Jonathan Coyne.
Weakness was Cass’s pet peeve. Her mother was weak, allowing men to trample her, the pattern repeated so many times it was like a music track on repeat. Even her father was weak, choosing scams and shortcuts over an honest day’s work. The predictable future for Cass would have been to follow the path beaten by her parents, but she’d decided many years ago to take a sharp detour. To master her own destiny through hard work and careful planning, and to always stay the course. So it pained her to see weakness in her decision to separate from Jonathan—to hear the echoes of her parents’ behavior and, more troubling, to face the evidence that she hadn’t come through her childhood without Donna and Dick fucking her up. She’d chosen a getaway instead of working through their problems together in therapy (she probably could have convinced him to go) or with forthright conversations between just the two of them without text message dings and Bloomberg alerts distracting them. Consolation was found only when she considered the flip side: there was strength in picking up one’s life and moving across the country, in muddling through issues alone, in being selfless enough to—despite the deafening ticktock of her biological clock—not rush into having a child who might ultimately end up bounced between homes by the dictum of some judge’s fancy. That had been her fate. Jonathan’s was to be raised in a loveless home: no moving around, a pack of siblings to commiserate with, but still fraught with its own issues. She wouldn’t let either situation happen, not on her watch.
We do what we need to do to make ourselves feel better about our choices. Oprah said that to her when she was home recovering from the D&C.
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
THE PILOT ASKED them to put their cell phones and iPads into airplane mode before takeoff. Not over the loudspeaker like she was used to. Normally, in the comfort of their business-class seats, she and Jonathan would wait until the last possible second—often after the threat of confiscation from the flight attendant—to turn off their gadgets. Today the pilot just came out of the cockpit to greet Marty and shake hands like they were old pals and make a few announcements about flight time and headwinds. That’s the way it goes on a private jet, apparently.
Disconnecting was harder than it should have been, and Cass pawed her now useless phone and stared far longer than normal at the picture of Puddles on its screen. It was taken the night of their condo building’s Christmas party. She and Jonathan had gotten so silly from the eggnog, they’d ridden the elevator up and down caroling with their dog in tow. They had been physically apart for months by now, but always just a text away. This was the first time since she left home that she wouldn’t be able to reach him in case of emergency, and it left her feeling more vacant than she expected.
Cass did her best to appear as nonchalant as possible about flying private. She hadn’t been warned that they’d be boarding the Spiegel company plane for their transatlantic flight, and even when they pulled into LAX, and she passed the terminal where she’d been recently to exchange Puddles, she’d had no inkling of what was in store. Only once their SUV glided into the private hangar and two uniformed captains were waiting next to the side of the plane drinking 5-Hour Energy shots did she get it. Her first instinct was to text Jonathan something like: Holy shit! I’m getting on a private plane and insert some moneybag emojis, but she’d sacrificed the ability to communicate with him in that way. She knew as much when he stopped responding instantly to her missives on everyday life (I saw on Facebook that Vlad had a baby! I took a boxing class with Alexi . . . watch out!). Now she’d maybe get a “nice” sent back a few hours later, if anything at all. For someone without much outward emotional range, Jonathan was still remarkably good at communicating his feelings. Besides, with what she was hiding, it was probably best not to bring her enthusiasm for this luxury front and center.
Luckily, she had plenty of practice in making no big deal of things that were in fact very big deals. After a lifetime in the metaphorical cheap seats, she’d managed to keep a perfectly still face when Betsy and Christopher took her and Jonathan to the Red Sox game and they sat in the owner’s box—he was an old friend of Christopher’s. But small mistakes that she couldn’t anticipate sometimes gave her away, and those errors haunted her the most. During the seventh-inning stretch, she’d complained about how long the line for the women’s room was going to be. Katie, who was also at the game, had quietly tapped her and pointed out the private restroom in the box. Katie was nine years younger than Cass and she’d hoped her husband’s baby sister would worship her as the glamorous Manhattan professional. But after the exchange at the baseball game, small moment that it was, Cass knew it wasn’t going to happen. First the lobster-night debacle at the Cheshire, then the Red Sox bathroom incident, plus a myriad of other clashes and embarrassments—she kept getting kicked down each time she tried to climb up.
“First time on a jet?” Marty asked her. There were four of them traveling over: Marty, Cass and two assistants named Minka and Brie who traveled with Marty everywhere. A blonde and a brunette; Cass immediately labeled them the Bobbsey Twins.
Should she lie? Why bother, and then get tripped up having to keep up with the inevitable private-jet slang? Plus Marty was like her, at least in the humble beginnings category.
“Yes,” she said, holding back the “It’s so cool” that was playing on repeat in her head.
“First time I did it I couldn’t stop smiling. I’m a poor kid from the Bronx. Eli too. We grew up in tiny row houses next door to each other—our dads were brothers. We were the scrappiest
kids you could find, always hustling to make enough money so we could go to the movies. My father worked for the city as a custodian; my mother was a home health-care worker, which basically means she wiped up old people’s crap. Only people who come from nothing can truly appreciate things. Those born with it see their privilege as an entitlement.”
Cass nodded, though she felt slightly offended on Jonathan’s behalf. He wasn’t too entitled, really. Marty had the senior Coynes pegged, though.
“What’s your story, Cass?”
Minka and Brie looked at her as she self-consciously lowered the sunglasses that were atop her head.
“Glare,” Cass said, and Brie jumped up to lower the window shade. She had no choice then but to return the sunglasses to the crown of her head, forcing eye contact.
“Not too different. I grew up in a blue-collar town in Michigan. My parents divorced when I was nine. We never had much, and things were especially hard after my parents split. A night out meant the drive-through. I never had the right jeans or backpack; my mom dragged me to Supercuts until I was sixteen and just flat-out refused to go. I wanted to do something creative when I graduated but was also very set on having a stable job. So I compromised, doubled in theater studies and economics at Brown and took a bunch of graphic design classes at RISD. Moved to New York City after college and haven’t lived anywhere else until now. I don’t know if I was scrappy, but I did a fair amount of lucrative Garbage Pail Kids trading when I was younger.”
The Intermission Page 23
