The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  Gloria found him a florist in Boston. He didn’t tell her what it was for and the fact that his family was there hopefully cast away any suspicion that they were intended for a woman. His assistant was like his office mom, except more attentive and helpful than his birth mother, but still he wasn’t ready to fill her in. Drafting a note to accompany the flowers proved a struggle. He hemmed and hawed on the telephone with the lovely woman who answered his call at Mayflower Florals, who was initially charmed by his indecision and then quickly lost patience. She offered her email address and told Jonathan to send her what he wanted printed on the card when he was ready.

  Finally, he put together:

  Dear Brett,

  Wanted to thank you for everything. I can’t wait to see you again.

  Jon

  Not a staggering work of genius, but he thought it expressed everything he wanted to say. For the arrangement, he selected pink tulips. Something in season, fragrant, in a feminine color would be just right for Brett. No finger-snatching plants required. For the rest of the day, between grappling with the bleak situation at work and breathing fire over Cass’s negligence, he delighted in thinking about Brett’s reaction when the bouquet arrived on her doorstep. At least someone appreciated him.

  25. CASS

  THREE WEEKS HAD passed since the bomb dropped and Winstar was appearing less in the papers. Or at least it was no longer making it to the cover or the front page of the business section, and Cass purposely avoided digging deeper. She rationalized that if Jonathan had been carted off in handcuffs or Winstar had been forced to shutter, the news would reach her somehow. Osmosis. Telepathy. Paper airplane. It was more plausible that the SEC had given up after the probe turned up nothing of any real significance and Jonathan was back to business as usual.

  Still . . . she hadn’t spoken or even written to him since the story broke. Of course, she did fly three thousand miles at the drop of a hat to see him, but he didn’t know that. How would that slight ever be undone? They were due for another Puddles handoff in about ten days. After Minka did the pickup at LAX last time, there was no way she could miss this one. A few options whirled before her: she could pretend she didn’t know what happened (not the most plausible, but she was living in Southern California, and they didn’t call it La La Land for nothing), or she could say that she wanted to give him space and not make things more stressful with her reappearance, or, the most daring option, she could confess. She did have her regrets about fleeing after she realized Brett had been there. It was sanctimonious of her to feel wounded that Jonathan had brought another woman into their bed. What was he supposed to do—rent a hotel room every time he wanted to have sex? And the fact that the owner of the panties was Brett? Cass had been the one to define the parameters of the break—never did she say that they could only see people with whom they had no past entanglements. Why had he chosen her, though? Familiarity? Availability? To please Betsy? Maybe there was no single answer—certainly there wasn’t one when it came to why she’d let herself get involved with Marty Spiegel.

  Marty. While the feelings of regret and confusion regarding Jonathan tap-danced on her superego, Marty worked her id. Dinners at the hottest restaurants where waiters and bartenders practically lay prostrate when he entered, a weekend away in Napa at a famous director’s winery, a Cartier watch that had a waiting list a mile long. With each new luxury item he gifted, her level of excitement diminished. Things were easy for Marty to give, and that made them less special. He did throw Alexi’s name in the ring for a supporting actress role in one of his new films, and for that Cass was the most appreciative. She wondered if this was what growing up felt like, or if she’d always been someone for whom material things weren’t as fulfilling as she’d thought they would be. Or was it that she was less deprived now, so she didn’t relish the next bracelet or the court seats at the Lakers? She still hated basketball, even when she was close enough for the players to drip sweat on her, and she still forgot to put on jewelry when she left the house.

  Across the country, she wondered if her husband was making any changes to please Brett. Evolution or regression? The thought of him reviving his pink polo shirt collection, or reading the books Brett suggested, or the two of them getting hooked on a TV series (somehow she pictured Brett liking The Bachelor or something else dreadfully lowbrow) made her ill. But it also made her feel less shitty about what she was doing with Marty. Which was, by the way, still not entirely defined. It was hard to picture a man of Marty’s vintage asking to have “the talk” with her. He was fully aware of her situation back in New York and never brought it up, leading her to wonder what kind of future he was imagining with her, if any. She vacillated between feeling that they were an item and that he could have six other women on the side. Strangely, both swings of the pendulum made her feel woozy. If he wanted things to progress even further with her, what would that mean for the future? Marty had five children already. It was hard to imagine him wanting numbers six and seven. She was ambivalent about some things in life, but not about wanting her own family. Her wish to have babies felt like breathing to her—not even a choice. The only question mark was when, but never if. For the raw simplicity of her desire to be a mother, she was grateful. And she didn’t want just one child. No, she wanted at least two. Often she’d thought how much better things would have been during her parents’ divorce if she could have had a sibling or two to commiserate with.

  And then came the email that halted everything. It appeared on her iPhone while she was lounging at Marty’s Olympic-sized pool, feeling like an extra in a rap video. The boss was off in the distance, shirtless and barking on a conference call, uniformed attendants bringing him a steady stream of Diet Cokes.

  Cassidy,

  We haven’t spoken in a long time and I know the next time I will see you is Thanksgiving. You will be surprised when you see me. I have stage-one lung cancer. Guess I shouldn’t be shocked after a lifetime of my Camels. The doctors discovered it after I had a blood clot a few months ago. I know I wasn’t the best mother and for that I am sorry. You are the person that makes me the happiest when I look back on my life. Seeing the life you and Jonathan have, knowing one day you will become parents (much better ones then your father and me), makes me smile.

  Love, Mom

  P.S. I know its bad that I’m doing this over email. Sorry.

  Devastation struck Cass on many levels: that her mother was sick, that she’d never hidden Donna’s cigarettes like she’d thought about doing a million times in high school, that her mom didn’t even know what a disappointment her daughter actually was, and that she, Cass, had turned into such a pretentious snob that she couldn’t help cringing when she noticed the grammatical errors in her mom’s message. The blood clot must have happened around the time Donna had called and spoken to Jonathan. She hadn’t even called her mother back, believing it was just some nonsense—gossip about a Hazel Park neighbor or Donna bragging about winning a few bucks at the casino. Why had she taken that chance?

  She dialed her mother’s cell.

  “I guess you got my email,” Donna said, her voice sounding like it was funneled through a vaporizer.

  “I want to come see you,” Cass sputtered, swallowing the lump in her throat.

  “It’s fine, Cassidy. I know you’re busy. I’ll see you and Jonathan in November. I’m not going anywhere before then, at least that’s what Dr. Shore told me.”

  “Dr. Shore? Are you kidding me? He’s got to be ninety by now. You can’t seriously be going to him. Mom, this is serious. You need better care now.”

  “He takes Medicare, and when the balance is more than what it covers, he looks the other way if I don’t send in the rest. I’m not going to run to the oncologist for every little ache and pain.”

  “I’m coming to Michigan,” Cass said, defiantly.

  “I would like to see you and Jonathan. You got lucky with that one. I never found a man h
alf as good.”

  “We’ll be there within a few days, Mom.” Cass hung up, staring at her phone in disbelief. One of the helpers who orbited around Marty day and night must have told him that she was crying, because he made his way over to her and swung an arm around her.

  “My mother is sick. Lung cancer,” she said softly.

  “Shit,” he said. She leaned her head on his bare shoulder, her tears mixing with the sweat slicked on his skin.

  “That is fucked-up,” he added. She nodded solemnly. “If Pedro can’t manage to shoot a war scene with three hundred extras, he can kiss my ass. I am not paying for a thousand extras. Tell him to use the fucking peasants from the village I plucked him from. I’m sure they’d be glad to be in a movie.”

  Cass looked up, confused, and saw the wire dangling from Marty’s other ear. It blended in with the curly black hairs that grew in patches on his chest and shoulders.

  He was still on the phone.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  TEXT OR CALL, text or call, text or call?

  She asked herself, and then Alexi, that question at least a dozen times before settling on email, the middle ground between distance and closeness. She purposefully sent it at 3:00 a.m., grateful for once for her insomnia. By dispatching the message in the middle of the night, she was saved the agony of refreshing her Gmail every two minutes waiting for a reply. At least she knew that when morning rolled around, an answer would be waiting.

  Jonathan:

  I hope you are doing well. There is no beating around the bush. My mom is sick. She has lung cancer and I know how much a visit from us would mean to her. Would you please consider it as a favor to me? She basically said our marriage is the only good thing in her life. Yes, I see the irony. Anyway, it would mean a lot to me.

  Cass

  “What are you doing?” Marty asked, rolling over unexpectedly.

  She was hunched over her iPad. The light cast a whitish glow in the bedroom that brought out the bluish-black bags under his eyes.

  “Working. I had an idea for the social media promotion of End of the World.”

  “Show me in the morning,” Marty said, and rolled back over, blasting his orchestral snores within seconds.

  Sleep was hopeless. She slipped out of bed and into the pile of clothes that were heaped on the floor. On tiptoe, she padded out of the house and entered the alarm code to open the iron front gates, knowing it might rouse Marty again but having no choice, then got into her car. Loosely, she knew she was headed in the direction of the apartment she shared with Alexi, but she chose a circuitous route, hoping the calming purr of the engine on an open road might pacify her.

  On Mulholland, the traffic lights shifted from green to yellow to red seamlessly, and no matter how hard she focused, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment of change. It gave her pause. Personalities weren’t fixed either. She could be one way with Jonathan and a totally different person with Marty, and both sides of her fit like a glove. It either meant she was a chameleon, which made her feel like the careful development of her identity over the past thirty-four years was a fiction, or that everyone chose personalities like prizes in a grab bag. Don’t like what you got? Throw it back and take another. Feel like reinventing yourself? Follow these three easy steps. One of the greatest doubts about her marriage was that she and Jonathan didn’t really know each other—too many secrets between them, inner selves buried under protective shells. But maybe there was no fixed Cass or Jonathan to know anyway; they were fluid, not static. And secrets weren’t secrets; they were just stories not yet shared. Though even as she considered that, she knew it was a sliding scale, and felt at once that her husband was more an open book than she’d ever be. Things would be different if he had some sinister side to him, but he was like the human version of vanilla ice cream.

  And her mother being sick? How was she supposed to feel about that after they had been basically estranged since she left for college and not even close before that? Throughout Cass’s childhood, Donna had put herself first—choosing to spend whatever extra money there was on makeup and lingerie instead of getting Cass new glasses or fixing her teeth. She’d say things to Cass from time to time like, “You can always talk to me,” but then never seemed to be around for a heart-to-heart. And yet still, Cass was rather sad thinking about her mother suffering alone, knowing she would face more trials after a lifetime of disappointments—men leaving, jobs lost, money tight. Now she and Cass might never have a chance to build a relationship. She’d harbored a below-the-surface notion that maybe a grandchild would unlock something in Donna: responsibility, generosity, maturity—qualities that were dormant in her mother all along that only a cherubic, cooing grandchild could summon forth.

  Would Jonathan come with her to visit? If not, she doubted she’d choose to be honest with her mother about the reason. Cass kind of enjoyed the superiority that came with showing Donna just how well she’d turned out in spite of everything. It would be easy enough to fib about Jonathan having a work commitment that prevented him from visiting. Maybe she’d even send a box of Godiva from him. Donna considered anything in that gold-and-brown box to be top-shelf. Once Cass offered her a truffle from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue and Donna teased her about not springing for the good stuff. Cass and Jonathan had exchanged a look. That single confection from their favorite chocolatier had cost seven dollars. God, they could be snobs sometimes.

  She made it all the way to the Santa Monica Pier before deciding to drive home. She thudded into bed as heavily as a wet towel and didn’t wake until after nine. Lunchtime in New York City. She reached for her cell phone and scrolled through her new messages, bottom to top, looking for Jonathan’s certain response. A message from Emmet startled her. He was planning a memorial service for Percy. It was timed for early September, around what would have been Percy’s fifty-sixth birthday. He asked that she and Jonathan please attend and would she consider speaking—she was Percy’s favorite PZA employee after all. Another visit to New York. She could scarcely draw in breath. Where would she stay? She didn’t want to be forced into a hotel like some interloper in her own city. But did she have a place in her own bed, wrapped in the linens she and their interior designer picked out at Pratesi, when Brett was keeping Jonathan warm at night? Perhaps the answer would become clear after a weekend with Jonathan in Hazel Park.

  Of course, she responded to Emmet. I miss him so much.

  Unfathomable, really, the way cancer could just appear out of nowhere and dismantle life as she knew it from the inside out, molecule by molecule. Percy’s death had shattered her like a vase into a million shards. And now her mother. Jonathan would help. Her stable, reasonable husband would bring order to chaos. Not Marty, for whom she was probably just a shiny plaything, but Jonathan, who loved her to the core.

  She continued scrolling through her inbox, imagining what she would find. That plane reservations were already made, a caring voicemail left for Donna. And yes, Godiva purchased.

  But instead, there was nothing, nada, zilch. Not even an “I’m sorry” or a “Call me.” Radio silence, and there was no way Jonathan hadn’t checked his email for the past ten hours. Not when Winstar was imploding and more than half of the investors were demanding redemptions. Okay, fine, she did peek at the news to see what was happening.

  What a jerk. Screwing his high school ex like some middle-aged guy having a midlife crisis. Why did he have to run to Brett the minute she’d closed the door behind her?

  She called him at work.

  “I guess the server is down at Winstar?”

  “Excuse me?” he answered, already on defense.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t checked your email. You know, you could have just said no to coming with me or at least offered a bit of sympathy. Unlike your mother, who treats me like trailer trash, my mother has always regarded you as some type of royalty from the kingdom of New
England.”

  On the other end, she heard papers shuffling, taps on a keyboard, a drawer being slammed shut, but no words.

  “Hello?” she prodded.

  “Cass,” he said, his voice loose and wild, like a spilled vial of poison. “You have some nerve talking to me about support. Everything’s always been about you. I dance around your moods, trying to figure out how to keep you happy. And I don’t complain. I don’t expect you to do the same for me when it comes to the little stuff. But honestly, my fucking career is collapsing and I don’t even get a text from you. You’re selfish, Cass, and I’m sick of it. No other man on the planet would stand for what I’ve stood for with your childish ‘intermission.’ This isn’t some dark play where the characters act like a bunch of little crybabies. This is my actual life.”

  She expected the click of the receiver meeting its cradle after that tirade, but Jonathan didn’t hang up. It meant there was still time. The simplest route out of this mess was for Cass to admit she flew to New York to see him as soon as she heard about Winstar. She’d cop to leaving when she saw Brett’s things. It would humanize her, give her a fighting chance of redeeming herself in Jonathan’s eyes, of making their separation an actual experiment and not just a placeholder until the divorce.

  Instead, she went coward.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you expect me to believe that you haven’t heard about Winstar? That Jerry was arrested? That we’ve had half of our investors pull out already? That I’m not sure I’ll have a job tomorrow?”