“Thanks for coming in, Tamara,” Marty said, walking her to the door as Cass entered. “Minka will show you out.” He turned to Cass. “How is everything?”
“Thank you for the flowers. That was truly generous.”
“It was nothing,” he said. “Took a little effort for Abby to find your mother’s address.”
“Yeah, well, she moves a lot,” Cass said, wanting to brush aside this conversation. This wasn’t the distraction she needed. “So Aidan told me he did the ad buy for School of Rebels. Back page of the New Yorker and banners on the People.com homepage? I’m happy you’re putting so much muscle behind it. I caught the dailies in the screening room the other night before I left work and they were intense.”
Marty walked over to his mini fridge and reached for a Diet Coke and a cold package of M&M’s, keeping his back to her.
“I’m glad you brought that up, Cass. You know how much I admire the work you’ve done for that film.” He paused to shovel some ice into his drink, which cracked and fizzed with the hiss of a snake. “Unfortunately it didn’t play well with the media.” He whirled around. “I had to make the call and go with the alternate campaign that Josephine created.”
“Josephine? I didn’t even know she was on the Rebels team. I could have redone the posters. What about the bus ads? I mean, no one ever suggested I make any changes. All I heard from you and Aidan was that my campaign was exactly on point.”
“I’m sorry, Cass.”
“What about the Sundance submission? Were my materials used for that? They don’t cater to subscribers like the New Yorker. And the buses,” she repeated, though she sensed she already knew the answer.
“This is a tough business. It takes a long time to get a feel for film advertising. It’s different than live theater. You will get there, Cass, I have no doubt. We’ll talk more about it tonight. Did you want to have dinner?”
She acquiesced wordlessly.
“Now I’m sorry to cut this short, but the girls have been buzzing me for the last half hour.” He walked over to her and kissed her gently on the forehead. “And you didn’t tell me anything about your mother. We’ll talk later.”
She retreated from his office and watched the Bobbsey Twins flock in like hungry seagulls. Neither of them looked at her when they passed, which made Cass question if they knew about the Rebels situation. Probably not, since they mostly fielded phone calls and organized snacks for Marty. Cass was just getting paranoid. Another troubling emotion to add to her growing list of maladies.
Something didn’t add up about what Marty said about her work. The New Yorker wouldn’t have a problem with the art she created—there was nothing controversial about it, and even if there was, it was the New Yorker!
She managed to stumble back to her seat and found her cell phone lit up with texts.
Jonathan: All good? Can’t wait to see you in a few days. xo
Dahlia: I signed with Housewives. They start filming me later this week. Don’t judge!
Cass dropped her head between her knees, heavy as a bowling ball. Aidan looked over at her curiously from his neighboring cube, but she ignored him. It was the perfect storm. The steady train of praise she’d received since day one at Spiegel had spontaneously derailed. She knew her concept for Rebels was strong, though she couldn’t say that Josephine’s wasn’t better. The question was why, unbeknownst to Cass, another person had been tapped to work on the same movie in the first place. Marty strategically placing Cass on the Rebels team to get in her pants was a big pill to swallow, but he wouldn’t be the first man to treat a woman preferentially at work because he wanted to sleep with her. Or maybe there was no conspiracy, and it was just her paranoia at work. Cass was new—Marty had given her a chance, but had a backup just in case. She just didn’t know what to believe. Her confidence was quicksand.
Then there was Dahlia, selling out to pay legal bills and Cass powerless to stop her. And Jonathan, her husband under fire, whose only solace in life was that he thought they were back together, firing off x’s and o’s like rounds of ammunition to her heart.
Aidan’s head appeared again over the partition.
“Don’t let it get you down. Marty can be very erratic.”
She rose to face him. “Were you surprised when I was assigned to work on School of Rebels so quickly after I started here?” she asked, in a whisper.
Aidan scratched at the scruff on his chin with slow, deliberate strokes.
“Not really,” he said finally, though Cass didn’t know if that was because it was an open secret she and Marty were sleeping together or because Marty routinely allowed rookies a chance to prove themselves early on. “Matcha cookie?” He held out a bakery box, as though Cass were a small child whose grievances could be mollified with sugar.
“No thanks,” she responded, and sank back in her chair, turning her attention to the blinking cell phone. She ignored Dahlia’s message for the moment and responded to Jonathan, without letting deliberation slow her down:
I’m truly sorry and feel terrible if the other night was confusing. I wasn’t in my right frame of mind. Please be patient with me—I still need time to work things out. I’ll see you soon to swap Puddles. C.
Then she added something else, even though she knew it was a mistake.
But thank you so much for everything. I love you.
And she did mean it, in her own way.
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
AFTER WORK, CASS called Marty to cancel their dinner plans. He clearly interpreted the cancellation as sulking over her Rebels campaign not being used and let it go easily. Alexi left for a date. Alone, Cass erupted in her first body-trembling, cathartic cry since the separation. She wasn’t one for dramatic tears, but her insides felt like they would rupture if she didn’t get some release. She lay on her stomach in bed and drowned her pillow in tears until there was nothing left to expel.
In this state, she took a stab at her speech for Percy’s memorial. She had a ton of light stories at her fingertips: getting trapped backstage after too many cocktails at Hamilton, stealing props from La Cage for the PZA talent show, disastrous typos in Playbills. But the words flowed from a darker recess inside her and she wrote instead of unexplained loss, needless suffering and quashed plans. Finally she fell asleep with the laptop on her thighs and woke in the middle of the night to move the computer to the rug. She made the mistake of glancing at her phone. Midnight in California, 3:00 a.m. in New York. There was a text from Jonathan, a response to her message:
Screw you.
28. JONATHAN
WHEN HE WAS growing up, his mother was fond of the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” She used it mostly in reference to bridge, but it obviously had implications beyond cards.
What should he say for himself after Cass treated him like Play-Doh, like a circus monkey, like a puppet whose every movement she manufactured and he went along with willingly, like some cult member following an insane but charismatic leader?
He should know better. He did know better. When he got on the plane to see Cass’s mother, in his heart he knew Cass didn’t really need him there. It was a test, like everything his wife did. It wasn’t designed to measure how devoted he was to her, like after the D&C; it was to see how much control she still exerted over him. And he failed the test by passing.
When it came to dating, people fell into two distinct categories: those who analyzed whether they liked the person they were out with and those who spent the time worrying if the other person liked them. Cass was the former and he was the latter, and that match generally worked. One hopes that after the initial courtship period is over, those roles soften and the liking/being-liked dichotomy blurs into a more natural give-and-take based on actual events. But with Cass and Jonathan they never really had. She was still sizing him up, and he was still trying to please her.
&n
bsp; But the sex. He couldn’t figure out what that was about. After he made the mistake of being at her beck and call, Cass should have given him the cold shoulder in Michigan, made him feel like an interloper. Instead, she stripped and offered herself to him in a way she never had before. She was outsmarting him at every opportunity; each time he thought he had her figured out, she was one step ahead. He just had to determine the significance of it, because there had to be one. And then it occurred to him. The sex was his last chance to redeem himself. He’d come running like a puppy to her side and so she’d given him one final opportunity to stand up for himself. By refusing to sleep with her he could have reconstructed his backbone, but instead he’d let her filet him like a sea bass. Of course, in classic Monday-morning-quarterbacking style, now he had a thousand responses to the sight of her naked body. “Cass, is this really the time?” . . . “I’m seeing someone” . . . “No fucking way” . . . “Not unless we’re back together.” Or, if he’d really had courage: “I’m too tired.”
But like a lamb to the slaughter, he’d entered her willingly. Only to receive a fuck-off text from her two days later. Well, technically it was a fuck-off followed up with an “I love you.” Because Cass couldn’t be straightforward about anything. She’d confuse him until he waved a white handkerchief and submitted to her treaty.
Another one of his mother’s expressions he now ruminated over, proverbially kicking himself: “Don’t throw out the dirty water until you have clean water.” Cruelly and impetuously, he’d kicked Brett to the curb when he believed his marriage was back on. As though two rounds of enthusiastic sex with his inebriated wife could reassemble the crumbling bricks.
And despite everything she’d done to him, he found himself feeling sorry for Cass. It was hard not to, walking into that nasty apartment that Donna was living in with its musty tobacco smell and secondhand furniture, with her loser boyfriend who would leave her the minute the chemo meant she couldn’t give him what he wanted. You had to feel for Cass. Her parents really were trash, though he hated to use that word. It wasn’t money they were missing; it was basic empathy and responsibility for the only child they had together. Donna should have waited for another opportunity to debut her latest boy toy, and Dick—that aptly name piece of shit—could have treated Cass at least a fraction as well as he did the three kids he had with his second wife. He could have avoided cheating her teachers and friends’ parents when they hired him to do contracting work, making Cass persona non grata in school and on playdates.
Screw you. Even as he reflected on his wife with compassion, he didn’t regret it. Yes, it was late at night and he was drinking a little bit when he wrote to Cass, but now it was the morning after, and in the sober light of day he’d write it again. No matter how much he found he could sympathize with Cass, he was still sick of being toyed with, frustrated that he’d cast aside Brett for the chance to be flogged again.
He pressed the speaker on his office phone.
“Gloria, I know it’s a weekend, but I need you to pick up my dog at the airport this coming Saturday from Cass. You can take off the following Monday.”
Without hesitating, she responded that she would. At least someone was on Team Jonathan. Actually Luna more than ever had seemed to take sides. Though they still never saw each other, he’d find notes from her on the dining room table saying things like, “I had the building super clear the shower drain today. Looked nasty full of Cass’s hair,” and, “Decided to put Cass’s clothes into storage bins. You deserve a bigger closet.” He had assumed Luna would ally herself with Cass from some neo-feminist impulse, but he’d been wrong. She was smarter than he’d given her credit for—taking his side in the War of the Coynes made it obvious. Maybe he’d give her an extra fifty bucks next week.
There was something else he knew from his night in Michigan: Cass was sleeping with someone else. Maybe multiple people, but he suspected there was a specific person. He knew it from the way her body responded to his touch, the way she carried herself naked, the rhythm of her moaning. It had the imprint of someone whose essence Jonathan couldn’t begin to conjure, who was filling Cass’s cup with whatever he’d failed to provide her.
For his part, he’d chosen to retreat to the familiar with Brett, even though he wondered how well he still knew her. The details of her divorce remained a mystery and she kept details about her son under lock and key. Frankly, if Brett told him she’d spied a UFO or was waiting for Mercury to be out of retrograde to decide on a future with him, he couldn’t even claim that was out of character. Maybe there wasn’t more to Brett than what was on the surface. At sixteen, she’d seemed fascinating and complex, but that was mostly due to her having a vagina. Now he wondered if she had always been a bit too straightforward for him. Simplistic, maybe that was a better word choice. Cass was too much; Brett was too little. Perhaps there was a woman out there who was just the right combination of sugar and spice. Or maybe he’d be better served adjusting his palate. In any event, he was sick and tired of trying to read the blueprint of any woman. It was a fool’s errand if there ever was one.
While he reached for his phone, he mentally expressed his gratitude to Laurel for introducing him to Instagram. On impulse, he pulled up Alexi’s feed, thankfully public. Headshots, headshots and more headshots. He almost closed out of it when a picture caught his eye. It was Cass, Marty and Alexi seated at a table together in an outdoor café. Well, it did make some amount of sense—Cass told him Marty had given Alexi a part in a film. Cass was in the middle, flanked by Alexi and Marty, though her chair was edged ever so slightly closer to her boss than to her friend. Jonathan brought the phone closer to his nose, accounting for everyone’s limbs. Marty and Cass were each missing a hand. As he tried to stretch the picture to see if they were holding hands under the table, as he suspected, a heart appeared in the center of the picture. What had he done? He had just been trying to zoom in on the image. Rather than ask Laurel again for help, he texted his little sister.
What does the heart mean on Instagram?
That you liked the picture.
And that’s public?
Yes.
How do I zoom in?
Carefully, dummy! Why? Is this about Cass?
He didn’t answer, just placed the phone down on his desk and let the last few months stream through his mind like a movie on high-speed rewind. Cass’s new “fabulous” job with Marty. Luna staunchly taking his side. Cass’s trip to London. Alexi getting that part. These revelations felt liked repeated stabs in the neck. He had spent the last six years trying to figure out how to make Cass happy for nothing. If fame and Hollywood glitz were what she was after, he had been doomed from the start. He gave Cass financial comfort beyond anything she’d ever anticipated growing up, but having paparazzi snapping pictures and turning heads when they walked into a room, that was never part of the equation. Did Cass genuinely want these things or was she just that bored with her life? That bored with him?
Marty had to be a good twenty years older than he and Cass. Maybe that meant his wife had been seeking a father figure all along, though Marty Spiegel seemed to be more of the sugar daddy variety. And for all of Cass’s mind games, she was still a relatively fragile person (and hadn’t he just adored that about her way back when) who needed scaffolding. Did Marty listen to her blather on endlessly about the virtues of one-man shows? Did Marty sympathize when she cried injustice over the fact that 80 percent of Broadway ticket buyers are women but all three major New York Times critics were men? Did Marty not snore? Did he praise her daily? Did he make her laugh?
By liking Alexi’s picture, which at first felt like the worst possible thing he could have done, he was acknowledging awareness of what was going on. Doing so made him ever so slightly less of a cuckold. He could picture Alexi running over to Cass and showing her the latest like, the two of them huddled over the phone trying to see how much it revealed.
He did a full 360-d
egree spin in his office chair. There had been an undeniable sea change. Since the moment Cass declared the intermission, he’d nurtured a gut feeling that his wife would eventually return to him. Some weeks he felt it more than others, but the basic idea was always there, migrating between the deepest recesses of his brain and his outermost thoughts. Now the certainty evaporated. Especially the part where something he might do or say would be just the thing to reel her back in. He now believed that he was powerless to determine his future with respect to his wife.
For type-A sorts, like him, that moment of relinquishing control is freeing for just a fleeting moment, but then the focus needs a desperate reallocation. For Jonathan, he knew that thing would be work, and he’d do his part to put the broken pieces of Winstar back together. He’d also focus on getting Leon into a good four-year college. Fuck—he’d learn squash and bridge and improve his tennis game too. He would do whatever it took so that he was left with virtually no free time. The plan reminded him of his sister’s eating disorder in high school. Really she wanted the popular girls to include her, and when she couldn’t make that happen, she shifted her focus to severely limiting her caloric intake. Reaching for the coffee on his desk, he took a long gulp and imagined the caffeine reaching his nerve endings, giving him the jolt he needed to propel himself into the next phase.
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
HE WASN’T DELIBERATELY holding Puddles hostage, but a few weeks had passed since Gloria had collected him at JFK and no arrangements had been made to get him back to Cass. It had become de facto protocol that the person who had Puddles for the month would initiate contact about the exchange, and Jonathan hadn’t done so yet. To be fair, Cass had a calendar—she was fully aware it was nearly Labor Day weekend—and she hadn’t reached out either. If she missed their dog so much, she’d be in touch.
The Intermission Page 32
