The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  “Dude, it’s cool,” Steve says.

  “Oh god,” she says. “Let me start over.”

  “Hey—no.” Steve picks up another file. “You know what? This makes it easier. They gave me this list of questions I’m supposed to drill you with, but you know what?” He tosses the file on the floor in a gesture of practiced-looking whimsy. “Now we can just chill. Don’t worry. It’s all good.”

  He leans forward again and places his hand on her knee, making her expect a reassuring pat, but that doesn’t happen. His big hand lingers there for a second and then another. She blushes. He says, “That okay with you?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess. Sure. But listen—”

  “Just a sec. I need a refill.” He gets up and goes to the kitchen. Again she hears the refrigerator door and the shifting of bottles. When he comes back with another beer he sits next to her on the futon instead of the chair. He takes a swig of his replacement beer and says, “So what do we have here?”

  Now that she’s admitted she’s going to another college no matter what, she supposes none of what happens matters anymore. Steve puts his leg up on the crate and they pause, relaxing into this knowledge the way he relaxes into the futon.

  “I don’t know what we have here. What do you think?” she says. She cocks her head quizzically and raises her eyebrows like Lyla. The sun streams into the room and strikes Steve’s leg, bleaching the hair into a radiant fringe. “Maybe I should leave now. I think I should.” She means to put her open hand on the futon, pushing herself off, but she miscalculates and her fingertips brush his hard thigh.

  “No, don’t go,” Steve says. He takes her hand and lets it stay there, looking into her eyes and then at her face, her hair, breathing onto her, and she can’t tell which burns more—her face or her hand—or whether she’s blushing again. What she feels is like embarrassment, like ambition, like a traveling clot. Modest, passionate, ambitious. It’s like all those things and not like any of them at all.

  He says, “Don’t go yet. I’ve got plenty of time to kill.”

  “You’ve gotten a totally wrong idea of who I am.” She clasps his hand. “I—let me please explain.”

  “No worries,” he says with a bright and idiotic smile. “No biggie.”

  She starts laughing then. Something unbuckles inside her and she cannot stop laughing. It doubles her over and makes her eyes water—this is so ridiculous—and when she undoubles the expression on Steve’s face is fond, and the water in her eyes washes away any sharp malice or condescension. “Sorry,” she says. “Oh. I’m so sorry.” She touches the side of his face with her free hand, to show him she’s sincere and there are no hard feelings.

  That is when he leans forward and kisses her.

  His kiss is gentle. He meets her, draws away to smile, draws back and leaves her puckering as though teasing her. The third time he does this she lurches forward, surprising herself, and wraps her arms around his neck, locking her mouth against his and hearing herself make a noise. He withdraws again, nibbles her ear, moves to her neck and traces, with his tongue, the exposed part of her chest. She gasps when he burrows his head under the top of her blouse. She is in the moment letting this happen and simultaneously not here at all; she is thinking how strange it is that ten minutes ago this wasn’t happening and now it is; she’s doing what everyone else has talked about, what Lyla has described, I’m having sex now, but at the same time she’s watching it happen.

  They are out of their clothes. Slowly he has helped her remove her blouse over her lifted arms, and unbuttoned her skirt, which he has tossed blithely next to his dirty underwear. He buries his head in the cleft between her breasts bearishly, like a hibernating animal, and unhooks her bra with his teeth as she pants and studies his broad back, his sharp shoulder blades, the perfect white moons of his buttocks flaring above his deeply tanned thighs. With one finger he pulls off her white panties and makes her yelp not only at the shock of it but the sight of his thing, hard and poking up from its nest of fur, like an animal springing out from a wood. He touches it, touches her down there with the heel of his hand, rubbing her slowly, then faster, gently, then with more pressure.

  When he touches her hand again she closes her eyes and suddenly imagines it’s Hal she’s with, Hal who slides off her underwear in one smooth practiced motion and grabs a condom from under the futon like he’s done it a million times, Hal who parts her legs and moves his lips exactly as they are being moved over her body right now, right here, slowly, inexorably, over her jaw, under her chin, down her neck, to the small rectangular window of flesh that covers her windpipe, and lingering there, pressing, the way she’s daydreamed she and Hal would press each other though they never have, they never will, they wouldn’t dare, she’s run off before they’ve ever had the chance. Why hasn’t she seen it sooner than this, as she lies here with every secret part of her exposed and her emotions rearranging themselves the way muscles rearrange themselves around a wound? It’s only in this stranger’s bed that she can fleetingly admit it: she’s wanted Hal to do this from the first month, the first week, the first day.

  She opens her eyes. From above Steve is looking at her with shocking vulnerability, like a hungry child begging for food. Despite his rippling muscles and stubble his face is a boy’s face, an innocent face. She could reach over and smother him or strangle him and he would let her do it, he would be powerless to stop her. She guesses this is what Lyla has been talking about: the close animal presence, as when dogs strain instinctively toward each other on the street and greet each other with a stare or a sniff before they’re yanked away again. No wonder people go crazy from it: they feel all this and then they’re yanked away again. It occurs to her that she’s lived in this estrangement all her life until this moment, unecstatic, unconsoled, unaware, and that maybe now it’s ending.

  She understands he will enter her. He has been rubbing against her groin in warm-up, reconnaissance, and now he is nosing his thing around her opening, hazarding a few tentative jabs and prodding her back into self-consciousness. She is a girl lying naked on some jock playboy’s futon in broad daylight. His entering her is supposed to meld them but it does the opposite; it interrupts whatever communion she had begun to feel for an impersonal—what is the right word?—procedure. It delivers them freshly to themselves again. His thing might as well be an appliance they’re experimenting with for the first time; its meaning detaches itself from their bodies as he aims and they both stare at it, with a dim scientific wonder.

  The sudden sharp pain rips to the center of her, as if there are bones inside her that Steve’s trying to stretch. Bones that will snap if he goes any farther. But he does go deeper, then deeper still, knocking the breath out of her, and it’s only worse when he withdraws. She inhales and he plunges in faster; she moves against him through the pain until it crosses over into something else, not quite pain. They move together like that, in a rocking motion, until she hears the creaking of the futon frame. Then she rolls him over so that she’s on top and she sits there on him, closing her eyes, scissoring her arms across her chest like someone in a yoga position when he bucks under her.

  “Oh Beth,” he says. “Oh shit—I’m getting there.” Steve’s eyelids flutter as he finishes. Then he lies inert beneath her for a while, breathing thinly, his face gone slack as if he’s suddenly fallen asleep. She doesn’t know what to do. It’s a relief when he opens his eyes and pulls her off him and smiles. “Whew! Don’t let anybody tell you high school girls don’t know what they’re doing. You’ve got a great little career ahead of you if you want it.”

  She drops the arm covering her breasts and the motion makes her shiver.

  He asks her what time it is. She looks at her wristwatch (the only thing he didn’t remove) and tells him. He says, “That was great. You’re great, Beth. But we’ve only got another half hour. Tops.”

  He says, “I’d invite you to stay longer, honey”—honey!—“but I’ve got another interview after this.” A misc
hievous grin flicks the corner of his mouth. He pauses, not sure if he should speak. “Actually, it’s with somebody else from your high school.”

  She should be quiet now. Or she should tell him everything—tell him he needn’t rush her out—and apologize or laugh, hoping that her laughter bridges him to the next feeling and he will laugh, too. But instead she says, “Oh yeah? Who with?”

  “May?” he says. “May something? Weird name. I forget.” He reaches for one of the folders he tossed beside the futon and opens it. “Here: Maize.”

  She hears herself say, “Yes. I know her.”

  He props himself up on his elbows so that his chest hair tickles her knee. Somewhere in her mouth is one of those hairs, curling around her tooth like dark floss. He says, “Oh yeah? What’s she like?”

  Blonde and pretty, Maize could say. Beautiful and brilliant. Very bold and sure of herself. Athletic and pragmatic and charming. Great sense of humor. Most likely to succeed. Ambitious.

  She pauses a moment, looking at the blank wall above their heads.

  “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I mean, I know her. But I don’t know her well at all.”

  She stands up off the futon. She puts on her clothes with her back to him; now that they’re no longer immersed in each other their nudity gives her goose bumps. She doesn’t want him to see her anymore and she doesn’t want to see him again, either, reclining there with one leg raised languidly, smoking a cigarette in a reverie and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling.

  The rest happens quickly. She picks up her bag from the floor and sticks up her free hand in a rigid farewell gesture. She glances back in his direction only for a second. She’s halfway down the stairs to the front door before he realizes she’s leaving. “Hey, Bethany—Hey! Wait up!” Now he’s standing at the top of the stairs, saronged in a blue towel. She still doesn’t turn around until she gets to the bottom and puts her hand on the doorknob. She addresses one of the stair treads.

  “Goodbye,” she says. “You’ve got your next interview and I’m supposed to meet someone, too. Bye.”

  He inhales deeply as though he’s going to say something important, talk a lot. “Okay. You won’t?—Okay then.” He exhales. “Later.”

  It takes her a moment to adjust to the sun in the courtyard. She blinks and squints, then everything comes clear again. She’s a bit sore but she walks perfectly. Swiftly. She checks her wristwatch as she nears the parking lot, still running ahead of schedule. She can already picture her own consternated face when she meets up with Lyla again at the store, and Lyla’s irritation as well, which will vanish as quickly as a baby’s tears when she displays her latest secondhand find to Maize: an ivory camisole in imitation silk, with contrasting brown straps and one small, barely visible spot near the shoulder. Lyla will smile at Maize as she approaches from a distance, ignorant of the other ways her friend is joining her and hardly listening to Maize’s lies about how well the interview went. She will raise the camisole so that it covers her face, drop it, raise it and drop it and laugh as in a game of peekaboo. At the very same moment, Maize imagines, Hal Jamesley will be at home finishing a painting or applying a fragment to a collage, grinning cautiously to himself in anticipation of their next long conference, unaware it won’t be happening again, and Steve will be sticking his head out the window toward the desolate courtyard. Steve will search not for her but for a girl named Maize, wondering what she’ll be like, whether she’ll be pretty, a blonde or a brunette, dulcet-voiced or loud. He’ll retract his head and go inside to check the clock on his kitchen wall, only to stick his head out again to scan the courtyard and the paths, the benches and the parking lot, as the sun starts falling and the wind in the trees makes them murmur an indecipherable language, like the first ghostly sounds of an arrival.

  Part

  Two

  During the first days of his trip, Robbie was frantic to keep moving. He’d barely landed at Leonardo da Vinci before he raced off to see the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, the Via Veneto and the Via Appia, the Aurelian Wall and the Arch of Constantine, the Sistine Chapel and the statue of Moses, the Spanish Steps and the Borghese Gardens, and walked or been driven past every famous square and fountain and basilica he’d highlighted in his guidebooks during the plane ride from New York. To each site he lugged a volume of Keats as if a little prodding voice were whispering, Yes, this too will be on the exam, while he scurried around, snapping a few pictures and trying not to look too much like a rube.

  He had promised Maize he’d forward dozens of photos of Rome (“Pictures, Robbie, I want pictures,” she’d demanded before he left) but so far he’d only gotten a handful of blurry and underexposed shots. In his frenzy he captured the outlines but not the essential details. He was too jumpy to hold the lens still long enough.

  He’d also switched hotels three times within seventy-two hours of landing, moving from an albergo in the Parioli district (a room that looked out on a wall) to Via Barberini (too noisy) to a room near Piazza di Spagna that was adequate for now if also dangerously close to the crowds. At each rejected lodging he’d merely shown up at the front desk with his overpacked bag a few minutes before checkout time, informed the concierge of his departure, and walked away without warning to the next place, e-mailing home as soon as he got to his new accommodation. By the time he decamped to his third hotel Maize observed that Rome had made him even more skittish than usual, if that was possible. What she e-mailed him was, “My god, Robbie. You’re acting like a fugitive. What’s up with that?” All his mother wanted to know was how much this new hotel would be setting her back since she was footing the bills.

  But even someone like Robbie—an underweight student with the metabolism of a hummingbird—had limits. On his third morning in Rome, in his third hotel, he woke so bone-tired he could barely pick up the bedside phone to order room service. And when his Continental breakfast arrived in the arms of an astoundingly handsome and amiable young hotel waiter named Carlo, Robbie lacked the energy to respond. He stood there jazz-headed in his tightly cinched seersucker robe, undoubtedly looking molto americano, and nodded catatonically as the beautiful waiter inquired, in alluringly broken English, where Robbie was from (Connecticut), how long he’d be staying in Rome (six days total), where he went to college (Rhode Island), and what he had been doing at night in the city “for amuse” (nothing much really). Unbidden, the waiter offered Robbie suggestions of bars and dance clubs Robbie knew he should make use of but wouldn’t.

  Was Carlo hitting on him or just being an excellent waiter? Robbie had such minimal experience with flirting he couldn’t tell; it was like a core course he hadn’t gotten around to taking. Over the past three years he’d been holed up in libraries and rare-book rooms while, it seemed, all his classmates were out screwing their way toward graduation. “Brother Robbie,” Maize often called him, meaning a monk rather than the sibling she wished she had, the twin who shared her whole history and got all her jokes.

  “Scusi,” Robbie said repeatedly to the gorgeous waiter as he tried not to study his physique and his Roman profile, so chiseled and fine it could be on a coin. “Scusi. Grazie. Scusi.”

  He could have met this Carlo halfway if he’d had the nerve. He wasn’t without some Romance language skills, having aced three semesters of intensive Italian back at college. Currently he was somewhere between introductory and intermediate levels, comfortable with passato prossimo if not remoto or imperfetto. But it was as if the ludicrous promise he’d made his mother before this trip—the vow that he wouldn’t speak Italian with his father or his father’s mistress—had tied his tongue altogether. A week ago, while hastily making travel arrangements, he’d imagined himself chattering with the natives and gesticulating as wildly as Giulietta Masina in an old Fellini film. Now he couldn’t even bring himself to ask for simple directions when he needed them. As a result he’d spent the past seventy-two hours frequently lost.

  Well, who could really blame Robbie? Was this entire situation his
fault? In preparation for the trip, his mother had packed him full of suspicions the way other mothers made their sons take extra sweaters or a first aid kit. Again and again she’d warned him about how tricky the Romans were—vitally ingratiating on the surface, sure, but always working an angle whenever they got the chance. It was their innermost nature to be duplicitous, she’d said; they couldn’t help themselves. The fact that Robbie’s father’s ancestors were Roman Jews—which made Robbie half-Roman—wasn’t lost on them, but neither was it discussed.

  “Trust me on this one, kiddo. They’ll rook you in the blink of an eye,” she’d told Robbie as they stood in his childhood bedroom and he struggled to close his overstuffed suitcase. She often talked like a suburban gun moll. “Keep your mouth clamped and pretend you’re a native. Avoid close contact at all costs. Otherwise you’ll look like a patsy.”

  So except for e-mails to Maize and his mother, and halting requests to taxi drivers and waiters and hotel clerks, Robbie had pretty much kept to himself since getting here. He was lonely and shamefully bored—in Rome of all places!—since he’d already covered all the tourist sites he’d wanted to see. He had four more days before his compulsory meeting with his father. What was he going to do with himself? There were only so many landmarks he could check off a hit list. There were only so many long-winded text messages and IMs he could send to Maize, assuring her that the food and the Roman men were as delicious as she’d heard. There were only so many times he could toss coins into the Trevi Fountain and repeat the wishes he’d made on the first day (Please let this reunion be bearable and Please make J. leave me alone) in case some pagan god hadn’t heard his pleas the last time.

  He was stranded for the duration. He had no choice in the matter. He would have to defy his nature and will himself to relax. He could relax if he really put his mind to it. Total incompetents managed to relax every day.