The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  But he’d misread what was happening. Within seconds came the dull tickle of J.’s bearded lips exploring the column of his bare neck from its base, slowly, tentatively, then less so, trailing upward and up some more, until his lips fastened on Robbie’s for a long first kiss with a thick tongue—J.’s tongue—darting and slithering so much it left them both speechless. When Robbie recovered enough to detach his mouth from J.’s he heard himself whisper, “I should go home,” yet he’d either spoken too softly or J. wouldn’t hear of it. J. was kissing Robbie everywhere he could now that his initial trepidation had passed—ferociously and randomly, on the mouth and the forehead and the jaw and the eyelids and the clavicle and the nose and the collarbone, and sticking his pointy tongue into Robbie’s ears between kisses, making him yelp from pleasure or surprise, or the surprise of pleasure, and brushing the smooth boyish skin of Robbie’s cheek with his bristly facial hair so that it soothed Robbie at the same time that it burned.

  How bizarre it all was. No one sensation was allowed to dominate or fully take the lead. Every time Robbie began to feel excitement, it got displaced by discomfort or fear or a sense of his own clumsiness, migrating inside him as unpredictably as J.’s hands and his mouth moved over his body, leaving him dazed.

  When J. started deftly unbuttoning Robbie’s shirt, Robbie threw back his head and stared at the ceiling. He closed and opened his eyes. The room began to spin—jazzed by Robbie’s hormones or mere confusion. He was enjoying himself both thoroughly and distantly, in the astounded way of someone stoned, J.’s kisses prodding through his numbness for a second before the numbness reappeared just as quickly. He assumed he could still get up and leave the apartment if he chose to; it wasn’t too late to excuse himself without complete offense. But before he could commit to action J. had fully removed Robbie’s shirt and his own polo and was towering over Robbie, asking him to get up and leading him by the hand to a corner of the room where a mattress wheezed as Robbie fell upon it.

  “Beautiful, beautiful,” J. said as he stood beside the bed, peering down at Robbie’s half-naked body. “Every inch of you.” But in a second he went around the room, turning off all the lamps, and they were invisible to each other. Robbie’s pupils throbbed at the sudden dousing of the lights.

  The complete darkness intensified everything. Robbie felt the dense wet heat of J. licking the cleft between his pectorals, and then J.’s big hands stroking his torso in a circular motion, and then his calloused fingertips flicking and teasing his nipples, pinching them hard until they shrank and pebbled, and then him sucking and sucking at them like a demanding newborn needing sustenance, and then him outlining the bars of Robbie’s rib cage and pressing his ear to Robbie’s abdomen. With each application of J.’s fingers and mouth the rest of Robbie vanished; all that existed was the part of him that J. was working on at the moment, methodically, devoutly, while Robbie’s own mouth formed an inarticulate O of disbelief. Flashes of horror coursed through Robbie along with waves of satisfaction and he supposed that these were inseparable, like freezing and scalding water that flowed from the same tap.

  J. unbuttoned the top of Robbie’s jeans, then the buttons of Robbie’s fly. He lifted Robbie’s torso and pulled the denim down over his legs, leaving him in nothing but socks and underwear—white briefs swollen and dampened by Robbie’s arousal, which evidently had a life ignorant of Robbie’s hesitation or more powerful than it. When J. asked him, Are you ready for me? and he didn’t answer, he clamped his mouth over the flimsy cotton covering Robbie, gripping him through the cloth, panting heavily and heavier still like someone about to die. Finally he lifted the elastic waistband of Robbie’s underwear and took him full in his mouth.

  Robbie had never experienced anything remotely like it before. Not even after years of frequent and expert masturbation. It felt like being fed into a tight, black, slick cave with trembling walls—not just his crotch but the rest of him subsumed deeper and deeper as J. continued, tracing with his tongue the thick dorsal vein that throbbed exquisitely, until Robbie believed he might pass out. It was like an abduction, this disappearance into someone else’s body, this voluptuous surrender to pampering or capitulation, and he’d need to reclaim himself any minute now. When J. gagged Robbie felt his own throat spasm.

  It was a relief when J. decided to take a breather. He stood and slowly removed the rest of his own clothes, folding them neatly on a chair, then draped himself over Robbie. With German fastidiousness he positioned himself so that their erections aligned and rubbed against each other and he thrust in simple, wonderful friction. Robbie moved against him for the first time all evening. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark he could see how magnetic J. was, with his big body and his milky rose skin covered in fur a shade darker than his head. He could appreciate the way J. dove at him again, even more violently this time, worshipping him and besieging him from all angles, up, down, left, right, sideways, with linear and corkscrew motions, nibbling and taking feral bites, and he could even enjoy J.’s orders to Be Still and Stop Moving So Much because he knew his compliance was temporary and this would soon be over. He’d be back in his dorm before morning.

  Nevertheless Robbie found he was shaking. Had J. noticed it, too? He took deep breaths to stop himself from hyperventilating. He told himself to stay calm.

  Just when he thought he’d settled himself down J. flipped him over on all fours and showed off more exotic skills. He ran his mouth over the backs of Robbie’s thighs and the crooks of his knees, licking his palm and fondling Robbie from behind with his wet fist, burrowing his tongue in places Robbie hardly knew about, like the small secret area below his scrotum where J. poked gently and then not gently at all, withdrawing and then stabbing his tongue forward dozens of times like a switchblade, inflaming hundreds or thousands or millions of nerve endings, until Robbie heard himself cry out and felt his hips jerk and exploded helplessly onto the bedding.

  J. flipped him onto his back again. Robbie was drenched everywhere and undoubtedly looked a wreck. He had to admit that what had just happened to him was amazing, and that he’d want it to happen again, but for now it was, thankfully, over. He wondered what time it was. He figured he would get out of J.’s apartment as quickly as possible and as soon as it was polite. He glanced across the dim room at J.’s front door like someone locating the fire exit in a strange hotel.

  The problem was that J. was hugging him tightly now, kissing him at his sweaty hairline, and murmuring about how happy he was and how much he’d wanted Robbie, his voice gone watery with emotion and his eyes half closed. He was far more effusive in this delirium than he was clothed and Robbie merely nodded in response, as he would at someone talking in his sleep who probably wouldn’t remember what he’d blurted out in the morning. He said “Thank you” as he glanced across the room at J.’s front door again.

  As if sensing Robbie’s departure, J. loosened his hold and stretched his arms over his head. He spread his long legs wide and then he smiled at Robbie rather curiously—waggling his thick eyebrows at Robbie with comic lasciviousness, like Groucho Marx. Robbie glanced toward the front door once again and waited for J.’s strange expression to pass. But when Robbie looked back he was still waggling his brows and grinning.

  Was Robbie supposed to laugh with him? Was he obliged to thank him again for performing with frightening gusto? Was that the correct thing to do next?

  It took two full minutes of J. smiling at him, spreading his legs even wider and starting to stroke himself, before he said, “So, my dear?” And it was only then that Robbie thought Oh god and grasped what had eluded him since he’d allowed any of it to begin: He was expected to reciprocate.

  “Well, I hope you’ll be taking pictures of your father’s place when you finally get there,” Maize said to Robbie now. “Whether or not it has the Bedroom of Horrors, I bet it’s interesting.”

  “Maybe,” Robbie said.

  She’d always gotten a kick out of his parents, the way only someone who was
n’t their child could. The few times she’d met Robbie’s father she’d smiled wryly at his effusive greetings, as if they were part of a larger sales pitch for something she’d decided against buying. She adored Robbie’s mother and considered her vulnerable—achingly tender, as she put it—not despite her crusty demeanor but because of it. Robbie wasn’t sure he agreed.

  Although it was natural that he’d view his parents differently from Maize, their opinions diverged even more after his father bailed. When Robbie allowed himself to think about his father at all, he remembered him as being mostly away at work but overwhelming in those rare moments he drew near, with his crushing vitality, his obliterating bonhomie, his boundless hunger for food, his grappling for money and success and proof that he was well liked. A hazel-eyed man who kissed startled strangers hello and took stairs two at a time. After his departure, Robbie convinced himself that everything about his father’s expansive surface was calculated to hide his businessman’s ruthless efficiency and clammed-up heart, whereas Robbie’s prickly mother—who rarely embraced anyone, never used endearments, and found giving or receiving compliments as repugnant as self-pity—came to seem more openhearted and exposed to him, like a foolhardy soul who goes through the winter underdressed for the elements. He could see the devastation in his mother’s immobile face, in the puffy skin under her eyes and the hollows of her cheeks. Occasionally her nose twitched as if freshly registering the shock of what her life had become. But in the photos Robbie’s father sent back from Rome, he looked tanned and robust under the Italian sun—his gleaming health an unbearable rebuke to both of them.

  “I don’t think your dad’s trying to piss you off,” Maize said one day in Robbie’s dorm room, when he showed her the latest photos to arrive from Italy and tore them up into confetti in front of her. “He’s probably just sort of retarded.”

  “I know,” Robbie said. “He’s a phony.”

  “No, I think he’s genuine,” Maize said. “It’s just that it’s three layers down. There’s what he shows you on the surface, and the stuff below the surface that has nothing to do with that, and the stuff below that, which is like the stuff on the surface only deeper.”

  “Huh?” Robbie said. “I don’t follow.” Next to her he often felt obtuse despite his superior grades—someone with a quick mind and a slow heart. “Fuck my father, who cares,” he said automatically, and Maize had darted her eyes toward his wastebasket and shrugged.

  He supposed he should listen more carefully when Maize analyzed people. Hadn’t she pegged Tonia Cantor as hopelessly unreliable, months before Robbie himself had had to write Tonia off? She could have saved Robbie a lot of grief.

  At his suggestion, Maize had enrolled in Tonia Cantor’s Intro Italian class, but she dropped it quickly because she found Professor Cantor charismatic yet loopy and incoherent. Tonia Cantor had shown up at the first meeting without a syllabus and regaled her students—in English, not Italian—with complaints about how lovelorn she was in their college town, how desperate for decent ethnic food, while her see-through blouse kept slipping off her shoulder, exposing her pink bra strap, and she made googly eyes at the boys in the front rows. Maize figured that if she stayed enrolled she’d learn a lot more about Professor Cantor’s personal life than about irregular verbs and pronouns, so she switched to Intro Spanish.

  It was true that Tonia Cantor was highly unorthodox and possibly even unbalanced. She was out there. But Robbie couldn’t help having a soft spot for her. He secretly considered her something of a kindred spirit despite their glaring dissimilarities. Although Tonia exploded and Robbie tended to stew like a Crock-Pot, they both had inner heat. And he admired how bravely she paraded her feelings to everyone who’d listen without caring if they found her excessive. To hell with them if they did! She was the most wildly emotional adult he’d ever met. Her anarchic qualities would probably cost her tenure in years to come, but they were a relief on a campus where many of the faculty were brittle, sherry-nipping Ph.D.s who pronounced the words basil and tomato like Edwardians. (“Oh, please, speak fucking American!” Tonia brayed at one of them after a few vodkas, at the same fateful cocktail party where she’d introduced Robbie to J.) She had only the faintest sense of professional and personal boundaries.

  Tonia Cantor’s legal first name was Miriam, which was what appeared in the college catalogue, but she insisted that everyone call her Tonia, the name she’d adopted when she’d done graduate work in Rome. During conferences when they were supposed to be discussing Robbie’s work, she identified herself as “just a Jewish girl from Long Island, trying to be cute,” but since her erstwhile Roman holiday she found she “couldn’t get arrested” by attractive men and was fast becoming “a single gal whose eggs are rotting” and “a frustrated love-o-maniac,” meaning that she loved to be in love whether or not she had takers. She acted possessive of Robbie well after she’d radared his preferences. (“Oh, I get it, you like boys,” she’d said. “Well, who the hell doesn’t?”)

  He developed protective feelings toward Tonia Cantor, who was unguarded and wept like a faucet, just as Tonia had initially tried to remain protective of Robbie after the affair, when J. divided Tonia’s loyalties. At least at first, she told Robbie that she disapproved of J.’s behavior and was “always, always, always on the side of youth in amorous matters.” She claimed to be appalled when J. followed Robbie into the isolated and already scary art history stacks, where Robbie had gone to research a paper on Cézanne’s apples, just so he could glower at him and shoot him the finger before retreating to his faculty apartment.

  Robbie was afraid he had it coming. He’d left J. without warning, announcing his desire to end their affair on the phone rather than in person, and then he’d treated J. like a leper rather than someone he’d been involved with—someone he shouldn’t communicate with in any fashion, like an ex-convict ordered to avoid all truck with other felons. He had been inexcusably awful to J., he realized, and arrogant to boot, yet he was also too terrified to waver in his resolve after dumping him; if he did he’d get sucked back into their morass and have to arrange his escape all over again.

  “That’s revolting! For shame! Shame on him! The library is a sacred place!” Tonia said when Robbie reported the Cézanne incident to her. “A temple of scholarship. That’s practically a sacrilege. You want to borrow my car to get away from campus a little while? You want to hide in my apartment? I’ll do anything to help you.”

  Tonia was a recklessly generous person—she really would do all that if Robbie asked her—but he shook his head no because he feared her lavishness was shot through with something darker, even if Tonia herself couldn’t see it. A consuming and faintly proprietary urgency. If he allowed Tonia to spend too much on him he might find himself owned. After the initial high of feeling completely protected and wonderfully spoiled he’d wake up and discover he’d been branded with her initials.

  “Your ex is acting like such a nimrod,” she said. She grabbed Robbie’s hand and stroked it in her office, as though it had been maimed along with his ego.

  “Well, whatever.” Robbie shrugged and withdrew his hand back to his lap. “It’s no big deal. Really, it’s all right.” In the silence that followed he felt that he should say something more. “I mean, I ended up getting an A on that Cézanne paper.”

  Yet Robbie was even more rattled by J.’s behavior than Tonia. Until their breakup J. had been a paragon of self-control. From the moment J. had started flirting with Robbie at Tonia’s party by standing close to him in her kitchen and quoting Rilke and asking him all about himself, he’d seemed an ideal starter lover—not only because he was erudite and experienced and tall and cute in a decidedly academic way, with his horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets and flyaway hair and blond beard, nor merely because he was ambitious and acerbically witty about his betters and colleagues (Tonia is her own symptom, he’d once said to Robbie), but most of all because Robbie guessed that J. wouldn’t, unlike Robbie’s peers, demand much of him b
eyond minor acrobatics a few times a week. He wouldn’t get in the way of Robbie’s studies. J. had every professional reason to treat their affair as a pastime rather than employment, since his main job was getting tenure and advancing up the ladder by being smart and politic.

  There was security in J.’s single-minded careerism. It was understood that Robbie wasn’t welcome to stay for breakfast because that was when J. got his writing done and his students’ German exams graded. It was understood that they’d never go out to a restaurant or a movie or even dine together at J.’s wobbly little bistro table because—leaving aside fear of exposure—they both had too much work. It was understood that whatever steamed up between them wouldn’t encompass intemperate declarations about a future together because there was no future, their affair was fleeting and transitory for all its stimulation, like an interesting course that had to conclude at the end of the term, with final grades submitted and evaluations filed and everyone more knowledgeable and just slightly older than when they’d started.

  Or at least Robbie assumed all that was understood.

  But when J. started getting clingy (wanting to know what Robbie was doing on their nights apart and with whom, and suggesting that Robbie might stay in Rhode Island after he graduated), and when Robbie’s high-Victorian reserve during sex in J.’s bed didn’t abate, and when Robbie got bored stealing out of J.’s apartment at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. like a burglar and impulsively declared that the affair was over, J.’s emotions rose like a fever he didn’t know he had until it was too late. J. had rattling shivers and hallucinations of ardor. He started writing mash notes instead of academic articles and calling Robbie at all hours of the night, breathing into the receiver rather than speaking, until Robbie had to mute his cell phone before bedtime. Then J. started appealing to Tonia’s sympathies and her attraction to drama, and before Robbie knew it he was in the middle of a riotous mess. Much as Robbie was homesick after three days in Rome, he was also pleased to be thousands of miles away from all that, in a place where J. would never think of tracking him and even his own father had no idea he was in town.