The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  Maybe J. had loved him and Robbie had ignored it, simply because he had nothing to give back. Maybe he had felt for Robbie painfully but Robbie had been too distracted, staring at his schoolbooks and term papers and anything else that would keep him from it as well as certain truths about himself. His cowardice. His laziness. His immaturity. Robbie could see that possibility now, for a fleeting moment, as distinctly as if it were an object before him to be captured by his useless camera. He could see that J. deserved more and also that, given the chance to replay their affair, he’d probably do nothing differently despite everything he’d learned.

  Now he kept moving. He passed one of the hotels he’d stayed at before proceeding to his current accommodation. Perhaps any fool would have noticed before now that with each new room he was drawing nearer and nearer to his father’s apartment, but Robbie hadn’t. He crossed to the opposite side of the street, blushing slightly and hoping no one from the staff would recognize him as he moved swiftly past. He didn’t know exactly where he was. Take a few unfamiliar steps and he could end up anywhere.

  He got lucky, though. When he reached the next street there was his latest hotel in the distance. He made a beeline for it. He was as focused on it as when he’d been following Clarissa, whose perfume lingered in his nostrils and whose image remained in his sweaty palms.

  But he didn’t go inside just yet. He sat on a travertine bench outside the hotel, looking at the postcards again, finding nothing new but deciding that he didn’t want to be alone with them in his room all the hours before departure. He didn’t want to carry them around anymore or travel with them but he didn’t want to throw them out, either. He kept staring.

  On the next bench over, some other tourist was being photographed. In German or Dutch the photographer called out something, probably instructions to smile.

  Robbie imagined that if someone snapped a picture of him right now it would look like this: a young student tourist in Rome. And under that picture another picture: a tourist in the life that came before and the life that came afterward, innocent of local customs and insecure about his command of alternate routes and idioms, no matter how many books he read.

  The midday sun continued burning down. Robbie was sweating. He stood among the passersby who didn’t acknowledge him. His heart was pounding and he felt a jagged edge of panic about to surface. But there was no reason for it. He had no reason to rush. Maybe he should wander to a store and buy himself something with his spare euros while he still had the chance.

  Instead he sat on the bench with the postcards and took out a pen. A week ago he might have defiled these useless images of Clarissa and George or tossed them into a garbage can. Now he turned them over to the flip side and addressed them. Two to J., two to Tonia Cantor, one to himself at his college address, and one to Maize, who’d get the whole story if not the other things he’d promised her before this trip. In a moment he’d dial her cell or leave a voice mail for her saying, I failed and I have something important to tell you.

  Although it occurred to him to write something like “Wish you were here” on the postcards, he left the message portions blank. He would send them incomplete. He could picture J.’s and Tonia’s bemused expressions as they flipped the cards over again and again, studying them, vaguely understanding that they’d received a souvenir but not quite knowing of what.

  Of course there’d be a long delay before the cards reached them. The mail in Italy was notorious. Robbie would be home and back in his regular life before anyone got his message.

  He didn’t know the first thing about the Italian post, so he surrendered the cards to the hotel’s front desk. He tipped the concierge lavishly to distract him from looking at them in his presence. The concierge was pleased to receive his cash, and when he leaned over his desk to shake Robbie’s hand and assure him that his mail would go out subito, immediately, Robbie noticed a lavender carnation pinned to his starched white dress shirt and a lavender necktie that matched the flower.

  He recalled that lavender and white were Tonia Cantor’s school colors. He knew it only because Tonia Cantor had waylaid him in her academic robes at last year’s commencement ceremony, where she’d marched in the procession and loudly cheered the Italian majors taking their degrees. Robbie had attended to avoid going home to his mother’s house for a few more days before the long hot summer began.

  That was fourteen months ago. All three of them had been there that day, Robbie and Tonia and J., and they were all still speaking to each other because nothing bad had happened between them yet.

  He remembered that as he packed up his little silver car and prepared to leave the campus, Tonia had bounded up to him carrying a spray of lilacs browned by the sun. She looked flushed with excitement, as if it were her own graduation, and it made Robbie curiously sad before he pushed the feeling away.

  “Look at these! Look how lovely!” she’d said, pointing to the lilacs and raising them above her head like a torch. “They match my gown, you see? The colors of my university. Now I’m giving them to you as a present on this wonderful day.”

  “Oh,” Robbie said. “Thank you. Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  He thanked her again though he knew they wouldn’t survive the long drive ahead. Tonia Cantor kissed him on both cheeks, in the European fashion, and then did it again for good measure.

  “We must stay in touch next year, Robbie. We must!” Tonia said. “And now that you’re no longer my student you must call me Tonia.”

  He promised her easily, and nodded. He slammed the trunk of his car shut and got in the overheated driver’s seat. Tonia was still talking as he closed the door behind him, turned on the ignition, and revved the engine. He smiled at her and lowered the window halfway to be polite. He heard himself agreeably chirping, “Yes, yes,” to whatever she was saying, not knowing if it was the appropriate response to what she asked, but from the look of her it was. Even as he pulled away she continued speaking to him and he kept saying Yes.

  He gave Tonia another look as he shifted gears and engaged his blinker and rolled down the long driveway that led from campus, picking up speed as the distance between them grew. In the rearview mirror she was gesticulating in his direction—waving at him and waving some more. The wind lifted the flaps of her robe and the light shimmied up from the asphalt. She looked wild and beautiful in that moment, like a classical heroine or the priestess of a minor religion. As he drove ahead she got smaller and smaller, and from far away it was hard to tell if she was bidding him farewell or welcoming him in.

  Part

  Three

  Robbie’s mother assured Maize the tasks would be simple: identify and separate, discard and pack up. On the phone she’d told Maize that they’d ransack the fourteen rooms of her house (including the maid’s room and the basement) like methodical looters, but they’d leave the dining room and kitchen and one of the living rooms intact because she needed someplace to park herself before the big move.

  Maize considered her orders manageable—a cinch compared to the work she’d been doing the past year—yet it still made her fidget the closer she got to the house. As she rode in the taxi from the train station, wedged in the backseat with Robbie and his new boyfriend, the backs of her sweaty thighs stuck to the vinyl beneath them. An early summer breeze lashed the car windows yet no one was saying much, and the cramped pneumatic silence felt like riding in an elevator with strangers rather than her best friend and Daniel, who’d jockeyed to take the aisle seat next to Robbie during the train ride up and who now held Robbie’s hand as he stared fixedly out the taxi window at the sliding scenery they rolled past, a blur of foliage interrupted by houses with stone walls and brick walls and split-rail fences, by velvety green lawns and midnight blue BMWs, by banks of red and white and coral impatiens flaring in the breeze like tiny flags from unfamiliar nations.

  It was a startling sight even to Maize now, coming from the gray-and-brown city block where she and Robbie lived.
You didn’t see crisp, stark colors like this outdoors in Manhattan or probably in the heathery countryside, either. They were the colors of someplace in between.

  “So there it is—that’s it,” Robbie said when the taxi reached his mother’s long, winding street. He pointed to an unfamiliar white clapboard colonial about fifty yards back from the road and said, “Close but no cigar.” The driver misunderstood and thought they’d reached their destination—jerked to a sudden stop so that Robbie had to apologize and tell him no, not just yet, five houses farther down on the opposite side, he’d let him know when they got to the right place.

  In Maize’s many years of captivity in this town, through elementary school and middle school and the slog of high school, she’d never noticed the house Robbie had just pointed out—the house where his mother would be moving soon—though she’d undoubtedly passed it many times when she’d visited him: a perfectly tidy if shrunken facsimile of his mother’s current residence, as if it were a scale model of the life she thought she’d be living, within easy walking distance of the grander place she was giving up, which was comforting or dispiriting, depending on how you looked at it.

  Maize glanced over at Robbie, who was smirking at the new house from the backseat. Over a month ago, when he’d informed Maize that his mother had, in her wisdom, up and sold his childhood home without consulting him and was buying another property in the same town and the same neighborhood and on the same street, just a few doors down, he twitched so much telling her that he looked like he was having a seizure. Maize insisted he sit on the Ikea sofa in the kitchen (which was also their living room) while she poured him cheap wine and cobbled together a pasta dinner for them both, although she herself had just had another awful day at work and was tired.

  “Five doors away,” Robbie had said to her that night. “I mean, why bother?”

  Maize had shrugged. “I guess your mother wants a change and figures it’s better than nothing.”

  Robbie had rolled his eyes and slouched deep in his seat—a position that reminded Maize of her coworker Eli, though otherwise the two looked nothing alike.

  To Maize, Robbie claimed that what angered him most wasn’t the sale of his childhood house—he wasn’t as attached to it as you might assume—so much as the insouciant way his mother had told him about it after the fact. She was forever doing things like that, he’d said, which seemed like an overstatement to Maize. Yet she knew that his mother tended to announce major events in an offhand manner, after a delay, as if their relationship were taking place via satellite. His mother reported traumatic events like a dame from a black-and-white movie—one of those women whose expressions remained unflappable behind a cigarette smoke screen—perhaps to convince herself and Robbie they weren’t so bad after all. “Doctors did a little housecleaning” was how his mother described her hysterectomy to him, phoning on the day she came home from the hospital. “Mother’s Day shopping will be lighter this year” was what she said by way of mentioning that his paternal grandmother had died and left him savings bonds. (Robbie, away at college and still estranged from his father at the time, hadn’t even known his grandmother was ill.) And when his guilty father tried to check on Robbie’s mother’s welfare after defecting to Italy, she’d changed their phones to new unlisted numbers and forgotten to tell Robbie until friends complained they couldn’t reach him. “So you missed a few calls, what’s the diff, this isn’t 911,” she’d said when he complained, refusing to concede how odd it was.

  “Slow down, okay?—Thanks,” Robbie told the driver now. He bobbed on the taxi seat twice, like a restless child about to jump. “Here’s where you turn. Right here—here!”

  “He heard you, honey,” Daniel said to Robbie, squeezing his hand, though he also twitched as if the nervousness were contagious.

  Robbie’s mother’s house loomed larger and larger as the taxi progressed down the semicircular driveway. It was a big three-story structure that sprawled over three wings, with black shutters and a slate roof and a bluestone porch, dormer windows on the top floor, and a decorative cupola over the garage. It had a broad side lawn on the left and, on the right, an incongruous rock garden with a Japanese maple that, Maize knew, Robbie’s father had planted before he’d split for Europe. She also knew that behind the house was a glittering pool hidden from the front, and behind that a rarely used tennis court that always seemed in need of a sweeping.

  None of it was a surprise to Maize as it would be to Daniel; she knew this house nearly as well as her own childhood home a mile and a half away in a lesser neighborhood with smaller lots. But coming from the four-hundred-square-foot hovel she and Robbie had been sharing for the past year, it did feel more gargantuan than she remembered it, and she had the impulse to turn around and flee.

  Too late to back out now. Robbie’s mother was already striding down the drive toward the taxi with a wad of cash in her hand, presumably for the driver. She’d promised to pay Maize and Daniel generously for their work, but not till the end of the week, and Robbie wouldn’t be compensated at all for his labors. It was what he loftily called his “filial duty” to be here. (“You know what I mean,” he’d said when Maize had asked him to elaborate. “Filial duty. Like in the House of Atreus.”)

  “Get a load of you, kiddo!” Robbie’s mother said to Maize after she paid the driver. “So skinny and gorgeous! And that hair!” His mother wrapped her arms around Maize while she was still holding her suitcase, making for a lopsided embrace. Maize had never known Robbie’s mother to be physically affectionate before. If anything, she was the opposite: a toughie despite her fine-boned face and delicate features, her big brown doe eyes (which Robbie had inherited) and her glossy dark hair, her good legs and her fragile-looking collarbone. To Maize she had always looked like Audrey Hepburn’s plumper and more world-weary sister, her wide mouth likelier to scowl than bloom into a dreamy smile. “I owe you one for helping me out,” she said into Maize’s hair now.

  No sooner had she hugged Maize than she pushed her away, as if snapping back to her regular personality. She nodded hello in Robbie’s direction. Then she stuck her hand out at Robbie’s boyfriend sharply, like a foreman greeting a site worker.

  “And you’re David,” she said.

  “Actually no, ma’am.” Robbie’s boyfriend met her assessing gaze. “It’s Daniel.”

  “Right,” she said in a protracted syllable, sounding skeptical, as if Daniel might not know his own name. “I’m the old battleaxe Robbie’s told you about. Don’t believe everything my son says about me.”

  “Robbie hasn’t said a thing, ma’am.” Daniel blinked at her and took a step backward. “Well, almost nothing.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Robbie said, filling the space between them. “Considering how we detest each other.” When no one replied he said, “So.”

  “Yep. So.” His mother slapped her hands lightly against her hips, like a cowgirl spurring a slow horse. “We’ve really got our work cut out for us, don’t we? Let’s get you kids settled in.” She turned to Maize. “Etta fussed so much over your guest rooms, she didn’t make my bed or put sheets on Robbie’s mattress this morning. You’ll probably find mints on your pillows or some other nonsense.”

  Etta, Maize remembered, was the family maid. The soft-spoken woman Robbie’s mother had hired after his father left, having fired the maid they’d had for many years before, as if banishing eyewitnesses to her marriage.

  “Mints on the pillows. Yum,” Maize said. She’d always taken a saucy tone with Robbie’s mother, from the moment she’d met her many years ago. They’d always gotten along, and she suspected that Robbie’s mother liked her far more than her own mother did. “I trust that means we’re getting room service, too?” Maize said.

  “Hah! Don’t press your luck,” Robbie’s mother said.

  “Your cleaning woman really shouldn’t have bothered herself,” Daniel said. “I can stay in Robbie’s room.”

  “No, I insist that you a
nd Maize take advantage of my guest rooms while I still have them,” Robbie’s mother said. “My next house won’t.”

  Maize grinned. She knew that Robbie had been out to his mother for several years and that his mother claimed she couldn’t care less. But Maize also knew that when Robbie informed his mother that her third helper this week would be his boyfriend, not merely another friend from the city, she’d paused a long moment before saying, “Hmm. Is that so,” and then skittered on to other topics. Robbie had been on speakerphone in their apartment so Maize had overheard.

  “We saw your new place on the way here,” Maize said to his mother now. “It looks terrific.”

  “It’ll do. Lower maintenance.”

  His mother strode forward. Daniel splayed his hand between Robbie’s shoulder blades and Maize watched Robbie close his eyes and sink into Daniel’s palm for a moment, with the pained yet beatific look of someone being massaged before he yanked himself away to proceed down the driveway. She scrambled to keep pace with Robbie’s mother while lugging her heavy suitcase. Again Robbie’s mother took Maize’s arm in hers as they neared the front door.

  More touchy-feeliness—what was this? Maize squinted while the bare dry arm pressed against hers, not unpleasantly, and they climbed the porch steps. Perhaps his mother was rattled by having a disarmingly handsome stranger like Daniel around during a week when she’d be packing up her life, although she’d supposedly encouraged Robbie to corral as many day laborers as he could and said she’d pay them lavishly for their trouble. Or perhaps his mother merely needed reassurance from someone familiar besides her son that Daniel was what she’d call a “good egg.”