If that’s what she was looking for, Maize wasn’t the girl to do it. She found herself fatigued by the trip and overwhelmed by the occasion and she didn’t know quite what to make of Daniel, either. Not just yet. He seemed nice enough—buff and bright and commandingly attractive, and he gazed on Robbie intensely, like a doctor with an unseemly interest in one of the patients he was examining—but she had learned hardly anything about Daniel besides the fact that Robbie had the sloppiest crush on him that she’d ever known her friend to indulge. Robbie stammered and flushed the few times he’d mentioned Daniel to her, but he’d pretty much kept them apart in the ten weeks since he and Daniel started dating.
“Nothing’s changed here. You’ll find it all the same,” Robbie’s mother said to Maize as she opened the front door. “Except soon it won’t be mine.”
Maize surveyed the interior details now—far more precisely than she had when she was a teenager hanging out here with Robbie. She supposed it was one of the many occupational hazards of having toiled in André Gilbert’s real estate office for the past year: no longer being able to enter someone’s home without assessing its features and impediments and resale potential. She was still in her honeymoon of loathing André Gilbert purely, before any complicating emotions intervened. It bugged her to think that André might have a permanent effect on her now that she’d been brutally cut loose. Yet she couldn’t help registering the size of the rooms and the high ceilings and the condition of the oak floors, or stop herself from counting the number of bedrooms (6) and baths (4) and half baths (2) and fireplaces (3), or regretting that all the windows were covered with shades and sheers and curtains that blocked out the natural light and would be bad for showings to potential buyers. She could almost hear André saying, Good bones here, but a gut job.
The only place where Maize could turn off her attention to housing details was the apartment she shared with Robbie. And that was defensive. Even before it was stripped bare by burglars, Maize had been aware of how grungy and grubby her own living space was—a world apart from the luxury properties she’d shown to André’s buyers. If she went looking for depressing features of her own home there’d be no end. It could practically be her next career.
Knock it off, she scolded herself now. Nobody asked you for a market evaluation. Robbie’s mother’s house was already sold and closing next week.
And as if thumbing her nose at André Gilbert, Maize studied the pastel blue Formica countertops and outdated appliances in the kitchen—which Robbie said his parents remodeled the same year his father left, nearly a decade ago, as if in an effort to refurbish their feelings about each other—and announced, “I love this room. It’s wonderful. I’ve always adored this kitchen.”
“It is very nice—enormous,” Daniel said, yet no one answered him as they moved toward the staircase.
“So this is yours, Maizie,” Robbie’s mother said, leading her to a chamber with pink walls and a floral bedspread and a sewing machine, as if decorated for an imaginary daughter. It was right next door to Robbie’s old bedroom, which eerily looked as it had in high school: a sparse white cell with a twin bed and Radiohead, Mozart, Schoenberg, and Joni Mitchell CDs fighting for space on crowded shelves with tomes like The Magic Mountain and Augustine’s Confessions, The Brothers Karamazov and Dante’s Purgatorio. Robbie had been bookish above all else for as long as Maize had known him, reading compulsively the way other people smoked or drank too much, scanning poetry and comparing translations of prose, which sometimes left him befuddled when he looked up from texts at the decidedly less artful life that surrounded him. He was confused when his experience didn’t conform to what he’d read somewhere.
Like right now, Maize thought. Now that his gorgeous boyfriend was here in the mix, poor Robbie didn’t have a clue about what to do with him. He kept sidling close to Daniel and then swerving away, like a bad driver who couldn’t keep to a lane.
As Maize glanced between them, she noted again how physically similar Daniel was to Robbie. It was practically narcissistic for the two of them to be sleeping together. Although Daniel was a more gleaming version of her best friend—taller, more muscular, and more sure-footed than Robbie—they both had nearly black hair and wide eyes (though Daniel’s were blue) and strong chins, not to mention smooth chests and hairy legs. The significant difference was their ages—only three years, but Daniel seemed a lot older than Robbie if not as cerebral, or at least that’s how Robbie seemed to see it. The few times he’d allowed Maize to go out with them for an evening, Robbie hung on Daniel’s words as if his boyfriend were the only adult present, though he did his best to hide any tremors of inferiority around him. He maundered on about subjects Daniel didn’t know about and stared longingly at Daniel only when he wasn’t looking back, like a starving man eyeing a banquet table for what he could furtively shove into his pockets. Noticing this made Maize flinch—not merely because Robbie seemed to be surveying a future that didn’t necessarily include her, but because it saddened her how hard it was for Robbie to relax into his hunger, and it brought back her own hunger and solitude before they’d first stumbled toward each other in high school and then rediscovered each other at college.
Now his mother pointed down the long hallway past two chandeliers and a series of heavy paneled doors toward the opposite corner of the house. “And David—sorry, Daniel—” She thumped her forehead comically as if to dislodge the stubborn fact of his true identity. “That’s where you’ll stay. Robbie will show it to you.” She took a few steps toward the staircase to the third floor and her own bedroom before freezing as if she thought better of it. “Go ahead, Robbie. I made our reservation for seven, so drop your bags and amuse yourselves until then.” She winked at Maize. “Only don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
* * *
For their first meal together, Robbie’s mother drove them to a French restaurant a few towns away. It had faux-rustic farmhouse touches like stippled stucco walls and primitive exposed beams and uneven wideboard floors and dim overhead lanterns, to distract you, Maize supposed, from the formality of the service and the decadent cuisine that seemed to emanate from a culinary time warp: chateaubriand and coquilles St. Jacques, vichyssoise and steak Diane, potatoes Anna and foie gras. The kind of gout-inducing food that was probably fashionable decades ago, although the prices were very au courant—what Maize’s mother would have called highway robbery.
Maize fidgeted in her seat. She and Robbie and Daniel weren’t well-enough dressed for this restaurant. Robbie’s mother looked inappropriate, too, Maize thought, in her denim shirt and khakis, but she seemed not to care. She encouraged the three of them to “order up a storm” because they’d need their strength for the week ahead, and she was equally generous with the burgundy she poured for everyone except Daniel, who clapped his hand over his glass each time she pointed the bottle his way and said thank you, he was fine with mineral water.
“So how’s your job, Maizie girl?” Robbie’s mother said. “Still rampaging though the world of zillion-dollar lofts?”
“Umm. No. Not exactly.” Maize took a sip of wine and shook her head.
“Maize is taking a little leave from real estate at the moment,” Robbie said.
Maize scoffed and said, “A leave? Let’s face it.” She turned to his mother. “What Robbie means is, I got fired.”
Since it had happened a month ago, Maize had been telling everyone except her own mother the same thing—I got fired—feeling a surge of power and shy pride every time she announced it, like someone who’d survived fire or flood or terrible surgery yet still had the pioneer pluck to be plowing forward. She didn’t feel bad about being sacked except for the lost pay and the lost sight of Eli, whom she’d gotten used to observing furtively whenever they were both in the office. It was working for André Gilbert that had made her feel pathetic and weak, she now realized; whatever followed was the opposite.
“Really. That guy must be nuts firing a smart girl like you,” Robbie’s mot
her said. “Unless you didn’t show up to work or were your usual uppity self.”
“Thanks,” Maize said. “It was complicated.” There was no reason to go into the fact that André had threatened to call the police when Maize was cleaning out the belongings from her desk that final day—as if Maize would take something that wasn’t hers on her way out—and that Maize had said, “Go ahead, André. I dare you. I have a few things I’d like to tell the police myself,” and that André had wisely backed off.
“I agree that Andy was unwise to let you go,” Daniel said.
“André,” Robbie said. “Not Andy.”
“Thanks, Daniel,” Maize said.
“Robbie mentioned your boss was a pip,” his mother said. Then she turned to Daniel. “And he tells me you’re a medical student. I guess you have a specialty since no one wants to be a regular G.P. anymore, right?”
“Um, well—yes, ma’am.” Daniel sat up and the caned dining chair squeaked under him. “Nephrology, probably.”
“Sorry,” she said. “What’s that?”
“Kidneys,” Robbie said.
“More or less,” Daniel said.
“Right. Kidneys. Of course.” Robbie’s mother daubed her mouth with a starchy white napkin and said, “Robbie’s father passed a few kidney stones a while back. Excruciating pain. Not that he didn’t deserve it.”
“Robbie never mentioned that,” Daniel said.
“No, he wouldn’t have.” She looked off toward an empty table next to theirs before turning back to Daniel. “In any event, I appreciate your coming up here with Maizie to help, but I’m surprised you can manage it. I thought medical students never had spare time. Slept thirty seconds a night and all that.”
“I’m in a gap period between medical school and my internship at the hospital,” Daniel said. “I have three weeks off before I start up again.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You kids sure have a lot of gaps these days. Some of them seem to last years.”
Robbie drummed his fingers on the damask tablecloth and said, “All the new interns start together as a group on the first of July. Across the country, right?” He appealed to Maize rather than Daniel for verification but she shrugged.
“That’s right,” Daniel said. He lifted the burgundy bottle and said, “We show up every summer like a swarm of locusts in white coats. Would anyone like me to pour more wine?”
“No, thank you,” Maize said, but Robbie and his mother merely shook their heads.
How polite Daniel was, Maize thought. A tall, blue-eyed Virginian with a Southern boy’s genteel manners. He’d raced from his side of the taxi to Maize’s to open the door for her when they arrived at the house today, and he held out the chair for Robbie’s mother at this restaurant before anyone on the staff could do it. Maize had also witnessed him lighting a strange woman’s unlit cigarette although he didn’t smoke. He’d probably resist letting Robbie’s mother pay when the check came before gracefully conceding.
“You’re undoubtedly thinking, Too bad he’s not straight,” Robbie had said to Maize some weeks ago when she’d commented on Daniel’s courtliness. “Women are dying for halfway decent behavior from guys these days, right? And he is a gentleman and he is wonderful—don’t get me wrong.” Robbie bit his nail. “But he can be different with men.”
Maize had supposed that was true. She’d seen Daniel flash the rigidity you heard about in Southerners: a hardness just under the velvety surface, a readiness to size up and dismiss with a word or a cutting look, especially around males his own age. As if life were a big locker room and there could be only one winner at each event. She’d witnessed him being peremptory with a waiter and a cashier the one night they’d all gone out together. But Robbie seemed to get a special dispensation from Daniel’s testosterone surges, like a physician’s note excusing him from gym class.
“What an expert Robbie’s becoming on internships these days,” Robbie’s mother said now, rolling her eyes, and she took another bite of her entrée.
Robbie had told Maize his mother wasn’t thrilled by his internship at the downtown weekly newspaper when he could get a real paying job someplace else. On the day he’d finally landed the position after months of rejection, having been told he was too inexperienced or too brainy for other entry-level positions, his mother’s reaction was: “Terrif, Robbie. You spend years getting honors so you can type and file and run other people’s errands for forty hours a week. And for free.”
“You’re correct about that, ma’am,” Daniel said to her now. “Robbie is becoming quite an expert on interns. Right, sweetheart?” He brushed the top of Robbie’s hand with his long fingers and it jumped reflexively before, Maize noticed, Robbie stared at his mother, willing himself to keep his hand there while Daniel stroked it. Maize was proud of Robbie for doing that—showing affection publicly; at the same time her throat tightened at the sight of it.
But Robbie couldn’t manage it for long. After a second he picked up his water goblet and took a long swig to free his hand again.
“Well then.” Robbie’s mother smiled. “Now that I’ve been warned, please remind me never to need an emergency room on Fourth of July weekend.”
“Excuse me?” Daniel said.
“Nothing personal,” she said. “But it’d be scary to have some rookie be the only thing standing between me and the cemetery.”
“We’re very closely supervised,” Daniel said. “I can guarantee that.”
“Of course,” Robbie said. His hand inched closer to Daniel’s again. “Of course you are. Mom—”
“I’m sure. No offense.” She pointed at the nearly empty bottle and asked Robbie and Maize if they liked what they were drinking or wanted to try something different.
Robbie shook his head, his face reddening as if in delayed reaction to what he’d already swallowed, and Maize said, “No, this is fine.” She hadn’t gotten this buzzed since her night out with Eli over a month ago. “It’s delicious.”
“More of the same then,” his mother said. “Never mix, never worry and all that.” And she summoned the waiter back to their table.
* * *
It was at that precise moment—when Robbie’s mother blithely shifted the subject after making a jab at someone—that Maize realized why she’d been experiencing a fluttery sort of déjà vu since stepping out of the taxi earlier. It was like being around André Gilbert again—a suburban, less employed, distaff version of André, but André nevertheless. Or perhaps Maize was merely so haunted by André and the shame of their connection that lots of unlikely things would resemble him from now on.
It made Maize bite the inside of her cheek. She wanted nothing more than to escape the memory of André now that she’d fallen out so badly with him. She didn’t want to add André to the list of people who would seemingly haunt her for life. She already had a long enough list of those people: her dead father and departed stepfather; Hal Jamesley, who’d left his counselor job after she’d graduated from high school and was now at large somewhere in the universe; her stern freshman English teacher, who said she was a potentially brilliant writer yet fatally unfocused and too daydreamy to get anywhere; her old friend Lyla, who, she’d last heard, was now living in an RV with a boyfriend in Portland; the slyly captivating Eli, who’d engrossed her for months by doing nothing more than sitting at his office desk and whom she’d been avoiding for the past month; the dorky college basketball player who’d given her rolling waves of orgasms for several weeks during sophomore year until, out of nowhere, he simply stopped texting her or speaking to her, as if he’d finally noticed they couldn’t make even the smallest of small talk about the weather when they weren’t having sex, leaving her relieved despite a roaring raw hunger for his body, because she didn’t want him to enter her imagination the way he’d entered her physically. No, not another one in the gathering of ghosts she traveled with; it was already crowded in there.
But the basketball player had shown up in her thoughts anyway, whenever she was wa
lking down the street and noticed someone freakishly tall: a beacon of something, though she didn’t know what.
She’d told Robbie about the basketball player and the rest of her hookups and fleeting attractions. She’d glancingly mentioned Eli to him, and the dead-eyed receptionist in the real estate office who’d never once greeted her in the morning or wished her good night at the end of the day. She’d told him about her mother. She’d told him about André Gilbert. She’d told him at least a little about pretty much everything, though nothing about Hal Jamesley, whom Robbie had never met and never would. Hal had shown up during senior year of high school, after Robbie had been shipped off to boarding school, and now it was as if the statute of limitations had run out on the misdemeanor of him. She figured even the most confessional types had to have a secret or two for themselves. Hal Jamesley was hers.
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t regale Robbie with details about the rest of her life. In the past year alone, she’d given him enough details about André Gilbert to fill three of her blank journals, which she’d written in more and more voluminously in the weeks since getting axed.
She’d met André just before their graduation last spring, through a flossy college classmate who was going off to a deb job at a literary magazine in Belgium and who’d found Maize amusing. This girl, Chandler Sloane, had a mother who’d sold her enormous apartment on Park Avenue and bought an equally enormous loft in Tribeca through André, who had just fired his assistant and was looking for a replacement with the right tone for his clientele. When Maize and Chandler Sloane had been briefly paired by their semiotics professor on a project—decoding Godard’s Alphaville—Chandler decided that Maize was wonderful because she did all the work for both of them. Chandler mentioned to Maize that André Gilbert was “this adorable gay guy” as well as “a trip,” and something about André’s former assistant being a kleptomaniac from Bryn Mawr or something equally ghastly. She said her mother could make a phone call to André for Maize, if she liked.
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