The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  Robbie didn’t understand why a clever girl like Maize would take a job as André Gilbert’s office robot when she could make money waitressing or temping, or doing something that required a less steady commitment until she found fulfilling work. But then Robbie didn’t have a mother like Maize’s mother, who’d transmitted her fear of poverty the way other parents passed on phobias about dogs or airplanes or aging to their children, and who’d repeatedly warned Maize that she expected her to support herself from the second she graduated college. Maize’s mother was convinced that paying your dues, in the form of demeaning and inane grunt jobs, built character, although from what Maize could tell it was just as likely to grind what minimal character you’d developed down to a nub.

  On the morning of her interview with André Gilbert, her mother had called Maize long distance to remind her to wear a suit and jewelry and makeup and perfume. As if she were going to a wedding. As if she were an idiot who might otherwise show up to a Manhattan luxury real estate agency in sweat clothes.

  It surprised Maize that André Gilbert didn’t question her about her name the first time they met. Almost everyone who encountered Maize for more than two seconds asked something about it. (Was she Native American? Was it like the corn or the puzzle? How exactly did she spell that?) But André hadn’t. He couldn’t seem to care less about that or anything else involving Maize’s personal life. Beyond glancing for a second at her résumé during the interview and saying “fancy schmancy” when noting the college she’d gone to, André didn’t concern himself with Maize’s history, either. He signaled clearly through his lack of chatter that all he cared about was Maize’s potential as a worker. He wanted to know how nine-hour days, six days a week (including Sunday open houses), sat with Maize. He asked her if she had a suitable wardrobe for the job—crisp and professional—because he wouldn’t tolerate the kind of “whore schmattas” college girls wore, especially in downtown offices like his, where it was even more inappropriate since all the men in the place were big sissies. The only time André looked directly at Maize was when asking whether she’d be fussy about not having a lunch hour (there was no time for that in this business, he explained; when you were on you were on), and then he stared so intensely at Maize, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward over his desk and passing his tongue over his upper lip, that she had started to feel a bit like lunch herself.

  “That’ll be okay,” Maize chirped before thinking about it. “I never eat much during the day, anyway.” She took a breath and looked at her ragged fingernails. “I guess I could have a bigger breakfast before I come to work.”

  “Whatever,” André said, and then informed Maize that the job came with health insurance but no pension plan.

  The tenor of their meeting made Maize want to squirm. Weren’t employment interviews supposed to be superficially friendlier than this? Weren’t you both supposed to see if you had some kind of rapport? She’d usually gotten along famously with gay men since there was no sexual tension to muddle things. She supposed it was possible that André had already prescreened Maize through Chandler Sloane, but there was no way of checking because Chandler had left no contact information when she’d decamped for Brussels.

  Maize shuddered inwardly at André’s lack of warmth or interest in her. But then André surprised her by offering her the job on the spot and she convinced herself that his aloofness was liberating. If André remained indifferent to who Maize was beyond the most basic facts, Maize was free to be whomever she wanted, at least while she was at work. She would be free to reinvent herself and become a new Maize—new and unexpected and presumably improved. Wasn’t that what the most vibrant people did when they came to this city? Wasn’t that the promise of youth, or at least the promise of someone with a brand-new B.A.?

  Still, the old Maize couldn’t resist making some sort of personal contact before she left the office. If André wouldn’t ask her anything about herself, Maize would turn the tables.

  “André,” Maize said, when they were both standing and the interview was wrapping up. “That’s an interesting name. I assume you’re Russian or French?”

  “Nope,” André said. He touched his perfectly streaked hair. “André’s what I go by instead of my real name. Which is Abbott. Abby. The ugliest old schnorrer name on the fucking planet.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Maize laughed, delighted that he had exposed a self-critical side in a semipublic place; it was like being in a dressing room with a friend who asked if certain jeans made him look fat. “I consider Abbott very distinguished,” she said. “I believe Abba means ‘father’ in Hebrew and it’s the male version of Abigail, which means ‘gift from God.’ And since an abbott’s the head of a monastery, I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection to the name Abelard, like Abelard and Héloïse. You know? The inspiration for all those beautiful twelfth-century love letters.”

  She felt very smart and bright saying all that, imparting what she knew like an enthusiastic high school teacher or Robbie in one of his scholarly fugues. Robbie would be so proud of her! For a moment it seemed her impeccably impractical education—in which she’d learned about Middle English and Duchamp’s urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone—wasn’t useless after all. She expected André to praise her or at least indicate, with a plucked eyebrow, that he’d registered his new assistant’s sophistication. Instead André went dead behind the eyes.

  “Right. Abbott, Abelard, blah blah,” he said. “I still hate that name. Don’t ever call me anything but André or I’ll have to kill you. Okay? We clear on that?” He smiled widely at Maize for the first time that day.

  Now Maize squirmed on the guest room mattress in Robbie’s mother’s house, replaying that moment and the variations on I’ll kill you that she’d heard André deliver to other brokers in the past eleven months, all of them involving pirated body parts: I’ll cut your heart out, I’ll cut you off at the legs, I’ll leave you with nothing but a bloody stump. She was alone with her memories—her fragmentary recollections of André and Eli and her ugly green desktop and the company’s hectoring e-mails about deportment—in a dark silence. She ordered herself to broom-clean these items from her consciousness and go to sleep. She had a big week ahead of her. She had a different boss now. Even if Robbie’s mother turned out to be a fascist shrew, this would undoubtedly feel like a spa vacation compared to André’s office.

  * * *

  Next door on the following morning, Robbie woke in his childhood bed to spasms of guilt—not merely because Daniel had sneaked into his room overnight and they’d gleefully messed up the sheets, which Robbie would have to launder later on, nor because Robbie had thought about J. while lying on his old twin mattress beside Daniel, but because he felt a thousand times more at home in his mother’s house than he did in his city apartment. Between rapturous rounds with Daniel, for the first time in months he’d slept as soundly as someone comatose, his dreams untroubled and vivid, his deep breathing in sync with his lover’s, the breeze through the window screens filtering sounds of crickets and tree frogs instead of sirens and car alarms. He hadn’t experienced the slightest twinge of longing for the life he and Maize had left behind for the week, though he knew he should have had at least a few twinges.

  Since the burglary their apartment was denuded except for a cot in his bedroom and an air mattress in Maize’s and some paper plates in the forlorn kitchen cabinets. Even before it had hardly been comfortable: a first-floor hovel in a crumbling tenement on a grubby stretch of lower western Chelsea that had resisted the gentrification of the rest of the neighborhood. In place of smart restaurants where steaming hunks cruised each other and ingested excessive amounts of protein, Robbie and Maize’s block had a corner bodega and a Jamaican jerk chicken stand that doubled as a check cashing parlor. In place of clever shops where men bought overpriced lamps or underwear on their way back from the gym, their block had a welfare housing pro
ject caged with rusted cyclone fencing.

  Robbie remembered how proud Maize had been about finding the apartment online and getting it for them a year ago, before the competition pounced. A rental in downtown Manhattan rather than Inwood or Bushwick or New Jersey where many college graduates had to start out. It had been advertised as a two-bedroom when in fact it was three dark closet-size rooms, the kitchen doubling as the living room. The second “bedroom,” Maize’s room, was in the middle of the apartment and looked out on a grimy brick wall six inches away, as did the bathroom and the living room/kitchen. There was no natural light except in Robbie’s room facing the street, where his view was of an Aztec-looking man with high cheekbones and a sleek black ponytail selling drugs from the front stoop to people in passing cars. Robbie watched through his barred windows, feeling less like a resident of the city than one of its inmates.

  But the worst part was that their apartment had two front doors, both inches from the building entrance—one to the living room/kitchen and a second, hollow-core number to Robbie’s room so flimsy that a five-year-old could have kicked it in during a tantrum. Day and night, whenever anyone was buzzed into the building through the squeaky metal security door, whenever the tenants used their keys, it sounded like they were entering Robbie’s bedroom directly from the street. Which in retrospect seemed a warm-up for the actual invasion that had happened a few weeks ago.

  “Hey there, Robbie, wake up,” Maize said now, bursting into his childhood bedroom with only the slightest warning knock. Forward and impolite, maybe, but nothing new. They had no privacy in their railroad apartment so they’d gotten used to walking in on each other at all hours. But when she discovered Daniel lying shirtless next to Robbie she gasped and stopped dead in her tracks on his mother’s blue shag carpet.

  “Oh my god—sorry!” she whispered. “I didn’t—I thought—you know—”

  Robbie beckoned her forward with his hand. He realized she wasn’t used to finding him in bed with anyone. Although he’d slept around since his senior year of college, making up for a late start, none of his dates had stuck before Daniel and he’d never brought any of them home to their apartment. Not even for dinner or a drink or a snack before the main event. He told them he wanted to spare his roommate the sight of half-naked strangers plodding through her room, but in truth it was his own room he wanted to keep them from. He wasn’t ready for the semblance of domesticity with anyone besides Maize yet—having his bedmates wake expecting breakfast or conversation or fresh towels for a shower or a spare toothbrush. He hadn’t advanced to that stage even with Daniel, whose confidence cowed Robbie, whose virility made him light-headed, and who’d met Maize a few times in restaurants but hadn’t yet spent a single night under their roof. In recent weeks Daniel had started asking Robbie about that, a little and then frequently, which was one of the reasons Robbie had invited him up here to Connecticut. That and the fact that his mother needed another laborer.

  “I want to spend more time together with you,” Daniel had said to Robbie a few weeks ago. “I want to be your boyfriend.”

  “That’s very sweet,” Robbie had said, and he’d remembered to smile. But even as he spoke he knew his reply was inadequate—not merely because it wasn’t the answer Daniel wanted to hear (Of course I really want to be your boyfriend, too) but because he couldn’t relax his face after Daniel had made his announcement, the same way Daniel sometimes didn’t unstiffen even after they’d both climaxed. He’d covered by giving Daniel a long deep kiss to compensate for the emotion he couldn’t express otherwise. Since he’d begun hooking up with men after J., it continually amazed Robbie what an all-purpose zapper sex could be, temporarily annihilating tensions and judgments and unanswered questions and obscuring how you didn’t look at a lover the right way or communicate with him when you were fully clothed. It was as if lovemaking displaced your frustrations and disappointments with each other and set them somewhere else, like an object thrown hastily on a bedside table just before you tumbled onto a mattress. But when you opened your eyes and woke again it was the first thing you saw sitting beside an alarm clock.

  Robbie had made tremendous progress with Daniel, he thought, nonetheless. Daniel was not only Robbie’s first overt longer-term partner (ten weeks and counting now) but the first man he’d ever felt an intense visceral connection to during sexual aerobics—the only man who rendered Robbie febrile whenever he touched him, and caused Robbie to salivate at the sight of his body like a drooling dog with a beef bone, and made Robbie’s skin hum whenever he straddled Daniel and devoured him head to toe (even pulling at his pubic hair with his teeth), and who provoked grunts and shouts and bestial noises Robbie had rarely heard before, much less out of his own mouth. With previous men sex had been part recreation and part physical therapy, the sensual pleasure of the exercise tainted by a sense of hygienic usefulness. But never with Daniel, right from the start. Daniel was exceptional.

  “Shouldn’t we be working already?” Maize whispered to Robbie now. “It sounds like your mother and Etta have been packing for hours.”

  “I guess,” Robbie whispered back. He yawned and nodded toward Daniel’s bare torso and closed eyes. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Could we maybe get some coffee first?” Daniel said in a regular voice. He rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed, exposing his statuesque midriff as he stretched his arms toward the ceiling.

  “Daniel—hi. How are you?” Maize said. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, Maize.” Daniel yawned and draped his arms around Robbie, laying his head on Robbie’s T-shirt. “And good morning to you, sweetheart. Ready to labor like a he-man today?”

  Daniel’s arms tightened around Robbie’s torso and his hot breath grazed Robbie’s earlobe. When Robbie glanced at his groin he noticed he was starting to tent the top sheet—right in front of Maize—so he raised his knees to hide himself.

  “I guess so,” he said to Daniel. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  The three of them spent the whole morning in the basement, sorting and stacking and packing things that probably hadn’t been touched in years. On the main floor, Etta was doing much the same thing with Robbie’s mother. Daniel said he was starving, but Robbie didn’t respond. Although Etta had made them a bacon-and-eggs breakfast Daniel had said, “Thanks, but I’m afraid I get queasy if I eat this early. I’ll just have one of the power bars I brought with me later on.”

  Robbie’s mother had ordered them to separate her belongings into two piles—keepers and discards—and she’d make the final decision about what stayed and went after they were done.

  “I certainly vote for tossing this,” Daniel said, holding up a small Murano vase that Robbie recognized as one of his mother’s old anniversary presents from his father.

  “I assume you’re joking,” Robbie said. “That’s Venetian glass.”

  “So?” Daniel said. “Just because it’s Italian doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable.”

  “But look at the detail. It’s so elegant,” Robbie said. It truly was exquisite, Robbie thought, with thousands of intricate flower shapes in dozens of colors. Robbie imagined an artisan working quickly and fervently on it, frantic to do something impressive with the molten material before it cooled down on him. He said, “That vase has got to be worth a lot. And even if it’s not expensive it’s just plain beautiful. It’s like—you know?—a Flemish tapestry made of glass or something.”

  “All right, all right. I guess I missed that art history class when I was taking organic chemistry.” Daniel squinted like someone in a conversation where the other speaker suddenly starts jabbering in a foreign language.

  Robbie’s eyes darted to Maize for a confirming nod, but she quickly glanced down at a box of flatware she was packing. Clearly she wasn’t going to second him, nor had she made a peep earlier when Daniel had voted to cast off china sets and framed photos and books in favor of old ice crushers and rotating fans and Mixmasters that probably didn’t work anymore.
Robbie supposed she was too smart to take sides about something that didn’t matter much in the long run. Maybe she even thought Robbie should fake sharing Daniel’s opinions just so they could move through the piles more quickly. That would be like Maize, Robbie thought—she had an absorbent personality—and of course she was right. His mother would have the final veto power, anyway.

  But Robbie knew he’d never been as big a person as Maize and he feared he’d become even smaller in the past year. Frustration had been puckering his spirit. Since he’d graduated from college his intelligence had been underused to the point of atrophy; he couldn’t casually relinquish his taste on top of that. It was one of the few things Robbie still had to offer the world and that he specifically had over Daniel, whose pre-med course work was far more practical than Robbie’s education and whose father had taught him manly things like how to rewire a lamp and chop firewood and sail, unlike Robbie’s father, who’d instructed him on the proper width of lapels and the length of shirt cuffs and the gaucherie of wearing black tie before six. In the short time they’d known each other, Robbie had noticed, Daniel had enjoyed lording his macho skills over Robbie although he also seemed to find Robbie’s helplessness amusing, as if Robbie were a kiddie savant who could name the square root of any prime number off the top of his head but lacked the sense to knot his shoelaces. When Robbie rambled on about poetry or dance or the visual arts Daniel nodded and yawned politely, or stroked Robbie tenderly and said, “You’re adorable, you know that?” which had the effect of making Robbie feel like a windy young fart. At Robbie’s instigation they almost always made love immediately afterward.

  Robbie knew he had a tendency to drift off into aesthetic monologues and effectively disappear into the intellectual ether, especially when he felt insecure. Maize was too simpatico to drag him back down to earth. He supposed he needed Daniel’s groundedness and he admired Daniel even if his proclivities were more than a little mundane. Whenever Daniel planted his big hands on Robbie’s shoulders and shook them, saying, “Earth to Robbie, Earth to Robbie, come in please,” Robbie was secretly grateful, though he was too proud to show it.