The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  “It’s a fragile thing, Daniel,” Robbie said when he saw him swathing the vase he’d just spared from the scrap heap in newspaper. “Shouldn’t you be using bubble wrap?”

  “That might be a good idea,” Maize murmured.

  “Not necessary. Not if you know what you’re doing,” Daniel said. And to show them he wrapped the vase elaborately, making deft use of scissors and cross-hatched tape, as carefully as he might stitch a wounded limb. By the time he was finished the vase’s outlines were so blurred that Robbie was sure it would have to be completely unwrapped for anyone to understand what he was holding on to. It was a small, tight mess.

  * * *

  Nevertheless, Robbie reminded himself as he and Daniel and Maize hauled boxes to the front wall of his mother’s house for garbage collection later that day, even if Daniel was unintellectual and had little feeling for art, he had plenty of excellent qualities. He was smart in the sciences and hardworking and responsible. He was handsome—so handsome that on certain days Robbie couldn’t look at him directly, for fear of becoming tongue-tied—as well as athletic and physically stronger than Robbie. He played basketball and soccer and bicycled and jogged and he didn’t even break a sweat now as they moved heavy boxes together, carrying a number of them by himself on his broad shoulders like a teamster. And his steely ambitions matched his hard body. To hear him tell it, he’d had a Doric certainty about what he’d wanted to do with his life since he was seventeen and he knew exactly how to make it happen, his career path toward the M.D. clearly marked at every stage. First college, then medical school, then an internship, then a residency, then a hospital position, then a burgeoning private practice. To an underemployed person like Robbie, Daniel’s careerism was nearly as big a turn-on as his blue eyes and lustrous hair and nicely shaped calf muscles and naturally bronzed skin, which was usually hot to Robbie’s touch and sometimes smelled faintly of the peanut butter he ate to keep up his energy during shifts.

  But if Robbie was going to be truthful with himself, he’d have to admit that his overwhelming emotion about Daniel was base naked animal lust. It was an inebriated state that made Robbie’s flesh prickle and his brain sweat. Daniel’s body was so perfect it could have illustrated one of his medical textbooks, and he knew how to use it everywhere. So Robbie took Daniel’s lead and gave himself over to the carnal sensations he’d resisted with J. and his other lovers: all the stirrings and flutterings, all the churnings and glidings and burnings, all the scrapings and frictions and burnishings and swoonings that made Robbie himself feel exponentially more desirable. From the moment Daniel had first leaned over and kissed Robbie full on the mouth, his two-day stubble a wondrous warmed sandpaper, his doctor’s hands exploring Robbie piece by piece and part by part and limb by limb with thrilling authority, and Robbie’s back had arched toward rising pleasure—from that moment Robbie was fiendishly hooked. He couldn’t get enough of Daniel after suppressing his lust for the better part of a decade, channeling it into cerebral pursuits. It seemed like life’s comic revenge on him for overcultivating his intellect at the expense of his libido. Now that he’d emigrated to the Dictatorship of Sex, he was one of its serfs.

  It was humbling yet undeniable. There was nothing of Daniel that Robbie didn’t want to devour or take into himself—nothing. Not just Daniel’s lips and Daniel’s mouth but Daniel’s long fingers; not just his fingers but his toes and the undersides of his huge feet; not just his feet but his shell-like ears; not just his ears and the small of his back but the parabolic curves of his buttocks; not just his buttocks and his pits and his cavities and his holes but his shoulders; not just his shoulders but his ropy bare arms, which enveloped Robbie in embraces where Robbie momentarily ceased to exist as someone separate.

  Yet with a shudder or two it was over and Robbie was forced to return to his own comparatively flawed body. Rattled and dejected with all his usual emotions colliding around inside of him. And when Daniel reached out to him with the same arms that had excited him a moment before, Robbie had to stop himself from squirming.

  Robbie reassured himself that he’d gotten closer to something momentous with Daniel—whatever you wanted to call it—than he had with any other man, even if it felt like being the sole witness to a small miracle.

  It was a problem with intimacy. Whether it involved a kiss or a hug or patting the back of someone’s hand or cradling someone or getting slammed against a floor for a bruising rough fuck, or merely whispering Yes, yes, I get it, me too from a near distance that felt like no distance at all, it always passed too quickly and you were abandoned to the rest of your life, bereft and a little disbelieving.

  “Congratulations. A hot doctor. He’s a catch,” Maize had said to Robbie after he’d introduced them for the first time. She’d said it without a trace of jealousy though she had no boyfriend of her own, and Robbie had found himself weirdly let down. He didn’t want Maize to grow competitive, but he realized he needed the spark of her envy, or something like it, to jolt him toward greater feelings about Daniel. Daniel was a catch by most people’s standards and superior to the other men Robbie had dated, but there was still a blankness whenever Robbie asked himself whether or not he could fall in love with him—an unanswered question that kept faintly echoing (Why not? Why not now?) like ambient noise unless he was around Maize. Whenever he recognized the perversity of that, he wanted to do something rash and declarative, like sign a lease with Daniel or buy him a ring or, at the least, invite him up to his mother’s house.

  As he glanced over at Daniel now he thought, And yet another good thing about my boyfriend: he dressed well but never preened like the many men Robbie had met in the past few years—men whose vanity was like a tacky mirrored partition between them and Robbie, a wall they had to shout over to be heard during their brief encounters.

  Generally speaking, Robbie’s dates after Professor J. had fallen into two categories: dull guys who became psychically invisible as the night wore on, nattering about clothes and celebrities and personal trainers, and desperately smart young things who were all too present, with an immediate surface dazzle that didn’t go farther, or that did go farther only to reveal more and more surface, like the antique Chinese boxes one of them collected, which were said to have hundreds of layers of lacquer.

  When they dropped another load of boxes outside his mother’s front wall, Robbie looked over at Daniel’s bad eight-dollar haircut from a barbershop in the East Village and a fresh surge of affection coursed through him. Robbie should be grateful he’d landed someone as versatile and driven and fetching and unvain as Daniel at all considering his helplessness in the dating department. He’d hooked up a lot during his senior year but when he got to the city he still felt as vulnerable as a junior high school kid overwhelmed by zits and his first palpitating crushes. He reflexively looked away like a maiden whenever men nodded at him or tried to hold his gaze on the street, as if they were pinpointing his shortcomings. He stood rigid and silent and stricken in bars, gripping sweaty drink glasses too tightly and wondering if he was sipping correctly, his self-consciousness a force field that repelled anyone within striking distance. And when he screwed up the courage to place his first online personal ad and asked Maize to look it over, she was stunned by his cluelessness.

  “LITERATE SEEKS SAME?” she’d said incredulously, reading the headline on Robbie’s computer screen while leaning over his shoulder. “How hot, Robbie! Are you shitting me?”

  Robbie had stiffened in his desk chair. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing if you’re hoping for a pudgy old scholar who reads Sanskrit. I thought you said you wanted to get laid.”

  “I do. Really, I do.” Robbie squinted at the screen and then looked up at her with widened eyes, biting his lower lip. In the months since they’d moved in together she occasionally adopted the commando tone of her horrible boss, André, whom she’d complained to Robbie about—barking and authoritative and quick with criticism no one had asked for—as if sh
e’d been embedded in a war zone too long and was picking up combat language.

  “Okay, dear,” Maize had gone on in a softer voice, as if she’d heard how she sounded and decided to correct it. “What picture of yourself are you using with the ad?”

  “I’m not posting any pictures. I figured I’d have a better chance of attracting serious guys that way.”

  Maize blinked and jerked back from Robbie’s desk chair. She looked like she might stagger. She also looked quizzical and frightened as if realizing for the first time in their long friendship that he was psychotic. It made Robbie look back at the computer screen to see what she’d seen, through her eyes: the literacy headline, followed by no description of himself beyond saying he had dark hair—nothing about age or height or weight or body type—followed by words like sincere and diligent and bookworm and considerate and depth, as if he’d spent the past twenty years sealed away in a cave like a newt. And no picture.

  He looked away from the screen again. Maize was gripping her forearms, kneading them—a gesture Robbie had never seen her make before—as if to restrain herself from slapping him.

  “All right then,” he said. “Rewrite it for me. Pimp me out.”

  She gave it the headline HOT ITALIAN 22 YR OLD and included all sorts of immodest details about his “toned smooth swimmer’s body” and “bedroom eyes” and made him upload her favorite digital picture of him, and within two hours his in-box was flooded.

  He’d had dozens of lackluster dates since then, ranging from underwhelming to godawful, until the grind of them got to him like a bad job. By the time Daniel came along, Robbie was losing hope that he’d ever meet anyone compatible—or at least someone who’d distract him from his dashed hopes for himself with an obliterating besottedness. He’d imagined that kind of febrile intimacy as the most secret, dangerous thing that could happen between people, in the dark and under the covers, away from the eyes of others who’d never be privy to exactly what had happened or how, as if it were a perfect crime. Yet until Daniel his dates hadn’t risen beyond the level of minor traffic violations.

  In flashes Robbie thought he loved Daniel, and he grasped at the feeling like a firefly until it slipped through his hands again. It wasn’t at the moments he’d expect—when they held hands in the dark or had sex or listened to Dinah Washington together. It happened at odder junctures, when they were merely sitting watching TV or a movie or reading separate books, saying nothing and not needing to say anything, or when Daniel stopped on the street to admire flowers in a townhouse’s front garden, bending down to smell them through a wrought-iron fence, or when Daniel stopped to give homeless people bills instead of spare change and wished them luck, or when Robbie noticed Daniel’s perfect posture and the spring in his walk, as if Daniel would always, always have enough resiliency not only for himself but for both of them if they needed it. In those fleeting moments Robbie wanted to seize Daniel and embrace him and never let him go. The hokey phrase this is the moment you’ve been waiting for all your life rang in his head and he ordered himself to do something, but he was paralyzed the way someone having a stroke is suddenly paralyzed. As the air cooled between them and the opportunity passed he felt relief that Daniel hadn’t noticed, and he scolded himself for feeling relief, and he reassured himself that he’d have another chance and the next time he’d do better, or the next.

  In the meantime he continued to do whatever work was put before him with a pack mule’s determination. Just like he did now, setting down another box of castoffs outside his mother’s wall, carefully, as if it mattered whether or not the contents got damaged.

  * * *

  The following day, after Robbie and Daniel finished their morning tasks, Robbie’s mother ordered them to take her charitable donations to “The Robbie and Maize Fund” to the garage and Robbie couldn’t help wincing at her command.

  When he’d informed his mother about the burglary a few weeks ago, he’d hardly expected her to react like normal mothers, with cooing concern, but neither did he expect her to be opportunistic—viewing it as a chance to get rid of her second-tier stuff. “Tough break,” was all she said in sympathy. “But at least your timing’s good. Now we won’t have to put my extra furniture in storage. Consider it yours.”

  “Mom, thanks, really, I…” Robbie breathed into the receiver and paused. He didn’t like her furniture, which tended toward the Victorian, but he was hardly in a position to refuse. He and Maize had no apartment insurance to cover getting cleaned out. Plus Maize apparently found Robbie’s mother’s taste less oppressive than he did. In the past few days, every time his mother pointed to something and said, “Could you kids use this?” Maize automatically chirped, “Sure!” and exchanged smiles of mutual gratitude with her, before Robbie had a chance to object. His mother and Maize agreed so often they felt like a tag team.

  Robbie and Maize and Daniel spent hours going to the rooms his mother ordered them to, gathering like pawnbrokers the objects she could live without: cumbersome lamps, beveled mirrors that made everyone look sallow, Louis XIV–style dining chairs and spare earthenware plates and rugs unraveling at the fringes. His mother had even offered them the twin mattress from Robbie’s bedroom—the one item Maize declined, to Robbie’s relief.

  While the three of them were hauling an old mahogany headboard into the garage Daniel said, “Please tell me you’re not taking this to your apartment. It’s butt ugly.”

  “I know,” Robbie said. “But I don’t have anything else right now.”

  “I kind of like it,” Maize said.

  “You like it because you’re in desperate scavenger mode. It looks like something an old lady would take to assisted living.” Daniel stared at Robbie and said, “Come on. Who needs an antique headboard, anyway? We could get you something better if you wanted it.”

  “I don’t have a paying job,” Robbie said, “if you’ll remember.”

  “How could I forget,” Daniel said. “Poor Robbie who’s come down so far in the world.”

  Robbie pursed his lips. He’d rarely complained to Daniel about his housing or his lowly position at the newspaper, though he could monologue about his disappointing internship for days if he allowed himself to start. It was Daniel who beefed to Robbie—about his long shifts at NYU, his lack of disposable income, his surrender of his entire twenties to his professional training, and, lately, about Robbie’s unwillingness to spend more nights with him. When Robbie had first met Daniel in a diner a few months ago, he’d noticed his critical streak and conflated it with analytical rigor. It excited him to be around a great-looking, affectionate guy who did serious work and had strong opinions. Daniel was nothing if not fervent, so Robbie figured this was a man who’d appreciate his ruminations the way Maize did. But as it turned out, Daniel was impatient with signs of ambivalence in Robbie—his cogitation and introspection and inner debates—which he seemed to view not only as dilatory but potentially dangerous, as if Robbie were a patient who’d expire pursuing a second opinion and a third and a fourth rather than committing to a course of treatment.

  “Daniel,” Maize said now. “We have an empty apartment, and no money for new furniture.”

  “So be spartan.” Daniel addressed Robbie rather than her. “It’s less to take care of, and you’d be surprised how well you can do without things you thought were essential, just because you’re used to having them around. They’re much easier to give up than you think.”

  “Sounds bleak,” Robbie said. He resisted saying Sounds Dickensian because he knew that would make Daniel scoff. He pictured Daniel’s medical student housing: one room with a mattress on the floor, a can opener, a tiny television, a tinier microwave, a sound system, and nothing else.

  “It’s not,” Daniel said. “Trust me.”

  Robbie shrugged. He half wanted to take Daniel’s advice but he probably shouldn’t add furniture to the list of things he’d already been forced to relinquish since finishing college a year ago: his comfortable dorm room and his conv
enient meal plan; his nicely structured week of stimulating classes and library research and midnight snacks with Maize; the blanketing approval of professors and deans and his pride in his academic success, which looked increasingly petty as time passed; and maybe most important, the sense of his life as a series of discrete sections like classes—chapters of time that had little connection to one another if he didn’t wish them to. It was as though the universe had given him permission to abandon whole populations of people continually, like a high school boy going away to college or a college graduate headed toward advanced study abroad. Because it was necessary for progress. How exhilarating that had seemed to Robbie—the cleansing prospect of shedding his past like a priest taking a vow, with fond memories or bad memories or no memories at all, with a stark demarcation between that stage and the new one just ahead.

  No overlap. No bridges. No bleeding of one character into the body of another. And no one would trail him—not his parents or classmates or teachers or lovers—and he needn’t be haunted, they’d reappear only in dreams and fleeting memories as he shifted from one place to the next. He could leave it all behind as easily as he and Daniel left heavy objects outside his mother’s wall, for someone else to haul away later.

  But it was getting harder to believe this now that he was out of college. It was like his special student visa had run out on him. The segments of experience weren’t as isolated as he’d hoped. They turned out to be part of something larger that bounced off something else and reflected it: a diptych, a triptych, a polyptych, and so on. Each panel of time obliquely mirroring another panel in an ongoing series he didn’t realize he was part of while it was unfolding, or that he sensed only dimly because he was distracted by the rigors and urgencies of the present.