The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  He wasn’t a student anymore, at least formally. He was nearly twenty-three and out of school for a year. Whether he liked it or not, many things had started to merge and coalesce in an unsortable tangle, enlarge and expand and grow complications like mold. And there wasn’t much he could do to stop it from happening.

  “Well then?” Daniel said now, knocking on the antique headboard as if testing its solidity. “Yes or no, Robbie? It’s your call.”

  Even as Daniel challenged him Robbie noticed that Daniel had sexy knuckles, which made him feel like a maniac.

  “I vote yes,” Maize said.

  Daniel was staring at him, still waiting for a decision, and so was Maize. Although it was a simple matter, he couldn’t make a choice. He said, “I don’t care either way,” and he told them both to leave the headboard where it was. He’d figure it out later in the week.

  * * *

  The following morning, as the three of them were sipping coffee and rubbing sleep out of their eyes at the kitchen table, Robbie felt a dull ache in several places he’d never felt before. Overnight he and Daniel had made love more strenuously than usual, with Robbie whispering, “Is that okay, Daniel? Is that good for you?” again and again as they went along. Afterward he’d twisted and turned in bed and observed his Daniel, whose looks changed subtly with each of his movements while he slumbered, as if he were housing several relatives of himself within the same body.

  Robbie had noticed that about Daniel before. In a certain light Daniel’s face was smoldering yet fine, with its bright, assessing eyes flicking up and down Robbie’s body and its firm chin and high forehead like a Holbein. But then suddenly a coarseness would swarm his features; it appeared briefly depending on the angle of Daniel’s head, brutishly intensifying his looks before receding. Whenever Robbie had noticed it, Daniel had turned left or right or got up and walked away, as if he’d caught Robbie observing and wanted to block his vision until the moment passed.

  But last night Daniel had slept through it all so Robbie got a longer view.

  Now Robbie’s mother stormed into the kitchen brandishing a mop. She said, “I need an upstairs maid.” Etta had the day off to visit a hospitalized relative and there were a number of tasks his mother didn’t want to do alone. One of her three minions should spend the day with her upstairs while the other two repainted a few windowsills in compliance with the sale contract; the buyers’ inspector had noticed a little rot and their persnickety lawyer had stipulated repainting as a condition of closing.

  “I’ll help you upstairs.” Daniel stood and bowed in her direction. “At your service, ma’am. Your wish is my command.”

  “Really? Oh.” After a beat Robbie’s mother said, “Thanks,” and smiled. But her expression was tight and nervous and what followed was more silence, as if she was waiting for something else.

  “Or, you know, I could,” Maize said.

  “Fine then, Maizie. You’re on,” his mother said. Her whole body slackened around the mop.

  Daniel squinted and said, “I volunteered first. Is there something wrong with me?”

  “No. Not at all,” Robbie’s mother said. “I just figured you’d be better at the windowsills.”

  “Scraping paint isn’t complicated,” Daniel said. “I’m sure Maize could manage it.”

  Maize said, “Sure.”

  “Maybe another time,” Robbie’s mother said. “What I need help with today is sort of women’s work, anyway. Girl stuff.”

  “How old-fashioned and sexist you are, Mom.” Robbie smiled as he crunched on an English muffin, hoping to diffuse whatever was swirling around them like dry wind. But when he looked at Daniel, his face had choleric splotches. “Do you want me to vacuum or dust if Etta’s not around?”

  “Robbie told me your buyers are investment bankers,” Daniel said. “I’m sure they won’t give a damn about a little chipped paint on the windowsills.”

  Robbie’s mother’s posture straightened around the mop.

  “Trust me, Daniel. They will,” Maize said. “I worked with buyers like that all year. That’s exactly who cares about a little chipped paint. You’d be surprised how petty people can be.”

  “No I wouldn’t,” Daniel said.

  “Or I could make the beds,” Robbie said.

  “That’s women’s work, too.” Daniel scoffed. “If not girl stuff. What—you a homo or something, Robbie?” Daniel said.

  Maize laughed, but no one else made a sound. Robbie’s mother’s eyes narrowed at Daniel as if reacting to glare.

  “Correct,” Robbie said. “And I’m frighteningly good at making beds. Military corners and everything.”

  * * *

  “Quant’è bella giovinezza / Che si fugge tuttavia / Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: / Di doman non c’è certezza,” Robbie recited later that day toward a bay window, with his breath clouding the glass. He and Daniel were standing on twin ladders, scraping paint. He informed Daniel that he’d first heard those lines of verse in Italian class at college and they’d reverberated in the years since like a song he couldn’t get out of his head. They were by Lorenzo di Medici, the Renaissance patron of artists and thinkers, whom his teacher had called “Lorenzo Il Magnifico.” “How beautiful is youth / That is fast slipping away…” Robbie began to translate, but before he could finish Daniel said, “Spare me, Professor. I’m trying to concentrate here.”

  Daniel hadn’t said much else to Robbie in the past few hours—not since asking him, “So why doesn’t your mother like me?” and having Robbie pretend that he didn’t know what Daniel was talking about, his mother was brusque with everyone, that was just her way, especially with men, including Robbie himself, particularly since his father left.

  That was true enough. His mother wasn’t the maternal type and she hadn’t had so much as a lunch date with a man in a decade. But the explanation didn’t satisfy Daniel. He stood silent on his ladder while Robbie filled the air with chatter like Nature rushing to fill a void, and when Robbie ran out of chatter he started quoting random facts and figures and lines of poetry without much of a segue, and when even that started to falter he went inside to check on Maize and his mother, who were having a lively conversation while they worked and looked contented even when they weren’t occupying themselves.

  The last time he’d escaped inside, his mother was wearing a head kerchief, humming to herself, and Maize was taking a break—sitting on the edge of her guest bed, writing in her journal. Over the past year Robbie had caught Maize doing that more and more often, scribbling intensely with her head bowed toward a blank page, grinning wispily and flushed with the ecstatic concentration of a zealot. He rarely knew what Maize was writing since she often snapped her journal closed at the sight of him, but occasionally he prodded her to read it aloud—uncanny descriptions of people and places and queerly acute conjurings of emotions or half-feelings, if half-feelings could be said to exist at all. Again and again he’d said, “You’re a writer, Maizie, you are, you could do it professionally,” but each time she’d merely chuckled at the outrageousness of it, as if he’d suggested she be a circus performer or a skydiver, and she changed the subject.

  God only knew what Maize was recording in her journal this time around. Probably something wry about this oversized house and the oversized personalities inside it. When he’d told her he’d invited Daniel to join them up here she’d said, “Are you sure you want to throw the two of them together for a week? I mean, it’s not like it’ll be a relaxing situation to begin with and, um, I don’t know about Daniel.”

  Robbie had willfully misinterpreted her by saying, “Yeah, I realize you hardly know Daniel. I have to get you two together more,” and in her usual fashion Maize had tactfully let it drop. Robbie had done the same thing whenever Maize mentioned other men to him, most recently a guy from work she went out with about a month ago, whose name she either didn’t specify (was it Leo? Max? Avi?) or that Robbie forgot within seconds of hearing it.

  Now Robbie and Daniel finished
the windowsills. They were sweaty and grimy, with their hair dandruffed by paint flecks and their T-shirts sticking to them like poultices. Robbie gave Daniel first crack at the shower and sat waiting for his turn while his mother rustled up dinner downstairs, with a clatter of pots and pans and curses. She’d never been good in the kitchen, unlike his father’s girlfriend, who was not only tall and gorgeous and talented but a whiz of a cook. “Your typical blonde nightmare,” his mother once described her.

  Upon hitting the shower Robbie shampooed his hair three times, reveling in the hot water and directing the spray between his shoulder blades, lingering until his fingertips shriveled. Daniel was waiting for him when he returned to his old bedroom in nothing but a towel—not in plain sight but hiding in the corner like a mugger. He stole up silently from behind and touched Robbie’s back, making him yelp.

  “Don’t say a word,” Daniel murmured into Robbie’s ear, reaching around to yank off Robbie’s towel in one deft motion. “Just do what the doctor orders. This won’t hurt a bit.”

  Then he was all over Robbie—rougher than he’d ever been and possibly more ardent for his roughness, which was comforting to Robbie after their earlier silence yet also a pity since he, Robbie, wasn’t in the mood. Although you wouldn’t have known it from the way his body reacted. He stood there and then lay there on the floor submitting to Daniel and putting up a good front, grabbing at Daniel each time he himself was grabbed, amazed at what a cheap reliable workhorse appliance his body was, running constantly at all hours and even at night like a refrigerator.

  Robbie almost wished Daniel would be rougher still with him—slap him to dislodge whatever was holding him back at the moment. This glazed state was what he usually experienced after sex rather than during it. Whenever he separated from Daniel he examined himself for bruises and welts and blemishes but found only his unmarked flesh, maybe a bit swollen but otherwise completely unchanged.

  Now while they were still in the throes of it Robbie’s mother called to announce that they were expected downstairs.

  “Robbie? Robbie?” she yelled. “Where are you? Dinner’s ready!”

  “We should stop,” he said to Daniel.

  “Not yet,” Daniel said.

  “Robbie? Daniel? Why aren’t you answering me?”

  He heard his mother say something he couldn’t quite make out to Maize, then the muffled reply of Maize’s voice.

  “Really,” he said to Daniel. “We should go.”

  “No.” Daniel pushed Robbie back to the carpet, got up and checked to make sure the door was locked, and threw himself on Robbie when he came back. They were both so sweat-pebbled and smelly that Robbie wanted another shower already.

  “Robbie?” his mother called again, but Robbie wasn’t physically capable of replying.

  It wasn’t until he overheard his mother asking Maize to go upstairs and fetch them that Daniel stopped, and then only after there was the first creak on the long staircase.

  Daniel bolted up, threw on the clothes he’d piled near the door like a quick-change artist, and left Robbie lying naked on the floor to fend for himself.

  “There you are,” Robbie heard Maize say to Daniel. “Robbie’s mother’s starting to bug out.”

  When Maize and Daniel returned to the dining room Robbie clearly heard his mother ask, “What’s keeping my son?”

  “I don’t know what’s keeping him, ma’am,” Daniel said. “I think you’ll have to ask your son that yourself.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Robbie caught Maize writing in her journal again. He was on his way back from brushing his teeth, having declined Daniel’s invitation to visit him in his room because he was too exhausted for a second round. Once again he found Maize perched on the edge of the bed in the room next to his with her pen moving frantically.

  “My, but we’re prolific these days,” he said. “A regular little Trollope.”

  “Who you calling a trollop?” Maize said. It was a joke of theirs ever since Robbie had helped her with a paper on the Palliser novels back at college.

  “You,” he said. “What are you writing?”

  “Oh—this?” Maize looked back at her journal. “Just about some of the guys I knew when I was a college slut.” She sighed. “Goodbye to all that.”

  Robbie knew she was hardly exaggerating. In the eleven months since they’d moved to the city, Maize had had sex with only one man Robbie heard about: the hot young cop who’d responded to her emergency call after she’d found their apartment cleaned out. And that was merely a one-afternoon stand. She’d never been prettier and more alluring than in the past year—men leered at her and hit on her every time they were out together—but she met any sign of amorousness with a vacant stare. She acted a lot like Robbie in his early college days—as if sex would trivialize her life and degrade her passion for higher endeavors. The only time he’d detected a spark was the night she went out with her real estate coworker, and that might have been because she was drunk—teetering as she’d propped herself against their front door and shrugging when he’d asked how it had gone.

  “Yeah, you haven’t been getting much,” Robbie said. He walked into her guest room and sat on the bed beside her. “What’s up with that?” He couldn’t stifle a yawn and he stretched out on the mattress.

  “Well, there are a million guys out there, but how many of them are, you know, really worth it?” Maize said.

  “You didn’t worry about that in college,” Robbie said. They lay next to each other now, their heads on adjacent pillows just a few inches apart.

  “Well, I do now. Or maybe I’m just becoming a lesbian and I don’t realize it.”

  “You should be so lucky,” Robbie said, and Maize laughed. “No, I’m afraid we’re both stuck with men.” He smiled wistfully and touched her pretty hair and said, “You’re gorgeous, you know,” and went back to his room for the night.

  * * *

  The next morning, before anyone else awoke, Robbie checked his cell phone. After three days away there were only four messages: a phone company solicitation, a hang-up from someone who’d put down the receiver too late, a junior editor at the newspaper wondering where Robbie had hidden the heavy-duty stapler, and a long-winded message from his father in Rome.

  “Robertino!” his father’s message began, in his usual chipper businessman’s tone. “This is your papa and Clarissa sending our greetings to you from bell’ Italia.” Through the staticky connection Robbie could hear Clarissa shout, “Hi, Robbie! Miss you!” in the background. His father inquired how Robbie was doing, and what he was doing, and whether anything was new “on your Rialto” as he put it, and he asked how Robbie’s internship was progressing at the newspaper, and how his roommate with the strange name was faring. Then he reported that he and Clarissa had recently gone to Paris on a trip that was half business and half pleasure, and that they’d had a great time despite his lousy French, and a charming suite at the Plaza Athénée, and that his work was busy as always, and that a gallery had recently expressed an interest in showing Clarissa’s paintings although Clarissa wasn’t sure whether she wanted to do it, you knew Clarissa, always modest and hiding her light under a bushel, but Clarissa was otherwise fine and getting a tremendous number of canvases finished, not to mention reading voraciously as usual …

  His father was in the middle of telling Robbie something else—that he was thinking of joining what he called an “exercise club,” which Robbie guessed was the same as a gym—but he got cut off because the voice mail’s time limit expired as he was saying the word however.

  Robbie replayed his father’s message twice as if it would yield more with repetition. He imagined his father felt stung by the interruption. He was a man used to holding forth and having his audience listen as long as need be. His heartiness shrank every room he entered, but there was a good side to that, too: he was oblivious to negative signals. Possibly he hadn’t noticed being cut off and just kept talking until he got to his usual farewell
of Mille baci, a thousand kisses, putting Clarissa on the phone at the last minute to say the same.

  Still, the call made Robbie shudder. It wasn’t like his father to simulate an entire conversation into a machine. The international messages he’d left Robbie regularly, every few weeks or so, weren’t verbose. This was Robbie’s fault. In the month since his mother had summoned his help with her move, he hadn’t returned his father’s calls or even shot him a brief e-mail, as if this would somehow protect them both from his mother’s withering resentment. When Robbie had returned from his Roman reunion trip two years ago, he’d made the mistake of telling his mother how welcoming and affectionate his father had been, followed by the colossal error of saying that Clarissa was surprisingly interesting and talented and that her brother George was drop-dead gorgeous.

  How dim was that? Had Robbie expected his mother to be delighted for him after his long estrangement from his father? He’d been as unblinkingly critical of his father as she was up till that point, so of course she took it as a betrayal.

  “Spare me the heartwarming details,” she’d said when Robbie continued describing his Roman trip to her. “I don’t want to hear about it—I don’t want to know about it!” And she’d burst into tears in front of him for the first time in his life, having stayed dry-eyed during her whole divorce and even at the funerals of her own parents.

  He’d taken his mother at her word since then. He didn’t mention his father or the fact that they had a relationship again after years of silence. He didn’t accuse her of demonizing his father over a failed marriage that was possibly half her fault. Nor did he let on that his father occasionally wired him a little money “to paint the town,” although it might’ve given his mother satisfaction to know that part of her ex-husband’s wealth wasn’t being spent on himself and Clarissa. It was less complicated for both of them if Robbie kept quiet. And in the rare moments when his mother asked him—in a painstakingly casual tone—whether he’d heard anything from his father lately, Robbie fidgeted and said, “No, I haven’t,” even if he’d spoken to his father that day or the day before.