The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  And also, he’d said shortly before firing Maize, always prefer single people to couples. Avoid couples like the plague so you have half the battle and don’t get caught in their unbelievably tedious cross-fire of tastes. A statement Maize came to take partly as André’s comment on his own home life.

  Maize gathered that André’s longtime partner, Trevor, was at best a bore to him, though André had never said it in so many words. Whenever Trevor called from their Tribeca loft, where he doodled on computer drawings or did architectural renderings or some such, André rolled his eyes. Sometimes he grunted for good measure. Nearly always he had Maize take a message instead of listening to him (Please tell André the dishwasher just broke down, please tell him the nanny’s asked for two weeks off in November and we need to discuss it, please remind him it’s Parent Night at Jordan’s school and he can’t skip it again) or he ordered Maize to relay warnings that he, André, had important business meetings, sales pitches, client meals, and wouldn’t be home for dinner, and Trevor should cook something for himself and their son or order it in from Bouley, but it had better be something nutritious and no desserts or he’d kill him, and he’d better make sure Jordan was in bed before ten because if he came home and found him awake he’d have to axe-murder both of them.

  Maize knew it was snobbish of her to find André so coarse and scrappy. André might be successful and affluent but apparently he hadn’t had her advantages. When Maize once idly asked what he’d majored in at college André had said, “Nothing. I didn’t go. My family was broke and I never liked school anyway. I majored in life.” And when Maize bowed her head in shame for having brought up the subject, André said, “Lookit, how adorable—you’re blushing for me,” and he’d drummed his manicured fingernails on Maize’s desktop. “Don’t worry your little head, Maize. Maybe I can’t say I don’t have the rent in three languages, but my life turned out fine anyway.” And he’d leaned closer to laugh in Maize’s face.

  Over the months, increasingly, revoltingly, Maize heard herself picking up that homely cackle of André’s—heard it coming from her own mouth—and she heard herself using André’s dominator tone during her own business calls as well, barking “Cut to the chase” when another broker’s assistant went on too long. She caught herself hanging up a few times when she was crazily busy and agents were asking about a property that had sold long ago or blurting, “Get that signed contract back to us today or we’ll turn this deal around so fast your head will spin,” shocking herself as much as the person she’d just threatened. Her aggression even thrust out at home occasionally, when she said things to Robbie like “Don’t be a complete idiot” or “Get your head out of your ass,” and saw the shock on his face before she could add something to cushion the blow.

  In those moments she wasn’t the overbearingly polite girl who said “Please” and “Thank you” and “Excuse me” even to people who didn’t deserve it. She was André Gilbert or a cross-dressing variation on him. André Lite. Now that she’d been fired she could only loiter in the memory of it, like an audience refusing to leave after a final curtain.

  Perhaps André had a hard time letting go of people, too, despite appearances to the contrary. Perhaps Maize would have understood that sooner if she’d been smarter or more observant before it was too late. Now she got up from the bed and walked to the other side of the house where she could see Robbie miserably scraping sills with Daniel, looking like a condemned man. Then she plodded back to the guest room to write about the moment when everything changed irrevocably between herself and André and she’d been too unsettled to realize what had happened.

  She’d been sitting in André’s office on a Monday morning, several months into her job and one day after an obligatory birthday visit with her mother in the suburbs. She was stuffing envelopes with promotional letters about André’s latest record-breaking sale and stealing looks at Eli now and then and trying not to dwell on what had happened in Connecticut the day before. She’d been so stultified and sugar-glazed at her mother’s place, after allowing herself two pieces of cake, that she’d picked the local newspaper off the coffee table and started leafing through it desultorily—astonished to find a wedding announcement for Bethany Campbell at the back of the second section. She’d flipped the page twice and then three times before reading it. Bethany was still blonde and smiling yet somehow faded, as if her beauty had gotten blurred by a little extra weight or experience of the world, and the groom standing behind her in the picture seemed unworthy—or at least unworthy of Maize’s idea of Bethany. A blandly handsome Dartmouth graduate with prematurely thinning hair and a stiff smile to match his suit, he looked like a junior mascot version of the many investment bankers Maize had shown glitzy lofts to in the past year, and she supposed Bethany would be one of the women who accompanied those men.

  Had she expected Bethany to be exceptional? To break out of the cage of her former identity and become someone completely unexpected? Not if Maize was being realistic. Bethany’s whole life had announced I Will Marry Well from the moment she hit puberty. Yet a dazzling disappointment had swept over Maize at the sight of Bethany’s photo, an aching homesickness so keen it was as though she’d discovered Bethany disfigured or bankrupt or as if the wedding announcement were an obituary. Inexplicable and irrational tears had come to Maize’s eyes as she threw the newspaper away. There was absolutely no reason to take it personally but she did. It felt like—what?—the end of something. And that night she recorded everything she could remember about Bethany in her journal—the clothes Bethany wore in high school, the way she walked, the sound of her laughter, the pure sweet lemony smell that atomized around her like a disposable aura—until she was too fatigued to remember any more and she fell asleep.

  She wrote in her journal all the time now—sometimes twice a day—as if saying I Was Here Too would make her life real to her when it was possibly just the opposite, a semifictional version of experience that made it more meaningful and bearable than it really was.

  Probably there was no point in jotting about herself or Bethany or André or Eli or Robbie or his mother, but she couldn’t stop. She supposed you couldn’t leave everything behind but you should try to get rid of as much as you could, the way Robbie’s mother was throwing out her knickknacks and mementoes. Only it was harder if you were like Maize—someone who saw a picture or heard a voice and suddenly felt weird mournful churnings in her current existence, like sediment at the bottom of a lake. It was amazing how even marginal presences could incite so much emotion in her, as if she were an overcharged magnet drawing all the stray filings within a radius of several miles.

  Suddenly the office phone had rung, snapping her back to the present. Maize drew a deep breath and girded herself, suspecting it was a broker she’d overheard André eviscerating that morning before going out to do showings. Instead it was André himself.

  “What the hell took you so long to pick up?” André said, though Maize had lifted the receiver on the second ring. He was panting lightly. He explained that he was in the East Seventies, outside his new townhouse listing, which he was supposed to show to a cowboyish CEO who’d just been profiled in The Wall Street Journal. Trouble was, he’d left the frigging keys to the townhouse in the office and he needed Maize to drop everything and deliver them to him immediately.

  “You mean like, um, right now, André?” Maize had asked stupidly, flummoxed since she was in the middle of ten other tasks.

  “What does immediately mean to you, Maize? To me it means five minutes ago,” André said. “Move that little tush. I’m standing outside this house like a bagman and the hotshot is on his way. They’re somewhere in my desk. The desk key’s taped under my chair.”

  “Oh.” André had never divulged where his desk key was before. (The one time Maize had asked about it he’d said, “Mind your own beeswax.”) “Okay. Do you want to stay on the phone while I look?” Maize said.

  “What I want is for you to get here ASAP. I’m pretty sure they
’re in the top middle drawer. Stupid stupid stupid!” André hissed into the receiver, and Maize flushed before she realized André was lambasting himself rather than her. Maize promised to be there right away.

  There were plenty of things chocking André’s middle drawer—business cards, address books, cuticle scissors and paper clips and a screwdriver—but no keys except for something so tiny it could only fit a post office box. Maize combed through the drawer a second time but still came up empty. “Please please,” she said aloud to herself. She could picture André yelling at her on some fancy street corner, quivering with rage at her tardiness as he stood beside some customer who wore a perturbed expression along with a Bluetooth and a hundred-thousand-dollar wristwatch.

  She’d looked over toward Eli’s desk for a second reflexively, hoping his large solid presence might steady her, but it was one of Eli’s days off so he wasn’t there.

  Maize told herself not to panic. She would find the keys. Of course she would find them. They were here somewhere. She’d hunt through every other drawer quickly yet carefully and find them and André wouldn’t be angry at her. On the contrary, she’d be André’s heroine.

  But André’s right top drawer had nothing.

  And André’s right middle drawer had no keys either.

  Okay, she thought as she yanked open the bottom right drawer. Now I’m getting somewhere. Under a pile of manila folders there was a heavy steel box with a delicate clasp that rattled promisingly when she picked it up and placed it on her lap. She had some trouble getting the lid open—the clasp was stuck so hard she had to force it—so when she succeeded it popped violently and almost grazed her chin.

  Her hands quivered when she saw what she was holding. Inside the fireproof box she found a pair of platinum cufflinks, a pearl-and-sapphire ring like the one André’s client Betsy Talbot had worn at a pitch session, an invitation to a museum costume ball addressed to another of André’s clients, a gold tie clip she’d never seen André wear in the office, six twenty-dollar bills and nine fifties and four singles, a key chain with a Bentley logo but no key, a French votive candle still in its wrapper and smelling of apricot, two Deco candlesticks she’d admired in the butler’s pantry of a classic seven they’d recently sold in Carnegie Hill, five Tiffany silver swizzle sticks a seller had complained went missing after an open house (“Tell her we’ll find them and shove them up her tight ass,” André had said when Maize relayed the complaint), a dirty linen handkerchief with the monogram PCF, an Hermès belt buckle, and matchbooks from the Carlyle, the Hassler, the Quisisana, and the Savoy. There was also a lot of loose change that sullied Maize’s fingers as she pawed through it looking for the keys.

  She had absolutely no business poring over these objects. She was in far, far too much of a rush to be dillydallying, but she couldn’t help herself. She closed the box and clamped it shut and shoved it exactly where it was before, under the files, then she proceeded frantically to the next drawer. She found four sets of keys in the middle left drawer, grabbed all of them, locked the desk again, threw on her coat, and sprinted out of the office.

  It was only in a cab hurtling up Park Avenue—between reassuring calls to André that she was on her way and requests to the driver that he please go as fast as possible—that she allowed herself to muse about the significance of the artifacts she’d uncovered. They were mostly the kind of small things you wouldn’t notice were missing until well after they disappeared, not for weeks or months or years, because you didn’t use them every day. When you eventually realized they were gone you wouldn’t have an inkling of where they were, although you were sure they must be somewhere just out of reach. And when you failed to locate them you’d blame yourself for losing them. When the truth was that you’d been robbed.

  Her concentration broke as the cab screeched to a stop in front of the townhouse and she paid the driver, neglecting to ask for a receipt.

  “There you are! Just in the nick!” André said as Maize scrambled to hand him the keys, but instead of thanking her he made a shooing gesture and ordered her to run along back to the office.

  Maize had written about that incident right after Robbie interrupted her the other day. She had recounted plenty more about André in her journal over the past month but she didn’t know why. To what end? It was like she was gathering evidence, like she could still be attacked by André tomorrow or the next day or the next, though André probably didn’t give her a thought anymore and had moved on to the task of harrying his new assistant. When she considered the possibility that she’d already been forgotten, a sickly, anxious feeling of having been jilted—not merely by André but by that whole period of her life—reared inside her. However misplaced, that was how she’d felt when her stepfather had left her mother’s house and, as far as she remembered, it was the way she’d felt when her father had died young and suddenly, though she herself had been so young at the time, it was a gauzy memory: pure inchoate hunger for something she needed to survive but had no words for, like a primitive.

  It struck her as strange that she hadn’t felt slighted when men in the city ignored or disregarded her, and that when they did pay attention her breath tightened and she envisioned all the problems they’d have together before she learned anything about them. Undoubtedly it was facile to claim that she’d been too sapped by slaving for André to care enough, or too burned out by the aftermath of her job to rejoin the game. But that’s probably what she’d tell anyone who asked, for lack of a better answer. She was nearly as clueless as the high school Maize popping in and out of Hal Jamesley’s office between classes, as tantalized by whatever happened there as she was protected by the knowledge that it had to end.

  She’d successfully evaded Hal—Hal and all other men except Robbie—before they really knew her. Her lovers might have assumed otherwise because sex allegedly tapped something primal, but they were wrong. There were several different kinds of primal drumming inside any one person, thrusting for dominance and then receding, each with an independent life, and it was sort of ludicrous to peg one or the other as the most essential. Which was most important depended on the season and the day and the moment, didn’t it? And perhaps a certain amount of confusion about it was necessary, not only so you could keep dreaming your life but so your life could keep dreaming you.

  * * *

  Robbie decided that he and Daniel needed a break. Enough with laboring together like a pair of field hands, saying little to each other while around them his mother and Maize and Etta clucked and chattered endlessly, folding and packing and ironing and wrapping. The silence between Robbie and Daniel was growing as uncomfortable as watching a make-out scene in a movie with a lover you barely kissed anymore. Maybe if they both lay by his mother’s pool or plunged into the deep end together it would refresh them. He told Daniel to get out his bathing suit.

  They’d been sunning by the pool for an hour, rubbing lotion on each other’s backs and passing a thermos of iced tea between them, when a shadow passed over their bare torsos like a cloud. Robbie heard Maize’s voice saying, “Get out of those lounge chairs, you lazy bums. We’ve still got tons of chores to do. Starting with the attic.”

  She sounded pushy and directive as though she’d caught her tone from Robbie’s mother. Or maybe she was still flipping the bird at her awful ex-boss, proving how productive she could be despite his firing her. (You think you’re efficient, you treacherous snake? I’ll show you efficient.)

  In a sleepy voice Daniel said, “Piss off, Maize.” He gave a leonine yawn and stretched his muscular arms and legs. “As it happens we are working now. On our tans.”

  “Excuse me?” Maize said. When Robbie opened his eyes she was standing over them with her hands cocked on her hips. “You’re a doctor, Daniel. You know UV rays are bad for you.” She waited for a reply but none came. “And we’re being paid to help out here, remember?”

  “You’re right, Maizie. Of course you’re right. Just five or ten more minutes,” Robbie said. “Prom
ise. Then we’ll be good.”

  “Speak for yourself, Robbie.” Daniel yawned again. He sat up in his chair, blinked against the light, and looked first at Robbie, then at Maize, and then between both of them. Back and forth and back as though the glare had rendered them indistinguishable silhouettes.

  Then he got off the chaise, stood at the edge of the pool, and slipped out of his shorts. His bare buttocks were stunning—smooth and firm and three shades lighter than the skin around them—like a pair of small, succulent honeydews. Just before Daniel crouched and jumped into the pool, he wagged his backside at Maize and Robbie in a mooning gesture. He was underwater before either of them could comment.

  When his head reemerged his straight hair was as slick and glossy as a seal’s.

  Maize yelled, “Woo-hoo, Daniel! Great ass! Hubba!”

  “Gee, thanks,” he said. “But I knew that already.” He swam toward the deep end and then turned back toward them. “There’s more where that came from. Want to see my special water trick?”