The Intimates: A Novel

by Ralph Sassone

  Her mother was becoming a member of the vast, unaffiliated tribe of the lonely. Maize saw them everywhere, sitting in restaurants with their books, or feeding themselves popcorn in movie theaters where they sat trying not to make noise as they sipped their sodas, ready to make way for couples who asked if neighboring seats were saved for anybody, or staring out bus windows or at overhead advertisements in subway cars, feigning rapt engrossment, or at parties nursing their drinks and gazing into the middle distance, searching for something that never quite came into focus, or outside walking the dogs they loved a little too much or a lot too much, or inside on the phone bending someone’s ear with all the petty details, all the subordinate clauses, all the minutiae of their lives, all the redundant statements they couldn’t resist repeating now that they had a real live audience.

  If Maize wasn’t careful she might join that tribe herself. She’d been a flank member in the last two years of high school, when Robbie had suddenly disappeared and they’d stopped speaking, only to have him accidentally show up at college freshman year. And she could have been mistaken for one in the past year as she labored at her office desk, speaking to few people except André or his clients, venturing furtive glances toward Eli’s desk yet never getting up the nerve to cross the little space between them and say something.

  Now she kept staring at her mother. She wished—she had wished for years—that her mother would look across the table and see her for who she truly was. Wasn’t that the myth of what mothers were able to do—have an X-ray vision of their children, even if exposure to too many X-rays was well known to be damaging? But really, who was it her mother would see at the moment? Maize’s focus was blurry and her ambitions were scattered. She’d thought it might toughen her up to survive in a cutthroat business like real estate, or that it would be stimulating to work at a newspaper like Robbie, or that it would be kicky to work with fashion houses like Robbie’s father, or fulfilling to work as a watercolorist like Hal Jamesley or a musician like Eli, or heady as a drug to wrest people from sickness and death like Daniel, or soothing to work with numbers that added up neatly like her mother, or liberating to try all those jobs for a while and see which one suited her, the way she had with hair colors and styles and the way she’d once been with her lovers.

  Yet no matter what she imagined for herself it was temporary and tentative. There was always another color shade, there was always another lover, there was always a different and potentially more arresting Maize beckoning from the sidelines or the periphery, warning her that if she dallied where she was too long she’d miss out on other options, another Maize luring her elsewhere and nowhere. At present her hair was its original color and usual length after countless experiments. She had no lover after hooking up through four college years, nor did she particularly want one. She had no job except for the terminal work Robbie’s mother had offered her for the week. She was in roughly the same position she’d been in high school and looked pretty much the same, too. If she ran into one of her old classmates on the trip between her mother’s condo and Robbie’s mother’s house, none of them would have the slightest inkling of the changes she’d been through since she was mousy little Maize hiding in the back row of social studies. Only Robbie would know.

  “If Bruce really didn’t do anything inappropriate, then why are you crying?” her mother said now.

  “What?” When she fingered her cheeks there were indeed tears streaming down her face. She swiped at them brusquely.

  “Maize?” her mother said.

  “I’m not crying,” Maize said. “My eyes are watering. I think I might be having an allergic reaction. Maybe to the shrimp.”

  * * *

  Back at the house that afternoon, while he and Daniel were in the sweaty attic that had basically become a junk room, Robbie checked his e-mail and found another urgent message from one of his coworkers. Again asking Robbie if he knew where the heavy-duty stapler was.

  He didn’t write back, although it was against his diligent nature not to. He’d left the stapler in the copy room file cabinet but they could figure that out for themselves. He was on vacation after all—if you could call this a vacation—and he wanted them to leave him alone so he could forget about his depressing job for a few days.

  “Whoa,” Daniel yelled from the other side of the attic. “Come over here, Robbie. Take a look at this.”

  Robbie was grateful to be called; he and Daniel hadn’t been speaking much all day. When he joined Daniel he found him hovering over a long, rectangular white cardboard box lined with pink satin—a bit like a white coffin—with matching pink wisps of silk tissue paper scattered near the lid Daniel had removed. Inside was a white silk dress with ivory beads at the bodice and sleeves.

  Could those be real seed pearls? In any case it was clearly a wedding gown. Robbie could tell that even before Daniel lifted it out of the box, releasing the smell of mothballs, its hem scraping the floor.

  “What are we supposed to do with this?” Daniel said, holding it up.

  “I wouldn’t know. I wish Maize were here. She’d know what to do.” Robbie touched it carefully—lightly and tentatively as he would a relic. Then he said, “Let’s just shove it back in the box.”

  “And then what?” Daniel said.

  “Forget we ever saw it and leave it here.”

  “We can’t do that,” Daniel said. “This house is supposed to be completely empty by the closing. It would weird out the new owners.”

  Before Robbie could stop him Daniel was at the top of the attic stairs, calling down to Robbie’s mother. “Hi down there!” he shouted twice, more loudly the second time. “Advice needed!”

  “What?” his mother called back. “What’s so important? Etta and I are in the middle of something.”

  “Could you come up for a second?”

  “What? What?” she said as she climbed the attic stairs. When she reached the top and saw Daniel holding up the dress she said, “Oh, please. Throw that out.”

  Robbie said, “You sure? Maybe you want to think it over a little.”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said. “It’s useless.”

  “But I mean,” Robbie said. “You know.” He took a moment. “You could, at least, maybe, donate it somewhere.”

  “Where—a knocked-up-girl’s society?” she said. “Look at it. It’s yellowed at the edges. And nobody wants a used wedding gown anyway. That’s bad luck unless it’s the bride’s mother’s or grandmother’s.” She glared at Robbie and laughed a laugh that was more like a scoff. “I assume you have no use for it.”

  “Of course not,” Daniel said. “But that’s hardly the point.”

  “Huh? Pardon?” She turned her glare on Daniel. It was the first time since she’d looked at him since the pool incident the day before, Robbie noticed, as if she were too repulsed to hazard so much as a glance in his direction. “Excuse me, bub, but I hardly need to be told what the point of my wedding dress is by you, thanks. So get rid of it. Or here. Better still—” She grabbed the gown from Daniel’s hands and laid it roughly over her forearm, where a bride would carry a bouquet. “I’ll take care of it.” And with that she turned her back on them both and stomped down the stairs, some of the voluminous silk catching on the steps as if it were a train she still hadn’t learned how to walk with correctly.

  “Charming,” Daniel said to Robbie when she was gone. “Now I see where you get your warmth.”

  Robbie took his cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at the time. He read Maize’s wry text message from the road. He calculated that it would be at least three more hours before Maize returned from visiting her mother, acting as she always did like Persephone freed from hell, though Robbie had always found Maize’s mother pleasant enough. One hundred eighty minutes and at least ten thousand eight hundred seconds. It seemed like forever. He could hardly wait for her to get back.

  * * *

  “Let’s get out of here,” Robbie said that night, after Maize had returned and the
three of them were facing down another dinner at his mother’s table. “Let’s borrow the car and go somewhere fun.”

  “I’m game,” Maize said. “Where?”

  “Anywhere. I don’t care. Anywhere,” he said.

  “We have to have a plan,” Daniel said, “or we’ll just be driving around aimlessly like suburban mall rats.”

  “Well, I don’t have a plan—okay? My plan right now is to avoid going crazy from being cooped up in the same house for five days on end. Is that good enough?”

  Maize felt like she should say something fast. Since she’d come back from her mother’s, Robbie had been unusually snappish. Daniel wasn’t responding much but Maize doubted that would last. She wondered what had happened while she was gone. When she’d returned and asked Robbie how his day went he’d only said, “I survived.”

  “I guess we could go to Playland,” Maize said. A lame suggestion, but she was desperate to offer something. She turned to Daniel. “It’s an amusement park.”

  “Oh goody-goody,” Daniel said. “The three of us can buy cotton candy and pretend to be ten-year-olds. Sounds intelligent.”

  “I’ll go get the car keys from my mother while you two figure it out,” Robbie said.

  But when he left Maize and Daniel just sat there in her guest room, avoiding each other’s eyes and waiting for Robbie to return, until the silence between them was so embarrassing she had to break it by saying, “I wonder what’s taking Robbie so long.”

  “His mother’s probably hassling him about taking the car,” Daniel said. “Sour old bitch.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.” Maize studied the knobs on the dresser. “You don’t know her.”

  “I don’t want to know her any better,” Daniel said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Maize pretended she needed a bathroom break just to get away from him—or if not from Daniel, from her disappointment for him. She felt sorry for him since he’d come up here so eager to win over Robbie’s mother and impress Robbie with his usefulness, unaware of how skittish they both could be before they’d known someone a long time. She guessed it must be hard for someone like Daniel—someone used to succeeding—to understand why he couldn’t. Perhaps he’d sat around trying to figure out how to crack the code to them. But it wasn’t that simple with Robbie and his mother. They were a confusing pair—magnetic yet standoffish, passionate yet aloof—and Maize guessed they confused themselves as much as anyone else. Under their chill exteriors hot currents blew into the sealed chambers of their personalities, clouding up the perspective the way a driver’s breath fogged a windshield on a winter day and made it difficult to see forward, so that the only solution seemed another blast of cold air. It made her shiver to notice it.

  Not that she was one to judge, given the way she’d acted around anyone eligible or interested in her for the past five years.

  Once Robbie got the car keys and they buckled themselves into his mother’s Mercedes, it all felt better: like an improved version of countless nights from Maize’s teen years. Driving and driving with no place to go, only this time around it wasn’t frustrating. In fact it was sort of delicious, knowing she wouldn’t have to return to her mother’s, resting against the cushy leather seats of a fancy car, gliding down winding roads. They passed posh houses where the sprinkler systems had snapped on, sending up misty sprays that made the properties look like dreams of themselves. Suddenly it was easy to see how people could get seduced into living here forever: everything was lush yet tidy and manicured, with the borderlines clearly marked and irises flaring in the dusk light. Every place looked like a haven and every lighted lampshade glowed in the windows against the encroaching dark.

  “This is tedious,” Daniel said from the backseat. “Do we have any idea where we’re going?”

  “Sort of, sort of not,” Robbie said as they turned a corner and passed the public high school. “Look, Maizie, your alma mater.”

  “Oh god, don’t remind me,” she said. “Drive faster.”

  “You know who I saw at the hardware store yesterday, when I had to get paintbrushes? Old Mrs. Franc, looking as certifiable as ever. She was screaming at the cashier about expired coupons or something.”

  “Yikes.” Maize turned back to Daniel and said, “A seriously wacko guidance counselor,” hoping she could change the subject by including him in the conversation if Robbie wouldn’t.

  “Was she your senior-year counselor?” Robbie said.

  “No.”

  “Who was?”

  “Not her. Someone else. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Could we maybe stop at a diner or something? I’m getting thirsty all of a sudden.”

  She wanted to detour around the subject of Hal Jamesley—yet even if she didn’t, what would there be to report? A minor flirtation in a college counselor’s office, with someone who’d once shared his cigarette with her and accidentally touched her hand? Even after she’d abruptly stopped visiting Hal he didn’t have the nerve to say anything to her—nothing beyond an overzealous “Hi! Hi!” whenever they passed each other in the school hallways and a stabbed look when she smiled without stopping to talk to him. The most he’d done was slip a handmade card with one of his watercolors into her locker with the question How Are You Doing These Days? But she hadn’t replied. If she told Robbie, he might think she was making the whole thing up.

  And it would be the same thing if she told Robbie more about Eli. They’d had a makeshift date and she’d pecked him chastely on the cheek at the end of the evening. It was next to nothing.

  Yet even after dozens of dates and hookups she’d never stopped thinking about Hal, really. She had to admit that to herself. Perhaps it wasn’t Hal she pined for but the thrilled anticipation she’d felt in his office, the mystique of sex rather than the overripe smell of it. Was that how it had been for Robbie in the run-up to his affair with Professor J., before it went wrong between them?

  She’d never again experienced what she’d had with Hal. Not quite. She’d kissed and danced and fucked and had volcanic orgasms but it—whatever it was—hadn’t begun to happen except for the brief and distant thrummings she’d felt around Eli. The last sex she’d had was with the cop who’d answered her emergency call after their apartment was cleaned out, who’d invited her on a date and said, “I could really get into a girl like you” while they were doing it, pulling his torso away from hers for a second and staring at her with his slightly beady eyes, smiling nervously—both wicked and boyish—so that his amber-colored mustache furrowed and lifted like an alert. They’d been humping against a wall in his apartment in Kew Gardens, so horny they hadn’t gotten past his foyer to the bedroom, and he was still wearing his uniform shirt as they rutted and thrust together. She realized at that moment that she could make him fall in love with her if she wanted to and, just maybe, let herself fall in love with him. But instead she’d turned it into a joke. “What do you mean you could get into me?” she’d said, looking down toward their crotches. “You already are into me, last I checked.” And they both laughed at how she’d deftly restaged a moment of true feeling into a fleeting farcical bit of craziness, saving them both. She knew she’d never see him again.

  Despite that tryst she’d been sort of a eunuch the past year—for several years, really—dwelling on a guy she’d met at seventeen because it was easy. Or at least easier than sticking around to have her conversations with Hal go soggy or to discover that he was a second-rate artist and she wasn’t nearly as special as he’d thought.

  If she’d been a cleverer girl—more manipulative or more spiteful—she would have stayed with the cop long enough to get André into legal trouble. She could have told him everything that had happened with André, the same as she’d told Robbie, and had him or one of his fellow cops pay André a little visit.

  On Maize’s last full day at the office, André had Maize call his home machine and leave a voice mail saying that André would be working late again and not to expect him. Fifteen minutes later Trevor call
ed back, screaming. Had André forgotten that it was their son’s birthday party that night? What the hell was wrong with him? He insisted that he speak with André directly, but when Maize put him on hold André said, “No dice, tell the douche bag I’m out or in the middle of a phone conference.”

  When Maize did as ordered, haltingly, Trevor said, “Uh-huh. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” and when Maize murmured that she wouldn’t he said, “And you wouldn’t lie to an eight-year-old on his birthday, right?” She heard him calling, “Jordan! Jordan! Get over here, please!”

  Maize clamped her palm over the receiver and called across the office in a fierce stage whisper: “André! He’s putting your son on the phone!” But André’s only response was to snarl and say, “I’m not here.” He slashed his finger across his own throat—a gesture he’d used many times before, whenever he wanted someone to stop talking immediately. Maize said “Help!” but André merely slashed his finger again.

  “Hi. Who are you?” André’s little boy was now saying into the receiver.

  “Oh—hi. Hi there,” Maize said. “Is this Jordan? Hi. I’m—this is your dad’s assistant. His helper. I mean, I work with your dad.” She had nearly said her name, but she was too abashed; she didn’t want to be specifically identified with this appalling little interlude. “Happy birthday, Jordan!” she said brightly. “How old are you today?”

  “Eight,” he said. “I want my dad.”

  Maize looked up and saw that André had closed his office door behind him. “He’s away,” Maize said. “Away right now.”

  “What?” Jordan said. She thought he wanted her to repeat what she’d said, but that wasn’t it. He was listening to something his other father was saying in the background, something Maize could overhear only in wisps, and when he said, “What? Okay,” she knew that André’s partner was feeding his son lines even before Jordan spoke them.

  “Promise me my father isn’t there,” the little boy said. “It’s my birthday. Swear it.”