The Intimates: A Novel
Page 24
“I’m sure he’d like to help you with it, anyway,” his mother said. “He’s your father. And he’s always loved giving his opinions regardless of whether anyone asked for them.” She coughed out a laugh.
The car continued to idle with the air conditioner running full blast. When it got close to departure time Robbie and Maize decided they’d better wait on the platform. Robbie’s mother insisted on watching from the car until she knew they were safely on board.
“That’s hardly necessary. What could happen to us here?” Robbie said. “You think we’ll get rolled by a roving band of golf ladies from Westport?”
“No,” his mother said. “But still.”
The train was late in arriving. Robbie and Maize sat in the plexiglass-enclosed waiting room, with their backs to his mother’s shadowy figure just a few yards behind them. Every few minutes one of them turned and waved to her and she waved back. When the train finally came they waved one last time and took a place on the three-seater side of the cabin, piling their bags on the empty seat beside them so no one would sit there. It was as if they were marking the spot where Daniel had been on the way up.
* * *
The train didn’t accelerate after it pulled away from the station, as Maize would have expected. It lumbered along as towns came into view beyond the window and slid away one after the other, slow enough for her to catch sight of landmarks in each place like chapters in a book. The train stopped and started and stopped again.
She pictured the apartment they’d be going back to—rooms so bare they echoed, the air inside it sharp and raw and waiting to be filled. For the moment it felt enthralling instead of frightening, or enthrallingly frightening. Her heartbeat thrummed as if she was beginning something.
She glanced out the window as they neared the Grand Central tunnel. Then she kept staring into the darkness where, here and there, a green light appeared, or an electrical box. Her reflection bloomed on the glass like a figure in a night window and she found she looked exotic and compelling. Although it made no sense—they had nearly no time left—she pulled out her pen and she bent over her journal as the train lights flickered above her.
In the romantic ending of her story, she would fall in love with Eli or a painter or the cop or an editor who wanted to publish every word she wrote, or someone else she hadn’t met just yet. She’d be happy or something like it. Wasn’t that the ending everyone wanted? Wasn’t that the ending she was supposed to want? Perhaps someday she would have it. All she could do today was phone Eli when she got back to the apartment, after she unpacked, and hope he’d take her call.
For the moment she still had Robbie sitting beside her—just one slot over, the way he’d existed in her imagination for so long, even in the years when they were separated—so close that she could feel his breath on her. It seemed like a lot: a true friend traveling next to her and, deep inside her, the fierce and strange impulse to write it all down.
As she wondered again what would happen next and what would become of her, the heat from Robbie’s leg pressed against hers and she kept filling the journal’s blank page until she reached the bottom of it, where she ran out of space.
Before she could turn the page to scrawl anything else Robbie said, “It won’t be long now,” as they both moved deeper into the tunnel and the city that lay beyond.
Acknowledgments
For their brilliant advice and invaluable support during the writing of this book, I am grateful to my friends Katherine Dieckmann and Clifford Chase; my astounding agent, Bill Clegg; my inspiring and extraordinary editor, Jonathan Galassi; and Peter and Lucy. I would also like to thank Jesse Coleman, Walter Abish, Concetta Adinolfi, Ryan Chapman, Dean Crawford, Kathy Daneman, Raffaella De Angelis, Robert DeMaria, Jr., Shaun Dolan, Frank Frattaroli, Elisa Gerarden, Daniel Halpern, John Hawkes, Matt Hudson, Ann E. Imbrie, Toni Y. Joseph, Rabbi Jennifer Krause, Jannay Morrow, Judith Nichols, Mary O’Donnell, Chris Peterson, Chris Pomeroy, Alice Quinn, Edmund Rung, Emily Russell, Paul Russell, Jeff Seroy, Ira Silverberg, Brett Singer, Elsieliese Thrope, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Nancy Willard and Eric Lindbloom, Amy Wilner, my family, everyone at FSG, and the late Jerome Badanes, for generosity in many forms.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011 by Ralph Sassone
All rights reserved
First edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sassone, Ralph.
The intimates / Ralph Sassone.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-17697-6 (alk. paper)
1. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.A813 I67 2010
813'.6—dc22
2010024668
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-2958-5
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux eBook Edition: February 2011