The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  He glanced at his calendar and saw only two meetings scheduled for the afternoon. Sneaking out early was a possibility. Maybe he and Cass could grab a bite instead of their usual scrounge-or-Seamless routine. But then he remembered he was meeting Leon at Starbucks on 112th Street at six. He couldn’t bail on Leon. His Little Brother had specifically asked Jonathan for help reviewing his college essay after their last group outing. Oh well, he’d have dinner out with Cass another night. She would understand. Cass loved Leon.

  Five years of marriage. The days were long but the years were flying by. Or maybe the days were short but the years were dragging. Somehow the rhythm of their lives felt askew—maybe because they weren’t marking it with children’s milestones yet (#twoweeksoldtoday or #teddysfirstsmile). Jonathan wasn’t quite sure why, but it felt like loving Cass could somehow warp time.

  3. CASS

  “THEY’RE REALLY, REALLY cute, Jem,” Cass said with a mouth full of guacamole and chips. Burn four hundred calories in spin class, consume eight hundred calories three hours later when her insides felt like they were eating themselves for survival. That was the latest pastime of her sabbatical—finding sense in the nonsensical.

  Jemima vigorously nodded her agreement, looking at her children like they were the Second Coming. It was love so entirely pure and all-encompassing that Cass couldn’t help feeling jealous. Count your own blessings, she reminded herself. It had become something of a daily chant for her lately.

  “I’m not supposed to say it, right? That they’re so adorable? But you don’t have your own yet so I think I can.”

  Cass tried to follow that logic, not that she should be critiquing anyone’s stream of consciousness. Her own looked like a Rorschach test.

  “Jasper? Blakey? Come hug Mummy.”

  The twins, newly three, borderline obedient, trotted over and jumped onto Cass’s couch to nestle into waiting arms, their salsa-stained hands leaving drops like fresh blood on the Ultrasuede. It was washable. Carmel the decorator, for all her insistence on unnecessary chairs and insufferable references to channeling Coco Chanel’s atelier, was exceptionally good at picking easy-to-live-with materials. And for that Cass was grateful, considering she hadn’t wanted to use a decorator in the first place and only did so because Jonathan suggested it and she was getting crushed at work at the time (two national tours of hit musicals, three new plays each with questionable subject matter at the Public) and didn’t have the bandwidth to devote to the apartment. So while Cass could have chosen a pleasing palette and designed an efficient furniture plan, she didn’t have a clue about thread counts and dye lots and durability and the difference between calacatta and terrazzo. Carmel had worked with enough young couples to know how to poop-proof and snot-proof chicly. Their decorator didn’t have to ask Cass and Jonathan about whether they planned to have children in the apartment. One look at them, the smiling and strapping Coynes holding hands in the design meetings, and procreation seemed inevitable.

  Before she moved in with Jonathan, Cass lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in the West Village. She did a decent job fixing up the place—and the daily hike up and down gave her a killer ass—but there was only so far she could go with her starter salary, most of which was going directly to pay down her college loans. She could repaint an Ikea cabinet and repurpose it as a bar cart, but it was still a few cheap slabs of particle board screwed together. She was reminded of that fact when it started to fall apart after only a few months. It would have been nice if her father, a contractor by trade, could have helped with the assembly. The instructions might as well have still been in Swedish. But her subpar accommodations didn’t matter that much to her—she was out every night seeing a show or working late in the office, and it just felt so good to be on her own. She had been de facto “on her own” since childhood, but, as a working woman, it finally felt like her independence and stage of life were appropriately aligned. She was never going to get visits from her parents to see her apartment or to take her for a trendy brunch in the Village, but at least she wasn’t alone, cowering in the library, on Parents’ Weekend.

  The first time she and Jonathan met with Carmel after their engagement to discuss redoing his bachelor pad, Cass had to keep pinching herself under the table to confirm it wasn’t a dream. She was choosing fabrics that cost three hundred dollars a yard, and someone else was paying for it without blinking an eye. She’d known that Jonathan’s career was going well—thank God she’d never considered settling down with one of the theater guys from college who were all probably on unemployment now—but still, this was almost too much to take in. When the decorator’s snarky assistant asked them for a deposit for the living room sofa, Cass had asked, innocently enough, for the details of the layaway plan. “No, honey,” he’d said, hand on hip, “this isn’t a payment plan. It’s standard to pay the atelier 50 percent up front for a custom piece.” Jonathan had squeezed her knee gently. It was a gesture of reassurance. His touch meant, “I don’t care that you don’t know about crap like this.” But Cass had wanted to shrivel up and disappear behind the marble breakfront—another exorbitantly priced object headed to their home. Yes, she was thrilled the days of layaway and wearing dresses with discreetly hidden tags only to return them the next day were over, but she hated the way she couldn’t shake feeling like trailer trash, that she was nothing without Jonathan. The contrast between them was too vast. And there was just so much for her to learn. Always.

  Cass edged closer to Jemima and the twins, cozily scrunched together on that very same couch, and let her forearms brush up against the huddle. What she liked most about her neighbor’s children was the feel of their skin. It was buttery soft and supple, the smoothest thing she’d ever touched in her whole life. That thought made her sad. Thirty-four years old and the best things she’d ever stroked were the alabaster cheeks of the toddlers in Apartment 16E. The closest second was the ikat fabric Carmel covered everything in.

  “It’s so much work, though,” Jemima volunteered as Blake shoved a football-shaped cookie into her mouth. “These kids suck the living daylights out of me. I almost never get a break. Even with Manuela and the part-time nanny, I’m washing, cleaning, calming or playing with something or someone the entire day. You’ll see soon enough. We”—she leaned in conspiratorially and covered the twins’ ears (the outer ears with her hands, the inner ones by suctioning them together, forcing a shriek out of Jasper)—“basically never have sex. We’re too tired.”

  “Neither do we,” Cass said, but the words lodged in her mouth so that all that actually came out was a cross between a groan and a mumble. Better that she didn’t say it anyway. Her mother was perhaps the opposite of a fountain of wisdom, but she had wisely advised Cass not to air dirty laundry—probably because she herself had so much of it. Besides, people were so weird about sex. Yes, intimate details were shared. Gaggles of girls whispered over dirty martinis at overpriced restaurants, “He couldn’t find my g-spot with a map” or “Anal was an utter disaster for us.” But the deep, dark truths, the ones that could reveal weaknesses in the fibers of a relationship, those were kept subterranean, and so you never really knew when you heard “We never have sex,” if that meant no more than once a week, or whether long, dry months had passed, causing condoms to expire and converting NuvaRings into vestigial body parts.

  It is worth it, though, isn’t it? Cass wanted to ask this deep and pressing question of her neighbor, whose answer might be a simple “Of course” or a cascading litany of trade-offs and hedges. Cass had always imagined that sacrificing her sanity and energy to have children who charged at her when she came through the door and always seemed to smell like baby powder and lemon zest was a no-brainer. But what about work? Cass wondered if Jemima missed it—their shared industry, so full of passion and creativity and, yes, glamour at times. But she couldn’t really ask now. Not in front of the twins. Maybe she’d ask Jemima the next time they were alone—she theorized it happening post
–spin class, when they were both sweaty and ready for truths to spill out of open pores, or over manicures while the technicians were distracted. Though really, she knew the chances of her probing this topic with her friend were quite low. Again, honesty would be an issue, hers and Jemima’s. Besides, Cass’s concerns with parenthood would be wholly unrelatable to Jemima. Hers were borne of unique circumstances that belonged solely to her and Jonathan.

  Across the living room, on low-slung Barcelona chairs, the other halves of these theoretically sexually deprived couples sat. Jonathan had a cold beer in his hand, a monogrammed linen cocktail napkin wrapped around it to catch the beads of condensation. It was a ridiculous sight, the Amstel covered in an E. Braun napkin that probably cost a fortune and took two months to make if you believed the whole “handmade in Florence” bit. But didn’t she love that? That Jonathan knew about “good” napkins but didn’t care enough to treat them with any particular respect? Nothing could be a further image from her upbringing. Her mom took one-ply napkins from the McDonald’s dispenser and stuffed them in her purse. The only time Cass saw ketchup come out of a squeeze bottle was at a playdate. Otherwise, it arrived in tiny packets pilfered from the condiment bar. Maybe that’s where her Le Bristol shampoo kleptomania came from. She could bring that up at her next shower therapy session, while she worked the stolen goods through her roots.

  Next to Jonathan, Jemima’s husband, Henry, sat with his paunch of a stomach spilling over his thighs, his shirt pulled so tightly across his chest a button was sure to pop off before the fourth quarter. Something good happened on the screen. Both men screamed, jumped up, hugged wildly, then peeled apart like one of them had told the other he had leprosy. Men were so strange about physical closeness, particularly her husband, who spooned her after sex for less than thirty seconds before rolling over or, worse, hopping in the shower. She didn’t want to complain about it, though, to become one of those wives bemoaning a lack of intimacy. She wanted to be above clichés. At least she knew not to take the lack of warmth personally. It was Super Bowl Sunday and her husband couldn’t embrace his friend without shame after a Giants touchdown. Correction: a field goal tying up the score. Cass really couldn’t give a crap. But it was better than sitting alone with Jonathan on the sofa, Chinese containers stinking up the apartment and her caring not a lick about the game. In those circumstances, she’d have ended up doing both of Puddles’s nightly walks in the freezing cold because the Super Bowl was sacred, an automatic pass for husbands. So she invited the Wentworths instead. Jonathan was thrilled. And she’d had an excuse to hire the dog walker: entertaining. What would her mother, or Tiff, or anyone else from home say if they caught wind that she shelled out forty bucks to have someone else scoop the poop for one evening? She’d been walking Puddles during the day since leaving her job without any trouble, but the night walks on the icy streets, those she particularly hated.

  Luckily, Jemima wasn’t judgmental and knew virtually nothing of where Cass had come from. They knew each other from work and had a long history together as far as friendships formed post-college went. They’d worked on the same show several years before Jemima gave birth to the twins, a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Cass was marketing and for which Jemima was designing the costumes. The wardrobe choices were impeccable. Cass had never seen a more sensual and explosive Maggie. After seeing the show in previews, Cass felt compelled to reach out to the costume designer. She was a newcomer named Jemima Bartlett who had recently brought her talents Stateside from the West End. A friendship bloomed and they met frequently for lunch in the Broadway district and dished about the bitchy insiders they both had to contend with. A few years later, Jemima was fixed up with Henry Wentworth, also a Brit, and got pregnant on their honeymoon. They left their Upper West Side rental for Brooklyn in search of square footage and a small backyard, even though it meant a harder commute for both of them.

  The Wentworths were initially charmed by Park Slope, even admitting to joining the famously high-handed food co-op, where the couple had mandatory shifts peddling bee pollen. But when Jasper and Blake were only two months old, Cass received a frantic email from Jemima detailing a harrowing scene at a breastfeeding support group that she attended strictly to make friends. The truth was that the feeding was going fine for Jemima—she’d stick a kid on each tit and watch Kathie Lee & Hoda at ten, Days of Our Lives at one, Ellen at four and Jeopardy! at seven. According to her, it was the least guilty she’d ever felt about her TV addiction. Still, she needed a mommy crew to roll with now that she’d taken an indefinite leave from her job, so she googled “mastitis” and headed for the pretentious Bend & Bloom yoga studio with her double stroller. There she found, in her words, “Bloody preschoolers demanding milk from their mums. I told Henry, to hell with the tiny excuse for a backyard we have. We’re moving back to Manhattan where children who can talk drink cow’s milk.” Cass had felt her nipples tingle at their conversation. She wanted to think it was a sign of readiness, but more likely it was a biological reaction to the memory of hearing her mother say to friends that it had been easier and cheaper to breastfeed Cass than to bother going out for formula.

  On impulse, Cass had told Jemima that their next-door neighbors were moving to the suburbs and vacating a lovely Classic Six if the Wentworths were interested in having a look. She didn’t think Jem would actually bite, but she and Henry jumped on the F train, each of them clutching a twin and oohing and aahing the next day over what would be the twins’ room and the kitchen’s southern exposure.

  Cass never appreciated just how talkative and unguarded Jem was until they became neighbors. Only then did she notice how her friend was eerily similar to a well-shaken soda can, prepared to bubble over if someone pulled her tab. This was especially true after a few drinks. Initially it made Cass nervous to be around someone who shared so much. She worried about having to give after all that take. But several years later Jemima still seemed content with the one-way nature of their relationship, and everything Cass had vaulted didn’t seem to be in any danger of getting out. Henry and Jonathan got on well enough. Between sports and the Dow Jones, they didn’t seem to lack for conversation. The Wentworth twins lived for Puddles, and Cass approved of anyone who appreciated Puddles’s supremacy over all other dogs. It was a happy living arrangement, not quite Melrose Place, but with Jemima’s unwillingness to acknowledge that American football was a real thing and Cass’s utter disinterest in sports, having them over for the Super Bowl was pretty ideal. The way their neighbors interacted—Henry often saying something inappropriate (misogynist comments were his jaw-dropper of choice, though he got away with it more than he should have because of his charming accent), Jemima swatting at him but secretly loving his irreverence—would give her and Jonathan so much to discuss over leftover pigs in a blanket once their guests left. Dissection: their favorite.

  “More wine?” Cass turned to Jemima, the bottle of Sancerre in her hand sweating onto her friend’s leather pants. Jem nodded appreciatively. She claimed her alcohol consumption tripled after having the twins, meaning a ratio of 1.5 drinks per child. Cass was already gently lying to her internist about her own drinking habits. Intake form: How many drinks do you consume per week? She’d scribble a five that could all too easily be mistaken for a three. She couldn’t imagine where her drinking would go after childbirth, especially on the heels of nine months of forced sobriety. Jonathan almost never drank to excess—she’d marvel at how he’d manage to leave over half a glass of wine at dinner when she’d gulped hers down before the appetizer arrived.

  “Mummy?” Blake said, looking suddenly green-tinged and hollow. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  Jemima rolled her eyes at Cass while stroking her daughter’s back. “It never ends,” she mouthed.

  “Henry, we have to go. Blake’s stomach again.”

  Cass watched as Henry rose slowly from his chair, the expression he shot to Jonathan clearly indicating that he didn’t und
erstand why that meant he should have to leave too.

  “Now,” Jemima snapped.

  Blake tugged wildly at her mother’s hand, signaling an urgency that frightened Cass. A moment after the door to their apartment shut and certainly before the Wentworths made it the ten paces to their home, the sounds of violent retching could be heard.

  Jesus, was that going to be her soon? Cass wondered. Mopping up puke, leaving parties early, sniping at her husband about shared responsibilities. Perhaps, but it would also be her French-braiding silken fine hair and securing it with satin ribbons, ordering Brown onesies online, lending a hand to assist those first wobbly steps. Those moments would surely eclipse the grunt work, she assured herself as she settled back onto the couch and gazed at her husband, wondering if any of these thoughts were running through his mind. For her at least, having a child was an opportunity to do everything so much better than she’d had it. Maybe so for Jonathan too, to a lesser extreme. They would make good parents, she and Jonathan, just so long as she could keep her head out of her ass and appreciate how good things were. But the reality was that having a child with Jonathan would mean increased dependence on him. And that wasn’t something she could easily abide after so many years of going it alone. She was scared to need someone so acutely.

  As she surveyed the shipwreck conditions of her apartment, her cell phone dinged.

  Sorry about that, Jemima wrote. Hoping that you’ll come to the twins’ bday party next weekend. It’s at Chelsea Piers. I promise to serve wine.