She was sure Jonathan had been the one to put that bottle of white back the other night. He’d offered to clean the table while she sorted through their mail and, out of the corner of her eye, she’d seen him put the Chardonnay in the fridge. He always did stupid shit like that, shelving cereal boxes with ten lousy flakes remaining or not replacing a toilet paper roll with one square left. Why wouldn’t he when, in his childhood home, fresh cereal and full rolls of toilet paper were magicked into existence? The sitcom version of her would have gotten him back by emptying his aftershave or favorite ice cream. Even if she didn’t have the energy for such antics, she wanted at least to be the Cass who practically skipped down the aisle five years ago, because that woman would never pick a fight about a silly thing like an empty wine bottle put back in the fridge.
God, had she wanted to marry Jonathan Coyne back then. Throughout their engagement, at the dress fittings getting nicked by pins, stuffing her face with veal loin at the tastings, proofreading in the calligrapher’s office, she’d sometimes get asked, “Any cold feet?” Not even chilled, she’d answer. In fact, her soles were ablaze, ready to run down the aisle at their wedding in the four-inch white satin Louboutins that she’d splurged on. “Prick me!” Cass wanted to yell at the dressmaker. “So that I know this is real.”
She couldn’t wait to loosen her father’s half-assed hold on her elbow when she reached the altar and to toss the orchid bouquet to all the single ladies like it was a hot potato. In the beginning, Cass even loved Betsy and her cluster of pearl-choked, martini-swilling friends: Louisa, Cecile, the Susans. The whole crew from the Cheshire Golf & Tennis Club made Cass feel elevated, like she suddenly existed on a plateau where the worst problem she might encounter was a back-ordered tablecloth. These ladies loved throwing showers. They loved inviting their daughters to meet the “new girl,” watching with pride as their offspring taught Cass how to make a hat out of ribbons and told her where to get the best stationery. And the daughters themselves were as sleek and invulnerable as a pack of young swans. They’d never had to watch the family credit cards get snipped in half by sniggering supermarket clerks or pretend they were dieting when their moms packed them a dented can of SlimFast for lunch instead of a sandwich.
Cass was genuinely over the moon as she sat in an oversized floral armchair with ornate wooden handles at her bridal shower (thrown by her future mother-in-law, of course), opening her fourth salad spinner. Because it meant she was marrying Jonathan Coyne, security at last. Love too, but sometimes Cass felt that part was ancillary. The last page of the novel was read, she’d carefully written the beginning, and all she had to look forward to was enjoying the middle.
There were girls, she’d known them all her life, who just couldn’t stand to be alone. So they went from boyfriend to boyfriend, trying out mates like they were shoes in a department store with a good return policy. Not her. Watching her mother marry and divorce three times and keep the company of dead-end boyfriends in between was all Cass needed to comprehend the value of independence and of waiting to settle down. Seventeen years of parental neglect did a lot to prepare her for the lonely stretches, to teach her to find satisfaction in the quiet of her own company. She was solo throughout Brown, kissing—sometimes screwing—whomever she felt like, but waiting patiently for the right person to come along before she honed in. Jonathan was it. She was certain. It just took him longer to realize how perfect they could be together.
She knew after their first encounter. At the college bar, after they exchanged their first real conversation after a hundred imagined ones, and Jonathan stood under a fluorescent Coors sign that made his dark hair glint and fished with strong hands through his worn leather wallet to pay for their drinks, something seismic happened to her. Then even more spark when he kissed her in the snow outside her dorm before sauntering off with the crooked gait of a tipsy college student. The current started in the tips of her fingers, the neurological origin point of chemistry, then spread to the pit of her belly, and finally erupted in the quickening of her heart. The work she’d done to make this moment come about had been worth it.
And then he didn’t call.
It bothered her for an entire month, much longer than she’d let any other guy unnerve her. Checking her email every five minutes, asking her roommates timidly if anyone had called—it was humiliating, like she was back in high school vying for the pretty, rich girls to look at her. There could be no denying that she and Jonathan clicked, exchanging easy banter with the ring of sitcom dialogue, laughing at each other’s jokes and trading stories like Halloween candy. He copped to seeing her around campus, and she thought she did an excellent job of playing coy about it, even while he did his best to figure out which course they may have taken together. And, boy, was he pretty. Long lashes, a narrow jawline, brown silky hair she ran through her fingers when they kissed. His tan was even, save the sunglass outline in white. There was mostly Irish and Italian in her stock, with a sliver of Eastern European Jewish (a “mutt,” her father used to call her, even though the word made her blood boil), and the ability to tan evenly would be something she’d envy in others her whole life, using it as a misguided decoder of social class. She’d never come across a guy who looked like Jonathan back home. Men in her hometown of Hazel Park, Michigan, wore tattoo sleeves instead of Izod; they grew mullets instead of letting the wind sweep their hair into whatever good thing Jonathan had going on.
All signs had pointed to him asking her out. He wanted to know which joint she thought had the best pizza in Providence, what her plans were for Christmas break (he was going to Round Hill, Jamaica—a place she had to look up later; she was reluctantly off to her aunt’s house in Delaware), and even inquired about past relationships. Cass, trying to play it cool, said she was doing her best to focus on school and not get too distracted with dating. She shared that she was majoring in theater arts and minoring in history, an impractical combination, but it suited her, and she saw Jonathan nod approvingly. She made sure to mention that if she met someone worthwhile, she’d find the time to juggle dating and schoolwork, hint hint. He said there’d been someone, his high school girlfriend, Brett, two years his junior, but they’d broken up quite a while ago. She didn’t like the face he made when he said her name or the way he hung on to that last t in her name. There were obvious traces of wistfulness, which she prayed was just high school nostalgia. Guys like Jonathan, the preppy boys, always came to college with a girlfriend from home. Someone sweet who visited campus for football games and fraternity parties wearing a Tiffany heart necklace, who pasted pictures of her far-off beau on the inside of her locker. The only certain thing about these relationships was that they never lasted long. As for Cass, on her high school graduation day, all she could think of as she looked at the crowd piled into folding chairs while she gave her valedictory speech from the podium was that she couldn’t wait to leave them all behind the minute she got to Brown.
Her break from home happened more quickly than she’d anticipated. She’d worried for weeks about navigating campus on move-in day with her mother, who would certainly say and wear all the wrong things, leaving Cass on a bad footing from day one. But her fear was for naught, as Donna announced Cass would be moving herself into college. Patty, Donna’s best friend from work, was getting married and her bachelorette shenanigans were taking place during move-in weekend. How did these women in their late forties not realize they were too old and weathered for bride-to-be sashes and penis-shaped shot glasses? For Cass, it turned out to be more embarrassing to drag her own ratty suitcases and street-bought halogen lamps up four flights of dormitory steps like an orphan than to be shadowed by her brash and irritable mother.
“Where are your parents, dear?” her freshman-year roommate’s mom asked, a look of pity in her eyes that went right through Cass. She was a bustling woman, thick in the middle and wearing a “Brown Mom” T-shirt, who agonized for nearly twenty minutes over where her daughter should hang
a silly Eiffel Tower poster.
“Venezuela.”
It was the first thing that popped into Cass’s head, and much like her twisted ankle from grade school, it proved to be a surprisingly effective cover. She spent the next few weeks concocting fictional stories about her parents having to be in South America for a distant family member’s wedding. Was it any wonder she was so determined to seek out a suitable mate? Someone with whom she could build a life her children wouldn’t need to bury beneath a protective coating of lies, an art form she’d been forced to perfect over the past decade?
Since breaking it off with Brett, Jonathan said he hadn’t had a serious girlfriend, lamenting that the girls on campus lumped him in with the rest of the athletes. He told her that was why he was at Paragon that night, and Cass was all ears, nodding with sympathy, the implication being that she would never stereotype him like that. She tried not to look at the crossed oars on his T-shirt peeking out from his unzipped hoodie. Later, on school break watching the Lifetime channel in Delaware and picking at leftover fruitcake, she’d wonder why someone would bother to trek across campus to reinvent himself and then wear a team shirt. She believed him to be a kindred spirit, someone also trying to shed an outer layer, it was just that he was less adept at it than her.
A few weeks of bad TV movies about stalkers, domestic violence and stolen babies coupled with a lonely Christmas with her mom, who was sullen due to an uncommon single patch, and her reindeer-loving aunt and uncle helped a little to beat back the romantic notions from her brain, but she was unable to vaporize Jonathan. She never stopped keeping tabs on him well after graduation, using social media, word of mouth and the alumni mailings to monitor his whereabouts and goings-on. She dated here and there, but mostly to fulfill her sex drive, which was a vibrant, forceful thing in her early twenties, and to remind herself there were straight men outside the entirely gay world in which her professional self existed. Once Jonathan made his way to New York City, she quit the diversions and made up her mind not to sleep with anyone but him from that day forward.
It happened on their third date after getting reacquainted. Cass had been with enough men by then to appreciate just how good it was with Jonathan. Before they even made it to her bedroom, his pants dropped around his ankles while he leaned against her refrigerator. That pretty-boy face, contorted with pleasure, brought her nearly to orgasm. It was important to her that he realize just how stupid he was not to have called her in college. She’d always be able to offer him something more than the Lilly Pulitzer girls. And it was true—their sex life had a wild character to it for a while, multiple times a day, in public bathrooms, and even once with a camera propped up on a tripod in the corner of the bedroom. She’d made up her mind then and there that if things progressed with Jonathan to where she wanted them to, she would never turn down sex. She might not be the full package, but she’d always have that. And when it came to satisfying a man, that was no small thing.
Brunch the morning after their first time sleeping together was at Balthazar. Over poached eggs and cappuccinos, it went unspoken that they were now a couple. Or so Cass hoped. He told her about his new job at a hedge fund called Winstar; she raved about her boss for maybe a little too long, but the guy was amazing. Percy Zimmerman had founded the largest theatrical ad agency in the country single-handedly and she was damn proud to work for him. She never expected such a high level of job satisfaction, what with her prior professional experience consisting of restocking shelves in the Brown library and working the Baskin-Robbins counter during the summer. And she wanted to tell Jonathan all about it.
Percy was a theater legend, with more than thirteen Tony credits to his name. Producers at all the major stages relied on PZA (formally the Percy Zimmerman Agency), and by extension Cass, for advice on scripts, staging, casting and—Percy’s forte—length. “Cut!” he would yell out unprompted during rehearsals when he felt the twitch of “ants in his pants.” Cass was less of a chopper, though she’d quietly suggest to her boss, if they were in a one-act play that seemed to be dragging, that it would benefit greatly from an intermission. Few things couldn’t benefit from pressing pause and letting people gather their thoughts. To let the suspense percolate and have the audience guess at what would be revealed in the next act. Or simply take a deep breath and prepare for the next phase.
Everything about PZA was cool—from its hipster workforce of theater geeks, to mandatory Ping-Pong breaks, to the freestyle desk arrangement where oddball props sat proudly like trophies. “Sit anywhere,” Percy would say, bounding into the office each morning rolling his electric blue bike alongside him. “Better yet, do jumping jacks.” He hired Cass, who at the time was working for a seventy-five-seat dance theater in Harlem, over email, and she basically worshipped him from that day forth. After she and Jonathan got Puddles, Percy not only let him come to work with her, he encouraged it. Puddles was an excellent playmate for his labradoodle, Shirley. On most days, Cass and Percy would run Puddles and Shirley over to the dog park in Chelsea for some frolicking after lunch. While they strolled with their pooches, they dished about their lives. One of the first things he’d said to her after she told him about her new boyfriend, Jonathan, was, Good, because you deserve someone who you can totally be yourself around. Had her boss suspected something about the nature of her budding relationship and offered this cautionary piece of advice? Or was it just a mindless thing people say when they are trying to sound wise? If it was the former, what had she done to create the impression that she was anything but genuine at all times? She dressed how she liked, expressed her views on work-related matters in earnest alignment with her opinions, and didn’t overthink her words when engaging her coworkers in office banter. Still, Percy had looked at her in a certain way when he’d said it that made her feel he knew everything about her and what she’d done.
She’d often wonder what else Percy could intuit about her. Did he know how much she pondered why married sex was a shadow of its former self, absent of showmanship and commingled sweat, pulsing hearts and body-quaking groans. Yes, she still came regularly, but when she did, the psychological effect was the same as paying a bill that had been sitting on the desk too long: So glad I got that done. And what of her promise to herself to never say no? Ha! She and Jonathan still had bodies that were young, fit and able, and she wondered sometimes how the sex would be when their skin puckered like prunes, veins rising to the surface like flotsam. Her vagina would dry out—she knew this from her mother, who overshared with her about menopause whenever they spoke—and Jonathan’s erection would no longer be counted on. Would Jonathan pop a pill and take on a lover, someone younger with no grays and an upright rack? Would she find someone even older than her who would appreciate that her parts were still more or less in the right places, no errant hairs on her chin, no uncontrollable flatulence? So far Jonathan had asked her for anal sex twice but she’d managed to deflect it without saying no. Maybe that would be their next “thing.” It was important to keep things spicy, but it was harder than she’d anticipated. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when sex had become a chore for her, but it didn’t really matter. The important thing was that her husband should never feel that way.
Even if she contemplated him straying from time to time when her imagination really got the best of her, Cass truly believed that Jonathan would never cheat on her. But then she’d remind herself, grimly, that he didn’t know her as well as he imagined he did. Maybe it was impossible to ever really know someone fully, and she shouldn’t feel so guilty. Marriage shouldn’t mean becoming one person, with each spouse swimming inside the other’s private thoughts. No, the best relationships were built like Venn diagrams of two overlapping circles, where the only variable was how big the shared part was and how much remained for the individual. The real question was how much overlap was enough. Cass worried constantly that she and Jonathan had a smaller shared circle than most. If this was true, Cass knew she alone was to
blame. Her early scheming might have robbed them of a shot at a fatter intersection. But if they could get through this bumpy patch, raising a child could very well change that and she’d have a chance to redraw the lines.
All signs pointed to the timing being right for Jonathan and Cass to start trying. Work for her was on pause, Jonathan was crushing it, and they’d been married for long enough to know it was sticking. Adding to their family was a case of simple math. One unemployed wife plus one successful husband plus five years of a pretty decent marriage equals baby.
Why wasn’t she working? Because Percy, her professional idol, was dead. Just nine months earlier, he came into work one day looking uncharacteristically somber and called a firm-wide meeting. Due to the nature of the workspace, an all-hands powwow meant the fifteen of them sitting cross-legged on the floor of the “ideas zone.” It was there that he dropped the bomb: he had stage-four pancreatic cancer. Six months to live. Percy’s partner, Emmet, a former chorus boy who was a regular at the office, was making his husband close up shop. A competitor had offered to purchase PZA’s database and buy out its contract with the largest billboard company in New York City, and Emmet was making Percy take the deal. There was no obvious heir apparent at PZA. Cass overheard Emmet say those exact words shortly after the doctor delivered the news. “PZA is Percy. No one else here has half his magic.” The words weren’t meant to wound, but they did.
The Intermission Page 5