Cass visited Percy in the hospital every night on her way home. Sometimes she’d stay for five minutes—just long enough to drop off his favorite German gummy bears—and sometimes she’d sit by his bed for hours before she could tear herself away. She always brought her game face and an arsenal of the choicest Broadway gossip—the latest understudy to sleep with a director, which new show had a set malfunction on opening night. But Percy barely smiled at the bawdy stories that once would have had him rolling with laughter. He was so fragile by then, barely an outline of the man he was before cancer, that Cass couldn’t bring herself to ask him why he didn’t think she was capable of taking over.
Percy used most of his remaining strength to ensure all of his employees would be able to keep their jobs after the buyout. He took his last breath just a week before Christmas as a soft, powdery snow was falling and the city was at its most magnificent. Cass remembered being upset that the weather wasn’t mirroring the blackness she was feeling. Then she quit a hot second after collecting her year-end bonus, two days after Percy’s funeral.
It was okay, this being unemployed for the first time in ages, tolerable because she’d gotten the motherhood bug, a welcome feeling after what had happened two years earlier that left her feeling like an empty vessel. Percy’s illness reset something intrinsic inside her, and suddenly she became obsessed with creating life in the face of death. Whereas she used to walk down the street staring only at her phone, now she was on permanent baby watch, peeking into strollers and estimating ages to the nearest month, because having a kid meant life was going to be measured in entirely different units of time. She was fawning over those tiny socks that looked like shoes, which seemed to be all the rage. Girls wore Mary Janes; boys wore ones that looked like Converse. She had her eyes on one of those tall Swedish strollers that supposedly kept the baby from sucking in car exhaust, and she’d even poked her head into Rosie Pope Maternity, just to see how bad things would be once she popped. To her surprise, the pregnancy clothes weren’t half bad, and she almost tempted fate by purchasing a fun vacation dress with horizontal stripes.
She had made an appointment with Dr. Levin, her ob-gyn, on her first morning of freedom and practically skipped down the block to his office. She didn’t know he would tell her to wait for the birth control hormones to be out of her bloodstream. “Two months is sufficient.” That’s what he’d said, but she’d decided to stretch it to three just to be safe by the time she saw Jonathan that evening. She didn’t want to take any chances of something going wrong—even though she positively detested getting her period every month, which was why she’d been on the super-strong pill Seasonale, making her period come only four times a year. More than two decades had passed already, and still she couldn’t shake the terrible feeling each time she saw those first few drops of blood in the toilet when it was her time of the month. She was staying at her father’s for the night when she bled for the first time. Thanks to obsessive readings of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Cass knew exactly what those bright crimson drops were when she saw them. But the smell, sour and faintly metallic, scared her. She had nothing with her—no sanitary pad packed in her overnight bag, even though she’d been smart enough to swipe a few from her mother to stash in her school locker. She snuck into the master bathroom, but found only tampons in Trish’s medicine cabinet, and she had no idea what to do with those. Well, she knew what to do, but she didn’t know how to do it. Having no better option, she wadded up toilet paper, scratchy sheets of one-ply, and layered them in her underwear. Then she tiptoed down the stairs carefully and tapped her stepmother on the shoulder. Trish was watching the lotto numbers get announced on TV with a pen in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Hang on, Cassidy,” Trish grunted, putting her smoking hand in Cass’s face. “Damn it, another loser,” she said, thrusting down her lotto tickets next to the ashtray on the coffee table.
“Sorry,” Cass stuttered. “About losing. I was wondering if you could help me out.” Knowing she wouldn’t have the words to describe the kind of help she needed, she slowly brought out a tampon from behind her back. “It’s my first time. I don’t know what to do,” she squeaked out.
Trish smiled, and for a moment Cass thought she was going to rescue her. It would be awkward as hell, but Cassidy would get through the night. But then Trish said, “Honey, you better call your mother. I didn’t sign up for this when I married your father.” And she swiveled her head back to the TV, leaving Cass to stare at the aerosol-locked frizz of her bleached blond hair.
Cass slunk away and went for the kitchen phone. She asked the operator to connect her to McGinley’s and, after speaking to two different bartenders, her mother came on the phone.
“What is it?” Donna asked, yelling over the annoying trill of “Bad Girls.”
Cass had no choice but to yell to be heard. She explained the situation.
“Fine, I’ll be right over. Make sure to be waiting by the front door so I don’t have to see Trish or the asshole.” Thirty minutes later (even though McGinley’s was only ten minutes away), the headlights of her mother’s car shone through the windows in the living room and Cass hopped up, careful not to jostle the toilet paper she’d arranged in her underpants, and left with no explanation. Trish could tell her father what had happened.
Unlike other bad memories from her childhood, which Cass had the ability to push aside for the most part, this was the one that dinged her every twenty-nine days like clockwork. The vision of Trish smiling before turning her back on Cass; the knowledge that her mother waited to finish her drink or get some loser’s phone number before picking her up. Those consistently filled her with rage and sadness each month until finally she heard about Seasonale on a TV commercial and was able to cut back dramatically on these nightmarish flashbacks. And now even that reprieve was gone.
If Cass had known her OB was going to tell her to wait for the birth control to fully flush out of her system, maybe she’d have stayed at work a bit longer, collected a few more paychecks instead of dust. Now she was home all day, overthinking everything: Jonathan’s annoying habit of biting his nails, why Percy never once mentioned her taking over PZA, how cancer was such a bitch, what kind of mother she would be, and why Jemima decided to get Botox. She found herself self-flagellating for noticing other men more than she used to, wondering if they found her attractive, and questioning when Jonathan had become so entrenched in his routine. He’d wake up, get to his desk by 7:15 (except for Tuesdays and Thursdays when he jogged with Puddles through the park and would arrive at work closer to 8:30), eat Shake Shack for lunch at his desk, come home around eight, watch one TV show, then go to bed. The only deviations from his routine occurred when he had a Big Brothers Big Sisters event or a work dinner. He really was a Boy Scout, down to his 4.9 Uber rating. A month earlier Cass had suggested to Jonathan that they go to a rock concert downtown—he looked at her like she had two heads.
Cass pressed her thumbs into her temples and massaged in a circular motion. Doing nothing was proving more exhausting than going to work each day. Without the fulfillment of her job, she spent her time reevaluating settled matters—specifically her marriage and whether it was strong enough to sustain the trials that parenthood would inflict upon it. Whether she and Jonathan would do a number on an innocent little being who hadn’t asked to be born. Then she’d remind herself that of course her marriage was solid and that if she pretty much did the opposite of what her parents did, their kid stood a solid chance.
These gripes she had—they were clearly annoyances masking something bigger. But it was easier to fixate on the small stuff than to dwell on what was really bothering her. Especially when she was going crazy from all this free time, picking fights to force up her blood pressure, goading Jonathan just to get a reaction. After all, she loved that he kept to a schedule. And that he was a mentor to an underprivileged kid. Who else did she know who was so selfless with their ti
me? Jonathan had yet to miss one of Leon’s basketball games. Did she honestly want a husband that she had to track down, whose absence in the evenings made her question his whereabouts or sneak glances at his text messages? Certainly not.
So what difference did it make how she and Jonathan had gotten to the place they were in? They were here now, they were happy, and that was all that mattered. If only he hadn’t given that toast at their wedding, the one where he went on and on until there wasn’t a dry eye in the room about fate and timing and how the sweetest things in life are usually born of serendipity. It was that stupid toast that kept her awake in the wee hours, agonizing over what-if. What if he knew how she’d zeroed in on him like a chomping Pac-Man after the cherry?
As she’d grown accustomed to doing, she pushed her guilt to the side, like an unwanted vegetable mucking up an otherwise great meal, and tried to focus on the future. Anything to bring about the restful night’s sleep she so desperately needed.
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
“MORNING ,” JONATHAN SAID, pecking her on the cheek. She was doing the Times crossword at their kitchen counter, grateful it was a Wednesday when she had a shot even on little sleep. The kiss felt jarring, like being approached by a close talker. The night before, they’d grabbed dinner with Jemima and Henry at some ridiculous fusion place. Even though they’d each had a few cocktails, they still didn’t have sex when they got home. It felt to her like the absence of intimacy was a third person in the room with them, hovering just out of reach. Maybe it was all the talk of the twins’ various issues—constipation, night terrors, speech delays, biting—that had ruined the mood. Not that they were off condoms yet and needed to have sex—that was still a few weeks away.
“You slept well,” she said, knowing he’d get her meaning.
“Snoring again?”
“Every night. You really need to see a doctor. Remember Marcy from PZA? You met her at Percy’s Christmas party? She went to the sleep clinic at Columbia and it’s only one overnight where they hook you up to a monitor to observe you. So not a big deal. It’s probably a deviated septum or whatever it is that people say they have so that insurance covers their nose jobs. But you really have it.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go. I’m sorry if it keeps you up—I noticed you were missing from bed in the middle of the night. Work has just been insane.” He grabbed a bagel from the brown bag on the counter, smothered it with full-fat cream cheese and took a huge bite. His ability to eat whatever he wanted and not gain weight made Cass hate him just a little bit. She’d so wanted to believe that marriage would mean the calorie counting could stop, and in some ways it was true. Jonathan would hardly mind if she gained five or even ten pounds—especially considering a pregnancy was hopefully imminent for them—but still she couldn’t bring herself to give in to the temptation she faced in every bakery window. Because she still wanted to be her most attractive self, to turn heads, to have other men want to take her clothes off. What did that mean? It wasn’t necessarily a red flag waving the notion that she and Jonathan wouldn’t go the distance. There were plenty of women wearing wedding bands sweating it out at CrossFit who would probably rather be home eating bonbons. But maybe that was because their husbands, unlike her own, expected them to keep a certain figure. That just made Cass feel worse about her vanity. For so long her looks felt like a possession no one could take from her. Her parents’ fighting got worse, but she got prettier. The popular kids at school got new clothes, but she had clear skin and nice cheekbones. Was it any wonder she wanted to keep up her appearance?
“It’s fine. Oh, I got you the smoked salmon you love from Sable’s yesterday. Eat it while it’s fresh.” She loved watching the gratitude he felt for her simple gesture spread across his face as he went to the fridge. To watch the effects of her love take hold was a beautiful thing. But why did she have to see her generosity self-referentially? That felt like a failure, undoing all the goodness.
“What’s a four-letter word for ‘a boring knife’?” She’d already cracked the clue, but sometimes it was just fun to test him.
“I don’t know, babe. Thanks for the salmon. When’s Luna coming back?” He gestured grandly to the mess of dishes spread across their countertops and piled high in the sink, a move Cass didn’t appreciate one bit. It was annoying that he was neater than her, probably because she attributed it to his coming from a meticulous household, unlike the revolving pigsties she grew up in.
“I’ll text her.” She scrawled in D-U-L-L, which intersected with the easiest clue in the puzzle for her—nine across: L-E-S-M-I-Z (Victor Hugo show, for short).
“It’s fine, I’ll load the dishwasher.” Jonathan took off his suit jacket, draped it over a stool and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Before she could protest, he got to work scrubbing remains off the blue-and-white Willow dishes they’d received from Betsy at their engagement party. “Heirloom,” she’d said, watching Cass unwrap the boxes and peel through layers of tissue.
“Then I’ll serve tomatoes on them,” Cass had said, with a little smile. Betsy didn’t smile back. She didn’t appreciate wordplay. Not when it came to the good china.
“The big plates go in the back, honey,” Cass now said, looking up from the paper after a few moments of considering ten across. “Plus you should be putting the knives in facing down. And a few of our mugs have chips, so you shouldn’t clutter them together.”
Silently, Jonathan shifted the dishes, replaced his suit jacket and said something to her she couldn’t decipher over the hum of the booted-up Miele.
6. JONATHAN
“WHAT THREE THINGS do you want most out of life? You know, like, for us?” he asked Cass, coiling locks of her wheat-colored hair around his index finger. He was leaning up against the headboard with his legs spread, she was propped against his chest like a neighboring book on a shelf. They had been engaged for six hours. The ring still looked like a third person in their relationship.
She exhaled deeply, letting him know she was giving the question the thought it deserved.
“One: I want to be with you forever.
“Two: Beautiful babies. Two or three little us-es.
“Three: I never want to be petty.”
Her words drifted to his ears like a cloud of baby powder raining on him softly.
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
* * *
♦ ♦ ♦
UN-BE-LIEVABLE, HIS WIFE. He’s got to get to work and she’s home all day doing God knows what. But he’s the one loading the dishwasher because she hires some college student with a trust fund to be their maid. Luna Spiegel’s father, Marty, was one of the wealthiest producers in Hollywood. He was half of Spiegel Productions, which he started out of his garage in the San Fernando Valley with his cousin Eli Spiegel, and which had produced more Oscar-winning films in the past thirty years than any of its competitors. Jonathan knew because he’d looked up the whole story on Wikipedia. And Marty’s daughter, Luna, from his first marriage to the soap actress Bella Criss, cleaned Jonathan’s toilet every week. It was more like every other week, actually. If Luna had an audition or a midterm, she would just fail to show up and, if she felt so inclined, would text Cass two days later to apologize. That’s what you got for hiring a maid who was probably four times richer than you.
Before Cass moved in, he’d had a woman named Manuela clean his apartment once a week. She was married to the building super, kept his place meticulous, and replaced vacuum bags and Swiffer pads like an invisible fairy godmother. Jonathan couldn’t even remember ever interacting with her. There was probably a handshake or a head nod at some point, but after that, Jonathan just left $150 in an envelope on the coffee table every Monday and he’d come home to a note saying something like “Mr. Jon, I bought Scotchgard with the petty cash.” That was the extent of their interaction and it suited him perfectly fine. She ironed his Turnbull & Asser shirts properly, cleaned
out the fridge periodically, and mopped away any crumbs left over from his ordered-in dinners throughout the week.
Enter Cass, with her artistic hours and her flair for shaking up things that didn’t need changing. Percy told his staff at PZA to come in when they felt “energized” enough to work. The thought of his boss saying anything like that was downright laughable. He’d say, “Son, you come in as soon as there is money to be made.” That meant approximately 7:30 a.m. for most of his team. Cass would typically leave for work around ten, after three cups of coffee, a scroll through Facebook (where she was a voyeur, not a poster) and reading several sections of the Times. Apparently, those were the things that “energized” her enough to design billboards and web banners and strategize on how best to get the blue-hairs to train it in from the burbs for lunch and a show. The result was that she and Manuela overlapped in the early morning. Unlike Luna, Manuela actually came to work, and punctually. She’d arrive promptly at eight thirty and start cleaning, exactly as she was paid to do. It was all too much for Cass, apparently.
“I can’t stand it, Jonathan,” Cass moaned to him one day. He could tell from the echo that she was holed up inside their shower stall making the call. “The guilt is killing me. Here I am drinking ridiculously expensive European espresso and doing sudoku, and Manuela is vacuuming under my feet. I see her scrubbing our toilets and I want to cry. If things were reversed, and I was the one born in Guatemala, you know I’d be doing the dirty work. She’d probably be a surgeon. I don’t even feel that comfortable having a cleaning lady to begin with. I certainly never grew up with one, and this just feels wrong.”
So try to clean the place yourself if you’re home, is what he was tempted to say. And—All you do is complain how disgusting your mother’s place is when we visit. But he bit his tongue, as he’d grown accustomed to doing. He probably had a permanent indentation in it by now.
The Intermission Page 6