The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “We’re still gonna fuck a lot once we’re married, right?” Cass had asked, her eyes glazed over from the alcohol. She dug her big toe into his ankle and gave him a pesky scratch. She always got a little raunchy when she drank. Whenever Cass let the dirty talk out, he could tell she was embarrassed about it the next day. Inevitably, over their morning coffee she’d bring up a New Yorker article she’d read or try to engage him in a conversation about world affairs while she left her glasses on longer than usual. The insecurity made his wife more human somehow, and he had the urge to hug her whenever her self-doubt crept out.

  “No less than three times a week,” he had responded to his soon-to-be wife that night on the beach, offering up his pinky for a swear. She looped hers around his and he thought their fate was sealed. Sex three times a week for the rest of his life. Why would anyone not want to get married? Those odds were certainly better than his chances when he was single.

  Recently they were down to once a week. No—once every two weeks. And they didn’t even have kids yet. Work got in the way, especially in the past six months when his chances of making equity partner were starting to seem more likely. Sometimes he was just too depleted to even attempt a move, and Cass still seemed shattered by Percy’s death over Christmas. He hated himself for what he had thought the instant Cass called him to tell him that Percy had passed. It was that she’d be so depressed that it could be more than a month before they’d have sex again. After all, Percy was more of a father to her than Dick had ever been, a hundred times over.

  Jonathan honestly believed that if they had sex a bit more regularly, Cass’s sleeping issues would dissipate. But he was scared to suggest it, thought she’d accuse him of looking out only for number one. They were fast approaching the baby-making start date. Maybe then they’d make up for all the sex they’d missed in the past year. Sure, he’d like their lovemaking to be more evenly spread out, but since when could beggars be choosers?

  “Of course, you’re right,” Laurel said, popping up. She suddenly seemed embarrassed by their talk. Was it something he said? Maybe she was reading his mind, that runaway train. “Sorry I bothered you.”

  “It’s never a bother. Call me Jonathan, by the way.”

  “Okay.” She smiled, revealing double dimples, elongated commas that looked like they’d be fun to trace with his index finger.

  When she was out of his office, he thought about closing the door and calling Cass to tell her about the exchange. But he was still too pissed about the dishwasher. And she might say something like, “What compromises have you made?” when he shared the advice he’d given Laurel and then rattle off a list of her concessions to their marriage. Instead, he looked at his watch and was glad to see it was nearly five o’clock. He strolled down the hall toward the well-stocked bar in Jerry’s office and pulled a Don Draper. To wedded bliss, he thought, silently toasting the anniversary he should have celebrated with Cass.

  7. CASS

  CASS WAS CONCERNED when her friend Dahlia insisted on meeting her for lunch ASAP. Their friendship had a steady rhythm and this move—requesting an immediate face-to-face—was disturbingly out of sync. The old college friends normally saw each other every two months, and they had just been together for a theater night shortly after New Year’s Eve. Cass had ranted to Dahlia about how terrible she thought the play’s promo materials were. It was a modern version of Romeo and Juliet where the ill-fated lovers lived on opposite sides of the Green Line. “Look at this Playbill cover,” she’d said over and over, thrusting the dull imagery in Dahlia’s face. “A balcony! Really? Couldn’t they have at least tried to be original?” Cass knew she sounded like a broken record but couldn’t help herself. Dahlia had patted her knee in sympathy.

  They’d talked about seeing another show in March, so Cass was surprised to receive a late-night text from her college roommate, asking her to grab a bite the next day. They met less than twelve hours later at Bella Blu, an under-the-radar Italian spot near Cass’s apartment. It was Dahlia’s choice, and a surprising one given that she tended to prefer a more see-and-be-seen ambience when she trained it in from Scarsdale. It was freezing outside, the groundhog intent on showing everyone who was boss, and Cass had to layer a vest, coat and scarf before venturing outdoors. Cass had so few plans of late and yet found herself not particularly motivated to leave the house. If she hadn’t been so worried about Dahlia, she’d have pushed it off.

  “What’s up?” Cass asked when she saw Dahlia making mincemeat of a cuticle, already waiting for her at a corner table. There was a half-eaten piece of focaccia on her plate and a thin strand of oregano stuck in her teeth. Cass couldn’t recall seeing Dahlia eat a carb since college. She expected to feel a twinge of satisfaction, watching her most high-strung, type-A friend finally succumb to temptation, but instead it just made Cass feel sad. Things must be dim if Dahlia was turning to gluten.

  “Harris and I are getting divorced,” Dahlia announced before Cass even had the chance to kiss her friend on the cheek.

  “Are you serious?” Cass asked, settling into the chair opposite Dahlia. This was worse than anything she had been imagining. Her eyes moved from the precarious water glass getting squeezed to the place where Dahlia’s canary diamond used to sit. Now there was just the hint of a tan line, which looked like an albino worm circling her finger. Cass fought the urge to reach out and pinch some color back into the lonely white spot.

  “Dead serious. Like we already have lawyers. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. We just told the kids. Brady was sobbing uncontrollably. I don’t think Toby had any clue what it all meant.”

  Cass felt like a balloon inside her chest was inflating and making it difficult for her to draw in air. Brady, her godson, was exactly the age she had been when her parents got divorced. Toby, only a preschooler, had a chance of coming away relatively unscathed. But nine. That huge year where double digits lie on the horizon, when social interactions take on a greater significance, and the first signs of puberty rear their ugly heads (at least they had for her). In other words, a year with enough complications. It was an age when a parent forgetting to call on your birthday is incomprehensible, and yet somehow you are forced to comprehend it. A time when the appearance of half siblings is mind-boggling, and jealousy inducing, and your teachers and your friends’ parents ask you too often if you’re “doing okay.”

  And poor Brady had looked so damn happy in the latest Bloomstein holiday portrait. Cass had cleared it off the living room mantel only a few days before, tossing it out along with the dozens of other holiday cards they kept displayed long after the New Year’s toasts were a distant memory. She swept most of the cards straight into a trash bag, but had paused to look for an extra moment at Brady in his basketball jersey. He’d gotten so tall and his boyish cuteness was morphing into something different—a chiseled face and actual muscles! Her heart swelled with a surprising shock of tenderness at seeing her godson growing up. It had to be the knowledge that her own “start date” was fast approaching, making her overly sensitive, so quick to succumb to emotion. She’d actually pressed Brady’s smiling face to her own before consigning it to the recycle bin.

  The Bloomsteins, under Dahlia’s auspices, sent a religion-neutral holiday card every year, the outside a collage of family pictures, the inside a rhyming update on their lives. This year’s had read as cheerfully as ever:

  Happy New Year to all from a family in Bloom

  May your holidays be all cheer and no gloom

  Brady’s in fourth grade, shooting hoops night and day

  Toby’s hit preschool, singing, painting, molding clay

  Dahlia and Harris went (sans kids!) to St. Barths

  A vacation filled with food, wine and hearts

  And so on and so on, for nine more stanzas!

  People with the earnestness and desire—not to mention the time—to compose verse about romantic trips and their children’s
hobbies weren’t supposed to get divorced. Her parents, Donna and Dick, they were the ones for whom divorce was preordained. Those two could barely fill out a mortgage application or send in a permission slip, and lord knows they never took a trip anywhere, with or without Cass. But Dahlia and Harris, the prom king and queen of Scarsdale? It felt impossible. They’d known each other since childhood—and despite what the statistics said about marrying a high school sweetheart, what changes could upend a couple who knew each other inside and out? They had everything: beautiful boys, a white-picket-fenced house on a coveted suburban cul-de-sac, extended families that meshed like peanut butter and jelly.

  Maybe the rhyming holiday card was a symptom of their problems. After all, the Wentworths sent a simple card with an embossed wreath and the words “Happy Christmas” along with their names printed inside. Mass-produced and ordered online from Minted. That somehow felt more appropriate than Dahlia’s big year-end production, evidence of a couple with nothing to prove. Cass and Jonathan never sent out a holiday greeting; the idea of mailing out a picture of the two of them on a beach with Puddles running between their legs seemed ridiculous. And yet, when the cards started bulging through their rubber-banded mail pile in early December, Jonathan had surprised her by suggesting they send one too.

  “Aren’t we a family already, even though we don’t have kids yet?” he’d said.

  “No, we’re not,” she answered, though she instantly regretted the harsh response. Puddles was like their baby, and even if there was no Puddles, they were still a unit worthy of showing off. Maybe next year she would do a card. But by then she could have a big belly to show, or even a newborn, so the point would be moot.

  Looking at Dahlia, who had just drawn blood picking away at the brittle skin around her nails, Cass wondered how she had missed the signs that her friend was unhappy. Cass and Dahlia always did girls things together, but maybe she and Jonathan should have driven out to Westchester more often instead. Brady was her godson after all, and while she Skyped with the Bloomstein kids every now and then, she was pretty sure Toby wouldn’t know her if she put a fistful of candy right in his face. What the hell else were she and Jonathan doing on weekends? How many brunches does a childless couple need to have? She’d always thought of herself as a fairly decent godparent, but she knew it would no longer be enough to send thoughtful birthday gifts or score backstage passes to kid-friendly musicals. Cass would have to step things up several notches in the future; Brady was going to need her now. She’d been in the trenches before—she knew there was a way out. At least there was no way Harris and Dahlia would botch things quite as badly as her parents did.

  After the Romeo and Juliet play, which was rather enjoyable once Cass was able to set aside its dismal logo and signage, Cass had hugged Dahlia and sent her on her way home to the burbs before the two of them had really gotten a chance to talk. Now it seemed laughable, but Cass had come very close that night to confessing her own marital woes and asking for some reassurance. She wanted to tell Dahlia that she sometimes wondered if Jonathan even knew her at all. Was he in love with the real Cass—the girl who once had to bail out her mother from jail for a DUI and whose deadbeat father ditched her like a bad apple at the first opportunity—or was he smitten with a carefully crafted facade? And if Jonathan had somehow managed to mine beneath Cass’s surface to touch the truest parts of his flawed partner, did it excuse the fact that, in the beginning, she thought of him mostly as a golden goose? There was no denying that she’d targeted Jonathan—and manipulated him—because she thought he could provide a one-way ticket out of her old life. Hell, she’d even used Google Earth to look up the house Jonathan grew up in—Greek Revival with a half dozen porches overlooking a verdant lawn that stretched on for acres. It had been easy enough to mentally Photoshop herself into the image, to imagine grasping the wooden banister as she descended the grand staircase, heading to the kitchen where a steaming apple pie sat cooling on the counter.

  She’d hoped Dahlia would assuage her fears and remind her that lots of women pulled some marionette strings to maneuver a potential partner into place, that all the Scarsdale housewives fantasized about being single from time to time and worried their spouses were often more like strangers than soul mates. Then Cass could cross Central Park in the back of a taxi knowing her feelings were normal. Damn, there was that word again. Well, she hadn’t broached it anyway, sensing Dahlia was tired. Plus, in the moment, Cass had been torn about whether she should unburden herself. She’d never admitted to anyone else that she had essentially stalked her husband and orchestrated their meet-cute as though she were planning an FBI sting. The part of her that wanted to finally come clean did battle with—and lost out to—the much stronger desire to keep her cards hidden. It was the same wariness that kept her from asking Jemima about motherhood.

  “Well . . . aren’t you going to ask me why?” Dahlia asked, sounding faintly bewildered. Cass shook herself back to the present moment with a large gulp of ice water. Whatever it was had to be something big. Bigger than anything she could imagine—definitely bigger than the secret she was holding on to, and drastically more significant than her childish quibbles with Jonathan.

  “Yes, of course. Please tell me what happened. Weren’t you two just in the Caribbean?” Dahlia’s social media feeds trickled through Cass’s brain—pictures of Dahlia and Harris clinking glasses, upright toes with the aquamarine sea in the background. The image had made Cass think about how she and Jonathan had let their five-year anniversary come and go without even a celebratory dinner, just some cards exchanged. In some ways she took it as a sign of strength—they were good every day, didn’t need a calendar to reinforce it. But in other ways, she saw it as weakness. Had they already given up on milestones? She wondered what Jonathan thought about the lack of fanfare. That’s if he’d noticed at all.

  “Okay,” Dahlia said, leaning in closer to Cass. She took up her stalk of bread again for reinforcement. “It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. That’s what my therapist said. The sooner you do it, the sooner the pain is over. So here goes: I fell in love with someone else. She’s . . . she’s . . . she’s a she. And she’s the assistant principal at Brady’s school.”

  Cass’s jaw went into instant battle with gravity. All it wanted to do was drop—badly. No. Fucking. Way. That’s what she desperately wanted to blurt out, but instead she mustered, “That’s great,” as though Dahlia had told her that Harris was being promoted. It was a “regional manager” to “East Coast manager” kind of response, but what could Cass do? The shock was so huge that her reaction was inversely related.

  Cass flashed back to the night she and Dahlia made out junior year. Wasn’t that just to get the attention of the swimmer boys too busy playing beer pong to notice them? Who had even suggested the kiss? Cass could never remember. Now she sized up her friend anew, looking for outward changes. But there was nothing except the bread consumption and a less-than-perfect hairstyle. In any event, it was fruitless to search Dahlia’s face and body for insights. Cass’s own appearance was unchanged since Percy had died, since her sex life deteriorated, since her brain wouldn’t let her sleep. She still tugged on her skinny jeans, slicked on mascara and brushed through her hair enough times to ward off any questions about her well-being.

  Besides the shock, there was something else that Cass was feeling upon hearing the revelation. The feeling was relief. The thing breaking down the Bloomstein marriage was monumentally bigger than anything that could fracture her and Jonathan. It was sexual orientation, for crying out loud, not some fib about a chance meeting! She felt her pulse decelerate.

  “Just wow,” Cass added, reaching for the breadbasket. Now she needed a blood-sugar fix. “I did not see that coming.”

  “Neither did Harris. But I’ve known forever. And I feel so lame doing this now. Coming out feels very fifteen years ago. I mean we went to freaking Brown. If there was ever a place to leave the closet behind . . .�
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  “Well, you’ve got nothing to apologize for. You did it when you were ready. So how do you feel? And who is this assistant principal?”

  “Oh gosh, where do I start? I feel really, really good. I mean, I know I look like hell, but that was mostly over telling the kids. I didn’t sleep for weeks. We wanted to wait until Brady’s weeklong tennis camp in Orlando was over. I couldn’t imagine sending him away with a portable fan, an economy-sized Purell and a note that said, P.S. Your mom’s gay. I’ll tell you what’s weird about the whole thing, though. As much as I’m happy to be with Roxanna—that’s her name—I know I won’t get married again. More kids—maybe. I know Roxanna wants at least one; she’s already done a bunch of fertility-slash-Franken-science research on how to make it happen.”

  Cass nodded. How would that work? she wondered. She made a mental note not to take it for granted how easy she and Jonathan had it, relatively speaking.

  “But marriage? Not a chance in hell. I’m telling you, this situation has turned Harris into the biggest asshole. Never divorce a lawyer. We’re looking at a minimum of two years for everything to get finalized, probably longer. We have to work out custody, divide the assets—Harris wants to sell the house. And he doesn’t want to see me, so we have to have all of the parent-teacher conferences twice so we can both go alone. A divorce without kids is a breakup with paperwork. With kids, it’s a nightmare.”

  Cass shook her head in vigorous agreement. She’d never heard her own deepest fears articulated so succinctly. In college, she’d heard stories from fellow students about parents who’d had amicable divorces, dividing custody easily and putting pettiness aside for the sake of their children. These anecdotes, shared late at night over beer and pizza and sometimes weed, felt like fables to her. She couldn’t help but wonder if these kids had just blocked out the bad stuff or forced themselves to wear rose-colored glasses. Didn’t their parents summon the police to demand months of owed child support, send nasty letters to the place of employment of their ex’s new spouse (Donna did that twice) and viciously malign the other right in front of their children? Didn’t they fight over some shitty piece of furniture that neither of them could remember buying until one of them took a match to it one night in frustration?