“Well, we are not getting divorced. In fact, I think we should have another child. Jon is off to boarding school soon enough. Michael is nine and Wallace is already six. It might help us to have something to celebrate together.”
“You think that’s the answer?” Christopher asked, sounding bewildered.
“It’s worth a shot,” Betsy said. “But no more fooling around.”
Less than a year later, his baby sister, Katherine, was born.
13. CASS
THEY VERY RARELY spoke of the termination. Instead they gave airtime to the cracks in their plaster mouldings, the long lines at Whole Foods, the insidiousness of everyone’s Internet addictions, but almost none to the thirteen weeks they squealed with joy privately with the knowledge they would be parents and then buried their heads behind closed doors when they learned they wouldn’t.
She came to them when they weren’t even trying for her. They knew the alien on the screen, the one that looked like all head and a pair of sneakers, was a she, and so much else about her after all the testing. Isabel. That’s what they were going to call her, after they briefly considered all the names that would pair hilariously with their last name: Penny; Golda; Ivana. It seemed like bad luck to use the real name before she was born, so they nicknamed her Peanut, which seemed a more suitable way to refer to a blurry image projected on-screen by sound waves with no personality or physical features to speak of. At least in this, Cass and Jonathan were in total agreement. This tiny lady-in-waiting would be Peanut Coyne until the day she came out screaming from the womb, a tiny red-faced thing they would instantly adore.
Cass believed the way people handled disappointment was the clearest window into their souls. Mr. B-positive said everything he shouldn’t have said: We weren’t really trying anyway . . . It’s for the best . . . At least we hadn’t told anyone yet . . . This will make us appreciate our baby so much more when it does happen. All she wanted to hear was: This really sucks. Let’s drink as much as it takes until we’re so numb we can barely feel our limbs, much less our pain. Jonathan had in spades that thing people were always touting—perspective. Back in junior high, when she’d cry over a bad grade, Tiff would say to her, “Cassidy, there are starving babies in Ethiopia. How can you complain about a stupid biology test?” Cass wasn’t a bad person, and she resented the implication that being disappointed about a shitty grade meant she couldn’t see that the world had far bigger problems than her GPA taking a minor hit. Of course she saw that. That didn’t make her less upset about her grade, it just meant she’d be even more upset if she was a starving kid in Africa. How did Tiffany, and her mother, and Jonathan, and everyone else who didn’t share her worldview not see that? Percy got it. When they lost a client, or a show they’d cradled tanked, they’d climb out to their office building’s rooftop, smoke a joint together (a habit for Percy, a treat for her) and curse everyone and everything in sight. Percy would quip, “At least we have our health,” and they’d both roll their eyes. In retrospect, she was plagued by how flippant they were.
Once she got over the confusion of how she could be pregnant, Cass was overjoyed. The pill was meant to be 99 percent effective, which really meant 100 percent effective; the pharmaceutical companies just couldn’t say that because of liability issues. Some dumb teenager would forget to take her pill for a week and would sue for a lifetime of expenses plus pain and suffering. Or so she thought. Because she never forgot to take her pill, gulping it with the same cup of water she used to wash out her morning toothpaste, every single day, like clockwork. And she was pregnant. Two years ahead of “schedule.”
By the first appointment with Dr. Levin, with Jonathan at her side, she’d become convinced that this was the most fortuitous way their family could start. How foolish to think they could schedule a baby like a vacation. It was so much more exciting, meant-to-be, fate-inspired that it happened like this, by a fluke of a diluted batch of birth control. Instead of agonizing over the perfect time to have a baby (and when had anyone actually ever felt the timing was right?), they were given one as a gift. With Cass’s history of machination, this twist in her plan felt especially significant.
Three months after she learned she was pregnant, precisely on the day of the procedure, she received a letter inviting her to join a class-action suit against the maker of her contraceptive. They had distributed six thousand ineffective pills, leading to countless babies, no doubt. She tore up the letter, even though she was perhaps one of the most affected victims. An unplanned pregnancy and a termination with serious attendant complications. She would have made one hell of a star witness.
They didn’t agree on much in the days and weeks surrounding the termination, but Jonathan did wholeheartedly support her decision to shred the invitation to litigate. They both needed a punching bag, her more than him, but some faceless conglomerate based in New Jersey wasn’t going to be a satisfying target. She took off two weeks from work, telling Percy she needed to go see her mother, and laid low in her apartment, where every commercial seemed to be for baby lotion. Maybe that’s when her hatred of daytime television first came about. Jonathan, on the other hand, returned to work the day after her procedure, trying to seal the deal with a new investor and burying himself unreasonably in developing some new algorithm to track earnings per share. Jonathan was a quantitative guy—he thought in numbers and spreadsheets and formulas—so what did she expect when she sought him out over the emotional theater guys at Brown who had naked parties to prepare for a production of Hair and took Ecstasy to get better in touch with their inner selves? Her husband was a math major, then a star at Wharton Business School, and now Jerry Winston’s sharpest numbers guy at Winstar. Of course a quant guy wouldn’t know how to handle the millions of emotions that accompanied losing a baby you didn’t plan to have after finding out the parents’ DNA wasn’t ideally “compatible.” His spectrum of feelings was limited: his angry, a seven out of ten; his happy, maybe an eight. She often thought it would be great to see her husband unhinged, even just once. Even when she told him about the break, he’d remained fairly collected. She’d have thrown the nearest picture frame across the room if the roles had been reversed. It would have looked like a Greek wedding by dawn, smashed plates everywhere, depleted bottles of liquor on their sides.
Every bad thing in life has a silver lining, right? She knew that even the most tragic deaths have a way of forging the survivors more closely together, that heinous mass crimes bond communities and change archaic laws. And she expected that this too would have a bright spot for her and Jonathan. Their experience would be like a shared possession that only they could see, a couple with the same imaginary friend. But instead, it created a wedge, and each of them took their posts on shifting tectonic plates.
“Canavan disease?” Jonathan had asked, his voice flush with certainty that what he was hearing couldn’t be possible. “I didn’t think I could be a carrier.” He looked at Cass, seated in the other chair opposite their OB’s desk, for affirmation.
“Like I said, it is primarily an Ashkenazi Jewish genetic disorder,” Dr. Levin said, looking at Jonathan with a disapproving glance. Levin. How dense could her husband be? “And in order for the fetus to have it, you both have to be carriers. Now obviously you are healthy adults, which means you are both recessive carriers. Perhaps one of your parents is part Jewish and doesn’t know. It happens all the time. Next time around, we will screen very early on. Or test the embryo in advance. There is a work-around.”
Betsy, oh please, let it be Betsy! Cass had almost squealed it out loud despite her distress. The woman prided herself on her lineage like it was something she had worked tirelessly to achieve. Maybe that diamond dealer in Midtown Manhattan with the payot (Cass made a point to learn the proper name) framing his chubby face, who gave Jonathan such a great deal on her engagement ring and wedding bands, was Betsy’s long-lost relative. Cass had vowed to get on Ancestry.com the minute she got home. If it
was Christopher, that would also be satisfying, but not to the same degree. His disdain for anyone “other,” persons outside his own milieu, flew a bit under the radar, whereas Betsy’s was as plain to see as her Lilly Pulitzer tunic collection.
By the time she returned home after a silent cab ride with Jonathan, she was back to hearing the whoosh-whoosh of the baby’s heartbeat on the Doppler on repeat. How could a baby with such a strong beat, 120 beats per minute crashing through the speaker, have a condition incompatible with life? And why did she feel responsible? Because it was her already-pouchy stomach providing a home for their little princess, their sweet pea, and their blend of DNA would soon be extracted from her body with a vacuum, that’s why. And because Jonathan said things to her like, “You’ll get pregnant again soon.” Like it was her fault. Who was this angry person cursing her husband that she didn’t recognize in the mirror? An alter ego sprung to life in her thirties, or an echo of the angry child she had been? It didn’t matter. The loss of Peanut had changed something in her. She wasn’t the person who made lemonade out of lemons. She chucked lemons against a wall and had to clean up the mess.
She and Jonathan had less than a handful of heart-to-hearts about their loss, but Cass returned to it whenever her mind wasn’t otherwise occupied. It was the memory that sat on the sidelines waiting for an opening. Like in California, where free time was just too plentiful. She had no friends besides Alexi and virtually zero errands to run without her normal responsibilities like buying dog food and getting clothes for Jonathan. The job she was able to finagle at the performing arts center was only part-time. She was working for the person they’d hired to fill the job she was meant to have, a massive bitch who pooh-poohed her Broadway experience as irrelevant to Southern California audiences, whatever that meant. Maybe she should go out with Gavin. If nothing else, it would fill her time for a few hours. Educate her about so-called Californians and get her out of the house. She used to like daylight and fresh air.
Alexi had obviously given her number to him anyway and he’d sent off a quick missive asking her to get in touch if she felt like going for a drink. It was early morning on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and it seemed like no matter where she went she couldn’t escape the question: What are your plans for the holiday? Like just because there was a Monday tacked on to the weekend, everyone from nail technicians to shop clerks felt entitled to know her schedule. She thought back to the number of times she’d callously asked people what their plans were—lonely singles who had no one to share the holidays with, people without the disposable income to take weekend getaways. Well, now she knew to nip that habit in the bud. It was especially odd to be asked this in Los Angeles, where Monday-to-Friday day jobs were hardly the norm and Tuesday morning didn’t feel all that different from Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, everyone was jazzed about the day off. She wondered what Jonathan would do with it. Probably immerse himself in work. She envied him his job at the moment, because he could always retreat to his office tower and find company, some other analyst on the rise researching new companies, courting investors, analyzing market trends. PZA was a ghost town by four o’clock on Fridays no matter what. The only people traversing its corridors on the weekends were wielding janitorial carts and industrial vacuums. If she had the power to choose how Jonathan spent the next three days, she truly wasn’t sure where she’d put him. Hitting golf balls with the doofuses from his fund at one of their snooty Westchester clubs seemed innocuous enough, though she did pity him the firing squad he’d face among the wives. “Where’s Cass?” “Los Angeles? So far!” Eventually someone brave enough would ask in a quiet voice, “Can I fix you up?” and gesture toward a lonely divorcée with a rocking body in the distance. Better to tuck Jonathan safely at home with Puddles, away from his demanding job and the twitchy country club women, where man and dog would only surface for walks to pick up coffee and a New Yorker from the newsstand.
She shot up in bed, jolted upright like she’d put her finger in a socket. Scrambling, she found her cell phone on the coffee table in the living room and confirmed the date.
Jonathan wasn’t even going to be in New York this weekend. He was going to the Vineyard for Michael and Jordyn’s wedding. Actually, he was probably already there, charged with keeping Betsy away from any of the hired help, shuttling the groomsmen from place to place as the oldest and most responsible brother. Poor Jordyn. She had to be crying into the ring bearer’s pillow at this very moment. Not only would Cass’s absence mean havoc wreaked on the symmetry of the table seating, but the cloud of vicious rumors that would drift around her precious wedding weekend would taint the pure, unadulterated rapture she worked so hard to achieve with the recycled parchment programs and the Lucida font on the menus. She had gotten an earful from Jordyn the last time they’d seen each other, over Christmas. Cass’s belief in Santa Claus was revived when Jordyn received an emergency call from the wedding planner and had to ditch Cass midway through a description of the bridesmaid bouquets.
And what did Jonathan do with Puddles? The plan had been for Percy’s partner, with whom she was still in frequent touch, to take him for the weekend to play with Shirley. She tried not to worry about it. Jonathan would find Puddles a comfortable place to stay so he could focus on the festivities, train his mind on assuring Michael that not all marriages were as erratic as his own and that Jordyn was nowhere near as unstable as his own wife. Had Jonathan forgotten about his brother’s wedding when she announced her departure? Surely he would have asked her to stay just through this weekend if he had realized. Or perhaps not. Either way, she felt awful about it. Betsy would destroy him. She’d make it all about her, worse than Jordyn. Cass needed to reach out to him, pronto. She grabbed her phone again.
Hi there. I just remembered it’s the big wedding this weekend. I’m so sorry about the timing. Please give your family my love, she texted, resisting the urge to ask about Puddles. She did not want to undermine her confidence in him. Let the poor guy have some dignity.
She threw the phone down and ripped open the barking fridge door and considered the bottle of cheap wine staring back at her. It was the kind that Betsy would sneer at, unless there was nothing else to drink, in which case her mother-in-law would guzzle it down until the last drop rolled into her tight-set mouth. Desperately in need of distraction in a form other than morning booze, Cass went back for her phone and responded to Gavin’s text.
Sure. Tell me when and where.
14. JONATHAN
NORMALLY HE PREFERRED to fly to the Vineyard—Cass too—but allowed to make decisions totally independently for the first time in almost six years, he opted to drive. He and Cass didn’t even keep a car in the city, and when he mentioned renting a Zipcar at the office, Jeff insisted on lending him one of his cars for the weekend. Jeff had two kids, so Jonathan hoped for at least an SUV to store his two duffel bags and garment bag filled with the various Jordyn-mandated outfits he had packed. Nantucket reds were on tap for the Friday night cocktails; seersucker for the rehearsal dinner; a light gray suit with purple pocket square for the wedding on Sunday afternoon. If the dress code was any indication, the wedding was going to be one giant cliché. When he got to Jeff’s Tribeca garage, his friend handed over the keys to a Bugatti convertible.
“Be good to her,” he said, slapping Jonathan on the back, and he just knew that Jeff waited patiently every day for someone to ask to borrow his car.
He crammed his luggage into the compact trunk and set off, not even bothering to check the traffic. It really didn’t matter. He could stop when he wanted to, pull over for a nap if he desired, or visit every McDonald’s he passed just for the hell of it. Nobody would tell him he was driving too fast or too slow, that he had missed the ferry exit (even though he knew the route to the Vineyard like the path from his bed to the toilet) or that the air-conditioning was on too high. He was listening to NPR, a This American Life about rebuilding homes after Hurricane Katrina, when a te
xt message buzzed, but he told himself that he wouldn’t read the message until the segment was over. Ira Glass quieted down as he pulled into a rest stop to take a piss and he saw an apologetic note from Cass about missing the wedding. He appreciated that she’d remembered, though he wasn’t sure how to respond.
After a few run-throughs in his head, he settled on: Thanks. I’ll pass on your message to everyone. Because what more was there to say? Except there was, because at the next stop, after topping off the tank with premium and buying himself a glazed donut, he pulled his phone from the cup holder and added, Brought Puddles with me. He says hi. Then he snapped a photo of Puddles, crammed into the backseat sleeping, and sent it to Cass. He compulsively checked the message three more times out of fear that he’d accidentally sent it to Jeff, who’d been texting him as well along the way, things like: “How’s she riding?” “Great pickup, right?” Jeff was mercifully oblivious to the fact that Jonathan was traveling with a Choodle who suffered from reflux. He had picked up his pooch three blocks from the garage from Maurice, the new permanent dog walker he’d hired to replace the less-than-stellar Stefania. Maurice was excellent with Puddles and totally reliable. Jonathan couldn’t help but smile to himself whenever he came home to see his dog nicely groomed, fed and comfortable. See that, Cass? I can manage just fine without you.
My boy! Cass responded immediately. Does he seem to miss me? And what car are you in? She dropped in a racecar emoji, which made him blanch. They weren’t really on emoji terms, were they?
It’s Jeff’s car . . . P is sad without you, but says he can’t wait to meet all the celebrity dogs in L.A. He hopes you can get him an agent.
The Intermission Page 14