The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “My daughter Camille was into those. Luna’s older sister.”

  “Mr. Spiegel, can I get you anything?” An olive-skinned flight attendant in a pristine minidress uniform appeared before them with a rolling cart of food. Sandwiches, fruit and cookies overflowed. “We’ll be serving a full dinner in a few hours.”

  “Just my usual,” he said, and a piping-hot corned-beef sandwich was produced from a warming drawer. “And tell the pilot to stop all this fucking turning. I’m getting dizzy.”

  The flight attendant smiled through gritted teeth, then skulked away toward the cockpit to deliver the news to the pilot that he was meant to get them to England without making turns.

  “From the Second Avenue Deli in New York City,” Marty said, lifting one dripping half of the sandwich to his lips. “Can’t beat a kosher deli. A taste of home.” How the sandwich got from New York City to Los Angeles to the plane was not revealed.

  He pulled a chunk of corned beef from the center of the sandwich and dropped it into his mouth after a swim in a tub of mustard. Cass’s stomach rumbled and she shifted self-consciously. All the fancy meals in the world couldn’t compare to a good Detroit-style pizza. She hadn’t thought about sinking her teeth into one of those in years. She and Tiff used to be able to put away a whole pie between the two of them.

  “I’m supposed to be off carbs,” he explained, pointing at the discarded bread of his sandwich. “Ladies, take some food.”

  She joined Minka and Brie in taking a china plate and plucking a few slices of melon from a silver tray.

  Unprompted, Brie produced a metal briefcase from under her seat and handed over several pill bottles and some papers to Marty. She also placed a stack of Varietys on the central table. Marty threw back a few unidentified pills like they were a handful of popcorn, pulled reading glasses from a Spiegel Productions canvas bag and started leafing through the documents. He looked over at the magazines, lifted the top one and threw it back down emphatically, and started screaming.

  “I want every goddamn article about that asshole who backed out on us for World War X flagged. I know we got Tom to step in for the role, but he still has to pay for flaking on me. I want to skewer him.”

  The getting-to-know-Cass portion of the flight was apparently over. Brief, but she’d shared a more accurate account of her upbringing with him and the Bobbsey Twins than she had with anyone except for Jonathan. Only her husband knew about the McDonald’s for her birthday when all the other kids went to Luigi’s, the white-and-red-checkered-tablecloth fine-dining establishment she gazed at from the car while her mom whizzed by with a cigarette dangling out the open window. And while Jonathan tried his best to be empathetic, there was just no way he could understand her childhood. Betsy looked at smokers like they were serial killers. She kept about fourteen different styles of cloth napkins in an antique sideboard. The Coynes never discussed how much anything cost—not only because Betsy thought it was crass, but because for them it really didn’t matter. Marty could respond to Cass in a way that Jonathan never could. With empathy, not sympathy.

  Within minutes of popping the pills and flagellating his copassengers, Marty was passed out, a dribble of drool sliding down his chin like condensation. Clearly he’d taken a sleeping aid, but she wondered what else had been in the stash he gobbled. Everyone was a mystery in some way or another. He was passed out the entire way until they landed, and even she, despite feeling on high alert, nodded off for the last leg of the journey and woke up only when they touched down in London.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  THEY ARRIVED AT the Connaught at 7:00 a.m. and were immediately taken to their individual rooms. Rules about no check-in before 3:00 p.m. were fudged for Marty, even abroad where his clout wasn’t as massive as it was Stateside.

  Her room was large and traditional, with calming watercolors in muted pastels on the walls. She was tantalized by the large flat-screen and the dreamy four-poster bed with its adorable row of boudoir pillows. She lay down with the remote in her hand, hoping to find some Masterpiece diversion until it was time to meet Marty and the twins in an hour.

  The nap fell upon her like a heavy blanket. She dreamed of a past Christmas morning, when she was about six. Her parents were still together and she didn’t know to want any more than she had. Their tree, a fake hauled up from the basement, looked beautiful in their living room, with a shiny angel on top and glossy red ornaments raining down. The dream, wavy and fluid from the jet lag and the champagne she’d sipped on the plane, morphed into a warmer Christmas on the beach in St. Barths, where she’d never been in her life but which appeared to her in sleep as sexy and sun-drenched, with overflowing platters of oysters and magnums of rosé. There, a pink tree strung with twinkling lights stood behind her swarthy French companion.

  She woke up disoriented, coming to her senses moments later to remember she was in a hotel room in London on a business trip. And she found, to her surprise, that she had no desire to go back to sleep and reclaim the dream. Instead, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up with purpose.

  There was something about being in a hotel room that made Cass feel like royalty. Was it the sumptuous sheets? The ability to order a three-course meal on a whim? The personal movie theater on her TV screen . . . so many options . . . categorized by genre! She supposed it was the fact that she controlled everything about the three-hundred-square-foot space: the temperature, who came in and out (she’d slipped the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle as soon as she arrived), the lighting. As a child, she’d barely traveled. Cass and Jonathan had stayed at their share of nice hotels, often on Winstar’s dime, but there was a unique luxury in experiencing it alone. Being king of the castle, so to speak.

  She changed her clothes and hastened to the lobby, where she found Marty schmoozing with the hotel manager. Minka and Brie were approaching from the opposite direction.

  “We’re all jet-lagged,” he told them, yawning like a bear. “Explore the city. I’m going to hang with my daughters.”

  “Hold up, Marty,” Minka said. “The AD for Careful What You Wish For just called me in a panic. The dailies are apparently a disaster and the director is refusing to cut any of the fight sequences.” She produced a laptop from her handbag and set it on a small marble table. Marty gestured for Cass to stand behind him so she could see the screen.

  Silently, they watched in a huddle. Out of sequence, with no understanding of the film, even Cass could tell it was bad.

  “Call Mitchell,” Marty said, referencing the AD, and Brie tapped away at her cell phone until she had him on the line. They crowded around the phone on speaker.

  “Mitch,” Marty said. “Cut minutes three through five. Show me what it would look like if minute eight started the sequence. And for God’s sake, blur the dialogue in minute six and set it to the theme music.”

  “Hang on,” the voice on the other end said. “I need a few minutes.”

  They waited, nobody speaking. Marty looked like an entirely different person. His face, normally in a half scowl, was lit from within. His irises were laser beams pointed at the computer, transmitting his ideas to the screen. His right knee bounced up and down, a nervous tic perhaps, a way to sublimate his voracious energy. You got the feeling that if the fire alarm went off, Marty wouldn’t hear it.

  “Got it,” Mitchell said. “Open it from the G drive.”

  Brie leaned over and did as told. They watched the revised version and Cass’s jaw fell to the floor.

  “Amazing,” she couldn’t help saying out loud.

  “All right,” Mitchell said. “I’ll present this on set tomorrow. We’ll talk later.”

  “Anyway,” Marty said, the scowl back, the fire gone. “Like I said, I’m taking Olive and Stella for the day. Philippa made a stink about them missing the day with their summer tutor, but I just told her to shove it. I’m meeting the
girls with their nanny outside the town house that I paid for in the divorce.”

  Cass nodded to show she was listening but found she had no appropriate verbal response. She noticed Minka and Brie doing the same and felt more at ease with her silence.

  Marty wanted her to get a sense of the consumer culture and distill it for him in a few bullet points. It was a vague assignment if there ever was one and Cass bristled a bit at being dragged to another country to satisfy one man’s desire to stick it to his ex. The plan was to reconvene the next morning for their meetings.

  As Cass pulled up a map on her phone to situate herself, she caught an eyeful of the kid-friendly itinerary that Minka handed to Marty for his review. He was taking his girls to the zoo, the Tower of London, lunch at Harrods and then to the London Eye.

  She couldn’t remember her father once planning a special day for her after the divorce. Every other Saturday, he would take her to the diner where she would make frownie faces on her pancakes with the syrup dispenser while he made easy chitchat with the waiter, the hostess, everyone but her. While she bubbled her orange juice through a straw waiting for him to tell her to stop, Dick tried to drum up business by asking everyone and their mother if they wanted to finish off their basements or were considering an addition. He was already busy with his second family by then (he and his new wife had triplets, as if Cass hadn’t felt left out enough), and Cass was like that last piece of luggage that takes forever to appear on the baggage carousel. Everyone just wanted to go off and start having fun without her. To this day, the sight of a divorced father eating a meal with his kids on a weekend, looking bored to tears and sneaking glances at his phone, made her want to leap from her chair and stab a fork in his arm.

  On one of those court-decreed Saturdays, when Cass had packed a full backpack of My Little Pony figurines, Mad Libs and a hardcover Nancy Drew from the library, Donna let her off at the old house and pulled away before Dick came to the door. Her parents had trouble making eye contact without flinging expletives at each other. No one answered the bell, so she lugged her sad overnight bag and backpack to the shed in the backyard where her father kept his power tools and was prone to disappear for hours on end. She heard voices, Dick and his business partner Bruce, and so she stealthily approached, curious to hear her father speak freely in his natural habitat.

  “So you’re taking the kids to Disney?” she heard Bruce ask.

  Her heart leapt. She’d seen so many Disney commercials by that point that she believed with all her heart that it was the place where dreams came true. True, she was eleven, and trotting around the theme park with a trio of two-year-olds would mean Dumbo instead of Space Mountain (she knew all the rides from her classmates), but that was okay. The point was to join the club of children who had been to Disney, which as far as she could tell was a major dividing line between the haves and have-nots. To return to school with pictures from the trip to tack up in her locker would be a serious move in the right direction. If she could only get her hands on name-brand school supplies, she’d have it made. Wait until Tiffany got a load of this.

  “Not Cassidy,” her father said. “Too much coordination with Donna, and those tickets are damn expensive.”

  “So you’re taking the real family?” Bruce asked. God, she’d always hated Bruce, with his redneck mullet and grease-stained fingernails. He always looked at her like she was fresh meat, and she found herself reaching for a baggy sweatshirt whenever he was around. Her father inexplicably referred to him as a partner in the construction business, but he was more of a hired hand whom Dick had plucked from a plumbing sub. Later she’d learn that Bruce had all sorts of dirt on her father’s business dealings, hence the “partnership.”

  “It’s not like that,” her father said, but she couldn’t hear any fists flying over the question either. She moved closer to the shed.

  “Well, I guess it is,” Dick added, ripping her to shreds in an instant. If he had turned his electric saw on her, it would have hurt less. Then she heard Bruce and her father laugh together, a dull roar that ruined male laughter for her forever.

  Cass admired Marty for making an effort with his little girls, and hated Philippa Eastland for robbing him of his chance to be a proper father. As she set off for the National Gallery, she was distracted by the hope that she’d bump into Marty and his kids. Maybe it was too chilly and rainy for the zoo, so he’d bring them museum-hopping instead. It made sense, though she didn’t lay eyes on them once despite her constant crowd scanning. She couldn’t stop thinking about how Marty’s entire face and demeanor changed while he was working. It was like an electrical force field sprang up around him and the pace of his quickened heartbeat and the rapid churn of his brain became palpable—these were the kind of juices Cass wanted to tap into. Her husband was dedicated to his business, but when he studied a matrix of dizzying Excel boxes, he wore the same expression one might wear to peruse the obituaries. Derivatives, shorts, lockups—the vernacular of hedge funds was so foreign that it left way too much lost in translation between them. Marty’s energy, creative in nature, felt like a language they had in common.

  She wanted to impress him when they spoke in the morning, let him know he and she were kindred spirits, appreciators of what makes art. But later that evening, cutting into a filet that looked glorious on the room service tray, and coddled by a generous, oversized terry robe and slippers, Cass realized that her main observation from the day was that the English spelled “color” with a “u.” She’d have to plunder her bullshit stash to think of something intelligent to say to him. Marty Spiegel was clearly not a man who tolerated being shortchanged. He may have come from nothing, but he was firmly at the top of his game now and he wasn’t afraid to let everyone know it.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  AFTER A GRUELING day of meetings with every top marketing and advertising firm in London trying to court their business, Marty, Cass, Minka and Brie settled into a booth at Nobu in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. Japanese was a cuisine Cass typically avoided, what with everyone using their chopsticks like stealthy tongs to snag a tempura veggie or a piece of spicy salmon from someone else’s plate. Not to mention that she still had a hard time with raw fish, having never laid eyes on sushi until college. That omakase meal with Jonathan on their third date had been a real pressure cooker. She’d swallowed as much as she could without chewing, because it seemed a better option than admitting she’d never eaten sushi before. But Marty hadn’t asked anyone where they wanted to go—Minka just texted her where and when to show up while she was in the hotel room freshening up. Cass would later learn Marty was a silent investor in the restaurant. It made her laugh, this phrasing of the business arrangement. As far as she had seen, Marty didn’t keep his mouth shut about anything.

  Minka and Brie had grown on her over the course of the trip. Cass never had an assistant at PZA and she came quickly to understand its charms, especially in duplicate form. At first they seemed to regard Cass with suspicion, and she realized that they, despite diminutive frames and only a stash of cell phones as weapons, considered themselves something like Marty’s bodyguards—their armor a resting bitch face. She’d passed some sort of test, because both of them softened on her, offering her the seat next to Marty in the booth, and even including her in their stream of office gossip. Gaining their approval wasn’t entirely accidental; Cass had made sure to let it be known she knew her place in the Spiegel pecking order—these girls knew Marty liked Diet Coke and eye masks—and she was nothing but an enthusiastic apprentice ready with pad and pen. Not that she was gunning for the role of third travel assistant, or to replace either member of his “dream team” as he called them, but that’s how it felt somehow. People around Marty were expected to learn his likes and dislikes and to anticipate what he would want next. Cass, not naturally a pleaser unless the challenge called for her to become one, was up to the task.

  Marty had a different aura in
London, undoubtedly the outcome of the sea not parting when he walked into a room like it did back home. Here he was charming, inquisitive, still a bit of a slob, but it was endearing in an environment where not everyone was kissing his ass. Cass even found the nerve to announce to her three companions that she preferred not to share and would be ordering her own green salad and miso-glazed cod. Marty didn’t say anything, just raised his eyebrows and looked amused. Cass had a tough time reading Marty’s plans for her. She was either meant to be a protégée, another daughter, or a friend—she suspected Marty didn’t have many of those and that he found some appeal in their random encounter at Craig’s, the fluke Luna connection. Cass knew all too well that men put a lot of stock in what they think happens to them by chance—romantics at heart, so much more so than women. Centuries of forced inferiority had turned women into pragmatists; years of coasting let men rest on notions of destiny. When she cast her pragmatism in a historical context, it didn’t seem quite as nefarious.

  “The Japanese can’t do dessert. I’m not eating green tea ice cream,” Marty announced after their main courses were cleared. “Let’s go back to the hotel for a drink.” They shuffled themselves into a waiting town car that glided them back to the Connaught and found the lounge nearly empty when they arrived. A table for four presented itself at the entrance and Cass took a seat, thought to order herself a sidecar, and was about to ask everyone else what they were having when she saw Marty bidding goodnight to Minka and handing off his button-down to Brie. He came into the lounge wearing a faded Nets T-shirt.

  “What happened?” she asked when Marty took the seat next to her. Fortunately it was a round table, so they weren’t forced to choose between sitting side by side or across from each other.