The Intermission

by Elyssa Friedland

  “I told them to go to sleep. We can talk business.”

  “Okay,” she said, and noticed he had already done that thing he did at Craig’s where he subliminally messaged the waiter to bring what he wanted, which was two Grey Goose and sodas.

  “You were great today in the meetings,” he said, pouring olive juice into both of their drinks. It was almost like he was testing to see at what point she would stop him. She’d provoked something in him when she announced she wouldn’t share because he’d taken it as a challenge to test her boundaries.

  “Thank you. I learned a lot from Percy.”

  “It’s obvious.” He reached across and took her hand, offered it something of a pat and a squeeze, a blurred line of what he wanted from her. She didn’t pull away.

  “I like you, Cass.” Again, a sentence with multiple interpretations.

  And then his fingers interlaced hers, and there was no mistaking his meaning.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  And she went.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  CONSIDERING SHE HADN’T slept with anyone but Jonathan in six years, and Marty was still something of a stranger to her, the sex was rather good. On top of his body, where she discovered he was more well-built than expected, she felt supple, springy, and light, a veritable sponge cake being released from a springform pan. His fingertips on her nipples gave her a rush and she came quickly and in earnest. She noted a few skin tags on his chest—a sign of the years he had on her. What kind of name was that anyway for a condition of aging, she found herself inauspiciously thinking when they were done. Tag! You’re old. Looking up at the ornate chandelier glowing above them, she conjured the image of Marty working on his new film, expertly splicing it together like a chef making a filet mignon out of beef stew—the genius he positively radiated. The tags disappeared and instead she saw only his brilliance and boyish arrogance.

  Next to her in bed, he reached for his cell phone.

  “Texting the concierge to send up some bacon and eggs,” he explained.

  In plush robes, his wide open, they gorged themselves on a midnight breakfast. She comfortably used her hands to pluck bacon strip after bacon strip from the plate, licking the grease off her fingers. Afterward, she wanted to return to her room for her toothbrush and contact lens case, but Marty again summoned these items by more invisible cell phone magic. They brushed their teeth side by side, and then Cass watched carefully as he opened yet another pill case, labeled with the days of the week, and popped at least four different capsules of varying sizes into his mouth. It was another sharp reminder that they had a good twenty years between them, if not more. A phlegm ball came up with his last pill, a capsule the size of a horse tranquilizer, and he unapologetically deposited it into their shared sink. He was rough around the edges, but somehow she not only tolerated it, she found it enabled her to relax.

  Back in bed Marty fell asleep quickly, with his stomach rising and falling under the blanket like a periodically erupting volcano. Within minutes, he was snoring, and Cass wondered, with a dry irony, if her life sentence was to sleep alongside someone whose very breathing disturbed her. She wanted to find meaning in what had just happened between them, to see its place in her decision about a future with Jonathan, but no bigger picture emerged quite yet. It had all happened so fast—the disappearance of the Bobbsey Twins, Marty’s hand slipping through the space between their drinks to touch hers, the ride in the elevator where she already felt herself pulsing—that Cass had had no time for calculation. At the very least, it was unexpected, and that fact alone pleased her. It wasn’t a total surprise that she’d be intimate with other men during the gap; she’d known that going into it, but actually doing it was surprisingly anticlimactic. The sky didn’t fall, Jonathan didn’t subliminally know what she’d done, and her confusion about the future wasn’t immediately vanquished. And while she did feel some amount of guilt, she was awash with a stronger feeling—it was sadness for her marriage, like it was a living, breathing person in need of a hug.

  She needed a reminder of what brought her here. Quietly, she slipped from the bed and went for her cell phone. She scrolled toward one of the first messages she’d received since creating her new email address with her married name, five years ago. The subject read, Wedding Toast.

  Dear Cass,

  Noticed you tearing up quite a bit during my toast. Here is a copy as a reminder of how much I love you. J.

  She darted her eyes over the opening remarks, where he thanked wedding guests from near and far for joining them and made a joke about his bungling the first dance.

  Not all of you know just how lucky I am. Not only do I feel so incredibly fortunate that Cass agreed to marry me, I feel especially lucky given the fortuitous circumstances of our relationship. Back at Brown, when I was a junior and Cass was a senior (sorry Cass for outing you as a little bit older), I first met this gorgeous, interesting woman at a little-known bar called Paragon. It was pure coincidence that we started chatting there, as that was a place where almost no undergraduates went. Cass was there because she was meeting with some art students from nearby RISD and I stumbled in looking for a change of scenery. We instantly hit it off and I remember thinking of all nights, of all bars, how great it was that I’d chosen to be there at that time.

  Cass swallowed hard and kept reading.

  Now, here I beg forgiveness of Cass because I was a total idiot and never called her after that. I thought of her from time to time as the super-cool girl from Paragon, but doubted we’d ever lay eyes on each other again. And then, as my tremendous luck would have it, we bumped into each other on a crowded New York City sidewalk five years after graduation. Thank God I’d grown up a little since college and knew not to squander this chance meeting again. We had coffee, then our first date, and the rest is history.

  Two chance meetings in unlikely places. That’s what I call fate.

  Cass, I don’t know where I’d be without you. I thank my lucky stars every day that, years after we met at Paragon, I was lucky enough to find you looking for a cab on 52nd Street at lunchtime on that excruciatingly hot day. Now let’s all raise a glass to love, to fate, and to my beautiful bride.

  When she set down the phone on the room-service table, next to the debris of their foolish midnight snack, Cass noticed she’d started to cry. She wiped an eye, tried to collect herself quickly. This was nothing new. She’d read that speech a hundred times by now and could practically recite it by heart.

  What would her husband do if he knew the truth? She slipped back into bed and let this question torment her until finally the snoring of the stranger beside her lulled her into a state of unconsciousness.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  BACK IN LOS Angeles, Cass said nothing to Alexi or anyone about sleeping with Marty in London. There were so many question marks surrounding the whole thing and a part of her was dying to dissect the entire episode with her roommate. But the stakes were simply too high. Cass was a grown woman with an estranged husband and a job to protect. She couldn’t just revert to her college self, pulling Alexi into some giddy postgame analysis not unlike the sessions she and Dahlia used to have after every big frat party. And then there was the fact that Alexi, a struggling actress, would happily cut off one of her diminutive limbs for a screen test at Spiegel, assuming said amputation wouldn’t mess up her chances. She wanted to help Alexi but needed a little bit of time for things to shake out before she went asking Marty for favors.

  From London, Marty flew to Toronto with Minka and Brie to check in on a period film that was set in what was supposed to be colonial Mumbai. It was hemorrhaging money because of a temperamental director who claimed that he could only work if he was high and that the pot in Canada was shit. Cass was sent home on Virgin Atlantic (business class), though she was a tiny bit crushed that Marty didn’t send the jet back for her. She marveled at ho
w quickly she’d managed to grow accustomed to new heights of luxury. Was that everyone, or just a particular weakness of hers? She hoped it was very much the former, that she wasn’t some materialism octopus. Like teenagers, she and Marty exchanged cell phone numbers the morning after their rendezvous and Cass was admittedly excited to receive a text message from him in Toronto. It was a selfie on set, the larger-than-life producer seated in a director’s chair. She returned the favor with a selfie of her own: lace nightie, Brigitte Bardot bun, a pout copied from a study of Alexi’s facial movements. The only difficulty was blocking any traces of her surroundings. By putting the camera close up, she was able to cut out the worn-out sheets, the headboard-less bed, the peeling paint on the walls. When had she last sent Jonathan a selfie? Maybe never. Married people didn’t do things like that. Not after the first year anyway. She cued a figurative sigh in her head.

  Whereas in New York she’d taken to stealthily peeking into baby carriages, now she found herself observing couples out and about in Los Angeles, especially those with noticeable differences in age or attractiveness. She attempted to decode their body language like those “experts” who get quoted in gossip magazines. Cass and Jonathan walking down the street together raised no eyebrows. They were well-groomed yuppies with flush bank accounts—people knew this from their matching Moncler vests and Cass’s well-tended highlights—of equal attractiveness give or take some small margin of error. Marty was a different story. He was just so much older than her that even when he was dressed in a casual tee and tennies, he was always going to look more like her father than her boyfriend. What did that say about what she was looking for? It was hard to imagine this whole experiment boiled down to unresolved daddy issues. It was more important to focus on why she cared what passersby would think. The years of her ill-fitting clothing, her tacky mother, their dented car with its dice hanging from the rearview mirror were a lifetime behind her, but they had taken their indelible toll. She still believed that everyone was sizing her up unfavorably, that she was a play that would get skewered on opening night.

  When she returned to the office after a weekend spent replaying the trip to London in her mind, Aidan told her she’d been reassigned to working on a small but important film about a group of Nigerian mothers who start an underground school to educate young rebels. It was projected to be the main event at Sundance. Aidan looked at her askance when he handed over the draft press kit. Success at Spiegel and in just a short time—yes, it was eyebrow raising. Cass tried to beat back her doubts about why she’d gotten the assignment.

  The new film was called School of Rebels and she went at it day and night, tinkering with some of the imagery that she’d previously designed for an off-Broadway play set in the Congo. Aidan approved of her drafts, often making no suggestions for improvement or just the smallest comment, and so she forged onward, gaining confidence with each passing day. She deserved this job. She deserved this assignment. If it wouldn’t have been so obscene, she’d like to have called Jonathan to lay out the case for him. He’d help to suppress any of her insecurities. Besides serving as Puddles’s playroom, the spare bedroom in their apartment was where Cass worked on her storyboards. Sometimes she’d see Jonathan in there looking at her work, a big smile on his face. But that was then and this was now. She wasn’t even sure she could call on him for that kidney anymore, let alone an ego stroking.

  22. JONATHAN

  ABOVE EVERYTHING, JONATHAN was a rational guy. Whether that made Cass love him or hate him was unclear—she had bits and pieces of an artist’s temperament, had accused him of being unfeeling more than once, with which he took serious issue. Wasn’t making a rational choice—weighing the pros and cons on the scales of justice in your mind carefully until you could see one side starting to tip—the very proof of how sensitive you were? In fact, when Cass spelled out her argument of why a separation would be healthy for them, she’d sounded like the rational one, not him.

  His way of thinking, the careful consideration of options until a course of action revealed itself, led him to call Brett a few days after she returned home to Boston. The way he saw it, why should two people who clearly want to have sex, who’ve done it together a hundred times before, not do it because they are worried about what the other will think? He didn’t put it to Brett like that, but he did say he’d like to take the train up to see her that weekend. She would connect the dots.

  There was something else that made him reach out to Brett again. Something that had really pissed him off, rendering his decision to call his ex three parts logic, one part impulse. He had been rummaging around Cass’s night table drawer looking for his Swiss Army knife. Normally he kept it in his travel case, but she was always swiping it to cut a loose thread or snip a hangnail, and she never remembered to put it back. In the drawer, pushed to the back, he found a letter from the director of human resources at the Los Angeles Performing Arts Center. Attached were brochures from half a dozen shows they had put on. The letter was dated January, two months before Cass had asked for the break. Could this be what Cass was alluding to when she said he didn’t really know her? He dialed Brett’s number as he crumpled the letter into a ball and swooshed it into the garbage can.

  And wouldn’t you know it? Brett accepted and a few days later he was ringing the doorbell of her home in Beacon Hill, where she lived on the second floor of a narrow row house.

  Sex with Brett, which they wasted no time getting to after a quick dinner she’d prepared, was like time traveling. For a brief, shining moment, they were sweaty, careless teenagers, basking in the glow of an orgasm achieved not with their own hands. Weightless, their bodies glistened, miscarriages and divorces evaporated, Daniel Rubia-Mendez was a name with no meaning, cheating didn’t exist, and life was magically simple. Brett wasn’t the woman with tense shoulders who opened the door to a home littered with finger-painting projects and refrigerator magnets. She was the girl who did her homework in short shorts with her legs positioned in a figure four, a scrunchie tying up her naturally wavy hair, the gum in her mouth forming gigantic bubbles that landed adorably on her nose when they popped. And he wasn’t the guy with a wife in California likely in bed with other men, with a job that could blow up any day if Laurel was onto something with the SEC, with secrets that could crush everything he cared about. He was the guy who wore sunglasses on the back of his head, rotated his crew T-shirts like day-of-the-week underwear and had a set place in the school cafeteria where no one else would dare sit.

  The moment passed, as he knew it would, and cell phones started dinging simultaneously. Lars had thrown up, was running a very high fever. No need to panic, Brett’s mother wrote, just letting you know. Cass texted: What is wrong with Puddles??? I had a voicemail from Dr. Strouber’s office to call ASAP. Freaking out!!!

  The high school sweethearts couldn’t help themselves, their screens were bright and buzzing, begging for stolen glances. They saw it all—the realities of having a child, a spouse, a complicated life in which the other person played no role. And he saw in his mind what he hadn’t wanted to see moments earlier. That when he kissed her stomach, inching lower and lower until he was going down on her, his lips passed a silvery scar about three inches wide—the place where she had been opened to remove her son. The indelible proof she wasn’t who she was fifteen years ago, and neither was he. Now they pecked each other on the cheek and said rushed good-byes.

  * * *

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  IT WAS MUCH ado about nothing with Puddles.

  Jonathan had boarded him in doggie daycare, a place called Groomingdales on Second Avenue that was practically as expensive as a night at the Four Seasons. He left careful written instructions about Puddles’s medication with the manager, which got blurry after a nervous dachshund owner knocked over her coffee on them. The manager at Groomingdales was able to decipher the phone number for the vet, where the receptionist passed along Cass’s cell number.

  “Why i
s Puddles at a hotel?” Cass asked. She wasn’t being accusatory, though Jonathan felt his defensive impulse kick in. In the background, his express train to New York was being called and he struggled to hear her over the stream of announcements.

  “I had to go out of town for work,” he found himself yelling back, and realized in his cover-up the reason Cass was so nonchalant. That’s exactly what she’d assumed—a business trip. Not that she expected celibacy from him, but he doubted she thought he’d traveled four hours to meet up with his ex-girlfriend. Especially the one whose name cued Cass’s famous eye roll. Who could blame her, though? Betsy seemed to relish mentioning Brett in front of Cass. Just last Fourth of July, Betsy announced how delightful it was that Brett had been promoted at her publishing job, where she designed book covers for young adult novels. Brett’s mother was a confidante of Betsy’s from the bridge club and Betsy just couldn’t say enough good things about how creative and talented she must be to do that kind of work. Three feet away, Cass attacked her hot dog with the tip of her knife, piercing the skin with sharp little gestures, then cross-attacking the flesh. Jonathan reached for her back, stroked it gently, though she wriggled out from under him.

  He couldn’t imagine Cass wanted him to say something to Betsy like, “Mom, you know Cass works in a creative field as well?” Needing to prove herself was beneath Cass, and they’d both agreed that Betsy’s opinions didn’t matter anyway.

  Jonathan wasn’t deliberately choosing to reconnect with Brett to wound Cass. In fact, he prayed she’d never find out. If and when they reconciled, he didn’t expect they’d give each other a full accounting of the six months apart. It should only matter that they chose to commit to the marriage, not what occurred to make them realize it.

  “How’s work?” Cass asked, once the matter of Puddles was settled.