The Intermission Read online

  She didn’t love her husband because he made a very good living (or for the comfortable nest egg his family provided), but she sure found it attractive that being Mrs. Jonathan Coyne meant that her mail was a stack of Architectural Digests and not letters from collection agencies. That she didn’t have to try a dozen pieces of plastic before sales clerks said to her, relief and pity in their eyes, “Okay, that one went through.” There was no shame in appreciating her lifestyle: on the contrary, she was proud. Up until recently, she had been contributing nicely too. And she’d continue to do so again, once . . . once . . . next steps were decided upon.

  The waning of their sex life, among other things, was worrying her, though she was resistant to visiting a shrink to talk about it. For one thing, Jonathan was dismissive of talk therapy. When she told him about a coworker starting couples counseling, he sniggered and said how grateful he was that Cass was so not the type to drag him to anything like that. And going alone to talk through things on a couch didn’t seem like it would yield much of a solution. Her friends told her their weekly sessions were essentially monologues, and you just had to pray the entire time you weren’t going to run into anyone you knew in the waiting room. How would she respond when the therapist inevitably asked, “What brings you here?” Could she really answer, “I’m not sure,” and then expect him to tease it out of her? Was there even anything to tease? A subtle layer of confusion clouding her everyday routine. An anxiety that shook the sleep out of her. The persistent revisiting of her past actions. Yes, it seemed there was most definitely something to be discussed, but once the genie was out of the bottle, restoring it and locking it back in the deep folds of her subconscious would be impossible. Talking to a bar of soap had fewer repercussions.

  “Actually, it’s more like once every two weeks,” she continued aloud. If she was going to unburden herself, even if only to the glass door getting soaked by the showerhead, it might as well be the truth. “My husband works a lot. I used to as well.”

  Tell me more about that, the therapist responded. Or he didn’t. It was always a he in her mind.

  “There’s nothing more to say. I just thought you should know. It seems to be an important subject.” Cass looked at her waterproof watch, saw it was 5:10, and decided the session was over. Another advantage to an invisible shrink.

  She worked the fragrant shampoo with the Le Bristol label on the mini bottle through her hair, scrubbing her scalp more vigorously than usual. How many bottles of that shampoo did she have left? She had filched about a dozen on her and Jonathan’s trip to Paris a year ago. He’d had to go for work and she had tagged along. He didn’t want her to bring home the bottles, bellyaching that airport security would think it was some kind of liquid bomb, and even if the bottles were cleared, they would surely leak in their suitcase. His undertone: If you want fancy bath products, just go buy them—in America. She acquiesced, but stuffed them in her luggage at the last minute anyway. They never discussed it when they got home, though Jonathan could hardly have missed the tidy row of them in their shared medicine cabinet. Lemon verbena. It smelled nice. She’d still never looked up what “verbena” was. A plant, probably. Something for rich people.

  What kind of rebellion was it anyway to provoke her virtuous husband by stealing toiletries? Was it just to show him she wasn’t embarrassed about where she came from? She was embarrassed, so what kind of move was it to try to convince him otherwise? Her insecurities fed her need to prove something to Jonathan, and though she recognized the vicious cycle, she simply couldn’t break it. What was it about feeling unworthy of Jonathan that brought out the worst in her? Basic common sense would dictate that she should be her best self around him: compassionate, loving and agreeable when it came to shampoo. But the repressed sense of inferiority—the depths of which only she knew—made her constantly feel the need to test her husband, who deserved none of this in his life. She wanted to pinch herself to make it stop—this gruesome habit of playing with fire. Sometimes when she laid her head on her pillow at night, after Jonathan said his ritualistic “Night, love you,” she’d swear to herself that the next day she’d be different. She’d pour his orange juice, kiss him tenderly before he headed for work and tell him how lucky she knew she was.

  2. JON(ATHAN)

  HE WAS STANDING in front of a Bloomberg Terminal in the hallway when the new girl approached.

  “Mr. Coyne, can you review these memos before I include them in the investor packet? I looked up several years of precedents before drafting, but I’m happy to make any changes you’d like.”

  “No problem. Just leave them on my desk. I’ll call you after I look them over.”

  “Thanks,” she said with a friendly smile, pivoting in the direction of his office. He started to watch her figure, tight and curvy, get smaller as it retreated down the hallway, but quickly looked back at the screen, out of the danger zone. So he checked out other women—every guy with a pulse did. And he didn’t think he should feel particularly guilty about it. Still, it was safer to focus on stock prices after a few seconds of instinctive fantasizing.

  Laurel, he thought her name was. She was a new hire at Winstar, still eager and a bit tentative, calling him “Mr. Coyne” and defending her work product. He found the vulnerability, and her desire to impress him, appealing. It would go away soon. Winstar Capital was an informal place, only twenty analysts (mostly junior, a few equity), one very rich owner, the requisite support staff, and a small investor relations team. That’s where Laurel fit in—another pretty girl to keep the clients happy. They rotated through Winstar like ripening crops. Somehow hearing “the returns have been disappointing” was more tolerable coming from a twentysomething with perky tits and a gravity-defying ass. Laurel was fresh out of Duke and had been assigned to help manage Jonathan’s clients. She was cute, with a ponytail of dark reddish hair and a Southern drawl like dripping molasses. Cass was more sophisticated, of course, her personality as layered as a mille-feuille. Simplicity could be attractive, but complication had a certain devastating allure. At least for him. He believed life would be easier if he was a meathead like so many of his college buddies and colleagues, married to Stepfords who did Pilates and shopped all day, but he couldn’t change his nature.

  He popped into the small office kitchen, with its flashy onyx countertops and stainless-steel everything, and made himself an elaborate cappuccino. What was Cass doing now? he wondered. It was strange to think of his wife at home all day. Unlikely she was enjoying her time off with daytime television. Judge Judy or Steve Harvey would make her skin crawl. Many things did, actually. It made pleasing her that much more satisfying. He never set out to love that type of woman, the kind requiring so much work, but it seemed to be his fate. To have married anyone else would have been like trying to swim upstream. Right now, Cass, his predestined bride, was probably reading Playbill online or palling around Central Park with Puddles. Their beloved Choodle (half Chihuahua/half poodle) came from a shelter because of Cass’s “concern” for the neglected animals of the world. She had opposed going to the breeder his family had used for decades. Maybe it was unfair, the way he put air quotes around her concern. She would have his balls if he ever did that in public. He just hoped she wasn’t thinking about Percy all day. He blamed Percy, or rather the absence of her beloved boss, for her sleeplessness and their recent lack of intimacy.

  “Women are all a lot of work,” claimed his rowing buddy Anders, the first of Jonathan’s friends from Brown to get married, over drinks one night after he and Cass had been out a couple of times. Jonathan already knew at that point she’d be complicated. He’d been Jon until he was twenty-eight years old. Then, after one date with Cass, he’d been rechristened Jonathan. The weird thing was, he was okay with it.

  “Has anyone ever called you Jonathan?” Cass had asked, making a show of dipping her french fry into ketchup and letting it linger on the trip to her mouth like it was on a sensual journey. They
were at Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien hotel, a kind of hole-in-the-wall that was cool for its randomness. He’d settled on that choice after deciding against trying to impress her with Boulud or Gramercy Tavern, feeling somehow that would strike the wrong chord. Cass ate a lot on their first date, which he liked, but he couldn’t shake the feeling she was doing it for his benefit. It was a classic first-date move, the hoping-to-impress-by-attempting-not-to-impress act. He normally hated them (first dates)—their awkwardness was reason enough to settle down—but this encounter was going better than most, even though they’d both obviously put in some thought about how to play things.

  “No, why?”

  “It’s nice,” she’d said. Simple as that. She never said, I’d like to call you Jonathan. Or, I dislike nicknames. Just “It’s nice.” And he, the fool, the romantic, the sexually charged, had responded, “You’re right. I think I’d like to try being Jonathan.”

  Headboard-gripping, doggy-style sex followed a few dates later. Maybe she wasn’t that hard to please after all.

  His mother, another woman for whose approval he’d worked overly hard (until Cass came along and siphoned off all his energy), was less enthused with the change. You’d think she’d be happy. She named him Jonathan, after twenty-seven hours of grueling labor with a failed epidural. He was supposed to be Christopher, like his dad, but Betsy thought it was pedestrian—the handyman who tended to her parents’ Fisher Island home was named Chris—so she declared naming rights while the doctor stitched her level-four tears. Jonathan Edward Coyne: it got written so quickly on his birth certificate that his father, the man who was meant to become Christopher Sr., barely had a second to quibble. By grade school, he was Jon, and Betsy never put up a fight. She’d won the war; the battle was beneath her.

  Betsy had scowled sharply the first time she heard Cass call him Jonathan. This was noteworthy because Betsy DeWalt Coyne did almost everything with subtlety. If you didn’t stare at her intently, you could almost miss the dismissive eye roll, the gentle shrug of disapproval or the quick pursing of her lips. Big emotions, loud voices—those were crude, decidedly “ethnic,” according to his mother. So the scowl, which darkened her face so fiercely that it seemed like a rain cloud had stationed itself above her head, was significant. It meant his mother’s reaction to Cass was so visceral that even she, the queen of composure, couldn’t hide it.

  Fucking women. Whoever said, “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them,” was a true genius.

  He glanced at his watch as he returned to his office, frothy drink in hand. It was past eleven. If she’d gone to the gym instead of trolling the Broadway blogs, she’d surely be back by now. He thought about what Cass had declared just the other day—that she would use her time off to get into the best shape of her life. Said she’d spin, lengthen, tone, crunch, and stretch the days away. He didn’t say what he wanted to say: that he didn’t understand how that goal fit in with their other stated goal. Because Cass said a lot of things, and didn’t mean half of them. His marriage ran a lot smoother once he realized that. Maybe he’d give her a call at home now, just to check in. As he picked up the receiver, his boss, Jerry, walked in with his usual burst of self-importance. Jerry was the kind of guy who got off on people’s automated responses to his arrival: phones slipped back into pockets, sucking candies discreetly tossed, spines stacked more uprightly. But he’d earned it—a self-made man was always entitled to have swagger—and Jonathan didn’t mind straightening his tie when his boss came in.

  “Jonathan, the energy gods are smiling on us. Ginny called to say she caught enough of CNBC this morning to know she could go crazy in the stores today.” Ginny: the prototypical Stepford. “You’ve done well, son,” he continued.

  Jerry’s use of “son” was unique. It wasn’t particularly parental or avuncular, but it wasn’t condescending either. It was something else, a Jerry-ism, and since Jonathan’s own father never called him “son,” he took it for what it was—some measure of affection, however attenuated. And Ginny. She was a first wife, surprise, surprise, but had nipped and tucked herself into someone who could easily pass as a second. Jonathan loved that Cass was nothing like Ginny, fitting into some prefab mold like Jell-O, but then again he was no Jerry either. Jerry’s meteoric rise from son of an oil rigger in Texas to one of the highest-paid energy traders (the poetic symmetry duly noted) was nearly apocryphal, while Jonathan’s own ascending career was rather less newsworthy. His father and both grandfathers were investment bankers from Boston, back when shoes were white and gin was a lunchtime staple. To get where he was, all Jonathan had to do was not screw up in any material way. Which he had, actually, but he was lucky that it occurred in that halcyon era just before every incident and rumor were documented for posterity online. Cass made a point of reminding Jonathan that he owed his professional success to no one but himself, that he’d turned down a courtesy title at his father’s firm in favor of an independent path, even if it was in a related industry. (That part couldn’t be helped—numbers were in the Coyne blood.) She’d identified his weak spot and chosen to massage it. He loved her for it, and hoped one day he could do the same for her. What were her weaknesses, though? Sometimes he thought he knew Cass inside and out, while other times the words that fell from her mouth made his wife seem like a total stranger. In the same vein, sometimes Cass could seem like the most confident woman in the world, and then she’d be petty and insecure a beat later. When he was a younger man, newly married and without a clue, he tried to match up these mood swings to her cycle, but found he wasn’t so lucky as to be able to predict her volatility with any type of regular rhythm.

  “It’s been a good quarter so far,” Jonathan agreed, with the innate modesty to which he attributed his success at Winstar. He got the feeling he was Jerry’s favorite analyst, if such things could be measured by the number of office pop-ins, backslaps and those “sons.” Other guys around him got ahead with relentless self-promotion, some of them even stealing credit for Jonathan’s own conquests. But he preferred to keep a lower profile. And he found that even at a hedge fund, some old-fashioned humility could still be rewarded. Yes, he was a hard worker and exhaustively researched all the tips and noise that came his way, but his whole presence at Winstar could be boiled down to an accident of birth if you looked back far enough. More importantly, it could all just as easily crash, and when it went in the other direction—as it always inevitably did—he didn’t want to be held responsible the way he was credited for the uptick.

  “Keep this up and you’ll be an equity analyst in no time. How’s Cass? She find a new job yet? Not that she needs one now.”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure she’s looking all that hard, to be honest. We’re thinking about a kid. It’s time.”

  Jerry nodded approvingly.

  “Ginny would love to take Cass to lunch. I’ll have her give her a call.” His boss turned away, strutting toward his corner office.

  Lunch with Ginny Winston. That would probably rate even lower than daytime television for Cass. But it had to be done. At least he and Cass would have a lot to talk about afterward. They called it “dissection,” their analysis of conversations and interactions with other people, acting as though they were lab partners probing a foreign body.

  He leaned back in his chair. Four monitors showing the Asian, U.S., Latin American and European markets blazed green and red wavy lines across his desk, like an EKG report. Oil prices were soaring. Copper was up too. He lifted the memos Laurel had left on his desk and gave them a good read. He barely had any changes. Smart girl. Maybe he’d talk to her about revising the quarterly packets they sent to investors. He’d had it in his head for a while to trim them and simplify the language. But it was probably a better idea to make Peter, a newish analyst, take the first bite at it rather than asking Laurel. Temptation was always showing up unannounced—he didn’t need to give it a personal invitation.

  He moved
his gaze over to the wedding photo perched on his desk, sunlight bouncing off the elegant frame. He brought it closer to appreciate the wide, gummy smile on Cass’s face. Her dress, strapless, straight, simple, was exactly what he’d expected her to pick. It went along with her pared-down aesthetic, which crossed over from her design work. The gown had no train in need of bustling, no frivolous beading or lace. Back when Cass was on the hunt for her dress, she’d printed several pictures of Carolyn Bessette on her wedding day for inspiration. He always wondered if that made him a John-John—is that how Cass saw him? Probably not, she just liked the simple dress. Cass wasn’t the kind of woman who played “wedding” with her dolls. Her childhood best friend, Tiffany, whom he’d met on one of their infrequent trips back to his wife’s hometown, told him a story of Cass leasing her the Barbie convertible she received for Christmas after she grew tired of playing with it. Apparently the terms were fair: a bag of Twizzlers and a pack of Garbage Pail Kids every month, no interest.