WHEN HE WAS growing up, his mother was fond of the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” She used it mostly in reference to bridge, but it obviously had implications beyond cards.
What should he say for himself after Cass treated him like Play-Doh, like a circus monkey, like a puppet whose every movement she manufactured and he went along with willingly, like some cult member following an insane but charismatic leader?
He should know better. He did know better. When he got on the plane to see Cass’s mother, in his heart he knew Cass didn’t really need him there. It was a test, like everything his wife did. It wasn’t designed to measure how devoted he was to her, like after the D&C; it was to see how much control she still exerted over him. And he failed the test by passing.
When it came to dating, people fell into two distinct categories: those who analyzed whether they liked the person they were out with and those who spent the time worrying if the other person liked them. Cass was the former and he was the latter, and that match generally worked. One hopes that after the initial courtship period is over, those roles soften and the liking/being-liked dichotomy blurs into a more natural give-and-take based on actual events. But with Cass and Jonathan they never really had. She was still sizing him up, and he was still trying to please her.
But the sex. He couldn’t figure out what that was about. After he made the mistake of being at her beck and call, Cass should have given him the cold shoulder in Michigan, made him feel like an interloper. Instead, she stripped and offered herself to him in a way she never had before. She was outsmarting him at every opportunity; each time he thought he had her figured out, she was one step ahead. He just had to determine the significance of it, because there had to be one. And then it occurred to him. The sex was his last chance to redeem himself. He’d come running like a puppy to her side and so she’d given him one final opportunity to stand up for himself. By refusing to sleep with her he could have reconstructed his backbone, but instead he’d let her filet him like a sea bass. Of course, in classic Monday-morning-quarterbacking style, now he had a thousand responses to the sight of her naked body. “Cass, is this really the time?” . . . “I’m seeing someone” . . . “No fucking way” . . . “Not unless we’re back together.” Or, if he’d really had courage: “I’m too tired.”
But like a lamb to the slaughter, he’d entered her willingly. Only to receive a fuck-off text from her two days later. Well, technically it was a fuck-off followed up with an “I love you.” Because Cass couldn’t be straightforward about anything. She’d confuse him until he waved a white handkerchief and submitted to her treaty.
Another one of his mother’s expressions he now ruminated over, proverbially kicking himself: “Don’t throw out the dirty water until you have clean water.” Cruelly and impetuously, he’d kicked Brett to the curb when he believed his marriage was back on. As though two rounds of enthusiastic sex with his inebriated wife could reassemble the crumbling bricks.
And despite everything she’d done to him, he found himself feeling sorry for Cass. It was hard not to, walking into that nasty apartment that Donna was living in with its musty tobacco smell and secondhand furniture, with her loser boyfriend who would leave her the minute the chemo meant she couldn’t give him what he wanted. You had to feel for Cass. Her parents really were trash, though he hated to use that word. It wasn’t money they were missing; it was basic empathy and responsibility for the only child they had together. Donna should have waited for another opportunity to debut her latest boy toy, and Dick—that aptly name piece of shit—could have treated Cass at least a fraction as well as he did the three kids he had with his second wife. He could have avoided cheating her teachers and friends’ parents when they hired him to do contracting work, making Cass persona non grata in school and on playdates.
Screw you. Even as he reflected on his wife with compassion, he didn’t regret it. Yes, it was late at night and he was drinking a little bit when he wrote to Cass, but now it was the morning after, and in the sober light of day he’d write it again. No matter how much he found he could sympathize with Cass, he was still sick of being toyed with, frustrated that he’d cast aside Brett for the chance to be flogged again.
He pressed the speaker on his office phone.
“Gloria, I know it’s a weekend, but I need you to pick up my dog at the airport this coming Saturday from Cass. You can take off the following Monday.”
Without hesitating, she responded that she would. At least someone was on Team Jonathan. Actually Luna more than ever had seemed to take sides. Though they still never saw each other, he’d find notes from her on the dining room table saying things like, “I had the building super clear the shower drain today. Looked nasty full of Cass’s hair,” and, “Decided to put Cass’s clothes into storage bins. You deserve a bigger closet.” He had assumed Luna would ally herself with Cass from some neo-feminist impulse, but he’d been wrong. She was smarter than he’d given her credit for—taking his side in the War of the Coynes made it obvious. Maybe he’d give her an extra fifty bucks next week.
There was something else he knew from his night in Michigan: Cass was sleeping with someone else. Maybe multiple people, but he suspected there was a specific person. He knew it from the way her body responded to his touch, the way she carried herself naked, the rhythm of her moaning. It had the imprint of someone whose essence Jonathan couldn’t begin to conjure, who was filling Cass’s cup with whatever he’d failed to provide her.
For his part, he’d chosen to retreat to the familiar with Brett, even though he wondered how well he still knew her. The details of her divorce remained a mystery and she kept details about her son under lock and key. Frankly, if Brett told him she’d spied a UFO or was waiting for Mercury to be out of retrograde to decide on a future with him, he couldn’t even claim that was out of character. Maybe there wasn’t more to Brett than what was on the surface. At sixteen, she’d seemed fascinating and complex, but that was mostly due to her having a vagina. Now he wondered if she had always been a bit too straightforward for him. Simplistic, maybe that was a better word choice. Cass was too much; Brett was too little. Perhaps there was a woman out there who was just the right combination of sugar and spice. Or maybe he’d be better served adjusting his palate. In any event, he was sick and tired of trying to read the blueprint of any woman. It was a fool’s errand if there ever was one.
While he reached for his phone, he mentally expressed his gratitude to Laurel for introducing him to Instagram. On impulse, he pulled up Alexi’s feed, thankfully public. Headshots, headshots and more headshots. He almost closed out of it when a picture caught his eye. It was Cass, Marty and Alexi seated at a table together in an outdoor café. Well, it did make some amount of sense—Cass told him Marty had given Alexi a part in a film. Cass was in the middle, flanked by Alexi and Marty, though her chair was edged ever so slightly closer to her boss than to her friend. Jonathan brought the phone closer to his nose, accounting for everyone’s limbs. Marty and Cass were each missing a hand. As he tried to stretch the picture to see if they were holding hands under the table, as he suspected, a heart appeared in the center of the picture. What had he done? He had just been trying to zoom in on the image. Rather than ask Laurel again for help, he texted his little sister.
What does the heart mean on Instagram?
That you liked the picture.
And that’s public?
Yes.
How do I zoom in?
Carefully, dummy! Why? Is this about Cass?
He didn’t answer, just placed the phone down on his desk and let the last few months stream through his mind like a movie on high-speed rewind. Cass’s new “fabulous” job with Marty. Luna staunchly taking his side. Cass’s trip to London. Alexi getting that part. These revelations felt liked repeated stabs in the neck. He had spent the last six years trying to figure out how to make Cass happy for nothing. If fame and Hollywood glitz were what she was after, he had been doomed from the start. He gave Cass financial comfort beyond anything she’d ever anticipated growing up, but having paparazzi snapping pictures and turning heads when they walked into a room, that was never part of the equation. Did Cass genuinely want these things or was she just that bored with her life? That bored with him?
Marty had to be a good twenty years older than he and Cass. Maybe that meant his wife had been seeking a father figure all along, though Marty Spiegel seemed to be more of the sugar daddy variety. And for all of Cass’s mind games, she was still a relatively fragile person (and hadn’t he just adored that about her way back when) who needed scaffolding. Did Marty listen to her blather on endlessly about the virtues of one-man shows? Did Marty sympathize when she cried injustice over the fact that 80 percent of Broadway ticket buyers are women but all three major New York Times critics were men? Did Marty not snore? Did he praise her daily? Did he make her laugh?
By liking Alexi’s picture, which at first felt like the worst possible thing he could have done, he was acknowledging awareness of what was going on. Doing so made him ever so slightly less of a cuckold. He could picture Alexi running over to Cass and showing her the latest like, the two of them huddled over the phone trying to see how much it revealed.
He did a full 360-degree spin in his office chair. There had been an undeniable sea change. Since the moment Cass declared the intermission, he’d nurtured a gut feeling that his wife would eventually return to him. Some weeks he felt it more than others, but the basic idea was always there, migrating between the deepest recesses of his brain and his outermost thoughts. Now the certainty evaporated. Especially the part where something he might do or say would be just the thing to reel her back in. He now believed that he was powerless to determine his future with respect to his wife.
For type-A sorts, like him, that moment of relinquishing control is freeing for just a fleeting moment, but then the focus needs a desperate reallocation. For Jonathan, he knew that thing would be work, and he’d do his part to put the broken pieces of Winstar back together. He’d also focus on getting Leon into a good four-year college. Fuck—he’d learn squash and bridge and improve his tennis game too. He would do whatever it took so that he was left with virtually no free time. The plan reminded him of his sister’s eating disorder in high school. Really she wanted the popular girls to include her, and when she couldn’t make that happen, she shifted her focus to severely limiting her caloric intake. Reaching for the coffee on his desk, he took a long gulp and imagined the caffeine reaching his nerve endings, giving him the jolt he needed to propel himself into the next phase.
HE WASN’T DELIBERATELY holding Puddles hostage, but a few weeks had passed since Gloria had collected him at JFK and no arrangements had been made to get him back to Cass. It had become de facto protocol that the person who had Puddles for the month would initiate contact about the exchange, and Jonathan hadn’t done so yet. To be fair, Cass had a calendar—she was fully aware it was nearly Labor Day weekend—and she hadn’t reached out either. If she missed their dog so much, she’d be in touch.
Jerry had reached a plea deal with the government that would spare him a jail sentence, which had created quite the outrage in the media. Jonathan had to appear on CNBC three more times, and even though he wasn’t there specifically to defend his boss, but rather to comment generally on the fate of the company, the fact of his employment at Winstar made him feel like the secondary villain. After his second appearance, Becky Quick complimented him on his improved television demeanor. You’d think she’d handed him an Academy Award the way he crowed afterward. A week later he received a call from a producer at CNBC asking him to return to the show, but this time to speak only about market trends in the energy sector, not about his workplace catastrophe. He accepted happily and chose his favorite suit and tie to appease his mother, who’d chastised him for having a wrinkled shirt on his last appearance.
It was true he was getting the hang of the whole television banter. A little humor, some sports analogies, a friendly smile—it wasn’t rocket science. Hours after his last guest spot when he was in line getting his lunch at Dishes, not one but two people stopped him to say they’d seen him on-air earlier that morning and to ask him some follow-up questions about his market theories. The recognition was surprisingly intoxicating, but even more so, the fact that it was his face spouting knowledge instead of Jerry’s made him feel like he could be the front-runner for a change. He’d always seen himself as a behind-the-scenes guy, but the turn of events at Winstar had forced him into the spotlight. During commercial breaks, the anchors would keep grilling him and he realized he wasn’t just filling airtime for them—they thought he had something valuable to offer. Maybe he’d have the balls to do what Cass had long ago suggested and start something on his own. Probably not, though.
There was a lot of hullabaloo over which bank or rival fund was going to buy Winstar and who would keep their jobs after they did. He knew raising his profile with the media appearances would help shore up his chances of staying employed after a takeover. For the moment, Goldman Sachs was the lead contender in the contest to swallow the fund, and although the idea of working at Goldman would once have made Jonathan euphoric, he had soured on his industry lately—and he knew why. The entire business was created on the premise that you could make money with money. He sometimes imagined his job as taking dollar bills and putting them in a photocopy machine. And that was when things went well. Often it was like taking dollar bills and running them through a shredder. Marty Spiegel created art. Yes, he made people rich with his business (the actors, the coproducers, not to mention himself), but he brought entertainment to hundreds of millions of people too. Jonathan pictured Cass’s glazed expression on the occasions he tried to tell her about his work and shuddered. How she must love working with Marty, the two of them feeling so superior for contributing to “culture.”
His office phone rang. Jonathan scooped up the receiver when he saw it was his brother Michael calling.
“You’re calling to ask if Becky Quick is hot, aren’t you?”
“What? No. I’m calling to see you if you’ve spoken to Mom today.”
“No, I haven’t. Is everything okay?”
“I’ll let her tell you. You’d better call.”
Jonathan immediately pushed for an open line and dialed his mother’s cell.
When she answered after four rings, her voice was raspy. She sounded a million miles away.
“Mom, I just got a call from Michael telling me to call you. What’s going on?”
She snorted.
“News travels fast. Your father left me. After thirty-six years together. One day before the Cheshire clambake, he packs himself up and tells me he rented an apartment in South Boston of all places. And do you know why?”
“No,” he said, but assumed it had to do with his father’s favorite pastime. During Jonathan’s childhood, Christopher took more “business trips” than a traveling salesman. He thought his father had slowed down in his old age, but perhaps not.
“It was you and Cass. You inspired him.” Jonathan could hear his mother putting air quotes around “inspired.”
“He said to me, ‘Betsy, I’m taking a page from Jonathan and Cass. They separated to see if they could be happier apart. I’m going to do the same. I should have done it decades ago.’ Can you imagine? Who’s going to want him, with his limp penis that he can barely get up and his all-night flatulence?”
Jonathan flinched at his mother’s lack of decorum. Not offended—just shocked to hear her this unhinged.
“Mom, you can’t blame me and Cass. We didn’t make you have a bad marriage.” He wasn’t automatically on his father’s side, but he could understand where he was coming from in wanting a woman who didn’t try to crush his balls daily, whose judgmental gaze wasn’t crippling. Even though his father had told his mother this was a separation à la he and Cass, was there really any chance they would reconcile? It was hard to imagine absence making the heart grow fonder for Betsy and Christopher.
“You put ideas in his head. Your whole generation thinks marriage is about being happy every second of the day. It’s childish.”
Well, she was somewhat right about that. It was childish. He’d thought that about Cass and her grand plan many times, especially after she first departed. Life wasn’t about choosing to be single on Mondays and married on Tuesdays, or getting to be a parent every other week. It was picking a lane and committing to it. That sounded awfully rigid, but it was the truth, unless you were Cass Coyne and married to a chump like him.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll call Dad if you think it’ll help.”
“Don’t you dare,” Betsy said.
She hung up abruptly and he found himself numbly holding the phone in his hand. He wasn’t ready to hang up, even from his mother, who was probably off to spread her wrath to Wallace or Katie.
Jonathan needed to talk to someone. And he knew just who that was.
In high school, he and Brett would trade stories about their dysfunctional parents, and then in the summer, when both families were on Martha’s Vineyard, they’d elbow each other when said dysfunction was on display. They hadn’t spoken since he dispatched that terrible message from Hazel Park.
He texted first because he knew there was no shot she’d pick up the phone otherwise. Choosing to be as direct and succinct as possible, he wrote: I’m about to call you. Please, please, please pick up. He added the praying hands emoji for emphasis.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Brett said after three long rings. Her voice, normally as velvety as tomato soup, was strained. At least she’d taken the call.
“I really appreciate your answering,” Jonathan blurted out. “I’m so sorry, Brett. About everything. I handled things terribly. Cass and I aren’t back together, by the way, but that’s not why I’m calling. I just got off the phone with my mother and she shared with me the fact that after thirty-six years of marriage, my dad is leaving her. Technically a trial separation, but not really. You were the first person I thought of. Remember how much we used to make fun of our crazy families?”
There was such a long silence that Jonathan almost told Brett he was sorry he called before hanging up.
“Of course I do,” she finally said. “Your parents have hated each other for ages. What took them so long? I bet your mom is going to have some bohemian sexual awakening now.”
Jonathan heard the tension melting in Brett’s voice and he found his body responding in kind. His rib cage must have dropped three inches.
“That I don’t need to picture. She says Cass and I are to blame.”
“Betsy never did like your wife, did she?”
“Nope,” Jonathan said simply, this time not filled with anger toward his mother but a resigned détente.
“So?” Brett asked.
“So. I am beyond sorry about the way I handled things. I just needed to say that.”
“Hang on a second,” Brett said, and Jonathan heard a trail of sirens and the blare of car horns that could only come from New York City traffic.
“Where are you?”
He could hear Brett hesitating, letting the fading sound of the fire trucks buy her time.
“I’m in New York. Doing a girls’ weekend with college friends in the city. We’re downtown.”
“Can I see you?” he asked. The loneliness became the blood in his veins, running through him in repetitive loops. “I know it’s asking a lot.”
“You know, I don’t even blame you, Jon. I kept tabs on you, a little bit anyway, since we broke up. By all accounts, Cass had a pernicious hold on you. Trust me, if I could figure out how to have that effect on people, I’d do it too.”
He almost started to defend his marriage and say things weren’t really like that, but he stopped himself. Brett didn’t even know the truth about the separation. Lies were everywhere he looked, in coffee cups and mirrors and the wind that flapped at his collar.
“Will you meet me for coffee? Take a few minutes out of your wild girls’ weekend and see me?”
“Let’s do a drink tomorrow night.”
“Drinks it is.”
When he hung up the phone, he closed his eyes, actually dizzy. He felt like a yo-yo, released and pulled back, released and pulled back, over and over and over.