The Intimates: A Novel Read online

  To Peter Crowe Franklin and Lucy Blackwell

  and to my parents

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Part

  One

  Whenever Maize snuck away to see Hal Jamesley, there was always a blissful moment when she hardly recognized herself. It happened at the desk in the guidance suite where a smoked glass partition separated the secretary’s cubicle from the counselors’ offices. Maize would stop to check herself out in the partition before taking the extra five steps to loiter outside Hal’s door, not knocking, just standing there until he noticed her shifting her feet on the carpet and summoned her forward for their next conference.

  There were several mirrors Maize could gaze into during the school day—in the girls’ bathroom or the girls’ locker room, in the rearview mirror of her friend Lyla’s car or the compact in her own pocket—but the smoked glass partition was her favorite. In its charcoaled and wavering reflection she was miraculously improved—slightly older and more cultivated, like Hal, with an urbane and faintly Gallic mystique she knew she didn’t have in her real life at seventeen. Her brown hair went black and her perfected skin grew luminous in the constant midnight of the thick dark glass. She looked, she thought, like a memory of herself come blazingly alive, only stranger since it was a memory that hadn’t happened yet.

  Maize brushed her fingers against her cheeks or her forehead or her wavy hair whenever she stared, to verify that it was really herself she was seeing. The regular old Maize bobbed to the surface threateningly and then receded and rose again. She had to do it all extremely quickly or the guidance department secretary would glower from her computer and say, “Do you have an appointment?” startling her from her spell before she could move closer toward Hal Jamesley.

  Mr. Jamesley’s office was like the portal to a more intelligent life, the vivified existence she hoped she’d have someday, although the door to it was ugly and institutional and always shut. It was beige steel with a glass-and-chicken-wire insert through which Maize could observe what he was doing and brace herself until he beckoned her. She’d noticed that when Hal Jamesley was alone he’d mostly be staring at the ceiling or the green cinder-block walls with a faint grimace, as if in a seizure of insight or indigestion. When he was with another student advisee he’d gesticulate wildly while he spoke, his face thought-tormented, twisting and re-twisting a black phone cord around his hands as if failing to lasso his own interest.

  He was her college counselor, a job at which he was incompetent. He made no secret that he was unqualified for the position and that he’d been hired under duress, as a last-minute replacement for Mrs. Franc, the college counselor who’d gone on a forced sabbatical after twenty years at the job. He had no experience as a counselor—he’d be the first to tell you that—having taken a teaching degree in studio art. In his other life, after school hours, he made collages and watercolors and paintings; he’d framed one small, blurry, burnt orange rectangle and propped it on his desk corner where the other counselors would have displayed bland smiley photos of their spouses and children. His fingertips were often stained with blue or red pigment like someone with an exotic circulatory disease.

  So he was probably temporary, which was fine with him. The school had been desperate. Toward the end of the burnout preceding her hasty leave, Mrs. Franc had been known to tell students that it didn’t matter how hard they worked or where they applied to college because they wouldn’t be successful or happy in the end anyway. She scoffed at the prospect of future achievements. Specifically, what she said was “What? You think you’re going to escape this whole mess-of-a-life just because you have good grades and nice manners and clean hair? Think again!” She’d said that to Maize, glaring toward her poster of Picasso’s Guernica. Parents, not Maize’s own, had started to complain.

  “I’m hardly a font of knowledge about this stuff,” Mr. Jamesley had said the first time they’d met. “I mean, when I was in high school, I wrote my personal essay on why my morose poetry was going to change the world, and then I wondered why I didn’t get into Yale. I actually referred to my poems as ‘my friends.’ How lame!” He’d laughed and turned away, looking for something on his shelves.

  Maize had watched him while he searched, sitting as silently as she did in all her classes. (Maize is very bright and perceptive and an excellent writer, her evaluations often said, but she’s shy and doesn’t participate enough in discussions.) She hid in the middle or the back of rooms—never up front unless forced—with her hair shielding her soft round face and her eyes bowed toward a notebook. Every now and then she pressed her fingers to the center of her full lips, as though suppressing an impulse to shout something rude. In her imagination she looked like nothing sitting there, and sounded like nothing and smelled like nothing, unlike Mr. Jamesley, who gave off a piney scent as he stalked around his office, rooting through drawers and cursing at the messy piles on his desk. “Where the hell is— I just had the damn thing in my— Yes! Finally!” he said with a gusty sigh. He handed her a thick book called Endless Alternatives for Top Students.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jamesley.”

  “Hal. Not Mr. Jamesley. The only Mr. Jamesley I know is my asshole of a father. Hal.”

  Maize had smiled wanly at the faint crease in Hal’s forehead, estimating him to be between twenty-seven and thirty-two. Certainly not any more than that. He made it sound like he’d graduated from college in the past decade, listening to the same alternative music in his dorm that Maize had started playing in middle school. But she was clueless at guessing the ages of adults unless they were truly ancient. The last time her mother fished for a compliment by saying, “Tell me the truth, Maizie, do I look my age?” Maize surprised them both by blurting, “No, you don’t. You look a lot older.” Sometimes Maize had the brutal candor of quiet people who don’t socialize enough; she’d noticed that about herself.

  During that same conversation her mother had instructed Maize to pick three forceful adjectives to describe herself (college interviewers always asked that, she said) and warned Maize that one of those words had to be ambitious as in: intelligent, creative, ambitious; sensitive, enterprising, ambitious.

  “Who the hell told you that?” Hal had said to her that first day, after Maize asked him about it. He’d glanced at her and squinched his silky black eyebrows.

  “I don’t remember.” Maize had darted her eyes at her jeans. “I guess—I guess a friend of a friend.”

  “These days the questions are more abstract than that,” Hal had said. “Do you know what I mean by ‘abstract’? No—of course you do.” He’d tapped her student file. “Extremely impressive. Your grades and scores are killer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The only problem is that you have ‘oral communication difficulties,’ according to some teachers.”

  Which teachers? Probably the lazy social studies teacher who encouraged everyone to babble to fill the class time—especially the cute boys—and downgraded Maize for bad participation even though her written tests were flawless.

  “Look, I can relate,” Hal had said. “I was shy at your age—I mean, I’m still shy, really. I don’t assert myself enough. To be honest.” He ran his hand through his thin dark hair and yanked it in the back, as though snapping himself to greater attention. Then he tweaked his earlobe. “Lack of confidence, which in your case is unjustified. Ludicrous. I mean—” he waved his arm at the other student folders piled on his desk and rolled his eyes—“far be it from me to say that most of these kids, including the honor students, a
re imbeciles, but—well, enough said. Right?”

  He had invited her to come back to his office once a week—at least once a week—to practice mock interviews with him. Although Maize liked him she didn’t know if she wanted to do that. All she knew was that their initial meeting had taken longer than expected and that her best friend, Lyla, would scold her when she joined her in the hallway. “So where were you?” Lyla would say, but Maize would merely shrug.

  She returned to Hal’s office the following week, during free period, and then frequently during the weeks after that. Yet they didn’t exactly talk about interviewing strategies and college admissions. They talked about the same things she talked about with Lyla: movies they’d seen, songs they’d downloaded, favorite books they’d read, and the lobotomizing vapidity of the suburbs where they lived. Or rather Hal talked and Maize mostly listened and he’d praise her for being so sensitive and mature. When she could slip away from Lyla at lunch without being noticed, she’d stop by Hal’s office with an orange that they’d split as they talked, offering each other slices and putting the pits in Hal’s Bennington College ashtray.

  Sometimes if Hal was with another student when Maize appeared behind his door, he’d stop the other student in mid-sentence and tell him or her to come back another time. Once she heard Hal yell, “Enough already! Basta!” at Josh Kaufman, a ridiculously pragmatic future pre-med type who wouldn’t stop talking about his chances at Johns Hopkins; he’d been talking about that since he was twelve years old. Maize was surrounded by kids who’d been prepping for college since they were toddlers—kids who’d been trained to describe every crummy playdate and softball game and summer job as an “extracurricular activity,” who’d never really been allowed to be kids—and parents who claimed all they wanted was a good education for their children when anyone could tell that was just a line. They were like Maize’s mother—snobs who lusted after elite colleges the same way they lusted for foreign cars and expensive handbags and giant houses. Josh Kaufman jumped out of his chair and scurried past Maize into the vestibule.

  Inside his office, Hal coughed out a laugh. “Oh my god—for this I get paid. I get paid to talk to these little morons,” he said to Maize. “Remind me of that. Please.” He touched her arm, then quickly withdrew his hand.

  “Okay. I’m reminding you,” Maize said. A little more sternly than she’d intended. “This is your job.”

  “Right,” Hal said. “Right.”

  She looked at Hal for a moment. He was handsomer than she’d first thought, with his silky black eyebrows and fierce dark eyes, and the fine hair on the back of his hands, and his Adam’s apple like Ichabod Crane’s, and she sometimes tingled a bit after she left his office, where Hal slumped in his desk chair inhaling the cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to light indoors and blowing the smoke toward a tiny window screen, telling her about art between puffs. He expounded on abstract expressionism and Dutch Master paintings and postmodernism. He told her that he himself was working on a series of post–Pop Art copies—fake reproductions he called appropriations—on weekends and after school hours. He would light up Camels and she’d breathe in his secondhand smoke deeply, as if ingesting wisps of his sophistication. The buzz she felt afterward was probably just the nicotine. In any case, she didn’t tell Lyla about it.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” she sometimes said when she dropped by his office unannounced.

  “No—glad you’re here. Be with you in a minute, Maize.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jamesley,” she would say. She called him Mr. Jamesley in the hallway, where the secretary could overhear her, and Hal when she was behind his closed door. When she was with Lyla she referred to him as Mr. Jamesley again. She didn’t want Lyla to find out about her special meetings with Hal; she didn’t exactly know why, and she felt a little guilty since she and Lyla talked all the time—before school, during school, after school, and at night. Lyla leavened the damp humor of Maize’s house with breezy reports of her sexual escapades. Maize especially liked to speak to Lyla after meals alone with her mother, at the table where Maize’s father and ex-stepfather, Bruce, had once sat, where it was sometimes so quiet Maize could hear herself chewing. She’d grab the phone and let Lyla’s words rush over her as though washing off the residue of misery itself, which would otherwise congeal inside her like something on a dinner plate.

  Lyla told her everything intimate about herself. Seemingly. But no matter how graphic Lyla was about the details of her after-school adventures (he bit my arm, we did it backwards, I blew him forever, he ate me out for days), Maize knew there must be something missing. No matter how much Lyla told and told and told, the essence of what she did remained a mystery to Maize. It was a little like the feeling she had when she stood outside Hal’s office and watched him, thinking she understood what was going on in there and inside Hal’s head, which was filled with exotic things she hadn’t learned, yet perhaps not knowing at all.

  * * *

  Now it was Saturday morning. Maize was going off to her first college interview—an “alumni interview” for a Vermont party school, held at the apartment of a recent graduate who lived on the other side of the county. Her mother had been firing warnings at her all through breakfast: “Don’t be yourself. Don’t be late which is typical of you. Get on the road in plenty of time in case you get lost and take a minute to fix yourself up once you get there. Your hair is always such a mess…”

  It was mornings like this when Maize wished her father hadn’t died and her stepfather were still around, if only to tell her mother to lay off.

  On Maize’s way out the front door her mother shouted, “Have your three words ready and remember to use ambitious!”

  Maize concentrated on blocking out her mother’s voice. When her mother wasn’t looking, she rolled her eyes. The whole application process was ridiculous when you stopped to think about it for two minutes. The colleges wanted to know all kinds of irrelevant information, like your mother’s maiden name, a famous person you admired, whether you wanted to cure cancer or design toasters or dig fossils. As if you could really know for sure at seventeen or wouldn’t be smart enough to simulate different ambitions for different colleges, like a stage actor changing costumes in the wings. On her application for the school in New Hampshire, Maize planned to present herself as a nature-loving cross-country skier; for the hippie college in Oregon, as a budding social activist; as a feminist bookworm with a special interest in archaeology for the famous women’s college in Pennsylvania; and for the Big Ten university in Michigan, as a smart girl who knew how to cheer on a football team and handle herself at a frat party although she didn’t know how to do that and disliked sports.

  The smaller colleges wanted to get to know you personally during a forty-five-minute face-to-face interview like the one Maize had scheduled for today. The larger universities couldn’t care less, though some of them pretended by asking you for a photograph of yourself.

  Okay then, Maize thought, as she turned the steering wheel at the end of her driveway and glanced at the dashboard clock with a sigh. She was insanely ahead of schedule for this interview—two and a half hours—but it beat listening to her mother criticize her and then, between criticisms, remind her that she needed to project confidence. Her mother took Maize’s applications more seriously than Maize did, offering to hire an SAT coach and an “essay doctor” and listing dozens of colleges under the headings REACH, COMFORT, SAFETY. Today’s school fell under the category SAFETY, but you could never be safe enough for her mother, who’d been the first in her family to graduate from college and, as a result, considered herself unhappy and frustrated at a higher level than her relatives. She was hysterically vigilant, clutching Vuitton purses like body armor and never letting herself be caught in public unless she was dressed “professionally” in pressed clothes, and her pretty face was prematurely lined from the strain of all the effort. She acted as though with any misstep Maize would drop down the social ladder and drag her along with her. Sudde
nly their Audi would be detoured to a poor neighborhood where everybody had broken-down jalopies and cheap shoes and nobody could get out.

  Her mother had been even more vigilant with her ex-husband, Bruce, whom she’d badgered for years, correcting his grammar in public and telling him to tuck in his shirttails at the dinner table and suggesting he lose weight and wear better neckties and take up a classy sport like golf, until it became clear to her that she’d never transform him into the gentleman CEO of her dreams. Bruce would remain obdurately who he was no matter how much attention her mother paid to remaking him. When her mother finally realized that, she’d kicked him out of the house.

  It had come to the point that Maize could hardly go online when her mother was around. Her mother refused to let Maize file electronic applications or request information from colleges if it meant surrendering personal information besides her e-mail address. She refused to let Maize order anything off the Web with a credit card. Although she’d armed their P.C. with firewalls and spam blockers and spyware and every other kind of filtration device, she remained convinced that they were only a few clicks away from the horrors of identity theft: ruined credit, ruined reputations, ruined prospects that would take years to rectify while others ran amok with their data. Whenever her mother lectured Maize on these imminent dangers, Maize wanted to say, Do you really think your identity’s good enough to bother stealing? but she didn’t. They argued enough as it was.

  Originally, Lyla was supposed to drive Maize to her interview. She was going to drop Maize off and meet up with her afterward at a secondhand store nearby, where Lyla liked to buy sleazy camisoles and teddies. But Maize’s mother exploded when she heard that plan. If Maize wanted to drive to the interview with someone like her friend Jayne—a class officer who knew Wellesley’s median SATs off the top of her head—that would be one thing. But the notion of Lyla driving Maize in her blowsy mother Bonnie’s car (a dented red convertible with a license plate that read BON BON) was unacceptable.