The Intimates: A Novel by Sassone Ralph

Author:Sassone, Ralph [Sassone, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

It was at that precise moment—when Robbie’s mother blithely shifted the subject after making a jab at someone—that Maize realized why she’d been experiencing a fluttery sort of déjà vu since stepping out of the taxi earlier. It was like being around André Gilbert again—a suburban, less employed, distaff version of André, but André nevertheless. Or perhaps Maize was merely so haunted by André and the shame of their connection that lots of unlikely things would resemble him from now on.

It made Maize bite the inside of her cheek. She wanted nothing more than to escape the memory of André now that she’d fallen out so badly with him. She didn’t want to add André to the list of people who would seemingly haunt her for life. She already had a long enough list of those people: her dead father and departed stepfather; Hal Jamesley, who’d left his counselor job after she’d graduated from high school and was now at large somewhere in the universe; her stern freshman English teacher, who said she was a potentially brilliant writer yet fatally unfocused and too daydreamy to get anywhere; her old friend Lyla, who, she’d last heard, was now living in an RV with a boyfriend in Portland; the slyly captivating Eli, who’d engrossed her for months by doing nothing more than sitting at his office desk and whom she’d been avoiding for the past month; the dorky college basketball player who’d given her rolling waves of orgasms for several weeks during sophomore year until, out of nowhere, he simply stopped texting her or speaking to her, as if he’d finally noticed they couldn’t make even the smallest of small talk about the weather when they weren’t having sex, leaving her relieved despite a roaring raw hunger for his body, because she didn’t want him to enter her imagination the way he’d entered her physically. No, not another one in the gathering of ghosts she traveled with; it was already crowded in there.

But the basketball player had shown up in her thoughts anyway, whenever she was walking down the street and noticed someone freakishly tall: a beacon of something, though she didn’t know what.

She’d told Robbie about the basketball player and the rest of her hookups and fleeting attractions. She’d glancingly mentioned Eli to him, and the dead-eyed receptionist in the real estate office who’d never once greeted her in the morning or wished her good night at the end of the day. She’d told him about her mother. She’d told him about André Gilbert. She’d told him at least a little about pretty much everything, though nothing about Hal Jamesley, whom Robbie had never met and never would. Hal had shown up during senior year of high school, after Robbie had been shipped off to boarding school, and now it was as if the statute of limitations had run out on the misdemeanor of him. She figured even the most confessional types had to have a secret or two for themselves. Hal Jamesley was hers.

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