The Intimates - Softcover

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,...