The Interestings (14 page)

“
You
try being interviewed,” said Ethan.

“No one will ever interview me,” said Jonah, and it was true that unless he became a famous musician, which could easily happen if he wanted it to, his mildness made it easy to overlook him. His face, however, was unusually beautiful; someone could interview him about his face.

“I would love to be interviewed,” said Goodman.

“What would they interview
you
about?” Cathy asked. “Your little Golden Gate Bridge made of popsicle sticks?”

“Just anything,” he said.

“My guidance counselor came in the other day with pamphlets about careers,” said Jules. “Now we have to think about becoming experts. We have to have a
field
.” She thought for a second. “Do you think most people,” she asked, “who do have a field, sort of stumbled into it? Or were they being shrewd when they decided to learn everything about butterflies or the Japanese parliament, because they knew it would make them stand out?”

“Most people aren’t shrewd,” Jonah said. “They don’t think that way at all.” But right then Jules ached for her own field too. No field had come to find her; theater didn’t exactly count, for she wasn’t brilliant at it. Still, she had loved being in the theater at camp, loved the moment when the cast of a play gathered around the director for notes. Each production resembled a floating island, and nothing at the time seemed more important than perfecting that island.

Ethan Figman was silent and respectful as they all rambled on about the fields they might or might not find or be found by. Ash, they agreed, could go the distance in her field, “but I have to know that I really want it,” Ash said. Ethan had definitely found his own field, or it had found him, when he was younger and caught in the middle of his parents’ bad marriage and lay in bed at night dreaming up an animated planet that existed in a shoe box under a little kid’s bed. Though he’d said something inane to a reporter from
Parade
magazine, Jules thought that maybe Ethan was on his way to somewhere great, and none of them would be able to go there with him.

“Jonah has the curse of the famous person’s son,” said Goodman. Then he said, “I wish I had a famous mother too. I have to become famous on my own, and that’s so much harder.” They laughed, but Goodman’s laziness was consistent, authentic. He wanted things done for him; he even wanted someone else to create his reputation. Ethan was the only one of them who was actually getting a reputation, and already it seemed to the others that he might ruin it.

On this day, they went from lunch straight down to the Village. Because this was during the golden age of weak, mellow marijuana, the fading days of thinking you could do what you wanted out in the open in the city, they shared a joint as they walked along 8th Street. They wandered in and out of bead stores and poster stores, and then they went uptown on the subway, emerging in a loose, noodling mass. Six abreast and taking up the width of the sidewalk, they headed along Central Park West to 91st Street, which was slightly too high up back in those days, though eventually all of Manhattan would unimaginably be colonized by the rich, and there would remain very few areas where you felt you could not walk. Together, now, they walked into the Labyrinth.

W
hen he was eleven years old in 1970 and sitting backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where his mother was one of the headliners, Jonah Bay happened to catch the eye of folksinger Barry Claimes, of the Whistlers. Barry Claimes had remained friends with Susannah since their affair in 1966, and they ran into each other frequently on the folk circuit. Susannah said she genuinely liked Barry; they hadn’t ever really broken up, but had simply been involved and then not been involved. Barry had been to the Bays’ loft on Watts Street frequently over the several months of their relationship, but he’d never shown all that much interest in Jonah, who at the time was a very quiet, dark-haired little boy, a miniature version of his mother, somber, always building with Lego, which could catch under your bare foot and leave deep marks in it.

But here in Newport, Jonah looked and behaved differently. Instead of just playing with Lego, he was becoming a musician, and he wandered around backstage at all the folk shows, playing whatever guitar happened to be available. “The kid’s good,” one of the roadies had observed to Barry, nodding toward Jonah, who was sitting and sweetly singing a weird little song he’d made up on the spot. In his high, preteen voice, Jonah sang:

“Because I am a piece of toast

You can bite me,

you can break me,

you can butter me,

you can take me . . .”

Then the lyrics and music ran out, and Jonah lost interest and put down the guitar. But Barry Claimes recognized that Susannah’s son and his song fragment were delightful. Barry’s own songwriting had always been forced. He was never going to be a good lyricist like Pete, one of the other Whistlers, who got all the credit for everything. Barry came over near Jonah and busied himself with a fancy, elaborate banjo riff, which naturally captured Jonah’s attention. Over the next hour, the boy and the man sat together in the Whistlers’ dressing room while the other members of the trio were elsewhere, and Barry gave Jonah a long, patient lesson on his banjo with the rainbow painted on the surface, and offered him cubes of cheese and sliced fruit and brownies from catering. They became friends quickly. When Barry asked Susannah if he could borrow Jonah for a day, take him to the house that the Whistlers had rented in Newport and let him explore the bluffs, Susannah agreed. Barry was a decent guy, a “softie,” people said. Jonah needed male companionship; he couldn’t spend all his time around his mother.

The next morning, Barry Claimes picked Jonah up at the hotel and brought him to the estate that the Whistlers’ manager had rented for the group. It looked out on the harbor, its minimal furniture was white wicker, and a housekeeper walked around putting lemon water in pitchers. They sat together in the solarium, and Barry said, “So why don’t you mess around with the guitar and see what you come up with?”

“Mess around?”

“Yeah, you know. Play some stuff, like you were doing the other day. You came up with some really neat beginnings of songs.”

Jonah said, in a formal voice, “I don’t think I can do that again.”

“Well, you’ll never know if you don’t try,” said Barry.

Jonah sat for an hour with the guitar, while Barry sat in the corner observing him, but the scene was so peculiar that Jonah felt nervous and unable to come up with much of anything. “Not a problem,” Barry kept saying. “You’ll come back again tomorrow.”

For some reason, Jonah did want to come back; no one other than his mother had ever paid this much attention to him before. Sitting in that living room again on the second day, Barry Claimes asked him, “You like gum?”

“Everybody likes gum.”

“That’s true. It sounds like a song you’d write. ‘Everybody Likes Gum.’ But there’s a new kind. It’s wild. You should try it.”

He pulled a pack of ordinary-looking Clark’s Teaberry gum from his pocket, and Jonah said, “Oh, I’ve had that kind before.”

“This is a limited edition,” said Barry. He handed a stick to Jonah, who unwrapped it and folded it into his mouth.

“It’s bitter,” said Jonah.

“Only at first.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be very popular.”

But the bitterness went away, and the gum was like all gum everywhere, putting you more in touch with your own saliva than you’d ever wanted to be. Barry said, “So. Guitar or banjo? Choose your poison.”

“Guitar,” said Jonah. “And you play banjo.”

“I’ll follow your lead, my lad,” said Barry. He leaned back against the couch, watching Jonah as he painstakingly picked his way through the few new chords that his mother had taught him. Barry took his banjo and played along. This went on for half an hour, an hour, and at a certain point Jonah noticed that the walls of the room appeared to be going convex and concave, buckling but not collapsing. It was like a slow-motion earthquake, except there was no vibration attached to it. “Barry,” he finally managed to say. “The walls.”

Barry leaned forward eagerly. “What about them?”

“They’re breathing.”

Barry smiled in calm appreciation of Jonah’s words. “They do that sometimes,” he said. “Just enjoy it. You’re a creative guy, Jonah. Tell me what you see, okay? Describe it for me. See, I’ve never been particularly good at describing my surroundings. It’s one of my many failings. But you have clearly been born with the powers of description. You’re very, very lucky.”

Jonah, when he moved his hand, saw a dozen hands following it. He was going crazy, he knew. He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people. He had a cousin Thomas who had become a schizophrenic in high school. “Barry,” said Jonah in a tortured voice. “I’m a schizophrenic.”

“Schizophrenic, that’s what you think? No, no, you’re just a really visual and creative person, Jonah, that’s all.”

“But things look different to me. I wasn’t feeling this way before and now I am.”

“I’ll take care of you,” said Barry Claimes magnanimously, and he reached his large hand out to Jonah, who could do nothing but take it. Jonah was very afraid, but he also wanted to laugh and stare at the trails his fingers left in the air. When he felt the need to curl into a fetal position and rock for a while, Barry sat with him, smoking and patiently watching over him. “Look,” said Barry at some point as the afternoon wore on in its bending way, “why don’t you fiddle with the guitar again, maybe sing some more funny lyrics. That’ll take your creative energy and put it to some use, my lad.”

So Jonah began to play, and Barry encouraged him to sing. The words fell out of Jonah, and Barry thought they were great, and he went into another room and got a tape deck, put in a cassette, and let it roll. Jonah sang words, though most of them made no sense, but being called “my lad” was amusing, and so he began to sing in the voice of Barry Claimes.

“
Go make me a peanut butter sandwich, my lad,”
he sang in an imitative melancholy brogue, and Barry said it was priceless.

This went on for nearly an hour, and Barry flipped the cassette tape to the other side. “Sing me something about Vietnam,” said Barry.

“I don’t know anything about Vietnam.”

“Oh, sure you do. You know all about our country’s dirty war. Your mom has taken you to peace marches; I went with the two of you once, remember? You’re like a mystic. A child mystic. Unspoiled.”

Jonah closed his eyes and began to sing:

“Tell them you won’t go, my lad

to the land of the worms and the dirty dirt

Tell them you won’t go, my lad

’Cause you’ve got life to live right here on earth . . .”

Barry stared at him. “Where’s this land you’re singing about?”

“
You
know,” said Jonah.

“You mean death? Jesus, you can do dark too. Not sure about ‘dirty dirt,’ though, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a strong concept, and even the melody’s good. It could really become something.” He reached out and lightly pinched Jonah’s cheek. “Nice going, kid,” he said, and he shut off the tape recorder with a snap.

But Jonah, though he was done playing guitar and writing words, continued to hallucinate for the rest of the day. If he stared at the butcher-block counter in the massive kitchen, the wood grain swam as if it were a whole colony of living things being looked at under a microscope. Wood grain swam and walls pulsed and a hand in motion left residue. It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was. Jonah sat on the floor in the living room of the house with his head in his hands and began to cry.

Barry stood and stared at him, not sure of what to do. “Oh,
shit
,” muttered Barry.

Eventually the two other Whistlers wandered in, accompanied by a few groupies. “Who’s the little guy?” asked a beautiful girl. She didn’t appear to be older than sixteen, Jonah noticed, much closer to his own age than to the men’s, but she was as unreachable as the rest of them. He was entirely alone. “He looks like he’s zonked,” she said.

“I’m a schizophrenic like my cousin!” Jonah confessed to her.

“Wow,” said the girl. “Really? Oh, you poor little boy. Do you have a split personality?”

“What? No
,
” said Barry. “That’s something else. And he’s not schizophrenic; he’s just being dramatic. His mother is Susannah Bay,” he added for emphasis, and the girl’s eyes went wide. Barry came over to Jonah and sat beside him. “You’ll be fine,” the Whistler whispered. “I promise.”

It was true that by the time Barry drove Jonah back, the hallucinations had quieted. All that remained was the occasional pale pink and green speckling on a white surface. Still, though, the hallucinations hovered, reminding Jonah that they might return at any time. “Barry, am I crazy?” he asked.

“No,” said his mother’s ex-boyfriend. “You’re just very creative and full of wise ideas. We have a term for people like you: an old soul.” He asked Jonah not to say anything to his mother about how he’d felt today. “You know the way mothers get,” Barry said.

Jonah wouldn’t tell her what had happened. He couldn’t talk to her that way; she wasn’t that kind of mother, and he wasn’t that kind of son. She loved him and had always taken care of him, but her work made her happiest; he accepted this about her. It didn’t even seem unnatural or wrong. Why shouldn’t her work make her happier than a boy with needs? Her work
bent
to her needs. She had been born with an extraordinary voice, and her guitar playing was excellent too. Her songwriting was fine—not great, but the instrumentality of her voice lifted it up and made it seem great. When she sang, everyone listened with deep pleasure. The world Jonah had grown up in so far was one of early calls and vans filled with equipment and the occasional march on the National Mall in Washington, which by the time they arrived wasn’t usually a march at all but simply just another enormous concert, held in the street. Someone was always leading Jonah up a freestanding metal stairway onto an airplane; he might accidentally leave his phonics workbook in a hotel suite, and another one would be sent to him in the next city. He spent a great deal of time by himself, constructing little machines out of Lego and describing for himself what those machines could do.

Susannah Bay wrote a song about her son that became, if not exactly anthemic at the level of “The Wind Will Carry Us,” then at least a generator of impressive royalties for the next couple of decades. “Boy Wandering” ended up putting Jonah through MIT. “I mean it
literally
is doing that,” Jonah explained to his friends when they all went off to college. “There’s a fund in my name at Merrill Lynch that we call ‘Boy Wandering Money Market Fund,’ and that’s all I’ll ever need for tuition and expenses.”

If hallucinating with Barry Claimes had been a one-off in 1970, Jonah Bay supposed the experience might have been folded into a whole life of experiences. He might even have been proud of it in an odd way. But it seemed that for the following year, wherever Susannah was, the Whistlers were there too. They performed at the same folk festivals, and they shared stage after stage, and Barry sought out Jonah as if they were close friends. According to this legend, Jonah was desperate to learn the banjo; he said nothing to contradict it. He did learn the banjo, and his guitar technique improved too over that year, but between lessons he went to whatever house Barry and the Whistlers were staying in, and each time he was there he soon found himself hallucinating, and sitting around writing fragments of little songs, which Barry dutifully taped. Once Jonah came up with an entire song about a character called the Selfish Shellfish, and Barry found this particularly hilarious. Off the top of his head, Jonah sang:

“. . . And the ocean belongs to me, just me

I really don’t want to share this sea

Maybe I’m really, really selfish

But selfishness is something that happens to shellfish . . .”

“The last two lines are a little artless,” Barry said. “Selfishness doesn’t ‘happen’ to someone. It’s how they behave. Plus, you’re squeezing too many words in there. And ‘really, really’ isn’t a good idea in a song. But never mind, the concept is solid. A selfish shellfish who wants the whole ocean to himself! Oh, man, you’re a genius, lad.”

Barry never took Jonah back to his mother’s hotel suite until he was himself again. “By which I mean,” said Barry, “your regular-world self. Not your creatively inspired old-soul self, which I somehow seem to bring out in you.” Never once did Jonah tell anyone about how he felt when he and Barry were alone for hours, and never once did anyone suspect anything unusual. Susannah herself said she was grateful that Jonah had a father figure; his biological father, she’d told him when he was young, had been a one-night stand, a folk archivist from Boston named Arthur Widdicombe, whom she’d introduced to Jonah when he was six. Arthur was a solemn young man with a shabby jacket and a patrician face, as well as the same long-lashed eyes as his son. He gripped a bursting old briefcase stuffed with papers about the history of American folk music and political activism from Joe Hill on upward. Arthur had come to the Watts Street loft to visit them exactly once, smoking heavily and anxiously, and then when a reasonable amount of time had passed he charged out as if sprung from a taxing labor. “I think you must have spooked him,” Susannah remarked after he suddenly left.