The Interestings (23 page)

One afternoon Ash wasn’t around to take a walk. Jane Zell said she’d seen her leave the teepee looking upset, the way she often looked this summer, but Jane had no idea of where Ash had gone. That night, in bed, in a humidity of a particularly savage degree, the five girls tossed and flopped. They talked a little, each of them telling stories from their home lives, except for Jenny Mazur, who only began to talk after the other talking ended. In her sleep she said, “The man had a face! He had a face!”

“Don’t they all,” said Nancy Mangiari.

Someone yawned. “It’s crazy late,” said Ash. “See you in the morning, ladies.”

The others hushed; the sleep talker stilled. Even through the heat, their bodies had circadian rhythms, and they managed to fall under. But later, close to two in the morning, after the counselors had ceased their halfhearted patrol, Jules awakened to the sound of the teepee door opening and footfall on the wooden floorboards. It was a male step, and in her half-conscious state she thought she actually might hear Goodman Wolf say the words, “My little sister, let me in.” Jules traveled up the flume of sleep in hopes of being fully awake at the moment when Goodman was reunited with his sister, and then with all of them. Tired, worn-out, maybe even injured Goodman, back from his misguided, panicked journeys. He would be a deer or he would be a boy, but it wouldn’t matter. Whatever had happened to him, he could be restored. His legal problems would slowly be worked out, Jules thought. The lawyer would get on the phone to the DA’s office and cut a deal that most likely would involve probation but no jail time. The trial would take place eventually, as it was supposed to have done, and in the end Goodman would no doubt be acquitted. Cathy, in time, would admit that she’d been immature back then—really fucked up and overly dramatic—and now she’d seen that maybe she’d distorted what had actually happened. What mattered was that Goodman was here now. Jules, still lying in bed, felt a bolt of dopey hope that awakened her further.

But once awake, she heard only,
“Shh,”
and then a chuckle, and then the sound of Ash fiercely whispering to someone, “No, over
here.
That’s Jenny Mazur. She’ll start to shout about the man with a face.”

“What?” he said.

“Come here. It’s okay. They’re asleep.”

Ethan Figman climbed into the bed of the most beautiful girl he’d probably ever seen, and if happiness made its own light, it might have pulsed from the bed across the hexagonal interior surface area of that teepee, radiating outward into the dark. Surely he was vibrating with happiness—but so, possibly, was Ash. Ethan and Ash. Ethan and Ash?

It made no sense. A pulse jumped in Jules’s eye as she tried to understand this. How was it possible that Ethan was the one Ash wanted? Jules hadn’t wanted him. But of course people were different, she remembered; they were
allowed
to be different. Everyone’s neurologies and tastes were singular. She forced herself to think about this as she turned her own body sharply away from their bodies, facing the window and the hot night, which expelled a small quantity of bad air through the screen. The voices across the teepee became low and unified, and then became
coos,
as if two doves were huddling together in bed. Sad, lovely, delicate Ash Wolf, and wonderful, ugly, brilliant Ethan Figman, improbably together, improbably pressed together on this extremely hot night, for privacy’s sake inside the sleeping bag with the red lining and the repeating pattern of cowboys and lariats, began to murmur and babble. Ash whispered to him, “Take off your shirt,” and he whispered, “My shirt? I don’t think so.” “You
have
to.” “Well, okay. Wait, it won’t come off. Look, look, it’s stuck.” And Ash whispered, “You are insane,” and in response, agreeable Ethan laughed insanely, followed by the soft, almost imperceptible sound of him most likely taking off his shirt in front of a girl for the first time ever. “There you go. That’s nice,” Ash whispered. “See?”

Then there were slurping, excruciatingly human sounds, and the doves returned again, and there was rotisserie-style turning inside overheated flannel. Love could not be explained. Jules Jacobson-Boyd would eventually know this when she became a therapist, but now Jules Jacobson knew it anecdotally, and she felt suddenly snide and defensive in response to it. Furious, actually. She felt as if she’d done everything wrong,
as always.
She had a wild need to say something to Jonah tomorrow about what she’d witnessed tonight. She imagined coming upon him as he sat curled over his guitar, and telling him, “Guess what? Apparently opposites really do attract, freakish though that is in this case.”

In the morning, the air returned to a reasonable temperature, and only the five girls remained in the teepee. They sat up in their beds to the opening strains of Haydn’s
Surprise
Symphony, which the Wunderlichs still played each day on a turntable and blasted across all of Spirit-in-the-Woods, waking everyone from their slumber.

I
t wasn’t easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you’d always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely? Jules Jacobson was lonely for the entire first year after Ash Wolf and Ethan Figman became lovers.
Lovers
was their word, not hers. No one she knew had ever used that word before, but Ash spoke it without any awareness that it was unusual for a teenager to say. Ash and Ethan had taken up with each other that summer in a state of deep, almost telepathic mutuality. It had not occurred to them before to be lovers, they explained to everyone. But after knowing each other well for several years, spending summers on the same piece of land in the Berkshire Mountains, they had been thunderstruck, and now they never wanted to be apart.

It was April 1977, and they had been a couple for eight months. Ethan had been by Ash’s side when the Wolf family’s dog developed an inoperable tumor and needed to be put down. Ash could not bring herself to actually go into the room with Noodge to have it done, so Ethan went instead. He accompanied Ash’s mother, and the two of them stroked the frantic, heaving side of that lovely golden dog—the dog of Ash and Goodman’s childhood—as the vet injected him with a drug that stopped his heart. Ethan comforted his girlfriend’s mother—his future mother-in-law, as it would turn out—and then he went back out into the waiting room and let Ash fall into his arms and cry. It seemed that Ethan Figman had become the repository of all female weeping. “Goodman wasn’t even here,” Ash said as she stood with her head against him. “Noodge was
our
dog, his and mine, and we both loved him so much, and Goodman missed his death, Ethan. He
owed
it to Noodge to be here today. We both did.” But Ethan hadn’t missed the death of this dog; Ethan was there for it, and for all other important occasions.

This week everyone had gotten their letters from colleges. Ash had been accepted to Yale, where her maternal uncles and grandfather had gone; Ethan had been accepted into the animation program at the School of Visual Arts in the city. They would be living two hours apart, but would commute frequently to see each other. Jonah, who’d said he had no interest in pursuing music in college, was going to MIT to study mechanical engineering, hoping to focus on robotics. And Jules, whose family had limited funds and who had been an indifferent student in high school since her attention had been on everything and everyone from Spirit-in-the-Woods, was going to the State University of New York at Buffalo. She thought about Ash and Ethan’s trips to see each other, picturing Ethan behind the wheel of his father’s old car, gripping it hard as he merged onto I-95. Jules could also picture Ash on the Amtrak train, her head in a Penguin classic. Everyone else was either bewildered or impressed by what Ash and Ethan had found in each other, but Jules felt that she and Jonah were the only ones who could perceive the intense degree of their friends’ commitment. Goodman, missing now for an entire year, had caused this relationship to take hold. Ash and Ethan would
never
have fallen in love if he hadn’t run off and become a fugitive.

“If
encoupled
is a word,” Jules said to Jonah one evening that spring before college, “then that is what they are.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I think it is a word. And that’s definitely what they are.”

Un
encoupled, if that too was a word, was what Jonah and Jules were. They sat in Jonah Bay’s mother’s loft, a large, not entirely finished space on Watts Street. Jules didn’t understand the feeling of loneliness she had all the time now. It didn’t make sense that the phenomenon of Ash and Ethan’s couplehood should have caused it. Jonah didn’t have the same feeling, exactly, but he admitted that he felt inadequate—embarrassed and even
appalled
when he thought back to the several months he’d been Ash’s boyfriend the year before, and what a bad job he’d done.

“It isn’t supposed to be a job,” Jules said.

“No, I guess not.” Jonah shrugged, but he didn’t elaborate. Neither of them yet knew how to be a boyfriend or girlfriend. This was not a skill set that could be taught; you just had to do it, and you had to want to do it, and somehow through doing it you became better at it. Surely at MIT there would be plenty of other people who didn’t know how to be boyfriends or girlfriends. Maybe, in that environment, tentative and virginal Jonah Bay could flourish.

“Kids!” called his mother. “Come listen to this. I need your opinion.” Susannah Bay and two other musicians sat in the alcove off the main part of the loft. They played a song with a
wah-wah
underbeat that made it sound a little like the soundtrack to a cop show. His mother was trying hard to stay relevant, Jonah had said. Her voice was still strong; it hadn’t been trashed like the voices of some of the women she’d come up with in the early days of the folk scene—women who’d started out as angelic sopranos and ended up sounding like someone’s uncle with emphysema.

Susannah Bay could still sing anything, but the question was whether people wanted to hear her anymore. When she gave a concert at one of the very few remaining folk clubs in the city, or in other cities, places with an increasingly heavy cover charge, there was always a nostalgic demand for “The Wind Will Carry Us” and “Boy Wandering” and some of the other old songs that reminded the audience of where they had been the first time they’d heard them—and how much their lives had changed since then, and how shockingly old they were now. Those beloved songs had to be interspersed generously throughout the set at a concert; you could sense restlessness and even hostility when you went on too long without singing something familiar.

“The tide is turning,” Susannah frequently said. But the tide always turned. When it was your tide, you took notice. Folk was over as a
scene,
and that was tremendously sad for all the people who’d been there in those early years, when an acoustic guitar and a single voice had seemed capable of hastening the end of a war; but now there was exciting music of all kinds—folk and not folk—everywhere. It was just that Susannah Bay’s new songs hadn’t made the graceful leap into the closing years of the 1970s. When her impromptu set in the loft was finished, Susannah anxiously asked Jonah and Jules if they thought that this was the sort of music that they and their friends might want to listen to. She asked, “Could you imagine a bunch of you sitting around and putting on my new album?”

“Oh, definitely,” Jules said, to be kind, and Jonah echoed her. Susannah seemed cheered by this, but the musicians knew it wasn’t true, and they headed out somewhat mutely, then eventually Jules left too.

“See you,” said Jonah at the door. They squeezed each other lightly, then patted each other on the back, making small physical gestures that affirmed their long-standing connection. They were the only two who were left now, the two who were still alone. Jonah was so good-looking that Jules marveled about it each time they had a moment of physical contact. His dark hair had recently been trimmed so that it now ended above his shoulders. He still sometimes wore a leather string around his neck, and a pocket T-shirt. He seemed almost embarrassed by his own beauty, and wanted to pretend that it was an optical illusion. Jules could also not understand why he’d always deflected talk about his musical talent, and why he’d abandoned it. She knew how good he was at guitar and singing and songwriting. Elektra, the label that had rejected his mother, might have wanted him now instead. But he didn’t want any of that; instead, he would be at MIT in a lab, doing things that Jules would never be able to understand. “Is it that performing makes you anxious?” she’d once tried to ask him, but he’d only regarded her with an uncharacteristically cold expression, and shook his head as if to say she had no idea what she was talking about. Jules decided that Jonah was just too modest to be a musician or to possibly become famous; he didn’t have the temperament, and she supposed this was honorable, and it made her own cravings for a big life, maybe even as a funny stage actress, seem a little crass.

Jules came to the loft often because she felt she needed to limit her time at the Labyrinth, where Ash and Ethan had essentially begun to live together. “You can set up shop in Goodman’s room,” Betsy Wolf had offered Ethan that spring. “Oh no, I can’t do that,” Ethan said. “But I really want you to,” Betsy said. Her desire to have Ethan “set up shop” had to have come out of her longing for her son, and though it was probably hard to see another boy in that room—the wrong boy—it helped her too. Goodman had an enormous desk below curling posters of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and
A Clockwork Orange
. Gently, nervously, Ethan moved some of Goodman’s surface objects to the side. On that desk, under the strong light of a green gooseneck lamp, Ethan Figman went to work, drawing frames for
Figland
cartoons.

Soon he was spending weekends at the Wolfs’, and then, more and more frequently, weeknights. As high school seniors, he and Ash were a facsimile of an adult couple, and the Wolfs were progressive about sex and said their daughter’s private life was none of their business. Ash had recently gone to Planned Parenthood and gotten fitted for a diaphragm; Jules had of course gone with her, sitting in the waiting room and pretending that she too was there to get a diaphragm.
Oh yes,
she thought as she sat in her chair,
that’s me, Diaphragm Girl.
She looked around at all the other women, and imagined that they thought she wasn’t a virgin, just like them. It was a surprisingly pleasurable thought. Afterward, when Ash came out carrying a plastic clamshell case, she and Jules went across the street from the clinic, sitting together on a low brick wall, and Ash took the object out of the case and they both examined it closely.

“What’s this dust on it, this powder?” Jules asked.

“Cornstarch; they gave me a sample. It’s to keep the silicon from eroding,” Ash said.

“Well aren’t you the scientist. You get your degree from Heidelberg?”

The thing was yellow-beige, the color of raw chicken skin, and Jules regarded it as Ash held it up and demonstrated its springiness and resilience. Jules uncomfortably thought of a stirred-up froth of gel and cornstarch and
fluids
, that awful word that had to do with the end result of a person’s, or two people’s, physical excitement. Ethan’s presence in the Wolfs’ apartment cheered the family up and distracted them from their feelings of dread about Goodman and what had become of him. Jules knew they feared they’d never see him again: that he would die, or that he was already dead. Who knew how he was supporting himself
?
The hopeful presence of young love in the household was just what was required to keep terrible conclusions away.

Anyone could tell that Ash Wolf and Ethan Figman loved each other, improbable or not. The love and the sex made sense to the two lovers, who felt it was almost
insane
, as Ash said, that it had taken them this long to figure it out. These days, the diaphragm was rarely in its case. Ash had confided to Jules recently that Ethan was a surprisingly good lover. “I know he’s not much to look at,” she’d said shyly, “but honestly, he knows how to connect with me in a physical way. He isn’t afraid, and he isn’t squeamish. He finds sex fascinating. He said he thinks it’s very creative. Like finger painting, he told me. He wants to talk about everything. I’ve never had conversations like that with anyone; I mean, you and I are unbelievably close, but we know what we’re talking about without having to explain. Because he’s male and I’m female, it’s as though we’re coming from different planets.”

“Yes. He’s on the planet Figland,” said Jules.

“Right! And I’m on earth. He wants to know all about so-called ‘female’ feelings—whether, for instance, girls actually find penises attractive, even though objectively they’re so bizarre looking; and whether, get this, my father and I are a little bit ‘in love’ with each other. The Electra complex. And then, kind of a side question, whether I think about death constantly, the way he does. ‘If you don’t obsess over the idea that one day you won’t exist,’ Ethan said to me, ‘then you aren’t the girl for me.’ I reassured him that I was extremely morbid and extremely existential, and he was very relieved to hear it. I think it even made him horny.”

Jules listened to this soliloquy in grim silence; she hardly knew what to say. Ash was describing an enclosed world that Jules too had been given a chance to enter, but hadn’t wanted to. She still didn’t want to, but the descriptions of the closeness and intensity of that world only increased her loneliness. “Go on,” was all she said.

“At first I didn’t think it would take,” said Ash. “I didn’t think I could find a way to be attracted to him, because, well, objectively,
you
know. But once we really started doing serious things in bed, it was as if he was made for it. Made for me. And I wanted to be looser finally; I wanted to not have to be so
good
all the time, so held in and perfect, Little Ms. A student at the Brearley School. I never would have thought this could happen between Ethan and me. But it did, and what can I say?”

There was nothing else to say. Jules left Jonah’s mother’s loft and clattered down into the subway to head up to Penn Station, where she would catch a train home, alone. She reminded herself that she herself had not wanted Ethan as her boyfriend, her “lover,” and still did not want him. She recalled Ethan’s strong breath and his eczema, even. She remembered the fatal lump that had pressed against her as they stood in the animation shed. Love transcended all of this, apparently. Love transcended breath, eczema, fear of sex, and an imbalance in physical appearance. If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

But obviously the physical imperfections of Ethan Figman hadn’t risen in importance to Ash the same way that they had for Jules. Ethan’s hygiene was better now than it had been at fifteen, but beyond that, he was also changing, growing into himself. The Ash and Ethan experience was private and specific to
them.
What complicated it a little was that Jules loved Ethan too, in her own private and enduring way. He was so talented and smart and worried and unusual and generous toward her. He believed in her, he nodded thoughtfully at many of her remarks, appreciated her wit, encouraged her to think that she could have a big life one day, living in the city and maybe becoming a funny actress and doing what she wanted. He remained loving toward her, and would do anything for her. Clearly she’d undervalued him, she thought now darkly, as she stood on the nighttime subway platform without a piece of silicon snapped deeply and securely inside her, covering the cervix and waiting to be put to use.