The Interestings (32 page)

All around them, making money, and wanting to make money, had grown infinitely more reputable. People spoke about their money managers with great feeling, as if describing artists. And artists themselves were spoken of more candidly in terms of their worth. Gallery owners shared the limelight with their star painters. The newly rich would drop a lot of money on the newly famous; everyone, whether in business or art, almost seemed to be the same, interchangeable, coated with an identical moneyed gleam, as if they’d been licked all over by the same magical dog. And even artists who hadn’t made it yet wanted some part of this, jockeying to become the implicit entertainment at certain Upper East Side dinner parties. During the soup course, everyone turned expectantly to hear them talk about what was happening in the art world. But you wouldn’t get asked back to those dinners if your career didn’t advance fairly soon. These days, if you were a starving artist, you were thought of as
failed
; and even if your work was really, really good, no one would quite believe it. Because surely, if it was
that
good, someone would have discovered it by now. “Van Gogh would never have been invited back to 1040 Park Avenue,” Jules told Ethan. It wasn’t just the visual arts either. “In the past,” a writer friend of Ethan’s had recently said, over lots of beer, “everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It’s like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.”

Jules and Dennis were aware of the change in the climate, and she knew they would need money themselves pretty soon; actually they needed it now. She just didn’t want to think about it yet, which she knew was a babyish attitude, yet also kind of admirable. There were so many poor people in the city who required therapy; she couldn’t imagine jacking up her fees and treating the rich. She feared that she wouldn’t even be able to relate to the rich. Jules had known a boy in college, a very talented tenor, who’d abandoned his operatic yearnings in order to become a stockbroker. Now, he cheerfully announced, he made a fucking fortune, and sang in the Gay Men’s Chorus once a week, so he had the best of both worlds. But money as an end product, money as a
creation,
seemed disgusting to Jules, just as it had seemed disgusting to Ethan. Was Ethan changing? Did he feel different now that he was in such a different world? But then she reminded herself that just because he made a lot of money, it did not mean he loved money. Although, she thought, if she had money, she’d probably love it.

Dennis, coming into the living room of the walk-up after fetching
Media Now
magazine at the store, held the rolled up magazine in his hand, as if he was going to swat something with it. “Go ahead,” Jules said. “Tell me about the list.” Dennis opened his hand and smoothed out the magazine.

“Number ninety-eight is great,” he said. “Remember, we didn’t even know if he would be on the list at all. He’s new to all this.” Then he handed her the issue, and together they looked at the page that featured a fairly decent photograph of Ethan, his estimated worth listed beside his rank. The amount was very big in normal-person terms. However, there was an asterisk next to it, and a note at the bottom of the page explaining that the editors were aware that the figure was much lower than the estimated wealth of most of the other people who lolled nearby on the list. But, wrote the editors, they considered Ethan one of the one hundred most powerful people in media party because of what was likely to happen to him over the next several years when
Figland
, already so beloved, would likely—though there were no guarantees—go into syndication.

Ethan had explained to Jules how the truly massive wealth in TV occurred once your show reached five seasons, or roughly a hundred episodes—because that was when it went into syndication. Ethan insisted that he still had no idea whether or not this would happen to his show, and that probably it wouldn’t. “The chances are low,” he’d said. “It’s a crapshoot. I’m amazed that we were even renewed this season. The reviews were good, but the ratings haven’t been stellar.” But maybe he’d been lying to her in order to seem more modest. Lying because he was embarrassed to be talking to Jules, a clinical social worker married to an ultrasound technician, about the extraordinary direction his own life was surely heading. He never said, “Isn’t it
wild,
Jules, what’s happened to me? Isn’t it
nuts
? I mean, this is me we’re talking about, me! Shouldn’t we stand on the roof of a building and
scream
?” Or, “Don’t worry, I won’t become one of those money assholes we hate. There is no Ferrari in my future.” He never gloated, or even really referred directly to what was happening, except obliquely, with embarrassment. Mostly he kept his head down and worked on many different aspects of his show.

The future, Ethan said, was always uncertain. But the editors who compiled this important top 100 list were more optimistic. They already expected that
Figland
would go into syndication, and felt confident pronouncing that Ethan’s power—though much more significant so far than his money—was pretty formidable even now. The figure that was listed was far more than Ethan and Ash had ever let on to Jules and Dennis, and also far more than their lifestyle suggested.

“Our powerful friend,” Jules said. “Fuck.”

“Why fuck?”

“I don’t know how to think about him anymore.”

“Why do you have to think anything?” Dennis asked.

“We can never tell them we went out and looked at the list,” she said. Ash had mentioned the magazine to Jules in passing—she and Ethan knew the issue was coming out, and the list, an annual, highly anticipated event in certain quarters, would probably get a lot of attention, but they didn’t know if he’d be on it. “It’d look like we were going out of our way to look him up,” Jules said. “To take his pulse without him knowing it.”

“Which is exactly what we
were
doing,” said Dennis. “But it’s okay. There’s nothing criminal about it. Just maybe a little creepy. A little stalkery.”

“I just wanted to know what we were dealing with,” Jules said. “And the money part too, even though I know it’s not that much compared with the money of the other people on the list. But obviously it’s going to go way up in a few years. Syndication, when it happens.
Assuming
it happens. Ethan says it probably won’t. The show is more prestigious than it is profitable. It all involves market share. God, I act like I even know what I’m talking about—‘market share’—but I don’t.”

“So we pried into our good friend’s power and finances,” said Dennis, “and now we’re done and we can think about something else. Are you going to the Bronx later? Is that girl you told me about still in the hospital?”

Jules had a client, a sweet, mumbling teenager, who had been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Jules went there every day and just sat talking to her and sometimes even got her to smile or laugh. Yes, she told Dennis, she would go to the hospital later. But she was not yet done with the conversation about Ethan. Probably she would never be done with it. Right now, a straight shot downtown in Tribeca, in the expansive honey-floored duplex loft they’d moved into, Ethan and Ash were probably getting up and padding across those floors to the walk-in refrigerator, a big, extravagant purchase that they’d originally shown off to their friends with embarrassment and childlike pride. “I can’t really explain my pleasure in this bizarre appliance,” Ethan had said.

“My theory,” said Ash, “is that it’s because after his mother left his father, the refrigerator was always empty. You know what his father kept in there? Sardines and Parkay margarine.”

“And eyedrops,” added Ethan. “Don’t forget eyedrops. My dad had some eye condition, and the drops had to be refrigerated.”

“Yes, eyedrops too. So now,” said Ash, “Ethan can actually walk
into
the refrigerator and be surrounded by choices. It doesn’t exactly make up for what he missed, but it can try.”

“She read all this in
The Drama of the Gifted Child
,” Ethan joked.

Dennis flopped down hard now on the little foam couch beside Jules, the whole cheap thing bisecting slightly; then he took off his shoes and socks and crossed a leg, depositing his bare foot in her lap. “Foot rub?” he asked. “I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

“Whatever Ethan gets an hour.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’d prefer cash, though gold bullion would be fine too.” She began to press her thumbs into the bottom and sides of his cold veiny foot.

“Ooh, that’s excellent,” he said. “Really, really excellent. You know exactly what to do.”

Jules Jacobson-Boyd rubbed her husband’s foot deeply and, after a minute, a little sadistically. It was thick and callused from the athletic shoes he wore during all those touch football games. Dennis closed his eyes and made a string of contented animal noises. He had gone out and brought home a greater understanding of Ethan’s power in the world and the current metrics of Ethan’s wealth, which would only expand insanely in due time, if everything went well. But already there was his percentage of revenue not only from the show but from every
Figland
T-shirt, plush toy, beach towel, and pencil eraser that anyone spent their money on.

“What I take away from this,” Jules said as she continued digging her thumbs into her husband’s foot, “is that he is in some other world, and that therefore so is Ash. And all this time when we keep inviting them over here, they probably say to each other, ‘Oh God, we really love them, but do we have to go to that depressing place again with the cheap furniture and all those stairs?’ Dennis, why didn’t this occur to us before? Obviously we’ve known they’re very very rich, but we should have been embarrassed all this time to let them come here. They don’t
want
to come here, but they have to act like they do. They play their wealth way, way down; they’re very modest about it. They act like they’re in the same world we’re in, but they aren’t. And all this time when we’ve gone out to eat with them and Ethan grabbed the bill, and we said, ‘No no, Ethan, that’s not necessary, let’s split it,’ it was completely absurd of us not to let him take care of it. It was actually
pathetic
of us, and he knew it but we didn’t. He was just being kind by not insisting. He probably doesn’t even want to go to those dinners with us anymore at normal-people restaurants,” she went on. “Remember how we all went to that Turkish place last month? I kept talking about the kebab special. Oh, whoopee, so it came with a chopped salad and all the microwaved flatbread you could eat. What a thrill for Ethan Figman!”

“What are you saying, Jules?”

“Ethan and Ash don’t need kebab specials in their lives anymore. What I really mean is, they don’t need us. If we all met now, we would never become friends. You think they would feel a connection if someone said, ‘Here is a very nice social worker and a very nice ultrasound technician?’ That’s why meeting in childhood can
seem
like it’s the best thing—everyone’s equal, and you form bonds based only on how much you like each other. But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the
worst
thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, ‘Wasn’t it funny that time in tenth grade when your parents came home and we were so wasted.’ If you didn’t feel sentimental about the past, you wouldn’t keep it up. And when Ethan’s show goes into syndication, this whole thing will be so much more massive and disturbing. If I was a better person,” Jules said, “then I would cut them free. They have other friends; remember those people at dinner?”

Dennis nodded. “They were okay,” he said. The friends of Ash and Ethan in question had been a couple of recent friendship vintage. The husband was a portfolio manager, slightly older, and the wife was an interior designer who also ran a literacy program in East Harlem. Both of them were lithe and angled, their clothes made of linen, and the dinner that night hadn’t been awkward so much as depressing. The portfolio manager and his wife had had nothing to ask Jules and Dennis. It wouldn’t have even occurred to them to ask them anything. The fact that all the interest flowed toward that couple did not seem at all unusual to them. They neutrally accepted the one-way flow, and Dennis in particular kept the conversation going, wanting to know the answers to various questions. Once again, he was interested in other people; it was an admirable quality generally, but in this case it irritated Jules, who didn’t want these people to think they should accept other people’s interest as their due. She herself, in her mild rage, began to ask them question after question. “What are the literacy rates in our country?” she drunkenly demanded of the wife. And, barely having listened to the answer, she turned to the husband and said, “Since when did ‘portfolio’ start to refer to money, not artwork? It’s like the way if someone’s an analyst, it no longer means they’re a Freudian, it means they study the stock market.” This was the kind of remark she and Ethan sometimes said to each other. She was furious at being ignored, and Ash, usually so sensitive to everyone’s needs, was so busy seeing that drinks were filled that she didn’t notice the unresponsiveness of the other couple or Jules’s anger. Jules and Dennis were the odd ones out that night; everyone else was inside a circle, an enclosure, a walk-in refrigerator of wealth and importance.

It had been an upsetting evening, and an indication of more to come, but Jules and Dennis had never spoken about it before now. They would have had to turn to each other on the way out of the loft building and say, “We are such doofuses.” If Jules had been talking to Ethan, she might have corrected herself and said, “We are
The Doofae.
It’s like the name of a Greek play that Ash would want to direct.”

Jules thought of that couple now, and the other friends that Ethan and Ash had accumulated over a relatively brief period of time. A few of their new friends worked in television or film and easily went back and forth between the coasts as though shuttling between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Somewhere along the way Ethan had become friends with a famous, boyish magician who once, at dinner, made figs pop out of Ethan’s ears and nose, and then dusted Ash’s long hair in what he insisted was volcanic ash.