The Interestings (34 page)

The assistant had booked them all on a climb with one of the top-of-the-line mountaineering outfits. After a couple of months walking up flights of stairs carrying heavy packs, and going on hikes whenever possible, in preparation for the trip, the three couples gathered with the other climbers in a lounge in a hotel in Arusha, where they were asked by the guides to take out their gear for inspection. Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert unzipped their bags and pulled out all the various, slightly alien items they’d had to buy at a camping-goods store downtown. Dampness-wicking underwear, a sleeping pad. “The salesman told me that
wicking
meant that the dampness is drawn away, but why does dampness need its own verb?” Jonah asked the group, but Jules was distracted by Ethan and Ash, who were crouched over their own gear, studying it as if they’d never seen it before. She realized that in fact they
had
never seen it before; someone else had done both their shopping and packing for this trip.

Further vacations taken by the two couples, and only occasionally also with Jonah and Robert, were carefully planned around the production schedule of
Figland
, and brought out other small revelations. On a trip to Paris, Ethan wanted to buy a surprise gift for Ash, “some kind of scarfy thing,” he’d said, and so Jules went with him, going off together on the pretext of getting
croque monsieurs
, which seemed legitimate, because what had interested the two of them most on this trip was the food. In a gleaming boutique on the rue de Sèvres, Jules said, “I want to ask you something that will sound very unsophisticated, but I’m going to ask it anyway. How do you know how to behave rich? Does the knowledge sort of arrive with the money? Or is it the kind of thing you learn on the job?” Ethan looked at her, surprised, and said you don’t know, you just wing it. He appeared displeased at the question, or at his own answer, as if it had forced him to acknowledge how his life was turning—the way a ship of state turns, slow and incremental, with great, violent, unseen convulsions underneath.

But then, over time, Jules noticed that Ethan seemed to be winging it less. He dressed better, and he actually seemed to know about wines when the list was handed to him in a restaurant in Madrid. When had he learned about wines? He hadn’t told her about his new knowledge. Had a wine tutor come in at night and given him lessons? She couldn’t ask him any longer. Ethan wasn’t a rube, but was polite and modest and gracious. He had become more comfortable around money than Jules had ever imagined he would be, and she realized this disappointed her.

Their lives were dividing further;
even finding time to get away with Ethan and Ash was difficult for her and Dennis. Clinical social workers—particularly ones with a fledgling part-time practice, as Jules now had—and ultrasound technicians usually had very little vacation time; Ethan, as frantic as he was with his complicated, overburdened schedule, and Ash, far less frantic, sometimes ended up needing to be the flexible ones.

One morning on a five-day vacation the two couples took to Venice in 1988, having been flown there by company jet, which was now a fairly frequent occurrence, Jules Jacobson, twenty-nine years old, lying in bed with Dennis, opened an eye and coolly looked around the room. This was not the way anyone else she knew traveled. Her small group of friends from social work school told one another about their vacations, recommending an all-inclusive cheap package deal to Jamaica or a great price on a hotel room in San Francisco. This hotel in Venice was the kind of place where wealthy, old-money European families stayed—“where the von Trapps might have stayed, had they traveled other than to escape the Nazis,” Jules wrote in a postcard to Jonah. “Help, Jonah, help!” she added at the bottom. “My values are being kidnapped!” The hotel did not feel age appropriate at all. A small slice of canal was in view out the wavy-glassed window; a fruit and cheese plate from the night before was wilting on a tray; the ceilings were coffered; and Dennis lay asleep with his head on one of the long, scrolled pillows.

By now,
Figland
had been sold all over Europe and in the UK, and Ethan was conducting TV business here. Dennis and Jules stayed in Venice while Ethan went for a short trip to Rome. Ash had decided that while he was in Rome she would take a flight to Norway to “have a look around,” as she said, since she was hoping to direct Ibsen’s
Ghosts
at the small Open Hand Theater in the East Village; she’d been strongly campaigning to be hired, and was waiting for their decision. It was true that Ash was going to have a look around Norway, but Jules also knew that she would be with Goodman during the trip. Ash hadn’t seen him in a while. Iceland was just over two hours by plane from Norway, and everyone on this vacation other than Ethan understood that Goodman would be joining his sister.

Ash, as her late twenties pressed on, tried to visit Goodman whenever she could, though often the visits seemed to Jules nervy and reckless. As a teenager it had been difficult enough for Ash to keep up a clandestine long-distance relationship with her fugitive brother, and then in her early twenties, living with Ethan had made it even harder. But after Ethan became so successful there was a little more latitude for Ash to be in touch with Goodman and see him sometimes when she traveled. Still, it was always a complicated and anxious proposition. Once in a while, every few weeks or so, when Jules and Ash were alone Jules might suddenly ask, “Anything new with your brother?”

Ash’s face would turn excited and she would say something like, “He’s doing okay, he really is. Working part-time as an assistant to an architect, actually. Well, not really as an assistant, more like running complicated errands, but he feels he might get more responsibility soon, and even be allowed to do some drafting. He just likes hanging around that world. And he’s still trying to get construction jobs.”

Once, nearly a year before Norway, Ash had told Jules that her parents had been to see Goodman, and that he’d seemed “unwell.” What did that mean? Jules asked. Oh, said Ash, it meant that Goodman had been staying out all night in Reykjavik’s drinking, drugging scene, and had started showing up for his construction job late and had been fired. Frustrated and idle, he’d spent his parents’ money on cocaine, then confessed the whole thing to them in an emotional phone call. After a month spent in a no-nonsense Icelandic rehab, Goodman returned to his flat over a fish store in the center of town. He hadn’t lived with Gudrun and Falkor for some years; they had their own child now, a daughter, and had needed Goodman’s room as a nursery. Eventually they moved somewhere much better, for Gudrun had rapidly built a very successful career as a textile designer; the money the Wolfs had sent all those years had allowed her to perfect her craft. It was amazing to realize that there were so many worlds within worlds, little subcultures that you might know nothing about, in which someone’s art could make them stand out. Though it was wonderful, certainly, it also seemed like a punch line to say that Gudrun Sigurdsdottir was apparently a superstar in the world of Icelandic handicrafts.

Keep what we’ve told you to yourself, the Wolf family had commanded Jules originally in the summer of 1977, and like the cow-eyed girl she was and would maybe always be—the funny but obedient one, the dope, the dupe—she’d obeyed them for years without much difficulty. The family’s belief in Goodman’s innocence was an organizing principle, and their belief became interchangeable with her own. Only later was it striking to Jules how she’d allowed herself to stay in this haze of certainty that wasn’t certainty, a state that could easily occur if you’d been thrust into it when you were young. In social work school, an old female professor in a cardigan with a balled tissue forming a lump beneath the sleeve spoke about the way people could often “know without knowing.”

For the first few years after Goodman had run off, Jules had had no one to talk to about the situation, other than Ash. She’d never said a word to Jonah. But then, starting in the early weeks of 1982, she had Dennis. Jules told Dennis everything important, and finally, only a couple of months into their relationship, when they were joined in a way that seemed to her permanent, this included telling him about the Wolf family’s ongoing secret support of their son. Of course he was shocked. “They just send him money?” he said. “They know where he is and they never told the police? Whoa, unbelievable. Unbelievably arrogant.”

“I think most parents would do that for their son if they were sure he was innocent,” Jules said, but she was only repeating something Ash had once said.

“Why were they so sure?”

“Well, because they
know
him,” Jules said.

“Still,” Dennis said, “didn’t you ever think about, you know, turning him in yourself?”

“Oh, well, vaguely,” she said. “But I just never wanted to get involved in that way. It’s not my place.”

“I can understand that,” said Dennis. “There was a family in my old building, right upstairs from Isadora. The mother verbally abused her five-year-old, calling her a worthless piece of shit and other terrible names. Finally someone in the building called Child Protective Services, and the girl was taken away from her mother, who she apparently loved despite everything. And then Isadora told me she’d heard that the girl was sent to foster care, where she was molested by a much older foster brother. So you never know what you’re setting in motion. Though I have to say,” Dennis said, “it’s still wild that the Wolfs did this. That they
do
it. But what’s really wild is that they keep it from Ethan. That Ash does. I mean,
whoa
.” He shook his head at the nerve of it all, the entitlement. He was not under the influence of that family.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Jules said. “But I had to. I’m never going to tell Ash that I did, so you can never ever mention it to her in any way. Seriously, even if you and I break up one day and you hate me for the rest of your life, you can never tell anyone about Goodman, okay?” She realized that she sounded the way Gil Wolf had originally sounded when he had spoken so sternly, almost threateningly, that night in the Café Benedikt. “I can’t even believe I told you, Dennis,” Jules went on. “What does it mean that I needed to tell you?”

He smiled happily. “It means something big!”

“Yes, I guess it does,” she said. “But you could call the police right now and have Goodman arrested. And the entire Wolf family too, probably.”

“And
you
,”
Dennis added. “Time to get a lawyer.” They were both silent; he’d gone too far. “I was kidding,” he quickly said. “I would never do that to you.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“I just love you,” Dennis said. “And now that you’ve told me this, I even love you more.”

“But why?” she asked. “What does it have to do with anything?”

“Because we’re still pretty new to each other, like two months’ new, and even so, you told me this thing. I am awed by it. It’s like . . . a declaration. I feel sorry for Ethan, though,” Dennis went on, thoughtfully. “He’s the genius, but he doesn’t even know this basic, major fact about his girlfriend and her family. I don’t like the Wolfs,” he added. “I like Ash, of course, she’s a good friend to you and everything, but I don’t like her and her family as a thing. A unit.”

“You don’t have to like them.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Dennis had never been seduced into anything by anyone other than Jules. He was grateful to have been folded into her life, and as far as he could see, the backstory of Goodman Wolf, someone he’d never met, had nothing much to do with anything anymore. Now, in Europe in 1988, Ash hadn’t entirely lied to Ethan about where she would be for the next two days in Norway; she’d only omitted key parts of her plans. It was true that she was staying at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. While Ash was in Oslo and Ethan was in Rome, Dennis and Jules spent the weekend by themselves in Venice. But she felt uneasy on her own with Dennis in this unnervingly expensive hotel room. She placed a hand on Dennis’s arm as he lay beside her in the bed, though he was still asleep. “Dennis,” she said. “Dennis.”

“What?” He opened his eyes and came closer to her, and she smelled his breath, which was strong but not bad.
Oaky
. Cork breath, from last night’s drinking. He was hardly awake, but he instinctively moved on top of her, and she felt the automaticity of his a.m. erection, for which she didn’t take any credit. He arranged himself, and though she’d only been self-conscious about the lavish surroundings and obscurely worried and had wanted just to talk to him about anything at all, this was as good or maybe better. Sex in an Italian hotel room had a specific effect on Americans: it made them feel Italian. Dennis at twenty-nine almost looked Italian, with his now slightly heavier-set, shadowed face and dark eyes, and the scramble of chest, underarm, and pubic hair. One of the scroll pillows dropped to the floor, heavy as an anchor. Half asleep, Dennis lifted Jules up as if she were weightless and planted her on top of him, but she reached down with both hands, not wanting this to turn into a moment when the positioning was wrong, and the woman had to make adjustments while the man looked away discreetly or else watched openly. Making sure a penis was inside you correctly so that it wouldn’t hurt when it pushed in was like the moment in a car when you struggled to connect the metal part at the end of the seat belt into its little groove. You waited for the click of a seat belt, just as here, in an Italian hotel bed, you waited for a different kind of click that came from interior mysteries. There was only a momentary resistance, and then none at all, and finally you were absurdly happy at how it had worked out, as though in arranging a penis inside your body, you had done something important, like successfully completing the critical repair of a space shuttle.

Below her in the hotel bed, Dennis closed his eyes, and his mouth hung open a little, the tongue slightly revealed. She thought of Ash and Goodman in separate beds in adjoining hotel rooms elsewhere on the continent, and then she thought of how, in the living room of the Wolfs’ apartment in the Labyrinth, Jules had once kissed Goodman, her own tongue seeking his and finding it, until he got bored and shut the kiss down. She leaned down now, her mouth covering Dennis’s, and he responded without mockery or ennui, and instead with his full self, the oaky, tannic mouth, half-closed eyes, and the unshowered body with its pheromones that drew her toward him even though the appeal could never fully be explained.