The Interestings (35 page)

Afterward, they had breakfast downstairs, one of those strange European hotel breakfasts that feature hard-boiled eggs and Weetabix, and then, right between the two, as if it were perfectly normal, organ meats. In the Babel of the breakfast room, she and Dennis sat at a table among Spaniards and Germans. Jules said to Dennis, “I wonder what Goodman looks like. He’s
thirty
now. Jesus, Goodman at thirty! It’s really hard to picture.”

“Well, I’ve obviously never met him, but he’s probably a lot more weather-beaten,” Dennis said. “Isn’t that what happens to people who smoke and drink and do drugs? It beats up their skin so it looks like—what’s that called?—distressed leather.”

She imagined Goodman lined and weathered and distressed, sprawled across one of the two double beds in his room at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. His long body took up the whole bed, and his sister lay on the other bed, both of them smoking and laughing. Ash would be so relieved to be with him again, to have a chance to check in on him and see that he was at least broadly okay, and hear his drawn-out, sardonic voice, and gaze at the face that had once hewed close to hers. The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.

My little sister, let me in.

Jules and Dennis took a high-speed train back to Rome to meet up with Ethan and Ash. On the last night of the vacation, the two couples had dinner near the Piazza del Popolo, during which they compared notes. Ethan described the meetings he’d had with the executives from the Italian public broadcasting service Rai, which took place over multicourse meals and a parade of wines that roiled inside him as he and the Rai people stayed out until two a.m., celebrating the continued Italian ratings success of
Figland
, which was known here as
Mondo Fig!

Jules and Dennis described their lazy weekend in Venice. “Dennis in Venice,” said Ethan. “A new comic strip.” They talked about the walks they’d taken through drizzly, impossible little streets.

“How was Oslo?” Ethan asked Ash.

“I like it there,” Ash said, shrugging lightly. “I just wandered around, imagining the atmosphere of the play.”

Jules had to remember: Oh right,
Ibsen,
the putative reason Ash had gone to Oslo. Ibsen’s
Ghosts
. Women briefly walking across the stage bare-breasted, in this version the nipples painted in Day-Glo colors, which would provide a strong effect with the lights down. Was Ash having a little fun, choosing that particular title? Goodman had slipped over into the land of the ghosts by now, twelve years after he’d run away from New York and the U.S. and his trial, but he was intermittently revivable, shuttling back and forth between ghost and living human. His mother sent him care packages, the way she used to do at Spirit-in-the-Woods, but instead of 6-12 insect repellent and cheese in a can she sent him protein powder and amber bottles of vitamins. Ash sent her brother books, recalling the tastes he’d had as an adolescent, and extrapolating from them into adulthood. She sent him a recent Günter Grass, and Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, and a novel by a young genius named David Foster Wallace called
The Broom of the System
. She once threw in her favorite book,
The Drama of the Gifted Child,
with a note saying that this book was relevant to her life, not his, but she thought maybe he would find it interesting anyway, given that they’d had the same parents. Goodman read everything his sister sent, and dutifully mixed the protein powder into his skyr and swallowed his mother’s vitamins, and he found construction jobs when he could—the job helping out in that architect’s office hadn’t worked out—though he had back problems now and was sometimes incapacitated for weeks. He smoked pot most evenings and some mornings, and he retained an intermittent interest in cocaine, requiring another stay in rehab.

“Here’s to our vacation, and to
Mondo Fig!
and to your generosity, as always,” Dennis said at dinner, raising his glass the way, in recent years, he and Jules had learned to do. Once you started toasting people, you had made the complete transition to full-throttle adulthood.

After the long flight back from Rome, a car dropped Jules and Dennis in front of their building on West 84th Street. Ethan and Ash took a separate car; he had to race off to the studio immediately, and didn’t even have time to go home. Everyone at the show was waiting for him, he said, as they always seemed to be. Standing before their narrow tenement, Jules and Dennis both looked upward and made a face at the same moment, then laughed. There were no bellmen to carry their suitcases, no sherpas. No trays of fruit and cheese awaited them upstairs, no robes. They wedged their suitcases through the narrow vestibule, and angled them carefully in order to drag them up the four flights of stairs, hearts thudding hard. In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.

Now there would be no vacations for a long while. Both of them had used up their vacation days. In time, Jules began to build up her private practice and ease out of working at the hospital. All her clients were low fee at first. An obese man wept about his wife leaving him; a teenaged boy only wanted to talk about Sid Vicious. It was like opening a novel whenever a new client walked in, Jules told Ash. She was never bored seeing people in therapy, even if she feared that her own powers to help them were small, tentative. Ash and Jules discussed their work all the time—Ash’s fears and excitement about actually getting to direct her first full production at Open Hand, and Jules’s interest in and worry about her clients, and her worry about her own abilities. “What if I say the wrong thing to them?” she said. “What if I give them bad advice and something goes wrong?” Ash told her she was sure Jules was a good therapist and wouldn’t do anything dreadful. “I remember when I came and sat on your bed at camp,” Ash said. “I can’t explain it, but it was just such a relief. I bet they feel that way.”

But also, at the same time their careers were really taking form, both women began to talk about having children. It wasn’t the right moment yet—Dennis was working long hours at MetroCare, the clinic on the Upper West Side where he’d been employed since leaving ultrasound school—but maybe in a year? Sometimes Jules and Ash shared a fantasy of having children within months of each other so that they could be mothers together, and their kids could be friends—best friends. Maybe both kids could attend Spirit-in-the-Woods!

For now, no one wanted to disrupt the way life was being lived, the opening of this new era, in which everyone was given a chance to vaguely start to catch up with Ethan. No, not catch up exactly, Jonah said; they could never do that. “I don’t even care about catching up, personally,” Jonah went on. “I grew up around really successful people, famous people. None of it impresses me. I don’t want any of it for myself. I’d just like to enjoy what I do for a living more. To actually look forward to going in each day. I keep waiting for that to happen, but it doesn’t.”

Ash liked her own work now. Ibsen’s
Ghosts
opened for a short run at the Open Hand Theater in the fall of 1989. Jules went with Ash to a rehearsal and saw that everything Ash had learned in the theater at Spirit-in-the-Woods had reappeared here, in adult, substantial form. The production she directed was well researched, earnest, and ambitious. It wasn’t witty, because Ash wasn’t particularly witty, but it was smart and careful, clever with its background use of women’s bodies. The Day-Glo nipples were a hit.
Ghosts
wasn’t some vanity production that Ethan’s wealth and success had made possible. You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly
off
gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

This wasn’t that. On the opening night of Ash’s play in September, the second-string reviewer from the
New York
Times
came to see it. In a small but positive review, the production was praised for its “fidelity,” “verve,” and its “thoughtful look at nineteenth-century morality, with a compelling emphasis on the meanings of femaleness. The reviewer wrote, “That Ms. Wolf is the wife of Ethan Figman, the creator of
Figland
, should be of no consequence. But it reminds us that this handsome production—with its colorful, startling anatomical flourishes—is anything but a cartoon.” The run was extended; Open Hand hadn’t gotten a reviewer from the
Times
to come to one of their plays in a long time, and nothing they’d produced had ever received such an important and positive review, and they giddily asked Ash what she was interested in directing next. Did she want to write something for them too? She could be their resident feminist playwright
and
director. Men still dominated the theater, and Open Hand said it was committed to changing that; Ash could make a difference.

A celebration dinner in honor of Ash was quickly arranged by Ethan, who invited Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert. They gathered at Sand, a tiny East Village restaurant that had also recently ascended after its own positive review in the
Times.
The restaurant was a skinny room with sand on the floor that crunched when you moved your chair or your feet. With sand beneath their shoes and complex tastes popping in their mouths, they ate their expensive, fussy-looking, last-days-of-the-eighties drizzled-plate dinner and talked about what was next for Ash. “I told her she should definitely take them up on their offer and write something original,” said Ethan. “She can be a double threat. Hey,” he said, turning to his wife with a droll face, “why not revive
Both Ends
?”

Everyone laughed, and Robert Takahashi asked what
Both Ends
was, and said it sounded like the name of a gay S&M play. Jonah had to explain to Robert that
Both Ends
was a one-woman show about Edna St. Vincent Millay that Ash had written when she was in high school. “A
terrible
one-woman show,” said Ash. “With, apparently, an unfortunate name. And these guys had to see multiple performances of it.” She turned to them and said, “I’m so sorry. If I could give you those hours back, I would.”

“Do the opening scene,” said Robert.

“I can’t, it’s too awful, Robert,” Ash said. “I finally get that, though it took me a long time. My parents said everything I did was wonderful.”

“Come on,” Robert said. “I have to see it.” He smiled charmingly at her; he and Jonah were so good-looking individually and together that Jules sometimes just surreptitiously looked at them for a while when they all got together for a big dinner.

Ash said, “Okay. So I’m Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I come out onstage by myself in a nightgown, carrying a candle. Otherwise the stage is completely dark. I stand in the middle and I say, ‘My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh my, friends— / It gives a lovely light!’ Then I step forward to the edge of the stage and I kind of beckon to the audience. I say to them, ‘While my candle stays lit, won’t you sit and listen? We’ll talk until the light dies away.’”

Everyone laughed, including Ash. “You said that?” said Robert. “You actually said that without cracking up? I wish I’d been there for it.”

“I wish you had too,” said Jonah.

“Dennis,” said Robert, “you and I came in to the story way late. We were supposed to have been here long ago. Look at what we missed.
Both Ends
.”

“I think I really will write something new for Open Hand,” said Ash. “I have no idea what. But if I start it right now, coming off
Ghosts
, it would come out sounding morose and Scandinavian.” Jules thought again of Goodman and Ash in Oslo together, sprawled out in a hotel room, talking all night.

“You don’t have to begin it now, that’s the good thing,” said Jonah. “You can take your time.”

“I like the idea of being able to take your time,” said Dennis, who’d never been
fast
like these friends here. “Not having to plan everything. Just waiting for things to fall into place,” he said, and maybe these were the last calm words he spoke that night. Or maybe this was more of a stage-play memory of the evening—the scene in which a woman’s husband contemplates the pleasures of taking one’s time, and within the hour it’s all ruined. Maybe he didn’t say this at all; later on, Jules wasn’t sure. There was so much drinking, and Ethan had arranged for a succession of amuse-bouches to be brought to the table before the meal. Little delicious items adorned with squirts of colorful gel kept appearing, and it was too dark in the room to see exactly what any of them were eating. Texture was everything in 1980s fine dining; specifics were often less meaningful.

Dennis, because of the MAO inhibitor he took, now referred to commonly as an MAOI, was always careful with what he ate; at the beginning of the evening he’d quietly told the waiter his food restrictions. But tonight there was an unusual force field around the table, in part because of Ethan’s presence in the restaurant, which had excited the owner, who was a big fan of
Figland
, and whose recitation of entire chunks of dialogue from the show was actually touching to Ethan, who agreed to draw Wally Figman on a tablecloth as a favor. Everyone at the table was talking a lot, excited for Ash about her first real success, feverish about their own possibilities, aware that thirty was a significant age and a good age. It might have been that Dennis’s tone, when speaking to the waiter, had made it sound like he just disliked smoked, pickled, and preserved meats and aged cheeses and liver and pâté; not that any of those foods could potentially kill him.