The Interestings (43 page)

“We get a lot of acorn-cap usage around here,” Ethan would say when Dennis and Jules took the train up for the weekend and he’d actually found the time to get away from the studio. “Do you know how hard it is to pry those fuckers off? I have acorn thumb.”

Ethan’s and Dennis’s love for their daughters wasn’t complicated, but in both instances was massive and wild. Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so
beautiful
about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last—yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It
respected
it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind and worshipful of and
humbled by
tiny. You couldn’t help but think about your own father as you saw your little girl with hers. The sight of them was overwhelming to Jules, and she had to look hard, then finally look away.

Something Rory wanted, when she was a young child, became obvious to Jules, but because it was not usually said aloud, she ignored it. It was darkly fitting that Jules herself, who envied her friends so powerfully, would have an envious daughter. But unlike her mother, Rory didn’t envy the enormous life of Ash and Ethan and Larkin. Instead, she envied boys. She came home from kindergarten talking about the boy whose cubby was beside hers. “Oh, Ma, Andrew Menzes stands up to go pee. The pee comes out in a curving string. A curving
golden
string,” she embellished, and then she cried.

And Jules could have cried too—two jealous crybabies—but she remained mute, and downplayed the importance of the curving golden string. “Your pee comes out in a golden string too,” she said lightly. “It’s a straight string, that’s all.”

“Andrew Menzes’s pee comes out of a
rocket
,” Rory said passionately, and her mother was left with nothing to reply. Some dreams in life were attainable, and others weren’t, no matter how much they were desired. It was all unfair, having more to do with luck than anything else. But sometimes, right after Jules had made a comment to Dennis with particular harshness about Ash and Ethan’s great good fortune—which included their wealth, their specialness, Ethan’s outsized talent, and now even their daughter—she felt sharply revived. Then everything settled down again, the current world returned, along with an image of her own wonderful daughter, and she imagined her friends’ kind faces—Ethan’s homely, flattened one; Ash’s lovely, sculpted one—puzzling over Jules’s light meanness.

Then, coming down further from the nasty little high, she felt even guiltier as she reminded herself that Ash and Ethan’s life might be vast and miraculous, but their marriage had a locked room in it, inside of which was not only the withheld information about Goodman but also the full freight of Ash’s ache about Goodman. The brother from her childhood was gone, even if Ash did get to slip off to see him once a year or so in Europe, and even if she did speak to him on a dedicated cell phone that Ethan knew nothing about—“my Batphone,” Ash called it—and write him letters when Ethan wasn’t home; and even though she was now supporting him with a very small fraction of the money her husband earned from the astonishing profits from
Figland
. The loss of Goodman was made almost manageable by the Wolf family’s elaborate and underground involvement and love; but still.

“Everyone suffers,” one of Jules’s favorite instructors in social work school had said on the first day of a seminar called “Understanding Loss.” “Everyone,” the woman added for emphasis, as if anyone in the room might think that some people were exempt.

Sometimes there would be a sudden, surprise reminder of that earlier life, before marriage, and before wealth or its absence, and before the addition of children. A life when Jules was still a girl, in awe of another girl and her brother and their parents and their big apartment and their gracious, splendid life. Even if she didn’t drop into sadness thinking about that early time, she still remembered what had once been. In the fall, at the annual psychotherapy convention held at the Waldorf Hotel, Jules had been standing in a banquet room among a cluster of social workers she knew, drinking a cup of coffee between lectures, when the past suddenly made a cameo. The place was crazed with therapists of all stripes—MSWs, CSWs, Ed.D.s, Ph.D.s, M.D.s—their voices rising as one tidal chorus in the bright, bland room. She noticed a frail elderly man being helped through the crowd by a younger woman. He must have been ninety, and as they slowly passed she read his nametag,
LEO SPILKA, M.D
., and with a quiet gasp she remembered the name. Without thinking about doctor-patient confidentiality, or even what the point might be of saying anything, she went up to him.

“Dr. Spilka?” she said.

“Yes?” The old man stopped and peered at her.

“My name is Jules Jacobson-Boyd. May I speak to you?”

He turned to the woman he was with, as if for approval, and she shrugged and nodded, and Dr. Spilka and Jules moved a few feet away, near a table of picked-over pastries.

“I’m a clinical social worker,” Jules said. “But when I was a teenager I was friends with a boy named Goodman Wolf. Does that name mean anything to you?” Dr. Spilka didn’t say anything. “Goodman Wolf,” she repeated, a little louder. “He was your client, your patient, in the 1970s. He was in high school then.” The doctor still said nothing, so Jules added, “He was accused of raping a girl at Tavern on the Green, on New Year’s Eve.”

Finally Dr. Spilka mildly said, “Go on.”

In a quicker, more excited voice, Jules said, “Well, it’s just been this unfinished thing for all of us who knew his family, and knew the girl who accused him. It’s been this thing we don’t really talk about openly—it was complicated—and then so much time passed that it was hard to bring it up. But I wondered whether there was anything you felt you could tell me, to just, you know, put it in perspective. Whatever you say, it would be between us. I know it’s not right of me to ask about a former patient. But it’s been so long, and I suddenly saw you here, and I just thought, okay, I have to ask.”

Dr. Spilka regarded her for a while, then he nodded his head, slowly. “Yes,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I remember that boy.”

“You do?”

“He was guilty,” said Dr. Spilka. Jules stared at him, and he stared right back. His gaze was even and cool, a tortoise’s ancient gaze; hers was shocked.

“Really?” she said in a small voice. “He was?” She hardly knew what else to say. The thought of having to report this conversation back to Ash created a thick presence of something in her mouth, a congestion, as if she was biting down on a gag. She hadn’t thought to wonder too often about Goodman’s innocence or guilt over the years; his family had known he was innocent, they were secure in this, and that was what she knew.

The psychoanalyst said, “Yes, he murdered that girl.”

“No, no. No, he didn’t,” Jules said. “She’s alive, she’s some kind of financial person now. She accused him of rape, remember?”

But Dr. Spilka insisted, “Oh yes he did. He raped her and he strangled her until her eyes bulged out. She may have been a slut, but he was a punk, and they put him in a maximum-security prison, where he
belongs,
that punk with the big jutting chin.”

“No, Dr. Spilka, no, you’re confusing him with someone else—the Preppy Murderer, I think. That happened about ten years later. Another Central Park story. There have been so many by now; maybe they’re kind of blurring together for you. That’s totally understandable.”

“I am certainly not confusing him with anyone,” said the old psychoanalyst, standing straighter.

The woman who’d accompanied him and was waiting nearby, observing, came over then and said she was his daughter, and that she hoped Jules would excuse her father. “He has dementia,” she confided easily, right in front of him. “He gets things mixed up. Right, Dad? I bring him to this conference every year because he used to like coming to it so much. I’m sorry if he said something that upset you.”

“He killed her,” Leo Spilka insisted with a shrug, and then his daughter steered him away.

W
hat was later referred to by Ethan, somewhat ironically but not entirely, as the Jakarta transformation was originally supposed to have been a restorative vacation. Mo had recently been diagnosed at the Yale Child Study Center as being on the autism spectrum, and Ash decided that the whole family needed to be together somewhere far away from the usual routine. Mo’s diagnosis had made Ash cry often in the beginning, but she’d also said, “I love him, and he’s ours, and I won’t give up on him.” For now, she wanted the family to be together in their “new reality,” as she put it.

Ethan, stunned into a flat coolness after the diagnosis, said, “Sure, fine.” Ash had chosen Indonesia because they’d never been there before, and it seemed like a beautiful and restful place, and also because she was thinking of directing a play for Open Hand that involved Balinese shadow puppets, though who knew when she’d be able to direct again; she wanted to be there for Mo now. Mo’s autism-spectrum disorder was not something that Ethan liked to talk about, even with his wife, because it was like staring into an eclipse. He felt as if he would burn up and disintegrate when he thought of his son. Ash was her usual self, emotional and fragile but finally the one who’d taken the initiative to make the appointment for the two-day diagnostic at Yale—and then, despite her sadness and shakiness, the one who had pressed ahead further and put Mo’s team of teachers and clinicians and caretakers in place. She was the strong one, and he never doubted that she would be able to tend their son with a mother’s warrior love. Ethan didn’t hide his deep sorrow from Ash—she felt her own sorrow, she said—but he kept from her his anger and indifference.

Whenever he started to think about Mo and all the possibilities for him that were now blocked off for good, Ethan’s thoughts turned elsewhere, usually toward his work, which was like an endless, interesting problem to be solved. The only place he wanted to be these days was in the studio, working. Over the past couple of years, he’d been referring to the studio unofficially as the Animation Shed, and recently the network had made the name official, with a sign on the glass wall when you arrived at the eighteenth floor of the office building in midtown on Avenue of the Americas. The actual animation for
Figland
was now produced in Korea, but preproduction and various other projects kept this place busy, hectic. Since Mo’s diagnosis, and even before it, Ethan had often stayed on at work after hours; he was rarely alone there. Someone was always in the middle of something and just couldn’t be pulled away. One night it was just him and the director, who was correcting timing on exposure sheets; they blasted old Velvet Underground music across the entire floor, and a security guard came up to see if anything was the matter. Late at night in the Animation Shed, Ethan Figman, the father of two young children—one delicate and brilliant, one compromised—offered suggestions and criticisms to staff members on points both huge and trivial. He was overworked from the discussions with network people and the table reads and recording sessions and all else, and was now suffering badly about his son; but still he would have liked nothing more than to remain at the studio for days on end, hiding out in the small private space that had been designed for him in an annex one flight up. Occasionally he even spent the night there, despite Ash’s protests. But she’d insisted on this family vacation, this bonding time among three people who were already bonded, and one who wasn’t but who needed to be bonded to the others and to the world.

Ash had a solid, reliable career now as artistic director of Open Hand. She had revived the ragged little East Village theater company and made it a place where young playwrights got their start and where young women in particular were given a shot in the still intractably sexist world of contemporary theater. Male playwrights and directors continued to dominate. (“Look at the studies,” Ash told everyone, handing out stapled Xeroxes that detailed the unfairnesses. “I know I look like a lunatic,” she’d said to Ethan, and, no, she did not look like a lunatic, but, yes, she could get repetitive, even though what she said was accurate, the facts disgraceful.) Open Hand had bought a larger, more elegant space around the corner on East 9th Street, and the first production that would be performed there, a two-hander by a young African-American woman about the estranged daughter of a Black Panther coming to visit her father on his deathbed, had won a few Obies and was in talks to move to Broadway. Ash was sometimes profiled in the arts sections of newspapers and in magazines; the respectful, praising pieces inevitably mentioned her marriage to Ethan—a fact that everyone already knew—and also referred to her physical beauty and grace. Both of these inclusions always bothered her.

“What do I have to
do
?”
Ash said. “I mean, really? Or maybe the issue is, ‘What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?’”

“Be a man, I guess,” Ethan said, and then he added, “I’m really sorry; I know it sucks,” as if sexism in theater and everywhere else was his fault. He was known for hiring women at all levels, and for supporting women’s causes, but still he felt bad. Everyone knew most people gave authority more easily to men. “There is no expression ‘girl genius,’” Ash had once said. Ethan was relieved that Ash was finally being given responsibility and attention, though the world of an off-Broadway theater in the East Village was always going to be so much smaller and less splashy than that of television or film. Still, Ash didn’t require splashiness. Neither of them did. But splashiness had happened to Ethan.

The vacation was planned, and the resort on Bali was unsurprisingly luxurious. The last time Ethan had slept in a bed like this, with mosquito netting and the open sky beyond it, he and Ash had been on the island of Kauai with Dennis and Jules, both couples childless then. He realized how much he missed that. But it was also that he missed Jules, which never stopped. For while they’d stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn’t plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you’d once been best friends—was now just that,
outsiders.
Families had their ways
.
You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one’s own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

Since having children, not only didn’t Ethan see Jules as often as he used to but he hardly ever saw Jonah at all; Jules had said the same thing to Ethan about Jonah. There was a further divide between those with children and those without, and you had to accept it. And now, having a developmentally disabled child like Mo seemed to have knocked everything into a more extreme arrangement. You and your family needed to
heal,
and you couldn’t do that with any of your friends around—neither the childless ones nor the ones with children—even though Ethan fervently wished you could. He would never tell Ash what he really felt about Mo, but he ached to confess it to Jules. I don’t know if I love him, Jules, he would say. I’m stubborn about my love, stingy about it. It comes and goes at all the wrong times.

In the big open-air bed of their villa, Larkin dive-bombed her parents, and Mo, age three, lay on his side, his thin body almost deliberately facing away from all of them. The whole family lay under purple Balinese fabric. Was any healing taking place yet? Let the healing begin, Ethan wanted to intone to Ash snidely. They’d been here for less than forty-eight hours. Was the “new reality” settling in? How in the world were you supposed to tell if it had started?

On the morning of their fourth day, Ash was asleep in bed in the breeze, and the children were eating breakfast on the terrace with Rose. Ethan sat in the shade of a big, shaggy-topped tree writing a postcard. He had addressed it to both Dennis and Jules to be considerate, but he really meant it for Jules, and of course she would know this.

“Dear D and J,” he wrote.

It would be so nice if you were here. But this is strictly family time, what with M’s diagnosis. All I can say is thank God for Rose, or else family time might become a little too much, and we might be inclined to leave Mo with the kindly fishmonger down the road. A JOKE! Mostly the trip has been peaceful. Ash was right, we did need to be away together for a while.

I’ve been thinking about you both a lot and I hope things are a little better than when we left last week. Please reconsider what we said, okay? More soon.

Love,

Ethan

Ethan knew that Dennis didn’t like to discuss his depression with their friends—he was embarrassed by it, and he wasn’t open about it with anyone but Jules—but though Rory was in school now, and Dennis’s stay-at-home services weren’t required full-time anymore, he still wasn’t ready to get a job outside the home that would require energy and focus and exactness and calm. Jules alone couldn’t earn enough money to support their family as well as she needed to in New York City in 1995. She had a close to full practice, but it didn’t pay nearly enough. Their apartment was the kind of place where you were supposed to live when you were starting out and childless; a place where you leapt up four flights of stairs to see your beloved, and where you clattered down those same flights to head out into the night with your gang of friends, all of you in your twenties, free agents, needing almost nothing. The Jacobson-Boyds didn’t belong there now; Rory didn’t even have her own
bedroom.
The small, difficult quarters made their situation—Dennis’s depression, the lack of money, the mostly unchangeable clients in Jules’s practice—seem only worse.

“We want to help you out,” Ethan had recently told them in a crowded restaurant. He’d said it before, but had always been shrugged away. The two families had gone out for one of those chaotic Sunday brunches young parents take with their children. Nobody has a good time, but everyone needs to find something to do with their kids on the weekend. Mo was in a booster seat, crying as usual—he always cried, it was just unbearable, but now they knew why. Everything grated against him, made him feel
raw.
Ash stood and went over to Mo, as she often did when he began to be upset. She was so natural and unflappable with him. Such an entitled girl she’d been, and yet she’d grown up into the kind of mother who could handle having a child with what people referred to now as “special needs.” Her ego hadn’t been fatally wounded by his diagnosis. She was a thoughtful mother to poor Mo, just the way she was a thoughtful lover to Ethan and a thoughtful friend to Jules and Dennis and Jonah and his boyfriend, Robert. Just the way she was thoughtful with the cast and crew of a play. “Gather round, everybody,” she said in her quiet voice, and even people in the farthest reaches of a theater would put down their hammers or scripts and come to her. At brunch, Mo, too, stopped his crying as though a switch had been thrown. His mother’s hand resting briefly on his stiff, coral-spined back made him look up sharply, squinting at her, remembering that she loved him. Remembering that there was such an element in the world as love. Ethan hadn’t been able to do that; or anyway he hadn’t thought to do that. Ash whispered magic words to their son—what did she say,
“Shazam
”?—and Mo’s body relaxed a little. Even Ethan’s body relaxed. Then she returned to her seat at the table, and Ethan just looked at her in wonder.

Rory was standing beside her own chair, shout-singing. Larkin sat quietly, drawing on her place mat with the crayons that the hostess had handed around to the children like bribes. Idly, Ethan glanced over to see what his daughter was drawing. On the place
mat, she’d made an extremely accurate rendering of Wally Figman and a recent addition to the
Figland
cast, the opinionated love interest of Wally on the planet Figland, Alpha Jablon.

“Nice,” he said to her, startled by her skill.

Larkin glanced up, as if returning from very far away. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.

Oh,
he thought,
I see, she’s an artist
. He felt sorry for her right then, as he sometimes felt sorry for himself. Though he was often so proud of Larkin, he wondered about early talent and the different fates it could meet. In his mind he checked off what had become of the six friends from that early summer, all of them meeting under the auspices of talent
.
One had become an artful, earnest stage director, finally breaking through, though would that have happened if she hadn’t had the ladder of her parents’ money and then Ethan’s money? No, not likely. One had closed down his musical talent for unknown reasons, remaining enigmatic to even the people who loved him. One had been born with a deep talent for dance, but by an accident of biology had been given a body that did not correspond to that talent past a certain age. One had been charming and privileged and lazy, with the potential to build things but also a longing to destroy them. One—Ethan himself—had been born with “the real thing,” as people wrote in reviews and profiles. Though he hadn’t been born into privilege, he too had been helped up the ladder over time, though the talent he possessed was squarely his. It had existed before the ladder ever appeared. But he didn’t even feel that he could take credit for his own talent, because he’d been born with it, and had simply discovered it while drawing one day, just the way Wally Figman had discovered that little planet, Figland, in a shoe box. And then there was the last of Ethan’s friends, who hadn’t been good enough at being funny onstage and had had to switch to another field, developing a skill more than an art. Jules’s clients apparently loved her; they were always bringing her gifts, and they wrote her moving letters after they no longer came to see her. But still Jules was disappointed in how she had ended up. Even now, Ethan wanted another outcome for her, and maybe it could still happen. Talent could go in so many directions, depending on the forces that were applied to it, and depending on economics and disposition, and on the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck.