The Interestings (48 page)

Jules took her mother in a cab back to Penn Station after the reception. Even now, Lois Jacobson wasn’t comfortable getting around the city by herself. Manhattan had never felt like a hospitable place to her; instead, it was a place where you might spend a lively but exhausting day seeing a Broadway show or shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and then at the end of it you would make a break for the train as fast as you could. Jules’s sister, Ellen, was the same way. She and her husband, Mark, lived in a house two towns away from Underhill and ran a party-rental company. Ellen had once remarked that she didn’t need the “excitement” that Jules had always needed since she first went to Spirit-in-the-Woods, and this was probably true.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Lois Jacobson actually said at the entrance to the track in Penn Station that night. Beyond it, the Long Island Railroad train awaited with all its steaming, gastric sounds. They kissed cheeks, and Jules’s mother, with her raincoat and pale gray hair, seemed fragile, although maybe it was just that Jules was seeing her now through the warning light of another mother’s death.

•   •   •

T
hat night, in the new apartment, Jules slept poorly, thinking of Ash, and Betsy, and how everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all. Neither she nor Dennis had been able to find the mattress cover among the boxes yet, and finally one elastic corner of the bedsheet unattached itself, and Jules woke up in the morning on a bare mattress, like a political prisoner. Dennis was already in the kitchen with Rory, making breakfast. It was a school day—also an egg day, from the smell of it. She wondered if Dennis had been able to turn up a spatula from one of the still unpacked kitchen boxes, and then she thought,
Oh, Ash’s mother is dead
. The spatula and the death of Betsy Wolf occupied the same part of her brain, briefly given equal weight. Jules lay on the uncovered mattress inhaling paint, and when the phone rang, her hand was on it before Dennis could get to the other extension in the kitchen. It must be Ash, she thought. Probably Ash had been awake all night crying, and now morning was here and she would need more comfort. Jules had a client at ten a.m., a new mother who was terrified of dropping her baby. She couldn’t cancel.

But after she said hello, a man’s voice said, “Hey,” under an ambient hiss.

Whenever a voice spoke into the phone but didn’t announce its owner, Jules thought it might be a client. “Who’s this?” she would ask neutrally, and so she asked it now.

“You don’t recognize me,” he said.

Jules gave herself an extra second to think, just the way she did in therapy sessions. The hiss of the call was a clue, but it wasn’t just that. She thought she knew who it was, and she sat up, grasping the blanket around the open front of her nightgown and her freckly, sleep-warm chest. “Goodman?”

“Jacobson.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to call you,” Goodman said. “Ethan told Ash he’s not going anywhere for a few weeks. He wants to be with her. So Ash said she won’t be able to call me too much, even on her supersecret Batphone.” Jules still didn’t know what she could say; she wasn’t composed, she was thrown. She heard a match being struck, and she imagined Goodman balancing a cigarette on his lip, tipping his chin up to meet the match.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” she finally said. “She was wonderful.”

He said, “Yeah, thanks, she was pretty great. It’s a fucking shame,” and then he didn’t say anything else, just smoked a little, and Jules heard ice knocking around in a glass. It was only four hours later where he was, eleven a.m., but maybe he was already drinking. Goodman asked, “So what was it like?”

“What?”

“The funeral.”

“It was good,” she said. “It felt like something she would have wanted. No references to God. Everyone spoke, and they were genuine. They all really loved her.”

“Who’s everyone.”

Jules named several different people, including Jonah, and cousin Michelle, and then she said, “Larkin read a poem she wrote, really moving, really precocious. It had a line in it about how your mother’s warm hand could cool a fever.” As soon as she said this, she realized that Goodman had never even met his niece. Larkin was just a concept to him, a generic niece in a photograph.

“That’s right, it really could,” he said. “She took good care of Ash and me when we were kids. I don’t get to see my parents very often, obviously. When they come over here they look more shrunken, especially my dad. I always thought he would go first. I can’t believe I’ll never see my mom again,” he said, and his voice thickened, became froggy.

Then Goodman started to cry, and Jules’s eyes responsively filled too; together they cried across an ocean, and she tried to picture the room he was in, the flat he lived in, but all she could come up with was a murky brown and gold decor, a color scheme she’d retrieved in her mind from the way the Café Benedikt had looked that night in 1977. He’d never thought to call her before; she had always been of little interest to him. He was still probably arrogant, but he was also broken up. Most recently, when Goodman’s name had come up, Ash had said, “Don’t ask.” Goodman was described as a lost cause, “kind of a mess.” Over all this time, whenever Jules intermittently thought about him, she was aware he rarely thought about her. But even with this disparity she felt tenderly toward him now. Motherly, because like his sister he was motherless. Goodman made a sound of nose blowing, and then she just heard breathing on the line. She waited it out, the way she did in therapy, being sympathetic and in no hurry. Though really, she thought, it was time to get up. She wanted to say good-bye to Rory before school; she wanted to shower. She waited for him to stop crying.

“Will you be okay?” Jules finally asked when he was quiet.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have, you know, someone to talk to there?”

“Someone to talk to? Like, some Icelandic version of Dr. Spilka?” Goodman asked. “Right, Ash said you’re a shrink now. So you believe in all that.”

“I meant like a friend.”

“A girlfriend?”

“Or a group of friends,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Do I have a group of friends to sit around a teepee with in Reykjavik? Is that what you’re asking me?” His voice was challenging now, not tearful.

“I don’t know what I’m asking,” Jules said. “I’m extemporizing. You can’t just call me as if this is
casual.
I mean, come on.”

“Some things never change, right?”

“What does that mean?”

“You were always a little into me,” Goodman said. “We even had a moment once, in my parents’ living room, remember? A little
tongue,
I believe.” He laughed lightly, teasing her, and she heard some relaxed pouring, then more ice.

“I don’t remember that,” Jules said in a new, formal voice, hot-faced.

“Oh, I’m sure you remember everything from that time,” he said. “I know how important it all was to you. Summers at camp. The
Interestings.
”

“It was just as important to you,” she tartly said. “You got to be a big deal at Spirit-in-the-Woods, and your father wasn’t there to criticize you. You were in heaven there. It wasn’t just me.”

“You do have a good memory,” was all he would say.

“Look, Goodman, I realize you’re really upset about your mother,” said Jules. “And I know it’s been hard for you living so far away. But I’m sure Ash will find a way to call you soon. And you two can talk about everything. But this is too strange for me. I can’t do this now. I’m sorry.” Her voice stuck a little. “I think I’m going to hang up,” Jules said. Goodman didn’t say anything, so then she added, pointlessly, “I’m hanging up.” She returned the phone to its cradle, then for two full minutes she sat in bed, waiting, hearing sounds of pans and plates, and the deep voices of Dennis and Rory, and finally she picked up the receiver again, making sure he was really gone.

•   •   •

O
ver time, the two couples continued to live their lives, sometimes separately, sometimes not, but always differently from each other. One couple traveled the world. The other couple unpacked the rest of their boxes and hammered the same old posters up on the walls, and placed the same lightweight silverware in a drawer. They became used to having an elevator, and barely remembered all those stairs they’d climbed. The apartment allowed them to breathe a little, though it seemed that always they would live with certain indignities; one day a mouse tore across the kitchen floor, and Jules insisted to Dennis that this was the
same mouse
from their previous apartment. It had followed them all the way here to their new apartment, like one of those dogs that goes out into the world searching for its master and eventually, miraculously finds him.

Ash grieved for a long time for her mother, and called Jules a lot, wanting to talk, asking her if she was being too much of a pain. “How could you be a pain?” Jules said. Ethan, following his run of bad fortune with
Alpha
, the failed spin-off of
Figland
, had a failure so big and public and expensive that it seemed to threaten the whole Figland enterprise. An article ran in the
Hollywood Reporter
called “An End to All Things Figman?” Ethan had created and written a high-budget animated feature film called
Dam
It!
using animated beaver characters to tell the story of the plight of child labor. It received bad reviews and did poorly, as Jules had warned him it would when he first told her he was thinking of trying to develop it as an idea. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she’d said. “It just sort of sounds unappealing and preachy, Ethan. Just stick to the actual cause. You don’t have to make it into a cartoon.” “Other people have been really encouraging about it,” he’d replied. “And Ash likes it.” But other people usually said yes to Ethan, and Ash was generally encouraging to him too; it was her way. “The
Ishtar
of cartoons,” wrote the
Reporter
. Every failure was the
Ishtar
of something; years later, Ethan would pronounce the Iraq war was the
Ishtar
of wars. No one at the studio blamed Ethan openly, but of course it was his fault, he explained to his friends over dinner one night, because the urgent work of the Anti-Child-Labor Initiative apparently did not translate into
whimsy
. “I should have listened to you, Jules,” he said moodily, looking at her across the table. “I should always listen to you.”

After the movie’s terrible opening weekend, Ethan took several days off and stayed in the house on Charles Street, but there he was made more aware than ever of how, when you took away work, you were left with the actual meat of your personal life: in this case, specifically, the developmental disability of his son. His young son, Mo, who was fractious and often unresponsive, and cried and cried, and was given therapy throughout the week by a rotation of teachers and therapists. Kind young women still streamed through the house, all of them lovely, all of them named Erin, Ethan joked, all of them deeply thoughtful and kind to the extent that they seemed
angelic
, and in comparison he seemed, at least to himself, cold-hearted and indifferent, or even worse.

His daughter, Larkin, was easy to love, so advanced and creative. Already she was talking about how when she was a teenager she wanted to be an apprentice at her father’s studio, the Animation Shed. “I could write cartoons and draw them on paper,” she said, “the way you used to do, Dad.” Which killed Ethan, because of course he’d moved far away from the old pen and paper days. Ethan still did the voices for his two
Figland
characters, and he still oversaw preproduction, and he was there at table reads, and in the recording studio, and stalking the floor of the Animation Shed even at the end of the day, when the staff probably said to themselves,
Oh please, Ethan, not me; I just want to go home, I just want to have a little time to myself and my family.
I’m not like you, Ethan; I can’t work this much and still have a life
. Though Ethan’s feature film was a calamity, and his TV spin-off a dud, the original show itself was still robust. It might go on and on forever.

Ash kept directing serious and usually feminist though somewhat uninspired plays, receiving respectful reviews from critics who were impressed by her modest but sly touch, especially in contrast with the very public, hyperkinetic work of her high-profile husband. She appeared on panels called “Women in Theater,” though she resented the fact that people thought such panels were still interesting or necessary. “It’s
embarrassing
to have to keep being seen as this minority. Why do we keep only looking to male voices again and again for authority?” she complained to Jules. “Well, I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ We don’t do it, but ‘they’ do. I mean everyone else.” It was astonishing and depressing to her that even now, in this enlightened age, men had the power in all worlds, even the small-potatoes world of off-Broadway theater.

Jules’s practice had been reasonably populated, but like all therapists, she’d experienced an increasing thinning-out of patients. People took antidepressants now instead of going into therapy; insurance companies paid for fewer and fewer sessions; and even though she kept her fees low, some clients ended therapy quickly. The ones who stayed said they were grateful for Jules’s calm, funny, kind presence. She poked and prodded at her practice as if it were kindling, supporting her family.

Rory grew bigger, and though she’d once been deeply envious of boys, she outgrew that and enjoyed herself. She was a very physical girl, needing to be in motion at all times. On weekends she played soccer in a league, and during the week Dennis took her to the park after school, the two of them smashing a ball back and forth. Dennis still talked about going back to work, though his voice was full of trepidation when he spoke about it. He read up on the latest advances in sonography, subscribing to a professional journal because it interested him, and because he hoped he could go back one day, but just not yet.