The Interestings (52 page)

After all the reminiscing, throughout which Dennis politely listened, certainly bored, they began discussing what the job would entail, and what the challenges were. The interview lasted an hour, and it ended with effusive hugs from the Wunderlichs, which seemed like a good sign, but you never knew. Then Jules waited, and two days later the call came with the offer. She picked up the message in her office, between clients. The voicemail was from Edie, who said, “Well, we saw everyone, but you two are the ones we want. Will you be able to move up to Belknap in the spring?”

Jules let out a little woofing sound, then immediately covered her mouth, remembering that she’d already buzzed a client in, who was now sitting in the waiting room. It was not ideal to hear one’s therapist woof. That evening, Jules and Dennis accepted the offer. It was as uncertain as anything; they’d been hired provisionally, and at the end of the summer they and the Wunderlichs would “reassess” the situation and see whether it was a good fit. Dennis had been assured he’d be rehired at the Chinatown clinic if for some reason he returned to the city after the summer; the understaffed clinic needed him there. Dennis knew so much and was very valuable to them. Jules, though, had to close her practice. There was no way she could keep her clients suspended; she would have to tell them that she’d help them seek other therapists, if that was what they chose. Though the Wunderlichs were only committing to the one summer, Jules felt fairly confident. And if it worked out, running the camp would become a year-round job. She and Dennis would be required to stump aggressively for Spirit-in-the-Woods, finding prospective campers and boosting enrollment in the off-season.

So this morning she’d begun to tell her clients that she was giving up her practice and moving away from New York City in April. The next several months, she said, would be spent talking with them about whatever came up, and trying to find closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever really experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light. Two clients cried, including Sylvia Klein, but Sylvia often cried, so it wasn’t a surprise; and a speech pathologist named Nicole asked if she could take Jules out to dinner and be her friend, now that Jules would no longer be her therapist. Jules demurred, but told her she was very touched by the offer. Most of the encounters had been like this, moving and a little mystifying. She knew these people but they didn’t really know her.

Now at the end of the day here was Janice Kling, her longest-standing client, who looked forward to her sessions with religious verve, even though it seemed that the quality of her life generally stayed the same. Janice still mourned the absence of intimacy, and had not been touched in a very long time. She was alone, and went on dates with men she described as uninteresting. She was faithful to therapy, though, and to her work with Jules. It was the center of her week, maybe her life. “So I’m leaving New York this spring,” Jules told Janice Kling. Suddenly she worried for Janice; wondered what would become of her, whether she would be okay. The city was hard on single people after a certain age; loneliness could be felt so sharply here, and sometimes if people weren’t in twos they started to hang back, stay home. “I’m closing my practice.”

“How far away will you be?” Janice asked. “Because my friend Karen, the one with lupus? Her therapist moved to Rhinebeck, and Karen takes Metro-North up there once a week. I could do that.”

“I won’t be doing therapy anymore.”

“Are you sick?” Janice asked in anxiety.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Then what is it?”

“I guess it’s one of those second-acts-in-American-lives moments,” Jules said.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m actually going to be the director of a summer camp.”

“A summer camp?” said Janice, shocked. “That’s what you’re giving this up for? What if it doesn’t work out? What if you find out that you’re bad at it?”

“I guess that’s always a possibility when you try something new,” said Jules. But she and Dennis had thought this through. They owned their apartment. The salary, and their low expenses in Belknap, would make it possible for them to return to the city after each summer ended, and work for the camp from their apartment until the spring. At which point they could try to sublet for a few months. Also, if the job proved to be a disaster—according to either them or the Wunderlichs—they would still have their home to return to. Jules’s practice, however, would be lost.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this. Doesn’t it feel bizarre?” asked Janice. “And, no offense, but what does running a summer camp have to do with being a therapist? It seems to me that they’re completely unrelated. Don’t you feel that way too? I just can’t see you ringing a wake-up bell, or singing ‘Kumbaya.’”

“I know the news comes out of nowhere, and I’m sure there’s a lot about it that’s going to keep coming up,” said Jules. She saw the fierce hurt conveyed in Janice’s eyes, but it had been in there for so long already, and though she wished she could make it go away, she’d never really been able to before, and now she never would.

That night, Jules lay in bed overly anxious and rustling, and beside her Dennis said, “You okay?”

“Who makes such a change at our age? No one.”

“Well, we’re pioneers.”

“Yeah, right; in our Conestoga wagon. And I know I’ve let my clients down.”

“You have to live your life.”

“I don’t only mean I let them down by leaving. I mean by having stayed all this time too. I found my way of being with them, and I was always interested in their lives and in the things that blocked them. I’ll miss them; I really hate to leave them. But the reality is, I’m not all that much more talented as a therapist than I was as an actor. I wasn’t what you’d call a natural.” She thought about this. “Actually, back at Spirit-in-the-Woods, everything did seem to come naturally. It was all sort of
electric.
That’s what I got there.”

Jules rested her head on Dennis’s shoulder, and would have stayed like that, falling asleep there, when he suggested they go for a walk, and maybe even go have a drink at a bar. “To celebrate,” he said. “Like Rory said.”

“Oh, right.” On separate extensions of the phone with Rory, who was up at school, they’d told her their sudden new plan. She’d been silent at first, shocked. “Are you both shitting me?” she finally said.

“No,” said Dennis. “Your parents shit you not.”

“Can we move on from this lovely exchange, please?” Jules said. But she was actually a little nervous about what Rory thought. Fully grown children often had a difficult time with change in their parents’ lives, she knew. They wanted everything to be the same, forever. In an ideal world, parents of grown children would never divorce, would never sell the childhood home, would never make any sudden moves to suit themselves. But this was a fairly significant sudden move, and Jules wasn’t surprised that Rory was shocked.

“You’re really doing this?” Rory asked.

“I think we are,” said Dennis. “I guess it’s pretty startling to you.”

Rory laughed her familiar, chesty laugh. “Jesus, Dad, you guys don’t do things like this. Big moves.”

“That’s true, we generally don’t.”

“You’re sure this isn’t some kind of early dementia? I’m mostly kidding,” she quickly added.

“I think we have all our faculties,” said Jules.

“Well, okay then,” said Rory. “I mean, it’s more than okay. Congratulations, you guys.”

“Will you visit us up there?” Jules asked.

“Sure. Maybe at the end of the summer. I do want to see the place. Anyway, you should celebrate, right? Even if this is just a midlife crisis or something, you should definitely celebrate.”

So now, following her advice, they fished into the laundry hamper and put back on the clothes they’d only taken off an hour earlier, and headed for the elevator. Outside, walking eastward, the streets increasingly stirred. They found a little bar called Rocky’s on a side street, and to their surprise it was fully populated. A couple of the men there looked familiar, though Jules couldn’t figure out why. In their small red booth, she and Dennis drank their beers. “Who are these people?” he asked. “They look like people we sort of know. Like people you see in a dream.”

The men’s faces appeared relaxed, middle-aged and older, with the occasional set of young, sharp features. Accents drifted over, strands of Eastern Europe and maybe also Ireland, but Jules couldn’t exactly place any of it or tease it apart. “I don’t know who they are,” she said.

“Wait,” Dennis suddenly said, “I do. They’re the doormen in the neighborhood. After they get off work, this is where they come.” Off duty, out of their greatcoats and peaked caps, the doormen looked completely different, but, yes, it was them, members of one of the countless subcultures in the city. “We’ve never had a doorman,” said Dennis. “And now we probably never will, which is fine with me. I wanted to say,” he said to her, “that I am very impressed with you for doing this. Being impetuous. Really making us go up there and do this.”

Though Dennis hadn’t gone to the camp, he had willingly been educated in its lore over the decades. It sometimes seemed to her that Dennis
had
gone there; he knew three of the central, relevant figures, and he knew so much about some of the others. If he’d been given a pop quiz about his wife’s summers at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he would have done well. “
Sandbox
by Edward Albee!” he would have answered correctly. “Ida Steinberg, the cook!” And he would have been able to write detailed observations about what the place had meant to his wife back then and what it had meant to her later on. Spirit-in-the-Woods was the camp that would not die, the camp that would not leave her, so instead she’d decided to go there, to become it.

Ash and Ethan and Jonah had all been excited and shocked when she told them about the job. “You’ll actually be living there again?” Ethan said. “You’ll be in charge of the whole place? You’ll go into the animation shed? That’s amazing. Take pictures.”

“For selfish reasons,” Ash said, “I want you to stay in the city forever. But I know that isn’t fair. And it’s not like I’m home so much anyway; I’m always running off on you. It’s just so hard to think of you not being here. That this is maybe the end of our New York life together. That’s huge.”

“I know,” said Jules. “It feels that way to me too.”

“But it’s also touching that you’ll be there, carrying the torch,” said Ash. “I wish we could come and visit this summer, but I’ll be directing, and then we’ll barely be on the East Coast. Maybe we can squeeze it in at the end, with a little luck.” Jules knew that Ash and Ethan had the weeklong Mastery Seminars in Napa, during which Mo would be with them, along with a caregiver, before he had to return to boarding school. And Larkin was planning on attending a Yale summer program in Prague; her parents would visit her there after Napa. “Next summer, for sure,” Ash said. “But you’ll give me a detailed report about everything, a blow-by-blow. Walk around and do one of those virtual tours, telling me everything that’s different and everything that’s the same. Do you get to decide what plays they put on? Or do you at least get to make suggestions? I know some excellent plays with strong parts for women.”

“I will take that under advisement.”

Jules and Dennis finished their drinks now and went outside into the street. The city—this place that they had managed rather than conquered—had its own relentless activity even at two a.m. Somewhere, far off, someone was banging metal against metal. She linked her arm through Dennis’s and they headed back to their apartment along the unremarkable streets, though already Jules was putting a lake behind them, and a mountain before them. She dotted the landscape with teenagers, and with bunches of bumblebees hanging low over wildflowers; with a crude but functional theater, and an animation shed and a dance studio and various indestructible teepees built of unfinished wood. She added llamas, for she’d been warned by the Wunderlichs that today all summer camps needed to offer llama care, for reasons unknown. No one ever loved the poor llamas, whose faces were as narrow as shoes. Here, in this green and golden world, among mountains and paths and trees, Jules and Dennis would venture out together. In the woods, she would be spirited again.

The Drama of the Gifted Child

T
he first car arrived before nine a.m. on the last day of June, slowly slipping between the stone gates that over the decades had become breaded and then repeatedly rebreaded with moss. “Sorry we’re early,” sang a man, leaning his head out the window as the car pulled up in front of the main building. “The Taconic was a breeze.” He was the father of a camper, and yet he looked appreciably younger than Jules and Dennis. The back door opened and a girl slid out grimly, as if saying, Take me, please take me. So Jules and Dennis took her. Soon others followed, a long line of cars with trunks strapped to roofs and back windows jammed with a mash of adolescent essentials. All over New England today, similar cars were crawling, though here on this lawn were a preponderance of cellos and bassoons and guitars and amps, and bags lumpy with dance gear. These were arty teenagers, today’s model. The population was more diverse than in the 1970s, though once again, as Jules had felt the first time she’d stood here, she was on the outside. This time, the inside involved being young, and the outside involved being old. The equation was simple and clear.

Was she really old?

Relatively. But it was much stranger to admit this than it was upsetting. As long as nothing terrible happened this summer—no campers went missing or were injured in a kiln explosion or
died
(Jules had nightmares of making that phone call to parents)—she wouldn’t have to worry about how much time had passed between then and now. Dennis puttered around with a clipboard, helping send everyone to the right teepee. None of the parents wanted to leave that first day. They lingered on the lawn and in the teepees, helping their children unpack each item individually from duffels and trunks. One mother said, with a wistful face, “Oh, if only I’d known about this place when I was growing up.” Many photographs were snapped of smiling or unsmiling teenagers indulging their mothers and fathers one final time. The parents would post them on Facebook immediately. The day lengthened, the sun dipped, and Jules and Dennis finally asked a percussionist to stand at the top of the hill and bang the gong she’d brought, at which point Dennis called into a megaphone, “Now it’s time for all families to say their farewells.”

Then somehow they managed to send the parents away, and the camp looked the way it was meant to. Not empty, as it had been all spring since Jules and Dennis had moved up here and begun living in the Wunderlichs’ house across the road. Running a summer camp for teenagers wasn’t as challenging as running one for younger kids, Jules had been told by veterans of this world on a summer camp directors’ Internet message board. Hardly anyone got homesick. There were no bullies. There was the likelihood of sexual activity and also drug use, but these would be hidden and beyond your control. Mostly, Jules thought, the kind of teenagers who came to Spirit-in-the-Woods came to do the art they loved and to be around similarly inclined teenagers. Every summer in recent years, though, enrollment had dropped further; a few of the teepees now sat empty. The Wunderlichs had sent Jules and Dennis to man a booth at several camp fairs that winter—loud, dull events held in high school gyms around the tristate area. Parents and kids gathered at other booths that promised a summer of “xtreme” sports, or “a 24/7 soccer extravaganza.” Even the booth for a juvenile diabetics’ camp called, almost tauntingly, Sugar Lake, had more customers than the Spirit-in-the-Woods booth did. The camp could not survive like this much longer.

“What I would love,” Manny had said after Jules and Dennis had been hired, “is for you to give the place new life not through some expensive computer lab or sports team—we’ll do the llamas, but that’s
it
—but through the passion you feel and the memories you hold.”

Ordering raw chicken thighs and broccoli and extra-firm tofu in industrial bulk was such a new and particular task that it felt revelatory. Overseeing repairs to the theater was gratifying too, though the building itself seemed much smaller than it once had. Being onstage in 1974 had felt like appearing on Broadway; now, the performance space revealed itself as a small square with a floor that was dotted with remnants of old masking tape. As for the teepees: how could anyone bear to live in them? One day shortly before the season started, Jules had gone into Boys’ Teepee 3 and sat down on the floor in the corner. All she could feel was the filth of the room and the choking musk of the years. She stood up almost immediately and went outside to get some air. Apparently you didn’t require air when you were a teenager. You made your own air.

On the opening night of camp, the counselors put on a show introducing the campers to all the different classes that would be available that summer. The music counselor, a rangy guy who called himself Luca T., played piano in the rec hall while the other counselors began to sing a song they’d collectively written:

“You won’t feel like a freak, if you try batik . . .

You can get your ass goin’ with a little glassblowin’ . . .”

At the end, the campers seemed jazzed up; no one could stay sitting anymore, and they jumped to their feet. Jules and Dennis stood at the microphone and made a few comments about what a great summer it would be. Jules told them, “I used to be a camper here myself,” but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn’t matter to them that she, a middle-aged woman with a sweater draped over her T-shirt and the kind of softened, undefined features that their mothers shared, had once been a camper here. They didn’t care, or even really
believe
it. Because if they did believe it, then they would have had to think that one day they too would become softened and undefined.

“This summer will be amazing,” Dennis said to them when he stood up at the mike. “Just watch.” He liked being here, seeing what Jules had been talking about all these years. Also, being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, its unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow. Up here in Belknap, they lived for free in the Wunderlichs’ big house, and their job was straightforward. No striving was necessary.

Ash had said that she envied them the decision to live a simpler life, and, of course, the decision to return to the place they’d once loved. You almost never got an opportunity to do that in life. Of course, Ash said, Jules and Dennis
had
to take the job, even though it meant changing and reorganizing their lives around it. “Once you step on that train,” Ash said, by which she meant once they had contacted the Wunderlichs and arranged an interview, “you can’t get off. What are you going to do,
not
accept the offer? I wish more than anything that Ethan and I could move up there with you.” This was a lie, a friendship lie. Ash was currently directing a gender-reversed
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, in which the terrifying central figure was now called Big Mommy. Possible new theater projects were arrayed before her. She would never give everything up to move to Spirit-in-the-Woods, and of course neither would Ethan, but she could see why Jules and Dennis might.

Now the floor of the rec hall was cleared, a DJ station was hastily set up, and music chugged through the long room. Jules recognized none of it. It was jangly, slidey techno, with an occasional human voice speaking almost accidentally. The DJ, an electric bass player named Kit Campbell, was fifteen, small, appealing, and capable. She had short spiky dark hair and pale skin. She was stylish in miniature, her shorts hanging low, her combat boots unlaced. This was her first summer here, and the other kids seemed drawn to her. By the end of the night Kit was ringed by several campers—a plain, white girl; an unplain black girl; two boys—one in eyeliner, the other studlike and swaggering, his baseball cap on backward—and they headed out, the girls doing hip bumps, the boys with hands shoved into pockets, all of them in a puppyish, coed knot.

Jules and Dennis walked across the dark lawn with flashlights, following the campers who zigzagged and looped around and hollered. She wished she could drop her flashlight with a thud and run ahead to catch up with them. But she had no place there, and so she stayed with her husband, who she could tell was content walking slowly, just the two of them. Finally, up ahead, the girls went one way and the boys went the other. Jules wondered if some of them had arranged to meet up later, though as camp directors she and Dennis were supposed to keep that from happening. It wasn’t that this place was about
sex
; it was more about the end of childhood aloneness, that lone-pilgrim-in-a-bed situation you found yourself in up until adolescence, when suddenly aloneness started to become unbearable, and you needed togetherness at all hours of the day and night.

Here was Dennis now, clicking off his flashlight and pulling open the unlocked door of the Wunderlichs’ house. “We will reconvene at some mutually agreeable point near the end of the summer and see where we stand,” Edie had said to them before she and Manny moved to a cottage they’d rented in Maine. For now, the Wunderlichs had left all their belongings behind, and the walls of the house were a tribute to summers past, and also to a Greenwich Village folk scene that no longer existed. Campers had never been invited in here; when Jules and Dennis arrived in April, it was the first time Jules had ever seen the inside.

“Aren’t you glad not to be sleeping in a teepee tonight?” Dennis asked as they walked through the dim entrance and turned on an overhead light. “You grew up, and so now you get to sleep in a real house.”

“Yes, thank God,” Jules said, mostly to be agreeable. She didn’t want to be in one of the teepees, but she also didn’t particularly want to be in this house now, either. She was restless, suddenly realizing that there was nowhere to go at night here, unless you wanted to wander around in the dark. She hadn’t felt that way before tonight. The city at least gave you the option of night-crawling; if you couldn’t sleep, you could find an all-night diner, not that Jules had done that many times in her life. But she and Dennis were here in the house for the night, the whole summer, perhaps years, perhaps for good. She wondered what was happening off in the teepees right now. Maybe she’d volunteer to do patrol before bed one night this week, a task that was almost always left to the counselors.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Dennis lay down on the side of the high old bed that he’d claimed in April: Manny’s side, clearly. When they moved in, Manny’s night table still held pieces of male paraphernalia: nail clippers, a much-squeezed tube of cream for athlete’s foot. “So?” said Dennis when Jules climbed into bed and turned off the light. “It started out okay, yes?”

“Yes. That’s what we’ll tell people. ‘It started out okay.’ And then we’ll segue into the terrible story.”

“The kiln tragedy,” he said.

“Or the sprouts tragedy.”

“They looked so innocent, those sprouts,” Dennis said. “The kids just piled them on their plates. If only we’d known!”

They laughed tentatively, as if they could ward off the possibility of something actually going badly wrong. Whatever happened, it would be their responsibility now. Already they’d received a couple of e-mails from parents. “I’m going to call Rory,” Jules said. “She told me to let her know right away how it was going.”

“Tell her I liked her e-mail,” said Dennis. “The one with the link to all those camp jokes. Lots of punchlines about bears and latrines.”

They’d gotten a crash course in camp directorship from Manny and Edie. The word “safety” came up a lot. The property had to be a secure place, with outsiders kept out and with campers and staff operating all the equipment in the workshops correctly. Though there were endless worries, and provisions for emergencies to consider, you could delegate a lot of the menial tasks to the underpaid but cheerful counselors, who had come here from all over the United States and, for some reason, Australia. American summer camps were routinely packed with Australian counselors. Jules had had a brief but unrealistic fantasy that somehow Rory would want to join the staff, but she preferred to spend the summer with her friends in Oneonta, where she had a job in a plant nursery. She promised to visit at the end of the season, “to see your midlife crisis in action, Mom,” she had written in an e-mail.

The idea of calling Rory tonight became less necessary. Rory would want her mother to be happy, and that was all. On the phone they would murmur at each other in the way they always did. Their worlds were far apart: the plant nursery and the dream of art. They didn’t need to speak tonight; they could talk tomorrow. Jules and Dennis turned to each other, as much because of the oddness of their new life here as anything else. They both wanted motion and forgetting. They wanted sex because they could have it, unlike the kids across the road, who were told they had to lie separately each night, their bodies poised in a clench of anticipation, while counselors circled with an intrusion of dancing flashlights. Dennis propped himself up on an elbow and craned his head toward her. His black hair had become increasingly spattered with gray in recent months, and his body, always so hairy, now seemed like a forest floor, all silver pine needle and turning leaf. You accepted this when you were this age. Jules thought of her mother, alone in the bed in the house in Underhill. Spending her forties alone, and her fifties, and her sixties, and then her seventies! All of those decades, alone and aching, just like the teenagers across the road, but without the reassurance that all of it would probably end in a blissful sexual fusillade. Why hadn’t her mother ever gone out on a date? How had she lived without sex or love? Sex could
be
love, or else, like now, it could be a very good distraction.

Dennis’s mouth was opening, his head tilting, his large hand cupping Jules’s breast that dropped down like a crookedly hung ornament. Isadora Topfeldt had long ago claimed that Dennis was “uncomplicated,” and though this wasn’t really true, what was truer was that he’d never felt as entitled as Jules did. He was here with her in Belknap because it was what she wanted, and she’d convinced him it could work. It took care of so many unmet needs. Dennis, cupping her breast, stroking her arm, said, somewhat anxiously, “You’re happy?” He wished his intermittently envying wife could finally, finally be fully happy again. Happy and electric. He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned her away from him, on her side, her face almost flush against Edie Wunderlich’s night table, which held a very old framed photograph of a young man and a young woman, bohemians from a long-ago day whooping it up on a rooftop in the city. Behind Jules, Dennis moved into a good position, and with an indecipherable syllable of acknowledgment, and with the briefest of overtures, he began to impel himself into her. Her own immediate replies made her self-conscious, as if one of the teenagers from the camp might have stealthily slipped into the house, and was even now standing in the doorway of the darkened room, shifting from foot to foot while watching an improbably carnal scene between these two people in their fifties. At any moment the gangly teenager would quietly say, “Um, excuse me? Jules? Dennis? A boy in my teepee has a nosebleed that won’t stop.”