The Interestings (58 page)

“Yes.”

“And, you know, she had a few things to say about me too. She didn’t exactly hold back. Since then, dealing with the kids and everything, we’ve tried to be cordial, and not get into everything all over again. But here’s one thing I keep thinking about: Ash is this big feminist director, and yet she never seriously considered Cathy Kiplinger’s version of what happened with Goodman. And that was never a contradiction for her. Her brother was separate, and he was in a category all his own. She’s able to compartmentalize like that. But what can I say? In other instances, it’s kind of great. She’s an amazing mother to Mo, whereas I have been a failure as a father. She shows delight when he comes into a room; she never loses her temper with him. Why does that irritate me? Am I really such a baby that I need all the attention? Or is it just that it reminds me of my horribleness? Ash has many amazing qualities, she truly does. She put together a thoughtful, beautiful home for us, and everyone always wanted to be in it. It’s hard not to fall in love with her. She makes such an effort with everything. She was raised to do that. Her mother was like that too, with all her meals,” he said. “Poor Betsy.”

“Poor Betsy,” Jules echoed. “I think of her so often.”

The death of Betsy Wolf stayed between them for a moment. “I know that Ash feels her parents put all this pressure on her, demanding art plus achievement,” Ethan said. “Meanwhile, it’s not like they were arty themselves. Drexel Burnham was about making money. But all her complaining about the pressure—I mean, enough already, right? I kind of feel these days that unless your life has included
torture
—unless you’ve practically been raped, or kept in a cellar, or you’re twelve or thirteen and forced to work in a factory—well, in the absence of any of that, I feel a little bit, like,
get over yourself.
When I started in with child labor, Ash saw what I saw—I showed her—and she was really shaken. But in a lot of ways she could never leave her family drama, and I get that. The past is so tenacious. It’s just as true for me. Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers. She was so into the whole idea of being the good child, the producing child, the gratifying child, which also in this case meant the lying child. The one who protects her horrible brother.”

“You think he’s horrible? You think he raped Cathy?” said Jules, her voice rising.

“Well, he definitely got too aggressive with her,” Ethan said. “He couldn’t imagine that she didn’t want to keep doing what they were doing. No one ever felt that way about him; everyone was charmed, at least at camp they were. It was that, plus maybe Cathy’s neediness. A bad combination. So, yeah, I would safely say he did something. I think he did it.” He paused and corrected himself, saying, “My adult self thinks that.” Then he looked at Jules, as if waiting for her to catch up with him, to leave her passive teenaged self that had waited for too long in overlapping states of knowing and not knowing.

“But none of it even exists anymore,” said Jules. “That’s the unreal part.”

“I know,” said Ethan. “Those two detectives are gone, remember them? The older one retired. And the younger one, Manfredo? Died of a heart attack. I googled him sort of compulsively over the years, wanting to see if he was still on the force, still somehow quietly working on the Goodman Wolf case. Maybe googling people
kills
them,” Ethan said. “Did you ever consider that? You keep looking them up to see where they are, until one day you look them up and they’re dead.”

“Even Tavern on the Green is gone,” said Jules.

“Right. And Goodman is ruined, I gather.” Ethan paused and collected himself. “Is he still, you know, attractive to you?” he asked in a suddenly formal voice. “Did you still feel something when you saw him in the woods?”

“God, no. Nothing. Just shame.”

Ethan nodded, as if relieved to have this information. “As for Cathy,” he said, “I think she’s actually doing okay now.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen her.”

“You
have?
When? Does Ash know?”

Ethan shook his head. “No. I first got back in touch with her after September eleventh, when she was being crucified in the news. I’d seen one of those interviews with her—people phoning in to the TV show to yell at her, and I knew it was her; I’d followed her life a little bit, and I knew she’d married this German guy, Krause. On TV she just sat there
taking
it, and it was very upsetting. I got her e-mail address and privately wrote to her, just saying hey, I’m so sorry about this, and letting her know I was thinking about her. She wrote back immediately, and we got together. But she seemed traumatized all over again. At some point she was talking about the relief fund for the families, and I ended up writing a check.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“I think I felt guilty. The way we all just let everything drop; let
her
drop.”

“I read the profile of her on the ten-year anniversary of the attacks,” said Jules. “I hate saying that: ‘the attacks.’ It’s just so jargony. But she finally got the families their health insurance, right? Through bonuses or something? And some of them apologized for being so hostile.”

“It took a few years,” said Ethan, “and it was obviously complicated, but, yeah, she did it.”

“Do you still see her?”

He shook his head. “We e-mailed each other a bunch more times, and I wrote to her when the families’ health insurance worked out. As I said, I think she’s doing okay. She told me she has a very good husband. I asked her about her and Troy, and she said that they’d broken up for good when she was eighteen. And she told me that many years after camp, when she was around thirty, she went to see him dance. She just sat there in the audience at Alvin Ailey, and he was magnificent. And instead of feeling upset about her life and her problems and how she hadn’t been able to dance professionally, it actually made her not think about herself at all. She said it did something else that art is supposed to do. Absorb you. The thing with Goodman, that definitely was a trauma for her. So yeah, I think it was a rape. But a lot of time finally passed. That’s mostly what happened: time.”

“Maybe that’s what you and Ash need,” Jules said. “To let time pass. I know everybody always says that; I’m not saying anything groundbreaking or original.” Ethan didn’t say anything at all. They sat for a while, then he stood with a loud shriek of his chair, and walked to a cabinet and produced a bottle of dessert wine. Jules followed him to the long gray couch, where they drank the wine, which was sweet and golden; it had the kind of taste that would have also appealed to their teenaged selves—a wine for people who were just starting to enter the adult world.

“So,” he said, “he’s back in Iceland, you know. Ash told me that much.”

“I didn’t know, but I assumed it. Ethan, you should see him. It’s just really awful; he looks so
marginal.
I wanted to talk to Ash about him, about all of this. But she doesn’t want to talk to me now. I’ve been pretty isolated.”

“Well, you have Dennis.” Jules shrugged and made a face, and Ethan said, “What? You don’t have Dennis? What’s that face?”

“We’re not so great. First I made us give up our jobs, then I made us give up the camp. I liked being around teenagers, but he was right—I didn’t want to be there and not be one of them. Actually, it was the fucked-up ones I liked working with most. And now we’re back here in the city and I’m jobless and Dennis is basically supporting us. I’m just sort of lumbering along, trying to figure out what to do now. I feel like I sort of missed the boat in a lot of ways.”

“You always underestimate yourself,” he said. “Why would you do that? I saw what you were like. I saw it that very first night in the boys’ teepee. You were wry.”

“And awkward.”

“Okay, fine, wry and awkward. Awkward and wry. A combination I happen to have a soft spot for. But maybe it’s an easier combination for a boy.”

“Yes,” she said. “It definitely is. Awkward and wry does not usually work for a girl. It makes everything hard.”

“I don’t want things to be hard for you.” He came closer on the couch and touched her hair, which didn’t seem at all strange. She felt that whatever he would do now, it wouldn’t be strange. Leaning forward, Ethan kissed her on the mouth, and as he did, Jules’s girl self flew up to meet her middle-aged-woman self. She recalled the way Ethan had long ago tried to upset her about her father’s death, hoping her sadness would lead to arousal. This time the moment was softened by golden wine, and it took place not in the animation shed but in the Animation Shed. He was rich and she wasn’t; he did what he loved and she did what she could, but they were alike: awkward and wry. The kiss would seal them and keep them alike; now their mouths were moving on each other, creating the seal. First there was only a sensation of gentle pressure, and it didn’t feel bad. But then Jules realized she’d become aware, in this new iteration of the kiss, that Ethan tasted and smelled a little sour, as if the sugars in the wine were already breaking down. Or maybe it was mostly that his mouth was an unknown interior, and she knew she shouldn’t be there, that this wasn’t hers, that she didn’t want to be there. How amazing to come this far and get an opportunity for a
do-over
, as Rory always used to say, but to feel it as if this were the same moment as the first one. Not a similar moment, but the very same one.

Pulling back from him, the anti-magnetism of their mouths making the lightest sound, a creak, a sigh—
straw-sound
, she thought. Jules looked away, and without speaking they each retreated to a far corner of the couch. She could not kiss Ethan Figman, or touch his body, or fuck him, or do anything at all physical with him. He was always trying to work his way back to her, always seeing how far he could go. He was like the mouse that Jules had told Dennis had followed them from one apartment to another. But she still wouldn’t let him, because he wasn’t hers.

Dennis, she thought, sometimes smelled a little toxic from the Stabilivox yet appealing, with a yeasty overlay. So he wasn’t whirling with irony and speed and creativity. She wondered what Dennis was doing right now, late on this cold weeknight. They’d been remote and cordial since the summer. There had been almost no sex, almost no kissing, but a good deal of polite, neutral-territoried conversation. He was still angry at her for making them turn around and leave Belknap when the camp season had actually run smoothly. He was probably sitting in bed with ESPN on now and a
Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography
in his lap. Here, in a loft space improbably located inside an office building, late at night, Jules and Ethan looked at each other across the expanse of the long couch.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“I tried,” said Ethan. “It’s just that these days I don’t really know the best way to live. I honestly just don’t know.”

“It’s always complicated.”

“No,” he said. “This is different. Jules, I have something.”

“What does that mean, something?”

“A melanoma,” he said.

She looked hard at him. “Where?” she demanded, and she sounded almost angry, disbelieving. She uneasily remembered her father coming into her room one night and telling her he was sick, and he needed to be in the hospital. She’d been sitting at her little white rolltop desk, writing a book report, and all at once the desk, the looseleaf paper, the pen in her hand, seemed absurd, as weightless as objects in space.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Ethan said. “But for what it’s worth, it’s up here.” He tapped the top of his head, and then tipped his head down and parted his hair so she could see the small bandage on his skull. “It’s also in the lymph nodes, apparently.”

“When did you discover it?” she said, and her voice was suddenly nearly inaudible.

“In the fall. I had an itch on my head and I scratched it. There was a little blood. It scabbed over. I thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be a mole that had been there for a long time, except I never saw it.”

“You were living on your own when you found it,” she said. “Who was there with you? Who did you tell?”

“No one,” he said. “I’ve kept it very quiet.”

“Ash doesn’t know?” He shook his head. “Ethan, you have to tell her.”

“Why?” he asked. “Apparently you’re allowed to keep critical information from your spouse.”

“She has to help you.”

“Maybe you can do that. Because frankly,” he said with a willed little smile, “it’s partly your fault, Jules. You made me take off my floppy denim hat that first summer, saying I looked like Paddington Bear. So the sun beat down all these years—”

“Shut up, that is really not funny.” He saw at once that he’d been in error teasing her. It seemed cruel, and he certainly would never want to be cruel to her. “There’s treatment, right?” she asked. “You’ve been doing things, chemotherapy?”

“Yes,” he said. “Two rounds. Hasn’t been effective yet, but they’re hopeful.”

“So what’s next?”

“A different drug,” he said. “I’m going to start Monday.”

“Ethan, you need to get Ash involved with this. She’ll want to take charge. She’ll want to take care of you. That’s what she does.”

Ethan’s face was unmoved. “I don’t think so,” he said. Then, softer, he told her, “You’re the one.”

“I’m not the one.”

“You are.”

She couldn’t continue the volley, and she thought: Okay, I am the one. I am the one and I have always been the one. This life was here for me, pulsing, waiting, and I didn’t take it.

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

Once, stepping out on a stage had been the greatest tonic for a fifteen-year-old girl whose father had died. Julie Jacobson, the poodle-headed girl from Underhill, New York, had been slapped into life at Spirit-in-the-Woods. But that was so many generations away from these middle-aged people in their soft skins, up late and talking. “Ethan, I’ll go with you wherever you want me to go,” she said. “I’m not working these days, so I have the time. I’ll be there for your appointments and your treatments. Is that what you’d like?”