The Interestings (60 page)

All the kids kept saying, “We’re so sorry about your friend!” and she realized eventually that they thought
friend
was a euphemism, and maybe it was. Because
friend
was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions. She hadn’t seen Ethan’s penis; he hadn’t seen her breasts. Big deal, she thought, though she wished somehow that she could show herself to him and say, “You see? You didn’t miss that much.”

That evening she and Dennis went to the house on Charles Street and stayed the night. The household was awake into the morning, the lights blazing. “What am I going to do?” Ash said in her nightgown at four a.m., sitting on the stairs smoking. “When we were separated for those months, I just couldn’t bear it. I was so lonely. And I’m so lonely again already now.”

“I’ll help you,” Jules said.

“You will?” asked Ash, grateful like a child, and Jules said yes, she would, she always would, and though neither of them knew what this meant, it already seemed to have some effect.

Ash’s father came over in the morning. Though he himself now appeared frail, and walked with a cane because of bad knees, he hugged his crying daughter to him as if keeping her grounded in a very strong wind. And then Ethan’s long-divorced parents coincidentally arrived at the same time, each one furious with the other, both of them round-bodied and disheveled. They promptly began to cry, then argue, and then they quickly left. Jonah came over too, and in the hurtling toward the funeral and then the plans for the larger memorial that would take place a month from now, it seemed that there were many details to address. Larkin and Mo needed attention, and, in Larkin’s case, sedation. Jules periodically observed, often in her peripheral vision, what Dennis was doing. Now he was making a series of phone calls to Ash’s friends, at Ash’s request; now he was sitting and watching Jonah and Mo play guitar and banjo; now he was bringing coffee to everyone; he was making himself useful in whatever ways he could. The house felt like a little insulated if exhausted environment free of outside clamor.

The next night, the night before the funeral, Duncan and Shyla appeared on the front doorstep. Oh, why were they here? Jules thought. The prick and the cunt! Even now, after Ethan’s death, she would have to share him and Ash with these people. But Duncan and Shyla were as broken up as everyone else; Duncan’s face kept screwing up into an expression of shocked, ongoing misery, and in the end they all stayed up very late drinking and trying unsuccessfully to comfort one another. Finally they fell asleep in chairs and on couches, and in the morning the house staff quietly came in, tiptoeing around them and picking up bottles and glasses and wadded-up tissues. Someone wiped down a surface that was unaccountably coated with a substance that no one could name.

Everyone wondered eventually about Ethan’s money, who it would go to, and how much of it there was. His family would be taken care of forever, of course. After Mo became too old for his boarding school, he would live in a community where he would not be overwhelmed and where he could do some work that interested him. Larkin would be allowed to flail for a while, then settle down to graduate school or to write a precocious and angry autobiographical novel. Much of Ethan’s money would certainly go to the Anti-Child-Labor Initiative and to other charities.

But then, regarding his money, there was also the question of his closest friends, and no one knew what his plans were for them. Two months before his death, Ethan had made an opaque joke to his estate lawyer, Larry Braff. “I don’t know,” Ethan had said as they sat together going over papers for several hours. “I think there are probably dangers in leaving your friends a lot of money.”

“I imagine that’s true.”

“You could call it
The Drama of the Gifted Adult
,” said Ethan. “And I’m using
gifted
in a different way here. As in,
having received a gift.
Maybe the gifted adult becomes a child, and then stays a child forever because of the gift. In your experience, Larry, is that the case? Is that what happens?”

The lawyer regarded Ethan through his rimless glasses and said, “Forgive my ignorance, Ethan, but this ‘drama’ thing—I actually don’t know what you’re referring to. Is it a specific reference? Can you explain?”

“It’s all right,” Ethan said. “I was just thinking out loud. Not to worry. I’ll figure it out.” So no one knew yet what he had decided, and no one asked; it would be dealt with in time.

A month after Ethan died, Ash, who Jules once again spoke to every day, called and said she’d finally been able to begin cleaning out Ethan’s office in the house, and that she was messengering over something she’d found that she thought Jules might like to have. “I don’t actually know how you’ll feel about it,” Ash said, “but it belongs to you more than me.”

The package arrived, a big brown paper square. Jules was home alone when the messenger came; Dennis was out in the park, kicking around a ball, “kicking around death,” he’d said. Tonight, very late, Rory was returning home from school upstate by bus and would stay for a week. “I just like being with you guys,” she’d explained to her parents; but they knew that for her, coming in from the outdoors and the world of her friends to be with her mother and father was something of a sacrifice, and she was doing it to cheer them up, to be kind. They awaited her return as if she were Jesus and would set them right.

In the front hallway, after signing for the package, Jules stood and opened it. Inside were some faded folded papers stapled together, and she opened them up to see they were a storyboard from an animated short that had never gotten made. Right away she recognized how old the drawings were. It wasn’t just that the paper looked delicate. Ethan’s style had also changed over the years, the faces taking on very particular qualities; but here, back in the beginning, the pencil strokes were wild and loose, as though his hand was in a race with his brain. The first frame, carefully drawn, was of a boy and a girl, immediately recognizable as Ethan and Jules at around age fifteen, standing under pine trees in moonlight that flooded down on their homely, goofy faces. The boy gazed upon the girl in rapture.

“So what do you think?” he wanted to know. “Any chance you might reconsider?”

And the girl said, “Can we
pleeeeze
talk about something else?”

The next frame showed them trudging up a hill together. “All right, so what do you want to talk about?” he asked her.

“Did you ever notice the way pencils look like collie dogs?” she said, and a big no. 2 pencil with the face of a dog appeared, its mouth open and yipping.

“Nope, I never did,” Ethan said in the next frame. The two figures reached the top of the hill and walked together through the trees.
Oh tragedy, oh tragedy,
the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little.
Oh joy, oh joy.
Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads.

The stapled sheets lay on the front hall table of the Jacobson-Boyds’ apartment for a couple of days, the same place where the Christmas letter from Ash and Ethan lingered for a while each year. Jules stood and looked at Ethan’s drawings again. Finally she placed them in the chest in the living room where she kept the few things that corresponded to that time in her life. There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan’s feet were planted on Jules’s head, and Jules’s feet were planted on Goodman’s head, and so on and so on. And didn’t it always go like that—body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit
off,
as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Various people—friends, experts, and often both—shared their knowledge and observations with me, and I am grateful to them all. They include Debra Solomon, Greg Hodes of WME, Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C, Sandra Leong, M.D., Kent Sepkowicz, M.D., David France, and Jay Weiner. Sheree Fitch, Jennifer Gilmore, Adam Gopnik, Mary Gordon, Gabriel Panek, Suzzy Roche, Stacy Schiff, Peter Smith, and Rebecca Traister are all sensitive readers whose advice I am lucky to have. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to my stellar agent, Suzanne Gluck. And I am once again indebted to my profoundly wise, generous editor, Sarah McGrath, as well as to Jynne Martin, Sarah Stein, and everyone else at Riverhead, including its excellent and, yes, feminist publisher, Geoffrey Kloske. As always, many thanks to Ilene Young. And, of course, my thanks and love to Richard.

*
C.T.G. = Clark’s Teaberry gum