The Interestings (26 page)

“Not true,” Ash piped up.

“Well, we’ll have to go into mother-daughter therapy one day to find out,” said Betsy with a small smile toward her daughter. “I’m sure it exists. We’ve paid for other kinds of therapy, so why not that? But the thing is, Jules, Ash loves you. You are the best friend she’s ever had, and I guess she wouldn’t mind my saying right now that she needs you too.” Betsy’s voice became unbound again, and Ash leaned across the table, putting her arms around her mother. They looked so much alike, the fine-featured, salt-and-pepper-headed mother and the shimmering daughter, whose looks would also one day turn in this same direction, still pleasing and fine, just no longer young and untouched.

Nearby, a gaggle of smoking, drinking students glanced over at the Americans and their open display of emotion, but no one at this table even tried to temper themselves tonight. “I love you so much, Mom,” Ash said, her face collapsing.

“And I love you too, darling girl.”

Goodman returned then, followed shortly by Gudrun, who immediately opened her pack of King’s Original, tapped one out, and lit it. The counselor seemed chic here in Iceland. Her hair was well cut, and Jules thought for a moment of the poor living conditions that Goodman had described in Gudrun and Falkor’s home. But then she remembered that for months now, money had steadily been coming into that household. Probably the living conditions had improved. Gudrun looked like a smartly dressed artist or designer.

“What’s going on?” Goodman said. “I go take a leak and all hell breaks loose.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jules. “There’s no relationship between your family’s emotional outpouring and your
bladder
outpouring.”

“It’s just very, very intense around here,” Ash said. She walked around the table and stood beside her brother, putting an arm around his shoulder; he had sat down again, but even sitting, he was almost as tall as she was.

“We were telling Jules how essential it is that we keep this to ourselves,” said Gil. “More than essential.”

“I know,” Jules said. “I really do know.”

“Thank you,” Ash said from across the table.

“Tomorrow,” said Gil Wolf, looking around at his family, “we’ll all go swimming in a geothermal pool, and then we’ll have a wonderful Icelandic meal. We’ll have a great day,” he said. “We deserve it. We need it.”

Then the Wolf family began to talk to one another all at once. They discussed the death of their dog, and Ash said, “I can’t believe you weren’t there, Goodman,” and Goodman said, “I know, I know, it
killed
me, I’m so sorry, I loved him too.” And they talked about how strange it was that Jonah was going to MIT of all places, and how Cousin Michelle was pregnant with twins, and about American politics, which Goodman usually only heard about through the filter of the Icelandic news. They talked and talked, bringing up anything that occurred to them. The family relaxed together in the close brown and gold quarters of the Café Benedikt. Jules drank another glass of water, and then she was suddenly weary again, but the Wolf family was still going strong, and might still be going strong for hours. Iceland, so far away from everywhere, stayed up late, as if to soothe itself in its isolation. Only Jules Jacobson and Gudrun Sigurdsdottir were left on the outer edges of this conversation, sitting in slightly formal silence, the teenaged girl and the grown woman. Jules looked at the former camp counselor, who looked at her, and they both smiled shyly, having nothing at all to say.

“So,” Jules said finally. “Do you still have that flashlight?”

Figland

I
n September 1984, at a small Japanese restaurant in New York City so expensive it had no name on the door and no prices on its calligraphic menu, Ethan Figman and Ash Wolf sat on pressed straw mats across from network executives Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin, both sleek and tailored and veneer-toothed, though it was clear that Gary had the power, and that Hallie’s power came from its complementarity. He spoke first; she seemed to repeat a milder and less engaging version of what had just been said. “This has been a wonderful sequence of developments,” Gary Roman said.

“So terrific,” said Hallie Sakin.

A pilot had been made, a deal going forward had been finalized, and a full season of
Figland
had been ordered, to be produced out of the studio in midtown Manhattan that the network was opening expressly for this purpose. Because of Ethan’s insistence on doing the voices of two recurring characters, he’d rendered himself permanently indispensable in this way as well as others. A few days earlier the executives had come in from LA for meetings with Ethan and his agent and his lawyers, and now, at last, for a celebration dinner.

A waiter took their orders, and then a waitress in a pale green kimono slid open the rice-paper doors and brought in wooden tray after wooden tray of food, while the waiter hovered and oversaw, the two of them like a Japanese version of Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin. Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved. Ethan would mention this to Ash later, when they were back in their apartment and had a chance to deconstruct the evening, during which Ethan felt deeply and uncomfortably formal and not himself. First of all, the weirdness of sushi itself had put him off. At age twenty-five, Ethan Figman had only ever eaten a California roll, which was not remotely raw. But now a selection of sushi, and varied rhombuses of sashimi, were carried in accompanied by smears of something sinus-opening called wasabi. There were glistening little globes, the harvest of mysterious underwater ovulation, and amputated tentacles served with a dipping sauce that tasted like smoked caramel. Ethan was scared of the parasites that sometimes swarmed in raw fish, but he was intrigued by the food too, and tried to overcome his fears. Japanese food was, in its way, like an edible cartoon.

Ash, beside him, had eaten sushi and sashimi many times; she even said, later that night, that she was sure she’d come to this very restaurant once, with her father, when she was a child in the 1960s. Gil Wolf had patiently taught his daughter to hold a pair of lacquered chopsticks at that dinner. But maybe it hadn’t been this restaurant at all; there were a few such places in the city, unlabeled, unlisted, unpriced. You just had to be the kind of person to know about them. You just had to have money.

But it wasn’t only the food that made Ethan feel the way he did. By rights he ought to have been relaxed. The time to be tense was before today, and he’d been tense then too. Now, with a season of the show ordered, and an entire floor of an office building rented as studio space, the network couldn’t take it back. They couldn’t suddenly realize the depth and breadth of their error, the fact that they had mistakenly offered
him
, of all people—uncool, unbeautiful Ethan Figman—a very large sum of money to do what he’d always done anyway, at least in his head.

“How does it feel to know that if audiences respond the way we think they will, you’re going to be the most lovable Figman in America?” Gary Roman asked.

“I bet you’re psyched,” murmured Hallie Sakin.

“I think I will actually be the second most lovable one,” said Ethan. “My great-uncle Schmendrick Figman is
worshipped
, at least within the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.”

There was a confused pause, and the executives both laughed with similar bleats, though Ash didn’t even pretend to find it funny. Ethan was babbling; this was what he did in times of stress. Of course he did not have a great-uncle Schmendrick, and the joke wasn’t even a joke. He knew that Ash didn’t like this part of him, but when you were in a relationship you had to take the whole package. By the time Ash came to love Ethan, he had developed so many liabilities: the babbling, the sweating hands, the insecurity, the general ugliness with his clothes on and perhaps the greater ugliness with them off. Ethan Figman needed more sake now in order to talk to these people the way a human talks to other humans. He couldn’t only talk to his friends for the rest of his life, though that would have been preferable—particularly if he could mostly talk to Jules. He and the network were now partnered, paired off. Ethan was going to have a show called
Figland
to create and write and do voices for and take part in table reads for and devote all his time to. He would be ringed by many, many people, not just Ash and Jonah and Jules.

Almost three years earlier, Ethan had been hired by a clever if shrill nighttime cartoon for adults called
The Chortles
. He was a few months out of the School of Visual Arts when he took the job, and though before then he’d been able to find work doing industrials, he was curious about what it would be like to be part of a show. Alone among his friends he appeared to be eminently hirable. Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet. Jules was still trying to be a comedic actor; Ash was trying to be a serious one. Jonah, fresh out of the Moonies, was undecided and lost, looking for some kind of engineering job.
The Chortles
was one of the very few TV cartoons for adults, and what made it even more unusual was that it was produced in New York, not LA; this was its biggest allure for Ethan. He didn’t actually like the way
The Chortles
looked, and the humor was sort of mean and childish. Characters actually stuck out a foot and tripped one another in a running gag that tested well with audiences between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the desired demographic. The animation studio where Ethan drew and wrote
The Chortles
was a big, open space in Chelsea with modular furniture, a Joy Division soundtrack, a refrigerator packed with sodas and juice, and a staff under the age of thirty. One day someone brought in a pogo stick that left a long line of pockmarks in the beautiful floor. Ethan settled in to the job and more than a year passed, during which he was given a series of raises and compliments.
The Chortles
was doing so well that the producers flew the staff to Hawaii in gratitude.

On the island of Maui in December 1982, sitting in a long-sleeved shirt and long pants—practically full beekeeper regalia—on a lounge chair under the shade of a tree with a book, while everyone else was in the sun or in the water, Ethan realized that he was depressed and not only needed to go home, he needed to leave his job. He didn’t want to be responsible for the Chortles with their wide, dumb heads any longer. Ethan went up to his hotel room and called Ash in New York; he hadn’t used the phone once since he’d been here, not wanting to rack up any extra expenses, afraid that someone from the network would be mad at him if he did. Even his minibar had remained unplundered. Surely all the other
Chortles
staff were eating fistfuls of Kona coffee–glazed macadamia nuts day and night. Ethan was concerned that when he told Ash he was quitting, she would say, “That’s really impulsive, Ethan. Look, stay for the rest of the trip, then come home and we’ll discuss it.”

But what she said was, “If that’s what you want to do.”

“It is.”

“All right, then. Let me know when you’re coming. I love you so much.”

“I love you too.” He said it fiercely, feeling her quiet power. Ash never judged. Come home, she told him, and now he would come home, and she would be waiting, and would help him sort it out. Partners and spouses had been invited on this trip, but Ash had chosen to stay in New York to be the assistant director of an experimental play called
Coco Chanel Gets Her Rocks Off
, which would be put on outdoors in the meatpacking district at night. She wasn’t being paid for her work, but Ethan’s salary supported them both. He packed his bag while the other animators splashed and dove in the Pacific, and he left a note at the hotel’s front desk for his boss, explaining that his decision had struck him swiftly but solidly. “It was like being hit in the head with a surfboard,” he wrote. “Not that I personally would know what that’s like, since as you might have noticed I spent this vacation in the shade reading
A Confederacy of Dunces.
But I have to get out, Stan. I’m not even sure why.”

Back at home in New York, Stan called and asked Ethan to come in the following week for a “sit-down,” but Ethan declined. He stayed in the apartment obsessively doodling Figland figures in the little spiral notebooks that he bought in bulk. Sometimes Jonah Bay, who was now overworked at the job he’d recently found designing daily-living innovations for disabled people, came over and stayed for much of the evening, and occasionally even collapsed on the couch and spent the night. Or else Jules came over with her boyfriend Dennis Boyd, a big, dark-haired man who had begun attending ultrasound technology school in the fall.

“I know you see ads all the time on the subway about becoming an ultrasound technician, so it sort of seems like a joke,” Jules had said after she’d announced Dennis’s plans. “But what he wants to do professionally is actually something important. He’s going to be able to see inside people, see the mysteries beneath their skeletons. And with sound waves, no less. It’s sort of like being a psychic, but with machines. I think it’s a kind of artistry, in a way. He’ll be dealing with anatomy. With people’s lives. What’s inside them. Their entire futures.”

“I know that,” said Ethan. “And I like Dennis. You don’t have to sell him to me.”

Dennis Boyd was shy, and there had been some emotional trouble in his background, Ethan knew. But mostly he seemed to be a decent person who would never hurt Jules, thank God; who would only love her. Looking across the room at Jules sometimes, Ethan felt as if the selves they’d inhabited at age fifteen were still thoroughly present. He could still kiss
her, he realized, and then he immediately told himself:
banish this thought.
In her twenties Jules Jacobson wasn’t even particularly sexy or sexual—not that she had been at fifteen, either—but he was excited by her to this day because he simply liked her so much. Jules was smart and charming and self-deprecating. No one had ever given her anything, and she hadn’t been coddled. Ethan hadn’t been coddled either; they had this in common, along with a certain skewed sensibility. Jules didn’t care if she seemed dignified or not. Her jokes were often on herself; she threw aside dignity in the service of comedic effect.

Ethan knew that, objectively, Jules wasn’t all that hilarious. Right out of college, she’d started coming into the city on the train from her mother’s house all the time to try out for funny parts in plays in New York, but she hadn’t had any luck. While Ash found her hilarious, Ethan found her funny and winning and wonderful. Why wasn’t that enough to make it in acting?

A few months earlier, Ash had come home one night after the acting class she and Jules had begun taking together in the summer, and said to Ethan, “Poor Jules. You wouldn’t believe what happened to her.”

“What happened?” He looked at his girlfriend with fear, not wanting anything to have happened to Jules. Unless, of course, Dennis had broken up with her. Bizarrely, that idea did not make Ethan too unhappy. It even gave him a prickle of well-being, thinking of Jules as now being
available
—even though, of course, Ethan himself was not available.

Ash dropped her big carpetbag pocketbook and sat down next to Ethan on the couch, her head on his shoulder. “In class tonight, Yvonne just kept riding her and riding her, telling her she wasn’t going deep enough. And then at the end, when we were all leaving, Yvonne suddenly asked her to stay. So I waited outside on the street, because you know that Jules and I always go get dinner. And she and Yvonne were in there for like ten minutes, and then Jules came out and her face was really, really red, but just in spots, the way it gets; you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” He’d long been a student of Jules’s blushing and flushing.

“She looked like she had the measles,” said Ash. “She was completely inflamed, completely upset. We went to the restaurant, and she told me that Yvonne had basically said to her, ‘My dear, let me be blunt. Why are you acting?’”

“Your acting teacher said that to Jules? ‘Why are you acting?’”

“Yes. And Jules said she muttered something like, ‘Well, because it’s what I want to do with my life.’ And then Yvonne said, ‘But have you ever asked yourself whether the world actually
needs
to see you act?’ That’s what she said! This bitchy old lady in a turban. And Jules said something like, ‘No, um, I haven’t thought of it.’ And Yvonne said, ‘We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what
other people
need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see
you
, my dear, reciting a tired old monologue from the Samuel French collection or pretending to be drunk and staggering around. Has that ever occurred to you?’”

“Oh my God,” said Ethan. “That’s horrible.”

“I know. So Jules said ‘Thank you, Yvonne’—she actually thanked her for saying this; it was totally masochistic of Jules—and then she came rushing out onto the street and started to cry.”

“I wish I’d been there to help her,” Ethan said.

The next day, while Ash was out of the apartment, Jules called. It was unclear which of them she’d wanted to speak to; probably Ash, but Ethan acted as though she’d wanted to speak to him, and he settled into the call. “It was humiliating, Ethan,” Jules said. “She was just standing there in her turban staring at me like she hated me. Like, ‘Get out of the theater!’ And I guess she’s right. I may be sort of funny. But it’s not ‘acting’ funny. It’s just ‘life’ funny. Like you,” she added. “Although, of course, you’re also ‘genius’ funny, so that gives you a lot of options.”