The Interestings (28 page)

“Yes. But Ash was the one who betrayed
me
here.
She
was the one, and now I’m waiting for
her.
How did that happen?”

“That’s the way it is with Ash. It’s just the way it always is.”

Ethan and Ash’s separation became unbearable to both of them. Each would call Jules and plaintively discuss the distress of being without the other. “He’s a part of me,” said Ash, “and I somehow momentarily forgot that, and now I just can’t bear not having him here. It’s almost like I had to sleep with someone else in order to see how much I need him.” All Ethan kept saying to Jules was, “I can’t take this anymore. I mean, I just
cannot take this
, Jules. You’re minoring in psychology. Explain girls to me. Tell me everything I need to know, because I feel like I know nothing.”

Eventually, though, the couple rushed back together, sealing themselves to each other once again. Ash never heard about the Buffalo nipple, and there was no reason that she ever should. Now Ethan and Ash had been living together since college, on East 7th Street, right off Avenue A, a street fully staffed by junkies and dealers. “I don’t like this one bit,” Gil Wolf said when he and Betsy visited; they promptly called a locksmith and paid for the most expensive titanium lock available.

Ash and Ethan were both twenty-three years old when her father invited Ethan to his office, a perfectly reasonable age to cohabitate and not yet have to turn an eye toward marriage. Ethan was concerned that somehow Gil was going to ask him about whether he had any plans in that direction. But Gil did not want to talk about marriage, or about Ash at all. It seemed that he was simply concerned about Ethan having quit his job at
The Chortles.
Gil seemed only to want to offer himself up as a father figure, knowing that Ethan’s own bitter, self-absorbed, and irresponsible father was useless. Ethan wore a brown skinny tie and a brown jacket that pulled at the sleeves; his hair was freshly moussed. He sat in a brushed steel and distressed leather chair across the desk from Ash’s father at the lower Lexington Avenue offices of what was now called Drexel Burnham Lambert. Outside the window the sky looked smeared with clouds, and the city, seen from here, was not quite recognizable, just as Ethan felt not quite recognizable.

“So what do you think you’ll do next?” Gil Wolf asked. On his desk was one of those executive ball-clickers, a Newton’s cradle, and it was all Ethan could do to keep himself from reaching out and playing with it, but he knew to keep his hands to himself.

“Haven’t a clue, Gil,” said Ethan. He smiled apologetically, as if the sentiment might be offensive to a man in finance. The men in this place all knew what to do
next.
The offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1982 were as revved up as a racetrack. Everyone here wanted to make money, and they knew how to do it too. Ethan was out of place in the world of investment banking. Today, before coming upstairs, he’d been given an adhesive visitor’s badge, and he stuck it on his lapel before entering the elevator, feeling as if instead of
VISITOR
it said
DISPLACED PERSON
. Yet he couldn’t deny the
tang
of being here, the chemical surge he felt when Gil’s assistant came to fetch him from the waiting area upstairs.

“Mr. Figman?” the young guy had said. “I’m Donny. This way.”

Donny was only slightly older than Ethan, in a conservative dark suit and starched shirt. No art school for him! Instead, he’d gone to business school. The environment here was perplexingly appealing to Ethan, who had rarely thought about money before. His father’s salary as a public defender had paid for their cramped and rent-controlled apartment off Washington Square. His mother was a substitute teacher, though she wasn’t very patient with children. In fact, she was a screamer. In the summers there had been just enough money to send Ethan to camp, and then he’d attended the School of Visual Arts on a free ride. In his childhood his parents often fought about money, but they fought about everything else too, and he’d grown up believing that the only thing that mattered, the only thing that would save you from the potential hellishness of your domestic life, was doing what you love. What was better than that?

But maybe the men at Drexel Burnham did what they loved too. Certainly they seemed engaged, and every open office door revealed someone, usually a man, deep in conversation with another man, or on the phone. Ethan followed Donny through the corridors, taking in all the chatter and hum. And now, in the serenity of Ash’s father’s office, he could have lain down on the cold leather sofa and slept for a few hours. He’d always known the Wolfs were rich, but he’d never before seen where much of their money actually was
made
, nor had it occurred to him to be particularly curious about how it was made. Gil Wolf was primarily the father of Ethan’s girlfriend, but here in this world he had a different role, one that was assertive and even refreshing.

“You have no clue what you want to do next? I find that hard to believe,” said Gil kindly, then he was the one to reach out a hand and lift one of the steel spheres hanging from strings on the Newton’s cradle. The ball went
click!
and it struck the others and knocked the last ball out of place, and both men impassively watched the little display of the laws of physics.

“I think I was spoiled by Spirit-in-the-Woods,” Ethan said. “You were allowed to really be expressive and imaginative there. Working on the show was nothing like that; there was a vision that you had to adhere to. I think I need to get out of animation and do something where I don’t have to feel resentful.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Ash’s father, and now he stopped fiddling with the toy and laced his hands together and looked directly at Ethan. “I completely believe in you. And I’m not the only one who does.”

“Thanks, Gil. That’s kind of you to say.”

“Not kind,” said Gil. “Self-interested too. Because I know that Ash is concerned about you. I don’t want to start trouble in paradise, Ethan. I mean that she wants you to be happy too. She wishes you could do what you’re most passionate about.”

“So do I.”

Gil leaned across the desk like a man about to offer once-in-a-lifetime investment advice. “Look, here’s what I would do,” he said. “Go back to them; tell them what you want to be doing.”

“Them?” Ethan laughed, then stopped himself. He had sounded obnoxious. “I mean, there is no them,” he said more gently. “The people I dealt with work on that show exclusively. They wouldn’t be interested in seeing anything else from me.”

“What about the network? Can’t you pitch them your so-called
Figland
? As a TV show, like
The Chortles
but much smarter and more satirical and, God knows, funnier.
And if they don’t want to do it, you can tell them you’ll go to the competition. I’ve done a little research on your behalf. There are black holes in the network’s schedule, where shows just won’t succeed. They’re consistently losing in certain time slots, and they’re worried.”

Ethan sat back and felt the spine of the ultramodern chair give a little too much, as though it might send him falling backward on his head. Gil Wolf was used to getting things done, made, taken care of; his assumptions and his blitheness were remarkable. He wanted Ethan to go to the network aggressively, confidently, pitch them
Figland
and make them think—no, make them
worry
—that there was a lot of money to be made from Ethan Figman. It would be a mindfuck of some kind, just like in Gil’s world. And, just like in Gil’s world, sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

Looking at Gil’s enthused, almost deranged face, Ethan felt himself stiffen and then relent. His own father had been so preoccupied and messed up, and as a result had been spectacularly bad at fatherhood. Now Ethan wanted the love of Ash’s father more than anything. After all, he’d even put a pudding-cup’s worth of mousse in his hair and donned a monkey suit in the middle of the day in order to get it. The intensity of their eye contact made Ethan suddenly realize that this conversation—or anyway some version of it—was what Gil was meant to have had with Goodman right around now. And now Ethan knew that that was what this whole meeting was really about.

A father who’d lost his son was a desperate creature. Empty-handed, in despair. The tragedy of Goodman’s sudden, lurching exit all those years earlier still followed Gil Wolf around, always reminding him of what he’d had, what he’d criticized constantly and probably never appreciated enough, and what he’d lost. The pain was unimaginable. Ash’s father needed Ethan to succeed because his own son had taken off and never been found. His own son was dead, for all intents and purposes, and Ethan was not.

Ethan would call the network—what the hell. He would put himself out there like a schmuck and see what they had to say. He could tolerate rejection; he’d experienced it before and survived it.

“And one other thing,” said Gil. “If you end up making a deal with them—”

“In my dreams,” said Ethan.

“If you do, you’ve got to give these guys things they can’t get anywhere else. They have to need
you.
This is key.”

“Oh, I see what you’re saying. Sure. Thank you,” he said to Gil. “And really, you’ve been so generous and everything.” Both men stood. In his mid-fifties Gil Wolf was still a slim man, a twice-weekly tennis player. There was almost no hair on the top of his head, but he’d developed impressive silver sideburns, and his clothes were natty, picked out by his wife, who had the same good eye for style that Ash had.

“Good,” said Gil. “Now let’s go to lunch. I want steak. I mean, I want salad.” He laughed. “That’s what I’m supposed to say. My internist told me that if I eat salad often enough, I will actually start craving it. And my good cholesterol will rise and my bad cholesterol will fade away like the morning dew.”

“Salad it is,” said Ethan, though at age twenty-three cholesterol was something he’d never given any thought to before. Vaguely, he knew it had to do with fat in the blood, though when anyone mentioned cholesterol, he realized he immediately ceased listening, similar to when someone told him their dream. Gil reached out and lightly pulled Ethan’s
VISITOR
tag off his lapel. It left behind a ghostly rectangle of pollen, which would remain there until the brown jacket was finally taken out of circulation the following year, at Ash’s insistence, and replaced with something expensive and not brown.

“Wait. One other thing,” said Gil. His face suddenly altered, becoming embarrassed. “I was wondering if you’d have a look at something.”

“Sure.”

Gil closed the door of his office, then went to the closet and took out a big, brick-colored accordion folder. The string had been elaborately wound around the knob, and he unwound it, saying, “This is my secret, Ethan. I’ve never shown these to anyone, not even Betsy.”

Oh shit, it’s going to be porn, Ethan thought, and his collar grew tight around his neck. Some kind of strange fetish porn. There would be images of children, photographed in houses where the windows were blacked out. Gil would want Ethan to be initiated into this world. No, no, that is such a stupid conclusion! Stop it, you’re babbling
inside
now,
Ethan told himself. He watched as Ash’s father removed a stack of drawings on heavy sketch paper. “Tell me what you think,” Gil said.

He handed the sheaf to Ethan, who looked at the first drawing, which was done in charcoal. It was of a woman sitting by a window, looking out at the street. It had been labored over, he could see. Through the cloudy gray charcoal it was possible to see all the erasures, the starts and restarts. The woman’s head was turned at such an angle that her neck almost looked broken, and yet she was sitting up. It was a very bad drawing; Ethan took that much in right away. But he knew, oh thank God he knew immediately, that this was not a joke, and that he was not supposed to laugh. Thank God, he would often think over the years, that he had not even smiled.

“Interesting,” Ethan murmured.

“I was trying for a three-quarter profile,” said Gil, peering over Ethan’s shoulder.

“I see that.” Then, in a very small voice, so small that maybe it was possible Ash’s father wouldn’t even hear it, and Ethan could have said it without actually having said it, he added, “I like it.”

“Thank you,” said Gil. Ethan put the drawing on the bottom of the pile and looked at the next one. It was a seascape, with gulls and rocks and clouds possessing sharp outlines instead of the wispy, amoeboid quality that actual clouds had. This drawing was less bad, but it was still quite poor. Gil Wolf wanted to have a hand that could hold a pencil and make it do anything—or, better yet, two ambidextrous hands like Ethan’s that could hold pencils equally well and make them do anything. But the problem was that talent couldn’t be willed into being. Ethan murmured something appropriate for each drawing he came to. It was like an extremely stressful game show, called
Say the Right Thing, You Idiot
.

“So what’s the verdict?” Gil asked, his voice husky with vulnerability. “Should I keep giving it a whirl?”

The moment extended into infinity. If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you’d meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be
illegal
for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child
,
your
boy,
then yes, he should draw and draw.

“Of course,” Ethan said.

The last drawing in the stack was of two figures, a boy and a girl, playing with a dog. Right away the tangle of their bodies was so tortured that it was like looking at a scene of actual torture. Someone was doing something bad to someone else! But, no, Ethan realized that these children were
laughing,
and their dog, who looked more like a seal, appeared to be laughing too, its lips upturned.