The Interestings (31 page)

“Yeah, there was
going
to be a trial, but then Goodman made sure there wasn’t. So who knows what happened? That question’s always been kind of lurking, right? Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And maybe we should really face it.”

“Why exactly should we face it?” she asked.

Ethan looked at her, surprised. “Isn’t knowing always better than not knowing? I mean, generally in life? It’s not like you can change anything, but at least if you have the information, then you can think, ‘Well, it is what it is.’ Isn’t that one of the messages of your little book?
The Drama of the Gifted Child
? That you have to know what really happened a long time ago so you can live truthfully now?”

“My little book? God, you’re condescending.”

“I’m sorry. But we could hire private detectives. Have you and your parents ever thought of that? Now that I’ve got this money coming in—I know it’s only one season they’ve committed to, but we’ve got
plenty.
We could hire someone really top-notch, and it could give you and your family some closure, some—”

“Would you just stop,” Ash said, and then her face went messy and soft the way it always did right before she began to cry. “I told you, Ethan, I
don’t like
to discuss my brother, it upsets me too much. He was in my life every minute of every day, and then he wasn’t. You don’t have any siblings, so you can’t understand. Goodman had all this potential—he just hadn’t put it together yet. He would’ve made something of himself, I know he would have. But he never got to do that, and it’s one of the saddest things I know.”

“You don’t know that for sure about him,” Ethan said.

“What, you think he’s off building the next great museum or skyscraper or . . . Fallingwater? I highly doubt it,” she said sharply. “Why are you
doing
this to me now? We can’t just ‘find’ him all of a sudden. Even if we did, it would open up a whole new legal thing for him. He’d definitely be sent to jail for skipping out on his court date. They would be very hard on him; there would be no mercy whatsoever. It would only add to what is already most likely a difficult and limited life. Can’t you just leave things
alone?
Or do you really want to torture me?”

Then she was in tears, and she turned away from him, which was just not bearable. Once you had what he had, you couldn’t ever not have it; he supposed that this was true of all passionate love. So now, having poked uselessly at the ancient question of Goodman Wolf and where he was and exactly what he had done to Cathy Kiplinger, Ethan Figman told his girlfriend he was very sorry; he’d forgotten how painful it was for her. No, no, he amended, of course he hadn’t
forgotten.
It was just that sometimes he had trouble distinguishing what should be kept as a thought from what should be spoken aloud.

It was odd, to be sure, that Ash never wanted to talk about Goodman and how he’d run away before there could be a trial. Not talking about it was an absolute denial, and the whole family engaged in it. Once in a while when Ethan and Ash went to the Wolfs’ for dinner, either Betsy or Gil might lightly mention Goodman’s name, and a suddenly atomized vapor of sadness would hover over them for a few minutes, before dissipating. Maybe Goodman really was dead. He could be anywhere in the world, or nowhere.

Ethan would try never to upset her like that again. He would keep it to himself instead. He’d been on such an idealistic, free-associative streak, and in the middle of it he’d said the wrong thing and had ruined, retrospectively, the whole evening, the celebratory Japanese dinner and the thrilling fucking for dessert, and then, of course, the quiet time afterward, which was always the happiest time for him, though not tonight.

D
ennis Jacobson-Boyd was on a mission. Early one spring morning, he walked to the corner store down the block and picked up a copy of a magazine that had been delivered shortly after dawn. The cover story of the May 1986 issue of
Media Now
was a list of the one hundred most powerful people in media. Dennis quickly flipped through the issue and found what he wanted, then he turned around and walked home to Jules, who had seen him approach from the apartment window high above the street, and was now out in the stairwell in her pajamas as he entered the vestibule down below.

“Well?” she called down as Dennis mounted the stairs. He looked up and laughed.

“You couldn’t wait until I got inside?” he called back.

“No.”

“Ninety-eight,” Dennis announced.

“Out of a hundred?” Jules called. “Is that good? It doesn’t seem all
that
good.”

“It’s very good,” he called back. “Just getting on the list means they think he’s really powerful.”

“And what about the money?” she asked. For this, of course, was the important part.

“That’s more complicated,” said Dennis.

“What do you mean?” she said, her voice a half-shout.

“Why are you shouting at me?” he called up. “Can’t you wait?”

By the time Dennis had arrived at the fifth floor she had already gone back inside. At age twenty-seven, Jules and Dennis had outgrown this walk-up apartment on West 84th Street, just around the corner from where Dennis used to live. Their place had an intractable mouse problem—mice seemed to dance in mockery, like puppets, ignoring the traps left for them. But the rent was manageable, and they couldn’t afford to move. Jules had a roster of clients in a Bronx psychiatric hospital, under close supervision. Dennis had been hired as an ultrasound technician by MetroCare, a medical clinic right in the neighborhood. Both of their professional lives were hectic and the hours were long, although between the two of them very little money came in.

They’d gotten married earlier that year in a small ceremony performed by a woman judge in a Greek taverna in the Village, attended by Ash, Ethan, Jonah, Dennis’s college friend Tom, and the Jacobsons and the Boyds. Neither family had any money, and it made sense to hold the wedding this modest way. Jules’s sister, Ellen, came from Long Island with her husband, Mark, and Dennis’s brothers stood broad-shouldered in dark suits and ties that they could not wait to unknot. Lois Jacobson looked so small and tentative in her turquoise dress. “Dad would have loved to be here,” she said, and for a second Jules had thought,
Whose dad?
And then she remembered:
oh, mine
. Warren Jacobson was so rarely thought of by her as “Dad.” He was “my father” or, even more often, “my father who died when I was fifteen.” It was better to keep him at a distance, and when her mother said this in the taverna Jules had no idea of what he would have loved. He’d never known her as a grown woman, only as a somewhat out-of-synch girl with ridiculous hair. He hadn’t even known her as Jules, only Julie. It was too sad to think about him today of all days, when she was joining her life with the life of a man who was vowing to stay beside her over the years. After a reasonable moment Jules turned away from her mother and put her arm around her substantial husband, who had taken off his jacket, and whose back was as warm and broad as a bed.

In the middle of the wedding lunch, Ash stood up at her seat and tapped on her water glass. “We’re all here,” she said, “because of Jules and Dennis. I realized, the other day, when I was thinking about what to say during my toast to my best friend and her groom—” The women gave each other a smile at the word
groom
, which was unfamiliar and thrilling. I have a groom! Jules thought, and Ash is sanctifying his presence. “—that Dennis is a solid and Jules is a liquid,” Ash went on. “And I don’t think there are any scientists among us, but I’m sure there’s some chemical explanation for how they found each other and fell in love. And anyway, I’m so glad they did.” She looked right at Jules, her eyes wet. “I’m not losing you,” said Ash. “Marriage, I don’t think, is like that. It’s something else. It’s a thing in which you get to see your closest friend become more of who she already is. I know Jules Jacobson—excuse me, Jules Jacobson-Boyd, hyphen queen—as well as I’ve known anyone. The solid and the liquid have joined together to make—well, not a gas, that doesn’t sound very nice.” There was laughter. “But some powerful substance that all of us need, and that all of us love.”

She sat down, smiling and streaming with tears, and Jules stood and kissed her, and Dennis did too. There were other toasts—something from Jonah about how seeing his friends grow up and go off into their lives was an astonishing, beautiful thing, like watching one of those speeded-up-growth-of-a-flower films he’d seen in grade school. “Except the difference is that I never used to get teary eyed about those flower films. But this is really getting to me.” One of Dennis’s brothers ended with a hardware store joke that Jules didn’t understand. But the toast she most remembered was from Ash, who always knew what to say, and who meant it.

Two months later, Ash and Ethan were married at the Water Club, with 200 guests in attendance, and cracked lobsters carried overhead as everyone looked out at the brilliant view over the East River. The Wolfs “went all out,” people said, and there was a tacit understanding in the room that the loss of Goodman had probably caused the family to want a bigger, more elaborate wedding than they would have had under normal circumstances. They were celebrating the child they still had, the child who was here. But of course they hadn’t lost Goodman in the way that people thought.

The subject of Goodman was vivid and present between Jules and Ash; the secret of Ash’s brother living quietly in Iceland had been carried along from adolescence into adulthood. It was huge, Jules knew, to possess this information, and while she sometimes experienced it like a sort of pressure between the eyes, a legal, moral migraine, she often still felt stupidly special to have been included. Ash sometimes needed to talk to her about Goodman; all of a sudden she’d grab Jules and take her somewhere private and quiet, and she would just unspool in front of Jules about her brother. Ash would smoke one cigarette after another and gesture with her hands and tell Jules whatever news there was from Iceland about Goodman’s limited but elaborately described life. All Jules could do was listen and commiserate and offer occasional exclamations. She was aware that her role was passive and fixed. She could never change; Ash needed her to listen. She was the only friend who could do that.

Every so often, Betsy and Gil Wolf went to Europe to visit their son. They would be traveling there soon, in fact, and Jules figured that they would bring along photos from the wedding to show him. So really, he wasn’t entirely gone, and it could almost be said that he hadn’t entirely missed everything. Even Ash managed to see her brother every couple of years. There had been a Wolf family trip to Paris upon her Yale graduation back in 1981, and Ethan had been discouraged from attending; Ash made it seem as though it was a real drag for her to have to travel with Gil and Betsy, and she convinced Ethan that he was lucky not to have to go with them too. Who wanted to go to Europe with his girlfriend’s parents? Ash had told Jules all about the plans in advance: the apartment her parents had sublet for the family in the Seventh Arrondissement, and how Goodman would meet them there. He was fairly comfortable traveling on his false passport throughout Europe, and there were various possibilities for family reunions in the future. When Ash returned home, she was buoyed and sentimental.

Ash would have loved more than anything to have had her brother at her wedding. At one point during the lunch, when she and Ethan were making the rounds of the room, Ash leaned down to Jules, her dress crackling, the wreath of little flowers in her hair brushing against Jules’s face, and whispered hotly to her, “You know what I’m doing right now?” “No, what?” said Jules. “I’m pretending he’s here.” And then Ash was gone, off to talk to other guests. Ash was imagining Goodman at the wedding reception, and now the whole day, in addition to being so beautiful and emotional, was complete.

Jules gave a toast to Ash, saying how lucky Ash and Ethan were to have found each other. “They are the best people I know,” she told the large, bright room. Then the moment called for humor. “And now,” she said, “I am going to perform
Both Ends,
the one-woman show Ash wrote in high school, in its entirety. If you need to go to the bathroom, please do so now. This will take a little while, maybe, oh, three to four hours.” There was a rolling wall of laughter, and Jules’s face was as hot as it ever got, and when she sat down she drank a full tumbler of water, ice and all.

Married life proved not very different from premarried life, except now there was the desire for solidity instead of expansion. Jules and Dennis, heading into professional lives that were, respectively, a compromise and a practicality, knew that they wouldn’t have an outcome similar to that of their closest friends, but still they thought everything would reconfigure and become something well beyond the low pay and hard work that predominated now. At that moment, early on in their marriage and deep into their twenties, Jules and Dennis were borderline poor together, with significant school loans and in credit card debt already, always anxious about being able to pay the rent, and unable to afford cable, though all of this was fine because they imagined that at some distant point their fortunes would increase.

They both felt that as a newly married couple—and eventually, they assumed, as a family—they would have money and stability. Dennis had learned a trade; his job included a health plan, thank God. He smoked cigars sometimes with a couple of his ultrasound friends, a diverse group, white, black, Hispanic, and he still played football in the park on weekends, coming home grass streaked, sated. He and Jules trusted that everything would come together for them because they were still relatively young, appealing, educated, and had started off their marriage happily, and Dennis’s MAO inhibitor was still working well, “knock wood,” they said.

The deep friendship between Ash and Jules had stealthily transformed into its adult version, which meant that what they talked about had expanded to include all the new people in their midst, and an increasing political awareness: Ash and feminism as it applied in the eighties; Jules and the economics of mental illness, which confronted her at the psychiatric hospital in the Bronx each day. Their friendship still had a primacy over most other things. Both Ash and Jules saw Jonah whenever they could, but he was busy at his robotics job, and also he was in the early stages of a relationship with Jules’s friend Robert Takahashi, and was always slipping off to be with him.

If Jules or Ash needed to see each other, then the two husbands stepped aside. It almost seemed gratifying to the men to step aside in those moments, remembering what women could have together that men rarely could. Ash and Jules felt relief in knowing each other as well as they did. The friendship was like a fortification for their marriages, an extra layer of security. Ethan was so busy with the show—the table reads, the recording sessions, the production meetings, the conference calls with the network—and Ash would always spend some of that time with Jules.

Once, looking through a women’s magazine together, they saw an article about a legendary sex toy emporium in New York for women called Eve’s Garden. It wasn’t that their marriages weren’t sexually satisfying to them—both of them had confided that they were—but they got into a discussion about how maybe it was a good idea to have “a vibrator of one’s own, to paraphrase the late, great Virginia Woolf,” Jules said. Then, to amuse Ash, she went off on a Woolf sex riff, saying, suggestively, “Are those rocks in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Going to the sex toy store would be a weird little adventure, the women decided. The place was famous, but it was unlike almost any other sex store in New York, because it lacked a lurid overtone. Instead, it had been designed as a feminist business celebrating sexual freedom, back in the earnest 1970s when women were joining the workforce and discovering their clitorises. (“Not at the same moment, I hope,” Jules had said to Ash. “You’d get fired.”) Now, deep into the Reagan years, you could still feel the sad spillover from that quaintly vanished era, and you could go with your best friend to this friendly sex toy store located in an anonymous office building, and stand together, silently shaking with laughter, both teenaged and fully grown all at once, knowing that you would never have to choose between those different states of maturity, because you contained them both inside yourselves.

“May I help you?” asked a woman who had just stepped out of a line drawing from
Our Bodies, Ourselves
. Ash and Jules let her advise them on vibrators, in the end both choosing the same model, a grotesque translucent pink jelly thing called the Joystick, and packs of overpriced batteries. At home, alone, Jules used the vibrator a few times, though tentatively and self-consciously, and once in a while she or Ash would tell the other, “I had a date with the Joystick the other day,” or, “You seem a little stressed; maybe you could use some
joy
in your life,” or, “Guess who I saw last night? My old friend Joy Stick. Remember her?
Joy Stick?
She was always such a
stimulating
person, don’t you think?” And then after a while life became so busy that the jokes slowed and then finally stopped. Jules tossed the thing deep in her closet and never missed it, and the Joystick wasn’t found again until a closet purge that took place some eight years later, by which point one of the batteries had exploded, corroding the whole pink and porous thing.

But the friendship was untouchable, uncorrodible; it was the centerpiece of the two marriages, and all four of them knew it. Jules and Ethan’s friendship in adulthood was different, less public, less explainable, more unusual and unspoken though quite deep, and harder to articulate, at least to Dennis and Ash. The two couples, side by side, had history and comfort. They had all come up together in New York City, but now the imbalance between the couples was suddenly, jarringly evident. It had been imbalanced for a long time, but having learned, a moment earlier, of Ethan’s place on the list in
Media Now
magazine, Jules felt with pinpoint pain that her life with Dennis was not likely to ever feel big enough in order to be tolerable, at least not as long as these two were their closest friends. Jules and Dennis had already understood that Ethan Figman was highly successful and talented—but
powerful
? Ethan? He didn’t care about power. He wore Felix the Cat and Gepetto T-shirts and still drew in little spiral notebooks. Powerful was something else. None of them were supposed to be powerful; power wasn’t anything they’d ever aspired to. They hadn’t aspired to money either, but in this respect they were now in the minority. Slowly, the movement away from the creative, and toward the creativity of money, was becoming increasingly visible.