The Interestings (40 page)

Jonah agreed to drive into town with his friends. He could get an ice pop at the general store; he hadn’t eaten anything with artificial color or even sugar in it in a very long time, and he still had a taste for such foods. But when Ethan’s father’s beat-up old car sped past “downtown” Dovecote, and Jonah said, “Why aren’t you stopping?” he supposed he’d already known the answer. He scrambled for the door handle, and Ash and Jules put their arms around him in the backseat and hugged him. “It’s okay,” said Ash, and Jules said, “Everything’s going to be fine,” and then Jonah began to cry, because he was confused, and very, very tired, and felt an underground tremor of nameless, swelling emotion that might have been—though he wasn’t sure, and couldn’t admit it—relief. He was desperate to sleep like a newborn baby squished between his old friends in the tiny car; he had barely slept since he’d been living on the farm. Chores started at dawn every day, and prayers lasted until late at night.

In the city, the deprogrammer awaited him in room 1240 of the dreary Wickersham Hotel half a block from Penn Station. His services were needed for three full days and nights; by the end of it all, Jonah was so worn out from the sleep deprivation that was part of the drill, and from being fed very little other than cold Burger King fries as sunrise broke over the city, and from the constant playing of taped negative testimonies from former church members, and from being repeatedly told that everything he’d heard on the farm was untrue, that Ash and Ethan insisted Jonah stay on their couch in the East Village for a few days, and this he did, gratefully.

It was funny, looking back on this so much later, that Ethan and Ash didn’t even have a guest room in their first apartment. The place was ordinary, with an old rag rug that Ash had taken from her childhood home. They were still, in 1981, like everyone else. And in 1981 they were thoroughly entwined, despite the love that Jonah had seen in the air around Jules when Ethan had looked at her. Because of the deprogramming, and the relatively brief period of time he’d been a member of the church, Jonah eventually forgot most of what he’d felt and learned on the farm. The teachings themselves were slowly leached from his consciousness, as if they were the subject matter of a required college course that hadn’t been of great interest. But he never forgot how he’d seen the ongoing love that Ethan still felt for Jules, and that Jules perhaps still felt for Ethan. He never forgot it, but he knew enough never to mention it again.

•   •   •

A
s it turned out, Susannah Bay stayed on the farm in Vermont for a few more days after her son left, singing to a circle of delighted, awed listeners. Their awe would not change over time because of fashion. They would not lose interest in Susannah’s talent, which as far as they were concerned was a fixed thing; instead, they just wanted to bask in it. Susannah returned to New York briefly, not by bus as planned, but in the purple minibus, in order to gather a few of her own essential belongings from the loft, which were then transported with her back up to the farm. A few months later, when Reverend Sun Myung Moon gave a speech at the World Mission Center in New York City, Susannah Bay was called onto the stage to sing her signature song with its newly written lyrics. Her voice was as strong and clear as it had been when she was starting out, and some of the listeners cried, thinking of how they used to listen to her when they were younger and how their lives had changed so dramatically since then. Many of them had broken with their parents, and with their soft suburban lives, and had taken up a greater purpose. This singer, so special, so talented, seemed to be singing right to them, and they were grateful.

The following year, Susannah, along with more than four thousand others, was married in a blessing ceremony in Madison Square Garden. The groom, Rick McKenna, twelve years her junior, a professional carpet installer and a member of the Unification Church from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a stranger to her until the moment they joined hands in front of the Messiah. Directly following the ceremony, Susannah Bay and her husband got into the minibus and headed back up to the farm, where they would live together for the rest of their earthly lives.

I
f you name your daughter Aurora, there is a good chance that eventually she won’t be able to carry the weight of that name with total ease and grace, unless she is very beautiful or very confident. Dennis and Jules hadn’t understood this when their baby was born in 1990. There had been many typical conversations in advance about baby names, discussions about what sort of name would work best preceding the clanking tin-can trail of “Jacobson-Boyd.” These discussions had mostly taken place between Jules and Ash, not Jules and Dennis. Ash had grown up in a family in which both children had been given unusual names. Unusual names was her
beat,
and Jules let her own aesthetic shift and settle accordingly. She would give her own child an unusual name too. Dennis was too cheerless and distracted to concentrate on this topic for very long. He tried, but soon the effort was too great, and one day he finally told Jules, “Oh, you decide.”

She had not meant to get pregnant, not now; it was the wrong time for this. Depression had sandbagged Dennis in the weeks after his release from the hospital following his small stroke. He’d been started on another antidepressant right away, but he said that he might as well have been taking Pez. The MAOI had kept him well since college, but now he was in a shaky, low-slung state. Various drug combinations were tried, yet nothing lifted his mood. Dennis went back to work at MetroCare a month after the stroke, but found himself unable to concentrate or follow the directions he’d been given; or else, sometimes, he became overly involved with the narratives revealed through the gray dimensions of ultrasound.

The day Dennis lost his job was a typically busy day at the clinic, and after seeing a few patients, a young woman came in who’d been experiencing pain on her right side. She was lovely, talkative, twenty-two years old, a recent college graduate from Kentucky who’d come to New York City in a tide of graduates, and who was working as an usher at Radio City Music Hall. “I get to see everything for free,” she said as she lay on the table, her head turned away from him. “Even the Rockettes. And all those concerts, which is pretty amazing, because we never had anything like that where I come from.” Dennis gently ran a transducer below her rib cage. “Oh, that tickles,” she said, and then suddenly on the display screen her liver came into view, looming up like the wreck of an old ship.

He saw the mass at once; it was unmissable. Without thinking, Dennis said, “Oh God.” The technicians were never allowed to offer any kind of opinion about what they saw, not even to give a hint as to whether it appeared normal or abnormal. Every other time he’d performed an ultrasound—and he’d performed thousands—he’d been poker-faced, mild, and cheerful. When patients had murmured a question, or searched his face for reassurance, he’d told them not to worry, that the doctor would read the results very soon, that it wasn’t his job to interpret. But of course he always tacitly interpreted; all the technicians did. He had never reacted this way before, but the young woman was an innocent in the city, and he couldn’t bear the idea that there was a significant chance she had cancer, and would die of it.

“What?” she said, turning her face toward him.

“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes you did,” she said, her mellow Kentucky voice becoming accusatory. “You said, ‘Oh God.’”

“I said it about tickling you,” he tried, but he knew it was no good. The world engulfed Dennis Jacobson-Boyd in all its shades of gray, its vulnerable soft organs, and he lifted the wand off the young woman’s body, placed it on the cart, and put his hands to his face, for now he was crying. He could not believe he had done this! But he knew that putting a person with untreated clinical depression in this position could easily lead to a bad moment of some kind, and here it was. The young woman pulled her paper gown around herself, but she was all wet with gel, and frightened of him, and frightened for her life. She lifted herself carefully off the table, and swiftly rustled out into the hallway, calling for assistance.

Two of the other ultrasound techs, Patrick and Loreen, immediately crowded the doorway. “Dennis,” said Patrick in a sharp voice, “what did you say to that patient?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But she has a mass. I could see it. It was like a monster in there.”

“
Dennis
,” said Patrick. “You have no idea if it’s malignant. And it’s not your place to get involved in this. You were sitting here crying? She heard you cry? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Then, “I do know.”

“Look, a stroke is a big deal,” Loreen said. “My grandpa had one. It takes time to recover. You’re not yourself. You need more time, Dennis.”

“It’s not the stroke. That was minor; I recovered from that.”

“Then what?” she asked. Patrick and Loreen would smoke on the street outside the clinic during breaks, and Dennis would stand happily with them in the draft of their smoke. Patrick was a big guy, a former Marine, with a shaved head and a saintly manner, married with four kids; Loreen was black, small, dreadlocked, single, full of ambition. The three of them had nothing in common, but until Dennis’s stroke and the return of his depression, he’d enjoyed their company. They’d all become real friends, joined together by sound waves, and now, apparently, separated by them.

He didn’t answer Loreen, but unbuttoned his white coat and somberly folded it into a soft pile, like a military flag. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

“I’ll say,” said Loreen. “Mrs. Ortega is going to fire you the minute she comes down here.”

“I behaved inappropriately,” said Dennis. “I know I did. I just felt so sad. I was overwhelmed by the futility of everything.” He nodded good-bye to his friends and walked past them, out into the hallway where the hefty, determined Mrs. Ortega was striding toward him.

His pharmacologist, Dr. Brazil, still did not want to put him back on the MAOI. “Not when we have so many sharper tools in our toolbox,” he said. But it seemed that even these sharp tools were too dull for Dennis, or else Dennis was the one who was dull, for he lay around the apartment in the mornings when Jules got ready to go to her office, or for a meeting with her supervisor, and he watched her through a kind of clinically depressed person’s thick cheesecloth.

“Dennis,” Jules said, wagging her foot back and forth as she stepped into a flattened shoe. “I do not like this current state of yours.”

“I do not like this current state of mine either, Jules,” he said, simply imitating her diction but sounding hostile. Why was he hostile? There was no reason, but he just was.

“I keep thinking you’ll snap out of it,” she said. “I know that’s babyish and obviously unrealistic.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he got up from the bed to give her a perfunctory hug, not because he felt loving, but because he was probably scared to not feel loving. Jules was clean and showered and dressed, smelling of the various floral and fruit cleansers and lotions that started her day; Dennis still smelled like an attic of sleep, and at the moment she wanted no part of him.

One day Ash, concerned about the bad situation, met Jules for lunch at a place on Amsterdam where the popovers were as large as a baby’s head, and the two women broke them open, steam rushing upward into their faces. Ash’s driver waited outside in the car, and would wait for her as long as was necessary. “Talk to me,” said Ash.

“You already know what’s happening.”

“But talk to me more.”

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jules said. “He’s diminished. He’s like some vague, irritable version of Dennis. It’s like they took him for a while and then returned him to me, but now he’s only an approximation of himself. Like he’s a member of Jonah’s cult back then.” Ash just shook her head and squeezed Jules’s hand, which was all she really had to do. The two women felt guilty eating their eggy and decadent popovers and talking about Dennis as if he were a particularly recalcitrant client of Jules’s. Dennis would hate the way they were talking about him, Jules thought; he would be horrified. “I shouldn’t be saying all this,” she added, but she needed to say it.

“No, it’s okay. You’re not gossiping or anything,” said Ash. “You love him, and you’re talking it through. And anyway, you’re telling
me
. It’s just me, Jules.”

Still Jules pictured Dennis’s mortified face, and she knew she had betrayed him. But Ash kept trying to help, wanting to listen and make suggestions. “Maybe he’ll just come out of it, like a person in a coma,” said Ash, not knowing at all what she was talking about. Dennis’s depression divided the two women. Jules could describe Dennis’s state to her, and what marriage was like with a husband in that state, but the descriptions weren’t vivid enough. You had to be there; Jules was there and Ash wasn’t.

At work, Jules’s clients somehow seemed to lift themselves out of their worst moods, as if they intuited that she needed them to do this. She cheered them up in ways that she couldn’t cheer up Dennis. Her wry running commentary was no good to him now, but only made him feel worse, as did everything else. Even talking to him seemed to grate, but she couldn’t help herself, and she chattered about what had happened in therapy, as if he might get some kind of secondhand usage out of it. “This client of mine, a married woman, a grade-school reading specialist, she got into a rut for a while. She’s just now coming out of it,” Jules told him. It wasn’t untrue, but Dennis had no response. At night he would fall asleep early, and she’d go into the living room to call Ash and Ethan, whispering to them from inside her gloomy marriage and imagining them off in their world of light. She felt almost
ill
from the claustrophobia of living with a depressed person, someone who didn’t have a job now, and who slept too much, and who shaved only when he couldn’t bear not to. Dennis now had the faint beginnings of a mountain-man appearance; no, a Rip Van Winkle appearance, for he’d been sleeping, not climbing.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said to Ash. “I mean, I’m not going to do anything. I just feel horrible. I can’t help him; nothing gets through to him. He’s really suffering.” Also, I am too, she stopped herself from adding, because it sounded so selfish.

Dennis’s parents came in from New Jersey, and his mother looked around the apartment with a suspicious eye, as if living here with Jules had done this to her son. “Where do you do your ironing?” she wanted to know.

“Pardon?” They hardly ironed anything, but whenever they absolutely had to, they laid the items on a beach towel across the bed. This is how we live, she wanted to say to Dennis’s mother. We don’t care about ironing, we have no money, and now thanks to genetics your son is losing the traits that I loved in him. But the Boyds seemed to blame Jules for his depression— because there was no ironing board, or maybe because Jules was Jewish. (Dennis had pointed out more than once his father’s absorption in Third Reich documentaries.) But she also saw that the Boyds were people whose love came with added sourness—and maybe, as a result, their son had developed the capacity for unspeakable sadness, and who could blame him? Dennis and Jules had both come from families that hadn’t really
felt good.
This they’d shared, and when they’d come together it was to make a home that did feel good, and even sometimes to say:
Fuck you, disappointing families
. The Wolf household in the Labyrinth had proved to Jules that a densely textured, emotionally fulfilling family was a possibility. She’d wanted to create a new, modest version of that with Dennis, and they’d seemed to be accomplishing that just around the time that Ash and Ethan rose up into a life that no one else could remotely approximate. And then, later, Dennis became depressed, and so modest fulfillment still could not take place.

One morning when Jules woke up and saw how relaxed and neutral Dennis’s face was in sleep, she thought that soon he’d be awake, and would remember how it felt to be in his skin, and the day would be shot. It was too bad he couldn’t just sleep and sleep, for he seemed almost happy then. Thinking about it, Jules realized she was so unhappy that she actually needed to vomit, and hovering over the cold bowl she recalled how few times she had vomited in her life. Most memorably she’d vomited in the hotel in Iceland, and later there were a few drunken, sick experiences in college. This time was different. She considered this to be
unhappiness puking
, but of course there was no such thing. An hour later, a tiny electrical zap
struck one of her nipples, and then, a little later, the other one. Vaguely, uncomfortably, Jules thought about how her last period had been particularly light, a fact that she hadn’t worried too much about at the time. This had happened at different points in her life; it was no big deal, and she’d attributed it to stress.

Jules, taking a home pregnancy test at the earliest date and staring at the result, sat in the little bathroom with a pulse pounding in her head, and tried to think about how and when this had occurred. That light period had obviously not been a period at all, but must have been what the books called implantation bleeding. Since Dennis’s stroke and recovery they’d had sex infrequently; he was mostly though not completely uninterested in it now. Jules’s new client Howie, a computer programmer with big transference issues, miserably but bravely told her he’d once masturbated to thoughts of her when he lay in bed with his wife; he’d made the bed tremble so much, he said, “that my wife woke up and thought it was an earthquake.”
And yet Jules’s own depressed husband was uninterested in touching her.

She tried to do the pregnancy math, thinking back to the weeks before Dennis’s stroke, and then before the return of the depression that had made him shapeless and slow. She remembered one night, shortly before Ash’s play
Ghosts
had opened, when they’d been at the Museum of Television and Radio for a black-tie opening of an exhibit called
This Land Is Figland
. Ethan stood somewhere in a corner of the main gallery with Ash beside him, in a mass of museum donors, animators, friends. Jules watched Ethan in his tuxedo, his arm around Ash, who wore a partly diaphanous and very short dress, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons running up the length of the back, like a costume from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which coincidentally she actually hoped to direct in the near future. The dress was “a Marco Castellano,” Ash had said before the evening, which hadn’t meant anything to Jules. Ethan noticed Jules looking at him, and he smiled from across the room.