The Interestings (54 page)

Jonah, who had barely been breathing during this monologue, felt his throat and chest fully constrict, and he pushed out of the doors and back into the hallway, just as Barry was finishing up and the senatorial candidate was about to go on. He found a men’s room further down the corridor and went into a stall and sank down onto the toilet. He stayed there for a long time, trying to recover and think. He was still in there a little later when the door to the men’s room swung open, voices preceding the men who entered.

“—really great. It’s all about branding. I’m involved with TEDx—you know what that is? We bring the TED conference experience right into communities. Here’s my card; I’d love to tell you more about it.”

“Well, thank you.”

The men went to their separate urinals, and Jonah heard stereophonic urination. There were more pleasantries, some hand washing, then turbine hand dryers roared, and finally the door opened again and one man left. Jonah peered out the narrow vertical slot of the stall door. He saw part of Barry Claimes’s wide back at the sink, the black silk vest and the thin white plankton layer of hair combed across the head. Big Barry picked up the banjo that was leaning on the sinks, swung it around himself on its strap, and strode out of the men’s room.

Jonah followed him through the wood-beamed hallways of the Strutter Oak Resort and Conference Center, staying at a distance and trying to look like someone on his way to a seminar. Every once in a while he glanced blankly at the booklet Caitlin Dodge had handed him. Barry Claimes stepped onto the elevator and so did Jonah, but three other people stepped on too, so Jonah was hardly noticed. They all pressed different floors. Ping, went the button, and a few people exited. Ping again. At 4 Barry Claimes got off, and so did Jonah Bay. The former Whistler was actually
whistling
a little as he walked to his hotel room. He slid the key card into the door, but Jonah felt sure it wasn’t necessary to stride forward quickly in that second; Barry was old and slow-moving, and would be imprecise in his card swiping. It would likely take two swipes for him to get the card in exactly right, and it did. By the time the green light popped on in the lock, Jonah was right behind him. No one was in the hall to see Jonah slip in after him before the door closed. Right inside the doorway, Barry Claimes turned, his mouth opened in old-man concavity and fear.

“What do you want?” he said, but the heavy door had sucked shut, and now Jonah reached out with both hands and pushed him deeper into the room. “I’ll get my wallet,” Barry said. “Are you on drugs? Meth?”

Of course Barry Claimes didn’t recognize him. Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those years that no one liked to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah’s age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

“It’s me, you sick fuck,” Jonah said. He shoved Big Barry against the wall in the entryway, and Big Barry shoved back, slamming him against a closet door. Jonah responded in kind, and they banged back and forth between two walls, clunking and clomping, accompanied by exerted breaths, moving further into the hotel room, and now Jonah had the advantage. He pushed Big Barry onto the bed and leapt on him, pinning him there, Jonah’s lean self on all fours above the bloated sea creature that was Barry Claimes. If Barry was a shellfish, he’d be a horseshoe crab, round and ancient, washed up on the sand. His face was all rosacea and splotch; the eyes behind his little Ben Franklin frames were pale blue and teary, as they’d been even back in 1970.

“Who?” demanded Barry. He squinted in terror for several seconds, then his face slackened and became almost thoughtful. “Oh my God. Jonah,” he said. “Jonah Bay. You scared the shit out of me.” He kept squinting at Jonah, and marveled softly, “Your hair got gray. Even you.”

It was as if, now that he knew this was Jonah, he felt he didn’t have to be afraid any longer. Immediately Jonah thought about sex with Robert Takahashi, and how one of them had sometimes been on all fours, while the other one lay resting, like the lion and the gypsy in the Rousseau painting. He didn’t want Barry Claimes to have a single moment of rest; he had no compassion for him, even though Barry looked like any other old sixties survivor, anyone who might have appeared on that PBS documentary
They Came, They Saw, They Strummed
, which seemed to air around the clock, because people could not get enough of what they’d lost, even if they no longer really wanted it.

Jonah kept Barry pinned down with a knee in his gut, and Barry made a sound of deep organ pain, so Jonah probed with his knee a little deeper, feeling floating objects shift inside. But then somehow Barry was up, roaring. “I tried to be a father figure to you,” Barry panted. “To teach you banjo. To encourage you. You weren’t used to it.”

“A father who drugs his child?” Jonah said, and he reached for anything nearby, his hand coming upon the banjo, which he swung wide, smacking Barry Claimes in the face once with an awful, gongish, vibrato.

“Oh Jesus, Jonah,” cried Barry in a nasal voice. Both he and Jonah were equally shocked. Barry fell back against the bed and brought his hands to his face, cupping it, for there was a little blood. The cupping was too much for Jonah. That we each need to protect what little we have, seemed, then, the truest thing, and he wouldn’t deny even Barry Claimes that instinct. He’d probably broken Barry’s nose, but he hadn’t fractured his cheekbone or blinded him or damaged the brain that sat inside that self-involved head. A banjo wasn’t the best weapon, for folk music itself wasn’t all-powerful. It hadn’t been able to stop a war in Southeast Asia, though the songs had kept people unified, passionate, listening with wild attention among an enormous block of bodies or all alone. And now it had maimed a man, but hadn’t killed him, which was maybe just as well.

“Oh Jesus,” Barry kept saying. “I’m . . . hurt here. What’s
wrong
with you, Jonah?” he continued in a gravel-based, thick voice.

“What’s
wrong
with me? You’re really asking me that?”

“Yes. What kind of person have you become? Are you always like this?”

“Stop talking, Barry, okay? Just stop.”

Jonah went to the bathroom and washed his hands with the inadequately tiny leaf-shaped soap that sat in the soap dish. There was a little blood on his sleeve, but not much. He noted Barry’s Dopp kit nearby on the marble counter. The kit was unzipped, revealing the items in it that belonged to this elderly man who was on the road many weeks a year. There was a pill bottle whose label read Lipitor, 40 mg, and an asthma inhaler and, oh God, a canister of Tucks Pads, which were described as meant to temporarily relieve “the local itching and discomfort associated with hemorrhoids.” All the little accoutrements of this reinvented person. No matter what you’d done in your life, no matter how forcefully antiwar you’d been or how much you’d helped preserve the oceans; no matter how many ideas you’d stolen from a young, shy boy, leaving him cerebrally scrambled and overstimulated, it all came down to the smallest details that made you
you.
Jonah left the bathroom, certain that Barry Claimes wouldn’t call security. Barry wouldn’t want to open this up; not now, when he had managed to transform himself one last time and remain viable long past the reign of mainstream folk music and into the twenty-first century, where it was usually so hard to make money from your own creations. In the nineties when all kinds of famous pop songs had become available to use on commercials, art and advertising became forever entwined. But folk music, the do-gooding underdog, had been preserved more often than not, and now it was back again, in a way. It wasn’t the dominant genre, but its seedlings had blown all around; and like all music now, even folk songs were file shared and showed up on YouTube and went everywhere they could go. Most folksingers, like all singers, made very little money, and that was hideously unfair, and was even often criminal, but for what it was worth, their work got played. He wished his mother knew about some of this; he hoped she did. He planned to tell her.

Barry was sitting on the bed looking at himself in the dresser mirror. “Look at me, my nose is going to swell up. I can’t be seen like this; I’m going to have to leave.” He turned to Jonah in annoyance, then appeared to become reflective. “You were such a creative kid. So free. It was a magnificent thing to witness.”

“Oh, stop talking.”

“I did what I could for you,” said Barry. “You didn’t know anything about being taken care of or being encouraged; it wasn’t your fault. Your mother had a great voice, but it’s sad what happened to her.”

“No it isn’t,” said Jonah. He didn’t want to hear another word spoken by Barry Claimes, and he had nothing more to say to him either, so he started to walk out of the hotel room. But at the door, where the walls were scuffed, he turned back and impulsively seized the banjo, and then he was out of there. Jonah’s head and his hands shook as he rode the elevator to his own floor. Pacing the Vintner’s Bounty Suite to try and calm his uncalm self, he felt his cell phone vibrate against his groin. He reached down and saw that it was an unfamiliar number, so he answered tentatively, hearing a female voice say, “Hey, Jonah, it’s Caitlin Dodge. Ethan thought you might meet him at Blue Horse Vineyard for a drink. If that works, someone will pick you up in twenty minutes. Sound okay?”

Jonah agreed, though this was probably a mistake. He showered quickly, then made his way out to the front entrance of the conference center, and within minutes a black Prius had pulled up at the curb. A driver got out and opened the back door, and Jonah slipped in. He was still shaking so much that he leaned hard against the door to anchor himself.

“How was your day, sir?” the driver asked. “You get to see any of those talks?”

“Yes.”

“There was that astronaut who came with a virtual weightlessness chair. You get to try it?”

Jonah paused. “Yes, I did.”

“What’s it feel like?”

Jonah sat up a little. “At first it’s terrifying,” he said. “Like you have no idea of what’s going to happen to you.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” said the driver, nodding. “The anticipation.”

“But then after a while you remember that it’s virtual, and you sort of go along with it. And somehow it changes you a little,” Jonah said.

“You still feeling the effects right now?” asked the driver.

“Yes, I still am.”

•   •   •

O
n the patio of the Blue Horse Vineyard, everyone but Ethan Figman sat in the generous sunshine with their big wineglasses and their small plates of pecorino and olives, but Ethan had commandeered the shade beneath an umbrella. All around, conference attendees discreetly glanced over, but no one approached his table. Jonah took a seat across from Ethan, still trembling; it had to be noticeable, didn’t it? When the wine arrived, “a mischievous Syrah,” the wine steward said before mercifully disappearing, Jonah began to drink a glass of it without stopping, pausing in the middle only because he realized that Ethan was staring at him.

“What?” said Jonah.

“Slow down, you’re not supposed to drink like that. Man, you’re like a kid with
milk.
You’ve practically got a wine mustache.”

Jonah obediently slowed down, then took an olive and tried to show interest in it. But his hand was unsteady, and the slippery olive fell to the patio and bounced off into the shrubs like a Super Ball. “Sorry,” Jonah said, and he put a hand over his face and let loose a single wretched sob. Ethan, shocked, stood and moved to the seat beside him. They were side by side now, facing away from all the other people on the patio; they looked out upon calm, sunlit acres of grapes and spindly sticks.

“Tell me,” Ethan said.

“I can’t.”

“Oh, just tell me.”

“I did something that I can’t undo, okay? It was very much not like me. Though really, you’re probably thinking you don’t even know what’s
like
me or
not
like me. You’ve never made me tell you things. You’ve never made me confess anything.”

“Why would I do that?” Ethan asked. “I’m no Catholic, I’m a big Jew. But I know that you don’t have to feel like this, Jonah. If you’re unhappy, or if you think you’re lost—”

“Yes, lost. That’s right.”

“Then you can do something about it. You’ve been in that situation before. Your Holy Father, Reverend Moon, remember him? ‘Reverend Moon Will Carry Us’?” Jonah was able to smile a little, wincingly. “I don’t know what you think you’ve done,” said Ethan, “but I can’t believe it’s irreparable.” He stewed for a few seconds. “Is this about a relationship?” he asked.

“No. I don’t do those,” said Jonah. “Don’t you know that I’m a monk?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” said Ethan. “I only know what you tell me. After you and Robert broke up, Ash and I worried a lot. We didn’t want you to be alone. But you’d never go out with any of those guys she knew, those actors.”

“I haven’t wanted to be in a real relationship since Robert,” Jonah said. “There have been occasional things—you know—but they tend to overwhelm me. And if you really want to know, it’s just not as urgent anymore, as I get older. The sex part. I’ve mostly focused on my work, just to stay busy.”

“Sometimes I think work is the great excuse for everything,” said Ethan. “But then I think, maybe it’s not an excuse at all. Maybe it really
is
more interesting than everything else. Than relationships.”

“Oh, I find it hard to believe that you think your work is more interesting than Ash and your kids.”

Ethan poked his fingers among some cubes of pecorino, and dislodged two of them and indelicately worked them into his mouth at the same time. “I love my family. Obviously I do. Ash and Larkin and Mo,” he said, giving each name deliberate, equal weight. “Though I think about work all the time. For me, it’s not just to stay busy. I mean, partly it’s a distraction from what I can’t change. They need me at the studio. When I’m gone, like this week, they all . . . flail. But mostly it’s because work is just so great to think about. It’s sort of endlessly replenishing.” He peered across the table at Jonah and said, “If you can’t have a good relationship with somebody, then you should at least have a good relationship with your work. Your work should feel like . . . an incredible person lying next to you in bed.”