The Interestings A Novel

ELEVEN





Dennis 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 *orises. (“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.

All around them, making money, and wanting to make money, had grown infinitely more reputable. People spoke about their money managers with great feeling, as if describing artists. And artists themselves were spoken of more candidly in terms of their worth. Gallery owners shared the limelight with their star painters. The newly rich would drop a lot of money on the newly famous; everyone, whether in business or art, almost seemed to be the same, interchangeable, coated with an identical moneyed gleam, as if they’d been licked all over by the same magical dog. And even artists who hadn’t made it yet wanted some part of this, jockeying to become the implicit entertainment at certain Upper East Side dinner parties. During the soup course, everyone turned expectantly to hear them talk about what was happening in the art world. But you wouldn’t get asked back to those dinners if your career didn’t advance fairly soon. These days, if you were a starving artist, you were thought of as failed; and even if your work was really, really good, no one would quite believe it. Because surely, if it was that good, someone would have discovered it by now. “Van Gogh would never have been invited back to 1040 Park Avenue,” Jules told Ethan. It wasn’t just the visual arts either. “In the past,” a writer friend of Ethan’s had recently said, over lots of beer, “everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It’s like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.”

Jules and Dennis were aware of the change in the climate, and she knew they would need money themselves pretty soon; actually they needed it now. She just didn’t want to think about it yet, which she knew was a babyish attitude, yet also kind of admirable. There were so many poor people in the city who required therapy; she couldn’t imagine jacking up her fees and treating the rich. She feared that she wouldn’t even be able to relate to the rich. Jules had known a boy in college, a very talented tenor, who’d abandoned his operatic yearnings in order to become a stockbroker. Now, he cheerfully announced, he made a f*cking fortune, and sang in the Gay Men’s Chorus once a week, so he had the best of both worlds. But money as an end product, money as a creation, seemed disgusting to Jules, just as it had seemed disgusting to Ethan. Was Ethan changing? Did he feel different now that he was in such a different world? But then she reminded herself that just because he made a lot of money, it did not mean he loved money. Although, she thought, if she had money, she’d probably love it.

Dennis, coming into the living room of the walk-up after fetching Media Now magazine at the store, held the rolled up magazine in his hand, as if he was going to swat something with it. “Go ahead,” Jules said. “Tell me about the list.” Dennis opened his hand and smoothed out the magazine.

“Number ninety-eight is great,” he said. “Remember, we didn’t even know if he would be on the list at all. He’s new to all this.” Then he handed her the issue, and together they looked at the page that featured a fairly decent photograph of Ethan, his estimated worth listed beside his rank. The amount was very big in normal-person terms. However, there was an asterisk next to it, and a note at the bottom of the page explaining that the editors were aware that the figure was much lower than the estimated wealth of most of the other people who lolled nearby on the list. But, wrote the editors, they considered Ethan one of the one hundred most powerful people in media party because of what was likely to happen to him over the next several years when Figland, already so beloved, would likely—though there were no guarantees—go into syndication.

Ethan had explained to Jules how the truly massive wealth in TV occurred once your show reached five seasons, or roughly a hundred episodes—because that was when it went into syndication. Ethan insisted that he still had no idea whether or not this would happen to his show, and that probably it wouldn’t. “The chances are low,” he’d said. “It’s a crapshoot. I’m amazed that we were even renewed this season. The reviews were good, but the ratings haven’t been stellar.” But maybe he’d been lying to her in order to seem more modest. Lying because he was embarrassed to be talking to Jules, a clinical social worker married to an ultrasound technician, about the extraordinary direction his own life was surely heading. He never said, “Isn’t it wild, Jules, what’s happened to me? Isn’t it nuts? I mean, this is me we’re talking about, me! Shouldn’t we stand on the roof of a building and scream?” Or, “Don’t worry, I won’t become one of those money a*sholes we hate. There is no Ferrari in my future.” He never gloated, or even really referred directly to what was happening, except obliquely, with embarrassment. Mostly he kept his head down and worked on many different aspects of his show.

The future, Ethan said, was always uncertain. But the editors who compiled this important top 100 list were more optimistic. They already expected that Figland would go into syndication, and felt confident pronouncing that Ethan’s power—though much more significant so far than his money—was pretty formidable even now. The figure that was listed was far more than Ethan and Ash had ever let on to Jules and Dennis, and also far more than their lifestyle suggested.

“Our powerful friend,” Jules said. “F*ck.”

“Why f*ck?”

“I don’t know how to think about him anymore.”

“Why do you have to think anything?” Dennis asked.

“We can never tell them we went out and looked at the list,” she said. Ash had mentioned the magazine to Jules in passing—she and Ethan knew the issue was coming out, and the list, an annual, highly anticipated event in certain quarters, would probably get a lot of attention, but they didn’t know if he’d be on it. “It’d look like we were going out of our way to look him up,” Jules said. “To take his pulse without him knowing it.”

“Which is exactly what we were doing,” said Dennis. “But it’s okay. There’s nothing criminal about it. Just maybe a little creepy. A little stalkery.”

“I just wanted to know what we were dealing with,” Jules said. “And the money part too, even though I know it’s not that much compared with the money of the other people on the list. But obviously it’s going to go way up in a few years. Syndication, when it happens. Assuming it happens. Ethan says it probably won’t. The show is more prestigious than it is profitable. It all involves market share. God, I act like I even know what I’m talking about—‘market share’—but I don’t.”

“So we pried into our good friend’s power and finances,” said Dennis, “and now we’re done and we can think about something else. Are you going to the Bronx later? Is that girl you told me about still in the hospital?”

Jules had a client, a sweet, mumbling teenager, who had been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Jules went there every day and just sat talking to her and sometimes even got her to smile or laugh. Yes, she told Dennis, she would go to the hospital later. But she was not yet done with the conversation about Ethan. Probably she would never be done with it. Right now, a straight shot downtown in Tribeca, in the expansive honey-floored duplex loft they’d moved into, Ethan and Ash were probably getting up and padding across those floors to the walk-in refrigerator, a big, extravagant purchase that they’d originally shown off to their friends with embarrassment and childlike pride. “I can’t really explain my pleasure in this bizarre appliance,” Ethan had said.

“My theory,” said Ash, “is that it’s because after his mother left his father, the refrigerator was always empty. You know what his father kept in there? Sardines and Parkay margarine.”

“And eyedrops,” added Ethan. “Don’t forget eyedrops. My dad had some eye condition, and the drops had to be refrigerated.”

“Yes, eyedrops too. So now,” said Ash, “Ethan can actually walk into the refrigerator and be surrounded by choices. It doesn’t exactly make up for what he missed, but it can try.”

“She read all this in The Drama of the Gifted Child,” Ethan joked.

Dennis flopped down hard now on the little foam couch beside Jules, the whole cheap thing bisecting slightly; then he took off his shoes and socks and crossed a leg, depositing his bare foot in her lap. “Foot rub?” he asked. “I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

“Whatever Ethan gets an hour.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’d prefer cash, though gold bullion would be fine too.” She began to press her thumbs into the bottom and sides of his cold veiny foot.

“Ooh, that’s excellent,” he said. “Really, really excellent. You know exactly what to do.”

Jules Jacobson-Boyd rubbed her husband’s foot deeply and, after a minute, a little sadistically. It was thick and callused from the athletic shoes he wore during all those touch football games. Dennis closed his eyes and made a string of contented animal noises. He had gone out and brought home a greater understanding of Ethan’s power in the world and the current metrics of Ethan’s wealth, which would only expand insanely in due time, if everything went well. But already there was his percentage of revenue not only from the show but from every Figland T-shirt, plush toy, beach towel, and pencil eraser that anyone spent their money on.

“What I take away from this,” Jules said as she continued digging her thumbs into her husband’s foot, “is that he is in some other world, and that therefore so is Ash. And all this time when we keep inviting them over here, they probably say to each other, ‘Oh God, we really love them, but do we have to go to that depressing place again with the cheap furniture and all those stairs?’ Dennis, why didn’t this occur to us before? Obviously we’ve known they’re very very rich, but we should have been embarrassed all this time to let them come here. They don’t want to come here, but they have to act like they do. They play their wealth way, way down; they’re very modest about it. They act like they’re in the same world we’re in, but they aren’t. And all this time when we’ve gone out to eat with them and Ethan grabbed the bill, and we said, ‘No no, Ethan, that’s not necessary, let’s split it,’ it was completely absurd of us not to let him take care of it. It was actually pathetic of us, and he knew it but we didn’t. He was just being kind by not insisting. He probably doesn’t even want to go to those dinners with us anymore at normal-people restaurants,” she went on. “Remember how we all went to that Turkish place last month? I kept talking about the kebab special. Oh, whoopee, so it came with a chopped salad and all the microwaved flatbread you could eat. What a thrill for Ethan Figman!”

“What are you saying, Jules?”

“Ethan and Ash don’t need kebab specials in their lives anymore. What I really mean is, they don’t need us. If we all met now, we would never become friends. You think they would feel a connection if someone said, ‘Here is a very nice social worker and a very nice ultrasound technician?’ That’s why meeting in childhood can seem like it’s the best thing—everyone’s equal, and you form bonds based only on how much you like each other. But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, ‘Wasn’t it funny that time in tenth grade when your parents came home and we were so wasted.’ If you didn’t feel sentimental about the past, you wouldn’t keep it up. And when Ethan’s show goes into syndication, this whole thing will be so much more massive and disturbing. If I was a better person,” Jules said, “then I would cut them free. They have other friends; remember those people at dinner?”

Dennis nodded. “They were okay,” he said. The friends of Ash and Ethan in question had been a couple of recent friendship vintage. The husband was a portfolio manager, slightly older, and the wife was an interior designer who also ran a literacy program in East Harlem. Both of them were lithe and angled, their clothes made of linen, and the dinner that night hadn’t been awkward so much as depressing. The portfolio manager and his wife had had nothing to ask Jules and Dennis. It wouldn’t have even occurred to them to ask them anything. The fact that all the interest flowed toward that couple did not seem at all unusual to them. They neutrally accepted the one-way flow, and Dennis in particular kept the conversation going, wanting to know the answers to various questions. Once again, he was interested in other people; it was an admirable quality generally, but in this case it irritated Jules, who didn’t want these people to think they should accept other people’s interest as their due. She herself, in her mild rage, began to ask them question after question. “What are the literacy rates in our country?” she drunkenly demanded of the wife. And, barely having listened to the answer, she turned to the husband and said, “Since when did ‘portfolio’ start to refer to money, not artwork? It’s like the way if someone’s an analyst, it no longer means they’re a Freudian, it means they study the stock market.” This was the kind of remark she and Ethan sometimes said to each other. She was furious at being ignored, and Ash, usually so sensitive to everyone’s needs, was so busy seeing that drinks were filled that she didn’t notice the unresponsiveness of the other couple or Jules’s anger. Jules and Dennis were the odd ones out that night; everyone else was inside a circle, an enclosure, a walk-in refrigerator of wealth and importance.

It had been an upsetting evening, and an indication of more to come, but Jules and Dennis had never spoken about it before now. They would have had to turn to each other on the way out of the loft building and say, “We are such doofuses.” If Jules had been talking to Ethan, she might have corrected herself and said, “We are The Doofae. It’s like the name of a Greek play that Ash would want to direct.”

Jules thought of that couple now, and the other friends that Ethan and Ash had accumulated over a relatively brief period of time. A few of their new friends worked in television or film and easily went back and forth between the coasts as though shuttling between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Somewhere along the way Ethan had become friends with a famous, boyish magician who once, at dinner, made figs pop out of Ethan’s ears and nose, and then dusted Ash’s long hair in what he insisted was volcanic ash.

“What were that couple’s names?” Jules asked Dennis. “The portfolio manager and the literacy volunteer. The ones I interrogated, and who didn’t give a shit about us or even ask us anything at all. The prick and the cunt.”

“The prick and the cunt?” said Dennis, laughing. “Whoa, listen to you. Their names were . . . Duncan and Shyla, I think.”

“Right!” said Jules. “We should let Ash and Ethan go be with Duncan and Shyla, and not make them feel that they have to stick with me, with us. The difference between our lives is humiliating, I see that now. Remember the day at the Strand?”

A few weeks earlier, Dennis and Jules had lugged several shopping bags full of books on the subway to the enormous, raw-spaced, famous Strand bookstore, where you could sell your used books. No matter how much you brought in, Dennis said, it always seemed as if they gave you fifty-eight dollars, but even that was enough to make it worthwhile. Fifty-eight dollars in your pocket made you feel a little bigger. As they struggled to drag their bulging, partly ripping shopping bags down the street into the bookstore, they came upon Ash and Ethan, arms linked, headed to the bookstore to browse. “Hey, where are you going?” Ash had said in pleasure when they saw one another. “We’ll help you.”

“Yes, we’ll help you,” Ethan said. “I have an hour max, and then I have to go to work. I’m playing hooky now; they’re waiting for me to show up.”

“They’re waiting for you?” said Jules. “Don’t keep them waiting to help us bring our books to the Strand. I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

“But I want to,” he said. “I’m dreading going in today. There’s a scene that no one knows how to fix. I’d rather be at the Strand with you guys.”

So they’d had to endure Ash and Ethan helping them navigate their bags of books into the store, and then insisting on standing on line with them amid all the other people selling their own books. There was a junkie couple on that line, a bedraggled, practically chimney-sweep-filthy man and woman whose teeth chattered and whose bony, ruined arms shook while they held their clearly stolen coffee-table books with titles like Mies van der Rohe: An Appreciation. That day at the bookstore, on line with the junkies, was so quietly humiliating that Jules hadn’t brought it up again to Dennis. But now that she had, he said quietly, “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Yes, it was,” said Jules. “Thinking back on it now, with this new perspective because of the list in the magazine, it feels to me as if they saw us selling our blood.”

“They would be really shocked to hear this,” Dennis said. “Isn’t Ash your closest friend? Isn’t Ethan your favorite male person—other than me?”

“Yes,” Jules said. “But the more I imagine things changing for them, the more I know they would just keep insisting they haven’t changed in substance. When Ethan tries to pay for meals, I see now that it’s just because he doesn’t want to embarrass us by letting us know the truth.”

“And what is the truth?” asked Dennis. He took his foot back, suddenly done with being touched by her.

“That in a few years he will probably never have to think about his own income again. That he will be able to do exactly what he wants forever. It’s already begun to happen. And Ash will be able to do what she wants too.”

“Yes, probably,” Dennis agreed. “Because of him.”

“Right. Him and his power. Him and his money. I would bet anything that in a few years Ash breaks through in her career too. She won’t have to distract herself with a million weird little theater projects anymore.” Ash’s résumé resembled those of hundreds of young women five years out of Ivy League schools—women who wanted to go into “the arts,” and were waiting for the perfect jump-rope moment when “the arts,” that nebulous place, became accessible to them. Through her connections from childhood and Yale and the city, Ash continued to take low-paying or no-paying jobs in theater whenever she could, directing a series of one-acts at a depressing nursing home, putting together a performance piece with a few college friends called Commuters right in the middle of Grand Central Terminal, while actual commuters, annoyed, had to walk around them to get to their trains. But these jobs were only occasional, and all the while Ash was making notes about feminist performances she wanted to direct—a contemporary Lysistrata, an evening devoted to the playwright Caryl Churchill—and reading long, demanding books of Russian theater theory, and living extremely well, without discouragement or financial anxiety.

“You have no way of knowing where she’ll be professionally in a few years,” said Dennis.

“I do know.” It was as though Jules possessed a new clarity she’d lacked until now. She understood that it had never just been about talent; it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father hadn’t encouraged and advised him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one had said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn’t have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

“I feel horrible saying this,” Jules said to Dennis. “I love her and she’s my best friend and she’s very dedicated, and she does the reading and puts in the time, and she’s legitimately interested in the feminist aspect. But isn’t it true that there are a lot of other people who are talented at the same exact level, and they’re all slaving away? She’s got some good ideas. But is she great at directing? Is she the theatrical equivalent of Ethan? No! Oh, God will strike me dead right now.”

Dennis looked at her and said, “Your nonexistent God, Ms. Atheist Jew? I doubt it.” He walked into the kitchen, and she followed him. The sink was piled high with plates from last night’s Chinese takeout, and Dennis wordlessly poured yellow liquid soap over the whole mess, and picked up a ragged sponge. He was now apparently going to hand wash all their dishes and stuff them precariously into the drying rack, performing a task that would further illustrate the disparity between them and Ethan and Ash. Jules wondered if Dennis was doing this on purpose.

“Ash doesn’t have greatness, I don’t think,” Jules said over the water. “And she might not even need it. I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, then connections.”

“You’re just realizing this now?” Dennis asked. “Haven’t you been seeing examples of it everywhere in the world?”

“I’m a slow learner.”

“No you’re not.”

“I bet she’s even going to have her own theater in a few years, devoted to promoting the work of women,” said Jules. “The Ash Wolf Athenaeum.”

“Her own theater? You’re a demented individual,” said Dennis. “Here, dry some of these. There’s no room to put them all on the rack.” He held a plate out to her and she took it and grabbed a dish towel, which felt slightly grimy, almost oily. If she dried the plate with this, they would find themselves trapped in not quite cleanliness. Suddenly she wanted to cry.

“Dennis,” said Jules. “Let’s leave these dishes and just go out somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Let’s just go out walking or something. Let’s do one of those New York things that are free and that make you happy when you’re feeling discouraged.”

Dennis studied her, his arms deep in the sink, and then slowly he lifted them out, dripping, and unstopped the drain. Water was pulled out with an obscene slurp, and Dennis wiped his hands on the sides of his pants and came forward to collect Jules against him. He smelled of lemon Dawn, and she probably smelled of whatever chemical was released when you became bitter. “Don’t be discouraged,” he said. “We have a lot of good things. We’re here in our little love nest. Okay, our crappy little love nest. But we’re here.” It touched her that he’d said this. “You are unbelievably nice to me, even when I’m like this. It’s just very hard for me,” she told him, “when I realize we’re at such a different place from them. I knew I wasn’t going to make it in acting, finally. I knew I had to stop trying out for all those plays. It wasn’t just what Yvonne said to me. I wasn’t supposed to be an actor in the first place. Acting, being funny, was my way into the world. And then I had to give it up. But it’s different for Ash. I feel that she and Ethan are bulletproof; him because he’s so talented and so huge. And her because she’s with him. And for us to think that somehow what we’re left with is enough—well, as of today, I know it isn’t.”

Dennis’s face shifted as he regarded her; the sympathy he’d shown her was retreating. He was tired of her again; it went in waves. “I thought you were winding down,” he said. “And I thought, good, because I’ve kind of had enough of this. But now here you are winding up again.”

“Not on purpose,” she said.

“I just don’t have the energy for this, Jules, I really don’t. You basically expect me to be this unchanging and totally understanding person, while you have your little fits every once in a while, and then I soothe you. Is that the way it’s always going to work between us? Does that sound happy to you? I don’t think I signed up for that.”

“But the situation has changed,” she said. “You ‘signed up’ for something that’s a little different now. That’s what happens. Things shift.”

“No, ‘things’ haven’t shifted; you’ve shifted them,” said Dennis. “You actually want me to comfort you while you’re the one basically coming in here and messing everything up. I cannot comfort you on this. I like our life. Is that such a f*cking crime? I like our life, regardless of what goes on around us, but you apparently don’t.” His usually low scrape of a voice had been tightened, and had become unpleasant. This was Dennis angry, which she had rarely seen, or at least she’d rarely seen the anger directed toward her for any length of time. Once, after he’d spotted a mouse in their kitchen and had tried to kill it with a spatula, the only implement within reach, he’d been in a fury, which they’d both admitted later had had a comical edge. But this didn’t.

“That is not true!” she said.

“Maybe this whole thing,” he went on, his voice unchanged, “is all a secret way for you to tell me you feel really cheated because I don’t make a fortune too.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“That you wish I was someone else, so you could be someone else.”

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

“Because that’s the way I’m starting to hear it,” said Dennis.

“It isn’t true,” said Jules. “I’m sorry,” she said, with feeling. “I know I should stop talking about this, I know it’s unhealthy.” Please stop being angry at me, she wanted to say. That was what seemed to matter now.

“Yes,” said Dennis. “That’s exactly what it is. It’s very, very unhealthy. You should think about it, Jules. Think about what these unhealthy comments do to us. They create this environment of unhealthiness. Of disease.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m happy with you,” she said. “I really am. I don’t suddenly think that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between money and happiness. When we fell in love, it had nothing to do with whether I thought we’d have some luxurious life. It never occurred to me to think about that. I’m not shallow, you know.”

The phone rang exactly then and Jules was relieved to answer it. This was how their arguments had ended a few times; someone called on the phone, and by the time the conversation was over, the imperative to argue had virtually disappeared. But it was Ash on the phone now, wanting to know if they could all have dinner that night. A new Asian fusion place had opened, she said, and the spring rolls with glass noodles inside were amazing. Ash sounded the way Ash always sounded—enthusiastic, warm—and Ethan was talking in the background, saying that Ash should tell Jules that she and Dennis had to come; the food would not taste good without them there.

Ash asked her, “Will you come?”

Jules pressed the phone against her chest and looked at Dennis. “They want to know, will we come?”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

So they went. The food was good and their friends were the same as ever. They did not appear different, or richer, or as if they lived in another world. But when the bill came, Ethan reached for it, and Jules and Dennis made an attempt to reach for it too, or at the very least to split it, yet in the end they let him get it. And so, quietly but noticeably, a new part of their lives began. From that night on, Ethan paid for almost all dinners and vacations.

• • •

The first trip they took together was to Tanzania, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in July 1987. Jonah and Robert Takahashi, whose relationship was now serious, came too. Ethan, though he’d been on some expensive vacations since becoming successful, did not love travel, and paid very little attention to it. “We didn’t go on a lot of family vacations when I was growing up,” he said. “The swankiest place my parents ever took me was the Pennsylvania Dutch country. We looked at people in old-fashioned clothes on horse and buggy, and my mother took pictures with her Polaroid Swinger, even though she wasn’t supposed to, and an Amish guy yelled at her, and my parents had a huge fight about it—so what else is new? Then we bought a hex sign and some weird kind of fudge called penuche—that name embarrassed me, it was like ‘penis’—and went home.” Now, though, Ethan had asked his assistant if she would mind terribly finding a trip for the three couples during a week later on in the year when Figland was on hiatus; he wanted a trip that was “outside my comfort zone,” as he put it. “Even asking my assistant such a question is outside my comfort zone,” Ethan said. “Even having an assistant is outside my comfort zone.” The assistant, having read Hemingway in college, suggested Kilimanjaro. The price of the trip seemed exorbitant, and this made Ethan anxious, but Ash reminded him, “You’re twenty-eight years old and independently wealthy. You have to get used to it and live accordingly. It actually isn’t particularly flattering for you to whine and complain about your good fortune. I don’t know who that helps. You’re not your crazy, screaming, financially erratic parents’ little kid anymore. You can actually go new places and try new things. And you can spend money; it’s okay, it really is.”

The assistant had booked them all on a climb with one of the top-of-the-line mountaineering outfits. After a couple of months walking up flights of stairs carrying heavy packs, and going on hikes whenever possible, in preparation for the trip, the three couples gathered with the other climbers in a lounge in a hotel in Arusha, where they were asked by the guides to take out their gear for inspection. Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert unzipped their bags and pulled out all the various, slightly alien items they’d had to buy at a camping-goods store downtown. Dampness-wicking underwear, a sleeping pad. “The salesman told me that wicking meant that the dampness is drawn away, but why does dampness need its own verb?” Jonah asked the group, but Jules was distracted by Ethan and Ash, who were crouched over their own gear, studying it as if they’d never seen it before. She realized that in fact they had never seen it before; someone else had done both their shopping and packing for this trip.

Further vacations taken by the two couples, and only occasionally also with Jonah and Robert, were carefully planned around the production schedule of Figland, and brought out other small revelations. On a trip to Paris, Ethan wanted to buy a surprise gift for Ash, “some kind of scarfy thing,” he’d said, and so Jules went with him, going off together on the pretext of getting croque monsieurs, which seemed legitimate, because what had interested the two of them most on this trip was the food. In a gleaming boutique on the rue de Sèvres, Jules said, “I want to ask you something that will sound very unsophisticated, but I’m going to ask it anyway. How do you know how to behave rich? Does the knowledge sort of arrive with the money? Or is it the kind of thing you learn on the job?” Ethan looked at her, surprised, and said you don’t know, you just wing it. He appeared displeased at the question, or at his own answer, as if it had forced him to acknowledge how his life was turning—the way a ship of state turns, slow and incremental, with great, violent, unseen convulsions underneath.

But then, over time, Jules noticed that Ethan seemed to be winging it less. He dressed better, and he actually seemed to know about wines when the list was handed to him in a restaurant in Madrid. When had he learned about wines? He hadn’t told her about his new knowledge. Had a wine tutor come in at night and given him lessons? She couldn’t ask him any longer. Ethan wasn’t a rube, but was polite and modest and gracious. He had become more comfortable around money than Jules had ever imagined he would be, and she realized this disappointed her.

Their lives were dividing further; even finding time to get away with Ethan and Ash was difficult for her and Dennis. Clinical social workers—particularly ones with a fledgling part-time practice, as Jules now had—and ultrasound technicians usually had very little vacation time; Ethan, as frantic as he was with his complicated, overburdened schedule, and Ash, far less frantic, sometimes ended up needing to be the flexible ones.

One morning on a five-day vacation the two couples took to Venice in 1988, having been flown there by company jet, which was now a fairly frequent occurrence, Jules Jacobson, twenty-nine years old, lying in bed with Dennis, opened an eye and coolly looked around the room. This was not the way anyone else she knew traveled. Her small group of friends from social work school told one another about their vacations, recommending an all-inclusive cheap package deal to Jamaica or a great price on a hotel room in San Francisco. This hotel in Venice was the kind of place where wealthy, old-money European families stayed—“where the von Trapps might have stayed, had they traveled other than to escape the Nazis,” Jules wrote in a postcard to Jonah. “Help, Jonah, help!” she added at the bottom. “My values are being kidnapped!” The hotel did not feel age appropriate at all. A small slice of canal was in view out the wavy-glassed window; a fruit and cheese plate from the night before was wilting on a tray; the ceilings were coffered; and Dennis lay asleep with his head on one of the long, scrolled pillows.

By now, Figland had been sold all over Europe and in the UK, and Ethan was conducting TV business here. Dennis and Jules stayed in Venice while Ethan went for a short trip to Rome. Ash had decided that while he was in Rome she would take a flight to Norway to “have a look around,” as she said, since she was hoping to direct Ibsen’s Ghosts at the small Open Hand Theater in the East Village; she’d been strongly campaigning to be hired, and was waiting for their decision. It was true that Ash was going to have a look around Norway, but Jules also knew that she would be with Goodman during the trip. Ash hadn’t seen him in a while. Iceland was just over two hours by plane from Norway, and everyone on this vacation other than Ethan understood that Goodman would be joining his sister.

Ash, as her late twenties pressed on, tried to visit Goodman whenever she could, though often the visits seemed to Jules nervy and reckless. As a teenager it had been difficult enough for Ash to keep up a clandestine long-distance relationship with her fugitive brother, and then in her early twenties, living with Ethan had made it even harder. But after Ethan became so successful there was a little more latitude for Ash to be in touch with Goodman and see him sometimes when she traveled. Still, it was always a complicated and anxious proposition. Once in a while, every few weeks or so, when Jules and Ash were alone Jules might suddenly ask, “Anything new with your brother?”

Ash’s face would turn excited and she would say something like, “He’s doing okay, he really is. Working part-time as an assistant to an architect, actually. Well, not really as an assistant, more like running complicated errands, but he feels he might get more responsibility soon, and even be allowed to do some drafting. He just likes hanging around that world. And he’s still trying to get construction jobs.”

Once, nearly a year before Norway, Ash had told Jules that her parents had been to see Goodman, and that he’d seemed “unwell.” What did that mean? Jules asked. Oh, said Ash, it meant that Goodman had been staying out all night in Reykjavik’s drinking, drugging scene, and had started showing up for his construction job late and had been fired. Frustrated and idle, he’d spent his parents’ money on cocaine, then confessed the whole thing to them in an emotional phone call. After a month spent in a no-nonsense Icelandic rehab, Goodman returned to his flat over a fish store in the center of town. He hadn’t lived with Gudrun and Falkor for some years; they had their own child now, a daughter, and had needed Goodman’s room as a nursery. Eventually they moved somewhere much better, for Gudrun had rapidly built a very successful career as a textile designer; the money the Wolfs had sent all those years had allowed her to perfect her craft. It was amazing to realize that there were so many worlds within worlds, little subcultures that you might know nothing about, in which someone’s art could make them stand out. Though it was wonderful, certainly, it also seemed like a punch line to say that Gudrun Sigurdsdottir was apparently a superstar in the world of Icelandic handicrafts.

Keep what we’ve told you to yourself, the Wolf family had commanded Jules originally in the summer of 1977, and like the cow-eyed girl she was and would maybe always be—the funny but obedient one, the dope, the dupe—she’d obeyed them for years without much difficulty. The family’s belief in Goodman’s innocence was an organizing principle, and their belief became interchangeable with her own. Only later was it striking to Jules how she’d allowed herself to stay in this haze of certainty that wasn’t certainty, a state that could easily occur if you’d been thrust into it when you were young. In social work school, an old female professor in a cardigan with a balled tissue forming a lump beneath the sleeve spoke about the way people could often “know without knowing.”

For the first few years after Goodman had run off, Jules had had no one to talk to about the situation, other than Ash. She’d never said a word to Jonah. But then, starting in the early weeks of 1982, she had Dennis. Jules told Dennis everything important, and finally, only a couple of months into their relationship, when they were joined in a way that seemed to her permanent, this included telling him about the Wolf family’s ongoing secret support of their son. Of course he was shocked. “They just send him money?” he said. “They know where he is and they never told the police? Whoa, unbelievable. Unbelievably arrogant.”

“I think most parents would do that for their son if they were sure he was innocent,” Jules said, but she was only repeating something Ash had once said.

“Why were they so sure?”

“Well, because they know him,” Jules said.

“Still,” Dennis said, “didn’t you ever think about, you know, turning him in yourself?”

“Oh, well, vaguely,” she said. “But I just never wanted to get involved in that way. It’s not my place.”

“I can understand that,” said Dennis. “There was a family in my old building, right upstairs from Isadora. The mother verbally abused her five-year-old, calling her a worthless piece of shit and other terrible names. Finally someone in the building called Child Protective Services, and the girl was taken away from her mother, who she apparently loved despite everything. And then Isadora told me she’d heard that the girl was sent to foster care, where she was molested by a much older foster brother. So you never know what you’re setting in motion. Though I have to say,” Dennis said, “it’s still wild that the Wolfs did this. That they do it. But what’s really wild is that they keep it from Ethan. That Ash does. I mean, whoa.” He shook his head at the nerve of it all, the entitlement. He was not under the influence of that family.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Jules said. “But I had to. I’m never going to tell Ash that I did, so you can never ever mention it to her in any way. Seriously, even if you and I break up one day and you hate me for the rest of your life, you can never tell anyone about Goodman, okay?” She realized that she sounded the way Gil Wolf had originally sounded when he had spoken so sternly, almost threateningly, that night in the Café Benedikt. “I can’t even believe I told you, Dennis,” Jules went on. “What does it mean that I needed to tell you?”

He smiled happily. “It means something big!”

“Yes, I guess it does,” she said. “But you could call the police right now and have Goodman arrested. And the entire Wolf family too, probably.”

“And you,” Dennis added. “Time to get a lawyer.” They were both silent; he’d gone too far. “I was kidding,” he quickly said. “I would never do that to you.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

“I just love you,” Dennis said. “And now that you’ve told me this, I even love you more.”

“But why?” she asked. “What does it have to do with anything?”

“Because we’re still pretty new to each other, like two months’ new, and even so, you told me this thing. I am awed by it. It’s like . . . a declaration. I feel sorry for Ethan, though,” Dennis went on, thoughtfully. “He’s the genius, but he doesn’t even know this basic, major fact about his girlfriend and her family. I don’t like the Wolfs,” he added. “I like Ash, of course, she’s a good friend to you and everything, but I don’t like her and her family as a thing. A unit.”

“You don’t have to like them.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Dennis had never been seduced into anything by anyone other than Jules. He was grateful to have been folded into her life, and as far as he could see, the backstory of Goodman Wolf, someone he’d never met, had nothing much to do with anything anymore. Now, in Europe in 1988, Ash hadn’t entirely lied to Ethan about where she would be for the next two days in Norway; she’d only omitted key parts of her plans. It was true that she was staying at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. While Ash was in Oslo and Ethan was in Rome, Dennis and Jules spent the weekend by themselves in Venice. But she felt uneasy on her own with Dennis in this unnervingly expensive hotel room. She placed a hand on Dennis’s arm as he lay beside her in the bed, though he was still asleep. “Dennis,” she said. “Dennis.”

“What?” He opened his eyes and came closer to her, and she smelled his breath, which was strong but not bad. Oaky. Cork breath, from last night’s drinking. He was hardly awake, but he instinctively moved on top of her, and she felt the automaticity of his a.m. erection, for which she didn’t take any credit. He arranged himself, and though she’d only been self-conscious about the lavish surroundings and obscurely worried and had wanted just to talk to him about anything at all, this was as good or maybe better. Sex in an Italian hotel room had a specific effect on Americans: it made them feel Italian. Dennis at twenty-nine almost looked Italian, with his now slightly heavier-set, shadowed face and dark eyes, and the scramble of chest, underarm, and pubic hair. One of the scroll pillows dropped to the floor, heavy as an anchor. Half asleep, Dennis lifted Jules up as if she were weightless and planted her on top of him, but she reached down with both hands, not wanting this to turn into a moment when the positioning was wrong, and the woman had to make adjustments while the man looked away discreetly or else watched openly. Making sure a penis was inside you correctly so that it wouldn’t hurt when it pushed in was like the moment in a car when you struggled to connect the metal part at the end of the seat belt into its little groove. You waited for the click of a seat belt, just as here, in an Italian hotel bed, you waited for a different kind of click that came from interior mysteries. There was only a momentary resistance, and then none at all, and finally you were absurdly happy at how it had worked out, as though in arranging a penis inside your body, you had done something important, like successfully completing the critical repair of a space shuttle.

Below her in the hotel bed, Dennis closed his eyes, and his mouth hung open a little, the tongue slightly revealed. She thought of Ash and Goodman in separate beds in adjoining hotel rooms elsewhere on the continent, and then she thought of how, in the living room of the Wolfs’ apartment in the Labyrinth, Jules had once kissed Goodman, her own tongue seeking his and finding it, until he got bored and shut the kiss down. She leaned down now, her mouth covering Dennis’s, and he responded without mockery or ennui, and instead with his full self, the oaky, tannic mouth, half-closed eyes, and the unshowered body with its pheromones that drew her toward him even though the appeal could never fully be explained.

Afterward, they had breakfast downstairs, one of those strange European hotel breakfasts that feature hard-boiled eggs and Weetabix, and then, right between the two, as if it were perfectly normal, organ meats. In the Babel of the breakfast room, she and Dennis sat at a table among Spaniards and Germans. Jules said to Dennis, “I wonder what Goodman looks like. He’s thirty now. Jesus, Goodman at thirty! It’s really hard to picture.”

“Well, I’ve obviously never met him, but he’s probably a lot more weather-beaten,” Dennis said. “Isn’t that what happens to people who smoke and drink and do drugs? It beats up their skin so it looks like—what’s that called?—distressed leather.”

She imagined Goodman lined and weathered and distressed, sprawled across one of the two double beds in his room at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. His long body took up the whole bed, and his sister lay on the other bed, both of them smoking and laughing. Ash would be so relieved to be with him again, to have a chance to check in on him and see that he was at least broadly okay, and hear his drawn-out, sardonic voice, and gaze at the face that had once hewed close to hers. The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.

My little sister, let me in.

Jules and Dennis took a high-speed train back to Rome to meet up with Ethan and Ash. On the last night of the vacation, the two couples had dinner near the Piazza del Popolo, during which they compared notes. Ethan described the meetings he’d had with the executives from the Italian public broadcasting service Rai, which took place over multicourse meals and a parade of wines that roiled inside him as he and the Rai people stayed out until two a.m., celebrating the continued Italian ratings success of Figland, which was known here as Mondo Fig!

Jules and Dennis described their lazy weekend in Venice. “Dennis in Venice,” said Ethan. “A new comic strip.” They talked about the walks they’d taken through drizzly, impossible little streets.

“How was Oslo?” Ethan asked Ash.

“I like it there,” Ash said, shrugging lightly. “I just wandered around, imagining the atmosphere of the play.”

Jules had to remember: Oh right, Ibsen, the putative reason Ash had gone to Oslo. Ibsen’s Ghosts. Women briefly walking across the stage bare-breasted, in this version the nipples painted in Day-Glo colors, which would provide a strong effect with the lights down. Was Ash having a little fun, choosing that particular title? Goodman had slipped over into the land of the ghosts by now, twelve years after he’d run away from New York and the U.S. and his trial, but he was intermittently revivable, shuttling back and forth between ghost and living human. His mother sent him care packages, the way she used to do at Spirit-in-the-Woods, but instead of 6-12 insect repellent and cheese in a can she sent him protein powder and amber bottles of vitamins. Ash sent her brother books, recalling the tastes he’d had as an adolescent, and extrapolating from them into adulthood. She sent him a recent Günter Grass, and Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, and a novel by a young genius named David Foster Wallace called The Broom of the System. She once threw in her favorite book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, with a note saying that this book was relevant to her life, not his, but she thought maybe he would find it interesting anyway, given that they’d had the same parents. Goodman read everything his sister sent, and dutifully mixed the protein powder into his skyr and swallowed his mother’s vitamins, and he found construction jobs when he could—the job helping out in that architect’s office hadn’t worked out—though he had back problems now and was sometimes incapacitated for weeks. He smoked pot most evenings and some mornings, and he retained an intermittent interest in cocaine, requiring another stay in rehab.

“Here’s to our vacation, and to Mondo Fig! and to your generosity, as always,” Dennis said at dinner, raising his glass the way, in recent years, he and Jules had learned to do. Once you started toasting people, you had made the complete transition to full-throttle adulthood.

After the long flight back from Rome, a car dropped Jules and Dennis in front of their building on West 84th Street. Ethan and Ash took a separate car; he had to race off to the studio immediately, and didn’t even have time to go home. Everyone at the show was waiting for him, he said, as they always seemed to be. Standing before their narrow tenement, Jules and Dennis both looked upward and made a face at the same moment, then laughed. There were no bellmen to carry their suitcases, no sherpas. No trays of fruit and cheese awaited them upstairs, no robes. They wedged their suitcases through the narrow vestibule, and angled them carefully in order to drag them up the four flights of stairs, hearts thudding hard. In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.

Now there would be no vacations for a long while. Both of them had used up their vacation days. In time, Jules began to build up her private practice and ease out of working at the hospital. All her clients were low fee at first. An obese man wept about his wife leaving him; a teenaged boy only wanted to talk about Sid Vicious. It was like opening a novel whenever a new client walked in, Jules told Ash. She was never bored seeing people in therapy, even if she feared that her own powers to help them were small, tentative. Ash and Jules discussed their work all the time—Ash’s fears and excitement about actually getting to direct her first full production at Open Hand, and Jules’s interest in and worry about her clients, and her worry about her own abilities. “What if I say the wrong thing to them?” she said. “What if I give them bad advice and something goes wrong?” Ash told her she was sure Jules was a good therapist and wouldn’t do anything dreadful. “I remember when I came and sat on your bed at camp,” Ash said. “I can’t explain it, but it was just such a relief. I bet they feel that way.”

But also, at the same time their careers were really taking form, both women began to talk about having children. It wasn’t the right moment yet—Dennis was working long hours at MetroCare, the clinic on the Upper West Side where he’d been employed since leaving ultrasound school—but maybe in a year? Sometimes Jules and Ash shared a fantasy of having children within months of each other so that they could be mothers together, and their kids could be friends—best friends. Maybe both kids could attend Spirit-in-the-Woods!

For now, no one wanted to disrupt the way life was being lived, the opening of this new era, in which everyone was given a chance to vaguely start to catch up with Ethan. No, not catch up exactly, Jonah said; they could never do that. “I don’t even care about catching up, personally,” Jonah went on. “I grew up around really successful people, famous people. None of it impresses me. I don’t want any of it for myself. I’d just like to enjoy what I do for a living more. To actually look forward to going in each day. I keep waiting for that to happen, but it doesn’t.”

Ash liked her own work now. Ibsen’s Ghosts opened for a short run at the Open Hand Theater in the fall of 1989. Jules went with Ash to a rehearsal and saw that everything Ash had learned in the theater at Spirit-in-the-Woods had reappeared here, in adult, substantial form. The production she directed was well researched, earnest, and ambitious. It wasn’t witty, because Ash wasn’t particularly witty, but it was smart and careful, clever with its background use of women’s bodies. The Day-Glo nipples were a hit. Ghosts wasn’t some vanity production that Ethan’s wealth and success had made possible. You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

This wasn’t that. On the opening night of Ash’s play in September, the second-string reviewer from the New York Times came to see it. In a small but positive review, the production was praised for its “fidelity,” “verve,” and its “thoughtful look at nineteenth-century morality, with a compelling emphasis on the meanings of femaleness. The reviewer wrote, “That Ms. Wolf is the wife of Ethan Figman, the creator of Figland, should be of no consequence. But it reminds us that this handsome production—with its colorful, startling anatomical flourishes—is anything but a cartoon.” The run was extended; Open Hand hadn’t gotten a reviewer from the Times to come to one of their plays in a long time, and nothing they’d produced had ever received such an important and positive review, and they giddily asked Ash what she was interested in directing next. Did she want to write something for them too? She could be their resident feminist playwright and director. Men still dominated the theater, and Open Hand said it was committed to changing that; Ash could make a difference.

A celebration dinner in honor of Ash was quickly arranged by Ethan, who invited Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert. They gathered at Sand, a tiny East Village restaurant that had also recently ascended after its own positive review in the Times. The restaurant was a skinny room with sand on the floor that crunched when you moved your chair or your feet. With sand beneath their shoes and complex tastes popping in their mouths, they ate their expensive, fussy-looking, last-days-of-the-eighties drizzled-plate dinner and talked about what was next for Ash. “I told her she should definitely take them up on their offer and write something original,” said Ethan. “She can be a double threat. Hey,” he said, turning to his wife with a droll face, “why not revive Both Ends?”

Everyone laughed, and Robert Takahashi asked what Both Ends was, and said it sounded like the name of a gay S&M play. Jonah had to explain to Robert that Both Ends was a one-woman show about Edna St. Vincent Millay that Ash had written when she was in high school. “A terrible one-woman show,” said Ash. “With, apparently, an unfortunate name. And these guys had to see multiple performances of it.” She turned to them and said, “I’m so sorry. If I could give you those hours back, I would.”

“Do the opening scene,” said Robert.

“I can’t, it’s too awful, Robert,” Ash said. “I finally get that, though it took me a long time. My parents said everything I did was wonderful.”

“Come on,” Robert said. “I have to see it.” He smiled charmingly at her; he and Jonah were so good-looking individually and together that Jules sometimes just surreptitiously looked at them for a while when they all got together for a big dinner.

Ash said, “Okay. So I’m Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I come out onstage by myself in a nightgown, carrying a candle. Otherwise the stage is completely dark. I stand in the middle and I say, ‘My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh my, friends— / It gives a lovely light!’ Then I step forward to the edge of the stage and I kind of beckon to the audience. I say to them, ‘While my candle stays lit, won’t you sit and listen? We’ll talk until the light dies away.’”

Everyone laughed, including Ash. “You said that?” said Robert. “You actually said that without cracking up? I wish I’d been there for it.”

“I wish you had too,” said Jonah.

“Dennis,” said Robert, “you and I came in to the story way late. We were supposed to have been here long ago. Look at what we missed. Both Ends.”

“I think I really will write something new for Open Hand,” said Ash. “I have no idea what. But if I start it right now, coming off Ghosts, it would come out sounding morose and Scandinavian.” Jules thought again of Goodman and Ash in Oslo together, sprawled out in a hotel room, talking all night.

“You don’t have to begin it now, that’s the good thing,” said Jonah. “You can take your time.”

“I like the idea of being able to take your time,” said Dennis, who’d never been fast like these friends here. “Not having to plan everything. Just waiting for things to fall into place,” he said, and maybe these were the last calm words he spoke that night. Or maybe this was more of a stage-play memory of the evening—the scene in which a woman’s husband contemplates the pleasures of taking one’s time, and within the hour it’s all ruined. Maybe he didn’t say this at all; later on, Jules wasn’t sure. There was so much drinking, and Ethan had arranged for a succession of amuse-bouches to be brought to the table before the meal. Little delicious items adorned with squirts of colorful gel kept appearing, and it was too dark in the room to see exactly what any of them were eating. Texture was everything in 1980s fine dining; specifics were often less meaningful.

Dennis, because of the MAO inhibitor he took, now referred to commonly as an MAOI, was always careful with what he ate; at the beginning of the evening he’d quietly told the waiter his food restrictions. But tonight there was an unusual force field around the table, in part because of Ethan’s presence in the restaurant, which had excited the owner, who was a big fan of Figland, and whose recitation of entire chunks of dialogue from the show was actually touching to Ethan, who agreed to draw Wally Figman on a tablecloth as a favor. Everyone at the table was talking a lot, excited for Ash about her first real success, feverish about their own possibilities, aware that thirty was a significant age and a good age. It might have been that Dennis’s tone, when speaking to the waiter, had made it sound like he just disliked smoked, pickled, and preserved meats and aged cheeses and liver and pâté; not that any of those foods could potentially kill him.

A shallow ceramic spoon arrived for each of them with something called “tomato water” in it and a single scallop like a big tooth. A bottle of wine appeared, and the presence of Pouilly on the label made it clear to Jules that it was good. They consumed everything given to them. Did some of the food taste smoked, pickled, preserved, poisonous? It was hard to say; it all tasted good, and Jules had no reason not to assume that Dennis was alert to his own food restrictions tonight, as usual. But near the end of the meal, in the middle of an array of free desserts, including a plate of cookies that were described by the waiter as “Serrano pepper molé ducats,” Dennis leaned over to Jules and said, “I’m not feeling great.”

“Did you eat something you’re not supposed to?” she asked, but he shook his head. “Do you want to leave?” she pressed, and in the candlelight she saw that he was sweating; his whole face was streaming. “Dennis,” Jules said sharply. “Dennis, I think something’s really wrong with you.”

“I think so too.” He pulled at his shirt collar and said simply, “I have a bad headache. I think I’m going to die.”

“You’re not going to die.” Dennis didn’t say anything, but just craned his head forward and began to vomit onto his plate.

“Oh my God,” Jules said, and she turned frantically to her friends, who were still looking at one another and laughing and eating. Robert was feeding Jonah a crab cake, for some reason. “Ethan,” Jules said without thinking; he was the one she wanted to help her. “Ethan, Dennis is really sick.”

Ethan looked up with his mouth half-open, and he saw Jules’s panic, which made him swallow his food quickly and practically launch himself across the table, his shirt nearly skimming the candle in its glass. “Dennis, look at me,” Ethan said, and Dennis, who’d stopped vomiting, looked at him but his expression was dull. Then somehow—had he flown?—Ethan was right beside Dennis, opening his shirt collar, and lowering him onto the floor between this table and the next one, which meant Dennis was lying on a bed of sand. On his back, his body made an imprint, a sand angel, a police outline foretelling an imminent death. Jules knelt on his other side, crying onto his neck and slack face. She found the pulse in Dennis’s wrist, and it was wild—“tacking,” the EMS technician would say a few minutes later.

Hovering over him, waiting for help, Jules thought that here was her dying husband, the ultrasound tech still ambling along, not a star in his field or any other. God, all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary life to Ash and Ethan, who would know how to use it, she thought as the EMS technicians strode through the narrow space, crunching purposefully along the floor with their heavy shoes, surrounding her husband. Leave everything to Ash and Ethan, for they deserve it. Just give me what we had, she heard herself thinking, or maybe saying. It’s enough now.