The Interestings A Novel

THIRTEEN





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You already know what’s happening.”

“But talk to me more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did the smile even mean? Probably just, Isn’t it humiliating, all this attention? Or else, I know you’re bored, and I am too. Or else, simply, Hello, over there, Jules Jacobson-Boyd, friend of my youth, soulmate, pal. But whatever it meant, it caused her once again to feel that old, familiar, pressurized sensation that what she and Dennis had was small and sad. By the time they took the subway home and walked up all those flights, Jules’s narrow high-heeled shoes had sliced up the tops of her toes. Inside the apartment they both pulled off their clothes and Jules stood in the bathroom with one bloody foot in the sink, jamming it under the faucet. Dennis came in and said, “You look like a crane.”

“I feel like a crane. Sort of awkward and stupid. The opposite of Ash’s enchanted sprite. That was a Marco Castellano, by the way.”

“What?”

“That’s my point.” She thought of how they were living a life now that was still in the end of its early stages, that was full of friends and love, and the tendrils of two careers, all of which would have been absolutely fine, if it weren’t for their best friends, whose life was so much finer.

But Dennis said, “You know, if I had wanted an enchanted sprite, I would have gone into an enchanted forest and found one.”

In the bathroom doorway his tie had been sprung, his cummerbund opened. Dark, strong-bodied Dennis was much better looking than Jules was, but it never bothered her, because he was not someone who would betray her with another woman. Now his bigness, his handsomeness, his dignity, his refusal to be intimidated by the glamorous evening and by a Marco Castellano impressed her. She didn’t have to compare their lives with their friends’ tonight; she didn’t have to do that at all, she realized, and it was an astonishing relief. Instead, Jules was drawn toward the hypnotic, inexplicable powers of her husband, who was so beautiful and unquestionably directed toward her, his dark eyes sweeping up and taking in the length of her. The bathroom usually seemed so small and inadequate; now it felt filled up with Dennis, a substantial man over whom she had claim. This had nothing to do with Ethan and Ash; this was for her alone. Everyone else was banished, and the private scene was beginning.

“Oh yeah?” Jules said, just for filler. “You’d have gone into an enchanted forest?”

“Yes, I would have,” Dennis said, and he took her by her arm and pulled her out of the microscopic bathroom, with the aqua shag carpeting that the previous tenants had crudely installed with a staple-gun, and into the moderately larger bedroom, where he lay her down on their bed. She smiled up at him as he pulled off the remains of his tuxedo, an outfit that he only ever needed to wear for events that had to do with Ethan and Ash. Then he helped Jules unzip her dress, which had left a pink zipper mark up her back, as if demarcating the place where the two sides of her body had been assembled in a factory. They were freed from their Ethan-and-Ashwear, those outfits that seemed much more mature than the people who had worn them, even though they themselves were not too young anymore.

They had to have used a condom that night; they must have, they almost always did, though they’d had a lot to drink on this occasion so it was possible they hadn’t. Jules wasn’t planning on getting pregnant yet. The sex that night, she later remembered, was unusually gripping, employing all four corners of the bed, with the sheet ending up twisted like a rope. Dennis was ardent, magnificent, and purposeful, pushing the scene forward, keeping each moment turning into another moment. A book that had been lying splayed open on Jules’s night table—a series of case studies about eating disorders that she’d checked out of the social work library at Columbia, where she still had privileges—somehow ended up across the room, accidentally thrust into the dusty space beneath the bureau. It wasn’t found until nearly a year later, at which point more money was owed in fines than the book was worth. But she had already stopped looking for it, because by that time Aurora Maude Jacobson-Boyd had been born, and life was different.

• • •

In September 1990, three months after Aurora arrived, Ash gave birth to her own daughter, Larkin Templeton Figman. At first the two women enjoyed the animal haze of motherhood together, and for once Jules got to be the expert, giving Ash nursing tips and sleep advice. She tossed off phrases like “nipple confusion” with pleasing authority. One morning, though, Ash called very early and sounded different. She didn’t seem overwhelmed in the way she’d often been since Larkin was born. This was something else. She said she’d like to come over, if that was okay. She had the driver take her uptown, and she brought Larkin with her in one of those Swedish papoose-style pouches. Jules still felt self-conscious when Ash or Ethan came to the apartment, though lately she’d perfected a false attitude of seeming not to care how the place looked—how disheveled it was, how crammed with baby goods, the stroller blocking the hallway, the onesies drying on the shower rack until they were crisp. Ash sat tensely in Jules and Dennis’s living room, refusing the offer of a cup of coffee or anything to eat. She settled onto the couch, arranging herself and the baby, and looked at Jules intently.

“You’re scaring me a little,” said Jules. The apartment was otherwise empty; Dennis was in Central Park with Aurora and the gang of mothers and nannies and babies with whom he sometimes spent the entire day. Jules had seen two clients in the morning, and was now home for the day. She would do a phone session later on with a woman who had broken her ankle and couldn’t go out.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to do that. Look, I know you’re having a bad time yourself over here, what with Dennis and all.” The way Ash spoke, her voice so cautious, made Jules think this was going to be another Goodman conversation. They hadn’t had one of those conversations in many weeks; the babies had mostly distracted them from all thoughts of him. Now Jules felt that Ash might say something like, I just wanted to tell you that Goodman is in rehab again. Or, Well, get this: Goodman actually got himself into architecture school. Or, Goodman is dying. Or, Goodman is dead. Instead, Ash said, “I really need to tell you something, Jules. I have to tell someone, and you’re the only one.”

“All right.”

“Well, you know how my parents were really upset when everything started falling apart at Drexel? The investigations and all that?” Jules nodded. “And then after the bankruptcy, my father retired early and got that payout?”

“Yes. But you said things were okay,” said Jules.

“They are okay.”

“All right,” she said, waiting.

“I think my father’s been enjoying retirement, actually. And, well, my parents apparently started thinking. And they called me over to their apartment and began saying things about how their money flow was going to be different now. It’d be fine, they assured me, but it wouldn’t be so liquid. I didn’t understand why they were saying this; it took me forever to get it, because they just didn’t want to come out and actually say it. But finally I realized where this was going. Finally I got it. I said to them, ‘Is this about Goodman?’ And my parents looked at each other kind of sheepishly, and I knew that that was exactly what this was about. My mother said something like, ‘We weren’t going to say anything, but we’ve been taking care of him for a long time, and he can barely work, and he has certain expenses, like anyone. And you and Ethan are so extraordinarily financially secure now, I mean, that’s an understatement, and if it were at all possible to transfer this responsibility over to you, it would really make a difference to us.’ ‘But only if you really want to,’ my father actually added, as if it were all my idea.”

“So what did you say?” asked Jules, though this whole family scenario was so far beyond her understanding. Her own mother cut out coupons for frozen yogurt and sent them to her.

“I said, ‘Well, if it’s important to you, I guess I could figure it out.’ Goodman can’t get a steady job, as you know, nothing professional, nothing that pays well. Plus, he isn’t trained to do anything. And as for his pickup construction jobs, his back problems are pretty bad. He got a stress fracture in his lumbar spine not too long ago, and he can’t really do much physically anymore. He needs physical therapy, and he doesn’t have a steady income. Plus, someone has to pay for his plane tickets when he visits us. And pay for all his little occasional habits, shall we call them. It all adds up.”

“Wow,” said Jules. “I’m shocked.”

“I know. Me too. Obviously I can’t ask Ethan for the money. My parents know that. They were always impressed that I never told him.”

“Are you sorry you didn’t?” Jules asked. She’d always wanted to ask this, but there had never been an acceptable moment before.

“Oh, sometimes, sure,” said Ash easily. “Because we talk about everything. Everything but that. And I can’t ever go there with him. It’s way too late for that, and I don’t know that he would recover. I want my life and my work to be honest, but I had to be faithful to my parents when they asked me to, you know I did, and now I can only go so far with the truth about this. Ethan and I barely talk about Goodman in any context anymore; he assumes it’s too painful for me, and that’s not completely untrue. It is painful. All of it, the way it happened. What Goodman might’ve become.”

“I wish Ethan knew,” Jules said in a low voice. “He just makes everything better,” she added before she could think not to.

“I know what you mean,” said Ash. “He’s the person I always want to go to when something’s wrong. I really wish I could tell him every detail from the start. But I can’t. I did what they wanted. I was their good child, their gifted child. I went along with the whole package, and it’s not like I can suddenly say to Ethan, Oh by the way, love of my life, person whose child I’ve given birth to, I’ve been in contact with my brother all these years, and my parents and Jules know about it too, but you’re the only one I neglected to tell.”

Jules said, strongly, “Tell him, Ash. Just do it.” Dennis had sometimes said that one day Ethan would probably find out anyway. “Life is long,” Dennis had said.

“You know I can’t,” Ash said. “He’s the most moral person, Jules, which of course is generally a quality I love about him. And he doesn’t hold back.”

“So what are you going to do? Do you have access to money that he wouldn’t know about?”

“The short answer is yes. And it’s not as if Ethan sits around and does the bills each month. We have someone who does that. There’s so much coming in, and so much going out. I don’t need to answer to him, or to Duncan, who handles our money now. Obviously, the main thing is to do it with an invisible hand. It makes me extremely nervous, because I’m not very good with money, or with anything that has to do with numbers, but I guess it’ll work. I have to make it work.” She shrugged, then stroked the flattish back of her baby’s head and said, “Somebody has to look out for Goodman now. And I guess it’s me.”

• • •

In the early years of motherhood, Ash and Jules continued their fantasy of a close friendship growing between their daughters, imagining it as a mirror of their own friendship. The girls did become friendly, and thought fondly of each other throughout their lives, but they were so different from each other that a close friendship between them eventually was more of a gift that they tried to give their mothers than something arising naturally.

“God are they different,” Jules said to Dennis after spending a day at Ash and Ethan’s. The girls were four years old then; Ash and Ethan had recently moved into the large brownstone on Charles Street, a graceful plaque house that rested in the sun in a choice part of Greenwich Village. Inside the house, despite the presence of a four-year-old daughter, and now a difficult two-year-old son, Morris Tristan Figman, known as Mo, calm and order were commonplace. This had a great deal to do with the Jamaican couple, Emanuel and Rose, who were employed as houseman and nanny, and oversaw most aspects of the family’s daily life. They were the most unobtrusive staff, a courteous husband with a shaved head, and his attentive but playful wife. The rooms were immaculate, the children were clean and looked after, and so were their parents.

A big playroom upstairs resembled a first-class airport lounge—carpeted so no one could get hurt, and decorated not in the garish colors that children were supposedly drawn to but in muted tones, softly lit. There was a trampoline and a vat full of balls. There was a slide and a bouncer and life-sized stuffed animals. Jules imagined one of Ethan’s assistants having called FAO Schwarz, saying, “Give us what you’ve got.”

What a place to grow up, she thought—to have such surroundings and such inventive, unruffled parents. Jules sat on one of the pale couches with a glass of wine handed to her by Rose, and she took a long drink, wanting to feel a softening and polishing along her throat and chest, so that she did not have to create a depressing split screen in her mind: this place, this life, and her own apartment, the walk-up on West 84th Street where she and Dennis and Aurora now lived in chaos and tight finances and the dominating blur of one person’s clinical depression.

Aurora tore through the Figman and Wolf playroom, yelling, “I am an army sergeant! I am the king!” The sergeant/king thrust herself deep into the pool of balls while Larkin, sitting on a window seat with an actual chapter book, watched her, impressed. Mo was asleep in his nursery, Ash had explained, which was an amazing feat, but then again, Rose was a genius with Mo, who was generally miserable at two, always shrieking and unable at naptime to give in to the necessary bonelessness of sleep. Though Jules tried to shush Aurora so she wouldn’t wake him up, Ash said she could be as loud as she wanted, because the walls were extremely thick here, and no sound ever penetrated.

Ash noted, “I see that Aurora likes to take control. Maybe she’ll run a network.”

“No!” said Aurora, her face flushed and triumphant. “I am the army man! I run everybody!”

The two women laughed. Aurora was “very much herself,” as Ash had said. Jules felt a kind of demented love for her daughter. Aurora was clownish in a very open way, which was different from being witty, and Jules was obsessed with her, and so was Dennis, who was able to ignore the hum of his depression when it mattered and be expressive toward his little girl. It was, maybe, like the equivalent of a parent lifting a car off a baby. He was depressed, but still he was able to rise from depression’s weight well enough to take good care of Aurora. Atypical depression sometimes allowed for such inconsistencies, said Dr. Brazil.

Jules observed that over the rest of the afternoon, whenever Larkin joined Aurora in physical play, Ash’s daughter mostly seemed to be doing it to be polite. Larkin dipped herself into the vat and graciously let Aurora pound ball after ball against her; she went on the slide headfirst, but after she’d landed at the bottom, she dusted herself off and returned to her place on the window seat with her book.

Aurora sat beside her. “What’s that book?” she asked.

“Little House in the Big Woods,” said Larkin.

“Does it have jokes?”

Larkin considered this. “No.”

“You can read it yourself?” Aurora asked.

Larkin nodded. “When I learned to read,” she confided, “it changed everything.”

Larkin was mature, but she was neither mean nor superior-seeming. She was an open little girl who’d inherited her mother’s fragile beauty, intelligence, and kindness, though from her father she’d inherited a predisposition for eczema, and already needed special creams. Did she have her father’s imagination? It was too soon to tell, but the depressing answer was, oh, probably.

“Are you going to get all bent out of shape about Larkin?” Dennis asked that night, when at bedtime Jules was still describing Larkin’s grace and precocity and delicate elegance, and the work being done to the regal house on Charles Street. “Or is that a stupid question?” he went on. “Is the real question, ‘How long will it take you to get unbent out of shape about this?’”

“No,” said Jules. “I wouldn’t trade Aurora for anything.”

“I see,” he said. “You’re saying it that way to draw a distinction with me. You’d trade me.”

“No,” she said, “not at all.”

“Yes, you would. I understand.” This conversation almost seemed to have perked him up, as if he thought that he could finally see the world the way Jules saw it again; he could see it through her vivid lens, as she made preparations for leaving.

“Well, stop understanding. This is very f*cked up, Dennis,” said Jules. “This whole conversation. Would I get rid of your depression? Would I trade you in for a version of you that wasn’t depressed? Yes, all right, I would. But isn’t that what you would do too? Isn’t that what we want?”

Ever since he’d been taken off the MAOI five years earlier, Dennis had rarely returned to buoyancy. Instead, he still struggled with what his pharmacologist variously referred to as “low-level depression,” “atypical depression,” and “dysthymia.” There were some people who were just very hard to treat, Dr. Brazil said. They were able to live their lives, sometimes to a fairly full extent, but they never felt good. Dennis’s atypical depression wasn’t making him break down, as it had done in college, but it also wouldn’t go away. He felt its presence like a speck in the eye or like a chronic, rattling cough. Different drugs were tried, but nothing worked for very long, or if a drug did work, the side effects made it untenable. Early on in the rotation of drugs, the discarded MAOI had been returned to, but it no longer even worked. Dennis’s brain chemistry seemed to have changed, and the MAOI was like a former lover who doesn’t look good anymore in the light of a new day.

After enough time seemed to have passed after losing his job at MetroCare, Dennis had made a diligent search for work and found nothing. He couldn’t get a good reference from the clinic after his “outrageous behavior with a patient,” as Mrs. Ortega promised to describe it in any letter she wrote to a potential new employer. But even so, Dennis admitted to Jules that when he eventually did go back to work, he was afraid of what he might see now upon looking into the human body. He and Jules lay in bed at night once and talked about this. “What do you think you’ll see?” she whispered.

“All kinds of things.”

“I never know what I’m going to see when someone walks into my office,” she said. “I wish I had a piece of equipment for looking. I envy you that thing—what’s it called, a transducer?—but you can’t even bear to use it. Your wand. Your magic wand. What I do feels so crude. I know that therapy can actually change the brain; they’ve done amazing studies. But so much of it involves just sort of waiting things out, and tolerating the same unconstructive ideas being repeated. You have a good eye, Dennis. You know your stuff; don’t forget that. And you get to use equipment too. It’ll still be there when you’re better, when you’re ready to go back.”

Dennis lay with his eyes open and said, “I did know my stuff. I don’t want to know it now. I can’t bear the idea of looking deeply. Because you inevitably turn up horrible things.”

“I don’t know, for someone who can’t bear looking deeply, that’s sort of a deep observation,” Jules said. “A lot of you is here, Dennis, more than you think. If you were gone, that would be a whole other story. But you’re not gone.” She wanted to perk him up somehow, to turn even her modest curative powers on him. Just a few days earlier her most recent client, sixty-year-old Sylvia Klein, who had essentially been crying for most of every session, had smiled when she described the way her grown daughter Alison, dead for three years of breast cancer, had been obsessed with Julie Andrews as a child, and had insisted on seeing The Sound of Music multiple times, and even went around speaking in a British accent, asking her mother, “Mummy, does my accent sound real?”

“You smiled, telling me about that,” Jules had said to her.

“No, I didn’t,” said Sylvia Klein, drawing back, but then she tilted her head and very tentatively smiled again. “Well, maybe I did,” she said.

But Jules couldn’t do much for Dennis except eat meals with him, rent movies from Blockbuster with him, lie in bed with him, and listen to him talk about the intractability of his dysthymic state. Then, when Jules found out she’d accidentally become pregnant, they were both similarly shocked, and anxious about how they would have enough money to support a baby, and what it would be like for Dennis with a baby in the apartment. What it would be like for the baby to have a depressed father—a dysthymic father, Jules insisted on saying, because that sounded less threatening. Would a baby be able to tell? Dennis had an additional worry: What if something was wrong with the baby? “There are so many things that can go wrong,” he said. “Weird DNA, anatomical abnormalities. The baby could be missing part of its brain, Jules. I have actually seen this. A whole big chunk can be missing; it just doesn’t grow. Or else there’s hydrocephalus, water on the brain, that’s another good one.” He exhausted her with his fears about the baby, and frightened her as well. At twenty weeks, when Jules was scheduled to have a level 2 ultrasound, the big anatomy scan, she asked Dennis to go with her, though he had declined to go to any appointments with her in the past, saying that he wouldn’t be very good company, which was probably true, so she hadn’t pushed him.

“I can’t,” he said.

“I need you there, for this one,” said Jules. “I cannot keep doing everything on my own.”

So he went with her, and sat beside her in the dim light of the small room, where a young ultrasound technician squirted a mound of gel onto Jules’s convex stomach, and began to move the transducer. Suddenly the baby corkscrewed into view. Dennis didn’t breathe. He stared at the screen as the young woman pressed some keys, and he asked her a few tense shorthand ultrasound questions. Jules remembered how, the day after the first time she and Dennis had slept together, they had gone to the Central Park Zoo, where they’d talked about his depression in the penguin house. Here they were in another darkened place, looking at a creature behind glass. The technician took measurements, and smiled reassuringly, and pointed.

“Oh, look at her move,” said Dennis, his face close to the display now, studying the shifting grainy image that only he and the technician could read, and which, to Jules, was a mysterious play of light and shadow.

“Her?” said Jules. “Her? We weren’t going to find out the sex.”

“I meant ‘her’ generically,” said Dennis quickly. “I can’t tell the sex.” The technician swiveled her head discreetly away at that moment, and Jules knew Dennis wasn’t telling the truth. Once again he had inappropriately given away big news in an ultrasound room, but this time no one was really upset.

The baby was a she, born to an anxious mother and a precarious father. After Aurora’s birth, they jointly decided that Dennis would stay home and take care of her during the day. If they did it this way, they realized that they wouldn’t need to put her in daycare, or hire outside child care, which they certainly could barely have afforded anyway. Instead of continuing to look for work, in hopes of finding another clinic job, taking care of the baby became what Dennis did for a living. He and Jules had sat down and addressed the question of whether or not he was too depressed to be with their daughter all day; Dennis said he wanted to try it and at least find out. It interested him, he told her cautiously. Jules also talked about this with Ash and Ethan. Ethan said, “What do you think, he’s going to read to her from The Bell Jar? I bet it’ll be okay.”

But not long after Dennis started taking care of the baby full-time, Jules realized that the days were often soothing to him. Curiously, even the tedious parts didn’t bother him, and neither did the frankly unpleasant parts, such as going down to the hot laundry room with Aurora in a carriage, dragging a cart swollen with dirty clothes and crib sheets behind him. He was relieved not to have to make conversation with other adults all day about topics like the sudden Gulf War that sprang up in August—the first televised war, viewed in fits and starts like an awful football game, with General Norman Schwarzkopf as the quarterback. Every time this sudden new war came up in conversation, you felt dread, thinking: What will happen next? Will it spread? Will it come here?

But in the separate, zipped-up universe of being with young children, the mothers and the nannies and Dennis talked about baby monitors, baby carriages, the comparative quality of different pediatricians. The television channel was turned away from news of the war, and instead there was always a gentle video playing or soft music, and this seemed to be what Dennis needed, as much as Aurora did. Somehow this was the life they’d created without planning it: a single-earner family in which the breadwinner was the mother and the caregiver was the father. Over time, there were many more stay-at-home fathers out with their babies in the city during the height of a workday, whether because of progressive thinking or the tanking economy, but in 1990 it was still an uncommon enough sight that, until they got to know him, mothers and nannies looked Dennis over carefully in the park and on the street, suspicious and curious about what exactly was wrong with him.

Dennis had a lasting but apparently tolerable depression, and Jules had found ways to tolerate it too. As Aurora came into herself, she was demanding and loud, but she gave Jules real joy; and if joy was too strong a word to apply to what Dennis felt, at least Aurora moved him, touched a place inside his depression. Jules imagined Dennis’s mind like the vat full of colored balls in the Figman-Wolf playroom. Once in a while the balls were stirred and shifted, and a few of them flew into the air when something got through to him.

When Aurora started kindergarten she threw off her first name as if it had been a dreadful affliction, a hair shirt festooned with overly feminine sequins and bows. Then she neatly turned herself, like one of the Transformers robot cars she played with for hours, into Rory—not unlike the way Julie had long ago simply turned into Jules.

Meanwhile, Larkin stayed Larkin forever, a study in pink and cream, and she often slipped envelopes under her parents’ bedroom door, or beside their plates at breakfast. In her early handwriting, advanced and shaky and charming, she wrote:


Mommy and Daddy wod you be my gessed at a dolls tee party it is in my room at 4 oh clock. From Larkin your doter.


“Oh you have to save these,” said Jules dully when Ash showed a few of the notes to her. Rory had no interest in writing, but wanted to be in motion at all times. Jules and Dennis bought her every kind of ride-on vehicle they could find: orange and yellow plastic things with wheels the size of inner tubes, which had to be lugged up all their flights of stairs, just as the stroller had had to be lugged up when Rory was a toddler. “We are too old to raise a kid like this in a place like this,” Jules said to Dennis. Rory didn’t even have her own room, but still slept on a fold-out bed in a corner of the living room. But Jules remembered what Cathy Kiplinger had said in the girls’ teepee long ago, referring to her own oversized breasts: “You get used to whatever you get.” Still, it was hard. Sometimes when Rory was asked to use her “inside voice,” or sit quietly doing a maze while Jules read over the notes from a therapy session, Rory would be unable to comply.

“I can’t sit still!” she shouted, as if in great discomfort. “I have an itch inside my body!”

“She has an itch inside her body,” Jules relayed to Ash on the phone.

“Can she scratch it?” Ash asked. “That seems to be the important part, don’t you think? That she should be able to scratch it.”

“I think she means a metaphorical itch.”

“I know what she means. And I’m just saying that she should be able to express herself, not for you but for her. You don’t want to end up with a situation like in The Drama of the Gifted Child.”

Larkin Figman was beautiful, creative, sensitive about everything. At the ivy-strung Tudor weekend house that Ash and Ethan had recently bought in Katonah, an hour north of the city—and sold several years later (they’d ended up rarely using it) for much more money than they’d paid for it—she ran toward her parents with her hands cupped, and inside them there might be a small wounded animal or a livid cricket trying to bang its way out. Larkin inevitably wanted to build a hospital for the creature, and then, if it recovered, hold a tea party in its honor. The tiniest cups in the world were fashioned.

“We get a lot of acorn-cap usage around here,” Ethan would say when Dennis and Jules took the train up for the weekend and he’d actually found the time to get away from the studio. “Do you know how hard it is to pry those f*ckers off? I have acorn thumb.”

Ethan’s and Dennis’s love for their daughters wasn’t complicated, but in both instances was massive and wild. Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last—yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind and worshipful of and humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think about your own father as you saw your little girl with hers. The sight of them was overwhelming to Jules, and she had to look hard, then finally look away.

Something Rory wanted, when she was a young child, became obvious to Jules, but because it was not usually said aloud, she ignored it. It was darkly fitting that Jules herself, who envied her friends so powerfully, would have an envious daughter. But unlike her mother, Rory didn’t envy the enormous life of Ash and Ethan and Larkin. Instead, she envied boys. She came home from kindergarten talking about the boy whose cubby was beside hers. “Oh, Ma, Andrew Menzes stands up to go pee. The pee comes out in a curving string. A curving golden string,” she embellished, and then she cried.

And Jules could have cried too—two jealous crybabies—but she remained mute, and downplayed the importance of the curving golden string. “Your pee comes out in a golden string too,” she said lightly. “It’s a straight string, that’s all.”

“Andrew Menzes’s pee comes out of a rocket,” Rory said passionately, and her mother was left with nothing to reply. Some dreams in life were attainable, and others weren’t, no matter how much they were desired. It was all unfair, having more to do with luck than anything else. But sometimes, right after Jules had made a comment to Dennis with particular harshness about Ash and Ethan’s great good fortune—which included their wealth, their specialness, Ethan’s outsized talent, and now even their daughter—she felt sharply revived. Then everything settled down again, the current world returned, along with an image of her own wonderful daughter, and she imagined her friends’ kind faces—Ethan’s homely, flattened one; Ash’s lovely, sculpted one—puzzling over Jules’s light meanness.

Then, coming down further from the nasty little high, she felt even guiltier as she reminded herself that Ash and Ethan’s life might be vast and miraculous, but their marriage had a locked room in it, inside of which was not only the withheld information about Goodman but also the full freight of Ash’s ache about Goodman. The brother from her childhood was gone, even if Ash did get to slip off to see him once a year or so in Europe, and even if she did speak to him on a dedicated cell phone that Ethan knew nothing about—“my Batphone,” Ash called it—and write him letters when Ethan wasn’t home; and even though she was now supporting him with a very small fraction of the money her husband earned from the astonishing profits from Figland. The loss of Goodman was made almost manageable by the Wolf family’s elaborate and underground involvement and love; but still.

“Everyone suffers,” one of Jules’s favorite instructors in social work school had said on the first day of a seminar called “Understanding Loss.” “Everyone,” the woman added for emphasis, as if anyone in the room might think that some people were exempt.

Sometimes there would be a sudden, surprise reminder of that earlier life, before marriage, and before wealth or its absence, and before the addition of children. A life when Jules was still a girl, in awe of another girl and her brother and their parents and their big apartment and their gracious, splendid life. Even if she didn’t drop into sadness thinking about that early time, she still remembered what had once been. In the fall, at the annual psychotherapy convention held at the Waldorf Hotel, Jules had been standing in a banquet room among a cluster of social workers she knew, drinking a cup of coffee between lectures, when the past suddenly made a cameo. The place was crazed with therapists of all stripes—MSWs, CSWs, Ed.D.s, Ph.D.s, M.D.s—their voices rising as one tidal chorus in the bright, bland room. She noticed a frail elderly man being helped through the crowd by a younger woman. He must have been ninety, and as they slowly passed she read his nametag, LEO SPILKA, M.D., and with a quiet gasp she remembered the name. Without thinking about doctor-patient confidentiality, or even what the point might be of saying anything, she went up to him.

“Dr. Spilka?” she said.

“Yes?” The old man stopped and peered at her.

“My name is Jules Jacobson-Boyd. May I speak to you?”

He turned to the woman he was with, as if for approval, and she shrugged and nodded, and Dr. Spilka and Jules moved a few feet away, near a table of picked-over pastries.

“I’m a clinical social worker,” Jules said. “But when I was a teenager I was friends with a boy named Goodman Wolf. Does that name mean anything to you?” Dr. Spilka didn’t say anything. “Goodman Wolf,” she repeated, a little louder. “He was your client, your patient, in the 1970s. He was in high school then.” The doctor still said nothing, so Jules added, “He was accused of raping a girl at Tavern on the Green, on New Year’s Eve.”

Finally Dr. Spilka mildly said, “Go on.”

In a quicker, more excited voice, Jules said, “Well, it’s just been this unfinished thing for all of us who knew his family, and knew the girl who accused him. It’s been this thing we don’t really talk about openly—it was complicated—and then so much time passed that it was hard to bring it up. But I wondered whether there was anything you felt you could tell me, to just, you know, put it in perspective. Whatever you say, it would be between us. I know it’s not right of me to ask about a former patient. But it’s been so long, and I suddenly saw you here, and I just thought, okay, I have to ask.”

Dr. Spilka regarded her for a while, then he nodded his head, slowly. “Yes,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I remember that boy.”

“You do?”

“He was guilty,” said Dr. Spilka. Jules stared at him, and he stared right back. His gaze was even and cool, a tortoise’s ancient gaze; hers was shocked.

“Really?” she said in a small voice. “He was?” She hardly knew what else to say. The thought of having to report this conversation back to Ash created a thick presence of something in her mouth, a congestion, as if she was biting down on a gag. She hadn’t thought to wonder too often about Goodman’s innocence or guilt over the years; his family had known he was innocent, they were secure in this, and that was what she knew.

The psychoanalyst said, “Yes, he murdered that girl.”

“No, no. No, he didn’t,” Jules said. “She’s alive, she’s some kind of financial person now. She accused him of rape, remember?”

But Dr. Spilka insisted, “Oh yes he did. He raped her and he strangled her until her eyes bulged out. She may have been a slut, but he was a punk, and they put him in a maximum-security prison, where he belongs, that punk with the big jutting chin.”

“No, Dr. Spilka, no, you’re confusing him with someone else—the Preppy Murderer, I think. That happened about ten years later. Another Central Park story. There have been so many by now; maybe they’re kind of blurring together for you. That’s totally understandable.”

“I am certainly not confusing him with anyone,” said the old psychoanalyst, standing straighter.

The woman who’d accompanied him and was waiting nearby, observing, came over then and said she was his daughter, and that she hoped Jules would excuse her father. “He has dementia,” she confided easily, right in front of him. “He gets things mixed up. Right, Dad? I bring him to this conference every year because he used to like coming to it so much. I’m sorry if he said something that upset you.”

“He killed her,” Leo Spilka insisted with a shrug, and then his daughter steered him away.