The Interestings A Novel

FOURTEEN





What was later referred to by Ethan, somewhat ironically but not entirely, as the Jakarta transformation was originally supposed to have been a restorative vacation. Mo had recently been diagnosed at the Yale Child Study Center as being on the autism spectrum, and Ash decided that the whole family needed to be together somewhere far away from the usual routine. Mo’s diagnosis had made Ash cry often in the beginning, but she’d also said, “I love him, and he’s ours, and I won’t give up on him.” For now, she wanted the family to be together in their “new reality,” as she put it.

Ethan, stunned into a flat coolness after the diagnosis, said, “Sure, fine.” Ash had chosen Indonesia because they’d never been there before, and it seemed like a beautiful and restful place, and also because she was thinking of directing a play for Open Hand that involved Balinese shadow puppets, though who knew when she’d be able to direct again; she wanted to be there for Mo now. Mo’s autism-spectrum disorder was not something that Ethan liked to talk about, even with his wife, because it was like staring into an eclipse. He felt as if he would burn up and disintegrate when he thought of his son. Ash was her usual self, emotional and fragile but finally the one who’d taken the initiative to make the appointment for the two-day diagnostic at Yale—and then, despite her sadness and shakiness, the one who had pressed ahead further and put Mo’s team of teachers and clinicians and caretakers in place. She was the strong one, and he never doubted that she would be able to tend their son with a mother’s warrior love. Ethan didn’t hide his deep sorrow from Ash—she felt her own sorrow, she said—but he kept from her his anger and indifference.

Whenever he started to think about Mo and all the possibilities for him that were now blocked off for good, Ethan’s thoughts turned elsewhere, usually toward his work, which was like an endless, interesting problem to be solved. The only place he wanted to be these days was in the studio, working. Over the past couple of years, he’d been referring to the studio unofficially as the Animation Shed, and recently the network had made the name official, with a sign on the glass wall when you arrived at the eighteenth floor of the office building in midtown on Avenue of the Americas. The actual animation for Figland was now produced in Korea, but preproduction and various other projects kept this place busy, hectic. Since Mo’s diagnosis, and even before it, Ethan had often stayed on at work after hours; he was rarely alone there. Someone was always in the middle of something and just couldn’t be pulled away. One night it was just him and the director, who was correcting timing on exposure sheets; they blasted old Velvet Underground music across the entire floor, and a security guard came up to see if anything was the matter. Late at night in the Animation Shed, Ethan Figman, the father of two young children—one delicate and brilliant, one compromised—offered suggestions and criticisms to staff members on points both huge and trivial. He was overworked from the discussions with network people and the table reads and recording sessions and all else, and was now suffering badly about his son; but still he would have liked nothing more than to remain at the studio for days on end, hiding out in the small private space that had been designed for him in an annex one flight up. Occasionally he even spent the night there, despite Ash’s protests. But she’d insisted on this family vacation, this bonding time among three people who were already bonded, and one who wasn’t but who needed to be bonded to the others and to the world.

Ash had a solid, reliable career now as artistic director of Open Hand. She had revived the ragged little East Village theater company and made it a place where young playwrights got their start and where young women in particular were given a shot in the still intractably sexist world of contemporary theater. Male playwrights and directors continued to dominate. (“Look at the studies,” Ash told everyone, handing out stapled Xeroxes that detailed the unfairnesses. “I know I look like a lunatic,” she’d said to Ethan, and, no, she did not look like a lunatic, but, yes, she could get repetitive, even though what she said was accurate, the facts disgraceful.) Open Hand had bought a larger, more elegant space around the corner on East 9th Street, and the first production that would be performed there, a two-hander by a young African-American woman about the estranged daughter of a Black Panther coming to visit her father on his deathbed, had won a few Obies and was in talks to move to Broadway. Ash was sometimes profiled in the arts sections of newspapers and in magazines; the respectful, praising pieces inevitably mentioned her marriage to Ethan—a fact that everyone already knew—and also referred to her physical beauty and grace. Both of these inclusions always bothered her.

“What do I have to do?” Ash said. “I mean, really? Or maybe the issue is, ‘What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?’”

“Be a man, I guess,” Ethan said, and then he added, “I’m really sorry; I know it sucks,” as if sexism in theater and everywhere else was his fault. He was known for hiring women at all levels, and for supporting women’s causes, but still he felt bad. Everyone knew most people gave authority more easily to men. “There is no expression ‘girl genius,’” Ash had once said. Ethan was relieved that Ash was finally being given responsibility and attention, though the world of an off-Broadway theater in the East Village was always going to be so much smaller and less splashy than that of television or film. Still, Ash didn’t require splashiness. Neither of them did. But splashiness had happened to Ethan.

The vacation was planned, and the resort on Bali was unsurprisingly luxurious. The last time Ethan had slept in a bed like this, with mosquito netting and the open sky beyond it, he and Ash had been on the island of Kauai with Dennis and Jules, both couples childless then. He realized how much he missed that. But it was also that he missed Jules, which never stopped. For while they’d stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn’t plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you’d once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one’s own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

Since having children, not only didn’t Ethan see Jules as often as he used to but he hardly ever saw Jonah at all; Jules had said the same thing to Ethan about Jonah. There was a further divide between those with children and those without, and you had to accept it. And now, having a developmentally disabled child like Mo seemed to have knocked everything into a more extreme arrangement. You and your family needed to heal, and you couldn’t do that with any of your friends around—neither the childless ones nor the ones with children—even though Ethan fervently wished you could. He would never tell Ash what he really felt about Mo, but he ached to confess it to Jules. I don’t know if I love him, Jules, he would say. I’m stubborn about my love, stingy about it. It comes and goes at all the wrong times.

In the big open-air bed of their villa, Larkin dive-bombed her parents, and Mo, age three, lay on his side, his thin body almost deliberately facing away from all of them. The whole family lay under purple Balinese fabric. Was any healing taking place yet? Let the healing begin, Ethan wanted to intone to Ash snidely. They’d been here for less than forty-eight hours. Was the “new reality” settling in? How in the world were you supposed to tell if it had started?

On the morning of their fourth day, Ash was asleep in bed in the breeze, and the children were eating breakfast on the terrace with Rose. Ethan sat in the shade of a big, shaggy-topped tree writing a postcard. He had addressed it to both Dennis and Jules to be considerate, but he really meant it for Jules, and of course she would know this.

“Dear D and J,” he wrote.


It would be so nice if you were here. But this is strictly family time, what with M’s diagnosis. All I can say is thank God for Rose, or else family time might become a little too much, and we might be inclined to leave Mo with the kindly fishmonger down the road. A JOKE! Mostly the trip has been peaceful. Ash was right, we did need to be away together for a while.

I’ve been thinking about you both a lot and I hope things are a little better than when we left last week. Please reconsider what we said, okay? More soon.


Love,



Ethan




Ethan knew that Dennis didn’t like to discuss his depression with their friends—he was embarrassed by it, and he wasn’t open about it with anyone but Jules—but though Rory was in school now, and Dennis’s stay-at-home services weren’t required full-time anymore, he still wasn’t ready to get a job outside the home that would require energy and focus and exactness and calm. Jules alone couldn’t earn enough money to support their family as well as she needed to in New York City in 1995. She had a close to full practice, but it didn’t pay nearly enough. Their apartment was the kind of place where you were supposed to live when you were starting out and childless; a place where you leapt up four flights of stairs to see your beloved, and where you clattered down those same flights to head out into the night with your gang of friends, all of you in your twenties, free agents, needing almost nothing. The Jacobson-Boyds didn’t belong there now; Rory didn’t even have her own bedroom. The small, difficult quarters made their situation—Dennis’s depression, the lack of money, the mostly unchangeable clients in Jules’s practice—seem only worse.

“We want to help you out,” Ethan had recently told them in a crowded restaurant. He’d said it before, but had always been shrugged away. The two families had gone out for one of those chaotic Sunday brunches young parents take with their children. Nobody has a good time, but everyone needs to find something to do with their kids on the weekend. Mo was in a booster seat, crying as usual—he always cried, it was just unbearable, but now they knew why. Everything grated against him, made him feel raw. Ash stood and went over to Mo, as she often did when he began to be upset. She was so natural and unflappable with him. Such an entitled girl she’d been, and yet she’d grown up into the kind of mother who could handle having a child with what people referred to now as “special needs.” Her ego hadn’t been fatally wounded by his diagnosis. She was a thoughtful mother to poor Mo, just the way she was a thoughtful lover to Ethan and a thoughtful friend to Jules and Dennis and Jonah and his boyfriend, Robert. Just the way she was thoughtful with the cast and crew of a play. “Gather round, everybody,” she said in her quiet voice, and even people in the farthest reaches of a theater would put down their hammers or scripts and come to her. At brunch, Mo, too, stopped his crying as though a switch had been thrown. His mother’s hand resting briefly on his stiff, coral-spined back made him look up sharply, squinting at her, remembering that she loved him. Remembering that there was such an element in the world as love. Ethan hadn’t been able to do that; or anyway he hadn’t thought to do that. Ash whispered magic words to their son—what did she say, “Shazam”?—and Mo’s body relaxed a little. Even Ethan’s body relaxed. Then she returned to her seat at the table, and Ethan just looked at her in wonder.

Rory was standing beside her own chair, shout-singing. Larkin sat quietly, drawing on her place mat with the crayons that the hostess had handed around to the children like bribes. Idly, Ethan glanced over to see what his daughter was drawing. On the place mat, she’d made an extremely accurate rendering of Wally Figman and a recent addition to the Figland cast, the opinionated love interest of Wally on the planet Figland, Alpha Jablon.

“Nice,” he said to her, startled by her skill.

Larkin glanced up, as if returning from very far away. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.

Oh, he thought, I see, she’s an artist. He felt sorry for her right then, as he sometimes felt sorry for himself. Though he was often so proud of Larkin, he wondered about early talent and the different fates it could meet. In his mind he checked off what had become of the six friends from that early summer, all of them meeting under the auspices of talent. One had become an artful, earnest stage director, finally breaking through, though would that have happened if she hadn’t had the ladder of her parents’ money and then Ethan’s money? No, not likely. One had closed down his musical talent for unknown reasons, remaining enigmatic to even the people who loved him. One had been born with a deep talent for dance, but by an accident of biology had been given a body that did not correspond to that talent past a certain age. One had been charming and privileged and lazy, with the potential to build things but also a longing to destroy them. One—Ethan himself—had been born with “the real thing,” as people wrote in reviews and profiles. Though he hadn’t been born into privilege, he too had been helped up the ladder over time, though the talent he possessed was squarely his. It had existed before the ladder ever appeared. But he didn’t even feel that he could take credit for his own talent, because he’d been born with it, and had simply discovered it while drawing one day, just the way Wally Figman had discovered that little planet, Figland, in a shoe box. And then there was the last of Ethan’s friends, who hadn’t been good enough at being funny onstage and had had to switch to another field, developing a skill more than an art. Jules’s clients apparently loved her; they were always bringing her gifts, and they wrote her moving letters after they no longer came to see her. But still Jules was disappointed in how she had ended up. Even now, Ethan wanted another outcome for her, and maybe it could still happen. Talent could go in so many directions, depending on the forces that were applied to it, and depending on economics and disposition, and on the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck.

“Look, I’m just going to put this out here pretty openly,” Ethan said to Dennis and Jules at brunch. “Will you let us help you?”

“No,” Dennis said. “We’ve already been through this.”

There was a moment of contemplative silence at the table, and it almost seemed as if even the children were listening to this adult conversation and understanding it, which Ethan strongly hoped was not true. He waited until the little girls started talking to each other, and then he quietly said to Jules and Dennis, “I’d like to think that if the situation were reversed, I’d be able to accept your help.”

Dennis looked at him for a long time, his eyes narrowing slightly. It was as if he was trying to imagine a situation in which Ethan Figman might actually need him. But he couldn’t, and neither could Ethan. Now both men were embarrassed.

Ash said, “Jules saves my life virtually every day,” and when Jules began to protest, Ash turned to her and said, “No, it’s true. You must be a wonderful therapist; I don’t care what you say about how your clients don’t really seem to break old patterns. You’re compassionate and loyal and witty and understanding, and they get so much from you. I don’t really know what friendship means if I can’t come in and help my closest friends when it’s called for. We’ve all been through a lot together already. Our lives are different now, I get that, but who’s the one I go to when I need someone to talk to—Shyla?”

“Who?” asked Dennis.

“You know,” Jules said to him quietly. “Shyla. Of Duncan and Shyla. Their good friends.”

“Oh, right,” said Dennis, and Ethan thought he saw a look pass between Jules and Dennis, but he wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t decipher it anyway.

“You’re the rock, Jules,” Ash said. “From the start.” She broke off and her face began to contort. At once, seeing her crying, Ethan thought of the loss of Goodman, and probably so did Jules; this was a moment of acknowledgment of the lost brother and how Jules had helped Ash cope with that. “And not just that, but also recently, with Mo,” Ash went on, and she looked right at Dennis, making her case directly to him. “Having her there with me when I went up to the Yale Child Study Center and Ethan had to be in LA—it saved me, it really did. And then afterward, when she came to the house for the night, it calmed me down. We’re just now dealing with Mo and the future. And knowing that I have Jules here for that is a big relief. So turn it around for a second, Dennis, and see this from our perspective. Our lives, Ethan’s and mine, have their own sadness; everyone’s does, you know that. But we also have resources that most people don’t have. I’m not trying to boast; it’s just true. I know you’re strapped, and going through a difficult patch in your life, and that the three of you are sort of on top of each other in the apartment. I realize it’s not the most fun time. Jules has told me what it’s like.”

Dennis looked at Jules impassively, and then Jules looked down at her plate of probably now unwanted, sickening brunch food under its slick of syrup. Ethan felt that Ash had misjudged, and had as a result inadvertently gone too far. He couldn’t bear upsetting Dennis or embarrassing Jules. He colored slightly just imagining Jules’s embarrassment. “The thing is,” Ethan quickly put in, “this is much more about us than it is about you. You may not feel you should take any help, but we need to give it. Can you really deny your oldest friends their deepest needs?” He gave them a deliberate expression of wide-eyed neediness, but nobody laughed. “Look, think about it while we’re away on our trip,” he said, and finally, if only to end the awkwardness, they agreed that they would.

Ethan didn’t want Jules to worry about money. He didn’t want Jules to worry about anything, even though part of his continuing love for her over the years was due to the fact that they could worry freely in front of each other, seeming foolish, idiotic, neurotic, all the while making jokes as they fretted and complained. Now, having been hustled off to Indonesia by his wife, Ethan walked down the path from their villa at the resort on Bali, clutching his postcard to Jules and Dennis. In the lobby, on one of the brown, cracked-leather couches, another guest of the resort sat reading The Financial Times. Ethan had seen him on the beach over the course of the week; he was American, in his fifties, shiny, trim, with a confident businessman’s sunniness. Ethan recognized that attitude from his father-in-law, back when he was employed. These days Gil Wolf sat in the apartment in the Labyrinth in an ergonomic chair, staring with cowed awe at the World Wide Web on his new Dell home computer.

The reader of The Financial Times put his paper down and smiled. “You’re Ethan Figman,” he said. “I’ve seen you around with your family.”

“Ah.”

“I’m glad even someone like you takes a break now and then. They say you’re a workaholic.”

“They?”

“Oh, chatter,” said the man. “I’m a workaholic too. Marty Kibbin. Paine and Pierce.” The men shook hands. “I’m glad you’re not here for some work thing. Some reconnaissance mission. Checking out the child labor scene in Jakarta, that sort of thing.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the merchandise.”

“Right,” said Ethan.

“It’s god-awful, no matter how you look at it,” the man went on easily. “Those subcontractors with the manufacturing rights can give you a real headache, but when CEOs get all pious, they need to go to, reminded that no one can police the world. No one. Things happen along the supply chain that you have no control over. Just give out the licenses to places that check out and seem decent, you know? And run your own company with the ethical code you were raised with.”

“Yes,” said Ethan. “Well, I should go.” What a lame excuse that was; no one at this resort had anywhere they had to go to, unless they had an appointment for a four-handed massage. He smiled thinly, and walked off. He must have dropped the postcard to Jules in the brass mail slot by the concierge’s desk, but later on he would have no memory of having done that. He was upset by the man’s self-assured words, and hoped he hadn’t just let the postcard fall from his hand onto the rush-covered floor.

Back at the villa, Ash stood in the teak shower with various nozzles shooting water at her from all directions. Through the open door he could see the moving lines of his wife’s young-seeming body, and also her head, which, whenever her hair was wet, appeared as small as an otter’s. He could also see the children and Rose and Emanuel out on the beach beyond the villa. Mo was crying again, his arms gesturing awkwardly and broadly; Rose and Larkin were attempting to comfort him.

Everyone considered Ethan a good person—“moral,” Ash always said, but they had no idea. No, you couldn’t police the world, but you told yourself you were doing the best you could. He had sat in on several meetings each year about the production of Figland merchandise. PLV Manufacturing was theoretically one of the cleaner operations, but they subcontracted all over China, India, and Indonesia, and all bets were always off when everything was handed to an overseas factory. It made Ethan seriously uneasy whenever he thought about what went on there. Maybe, he thought, latching on to a ludicrous idea, that was why Ash had unconsciously chosen this place for a vacation, and why he was here now.

Ethan got on the phone, placing a call to LA, where it was fourteen hours earlier. It was still last night in LA, but the executives he dealt with always worked until very late, so he knew he could reach them. Even if it was last year in LA now, someone would patch him through.

Jack Pushkin, who had replaced Gary Roman some years earlier, got right on the line. “Ethan?” he said, surprised. “Aren’t you in India?”

“Indonesia.”

“They’re the ones with rijsttafel, right? The rice dish? I’ve always wanted to try that.”

“Jack,” he said, stopping him.

“What is it, Ethan? What’s wrong?”

“I want to see what’s what.”

• • •

The conditions at the Leena Toys Factory at Kompleks DK2 in Jakarta were dismal by anyone’s reckoning, but nothing seemed extraordinarily outrageous—not that “extraordinarily outrageous” was a legal, technical, specific description. Ethan, dressed in the one nice linen shirt that Ash had had Emanuel pack “just in case,” followed the short, imperious Mr. Wahid, who took him through the squat, fused-together yellow industrial buildings where textiles were manufactured, and onto the floor. He saw the women, many in headscarves, huddled over their old sewing machines in an exposed-pipe, overheated space, but the scene didn’t seem all that different from the garment district in New York City where Ethan’s grandmother Ruthie Figman had once labored. Some of the machines here were unattended. “Slow day,” said Mr. Wahid, shrugging, uninterested, when Ethan inquired.

A skinny old man was trotted out to show Ethan what he was making: a shiny satin throw pillow decorated with Wally Figman’s face. Like everyone, Ethan was appalled that the workers earned what they earned, and he couldn’t call himself content after his brief tour of the depressing Leena Toys, a place you couldn’t help but never want to think about again. Yet after visiting he was also somehow not beside himself with guilt and self-hatred. He’d asked to see what one of these factories was like, and now he knew, and he could report back to everyone at the studio and the network about what he’d seen, and urge them to look into what could be done to increase overseas workers’ wages. Ash would want to get involved too, though of course she’d have no time, between running the theater and now starting to manage Mo’s complicated regimen.

Ethan had hired a pilot and a small plane to take him from Bali to Jakarta this morning, and before he made the return flight he thought he would spend a little time on his own in Jakarta; he was in no hurry to return to the healing of his family. He walked around the streets of Old Batavia, wandering in and out of little shops; he bought a snow globe for Larkin, and then he was at a loss as to what to bring Mo. What did you get for the boy who wanted nothing, and who gave his father nothing? It was a cruel question, but he knew he was the wrong father for this little boy, whose problems had become more obvious with each passing month, leading Ash to ignore the pediatrician’s blasé observations that some children need a long time to “settle.” Ash had taken action and made the appointment at the Yale Child Study Center. “Whatever they say, I know we can trust,” she’d said to Ethan. “I’ve read up on them.”

Those were the words that did it. Ethan couldn’t bear the idea that Mo would get an incontrovertible diagnosis, and that from then on, assuming it was bad (and he did assume it) they would have to reduce their expectations of him down to a sliver of soap. “The appointment is at ten a.m. on the twenty-third,” Ash said. “We drive up and spend two full days there, staying in a hotel at night, and they watch Mo, and they also watch us interacting with Mo, and they give him a battery of tests and do some physical exams, and at the end of the whole thing we sit down with the team and they tell us their findings and their recommendations.”

“I can’t make it,” Ethan said reflexively.

“What?”

He was shocked he’d said it, but now it was too late to take it back. He had to keep going. “I can’t, I’m sorry. The twenty-third? Two days? I have meetings in LA. People are flying in from overseas. If I don’t show up, then I’m insulting them.”

“Can’t you postpone the meetings?” she asked. “I mean, you’re the top person.”

“That’s exactly why I can’t. I’m sorry, I wish I could. I know, it’s horrible of me, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, I’ll try to change the date at Yale,” she said unpersuasively. “It generally takes a long time to get these appointments—some people wait a year or more—but, you know, I pulled strings. I guess I can pull them again, though I don’t want to seem ungrateful by rejecting the date they gave me when there supposedly were no dates.”

“You need to take him. Keep the date.” He thought fast, then said, “Can Jules go with you?”

“Jules? Instead of you? You’re Mo’s father, Ethan.”

“I feel terrible,” Ethan said, and this was actually true, interpreted loosely.

So he had told his wife a bold and monstrous lie, and then, when the twenty-third arrived and he supposedly had to be in LA, he hid out instead for two nights in the Royalton Hotel in New York, in a room that was chic but small, with a shower that was difficult to operate and a stainless steel sink that resembled a wok. Ash called Ethan’s cell phone at the end of the first day, when there was nothing conclusive to say yet, and then again late in the afternoon at the end of the second day, when the diagnosis of PDD-NOS had been given—a diagnosis that meant Mo was on the “spectrum.” She spoke to Ethan from the car, crying as she talked, and he kept extremely calm and told her he loved her. She didn’t ask whether he still loved Mo; that question wouldn’t have occurred to her. Ethan spoke to Ash for a while and then asked to speak to Jules, and cool as anything he asked Jules whether she could stay at the house that night with Ash, to comfort her. When Ethan got off the phone, he ordered room service for himself, and when it came he quickly gobbled the steak and the fingerling potatoes and the creamed spinach and drank half the bottle of wine. After pushing the cart out into the hallway he watched a porno film about cheerleaders and pathetically jerked off to it, and then he slept, his mouth open, barnyard loud.

Now he decided on buying a pinwheel for Mo from a shop, and he carried it through the streets, actually liking the clicking it made as the spokes turned. Ethan sat in a sleepy-looking restaurant in a very old building, eating noodles in broth from a blue bowl, loudly sucking each one up in a way that would have embarrassed his wife if she was here, which luckily she wasn’t. He sucked away. He was reading the book he’d brought with him on this vacation: Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, which had been Goodman’s favorite back when they were teenagers. This copy—Goodman’s copy, he knew, for the name was written clearly on the flyleaf in superslanted high-school handwriting—had sat on Ash and Ethan’s bookshelf all these years, and he’d never thought to read it. Ethan barely had time to read books anymore. He had recently found himself reading an article on the Web about hedge funds, absorbed in this subject as thoroughly as if it were literature, thinking about his own money as he kept reading, wondering whether he should invest with the charismatic guy who was being profiled—and he caught himself doing this and was shocked. He’d been lulled and snared by the pulsing screen and the promise of money begetting more money. It happened to people all the time; it had happened to him.

So when he saw the Günter Grass novel on the shelf at home he’d felt a tremendous and sad longing to connect with the book, and with Ash’s brother, his old, lost friend. Goodman had been torn away, taking lightness with him. Ethan wanted that early lightness back—he wanted schmucky, lively Goodman back, and all the goofing around they’d done, and then the talks after lights-out in the teepee, the discussions about what they’d like to do to Richard Nixon, what they’d physically like to do to him, which wasn’t pretty; and about sex, and fear of death, and whether there was an afterlife. Ethan wanted all that back, but instead what he had was Goodman’s copy of The Tin Drum, and he handled it reverently, making sure not to splash broth on it as he sat in that Jakarta restaurant. He was sitting with his noodles and his novel, feeling sorry for himself, when he suddenly imagined how others saw him. The people at the factory this morning must have thought of him as just another rich American idiot who wanted to reassure himself that everything in the world was fine. Everything is fine, rich American idiot, Mr. Wahid had essentially told him as he gave Ethan the nickel tour, and then showed him the door. As soon as he left, did they all cheer? Did the workers take out a pillow with Wally Figman’s face on it and kick it around like a football, then stomp on it and shred it to bits?

Ethan stood up suddenly, breathlessly, knocking his shin against the table leg. He paid for his meal quickly, leaving too many bills, and then he headed outside into the street, where he waved his arms clumsily to hail a bajaj, one of the orange three-wheel taxis that ferried passengers around the city. The bajaj whipped down the street, and when it turned a corner, Ethan felt sure that the back two wheels would be sheared off, and he would instantly smash into a wall. “Ethan Figman, 36, creator of Figland, dead in traffic accident in Jakarta” the headline would read.

Arriving back at the Leena Toys Factory, he was relieved to still have his pass with him, and the guard waved him through the gates, distracted. Ethan stood in the courtyard, unsure of who he should confront now and what he should say. Probably he should find Mr. Wahid again, and state his case to him forcefully, saying, You told me there was nothing more for me to see, but I don’t think that’s true. But he imagined he would get no satisfaction from that man. No one had admitted to anything, and they weren’t going to start now. Ethan pushed through the heavy metal doors, and went back onto the hot floor. At first, he perceived only the same clatter and heat, but then he sensed that it was a little different now, a little louder and more crowded. The machines were all in use, he realized; there were no spaces between people. Beside a hunched-over man was a hunched-over smaller man, and Ethan came closer to look at the face, which was not wizened or even settled into an acceptance of a hard life. This was a teenager—thirteen? fourteen?—and he hadn’t been here this morning. His head was dipped down and he was working with intensity, his hands buzzing around the machine. The man beside him looked up at Ethan with an expression of open anxiety. Busted, Ethan thought, busted. Across the way, was that a young girl? No, just an old woman with a delicate appearance. But there in the corner was a girl for certain, maybe twelve years old; it was hard to say. The underaged had not been here before when Ethan was given his tour; they had been told to come in late today, or to stay in their tiny, unlivable rooms until they were given the signal. It had all been arranged and handled brazenly, calmly, because their presence was as common as anything, was just the way it was, and because people knew Ethan Figman was some bleeding-heart liberal American animator who could put on funny voices and didn’t know anything about anything—he was essentially an infant—and was tickled by big profits, but needed to be reassured that everything was fine. How many children were on this floor? he wondered, and he had no idea but figured it was at least a dozen. Each one had a dark face and dark eyes that were focused on holding a square of shitty fabric under the stuttering piston of a needle. It was unbearable.

He stood there surrounded, looking at the children’s faces and feeling as if he was coated in sensation, and after a while he had to close his eyes. But even with his eyes closed, he saw them; they were overrunning the factory floor, they were devoting their days to Figland merchandise, and he was ashamed of the smiling face of Wally Figman on all the pillows, and even ashamed of his daughter’s happiness later that day when he presented her with the snow globe he’d bought. Then he thought of Mo, and knew that when he handed him the pinwheel, Mo would not be happy, would not be uplifted; but what could Ethan do? He was unable to open his own heart to his son. He felt perverse. He knew his detachment hadn’t come about because he needed Mo to perform, the way Ash’s parents had needed her to perform. Ethan and Ash had two children, a boy and a girl, like the Wolfs; and just as Goodman’s lack of discipline had been intolerable to Gil Wolf, Mo’s problems made Ethan feel as if the world would now see his own distorted nature, revealed through his son. Ethan had imagined his life was nearly perfect except for the flawed son; but the flaw was in the father.

He would start to atone for his detachment and emptiness. Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

• • •

The postcard didn’t arrive in the Jacobson-Boyd mailbox until weeks later, having been ripped nearly in half and then taped back together. The trip from Bali to New York City had been almost too much for that oblong of stiff paper with the painting on its front of the Balinese god of love. But Ethan, when he went to visit Jules himself only a few days after his return, was in very good shape. With no warning he had called her and asked if he could come over.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Now?”

It was the middle of the day on a Saturday, and Jules and Dennis’s apartment was unkempt. Rory had been “learning” karate lately, and she frequently chopped the pencils and balsa wood sticks that Dennis bought her in bulk at the hardware store. The floor of the living room was littered with broken wood, and no one had the energy to clean it up. Dennis was still asleep. He’d been on yet another new antidepressant, and one of the side effects was that he was very, very sleepy. Shouldn’t an antidepressant try to keep you in the world more? This one wasn’t doing that. Jules had asked Dennis to talk to Dr. Brazil about this, but she had no idea if he had.

“Yeah. Now,” said Ethan.

“I don’t have anything in the house,” Jules said. “And I look like crap.”

“I doubt it.”

“Also, Dennis is sleeping. The place is pretty chaotic. By which I mean it’s hell. I’m warning you: you would be walking into hell.”

“You sure know how to entice me, you siren you,” said Ethan.

It was unusual for Ethan to come over without Ash. Jules and Ethan had occasionally gone out for a meal on their own in recent years, but mostly in their thirties they saw each other in the context of being couples, then families. There used to be all those couple vacations, which had given Ethan and Jules a chance to sit together and talk, but after the children were born, the group vacations had mostly stopped. Now it had been a very long time since they’d seen each other alone, and it was almost as though they’d forgotten the perfection of their original, single-selves’ friendship.

Jules hung up the phone in the living room and turned around. Behind her, Rory was dressed in her gi, with her arm raised in the air over the ledge of the table, hovering above a pencil. “Hi-yaaaaa!” she cried, and when the pencil cracked, she jumped in pleasure, as though there was even a chance that a simple Ticonderoga no. 2 might be able to resist the side of the hand of a girl as strong as she was.

A while later, with Rory off in the bathroom doing experiments at the sink, and with Dennis still not having arisen, Jules watched the street from the living room window and saw the Town Car arrive. A driver got out and opened the back door, and Ethan appeared, scratching his head. Then the driver handed him a small bag, which Ethan took, and headed for the entrance of the walk-up building. Jules hoped he wasn’t thinking of how poor the building looked, but was instead reminded that some people lived in a way that was modest but true to themselves—that some people had not entirely changed. Some people had no Town Car. What was a Town Car, and why did they call it that? What town did it refer to? The buzzer sounded and she let him in. Peering out the apartment door, she watched as Ethan Figman began to climb the four flights, slowing down as he rose. When he got to three and stopped for a moment, winded, she called down to him, “You’re doing great! Almost at nineteen thousand feet!” He looked up at her and waved.

Once he got to five, he didn’t make a show of what a big climb it had been. He seemed to know that Jules had developed a jokey attitude about living in a walk-up building only in order to deflect the comments she often heard from anyone who made the climb. Ethan put his arms around her, and Jules couldn’t recall when they’d actually last embraced; in their foursome there were often kisses and hasty hugs, but because their lives were so scattered and children were always swirling and pulling, all touching had a distracted, thoughtless quality. Here, in the doorway, just the two of them, Ethan Figman hugged Jules Jacobson-Boyd with what seemed to her like undiluted and almost overwhelming feeling.

“Hi, you,” he said.

“Hi, you.” She pulled back and looked at him. He was mostly the same: still indisputably homely, but he now had more sun in his face, and seemed somehow less burdened than usual. “Did you sunbathe on Bali or something?” she asked.

“Nope,” he said. “But I walked around Jakarta. That was interesting. Can we go in? I have things that need to be eaten.”

He had brought her the best brioches in New York City. “They’re as warm as baby birds,” Jules said when she opened the bag. “Peep, peep, peep.”

“Where is everyone?” Ethan asked.

“Dennis hasn’t put in an appearance yet. Rory is making penicillin in the bathroom sink. I know she’ll want to come out and see you before too long.”

They sat on the living room couch, eating the small, buttery things. Neither Ash nor Dennis was a big eater; Ash was too tiny for that, and Dennis’s appetite had flattened out in recent years, though he still weighed a little too much from the different drugs. Jules and Ethan, though, now sat in sated silence. She thought again of Ethan’s walk-in refrigerator, which had survived the move from the Tribeca loft to the Charles Street brownstone; she knew how differently stocked it would be if she were the one married to him. These brioches would always be on hand, along with the brick of farm butter he had brought. You would walk into that cold room and find anything that people like Ethan and Jules liked.

How was it possible that she still related so closely to him, and he to her? There was a bit of butter dotting his lip right now, and probably there was a bit of butter dotting hers. Ethan seemed curiously happy today. The purpose of the visit, she was sure, was to once again discuss the monetary gift that he and Ash wanted to give her and Dennis. He would offer them several thousand dollars, maybe even as much as five or ten thousand, and she would feel sick at the offer, so much did they need that money, but so unwilling would she be to take it, particularly because Dennis wouldn’t want them to.

It was probably for the best that Dennis was still in bed. He didn’t need to be part of this, after they’d already gone over it so uncomfortably at brunch recently. She would continue to put Ethan off, despite the fact that she and Dennis owed so much to two different credit card companies, and to the well-intentioned but mostly useless Dr. Brazil. Jules also still had student loans to pay, as well as estimated quarterly taxes. Once, they had thought of having a second child, but between her single income and Dennis’s depression, it was a bad idea. Plus, you needed to have sex in order to get pregnant, and that wasn’t happening very often anymore. Everything had slowed, was stopping.

“Now look,” Ethan began.

“I don’t want you to do this, Ethan.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I was going to start off by telling you a story about something that happened in Indonesia.”

“Oh,” she said, and she sat back, a little surprised but still suspicious. “All right. Go ahead.”

Ethan drank the coffee she’d served to him in a Figland mug that he must have given them years earlier. He held it up high now and looked at the bottom of it, then put it down. “I asked to go see a factory,” he said, “where they make some of the merchandise. There are different types of factories, ones for metals or plastics; they have these molds that they use. This particular factory was for textiles, and of course what I saw there, child labor, is a really common sight, but I just couldn’t tolerate it. It just screams out at you, and you have to do something. You can’t just keep going on your merry way. I know that how I came to it isn’t great; it’s like those Republicans who are against gun control until their wives are shot in the head. But I decided that I had to pull out of this whole thing, at least to whatever degree they’ll let me. I called my lawyer and asked him what he thought we could ask for, and what he thought we could get. Then we had a huge conference call on the phone with Pushkin.”

“I’m assuming this isn’t the Russian writer.”

“Pushkin has never read Pushkin. That tells you a little bit about who he is. If you shared a name with one of the great Russian writers, wouldn’t you at least try to read him? Jack Pushkin is an executive at the studio, and he’s not a bad guy at all. But when my lawyer told him that we wanted to move some of the merchandising out of the factories and bring it back to the States, he got really silent really fast. Obviously. It’s incredibly complicated, and what’s going to happen to those kids and their families, right? Will they keep working? Will they be okay? Is there something else that can be done for them? It’s a terrible, terrible situation. These questions could break your head open.”

“I can see that.”

“I was thinking about all of that on the phone, while Pushkin and my lawyer were fighting, and then Pushkin hung up. He called back about two seconds later, very apologetic, and everybody had to get conferenced in again, which is not so easy when one of you is in Indonesia. They continued their talks without me, and by the time I got back to New York I found out that everybody tentatively agreed on the basic idea, though they’re still haggling. It’s a really huge deal. My lawyer said that if they didn’t just say yes, it would make them look really bad. They’re losing so much money on this, not just because of labor costs but because of the overseas tax breaks, which they’re going to have to sacrifice for the greater good. So they’re taking a hit, but at least I’m doing something I can live with—though who knows, maybe it’ll turn out worse than it had been to begin with. Anyway, they get to send out a press release saying how proud they are that we’re doing this thing. A small, as-yet-to-be-determined percentage of the manufacturing moved over here, to struggling factories in upstate New York. And I’ve just started talking to this woman at UNICEF about bringing in money to those workers, those kids. And I asked her whether it might be possible even to start a school for them over there. She said she’d put me in touch with some people. I know I still cause harm, probably a ton of it no matter what I do. And it kills me, it just kills me, that maybe the best you can ever do is cause less harm. But there you have it.”

“I’m sorry, but I think you are the least harmful person I know,” said Jules.

“Oh, I’m sure that isn’t true,” Ethan said. “But at least now I’m a harmful person who had an epiphany. I call it the Jakarta transformation. At least when I’m talking to myself.”

“So what does Ash say?”

“She’s supportive. She’s not one of those critical spouses,” he said. “You aren’t either,” he added after a moment, but Jules didn’t say anything. “You wouldn’t do that to Dennis. You just let him be himself, and go through what he has to go through.”

“Do I have a choice?” asked Jules, and it came out so sour. “It’s the middle of the day, and you and I are having a conversation about actual things, and eating actual food, while Dennis lies in bed.”

Ethan gave her a long, considering look. “I know it’s very hard for both of you,” he said.

“He’s so passive,” she burst out. “We used to laugh all the time, and talk a lot, and have good sex—excuse me for saying that, Ethan—and he had a lot of energy. Then everything stopped. He’s taken care of Rory, which has been a huge and admirable job, and stay-at-home parents never get enough credit, and I don’t want to underplay what he’s done. But you know he’s still not fully here. He has no desires for himself. It’s like when my father was dying, that same kind of slow-motion loss. But now it just goes on and on. A person who’s half here and half not. I don’t want that, and I feel so selfish saying it. I don’t want him to go through this, of course, but I also think about Rory and me.”

“And there’s really nothing else he can try? It seems like everyone in the world is on an antidepressant, and they’re always mixing and matching. I don’t mean to take this lightly, but is there really nothing that can work?”

“Oh, you know, sometimes a new drug seems to be having an effect. And we get all hopeful. But then he tells me it’s not working after all. Or else the side effects are bad. I see depressed people in my practice, but his depression, even though it’s supposedly ‘low-level,’ is just so tenacious, and hard to treat. Atypical, they call it.”

“If you want to experience over-the-top depression,” said Ethan, “just go to Jakarta and see how those workers live. That’ll really depress you.”

“Just what I want,” said Jules. “More depression in my life.”

Rory appeared then in the entry of the living room, still wearing her gi, though the sleeves were now dripping from what she’d been doing in the sink. She bowed deeply to Ethan, who stood and bowed back. “Ethan, I’ve gotten very good at destroying wood,” Rory said.

“That’s good, Rory. Wood is evil. That’s what I tell Larkin every day.”

“I know you’re teasing me. Want to see me destroy a piece of wood?”

“Naturally.”

Rory placed a thick piece of wood on the edge of the table and said, “Hi-yaaaaa!” and split the thing in half. The wood went flying, some of it landing under the radiator. It would stay there for months, years, wedged in a small space even after the Jacobson-Boyd family moved out. The wood would go unnoticed for a very long time, like the library book that had been flung under the bureau during Rory’s conception. Jules often thought of that night; she remembered Dennis in black tie, and how substantial he’d looked, how full of himself. That was it: Ethan was full, and Dennis now wasn’t. Depression sprang a leak. Dennis was leaking.

“You’re a genius at karate, kiddo,” Ethan said, and then he pulled Rory onto his lap.

“You can’t be a genius at karate,” declaimed Rory.

“No, that’s true. I can’t. But you can.”

Rory understood the joke and laughed chestily. “Ethan Figman, THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT!” she said in a voice that was so sure of itself and so deep that Jules sometimes referred to her as James Earl Jones. There was no point in telling Rory that she had to use her inside voice; she didn’t really have any idea how to modulate. She was spirited, full of herself too, the way Jules had just been thinking Ethan was.

Rory slipped off, went to destroy more wood in the front hallway. Ethan said to Jules, “Okay, I have to leave. Ash wants me to look at some set designs for that Balinese play. But before I go, you and I have to talk about the thing between us. The horrible thing about one friend helping another.”

“I never get to help you,” Jules said. “You’re always helping me and Dennis and everyone else.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “You know you help me.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re talking about me going with Ash to the Yale Child Study Center? I know she brought that up at brunch, but it was no big deal. And anyway, I helped her that day more than you.”

“You helped both of us.” He looked at her for a long, unblinking moment, and then said, “All right. I’m going to tell you something now that I really wasn’t planning on telling you. But I’m just going to do it. And once I do, you’re obviously free to think anything you want about me.” He crossed his arms, looked away and then looked back at her. “You know how I couldn’t come that day because I was in LA?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t in LA. I was hiding out at the Royalton Hotel in midtown. I just couldn’t bring myself to go up there and hear them give my son a definitive diagnosis. They were the experts, and once they said what I pretty much knew they were going to say, they couldn’t unsay it. I should have gone up there with Ash. But I just couldn’t bear it.”

Jules stared at him, her eyes first wide, then narrow. “Really?” she said. “You did that?”

“I did that.”

“Wow.”

“Say something,” Ethan said.

“I just did. I said wow. As in, I can’t believe that you did something . . . so morally bad. And that you did it to Ash.” Despite herself, Jules began to laugh.

“I can’t imagine why you’re laughing,” said Ethan, who wasn’t smiling at all, but appeared very somber and still.

“What you told me is just so unlikely,” said Jules. “You did something really not good, and I don’t know what to make of it.”

“I’ve been telling you for a long time that I’m not so good. Why doesn’t anyone believe me? Did you know that I yell at people too? People I work with? I never used to do that, but everything’s become so stressful. I yelled at one of the writers and called him a hack. Then I spent the entire table read apologizing to him. My temper is short, and I’ve made some horrible decisions. You know the spin-off Alpha? The one that just got shelved? The studio lost a shitload of money on that because I insisted it would work. I sort of convinced myself that everything related to Figland would turn to gold. But that can’t happen if it isn’t good; and the spin-off was pretty lame. But I pushed it through because I got delusional about the Figland brand. They’re all mad at me over there, but they won’t say it. This has actually not been a good moment for me professionally, but I act like it is. And I hid out in a hotel room for two nights while you went up to New Haven with Ash to have Mo diagnosed.”

“I really cannot believe you did that,” Jules said. It was terrible what Ethan had done to Ash, abandoning her at such an important moment, but the fact that he hadn’t confessed it to Ash, and had confessed it to Jules instead, gave this exchange a sudden intimacy.

He looked at her with his familiar, searching eyes, and said, miserably, “I don’t even know that I love him.”

Jules gave this a moment, and it seemed rude to refute it, but she felt strongly that she had to. She folded her arms and said, “I think you do.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to know. Just do the right things around him. Be loving. Be attentive. Don’t leave it all on Ash again, okay? Just say to yourself, This is love, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And then go barreling ahead even when you feel cheated that this is how things have turned out. He’s your little boy, Ethan. Love him and love him.”

Ethan was silent, and then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I will try to do that. I will really try, Jules. But Jesus, there is nothing of Old Mo in my kid. Nothing.” Then he added, worriedly, “You won’t tell Ash?”

“No.” But Jules thought, suddenly, that if Ethan told Ash, then maybe Ash could tell him about Goodman. It was all about leverage, and Ash would have it at that moment. But Ash wouldn’t want to do that; she would never want to.

Ethan said, “All right, that’s enough about this. Thank you for letting me unburden myself to you. Please don’t hate me, at least not overtly. I will really think about what you said. And now here’s the part that’s not about me; here’s the part about you and Dennis. Every day, in my work life, there are people who want me to give them something because it’s my job to do that, and then there are other people who want me to give them something because they think it’ll advance their careers. I usually end up saying yes to everyone, regardless, because it’s easier that way. When in fact the person I really want to give something to is you. You and Dennis,” he amended. Ethan reached into his pocket and felt around. “Shit,” he said. “I know I brought it.” He frisked himself. “God, where is it? Oh wait, here we go.” Ethan extracted a small, folded piece of paper and smoothed it out; it was a bank check with his signature on it. He handed it to her and she saw that it was made out to her and Dennis, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.

“No!” Jules said. “This is a ridiculous amount. And Dennis will never let you do it.”

“Is it fair to let a depressed person call the shots?” Jules didn’t answer him. “This’ll make life a little easier,” Ethan said. “That’s something that money can really do. You know I’m not really into things—but money isn’t just for things. In my experience it also paves your life, so you don’t have to think about all the constant worries and problems. It just makes everything run so much more smoothly.”

“We could never pay it back.”

“I don’t want you to. The point is that you work really hard, you’re dedicated, and New York is so tough and unforgiving. Dennis will come around eventually. Something will change for him, I know it will. But in the meantime you’ve got to leave this apartment, Jules. It’s a step. Go put a down payment on someplace bright and modern that gives you a hopeful feeling each day. I’ll cosign the mortgage. I want you to feel like you’re getting a new start, even if you aren’t, exactly. Sometimes you just have to trick yourself a little. Move someplace with an elevator; those stairs are a bitch. Also, give Rory her own room already. She needs it! And buy her some more pencils and wood and whatever else she wants. There’s nothing worse than money anxiety. I used to hear my parents arguing about money, and I was positive they were tearing each other’s flesh from their bones. I thought that in the morning they’d come out of their bedroom with their skin hanging off. Plus, constantly worrying about money is boring. Use your brain to think about your clients and their problems. Use it to be creative.”

“There’s no way I can take a hundred thousand dollars from you.” Jules held out the check and tried to tuck it back into his shirt pocket.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he said, dodging her, laughing slightly. “Come on, take it, Jules, take it.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“I’m sorry, you have to, I’m afraid it’s too late,” Ethan said, and he stood and backed away, as though there were nothing he could do about it now.

• • •

A little while after Ethan left, Rory stormed the bedroom where Dennis slept, climbed up on the bed, and stood above him. When he opened his eyes in the darkened room his daughter was looming, one leg on either side of his chest. “Daddy,” she announced. “Guess what? Ethan Figman gave Mom a hundred dollars. And he said, ‘Take it, Jules, take it.’ I heard them from the hallway. A hundred dollars,” she boomed, scandalized.

Dennis got out of bed and came into the living room. “Ethan was here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jules said. “He called and asked if he could come over. He brought some really good brioches, if you want one.”

“I don’t want his really good brioches. And as you already know, I don’t want his money. Was it all in twenties or one crisp new bill? I mean, this is so pathetic, Jules, so humiliating, I can’t believe it. Why would you take it? What are you, a homeless person?”

“What are you talking about, Dennis?”

“Rory told me about the hundred dollars.”

“Oh, she did?” Jules laughed in a single, hollow syllable.

“What?” he said, confused.

She brought over the check, holding it out to him in such a way that, when discussing it later, he could not say she had thrust it at him.

Dennis took it, looked at it, and closed his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. He sat down on the couch and put his hands to his head. “I was insulted by the idea of a hundred dollars. But now I’m much more insulted. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Dennis, it’s okay,” Jules said.

“If you want to get out of this marriage, then just do it,” he said. “You didn’t ask for this.”

“I’m not saying anything like that. Why are you talking about it?”

“This isn’t good. I was fun to be with back before the stroke, back before they changed my meds, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, of course.”

“God, I hate the word ‘meds.’ I hate that it’s something I have to think about. I try to remember, I was fun, and I can be fun again. But I keep finding myself unable to do that. Or else I do something all wrong. That girl from Kentucky with the liver mass—if it was malignant she’s probably dead by now. Oh Jesus, now I’m going to obsess about her again. Everything is such an effort. I’m not crisp like you and Rory. And I know I’m going to lose you.”

“You’re not,” said Jules. Here he was in the middle of the day, in soft, creased clothes. He had lost all crispness the night he ate the food containing hidden stores of tyramine, and then she and everyone had continued marching through the world while he struggled. He might lose her if they stayed as they were. She saw this now, and it was like looking ahead to the very sad ending of a novel, then quickly shutting the book, as if that could keep it from happening. “Dennis, we have to get out of this moment in our lives,” she said. “We have to leave this place, for starters. This apartment. You have to keep trying whatever you can try. Newer medications. More exercise. Mindfulness. Whatever. But I think, just this one time, we need to accept Ethan and Ash’s help.”

Dennis looked at her searchingly, and then Rory reappeared; her timing was always exact in this way, as though she was guided by electrical impulses that led her toward the heat in any given, tense moment. She stood before her parents, looking from one face to the other. “Is that the hundred dollars?” she asked her father.

“Yes.”

Satisfied, Rory looked at her mother, and who knew what complexities caused her to make the request, the demand, that she then made. “Mommy, kiss Daddy,” she said.

“What?” said Jules.

“Kiss Daddy. I want to see.”

“A kiss is kind of private, babe,” Dennis said, but Jules took him by both sides of his face and pulled him toward her; he did not resist. Their eyes were closed, but they could hear Rory laugh—a low, satisfied laugh, as if she knew the full extent of her power.