The Interestings A Novel

FIFTEEN





Then they were in another place half a dozen blocks north, a cleaner, brighter place, “an elevator building!” they remarked to each other with wonder, as if such a thing were unheard of. They actually owned this apartment, and on moving day, when the miracle elevator took them upstairs to their new, bright, though slapped-together rooms with the smell of paint and polished floors, they felt as if they had been saved. They weren’t saved; they’d only been transplanted somewhere different and better, in a co-op whose mortgage Ethan had cosigned. And Dennis’s depression was certain to hang around like a paint smell that wouldn’t fade, but still it was something. The movers worked, dropping everything in the middle of the rooms. The same framed posters—Threepenny Opera, a Georgia O’Keeffe animal skull—which they’d outgrown but could not yet replace, would soon decorate these new walls. Ash came over to help in the afternoon, and as a joke she wore one of the moving company’s red T-shirts. SHLEPPERS, it read. Who knew how she’d gotten one from them? She went right to work, tearing open cartons and helping assemble Rory’s bedroom—an actual bedroom of her own, not just a corner of a living room turned into a bedroom at night. Jules could hear them, Ash’s soft voice inquiring, and then Rory’s loud voice intoning, “Don’t put the Rollerblades away, Ash. Mom and Dad say I can wear them IN THE APARTMENT like my Indian moccasin slippers.” They were in there together, the best friend and the little girl, until the room was completely unpacked. At eight in the evening Ash was still at the new apartment, and they all ate Vietnamese food from what would become their primary takeout restaurant for over twelve years, until it closed during the recession of 2008. Jules tore the plastic wrap and packing tape from the couch and they sat on it with plates and silverware they had dug up from boxes marked KITCHEN 1 and KITCHEN 2. Rory ate too many spring rolls, one after another, then belched appreciatively and went into her new room and fell asleep in her clothes. The three adults were hopeful—even, guardedly, Dennis.

“This is going to be good,” Ash said. “I’m excited for you.”

She sat with them, talking about the apartment and her theater company and about how great Mo’s therapists were, and how he’d already shown some improvement. “He’s working so hard with Jennifer and Erin. He’s my hero, that boy.” Ethan was in Hong Kong this week, and Ash was keeping all the parts of their lives going.

“When you have a child,” she’d recently said to Jules, “it’s like right away there’s this grandiose fantasy about who he’ll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child gets pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit. So now you know he’s not going to be an athlete. And now you know he’s not going to be a painter. Now you know he’s not going to be a linguist. All these different possibilities fall away. But with Mo, I’ve seen a lot of things fall away, really fast. Maybe they’ll be replaced by other things I can’t even imagine now; I really don’t know. But I met this mother recently who said that she’d become so grateful that her child is high-functioning. She said she’d become proud of the term high-functioning, as if it was the same as National Merit Scholar.”

Jules thought about her own child, and though she had the suspicion that Rory would have a life that wasn’t gilded with specialness and privilege, she knew Rory wouldn’t even want that kind of life. She was happy with herself; that was apparent. And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot. Rory and Larkin might well do fine; Mo, with his long, anxious face and active fingers—who knew?

On the night of the move, Ash went home at around ten, saying she was exhausted, and joking that she and the other Shleppers had a job in the morning in Queens. That night, not too far away, on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth, Ash’s mother Betsy Wolf, age sixty-five, was awakened from sleep by a headache so tremendous she could only whimper “Gil,” and touch her head to show him what was wrong. It was a bleed to the brain, and she died immediately. Later, after the trip to the hospital and the paperwork, Ash called Jules, barely able to speak, and the ringing phone in the night and the crying friend told the story. Ethan was in Hong Kong, Ash reminded her; could Jules come over now? Of course, Jules said, I’ll be right there, and she dressed in the darkness of the new, unfamiliar apartment among the unpacked boxes, and went down in the elevator in the middle of the night to find a cab.

She had not been to the Labyrinth for years now; there had been no reason to go there anymore, and on the ride up in the gold elevator she held her arms around herself, feeling sad and full of dread as she rose. Ash opened the apartment door and fell against Jules so hard it was as if she had been flung. Having lost her mother, she appeared so different from how she’d been all afternoon and evening, helping Rory put her room together, then sitting around with everyone, eating sugarcane shrimp. “What am I going to do?” Ash said. “How can I not have a mother? How can I not have my mother? We just talked tonight, when I got home from your new place. And now—she doesn’t exist anymore?” A fresh bout of almost assaulted-sounding weeping began.

Jules kept her arm around her and they stood together for a couple of minutes. Behind Ash, the apartment revealed itself dimly, both real and somehow like a stage set for this apartment instead of the actual place. She took in the wide foyer and then the living room, and the long hallway that led to all those bedrooms where the Wolfs had lived and slept. Jules tried to think of something to say to Ash, but all she could do was agree with her. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Your mother was an amazing person. She wasn’t supposed to die so young.” Or ever, was what Jules meant. Betsy Wolf at sixty-five had still been a beauty. She was a docent at the Met, and taught an art class there for children on Saturdays. Everyone always said how young and elegant she looked.

When Jules’s father had died, that had been a tragedy too, even more of one if you thought of it in terms of age. “Forty-two,” Ethan had once marveled. “So f*cking unfair.” Jules wanted to explain to Ash how the death of a parent is such a big and inexpressible event that all you can do against it is shut yourself down. That was what Jules—Julie—had originally done. She’d shut herself down, and she hadn’t started herself up again until that summer when she first met the rest of them. Julie would have done all right on her own, Jules suddenly thought. She would have been fine, would probably have been pretty happy.

Finally Ash extricated herself and walked ahead into the living room, so Jules followed. What was it about the place now—what made it seem frayed? Maybe it could have used a paint job, or maybe it had immediately absorbed the death of Betsy Wolf, so that everything about this room and this apartment that had once been warm and glittering had now been dimmed and dulled—and even the familiar lamps and rugs and ottomans were symbols not of comfort and familiarity but of something useless, wasteful, even awful. Ash threw herself down on the loosely slipcovered couch and put her hands over her face.

Almost immediately there was a sound, and Jules turned to see Ash’s father standing in the entrance of the living room. While in her new grief Ash looked like a young girl, Gil Wolf just looked old. He wore a bathrobe; his silver hair was tufted and he seemed bewildered and slow. “Oh,” he said. “Jules. You’re here.”

She gave him a careful hug, saying, “I’m so sorry about Betsy.”

“Thank you. We had a good marriage,” he said. “I just thought it would be so much longer.” Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn’t matter anymore. He looked over at Ash and said, “That sleeping pill you gave me hasn’t kicked in.”

“It will, Dad. Give it a little time. Just go lie down.”

“Did you call?” he asked with anxiety.

Jules didn’t know what this meant, but then immediately she did: Did you call your brother?

“I’m about to.” Ash helped her father down the hall to bed, and then she went into her old bedroom to make the call. Jules didn’t dare follow her, not wanting to see the mausoleum bedrooms that had once belonged to Ash and Goodman. She stayed in the living room, sitting stiffly in an armchair. Ash’s mother did not exist anymore, Ash had said. Betsy’s hair, in its bun, the strays coming loose in filaments, did not exist; the New Year’s Eve parties she’d overseen did not exist; the lat-kees she’d fried in a pan each Chanukah did not exist. Goodman had gone into hiding, but Betsy was the one who was gone.

Ash’s mother’s funeral was held four days later at the Ethical Culture Society, where Jules had attended memorials for various men who had died of AIDS, and then the wedding of her teepeemate Nancy Mangiari. For Betsy’s funeral they all had to wait for Ethan to return from Hong Kong on the network’s private jet. Jules’s own mother had said she wanted to come to the funeral. “But why, Mom?” Jules asked irritably on the phone. “You didn’t really know Ash’s mother. You only met her at the airport once, like a hundred years ago in 1977, when I went to Iceland with them.”

“I know,” said Lois. “I remember it well. They were very generous, taking you along like that. And Ash has always been so dear. I’d like to pay my respects.”

So Lois Jacobson took the Long Island Railroad into the city from Underhill and attended the funeral with Jules. It was an openly emotional memorial, crowded with family friends and relatives; it seemed as if everyone connected with the Wolfs wanted to speak. Cousin Michelle, who’d gotten married in the Wolfs’ living room and danced to “Nights in White Satin” and was now, incredibly, about to be a grandmother, spoke about Betsy’s generosity. Jules herself stood and said a few stiff words about loving the sensation of being around the Wolf family, though as she spoke she realized she didn’t want to go too far and hurt her own mother’s feelings. With Lois in the room, she couldn’t say, “When I was with them, I was happier than I’d ever thought I could be.” She kept her remarks very brief, and looked right at Ash, who was having a very hard time getting through this. Ethan’s arm was around her, steadying her, but Ash could barely be steadied. On her other side sat Mo, in a shirt and tie. He sat forward in his seat, both hands driving a Game Boy, as if he could steer himself away from this entire event.

After Jules, Jonah stood and spoke, handsome in his dark, tailored suit, while in his seat to the side, Robert Takahashi watched him closely. Jonah so rarely spoke in front of a gathering of people; he didn’t perform, he didn’t do this sort of thing. The last time might have been at Ash and Ethan’s wedding. But here he was now, and everyone seemed to like looking at him, and listening to him. “I had many dinners at the Wolfs’ apartment when I was young,” he said. “Everyone tended to stay at the table for a long time, and there was always joking around, and really good conversation, and amazing meals. I tasted foods there that I’d never had in my life. My own mother was a vegetarian long before you could be one and actually eat well. So our meals at home were a little . . . you know. But whenever I went over to the Wolfs’ apartment, Betsy would be in the kitchen whipping something up. One night she served a new pasta, and she told us it was called orzo, and she spelled it out for me when I asked. O-R-Z-O. But I remembered the name wrong, and I kept going into supermarkets and asking, ‘Do you carry ozro? O-Z-R-O.’ And no one knew what I was talking about.” There was laughter. “But you know, God, this was all so long ago,” Jonah added. “I just . . .” He stopped, unsure of what to say. “I just want to say that I’d give anything for another one of Betsy’s meals.”

Finally Larkin, barely five and a half, stood and walked to the podium, tipping the microphone down, and said in a hoarse voice, “I’m going to read a poem I wrote for Grandma B.” First, it was strange enough that Larkin looked almost exactly the way Ash had looked in the photos from when she was that young. Larkin’s beauty had somehow been untouched by the Ethanness in her, which had revealed itself in the brain and on the surface of the skin, but not in the facial features; today Larkin wore a dress that covered her arms, and Jules thought she knew why.

The poem was very precocious and moving: “Her warm hand could always cool our fevers,” was one of the lines, and Larkin cried as she read it, her nose and mouth twisting to the side. At the end she said, “Grandma B., I’ll never forget you!” Her voice broke, and much of the room cried in one swoop at the sight of this overcome little girl. Jules suddenly thought of how Goodman should have been here. First he had missed his dog’s death—a rehearsal, in the scheme of things—and now this, the real event.

Maybe everyone in the room was thinking about Goodman too. Jules wondered if he’d wanted to come to the funeral, if he’d even discussed with Ash the possibility of flying here and showing up. Jules looked toward the door in the back, as if she expected him to be lurking beneath the exit sign, taking his chances that no one here would dare to turn him in. She could see him standing with his head bowed, his shoulders set, and his hands folded, a tall middle-aged man dressed in the clothes of someone who had been traveling on a plane all night. But because Jules had not seen Goodman for nineteen years, all she could picture was his young handsome face juxtaposed with gray-stippled hair.

Goodman was lightly mentioned in the female minister’s list of the people Betsy had left behind. Frequently when Jules looked at Ash and Ethan during the service, Ash was bent over, as if her mother’s death had brought her near death herself. Ethan had his arm around her the entire time. He was dropping everything for a while, he’d said when he returned from Hong Kong; he was canceling a speech at Caltech, postponing meetings about the Keberhasilan School that he was trying to create in Jakarta. Finally, when the head of the Ethical Culture Society seemed to be making her way toward wrapping up, Mo, who had been absorbed in his Game Boy, threw it to the floor with a dull crash and then shrieked as if scalded and sprang up. He twisted away from his sister and mother, and there was a commotion as someone by the door blocked him from running out, and the service was hastily brought to a close.

Jules took her mother in a cab back to Penn Station after the reception. Even now, Lois Jacobson wasn’t comfortable getting around the city by herself. Manhattan had never felt like a hospitable place to her; instead, it was a place where you might spend a lively but exhausting day seeing a Broadway show or shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and then at the end of it you would make a break for the train as fast as you could. Jules’s sister, Ellen, was the same way. She and her husband, Mark, lived in a house two towns away from Underhill and ran a party-rental company. Ellen had once remarked that she didn’t need the “excitement” that Jules had always needed since she first went to Spirit-in-the-Woods, and this was probably true.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Lois Jacobson actually said at the entrance to the track in Penn Station that night. Beyond it, the Long Island Railroad train awaited with all its steaming, gastric sounds. They kissed cheeks, and Jules’s mother, with her raincoat and pale gray hair, seemed fragile, although maybe it was just that Jules was seeing her now through the warning light of another mother’s death.

• • •

That night, in the new apartment, Jules slept poorly, thinking of Ash, and Betsy, and how everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all. Neither she nor Dennis had been able to find the mattress cover among the boxes yet, and finally one elastic corner of the bedsheet unattached itself, and Jules woke up in the morning on a bare mattress, like a political prisoner. Dennis was already in the kitchen with Rory, making breakfast. It was a school day—also an egg day, from the smell of it. She wondered if Dennis had been able to turn up a spatula from one of the still unpacked kitchen boxes, and then she thought, Oh, Ash’s mother is dead. The spatula and the death of Betsy Wolf occupied the same part of her brain, briefly given equal weight. Jules lay on the uncovered mattress inhaling paint, and when the phone rang, her hand was on it before Dennis could get to the other extension in the kitchen. It must be Ash, she thought. Probably Ash had been awake all night crying, and now morning was here and she would need more comfort. Jules had a client at ten a.m., a new mother who was terrified of dropping her baby. She couldn’t cancel.

But after she said hello, a man’s voice said, “Hey,” under an ambient hiss.

Whenever a voice spoke into the phone but didn’t announce its owner, Jules thought it might be a client. “Who’s this?” she would ask neutrally, and so she asked it now.

“You don’t recognize me,” he said.

Jules gave herself an extra second to think, just the way she did in therapy sessions. The hiss of the call was a clue, but it wasn’t just that. She thought she knew who it was, and she sat up, grasping the blanket around the open front of her nightgown and her freckly, sleep-warm chest. “Goodman?”

“Jacobson.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to call you,” Goodman said. “Ethan told Ash he’s not going anywhere for a few weeks. He wants to be with her. So Ash said she won’t be able to call me too much, even on her supersecret Batphone.” Jules still didn’t know what she could say; she wasn’t composed, she was thrown. She heard a match being struck, and she imagined Goodman balancing a cigarette on his lip, tipping his chin up to meet the match.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” she finally said. “She was wonderful.”

He said, “Yeah, thanks, she was pretty great. It’s a f*cking shame,” and then he didn’t say anything else, just smoked a little, and Jules heard ice knocking around in a glass. It was only four hours later where he was, eleven a.m., but maybe he was already drinking. Goodman asked, “So what was it like?”

“What?”

“The funeral.”

“It was good,” she said. “It felt like something she would have wanted. No references to God. Everyone spoke, and they were genuine. They all really loved her.”

“Who’s everyone.”

Jules named several different people, including Jonah, and cousin Michelle, and then she said, “Larkin read a poem she wrote, really moving, really precocious. It had a line in it about how your mother’s warm hand could cool a fever.” As soon as she said this, she realized that Goodman had never even met his niece. Larkin was just a concept to him, a generic niece in a photograph.

“That’s right, it really could,” he said. “She took good care of Ash and me when we were kids. I don’t get to see my parents very often, obviously. When they come over here they look more shrunken, especially my dad. I always thought he would go first. I can’t believe I’ll never see my mom again,” he said, and his voice thickened, became froggy.

Then Goodman started to cry, and Jules’s eyes responsively filled too; together they cried across an ocean, and she tried to picture the room he was in, the flat he lived in, but all she could come up with was a murky brown and gold decor, a color scheme she’d retrieved in her mind from the way the Café Benedikt had looked that night in 1977. He’d never thought to call her before; she had always been of little interest to him. He was still probably arrogant, but he was also broken up. Most recently, when Goodman’s name had come up, Ash had said, “Don’t ask.” Goodman was described as a lost cause, “kind of a mess.” Over all this time, whenever Jules intermittently thought about him, she was aware he rarely thought about her. But even with this disparity she felt tenderly toward him now. Motherly, because like his sister he was motherless. Goodman made a sound of nose blowing, and then she just heard breathing on the line. She waited it out, the way she did in therapy, being sympathetic and in no hurry. Though really, she thought, it was time to get up. She wanted to say good-bye to Rory before school; she wanted to shower. She waited for him to stop crying.

“Will you be okay?” Jules finally asked when he was quiet.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have, you know, someone to talk to there?”

“Someone to talk to? Like, some Icelandic version of Dr. Spilka?” Goodman asked. “Right, Ash said you’re a shrink now. So you believe in all that.”

“I meant like a friend.”

“A girlfriend?”

“Or a group of friends,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Do I have a group of friends to sit around a teepee with in Reykjavik? Is that what you’re asking me?” His voice was challenging now, not tearful.

“I don’t know what I’m asking,” Jules said. “I’m extemporizing. You can’t just call me as if this is casual. I mean, come on.”

“Some things never change, right?”

“What does that mean?”

“You were always a little into me,” Goodman said. “We even had a moment once, in my parents’ living room, remember? A little tongue, I believe.” He laughed lightly, teasing her, and she heard some relaxed pouring, then more ice.

“I don’t remember that,” Jules said in a new, formal voice, hot-faced.

“Oh, I’m sure you remember everything from that time,” he said. “I know how important it all was to you. Summers at camp. The Interestings.”

“It was just as important to you,” she tartly said. “You got to be a big deal at Spirit-in-the-Woods, and your father wasn’t there to criticize you. You were in heaven there. It wasn’t just me.”

“You do have a good memory,” was all he would say.

“Look, Goodman, I realize you’re really upset about your mother,” said Jules. “And I know it’s been hard for you living so far away. But I’m sure Ash will find a way to call you soon. And you two can talk about everything. But this is too strange for me. I can’t do this now. I’m sorry.” Her voice stuck a little. “I think I’m going to hang up,” Jules said. Goodman didn’t say anything, so then she added, pointlessly, “I’m hanging up.” She returned the phone to its cradle, then for two full minutes she sat in bed, waiting, hearing sounds of pans and plates, and the deep voices of Dennis and Rory, and finally she picked up the receiver again, making sure he was really gone.

• • •

Over time, the two couples continued to live their lives, sometimes separately, sometimes not, but always differently from each other. One couple traveled the world. The other couple unpacked the rest of their boxes and hammered the same old posters up on the walls, and placed the same lightweight silverware in a drawer. They became used to having an elevator, and barely remembered all those stairs they’d climbed. The apartment allowed them to breathe a little, though it seemed that always they would live with certain indignities; one day a mouse tore across the kitchen floor, and Jules insisted to Dennis that this was the same mouse from their previous apartment. It had followed them all the way here to their new apartment, like one of those dogs that goes out into the world searching for its master and eventually, miraculously finds him.

Ash grieved for a long time for her mother, and called Jules a lot, wanting to talk, asking her if she was being too much of a pain. “How could you be a pain?” Jules said. Ethan, following his run of bad fortune with Alpha, the failed spin-off of Figland, had a failure so big and public and expensive that it seemed to threaten the whole Figland enterprise. An article ran in the Hollywood Reporter called “An End to All Things Figman?” Ethan had created and written a high-budget animated feature film called Dam It! using animated beaver characters to tell the story of the plight of child labor. It received bad reviews and did poorly, as Jules had warned him it would when he first told her he was thinking of trying to develop it as an idea. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she’d said. “It just sort of sounds unappealing and preachy, Ethan. Just stick to the actual cause. You don’t have to make it into a cartoon.” “Other people have been really encouraging about it,” he’d replied. “And Ash likes it.” But other people usually said yes to Ethan, and Ash was generally encouraging to him too; it was her way. “The Ishtar of cartoons,” wrote the Reporter. Every failure was the Ishtar of something; years later, Ethan would pronounce the Iraq war was the Ishtar of wars. No one at the studio blamed Ethan openly, but of course it was his fault, he explained to his friends over dinner one night, because the urgent work of the Anti-Child-Labor Initiative apparently did not translate into whimsy. “I should have listened to you, Jules,” he said moodily, looking at her across the table. “I should always listen to you.”

After the movie’s terrible opening weekend, Ethan took several days off and stayed in the house on Charles Street, but there he was made more aware than ever of how, when you took away work, you were left with the actual meat of your personal life: in this case, specifically, the developmental disability of his son. His young son, Mo, who was fractious and often unresponsive, and cried and cried, and was given therapy throughout the week by a rotation of teachers and therapists. Kind young women still streamed through the house, all of them lovely, all of them named Erin, Ethan joked, all of them deeply thoughtful and kind to the extent that they seemed angelic, and in comparison he seemed, at least to himself, cold-hearted and indifferent, or even worse.

His daughter, Larkin, was easy to love, so advanced and creative. Already she was talking about how when she was a teenager she wanted to be an apprentice at her father’s studio, the Animation Shed. “I could write cartoons and draw them on paper,” she said, “the way you used to do, Dad.” Which killed Ethan, because of course he’d moved far away from the old pen and paper days. Ethan still did the voices for his two Figland characters, and he still oversaw preproduction, and he was there at table reads, and in the recording studio, and stalking the floor of the Animation Shed even at the end of the day, when the staff probably said to themselves, Oh please, Ethan, not me; I just want to go home, I just want to have a little time to myself and my family. I’m not like you, Ethan; I can’t work this much and still have a life. Though Ethan’s feature film was a calamity, and his TV spin-off a dud, the original show itself was still robust. It might go on and on forever.

Ash kept directing serious and usually feminist though somewhat uninspired plays, receiving respectful reviews from critics who were impressed by her modest but sly touch, especially in contrast with the very public, hyperkinetic work of her high-profile husband. She appeared on panels called “Women in Theater,” though she resented the fact that people thought such panels were still interesting or necessary. “It’s embarrassing to have to keep being seen as this minority. Why do we keep only looking to male voices again and again for authority?” she complained to Jules. “Well, I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ We don’t do it, but ‘they’ do. I mean everyone else.” It was astonishing and depressing to her that even now, in this enlightened age, men had the power in all worlds, even the small-potatoes world of off-Broadway theater.

Jules’s practice had been reasonably populated, but like all therapists, she’d experienced an increasing thinning-out of patients. People took antidepressants now instead of going into therapy; insurance companies paid for fewer and fewer sessions; and even though she kept her fees low, some clients ended therapy quickly. The ones who stayed said they were grateful for Jules’s calm, funny, kind presence. She poked and prodded at her practice as if it were kindling, supporting her family.

Rory grew bigger, and though she’d once been deeply envious of boys, she outgrew that and enjoyed herself. She was a very physical girl, needing to be in motion at all times. On weekends she played soccer in a league, and during the week Dennis took her to the park after school, the two of them smashing a ball back and forth. Dennis still talked about going back to work, though his voice was full of trepidation when he spoke about it. He read up on the latest advances in sonography, subscribing to a professional journal because it interested him, and because he hoped he could go back one day, but just not yet.

In March 1997, Jules and Dennis went to dinner at Ash and Ethan’s house along with Duncan and Shyla, the portfolio manager and the literacy advocate. The prick and the cunt, Jules had once called them. Jules and Dennis had never understood why Ash and Ethan liked this couple so much, but they’d all been thrown together so many times over the years, for casual evenings and more formal celebrations, that it was too late to ask. Duncan and Shyla must have felt equally puzzled at Ash and Ethan’s fidelity to their old friends the social worker and the depressive. No one said a word against anyone; everyone went to the dinners to which they were invited. Both couples knew they satisfied a different part of Ash and Ethan, but when they all came together in one place, the group made no sense.

On this night, which was unusually warm, the three couples sat at the table in the small backyard garden of the house, in torchlight. Larkin came outside with Mo to say good night to the adults; she held her brother’s hand in a death grip while they stood in the orange light of the garden. The guests tried to make the moment light and felicitous, but it was forced. “Mo,” said Ash, “did Rose give you dinner, honey?”

“No,” said Mo.

“Do you want to try our food here at the table? There’s some paella left.”

Everyone stiffly waited for his answer; their smiles were tight and anticipatory even as they tried to look relaxed. But Mo just shook his hand free, broke away from his sister, and darted back inside.

“I’d better go follow him,” said Larkin. “I am my brother’s keeper. Good night, everybody. Oh, Mom, Dad, save me some lemon cake, please. Bring it into my room and leave it on my dresser, even if it’s really, really late, okay?” Then she kissed her mother and father and danced off winningly into the house. Everyone watched her go, in silence.

“So adorable, both of them,” Jules finally said, and there were noises of agreement from around the table.

The paella, prepared by an unseen cook, had been delicious; the men’s and Jules’s plates were now empty, all the rice gone and the juices and oils mopped up with bread, and with only a few mussel shells scattered; but Ash and Shyla’s plates, in that female way that unnerved Jules, were left half full. Tonight at dinner, like at all dinners lately, everyone was talking about the World Wide Web. They all had stories to tell about websites they’d been to, and startups they’d heard about. Duncan talked about a financial website he and three partners were investing in, and he teased Ethan about going in on it with them; never as he talked did he look over to Dennis and Jules to include them in the conversation, even as a courtesy.

After Duncan was done speaking, Shyla told a story about an old friend of hers in LA, the wife of a record producer. “She and Rob had the most beautiful house in the canyon. And a place in Provence. I mean, I was jealous of their life.”

“Oh, you were not,” said Ash.

“I was. And one weekend when I was in LA I called Helena and asked if we could get together. She was very reluctant, but finally she agreed that I could come over. So I went, and she’d gotten heavy, actually, which amazed me. I hadn’t seen her in years; we’d all been to the Grammys together a long time ago. I mean, if I think about who won that year, it was probably the Bee Gees. I’m joking, but it had been a while. She said she rarely left the house anymore. Nothing made her feel good, and she admitted that she was seriously thinking of taking her own life. I was very shaken. Anyway, long story short, the following week she was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai, in some special unit where it’s like a spa but with heavy meds. And they tried her on all sorts of different things, but nothing worked. The insurance company wouldn’t cover it, but of course Rob did. They were going to start her on electroshock, but then a doctor came in during rounds and said that there was this new drug about to enter clinical trials at UCLA, but that it was controversial because it approached serotonin in a whole new way, and no one knew if it would do anything. There was going to be a double-blind study, and Rob was like, ‘Well, let’s put her in the study, but can you see that she doesn’t get a placebo?’ Apparently even he couldn’t make that happen. These researchers are totally ethical. Well, maybe not totally, because they squeezed Helena in, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they bumped someone else from the trial. Within a month she felt different. Sort of like she was a marionette that was being pulled back to life. That was her metaphor, not mine.”

No kidding, Jules thought.

“But the upshot,” said Duncan, “is that when Rob saw how his wife had been helped, he gave the psychiatric center the largest donation it had ever received. I know,” he said, “that double-blind means double-blind, but when potential big donors’ wives take part in a clinical trial, don’t you think it’s prudent to make sure they don’t get a placebo?” Everyone laughed a little, and Jules looked over at Dennis, who to her surprise didn’t seem all that interested in this story; she would have to be interested for him. He could get into that trial if it was still going on, she thought. He could push to the front of the line and be accepted into the trial because of Rob and Helena and Duncan and Shyla and Ethan and Ash. Because of the wealthy people being discussed at this table or sitting here. She knew that Dennis would never ask whether there was a way he could try this drug too; he wouldn’t even think it could help him. But maybe it could. As with everything, you had to know someone; you had to have connections and power and influence. LA doctors, at least some of them, were seducible by Ethan Figman and his high-end friends. When Jules called UCLA on Dennis’s behalf the following day, she was told that yes, the clinical trial was ongoing, but that it was not taking any new patients. Then Jules called Ethan, who agreed to look into it.

Not long afterward, Dennis flew to LA to meet with the doctor running the study and have blood work and a physical done. A day later, he was accepted into the double-blind trial, and he and Jules hoped very hard that he hadn’t received a placebo. Within a month of starting the drug, Stabilivox, he was fairly sure he hadn’t. “Only the migrant farmworkers in the study have received a placebo,” Jules told Ethan and Ash. Though really, she thought briefly, maybe Dennis had received a placebo too. Maybe the idea of a drug that required knowing someone powerful just to get a chance to try it was itself so suggestive that it could change your neurology. But, no, that would only have worked on Jules, not Dennis.

Everything inside him seemed to unfold a little, he told her; only then did he realize how folded he’d been all these years. “Crouched,” he said to Jules. He’d previously only thought of his depression as draining him, which was how she’d seen it too, but now he saw that it had also forced him into an unnatural stance. For years he’d not only been depressed, he’d also been uneasy. The opening, the return, was slow and incremental over that spring and summer, but genuine. Jules had treated a few clients who were also taking antidepressants while in therapy with her, and she’d seen this kind of shift in them, but never in Dennis.

“My sleep is deeper,” he said in wonder. Once, in the middle of the night, he woke Jules up with his head between her breasts, and then he was crying a little, and she said, alarmed, “What’s wrong?” Nothing was wrong, he told her. He had awakened and felt good. Felt like doing things. Doing things to her. With her. Sex, which had been intermittent, returned to them like an old gift they’d once been given and which had been lost under a big pile of objects for a long time. He was unsteady at first, and one time his fingers jammed into her in a way that made her yelp like a dog whose tail has been stepped on, and then he was horrified that he’d hurt her. “I’m fine,” she told him. “Just go easy. Have a lighter touch.” There were other problems; it took him longer now, and they made jokes about her inevitable soreness later on. “You know what kind of cookware I want as a gift?” she asked him once, lying together after an episode of this new, post-depression sex.

“What? Oh, this is a joke,” Dennis said. “A pun. Let me see . . . No, I can’t think of where you’re taking this.”

“A chafing dish,” she said, smiling, her chin on his chest.

By the end of the summer Dennis felt as if he’d returned to himself almost completely for the first time since he’d been taken off his MAOI in 1989. Neither of them trusted it would last forever, or even for a while. In late August, Dennis went back to work; though he had a black mark on his employment record from the previous clinic, he managed to demonstrate that his inappropriate behavior there had been due to his untreated depression at the time, and that now he was well. Dr. Brazil heartily backed him up. A clinic in Chinatown, understaffed and desperate, hired Dennis at a bad starting salary, and he began work again part-time; then, months later, full-time.

The two families went on like this as the decade ended and the millennium began. There were fears about worldwide computers crashing, and both couples and their children and Jonah and Robert held their silly, collective breaths on New Year’s Eve at the house on Charles Street, then released them. Jules felt her envy toward Ash and Ethan seem to lighten, as though it had been a kind of long, intractable depression itself. The sight of Dennis getting dressed for work in the morning seemed to be enough gratification for her for a while.

In time, small changes took place almost imperceptibly; among them was Ash’s slow but noticeable acceptance of her mother’s death. Her dreams about Betsy became less constant and harsh. Ash also became marginally less beautiful, and Ethan became marginally less ugly. Dennis was so relieved to be working again that his job seemed bracing to him, and Jules tried harder to be a good therapist to her crop of clients who hardly ever seemed to change unambiguously. But when she looked over at Ash and Ethan, she often felt a small reminder of how she herself didn’t entirely change. Her envy was no longer in bloom; the lifting of Dennis’s depression had lessened it. But it was still there, only closed-budded now, inactive. Because she was less inhabited by it, she tried to understand it, and she read something online about the difference between jealousy and envy. Jealousy was essentially “I want what you have,” while envy was “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.” Sometimes in the past she’d wished that Ash and Ethan’s bounty had simply been taken away from them, and then everything would have been even, everything would have been in balance. But Jules didn’t fantasize about that now. Nothing was terrible, everything was manageable, and sometimes even better than that.

The city evolved, becoming cleaner, its homeless population pushed off the streets by a zealous mayor in crackdown mode. Everyone admitted that though the mayor and his laws were cruel, you could now walk virtually anywhere and feel safe. It was almost impossible to find an affordable place to live in Manhattan, though, and if Ethan hadn’t given them that money and cosigned their mortgage, Jules and Dennis would have been gone from here like so many people they knew. Larkin attended some private girls’ school her mother had also attended. Mo went to a special school in Queens that cost so much money that most parents—though of course not Ethan and Ash—had to sue the city in order to be reimbursed for much of the tuition. Rory attended the local public middle school, and that was fine for now, but there would be problems when high school arrived and she’d need to apply to one of the city’s better schools. She didn’t “test well,” Jules said to Ash. But actually Rory wasn’t interested in those tests, or even all that much in school. She longed to be a forest ranger instead, though her parents pointed out that she would still need to go to school for that. They had no idea of how much school it entailed, though, or even what kind of school; they really didn’t know what they were talking about. The time Rory had spent in forests was primarily because of Ethan and Ash; up at their weekend house in Katonah as a little girl she’d waved a stick as she tramped through woods, and she’d also gone hiking around their ranch in Colorado. She was happy when she was slick with mud, wearing waders, doing activities that were outside the usual spheres of city life.

In 2001, the World Trade Center’s destruction was an equalizer, briefly. Strangers talked to one another on the street; everyone felt similarly dazed, afraid and unprotected. Jules gave her clients her home phone number for the first time ever, and fielded frequent calls. The phone would ring at dinnertime, bedtime, even the middle of the night, and she would hear, “Jules? It’s Janice Kling. I’m really sorry to bother you, but you said I could call and I’m kind of freaking out.” Jules would take the phone into another room to talk to a client in private. She herself was frightened—it was a shock to see such primitive anger on such a large scale—but never hysterical. As a therapist in this crisis, she realized that she’d been given a kind of reprieve, in that she didn’t have the option to become overly anxious herself. Instead, she helped her clients so they didn’t fall apart. Sylvia Klein, the woman whose daughter had died of breast cancer years earlier, was very afraid now, and didn’t think she could manage her anxiety. “If there’s another attack, Jules,” she said, “and it’s the middle of the night and I wake up and hear it, I won’t be able to cope. I’ll just start screaming.”

“So you’ll call me,” Jules said. “I’ll expect screaming.”

When Sylvia Klein called, it wasn’t the middle of the night but early morning in New York City on a weekday late in September, and Sylvia, who’d been driving out to New Jersey to see her motherless grandchildren, found herself in her car, completely stopped in traffic near the exit of the Holland Tunnel. There was apparently some kind of police action ahead, according to the radio, and nothing was moving. She thought she’d be killed momentarily, and that she would soon join her poor dead daughter, Alison, and never see her husband or grandchildren again. She would die in her blue Nissan Stanza when a remote explosive device was set off by al-Qaeda in another car, suffusing the whole tunnel with fire and poison gas. But sitting trapped in her car, waiting for her own death, she took out her phone and hoped that somehow she got reception here. Fortunately she did, and she called Jules, who at the time was on the exercise bike that had been squeezed in recently next to Dennis’s closet in the bedroom.

“Jules,” said the voice on the phone. “I am going to die.”

The last person to have said similar words to Jules was Dennis, back in the restaurant during his stroke; and now, after she had established who was calling, she said to Sylvia what she had said to him. “You’re not going to die,” she told her panicking client. “But I’m not getting off the phone. I’m right here, and I’ll stay here, because I actually don’t have to be anywhere else.” So she stayed on the phone with Sylvia, chatting lightly with her about different subjects, and then, finally, when almost half an hour had passed and they seemed to have run out of conversation, she encouraged Sylvia to put a CD on in the car. “What have you got there? Anything good?”

“I don’t know. My husband handles the CDs. Some of them were Alison’s.”

“Which ones? Any Julie Andrews?” Jules remembered how Sylvia’s mood had lifted talking about her daughter’s love of Julie Andrews when she was a girl.

“No, I don’t think so. Oh, let me see. Wait, yes, here’s one. My Fair Lady.”

“Crank it up,” said Jules.

“I could have dawnced all night,” Julie Andrews sang, and Sylvia began to sing too, and then so did Jules, the trio of voices tremulous but holding together, until finally up ahead the traffic began to move.

A few days later, near the very end of that bad month, Dennis and Jules were cleaning up one night after dinner; Rory, eleven, was slowly rolling around the apartment on her skateboard, anything so as not to turn to her homework, which she loathed. The TV was on, as it had often been on during those early weeks. Channel after channel showed the same footage. CNN had a talk show, and Dennis paused at it, then clicked past, but Jules, who’d been looking at the screen, held up a hand and said, “Wait, turn back.” A blond woman in her early forties was being interviewed; she was sleekly dressed, with big, nuggety earrings and a hard but anguished face.

“It’s her,” Jules said, shocked.

“Who?” said Dennis. White letters were superimposed over the screen: Catherine Krause, CEO, Bayliss McColter. This was the firm that had lost 469 employees; two weeks earlier, on September 12, the CEO had made a public vow not to cut off the paychecks of the dead, or their families’ health insurance. Jules had read about her but hadn’t seen her interviewed until now.

“Cathy Kiplinger,” said Jules. “Oh my God. I mean, I’m not positive, but I think so. I wish I could call Ash!” she said. “But it would just be too weird, and I don’t know how she’d react. I’m calling Jonah; I hope he’s home.” When she got him on the line she said, “Oh good, you’re there. Turn on CNN, okay? You need to tell me if I’m right.”

“What’s going on?” Jonah said as he turned on his TV in the loft. A commercial was jabbering.

“Wait.”

When the show resumed, Jonah watched for about fifteen seconds without saying anything, then let out a long breath and said, “It’s her, right?”

In the background Jules heard Robert say, “Who her?”

“Yes,” said Jules. “I think it is.”

“Well, I do too.”

Jules and Jonah stayed on the phone watching throughout the entire hour, magnetized by the image of Cathy, who had finally and dramatically emerged from her time portal. Her face was drawn, and tense and upset, but her bearing was professional; she’d learned to be composed in public, even as she was once again most likely falling apart.

“What do you say to your critics?” the aquiline-featured TV host asked her, leaning forward as if he might kiss her, or hit her.

“That I’m still going to keep my promise.”

“But the widows and widowers are saying you haven’t done that. Their paychecks were cut off. They lost their health insurance at the worst time in their lives.”

“It’s just that the money’s not there yet,” Cathy said. “I’d thought we could get up and running again somewhere else, in some limited form, almost immediately, but it turned out not to be possible. Look, I’m asking the families to be patient. As you know, we’re building a relief fund. But I really need everyone to bear with me a little longer.”

“That’s right,” said Jonah. “I read about that—how she said she was going to give everyone all this money. But then she cut off the checks.”

“She said it isn’t her fault,” Jules said.

The host fielded calls, mildly saying, “Go ahead, caller,” and turning them over to Cathy.

“We believed you,” a woman said, her voice husky, furious. “We believed what you told us. My family is in bad shape, not only because we’re grieving but also because we don’t have my husband’s income. This is how you honor the memory of the people who worked for you? This is what you do?”

“We’re going to take care of you,” Cathy said evenly. “Please give us a little more time.”

“You’re such a hypocrite, it’s unbelievable. I mean, fu—” said the caller, before being cut off.

Cathy Kiplinger sat very still on camera. In their living room, Jules and Dennis sat very still too, and in his loft, so did Jonah. Oblivious to everything, Rory rolled around on her skateboard, trying new moves. Jules watched as Cathy stayed in her swivel chair in the TV studio, accepting the wrath of murdered employees’ spouses but also accepting some mitigating support from a lawyer and a motherly if whorish psychotherapist, who regularly lent herself out to the evening news shows. Cathy stayed still, repeating the same lines about asking for patience, but by the end of the hour she’d been worn down. The last shot of her, beneath the credits, showed her lightly blowing her inflamed nose and shaking her head.

Dennis shut off the TV and went off to get Rory ready for bed. “You still there?” Jonah asked Jules on the phone.

“Yes.”

“So what do you think about it?”

“I don’t want to sound like that therapist, that ‘Dr. Adele,’” said Jules, “but to me it’s like Cathy is almost repeating what she feels was done to her.”

“Explain,” Jonah said.

“Well, you know, she felt that nobody came to her defense originally with Goodman. That nobody was looking out for her. So when this enormous tragedy happens, it makes sense that she wants to be heroic. Except she can’t be. The money isn’t there yet. So she ends up doing to these families what she says Goodman did to her. And what she says we did to her too.”

“And bin Laden.”

“Exactly. Destroyed her.”

“So do you think she’s destroyed?” Jonah asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jules said softly. “I have no way of knowing.”

“Do you actually even remember Goodman all that well anymore?”

“I remember certain details. His sunburned nose. His knees. And his big feet in those sandals.”

“Yeah, he was a big, sexy guy,” said Jonah.

“He was.”

“I must have been so attracted to him, but I couldn’t even deal with it then,” said Jonah. “I couldn’t admit I was gay to any of you, and I could barely say it to myself, though God knows I’d been gay forever. Born queer.” He was quiet. “I wonder what kind of life he has,” he said. Jonah had occasionally made comments like this over the years. “And how he supports himself, wherever he is. Cathy switched gears and ended up with this huge financial career. I don’t know what Goodman’s talent would have been in the end. Other than f*cking up. He was very good at that.”

“And being seductive,” Jules said faintly.

“So what do you really think about what happened with him and Cathy?”

“Jonah,” said Jules, hardly knowing what to say. It had been so long since this had come up. “We’re here in New York City only weeks after this huge terrorist attack. We’re all trying to keep ourselves together. You’re asking me about Cathy and Goodman now?” She was deflecting his question, trying to bat it away, and not very believably.

“I’m sorry,” Jonah said, surprised. “Don’t you ever think about it anymore?”

Jules gave the question a considered, deliberate pause. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”