The Interestings A Novel

TWO





Talent, that slippery thing, had been the frequent subject of dinner conversation between Edie and Manny Wunderlich for over half a century. They never tired of it, and if someone studied word frequency in the dialogue of this now elderly couple, they might note that talent kept appearing; though really, Manny Wunderlich thought as he sat in the underheated dining room of the big gray house off-season, occasionally when they said it, they meant “success.”

“She became a great talent,” his wife was saying as she served him a spoonful of potato, banging the spoon against his plate to release it, though it apparently did not want to be released. When they first met in Greenwich Village at a party in 1946, she was a modern dancer, and she leapt around her bedroom on Perry Street wearing just a bedsheet, with ivy twined in her hair. In bed, the callused bottoms of her feet were sharp against his legs. Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny’s great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn’t rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded. Edie proved to be a dreadful cook, and throughout their life together the food she prepared was often like poison. When they opened Spirit-in-the-Woods in 1952, they both knew that finding an excellent cook would be essential to the enterprise. If the food wasn’t good, then no one would want to come. Edie’s shy second cousin Ida Steinberg, a survivor of “that other kind of camp,” as someone had tastelessly said, was hired; and in the summertime the Wunderlichs ate like royalty, but in the off-season, when Ida only worked occasionally, for special events, they generally ate like two people in a gulag. Glutinous stews, potatoes in various iterations. The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers who had come through these stone gates and slept in these teepees.

Lately, as the year 2009 came to a close, they could no longer remember all of them, or even most of them, but the coin-bright ones shone through the murk of the Wunderlichs’ memory.

Manny had unconsciously begun grouping the campers over the decades into categories. All he needed was a name, and then the thought process and classification could begin. “Who became a great talent?” he asked.

“Mona Vandersteen. You remember her. She came for three summers.”

Mona Vandersteen? Dance, he suddenly thought. “Dance?” he said tentatively.

His wife looked at him, frowning. Her hair was as white as his hair and his out-of-control eyebrows, and he could not believe that this thick, tough old pigeon was the same girl who’d loved him the way she had done back on Perry Street just after the Second World War. The girl who’d sat on a bed with a white iron headboard and parted her labia in front of him; he had never before seen such a sight, and his knees had almost given out. She had sat there, opening herself like little curtains and smiling at him as though this was the most natural behavior in the world. He’d just stared at her, and she’d said, “Well? Come on!” without any indication of shyness.

Like a giant Manny had crossed the room in one big step, throwing himself upon her, his hands trying to part her further, to split her and yet own her at the same time—conflicting goals that somehow got worked out over the next hour in that bed. She grasped the rails of the headboard; she opened and closed her legs upon him. He thought she might kill him accidentally or on purpose. She was wild that day and for a long time afterward, but then eventually the wildness faded.

The only part that now remained of that slight, flexible girl was the cheese-grater texture of the heels of her feet. Her body had been stocky since the early 1960s, and it wasn’t childbirth that had done this; the Wunderlichs had been unable to conceive, and though there was pain in this fact, it had been blunted over time by all the teenagers who came through Spirit-in-the-Woods. Edie, back in late middle age, seemed to have been physically rebuilt in the image of a pyramid; no, she was built, Manny realized one day, like one of the teepees they could see out their window across the road—one of the teepees that had lasted all this time and never needed repair, never needed anything, because they were so primitive and basic and self-contained.

“Mona Vandersteen was not a dancer,” Edie said now. “Think again.”

Manny closed his eyes and thought. Various girls from camp obediently appeared before him like the Muses: dancers, actresses, musicians, weavers, glassblowers, printmakers. He pictured one particular girl with her arms thrust into a bucket of purple dye. Now he felt an old twitch and stir in his hiked-up trousers, though this was only phantom-limb arousal, since he was on hormones for prostate cancer and had budding breasts like a girl and hot flashes of the kind that his fairly stupid mother used to complain about as she fanned herself with a copy of Silver Screen magazine in their Brooklyn apartment. Manny was a physical disaster now, chemically castrated—his young doctor had actually, cheerfully used that word—and almost nothing got him going anymore. He thought of the name Mona Vandersteen, and a new image rushed to meet him.

“Yes, she had wavy blond hair,” he said to his wife with false certainty. “Back in the 1950s, she was one of the earliest group of campers. Played flute and went on to join . . . the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

“It was the sixties,” Edie said, seeming a little annoyed. “And oboe.”

“What?”

“She played the oboe, not the flute. I remember this, because she had reed breath.”

“What is reed breath?”

“Didn’t you ever notice that the woodwind players who use reeds always have a certain kind of bad breath? You never noticed this, Manny? Really?”

“No, Edie, I did not. I never noticed her breath, or anyone else’s,” he said piously. “I just remember that she was so talented.” Also he remembered that she’d had narrow hips and a big, pleasing ass, but this he did not add.

“Yes,” Edie said, “she was very talented.” Together they ate their potatoes under a shimmer of brown sauce and individually thought of Mona Vandersteen, who had been so talented and who had gone on to greatness for a while. Though if she’d been in the Boston Symphony Orchestra all the way back in the 1960s, then who knew what she did now, or if what she did was lie in her grave.

The Wunderlichs were older than everyone; they hovered like God and God’s wife, white-headed, still living in the house across the road from the camp. The collapsing economy was terrible for all summer camps—who had seven thousand dollars to spend now so their kids could throw pots? A couple of years earlier they had hired a young, energetic man to do planning and run the day-to-day operations, but the sessions remained pitifully undersubscribed. They didn’t know what they were going to do now, but they knew the situation wasn’t good and that eventually it would reach a crisis.

Whatever happened, they would not sell the camp. They loved it too much for that; it was a little utopia, and the kids who came to it were self-selecting, always the same type—utopians themselves, in a way. The camp needed to remain intact, serving its valuable purpose of bringing art into the world, generation after generation.

Each Christmas, former campers crammed the Wunderlichs’ mailbox with letters from their lives, and Edie or Manny walked slowly to the end of the driveway, opened the stiff door of the silver box, then brought the mail back inside the house, where Edie read the letters aloud to her husband. Sometimes she skipped lines or whole paragraphs when they grew too boring. Neither of them was particularly interested in the family lives of these former campers: where their children had been accepted to college; who had had a coronary bypass—oh boo hoo, everyone’s life was hard, and if you’d survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough. Sometimes Manny thought that the campers should have sent the Wunderlichs a pared-down, expurgated version of a Christmas letter, and all it would contain would be evidence of the great talent of that person. Slides, audio samples, manuscripts. Examples of what he or she had gone on to accomplish in the years and decades after leaving Spirit-in-the-Woods.

But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place. Most of the time Manny Wunderlich took the former view, though lately, as his head and eyebrows gathered even more white hairs, giving him a snowy and deceptively mellow appearance, he thought that he and his wife had merely been like railroad conductors on a talent train, collecting the tickets of many brilliantly able kids as they passed through Belknap, Massachusetts, on their way to somewhere even better. He thought dispiritedly that the main thing Spirit-in-the-Woods had created in anyone was nostalgia. At the bottom of a card, a camper would write lines like:


Dear Manny and Edie,


I wanted you to know that I think about my summers at camp every day of my life. Though I have performed in Paris, Berlin, you name it, and though the Barranti Fellowship last year gave me the freedom to really concentrate on my libretto and not have to teach at the conservatory anymore, nothing has been as wonderful as Spirit-in-the-Woods. Nothing! I send you my love.


Whenever Manny Wunderlich became despondent, he sank into himself and felt his heart working hard, and he looked across the road and out over the winter lawn, where the tips of the teepees poked up. He felt himself falling, and only his wife’s voice could pull him back, as though she were yanking him by his suspenders, or as though an earlier, sexually devilish version of her were bringing him back into vitality. “Manny,” she said from across time. “Manny.”

He looked up from behind the glaze of his failing eyes, into her eyes that were hard and blue. “What?” he said.

“I saw you disappear,” she said. “Let’s talk about someone else. We received a very interesting card today. With one of those Christmas letters inside.”

“All right,” he said, waiting. Which former camper would he have to try and remember now? Would it be a flutist, a dancer, a singer, a designer of surreal theater sets? All of them had passed through here at some point or another.

“You’ll like this one,” said his wife. Then she smiled, her mouth appearing soft in a way it rarely did anymore. “It’s from Ethan and Ash.”

“Oh!” he said, and he was silent, appropriately reverent.

“I will read it to you,” she said.