The Interestings A Novel

TWENTY





By the midpoint of the camp season, nothing terrible had happened, and for this Jules and Dennis congratulated themselves, but only very quietly, for fear of jinxing it. One afternoon a couple of serious, hushed violists came back from a walk in the woods saying that they’d seen someone there. The swimming counselor and the pottery counselor were dispatched to see if there were trespassers, and they reported meeting up with two young hikers, a man and a woman, who had wandered out of the mountains and were stopping to rest, which sometimes happened on the grounds of the camp. The outer edges of the woods, although camp property, had always been lightly shared, and unless there was trouble, generally no one really complained. Occasionally, the Wunderlichs had said, they’d called the local police to have a look around, because you could never take chances when you were dealing with the safety of minors.

The summer bore on, with its quotidian demands. Only one camper had defected, a French horn player from the city, who simply hated everything about the program and did not want to stay here a day longer. No one was sorry to see him go. But when, early in August, the dancer Noelle Russo was discovered behind the dance studio after dinner with her finger down her throat, throwing up loudly into the bushes, the local doctor affiliated with the camp was called in for a consult, and together he and the camp nurse agreed that Noelle ought to go home.

The night before she was to leave, there was much drama in her teepee, with the other girls apparently sitting around her as if she were being sent to prison or damned to hell. Noelle, her belongings hastily packed in her trunk, cried and said, “Why are they doing this to me? I’m fine. Whoever ratted me out is totally exaggerating.” Her friends came to the front office and begged Jules and Dennis to let Noelle stay, but they had to say no, regretfully. “It’s not safe,” the camp nurse had said. “She needs more supervision.”

In bed that night, Jules heard a sound from somewhere in the distance, probably on the camp property, but she couldn’t make it out. Even Dennis heard it from his sleep. She expected that one of the counselors would call now, and as she thought this, the red phone on Dennis’s night table sounded its raw ring. This was the first middle-of-the-night phone call all summer; they’d been waiting for it. Preeti Singh, who was in charge of both animation and llama care, was on the line. “Something’s happened to the llamas,” Preeti said. “Can you get down here?” Dennis and Jules put coats on over their pajamas and hurried outside with flashlights.

Both llamas had vanished from their pen; Preeti had learned this when she went to check on them before lights-out. “But who would want them?” she said. “Only some kind of sick vivisectionist.”

The counselors were all sent off in different directions to look for the animals. The campers quickly heard what was going on and came out of their teepees in pajamas and shorts and T-shirts to join the search party. It was midnight now, with a nearly full yellow moon, and the entire camp was on the lawn and in the field and by the lake and the pool. “Over here!” came a girl’s voice, and they ran toward it. In the light from twenty different flashlights, the two llamas were located, huddled together on the path that led down to the art studios. They both had signs draped around their long, poignant necks: NOELLE SHOULD STAY, one read. THIS IS SO F*ckING UNFAIR, read the other.

The frightened llamas were gently led back to their pen. Someone noticed then that Noelle was missing too, and as the search for her began, Jules felt a sharp bolt of fear. She was in charge, she and Dennis. “Noelle!” she called, her throat tight, and she pictured the lake, and how it could take a person, and suddenly she was hysterical.

“Noelle!” hollered Dennis.

“Noelle! Noelle!” called the campers. All the flashlights went on again, and the teenagers were excited and thrilled at the drama that had unexpectedly collected around them twice in one night. Guy, the counselor with the pirate earrings, whom Noelle had such a crush on, stood in the middle of a path and called out in the loudest voice of anyone, distinctive with its strong Australian accent, “Noelle! Where the hell are you? It’s Guy here! Come on, Noelle, give it up!”

Everyone was quiet, thinking that Guy would somehow smoke her out. And he did. She rustled tentatively out of the woods; Jules and Dennis watched as the birdlike, fragile girl went directly to this counselor, and he took her in his arms and spoke to her, and after a moment he looked up toward Dennis and Jules, whose job it was to take her. Later, Jules sat on the edge of Noelle’s bed while the other girls lingered nearby, excited, listening.

“It’s just that I wanted this summer to be so good,” said Noelle, still crying a little.

“There were good parts for you, weren’t there?” asked Jules.

She nodded. “Oh yes. I got to dance,” she said. “I danced more than I ever get to dance in the entire school year. They’re always making me do things I hate there, which have nothing to do with the rest of my life.”

“I know,” said Jules. “I really know.”

Noelle lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry about the llamas,” she said. “I just wanted to make a point. I went to put the signs on them for everyone to see in the morning, but they got out of the pen, and I couldn’t get them back in. I didn’t want to hurt them.”

“They’re not hurt.”

“I hope they’ll be okay, and that you don’t think that, you know, they shouldn’t be here anymore. They’re a part of this place.”

“Yeah,” echoed Samantha. “The llamas are completely a part of this place.”

No they’re not, Jules wanted to say, but of course yes they were. When these girls thought back on this summer, they would see, among everything else, llamas. Forever they would have a specific association to llamas, whose bland faces would represent a moment in their lives that would be like no other. A first moment, art filled, friend filled, boy filled, llama filled. The teepee was as small as a thimble, but it fit these girls. Jules left them there to comfort their friend who was being driven to Logan Airport in Boston tomorrow, where she would fly home to her waiting, worried parents. A summer emergency had taken place, but no one had died.

The following morning, Noelle was gone. Dennis played the Surprise Symphony and the music drifted out, but the camp roused itself slowly, tired from the excitement of the late-night adventure and already aware, even in sleep, that the day was going to be hot. So far the summer had been mild, but the forecast called for a succession of very hot days, and this would be the first of them. The heat hit the nineties by noon, causing a mandatory interruption of classes, and extra pool time. These kids were not big swimmers; they hung in the water like eels.

The cook made raspberry milk sherbet in long metal tubs. The campers staggered into the dining hall, and already the heat had turned them listless, and no one ate very much. That first afternoon, off in the woods with their drama class to rehearse A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boy and girl playing Puck and Hermia told their drama teacher they’d seen a man urinating against a tree. By the time the drama teacher went to find the man, he was gone, so Dennis said that he and Jules would go check out the situation. It was an unpleasant task on such a damp, hot day, and there was a mosquito drone like a soundtrack over the entire woods. Dennis and Jules were both tired from the night, and they split up and walked around slowly in the heat.

Jules soon saw the hiker. “Hello!” she called in what she hoped was a casual voice. He was leaning against a tree drinking from a beer bottle. He was young, early twenties, his face possessing a feral alertness. He looked unclean, and Jules suddenly thought to be cautious. Dennis was elsewhere, but certainly not too far away. “You’ve been hiking?” she asked, though there was no sign of any gear.

“I’m staying in the area,” the young man said neutrally.

“This is actually the property of a summer camp,” Jules said in as easy and cheerful a voice as she could manage. “A lot of people end up here, not knowing. I think we need to mark it a little better.”

“A lot better,” he said. “I thought it was just a place we could go. A place we could go and spend a few days and nights.”

She knew something was wrong with him, and she remembered once feeling afraid of a patient at the psychiatric hospital where she used to work, an agitated young man who’d sliced the air with vertical chops as he spoke about his mother. “No harm done,” said Jules now. “It’s not public property, though. There’s a public campground a few miles south. I think you need a permit to spend the night, but you can ask at the visitors’ bureau downtown, and they should be able to point you in the right direction.”

Branches broke and a second man came through, looking unperturbed. He was much older, gray-bristle-haired, tall, stooped, creased. He had a face like something in a woodcut, a smoker’s face. He seemed about to say something, his mouth opening, and she saw his gold incisor. Father and son? she wondered, then thought, no.

She still didn’t recognize him yet. The beauty had been cut away from the face as if through multiple cruel procedures. He looked wrecked, as if he hadn’t been taking care of himself for a long time. She thought: This is a moment of strangeness, but she didn’t even know why she thought that; and then, seeing how he looked at her, languid and unsurprised, though perhaps very faintly entertained, she knew, but she hardly believed it until he spoke, and then she was certain. “Jacobson?” he said. “I wondered when I’d see you.”

She stared at Goodman Wolf, as if he were a lost animal that had stumbled into woods where he shouldn’t have gone. Both of them were lost animals in the woods. Neither of them had any business being here, but they were.

The younger man looked back and forth between them, and then finally he said, “John, you know her?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Ash told you I was living here?” Jules asked Goodman.

“Oh yeah.” He squinted slightly and tilted his head a little. “Oh, you thought that’s why I came? Because you’re here? That’s sweet,” he said. “But actually I haven’t come across an ocean on account of you, Jacobson. Security’s pretty tight since you know what. And I didn’t even tell Ash I was coming. She doesn’t know. But I made an executive decision.”

Goodman formed the words as though they were witty, but they weren’t. Jules felt her face heating up fast, the heat moving up toward the hairline, giving everything away, not letting her keep her dignity. A man like Goodman would never be attracted to a woman like Jules, but finally they were even: she wasn’t attracted to him either. His gold tooth reasserted itself as his lip drew back, and she wondered how it was he thought this was a good look. It was actually a terrible look, seedy and truculent. He held himself as though he was still handsome, though his handsomeness was entirely gone from him. Goodman seemed not to know it, though; no one had told him. Maybe no one had had the heart to. Or maybe he hardly knew anyone anymore who had known him then. He kicked at the dirt; she looked down and saw his scuffed sandals. A toenail poked out, a thick yellow horn.

“But why did you suddenly want to come?” Jules asked. “I don’t get this.”

Goodman said, with quiet feeling, “It wasn’t sudden. I’ve always thought about moving to one of the hill towns.”

“But how could you?” Jules said. “How could that be possible?”

Goodman shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I kept thinking about it. I kept going to these real estate sites on the Internet and I saw all these properties—real cheap pieces of shit. It was just a fantasy, that’s all. But suddenly Ash tells me you’ve moved back here, and I’m thinking maybe it’s the thing to do. The zeitgeist thing, you know? And maybe, if I get my act together, Lady Figman could be convinced to help me.”

“I’m just amazed by this,” Jules said.

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“It’s not the same,” she said sharply. “Not at all. So were you going to come by? Like, through the front entrance?”

“I actually was there this morning, just sort of going past and looking in, but I didn’t see you. I didn’t see anyone I knew,” he said, as if bewildered. “It was all new people.” Then he looked at her and said, “So how’s it been for you? Is it everything you’ve dreamed of, and more?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jules said. She didn’t want him to know anything about her life, how it felt to be back, or why she’d come. “But look, you’re really not supposed to be here.”

“You mean ‘here’ here?” Goodman said. “Or here more generally.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.” She looked toward his friend, who appeared completely confused by all of this, but then she understood that they barely knew each other.

“John,” said the young man. “You said we’d get something to eat.”

“We will; take it easy.”

“Where did you two meet each other?” Jules asked, curious. “And when?”

“Downtown yesterday. His name’s Martin,” Goodman said. “He’s a f*cking great artist. A printmaker. I’ve been giving him advice. People will try and use him; I told him he should be wary, not sell himself to the lowest bidder. He should take time to let his talent unscroll—isn’t that what I said, Martin?” Goodman Wolf, the gold-toothed fugitive, was now an art consultant?

“Yes,” said the young man.

“It’s f*cking good advice,” Goodman added. “Don’t forget it.”

Bushes crackled with the sound of another approach, and Jules turned to see Dennis pushing through, big as a bear; she wanted to rush over to him, but she felt she shouldn’t register too much right now. “Hello,” said Dennis, looking them over, taking this in. “What’s going on?”

Goodman looked him over as well, overtly, taking in the convexity of Dennis’s thick middle-aged gut in a T-shirt, and his bramble-haired legs, and his work boots with white socks and shorts. The nerd camp-director look, not bohemian the way Manny Wunderlich had looked when he ran this place, but a different look that was Dennis’s own: more of a husband look.

“You’re the husband,” Goodman said.

“What’s happening?” Dennis asked.

“I’ve had a sighting,” said Jules. She sent Dennis a message, pulsing with telekinesis, but still he could not understand, and he just appeared baffled. “This is Ash’s brother,” she said, somehow still not wanting to say Goodman’s name aloud and expose him.

“For real?” said Dennis.

“For real,” said Goodman.

Dennis had no allegiance to the past, or to this man who seemed like someone you knew enough to dislike, even as you saw he was mostly pathetic. “You shouldn’t be here,” Dennis said to him.

“Yeah, that’s what your wife said too,” said Goodman Wolf.

“Okay, I’m not kidding,” said Dennis. “From what I understand, there’s a warrant.”

“Whoa, whoa,” said Goodman. “You’re talking ancient history.”

“You want to get into a thing?” Dennis said. “Because we can do that. I am really ready.”

“Dennis,” said Jules in the blandest voice she could manage.

Her husband took out his cell phone and said, “Verizon sucks, but we get service in the woods. I’m going to call.”

“All right, stop,” said Goodman, his eyes brighter, and Martin looked at him with equal intensity.

“What’s going on?” Martin said. “I don’t understand this at all.”

“Apparently I’ve got to go, man,” said Goodman, and he came forward and gripped Martin’s arm in a handshake and an embrace.

“But we were going to get some food.”

“Good luck with your artwork. Don’t sell out.”

“Get the f*ck out of here, Goodman,” said Dennis. “Not just the camp. Go back to where you live. Go back to your life there. I am really not kidding.”

Goodman nodded at him, then looked at Jules and said, “Jacobson, you got yourself a man.” The tooth shone one last time, but when he turned and walked off, his steps quickened, and then he became like an animal leaping away from hunters—a wounded deer that had once been a boy who had drunk from an enchanted, unlucky stream. Jules crossed her arms hard around herself, and she would have liked Dennis to come over to her and throw his big arm across her shoulder, but he wasn’t even looking at her yet; he was talking to Martin.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Rindge, New Hampshire.”

“And what brought you down here?” Dennis’s voice was tender and deep; Jules thought he might put an arm around Martin, not her.

“I had some problems,” Martin said in an indistinct voice. “There’s a hospital here.”

Dennis nodded quickly. “Langton Hull.”

“But they weren’t doing anything for me. Too many drugs, so I walked out. It was entirely my choice,” he added.

“Okay, you walked out,” said Dennis. “And then you met that guy?”

“John. Yeah, at the bus station. I was going to go somewhere, maybe home. He started talking to me; he showed like a real interest. He’d just gotten off a bus. So I went with him to this place. He said it was for artists.”

“It is,” Jules felt she had to say.

“Look, I’ve stayed at Langton Hull,” said Dennis. “They’ll help you, okay? You should go back and let them try.”

Martin considered this. “I am very hungry,” he finally said, as though that made the decision.

Dennis dropped his cell phone back into his pocket and said to Jules, “I’m going to take him there. You go back by yourself, okay? They’re going to wonder where we are.”

She watched as the two men headed off in the other direction, away from camp and toward town. Goodman was already somewhere far ahead, getting smaller, getting on a bus soon, then a plane, leaving and going home. Maybe he would eat one last big American meal in the airport—a bloody hamburger and fries, looking around at all the travelers, most of whom probably had people waiting for them somewhere. Jules’s heart was beating so hard, and she checked her own cell phone and saw that she had two bars of reception, which was probably enough. Ash’s cell phone was on Jules’s phone’s speed-dial; so many times Jules had called it over the years when Ash was traveling with Ethan, or traveling alone for work and meeting up with Goodman in Europe. Now Ash and Ethan were visiting Larkin in Prague at her Yale summer program. It was evening there; the phone rang in that international way, loud and quick and stern.

Ash answered, her voice revealed through a hiss like water in pipes. “It’s me,” Jules said.

“Jules? Oh, wait a sec, I’m in the car. I’ll put—” Her voice cut out for a second. “—phone,” she said.

“What? You’re breaking up. I just heard ‘phone.’”

“Sorry. Is this better? Is everything okay?” Ash asked.

“Look, I have to tell you something. I saw Goodman!” she said in a rush. “He’s here at camp, he traveled here from Iceland, wanting to look at houses here. He said he hadn’t told you he was coming. It’s just crazy. Dennis started yelling at him, and Goodman ran off. I think he’s going back to Reykjavik. It was horrible. He looks so different, Ash,” she said. “You didn’t tell me that.” Still she heard nothing. “Are you all right?” Jules asked. “I know it’s all pretty wild. Ash?”

There was more silence on the line, followed by some muted background talking. Jules heard, “No, I will tell you. Yes, Iceland,” and then a male voice spoke to Ash, agitated, but all of it took place under that international hiss, and Jules couldn’t make anything else out.

“Hello?” Jules said. “Hello?”

But Ash was talking to Ethan, not her. “Give me a second,” Ash was saying to him, strained, “and I’ll tell you. Yes,” she said. “Goodman. Jules was talking about Goodman. All right, Ethan, all right. Please just stop.” Her voice was pleading, and then she came back on the phone and began to cry. “I have to go, Jules,” she said. “You were on speakerphone and Ethan’s right here.”

“Oh God,” Jules said before she could stop herself. And then the call was over.

She hurried out of the woods, walking fast, then running, finding her way back instinctively and emerging onto the lawn in the middle of a hot, ordinary afternoon. Several teenagers were lolling under trees playing instruments, and they waved to her. That night, Jules sat through an evening of one-act plays written by campers, and the next day she tolerated a lunchtime barbecue, at which a hammer dulcimer trio played Nirvana songs on homemade instruments. She had her phone in her pocket at all times, waiting for it to vibrate and for Ash to be on the other end. When Ash did call, during breakfast the following day, she said, “Jules? Can you talk?”

The hiss on the line was back. Jules abruptly stood up from the table where she’d been sitting with two boys, actors, who seemed to be falling in love right in front of her. “Yes,” Jules said into the phone, walking through the dining hall and out the screen door to the patio, where it was quiet and she could be alone. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the Prague airport. I’m going home alone. Ethan and I broke up.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know. After we got back to the hotel we just got into everything. The whole marriage. He says that it isn’t only the actual lie that gets to him, it’s also the implications.”

“Which are what?”

“Oh, that in keeping this promise to my parents, I basically chose them over him. He says he’s always felt that anyway, and this just confirms it. Like I’m still a little girl. He was so condescending, Jules! And I told him that, too.”

“It sounds awful,” Jules said.

“It was. I apologized to him about Goodman over and over, and he just ignored me and kept going on about my family. Finally I told him that he never tries to see things my way, and that he has no idea what it’s like being married to him.”

“What did you mean?”

“Everyone fawning all over him. And how much space he takes up in the world; it’s just exhausting. And he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry it’s such torture flying on company jets and not thinking about all the little boring details of running a life; and also having more money than anyone we know.’ And I said, ‘Is that what you think I care about?’ He backed down really fast, because he knows I’m not like that. By now we were just saying all kinds of deranged things to each other.” Ash’s voice was increasingly manic, and Jules just listened. “I told him I knew he never really liked my work. And in the middle of this fight he basically stops the action and feels he has to refute that point and actually compliment me. He says, ‘You know I like what you did with the staging in that evening of one-acts.’ And I said, ‘God, Ethan, stop it! Stop saying something nice but vague, trying to show that you respect me.’ And he admitted that I was right. I know he’s bored with me, Jules, and he’s too polite to say so. Him finding out about Goodman just cracked everything open that’s been there in front of us. Like, even though Ethan spends so little time with Mo, I know it really bothers him how involved I am in Mo’s education and treatment and vocational plan; can you believe that? Someone has to take charge of Mo’s schedule, and it’s sure not going to be Ethan Figman. But he also gets jealous, I swear he does, because I’m paying so much attention to Mo, and I know how to do it, and he doesn’t. He practically admitted this. We were standing in this Prague hotel room screaming at each other. And now we’re broken up. We reached that decision at about sunrise, when we were both so exhausted we were practically falling on the floor. But it was mutual.” Suddenly she was silent.

“Come on, Ash, you can’t be serious,” said Jules, gesticulating, and a few campers looked out at her through the windows in curiosity or concern.

“I am,” Ash said. “We just said too many things.”

“But you love each other. You’re this huge couple, and you belong together, and that can’t just change.”

There was a tiny sound, when crying is so great that it can’t even be released. Finally Ash composed herself, and said, “It’s done now, Jules. It’s done.”

• • •

When you have inadvertently been responsible for ending the marriage of your oldest and closest friends, it is impossible to think of much else. Jules discovered this in the final weeks of Spirit-in-the-Woods, as she was forced back into the daily needs of the camp but felt herself only partly available. Ethan and Ash were really separated; Ash wasn’t going to go with him on their planned trip to Asia. When she returned from Prague she stayed in New York for a few days, but couldn’t stand being in the house alone, and instead she flew to the ranch in Colorado in the middle of August, taking Mo with her and the cast of her next production, surrounding herself with her son and actors and scripts and work.

“I have to lie low for a while,” Ash explained. “I can’t think about the things that remind me of everything.” The people, she meant. “I’ll call you,” she said vaguely, but she didn’t, and she swore it had nothing to do with Jules having accidentally let Ethan know about Goodman. Ash wasn’t angry with Jules, she promised her; not at all. She just had to go somewhere alone. Ash was in such distress, and though it was unlike her not to rely on Jules, she stayed away.

Jules thought about how she and Dennis had actually managed to come back up to Belknap, Massachusetts, to the bursting, splendid place of her early life, but the catch seemed to be that she could never again see the people she’d loved when she had first been here. “Call Ethan,” Dennis said one night when they were sitting in the Wunderlichs’ house answering e-mails from parents, which came in at a far greater volume than they could have imagined. If Jules’s mother had ever called the camp when Jules was a camper, she would have been mortified and furious. But today’s parents could not stay away. They wanted to know what classes their children were taking and whether they were being cast in plays. “Talk to him,” said Dennis, not looking up from his laptop. There were nine days left in the camp season, and the Wunderlichs were driving down from Maine the next day to have the planned end-of-summer discussion. Jules didn’t know what they were going to say; someone at the camp would surely tell them about what had happened with the llamas, and they had already been informed about Noelle’s unhappy departure. Who knew what they would think about the job that Jules and Dennis had done, but Jules was so upset by Ash and Ethan’s breakup and her own role in it, that she could barely think about camp right now.

“I can’t call Ethan,” she said. “I’m sure he’s very angry at me for knowing about Goodman and not telling him.”

“He can’t be that angry at you. Not for long.”

“And why is that?”

“You know,” said Dennis.

The Wunderlichs arrived the next afternoon during free period, and Jules and Dennis walked them around the grounds, showing them all the healthy, fertile activity taking place. You barely had to do anything to get the kids split up into groups, sewing costumes, planning events. “We haven’t run the place into the ground,” Dennis said easily. “Yet.” Manny, with his anarchic eyebrows, and Edie in her big straw summer hat, seemed like benevolent grandparents who’d come to visit their grandchildren, and they nodded and smiled in approval of everything they saw.

During lunchtime, the four of them sat at their own table by the windows in the dining hall. “It all looks good,” Manny said. “It seems that we weren’t wrong to turn it over to you.”

“No, we weren’t,” Edie echoed. “We’d thought about going in a different direction, but we’re glad we went with you.”

“Whew,” said Dennis, and he and Jules laughed self-consciously. There was a pause, and no one spoke.

“We think it’s going so well,” said Manny, “that we want to make you another offer.”

“Oh boy,” said Dennis. “Okay.” He was pleased to have been praised. He’d rarely been praised for work he did, and Jules could see him almost leaning into it. Praise could be more gratifying than work itself.

“We’d like to ask you to make a five-year commitment to the camp,” Manny said. “A five-year contract. We’ve written down the terms. With five years, you can bring the camp along in the way that you see fit. One year is nothing. You’re just getting your feet wet now. With five years, not only can you make the camp become the place you’d like it to be, but we also won’t have to worry about it. We can back off completely. That sounds like a relief to us, if you must know. We’ve been so invested in every last detail all these years; we’ve been very hands-on. Maybe now we might do a little something else with ourselves. Like sleep, for a start.”

“Or I might finally have surgery on my bunions,” Edie said. “I’ve let them go a very long time. My feet don’t even look human right now. They look like hooves,” she said.

“It’s true,” he said. “They do.”

“Thank you, darling,” said Edie, and they smiled at each other.

“When we started this place we thought we could make a utopia,” said Manny. “And for a long time we did. When you were here as a camper, Jules, it was still pretty great, wasn’t it? But already it was long past the heyday.”

“I’m curious, Manny, what would you say the heyday was?” asked Edie, and for a moment it was just the two of them mulling it over. “Nineteen sixty-one?”

“Or maybe nineteen sixty-two,” said Manny. “Yes, that was a good year.”

“It was,” said Edie, and they nodded together at the distant image of that year.

“And the late sixties were very exciting here too, naturally,” Manny said. “A couple of kids actually tried to take over the front office. They called themselves SDS. ‘Spirit-in-the-Woods for a Democratic Society.’ Cracked me up. And we did have all that trouble for a while with LSD, remember that?”

“That harp player on the diving board at three a.m.,” Edie said, and the couple nodded at each other again, in a reflective, knowing way.

“By the time the eighties came around,” said Manny, turning back to the table, “the main thing the kids wanted to do was shoot those damn music videos. And every time something new came along, we had to fight it off with a stick.”

“Five years sounds good,” Dennis said suddenly, and Jules turned to him in surprise. “No?” he said to her. “It doesn’t?”

“Dennis, we’ll have to talk about it,” she said. He gave her a perplexed, glowering look, then returned to the Wunderlichs.

“I personally feel honored that you’re so pleased with how we’ve handled the camp this summer,” Dennis said to them.

Jules felt her face grow warm as she said, “Yes, thank you, Manny, Edie. We’ll get back to you about this.”

Later, when the Wunderlichs were gone, and the whole camp was in the rec hall for the poetry slam, Dennis and Jules stood together on the buggy hill at dusk. “I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore,” he said to her. “First you want to come up here, and I say yes, fine, you can return to your roots, let’s give it a whirl. And then you get a chance to make it happen, to make it stick, and suddenly you realize this isn’t what you want to do after all. Because all you’re thinking about is your friends. What about us? We gave up our jobs, Jules. You quit your practice. We left the city and came up here for this idea of yours.”

“It’s not what I thought it would be,” she said.

“And what did you think? You were going to get to have funny parts in plays? And everyone would pay attention to you all over again?”

“No,” she said.

“I think that’s exactly what you thought,” said Dennis. “I knew that going into this. But you seemed so excited, and I didn’t think I should interrupt that.”

“What do you want from me, Dennis?” she said. “My friends have broken up because of me. Can’t I be upset?”

“It’s not because of you,” he said. “It’s because of them. And you are here now. You’re running a summer camp. You’re supposed to do the budget with me, and write the newsletter, and send e-mails to parents about their brilliant sons and daughters. And instead you’re off in some deep, lost place in your brain, some pathetic place.”

“Oh, pathetic?”

“Definitely. Look at you. You should have seen the way you were blushing when that loser brother of Ash was in the woods.”

“It was just a reflex,” Jules said.

“That’s who you’ve been talking about all this time? When I took that kid back to the hospital I heard all about how Goodman—I mean John—was going to advise him about his artwork. Give me a f*cking break! What did the Wolf parents tell their kids: You are so special that the normal rules don’t apply to you? Well, you know what? Everybody’s grown-up, everybody’s old, and the normal rules do apply.”

“Why are you so mad at me?” Jules said. “Because I don’t want to sign on for five years? You’re just thrilled that someone wants you,” she said, knowing this was mean but unable to stop herself. “That someone is saying, yes, yes, you can do this job and we’re happy with your performance. That you’re not in danger of falling into a depression and telling some poor woman she might be dying of a tumor on her liver.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Dennis said. “I haven’t had people telling me how great I am. And the truth of it is that none of you were all that great. Your friends: Mr. loser gold tooth, and his lying sister with her precious plays that I have never understood, and Ethan the magnificent, all of whom you’ve always worshipped beyond anything or anyone else on earth. And the thing is: They’re not that interesting.”

“I never said they were.”

“That’s all you said. That’s all you said. And I was the good-natured husband. And it’s still not enough for you, you’re still there with them, so much more invested in their story than you are in ours.”

“Not true.”

“You wanted to come back here,” Dennis said, “but it turned out to be hard work. And none of you ever had to really work when you were here. Everything was fun. And you know why? Because what was so great about this place wasn’t this place. It’s perfectly fine. We have plays! We have dance! We nurture the inner glassblower in your kids! I’m sending e-mails to parents who demand that their kids get into the glassblowing workshop. Parents love glassblowing children, right? But good luck to the glassblowing adult. If those same kids ended up blowing glass at thirty, their parents would feel they’d failed.” He was panting, raging. “This camp is a perfectly fine place, Jules, but there are a lot of other places like it, or at least there used to be. And if you’d gone to another one, you would’ve met an entirely different group of people and become friends with them. That’s just the way it is. Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.”

“No. It wasn’t only that,” Jules said. “You weren’t here then. It did something to me. This place—this particular place—did something to me.”

“All right,” Dennis said. “So it did. It made you feel special. What do I know—maybe it actually made you special. And specialness—everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do—kill themselves? Is that what I should do? I’m an ultrasound technician, and for about a minute I was the director of a summer camp. I’m a quick study. I learn skills and I read up on things to compensate for my absolute lack of specialness.”

“Stop it,” said Jules. “Don’t say you’re not special.”

“You don’t treat me like I am,” he said. His face burned; together, both their faces burned. She tried to touch him, but he twisted away and didn’t look back at her.

That night Dennis slept downstairs on the old mildewed couch in the living room, and the following day they formally declined the Wunderlichs’ offer. “You tell them, I don’t want to,” Dennis said. Manny and Edie were shocked and disappointed, but not destroyed. Apparently other Spirit-in-the-Woods alumni were eager for a chance at this job; many people wanted a way to return here. A woman who used to do elaborate mosaics at the camp in the 1980s really wanted the directorship, and they would offer it to her and her female partner, who had both been the Wunderlichs’ close second choice.

The camp would go on in its own fashion, and teenagers would continue to be shepherded through the gates, and then shepherded back out again at the end of the summer, weeping, stronger. They would blow glass and dance and sing for as long as they could, and then the ones who weren’t very good at it would likely stop doing it, or only keep doing it once in a while, and maybe only for themselves. The ones who kept up with it—or maybe the one who kept up with it—would be the exception. Exuberance burned away, and the small, hot glowing bulb of talent remained, and was raised high in the air to show the world.