The Interestings A Novel

TWENTY-ONE





The clinic in Chinatown was relieved to have Dennis back in September, as they were still badly understaffed, but Jules had no job to return to. The social worker whose office she’d shared offered to help her with referrals, and Jules thanked her, but she dreaded trying to build a practice all over again; she didn’t have the energy for it or the belief. She missed her clients, but they wouldn’t be back. They were off, some of them with new therapists, others with no one. Janice Kling had written Jules a nice note about how much she liked the woman she was working with, someone Jules had referred her to. A colleague urged Jules to advertise on a few psychotherapy websites, and when she did, describing herself as “a caring, nonjudgmental therapist with a special interest in creativity,” she felt uneasy, as though she was lying.

The ads did nothing, and her practice did not refill. She would have to think of something else. At night Jules and Dennis sat across from each other at the small kitchen table in the apartment, often eating some form of takeout. They’d made a patched-up peace by the time they left Belknap, for both of them were too weary to take up the fight again. As Jules’s work dwindled, Dennis worked overtime. He knew his field very well, and after his disaster at MetroCare, he’d become highly vigilant; by now, his vigilance had transformed into expertise, and he was in demand. Needing more income because Jules wasn’t working, Dennis asked for a significant raise and was startled to receive it.

In a marriage, they both knew, sometimes there was a period in which one partner faltered, and the other partner held everything together. Jules had been the one to hold everything together after Dennis’s stroke and during his depression. Now he took on that role, and didn’t complain. Jules was so worried about finding work, but what remained just as pressing to her was the breakup of Ethan and Ash. She’d sent more e-mails to Ash, who was still living on the ranch in Colorado. Jules had implored her to at least talk to her on the phone, and they’d spoken a few times, but the calls were flat, because Ash was so unhappy.

Rory, who didn’t really understand why her mother had given up the job at the camp, and was now concerned about whether she would find another job in New York, called more often than usual. “Don’t worry,” Jules said. “We’ll still be able to pay your tuition, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Rory. “I was thinking about you, Mom. It’s weird with you not working. You always had a client to see. No matter what was going on, you were thinking about your clients.”

“I thought about you too, honey.”

“I know you did. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that you were really involved in your work, and it seems so weird now that you’re just kind of . . . between things.”

“Yes, that’s a good way to put it,” said Jules.

“Well, I’d better go,” said Rory apologetically. “There’s a house party.”

“There’s always a house party,” said her mother. Someone shrieked in the background up in Oneonta, and then Rory laughed and hung up before Jules could finish telling her to have fun and be safe.

One day, in that strange and fallow time, Jules’s mother called and said, “Well, I have some news. I’m selling the house.” It was time for her to move to a condo in Underhill—actually, it had been time for years, Lois Jacobson said, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with it until now. Could Jules come and help her clean out the basement? Her sister, Ellen, would come too.

Jules took the Long Island Railroad out to Underhill on a weekday morning, and when she stood on the platform she saw her mother in the parking lot, waving from beside her little compact car. Her mother had gotten small, losing a couple of inches of spinal height. She’d also let her hair go dove white, and still had it styled each week at the same beauty shop where she’d always gone, and where Jules had once gotten that dreadful perm. There was Lois now with her swirled, newly set white hair and her raincoat, looking like someone’s grandmother, which she also was. Jules clattered down the stairs to the car, and when she embraced her mother she refrained from picking her up like a doll.

Ellen was in the backseat, and the sisters reached toward each other in some approximation of an embrace. In middle age, Ellen and Jules looked more alike now than they ever had. Ellen, who lived only twenty minutes away with her husband, Mark, saw their mother all the time. They were close, and Jules was the one who had left the family, going off into the city, which could seem sometimes like another country. Neither Lois nor Ellen went into the city very often themselves. Underhill had improved greatly, and there were now two Thai restaurants and a bookstore/café. Lois Jacobson had kept up the house on Cindy Drive as best she could all these years, but it needed a paint job, and the mailbox still hung at a slant. Thinking about her mother coming into the house alone, evening after evening, was enough to make Jules want to sweep her mother up in her arms for real and ask her how she’d done it. But now they were in the kitchen, and Lois was making them lunch with ingredients from an organic market that had just moved into town, “thank God,” said Lois.

“Mom, you buy organic now?” asked Jules.

“Yes. Is that so surprising?”

“Yes!” said both daughters—both girls, they thought of themselves in the infrequent times they were together.

“Who are you?” said Jules. “Give me back my real mother. The one who served us Green Giant frozen corn when we were growing up.”

“And Libby’s canned peaches,” said Ellen, and they looked at each other and laughed. After lunch, their mother was already down in the basement getting to work, and Jules and Ellen stood in the kitchen clearing the dishes. Ellen and Mark had a close marriage. No children, their choice; a small, pretty house; a Caribbean cruise each year. “So what will you do now if you don’t have a therapy practice anymore?” Ellen asked Jules.

“I don’t know. I’m sending out feelers. But I’m going to have to figure it out soon.”

“I’m sorry the camp didn’t work out,” Ellen said. “I remember that place. The sight of all those kids running around.”

“At the end of the first summer I went there, I returned all show-offy, I think,” said Jules. “I’m sorry if I was a jerk,” she added, unexpectedly emotional. “If I bragged a lot. I’m sorry if I made you jealous.”

Ellen picked a dish up from the table and slipped it into a slot in the avocado-colored, apparently indestructible dishwasher of their girlhood. “Why would I have been jealous?” she said.

“Oh, because I always went on and on about my friends, and the camp, and the Wolf family and everything. I thought that was why you, you know, treated me kind of coldly.”

Ellen said, “No, I treated you kind of coldly because I was kind of a bitch. I treated everyone that way, didn’t you notice? Mom was thrilled when I finally moved out of the house after college. Mark sometimes teases me and tells me I’m in ‘bitch royale’ mode, so then I try and rein it in. But it’s just who I am; I can’t really help it. No, don’t worry, Jules, I was never jealous of you.”

• • •

The streets around the Animation Shed’s midtown Manhattan office building were purposeful by day, and then quiet and characterless at night. Almost everyone fled at the end of the workday, and now, at seven p.m. on a Thursday in December, Jules walked into the enormous, chilled lobby, with its roped-off elevators and skeleton-crew security guards. Ethan’s assistant, Caitlin Dodge, had called a few days earlier, to say that Ethan wondered if Jules was free for dinner this week. The call had come in the wet heart of winter, when Jules was spending her days answering ads for part-time clinical social workers. Only from one did she receive an interview; at over fifty, it was rare to be a first-choice hire. She and Dennis barely discussed what she would do now, though the urgency of finding work was upon them, bearing down. He’d come home at night and there she’d be at her computer, answering ads or rearranging items on her résumé. She was friendless, she felt, with Ash still very separate in Colorado, and Jonah busy with work and apparently now informally playing guitar every Saturday night with a group of musicians—one of the guys from Seymour Glass and three of his friends. A couple of social workers e-mailed Jules, wanting to get together, and she went once; at the bar, the women talked about how managed care was ruining everything, and then they all drank much too much and left feeling defeated.

So when Caitlin Dodge suddenly called, Jules felt like shouting into the phone. Someone needed to rescue her, though she had never dared to hope it would be Ethan. She’d worried that he wouldn’t want anything to do with her ever again. But for some reason, here he was.

In the hallway outside the animation studio after hours, Jules spoke her name into an intercom and waited beside a glass wall until an assistant came to get her. The place was dim but still discreetly active at this hour. All she could see was busyness, industry, motion.

Behind the glass wall of his large office, Ethan was at his desk. She hadn’t seen him since the spring, before she and Dennis had made the move up to Belknap. His hair didn’t look particularly combed now, and he was staring into a computer screen and might have already been staring into it for hours. On his couch sat Mo, bent over a banjo and studiously playing. Adolescence had claimed Mo Figman unhappily; he’d been a bony boy, all heightened sensitivity and irritability, and now at age nineteen he had a man’s body but a restless, awkward demeanor.

Jules walked up to the office and tapped lightly on the glass. “Hello,” she said.

Mo stopped playing, then stood quickly, as if she’d scared him. “It’s Jules, Dad,” he said in his thin voice.

“I see that,” said Ethan. He stood up behind the wide plane of battered copper that served as his desk.

She wasn’t sure which of them to greet first, and so she went to Mo, who didn’t want to either shake hands or be hugged. They nodded to each other, almost bowing a little. “Hi, Mo, how are you? How’s boarding school?” she asked.

“I’m home for a break,” he said. Then he added, as if he’d rehearsed it, “I don’t like school, but what else am I going to do.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry you don’t like it. I didn’t like school either. I liked camp. Hey, I didn’t know you played the banjo.”

“Jonah Bay started giving me lessons on Skype,” said Mo with sudden force. “He gave me this.” He held out the instrument, and Jules admired the faded rainbow on the worn surface.

Mo smiled quickly, and then a stylish young woman entered the office and said, “Are you about ready to go, Mo?”

“Ready,” he said. He zipped the banjo into a case and started to leave with her, but Ethan said, “Wait, wait. You’re just going to leave like that?”

“Sorry, Dad.” Mo sighed, rearranging his shoulder bones, oddly stretching his neck, and then he turned to Jules and made eye contact, which seemed to take all his effort. “Good-bye, it was nice to see you,” he said to her. Then he turned again, toward Ethan, and said, “See you later, Dad. Is that better?”

“So much better,” said Ethan. He reached out to hug Mo, who tolerated the touch, his eyes closed as if he were heading downhill on a sled, awaiting a soft collision at the bottom.

When he was gone, Ethan turned to Jules and their embrace was no less awkward; she also closed her eyes against it. Then she pulled back and had a good look at him, and it was almost worse to see that he didn’t appear angry. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I didn’t know when I’d hear from you,” said Jules. “I assumed you were furious.”

“Nah. Just upset about everything. I needed to calm down.”

“And you’re calm now?”

“I’m the Dalai Lama,” he said. “Can’t you tell?” But it was hard to conclude anything about him, really; he mostly looked disheveled and morose. “Let’s go get dinner,” Ethan said, and instead of leaving the building they walked up a shuddering metal spiral staircase that led to a space she hadn’t known about.

“This place is like something in a dream, when you find out there’s an extra room in your apartment,” she said as they stood in the dislocating, loftlike space that had been designed expressly for Ethan upstairs. He told her that sometimes over the years when he was working late he would simply spend the night there instead of going home, even though technically he wasn’t supposed to, because this was an office building.

A winter stew had been left in a slow cooker in the open kitchen, and Ethan brought two bowls of it over to the dining table. He and Jules sat across from each other, with a row of dark windows behind him. “I haven’t seen Mo in almost a year, I think,” she said as they ate. “He’s getting so handsome. And he has a lot of Ash in him.”

“They both do, physically. I’m glad for them. Mo usually likes being home on break from school, but now, with Ash and me living apart, it’s been really difficult for him. He just doesn’t understand why we’re doing this. I’ve tried to keep him busy, tried putting him to work here, but he gets very agitated. I had him sorting mail, putting it in people’s boxes, but sometimes he would actually open the letters, and once he threw a whole stack out. Everyone’s very nice about it, of course, but he’s just too disruptive. He can live at the boarding school until he’s twenty-three, and then who knows what we’ll do. It terrifies me not to know.”

“Twenty-three is a long time from now,” Jules said. “You don’t have to figure it out yet.”

“I have to figure everything out.”

“You really don’t.”

“I am all f*cked up, Jules. Everything just sort of fell into a hole. The end of marriage hole. It was kind of building up, I guess.”

“Wait,” Jules said. “Before we get into that, can we talk about me in all of this? Me knowing about Goodman too? Let’s get that out right away.”

Ethan waved a hand at her. “What else were you supposed to do? You promised the family, and there was just one of you versus all of them. I get it. I’m sure Ash gave you a blow by blow of our fight that night,” he went on, “and I hardly remember what I said, but I know I talked about her choosing them over me. Did she tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“And, you know, she had a few things to say about me too. She didn’t exactly hold back. Since then, dealing with the kids and everything, we’ve tried to be cordial, and not get into everything all over again. But here’s one thing I keep thinking about: Ash is this big feminist director, and yet she never seriously considered Cathy Kiplinger’s version of what happened with Goodman. And that was never a contradiction for her. Her brother was separate, and he was in a category all his own. She’s able to compartmentalize like that. But what can I say? In other instances, it’s kind of great. She’s an amazing mother to Mo, whereas I have been a failure as a father. She shows delight when he comes into a room; she never loses her temper with him. Why does that irritate me? Am I really such a baby that I need all the attention? Or is it just that it reminds me of my horribleness? Ash has many amazing qualities, she truly does. She put together a thoughtful, beautiful home for us, and everyone always wanted to be in it. It’s hard not to fall in love with her. She makes such an effort with everything. She was raised to do that. Her mother was like that too, with all her meals,” he said. “Poor Betsy.”

“Poor Betsy,” Jules echoed. “I think of her so often.”

The death of Betsy Wolf stayed between them for a moment. “I know that Ash feels her parents put all this pressure on her, demanding art plus achievement,” Ethan said. “Meanwhile, it’s not like they were arty themselves. Drexel Burnham was about making money. But all her complaining about the pressure—I mean, enough already, right? I kind of feel these days that unless your life has included torture—unless you’ve practically been raped, or kept in a cellar, or you’re twelve or thirteen and forced to work in a factory—well, in the absence of any of that, I feel a little bit, like, get over yourself. When I started in with child labor, Ash saw what I saw—I showed her—and she was really shaken. But in a lot of ways she could never leave her family drama, and I get that. The past is so tenacious. It’s just as true for me. Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers. She was so into the whole idea of being the good child, the producing child, the gratifying child, which also in this case meant the lying child. The one who protects her horrible brother.”

“You think he’s horrible? You think he raped Cathy?” said Jules, her voice rising.

“Well, he definitely got too aggressive with her,” Ethan said. “He couldn’t imagine that she didn’t want to keep doing what they were doing. No one ever felt that way about him; everyone was charmed, at least at camp they were. It was that, plus maybe Cathy’s neediness. A bad combination. So, yeah, I would safely say he did something. I think he did it.” He paused and corrected himself, saying, “My adult self thinks that.” Then he looked at Jules, as if waiting for her to catch up with him, to leave her passive teenaged self that had waited for too long in overlapping states of knowing and not knowing.

“But none of it even exists anymore,” said Jules. “That’s the unreal part.”

“I know,” said Ethan. “Those two detectives are gone, remember them? The older one retired. And the younger one, Manfredo? Died of a heart attack. I googled him sort of compulsively over the years, wanting to see if he was still on the force, still somehow quietly working on the Goodman Wolf case. Maybe googling people kills them,” Ethan said. “Did you ever consider that? You keep looking them up to see where they are, until one day you look them up and they’re dead.”

“Even Tavern on the Green is gone,” said Jules.

“Right. And Goodman is ruined, I gather.” Ethan paused and collected himself. “Is he still, you know, attractive to you?” he asked in a suddenly formal voice. “Did you still feel something when you saw him in the woods?”

“God, no. Nothing. Just shame.”

Ethan nodded, as if relieved to have this information. “As for Cathy,” he said, “I think she’s actually doing okay now.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen her.”

“You have? When? Does Ash know?”

Ethan shook his head. “No. I first got back in touch with her after September eleventh, when she was being crucified in the news. I’d seen one of those interviews with her—people phoning in to the TV show to yell at her, and I knew it was her; I’d followed her life a little bit, and I knew she’d married this German guy, Krause. On TV she just sat there taking it, and it was very upsetting. I got her e-mail address and privately wrote to her, just saying hey, I’m so sorry about this, and letting her know I was thinking about her. She wrote back immediately, and we got together. But she seemed traumatized all over again. At some point she was talking about the relief fund for the families, and I ended up writing a check.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“I think I felt guilty. The way we all just let everything drop; let her drop.”

“I read the profile of her on the ten-year anniversary of the attacks,” said Jules. “I hate saying that: ‘the attacks.’ It’s just so jargony. But she finally got the families their health insurance, right? Through bonuses or something? And some of them apologized for being so hostile.”

“It took a few years,” said Ethan, “and it was obviously complicated, but, yeah, she did it.”

“Do you still see her?”

He shook his head. “We e-mailed each other a bunch more times, and I wrote to her when the families’ health insurance worked out. As I said, I think she’s doing okay. She told me she has a very good husband. I asked her about her and Troy, and she said that they’d broken up for good when she was eighteen. And she told me that many years after camp, when she was around thirty, she went to see him dance. She just sat there in the audience at Alvin Ailey, and he was magnificent. And instead of feeling upset about her life and her problems and how she hadn’t been able to dance professionally, it actually made her not think about herself at all. She said it did something else that art is supposed to do. Absorb you. The thing with Goodman, that definitely was a trauma for her. So yeah, I think it was a rape. But a lot of time finally passed. That’s mostly what happened: time.”

“Maybe that’s what you and Ash need,” Jules said. “To let time pass. I know everybody always says that; I’m not saying anything groundbreaking or original.” Ethan didn’t say anything at all. They sat for a while, then he stood with a loud shriek of his chair, and walked to a cabinet and produced a bottle of dessert wine. Jules followed him to the long gray couch, where they drank the wine, which was sweet and golden; it had the kind of taste that would have also appealed to their teenaged selves—a wine for people who were just starting to enter the adult world.

“So,” he said, “he’s back in Iceland, you know. Ash told me that much.”

“I didn’t know, but I assumed it. Ethan, you should see him. It’s just really awful; he looks so marginal. I wanted to talk to Ash about him, about all of this. But she doesn’t want to talk to me now. I’ve been pretty isolated.”

“Well, you have Dennis.” Jules shrugged and made a face, and Ethan said, “What? You don’t have Dennis? What’s that face?”

“We’re not so great. First I made us give up our jobs, then I made us give up the camp. I liked being around teenagers, but he was right—I didn’t want to be there and not be one of them. Actually, it was the f*cked-up ones I liked working with most. And now we’re back here in the city and I’m jobless and Dennis is basically supporting us. I’m just sort of lumbering along, trying to figure out what to do now. I feel like I sort of missed the boat in a lot of ways.”

“You always underestimate yourself,” he said. “Why would you do that? I saw what you were like. I saw it that very first night in the boys’ teepee. You were wry.”

“And awkward.”

“Okay, fine, wry and awkward. Awkward and wry. A combination I happen to have a soft spot for. But maybe it’s an easier combination for a boy.”

“Yes,” she said. “It definitely is. Awkward and wry does not usually work for a girl. It makes everything hard.”

“I don’t want things to be hard for you.” He came closer on the couch and touched her hair, which didn’t seem at all strange. She felt that whatever he would do now, it wouldn’t be strange. Leaning forward, Ethan kissed her on the mouth, and as he did, Jules’s girl self flew up to meet her middle-aged-woman self. She recalled the way Ethan had long ago tried to upset her about her father’s death, hoping her sadness would lead to arousal. This time the moment was softened by golden wine, and it took place not in the animation shed but in the Animation Shed. He was rich and she wasn’t; he did what he loved and she did what she could, but they were alike: awkward and wry. The kiss would seal them and keep them alike; now their mouths were moving on each other, creating the seal. First there was only a sensation of gentle pressure, and it didn’t feel bad. But then Jules realized she’d become aware, in this new iteration of the kiss, that Ethan tasted and smelled a little sour, as if the sugars in the wine were already breaking down. Or maybe it was mostly that his mouth was an unknown interior, and she knew she shouldn’t be there, that this wasn’t hers, that she didn’t want to be there. How amazing to come this far and get an opportunity for a do-over, as Rory always used to say, but to feel it as if this were the same moment as the first one. Not a similar moment, but the very same one.

Pulling back from him, the anti-magnetism of their mouths making the lightest sound, a creak, a sigh—straw-sound, she thought. Jules looked away, and without speaking they each retreated to a far corner of the couch. She could not kiss Ethan Figman, or touch his body, or f*ck him, or do anything at all physical with him. He was always trying to work his way back to her, always seeing how far he could go. He was like the mouse that Jules had told Dennis had followed them from one apartment to another. But she still wouldn’t let him, because he wasn’t hers.

Dennis, she thought, sometimes smelled a little toxic from the Stabilivox yet appealing, with a yeasty overlay. So he wasn’t whirling with irony and speed and creativity. She wondered what Dennis was doing right now, late on this cold weeknight. They’d been remote and cordial since the summer. There had been almost no sex, almost no kissing, but a good deal of polite, neutral-territoried conversation. He was still angry at her for making them turn around and leave Belknap when the camp season had actually run smoothly. He was probably sitting in bed with ESPN on now and a Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography in his lap. Here, in a loft space improbably located inside an office building, late at night, Jules and Ethan looked at each other across the expanse of the long couch.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“I tried,” said Ethan. “It’s just that these days I don’t really know the best way to live. I honestly just don’t know.”

“It’s always complicated.”

“No,” he said. “This is different. Jules, I have something.”

“What does that mean, something?”

“A melanoma,” he said.

She looked hard at him. “Where?” she demanded, and she sounded almost angry, disbelieving. She uneasily remembered her father coming into her room one night and telling her he was sick, and he needed to be in the hospital. She’d been sitting at her little white rolltop desk, writing a book report, and all at once the desk, the looseleaf paper, the pen in her hand, seemed absurd, as weightless as objects in space.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Ethan said. “But for what it’s worth, it’s up here.” He tapped the top of his head, and then tipped his head down and parted his hair so she could see the small bandage on his skull. “It’s also in the lymph nodes, apparently.”

“When did you discover it?” she said, and her voice was suddenly nearly inaudible.

“In the fall. I had an itch on my head and I scratched it. There was a little blood. It scabbed over. I thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be a mole that had been there for a long time, except I never saw it.”

“You were living on your own when you found it,” she said. “Who was there with you? Who did you tell?”

“No one,” he said. “I’ve kept it very quiet.”

“Ash doesn’t know?” He shook his head. “Ethan, you have to tell her.”

“Why?” he asked. “Apparently you’re allowed to keep critical information from your spouse.”

“She has to help you.”

“Maybe you can do that. Because frankly,” he said with a willed little smile, “it’s partly your fault, Jules. You made me take off my floppy denim hat that first summer, saying I looked like Paddington Bear. So the sun beat down all these years—”

“Shut up, that is really not funny.” He saw at once that he’d been in error teasing her. It seemed cruel, and he certainly would never want to be cruel to her. “There’s treatment, right?” she asked. “You’ve been doing things, chemotherapy?”

“Yes,” he said. “Two rounds. Hasn’t been effective yet, but they’re hopeful.”

“So what’s next?”

“A different drug,” he said. “I’m going to start Monday.”

“Ethan, you need to get Ash involved with this. She’ll want to take charge. She’ll want to take care of you. That’s what she does.”

Ethan’s face was unmoved. “I don’t think so,” he said. Then, softer, he told her, “You’re the one.”

“I’m not the one.”

“You are.”

She couldn’t continue the volley, and she thought: Okay, I am the one. I am the one and I have always been the one. This life was here for me, pulsing, waiting, and I didn’t take it.

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

Once, stepping out on a stage had been the greatest tonic for a fifteen-year-old girl whose father had died. Julie Jacobson, the poodle-headed girl from Underhill, New York, had been slapped into life at Spirit-in-the-Woods. But that was so many generations away from these middle-aged people in their soft skins, up late and talking. “Ethan, I’ll go with you wherever you want me to go,” she said. “I’m not working these days, so I have the time. I’ll be there for your appointments and your treatments. Is that what you’d like?”

He nodded and closed his eyes, relieved. “Yes, very much. Thank you.”

“All right,” Jules said. “But you have to call Ash and tell her things.”

“What things?”

“She can’t be the only one who did something. I recognize that not telling you about Goodman set off a lot of things between you. But she’s Ash, and you love her, and you have to tell her about, you know, how you hid out in that hotel room instead of going with her and Mo to the Yale Child Study Center.”

“Oh my God.”

“And also, if it seems appropriate, you might even tell her you’ve been in touch with Cathy, and gave her money. And, obviously, you have to tell her about being sick.”

“That is some conversation, Jules.”

“Yes. And you have to have it with her, not me.”

• • •

Dennis had fallen asleep before Jules got home, though he denied it in that strange way that people often deny they’ve been sleeping. But his face appeared lined with a pattern that was an exact match with the ribbed velour of the old sofa in the living room, and Jules imagined him lying with his face smashed down, solidly asleep but still near enough to the surface to become snortingly attentive upon hearing her key in the lock. It was nearly midnight. She hadn’t accepted the offer of a ride in Ethan’s car uptown but had instead said she’d wanted to walk a little. The night was cold, with snow persistently falling, on a slant, and it was a relief to walk for at least a few blocks on the deserted streets before getting on the subway.

“What happened?” Dennis said, looking at her peculiarly. “Something happened.”

“Your face is all creased,” said Jules. She took off her snowy coat and sat on the sofa, which was still warm from where he’d lain.

“You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Even though I don’t really want to.” Then, with as little intonation as possible, keeping it all at a slight distance for self-preservation, just as Ethan had done with her, she told him about Ethan’s melanoma. She didn’t tell him about the kiss, for it had already inverted itself and disappeared. Dennis sat passively listening, then he said, “Oh shit. Well, it’s Ethan, so he’ll get himself the best treatment. He’ll do whatever he has to do.”

“I know that.”

“What about you?” Dennis said. “Are you going to be okay?”

He reached out and touched her hair, just as Ethan had done; it was one of the basic moves in the male playbook, coming as naturally to them as anything. Jules let herself fall with a thud against her husband’s wide chest, and Dennis willed himself into full presence again. He willed the marriage back, and pulled his wife toward him. Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.