The Interestings A Novel

TWENTY-TWO





The two couples met for dinner twice more that winter; Jonah joined them for the first one. They went to the same easy, muted restaurant both times, and they ate very early because Ethan got too tired from his chemotherapy. He was high from the medical marijuana he’d been smoking for nausea, and he smiled loopily at Jules from across the table. The first time she’d spoken to him in her life he’d been rolling a terrible, wet joint. These days his joints were tightly rolled by someone else, and they were uniformly thin and powerful. He smoked often lately, Jules knew. They were all slow-moving and cautious, closed up into a small, private bloom of friends. Ash, having reconciled with Ethan that winter, still seemed afraid her marriage would fall apart again, and she sat beside him with her hand on his. She and Jules didn’t see each other alone very often. The leisureliness of a girlhood friendship—or even of a friendship between two women, in which they’d talked about sex and marriage and art and children and the election and what would happen next—was enviable, but not what either of them wanted right now. They hadn’t known in advance that leisureliness would be something they would lose, and would mourn. When Jonah came to dinner, Ash told everyone about how he’d been teaching Mo to play banjo. “I don’t know if he’s actually going to learn that much,” Ash qualified, “but he seems to really want to try.”

“He’s definitely learning,” said Jonah. He’d only come to their house for two in-person lessons when Mo was home from boarding school, but he was still working with him on Skype; the distance was reassuring to Mo, and so was the filtering presence of the screen. Jonah had his guitar with him at dinner in the restaurant, and he made an apologetic exit before coffee; he was meeting up with a couple of musicians in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he didn’t want to be late.

Ethan began dying early that spring, though no one except Ash recognized this until it was really upon them. He’d lost some weight, and he was pale, but it was subtle. Because he had so many projects going, they didn’t understand what was happening. He had been away from the studio so much, but the staff worked around his absence. From the house on Charles Street he’d been shooting out e-mails liberally, and sometimes indiscriminately, trying to make arrangements for next year’s Mastery Seminars and recording his lines for the show with a highly sensitive voice recorder that he’d had installed. He dictated a memo to the network about a minor dustup over some supposedly controversial material on a recent episode of Figland that had caused an energy drink company to threaten to pull advertising.

There were stories, out there in the world, that Ethan Figman was ill, but no one knew the extent of his illness. Everyone had cancer; that was the consensus. Cancer wasn’t shocking anymore, and melanoma didn’t seem so bad, the way, say, pancreatic cancer did. Ethan had always maintained that doing projects kept you in the world, and kept you alive. Work, he’d once said, was the anti-death. Jules, who realized she agreed with this, somehow had managed to return to work too. The adolescent groups at the Child and Family Center in northern Manhattan were held in one of those drab all-purpose rooms where folding chairs were stacked at the side and an ancient piñata still hung overhead, bashed in and excavated of its loot. The light in the room was poor, and the teenagers sat slumped in their circle at the beginning, but as the hour progressed they were enlivened; and by the end one of them was weeping about her alcoholic father, another was hugging the weeper, and a boy stood on a chair and pulled down the useless piñata once and for all. The motherly supervisor, Mrs. Kalb, who had hired Jules on a trial basis, sat in a corner on her own folding chair, taking notes.

Afterward, in her office, Mrs. Kalb remarked that Jules seemed to have “an enormous affection for the young and troubled,” and Jules readily said yes, this was true. So now she was running three groups that each met twice a week for two hours. Two more groups would be added by the end of the year. The pay here was lousy, but Jules and Dennis’s expenses weren’t all that high. Rory’s state school tuition was manageable, and soon enough she’d be out of college, though God knew if there was a job for her out there; that was what all parents of college-age students said to one another. Everyone was terrified that their kids would be unemployable, just another statistic, living at home forever in their childhood bedrooms, among their posters and trophies. People dissuaded their kids from going into the arts, knowing that there was no longer a future there. Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash’s theater, and afterward, during the “talkback,” when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who’d directed the production, a woman stood up and said, “This one is for Ms. Wolf. My daughter wants to be a director too. She’s applying to graduate school in directing, but I know very well that there are no jobs, and that she’s probably only going to have her dreams dashed. Shouldn’t I encourage her to do something else, to find some other field she can get into before too much time goes by?” And Ash had said to that mother, “Well, if she’s thinking about going into directing, she has to really, really want it. That’s the first thing. Because if she doesn’t, then there’s no point in putting herself through all of this, because it’s incredibly hard and dispiriting. But if she does really, really want it, and if she seems to have a talent for it, then I think you should tell her, ‘That’s wonderful.’ Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”

The audience had spontaneously applauded, and Ash had looked very pleased, and so had the mother. Jules wondered what had happened to that daughter; had she tried to be a director? You could feel a little smug with a daughter like Rory, who wanted to work for the national parks and wasn’t one of those kids who needed to be creative but ended up working behind the counter at Chipotle.

Ethan was glad to hear that Jules had a new job that she liked. “I wish I could come to your group and eavesdrop,” he said. “I want to see you in action. I could pretend I was one of the teenagers.”

Across the table at the second of the two dinners that year, in the low light of the candles, Ethan said something to Jules that she didn’t hear. She put her hand to her ear, but at that moment Dennis put his own hand on top of Jules’s other hand, and each of them returned to the relevant partner.

After the latest round of chemotherapy proved “disappointing,” Ethan and Ash decided to seek alternative treatment, and so they traveled to a clinic in Geneva, Switzerland, which had been recommended to them through another friend of Duncan and Shyla’s. “The Toblerone cure,” Ethan said on the phone to Jules the night before the trip, sarcastic but resigned. In Switzerland Ethan felt so poisoned by the harsh, untried drugs that he quit five days into the twenty-one-day protocol. Home again, he and Ash stayed in the house, not wanting to see friends, not even Jules, who became very agitated by the lack of communication. “Let me know the next phase of the battle plan,” she wrote to Ash. “Will do,” Ash wrote back, but she was unconvincing. Jules sent e-mails directly to Ethan, telling him what had happened in her “children of divorce” group that day. “Actually, you could join that group,” she wrote to him. “You’re a child of divorce. Plus, the Times Science section said there’s a new cutoff age for when adolescence officially ends. Fifty-two! You just made it!!!” She liberally threw out exclamation marks, each one more desperate and manic than the last.

No one told you that in moments of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship. Ethan and Ash’s children were summoned by their mother in the middle of the week; Larkin, at home, was almost hysterical with anxiety, needing Klonopin, which Ash fed her bits of over the course of the day, then fed the rest to herself. Larkin had gotten a tattoo in New Haven that crawled across her shoulder and down the length of her left arm. It was a compendium of Figland characters, and was meant as a tribute to her father, but all he could say when he saw it was, “Jesus, what were you thinking?” Which made Larkin start crying that her parents never cared about what she wanted, only what they wanted. “That isn’t true,” said Ash, who’d been a tremendous mother to both of her children. Then Larkin collapsed, saying that of course Ash had been a good mother; she didn’t know what she was saying. Ash cried too, and Mo, who had been driven home only hours earlier from his boarding school, became so anxious by all the untamed emotion that he slammed into his bedroom and stayed in there.

Later, his parents could hear him playing banjo through the door. “Mo,” said Ethan, standing outside the room but wanting nothing more than to go back down the hall and get into bed. “Please come out.” He tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn.

“I don’t want to, Dad. I don’t like what’s going on here.”

“Nothing’s going on,” Ethan said. “I got angry at your sister because of the tattoo, but it’s her body, and she was trying to do something loving. I shouldn’t have yelled at her. Come on out. I’m your dad and I want to be with you.” He forced himself to say these words, and forced himself to mean them, the way Jules had always explicitly told him to try to do. For a few seconds the door didn’t open, and then it did. Mo stood in the doorway, flesh of Ethan Figman’s flesh. Love your son, Jules always told him. Love him and love him. She had sent love messages for Ethan to pour into Mo, and now, still feeling so sick from this recent experimental drug, Ethan said, “Can I come in?” Mo was surprised, because his father rarely came to him. But Ethan entered the room and sat at the foot of Mo’s bed. “What were you playing?” he asked.

“A song. I’ll show you,” said Mo. And then, stopping and starting as he needed, making errors but continuing on, he slowly worked his way through a recognizable instrumental version of “The Wind Will Carry Us,” the strings lifting and coming together like individual chimes banging. When he was finished, Mo said, “Dad, didn’t you like it? Dad, are you crying?”

The family stayed together in the house for a full week. Meals were prepared for them; packages arrived and were signed for; an oncological nurse visited twice; and still very few other people understood what was happening. Even Jules, uptown in her own apartment with Dennis, could not make herself understand. “Do you think they’ll figure something out?” she asked Dennis.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Yes, you do. You deal with cancer at work all the time. You read those journals. Tell me. Tell me what you think.”

Dennis looked at her, unblinking. It was morning and they were both awake and in the one bathroom they shared, side by side at the sink. She’d never gotten her own bathroom in marriage, though it had been something she’d always longed for. Dennis was shaving, drawing a path through the field of dark hair on his cheek. By the time he returned from work it would already have grown back. He looked mournful with his half beard and thatches of shaving cream. He put down the razor on the side of the sink and said, “If it’s in both lungs now, as you say it is, then, no, I don’t think there’s anything more they can do for him. At least, not that I’m aware of. I’m only an ultrasound technician,” he felt compelled to add. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Oh, but you know a lot by now, Dennis,” said Jules. “And here’s what I keep thinking. I keep obsessing over the idea that he might never get a chance to be known as Old Ethan Figman.”

“What?”

“Like Old Mo Templeton,” she said in what almost sounded like a wail.

“Right. Disney’s tenth Old Man.”

Dennis went to work that morning, and Jules went to work, and it was a regular day, with spring trying to crack through everywhere and the adolescents in Jules’s recently released inpatient group particularly rambunctious and flirtatious with one another. An air of good cheer infused the grim room at the mental health center; and a boy named JT, who had body dysmorphia, had brought in a box of Entenmann’s raspberry Danish, saying that if you microwaved it for twenty seconds, no more and no less, it was “ambrosia.” JT and two girls ran down the hall to use the microwave in the kitchenette, and in the brief lull before group resumed, Jules recalled the huckleberry crumble that she’d eaten in her teepee, and how it had supposedly tasted like sex, whatever that meant. The group reassembled, and the kids talked about their meds; their parents; their boyfriends; their cutting; their bulimia; and mostly their tender, hectic lives.

At lunch with her supervisor, Mrs. Kalb, at the one place in the bad neighborhood where the food was okay, and where all the mental health workers went to eat Caesar salads, Jules’s cell phone pulsed and it was Ash calling. Even as Jules answered the phone in that crowded, dark green–walled restaurant with the TV playing overhead, she wasn’t afraid, because it was daytime, and a cell phone pulsing in daylight was benign. But Ash, on the phone, her voice very soft but audible, said, “Jules? It’s me. Oh, listen. Ethan had a heart attack this morning, and they couldn’t revive him.”

And even then, for a few seconds, Jules thought he could still recover. She remembered that when her mother had come home from the hospital on Long Island late at night and dropped her purse heavily to the floor, and said to Jules and Ellen, “Oh girls, Dad didn’t make it,” Jules had cried, “Can’t they try something else?”

There was nothing else to try for this long chain of bodies, souls. Ethan’s heart had stopped, possibly because of the drug he’d tried in Switzerland, or the accumulation of drugs he’d taken before. He’d had a massive heart attack sitting up in bed eating breakfast, and had died in the ambulance. After Jules talked to Ash for a few minutes, standing outside the restaurant coatless in the cold, she came back in and flatly repeated to Mrs. Kalb what she’d been told. Mrs. Kalb said, “Let me go cancel your group for you, honey. You’re too upset for that. Just go home,” but Jules wanted to go back to the group.

The kids, when she told them her friend had died, gathered around their therapist as if she were a maypole. A big, phobic Hispanic boy named Hector put his arms around her, and a tiny girl with a face so heavily pierced it looked like a bulletin board with old staples all over it, started to cry too, saying, “Jules! Jules! You must have loved your friend so much.”

All the kids kept saying, “We’re so sorry about your friend!” and she realized eventually that they thought friend was a euphemism, and maybe it was. Because friend was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions. She hadn’t seen Ethan’s penis; he hadn’t seen her breasts. Big deal, she thought, though she wished somehow that she could show herself to him and say, “You see? You didn’t miss that much.”

That evening she and Dennis went to the house on Charles Street and stayed the night. The household was awake into the morning, the lights blazing. “What am I going to do?” Ash said in her nightgown at four a.m., sitting on the stairs smoking. “When we were separated for those months, I just couldn’t bear it. I was so lonely. And I’m so lonely again already now.”

“I’ll help you,” Jules said.

“You will?” asked Ash, grateful like a child, and Jules said yes, she would, she always would, and though neither of them knew what this meant, it already seemed to have some effect.

Ash’s father came over in the morning. Though he himself now appeared frail, and walked with a cane because of bad knees, he hugged his crying daughter to him as if keeping her grounded in a very strong wind. And then Ethan’s long-divorced parents coincidentally arrived at the same time, each one furious with the other, both of them round-bodied and disheveled. They promptly began to cry, then argue, and then they quickly left. Jonah came over too, and in the hurtling toward the funeral and then the plans for the larger memorial that would take place a month from now, it seemed that there were many details to address. Larkin and Mo needed attention, and, in Larkin’s case, sedation. Jules periodically observed, often in her peripheral vision, what Dennis was doing. Now he was making a series of phone calls to Ash’s friends, at Ash’s request; now he was sitting and watching Jonah and Mo play guitar and banjo; now he was bringing coffee to everyone; he was making himself useful in whatever ways he could. The house felt like a little insulated if exhausted environment free of outside clamor.

The next night, the night before the funeral, Duncan and Shyla appeared on the front doorstep. Oh, why were they here? Jules thought. The prick and the cunt! Even now, after Ethan’s death, she would have to share him and Ash with these people. But Duncan and Shyla were as broken up as everyone else; Duncan’s face kept screwing up into an expression of shocked, ongoing misery, and in the end they all stayed up very late drinking and trying unsuccessfully to comfort one another. Finally they fell asleep in chairs and on couches, and in the morning the house staff quietly came in, tiptoeing around them and picking up bottles and glasses and wadded-up tissues. Someone wiped down a surface that was unaccountably coated with a substance that no one could name.

Everyone wondered eventually about Ethan’s money, who it would go to, and how much of it there was. His family would be taken care of forever, of course. After Mo became too old for his boarding school, he would live in a community where he would not be overwhelmed and where he could do some work that interested him. Larkin would be allowed to flail for a while, then settle down to graduate school or to write a precocious and angry autobiographical novel. Much of Ethan’s money would certainly go to the Anti-Child-Labor Initiative and to other charities.

But then, regarding his money, there was also the question of his closest friends, and no one knew what his plans were for them. Two months before his death, Ethan had made an opaque joke to his estate lawyer, Larry Braff. “I don’t know,” Ethan had said as they sat together going over papers for several hours. “I think there are probably dangers in leaving your friends a lot of money.”

“I imagine that’s true.”

“You could call it The Drama of the Gifted Adult,” said Ethan. “And I’m using gifted in a different way here. As in, having received a gift. Maybe the gifted adult becomes a child, and then stays a child forever because of the gift. In your experience, Larry, is that the case? Is that what happens?”

The lawyer regarded Ethan through his rimless glasses and said, “Forgive my ignorance, Ethan, but this ‘drama’ thing—I actually don’t know what you’re referring to. Is it a specific reference? Can you explain?”

“It’s all right,” Ethan said. “I was just thinking out loud. Not to worry. I’ll figure it out.” So no one knew yet what he had decided, and no one asked; it would be dealt with in time.

A month after Ethan died, Ash, who Jules once again spoke to every day, called and said she’d finally been able to begin cleaning out Ethan’s office in the house, and that she was messengering over something she’d found that she thought Jules might like to have. “I don’t actually know how you’ll feel about it,” Ash said, “but it belongs to you more than me.”

The package arrived, a big brown paper square. Jules was home alone when the messenger came; Dennis was out in the park, kicking around a ball, “kicking around death,” he’d said. Tonight, very late, Rory was returning home from school upstate by bus and would stay for a week. “I just like being with you guys,” she’d explained to her parents; but they knew that for her, coming in from the outdoors and the world of her friends to be with her mother and father was something of a sacrifice, and she was doing it to cheer them up, to be kind. They awaited her return as if she were Jesus and would set them right.

In the front hallway, after signing for the package, Jules stood and opened it. Inside were some faded folded papers stapled together, and she opened them up to see they were a storyboard from an animated short that had never gotten made. Right away she recognized how old the drawings were. It wasn’t just that the paper looked delicate. Ethan’s style had also changed over the years, the faces taking on very particular qualities; but here, back in the beginning, the pencil strokes were wild and loose, as though his hand was in a race with his brain. The first frame, carefully drawn, was of a boy and a girl, immediately recognizable as Ethan and Jules at around age fifteen, standing under pine trees in moonlight that flooded down on their homely, goofy faces. The boy gazed upon the girl in rapture.

“So what do you think?” he wanted to know. “Any chance you might reconsider?”

And the girl said, “Can we pleeeeze talk about something else?”

The next frame showed them trudging up a hill together. “All right, so what do you want to talk about?” he asked her.

“Did you ever notice the way pencils look like collie dogs?” she said, and a big no. 2 pencil with the face of a dog appeared, its mouth open and yipping.

“Nope, I never did,” Ethan said in the next frame. The two figures reached the top of the hill and walked together through the trees. Oh tragedy, oh tragedy, the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little. Oh joy, oh joy. Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads.

The stapled sheets lay on the front hall table of the Jacobson-Boyds’ apartment for a couple of days, the same place where the Christmas letter from Ash and Ethan lingered for a while each year. Jules stood and looked at Ethan’s drawings again. Finally she placed them in the chest in the living room where she kept the few things that corresponded to that time in her life. There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan’s feet were planted on Jules’s head, and Jules’s feet were planted on Goodman’s head, and so on and so on. And didn’t it always go like that—body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




Various people—friends, experts, and often both—shared their knowledge and observations with me, and I am grateful to them all. They include Debra Solomon, Greg Hodes of WME, Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C, Sandra Leong, M.D., Kent Sepkowicz, M.D., David France, and Jay Weiner. Sheree Fitch, Jennifer Gilmore, Adam Gopnik, Mary Gordon, Gabriel Panek, Suzzy Roche, Stacy Schiff, Peter Smith, and Rebecca Traister are all sensitive readers whose advice I am lucky to have. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to my stellar agent, Suzanne Gluck. And I am once again indebted to my profoundly wise, generous editor, Sarah McGrath, as well as to Jynne Martin, Sarah Stein, and everyone else at Riverhead, including its excellent and, yes, feminist publisher, Geoffrey Kloske. As always, many thanks to Ilene Young. And, of course, my thanks and love to Richard.