The Interestings A Novel

SIX





When he was eleven years old in 1970 and sitting backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where his mother was one of the headliners, Jonah Bay happened to catch the eye of folksinger Barry Claimes, of the Whistlers. Barry Claimes had remained friends with Susannah since their affair in 1966, and they ran into each other frequently on the folk circuit. Susannah said she genuinely liked Barry; they hadn’t ever really broken up, but had simply been involved and then not been involved. Barry had been to the Bays’ loft on Watts Street frequently over the several months of their relationship, but he’d never shown all that much interest in Jonah, who at the time was a very quiet, dark-haired little boy, a miniature version of his mother, somber, always building with Lego, which could catch under your bare foot and leave deep marks in it.

But here in Newport, Jonah looked and behaved differently. Instead of just playing with Lego, he was becoming a musician, and he wandered around backstage at all the folk shows, playing whatever guitar happened to be available. “The kid’s good,” one of the roadies had observed to Barry, nodding toward Jonah, who was sitting and sweetly singing a weird little song he’d made up on the spot. In his high, preteen voice, Jonah sang:


“Because I am a piece of toast

You can bite me,

you can break me,

you can butter me,

you can take me . . .”


Then the lyrics and music ran out, and Jonah lost interest and put down the guitar. But Barry Claimes recognized that Susannah’s son and his song fragment were delightful. Barry’s own songwriting had always been forced. He was never going to be a good lyricist like Pete, one of the other Whistlers, who got all the credit for everything. Barry came over near Jonah and busied himself with a fancy, elaborate banjo riff, which naturally captured Jonah’s attention. Over the next hour, the boy and the man sat together in the Whistlers’ dressing room while the other members of the trio were elsewhere, and Barry gave Jonah a long, patient lesson on his banjo with the rainbow painted on the surface, and offered him cubes of cheese and sliced fruit and brownies from catering. They became friends quickly. When Barry asked Susannah if he could borrow Jonah for a day, take him to the house that the Whistlers had rented in Newport and let him explore the bluffs, Susannah agreed. Barry was a decent guy, a “softie,” people said. Jonah needed male companionship; he couldn’t spend all his time around his mother.

The next morning, Barry Claimes picked Jonah up at the hotel and brought him to the estate that the Whistlers’ manager had rented for the group. It looked out on the harbor, its minimal furniture was white wicker, and a housekeeper walked around putting lemon water in pitchers. They sat together in the solarium, and Barry said, “So why don’t you mess around with the guitar and see what you come up with?”

“Mess around?”

“Yeah, you know. Play some stuff, like you were doing the other day. You came up with some really neat beginnings of songs.”

Jonah said, in a formal voice, “I don’t think I can do that again.”

“Well, you’ll never know if you don’t try,” said Barry.

Jonah sat for an hour with the guitar, while Barry sat in the corner observing him, but the scene was so peculiar that Jonah felt nervous and unable to come up with much of anything. “Not a problem,” Barry kept saying. “You’ll come back again tomorrow.”

For some reason, Jonah did want to come back; no one other than his mother had ever paid this much attention to him before. Sitting in that living room again on the second day, Barry Claimes asked him, “You like gum?”

“Everybody likes gum.”

“That’s true. It sounds like a song you’d write. ‘Everybody Likes Gum.’ But there’s a new kind. It’s wild. You should try it.”

He pulled a pack of ordinary-looking Clark’s Teaberry gum from his pocket, and Jonah said, “Oh, I’ve had that kind before.”

“This is a limited edition,” said Barry. He handed a stick to Jonah, who unwrapped it and folded it into his mouth.

“It’s bitter,” said Jonah.

“Only at first.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be very popular.”

But the bitterness went away, and the gum was like all gum everywhere, putting you more in touch with your own saliva than you’d ever wanted to be. Barry said, “So. Guitar or banjo? Choose your poison.”

“Guitar,” said Jonah. “And you play banjo.”

“I’ll follow your lead, my lad,” said Barry. He leaned back against the couch, watching Jonah as he painstakingly picked his way through the few new chords that his mother had taught him. Barry took his banjo and played along. This went on for half an hour, an hour, and at a certain point Jonah noticed that the walls of the room appeared to be going convex and concave, buckling but not collapsing. It was like a slow-motion earthquake, except there was no vibration attached to it. “Barry,” he finally managed to say. “The walls.”

Barry leaned forward eagerly. “What about them?”

“They’re breathing.”

Barry smiled in calm appreciation of Jonah’s words. “They do that sometimes,” he said. “Just enjoy it. You’re a creative guy, Jonah. Tell me what you see, okay? Describe it for me. See, I’ve never been particularly good at describing my surroundings. It’s one of my many failings. But you have clearly been born with the powers of description. You’re very, very lucky.”

Jonah, when he moved his hand, saw a dozen hands following it. He was going crazy, he knew. He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people. He had a cousin Thomas who had become a schizophrenic in high school. “Barry,” said Jonah in a tortured voice. “I’m a schizophrenic.”

“Schizophrenic, that’s what you think? No, no, you’re just a really visual and creative person, Jonah, that’s all.”

“But things look different to me. I wasn’t feeling this way before and now I am.”

“I’ll take care of you,” said Barry Claimes magnanimously, and he reached his large hand out to Jonah, who could do nothing but take it. Jonah was very afraid, but he also wanted to laugh and stare at the trails his fingers left in the air. When he felt the need to curl into a fetal position and rock for a while, Barry sat with him, smoking and patiently watching over him. “Look,” said Barry at some point as the afternoon wore on in its bending way, “why don’t you fiddle with the guitar again, maybe sing some more funny lyrics. That’ll take your creative energy and put it to some use, my lad.”

So Jonah began to play, and Barry encouraged him to sing. The words fell out of Jonah, and Barry thought they were great, and he went into another room and got a tape deck, put in a cassette, and let it roll. Jonah sang words, though most of them made no sense, but being called “my lad” was amusing, and so he began to sing in the voice of Barry Claimes.

“Go make me a peanut butter sandwich, my lad,” he sang in an imitative melancholy brogue, and Barry said it was priceless.

This went on for nearly an hour, and Barry flipped the cassette tape to the other side. “Sing me something about Vietnam,” said Barry.

“I don’t know anything about Vietnam.”

“Oh, sure you do. You know all about our country’s dirty war. Your mom has taken you to peace marches; I went with the two of you once, remember? You’re like a mystic. A child mystic. Unspoiled.”

Jonah closed his eyes and began to sing:


“Tell them you won’t go, my lad

to the land of the worms and the dirty dirt

Tell them you won’t go, my lad

’Cause you’ve got life to live right here on earth . . .”


Barry stared at him. “Where’s this land you’re singing about?”

“You know,” said Jonah.

“You mean death? Jesus, you can do dark too. Not sure about ‘dirty dirt,’ though, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a strong concept, and even the melody’s good. It could really become something.” He reached out and lightly pinched Jonah’s cheek. “Nice going, kid,” he said, and he shut off the tape recorder with a snap.

But Jonah, though he was done playing guitar and writing words, continued to hallucinate for the rest of the day. If he stared at the butcher-block counter in the massive kitchen, the wood grain swam as if it were a whole colony of living things being looked at under a microscope. Wood grain swam and walls pulsed and a hand in motion left residue. It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was. Jonah sat on the floor in the living room of the house with his head in his hands and began to cry.

Barry stood and stared at him, not sure of what to do. “Oh, shit,” muttered Barry.

Eventually the two other Whistlers wandered in, accompanied by a few groupies. “Who’s the little guy?” asked a beautiful girl. She didn’t appear to be older than sixteen, Jonah noticed, much closer to his own age than to the men’s, but she was as unreachable as the rest of them. He was entirely alone. “He looks like he’s zonked,” she said.

“I’m a schizophrenic like my cousin!” Jonah confessed to her.

“Wow,” said the girl. “Really? Oh, you poor little boy. Do you have a split personality?”

“What? No,” said Barry. “That’s something else. And he’s not schizophrenic; he’s just being dramatic. His mother is Susannah Bay,” he added for emphasis, and the girl’s eyes went wide. Barry came over to Jonah and sat beside him. “You’ll be fine,” the Whistler whispered. “I promise.”

It was true that by the time Barry drove Jonah back, the hallucinations had quieted. All that remained was the occasional pale pink and green speckling on a white surface. Still, though, the hallucinations hovered, reminding Jonah that they might return at any time. “Barry, am I crazy?” he asked.

“No,” said his mother’s ex-boyfriend. “You’re just very creative and full of wise ideas. We have a term for people like you: an old soul.” He asked Jonah not to say anything to his mother about how he’d felt today. “You know the way mothers get,” Barry said.

Jonah wouldn’t tell her what had happened. He couldn’t talk to her that way; she wasn’t that kind of mother, and he wasn’t that kind of son. She loved him and had always taken care of him, but her work made her happiest; he accepted this about her. It didn’t even seem unnatural or wrong. Why shouldn’t her work make her happier than a boy with needs? Her work bent to her needs. She had been born with an extraordinary voice, and her guitar playing was excellent too. Her songwriting was fine—not great, but the instrumentality of her voice lifted it up and made it seem great. When she sang, everyone listened with deep pleasure. The world Jonah had grown up in so far was one of early calls and vans filled with equipment and the occasional march on the National Mall in Washington, which by the time they arrived wasn’t usually a march at all but simply just another enormous concert, held in the street. Someone was always leading Jonah up a freestanding metal stairway onto an airplane; he might accidentally leave his phonics workbook in a hotel suite, and another one would be sent to him in the next city. He spent a great deal of time by himself, constructing little machines out of Lego and describing for himself what those machines could do.

Susannah Bay wrote a song about her son that became, if not exactly anthemic at the level of “The Wind Will Carry Us,” then at least a generator of impressive royalties for the next couple of decades. “Boy Wandering” ended up putting Jonah through MIT. “I mean it literally is doing that,” Jonah explained to his friends when they all went off to college. “There’s a fund in my name at Merrill Lynch that we call ‘Boy Wandering Money Market Fund,’ and that’s all I’ll ever need for tuition and expenses.”

If hallucinating with Barry Claimes had been a one-off in 1970, Jonah Bay supposed the experience might have been folded into a whole life of experiences. He might even have been proud of it in an odd way. But it seemed that for the following year, wherever Susannah was, the Whistlers were there too. They performed at the same folk festivals, and they shared stage after stage, and Barry sought out Jonah as if they were close friends. According to this legend, Jonah was desperate to learn the banjo; he said nothing to contradict it. He did learn the banjo, and his guitar technique improved too over that year, but between lessons he went to whatever house Barry and the Whistlers were staying in, and each time he was there he soon found himself hallucinating, and sitting around writing fragments of little songs, which Barry dutifully taped. Once Jonah came up with an entire song about a character called the Selfish Shellfish, and Barry found this particularly hilarious. Off the top of his head, Jonah sang:


“. . . And the ocean belongs to me, just me

I really don’t want to share this sea

Maybe I’m really, really selfish

But selfishness is something that happens to shellfish . . .”


“The last two lines are a little artless,” Barry said. “Selfishness doesn’t ‘happen’ to someone. It’s how they behave. Plus, you’re squeezing too many words in there. And ‘really, really’ isn’t a good idea in a song. But never mind, the concept is solid. A selfish shellfish who wants the whole ocean to himself! Oh, man, you’re a genius, lad.”

Barry never took Jonah back to his mother’s hotel suite until he was himself again. “By which I mean,” said Barry, “your regular-world self. Not your creatively inspired old-soul self, which I somehow seem to bring out in you.” Never once did Jonah tell anyone about how he felt when he and Barry were alone for hours, and never once did anyone suspect anything unusual. Susannah herself said she was grateful that Jonah had a father figure; his biological father, she’d told him when he was young, had been a one-night stand, a folk archivist from Boston named Arthur Widdicombe, whom she’d introduced to Jonah when he was six. Arthur was a solemn young man with a shabby jacket and a patrician face, as well as the same long-lashed eyes as his son. He gripped a bursting old briefcase stuffed with papers about the history of American folk music and political activism from Joe Hill on upward. Arthur had come to the Watts Street loft to visit them exactly once, smoking heavily and anxiously, and then when a reasonable amount of time had passed he charged out as if sprung from a taxing labor. “I think you must have spooked him,” Susannah remarked after he suddenly left.

“What did I do?” Jonah had sat very quietly and respectfully throughout his biological father’s visit. At his mother’s urging he had offered Arthur Widdicombe a cup of hawthorn tea.

“You existed,” said his mother.

Sometimes after that day Arthur’s name would come up, but not very often, and it wasn’t as if Jonah pined for him. To say that Barry Claimes became a father figure was a wild overstatement—God knows it hadn’t happened at all back when Barry was sleeping with Susannah—though maybe his relationship with Barry was more father-son than Jonah imagined, for he felt greatly ambivalent about Barry, which was the way most sons seemed to feel about their fathers. Only when those fathers were not on the premises could they be elevated and deified. Barry Claimes was kind of a pain in the ass. He was pushy, he was demanding, and when Jonah didn’t feel like playing music into Barry’s tape recorder, Barry sometimes got annoyed, or became cold, and then Jonah had to apologize and try to get Barry to pay attention to him again. “Look, look, I’m singing another song for you,” Jonah would say, and he would grab the guitar or the banjo and make up something on the spot.

Somewhere around age twelve, it was as if Jonah Bay finally understood that what had been happening for a year whenever he saw Barry had been happening to him. He thought back on all those long days he’d spent with this member of the Whistlers in rented houses and hotel suites, “going creatively insane,” as they had ended up calling it, and then sitting around for hours with Barry, writing dumb lyrics, becoming afraid, being soothed, pacing, feeling his jaw tighten, swimming in pools and in the ocean, and once eating a hamburger at a drive-through and feeling the burger pulse in his hands as though the chopped-up cow still somehow managed to have a heartbeat in its chopped-up heart. (This would be the last time Jonah ever ate meat in his life.) All those sensations and behaviors weren’t those of a schizophrenic, or a “creatively insane” person, or an old soul. They were, Jonah finally, finally knew—and it had taken him almost a full year to know this—the sensations and behaviors of a person under the influence.

Back home in New York City for a few unbroken weeks, Jonah walked to a bookstore on the Lower East Side. Grown men and women stood around looking at novels and art books and the Partisan Review and the Evergreen Review. Jonah went to the counter and nervously whispered to a sales clerk, “Do you have books about drugs?”

The clerk looked him over, smirking. “What are you, ten?”

“No.”

“Drugs. You mean, like, psychotropics?” asked the clerk, whatever that meant, and Jonah took a gamble and said yes. The clerk walked him toward a section against the wall and pulled a book out from a tightly packed shelf, then pushed it against Jonah’s chest. “Here’s the bible, little buddy,” he said.

That night, Jonah sat in bed reading The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, and by the time he was only a quarter of the way through, he knew that he, like the author, had been experiencing the effects of hallucinogens, though in Jonah’s case it was involuntary. He thought back to some of the different times he’d been to Barry Claimes’s place, and he took out his math notebook and on a clean page made a list of the foods he could remember that he’d eaten when they were together—not during the creative insanity but in the period of time at the start of each visit, before the insanity began. He wrote:


1) a piece of Clark’s Teaberry gum

2) a slice of pound cake

3) a bowl of Team cereal

4) NOTHING (?)

5) Another piece of Clark’s Teaberry gum

6) Lipton’s onion dip and potato chips

7) two Yodels

8) beef chili

9) C.T.G.* again


It all made sense, except for that fourth time. He was positive he’d had nothing to eat or drink that time, because he’d just gotten over a stomach flu. But what had happened that day? Jonah generally had a heightened ability to remember events that had taken place even months earlier, and he thought back to that afternoon of sitting around the house that the Whistlers had rented in Minneapolis. Barry had asked him to go mail a letter. He’d handed it to Jonah and said, “Would you take this to the mailbox on the corner for me?”

But Jonah pointed out that there was no stamp, and so Barry said, “Oh, you’ve got a good eye,” and went and handed Jonah a stamp. And what had happened then?

Jonah had licked it. This counted as eating something, didn’t it? The stamp-licking had been planned. At age twelve Jonah looked back on the previous year of his life with the dreadful comprehension that over all that time he had been slowly fed drugs by a folksinger—psychotropics—and his mind had been stretched and distorted, his thoughts pushed into the mesh of a perceptual net whose shape had been changed by the hallucinogens Barry Claimes had been giving him for his own purposes. There were residual effects: moments when Jonah still woke up in the night thinking he was hallucinating. When he waved his hand across his field of vision, he could occasionally still see trails. He was on the edge of thinking his mind had been shattered for good, even though he wasn’t schizophrenic, just fragile. Fragile and prone to seeing images that weren’t quite there. Also, he had increasingly confused ideas about reality, which now seemed to him a not fully graspable thing.

So not long after that, when Jonah’s mother wanted to take him to California, where she was to perform in the Golden Gate folk fest, he declined, saying he’d outgrown being a folksinger’s kid walking around backstage with an all-access pass around his neck. He had thought this would be the end, but it was not. Barry Claimes called Jonah from the folk fest, because he still had Susannah’s home number. “I was so disappointed not to give you another banjo lesson,” said Barry on the long-distance call. Deep in the background came the sound of applause; Barry was phoning from backstage, and Jonah could imagine him taking off his aviator glasses and rubbing his watering blue eyes, then putting them on again, doing this half a dozen times.

“I have to go,” Jonah told him.

“Who’s on the phone?” asked Jonah’s babysitter, coming into the room.

“Come on, don’t do this, Jonah,” Barry said. Jonah didn’t say anything. “You are an extremely creative person, and I love being around your energy,” Barry went on. “I thought you had an interesting time with me, too.”

But Jonah just repeated that he had to go, then quickly hung up. Barry Claimes called him back a dozen times, and Jonah didn’t realize that he could simply not answer. Each time the phone rang, Jonah answered. And each time, Barry Claimes said he cared about him, he missed him, he wanted to see him, Jonah was his favorite person, even including all the folksingers he had known—even including Susannah and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and Richie Havens and Leonard Cohen. Jonah reminded him again that he had to go, and got off the phone, suddenly producing one of those horrible vomit burps that seem in danger of turning into actual vomiting but don’t. The next day, Barry called three times, and the day after that he called twice, and the day after that, only once. Then Susannah returned from the road and Barry no longer called at all.

A few months later, Barry Claimes abruptly left the Whistlers and then struck out on his own with an album of political songs. The chorus of his one hit from that album was an antiwar ballad that was spoken more than sung:


“Tell them you won’t go, my lad

to the land of the worms and the spaded dirt

Tell them you won’t go, my lad

for you’ve got a life to live right here on earth.”


The first time Jonah heard the song on the radio he said, “What?” but no one was in the room to hear him. “What?” he’d said again. “Dirty dirt” had been traded up for the superior term, “spaded dirt.” Jonah didn’t even know what “spaded” meant, but the central ideas and the unusual melody of the song had been his, and then Barry Claimes had worked on it and structured it and made it into something of his own. There was no one Jonah could tell, no one he could complain to about the injustice. Certainly not his mother. His music had been stolen and his brain had been manipulated, and he was in skittish shape for a very long time, though he tried very hard to hide it. Sometimes at night he would see remnants of etchings in the ceiling, and he would lie awake and wait them out, relieved when the morning came and the room was again bland and normal. “Tell Them You Won’t Go (My Lad)” had a bit of staying power near the middle and then the bottom of the charts; and whenever the song came on the radio, Jonah felt as if he were going to explode, but he kept himself carefully contained, riding it out. Finally the song disappeared, only to return many years later on every “best of the oldies” compilation album ever sold or given away during fund drives for public television; and eventually the acid flashbacks faded in frequency and intensity. One day Jonah was alarmed to see a pattern of menacing leaves and vines on a white wall, but then he realized that it was only wallpaper.

By the time they all entered Goodman and Ash Wolf’s apartment building, the Labyrinth, in the fall of 1974, what was left of Jonah’s flashbacks had been tamped down to very, very occasional frequency, and his obsessive thoughts about Barry stealing ideas from him and almost liquefying his brain had also lessened. He had other things to think about now. He was in high school, he was in the world. Jonah had known, roughly since first grade, that he liked boys—liked thinking about them, liked “accidentally” touching them during games—but it wasn’t until puberty that he allowed himself to recognize the meaning of that thinking and that touching. Still, he hadn’t done anything yet with any boy, and he couldn’t imagine how it would ever happen. He wasn’t about to tell anyone his desires, not even his great friends from Spirit-in-the-Woods, and he thought he might well end up living a monkish life. His life also probably wouldn’t involve music, even though he had been told repeatedly that he had the talent for a big career. His music had been taken from him, siphoned off by Barry Claimes’s greed.

At Spirit-in-the-Woods Jonah often got high with his friends, but he did it defiantly, knowing that he was drugging himself, and no one else was doing it. And he didn’t ever use hallucinogens. Until this summer, Jonah hadn’t come upon Barry Claimes in a couple of years, and in that time Jonah had changed and lengthened. He’d let his dark hair grow very long, and since camp ended he’d begun to cultivate the vaguest start of a beard that he didn’t quite know what to do with: Shave it? Ignore it? Shape it into a Fu Manchu? He gave himself a perfunctory glance in the mirror on the morning of the first casual Spirit-in-the-Woods reunion, and with a razor he scraped the skimpy thing off, like a cartographer erasing a land mass from a nascent map.

“Good,” said his mother when he appeared in the kitchen area of the loft. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but this is much better.”

She was at home more frequently lately, sitting at the table with a cigarette and a newspaper and a sheaf of contracts. Susannah could still fill concert halls, though smaller ones. She was now sometimes booked in the auditorium upstairs, as opposed to the main stage. Lately she’d been playing the occasional suburban venue with expensive pots of fondue and two-drink minimums. Her audiences were aging more dramatically as the seventies ground on, becoming consumers of soothing foods and increasingly sophisticated wines; but of course Susannah was aging too. Jonah sometimes looked at his mother and saw that while she was still beautiful, with a physical appearance like no one else’s mother, she no longer resembled the winsome hippie girl in the poncho he recalled from his early childhood. Jonah held a particular memory of sitting beside her on a tour bus during an overnight ride, his head leaning against her shoulder, the filaments of poncho wool brushing against his eyelids in the dim, sleeping bus. Like many female folksingers, Susannah Bay’s power, which was sensual, gentle, intermittently political, had always seemed at least partially to reside in her hair. But now her long hair made her look a little old, and he was afraid she was going to get that middle-aged coven-member look cultivated by some older women with long hair.

Jonah was protective of her, even as she had never been particularly protective of him. He hadn’t allowed her to protect him, hadn’t told her what had happened with Barry Claimes, so what was she supposed to have done? Amazingly and horribly she remained friendly with Barry, and they occasionally appeared in folk shows together or went out to dinner in the city or on the road. Jonah couldn’t believe he had to hear stories about Barry even now, after having been drugged and terrorized and robbed of his music by him for a full year in his childhood.

Since Jonah had begun spending those relieving summers at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he was determined to place his friends at the center of his thoughts, not that man. Summers in Belknap were extraordinary, as his mother had assured him they would be, but this year Susannah had shown up with Barry, for God’s sake, and Jonah had been so furious he hadn’t known what to do. He’d stormed off from the hill and headed back to his teepee, where he lay in the suffocating dark; luckily no one followed him there, though he supposed he hoped someone would—a boy, a comforting boy.

Now, Jonah and the others stood in a gold elevator car in the Labyrinth, rising. The Wolf parents’ design taste was handsome, Jonah had always thought since the first time he’d gone over to Ash and Goodman’s apartment two years earlier, though also heavy and effortful. The walls were painted deep and brooding colors, and there were various hassocks scattered around. The Wolfs’ dog, a loping golden retriever called Noodge, nosed his way into the group, excited and needing attention, but was finally ignored by everyone. Ash and Goodman’s parents were gone for the day to visit friends out at the beach, so Jonah and his friends spread out, commandeering different rooms. The Wolfs had a fine stereo system with enormous speakers, but Jonah wasn’t impressed. In his mother’s loft downtown, with the spare white walls and plain wood floors, the stereo system was sleek and Danish and far better than this one. If there was one thing Susannah Bay cared about, it was quality of sound. The Wolfs’ stereo was just one among many high-end appliances. Jonah thought about how Ash and Goodman had been raised among a riot of objects. If either of them fell, they would be cushioned; everything they needed over the whole of their lives was here for them in the Labyrinth.

After eating snacks together in the living room now, they tacitly divided up into groups of two. By design, by default, the beautiful Jonah Bay found himself with the beautiful Ash Wolf, and because this was her home, she asked him if he wanted to see her room. He’d been in there many times before, but he felt that he would be seeing it in a different way now.

They sank down onto the swamp of her bed with all its slaughtered stuffed animals that were loosely and unevenly filled from all those years of having been loved by a young girl, then having been thrown around by a thoughtless adolescent and her friends. Jonah would have liked to sleep there with Ash and the animals, just sleep and sleep. But she was beside him on the bed, her heavy door closed, and honestly, though he felt no sexual pull toward her, Ash Wolf was like a strange and beautiful object. He had always liked looking at her, but it had never occurred to him to touch her. Now, though, he considered that touching her might not be a bad idea. They’d always been the pretty ones in the group; Goodman was incredible looking, of course, Jesus, but could not be described as pretty or fine-lined. Cathy, too, was so strongly female, so full; physically she was much more than pretty. Though Ash was a girl, Jonah thought it was possible that touching her might feel pleasant in the way that touching himself was.

“You have such amazing eyes, Jonah. Why didn’t we do this in the summer?” Ash asked as he tentatively ran his hand along her arm. “We wasted valuable time.”

“Yeah, it was a big mistake,” he said, though it wasn’t true. Touching her arm felt good, certainly, but there was no urgency attached to the swishing motion. They lay against each other, both of them hesitant.

“I like this so much,” said Ash.

“Me too.”

Did people in bed usually say things like “I like this so much?” and “Me too”? Or weren’t they more likely to be utterly quiet and entranced, or else loud and chugging and apelike? Girls at camp and at parties at the Dalton School had kissed Jonah before, and he’d obligingly kissed them back, though in recent years he’d tried to picture boys when this happened, transforming a pretty girl’s face into the face of a laughing, flexing boy. Girls tended to love him, and the previous summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he’d walked around holding hands with a blond pianist named Gabby. Jonah was good-natured about these pretty girls who developed crushes on him. Ash was simply the most extreme example of such a girl.

Love, he thought, should be as powerful as a drug. It should be like chewing a stick of laced Clark’s Teaberry gum and then feeling your neurons blasting all around you. He remembered the specific moment each time when he’d felt as if he was going mad. He could pinpoint the exact fraction of a second when the drug had dropped over him. Jonah wanted a tiny bit of that feeling now—not too much, just a little—but instead he felt understimulated, a little bored, and safe.

In Ash Wolf’s bed, the two friends kissed for a very long time. It was a marathon of kissing, not thrilling but certainly not bad, because Ash was like some kind of overgrown meadow. She seemed to be a walking version of her own bedroom, replete with hidden corners, surprises, and delights. Her saliva was thin and inoffensive. The sun dimmed over Central Park, and the afternoon fell away, and the kissing never revved up into anything beyond itself, which was actually fine with him.

Walking out of Ash’s bedroom, still holding her hand, Jonah sensed that all of them had coupled up today in significant ways. Goodman and Cathy were off in Goodman’s room, probably going very far together, perhaps going all the way. Goodman’s door was closed, Ash announced now, having quickly gone down the hall to check. Jonah pictured the mess that was Goodman’s room, the perennially unmade bed, the little half-finished and abandoned architectural models, the clothes he threw everywhere just because he could. The housekeeper Fernanda would be in first thing Monday morning, and she’d stand in the teen stink of Goodman’s room, folding, smoothing, and disinfecting. Jonah suddenly pictured Goodman positioning himself between Cathy Kiplinger’s sturdy legs, and the image disturbed him.

As for Jules and Ethan: where were they? By default the two homeliest of the group were probably off doing something lovelike too. He knew that they’d tried to be a couple over the course of the summer, though Ethan had finally said there was really nothing between them. “She’s just my friend,” he’d confided. “We’re leaving it at that.” “I hear you,” Jonah had replied. As Jonah followed Ash down the hall into the living room, heading toward the kitchen to get something to drink after all that kissing, he heard a sound and turned. On the floor behind the couch, in an alcove of the large, overdressed living room, were Jules and Ethan. What were they doing? Not sex, not even kissing. They were playing the board game Trouble, which they’d dug up from the chest in the window seat that contained all the treasures of the Wolf family’s game nights over the years: Trouble, Life, Monopoly, Scrabble, Battleship, and a couple of off-brand board games called Symbolgrams and Kaplooey!, which no one outside the Wolf family had ever heard of.

Ethan and Jules were deep into their game, their palms beating down on the plastic dome, which made that strangely satisfying pock sound. The game of Trouble was predicated on the idea that people liked the novelty of this sound. People wanted novelty. Sex was a novelty too; if Cathy Kiplinger gave a blow job to Goodman Wolf, at the end of it his dick might pop out of her mouth with a pock sound like the dome in Trouble being pushed. Jonah only made that connection now as he heard the sound and saw Ethan and Jules, this non-couple, sitting and playing the game with the contentment of two people who don’t need to do anything physical and extreme. Song lyrics came into his head, unbidden:


“Now his dick popped out of the bubble

making a sound like the game of Trouble . . .”


Jonah imagined himself sitting with Barry Claimes and writing these stupid lyrics; he saw Barry listening intently, the wheels of his cassette tape turning. The image was sickening, and he tried to return to thoughts of Ash. He wondered if he’d graduated to being Ash Wolf’s boyfriend now, and if so, what that would entail. He almost thought of being a boyfriend as like being a duke or an earl; it was as if he had land to oversee now, and ribbons to cut. Ash took his hand and led him past the board-game-playing couple, then into the kitchen where they drank glasses of New York City tap water, then down the hall past the probably-going-very-far couple, Goodman and Cathy, and finally into the den, a room filled with reeds jutting from ceramic urns, and low, cracked-leather couches.

“Let’s lie down,” Ash said.

“We’ve been lying down,” said Jonah.

“I know, but we haven’t been lying down in here. I want to try every couch and every bed with you.”

“In the world?” he asked.

“Well, eventually. But we can start with this one.”

He couldn’t tell her that what he wanted now, more than anything, was to fall asleep beside her. No touching, no kissing, no stimulation. No sensation, no consciousness. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.