The Interestings A Novel

SEVEN





Of the many people who came to the apartment on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth and stayed a day or two or even longer, most were so pleased to feel wanted that they forgot to ask themselves if there was anywhere else they ought to be. Over the years, various people considered themselves honorary members of the Wolf family, believing briefly that being allowed to stay here as long as you liked was the same thing as being one of them. But no matter how many times Jules Jacobson walked into the foyer, greeted with wild enthusiasm by Noodge the dog, and then headed down the long hallway that was crowded with photographs of the Wolfs doing various Wolfish things, she never felt that she entirely belonged here, just as she had not belonged in that teepee on that first night. But no longer did she feel like an interloper.

Gil and Betsy Wolf didn’t seem overly curious about their daughter’s sudden closest friend, Jules, and when she stayed for dinner their questions to her were friendly if perfunctory (“Jules, have you ever tasted chicken saltimbocca before? No? Well, that’s a crime”), but still Ash said she was always welcome. The place was a constant hub for Spirit-in-the-Woodsians. Jonah, who’d become Ash’s first serious boyfriend since that day in September, was often here during the week and on weekends. Cathy, who had now officially become Goodman’s girlfriend—also since that same day—kept a leotard in Goodman’s bureau drawer, which seemed to Jules and Ash a spectacularly mature gesture. Cathy and Goodman fought a lot, and the words that came through the walls sounded like the argument of adults, not teenagers. “STOP TREATING ME LIKE GARBAGE, IT ISN’T FAIR!” Cathy would yell, but her rage would immediately be engulfed by tears.

“If you don’t stop crying, then we are through,” Goodman would say in a tight, furious voice. Sometimes he suddenly told her to leave. Days would go by during which Cathy wouldn’t hear from him at all, and she would call the Labyrinth, demanding to know where he’d been. Several times he told Ash to tell Cathy he wasn’t home. “I just can’t deal with her,” he said to his sister.

Ethan came over to the Wolfs’ whenever he could, though he was often at home making one of his cartoon shorts. His public-defender father, with whom he shared the cramped apartment in the Village since his mother had run off with the pediatrician, had allowed him to turn the dining room into an animation workspace, and so the table was covered with Ethan’s work, and the plastic smell of cel paint was in the air. Ethan’s family had very little money, he’d told Jules. Stuyvesant, the very good public high school he attended, was of course free. “Thank God for Stuy,” Ethan said. Though the school was known as a powerhouse for math and science, the teachers respected Ethan’s big talent and let him work on independent-study projects. He made funny cartoons that he sometimes screened to great reception at assembly. Ethan’s life was busy and chaotic; his father’s apartment was filthy, and he told Jules that he never wanted her to see it, which was fine with her, since she’d told him she never wanted any of them to see the house in Underhill—not because it was filthy, which it wasn’t, but just because it was ordinary.

Since Jules had first gone to the Wolfs’, all she had wanted was to find ways and excuses to get back there. But there were times when, for no good reason, her mother wouldn’t allow her to go. It was as if Lois Jacobson knew she was in the process of gradually losing her younger daughter—had maybe already lost her. Jules expressed increasingly open contempt for her mother and sister. The Wolfs, however, were cosmopolitans, a cultured, lively family that celebrated everything. Ash and Goodman teased their pretty peahen of a mother about her pronunciation of the word latke around Chanukah.

“I can’t help it,” Betsy Wolf said. “I didn’t grow up with the word. Your grandfather would have been quite upset to see me frying up a pan of these.”

“Of these what, Mom?” Goodman goaded her.

“Lat-kees,” she said, and the Wolfs all laughed. In honor of their mother’s non-Jewishness they put up a “latke mistletoe” over the door at their Chanukah party: a single potato pancake dangling from a string, under which all guests might receive a kiss. Just the idea of a latke mistletoe, something jokey and indigenous to one particular family, was alien to Jules. She fell into a funk thinking of her own childhood, which in comparison withered like a latke on the vine.

The Wolfs could do no wrong; they were stylish in separate, distinct ways. Betsy, a Smith College graduate, was the aging New England glamorous type, strands of hair waving from her loose bun; Gil was the Drexel Burnham banker, though full of yearning. Ash was the tiny one who would go very far as an actress or playwright, and with whom everyone took great care. Goodman was the disturbingly charismatic boy who had no “follow-through” and who enraged his father and entertained other people with his seductive, erratic nature. He’d been kicked out of his traditional all-boys’ school back in seventh grade, for cheating. “For cheating openly,” Ash had clarified to Jules. The other boys had been so much more surreptitious than Goodman. Everything he did was big and blustery, performed with ill-advised flourish. “The pressure’s always been on me to be the one who doesn’t screw up,” Ash explained to Jules. “The perfect, creative one. It’s sort of a full-time job.” But of course it seemed like a good job to Jules, to whom that whole family was so vivid and desirable.

“What is it you get from them?” her sister, Ellen, once asked when Jules was preparing to go into the city for the weekend.

“Everything,” was the only answer.

Freshman year in college a few years later, living in a suite with that group of nasty girls and escaping one night to the dorm room of a boy named Seth Manzetti, of interest to her mostly for his satyr’s head and slightly mossy body smell, Jules Jacobson had lain very still on his bed that was covered with velour sheets, and considered how, as of five minutes earlier, she was no longer a virgin. She quickly assessed that she didn’t feel at home in this state, yet still wanted to be in it. Her thighs felt a little banged-up, and her nipples raged from the satyr’s zealous attentions. But here in this state was where she would stay and where she would want to return and maybe sometimes live. Not with Seth Manzetti, to be sure, but in the beds and corridors of sex and love, adult love. Jules Jacobson wished that somehow she’d been able to trick Goodman Wolf into touching her in some sensual way that first summer, or even over the course of the following year and a half they all still had with him. A modestly homely girl should be allowed one such moment, just to know what she was missing, and then be able to move on. Not to have to long for it forever, wondering what it would have felt like.

The Wolf parents were party givers. Once in a while, Jules would enter the apartment on a weekend only to find Gil or Betsy standing in the foyer with a couple of party-rental people. “Jules, we were having a scintillating conversation about chairs,” Gil once said. “Cousin Michelle on my wife’s side is getting married here next month.”

“Goodman can DJ!” called Ash from the living room, where she’d been sitting on the window seat with a notebook, curled up against Noodge’s side, writing a play.

So Goodman was hired, and at the wedding he proved adept at spinning 45s and making suggestive patter. “This next song is for Michelle and Dan,” he said, leaning in close to the microphone so that his voice was distorted. “Because tonight is going to be one of those nights spent in white satin. Until Dan . . . takes her satin . . . off.”

“Maybe you should go into radio,” his mother said later, and the comment was meant to be helpful, but it also reflected his parents’ anxiety that Goodman had no “real” talent yet. Yes, he wanted to be an architect, but you couldn’t have an architect who carelessly forgets to include a girder. There was pressure for him to “get his act together,” as his father often said. But why did he need to have a workable skill already? Jules wondered. Goodman at sixteen was an indifferent, restless student at his alternative high school. Standing behind the turntable at cousin Michelle’s wedding allowed him to reclaim the power he had every summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods.

There was a New Year’s Eve party held at the Labyrinth every year too, and the friends from camp attended. They snagged puff pastry canapés as they made their way around the room in the final hours of 1974, and Ash snatched up a cocktail shaker of martinis and brought it into Goodman’s dark, slovenly bedroom. In a beanbag chair, Ash sat in her boyfriend Jonah’s lap. Jules watched from a corner as Cathy Kiplinger leaned against Goodman on the bed with the pineapple-shaped finials, her mouth on his ear. On his ear! He, unperturbed, openly pleased, put his hand deep into Cathy’s blond hair. Jules thought of how her own hair lacked the high silk content that boys like Goodman and all the men in the world apparently wanted. But Ethan hadn’t seemed to want to put his hand in hair like that this summer. He’d only wanted Jules’s hair, had only wanted Jules.

The two of them, Ethan and Jules, now sat together by default as midnight approached, and when the New Year officially arrived, Ethan Figman’s lips were upon Jules’s, and he could not resist seeing how much of a kiss he’d be allowed. Because it was New Year’s Eve she didn’t immediately draw back from him. The sensation wasn’t too terrible this time, but she couldn’t forget that this was Ethan, her friend. Ethan, who did not attract her. Finally, after a couple of seconds, she ducked away and said, “Ethan, what are we doing?”

“Nothing. That was a nostalgia kiss,” he said. “It’s sepia colored. People in that kiss are . . . wearing stovepipe hats . . . and children are rolling hoops down the street, and eating penny candy.”

“Yeah, right,” was all she could say, smiling.

Jules noticed that on the bed, Goodman seemed as if he wanted to eat Cathy, to absorb her into himself. But there was no similarly intense activity taking place between Ash and Jonah, who continued to kiss like two matching birds on a branch cooperatively passing a worm back and forth, beak to beak.

“Happy New Year, Jules the Great,” Ethan Figman said, looking into her eyes.

“I’m not great,” she said.

“I think you are.”

“Why?” she couldn’t help but ask. She wasn’t trying to fish for compliments; she just wanted to understand.

“You’re just so much yourself,” he said with a shrug. “You’re not all neurotic like some girls—watching what they eat all the time, or pretending to be a little less smart than a boy. You’re ambitious, you’re quick, you’re really funny, and you’re a good friend. And, of course, you’re adorable.” His arms went around her once again; and even though he understood that there might be a moment like this one every now and then, still nothing sexual or even romantic was ever going to happen between them. They were friends, just friends, though friendship counted for so much.

“I’m really not great,” she persisted. “I have no greatness in me.”

“Oh I think you do. It’s just not show-offy. I like that. But you should let other people see it too,” Ethan said, “not just me. Although,” he added after a second, hoarsely, then clearing his throat, “once they see it, they’ll snap you up, and I’ll be sad.”

Why was he so faithful to her, and to the idea of her? His fidelity made her want to be better than she really was: smarter, funnier, with broader range. Be better, she told herself sternly. Be as good as he is.

A little while later, Jules and Ethan got ready for sleep, lying side by side in the Wolfs’ den on the white rug that appeared made of sheepdog. The fish tank threw carbonated light onto the books that lined all four walls, the names of the authors confirming that here was a home where thoughtful, intelligent, up-to-date people resided, people who read Mailer, Updike, Styron, Didion. Jules might have whispered to Ethan, “I’m very happy right now,” but it would have sounded like a tease. She lay beside him, smiling, and he had to say, “What’s so funny? Are you making fun of me?”

“No, of course not. I just feel content,” she said carefully.

“That’s an old person’s word,” said Ethan. “Maybe you used it because you’re settling in to old age.”

“I might be.”

“Nineteen seventy-five. Doesn’t that sound extremely old? Nineteen seventy-four was already pushing it. I liked nineteen seventy-two; that’s the one for me,” he said. “In answer to the question ‘What year is it?’ I feel like the answer should always be ‘Nineteen seventy-two.’ George McGovern, remember him?” Ethan said, sighing. “Good old George?”

“Do I remember him? I’m not brain damaged, Ethan.”

“He just came and went. We put him up like idiots, and we got beaten down, and then time passed. Everything,” he said with passion, “is going to move farther and farther away from what feels familiar. I read somewhere that most of the really intense feelings you’ll ever feel take place right around our age. And everything that comes afterward is going to feel more and more diluted and disappointing.”

“Oh, don’t say that. It can’t be true,” Jules said. “We haven’t even done anything yet. Not really.”

“I know.” They were both quiet and somber, considering this.

“But at least you’re starting to,” Jules said. “Parade magazine thinks so.”

“I mean I haven’t done anything, as in have experience,” he said. “Life experience.”

“Oh, experience like Goodman has?” Jules asked, trying to make her voice sound dismissive, as though what she and Ethan had in their platonic friendship was far superior to the physical pleasures Goodman regularly received from and gave to Cathy Kiplinger. Her mouth on his ear. Her dancerly legs opening so his penis could find its rightful notch.

“Yes, all right, sex and other things. Emotional things,” Ethan said. “Dark, dark moods.”

“You are the least dark person I know,” said Jules. Ethan was deep, and a worrier, but somehow he cheerfully adapted to all situations.

“But why do girls always want someone dark and moody?” Ethan asked. “I see a moody person in your future.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Yes. While I sit at home with no food in my fridge, and my little cartoons, weeping over how the Democrats were crushed in seventy-two. Please send me postcards from out there in the world,” Ethan said. “Mail them to the place where I will spend the rest of my solitary life.”

“And where will that be?”

“Just address the postcards to ‘Ethan Figman, Hollow Tree number six, Belknap, Massachusetts, 01263.’”

“That sounds nice,” Jules said, and she pictured Ethan inside his hollow tree, making tea for himself in a kettle over a fire, wearing a quilted maroon satin robe. In this image he was transformed into some kind of C. S. Lewis furred woodland animal character who still bore Ethan’s distinctive facial features.

“But what if things don’t go well?” Ethan said. “At Spirit-in-the-Woods I’ve always been, you know, the weird-looking animation guy, the roly-poly joint roller, while everyone else understood that things essentially suck. I knew they sucked too. Watching the nightly news, sitting there with my dad with the TV on, eating Beefaroni. But you and I and everyone we know, we were just a little too young to actually see it up close. My Lai, all that horrible tragedy. We sort of fell between the cracks.”

“Yes.” It had hardly occurred to Jules to think about what it might be like not to have fallen between the cracks in the way he described. She hadn’t known what it might feel like to be inside real drama. To do something important. To be brave. What an imponderable thought: bravery.

“I can’t decide if that’s good or bad,” he said. “It’s definitely good, in that we’re not dead. I didn’t die some pointless death in Hanoi, probably accidentally shooting myself with my own M16. On the other hand, it’s bad that we missed out on experience. You know what I want?” Ethan said, suddenly sitting up in the dark den. Fluff clung to his hair from the rug, like a dusting of snow that had landed there when he’d briefly poked his head out from Hollow Tree number 6.

“Experience?” Jules said.

“Yeah, that too, but something else. This will sound pretentious,” said Ethan, “but I want to not think about myself so much.” He looked at her for a reaction.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world.”

“And an uncircumcised world,” Jules said, for no reason other than that it was the kind of thing they said to each other, calling it wit. It was exactly the kind of talk Ethan was saying he no longer wanted. “You can have that,” she quickly said. “I’m sure you can have all of that.”

“It’ll be my New Year’s resolution,” he said. “So what’s yours?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, let me know when you come up with one,” said Ethan, and he yawned, his mouth so wide that she could see his many fillings.

Jules suspected that her resolution wouldn’t be noble like his. She would want something that concerned herself and her own gratification. And then she suddenly knew what it was: she wanted to be loved by someone who was not Ethan Figman. The cruelty in this realization could knock her over, but she knew she wanted to be loved by someone and to respond to him, even if he was not worthy. Goodman would have been so perfect. She thought of his hand in Cathy Kiplinger’s hair, and his mouth smeared with that other girl’s colorless lip gloss. But Goodman Wolf was already taken, and in so many ways he was a horrible choice, not to mention the critical fact that he did not desire Jules, and would never desire her—and that was the most important element here: He needed to desire her too. She wished she could make Goodman do that this year, which would be the last full year that all of them would be together. Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency. What she wanted—and wanted now—was to be loved by someone who excited her. There was nothing wrong with that. But still it felt unkind to Ethan, and unfair.

In other rooms, the revelers were winding down. “I’m sorry to say that though I am really enjoying this conversation, I have to go to sleep,” said Ethan, and he turned away from Jules, unaware of her secret resolution, giving her the curved wall of his back, which rose and fell into the morning and the true start of 1975.

• • •

Over that next year, the changes among them all were subtle instead of striking. Their faces became longer, their handwriting altered slightly, and their sleeping arrangements shifted. Jules’s New Year’s resolution did not come true, and she stayed absorbed in the relationship dramas of her friends, all of whom went to different schools in the city. In Underhill, Jules sat in the classrooms of her enormous high school, looking out the window in what seemed to be the general direction of New York City. Ash and Jonah were no longer a couple, having broken up in late February, for reasons that were only vaguely explained to the others.

“I’m glad we had a relationship,” Ash would say to Jules on the phone, “but now it’s over. Of course it’s sad, but I’m really busy, so it’s probably just as well.” Ash had written a one-woman play called Both Ends, which was about the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It had been performed at Talent Night at Brearley, her all-girls’ school, and her friends had gone to see it. The auditorium went silent and attentive as Ash stood onstage in a nightgown, holding a single candle, and began to speak so deliberately quietly that everyone instinctively leaned forward so as not to miss a word. “‘My candle burns at both ends,’” she recited. “‘It will not last the night . . .’”

Jonah, since the breakup, had also been reticent about it, but this was more in keeping with his usual way of being. He’d gotten involved in the robotics club at Dalton, and though the other boys who stayed late in the science room with their mechanized creations were nothing like Jonah—none of them had had a girlfriend yet, and none of them would ever have a girlfriend like Ash unless they created her out of robot parts—he didn’t mind, and actually felt serene among cogs and motors and batteries. In Jonah’s reserve, his friends sensed great feeling; to them, Jonah and Ash had experienced a potent but fragile love.

A month later, Goodman and Cathy’s breakup was as loud and difficult as Ash and Jonah’s had been mild. The Wolf family had gone on vacation in March 1975 to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, and on the soft white beach Goodman met a British girl who was staying at the hotel with her family. Jemma was pretty and sly, and at night Goodman went off with her after both sets of parents were asleep. He came back to the hotel suite once at two a.m. bearing a fresh hickey like a badge, and his father was furious. “We had no idea where you were,” Gil Wolf said. “We thought you’d been kidnapped.” But they hadn’t thought that at all.

Upon the Wolfs’ departure from Tortola, Goodman sensed he wouldn’t ever again see Jemma, the girl who spoke and looked like a sexier and more experienced Hayley Mills, but now he didn’t want to go back to being the boyfriend of Cathy Kiplinger, who made so many demands on him. He bluntly broke up with Cathy the morning after his family returned home, and she cried and called him a lot to try and make him change his mind, and she required long phone calls and hasty meetings with Ash, Jules, Jonah, and Ethan, but still none of them were seriously worried about her.

Then there were a few weeks of social discomfort, and when they all got together on a weekend, either Cathy or Goodman would not appear. They tag-teamed each other in this manner for a while, until finally it seemed that they had both moved on and could bear being in each other’s presence again. But unlike Jonah and Ash, who had simply returned to their previous friendship incarnation, Cathy and Goodman were now strained and strange when together.

Three months later in late June, back at Spirit-in-the-Woods again, the six of them resumed their summer formation full force, though Cathy Kiplinger showed up for their gatherings in Boys’ Teepee 3 less and less frequently. “Where is she?” Goodman asked the other girls, and the answer was always, “Dancing.” Cathy, finally recovered from Goodman, had returned to the dance studio, and despite her too-big breasts and too-wide hips, she still danced with great relief and strength. Her talent wasn’t overlooked here, but was instead celebrated.

“Go get Cathy,” Goodman told Ash one night as they all sat around Boys’ Teepee 3. “Tell her that her presence is requested in this teepee.”

“God, Goodman, why do you care if she’s here?” his sister asked.

“I just want everyone together again like we used to be,” he said. “Come on, go get Cathy. Jacobson, see that she goes, okay?”

So Ash went off with Jules beside her, the mission feeling important and exciting. Already from down the path, music could be heard: Scott Joplin’s saddest rag, “Solace.” Through the unscreened window of the dance studio, the big blond girl was dancing with a tall black boy while a record spun. His name was Troy Mason; he was seventeen, and this was his first summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods. He was from the Bronx, here on scholarship like Jules, a quiet, strongly built dancer with a wide Afro, one of only five nonwhite kids at the camp. (“We must do more outreach,” Manny Wunderlich said.) At lunch earlier that week Troy had mentioned that not only had he never eaten mung bean sprouts before, he had never heard of them. In response, Cathy had piled them on Troy’s plate from the salad bar, and he’d loved them and wanted seconds. Now he was dancing with her to this mournful rag in a dreamy but disciplined way.

Jules and Ash stood at the window like orphans looking in on a feast. Love. That was what they were seeing. Neither of them had had it yet—not the beautiful Ash or the unbeautiful Jules. They were outside love, and Cathy was in. Her breasts would sink the possibility of her dancing professionally, but right now she didn’t have to think about that at all. She had gotten over Goodman Wolf, that exciting but unmanageable figure, that disaster of a boyfriend, and had turned toward someone else. They couldn’t bring her back to Boys’ Teepee 3 tonight, and maybe not any other night either.

From their place in the blackberry bush in the dark, Ash whispered, “What am I supposed to tell my brother?”

• • •

In the late afternoon of the last full day of that second summer, Manny and Edie Wunderlich gathered everyone on the lawn. Some people assumed Susannah Bay was about to appear—she hadn’t yet shown up at all—but Jonah told his friends that his mother wasn’t coming this year. She was finishing a few tracks of an album, having signed with a new label after being rudely dropped by Elektra. This album wasn’t even folk, really, but actually it had “a disco quality,” Jonah said, keeping his voice as unjudgmental as possible. “Disco folk.”

“Dolk,” corrected Ethan.

The Wunderlichs had gathered everyone not to listen to Susannah Bay, and not to watch another president resign, but to have an aerial photograph taken with all the campers lying on the grass head to toe. “Your counselors will be walking around to help you get into position,” Manny boomed to them through a megaphone. He looked ecstatic whenever he got a chance to address the entire camp. Beside him, Edie stood beaming. The Wunderlichs seemed like dinosaurs of the arts, and how could you not respect that? They had known people like Bob Dylan, who, in the early 1960s when he was a lamb-faced, milk-complexioned boy, had sat in their Greenwich Village apartment, sent there by Susannah Bay, a friend of his from the emerging folk scene. “Crash at Manny and Edie’s,” Susannah had apparently told him. “I used to teach guitar at their summer camp. They won’t give you any grief.” The young boy folksinger had shown up on the Wunderlichs’ doorstep in a thin coat with the collar turned up and a hat that looked Cossack, and of course they’d had the generosity and foresight to let him in.

Now Manny Wunderlich stood with his wife on the lawn, explaining how all the campers were going to form letters of the alphabet with their bodies for the aerial photograph, spelling out Spirit-in-the-Woods 1975. The hyphens would be formed by the three youngest and shortest campers. It took more than an hour to get everyone curving the right way, and Manny and Edie walked around and made adjustments like the choreographers of a massive avant-garde performance.

Jules lay with the top of her head against the bottoms of Ethan’s cold bare feet; her own feet touched the big head of Goodman, and she felt with certainty that this was the closest she would ever in her life come to touching him. How pathetic it was that because she was a girl who looked the way she did, she would have to use her feet, and her feet only. For good measure she bent her toes, pressing down against the hard, masculine nut of Goodman’s skull. And as she did, she could feel Ethan’s feet pressing against her own head, for he too was getting in a surreptitious little foot feel, the only kind now permitted him.

As they all lay still, the sounds of an airplane churned in the sky, and then the twin engine came into view. The cook, Ida Steinberg, was up there with Dave, the groundskeeper, who had a pilot’s license. Ida lifted the Nikon F2 and recorded the moment.

That night, at the farewell party in the rec hall, Cathy Kiplinger and Troy Mason held each other and danced to every number, slow or fast. The Rolling Stones played and Cream and the Kinks, with Goodman serving as DJ for the first hour. But the sight of Cathy being held by her dancer boyfriend was too much for Goodman, and he abruptly headed back to Boys’ Teepee 3, where a hasty round of V&Ts were mixed, and Goodman knocked back a few drinks, with everyone else becoming respectfully silent, until he suddenly announced, as if bewildered by this realization, “I am totally plastered.”

From outside the teepee came a particularly strong round beam of light, and behind it appeared the weaving teacher and lifeguard Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, with her hardy Icelandic flashlight, whose chunk of a battery would probably outlive them all. She came into the teepee, saying, “Relax, this is a friendly visit,” and uncharacteristically sat down on one of the boys’ beds, where, even more surprisingly, she lit up a cigarette. “Do not ever do what I’m doing,” Gudrun told them after she took a drag. “First of all, the result of smoking—cancer—is proven. Then there is the safety issue. What is the expression: ‘This place can be engulfed like a tinder-chamber’?”

“That’s not an expression,” Ethan said. “At least,” he added politely, “not one that I’ve heard.” They sat for a while, but after Gudrun put out her cigarette in a collapsible cup and said she should leave, they begged her to stay a little longer. She was twenty-eight years old, dark-blond-haired, slightly worn looking but subtly exotic. Jules wondered what it was like to be a bohemian in Reykjavik, and whether Gudrun felt alone there. No one had ever thought to ask the counselor anything about herself. She taught weaving and watched over the swimming pool here at a place where most people didn’t exactly swim. In the mornings she gave diving lessons to a motivated few, though the pool didn’t have the most pristine surface. Leaves would collect, and in the unfurling mist right before the wake-up recording of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony that was played at seven a.m. each day, Gudrun Sigurdsdottir could be seen at poolside with a net, skimming the surface for all the dropped bits of nature and the dead or doomed frogs that had haplessly seaplaned there overnight.

“Gudrun, tell me something,” the very drunk Goodman said. “Why do you think women act the way they do? Being all needy and then getting you completely drawn in, then screwing things up. Doing this little back and forth with you. Why are relationships so f*cked up? Does it ever change? Is it different in Denmark?”

“I am not from Denmark, Goodman.”

“Of course you’re not. I knew that. I was just wondering if you knew how it was in Denmark.”

“Nice save, Wolf,” said Ethan.

“What are you asking me exactly?” Gudrun said. “Why do I think the problems between the men and women of the world are the way they are today? You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel—will they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?”

Goodman shifted in discomfort. “Something like that,” he said.

“Yes,” said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. “Always they will be aching. I wish I could tell you something else, but I wouldn’t be telling the truth. My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on.”

No one could say anything. “We are so, so f*cked,” Jules finally said, wanting to assert herself and make sure she remained essential to these people. Already, she couldn’t ever imagine being without them.

The last night of camp grew cold, and when the rain began to batter the slanted wood of the boys’ teepee, the girls inside made a run for it, heads down. They wanted beds and warmth; they wanted the summer not to be over, but it was.

• • •

Back in the city, Goodman remained bitter and never entirely sobered up. When the school year began, he drank on weekday afternoons, alarming his parents, who sent him to see a highly recommended psychoanalyst. “Goodman said that Dr. Spilka wants him to tell him everything,” Ash said to Jules. “He wants him to tell him what, quote, ‘sexual intercourse’ with Cathy was like. My parents are paying sixty dollars an hour for this; have you ever heard of anyone paying that much for a shrink?”

Over the school year, during constant, urgent visits to the city, Jules tracked Goodman’s increase in surliness. One weekend in November they all returned to the Autopub, and this time Cathy brought her boyfriend, Troy, with her. They sat together in an antique Ford, making out while the Marx Brothers played. Goodman sat in his own car beside his sister, slouched down as he watched Cathy and Troy from behind.

“Goodman is being very difficult, even for Goodman,” Ash said quietly to Jules as they all stood on the subway platform afterward; they stayed slightly apart from the others so they could talk. “It’s been, what, eight months since he and Cathy broke up. That’s enough already. You know, he keeps vodka in his work boot in his closet.”

“Just poured into it?”

“I mean in a flask in his boot. Not sloshing around loose, Jules.”

“Why should he be so upset?” Jules asked. “He’s the one who broke up with her.”

“No idea.”

“I like Cathy.”

“I like her too,” Ash said. “I just don’t like what it’s all done to my brother.”

“She really seems in love with Troy,” said Jules. “Imagine getting to see a male dancer naked every night. That would really be something. Seeing his . . . loins.” The two girls laughed like conspirators.

“And then you could go to your psychoanalyst the next day,” Jules said, “and lie down on the couch and tell him all about what sexual intercourse was like. He probably wants to hear about it because he’s never tried it himself.”

“Jonah and I almost did it, you know,” Ash suddenly said. “The deed.” She raised her chin toward Jonah, who was up ahead on the platform talking to Goodman.

“Really? You never told me this.” Jules was shocked at not having known; usually, she knew so much about Ash.

“I didn’t feel I could talk about it at the time. He brought along a Trojan; I’d asked him to, I was curious—but he wanted me to do everything, and of course I didn’t know what I was doing. We needed guidance, and we didn’t have it. Neither of us was willing to take the lead.” Then she added, “So we went to see an X-rated movie for inspiration.”

“You did? Which one?”

“Behind the Green Door. A revival was playing at this really creepy theater, and I can’t even believe they let us in. Guess how many lines Marilyn Chambers has in that movie.”

“Twelve.”

“Zero. She never speaks. She just has all kinds of sex, and she lets people do things to her, insert things into her. It’s disgusting and sexist. I swear, I’m going to devote my life to being a feminist. Jonah and I watched it together, and it was like a nightmare, but the thing I couldn’t get away from is that even though it was a movie, and it was all so fake, and these actors were being paid to be in it, and probably in real life they were all heroin addicts or something—they actually seemed into it. I think Jonah and I both had the same thought, which was that what was happening in Behind the Green Door was much more intense than what we’d ever done. It was really nice, Jonah and me, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But we didn’t exactly go together. We weren’t Cathy and Troy. Jonah’s so hard to read; it’s like he’s standing behind a screen door all the time. Get it? A screen door, not a green door.”

“I’m sorry, Ash,” Jules said. “It’s sort of like me and Ethan. Not meant to be.”

Back at the Labyrinth, Goodman went into the closet in his bedroom, reached into his work boot, pulled out the Smirnoff, and soon he became hot-faced, sloppy, and unpleasant. At the end of the afternoon the Wolf parents came home from a concert in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Betsy’s hair had been gathering a slight frosting of silver lately; she was now forty-five years old. “The music was terrific,” said Gil. “All Brahms. It made me think how talented some people are. True talent is extraordinary. Ash has it, and I can’t wait to see what she does with it.”

“Don’t hold your breath, Dad,” Ash said.

“Oh, I won’t need to, my girl,” said her father. “You’re on your way with your plays and all that. Both Ends was wonderful. You’re going to be very big one day.”

“As opposed to your boy,” Goodman muttered, “who is on his way to nowhere.”

Glowering, inebriated, Goodman regarded them from one of the flowing-upholstered sofas in the middle of the room where everyone always collected. Ash went to her room; Gil walked down the hall. Betsy drifted off to the kitchen to start a Bolognese sauce, and Ethan followed.

“Ethan,” Betsy said, “be my sous-chef. You can do the onion, and tell me what’s new in that cartoon world of yours. Hanna-Barbera,” she added vaguely.

“Pardon?”

“Isn’t that those cartoon people? That’s the extent of my knowledge,” she explained.

“Oh, I see,” he said. He turned to Jules on his way into the kitchen and said, “Join us.”

As Jules followed, walking past Goodman who was still sprawled on the couch, he suddenly reached up and grabbed her wrist. Startled, she looked down, and Goodman said to her, “You know what? You’re all right, Jacobson.” He continued to hold her wrist, so she didn’t move. Ethan was already banging around in the kitchen with Betsy; Jules and Goodman were alone here. The only other time they had been alone was the summer before last, in the dining hall on the final day of camp, and they’d been interrupted by her mother and sister. Here was a chance to make up for that interruption.

Goodman stood and brought his enormous rock of a face close to hers, creating in Jules a deep sense of panic. But it wasn’t disgust panic, as she’d felt with Ethan originally in the animation shed. It was arousal; yes, this was the real thing, as distinctive as a giraffe or a flamingo. Even though Goodman was drunk, even though he’d never shown her any interest before, she was aroused by him, nearly to the point of twitching. She couldn’t even try to imagine what it might be like to see Goodman Wolf in full flower, behind the green door.

Because no one else was here, and his head was right in front of hers, Jules instinctively closed her eyes and let her mouth open. Then Goodman’s unfamiliar mouth was against hers, opening too. The tip of Jules’s tongue came forth like a little plant shoot against Goodman’s tongue, and both tongues engaged in that silent, strange mime that apparently everyone’s tongues knew how to do. Jules heard herself groan; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t stopped herself from making a sound. The delirium of the kiss continued for another moment until, suddenly, Goodman’s mouth closed and he backed away from her, the way she had backed away from Ethan. When she looked at him she saw that he was already thinking about something or someone else. He’d gotten bored in the middle of this kiss that had been so exciting to her.

“All right, you had your kicks,” Goodman said. “Go help with dinner.”

“Don’t be an a*shole,” she said, to which he reached out and messed up her hair.

• • •

Then, soon, everything, the six of them, was over. Or if not over, then changed into something so different from what it had originally been as to be unrecognizable. Jules never got a chance to pause and watch this exquisite part of her life recede, then grieve for it. On her second New Year’s Eve with them, the New Year’s Eve that was to begin the endlessly promoted bicentennial year, taxis pulled up in front of the Labyrinth all evening, and the doormen sent everyone to the correct elevators. Many of the buttons in the south elevator were lit up to signal for the various floors, and the door slid open upon party after party. Nineteen seventy-five was ending, one more year in a sequence of shameful years. In his cartoons, Ethan had inserted the U.S. failure and military retreat from Vietnam. His animated figures literally limped home, whimpering and saying “owwww” in Ethan’s distinctive voice.

On 3, the Veech party was dominated by the family’s college-aged children and their friends; a sirocco of pot smoke swept toward the elevator when the doors opened. Up on 6, Jules Jacobson and Ethan Figman walked together into the Wolfs’ apartment, which had been dotted with red, white, and blue touches, and where loose-limbed Herbie Hancock music was playing—the finger-snapping music of aging dads. Deep in the living room, dressed in a long, lavender fairy dress, Ash was politely listening to her mother’s oldest friend. “Of course, you girls don’t need to go to single-sex colleges anymore, like we did,” said Celeste Peddy, already more talkative than usual from two glasses of champagne. “Your mom and I lived in the same house at Smith, but I imagine that when it’s time for you to go to college, a girl like you, complete catnip, will want boys around as distractions, especially after having put in all this time in the absolute nunnery of Brearley.”

Ash smiled politely. “Yes, I’ll definitely want a coed school,” she said.

“And no more M.R.S. degrees, thank God,” said Celeste Peddy with a battering little laugh. “That was what we all got, and we lived to regret it. But now everything’s different. Gloria Steinem—a Smithie too, I might add.”

“I know,” said Ash. “She’s amazing. I plan on getting involved in the women’s movement in college. It’s a cause I really believe in.”

“Good for you,” said Celeste, looking her over. “We need women who look like you and Gloria Steinem. We can’t just have those dumpy bull dykes representing the cause. Oh,” she said, “listen to me, talking like this. What’s wrong with me?” She put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “I guess I’m a little drunk.”

When Ash saw Jules and Ethan approach, she popped up and made excuses to her mother’s friend. “Come on, let’s go,” Ash whispered to Jules. “Celeste Peddy is starting to reveal her true self.” They all slipped from the living room and made their way down the hall to Ash’s room, which had lately become overgrown with prisms, stuffed animals, theater posters, and a generalized spray of dog hair. By ten-thirty, Goodman was already drunk.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Goodman asked Cathy when she showed up alone. Though they all knew it was strange having her there, it would’ve been stranger not having her there. Cathy explained that Troy was off dancing that night at a black-tie benefit his dance program was putting on to raise money for arts in the public schools. Here was Cathy, self-consciously alone on New Year’s Eve but trying to appear casual, dressed in a black Indian-print blouse with tiny mirrors speckling the front. Tonight Jules wore a peasant blouse and a peasant skirt—“appropriate, in this crowd, in which I’m the peasant,” she’d said to Ethan.

Jonah came wearing an old tuxedo shirt that he’d found at a vintage clothing store, and Jules had the thought again that he was unavailable, inscrutable, and she wished she could say to him, “What’s the deal with you, Jonah?” Tonight he had brought a water pipe he’d found in the corner of his mother’s loft; one of her musician friends had left it behind. “This is my contribution to the evening,” Jonah said, showing off the long violet glass pipe and the small lump of hash that he’d found inside the bowl. They all smoked and sucked and burbled, and Jules became so high that it took her a while to realize that eventually Jonah, Cathy, and Goodman were gone from the room.

“Where’d they go?” she asked, but Ethan and Ash were also too high to really hear her or pay attention. She sank back against the pile of stuffed animals, then picked one up, an ancient, pale purple unicorn, and held it to her face, noticing that it smelled distinctly like Ash.

Jonah reappeared a little later, and Jules asked him where he’d been. “I helped our friends get a cab,” he said with a smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Goodman and Cathy. They said they had a secret adventure planned. They were really stoned, and afraid they’d have trouble getting a cab on their own. I have no idea of what a ‘secret adventure’ meant, and I don’t want to know.” He fell onto the bed, that place where he used to lie with Ash, and closed his eyes with their startlingly long lashes, and within seconds he appeared to be asleep.

When midnight was about to arrive, Dick Clark, still nearly as boyish and box-headed as ever, began his New Year’s countdown with Average White Band on the bandstand in Times Square. Ash, Ethan, Jonah, and Jules sat watching it on TV, and as the ball fell, the boys chastely kissed the girls in turn. The kisses made Jules wonder where Goodman and Cathy were right now and what their adventure was. She felt a low-level jealousy about it and hoped, somehow, that it was a disappointment to them both.

“God, I’m high,” said Ash. “I don’t like the way I feel.” It took almost nothing for Ash to get too high; she weighed so little, and she felt everything strongly and immediately.

When Ash’s pink Princess phone (“My ironic Princess phone,” she’d insisted, “bought when I was twelve, okay?”) rang just before one a.m., Ethan reached over and grabbed it. “Wolf house,” he said. “The wolves are being fed right now. We give them little bits of Red Riding Hood, lightly seasoned. May I take a message?” But then Ethan said, “Goodman? What? Jesus.” He motioned for everyone to be quiet, and when they wouldn’t, he called out for them to shut up. Jonah turned off the record player, the needle skidding to a warping stop, and they all watched Ethan, who looked stricken as he listened into the phone. “You’re not f*cking with me, right?” he finally said. “I mean, is she okay? What? All right, hang on, I’ll get them.” Ethan pressed the receiver to his chest and said to Ash, “Go tell your parents to pick up the phone. Your brother’s been arrested.”

“What?” Ash said.

“Ash, just go tell them.”

“But what did he do?” Her voice rose, and her hands flapped in the air.

“Cathy said he raped her.”

“That’s insane.”

“Go! Get your parents on the phone!” Ethan said. “This is that one phone call they give you.”

Ash ran from the room and down the hall, tearing through the mess of adults. Soon the Wolfs were on the line, and Ethan quietly hung up Ash’s extension. “From what I could tell, they asked the cab to take them to Tavern on the Green,” Ethan explained to everyone.

“That was the adventure?” said Jonah, agitated. “Tavern on the Green?”

“Yeah,” said Ethan. “Apparently they wanted to see if they could sneak in to the New Year’s Eve party there and score some hors d’oeuvres and champagne. I think Cathy said it would be impossible, they’d get thrown out, and Goodman said no they wouldn’t. And I guess it was so hectic at the hostess’s station that they actually got in unnoticed. So they grabbed a couple of glasses of champagne off a tray and slipped down a hall and into a storage room. They started, you know, fooling around, Goodman said, and then something happened. He says it was a total misunderstanding. But I guess people heard Cathy screaming, and the police were there in about a second, and Cathy told them he raped her, so they arrested him. They took her to the hospital for an exam and everything.”

“Oh my God,” said Jonah, his hands to his head. “I got them the cab.”

“So? That’s irrelevant. It’s not your fault,” Jules said. “You didn’t know what would happen.”

“But it is my fault,” he insisted. “And I brought the hash too. It’s way stronger than our usual shit.” He looked searchingly at his friends. “I drugged them both,” he said. “It’s completely my fault.”

“Jonah,” said Ethan, “quit it right now. I don’t know why you’re being so weird. So you got them a cab. Big deal. So you brought the hash. We’ve all been getting high together since the minute we met each other. You didn’t drug anyone; what an odd way to put it. And Goodman has basically been f*cked up all year. This isn’t about you or anything you did, okay?”

“Okay,” Jonah said quietly, but he looked shaken and ill.

“The thing is,” said Jules, and then she let her voice trail off. “Oh, nothing.”

“You can say it,” said Ethan.

They were each thinking as hard and fast as they could, even Jonah, who seemed to be struggling to climb out of his guilt; so Jules carefully asked, “Is there any chance? I hate to ask it, but, you know, it’s there, right?”

Neither boy said anything, then Ethan said, “Goodman says he didn’t do anything wrong. But is he capable of it? Am I?” he added.

They were all quiet again, stewing. “He does get into these little rages,” Jonah said. “But I always thought they were just bad moods.”

“His hostile side is only one part of him,” said Jules. “Boy,” she added, “Ash would not like this conversation at all.” They looked toward the door nervously.

“But what about Cathy?” Ethan said. “If it isn’t true, why would she say it? Is she really still that pissed off because he broke up with her?”

“She did lose her shit when they broke up,” said Jonah. “But she’s the kind of girl who loses her shit a lot.”

They all nodded. Cathy Kiplinger was the first needy girl any of them had known well. What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt that they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in—although annoyed at—their needs. Jules had never felt entitled to take nearly as much as those girls did. They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations resulted.

I will never be in a profoundly messy situation with a boy, Jules Jacobson thought with an unaccountable little burst of despair. I will never get that kind of attention. No matter what I do, the only attention I will receive will be from faithful, dogged Ethan Figman, who will love me until the day I die, and then even afterward.

She saw herself as a pile of underground bones laced and encircled with worms, while aboveground Ethan knelt in the grass and cried. The next image that appeared, of Cathy lying on the floor of a storage room in a restaurant that glittered like a disco ball, was somehow irritating now too. Why do girls like that always get things? Maybe Cathy was lying. Maybe she had to lie to keep everyone interested. It wasn’t enough that she had breasts like Marilyn Chambers and the face of a woman of experience. Everyone would continue to give Cathy Kiplinger all the attention she could ever want. Even right this minute she was probably getting attention from doctors and nurses and police officers and from her parents. All of them would be huddled behind a curtain in the ER, talking to Cathy in gentle but inquisitive voices.

Jules realized that it had grown quiet out in the living room. The party was breaking up; the Wolfs were sending their guests home. The bedroom door opened then and Ash stood with her father right behind her. “We’re going down to the precinct,” Ash said. “I personally think it’s fine if you all wait here, but my parents say you have to leave.”

“We’ll come with you,” Ethan said.

“No,” said Gil. “Absolutely not.”

“Some of us can go see Cathy,” Ethan said. “We can split up.”

“We don’t even know where Cathy is,” said Ash.

“You didn’t ask what hospital?”

“No, I didn’t think of it.”

“Then we’ll find out later,” Jonah said. “But we’ll all go to the police station now. We want to come,” he said with emphasis and anxiety. “We really, really do.”

“No, kids, it’s just not a good idea,” said Gil Wolf.

“Dad, I need them there, okay?” said Ash. “They’re my friends.” She looked at her father with a tortured expression. “Please, Dad,” she said. “Please.”

Her father paused; Ash held her expression and would not budge. “All right,” he said. “But hurry up, all of you.”

They got themselves together quickly. In the chaos no one gave much thought to how they would appear to the police when they showed up smelling of pot and alcohol. They filed out grimly, but animated by fear and excitement too, and found their coats on the rack in the hall. The other coats were all gone, except for one lonely London Fog raincoat, which belonged to a junior colleague of Gil’s from Drexel Burnham, who was passed out in the guest room.

“I really hope Cathy’s all right,” Ethan said to Ash as they waited for the elevator. “Do you know if anyone talked to her?”

“No idea,” Ash said. “Why would she say Goodman did this? It’s clearly bullshit.”

No one said anything to support or contradict this; out of nervousness Jules reached out and ran her hand along the gift-wrap-striped wallpaper that lined the hall. “We’ll get it all sorted out,” Gil said to his wife. “I’m calling Dick Peddy to step in as counsel. He was just here ten minutes ago; I should have grabbed him then.” He paused and shook his head. “Goodman couldn’t stay in, could he? Had to go off somewhere. Just like on Tortola.”

Jonah turned to Jules and mouthed something. “What?” she said, and he mouthed the words again: “I drugged them.”

“Stop it, Jonah,” she hissed at him.

Outside the building, the Wolfs climbed into a taxi that was already waiting. Jules, Ethan, and Jonah stood in front of the Labyrinth in the same spot where, a couple of hours earlier, a fleet of partygoers had arrived in long coats, cradling bottles in gold or silver foil. Now the three of them were empty-handed, and there wasn’t another taxi in sight.