The Interestings A Novel

NINE





It wasn’t easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you’d always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely? Jules Jacobson was lonely for the entire first year after Ash Wolf and Ethan Figman became lovers. Lovers was their word, not hers. No one she knew had ever used that word before, but Ash spoke it without any awareness that it was unusual for a teenager to say. Ash and Ethan had taken up with each other that summer in a state of deep, almost telepathic mutuality. It had not occurred to them before to be lovers, they explained to everyone. But after knowing each other well for several years, spending summers on the same piece of land in the Berkshire Mountains, they had been thunderstruck, and now they never wanted to be apart.

It was April 1977, and they had been a couple for eight months. Ethan had been by Ash’s side when the Wolf family’s dog developed an inoperable tumor and needed to be put down. Ash could not bring herself to actually go into the room with Noodge to have it done, so Ethan went instead. He accompanied Ash’s mother, and the two of them stroked the frantic, heaving side of that lovely golden dog—the dog of Ash and Goodman’s childhood—as the vet injected him with a drug that stopped his heart. Ethan comforted his girlfriend’s mother—his future mother-in-law, as it would turn out—and then he went back out into the waiting room and let Ash fall into his arms and cry. It seemed that Ethan Figman had become the repository of all female weeping. “Goodman wasn’t even here,” Ash said as she stood with her head against him. “Noodge was our dog, his and mine, and we both loved him so much, and Goodman missed his death, Ethan. He owed it to Noodge to be here today. We both did.” But Ethan hadn’t missed the death of this dog; Ethan was there for it, and for all other important occasions.

This week everyone had gotten their letters from colleges. Ash had been accepted to Yale, where her maternal uncles and grandfather had gone; Ethan had been accepted into the animation program at the School of Visual Arts in the city. They would be living two hours apart, but would commute frequently to see each other. Jonah, who’d said he had no interest in pursuing music in college, was going to MIT to study mechanical engineering, hoping to focus on robotics. And Jules, whose family had limited funds and who had been an indifferent student in high school since her attention had been on everything and everyone from Spirit-in-the-Woods, was going to the State University of New York at Buffalo. She thought about Ash and Ethan’s trips to see each other, picturing Ethan behind the wheel of his father’s old car, gripping it hard as he merged onto I-95. Jules could also picture Ash on the Amtrak train, her head in a Penguin classic. Everyone else was either bewildered or impressed by what Ash and Ethan had found in each other, but Jules felt that she and Jonah were the only ones who could perceive the intense degree of their friends’ commitment. Goodman, missing now for an entire year, had caused this relationship to take hold. Ash and Ethan would never have fallen in love if he hadn’t run off and become a fugitive.

“If encoupled is a word,” Jules said to Jonah one evening that spring before college, “then that is what they are.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I think it is a word. And that’s definitely what they are.”

Unencoupled, if that too was a word, was what Jonah and Jules were. They sat in Jonah Bay’s mother’s loft, a large, not entirely finished space on Watts Street. Jules didn’t understand the feeling of loneliness she had all the time now. It didn’t make sense that the phenomenon of Ash and Ethan’s couplehood should have caused it. Jonah didn’t have the same feeling, exactly, but he admitted that he felt inadequate—embarrassed and even appalled when he thought back to the several months he’d been Ash’s boyfriend the year before, and what a bad job he’d done.

“It isn’t supposed to be a job,” Jules said.

“No, I guess not.” Jonah shrugged, but he didn’t elaborate. Neither of them yet knew how to be a boyfriend or girlfriend. This was not a skill set that could be taught; you just had to do it, and you had to want to do it, and somehow through doing it you became better at it. Surely at MIT there would be plenty of other people who didn’t know how to be boyfriends or girlfriends. Maybe, in that environment, tentative and virginal Jonah Bay could flourish.

“Kids!” called his mother. “Come listen to this. I need your opinion.” Susannah Bay and two other musicians sat in the alcove off the main part of the loft. They played a song with a wah-wah underbeat that made it sound a little like the soundtrack to a cop show. His mother was trying hard to stay relevant, Jonah had said. Her voice was still strong; it hadn’t been trashed like the voices of some of the women she’d come up with in the early days of the folk scene—women who’d started out as angelic sopranos and ended up sounding like someone’s uncle with emphysema.

Susannah Bay could still sing anything, but the question was whether people wanted to hear her anymore. When she gave a concert at one of the very few remaining folk clubs in the city, or in other cities, places with an increasingly heavy cover charge, there was always a nostalgic demand for “The Wind Will Carry Us” and “Boy Wandering” and some of the other old songs that reminded the audience of where they had been the first time they’d heard them—and how much their lives had changed since then, and how shockingly old they were now. Those beloved songs had to be interspersed generously throughout the set at a concert; you could sense restlessness and even hostility when you went on too long without singing something familiar.

“The tide is turning,” Susannah frequently said. But the tide always turned. When it was your tide, you took notice. Folk was over as a scene, and that was tremendously sad for all the people who’d been there in those early years, when an acoustic guitar and a single voice had seemed capable of hastening the end of a war; but now there was exciting music of all kinds—folk and not folk—everywhere. It was just that Susannah Bay’s new songs hadn’t made the graceful leap into the closing years of the 1970s. When her impromptu set in the loft was finished, Susannah anxiously asked Jonah and Jules if they thought that this was the sort of music that they and their friends might want to listen to. She asked, “Could you imagine a bunch of you sitting around and putting on my new album?”

“Oh, definitely,” Jules said, to be kind, and Jonah echoed her. Susannah seemed cheered by this, but the musicians knew it wasn’t true, and they headed out somewhat mutely, then eventually Jules left too.

“See you,” said Jonah at the door. They squeezed each other lightly, then patted each other on the back, making small physical gestures that affirmed their long-standing connection. They were the only two who were left now, the two who were still alone. Jonah was so good-looking that Jules marveled about it each time they had a moment of physical contact. His dark hair had recently been trimmed so that it now ended above his shoulders. He still sometimes wore a leather string around his neck, and a pocket T-shirt. He seemed almost embarrassed by his own beauty, and wanted to pretend that it was an optical illusion. Jules could also not understand why he’d always deflected talk about his musical talent, and why he’d abandoned it. She knew how good he was at guitar and singing and songwriting. Elektra, the label that had rejected his mother, might have wanted him now instead. But he didn’t want any of that; instead, he would be at MIT in a lab, doing things that Jules would never be able to understand. “Is it that performing makes you anxious?” she’d once tried to ask him, but he’d only regarded her with an uncharacteristically cold expression, and shook his head as if to say she had no idea what she was talking about. Jules decided that Jonah was just too modest to be a musician or to possibly become famous; he didn’t have the temperament, and she supposed this was honorable, and it made her own cravings for a big life, maybe even as a funny stage actress, seem a little crass.

Jules came to the loft often because she felt she needed to limit her time at the Labyrinth, where Ash and Ethan had essentially begun to live together. “You can set up shop in Goodman’s room,” Betsy Wolf had offered Ethan that spring. “Oh no, I can’t do that,” Ethan said. “But I really want you to,” Betsy said. Her desire to have Ethan “set up shop” had to have come out of her longing for her son, and though it was probably hard to see another boy in that room—the wrong boy—it helped her too. Goodman had an enormous desk below curling posters of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and A Clockwork Orange. Gently, nervously, Ethan moved some of Goodman’s surface objects to the side. On that desk, under the strong light of a green gooseneck lamp, Ethan Figman went to work, drawing frames for Figland cartoons.

Soon he was spending weekends at the Wolfs’, and then, more and more frequently, weeknights. As high school seniors, he and Ash were a facsimile of an adult couple, and the Wolfs were progressive about sex and said their daughter’s private life was none of their business. Ash had recently gone to Planned Parenthood and gotten fitted for a diaphragm; Jules had of course gone with her, sitting in the waiting room and pretending that she too was there to get a diaphragm. Oh yes, she thought as she sat in her chair, that’s me, Diaphragm Girl. She looked around at all the other women, and imagined that they thought she wasn’t a virgin, just like them. It was a surprisingly pleasurable thought. Afterward, when Ash came out carrying a plastic clamshell case, she and Jules went across the street from the clinic, sitting together on a low brick wall, and Ash took the object out of the case and they both examined it closely.

“What’s this dust on it, this powder?” Jules asked.

“Cornstarch; they gave me a sample. It’s to keep the silicon from eroding,” Ash said.

“Well aren’t you the scientist. You get your degree from Heidelberg?”

The thing was yellow-beige, the color of raw chicken skin, and Jules regarded it as Ash held it up and demonstrated its springiness and resilience. Jules uncomfortably thought of a stirred-up froth of gel and cornstarch and fluids, that awful word that had to do with the end result of a person’s, or two people’s, physical excitement. Ethan’s presence in the Wolfs’ apartment cheered the family up and distracted them from their feelings of dread about Goodman and what had become of him. Jules knew they feared they’d never see him again: that he would die, or that he was already dead. Who knew how he was supporting himself? The hopeful presence of young love in the household was just what was required to keep terrible conclusions away.

Anyone could tell that Ash Wolf and Ethan Figman loved each other, improbable or not. The love and the sex made sense to the two lovers, who felt it was almost insane, as Ash said, that it had taken them this long to figure it out. These days, the diaphragm was rarely in its case. Ash had confided to Jules recently that Ethan was a surprisingly good lover. “I know he’s not much to look at,” she’d said shyly, “but honestly, he knows how to connect with me in a physical way. He isn’t afraid, and he isn’t squeamish. He finds sex fascinating. He said he thinks it’s very creative. Like finger painting, he told me. He wants to talk about everything. I’ve never had conversations like that with anyone; I mean, you and I are unbelievably close, but we know what we’re talking about without having to explain. Because he’s male and I’m female, it’s as though we’re coming from different planets.”

“Yes. He’s on the planet Figland,” said Jules.

“Right! And I’m on earth. He wants to know all about so-called ‘female’ feelings—whether, for instance, girls actually find penises attractive, even though objectively they’re so bizarre looking; and whether, get this, my father and I are a little bit ‘in love’ with each other. The Electra complex. And then, kind of a side question, whether I think about death constantly, the way he does. ‘If you don’t obsess over the idea that one day you won’t exist,’ Ethan said to me, ‘then you aren’t the girl for me.’ I reassured him that I was extremely morbid and extremely existential, and he was very relieved to hear it. I think it even made him horny.”

Jules listened to this soliloquy in grim silence; she hardly knew what to say. Ash was describing an enclosed world that Jules too had been given a chance to enter, but hadn’t wanted to. She still didn’t want to, but the descriptions of the closeness and intensity of that world only increased her loneliness. “Go on,” was all she said.

“At first I didn’t think it would take,” said Ash. “I didn’t think I could find a way to be attracted to him, because, well, objectively, you know. But once we really started doing serious things in bed, it was as if he was made for it. Made for me. And I wanted to be looser finally; I wanted to not have to be so good all the time, so held in and perfect, Little Ms. A student at the Brearley School. I never would have thought this could happen between Ethan and me. But it did, and what can I say?”

There was nothing else to say. Jules left Jonah’s mother’s loft and clattered down into the subway to head up to Penn Station, where she would catch a train home, alone. She reminded herself that she herself had not wanted Ethan as her boyfriend, her “lover,” and still did not want him. She recalled Ethan’s strong breath and his eczema, even. She remembered the fatal lump that had pressed against her as they stood in the animation shed. Love transcended all of this, apparently. Love transcended breath, eczema, fear of sex, and an imbalance in physical appearance. If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

But obviously the physical imperfections of Ethan Figman hadn’t risen in importance to Ash the same way that they had for Jules. Ethan’s hygiene was better now than it had been at fifteen, but beyond that, he was also changing, growing into himself. The Ash and Ethan experience was private and specific to them. What complicated it a little was that Jules loved Ethan too, in her own private and enduring way. He was so talented and smart and worried and unusual and generous toward her. He believed in her, he nodded thoughtfully at many of her remarks, appreciated her wit, encouraged her to think that she could have a big life one day, living in the city and maybe becoming a funny actress and doing what she wanted. He remained loving toward her, and would do anything for her. Clearly she’d undervalued him, she thought now darkly, as she stood on the nighttime subway platform without a piece of silicon snapped deeply and securely inside her, covering the cervix and waiting to be put to use.

Then Jules thought, no, she hadn’t undervalued Ethan. She’d valued him highly, but she just hadn’t wanted him. And in a pivotal moment of strangeness, Ash had. Ash Wolf choosing Ethan Figman elevated Ash to some higher plane of being. The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like . . . robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all.

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought: I am the loneliest person in this subway car. Everything here looked ugly: the aqua subway seats; the ads for Goya products, as if a faded color illustration of now-gray guavas in gray syrup could make you want to eat them; the metal rails that had been grasped by thousands of hands that very day; the stations as they flowed past the window. I am having a crisis, she thought. I suddenly feel a new, fragile sense of myself in the world, and it is unbearable.

The year remained intensely lonely, and sometimes at night in bed Jules thought of how she and her mother and sister were all lying separately in their beds, each of them almost throbbing with aloneness. She suddenly couldn’t imagine how her mother had survived widowhood at age forty-one. Jules realized that she had almost never wondered about this before. She’d mostly thought: I am a girl whose father is dead, and this had had a certain tragic cachet to it. Other people had said to her, “I’m very sorry for your loss,” and after she’d heard this said often enough, she’d almost felt that the loss was hers alone. Jules wanted to apologize to her mother, to let her know that she’d been so self-absorbed until this moment, but the truth was that she was still extraordinarily self-absorbed.

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it. While Jules lay alone in the bedroom on Cindy Drive, her two good friends lay without clothes in Ash’s bed on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth. Ethan Figman in his vulnerable nakedness was somehow maybe even beautiful. He was no different from anyone in the world. He wanted what he wanted, and he’d found it, and now he and Ash were dumbly happy in their shared bed.

Goodman was rapidly disappearing from daily conversation since Ethan and Ash became a couple. The family remained troubled and sad about him, but you could tell that they were actually recovering. A summer trip to Iceland was in the planning stages; Ash said her father had business to conduct there. More than that, though, the trip would be a way for the three remaining Wolfs to be quietly together one more time before Ash went off to Yale in the fall. They would ride horses in Iceland and go swimming in a geothermal pool.

One day at the end of May, when Jules and Ash were standing in a bead store on Eighth Street, their hands roaming and sifting through bins of shining, buffed glass, Ash said, “So, what are you going to do this summer?”

“Getting a job at Carvel,” said Jules. “Not very thrilling, but it’ll give me some spending money for Buffalo. My sister used to work there. They said they’d hire me.”

“When do you start?”

“It has yet to be determined. I’ll have to check with Personnel.” She paused, then added, “That was a joke.”

Ash was smiling with deep secrecy. “Tell them you can’t start until the end of July,” she said.

“Why?”

“You’re coming to Iceland.”

“You know I can’t pay for that.”

“My parents invited you, Jules. They’ll take care of everything.”

“They invited me? Are you serious? It’s not like inviting me to dinner.”

“They really want you to come.”

“Did they invite Ethan too?”

“Of course,” said Ash, a little flustered. “But he can’t, because of Old Mo Templeton. You know, he even turned down that amazing internship because of Old Mo.” Ethan’s animation teacher was dying of emphysema in the Bronx, and Ethan had taken it upon himself to care for him instead of going to LA to work at Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes. “He can’t come,” said Ash. “But you can.”

“She’ll never let me go,” Jules said, “she” being her mother. Then she remembered that Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, the former counselor from Spirit-in-the-Woods, lived in Iceland. “Oh, you know what?” Jules said. “If I did get to go with you, we could look up Gudrun. That would be so weird, seeing her on her own turf.”

“Oh, right, Gudrun the weaver,” said Ash.

“And she could tell us more about a tinder chamber being engulfed with flames.”

“God, Jules, you remember everything.”

Lois Jacobson was predictably uncomfortable with the Wolfs’ extravagant invitation. “It just makes me feel that Ash’s parents must think of us as poor people or something,” she said. “And that isn’t true. But there isn’t money for a trip like this. And I just hate the idea of someone else’s parents paying for you.”

“Mom, it isn’t just someone else’s parents. It’s Ash’s.”

“I know that, honey.”

Ellen, puttering around the kitchen during the conversation, looked at Jules and said, “Why are they being so nice to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen. “I just never heard of a family doing that.”

“Maybe they like me.”

“Maybe they do,” said Ellen, who couldn’t seem to imagine why a glamorous family she’d never met would be so interested in her sister.

Jules and the Wolfs left for Iceland on July 18, on a night flight from Kennedy Airport to Luxembourg, where they would change planes for Reykjavik. The first-class cabin was as comfortable as the Wolfs’ living room, and after dinner Jules made her wide seat recline, and she and Ash lay under soft blankets. Later, over the Atlantic, Jules awoke in a fully formed and inexplicable state of fear and dread. But when she looked around her, she was reassured by the calm, purring golden cabin with a few pin lights that cast beams downward on their seats’ occupants. Ash and her mother both slept, but Gil Wolf was awake, looking through papers in his briefcase and occasionally glancing out the little window into the blackness with what seemed to Jules, from her place across the aisle, like his own state of fear and dread.

The city of Reykjavik was notably clean and small, the buildings low and the sky wide. On the first day, trying to adjust to the time difference, the family stayed awake as long as they could, walking around the city, which felt like an appealing college town, and drinking coffee and Cokes and eating hot dogs from a street vendor. The music scene that later exploded in Reykjavik was not in place yet; Björk, the singer, was at the moment only eleven years old. Walking along a modest, well-kept little street, Jules felt unsteady. “Garden-variety jet lag,” Betsy Wolf said. But soon Jules’s mouth became wet with excess saliva, and then her stomach began to emit strange and unnatural noises. Jules could barely make it back into the Hotel Borg. The strangeness of strange places was now unbearable. Her mouth kept filling with saliva, and her legs shook, and once inside the hotel suite, Jules ran ahead and let loose a straight shot of vomit into the toilet. She actively vomited for so long that the Wolfs had the hotel’s on-call doctor brought in, and he gave her a large, gelatinous-looking pill that she was about to put into her mouth before he stopped her and said in a kind but awkward voice, “No, miss, please. The anal opening,” for it was a suppository.

Jules slept through much of the first evening in Iceland. When she could finally open her eyes, she had a dull headache but was also urgently hungry and thirsty. “Hello?” she said, trying out her voice. “Ash?” The hotel room was empty, and so was the adjoining one where Ash’s parents were staying, and she had no idea what time of day or night it was. Jules pulled back the edge of the drape on the window and saw that the sky was still bright. She went into the bathroom and there was a note propped up on the sink, where she couldn’t miss it, written in Ash’s rounded, girlish hand on hotel stationery:


Jules!!!!


I hope you are better, poor you. We are at the Café Benedikt, which is VERY nearby. Ask the concierge how to get here. Please come as soon as you can, SERIOUSLY.


Love you,



Ash




With a bar of green soap, Jules stood at the sink and washed her face, then managed to locate her toothbrush and toothpaste from the piece of red Samsonite luggage her mother had bought her as a going-away present. She cleaned her mouth, ran a brush through her hopeless hair, and went downstairs. The lobby was stately, with classical music playing softly. It was far dimmer in here than it was outside. Jules got directions from the concierge—everyone spoke English—and pushed through the door, heading into the sunlit Reykjavik night. This was a place that, in its puzzling continual daylight, appeared totally alien to her, a place where she had almost eaten a suppository. As she walked the two blocks to the café she sensed that she was walking toward something unusual. But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don’t appear at the time as knowledge at all. Jules walked down the street with her hair frizzing, a small splash of yellow vomit on the collar of her Huk-a-Poo blouse, though she hadn’t noticed it yet. She wore the turquoise clogs she had brought with her—“Finally we will be wearing clogs in the right part of the world,” she’d said to Ash before the trip—and they clacked loudly over stones, each step making her feel self-conscious and alone but purposeful. Many people here were wearing clogs, but none of them seemed to walk as percussively as she did.

Jules walked past men who were obviously drunk; she walked past a cluster of backpackers—latter-day hippies who were doing a tour of Iceland on almost nothing a day. A boy called out to her in a language she didn’t understand, maybe Greek, but Jules kept walking. Because of the broken blood vessels in her eyes, she knew she must look like a zombie out on a death mission. She easily found the right street with its row of cafés, all of them crowded, and with the strong smell of cigarettes rolling out. When she located the Café Benedikt and looked in the window, the first face she recognized didn’t belong to one of the Wolfs. Instead, it was a face completely out of context, and she had to take a second to recall the beam of the heavy, industrial-type flashlight that the weaver and lifeguard Gudrun Sigurdsdottir had first shone into the teepee in the summer of 1974. Gudrun was here again now, smiling, and from behind her, deeper in the packed restaurant, the Wolf family strained forward to make themselves seen by Jules too, and they were all smiling out at her with expressions that were uniform in their intensity and peculiarity. Ash was looking right at Jules, her eyes wet and happy. Beside her at the table, only half-viewable from this angle, his face partly hidden by a wooden post, was Goodman. He raised his glass of beer, and then they all motioned for Jules to come inside.

• • •

His voice on the phone just stopped me dead in my tracks,” Betsy Wolf explained. “‘Mom.’”

“Mom,” Goodman said now, for emphasis, and the name seemed to pierce Betsy Wolf all over again; she put down her glass of wine and took her son’s hands in her own and kissed them. Everyone at the table had an emotional face on, even Gudrun. Jules too had been pulled in, and her shock had changed quickly, liquefying, going loose and responsive.

“We were going to tell you everything as soon as we got to the hotel, Jules,” said Ash. “Goodman was working today and couldn’t see us until tonight. We had a plan to sit down and talk to you first and explain everything. But then you got food poisoning, and it would have been too weird to suddenly spring this on you when you were throwing up. You probably would’ve thought you hallucinated it.”

“I still think that.”

“I’m real,” said Goodman. “But you look like an impostor, Jacobson. What’s the deal with your eyes?”

“I broke my blood vessels throwing up,” she said. “It looks a lot worse than it is.”

“Yeah, you look like the girl in The Exorcist,” Goodman said. “But in a good way.” This was the kind of amusing, insulting remark he would have made back when they all gathered in the teepee. But he’d long outgrown teepee life, and had entered someplace well beyond the rest of them. He now had the appearance of a sophisticated, bohemian European student who was perhaps at university on scholarship. He was not actually in school, he told Jules, because he would have needed too much legitimate documentation for that. He still longed to become an architect someday, but he knew he could never get licensed here or anywhere. Jules wondered whether that was entirely the case; could he possibly have found a way, if it was what he really wanted, and worked toward it? For the time being, he was working construction with Gudrun’s husband, Falkor, which was what he’d been doing today, and why he couldn’t see his family until evening. The two men gutted houses, and at the end of the workday they took hot saunas, and then, if it was warm enough outside, jumped into a cold lake.

Goodman, Jules found out as everyone at the table told her pieces of the story, had originally taken a Peter Pan bus from Port Authority up to Belknap, Massachusetts, on the morning he ran away. He’d banged on the door of the big gray house across the road from the camp, where Manny and Edie Wunderlich lived, but no one answered. He’d worked himself into a panic in the days building up to his sudden flight, afraid that the jury wouldn’t believe him and he would lose his court case and be sent to jail until he was a middle-aged man. So after he decided to flee, and collected a large sum of money from his bank account, placing it in the duffel bag he used to take to camp with him, Spirit-in-the-Woods was the only place he’d thought to go. Goodman walked around and around the property of the camp, which was empty and still and appeared so melancholy off-season. Outside the dining hall he saw the cook, Ida Steinberg, taking out the garbage, and he went over and said hello. She’d had no idea of his arrest, but when he said he needed to get away, she understood that he meant he needed to get away and not be found.

The cook took Goodman inside the camp kitchen, sat him down, and ladled some lentil soup into a bowl. It was a lucky coincidence that she happened to be here today, she explained; she only worked for the Wunderlichs very infrequently in the off-season, but some workers were here doing intensive repairs to the grounds in anticipation of a facility inspection, and so her cooking services were needed. The Wunderlichs were in Pittsfield for the day, buying supplies. Goodman instinctively asked Ida not to tell them he’d been here. He knew that they liked his parents, but they also liked the Kiplingers.

“Go find a nice person to take you in,” Ida Steinberg suggested to him. “Far away.”

Goodman immediately thought of Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, who had come into the boys’ teepee once and lounged on a bed, smoking and talking openly about the pain of life. As if Spirit-in-the-Woods had its own underground resistance, Goodman asked Ida if she could give him Gudrun’s address and phone number. The cook dutifully retrieved it from the Rolodex in the front office. Goodman had money; he would fly to some city in Europe, then make his way to Iceland to find Gudrun and ask her to help him. His thinking was cockeyed—what if he traveled all that distance and she’d said no? What then?—but to him it was reasonable. First he took a bus to Boston and asked around about securing a fake passport. Three days later, after having moved into an SRO, Goodman purchased a shockingly expensive passport that actually worked, though before his flight took off for Paris out of Terminal E at Logan he sat shaking in seat 14D, his eyes fixed on a book he’d picked up in desperation in the airport, the kind of popular novel that he, who loved Günter Grass, would never have read in his life: Curtain, by Agatha Christie.

Under an assumed name, Goodman had been living here in Reykjavik with Gudrun and Falkor, sleeping on the futon in their tiny spare room. “But why did you pick Iceland?” Jules asked.

“I told you. Because of Gudrun,” Goodman said.

“It just seems so random.”

“She was the only one far enough away not to know about the whole thing with Cathy, and not to judge me. She never judged any of us, remember? She was kind.”

Gudrun, listening, wiped her eyes a little. “Goodman showed up and said he needed help. I always liked him. He was in your nice group of friends.”

Gudrun and her husband, who was also a weaver when he wasn’t working construction, had very little money, and they lived plainly. Often the only food on hand was a kind of dark brown wood-pulp type of cracker and some skyr, the tartest, most monastic yogurt in the world. At night Goodman slept on the bare futon under one of Gudrun and Falkor’s hand-woven blankets. But he longed for his parents and his sister; he felt desperate to reestablish contact with them. As the anniversary of the day he’d fled approached, Goodman experienced unbearable homesickness, thinking of his family in the apartment in New York, and the smells of his mother’s cooking, and the comfort of being in a wonderful family, having a key that opened a door to a place where you lived. He knew it had been a fatal mistake to bolt. It had torn his family up, just as it had torn him up.

Day after day in his narrow new Icelandic life, Goodman had trudged past pay phones in Reykjavik, and had to keep himself from stopping and calling home. One day in March, he went to Gudrun and Falkor’s place and gathered a large scoop of krónur and put it all in a satchel, and the next afternoon, on a break from a construction job in Breidholt, Goodman walked to a small store on the side of a road. Shaking, he peppered the phone slot with coin after coin until the line rang, and across the ocean his sad mother said hello in her pretty, motherly voice, and he said simply, “Mom.”

Betsy Wolf breathed in a gasp, an inverted sigh, and then she said, “Oh my God.”

He knew it was a big risk to call home, but so much time had passed since he’d run off, and perhaps no one was lying in wait for him anymore. Perhaps they had even forgotten. The lead detectives, Manfredo and Spivack, had called the Wolfs frequently in the beginning to ask if they knew anything, but then they called less often. “Frankly, we’re overburdened,” Manfredo had admitted to Betsy. “In fact, we’re kind of dying here. The department just laid off two people, and more cuts are coming. The city doesn’t have the money.” Many years later a teenaged boy from suburban Connecticut would be accused of two separate, vicious rapes, and would escape to Switzerland to live as a ski bum, his idle life bankrolled by his wealthy parents. But that boy was a predator, having assaulted more than one victim, and the case would not die; his arrest was seen as a triumph. Goodman’s case had been less sensationalistic and less interesting from the start. When he fled, the Kiplingers had no desire to speak to the press, and after a while the case appeared to have gotten lost under other priorities. Goodman, nervily calling home from abroad, worried for a moment that somehow his parents and sister had forgotten him too, that they’d managed to move on with their lives. He said a few tentative words to his mother, and Betsy began to cry and begged him to tell her where he was.

“I can’t. What if your phone is bugged?” he said.

“It isn’t,” Betsy Wolf said. “Just tell me. You’re my child and I need to know where you are. It’s been torture.” He told his mother where he was, and then she said, “All right, fine, you’re very young and you made a snap decision and it was a bad one; now we have to fix it.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll come home,” said his mother. “You’ll get on a plane and fly here, and we will meet you at the airport and you can voluntarily surrender.”

“Surrender?” said Goodman. “You make it sound like I did something, Mom.”

“Well,” said Betsy, “you did do something: you fled. That’s not nothing, honey, but we’ll work it out, we’ll smooth it over.”

Goodman told her she was being naive, that life didn’t always work out, and that he couldn’t possibly come home. They went back and forth like this, his mother begging, and Goodman insisting that no, he wasn’t coming back, he’d made a break and that was the way it was going to be; if he came back he might be sent to jail for a very long time, and if he stayed here at least he could have a life of some kind. Finally she saw that he was not going to change his mind. Though he was dreadfully homesick, he’d gotten used to the idea that this was where he now lived. Other than turn him in herself, she didn’t see what she could do to get him to come back.

And so, acting parentally, brazenly, but telling no one—not even Ash—Betsy and Gil Wolf sent money to Iceland through elaborate banking channels. He was their son and they knew he was innocent, and if they could not convince him to come home, then this was what they felt they needed to do. After the money arrived without incident, they waited tensely, and finally they decided it was fair to assume that by some stroke of luck no one else was thinking about Goodman anymore, and that maybe they could conceivably even go see him. It was time to tell Ash, they decided.

“I came home from school one day,” Ash explained to Jules at the café, “and my parents both sat me down in the living room. Their expressions were incredibly weird. I thought they were going to tell me that Goodman had been found, and that he was dead. I just couldn’t bear it. But then they told me he was fine, he was in Iceland, and that they’d been sending him money, and that finally we were going to get to see him. I almost died. We all began to scream and hug each other. I thought I would explode, keeping that secret from you, Jules. But my parents said, ‘Tell no one!’ They were like the Mafia. And it was all I could do not to tell Ethan too. I mean, I tell him everything, now that we’re together. I talk to him about extremely personal subjects, as you know.”

“You and Ethan,” said Goodman. “I still can’t get over that. Mom wrote me. Damn, Ash, can’t you do better than that? You’re a catch, and he’s . . . Ethan. I love the guy, but I would never have put my money on that horse.”

“No one wants to hear your opinion of my love life,” said Ash, smiling but still crying too. Then she turned to Jules and said, “But I couldn’t tell Ethan, of course, because who knows what he’d think. Or do.”

“What?” said Jules. “Ethan still doesn’t know?”

“No.”

“Are you kidding? He’s your boyfriend, and you have such a close relationship.” She just stared at Ash.

“I know, but I can’t tell him. My dad would kill me.”

“That’s for damn sure,” said Gil Wolf, and everyone laughed politely, uncomfortably.

“Ethan has all these views of life that no one can control,” said Ash. “All these ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. That whole code of the road that he lives by. Did you ever see that cartoon he made where the president of Figland is impeached, and the vice president pardons him? And in the middle of signing the pardon, the vice president turns into a weasel? And then there was Ethan’s insistence on cutting school to work for the Carter campaign.”

“Well, that one worked out,” said Jules.

“Or taking care of Old Mo instead of doing Looney Tunes. And remember how he just had to be in touch with Cathy when Dick Peddy said we weren’t supposed to? If I told Ethan about Goodman, he might think he had to report it or something, out of respect for Cathy. Report all of us. Have us taken away and put on a chain gang.”

“When in fact,” said Goodman, “I didn’t do anything to Cathy Kiplinger. She totally distorted it.”

“Oh, we know that,” said his mother. She looked longingly at him and said, “You really won’t consider coming home and hoping for the best?”

“Mom,” said Goodman sharply. “Stop it. I told you.”

“God knows what a jury would think, Betsy,” said Gil. Everyone was quiet for a moment, looking at Goodman, who, it was true, did not appear boyish or defenseless. Construction work had built up his long muscles. Jules dragged up the word sinew from somewhere in her vocabulary. Goodman—in this new, slightly older, Icelandic version—looked strong and handsome and more worldly. God knew what a jury would think of him. “Leave it alone,” said Gil quietly, and then finally Betsy sighed and nodded, squeezing her son’s hand.

Jules could not let go of the question of Ash telling Ethan, and she said to Ash, “But how could you not tell the person you’re in love with?”

“You are the only one I can trust about this,” Ash said. Which was maybe just another version of what Cathy Kiplinger had said to Jules: you are weak.

“But you’ll have to tell him eventually, right?” Jules asked.

Ash didn’t say anything, so her father spoke up. “No, she won’t,” he said. “That’s the point I’ve been trying to make.”

The moment was so stiff that Jules didn’t know who to look at or what to say. Goodman stood up from the table then and said, “Good time to go take a leak.” He loped away, more enormous than he’d been when Jules had seen him last. Construction work, the Icelandic sun, cup upon cup of skyr, sexual deprivation, an occasional gambling habit, the guzzling of Brennivin, aka Black Death, a kind of hardcore schnapps made from fermented potato and caraway seeds: all of it had contributed to making him into some kind of hulking young expat whose first name was now, someone had mentioned tonight, John.

While he was gone from the table the other three Wolfs drew closer, and Gudrun took this opportunity to go out and buy cigarettes. “Now look,” Gil said, taking a drink of beer and then gazing directly at Jules, “I cannot emphasize enough that this is a heavy, heavy situation. You understand that, right?”

“Yes,” she said in a whisper.

“And you can be absolutely trusted?” he asked. They were all looking right at her, gravely.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I can.”

“Okay, good,” Gil said. “Because the thing is, we did not want Ash telling anyone. Anyone. Not you. Not Ethan. The consequences could be so awful that I don’t even want to think about it. But Ash insisted she had to talk to someone other than us, or else she would have a nervous breakdown. That may sound a little melodramatic—”

“I wasn’t being melodramatic, Dad,” Ash broke in, and her father turned to her.

“All right, you weren’t. But we all know you react very sensitively to everything, and we took that into account.” He seemed to struggle to contain himself, then he turned back to Jules, his face stern, fatherly, or, more than that, headmasterly. “When she goes off to Yale in the fall, she has to be able to focus,” Gil said. “She can’t be thrown off-balance by all of this. None of us can. We have to act as though nothing is new. Everything is the same.”

Jules imagined returning to Underhill, and her mother innocently asking, “So was it the exciting trip you’d hoped it would be? Tell me all the highlights.” Lois would be unaware that Jules had been initiated into this, and she wouldn’t know how frightening it had felt, how independent. Jules wished that she could tell Ethan; he would guide her. “I have a moral puzzle for you,” she’d tell him. “Go ahead,” he’d say, and she would begin. “There was a family, uncommonly seductive and alluring . . .”

“To tell you the truth, Jules,” said Betsy Wolf, “in an ideal world only our immediate family would know that we’ve had contact with Goodman, and that we’re trying to see to it that he has a decent life. We know he’s innocent of those outrageous charges made by that very troubled girl, and when the time is right we will help ease his way back home. We’ll speak to the DA’s office and do what needs to be done. Goodman will make amends for leaving. But that time is not now. I don’t want to insult you by saying the kind of thing people sometimes say: ‘We think of you as family.’ I once heard Celeste Peddy actually say that to the poor Peruvian—or is it Indian—woman who comes in once a week to basically stand in a closet and do her ironing. Only family is family, and it’s an unjust fact of life. You have your own family. I’ve only spoken to your mother a couple of times, and I just met her the other day at the airport, but she seems like a very nice person. You aren’t in our family, though it would be so nice if you were. I’m not your mother, and Gil’s not your father, and we can’t force you to do what we’ve decided to do. I think Ash manipulated us just a tiny bit to get us to include you on this trip—”

“Not true,” Ash piped up.

“Well, we’ll have to go into mother-daughter therapy one day to find out,” said Betsy with a small smile toward her daughter. “I’m sure it exists. We’ve paid for other kinds of therapy, so why not that? But the thing is, Jules, Ash loves you. You are the best friend she’s ever had, and I guess she wouldn’t mind my saying right now that she needs you too.” Betsy’s voice became unbound again, and Ash leaned across the table, putting her arms around her mother. They looked so much alike, the fine-featured, salt-and-pepper-headed mother and the shimmering daughter, whose looks would also one day turn in this same direction, still pleasing and fine, just no longer young and untouched.

Nearby, a gaggle of smoking, drinking students glanced over at the Americans and their open display of emotion, but no one at this table even tried to temper themselves tonight. “I love you so much, Mom,” Ash said, her face collapsing.

“And I love you too, darling girl.”

Goodman returned then, followed shortly by Gudrun, who immediately opened her pack of King’s Original, tapped one out, and lit it. The counselor seemed chic here in Iceland. Her hair was well cut, and Jules thought for a moment of the poor living conditions that Goodman had described in Gudrun and Falkor’s home. But then she remembered that for months now, money had steadily been coming into that household. Probably the living conditions had improved. Gudrun looked like a smartly dressed artist or designer.

“What’s going on?” Goodman said. “I go take a leak and all hell breaks loose.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jules. “There’s no relationship between your family’s emotional outpouring and your bladder outpouring.”

“It’s just very, very intense around here,” Ash said. She walked around the table and stood beside her brother, putting an arm around his shoulder; he had sat down again, but even sitting, he was almost as tall as she was.

“We were telling Jules how essential it is that we keep this to ourselves,” said Gil. “More than essential.”

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

“Thank you,” Ash said from across the table.

“Tomorrow,” said Gil Wolf, looking around at his family, “we’ll all go swimming in a geothermal pool, and then we’ll have a wonderful Icelandic meal. We’ll have a great day,” he said. “We deserve it. We need it.”

Then the Wolf family began to talk to one another all at once. They discussed the death of their dog, and Ash said, “I can’t believe you weren’t there, Goodman,” and Goodman said, “I know, I know, it killed me, I’m so sorry, I loved him too.” And they talked about how strange it was that Jonah was going to MIT of all places, and how Cousin Michelle was pregnant with twins, and about American politics, which Goodman usually only heard about through the filter of the Icelandic news. They talked and talked, bringing up anything that occurred to them. The family relaxed together in the close brown and gold quarters of the Café Benedikt. Jules drank another glass of water, and then she was suddenly weary again, but the Wolf family was still going strong, and might still be going strong for hours. Iceland, so far away from everywhere, stayed up late, as if to soothe itself in its isolation. Only Jules Jacobson and Gudrun Sigurdsdottir were left on the outer edges of this conversation, sitting in slightly formal silence, the teenaged girl and the grown woman. Jules looked at the former camp counselor, who looked at her, and they both smiled shyly, having nothing at all to say.

“So,” Jules said finally. “Do you still have that flashlight?”