The Interestings

  “I know all about it,” said Jules.

  Cathy had a distinctly cartilaginous nose; though she wasn’t crying now, her eyes were red rimmed because she’d been crying a great deal since New Year’s. “Honest, Jules,” said Cathy, “it’s like you just don’t know anything. You’re just so goony about him, and about Ash, and about good old Betsy and Gil. You think they all saved you from a boring life. But unlike you, I don’t despise my family. I actually love them.”

  “I don’t despise my family,” Jules said meekly, shocked to have been discovered, her voice miserably disappearing into her throat as she spoke.

  “My parents have been wonderful to me,” said Cathy. “And so has Troy, though I doubt he’s going to stick around much longer. I’m a mess, and he knows it. I can’t concentrate. I cry a lot. I’m not exactly the greatest girlfriend. The teachers at Nightingale are all being really nice about it, but this thing changed me, and now I’m different.” She leaned forward and said, “Goodman pushed himself into me. Jules, are you hearing me? I wasn’t ready; I was dry. Do you even know what I’m talking about—dry?” Jules nodded, though she also thought: Wait, do I really know what that means? She sort of did and sort of didn’t. Sex and secretions still existed only in half-consciousness for her. They lurked like light under a door, or more like water flooding under a door. Soon the whole floor would be covered, but not just yet. “I was dry and it hurt, it really hurt,” said Cathy, “and I yelled at him to stop, but you know what he did?” Her mouth went wavy. “He just smiled down at me like he thought it was funny, and he kept doing his thing. It was like he was turning a crank. Can you feel it now, when I say it?”

  Yes, Jules felt it, and her jaw went stiff and her thighs automatically tensed; she and Cathy were on the rack together, and no one could help them. She wanted to eat her own fingers now. She looked at Cathy in desperation. Jules blinked, attempting to loosen herself. The crank turned the other way, releasing her. She regained herself and said the only sentence she could think to say. It would disappoint and disgust Cathy Kiplinger forever, but she lamely said it anyway: “You’ll probably start to feel a little better at some point, you know.”

  Cathy took a moment, then said, “And what is this opinion based on? Some special research you did?”

  “No,” said Jules, and she felt herself go warm-faced. “I guess I just meant that I want you to feel better.”

  “Of course you do. You just want it to go away. But none of you knows what it felt like when he was fucking me and I got abrasions, okay? That’s what the doctor said when he examined me. Labial abrasions. How’s that going to sound in court?”

  Cathy was sitting across from Jules in the booth with her inflamed face and tiny, hard eyes and ten maimed fingers. Somehow Jules had really believed that Cathy would “come around” and that the force field of sentimentality that surrounded the six of them would be the catalyst. Jules would be able to go to the Wolfs’ apartment tonight knowing that Cathy was bagged and passive. Jules would be the heroine of this story, and all the Wolfs would admire her, including Goodman, who would rise out of his extended dark mood and give Jules a crushing hug. She pictured his long face and big strong teeth.

  “Couldn’t you have misinterpreted what happened?” Jules said. “Isn’t there a way that that’s possible, even slightly?”

  “You mean, isn’t there another view? Like Rashomon?”

  “Yes, something like that,” said Jules. Ethan had taken her to see that film recently at the Waverly Theater in the Village; it was one of his favorites, and she’d wanted to love it too. “I loved it theoretically,” she’d said to him afterward as they walked out; this was the way she’d learned to speak.

  “This is nothing like Rashomon,” said Cathy, and she stood up. “God, Jules, you are so incredibly weak.”

  “I know,” said Jules. Cathy’s remark seemed to be the truest thing that anyone had ever said about her. In times of self-laceration she’d thought herself to be ignorant, awkward, unschooled, clumsy. But weak was what she really was. Even more miserably now, speaking out of that weakness, Jules asked, “But do you really need to take him to court? He could be sent to jail for twenty-five years. His life could go one way, or it could go another. All because of something that was maybe a misunderstanding. We all only get one life,” she added.

  “I’m fully aware of how many lives we get. My one life has already been fucked up,” Cathy said. “And do I need to take him to court? Yes, I do. If it was a stranger who had jumped out at me in a stairwell, you’d be saying, ‘Oh, Cathy, you have to take him to court, and we’ll all be there to provide moral support.’ But you’re not saying that, because it’s Goodman. And because you’re so completely captivated by him, and by those supposedly magical summers at camp, and by some idea about the end of childhood, and being accepted for the first time in your life. Troy can’t even believe that I hung around with all of you for so long. Your totally privileged group. You know, he was on scholarship at Spirit-in-the-Woods. He always felt completely different from everyone else there. That camp was extremely white, have you ever noticed that? I mean, my parents wanted me to go to a traditional all-girls camp in Maine where you wear uniforms and play sports all day and salute the flag, but I told them no thank you, I already go to an all-girls school. I wanted something different. I wanted to dance; I wanted to get outside my little insular life. But just look at Spirit-in-the-Woods. When Troy first got there, he said he felt like a freak.”

  “So did I!” said Jules. “It’s not just him. And by the way, I was on scholarship too, just so you know.”

  Cathy was unimpressed. “The point is that you got caught up in some fantasy, and now you can’t see anything at all. But I can.” Cathy’s mouth took on a feral shape. “The only one of you who’s tried to find out how I am is Ethan,” she said.

  “Ethan?” Jules was really surprised.

  “On that first night, after it happened, he left a long, tortured, Ethan-y message on my parents’ answering machine.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes. And he still calls me. Mostly I rant, and he listens. He never tells me to buck up, or whatever the rest of you think I should do. Sometimes,” she admitted, “I even call him.”

  “You call Ethan? I had absolutely no idea.” Dick Peddy had expressly said they were not to talk to Cathy; Ethan had apparently just ignored this order, without clearing it with Ash or anyone.

  “But the rest of you, Jesus,” said Cathy. “You were all my closest friends—not that you and I ever had that much to say, let’s be honest.”

  Jules couldn’t fully explain herself. She had said all the wrong things here from the start. In Improv class at camp Jules had once acted out a scene based on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and she’d had to recite a line to the boy facing her across a tea table, the way Cathy faced Jules now. She’d looked into that boy’s eyes and said, “‘That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.’”

  It wasn’t supposed to go like this with Cathy. “We should have tried to talk to you,” Jules said. “You’re right, we really should have. But it was complicated. That lawyer was so insistent. It scared me. I’d never been in a situation like this before.”

  “Truly, you make me want to puke,” Cathy said, winding her crocheted scarf around her neck. “When are you going to learn to think for yourself, Jules? You’re going to have to eventually. You might as well start now.”

  Then the teenaged version of Cathy Kiplinger was gone from the coffee shop and summarily gone from them. In twenty-five years she would return through a time portal in a changed, late-middle-aged-woman form. Her hair would be artificially made the same yellow color it had once naturally been, her breasts would be surgically reduced after two decades of chronic back problems, and her tense face would shine from low-concentration Retin-A cream and the occasional oxygen facial, but the tension itself would never be unlocked and released.

  “Here you go,” said the
waitress, lightly slapping down the check. Cathy had drunk six Tabs. Jules paid for them, then in a sick fog took the subway up to the Wolfs’ apartment, where Ash was waiting.

  “Well?” said Ash. “What did she say?”

  Jules threw herself facedown onto the cluttered bed and said, “She’s a total mess.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, so? Isn’t the question why is she a total mess? If she was making it all up, would she really be such a mess? Wouldn’t she be more of a fake mess? More, you know, photogenic? More studied?”

  After a few seconds of silence Jules craned her head around from where she lay on the bed, in order to see Ash in the swivel chair at her desk. Even from this angle, she could see that her mood state had changed. Ash stood and said, “I think you should go home now, Jules.”

  Jules scrambled to stand too. “What? Why?”

  “Because I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “We can’t even discuss it as a possibility?” Jules said. “Cathy’s our friend too. She’s never made things up before. She seemed genuinely fucked up, Ash. You should see her fingernails.”

  “What do her fingernails have to do with anything?”

  “They’re all chewed up, like a cannibal ate them.”

  “And because of her fingernails, my brother’s guilty?”

  “No. But I just think we owe it to her to—”

  “Please go,” said Ash Wolf, and she actually went to the door and held out her arm. Hot-faced, shocked, Jules walked out of the room and down the hall, passing the gaggle of family photos. In the distance, she saw Goodman in the living room with headphones on, nodding dully to a private, thudding beat.

  Nearly two weeks of an unbearable freeze-out passed. Jules cowered and hulked in Underhill, walking through the school halls blankly, paying no attention in class. If she couldn’t be at the Labyrinth with Ash and Goodman and their parents, then what was the point? Jonah stayed in touch sometimes, and Ethan tried to cheer her up on the phone every night. “Ash will come around,” Ethan said.

  “I don’t know. How do you manage to walk this tightrope?” Jules asked him. “Having everyone like you and respect you no matter what you do.”

  There was silence on the line except for Ethan’s mouth breathing. Finally he said, “Let me see. I guess, maybe, I don’t rush to conclusions. By the way,” he said after another pause, lightly, as if trying not to make her feel too bad about what he was about to say. “Jonah and I had dinner at the Labyrinth last night.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. It felt very weird not having you there. But even if you were there, it would’ve been weird because it’s very tense. In case you’re interested, Betsy made sea bass and orzo.”

  “What’s orzo?”

  “It’s this new kind of pasta, shaped like rice but bigger. You’d like it. The food was good, but the mood over there is getting even worse. They’re all scared to death of the trial, but no one says it. Goodman’s used to having everything work out for him. Even after getting kicked out of Collegiate, they got him into Walden, right? And he’s a powerful guy. He can’t believe things aren’t working out this time; that none of the fail-safes are in place. He thinks he might really be in danger now. He pulled me aside after dinner and told me that he needed me to know he didn’t do anything wrong. I told Ash it’s not my place to figure out what happened that night at Tavern on the Green, or what should happen now. I said that’s what a trial is for—like I even know what I’m talking about. My credentials are basically that my dad and I used to sit around and watch Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law.”

  Jules said, “Did Ash say anything about me?”

  “She said she misses you.”

  “Well, she’s very angry with me.”

  “No, not really,” said Ethan. “Not anymore. I’ve been smoothing that out. She’s embarrassed that she made you leave the apartment. She wishes she could take it back, but she doesn’t think you’d let her.”

  “I’d let her.”

  So Ethan brokered the peace between them. He refused to attempt to broker an end to the legal fight between Goodman and Cathy—it was corrupt to try and interfere with the legal process, he said—but he was happy to help Ash and Jules become friends again. Later that night, Ash called Jules and said, “I’m so sorry I acted like that. I don’t know if you can forgive me, but I hope you can.” Jules told her yes, of course she already forgave her. Jules didn’t need to say that she knew Goodman hadn’t done anything wrong; instead, she only had to agree that the situation was horrible, and that the trial would correct the wrongness of the accusation; and she had to agree to return on Saturday to the Labyrinth.

  Over the next weeks, Ethan was the only one of them who really spoke at all about Cathy Kiplinger. “I talked to her last night,” he announced one day when they were all sitting together on a bench in Central Park in cold sunlight.

  “Who?” said Jonah.

  “Cathy.”

  Goodman and Ash gave him a sharp sidelong look. “Cathy?” Goodman asked.

  “Cathy?” Ash echoed.

  “Hope you two had a very nice chat,” said Goodman.

  “I know it’s hard for you to understand,” Ethan said. “I get that.”

  “I just can’t believe you’re speaking to her,” Ash said, lighting a cigarette and holding the match out to her brother, lighting his cigarette as well.

  “I see why you feel that way,” said Ethan. “But I just wanted her to know I was thinking about her. I felt that this was important to convey.” He sat up straighter on the bench and said, “I have to make my own decisions about what’s right.”

  “‘Thinking about her,’” said Ash. “Well, I guess that’s true enough.” Then she said, “My feeling is that Cathy’s probably gone a little insane—remember how Jules described her when they went to the coffee shop?—and now she actually believes her own story. That’s what Dr. Spilka told Goodman. Isn’t that what he said, Goodman?”

  “I don’t know,” said Goodman.

  The trial was expected to be in the fall, and it was all that any of them could talk about over the rest of the school year. The outside world and its political chatter remained remote and of only intermittent interest, while Goodman’s upcoming trial and, well before that, the “adjourned date” in late April, when certain motions would be filed, the lawyer had explained, were far more compelling. Goodman prepped with his lawyer and his lawyer’s two associates; they wore him out with all their prepping. But no one saw the extent to which Goodman had just had enough of all this and could not take much more. The extent to which he was frightened, or to which maybe he felt guilty. Cathy had been strong and believable in the coffee shop, but Jules couldn’t hold on to her words. If she held on to them, if she remembered them and completely absorbed them, then she might not have still been lingering around the Labyrinth.

  His family believed Goodman to be entirely innocent—though actually, Ash had confessed to Jules, she’d had an odd moment late one night with her mother, when Betsy had come into Ash’s room. “Sometimes I think the male of our species is unknowable,” Betsy Wolf had said, despairingly, in response to nothing. And Ash had tried to find out what she meant, but then her father appeared in the doorway, looking for her mother, and it became clear to Ash that her parents had been having an argument. Then they said good night to her; and weeks later, when Ash told the story to Jules, she said that she hadn’t known if her mother had been trying to find a way to talk about Goodman and who he was. Or whether, instead, she’d only been making a comment about Gil, after a marital argument that, one way or another, must surely have been about Goodman. Maybe Betsy, who’d always protected and loved her difficult son, even as she pushed him in certain ways, had briefly wavered. But there was no way to know, because she never again said anything to suggest it. In fact, she even seemed to become more righteous about his innocence, disgusted by what Goodman had to endure.

  None of the Wolfs had spoken to
Cathy, as Ethan and Jules had. But even having spoken to her, Ethan and Jules were only sixteen years old, and much later it would be clear that they couldn’t have been expected to know what to do, or exactly what to feel. Cathy’s words had been disturbing, even shocking, but the firm, unified belief of the Wolf family carried its own, more significant weight.

  At the Wolfs’ apartment, everyone nervously watched Goodman, and they saw him become almost a non-person, and they said to one another, “At least he’s still going to Dr. Spilka,” as though this psychoanalyst they’d never met could keep him intact. Even when Ash heard Dr. Spilka’s halting voice on the Wolfs’ answering machine on a Thursday afternoon in early April, she wasn’t made anxious. “Hel-lo, this is Dr. Spilka,” he said in a formal voice. “Goodman did not show up for our appointment today. I would like to remind you of my twenty-four-hour cancellation policy. That is all. Good day.”

  Ash, home after school and sitting in the kitchen with two classmates eating raw cookie dough and rehearsing for the upcoming Brearley play, Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, had been the one to play back the message on the machine, but she didn’t particularly worry when she heard it. So Goodman hadn’t been to his shrink today; big deal. He wasn’t a reliable person. She imagined he was lying on his bed down the hall right now listening to music or perhaps getting high, but she didn’t feel like interrupting her rehearsal to go in and visit her brother in his lair.

  Ash Wolf had a great tolerance for the ways of boys; she forgave them their primitive traits, and she sympathized with Goodman almost entirely. When something happened to him, she’d once explained to Jules, it seemed as if it were happening to her too. She and her school friends rehearsed their lines from the sad and wonderful play about an emotionally disturbed mother and her daughters, and then after the other girls left, her own relievedly undisturbed mother came home from an afternoon of stuffing envelopes for a muscular dystrophy charity run by a friend whose son had the disease, and Ash helped her make dinner.