The Interestings

  Even in the midst of Goodman’s tremendous problems, Betsy Wolf continued to prepare excellent meals. Ash was handed a rubber-banded bunch of leeks, and at the sink she unbound them, then soaked the individual thick-bulbed stalks to remove the sand and dirt, and chopped and sautéed them, and by the time her father walked into the apartment right before seven, already muttering about the latest legal bills, Ash remembered the phone call from Dr. Spilka, and that Goodman hadn’t yet left his foul cave. She felt uneasy suddenly, and went to his door, banged once, then entered. The place was much cleaner than usual. Sometime between last night and this morning when he was supposed to have left for school, her brother had actually cleaned his room. He had lined up his little architectural models on the desk, and he had made his bed. It was as disturbing in there as a crime scene, and Ash turned and ran back down the hall to get her parents.

  Goodman was really gone; gone with the passbook from a special account his maternal grandfather had set up for him at Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust. His parents had arranged for a cap on all withdrawals, making sure Goodman never dipped in too deeply to buy drugs or do something stupid. Today, they learned, he had made the maximum withdrawal. He was also gone with his passport, as well as every other relevant official document that he’d been able to find, including his birth certificate and his social security card, which had been kept in a catchall drawer in his parents’ bedroom bureau. He’d just dug around in there when no one was in the room and grabbed whatever had his name printed on it. Maybe he was planning on leaving the country, maybe not. If you thought of Goodman Wolf, there wasn’t any one place that you imagined he might go.

  Except, said Ash, for Spirit-in-the-Woods. He loved it there so much; he was a powerful figure there, he had currency, he was seen as big and important and erotically charged and free of his father’s criticism, and, of course, he was happy there. It was a long shot, but Gil Wolf called the Wunderlichs and asked if by any chance their “wayward son” had turned up today. Gil tried to keep his voice light. The Wunderlichs, who already knew something about the legal situation, said no, they’d been away in Pittsfield for the day, but to their knowledge Goodman had not been there.

  Next the Wolfs called Dick Peddy, who instructed them on what and what not to do. “We don’t have to jump to conclusions,” Dick said.

  “Jesus, I’ve already done that, Dick. The kid is gone.”

  “You don’t know that. Consider his absence a kind of reflective vacation.”

  “Reflective? Goodman doesn’t reflect; he just does.”

  “As long as he shows up on the adjourned date,” said the lawyer, “then all will be well.”

  The Wolfs knew that Goodman was not likely to show up then; why would he have left home, only to appear in court on the appointed day? Their best hope was that he was with some pot-smoking friend in the city who they didn’t know about—and that he would crash at this friend’s place in the interim and eventually would come home, or would even just show up at the court in a couple of weeks in wrinkled, unwashed clothes.

  At nine a.m. on the adjourned date, Betsy and Gil Wolf sat very still in the paneled courtroom on the fourth floor of a courthouse downtown, and waited with their lawyer. The assistant DA coughed repeatedly, and the judge offered him a lozenge. “Fisherman’s Friend; works wonders,” said the judge, taking out a little rattling tin box from a drawer and handing it to the bailiff, who handed it to the assistant DA. Minutes passed; Goodman did not show. A bench warrant was issued, and Detectives Manfredo and Spivack took the Wolfs aside and instructed them that as soon as they heard from Goodman, they needed to report it, as well as urge Goodman to turn himself in.

  When the city tabloids found out that the boy who’d been arrested on New Year’s Eve at Tavern on the Green had not shown up for a court appearance, they sent photographers to hang around outside the Labyrinth, and Ash was discreetly approached as she headed for the crosstown bus to school. “Prep-School Park Perp Flight Shocker” was not a story with much traction, though, because in the last days of April, two men were apprehended after they’d robbed and shot a fifty-year-old woman in Central Park, near the Boat Basin. Now, whenever Goodman was occasionally mentioned in the Post and the Daily News, it was in the context of the dangers of Central Park, particularly for women. Unrelatedly, a hundred-pound tree branch broke off and killed a teenaged girl in the park near 92nd Street, but still all these stories were unsettling. The whole city had begun to seem even more unsavory, and not just the park. Muggings were constant. The squeegee men stood at the mouths of tunnels with their tools and buckets of dark water, aggressively approaching cars. Goodman Wolf, Prep-School Park Perp, became just a small part of a big, seething story, mild in comparison with what would come.

  It would be ten years before the notorious case in which another prep-school boy attacked a girl in Central Park, but that boy also killed that girl. And it would be thirteen years before a young female investment banker out for a jog in the park at night was raped and beaten into a coma, thought to be the victim of a gang of boys out “wilding,” as people called it, though much later the convictions would be overturned when someone else confessed. Who ever knew what really happened? The park was a dark, beautiful, and now intimidating stretch of green that seduced and divided the city.

  Decades earlier, Manny and Edie Wunderlich had traveled through New York on elevated trains. They went to Socialist meetings and avant-garde operas, and then, eventually, to folk club after folk club, and every single activity apparently cost “a nickel,” at least the way they told it. The Hudson River shone on one side of Manhattan, the East River on the other. Between the two rivers, young bohemians owned this place. Now they no longer did, and because of that it was all much worse. But Goodman wasn’t lumped in with the worst; he was given a tiny mention in the catalog of the great city’s decline; and with a little time, he faded away.

  But here he was now, still—vivid, fresh, the locus of a pain that didn’t lessen. Ash was on the phone constantly to Jules, crying and smoking and talking, or else just being silent; she missed Goodman so much, she said. She knew he was a fuckup, but until now all his fuckups had been redeemable. This had been his role since they were kids; and it had been almost funny back then, because he was also charming and bad and always made family life so much livelier. He used to dress their dog, Noodge, in Ash’s training bra. He used to wake Ash up in the middle of the night and take her up onto the forbidden roof of the Labyrinth, where they would sit sharing a bag of mini-marshmallows while looking out over the paused, exhaling city. Her parents’ sadness at their loss was intolerable now, and so was her own.

  One Saturday morning in May, Ash took the Long Island Railroad out to Underhill to spend the weekend at the Jacobsons’. There was a time when Jules would have dissuaded her from coming, but not now. None of her friends had seen her small house or her dull, unfancy suburb; they had all expressed an interest in visiting her before, but Jules had deflected it, saying something meaningless like, “All in good time, my pretty.” But now Ash needed to get away from her parents and the city. Before she arrived, Jules went around the house, glaring at everything, trying to find clever ways to make the place look better. She stalked through the rooms, her eyes narrowed in assessment, snatching up an ugly ashtray and spiriting it into a drawer, removing a pillow that her mother’s sister, Aunt Joan, had embroidered from a kit with the words Home Is the Place Where When You Have to Go There They Have to Take You In—Robert Frost. Jules couldn’t bear the image of Aunt Joan, who had never read a poem in her life, stitching the name Robert Frost in green yarn, as if that somehow made her “literary.” The pillow went into the drawer beside the ashtray, and as Jules closed the drawer her mother saw her and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Just straightening up.”

  Lois glanced around the room, noticing the way the rug had been vacuumed within an inch of its life, items on surfaces had been regrouped, and a shawl had been thrown across the couch
, not to hide any stain or imperfection but to hide the couch itself. Seeing her mother see the house from Jules’s perspective made her ashamed of herself. Suddenly Lois Jacobson, who had been given no credit for anything, seemed to know everything. She’d lived through the death of her young husband, and now she was a single mother with two daughters, one in college at nearby Hofstra but living at home for financial reasons; and one who had made it clear that she preferred a richer, more sophisticated and engaging family over her own. Lois had recently started working again for the first time since getting married. “Women’s lib had something to do with it,” she’d said. “But also I need the income now.” She had gotten a job as an assistant to the principal at the Alicia F. Derwood Elementary School, where Jules and Ellen had once been students, and she liked being out of the house and in the jumping, unpredictable environment of the school.

  “Well, it looks very nice,” Lois finally decided to say as she took in all that Jules had done to the living room. “Thank you.”

  The bigger surprise that weekend was that Ash liked her mother, and that her mother liked Ash. The only uneasy person here was Jules, who found it hard to manage the overlap of these two worlds. When the train arrived, Ash stepped off onto the platform looking like a child who has been sent to the countryside to escape the London blitz. Jules, in the parking lot with her mother, leapt out of the car and strode up the metal steps to greet Ash, as if her city friend wouldn’t be able to descend these stairs without assistance.

  “Welcome to Underhill,” Lois said when Ash climbed into the backseat.

  “Yes, welcome to beautiful Underhill,” said Jules in the sort of voice that might be used to accompany a corny old educational filmstrip. “A bustling metropolis that is home to three art museums and six orchestras. In addition, the next summer Olympics will be held in our fair city.”

  Ash pretended not to hear her. “Thank you, Mrs. Jacobson. I am really glad to be here. I had to get away. You don’t know it, but you’re kind of saving my life.”

  “First stop, the extremely glamorous and elegantly named Cindy Drive!” said Jules as they pulled into the development of identical ranch houses that sat shoulder to shoulder along the straight street. When you took a shower at the Jacobsons’, you could see right into the shower at the Wanczyks’. Once, Jules and Mrs. Wanczyk had stared straight at each other with a neck-up view, while water simultaneously beat down on their heads. “Did you know that Zsa Zsa Gabor lives across the street?” Jules said to Ash. “No, really, right over there! Nine Cindy Drive. There she is, putting on a boa! She is such a sweet person. Hallooo, Ms. Gabor!”

  “Please ignore my daughter, Ash,” said Lois. “She seems to have gone mad.”

  The weekend was spent partaking of all the suburban activities that Jules generally hated. Ash Wolf was actually grateful for the Walt Whitman Mall, whose name Jules had mocked mercilessly with her friends in the summer. Decades later, archly describing her childhood at a dinner party, she would say, “Could there be a bigger oxymoron than the Walt Whitman Mall? Maybe only . . . the Emily Dickinson Waterpark.” Now Jules and Ash walked together around the enormous space, laughing at almost anything, going in and out of stores. They also went to the movie theater to see All the President’s Men, and while it played, Jules thought again about Nixon’s departure from the White House lawn, which the entire camp had watched. But really, before that day all the campers had been like industrious cobblers at work in a forest, only partly aware of the outside world—the move toward impeachment, the noise—and willing themselves a way to stay in that indefensible state of half-consciousness as long as they could. Now, out in the world and much more conscious, Ethan had begun devoting his energy to drawing sketches of Jimmy Carter as a figure in Figland, and perfecting that drowsy Southern accent. “I wish we had someone a lot more liberal, but I think he’s pretty ethical, which is rare,” said Ethan. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  At night during that weekend in Underhill, Jules and Ash lay together in her bed, with Ash’s head against the footboard. Many years later, they would lie across other beds with their children playing all around them, and it was a relief to know that even in getting older and splitting off into couples and starting families, you could still always come together in this way that you’d learned to do when you were young, and which you would have a taste for over your entire life. Ash, up close in Jules’s bed in Underhill, having performed a series of elaborate nighttime ablutions in the house’s single, peach-colored bathroom, now smelled milky and peppery at once. Maybe the soap she’d brought with her from the city was called Pepper Milk, Jules thought as she grew sleepy. Whatever it was, anyone would want to be around that smell, to drink it in from a girl if they couldn’t drink it in from a bottle.

  “So what do you think will happen to Goodman?” Ash asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because he’s a boy it’s probably easier for him out in the world,” said Ash. “But because he’s Goodman it’s harder. It’s always been harder. He just sort of blunders through. He doesn’t even try to play the games you need to play. Like, I always knew, since I was little, how to please teachers. I would write these really elaborate short stories and turn them in for extra credit. You want to know the secret? The stories were long. They weren’t all that good, but they showed purpose. That’s my strength: purpose. I’m sure they wore my teachers out. ‘The Secret of the Gold-Leaf Mantelpiece.’ ‘The Carson Triplets on Wandering Bluff.’ They were exhausting! I also made birthday cards for my parents every year—I mean, I spent hours on them. Once I even tie-dyed a card—and Goodman would completely forget about their birthdays, and I’d remind him, and at the last minute he’d ask me to let him sign the card I’d made. But they never thought he’d spent a second on it. I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society,” Ash said. “But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention. I always did.”

  “I never did,” said Jules. “Not until I met all of you.”

  “Do you think we’re horrible narcissists—those of us who swept you up into our clutches?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do? Thanks a lot.” Ash tossed a pillow at her in a halfhearted attempt at female playfulness. But that was not what their friendship was. They didn’t sit around polishing their nails and talking dreamily; their roles were different from that. Ash still fascinated Jules and showed her how to be in the world; Jules still profoundly amused and comforted Ash. She still cracked her up without cracking her up.

  “I’m kidding,” Jules quickly said. “Of course you’re not narcissists. And by the way, you smell really good right now.”

  “Thank you.” Ash yawned. “Maybe, if I don’t make it in the theater, they can write that on my gravestone: ‘She smelled really good.’”

  “‘She had olfactory brilliance.’”

  They were quiet. “I wonder exactly when we’ll die,” Ash said. They both thought of their own eventual deaths and felt sorry for themselves, but that passed quickly, like a shiver. Then Ash said, “I wonder when Goodman will die. And if he’ll do anything with his life first. If only he’d had someone like Old Mo Templeton to guide him along and be his mentor. Help him with his architecture, or whatever else he decided to do. If only he’d had a talent that was brought out and worked on. That would have helped. Talent gets you through life.”

  At the end of the weekend in Underhill Ash seemed stronger. “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Jacobson,” she said as she stood in the kitchen, clutching her weekend bag. “It’s just been so stressful at home, and I didn’t know what to do—” Here her voice collapsed, and Jules’s mother impetuously hugged her.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Lois said. “I see why Jules is so fond of you. And you’re beautiful too,” she added. Jules knew that mentioning Ash’s beauty was a
n indirect comment on Jules’s lack of it, but somehow it was okay, even pleasurable, to hear her mother say this. Jules took pride in Ash’s beauty, as if she’d had something to do with it. “You are welcome anytime,” Lois went on. “Just say the word.”

  “Yes, there’s always a place for you on exclusive Cindy Drive,” Jules said. “Only three blocks away from the Dress Cottage.”

  Ash said, “Oh, shush,” smiling, and waved her off.

  That afternoon, after they’d driven Ash back to the train and then returned home, Jules went into the drawer of the hutch cabinet and took out the ashtray and the embroidered pillow, returning them to their rightful places in the living room. Within half an hour, though, she saw that her mother had removed them again. From then on, Lois Jacobson didn’t seem to feel as threatened when Jules went into the city weekend after weekend.

  Life at the Wolf household remained in trauma mode. Still no one knew where Goodman was; he might be anywhere at all. Whenever he was found, or whenever he returned home, he would immediately be arrested; the lawyer had made this clear to them. They waited for Goodman to call or write so they could find out if he was okay and urge him to come home, telling him they knew he’d gotten frightened, but this wasn’t the way to handle it. They knew he was innocent, they would remind him, and soon everyone else would know it too. Come home, they would say. But he didn’t contact any of them, and the school year ended like a regular school year, except Goodman didn’t graduate from high school, didn’t advance in life as he was meant to do. He hadn’t had a chance to mature into something other than what he was. His story paused there.

  This was to be the last summer the rest of them would spend at Spirit-in-the-Woods, except now Ash didn’t even know if she could bear to go. Cathy wouldn’t be coming back, of course; she still wasn’t speaking to any of them. Troy was too old now even if he’d wanted to come back, which of course he didn’t. The absence of Goodman—who also would’ve been too old to come back, since he was supposed to have gone off to college in the fall—made the idea of a summer there seem wrong. But the following year they would all be too old, so Ash, Jules, Ethan, and Jonah decided they would go back one more time.