The Interestings

  Not long after Jules arrived again in Belknap at the end of June, she knew it was a mistake. Most of the other campers seemed so much younger now. There were plenty of new ones, and some were a little different from campers of the past. On the path to the lake, Jules overheard a very basic, crude fart joke. Did these kids not know that if you were going to make a fart joke, the punch line would have to have something to do with, perhaps, Brecht? In Girls’ Teepee 2 for this final summer lived Jules, Ash, Nancy Mangiari, and Jane Zell. Sleeping in Cathy Kiplinger’s old bed was a new girl, Jenny Mazur, an introverted glassblower with a habit of talking in her sleep, the only time she let loose. “Mother! I did not betray you!” she cried as the others listened with prurient fascination.

  Ash’s sadness and preoccupation with Goodman were known throughout the camp. Sometimes at night, when the trees scratched the roof of their teepee, or a flashlight popped on through the pines and then the beam dashed away, Ash briefly held the fantasy that Goodman had come back. “It’s not impossible, Jules. He knows where to find us,” Ash once whispered. “He’ll tell us he’s been hiding out somewhere around here, maybe living in some shitty apartment in Pittsfield. There was this Grimms’ fairy tale that our mother used to read us,” she said. “A brother and sister run off into the woods to get away from their evil stepmother. It’s always a stepmother, never a stepfather; even fairy tales are sexist. Anyway, the brother gets really thirsty, but the stepmother has enchanted all the springs. And there’s this one spring that, if he drinks from it, he’ll turn into a deer. And the sister says, ‘Please don’t drink from it, because if you turn into a deer you’ll run away from me.’ And he says, ‘No, no, I promise I won’t,’ and he drinks from it and of course he turns into a deer.”

  “And runs away from her like she predicted, right?” said Jules. “To join a hunt? I remember this fairy tale.”

  “Yes, right. And she’s devastated. But he keeps coming back to visit her in his deer form, and with his hoof he knocks on the door of the house where she’s staying, and he says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ He keeps doing this, night after night, and he goes back and forth into the woods. And one night he comes to her and says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ And she lets him in and sees that he’s been wounded. That’s what I keep thinking,” said Ash in an agitated voice. “That Goodman’s going to show up one night, and he’ll be wounded in a way. Something will have happened to him out there. And I’ll let him in, and take care of him, and make him stay with me.” She looked somewhat childishly at Jules. “Don’t you think it could happen?” she asked.

  “In real life?” Jules said, and Ash nodded. “Maybe,” was all she could bring herself to say.

  But Goodman didn’t come. The scratching heard on the roof was an overhanging claw of a branch, and the footsteps outside the teepee were wandering counselors, whose flashlights threw yellow scattershot beams among the pines. Everything was different this summer. Even Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, the Icelandic weaver and lifeguard, had not returned. Someone said she’d gotten married over there. The Wunderlichs, too, seemed exponentially older. Ida Steinberg, the cook, looked especially tired. Those three had been there since the founding of Spirit-in-the-Woods—the Wunderlichs were Spirit-in-the-Woods—and they always said that the camp kept them young, but perhaps you could not drink from that particular spring forever.

  Ethan did the best work he’d ever done, working side by side with Old Mo Templeton, who was now, Jules remarked once to Ethan—then immediately regretted it—Decrepit Mo Templeton. One day Jules saw Ethan helping Mo walk to the animation shed, carefully holding the arm of his mentor to make sure he didn’t trip and fall. Sometimes, Ethan would mention to Old Mo a detail from the early days of animation and ask him a complicated question about it, and in the past Old Mo had always replied expansively. But now, when Ethan referred to the short Skedaddle, from the Slowpoke Malone series of 1915, Mo smiled and just said, “Yes, that was good work they did back then.” Yet when Ethan wanted to hear more about it, Mo touched his hand and murmured, “All your questions, Ethan, all your questions.” And that was that. It was as if Mo Templeton was conserving his energy for waking up in the morning when the day started, and walking down the hill, and sitting among these teenagers and their ideas, and looking at their drawings of figures who seemed suddenly and exhaustingly in motion.

  It was time for the old to step aside and the young to take a big step up. It was unequivocally time. Over the summer, Jules and Ash walked everywhere together around the grounds, going deep into the pine forest where they’d never wanted to go before. Two girls less interested in nature and natural phenomena could hardly be found anywhere on earth. But now nature walks seemed to be called for, and the Dr. Scholl’s sandals that Jules and Ash both wore pressed down on the bed of red and brown pine needles. Occasional groups of mushrooms popped up after a rainstorm like carbuncles. Both girls jerked away when they saw an embryonic bird that had been munched upon by a carpet of flying and walking creatures. When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.

  One afternoon Ash wasn’t around to take a walk. Jane Zell said she’d seen her leave the teepee looking upset, the way she often looked this summer, but Jane had no idea of where Ash had gone. That night, in bed, in a humidity of a particularly savage degree, the five girls tossed and flopped. They talked a little, each of them telling stories from their home lives, except for Jenny Mazur, who only began to talk after the other talking ended. In her sleep she said, “The man had a face! He had a face!”

  “Don’t they all,” said Nancy Mangiari.

  Someone yawned. “It’s crazy late,” said Ash. “See you in the morning, ladies.”

  The others hushed; the sleep talker stilled. Even through the heat, their bodies had circadian rhythms, and they managed to fall under. But later, close to two in the morning, after the counselors had ceased their halfhearted patrol, Jules awakened to the sound of the teepee door opening and footfall on the wooden floorboards. It was a male step, and in her half-conscious state she thought she actually might hear Goodman Wolf say the words, “My little sister, let me in.” Jules traveled up the flume of sleep in hopes of being fully awake at the moment when Goodman was reunited with his sister, and then with all of them. Tired, worn-out, maybe even injured Goodman, back from his misguided, panicked journeys. He would be a deer or he would be a boy, but it wouldn’t matter. Whatever had happened to him, he could be restored. His legal problems would slowly be worked out, Jules thought. The lawyer would get on the phone to the DA’s office and cut a deal that most likely would involve probation but no jail time. The trial would take place eventually, as it was supposed to have done, and in the end Goodman would no doubt be acquitted. Cathy, in time, would admit that she’d been immature back then—really fucked up and overly dramatic—and now she’d seen that maybe she’d distorted what had actually happened. What mattered was that Goodman was here now. Jules, still lying in bed, felt a bolt of dopey hope that awakened her further.

  But once awake, she heard only, “Shh,” and then a chuckle, and then the sound of Ash fiercely whispering to someone, “No, over here. That’s Jenny Mazur. She’ll start to shout about the man with a face.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Come here. It’s okay. They’re asleep.”

  Ethan Figman climbed into the bed of the most beautiful girl he’d probably ever seen, and if happiness made its own light, it might have pulsed from the bed across the hexagonal interior surface area of that teepee, radiating outward into the dark. Surely he was vibrating with happiness—but so, possibly, was Ash. Ethan and Ash. Ethan and Ash?

  It made no sense. A pulse jumped in Jules’s eye as she tried to understand this. How was it possible that Ethan was the one Ash wanted? Jules hadn’t wanted him. But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different. Everyone’s neurologies and
tastes were singular. She forced herself to think about this as she turned her own body sharply away from their bodies, facing the window and the hot night, which expelled a small quantity of bad air through the screen. The voices across the teepee became low and unified, and then became coos, as if two doves were huddling together in bed. Sad, lovely, delicate Ash Wolf, and wonderful, ugly, brilliant Ethan Figman, improbably together, improbably pressed together on this extremely hot night, for privacy’s sake inside the sleeping bag with the red lining and the repeating pattern of cowboys and lariats, began to murmur and babble. Ash whispered to him, “Take off your shirt,” and he whispered, “My shirt? I don’t think so.” “You have to.” “Well, okay. Wait, it won’t come off. Look, look, it’s stuck.” And Ash whispered, “You are insane,” and in response, agreeable Ethan laughed insanely, followed by the soft, almost imperceptible sound of him most likely taking off his shirt in front of a girl for the first time ever. “There you go. That’s nice,” Ash whispered. “See?”

  Then there were slurping, excruciatingly human sounds, and the doves returned again, and there was rotisserie-style turning inside overheated flannel. Love could not be explained. Jules Jacobson-Boyd would eventually know this when she became a therapist, but now Jules Jacobson knew it anecdotally, and she felt suddenly snide and defensive in response to it. Furious, actually. She felt as if she’d done everything wrong, as always. She had a wild need to say something to Jonah tomorrow about what she’d witnessed tonight. She imagined coming upon him as he sat curled over his guitar, and telling him, “Guess what? Apparently opposites really do attract, freakish though that is in this case.”

  In the morning, the air returned to a reasonable temperature, and only the five girls remained in the teepee. They sat up in their beds to the opening strains of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, which the Wunderlichs still played each day on a turntable and blasted across all of Spirit-in-the-Woods, waking everyone from their slumber.

  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.