The Interestings

  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.