The Interestings

  “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 t
hat 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 offic
e 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.