The Interestings

  “Thanks, Gil. That’s kind of you to say.”

  “Not kind,” said Gil. “Self-interested too. Because I know that Ash is concerned about you. I don’t want to start trouble in paradise, Ethan. I mean that she wants you to be happy too. She wishes you could do what you’re most passionate about.”

  “So do I.”

  Gil leaned across the desk like a man about to offer once-in-a-lifetime investment advice. “Look, here’s what I would do,” he said. “Go back to them; tell them what you want to be doing.”

  “Them?” Ethan laughed, then stopped himself. He had sounded obnoxious. “I mean, there is no them,” he said more gently. “The people I dealt with work on that show exclusively. They wouldn’t be interested in seeing anything else from me.”

  “What about the network? Can’t you pitch them your so-called Figland? As a TV show, like The Chortles but much smarter and more satirical and, God knows, funnier. And if they don’t want to do it, you can tell them you’ll go to the competition. I’ve done a little research on your behalf. There are black holes in the network’s schedule, where shows just won’t succeed. They’re consistently losing in certain time slots, and they’re worried.”

  Ethan sat back and felt the spine of the ultramodern chair give a little too much, as though it might send him falling backward on his head. Gil Wolf was used to getting things done, made, taken care of; his assumptions and his blitheness were remarkable. He wanted Ethan to go to the network aggressively, confidently, pitch them Figland and make them think—no, make them worry—that there was a lot of money to be made from Ethan Figman. It would be a mindfuck of some kind, just like in Gil’s world. And, just like in Gil’s world, sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

  Looking at Gil’s enthused, almost deranged face, Ethan felt himself stiffen and then relent. His own father had been so preoccupied and messed up, and as a result had been spectacularly bad at fatherhood. Now Ethan wanted the love of Ash’s father more than anything. After all, he’d even put a pudding-cup’s worth of mousse in his hair and donned a monkey suit in the middle of the day in order to get it. The intensity of their eye contact made Ethan suddenly realize that this conversation—or anyway some version of it—was what Gil was meant to have had with Goodman right around now. And now Ethan knew that that was what this whole meeting was really about.

  A father who’d lost his son was a desperate creature. Empty-handed, in despair. The tragedy of Goodman’s sudden, lurching exit all those years earlier still followed Gil Wolf around, always reminding him of what he’d had, what he’d criticized constantly and probably never appreciated enough, and what he’d lost. The pain was unimaginable. Ash’s father needed Ethan to succeed because his own son had taken off and never been found. His own son was dead, for all intents and purposes, and Ethan was not.

  Ethan would call the network—what the hell. He would put himself out there like a schmuck and see what they had to say. He could tolerate rejection; he’d experienced it before and survived it.

  “And one other thing,” said Gil. “If you end up making a deal with them—”

  “In my dreams,” said Ethan.

  “If you do, you’ve got to give these guys things they can’t get anywhere else. They have to need you. This is key.”

  “Oh, I see what you’re saying. Sure. Thank you,” he said to Gil. “And really, you’ve been so generous and everything.” Both men stood. In his mid-fifties Gil Wolf was still a slim man, a twice-weekly tennis player. There was almost no hair on the top of his head, but he’d developed impressive silver sideburns, and his clothes were natty, picked out by his wife, who had the same good eye for style that Ash had.

  “Good,” said Gil. “Now let’s go to lunch. I want steak. I mean, I want salad.” He laughed. “That’s what I’m supposed to say. My internist told me that if I eat salad often enough, I will actually start craving it. And my good cholesterol will rise and my bad cholesterol will fade away like the morning dew.”

  “Salad it is,” said Ethan, though at age twenty-three cholesterol was something he’d never given any thought to before. Vaguely, he knew it had to do with fat in the blood, though when anyone mentioned cholesterol, he realized he immediately ceased listening, similar to when someone told him their dream. Gil reached out and lightly pulled Ethan’s VISITOR tag off his lapel. It left behind a ghostly rectangle of pollen, which would remain there until the brown jacket was finally taken out of circulation the following year, at Ash’s insistence, and replaced with something expensive and not brown.

  “Wait. One other thing,” said Gil. His face suddenly altered, becoming embarrassed. “I was wondering if you’d have a look at something.”

  “Sure.”

  Gil closed the door of his office, then went to the closet and took out a big, brick-colored accordion folder. The string had been elaborately wound around the knob, and he unwound it, saying, “This is my secret, Ethan. I’ve never shown these to anyone, not even Betsy.”

  Oh shit, it’s going to be porn, Ethan thought, and his collar grew tight around his neck. Some kind of strange fetish porn. There would be images of children, photographed in houses where the windows were blacked out. Gil would want Ethan to be initiated into this world. No, no, that is such a stupid conclusion! Stop it, you’re babbling inside now, Ethan told himself. He watched as Ash’s father removed a stack of drawings on heavy sketch paper. “Tell me what you think,” Gil said.

  He handed the sheaf to Ethan, who looked at the first drawing, which was done in charcoal. It was of a woman sitting by a window, looking out at the street. It had been labored over, he could see. Through the cloudy gray charcoal it was possible to see all the erasures, the starts and restarts. The woman’s head was turned at such an angle that her neck almost looked broken, and yet she was sitting up. It was a very bad drawing; Ethan took that much in right away. But he knew, oh thank God he knew immediately, that this was not a joke, and that he was not supposed to laugh. Thank God, he would often think over the years, that he had not even smiled.

  “Interesting,” Ethan murmured.

  “I was trying for a three-quarter profile,” said Gil, peering over Ethan’s shoulder.

  “I see that.” Then, in a very small voice, so small that maybe it was possible Ash’s father wouldn’t even hear it, and Ethan could have said it without actually having said it, he added, “I like it.”

  “Thank you,” said Gil. Ethan put the drawing on the bottom of the pile and looked at the next one. It was a seascape, with gulls and rocks and clouds possessing sharp outlines instead of the wispy, amoeboid quality that actual clouds had. This drawing was less bad, but it was still quite poor. Gil Wolf wanted to have a hand that could hold a pencil and make it do anything—or, better yet, two ambidextrous hands like Ethan’s that could hold pencils equally well and make them do anything. But the problem was that talent couldn’t be willed into being. Ethan murmured something appropriate for each drawing he came to. It was like an extremely stressful game show, called Say the Right Thing, You Idiot.

  “So what’s the verdict?” Gil asked, his voice husky with vulnerability. “Should I keep giving it a whirl?”

  The moment extended into infinity. If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you’d meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw.

  “Of course,” Ethan said.

  The last drawing in the stack was of two figures, a boy and a girl, playing with a dog. Right away the tangle of their bodies was so tortured that it was like looking at a scene of actual torture. Someone was doing something bad to someone else! But, no, Ethan realized that these children were laughing, and their dog,
who looked more like a seal, appeared to be laughing too, its lips upturned.

  “It’s from an old photo,” said Gil. His voice was strained, and Ethan didn’t want to look up and over at him, for he feared what he would see. Just a moment earlier Ethan had worried that he would laugh; now he knew it was possible that Gil might cry. And then, of course, Ethan would cry too, but he would also need to protect Gil, to make a tender gesture toward him, to tell him he was so glad Gil had shown him his artwork. In the drawing, Ash and Goodman were playing with Noodge when he was a puppy. Gil had done his best to capture a moment in time. Here was a labored scene of Ethan Figman’s girlfriend as a little girl, looking vaguely the way she’d actually looked, according to the many photos Ethan had seen on the walls of the Wolfs’ apartment. In her father’s rendering, Ash and Goodman were happy, the dog was happy and alive, time was stopped, and there was no sense of what the future would be for these children, though, disturbingly, everyone’s neck—the brother, the sister, and the dog—appeared to have been idly broken.

  • • •

  After leaving the celebration dinner at the dark and beautiful Japanese restaurant, and saying effusive good-byes to the network executives that included an appropriately solid, manly handshake between the men and delicate cheek kisses between everyone else, Ethan and Ash walked down Madison Avenue in the light rain. It was late, and this street was not meant for nighttime. Everyone out tonight was in a hurry to get somewhere else. All store windows were grilled; the expensive clothes and shoes and chocolates were tucked away into unreachability for the night. Ethan and Ash walked slowly south; he wasn’t ready to get into a cab just yet. He put his arm around her and they leaned together as they walked. They stopped on the corner of 44th Street and he kissed her; she smelled a little bit like sake, a little bit like fish. Intoxicating, vaginal, and he felt stirred, right in the middle of everything else he was feeling. She seemed to sense his mood, its many tentacles reaching out unsurely.

  “Which one did you like best?” Ethan asked her.

  “Like? Is that the operative word? And don’t you mean better, not best, because there are only two of them? They’re both so slick. And Hallie basically defers to Gary.”

  “I meant which kind of sushi. And sashimi. Not which network executive. I liked the piece that looked like a gramophone.”

  “Oh, right. Yes, that one was cool,” Ash said. “I think I liked the one that looked like a Christmas present. Red and green. Your show is going to be great, by the way,” she said.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Are you kidding me, Ethan?”

  “It’s just that there’s a dividing line in my life now,” he said. “Before and after.” Ethan felt convinced that it was easy to become greedy the minute your fortunes increased. Ash had always seemed to take her family’s money for granted, which bothered him; Ethan, living first with his squabbling, aggravated, moneyless parents, and then with his careless father, had mostly been indifferent to wealth, but his Socialist tendencies never really developed; he’d been born too late to find enough company for that. “What if it’s not right, this show?” he asked. “What if it’s a real embarrassment, a total artistic failure? A mistake.”

  “Ethan, you think everything is a mistake. You have no sense of when things feel right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the time you were offered that summer internship after high school—”

  “I turned it down for Old Mo,” Ethan said hotly. “He was dying of emphysema, Ash, I mean, come on, what did you think I was going to do?” Even thinking about that summer, Ethan felt himself sigh and deflate. Old Mo Templeton, on oxygen and weighing so little, had been unable to eat, and Ethan went out and bought him a juicer. The juicer had been a beauty, the Jaguar of juicers, as futuristic as a spaceship, and he’d pushed carrots and beets and celery into it, and sat by the hospital bed that had been installed in Old Mo’s apartment, and held the glass of juice and angled the straw for him.

  Once, as Ethan bent the flexible straw, he became aware of the tiny little creak it made upon bending, and he filed away the idea, straw sound, for some future endeavor. “Straw sound! Straw sound!” the character Wally Figman demanded of his mother, who’d given him a glass of chocolate milk a few months later in a flashback to early childhood in one of the short Figland films. The noisy, brash cartoon soundtrack came to a halt while Wally’s mother bent the straw for her son, and the straw made that unmistakable and somehow pleasurable little squeaking creak.

  Once Figland hit primetime, stoners watching the show would soon say to one another, “Straw sound, straw sound!” And someone might go into a kitchen, or even run out to a store, and bring back a box of Circus Flexi-Straws and bend straw after straw to hear that specific, inimitable sound, finding it unaccountably hilarious.

  Ethan had stayed with Old Mo until the last days when the old man was moved to the hospital, and then he’d been there when Old Mo died. He’d inherited everything from his teacher’s personal collection of old reel-to-reel cartoons: Skedaddle, Big Guy, Cosmopolitan Ranch Hands, and all the others. Sometimes late at night when Ash slept but Ethan couldn’t, he threaded the cocoa-colored Bell & Howell projector and sat in the living room, screening the ancient cartoons on the wall, though lately that seemed maudlin and self-pitying, and so he packed up all the reels and stored them at his father’s place. One more box in that disgusting apartment wouldn’t make a difference.

  He’d thrown over the job at Looney Tunes for an important reason, but it was true that he hadn’t been able to appreciate what the job might have been like, and what it might have done for him. Looney Toons was a potential nightmare of subservience and adherence to someone else’s fixed vision, and yet maybe working there would have been exciting. Of course there was no way to know now. He hadn’t gone the showy, Warner Bros./LA route, and had instead stayed in New York after graduating from art school.

  “And frankly,” said Ash, “it was only a matter of time before you left The Chortles. They weren’t good enough for you. I said to myself: Where’s the subtlety? Ethan’s going to hate this.”

  “You knew more than I did. And then your dad, with his big pep talk that day in his office—without him I would be doing who knows what. Drifting.”

  For months Ethan had mulled over everything Gil had said, all the while doing industrials again to bring in money. Finally, after a great deal of obsessive thinking, he thought he was ready to present his ideas, as Gil had urged him to do, and to his astonishment the network had said sure, we’ll be glad to hear your pitch. He’d brought in a storyboard, and he’d done the voices that he’d always done in the short films, and everyone in the room laughed a lot and called him back for two more meetings with other executives, and somehow in the end they’d actually said yes, and had given him his own show. It would never have occurred to Ethan on his own to have the balls to go in there like that. Balls. He remembered the Newton’s cradle on Gil’s desk. Gil had plenty of balls, hanging from strings, smashing into one another and clicking like mad. He owed Gil everything, and yet even thinking this, Ethan knew it wasn’t really the case.

  Tonight, after the miraculous, gemological assortment of raw fish, and the raised glasses of aromatic sake that had been knocked together in celebration, the dazzling truth of his success was indisputable. But on the street in the rain after dinner, Ethan felt clubbed yet again, the way he’d felt on Maui. And this time he was doing what he wanted! This time he had gotten everything imaginable! The clubbing came from a different source. Not disappointment but fulfillment. He knew his life would change in a shudderingly radical fashion, and he would emerge different. He would probably even look different. He was like a baby whose head gets elongated as it makes the awful soft-serve ice cream machine trip through the birth canal. Ash was in her coat and scarf, she who had looked so pretty at the low, lacquered table beside him as they sat on the straw mats; obviously Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin had been impressed and s
urprised by her. Ethan was socially elevated by the incongruous beauty and loveliness of his girlfriend. He hated the fact of this; it insulted Ash, and it insulted him, but the problem was that it was predictable and true.

  When they got home that night, instead of feeling weary and damp from the rain they dropped together onto their futon, and without any discussion began to fuck. Ash took off her good clothes until she was wearing only her little sleeveless undershirt that made him incredibly excited for reasons he didn’t understand. He slid his hand up under the elastic ribbed cotton; at some point she was on her stomach and he found himself climbing on top of her, and he saw that the T-shirt label was sticking up in back. HANES FOR MEN it read upside down, and these words alone sent new blood rushing to his already filled penis. He wanted to laugh.

  Sex was as strange as anything, as strange as sushi, or art, or the fact that he was a grown man now who could fuck a woman who loved him. The fact that he, Ethan Figman, was really fuckable after all, when he had spent the entire first seventeen years of his life certain that this was not the case and never would be. But then, early one morning on a terrible New Year’s Day, he’d put his arm around Ash Wolf as they left the police station after her brother Goodman’s arrest, and she’d looked over at him with what he’d later thought of as fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it’s caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts. Ash gave him the fawn face, and he’d blinked in confusion. He’d put an arm around her out of instinct, wanting to protect her because he knew how much she loved her brother and how agonizing this was for her. But there was that face, and he decided that he was wrong, it couldn’t mean anything different from usual. She was grateful to him, that was all.

  For a long time, seven months to be exact, he’d assumed he had misread Ash’s expression. But then in the middle of camp again in the summer, away from her family and its nonstop grief at Goodman’s disappearance, Ethan and Ash had sat in the animation shed together a few times, and they’d told each other a frank assortment of personal details. Ethan told Ash about the first inklings of Figland he’d had when he was really young. The place had seemed to send him messages about its existence, as if through little smokestacks in his brain. He told Ash he had been positive that the hateful, real world in which we all lived couldn’t possibly be all there was, so he’d had to create an alternate world as well. She, when it was her turn, spoke about Goodman, and how she knew they had very little in common other than the same parents, but it didn’t matter; she felt as if she was him. Ash said she would wake up sometimes, and briefly, literally think she was her brother, lying in a bed somewhere. She also told Ethan about how she’d shoplifted constantly for a full year in eighth grade, and had never once been caught. As a result, she still had an entire drawer full of Coty makeup and L’eggs panty hose in colors and sizes she would never use: “Deep Bayou Blush.” “Extra-Plus Queen.” It was as though they both knew they were about to commit to each other for life, so they’d better let the other person know all the particulars of what they were getting into and would have to live with. But how could they possibly have understood what was happening to them at seventeen?