The Interestings

  “I’m not an artist,” Jonah said flatly. “That didn’t happen.”

  “You don’t have to be one,” Jules suddenly put in. “You can be whatever you want. It just doesn’t matter.”

  Jonah looked around at all of them. “I needed something, okay?” he said. “I didn’t even know I did, but I did. Ash, you and Ethan have each other. Me, I’m totally on my own.” He was almost in tears as he spoke, confessing his isolation to his oldest friends. “Maybe I needed a deep love that was more powerful than any other kind. Didn’t any of you ever feel you needed that?” he asked them, but he had turned his head now and was looking right at Jules. She was the other unattached one here, the one who seemed to be quietly waiting, standing in the river of her life, the way Jonah had been. Jules looked down at the ground, as if it hurt her to make eye contact with him.

  “Sure, sometimes,” Jules said, and it was the strangest thing, but Ethan was now looking at Jules too; he and Jonah were both regarding Jules Jacobson attentively. Ethan, looking at Jules, seemed to have fixed himself upon her the way people fixed themselves upon the Messiah. Jonah could almost see the ragged edges of light that Ethan certainly saw around her—the coronal fringe light that was sometimes created by diligent, applied love.

  Ethan loves her, Jonah thought. This was an epiphany, one of many that he’d experienced on the farm. Ethan Figman loves Jules Jacobson even now that he’s bound his life to Ash Wolf, even now that so many years have passed since that first summer. He still loves her, and because I am now a devotee of the Messiah, I can see such powerful and radiant light.

  “You love her,” Jonah said to Ethan indiscreetly. He’d seen it, and he felt he had to say it.

  “Who, you mean Jules? Yes, of course,” Ethan said in a curt voice. “She’s my old friend.” Everyone looked in all sorts of directions, trying to sever the moment from the meaning that Jonah was giving it. Ethan walked back over to Jonah now and put an arm around his shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “if you let us, we’ll get you some help.”

  “What kind of help do you think I need?”

  By now, a few residents of the farm had begun paying attention to the agitated scene between Jonah and his visitors. Hannah and Joel came over to intervene, and Tommy hummed up in the wheelchair, his baseball cap backward on his head. “Is there something distressing going on here?” asked Hannah. “Some conflict?”

  “No, we’re just talking,” said Ethan.

  “Jonah was asked to tend the hydroponic lettuces,” Joel said.

  “Seriously, you can go fuck the hydroponic lettuces, Joel,” Ethan said. “I mean, really, are you going to compare the need for lettuces to be tended with the need for this person, this great friend of ours, to have an actual life out there in the world? Doesn’t everyone deserve a chance to live in the world, instead of hiding away on a farm, selling dyed flowers that no one wants, and that everyone runs away from when they see the dyed-flower bucket coming their way? What is it with you guys and selling flowers? The Hare Krishnas do it too. What, did everyone see My Fair Lady and think, ooh, that looks like a good idea?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Tommy. “But you’re being disrespectful, and it’s time for you to go.” He pressed a button and reared slightly backward in his chair.

  Then Susannah Bay, who’d been giving a guitar lesson in the barn to two young women, suddenly appeared with her guitar. “We’re ready to take a little trip to town, Susannah,” Ethan said, his face full of meaning, trying to tell her, we have to move now. To Jonah he said, “I tell you what. Let’s go for a ride. You can show us around the town. Your mom will come too.”

  “Oh,” said one of the wide-eyed young women who accompanied her, “Susannah was teaching us ‘Boy Wandering.’ The chords are actually easy. It’s mostly A minor, D minor, E.”

  “And she showed us the open D tuning for ‘The Wind Will Carry Us,’” said the other woman.

  For someone who had been so upset since her son had moved to the farm, Susannah Bay now appeared calmer, as if what she’d seen here wasn’t nearly as dire as she’d imagined. She’d had a tour of the gardens and the crops and the sheep in the meadow. She’d given an impromptu guitar lesson to people who still knew who she was and still cared about her music. Time stood still here on this commune in Dovecote. Everyone dressed as if they were at a three-day music festival; no one owned more than a few material possessions. The income they’d earned in the past, or that they marginally earned now, went to the church. Susannah Bay found herself and her work cherished here. It had been a surprise, and now she was going to have to give it up?

  “We’ve been talking to Susannah,” said the first young woman, “and we’ve asked her a favor.”

  “What?” said Ash. “What could you possibly want from Jonah’s mother?”

  “Reverend Moon is holding a spiritual gathering this winter in New York City, in Madison Square Garden,” said the woman in a casual, confident voice. “We all just love ‘The Wind Will Carry Us,’ and we wondered if we could possibly get our chorale—a chorus of five hundred of the best voices from around the world—to sing it at that event. With different lyrics, slightly.”

  “Different lyrics?” said Jonah. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m not a musician myself,” said the woman, “but I was thinking it could be something like, ‘The Reverend Moon will carry us / Carry us . . . apart.’”

  They were all silent, horrified. “Oh yes,” said Ethan finally, in a voice thick with irony and condescension. “That’s exactly what he’ll do. Carry everyone apart.” He and Jules looked at each other and smiled slightly.

  “Pardon?” said one of the women.

  “Nothing. Look,” said Ethan, “obviously Susannah Bay is not going to allow her lyrics to be messed with. It’s not negotiable.”

  But Jonah’s mother appeared contemplative. Was she faking them all out? It was impossible to tell. After a moment she quietly said, “I’d consider it.”

  One of the women asked if Susannah would also consider staying on the farm for a few more days to work on the song with them, and on guitar and vocal technique in general. It wasn’t as if she had any pressing engagements, right? To everyone’s bewilderment Susannah agreed that she would stay here until Wednesday, when someone would drive her to Brattleboro to take the bus home. But Jonah, Ash insisted, should come for a ride into town now. If they’d told him they were taking him back to the city, surely he would have bolted. Jonah, Susannah, and a few key residents of the farm walked away to discuss the situation in private.

  “I really don’t like the idea of this,” Ethan whispered to Ash and Jules as they stood watching the group of people talk among themselves. “It feels like a hostage exchange.”

  “They said it’s just for a few days,” said Ash. “Apparently Jonah’s mom is into the idea of working with them, maybe even letting them use her song, though I honestly have no idea why. It seems like a terrible mistake to me.”

  “I think she’s just so grateful that someone’s thinking about her music again,” said Ethan. “It’s one thing to have a voice like hers, but if nobody appreciates it anymore, then it’s depressing. This is probably giving her a big lift. But this way, at least we get Jonah to come with us. We’ll deal with his mother later.”

  It occurred to Jonah during all the confusing, complicated negotiations—Why did they want him to go into town with them so badly? Why were they even here, exactly?—that he’d never wanted to run away from home, but instead he’d wanted to have his home, in the person of his mother, run after him. Here she was now, and he was within reach, but she was wavering. He didn’t really mind it, though. She was appreciated here, the way she’d been appreciated in the past, but now in a much smaller and more concentrated form. She was making a decision to go where the audience was.

  Jonah agreed to drive into town with his friends. He could get an ice pop at the general store; he hadn’t eaten anything with artificial color or
even sugar in it in a very long time, and he still had a taste for such foods. But when Ethan’s father’s beat-up old car sped past “downtown” Dovecote, and Jonah said, “Why aren’t you stopping?” he supposed he’d already known the answer. He scrambled for the door handle, and Ash and Jules put their arms around him in the backseat and hugged him. “It’s okay,” said Ash, and Jules said, “Everything’s going to be fine,” and then Jonah began to cry, because he was confused, and very, very tired, and felt an underground tremor of nameless, swelling emotion that might have been—though he wasn’t sure, and couldn’t admit it—relief. He was desperate to sleep like a newborn baby squished between his old friends in the tiny car; he had barely slept since he’d been living on the farm. Chores started at dawn every day, and prayers lasted until late at night.

  In the city, the deprogrammer awaited him in room 1240 of the dreary Wickersham Hotel half a block from Penn Station. His services were needed for three full days and nights; by the end of it all, Jonah was so worn out from the sleep deprivation that was part of the drill, and from being fed very little other than cold Burger King fries as sunrise broke over the city, and from the constant playing of taped negative testimonies from former church members, and from being repeatedly told that everything he’d heard on the farm was untrue, that Ash and Ethan insisted Jonah stay on their couch in the East Village for a few days, and this he did, gratefully.

  It was funny, looking back on this so much later, that Ethan and Ash didn’t even have a guest room in their first apartment. The place was ordinary, with an old rag rug that Ash had taken from her childhood home. They were still, in 1981, like everyone else. And in 1981 they were thoroughly entwined, despite the love that Jonah had seen in the air around Jules when Ethan had looked at her. Because of the deprogramming, and the relatively brief period of time he’d been a member of the church, Jonah eventually forgot most of what he’d felt and learned on the farm. The teachings themselves were slowly leached from his consciousness, as if they were the subject matter of a required college course that hadn’t been of great interest. But he never forgot how he’d seen the ongoing love that Ethan still felt for Jules, and that Jules perhaps still felt for Ethan. He never forgot it, but he knew enough never to mention it again.

  • • •

  As it turned out, Susannah Bay stayed on the farm in Vermont for a few more days after her son left, singing to a circle of delighted, awed listeners. Their awe would not change over time because of fashion. They would not lose interest in Susannah’s talent, which as far as they were concerned was a fixed thing; instead, they just wanted to bask in it. Susannah returned to New York briefly, not by bus as planned, but in the purple minibus, in order to gather a few of her own essential belongings from the loft, which were then transported with her back up to the farm. A few months later, when Reverend Sun Myung Moon gave a speech at the World Mission Center in New York City, Susannah Bay was called onto the stage to sing her signature song with its newly written lyrics. Her voice was as strong and clear as it had been when she was starting out, and some of the listeners cried, thinking of how they used to listen to her when they were younger and how their lives had changed so dramatically since then. Many of them had broken with their parents, and with their soft suburban lives, and had taken up a greater purpose. This singer, so special, so talented, seemed to be singing right to them, and they were grateful.

  The following year, Susannah, along with more than four thousand others, was married in a blessing ceremony in Madison Square Garden. The groom, Rick McKenna, twelve years her junior, a professional carpet installer and a member of the Unification Church from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a stranger to her until the moment they joined hands in front of the Messiah. Directly following the ceremony, Susannah Bay and her husband got into the minibus and headed back up to the farm, where they would live together for the rest of their earthly lives.

  THIRTEEN

  If you name your daughter Aurora, there is a good chance that eventually she won’t be able to carry the weight of that name with total ease and grace, unless she is very beautiful or very confident. Dennis and Jules hadn’t understood this when their baby was born in 1990. There had been many typical conversations in advance about baby names, discussions about what sort of name would work best preceding the clanking tin-can trail of “Jacobson-Boyd.” These discussions had mostly taken place between Jules and Ash, not Jules and Dennis. Ash had grown up in a family in which both children had been given unusual names. Unusual names was her beat, and Jules let her own aesthetic shift and settle accordingly. She would give her own child an unusual name too. Dennis was too cheerless and distracted to concentrate on this topic for very long. He tried, but soon the effort was too great, and one day he finally told Jules, “Oh, you decide.”

  She had not meant to get pregnant, not now; it was the wrong time for this. Depression had sandbagged Dennis in the weeks after his release from the hospital following his small stroke. He’d been started on another antidepressant right away, but he said that he might as well have been taking Pez. The MAOI had kept him well since college, but now he was in a shaky, low-slung state. Various drug combinations were tried, yet nothing lifted his mood. Dennis went back to work at MetroCare a month after the stroke, but found himself unable to concentrate or follow the directions he’d been given; or else, sometimes, he became overly involved with the narratives revealed through the gray dimensions of ultrasound.

  The day Dennis lost his job was a typically busy day at the clinic, and after seeing a few patients, a young woman came in who’d been experiencing pain on her right side. She was lovely, talkative, twenty-two years old, a recent college graduate from Kentucky who’d come to New York City in a tide of graduates, and who was working as an usher at Radio City Music Hall. “I get to see everything for free,” she said as she lay on the table, her head turned away from him. “Even the Rockettes. And all those concerts, which is pretty amazing, because we never had anything like that where I come from.” Dennis gently ran a transducer below her rib cage. “Oh, that tickles,” she said, and then suddenly on the display screen her liver came into view, looming up like the wreck of an old ship.

  He saw the mass at once; it was unmissable. Without thinking, Dennis said, “Oh God.” The technicians were never allowed to offer any kind of opinion about what they saw, not even to give a hint as to whether it appeared normal or abnormal. Every other time he’d performed an ultrasound—and he’d performed thousands—he’d been poker-faced, mild, and cheerful. When patients had murmured a question, or searched his face for reassurance, he’d told them not to worry, that the doctor would read the results very soon, that it wasn’t his job to interpret. But of course he always tacitly interpreted; all the technicians did. He had never reacted this way before, but the young woman was an innocent in the city, and he couldn’t bear the idea that there was a significant chance she had cancer, and would die of it.

  “What?” she said, turning her face toward him.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes you did,” she said, her mellow Kentucky voice becoming accusatory. “You said, ‘Oh God.’”

  “I said it about tickling you,” he tried, but he knew it was no good. The world engulfed Dennis Jacobson-Boyd in all its shades of gray, its vulnerable soft organs, and he lifted the wand off the young woman’s body, placed it on the cart, and put his hands to his face, for now he was crying. He could not believe he had done this! But he knew that putting a person with untreated clinical depression in this position could easily lead to a bad moment of some kind, and here it was. The young woman pulled her paper gown around herself, but she was all wet with gel, and frightened of him, and frightened for her life. She lifted herself carefully off the table, and swiftly rustled out into the hallway, calling for assistance.

  Two of the other ultrasound techs, Patrick and Loreen, immediately crowded the doorway. “Dennis,” said Patrick in a sharp voice, “what did you say to
that patient?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “But she has a mass. I could see it. It was like a monster in there.”

  “Dennis,” said Patrick. “You have no idea if it’s malignant. And it’s not your place to get involved in this. You were sitting here crying? She heard you cry? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then, “I do know.”

  “Look, a stroke is a big deal,” Loreen said. “My grandpa had one. It takes time to recover. You’re not yourself. You need more time, Dennis.”

  “It’s not the stroke. That was minor; I recovered from that.”

  “Then what?” she asked. Patrick and Loreen would smoke on the street outside the clinic during breaks, and Dennis would stand happily with them in the draft of their smoke. Patrick was a big guy, a former Marine, with a shaved head and a saintly manner, married with four kids; Loreen was black, small, dreadlocked, single, full of ambition. The three of them had nothing in common, but until Dennis’s stroke and the return of his depression, he’d enjoyed their company. They’d all become real friends, joined together by sound waves, and now, apparently, separated by them.

  He didn’t answer Loreen, but unbuttoned his white coat and somberly folded it into a soft pile, like a military flag. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “I’ll say,” said Loreen. “Mrs. Ortega is going to fire you the minute she comes down here.”

  “I behaved inappropriately,” said Dennis. “I know I did. I just felt so sad. I was overwhelmed by the futility of everything.” He nodded good-bye to his friends and walked past them, out into the hallway where the hefty, determined Mrs. Ortega was striding toward him.

  His pharmacologist, Dr. Brazil, still did not want to put him back on the MAOI. “Not when we have so many sharper tools in our toolbox,” he said. But it seemed that even these sharp tools were too dull for Dennis, or else Dennis was the one who was dull, for he lay around the apartment in the mornings when Jules got ready to go to her office, or for a meeting with her supervisor, and he watched her through a kind of clinically depressed person’s thick cheesecloth.