The Interestings

  “Dennis,” Jules said, wagging her foot back and forth as she stepped into a flattened shoe. “I do not like this current state of yours.”

  “I do not like this current state of mine either, Jules,” he said, simply imitating her diction but sounding hostile. Why was he hostile? There was no reason, but he just was.

  “I keep thinking you’ll snap out of it,” she said. “I know that’s babyish and obviously unrealistic.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he got up from the bed to give her a perfunctory hug, not because he felt loving, but because he was probably scared to not feel loving. Jules was clean and showered and dressed, smelling of the various floral and fruit cleansers and lotions that started her day; Dennis still smelled like an attic of sleep, and at the moment she wanted no part of him.

  One day Ash, concerned about the bad situation, met Jules for lunch at a place on Amsterdam where the popovers were as large as a baby’s head, and the two women broke them open, steam rushing upward into their faces. Ash’s driver waited outside in the car, and would wait for her as long as was necessary. “Talk to me,” said Ash.

  “You already know what’s happening.”

  “But talk to me more.”

  “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jules said. “He’s diminished. He’s like some vague, irritable version of Dennis. It’s like they took him for a while and then returned him to me, but now he’s only an approximation of himself. Like he’s a member of Jonah’s cult back then.” Ash just shook her head and squeezed Jules’s hand, which was all she really had to do. The two women felt guilty eating their eggy and decadent popovers and talking about Dennis as if he were a particularly recalcitrant client of Jules’s. Dennis would hate the way they were talking about him, Jules thought; he would be horrified. “I shouldn’t be saying all this,” she added, but she needed to say it.

  “No, it’s okay. You’re not gossiping or anything,” said Ash. “You love him, and you’re talking it through. And anyway, you’re telling me. It’s just me, Jules.”

  Still Jules pictured Dennis’s mortified face, and she knew she had betrayed him. But Ash kept trying to help, wanting to listen and make suggestions. “Maybe he’ll just come out of it, like a person in a coma,” said Ash, not knowing at all what she was talking about. Dennis’s depression divided the two women. Jules could describe Dennis’s state to her, and what marriage was like with a husband in that state, but the descriptions weren’t vivid enough. You had to be there; Jules was there and Ash wasn’t.

  At work, Jules’s clients somehow seemed to lift themselves out of their worst moods, as if they intuited that she needed them to do this. She cheered them up in ways that she couldn’t cheer up Dennis. Her wry running commentary was no good to him now, but only made him feel worse, as did everything else. Even talking to him seemed to grate, but she couldn’t help herself, and she chattered about what had happened in therapy, as if he might get some kind of secondhand usage out of it. “This client of mine, a married woman, a grade-school reading specialist, she got into a rut for a while. She’s just now coming out of it,” Jules told him. It wasn’t untrue, but Dennis had no response. At night he would fall asleep early, and she’d go into the living room to call Ash and Ethan, whispering to them from inside her gloomy marriage and imagining them off in their world of light. She felt almost ill from the claustrophobia of living with a depressed person, someone who didn’t have a job now, and who slept too much, and who shaved only when he couldn’t bear not to. Dennis now had the faint beginnings of a mountain-man appearance; no, a Rip Van Winkle appearance, for he’d been sleeping, not climbing.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said to Ash. “I mean, I’m not going to do anything. I just feel horrible. I can’t help him; nothing gets through to him. He’s really suffering.” Also, I am too, she stopped herself from adding, because it sounded so selfish.

  Dennis’s parents came in from New Jersey, and his mother looked around the apartment with a suspicious eye, as if living here with Jules had done this to her son. “Where do you do your ironing?” she wanted to know.

  “Pardon?” They hardly ironed anything, but whenever they absolutely had to, they laid the items on a beach towel across the bed. This is how we live, she wanted to say to Dennis’s mother. We don’t care about ironing, we have no money, and now thanks to genetics your son is losing the traits that I loved in him. But the Boyds seemed to blame Jules for his depression— because there was no ironing board, or maybe because Jules was Jewish. (Dennis had pointed out more than once his father’s absorption in Third Reich documentaries.) But she also saw that the Boyds were people whose love came with added sourness—and maybe, as a result, their son had developed the capacity for unspeakable sadness, and who could blame him? Dennis and Jules had both come from families that hadn’t really felt good. This they’d shared, and when they’d come together it was to make a home that did feel good, and even sometimes to say: Fuck you, disappointing families. The Wolf household in the Labyrinth had proved to Jules that a densely textured, emotionally fulfilling family was a possibility. She’d wanted to create a new, modest version of that with Dennis, and they’d seemed to be accomplishing that just around the time that Ash and Ethan rose up into a life that no one else could remotely approximate. And then, later, Dennis became depressed, and so modest fulfillment still could not take place.

  One morning when Jules woke up and saw how relaxed and neutral Dennis’s face was in sleep, she thought that soon he’d be awake, and would remember how it felt to be in his skin, and the day would be shot. It was too bad he couldn’t just sleep and sleep, for he seemed almost happy then. Thinking about it, Jules realized she was so unhappy that she actually needed to vomit, and hovering over the cold bowl she recalled how few times she had vomited in her life. Most memorably she’d vomited in the hotel in Iceland, and later there were a few drunken, sick experiences in college. This time was different. She considered this to be unhappiness puking, but of course there was no such thing. An hour later, a tiny electrical zap struck one of her nipples, and then, a little later, the other one. Vaguely, uncomfortably, Jules thought about how her last period had been particularly light, a fact that she hadn’t worried too much about at the time. This had happened at different points in her life; it was no big deal, and she’d attributed it to stress.

  Jules, taking a home pregnancy test at the earliest date and staring at the result, sat in the little bathroom with a pulse pounding in her head, and tried to think about how and when this had occurred. That light period had obviously not been a period at all, but must have been what the books called implantation bleeding. Since Dennis’s stroke and recovery they’d had sex infrequently; he was mostly though not completely uninterested in it now. Jules’s new client Howie, a computer programmer with big transference issues, miserably but bravely told her he’d once masturbated to thoughts of her when he lay in bed with his wife; he’d made the bed tremble so much, he said, “that my wife woke up and thought it was an earthquake.” And yet Jules’s own depressed husband was uninterested in touching her.

  She tried to do the pregnancy math, thinking back to the weeks before Dennis’s stroke, and then before the return of the depression that had made him shapeless and slow. She remembered one night, shortly before Ash’s play Ghosts had opened, when they’d been at the Museum of Television and Radio for a black-tie opening of an exhibit called This Land Is Figland. Ethan stood somewhere in a corner of the main gallery with Ash beside him, in a mass of museum donors, animators, friends. Jules watched Ethan in his tuxedo, his arm around Ash, who wore a partly diaphanous and very short dress, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons running up the length of the back, like a costume from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which coincidentally she actually hoped to direct in the near future. The dress was “a Marco Castellano,” Ash had said before the evening, which hadn’t meant anything to Jules. Ethan noticed Jules looking at him, and he smiled from across the room.

 
What did the smile even mean? Probably just, Isn’t it humiliating, all this attention? Or else, I know you’re bored, and I am too. Or else, simply, Hello, over there, Jules Jacobson-Boyd, friend of my youth, soulmate, pal. But whatever it meant, it caused her once again to feel that old, familiar, pressurized sensation that what she and Dennis had was small and sad. By the time they took the subway home and walked up all those flights, Jules’s narrow high-heeled shoes had sliced up the tops of her toes. Inside the apartment they both pulled off their clothes and Jules stood in the bathroom with one bloody foot in the sink, jamming it under the faucet. Dennis came in and said, “You look like a crane.”

  “I feel like a crane. Sort of awkward and stupid. The opposite of Ash’s enchanted sprite. That was a Marco Castellano, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my point.” She thought of how they were living a life now that was still in the end of its early stages, that was full of friends and love, and the tendrils of two careers, all of which would have been absolutely fine, if it weren’t for their best friends, whose life was so much finer.

  But Dennis said, “You know, if I had wanted an enchanted sprite, I would have gone into an enchanted forest and found one.”

  In the bathroom doorway his tie had been sprung, his cummerbund opened. Dark, strong-bodied Dennis was much better looking than Jules was, but it never bothered her, because he was not someone who would betray her with another woman. Now his bigness, his handsomeness, his dignity, his refusal to be intimidated by the glamorous evening and by a Marco Castellano impressed her. She didn’t have to compare their lives with their friends’ tonight; she didn’t have to do that at all, she realized, and it was an astonishing relief. Instead, Jules was drawn toward the hypnotic, inexplicable powers of her husband, who was so beautiful and unquestionably directed toward her, his dark eyes sweeping up and taking in the length of her. The bathroom usually seemed so small and inadequate; now it felt filled up with Dennis, a substantial man over whom she had claim. This had nothing to do with Ethan and Ash; this was for her alone. Everyone else was banished, and the private scene was beginning.

  “Oh yeah?” Jules said, just for filler. “You’d have gone into an enchanted forest?”

  “Yes, I would have,” Dennis said, and he took her by her arm and pulled her out of the microscopic bathroom, with the aqua shag carpeting that the previous tenants had crudely installed with a staple-gun, and into the moderately larger bedroom, where he lay her down on their bed. She smiled up at him as he pulled off the remains of his tuxedo, an outfit that he only ever needed to wear for events that had to do with Ethan and Ash. Then he helped Jules unzip her dress, which had left a pink zipper mark up her back, as if demarcating the place where the two sides of her body had been assembled in a factory. They were freed from their Ethan-and-Ashwear, those outfits that seemed much more mature than the people who had worn them, even though they themselves were not too young anymore.

  They had to have used a condom that night; they must have, they almost always did, though they’d had a lot to drink on this occasion so it was possible they hadn’t. Jules wasn’t planning on getting pregnant yet. The sex that night, she later remembered, was unusually gripping, employing all four corners of the bed, with the sheet ending up twisted like a rope. Dennis was ardent, magnificent, and purposeful, pushing the scene forward, keeping each moment turning into another moment. A book that had been lying splayed open on Jules’s night table—a series of case studies about eating disorders that she’d checked out of the social work library at Columbia, where she still had privileges—somehow ended up across the room, accidentally thrust into the dusty space beneath the bureau. It wasn’t found until nearly a year later, at which point more money was owed in fines than the book was worth. But she had already stopped looking for it, because by that time Aurora Maude Jacobson-Boyd had been born, and life was different.

  • • •

  In September 1990, three months after Aurora arrived, Ash gave birth to her own daughter, Larkin Templeton Figman. At first the two women enjoyed the animal haze of motherhood together, and for once Jules got to be the expert, giving Ash nursing tips and sleep advice. She tossed off phrases like “nipple confusion” with pleasing authority. One morning, though, Ash called very early and sounded different. She didn’t seem overwhelmed in the way she’d often been since Larkin was born. This was something else. She said she’d like to come over, if that was okay. She had the driver take her uptown, and she brought Larkin with her in one of those Swedish papoose-style pouches. Jules still felt self-conscious when Ash or Ethan came to the apartment, though lately she’d perfected a false attitude of seeming not to care how the place looked—how disheveled it was, how crammed with baby goods, the stroller blocking the hallway, the onesies drying on the shower rack until they were crisp. Ash sat tensely in Jules and Dennis’s living room, refusing the offer of a cup of coffee or anything to eat. She settled onto the couch, arranging herself and the baby, and looked at Jules intently.

  “You’re scaring me a little,” said Jules. The apartment was otherwise empty; Dennis was in Central Park with Aurora and the gang of mothers and nannies and babies with whom he sometimes spent the entire day. Jules had seen two clients in the morning, and was now home for the day. She would do a phone session later on with a woman who had broken her ankle and couldn’t go out.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to do that. Look, I know you’re having a bad time yourself over here, what with Dennis and all.” The way Ash spoke, her voice so cautious, made Jules think this was going to be another Goodman conversation. They hadn’t had one of those conversations in many weeks; the babies had mostly distracted them from all thoughts of him. Now Jules felt that Ash might say something like, I just wanted to tell you that Goodman is in rehab again. Or, Well, get this: Goodman actually got himself into architecture school. Or, Goodman is dying. Or, Goodman is dead. Instead, Ash said, “I really need to tell you something, Jules. I have to tell someone, and you’re the only one.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, you know how my parents were really upset when everything started falling apart at Drexel? The investigations and all that?” Jules nodded. “And then after the bankruptcy, my father retired early and got that payout?”

  “Yes. But you said things were okay,” said Jules.

  “They are okay.”

  “All right,” she said, waiting.

  “I think my father’s been enjoying retirement, actually. And, well, my parents apparently started thinking. And they called me over to their apartment and began saying things about how their money flow was going to be different now. It’d be fine, they assured me, but it wouldn’t be so liquid. I didn’t understand why they were saying this; it took me forever to get it, because they just didn’t want to come out and actually say it. But finally I realized where this was going. Finally I got it. I said to them, ‘Is this about Goodman?’ And my parents looked at each other kind of sheepishly, and I knew that that was exactly what this was about. My mother said something like, ‘We weren’t going to say anything, but we’ve been taking care of him for a long time, and he can barely work, and he has certain expenses, like anyone. And you and Ethan are so extraordinarily financially secure now, I mean, that’s an understatement, and if it were at all possible to transfer this responsibility over to you, it would really make a difference to us.’ ‘But only if you really want to,’ my father actually added, as if it were all my idea.”

  “So what did you say?” asked Jules, though this whole family scenario was so far beyond her understanding. Her own mother cut out coupons for frozen yogurt and sent them to her.

  “I said, ‘Well, if it’s important to you, I guess I could figure it out.’ Goodman can’t get a steady job, as you know, nothing professional, nothing that pays well. Plus, he isn’t trained to do anything. And as for his pickup construction jobs, his back problems are pretty bad. He got a stress fracture in his lumbar spine not too long ago, and
he can’t really do much physically anymore. He needs physical therapy, and he doesn’t have a steady income. Plus, someone has to pay for his plane tickets when he visits us. And pay for all his little occasional habits, shall we call them. It all adds up.”

  “Wow,” said Jules. “I’m shocked.”

  “I know. Me too. Obviously I can’t ask Ethan for the money. My parents know that. They were always impressed that I never told him.”

  “Are you sorry you didn’t?” Jules asked. She’d always wanted to ask this, but there had never been an acceptable moment before.

  “Oh, sometimes, sure,” said Ash easily. “Because we talk about everything. Everything but that. And I can’t ever go there with him. It’s way too late for that, and I don’t know that he would recover. I want my life and my work to be honest, but I had to be faithful to my parents when they asked me to, you know I did, and now I can only go so far with the truth about this. Ethan and I barely talk about Goodman in any context anymore; he assumes it’s too painful for me, and that’s not completely untrue. It is painful. All of it, the way it happened. What Goodman might’ve become.”

  “I wish Ethan knew,” Jules said in a low voice. “He just makes everything better,” she added before she could think not to.

  “I know what you mean,” said Ash. “He’s the person I always want to go to when something’s wrong. I really wish I could tell him every detail from the start. But I can’t. I did what they wanted. I was their good child, their gifted child. I went along with the whole package, and it’s not like I can suddenly say to Ethan, Oh by the way, love of my life, person whose child I’ve given birth to, I’ve been in contact with my brother all these years, and my parents and Jules know about it too, but you’re the only one I neglected to tell.”