The Interestings

  Jules said, strongly, “Tell him, Ash. Just do it.” Dennis had sometimes said that one day Ethan would probably find out anyway. “Life is long,” Dennis had said.

  “You know I can’t,” Ash said. “He’s the most moral person, Jules, which of course is generally a quality I love about him. And he doesn’t hold back.”

  “So what are you going to do? Do you have access to money that he wouldn’t know about?”

  “The short answer is yes. And it’s not as if Ethan sits around and does the bills each month. We have someone who does that. There’s so much coming in, and so much going out. I don’t need to answer to him, or to Duncan, who handles our money now. Obviously, the main thing is to do it with an invisible hand. It makes me extremely nervous, because I’m not very good with money, or with anything that has to do with numbers, but I guess it’ll work. I have to make it work.” She shrugged, then stroked the flattish back of her baby’s head and said, “Somebody has to look out for Goodman now. And I guess it’s me.”

  • • •

  In the early years of motherhood, Ash and Jules continued their fantasy of a close friendship growing between their daughters, imagining it as a mirror of their own friendship. The girls did become friendly, and thought fondly of each other throughout their lives, but they were so different from each other that a close friendship between them eventually was more of a gift that they tried to give their mothers than something arising naturally.

  “God are they different,” Jules said to Dennis after spending a day at Ash and Ethan’s. The girls were four years old then; Ash and Ethan had recently moved into the large brownstone on Charles Street, a graceful plaque house that rested in the sun in a choice part of Greenwich Village. Inside the house, despite the presence of a four-year-old daughter, and now a difficult two-year-old son, Morris Tristan Figman, known as Mo, calm and order were commonplace. This had a great deal to do with the Jamaican couple, Emanuel and Rose, who were employed as houseman and nanny, and oversaw most aspects of the family’s daily life. They were the most unobtrusive staff, a courteous husband with a shaved head, and his attentive but playful wife. The rooms were immaculate, the children were clean and looked after, and so were their parents.

  A big playroom upstairs resembled a first-class airport lounge—carpeted so no one could get hurt, and decorated not in the garish colors that children were supposedly drawn to but in muted tones, softly lit. There was a trampoline and a vat full of balls. There was a slide and a bouncer and life-sized stuffed animals. Jules imagined one of Ethan’s assistants having called FAO Schwarz, saying, “Give us what you’ve got.”

  What a place to grow up, she thought—to have such surroundings and such inventive, unruffled parents. Jules sat on one of the pale couches with a glass of wine handed to her by Rose, and she took a long drink, wanting to feel a softening and polishing along her throat and chest, so that she did not have to create a depressing split screen in her mind: this place, this life, and her own apartment, the walk-up on West 84th Street where she and Dennis and Aurora now lived in chaos and tight finances and the dominating blur of one person’s clinical depression.

  Aurora tore through the Figman and Wolf playroom, yelling, “I am an army sergeant! I am the king!” The sergeant/king thrust herself deep into the pool of balls while Larkin, sitting on a window seat with an actual chapter book, watched her, impressed. Mo was asleep in his nursery, Ash had explained, which was an amazing feat, but then again, Rose was a genius with Mo, who was generally miserable at two, always shrieking and unable at naptime to give in to the necessary bonelessness of sleep. Though Jules tried to shush Aurora so she wouldn’t wake him up, Ash said she could be as loud as she wanted, because the walls were extremely thick here, and no sound ever penetrated.

  Ash noted, “I see that Aurora likes to take control. Maybe she’ll run a network.”

  “No!” said Aurora, her face flushed and triumphant. “I am the army man! I run everybody!”

  The two women laughed. Aurora was “very much herself,” as Ash had said. Jules felt a kind of demented love for her daughter. Aurora was clownish in a very open way, which was different from being witty, and Jules was obsessed with her, and so was Dennis, who was able to ignore the hum of his depression when it mattered and be expressive toward his little girl. It was, maybe, like the equivalent of a parent lifting a car off a baby. He was depressed, but still he was able to rise from depression’s weight well enough to take good care of Aurora. Atypical depression sometimes allowed for such inconsistencies, said Dr. Brazil.

  Jules observed that over the rest of the afternoon, whenever Larkin joined Aurora in physical play, Ash’s daughter mostly seemed to be doing it to be polite. Larkin dipped herself into the vat and graciously let Aurora pound ball after ball against her; she went on the slide headfirst, but after she’d landed at the bottom, she dusted herself off and returned to her place on the window seat with her book.

  Aurora sat beside her. “What’s that book?” she asked.

  “Little House in the Big Woods,” said Larkin.

  “Does it have jokes?”

  Larkin considered this. “No.”

  “You can read it yourself?” Aurora asked.

  Larkin nodded. “When I learned to read,” she confided, “it changed everything.”

  Larkin was mature, but she was neither mean nor superior-seeming. She was an open little girl who’d inherited her mother’s fragile beauty, intelligence, and kindness, though from her father she’d inherited a predisposition for eczema, and already needed special creams. Did she have her father’s imagination? It was too soon to tell, but the depressing answer was, oh, probably.

  “Are you going to get all bent out of shape about Larkin?” Dennis asked that night, when at bedtime Jules was still describing Larkin’s grace and precocity and delicate elegance, and the work being done to the regal house on Charles Street. “Or is that a stupid question?” he went on. “Is the real question, ‘How long will it take you to get unbent out of shape about this?’”

  “No,” said Jules. “I wouldn’t trade Aurora for anything.”

  “I see,” he said. “You’re saying it that way to draw a distinction with me. You’d trade me.”

  “No,” she said, “not at all.”

  “Yes, you would. I understand.” This conversation almost seemed to have perked him up, as if he thought that he could finally see the world the way Jules saw it again; he could see it through her vivid lens, as she made preparations for leaving.

  “Well, stop understanding. This is very fucked up, Dennis,” said Jules. “This whole conversation. Would I get rid of your depression? Would I trade you in for a version of you that wasn’t depressed? Yes, all right, I would. But isn’t that what you would do too? Isn’t that what we want?”

  Ever since he’d been taken off the MAOI five years earlier, Dennis had rarely returned to buoyancy. Instead, he still struggled with what his pharmacologist variously referred to as “low-level depression,” “atypical depression,” and “dysthymia.” There were some people who were just very hard to treat, Dr. Brazil said. They were able to live their lives, sometimes to a fairly full extent, but they never felt good. Dennis’s atypical depression wasn’t making him break down, as it had done in college, but it also wouldn’t go away. He felt its presence like a speck in the eye or like a chronic, rattling cough. Different drugs were tried, but nothing worked for very long, or if a drug did work, the side effects made it untenable. Early on in the rotation of drugs, the discarded MAOI had been returned to, but it no longer even worked. Dennis’s brain chemistry seemed to have changed, and the MAOI was like a former lover who doesn’t look good anymore in the light of a new day.

  After enough time seemed to have passed after losing his job at MetroCare, Dennis had made a diligent search for work and found nothing. He couldn’t get a good reference from the clinic after his “outrageous behavior with a patient,” as Mrs. Ortega promised to describe it in any letter she wrote t
o a potential new employer. But even so, Dennis admitted to Jules that when he eventually did go back to work, he was afraid of what he might see now upon looking into the human body. He and Jules lay in bed at night once and talked about this. “What do you think you’ll see?” she whispered.

  “All kinds of things.”

  “I never know what I’m going to see when someone walks into my office,” she said. “I wish I had a piece of equipment for looking. I envy you that thing—what’s it called, a transducer?—but you can’t even bear to use it. Your wand. Your magic wand. What I do feels so crude. I know that therapy can actually change the brain; they’ve done amazing studies. But so much of it involves just sort of waiting things out, and tolerating the same unconstructive ideas being repeated. You have a good eye, Dennis. You know your stuff; don’t forget that. And you get to use equipment too. It’ll still be there when you’re better, when you’re ready to go back.”

  Dennis lay with his eyes open and said, “I did know my stuff. I don’t want to know it now. I can’t bear the idea of looking deeply. Because you inevitably turn up horrible things.”

  “I don’t know, for someone who can’t bear looking deeply, that’s sort of a deep observation,” Jules said. “A lot of you is here, Dennis, more than you think. If you were gone, that would be a whole other story. But you’re not gone.” She wanted to perk him up somehow, to turn even her modest curative powers on him. Just a few days earlier her most recent client, sixty-year-old Sylvia Klein, who had essentially been crying for most of every session, had smiled when she described the way her grown daughter Alison, dead for three years of breast cancer, had been obsessed with Julie Andrews as a child, and had insisted on seeing The Sound of Music multiple times, and even went around speaking in a British accent, asking her mother, “Mummy, does my accent sound real?”

  “You smiled, telling me about that,” Jules had said to her.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Sylvia Klein, drawing back, but then she tilted her head and very tentatively smiled again. “Well, maybe I did,” she said.

  But Jules couldn’t do much for Dennis except eat meals with him, rent movies from Blockbuster with him, lie in bed with him, and listen to him talk about the intractability of his dysthymic state. Then, when Jules found out she’d accidentally become pregnant, they were both similarly shocked, and anxious about how they would have enough money to support a baby, and what it would be like for Dennis with a baby in the apartment. What it would be like for the baby to have a depressed father—a dysthymic father, Jules insisted on saying, because that sounded less threatening. Would a baby be able to tell? Dennis had an additional worry: What if something was wrong with the baby? “There are so many things that can go wrong,” he said. “Weird DNA, anatomical abnormalities. The baby could be missing part of its brain, Jules. I have actually seen this. A whole big chunk can be missing; it just doesn’t grow. Or else there’s hydrocephalus, water on the brain, that’s another good one.” He exhausted her with his fears about the baby, and frightened her as well. At twenty weeks, when Jules was scheduled to have a level 2 ultrasound, the big anatomy scan, she asked Dennis to go with her, though he had declined to go to any appointments with her in the past, saying that he wouldn’t be very good company, which was probably true, so she hadn’t pushed him.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “I need you there, for this one,” said Jules. “I cannot keep doing everything on my own.”

  So he went with her, and sat beside her in the dim light of the small room, where a young ultrasound technician squirted a mound of gel onto Jules’s convex stomach, and began to move the transducer. Suddenly the baby corkscrewed into view. Dennis didn’t breathe. He stared at the screen as the young woman pressed some keys, and he asked her a few tense shorthand ultrasound questions. Jules remembered how, the day after the first time she and Dennis had slept together, they had gone to the Central Park Zoo, where they’d talked about his depression in the penguin house. Here they were in another darkened place, looking at a creature behind glass. The technician took measurements, and smiled reassuringly, and pointed.

  “Oh, look at her move,” said Dennis, his face close to the display now, studying the shifting grainy image that only he and the technician could read, and which, to Jules, was a mysterious play of light and shadow.

  “Her?” said Jules. “Her? We weren’t going to find out the sex.”

  “I meant ‘her’ generically,” said Dennis quickly. “I can’t tell the sex.” The technician swiveled her head discreetly away at that moment, and Jules knew Dennis wasn’t telling the truth. Once again he had inappropriately given away big news in an ultrasound room, but this time no one was really upset.

  The baby was a she, born to an anxious mother and a precarious father. After Aurora’s birth, they jointly decided that Dennis would stay home and take care of her during the day. If they did it this way, they realized that they wouldn’t need to put her in daycare, or hire outside child care, which they certainly could barely have afforded anyway. Instead of continuing to look for work, in hopes of finding another clinic job, taking care of the baby became what Dennis did for a living. He and Jules had sat down and addressed the question of whether or not he was too depressed to be with their daughter all day; Dennis said he wanted to try it and at least find out. It interested him, he told her cautiously. Jules also talked about this with Ash and Ethan. Ethan said, “What do you think, he’s going to read to her from The Bell Jar? I bet it’ll be okay.”

  But not long after Dennis started taking care of the baby full-time, Jules realized that the days were often soothing to him. Curiously, even the tedious parts didn’t bother him, and neither did the frankly unpleasant parts, such as going down to the hot laundry room with Aurora in a carriage, dragging a cart swollen with dirty clothes and crib sheets behind him. He was relieved not to have to make conversation with other adults all day about topics like the sudden Gulf War that sprang up in August—the first televised war, viewed in fits and starts like an awful football game, with General Norman Schwarzkopf as the quarterback. Every time this sudden new war came up in conversation, you felt dread, thinking: What will happen next? Will it spread? Will it come here?

  But in the separate, zipped-up universe of being with young children, the mothers and the nannies and Dennis talked about baby monitors, baby carriages, the comparative quality of different pediatricians. The television channel was turned away from news of the war, and instead there was always a gentle video playing or soft music, and this seemed to be what Dennis needed, as much as Aurora did. Somehow this was the life they’d created without planning it: a single-earner family in which the breadwinner was the mother and the caregiver was the father. Over time, there were many more stay-at-home fathers out with their babies in the city during the height of a workday, whether because of progressive thinking or the tanking economy, but in 1990 it was still an uncommon enough sight that, until they got to know him, mothers and nannies looked Dennis over carefully in the park and on the street, suspicious and curious about what exactly was wrong with him.

  Dennis had a lasting but apparently tolerable depression, and Jules had found ways to tolerate it too. As Aurora came into herself, she was demanding and loud, but she gave Jules real joy; and if joy was too strong a word to apply to what Dennis felt, at least Aurora moved him, touched a place inside his depression. Jules imagined Dennis’s mind like the vat full of colored balls in the Figman-Wolf playroom. Once in a while the balls were stirred and shifted, and a few of them flew into the air when something got through to him.

  When Aurora started kindergarten she threw off her first name as if it had been a dreadful affliction, a hair shirt festooned with overly feminine sequins and bows. Then she neatly turned herself, like one of the Transformers robot cars she played with for hours, into Rory—not unlike the way Julie had long ago simply turned into Jules.

  Meanwhile, Larkin stayed Larkin forever, a study in pink and cream, and she often slippe
d envelopes under her parents’ bedroom door, or beside their plates at breakfast. In her early handwriting, advanced and shaky and charming, she wrote:

  Mommy and Daddy wod you be my gessed at a dolls tee party it is in my room at 4 oh clock. From Larkin your doter.

  “Oh you have to save these,” said Jules dully when Ash showed a few of the notes to her. Rory had no interest in writing, but wanted to be in motion at all times. Jules and Dennis bought her every kind of ride-on vehicle they could find: orange and yellow plastic things with wheels the size of inner tubes, which had to be lugged up all their flights of stairs, just as the stroller had had to be lugged up when Rory was a toddler. “We are too old to raise a kid like this in a place like this,” Jules said to Dennis. Rory didn’t even have her own room, but still slept on a fold-out bed in a corner of the living room. But Jules remembered what Cathy Kiplinger had said in the girls’ teepee long ago, referring to her own oversized breasts: “You get used to whatever you get.” Still, it was hard. Sometimes when Rory was asked to use her “inside voice,” or sit quietly doing a maze while Jules read over the notes from a therapy session, Rory would be unable to comply.

  “I can’t sit still!” she shouted, as if in great discomfort. “I have an itch inside my body!”

  “She has an itch inside her body,” Jules relayed to Ash on the phone.

  “Can she scratch it?” Ash asked. “That seems to be the important part, don’t you think? That she should be able to scratch it.”

  “I think she means a metaphorical itch.”

  “I know what she means. And I’m just saying that she should be able to express herself, not for you but for her. You don’t want to end up with a situation like in The Drama of the Gifted Child.”

  Larkin Figman was beautiful, creative, sensitive about everything. At the ivy-strung Tudor weekend house that Ash and Ethan had recently bought in Katonah, an hour north of the city—and sold several years later (they’d ended up rarely using it) for much more money than they’d paid for it—she ran toward her parents with her hands cupped, and inside them there might be a small wounded animal or a livid cricket trying to bang its way out. Larkin inevitably wanted to build a hospital for the creature, and then, if it recovered, hold a tea party in its honor. The tiniest cups in the world were fashioned.