The Interestings

  So when he saw the Günter Grass novel on the shelf at home he’d felt a tremendous and sad longing to connect with the book, and with Ash’s brother, his old, lost friend. Goodman had been torn away, taking lightness with him. Ethan wanted that early lightness back—he wanted schmucky, lively Goodman back, and all the goofing around they’d done, and then the talks after lights-out in the teepee, the discussions about what they’d like to do to Richard Nixon, what they’d physically like to do to him, which wasn’t pretty; and about sex, and fear of death, and whether there was an afterlife. Ethan wanted all that back, but instead what he had was Goodman’s copy of The Tin Drum, and he handled it reverently, making sure not to splash broth on it as he sat in that Jakarta restaurant. He was sitting with his noodles and his novel, feeling sorry for himself, when he suddenly imagined how others saw him. The people at the factory this morning must have thought of him as just another rich American idiot who wanted to reassure himself that everything in the world was fine. Everything is fine, rich American idiot, Mr. Wahid had essentially told him as he gave Ethan the nickel tour, and then showed him the door. As soon as he left, did they all cheer? Did the workers take out a pillow with Wally Figman’s face on it and kick it around like a football, then stomp on it and shred it to bits?

  Ethan stood up suddenly, breathlessly, knocking his shin against the table leg. He paid for his meal quickly, leaving too many bills, and then he headed outside into the street, where he waved his arms clumsily to hail a bajaj, one of the orange three-wheel taxis that ferried passengers around the city. The bajaj whipped down the street, and when it turned a corner, Ethan felt sure that the back two wheels would be sheared off, and he would instantly smash into a wall. “Ethan Figman, 36, creator of Figland, dead in traffic accident in Jakarta” the headline would read.

  Arriving back at the Leena Toys Factory, he was relieved to still have his pass with him, and the guard waved him through the gates, distracted. Ethan stood in the courtyard, unsure of who he should confront now and what he should say. Probably he should find Mr. Wahid again, and state his case to him forcefully, saying, You told me there was nothing more for me to see, but I don’t think that’s true. But he imagined he would get no satisfaction from that man. No one had admitted to anything, and they weren’t going to start now. Ethan pushed through the heavy metal doors, and went back onto the hot floor. At first, he perceived only the same clatter and heat, but then he sensed that it was a little different now, a little louder and more crowded. The machines were all in use, he realized; there were no spaces between people. Beside a hunched-over man was a hunched-over smaller man, and Ethan came closer to look at the face, which was not wizened or even settled into an acceptance of a hard life. This was a teenager—thirteen? fourteen?—and he hadn’t been here this morning. His head was dipped down and he was working with intensity, his hands buzzing around the machine. The man beside him looked up at Ethan with an expression of open anxiety. Busted, Ethan thought, busted. Across the way, was that a young girl? No, just an old woman with a delicate appearance. But there in the corner was a girl for certain, maybe twelve years old; it was hard to say. The underaged had not been here before when Ethan was given his tour; they had been told to come in late today, or to stay in their tiny, unlivable rooms until they were given the signal. It had all been arranged and handled brazenly, calmly, because their presence was as common as anything, was just the way it was, and because people knew Ethan Figman was some bleeding-heart liberal American animator who could put on funny voices and didn’t know anything about anything—he was essentially an infant—and was tickled by big profits, but needed to be reassured that everything was fine. How many children were on this floor? he wondered, and he had no idea but figured it was at least a dozen. Each one had a dark face and dark eyes that were focused on holding a square of shitty fabric under the stuttering piston of a needle. It was unbearable.

  He stood there surrounded, looking at the children’s faces and feeling as if he was coated in sensation, and after a while he had to close his eyes. But even with his eyes closed, he saw them; they were overrunning the factory floor, they were devoting their days to Figland merchandise, and he was ashamed of the smiling face of Wally Figman on all the pillows, and even ashamed of his daughter’s happiness later that day when he presented her with the snow globe he’d bought. Then he thought of Mo, and knew that when he handed him the pinwheel, Mo would not be happy, would not be uplifted; but what could Ethan do? He was unable to open his own heart to his son. He felt perverse. He knew his detachment hadn’t come about because he needed Mo to perform, the way Ash’s parents had needed her to perform. Ethan and Ash had two children, a boy and a girl, like the Wolfs; and just as Goodman’s lack of discipline had been intolerable to Gil Wolf, Mo’s problems made Ethan feel as if the world would now see his own distorted nature, revealed through his son. Ethan had imagined his life was nearly perfect except for the flawed son; but the flaw was in the father.

  He would start to atone for his detachment and emptiness. Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

  • • •

  The postcard didn’t arrive in the Jacobson-Boyd mailbox until weeks later, having been ripped nearly in half and then taped back together. The trip from Bali to New York City had been almost too much for that oblong of stiff paper with the painting on its front of the Balinese god of love. But Ethan, when he went to visit Jules himself only a few days after his return, was in very good shape. With no warning he had called her and asked if he could come over.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  It was the middle of the day on a Saturday, and Jules and Dennis’s apartment was unkempt. Rory had been “learning” karate lately, and she frequently chopped the pencils and balsa wood sticks that Dennis bought her in bulk at the hardware store. The floor of the living room was littered with broken wood, and no one had the energy to clean it up. Dennis was still asleep. He’d been on yet another new antidepressant, and one of the side effects was that he was very, very sleepy. Shouldn’t an antidepressant try to keep you in the world more? This one wasn’t doing that. Jules had asked Dennis to talk to Dr. Brazil about this, but she had no idea if he had.

  “Yeah. Now,” said Ethan.

  “I don’t have anything in the house,” Jules said. “And I look like crap.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Also, Dennis is sleeping. The place is pretty chaotic. By which I mean it’s hell. I’m warning you: you would be walking into hell.”

  “You sure know how to entice me, you siren you,” said Ethan.

  It was unusual for Ethan to come over without Ash. Jules and Ethan had occasionally gone out for a meal on their own in recent years, but mostly in their thirties they saw each other in the context of being couples, then families. There used to be all those couple vacations, which had given Ethan and Jules a chance to sit together and talk, but after the children were born, the group vacations had mostly stopped. Now it had been a very long time since they’d seen each other alone, and it was almost as though they’d forgotten the perfection of their original, single-selves’ friendship.

  Jules hung up the phone in the living room and turned around. Behind her, Rory was dressed in her gi, with her arm raised in the air over the ledge of the table, hovering above a pencil. “Hi-yaaaaa!” she cried, and when the pencil cracked, she jumped in pleasure, as though there was even a chance that a simple Ticonderoga no. 2 might be able to resist the side of the hand of a girl as strong as she was.

  A while later, with Rory off in the bathroom doing experiments at the sink, and with Dennis still not having arisen, Jules watched the street from the living room window and saw the Town Car arrive. A driver got out and opened the back door, and Ethan appeared, scratching his head.
Then the driver handed him a small bag, which Ethan took, and headed for the entrance of the walk-up building. Jules hoped he wasn’t thinking of how poor the building looked, but was instead reminded that some people lived in a way that was modest but true to themselves—that some people had not entirely changed. Some people had no Town Car. What was a Town Car, and why did they call it that? What town did it refer to? The buzzer sounded and she let him in. Peering out the apartment door, she watched as Ethan Figman began to climb the four flights, slowing down as he rose. When he got to three and stopped for a moment, winded, she called down to him, “You’re doing great! Almost at nineteen thousand feet!” He looked up at her and waved.

  Once he got to five, he didn’t make a show of what a big climb it had been. He seemed to know that Jules had developed a jokey attitude about living in a walk-up building only in order to deflect the comments she often heard from anyone who made the climb. Ethan put his arms around her, and Jules couldn’t recall when they’d actually last embraced; in their foursome there were often kisses and hasty hugs, but because their lives were so scattered and children were always swirling and pulling, all touching had a distracted, thoughtless quality. Here, in the doorway, just the two of them, Ethan Figman hugged Jules Jacobson-Boyd with what seemed to her like undiluted and almost overwhelming feeling.

  “Hi, you,” he said.

  “Hi, you.” She pulled back and looked at him. He was mostly the same: still indisputably homely, but he now had more sun in his face, and seemed somehow less burdened than usual. “Did you sunbathe on Bali or something?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “But I walked around Jakarta. That was interesting. Can we go in? I have things that need to be eaten.”

  He had brought her the best brioches in New York City. “They’re as warm as baby birds,” Jules said when she opened the bag. “Peep, peep, peep.”

  “Where is everyone?” Ethan asked.

  “Dennis hasn’t put in an appearance yet. Rory is making penicillin in the bathroom sink. I know she’ll want to come out and see you before too long.”

  They sat on the living room couch, eating the small, buttery things. Neither Ash nor Dennis was a big eater; Ash was too tiny for that, and Dennis’s appetite had flattened out in recent years, though he still weighed a little too much from the different drugs. Jules and Ethan, though, now sat in sated silence. She thought again of Ethan’s walk-in refrigerator, which had survived the move from the Tribeca loft to the Charles Street brownstone; she knew how differently stocked it would be if she were the one married to him. These brioches would always be on hand, along with the brick of farm butter he had brought. You would walk into that cold room and find anything that people like Ethan and Jules liked.

  How was it possible that she still related so closely to him, and he to her? There was a bit of butter dotting his lip right now, and probably there was a bit of butter dotting hers. Ethan seemed curiously happy today. The purpose of the visit, she was sure, was to once again discuss the monetary gift that he and Ash wanted to give her and Dennis. He would offer them several thousand dollars, maybe even as much as five or ten thousand, and she would feel sick at the offer, so much did they need that money, but so unwilling would she be to take it, particularly because Dennis wouldn’t want them to.

  It was probably for the best that Dennis was still in bed. He didn’t need to be part of this, after they’d already gone over it so uncomfortably at brunch recently. She would continue to put Ethan off, despite the fact that she and Dennis owed so much to two different credit card companies, and to the well-intentioned but mostly useless Dr. Brazil. Jules also still had student loans to pay, as well as estimated quarterly taxes. Once, they had thought of having a second child, but between her single income and Dennis’s depression, it was a bad idea. Plus, you needed to have sex in order to get pregnant, and that wasn’t happening very often anymore. Everything had slowed, was stopping.

  “Now look,” Ethan began.

  “I don’t want you to do this, Ethan.”

  “You don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I was going to start off by telling you a story about something that happened in Indonesia.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she sat back, a little surprised but still suspicious. “All right. Go ahead.”

  Ethan drank the coffee she’d served to him in a Figland mug that he must have given them years earlier. He held it up high now and looked at the bottom of it, then put it down. “I asked to go see a factory,” he said, “where they make some of the merchandise. There are different types of factories, ones for metals or plastics; they have these molds that they use. This particular factory was for textiles, and of course what I saw there, child labor, is a really common sight, but I just couldn’t tolerate it. It just screams out at you, and you have to do something. You can’t just keep going on your merry way. I know that how I came to it isn’t great; it’s like those Republicans who are against gun control until their wives are shot in the head. But I decided that I had to pull out of this whole thing, at least to whatever degree they’ll let me. I called my lawyer and asked him what he thought we could ask for, and what he thought we could get. Then we had a huge conference call on the phone with Pushkin.”

  “I’m assuming this isn’t the Russian writer.”

  “Pushkin has never read Pushkin. That tells you a little bit about who he is. If you shared a name with one of the great Russian writers, wouldn’t you at least try to read him? Jack Pushkin is an executive at the studio, and he’s not a bad guy at all. But when my lawyer told him that we wanted to move some of the merchandising out of the factories and bring it back to the States, he got really silent really fast. Obviously. It’s incredibly complicated, and what’s going to happen to those kids and their families, right? Will they keep working? Will they be okay? Is there something else that can be done for them? It’s a terrible, terrible situation. These questions could break your head open.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I was thinking about all of that on the phone, while Pushkin and my lawyer were fighting, and then Pushkin hung up. He called back about two seconds later, very apologetic, and everybody had to get conferenced in again, which is not so easy when one of you is in Indonesia. They continued their talks without me, and by the time I got back to New York I found out that everybody tentatively agreed on the basic idea, though they’re still haggling. It’s a really huge deal. My lawyer said that if they didn’t just say yes, it would make them look really bad. They’re losing so much money on this, not just because of labor costs but because of the overseas tax breaks, which they’re going to have to sacrifice for the greater good. So they’re taking a hit, but at least I’m doing something I can live with—though who knows, maybe it’ll turn out worse than it had been to begin with. Anyway, they get to send out a press release saying how proud they are that we’re doing this thing. A small, as-yet-to-be-determined percentage of the manufacturing moved over here, to struggling factories in upstate New York. And I’ve just started talking to this woman at UNICEF about bringing in money to those workers, those kids. And I asked her whether it might be possible even to start a school for them over there. She said she’d put me in touch with some people. I know I still cause harm, probably a ton of it no matter what I do. And it kills me, it just kills me, that maybe the best you can ever do is cause less harm. But there you have it.”

  “I’m sorry, but I think you are the least harmful person I know,” said Jules.

  “Oh, I’m sure that isn’t true,” Ethan said. “But at least now I’m a harmful person who had an epiphany. I call it the Jakarta transformation. At least when I’m talking to myself.”

  “So what does Ash say?”

  “She’s supportive. She’s not one of those critical spouses,” he said. “You aren’t either,” he added after a moment, but Jules didn’t say anything. “You wouldn’t do that to Dennis. You just let him be himself, and go through what he has to go through.”

 
“Do I have a choice?” asked Jules, and it came out so sour. “It’s the middle of the day, and you and I are having a conversation about actual things, and eating actual food, while Dennis lies in bed.”

  Ethan gave her a long, considering look. “I know it’s very hard for both of you,” he said.

  “He’s so passive,” she burst out. “We used to laugh all the time, and talk a lot, and have good sex—excuse me for saying that, Ethan—and he had a lot of energy. Then everything stopped. He’s taken care of Rory, which has been a huge and admirable job, and stay-at-home parents never get enough credit, and I don’t want to underplay what he’s done. But you know he’s still not fully here. He has no desires for himself. It’s like when my father was dying, that same kind of slow-motion loss. But now it just goes on and on. A person who’s half here and half not. I don’t want that, and I feel so selfish saying it. I don’t want him to go through this, of course, but I also think about Rory and me.”