The Interestings
She had not been to the Labyrinth for years now; there had been no reason to go there anymore, and on the ride up in the gold elevator she held her arms around herself, feeling sad and full of dread as she rose. Ash opened the apartment door and fell against Jules so hard it was as if she had been flung. Having lost her mother, she appeared so different from how she’d been all afternoon and evening, helping Rory put her room together, then sitting around with everyone, eating sugarcane shrimp. “What am I going to do?” Ash said. “How can I not have a mother? How can I not have my mother? We just talked tonight, when I got home from your new place. And now—she doesn’t exist anymore?” A fresh bout of almost assaulted-sounding weeping began.
Jules kept her arm around her and they stood together for a couple of minutes. Behind Ash, the apartment revealed itself dimly, both real and somehow like a stage set for this apartment instead of the actual place. She took in the wide foyer and then the living room, and the long hallway that led to all those bedrooms where the Wolfs had lived and slept. Jules tried to think of something to say to Ash, but all she could do was agree with her. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Your mother was an amazing person. She wasn’t supposed to die so young.” Or ever, was what Jules meant. Betsy Wolf at sixty-five had still been a beauty. She was a docent at the Met, and taught an art class there for children on Saturdays. Everyone always said how young and elegant she looked.
When Jules’s father had died, that had been a tragedy too, even more of one if you thought of it in terms of age. “Forty-two,” Ethan had once marveled. “So fucking unfair.” Jules wanted to explain to Ash how the death of a parent is such a big and inexpressible event that all you can do against it is shut yourself down. That was what Jules—Julie—had originally done. She’d shut herself down, and she hadn’t started herself up again until that summer when she first met the rest of them. Julie would have done all right on her own, Jules suddenly thought. She would have been fine, would probably have been pretty happy.
Finally Ash extricated herself and walked ahead into the living room, so Jules followed. What was it about the place now—what made it seem frayed? Maybe it could have used a paint job, or maybe it had immediately absorbed the death of Betsy Wolf, so that everything about this room and this apartment that had once been warm and glittering had now been dimmed and dulled—and even the familiar lamps and rugs and ottomans were symbols not of comfort and familiarity but of something useless, wasteful, even awful. Ash threw herself down on the loosely slipcovered couch and put her hands over her face.
Almost immediately there was a sound, and Jules turned to see Ash’s father standing in the entrance of the living room. While in her new grief Ash looked like a young girl, Gil Wolf just looked old. He wore a bathrobe; his silver hair was tufted and he seemed bewildered and slow. “Oh,” he said. “Jules. You’re here.”
She gave him a careful hug, saying, “I’m so sorry about Betsy.”
“Thank you. We had a good marriage,” he said. “I just thought it would be so much longer.” Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn’t matter anymore. He looked over at Ash and said, “That sleeping pill you gave me hasn’t kicked in.”
“It will, Dad. Give it a little time. Just go lie down.”
“Did you call?” he asked with anxiety.
Jules didn’t know what this meant, but then immediately she did: Did you call your brother?
“I’m about to.” Ash helped her father down the hall to bed, and then she went into her old bedroom to make the call. Jules didn’t dare follow her, not wanting to see the mausoleum bedrooms that had once belonged to Ash and Goodman. She stayed in the living room, sitting stiffly in an armchair. Ash’s mother did not exist anymore, Ash had said. Betsy’s hair, in its bun, the strays coming loose in filaments, did not exist; the New Year’s Eve parties she’d overseen did not exist; the lat-kees she’d fried in a pan each Chanukah did not exist. Goodman had gone into hiding, but Betsy was the one who was gone.
Ash’s mother’s funeral was held four days later at the Ethical Culture Society, where Jules had attended memorials for various men who had died of AIDS, and then the wedding of her teepeemate Nancy Mangiari. For Betsy’s funeral they all had to wait for Ethan to return from Hong Kong on the network’s private jet. Jules’s own mother had said she wanted to come to the funeral. “But why, Mom?” Jules asked irritably on the phone. “You didn’t really know Ash’s mother. You only met her at the airport once, like a hundred years ago in 1977, when I went to Iceland with them.”
“I know,” said Lois. “I remember it well. They were very generous, taking you along like that. And Ash has always been so dear. I’d like to pay my respects.”
So Lois Jacobson took the Long Island Railroad into the city from Underhill and attended the funeral with Jules. It was an openly emotional memorial, crowded with family friends and relatives; it seemed as if everyone connected with the Wolfs wanted to speak. Cousin Michelle, who’d gotten married in the Wolfs’ living room and danced to “Nights in White Satin” and was now, incredibly, about to be a grandmother, spoke about Betsy’s generosity. Jules herself stood and said a few stiff words about loving the sensation of being around the Wolf family, though as she spoke she realized she didn’t want to go too far and hurt her own mother’s feelings. With Lois in the room, she couldn’t say, “When I was with them, I was happier than I’d ever thought I could be.” She kept her remarks very brief, and looked right at Ash, who was having a very hard time getting through this. Ethan’s arm was around her, steadying her, but Ash could barely be steadied. On her other side sat Mo, in a shirt and tie. He sat forward in his seat, both hands driving a Game Boy, as if he could steer himself away from this entire event.
After Jules, Jonah stood and spoke, handsome in his dark, tailored suit, while in his seat to the side, Robert Takahashi watched him closely. Jonah so rarely spoke in front of a gathering of people; he didn’t perform, he didn’t do this sort of thing. The last time might have been at Ash and Ethan’s wedding. But here he was now, and everyone seemed to like looking at him, and listening to him. “I had many dinners at the Wolfs’ apartment when I was young,” he said. “Everyone tended to stay at the table for a long time, and there was always joking around, and really good conversation, and amazing meals. I tasted foods there that I’d never had in my life. My own mother was a vegetarian long before you could be one and actually eat well. So our meals at home were a little . . . you know. But whenever I went over to the Wolfs’ apartment, Betsy would be in the kitchen whipping something up. One night she served a new pasta, and she told us it was called orzo, and she spelled it out for me when I asked. O-R-Z-O. But I remembered the name wrong, and I kept going into supermarkets and asking, ‘Do you carry ozro? O-Z-R-O.’ And no one knew what I was talking about.” There was laughter. “But you know, God, this was all so long ago,” Jonah added. “I just . . .” He stopped, unsure of what to say. “I just want to say that I’d give anything for another one of Betsy’s meals.”
Finally Larkin, barely five and a half, stood and walked to the podium, tipping the microphone down, and said in a hoarse voice, “I’m going to read a poem I wrote for Grandma B.” First, it was strange enough that Larkin looked almost exactly the way Ash had looked in the photos from when she was that young. Larkin’s beauty had somehow been untouched by the Ethanness in her, which had revealed itself in the brain and on the surface of the skin, but not in the facial features; today Larkin wore a dress that covered her arms, and Jules thought she knew why.
The poem was very precocious and moving: “Her warm hand could always cool our fevers,” was one of the lines, and Larkin cried as she read it, her nose and mouth twisting to the side. At the end she said, “Grandma B., I’ll never forget you!” Her voice broke, and much of the room cried in one swoop at the sight of this overcome l
ittle girl. Jules suddenly thought of how Goodman should have been here. First he had missed his dog’s death—a rehearsal, in the scheme of things—and now this, the real event.
Maybe everyone in the room was thinking about Goodman too. Jules wondered if he’d wanted to come to the funeral, if he’d even discussed with Ash the possibility of flying here and showing up. Jules looked toward the door in the back, as if she expected him to be lurking beneath the exit sign, taking his chances that no one here would dare to turn him in. She could see him standing with his head bowed, his shoulders set, and his hands folded, a tall middle-aged man dressed in the clothes of someone who had been traveling on a plane all night. But because Jules had not seen Goodman for nineteen years, all she could picture was his young handsome face juxtaposed with gray-stippled hair.
Goodman was lightly mentioned in the female minister’s list of the people Betsy had left behind. Frequently when Jules looked at Ash and Ethan during the service, Ash was bent over, as if her mother’s death had brought her near death herself. Ethan had his arm around her the entire time. He was dropping everything for a while, he’d said when he returned from Hong Kong; he was canceling a speech at Caltech, postponing meetings about the Keberhasilan School that he was trying to create in Jakarta. Finally, when the head of the Ethical Culture Society seemed to be making her way toward wrapping up, Mo, who had been absorbed in his Game Boy, threw it to the floor with a dull crash and then shrieked as if scalded and sprang up. He twisted away from his sister and mother, and there was a commotion as someone by the door blocked him from running out, and the service was hastily brought to a close.
Jules took her mother in a cab back to Penn Station after the reception. Even now, Lois Jacobson wasn’t comfortable getting around the city by herself. Manhattan had never felt like a hospitable place to her; instead, it was a place where you might spend a lively but exhausting day seeing a Broadway show or shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and then at the end of it you would make a break for the train as fast as you could. Jules’s sister, Ellen, was the same way. She and her husband, Mark, lived in a house two towns away from Underhill and ran a party-rental company. Ellen had once remarked that she didn’t need the “excitement” that Jules had always needed since she first went to Spirit-in-the-Woods, and this was probably true.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Lois Jacobson actually said at the entrance to the track in Penn Station that night. Beyond it, the Long Island Railroad train awaited with all its steaming, gastric sounds. They kissed cheeks, and Jules’s mother, with her raincoat and pale gray hair, seemed fragile, although maybe it was just that Jules was seeing her now through the warning light of another mother’s death.
• • •
That night, in the new apartment, Jules slept poorly, thinking of Ash, and Betsy, and how everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all. Neither she nor Dennis had been able to find the mattress cover among the boxes yet, and finally one elastic corner of the bedsheet unattached itself, and Jules woke up in the morning on a bare mattress, like a political prisoner. Dennis was already in the kitchen with Rory, making breakfast. It was a school day—also an egg day, from the smell of it. She wondered if Dennis had been able to turn up a spatula from one of the still unpacked kitchen boxes, and then she thought, Oh, Ash’s mother is dead. The spatula and the death of Betsy Wolf occupied the same part of her brain, briefly given equal weight. Jules lay on the uncovered mattress inhaling paint, and when the phone rang, her hand was on it before Dennis could get to the other extension in the kitchen. It must be Ash, she thought. Probably Ash had been awake all night crying, and now morning was here and she would need more comfort. Jules had a client at ten a.m., a new mother who was terrified of dropping her baby. She couldn’t cancel.
But after she said hello, a man’s voice said, “Hey,” under an ambient hiss.
Whenever a voice spoke into the phone but didn’t announce its owner, Jules thought it might be a client. “Who’s this?” she would ask neutrally, and so she asked it now.
“You don’t recognize me,” he said.
Jules gave herself an extra second to think, just the way she did in therapy sessions. The hiss of the call was a clue, but it wasn’t just that. She thought she knew who it was, and she sat up, grasping the blanket around the open front of her nightgown and her freckly, sleep-warm chest. “Goodman?”
“Jacobson.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to call you,” Goodman said. “Ethan told Ash he’s not going anywhere for a few weeks. He wants to be with her. So Ash said she won’t be able to call me too much, even on her supersecret Batphone.” Jules still didn’t know what she could say; she wasn’t composed, she was thrown. She heard a match being struck, and she imagined Goodman balancing a cigarette on his lip, tipping his chin up to meet the match.
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” she finally said. “She was wonderful.”
He said, “Yeah, thanks, she was pretty great. It’s a fucking shame,” and then he didn’t say anything else, just smoked a little, and Jules heard ice knocking around in a glass. It was only four hours later where he was, eleven a.m., but maybe he was already drinking. Goodman asked, “So what was it like?”
“What?”
“The funeral.”
“It was good,” she said. “It felt like something she would have wanted. No references to God. Everyone spoke, and they were genuine. They all really loved her.”
“Who’s everyone.”
Jules named several different people, including Jonah, and cousin Michelle, and then she said, “Larkin read a poem she wrote, really moving, really precocious. It had a line in it about how your mother’s warm hand could cool a fever.” As soon as she said this, she realized that Goodman had never even met his niece. Larkin was just a concept to him, a generic niece in a photograph.
“That’s right, it really could,” he said. “She took good care of Ash and me when we were kids. I don’t get to see my parents very often, obviously. When they come over here they look more shrunken, especially my dad. I always thought he would go first. I can’t believe I’ll never see my mom again,” he said, and his voice thickened, became froggy.
Then Goodman started to cry, and Jules’s eyes responsively filled too; together they cried across an ocean, and she tried to picture the room he was in, the flat he lived in, but all she could come up with was a murky brown and gold decor, a color scheme she’d retrieved in her mind from the way the Café Benedikt had looked that night in 1977. He’d never thought to call her before; she had always been of little interest to him. He was still probably arrogant, but he was also broken up. Most recently, when Goodman’s name had come up, Ash had said, “Don’t ask.” Goodman was described as a lost cause, “kind of a mess.” Over all this time, whenever Jules intermittently thought about him, she was aware he rarely thought about her. But even with this disparity she felt tenderly toward him now. Motherly, because like his sister he was motherless. Goodman made a sound of nose blowing, and then she just heard breathing on the line. She waited it out, the way she did in therapy, being sympathetic and in no hurry. Though really, she thought, it was time to get up. She wanted to say good-bye to Rory before school; she wanted to shower. She waited for him to stop crying.
“Will you be okay?” Jules finally asked when he was quiet.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have, you know, someone to talk to there?”
“Someone to talk to? Like, some Icelandic version of Dr. Spilka?” Goodman asked. “Right, Ash said you’re a shrink now. So you believe in all that.”
“I meant like a friend.”
“A girlfriend?”
“Or a group of friends,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Do I have a group of friends to sit around a teepee with in Reykjavik? Is that what you’re asking me?” His voice was challenging now, not te
arful.
“I don’t know what I’m asking,” Jules said. “I’m extemporizing. You can’t just call me as if this is casual. I mean, come on.”
“Some things never change, right?”
“What does that mean?”
“You were always a little into me,” Goodman said. “We even had a moment once, in my parents’ living room, remember? A little tongue, I believe.” He laughed lightly, teasing her, and she heard some relaxed pouring, then more ice.
“I don’t remember that,” Jules said in a new, formal voice, hot-faced.
“Oh, I’m sure you remember everything from that time,” he said. “I know how important it all was to you. Summers at camp. The Interestings.”
“It was just as important to you,” she tartly said. “You got to be a big deal at Spirit-in-the-Woods, and your father wasn’t there to criticize you. You were in heaven there. It wasn’t just me.”
“You do have a good memory,” was all he would say.
“Look, Goodman, I realize you’re really upset about your mother,” said Jules. “And I know it’s been hard for you living so far away. But I’m sure Ash will find a way to call you soon. And you two can talk about everything. But this is too strange for me. I can’t do this now. I’m sorry.” Her voice stuck a little. “I think I’m going to hang up,” Jules said. Goodman didn’t say anything, so then she added, pointlessly, “I’m hanging up.” She returned the phone to its cradle, then for two full minutes she sat in bed, waiting, hearing sounds of pans and plates, and the deep voices of Dennis and Rory, and finally she picked up the receiver again, making sure he was really gone.
• • •
Over time, the two couples continued to live their lives, sometimes separately, sometimes not, but always differently from each other. One couple traveled the world. The other couple unpacked the rest of their boxes and hammered the same old posters up on the walls, and placed the same lightweight silverware in a drawer. They became used to having an elevator, and barely remembered all those stairs they’d climbed. The apartment allowed them to breathe a little, though it seemed that always they would live with certain indignities; one day a mouse tore across the kitchen floor, and Jules insisted to Dennis that this was the same mouse from their previous apartment. It had followed them all the way here to their new apartment, like one of those dogs that goes out into the world searching for its master and eventually, miraculously finds him.