The Interestings

  “So you’ll call me,” Jules said. “I’ll expect screaming.”

  When Sylvia Klein called, it wasn’t the middle of the night but early morning in New York City on a weekday late in September, and Sylvia, who’d been driving out to New Jersey to see her motherless grandchildren, found herself in her car, completely stopped in traffic near the exit of the Holland Tunnel. There was apparently some kind of police action ahead, according to the radio, and nothing was moving. She thought she’d be killed momentarily, and that she would soon join her poor dead daughter, Alison, and never see her husband or grandchildren again. She would die in her blue Nissan Stanza when a remote explosive device was set off by al-Qaeda in another car, suffusing the whole tunnel with fire and poison gas. But sitting trapped in her car, waiting for her own death, she took out her phone and hoped that somehow she got reception here. Fortunately she did, and she called Jules, who at the time was on the exercise bike that had been squeezed in recently next to Dennis’s closet in the bedroom.

  “Jules,” said the voice on the phone. “I am going to die.”

  The last person to have said similar words to Jules was Dennis, back in the restaurant during his stroke; and now, after she had established who was calling, she said to Sylvia what she had said to him. “You’re not going to die,” she told her panicking client. “But I’m not getting off the phone. I’m right here, and I’ll stay here, because I actually don’t have to be anywhere else.” So she stayed on the phone with Sylvia, chatting lightly with her about different subjects, and then, finally, when almost half an hour had passed and they seemed to have run out of conversation, she encouraged Sylvia to put a CD on in the car. “What have you got there? Anything good?”

  “I don’t know. My husband handles the CDs. Some of them were Alison’s.”

  “Which ones? Any Julie Andrews?” Jules remembered how Sylvia’s mood had lifted talking about her daughter’s love of Julie Andrews when she was a girl.

  “No, I don’t think so. Oh, let me see. Wait, yes, here’s one. My Fair Lady.”

  “Crank it up,” said Jules.

  “I could have dawnced all night,” Julie Andrews sang, and Sylvia began to sing too, and then so did Jules, the trio of voices tremulous but holding together, until finally up ahead the traffic began to move.

  A few days later, near the very end of that bad month, Dennis and Jules were cleaning up one night after dinner; Rory, eleven, was slowly rolling around the apartment on her skateboard, anything so as not to turn to her homework, which she loathed. The TV was on, as it had often been on during those early weeks. Channel after channel showed the same footage. CNN had a talk show, and Dennis paused at it, then clicked past, but Jules, who’d been looking at the screen, held up a hand and said, “Wait, turn back.” A blond woman in her early forties was being interviewed; she was sleekly dressed, with big, nuggety earrings and a hard but anguished face.

  “It’s her,” Jules said, shocked.

  “Who?” said Dennis. White letters were superimposed over the screen: Catherine Krause, CEO, Bayliss McColter. This was the firm that had lost 469 employees; two weeks earlier, on September 12, the CEO had made a public vow not to cut off the paychecks of the dead, or their families’ health insurance. Jules had read about her but hadn’t seen her interviewed until now.

  “Cathy Kiplinger,” said Jules. “Oh my God. I mean, I’m not positive, but I think so. I wish I could call Ash!” she said. “But it would just be too weird, and I don’t know how she’d react. I’m calling Jonah; I hope he’s home.” When she got him on the line she said, “Oh good, you’re there. Turn on CNN, okay? You need to tell me if I’m right.”

  “What’s going on?” Jonah said as he turned on his TV in the loft. A commercial was jabbering.

  “Wait.”

  When the show resumed, Jonah watched for about fifteen seconds without saying anything, then let out a long breath and said, “It’s her, right?”

  In the background Jules heard Robert say, “Who her?”

  “Yes,” said Jules. “I think it is.”

  “Well, I do too.”

  Jules and Jonah stayed on the phone watching throughout the entire hour, magnetized by the image of Cathy, who had finally and dramatically emerged from her time portal. Her face was drawn, and tense and upset, but her bearing was professional; she’d learned to be composed in public, even as she was once again most likely falling apart.

  “What do you say to your critics?” the aquiline-featured TV host asked her, leaning forward as if he might kiss her, or hit her.

  “That I’m still going to keep my promise.”

  “But the widows and widowers are saying you haven’t done that. Their paychecks were cut off. They lost their health insurance at the worst time in their lives.”

  “It’s just that the money’s not there yet,” Cathy said. “I’d thought we could get up and running again somewhere else, in some limited form, almost immediately, but it turned out not to be possible. Look, I’m asking the families to be patient. As you know, we’re building a relief fund. But I really need everyone to bear with me a little longer.”

  “That’s right,” said Jonah. “I read about that—how she said she was going to give everyone all this money. But then she cut off the checks.”

  “She said it isn’t her fault,” Jules said.

  The host fielded calls, mildly saying, “Go ahead, caller,” and turning them over to Cathy.

  “We believed you,” a woman said, her voice husky, furious. “We believed what you told us. My family is in bad shape, not only because we’re grieving but also because we don’t have my husband’s income. This is how you honor the memory of the people who worked for you? This is what you do?”

  “We’re going to take care of you,” Cathy said evenly. “Please give us a little more time.”

  “You’re such a hypocrite, it’s unbelievable. I mean, fu—” said the caller, before being cut off.

  Cathy Kiplinger sat very still on camera. In their living room, Jules and Dennis sat very still too, and in his loft, so did Jonah. Oblivious to everything, Rory rolled around on her skateboard, trying new moves. Jules watched as Cathy stayed in her swivel chair in the TV studio, accepting the wrath of murdered employees’ spouses but also accepting some mitigating support from a lawyer and a motherly if whorish psychotherapist, who regularly lent herself out to the evening news shows. Cathy stayed still, repeating the same lines about asking for patience, but by the end of the hour she’d been worn down. The last shot of her, beneath the credits, showed her lightly blowing her inflamed nose and shaking her head.

  Dennis shut off the TV and went off to get Rory ready for bed. “You still there?” Jonah asked Jules on the phone.

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you think about it?”

  “I don’t want to sound like that therapist, that ‘Dr. Adele,’” said Jules, “but to me it’s like Cathy is almost repeating what she feels was done to her.”

  “Explain,” Jonah said.

  “Well, you know, she felt that nobody came to her defense originally with Goodman. That nobody was looking out for her. So when this enormous tragedy happens, it makes sense that she wants to be heroic. Except she can’t be. The money isn’t there yet. So she ends up doing to these families what she says Goodman did to her. And what she says we did to her too.”

  “And bin Laden.”

  “Exactly. Destroyed her.”

  “So do you think she’s destroyed?” Jonah asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jules said softly. “I have no way of knowing.”

  “Do you actually even remember Goodman all that well anymore?”

  “I remember certain details. His sunburned nose. His knees. And his big feet in those sandals.”

  “Yeah, he was a big, sexy guy,” said Jonah.

  “He was.”

  “I must have been so attracted to him, but I couldn’t even deal with it then,” said Jonah. “I couldn’t admit I was gay to an
y of you, and I could barely say it to myself, though God knows I’d been gay forever. Born queer.” He was quiet. “I wonder what kind of life he has,” he said. Jonah had occasionally made comments like this over the years. “And how he supports himself, wherever he is. Cathy switched gears and ended up with this huge financial career. I don’t know what Goodman’s talent would have been in the end. Other than fucking up. He was very good at that.”

  “And being seductive,” Jules said faintly.

  “So what do you really think about what happened with him and Cathy?”

  “Jonah,” said Jules, hardly knowing what to say. It had been so long since this had come up. “We’re here in New York City only weeks after this huge terrorist attack. We’re all trying to keep ourselves together. You’re asking me about Cathy and Goodman now?” She was deflecting his question, trying to bat it away, and not very believably.

  “I’m sorry,” Jonah said, surprised. “Don’t you ever think about it anymore?”

  Jules gave the question a considered, deliberate pause. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  SIXTEEN

  If you had told me, in 1986, after I was first diagnosed, that I would still be alive in 2002, I would have asked you what you were smoking,” Robert Takahashi told the dark gold banquet room. This was met with polite laughter and a slightly ominous, liquid cough from somewhere among the tables. “Then again,” he said, “if you had told me, in 1986, that one day two towers in our city would be brought down by hijacked airliners, I would have said the same thing.” Earlier that night, in Jonah’s loft, when Robert was practicing this speech, Jonah had interrupted to say he didn’t see the relevance of the terrorism line; including it seemed knee-jerk, he said, but Robert insisted it was required. “But as I well know, sixteen years after my diagnosis,” Robert went on now, “with access to protease inhibitors and good care, HIV remains a serious disease but is no longer necessarily a death sentence. I’m grateful to Lambda Legal for providing me with a great place to work over all these years that I’ve remained surprisingly alive—the terrifying years, the tremendously sad years, and now this new era that I guess we could call the anxious years. I myself happen to be anxious but hopeful. And very much alive.”

  There was applause, then more coffee was poured, and the gelatinous roofs of unloved desserts were listlessly poked at, along with the obligatory three raspberries, then another speech was given by a French virologist, and the final speech of the night was delivered by a diminutive activist nun, who shook her fist as she leaned up toward the too-high microphone. Jonah and Robert, in their good dark suits, sat at the head table. Domenica’s had been a savings and loan at the turn of the twentieth century, and now its soaring ceilings and paneled walls lent themselves well to fund-raising evenings such as this one. It was late February, and many of the winter benefits in the city had been canceled; no one had the heart or the concentration to go through with them. But the organizer of this benefit had said something about how if we weren’t going to give in to AIDS, we also weren’t going to give in to terrorists.

  That logic didn’t exactly track, but enough time had passed so that some of the generalized shakiness had gone away. Instead of feeling frightened all the time that another building would come down, or that a dirty bomb would go off in Times Square, you could also feel a little defiant, and that was the mood here tonight. Many aging men in this room had danced closely together as young men or boys in the 1980s at places like Limelight or the Saint, or Crisco Disco. Then their numbers had been thinned, and of the ones still alive, quite a few had ended up here tonight, in business dress, holding on.

  Robert Takahashi was not, apparently, dying after all, at least not with certainty. He’d held on long enough for protease inhibitors to become standard protocol, and suddenly, astonishingly, if you were lucky enough to tolerate the side effects of the drugs, you might live for a very long time. No one they knew had ever thought this change would occur in their lifetimes; they’d imagined the death pileup continuing on into infinity. Still, it did often lead to death. People went unprotected, ignorant, passed it on; and in many places the drugs often weren’t affordable, or weren’t available at all, and so the world was still dying and AIDS was still a reason why, but in some quarters there was hope. Death was often held off, pushed back. President Reagan had left the scene long ago, and now he was an elderly, confused man who probably no longer remembered how he’d once behaved—or maybe he only remembered certain glittering, particular pieces of his long presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

  Tonight, having been the recipient of the Eugene Scharfstein Award for Political Activism Within the Legal Profession, Robert stayed on at the glossy bar of Domenica’s after the ceremony and dinner had ended. Other, younger men were also still hanging around, but the new generation barely looked over at Robert and Jonah, thinking they were stylish men from another generation, which at just past forty they nearly were. Both of them had had a lot to drink; Robert wasn’t supposed to do that, but tonight was a special occasion. He was fairly drunk when he tugged on Jonah’s ice-blue tie and said, “You look so good in a suit. I always tell you that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should dress like this every day for work. You’d get your way in all the meetings. Everyone would want to do you.”

  “No one dresses up at my job, as you know.”

  “I didn’t know that. You hardly talk about your job.”

  “You hardly ask.”

  In all their years together, Robert had only been to visit Jonah at Gage Systems once, and that was when the robotics firm was still at its old location. Robert had never seen Jonah’s sun-filled cubicle with the drafting table and the corkboard on which he’d pinned a photo of himself and Robert, and another photo of the world’s largest Lego sculpture, and one of his mother singing on a river barge with Peter, Paul and Mary about a million years ago. But to be fair, Jonah thought, he’d only been to Robert’s office once, too. It was just the way they were. On the nights they were together, one of them was usually preoccupied with something that didn’t include the other. Even stripped down to boxers for bed, Robert was often on his BlackBerry, tapping away, and Jonah was at the table looking over designs. Half the week Robert slept in his own apartment nearby on Spring Street.

  “Well, you look good,” Robert said now at the bar, and he leaned forward and kissed Jonah quickly. Jonah’s recoil was imperceptible, he hoped; Robert smelled like whiskey concentrate, and even under the best circumstances Jonah Bay was not completely natural when it came to being physically demonstrative. But Robert let go of the tie and sat back on the stool, his expression readjusting itself. “Jonah,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We struck a bargain back in the beginning, don’t you think?”

  Jonah felt himself tense down his arms and the long sides of his calves. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he finally said.

  “You couldn’t handle too much with me. And that was okay. Because truly, I couldn’t give you all that much then. I had this diagnosis. I was going to die. And we had to watch what we did, of course. And what we do. Which has been fine, really.”

  “Except?”

  “Except now, as you know,” said Robert, in deep discomfort but forcing himself to keep going, “it seems I am not necessarily going to die of this. And honestly, Jonah, as time has gone by I’ve been thinking that I want something more complete.”

  “Complete? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Oh, you know—love. Sex. The full package. Someone who throws himself into me, physically and mentally.”

  “And where are you going to find this package, Robert? This throwing-himself-in package.”

  Robert looked down into his drink, the default place to look during a breakup, which this was so hideously and amazingly turning out to be. “I found him,” he said.

  “You found him.” A sour statement.

  “Yes.” Robe
rt looked up and bravely held Jonah’s gaze. “At the board meeting three months ago. He’s in research at Columbia. He’s positive.”

  Not thinking, Jonah said, “He’s positive he’s in research?”

  “He’s HIV positive. Like me. We started talking. We fell into this, Jonah. It wasn’t supposed to happen, I recognize that. But we found ourselves sort of . . . free. It felt amazing. I don’t think there’s been too much freedom in our relationship, yours and mine.”

  “Oh, freedom, that’s the coveted thing? The holy grail. Fucking without protection?”

  “It’s not just that,” said Robert. “He knows what it means to live with this.”

  “And me? I have lived with you all these years.”

  “No, not with me. You never even wanted me to move in. Look, I am this year’s winner of the Eugene Scharfstein Award, and I think I deserve a moment of big honesty here. You always wanted to keep yourself separate, Jonah. That was your doing, not mine, and I went along with it because what else could I do?”

  Each time he said Jonah’s name, it got worse, as if Robert were a kindly, distant person speaking to someone who was doomed. After all this time, Robert was the survivor, while Jonah occupied a land between the ill and the well, a torturous purgatory in which he’d be forced to remain. “All right,” said Jonah, gathering himself. “So what is it you want now?”