The Interestings

  “You mean ‘here’ here?” Goodman said. “Or here more generally.”

  “Come on, you know what I mean.” She looked toward his friend, who appeared completely confused by all of this, but then she understood that they barely knew each other.

  “John,” said the young man. “You said we’d get something to eat.”

  “We will; take it easy.”

  “Where did you two meet each other?” Jules asked, curious. “And when?”

  “Downtown yesterday. His name’s Martin,” Goodman said. “He’s a fucking great artist. A printmaker. I’ve been giving him advice. People will try and use him; I told him he should be wary, not sell himself to the lowest bidder. He should take time to let his talent unscroll—isn’t that what I said, Martin?” Goodman Wolf, the gold-toothed fugitive, was now an art consultant?

  “Yes,” said the young man.

  “It’s fucking good advice,” Goodman added. “Don’t forget it.”

  Bushes crackled with the sound of another approach, and Jules turned to see Dennis pushing through, big as a bear; she wanted to rush over to him, but she felt she shouldn’t register too much right now. “Hello,” said Dennis, looking them over, taking this in. “What’s going on?”

  Goodman looked him over as well, overtly, taking in the convexity of Dennis’s thick middle-aged gut in a T-shirt, and his bramble-haired legs, and his work boots with white socks and shorts. The nerd camp-director look, not bohemian the way Manny Wunderlich had looked when he ran this place, but a different look that was Dennis’s own: more of a husband look.

  “You’re the husband,” Goodman said.

  “What’s happening?” Dennis asked.

  “I’ve had a sighting,” said Jules. She sent Dennis a message, pulsing with telekinesis, but still he could not understand, and he just appeared baffled. “This is Ash’s brother,” she said, somehow still not wanting to say Goodman’s name aloud and expose him.

  “For real?” said Dennis.

  “For real,” said Goodman.

  Dennis had no allegiance to the past, or to this man who seemed like someone you knew enough to dislike, even as you saw he was mostly pathetic. “You shouldn’t be here,” Dennis said to him.

  “Yeah, that’s what your wife said too,” said Goodman Wolf.

  “Okay, I’m not kidding,” said Dennis. “From what I understand, there’s a warrant.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” said Goodman. “You’re talking ancient history.”

  “You want to get into a thing?” Dennis said. “Because we can do that. I am really ready.”

  “Dennis,” said Jules in the blandest voice she could manage.

  Her husband took out his cell phone and said, “Verizon sucks, but we get service in the woods. I’m going to call.”

  “All right, stop,” said Goodman, his eyes brighter, and Martin looked at him with equal intensity.

  “What’s going on?” Martin said. “I don’t understand this at all.”

  “Apparently I’ve got to go, man,” said Goodman, and he came forward and gripped Martin’s arm in a handshake and an embrace.

  “But we were going to get some food.”

  “Good luck with your artwork. Don’t sell out.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Goodman,” said Dennis. “Not just the camp. Go back to where you live. Go back to your life there. I am really not kidding.”

  Goodman nodded at him, then looked at Jules and said, “Jacobson, you got yourself a man.” The tooth shone one last time, but when he turned and walked off, his steps quickened, and then he became like an animal leaping away from hunters—a wounded deer that had once been a boy who had drunk from an enchanted, unlucky stream. Jules crossed her arms hard around herself, and she would have liked Dennis to come over to her and throw his big arm across her shoulder, but he wasn’t even looking at her yet; he was talking to Martin.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Rindge, New Hampshire.”

  “And what brought you down here?” Dennis’s voice was tender and deep; Jules thought he might put an arm around Martin, not her.

  “I had some problems,” Martin said in an indistinct voice. “There’s a hospital here.”

  Dennis nodded quickly. “Langton Hull.”

  “But they weren’t doing anything for me. Too many drugs, so I walked out. It was entirely my choice,” he added.

  “Okay, you walked out,” said Dennis. “And then you met that guy?”

  “John. Yeah, at the bus station. I was going to go somewhere, maybe home. He started talking to me; he showed like a real interest. He’d just gotten off a bus. So I went with him to this place. He said it was for artists.”

  “It is,” Jules felt she had to say.

  “Look, I’ve stayed at Langton Hull,” said Dennis. “They’ll help you, okay? You should go back and let them try.”

  Martin considered this. “I am very hungry,” he finally said, as though that made the decision.

  Dennis dropped his cell phone back into his pocket and said to Jules, “I’m going to take him there. You go back by yourself, okay? They’re going to wonder where we are.”

  She watched as the two men headed off in the other direction, away from camp and toward town. Goodman was already somewhere far ahead, getting smaller, getting on a bus soon, then a plane, leaving and going home. Maybe he would eat one last big American meal in the airport—a bloody hamburger and fries, looking around at all the travelers, most of whom probably had people waiting for them somewhere. Jules’s heart was beating so hard, and she checked her own cell phone and saw that she had two bars of reception, which was probably enough. Ash’s cell phone was on Jules’s phone’s speed-dial; so many times Jules had called it over the years when Ash was traveling with Ethan, or traveling alone for work and meeting up with Goodman in Europe. Now Ash and Ethan were visiting Larkin in Prague at her Yale summer program. It was evening there; the phone rang in that international way, loud and quick and stern.

  Ash answered, her voice revealed through a hiss like water in pipes. “It’s me,” Jules said.

  “Jules? Oh, wait a sec, I’m in the car. I’ll put—” Her voice cut out for a second. “—phone,” she said.

  “What? You’re breaking up. I just heard ‘phone.’”

  “Sorry. Is this better? Is everything okay?” Ash asked.

  “Look, I have to tell you something. I saw Goodman!” she said in a rush. “He’s here at camp, he traveled here from Iceland, wanting to look at houses here. He said he hadn’t told you he was coming. It’s just crazy. Dennis started yelling at him, and Goodman ran off. I think he’s going back to Reykjavik. It was horrible. He looks so different, Ash,” she said. “You didn’t tell me that.” Still she heard nothing. “Are you all right?” Jules asked. “I know it’s all pretty wild. Ash?”

  There was more silence on the line, followed by some muted background talking. Jules heard, “No, I will tell you. Yes, Iceland,” and then a male voice spoke to Ash, agitated, but all of it took place under that international hiss, and Jules couldn’t make anything else out.

  “Hello?” Jules said. “Hello?”

  But Ash was talking to Ethan, not her. “Give me a second,” Ash was saying to him, strained, “and I’ll tell you. Yes,” she said. “Goodman. Jules was talking about Goodman. All right, Ethan, all right. Please just stop.” Her voice was pleading, and then she came back on the phone and began to cry. “I have to go, Jules,” she said. “You were on speakerphone and Ethan’s right here.”

  “Oh God,” Jules said before she could stop herself. And then the call was over.

  She hurried out of the woods, walking fast, then running, finding her way back instinctively and emerging onto the lawn in the middle of a hot, ordinary afternoon. Several teenagers were lolling under trees playing instruments, and they waved to her. That night, Jules sat through an evening of one-act plays written by campers, and the next day she tolerated a lunchtime barbecue, at which a hammer dulcimer tri
o played Nirvana songs on homemade instruments. She had her phone in her pocket at all times, waiting for it to vibrate and for Ash to be on the other end. When Ash did call, during breakfast the following day, she said, “Jules? Can you talk?”

  The hiss on the line was back. Jules abruptly stood up from the table where she’d been sitting with two boys, actors, who seemed to be falling in love right in front of her. “Yes,” Jules said into the phone, walking through the dining hall and out the screen door to the patio, where it was quiet and she could be alone. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Prague airport. I’m going home alone. Ethan and I broke up.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I know. After we got back to the hotel we just got into everything. The whole marriage. He says that it isn’t only the actual lie that gets to him, it’s also the implications.”

  “Which are what?”

  “Oh, that in keeping this promise to my parents, I basically chose them over him. He says he’s always felt that anyway, and this just confirms it. Like I’m still a little girl. He was so condescending, Jules! And I told him that, too.”

  “It sounds awful,” Jules said.

  “It was. I apologized to him about Goodman over and over, and he just ignored me and kept going on about my family. Finally I told him that he never tries to see things my way, and that he has no idea what it’s like being married to him.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Everyone fawning all over him. And how much space he takes up in the world; it’s just exhausting. And he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry it’s such torture flying on company jets and not thinking about all the little boring details of running a life; and also having more money than anyone we know.’ And I said, ‘Is that what you think I care about?’ He backed down really fast, because he knows I’m not like that. By now we were just saying all kinds of deranged things to each other.” Ash’s voice was increasingly manic, and Jules just listened. “I told him I knew he never really liked my work. And in the middle of this fight he basically stops the action and feels he has to refute that point and actually compliment me. He says, ‘You know I like what you did with the staging in that evening of one-acts.’ And I said, ‘God, Ethan, stop it! Stop saying something nice but vague, trying to show that you respect me.’ And he admitted that I was right. I know he’s bored with me, Jules, and he’s too polite to say so. Him finding out about Goodman just cracked everything open that’s been there in front of us. Like, even though Ethan spends so little time with Mo, I know it really bothers him how involved I am in Mo’s education and treatment and vocational plan; can you believe that? Someone has to take charge of Mo’s schedule, and it’s sure not going to be Ethan Figman. But he also gets jealous, I swear he does, because I’m paying so much attention to Mo, and I know how to do it, and he doesn’t. He practically admitted this. We were standing in this Prague hotel room screaming at each other. And now we’re broken up. We reached that decision at about sunrise, when we were both so exhausted we were practically falling on the floor. But it was mutual.” Suddenly she was silent.

  “Come on, Ash, you can’t be serious,” said Jules, gesticulating, and a few campers looked out at her through the windows in curiosity or concern.

  “I am,” Ash said. “We just said too many things.”

  “But you love each other. You’re this huge couple, and you belong together, and that can’t just change.”

  There was a tiny sound, when crying is so great that it can’t even be released. Finally Ash composed herself, and said, “It’s done now, Jules. It’s done.”

  • • •

  When you have inadvertently been responsible for ending the marriage of your oldest and closest friends, it is impossible to think of much else. Jules discovered this in the final weeks of Spirit-in-the-Woods, as she was forced back into the daily needs of the camp but felt herself only partly available. Ethan and Ash were really separated; Ash wasn’t going to go with him on their planned trip to Asia. When she returned from Prague she stayed in New York for a few days, but couldn’t stand being in the house alone, and instead she flew to the ranch in Colorado in the middle of August, taking Mo with her and the cast of her next production, surrounding herself with her son and actors and scripts and work.

  “I have to lie low for a while,” Ash explained. “I can’t think about the things that remind me of everything.” The people, she meant. “I’ll call you,” she said vaguely, but she didn’t, and she swore it had nothing to do with Jules having accidentally let Ethan know about Goodman. Ash wasn’t angry with Jules, she promised her; not at all. She just had to go somewhere alone. Ash was in such distress, and though it was unlike her not to rely on Jules, she stayed away.

  Jules thought about how she and Dennis had actually managed to come back up to Belknap, Massachusetts, to the bursting, splendid place of her early life, but the catch seemed to be that she could never again see the people she’d loved when she had first been here. “Call Ethan,” Dennis said one night when they were sitting in the Wunderlichs’ house answering e-mails from parents, which came in at a far greater volume than they could have imagined. If Jules’s mother had ever called the camp when Jules was a camper, she would have been mortified and furious. But today’s parents could not stay away. They wanted to know what classes their children were taking and whether they were being cast in plays. “Talk to him,” said Dennis, not looking up from his laptop. There were nine days left in the camp season, and the Wunderlichs were driving down from Maine the next day to have the planned end-of-summer discussion. Jules didn’t know what they were going to say; someone at the camp would surely tell them about what had happened with the llamas, and they had already been informed about Noelle’s unhappy departure. Who knew what they would think about the job that Jules and Dennis had done, but Jules was so upset by Ash and Ethan’s breakup and her own role in it, that she could barely think about camp right now.

  “I can’t call Ethan,” she said. “I’m sure he’s very angry at me for knowing about Goodman and not telling him.”

  “He can’t be that angry at you. Not for long.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You know,” said Dennis.

  The Wunderlichs arrived the next afternoon during free period, and Jules and Dennis walked them around the grounds, showing them all the healthy, fertile activity taking place. You barely had to do anything to get the kids split up into groups, sewing costumes, planning events. “We haven’t run the place into the ground,” Dennis said easily. “Yet.” Manny, with his anarchic eyebrows, and Edie in her big straw summer hat, seemed like benevolent grandparents who’d come to visit their grandchildren, and they nodded and smiled in approval of everything they saw.

  During lunchtime, the four of them sat at their own table by the windows in the dining hall. “It all looks good,” Manny said. “It seems that we weren’t wrong to turn it over to you.”

  “No, we weren’t,” Edie echoed. “We’d thought about going in a different direction, but we’re glad we went with you.”

  “Whew,” said Dennis, and he and Jules laughed self-consciously. There was a pause, and no one spoke.

  “We think it’s going so well,” said Manny, “that we want to make you another offer.”

  “Oh boy,” said Dennis. “Okay.” He was pleased to have been praised. He’d rarely been praised for work he did, and Jules could see him almost leaning into it. Praise could be more gratifying than work itself.

  “We’d like to ask you to make a five-year commitment to the camp,” Manny said. “A five-year contract. We’ve written down the terms. With five years, you can bring the camp along in the way that you see fit. One year is nothing. You’re just getting your feet wet now. With five years, not only can you make the camp become the place you’d like it to be, but we also won’t have to worry about it. We can back off completely. That sounds like a relief to us, if you must know. We’ve been so invested in every last detail all these years; we’ve been v
ery hands-on. Maybe now we might do a little something else with ourselves. Like sleep, for a start.”

  “Or I might finally have surgery on my bunions,” Edie said. “I’ve let them go a very long time. My feet don’t even look human right now. They look like hooves,” she said.

  “It’s true,” he said. “They do.”

  “Thank you, darling,” said Edie, and they smiled at each other.

  “When we started this place we thought we could make a utopia,” said Manny. “And for a long time we did. When you were here as a camper, Jules, it was still pretty great, wasn’t it? But already it was long past the heyday.”

  “I’m curious, Manny, what would you say the heyday was?” asked Edie, and for a moment it was just the two of them mulling it over. “Nineteen sixty-one?”

  “Or maybe nineteen sixty-two,” said Manny. “Yes, that was a good year.”

  “It was,” said Edie, and they nodded together at the distant image of that year.

  “And the late sixties were very exciting here too, naturally,” Manny said. “A couple of kids actually tried to take over the front office. They called themselves SDS. ‘Spirit-in-the-Woods for a Democratic Society.’ Cracked me up. And we did have all that trouble for a while with LSD, remember that?”

  “That harp player on the diving board at three a.m.,” Edie said, and the couple nodded at each other again, in a reflective, knowing way.

  “By the time the eighties came around,” said Manny, turning back to the table, “the main thing the kids wanted to do was shoot those damn music videos. And every time something new came along, we had to fight it off with a stick.”

  “Five years sounds good,” Dennis said suddenly, and Jules turned to him in surprise. “No?” he said to her. “It doesn’t?”

  “Dennis, we’ll have to talk about it,” she said. He gave her a perplexed, glowering look, then returned to the Wunderlichs.

  “I personally feel honored that you’re so pleased with how we’ve handled the camp this summer,” Dennis said to them.