The Interestings

  Jules felt her face grow warm as she said, “Yes, thank you, Manny, Edie. We’ll get back to you about this.”

  Later, when the Wunderlichs were gone, and the whole camp was in the rec hall for the poetry slam, Dennis and Jules stood together on the buggy hill at dusk. “I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore,” he said to her. “First you want to come up here, and I say yes, fine, you can return to your roots, let’s give it a whirl. And then you get a chance to make it happen, to make it stick, and suddenly you realize this isn’t what you want to do after all. Because all you’re thinking about is your friends. What about us? We gave up our jobs, Jules. You quit your practice. We left the city and came up here for this idea of yours.”

  “It’s not what I thought it would be,” she said.

  “And what did you think? You were going to get to have funny parts in plays? And everyone would pay attention to you all over again?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I think that’s exactly what you thought,” said Dennis. “I knew that going into this. But you seemed so excited, and I didn’t think I should interrupt that.”

  “What do you want from me, Dennis?” she said. “My friends have broken up because of me. Can’t I be upset?”

  “It’s not because of you,” he said. “It’s because of them. And you are here now. You’re running a summer camp. You’re supposed to do the budget with me, and write the newsletter, and send e-mails to parents about their brilliant sons and daughters. And instead you’re off in some deep, lost place in your brain, some pathetic place.”

  “Oh, pathetic?”

  “Definitely. Look at you. You should have seen the way you were blushing when that loser brother of Ash was in the woods.”

  “It was just a reflex,” Jules said.

  “That’s who you’ve been talking about all this time? When I took that kid back to the hospital I heard all about how Goodman—I mean John—was going to advise him about his artwork. Give me a fucking break! What did the Wolf parents tell their kids: You are so special that the normal rules don’t apply to you? Well, you know what? Everybody’s grown-up, everybody’s old, and the normal rules do apply.”

  “Why are you so mad at me?” Jules said. “Because I don’t want to sign on for five years? You’re just thrilled that someone wants you,” she said, knowing this was mean but unable to stop herself. “That someone is saying, yes, yes, you can do this job and we’re happy with your performance. That you’re not in danger of falling into a depression and telling some poor woman she might be dying of a tumor on her liver.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Dennis said. “I haven’t had people telling me how great I am. And the truth of it is that none of you were all that great. Your friends: Mr. loser gold tooth, and his lying sister with her precious plays that I have never understood, and Ethan the magnificent, all of whom you’ve always worshipped beyond anything or anyone else on earth. And the thing is: They’re not that interesting.”

  “I never said they were.”

  “That’s all you said. That’s all you said. And I was the good-natured husband. And it’s still not enough for you, you’re still there with them, so much more invested in their story than you are in ours.”

  “Not true.”

  “You wanted to come back here,” Dennis said, “but it turned out to be hard work. And none of you ever had to really work when you were here. Everything was fun. And you know why? Because what was so great about this place wasn’t this place. It’s perfectly fine. We have plays! We have dance! We nurture the inner glassblower in your kids! I’m sending e-mails to parents who demand that their kids get into the glassblowing workshop. Parents love glassblowing children, right? But good luck to the glassblowing adult. If those same kids ended up blowing glass at thirty, their parents would feel they’d failed.” He was panting, raging. “This camp is a perfectly fine place, Jules, but there are a lot of other places like it, or at least there used to be. And if you’d gone to another one, you would’ve met an entirely different group of people and become friends with them. That’s just the way it is. Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.”

  “No. It wasn’t only that,” Jules said. “You weren’t here then. It did something to me. This place—this particular place—did something to me.”

  “All right,” Dennis said. “So it did. It made you feel special. What do I know—maybe it actually made you special. And specialness—everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do—kill themselves? Is that what I should do? I’m an ultrasound technician, and for about a minute I was the director of a summer camp. I’m a quick study. I learn skills and I read up on things to compensate for my absolute lack of specialness.”

  “Stop it,” said Jules. “Don’t say you’re not special.”

  “You don’t treat me like I am,” he said. His face burned; together, both their faces burned. She tried to touch him, but he twisted away and didn’t look back at her.

  That night Dennis slept downstairs on the old mildewed couch in the living room, and the following day they formally declined the Wunderlichs’ offer. “You tell them, I don’t want to,” Dennis said. Manny and Edie were shocked and disappointed, but not destroyed. Apparently other Spirit-in-the-Woods alumni were eager for a chance at this job; many people wanted a way to return here. A woman who used to do elaborate mosaics at the camp in the 1980s really wanted the directorship, and they would offer it to her and her female partner, who had both been the Wunderlichs’ close second choice.

  The camp would go on in its own fashion, and teenagers would continue to be shepherded through the gates, and then shepherded back out again at the end of the summer, weeping, stronger. They would blow glass and dance and sing for as long as they could, and then the ones who weren’t very good at it would likely stop doing it, or only keep doing it once in a while, and maybe only for themselves. The ones who kept up with it—or maybe the one who kept up with it—would be the exception. Exuberance burned away, and the small, hot glowing bulb of talent remained, and was raised high in the air to show the world.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The clinic in Chinatown was relieved to have Dennis back in September, as they were still badly understaffed, but Jules had no job to return to. The social worker whose office she’d shared offered to help her with referrals, and Jules thanked her, but she dreaded trying to build a practice all over again; she didn’t have the energy for it or the belief. She missed her clients, but they wouldn’t be back. They were off, some of them with new therapists, others with no one. Janice Kling had written Jules a nice note about how much she liked the woman she was working with, someone Jules had referred her to. A colleague urged Jules to advertise on a few psychotherapy websites, and when she did, describing herself as “a caring, nonjudgmental therapist with a special interest in creativity,” she felt uneasy, as though she was lying.

  The ads did nothing, and her practice did not refill. She would have to think of something else. At night Jules and Dennis sat across from each other at the small kitchen table in the apartment, often eating some form of takeout. They’d made a patched-up peace by the time they left Belknap, for both of them were too weary to take up the fight again. As Jules’s work dwindled, Dennis worked overtime. He knew his field very well, and after his disaster at MetroCare, he’d become highly vigilant; by now, his vigilance had transformed into expertise, and he was in demand. Needing more income because Jules wasn’t working, Dennis asked for a significant raise and was startled to receive it.

  In a marriage, they both knew, sometimes there was a period in which one partner faltered, and the other partner held everything together. Jules had been the one to hold everything together after Dennis’s stroke and during his depression. Now he took on that role, and didn’t complain. Jules was so worried about
finding work, but what remained just as pressing to her was the breakup of Ethan and Ash. She’d sent more e-mails to Ash, who was still living on the ranch in Colorado. Jules had implored her to at least talk to her on the phone, and they’d spoken a few times, but the calls were flat, because Ash was so unhappy.

  Rory, who didn’t really understand why her mother had given up the job at the camp, and was now concerned about whether she would find another job in New York, called more often than usual. “Don’t worry,” Jules said. “We’ll still be able to pay your tuition, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Rory. “I was thinking about you, Mom. It’s weird with you not working. You always had a client to see. No matter what was going on, you were thinking about your clients.”

  “I thought about you too, honey.”

  “I know you did. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that you were really involved in your work, and it seems so weird now that you’re just kind of . . . between things.”

  “Yes, that’s a good way to put it,” said Jules.

  “Well, I’d better go,” said Rory apologetically. “There’s a house party.”

  “There’s always a house party,” said her mother. Someone shrieked in the background up in Oneonta, and then Rory laughed and hung up before Jules could finish telling her to have fun and be safe.

  One day, in that strange and fallow time, Jules’s mother called and said, “Well, I have some news. I’m selling the house.” It was time for her to move to a condo in Underhill—actually, it had been time for years, Lois Jacobson said, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with it until now. Could Jules come and help her clean out the basement? Her sister, Ellen, would come too.

  Jules took the Long Island Railroad out to Underhill on a weekday morning, and when she stood on the platform she saw her mother in the parking lot, waving from beside her little compact car. Her mother had gotten small, losing a couple of inches of spinal height. She’d also let her hair go dove white, and still had it styled each week at the same beauty shop where she’d always gone, and where Jules had once gotten that dreadful perm. There was Lois now with her swirled, newly set white hair and her raincoat, looking like someone’s grandmother, which she also was. Jules clattered down the stairs to the car, and when she embraced her mother she refrained from picking her up like a doll.

  Ellen was in the backseat, and the sisters reached toward each other in some approximation of an embrace. In middle age, Ellen and Jules looked more alike now than they ever had. Ellen, who lived only twenty minutes away with her husband, Mark, saw their mother all the time. They were close, and Jules was the one who had left the family, going off into the city, which could seem sometimes like another country. Neither Lois nor Ellen went into the city very often themselves. Underhill had improved greatly, and there were now two Thai restaurants and a bookstore/café. Lois Jacobson had kept up the house on Cindy Drive as best she could all these years, but it needed a paint job, and the mailbox still hung at a slant. Thinking about her mother coming into the house alone, evening after evening, was enough to make Jules want to sweep her mother up in her arms for real and ask her how she’d done it. But now they were in the kitchen, and Lois was making them lunch with ingredients from an organic market that had just moved into town, “thank God,” said Lois.

  “Mom, you buy organic now?” asked Jules.

  “Yes. Is that so surprising?”

  “Yes!” said both daughters—both girls, they thought of themselves in the infrequent times they were together.

  “Who are you?” said Jules. “Give me back my real mother. The one who served us Green Giant frozen corn when we were growing up.”

  “And Libby’s canned peaches,” said Ellen, and they looked at each other and laughed. After lunch, their mother was already down in the basement getting to work, and Jules and Ellen stood in the kitchen clearing the dishes. Ellen and Mark had a close marriage. No children, their choice; a small, pretty house; a Caribbean cruise each year. “So what will you do now if you don’t have a therapy practice anymore?” Ellen asked Jules.

  “I don’t know. I’m sending out feelers. But I’m going to have to figure it out soon.”

  “I’m sorry the camp didn’t work out,” Ellen said. “I remember that place. The sight of all those kids running around.”

  “At the end of the first summer I went there, I returned all show-offy, I think,” said Jules. “I’m sorry if I was a jerk,” she added, unexpectedly emotional. “If I bragged a lot. I’m sorry if I made you jealous.”

  Ellen picked a dish up from the table and slipped it into a slot in the avocado-colored, apparently indestructible dishwasher of their girlhood. “Why would I have been jealous?” she said.

  “Oh, because I always went on and on about my friends, and the camp, and the Wolf family and everything. I thought that was why you, you know, treated me kind of coldly.”

  Ellen said, “No, I treated you kind of coldly because I was kind of a bitch. I treated everyone that way, didn’t you notice? Mom was thrilled when I finally moved out of the house after college. Mark sometimes teases me and tells me I’m in ‘bitch royale’ mode, so then I try and rein it in. But it’s just who I am; I can’t really help it. No, don’t worry, Jules, I was never jealous of you.”

  • • •

  The streets around the Animation Shed’s midtown Manhattan office building were purposeful by day, and then quiet and characterless at night. Almost everyone fled at the end of the workday, and now, at seven p.m. on a Thursday in December, Jules walked into the enormous, chilled lobby, with its roped-off elevators and skeleton-crew security guards. Ethan’s assistant, Caitlin Dodge, had called a few days earlier, to say that Ethan wondered if Jules was free for dinner this week. The call had come in the wet heart of winter, when Jules was spending her days answering ads for part-time clinical social workers. Only from one did she receive an interview; at over fifty, it was rare to be a first-choice hire. She and Dennis barely discussed what she would do now, though the urgency of finding work was upon them, bearing down. He’d come home at night and there she’d be at her computer, answering ads or rearranging items on her résumé. She was friendless, she felt, with Ash still very separate in Colorado, and Jonah busy with work and apparently now informally playing guitar every Saturday night with a group of musicians—one of the guys from Seymour Glass and three of his friends. A couple of social workers e-mailed Jules, wanting to get together, and she went once; at the bar, the women talked about how managed care was ruining everything, and then they all drank much too much and left feeling defeated.

  So when Caitlin Dodge suddenly called, Jules felt like shouting into the phone. Someone needed to rescue her, though she had never dared to hope it would be Ethan. She’d worried that he wouldn’t want anything to do with her ever again. But for some reason, here he was.

  In the hallway outside the animation studio after hours, Jules spoke her name into an intercom and waited beside a glass wall until an assistant came to get her. The place was dim but still discreetly active at this hour. All she could see was busyness, industry, motion.

  Behind the glass wall of his large office, Ethan was at his desk. She hadn’t seen him since the spring, before she and Dennis had made the move up to Belknap. His hair didn’t look particularly combed now, and he was staring into a computer screen and might have already been staring into it for hours. On his couch sat Mo, bent over a banjo and studiously playing. Adolescence had claimed Mo Figman unhappily; he’d been a bony boy, all heightened sensitivity and irritability, and now at age nineteen he had a man’s body but a restless, awkward demeanor.

  Jules walked up to the office and tapped lightly on the glass. “Hello,” she said.

  Mo stopped playing, then stood quickly, as if she’d scared him. “It’s Jules, Dad,” he said in his thin voice.

  “I see that,” said Ethan. He stood up behind the wide plane of battered copper that served as his desk.

  Sh
e wasn’t sure which of them to greet first, and so she went to Mo, who didn’t want to either shake hands or be hugged. They nodded to each other, almost bowing a little. “Hi, Mo, how are you? How’s boarding school?” she asked.

  “I’m home for a break,” he said. Then he added, as if he’d rehearsed it, “I don’t like school, but what else am I going to do.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry you don’t like it. I didn’t like school either. I liked camp. Hey, I didn’t know you played the banjo.”

  “Jonah Bay started giving me lessons on Skype,” said Mo with sudden force. “He gave me this.” He held out the instrument, and Jules admired the faded rainbow on the worn surface.

  Mo smiled quickly, and then a stylish young woman entered the office and said, “Are you about ready to go, Mo?”

  “Ready,” he said. He zipped the banjo into a case and started to leave with her, but Ethan said, “Wait, wait. You’re just going to leave like that?”

  “Sorry, Dad.” Mo sighed, rearranging his shoulder bones, oddly stretching his neck, and then he turned to Jules and made eye contact, which seemed to take all his effort. “Good-bye, it was nice to see you,” he said to her. Then he turned again, toward Ethan, and said, “See you later, Dad. Is that better?”

  “So much better,” said Ethan. He reached out to hug Mo, who tolerated the touch, his eyes closed as if he were heading downhill on a sled, awaiting a soft collision at the bottom.

  When he was gone, Ethan turned to Jules and their embrace was no less awkward; she also closed her eyes against it. Then she pulled back and had a good look at him, and it was almost worse to see that he didn’t appear angry. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I didn’t know when I’d hear from you,” said Jules. “I assumed you were furious.”

  “Nah. Just upset about everything. I needed to calm down.”

  “And you’re calm now?”

  “I’m the Dalai Lama,” he said. “Can’t you tell?” But it was hard to conclude anything about him, really; he mostly looked disheveled and morose. “Let’s go get dinner,” Ethan said, and instead of leaving the building they walked up a shuddering metal spiral staircase that led to a space she hadn’t known about.