by Meg Wolitzer
But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place. Most of the time Manny Wunderlich took the former view, though lately, as his head and eyebrows gathered even more white hairs, giving him a snowy and deceptively mellow appearance, he thought that he and his wife had merely been like railroad conductors on a talent train, collecting the tickets of many brilliantly able kids as they passed through Belknap, Massachusetts, on their way to somewhere even better. He thought dispiritedly that the main thing Spirit-in-the-Woods had created in anyone was nostalgia. At the bottom of a card, a camper would write lines like:
Dear Manny and Edie,
I wanted you to know that I think about my summers at camp every day of my life. Though I have performed in Paris, Berlin, you name it, and though the Barranti Fellowship last year gave me the freedom to really concentrate on my libretto and not have to teach at the conservatory anymore, nothing has been as wonderful as Spirit-in-the-Woods. Nothing! I send you my love.
Whenever Manny Wunderlich became despondent, he sank into himself and felt his heart working hard, and he looked across the road and out over the winter lawn, where the tips of the teepees poked up. He felt himself falling, and only his wife’s voice could pull him back, as though she were yanking him by his suspenders, or as though an earlier, sexually devilish version of her were bringing him back into vitality. “Manny,” she said from across time. “Manny.”
He looked up from behind the glaze of his failing eyes, into her eyes that were hard and blue. “What?” he said.
“I saw you disappear,” she said. “Let’s talk about someone else. We received a very interesting card today. With one of those Christmas letters inside.”
“All right,” he said, waiting. Which former camper would he have to try and remember now? Would it be a flutist, a dancer, a singer, a designer of surreal theater sets? All of them had passed through here at some point or another.
“You’ll like this one,” said his wife. Then she smiled, her mouth appearing soft in a way it rarely did anymore. “It’s from Ethan and Ash.”
“Oh!” he said, and he was silent, appropriately reverent.
“I will read it to you,” she said.
THREE
The envelope, made of a vellum so thick and smooth that it seemed to have been massaged with lanolin and special oils, remained unopened on the little mail and keys table in the front hallway of the Jacobson-Boyds’ apartment for a day or two before they decided to open it. For many years this had been a way of tolerating the inadequacy of their own lives in relation to whatever was described in the annual letter. Whenever they opened one of these envelopes, Jules felt as if a wall of flames might roar up and fry the air above it. With enough time and age her envy of her friends’ lives had diminished and become manageable; but still, even now, when the Christmas letter arrived Jules allowed herself to experience a new, small surge of a very old feeling. It wasn’t as if Ash and Ethan’s Christmas letter had ever been bloated with self-regard, even back when their lives had first become so extreme. Instead, the writers of the letter always deliberately seemed to hold back, as if not wanting to assail their friends with the minutiae of their good fortune.
Ash and Ethan’s letter went into the mail each year in the protective sheath of a thick, square, fat envelope that included on the back only a return address, though not one they ever lived at for more than a few weeks in a given year: “Bending Spring Ranch, Cole Valley, Colorado.”
“What kind of a ranch is it anyway?” Dennis had asked Jules originally when the property had been purchased. “Cattle? Dude? I wasn’t really sure.”
“No, it’s a tax ranch,” she’d said. “See, they raise little tax brackets there. It’s the only one of its kind in the world.”
“You’re bad news,” he’d said, mostly joking, but they both knew, back then, that her envy had no power of its own; it was a sickly and spreading thing that enclosed her, and all she could do was make lightly sarcastic jokes in order to expel a little hostility and remain friends with Ash and Ethan. Without the jokes, the sarcasm, the muttered comments, she wouldn’t have been able to cope too well with how much Ash and Ethan had in comparison with her and Dennis. So she talked on and on about life on the tax ranch, telling Dennis about the ranch hands who’d been hired to lasso the little tax brackets that tried to get away; she also described how the ranch owners, Ash and Ethan, sat on their porch swing, contentedly watching the laborers in action. “Not a single child laborer can be found on that ranch,” Jules said to Dennis. “The ranch owners are very proud.”
But her scenario suggested that somehow in reality Ash and Ethan were lazy and casually cruel taskmasters, when both of them were actually known to be respectful and generous to the people who worked for them, and not in a knee-jerk fashion but in a real way. Also, as everyone knew, Ash and Ethan worked constantly, going from project to project, both artistic and philanthropic. Even Ethan, in possession of a series of successes that, by the time the Christmas letter of 2009 had arrived, spanned more than two decades, never stopped and never wanted to. “When you stop, you die,” he’d said once at dinner, and everyone at the table had somberly agreed. Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d given up and turned the keys of the world over to other people. The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.
Ethan Figman’s ideas were so much more valuable now than they had been in 1984, when, only three years after graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he’d made a deal for an animated adult TV show called Figland. After the pilot was finished and had tested well, the network ordered a whole season. Ethan had insisted on doing the voice of Wally Figman’s amusingly infuriated father, Herb Figman, and that of a lesser character who lived in the parallel universe of Figland, Vice President Sturm. He’d also insisted that he had to stay in New York, not move to LA, and after a lot of tense discussion, the network, astonishingly, agreed, opening a studio for the show in an office building in midtown Manhattan. In its first year, Figland became a startling hit. Very few people had any idea that Ethan’s technique had been learned in an animation shed on the grounds of a summer camp under the tutelage of Old Mo Templeton—who had probably never, Jules realized, been referred to in his lifetime as Young Mo Templeton. Ethan, though, stayed youngish over the years of all his accomplishments. At fifty he was as deeply homely as he’d been at fifteen, but his curls had thinned out and turned a kind of burned goldish silver, and his homeliness gave him cachet. Once in a while, someone recognized him on the street and said, “Hello, Ethan,” as though he or she knew him personally. Though he often still wore T-shirts with kitschy silk-screened animation figures on them, some of his collared shirts were made of expensive textured materials that resembled the skins of Japanese lanterns. At the beginning of his success, Ash had encouraged him to shop in better places—real stores, not tables on street corners, she’d said—and after a while he’d even seemed to enjoy some of the clothes he owned, though he would not admit it.
Ethan had so many ideas that they were like Tourette’s syllables that needed to be spat out in chaotic yips and explosions. But many of them, even most of them, paid off in some way. After his success with the show was well established, he’d become an anti-child-labor activist in the mid-1990s and founded a school in Indonesia for children who’d been saved from labor. Alongside him Ash had become involved in this mission too, and their benevolence was genuine, not just a brief phase that soon bored them. Now Ethan was heading into the second year of the Mastery Seminars, a weeklong summer event he’d created at a resort in Napa, California, where politicians, scientists, Silicon Valley visionaries, and artists gave presentations about ideas in front of a privileged audience. The firs
t year had been a success. Still several steps below other, similar conferences, the Mastery Seminars had gotten attention quickly. Even though it was only December now, the next season was already selling out.
Jules and Dennis Jacobson-Boyd read the 2009 Figman and Wolf Christmas letter one evening right before Christmas. New York City was in its annual crisis. Traffic didn’t move. Families from out of town, carrying blooms of shopping bags, meandered along sidewalks. Despite the decimated economy, people still came here for the holidays; they just couldn’t stay away. Canned music rang out in the streets, including those terrible 1950s Christmas novelty songs that made you “want to die,” as one of Jules’s clients had said to her that day. Everyone who lived in New York was weary, annoyed at the temporary occupation of their city, and forced into a state of imposed celebration. Jules had just gotten home from seeing her last client of the day and of the whole week. Years earlier, many therapists, including herself, had stopped using the word patients. Having clients still seemed a little unnatural, though; it made Jules feel that she was a businessperson, someone in, say, consulting, that vague field that she’d never really understood, though over the years through Ethan and Ash, she and Dennis had met people who made their livings this way. No one wanted to be a patient anymore; everyone wanted to be a client. More to the point, everyone wanted to be a consultant.
The last client on her schedule was Janice Kling; her name was a little amusing, considering that Janice did not want to leave therapy, ever. She clung marsupially, and her attachment was moving and sometimes unsettling. She had started seeing Jules many years earlier when she was in law school at NYU and had become frightened of the Socratic method, clobbered into silence when called upon by an intimidating professor. Now Janice, who’d initially imagined becoming an academic, had become an overstressed and underpaid lawyer for an environmental group. She worked long hours, trying to save the world from deregulation, but in Jules’s office she sank into the chair with slumped posture and a hopeless expression.
“I can’t stand living without intimacy,” Janice had said recently. “Going to meetings, fighting mean-spirited GOP legislation, then falling into bed alone and wolfing down leftover pad thai at midnight. Even, you know, using a vibrator in my apartment, where I haven’t had a chance to put anything on the walls and it echoes. Is that pathetic to admit? Particularly the echoing vibrator part? Does it sound just, you know, sad?”
“Of course not,” Jules had said. “They should hand out vibrators if they’re going to demand so much of you that you can’t find time for a private life. And even if you can find time,” she quickly added. The two women had laughed together over the image of overworked professional women and their vibrators. Some therapists were motherly types, caftanned and big-lapped. Others seemed to make a point of being frosty and clinical and detached, as though coldness itself possessed curative properties. Jules felt neither particularly maternal nor remote as a therapist. She was herself, in concentrate, and clients had sometimes told her that she was funny and encouraging, which they meant as a compliment, but which she uneasily knew was not, entirely.
Today, in Janice Kling’s session, Janice was talking about a familiar theme, loneliness, and perhaps because it was Christmas season the conversation had a desperate charge. Janice said that she had no idea how people went on year after year, not being touched or spoken to intimately. “How do they do it, Jules?” she asked. “How do I do it? I should go to an intimacy prostitute.” She paused, and then looked up with a sharply smiling face. “Maybe I do go to one,” she said, pointing.
“Well, if I’m an intimacy prostitute,” Jules said lightly, “then I should charge you much, much more.” Her fees were low as a rule. Managed care had changed everything, and most health plans now paid for only a handful of sessions. And, of course, drugs had replaced therapy for a lot of people. Jules and a few other clinical social worker friends met once in a while to discuss how much worse the climate was this year than it had been last year. But still they kept their practices, sharing offices to keep their costs down; still they hung on. All of Jules’s clients were struggling, and, though they did not know it, so was their therapist.
Now she had come home from a session of mild laughter and mild crying. She and Dennis had been living in their modern, modest apartment in the west Nineties for over a decade. On their street were brownstones and prewar buildings and small, anonymous elevator buildings like theirs, and a nursing home where, when the sun shone, a lineup of old people in wheelchairs were stationed out front, their eyes closed, their pink and white heads tilted up toward the light. The apartment belonged to Jules and Dennis; there was a narrow-aisled, sagging supermarket two avenues away; Central Park was close by; and they were settled here for good. They had raised their daughter, Rory, here; sent her to the local public school and taken her to the park so she could run and kick balls.
When Jules opened the front door, the apartment was bright with cooking; apparently Dennis was making steamed five-spice chicken. She stood and looked at the mail that had accrued today, a small, dull pile of bills and cards. Beside the fresh pile was the square card that had been lying on the front hall table for a couple of days already, unopened.
The Christmas letter.
Jules brought it into the kitchen, where Dennis stood over the stove in his Rutgers sweatshirt. He always looked too big for their small New York kitchen, his body solid and indelicate, his movements broad. He couldn’t seem to keep his face free of hair growth. “My Chia Pet,” she’d called him in bed back in the beginning, twenty-eight years earlier. He was big, black-haired, male, artless, at least in the sense that he had no art, no personal need for refined aesthetics. He liked to play touch football on the weekend with his friends who sometimes came to the apartment afterward for beer and pizza, high-fiving one another without evident irony. Like several of these friends, Dennis was an ultrasound technician, a field he’d chosen not because he’d grown up with a desire to know what lay beneath surfaces but because after a rough emotional time in college and then a shaky recovery, he’d seen a convincing ad on the subway for ultrasound school. Now, decades later, he worked at a busy clinic in Chinatown. Sometimes on the way to the subway home, walking past the row of Chinese vendors on the street, he would pick up some star anise or long beans or a twisted root that looked like an old wizard’s hand. His proximity to these vendors kept him somehow a little exotic himself.
Dennis turned away from the stove and walked toward her with a dripping spoon. “Hello,” he said, kissing her; their lips suctioned, springy, and they held the kiss.
“Hello,” Jules finally said. “It smells good in here. When did you get home?”
“An hour ago. I went right from a pelvic ultrasound to this. Oh, there are two messages on the machine. Your mother and Rory. Your mother said it’s not necessary to call her back, she was just checking in, and wondered if you’d heard from Rory yet. And Rory said that she’d arrived safely at Chloe’s house in New Hampshire and that the roads weren’t bad.”
“They shouldn’t let college students drive,” said Jules. “They get in these crappy cars that their parents no longer want, and hit the road. It’s sickening.”
“It’s sickening that they have to ever move out,” said Dennis. But this wasn’t really true in their case. Though they’d been struck hard when Rory went off to college, and had been dumbly bewildered that she no longer lived there, she’d always been self-contained, eager to go outside; and so sending her to college all the way upstate was a little like returning an animal into the wild.
“Well, she’s fine,” said Dennis. “They’re going to cross-country ski. She’ll have a great time.” Then he noticed what Jules held. “Hey, the letter,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “The letter from our friends, the ranchers.”
“You still want to do the thing this year? Where I read it aloud? You’re still not past that?”
“Oh, I’m past it,” she said. “I just li
ke doing it. One of our only rituals—you the lapsed Catholic and me the short-sedered Jew.”
“The what? Oh, short-sedered,” said Dennis, amused. “Yes, that’s exactly how I describe you to everyone.”
“And still in need of a read-aloud Christmas letter,” said Jules.
“Okay. But wait, I have wine,” he said.
“Oh, good. Thank you, honey.”
He went to the cabinet and poured glasses of red, then sat with her at the table in their barely eat-in kitchen, while snow pinged the narrow window that overlooked the alley. There was a silent moment as Dennis pushed his finger inside the envelope, revealing an oxblood lining. Suddenly Jules remembered Ash’s sleeping bag from camp with its own suggestive red lining. The illustration on the card was, as always, a new Ethan Figman drawing, seasonally relevant. This time he had drawn the Three Wise Men, each one plump and eccentric in a robe and tall hat; each one crankier than the last. Jules and Dennis studied and admired the drawing together. The corners contained tiny asides—throwaway jokes about the trashed economy and illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: “Hello there, I’m Frankincense. Well, technically I’m Frankincense’s monster, but everyone gets that wrong.”
One year the Christmas letter had included an advent calendar with windows that hid wonderful little cartoon scenes. Another year, when you opened the card, the theme song from Figland played, though the technology was not advanced yet, and the sound was like miniature children trapped inside the card, singing “Ee-ee-ee.” In 2003, memorably, a burst of pink powder had flown out, though some recipients had apparently been frightened, thinking it was a letter bomb, which horrified Ethan and Ash, who had just imagined it would be a cool effect. So the Christmas card became tame again, but it always contained a classic Ethan Figman illustration as well as a detailed accounting of the previous year.