The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  No one could say anything. “We are so, so fucked,” Jules finally said, wanting to assert herself and make sure she remained essential to these people. Already, she couldn’t ever imagine being without them.

  The last night of camp grew cold, and when the rain began to batter the slanted wood of the boys’ teepee, the girls inside made a run for it, heads down. They wanted beds and warmth; they wanted the summer not to be over, but it was.

  • • •

  Back in the city, Goodman remained bitter and never entirely sobered up. When the school year began, he drank on weekday afternoons, alarming his parents, who sent him to see a highly recommended psychoanalyst. “Goodman said that Dr. Spilka wants him to tell him everything,” Ash said to Jules. “He wants him to tell him what, quote, ‘sexual intercourse’ with Cathy was like. My parents are paying sixty dollars an hour for this; have you ever heard of anyone paying that much for a shrink?”

  Over the school year, during constant, urgent visits to the city, Jules tracked Goodman’s increase in surliness. One weekend in November they all returned to the Autopub, and this time Cathy brought her boyfriend, Troy, with her. They sat together in an antique Ford, making out while the Marx Brothers played. Goodman sat in his own car beside his sister, slouched down as he watched Cathy and Troy from behind.

  “Goodman is being very difficult, even for Goodman,” Ash said quietly to Jules as they all stood on the subway platform afterward; they stayed slightly apart from the others so they could talk. “It’s been, what, eight months since he and Cathy broke up. That’s enough already. You know, he keeps vodka in his work boot in his closet.”

  “Just poured into it?”

  “I mean in a flask in his boot. Not sloshing around loose, Jules.”

  “Why should he be so upset?” Jules asked. “He’s the one who broke up with her.”

  “No idea.”

  “I like Cathy.”

  “I like her too,” Ash said. “I just don’t like what it’s all done to my brother.”

  “She really seems in love with Troy,” said Jules. “Imagine getting to see a male dancer naked every night. That would really be something. Seeing his . . . loins.” The two girls laughed like conspirators.

  “And then you could go to your psychoanalyst the next day,” Jules said, “and lie down on the couch and tell him all about what sexual intercourse was like. He probably wants to hear about it because he’s never tried it himself.”

  “Jonah and I almost did it, you know,” Ash suddenly said. “The deed.” She raised her chin toward Jonah, who was up ahead on the platform talking to Goodman.

  “Really? You never told me this.” Jules was shocked at not having known; usually, she knew so much about Ash.

  “I didn’t feel I could talk about it at the time. He brought along a Trojan; I’d asked him to, I was curious—but he wanted me to do everything, and of course I didn’t know what I was doing. We needed guidance, and we didn’t have it. Neither of us was willing to take the lead.” Then she added, “So we went to see an X-rated movie for inspiration.”

  “You did? Which one?”

  “Behind the Green Door. A revival was playing at this really creepy theater, and I can’t even believe they let us in. Guess how many lines Marilyn Chambers has in that movie.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Zero. She never speaks. She just has all kinds of sex, and she lets people do things to her, insert things into her. It’s disgusting and sexist. I swear, I’m going to devote my life to being a feminist. Jonah and I watched it together, and it was like a nightmare, but the thing I couldn’t get away from is that even though it was a movie, and it was all so fake, and these actors were being paid to be in it, and probably in real life they were all heroin addicts or something—they actually seemed into it. I think Jonah and I both had the same thought, which was that what was happening in Behind the Green Door was much more intense than what we’d ever done. It was really nice, Jonah and me, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But we didn’t exactly go together. We weren’t Cathy and Troy. Jonah’s so hard to read; it’s like he’s standing behind a screen door all the time. Get it? A screen door, not a green door.”

  “I’m sorry, Ash,” Jules said. “It’s sort of like me and Ethan. Not meant to be.”

  Back at the Labyrinth, Goodman went into the closet in his bedroom, reached into his work boot, pulled out the Smirnoff, and soon he became hot-faced, sloppy, and unpleasant. At the end of the afternoon the Wolf parents came home from a concert in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Betsy’s hair had been gathering a slight frosting of silver lately; she was now forty-five years old. “The music was terrific,” said Gil. “All Brahms. It made me think how talented some people are. True talent is extraordinary. Ash has it, and I can’t wait to see what she does with it.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Dad,” Ash said.

  “Oh, I won’t need to, my girl,” said her father. “You’re on your way with your plays and all that. Both Ends was wonderful. You’re going to be very big one day.”

  “As opposed to your boy,” Goodman muttered, “who is on his way to nowhere.”

  Glowering, inebriated, Goodman regarded them from one of the flowing-upholstered sofas in the middle of the room where everyone always collected. Ash went to her room; Gil walked down the hall. Betsy drifted off to the kitchen to start a Bolognese sauce, and Ethan followed.

  “Ethan,” Betsy said, “be my sous-chef. You can do the onion, and tell me what’s new in that cartoon world of yours. Hanna-Barbera,” she added vaguely.

  “Pardon?”

  “Isn’t that those cartoon people? That’s the extent of my knowledge,” she explained.

  “Oh, I see,” he said. He turned to Jules on his way into the kitchen and said, “Join us.”

  As Jules followed, walking past Goodman who was still sprawled on the couch, he suddenly reached up and grabbed her wrist. Startled, she looked down, and Goodman said to her, “You know what? You’re all right, Jacobson.” He continued to hold her wrist, so she didn’t move. Ethan was already banging around in the kitchen with Betsy; Jules and Goodman were alone here. The only other time they had been alone was the summer before last, in the dining hall on the final day of camp, and they’d been interrupted by her mother and sister. Here was a chance to make up for that interruption.

  Goodman stood and brought his enormous rock of a face close to hers, creating in Jules a deep sense of panic. But it wasn’t disgust panic, as she’d felt with Ethan originally in the animation shed. It was arousal; yes, this was the real thing, as distinctive as a giraffe or a flamingo. Even though Goodman was drunk, even though he’d never shown her any interest before, she was aroused by him, nearly to the point of twitching. She couldn’t even try to imagine what it might be like to see Goodman Wolf in full flower, behind the green door.

  Because no one else was here, and his head was right in front of hers, Jules instinctively closed her eyes and let her mouth open. Then Goodman’s unfamiliar mouth was against hers, opening too. The tip of Jules’s tongue came forth like a little plant shoot against Goodman’s tongue, and both tongues engaged in that silent, strange mime that apparently everyone’s tongues knew how to do. Jules heard herself groan; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t stopped herself from making a sound. The delirium of the kiss continued for another moment until, suddenly, Goodman’s mouth closed and he backed away from her, the way she had backed away from Ethan. When she looked at him she saw that he was already thinking about something or someone else. He’d gotten bored in the middle of this kiss that had been so exciting to her.

  “All right, you had your kicks,” Goodman said. “Go help with dinner.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said, to which he reached out and messed up her hair.

  • • •

  Then, soon, everything, the six of them, was over. Or if not over, then changed into something so different from what it had originally been as to be unrecognizable. Jules never got a chance to paus
e and watch this exquisite part of her life recede, then grieve for it. On her second New Year’s Eve with them, the New Year’s Eve that was to begin the endlessly promoted bicentennial year, taxis pulled up in front of the Labyrinth all evening, and the doormen sent everyone to the correct elevators. Many of the buttons in the south elevator were lit up to signal for the various floors, and the door slid open upon party after party. Nineteen seventy-five was ending, one more year in a sequence of shameful years. In his cartoons, Ethan had inserted the U.S. failure and military retreat from Vietnam. His animated figures literally limped home, whimpering and saying “owwww” in Ethan’s distinctive voice.

  On 3, the Veech party was dominated by the family’s college-aged children and their friends; a sirocco of pot smoke swept toward the elevator when the doors opened. Up on 6, Jules Jacobson and Ethan Figman walked together into the Wolfs’ apartment, which had been dotted with red, white, and blue touches, and where loose-limbed Herbie Hancock music was playing—the finger-snapping music of aging dads. Deep in the living room, dressed in a long, lavender fairy dress, Ash was politely listening to her mother’s oldest friend. “Of course, you girls don’t need to go to single-sex colleges anymore, like we did,” said Celeste Peddy, already more talkative than usual from two glasses of champagne. “Your mom and I lived in the same house at Smith, but I imagine that when it’s time for you to go to college, a girl like you, complete catnip, will want boys around as distractions, especially after having put in all this time in the absolute nunnery of Brearley.”

  Ash smiled politely. “Yes, I’ll definitely want a coed school,” she said.

  “And no more M.R.S. degrees, thank God,” said Celeste Peddy with a battering little laugh. “That was what we all got, and we lived to regret it. But now everything’s different. Gloria Steinem—a Smithie too, I might add.”

  “I know,” said Ash. “She’s amazing. I plan on getting involved in the women’s movement in college. It’s a cause I really believe in.”

  “Good for you,” said Celeste, looking her over. “We need women who look like you and Gloria Steinem. We can’t just have those dumpy bull dykes representing the cause. Oh,” she said, “listen to me, talking like this. What’s wrong with me?” She put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “I guess I’m a little drunk.”

  When Ash saw Jules and Ethan approach, she popped up and made excuses to her mother’s friend. “Come on, let’s go,” Ash whispered to Jules. “Celeste Peddy is starting to reveal her true self.” They all slipped from the living room and made their way down the hall to Ash’s room, which had lately become overgrown with prisms, stuffed animals, theater posters, and a generalized spray of dog hair. By ten-thirty, Goodman was already drunk.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” Goodman asked Cathy when she showed up alone. Though they all knew it was strange having her there, it would’ve been stranger not having her there. Cathy explained that Troy was off dancing that night at a black-tie benefit his dance program was putting on to raise money for arts in the public schools. Here was Cathy, self-consciously alone on New Year’s Eve but trying to appear casual, dressed in a black Indian-print blouse with tiny mirrors speckling the front. Tonight Jules wore a peasant blouse and a peasant skirt—“appropriate, in this crowd, in which I’m the peasant,” she’d said to Ethan.

  Jonah came wearing an old tuxedo shirt that he’d found at a vintage clothing store, and Jules had the thought again that he was unavailable, inscrutable, and she wished she could say to him, “What’s the deal with you, Jonah?” Tonight he had brought a water pipe he’d found in the corner of his mother’s loft; one of her musician friends had left it behind. “This is my contribution to the evening,” Jonah said, showing off the long violet glass pipe and the small lump of hash that he’d found inside the bowl. They all smoked and sucked and burbled, and Jules became so high that it took her a while to realize that eventually Jonah, Cathy, and Goodman were gone from the room.

  “Where’d they go?” she asked, but Ethan and Ash were also too high to really hear her or pay attention. She sank back against the pile of stuffed animals, then picked one up, an ancient, pale purple unicorn, and held it to her face, noticing that it smelled distinctly like Ash.

  Jonah reappeared a little later, and Jules asked him where he’d been. “I helped our friends get a cab,” he said with a smile.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Goodman and Cathy. They said they had a secret adventure planned. They were really stoned, and afraid they’d have trouble getting a cab on their own. I have no idea of what a ‘secret adventure’ meant, and I don’t want to know.” He fell onto the bed, that place where he used to lie with Ash, and closed his eyes with their startlingly long lashes, and within seconds he appeared to be asleep.

  When midnight was about to arrive, Dick Clark, still nearly as boyish and box-headed as ever, began his New Year’s countdown with Average White Band on the bandstand in Times Square. Ash, Ethan, Jonah, and Jules sat watching it on TV, and as the ball fell, the boys chastely kissed the girls in turn. The kisses made Jules wonder where Goodman and Cathy were right now and what their adventure was. She felt a low-level jealousy about it and hoped, somehow, that it was a disappointment to them both.

  “God, I’m high,” said Ash. “I don’t like the way I feel.” It took almost nothing for Ash to get too high; she weighed so little, and she felt everything strongly and immediately.

  When Ash’s pink Princess phone (“My ironic Princess phone,” she’d insisted, “bought when I was twelve, okay?”) rang just before one a.m., Ethan reached over and grabbed it. “Wolf house,” he said. “The wolves are being fed right now. We give them little bits of Red Riding Hood, lightly seasoned. May I take a message?” But then Ethan said, “Goodman? What? Jesus.” He motioned for everyone to be quiet, and when they wouldn’t, he called out for them to shut up. Jonah turned off the record player, the needle skidding to a warping stop, and they all watched Ethan, who looked stricken as he listened into the phone. “You’re not fucking with me, right?” he finally said. “I mean, is she okay? What? All right, hang on, I’ll get them.” Ethan pressed the receiver to his chest and said to Ash, “Go tell your parents to pick up the phone. Your brother’s been arrested.”

  “What?” Ash said.

  “Ash, just go tell them.”

  “But what did he do?” Her voice rose, and her hands flapped in the air.

  “Cathy said he raped her.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Go! Get your parents on the phone!” Ethan said. “This is that one phone call they give you.”

  Ash ran from the room and down the hall, tearing through the mess of adults. Soon the Wolfs were on the line, and Ethan quietly hung up Ash’s extension. “From what I could tell, they asked the cab to take them to Tavern on the Green,” Ethan explained to everyone.

  “That was the adventure?” said Jonah, agitated. “Tavern on the Green?”

  “Yeah,” said Ethan. “Apparently they wanted to see if they could sneak in to the New Year’s Eve party there and score some hors d’oeuvres and champagne. I think Cathy said it would be impossible, they’d get thrown out, and Goodman said no they wouldn’t. And I guess it was so hectic at the hostess’s station that they actually got in unnoticed. So they grabbed a couple of glasses of champagne off a tray and slipped down a hall and into a storage room. They started, you know, fooling around, Goodman said, and then something happened. He says it was a total misunderstanding. But I guess people heard Cathy screaming, and the police were there in about a second, and Cathy told them he raped her, so they arrested him. They took her to the hospital for an exam and everything.”

  “Oh my God,” said Jonah, his hands to his head. “I got them the cab.”

  “So? That’s irrelevant. It’s not your fault,” Jules said. “You didn’t know what would happen.”

  “But it is my fault,” he insisted. “And I brought the hash too. It’s way stronger than our usual shit.” He looked sear
chingly at his friends. “I drugged them both,” he said. “It’s completely my fault.”

  “Jonah,” said Ethan, “quit it right now. I don’t know why you’re being so weird. So you got them a cab. Big deal. So you brought the hash. We’ve all been getting high together since the minute we met each other. You didn’t drug anyone; what an odd way to put it. And Goodman has basically been fucked up all year. This isn’t about you or anything you did, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jonah said quietly, but he looked shaken and ill.

  “The thing is,” said Jules, and then she let her voice trail off. “Oh, nothing.”

  “You can say it,” said Ethan.

  They were each thinking as hard and fast as they could, even Jonah, who seemed to be struggling to climb out of his guilt; so Jules carefully asked, “Is there any chance? I hate to ask it, but, you know, it’s there, right?”

  Neither boy said anything, then Ethan said, “Goodman says he didn’t do anything wrong. But is he capable of it? Am I?” he added.

  They were all quiet again, stewing. “He does get into these little rages,” Jonah said. “But I always thought they were just bad moods.”

  “His hostile side is only one part of him,” said Jules. “Boy,” she added, “Ash would not like this conversation at all.” They looked toward the door nervously.

  “But what about Cathy?” Ethan said. “If it isn’t true, why would she say it? Is she really still that pissed off because he broke up with her?”

  “She did lose her shit when they broke up,” said Jonah. “But she’s the kind of girl who loses her shit a lot.”

  They all nodded. Cathy Kiplinger was the first needy girl any of them had known well. What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt that they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in—although annoyed at—their needs. Jules had never felt entitled to take nearly as much as those girls did. They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations resulted.

  I will never be in a profoundly messy situation with a boy, Jules Jacobson thought with an unaccountable little burst of despair. I will never get that kind of attention. No matter what I do, the only attention I will receive will be from faithful, dogged Ethan Figman, who will love me until the day I die, and then even afterward.