by Meg Wolitzer
“Jules, you are many things, but you are nothing like Marjorie Morningstar,” Ethan said after a moment of silence. He wasn’t being insulting, and Jules must have understood this. She wasn’t naturally headed for stardom, and never really had been, and so in all likelihood her story wouldn’t have a devastating ending.
Ash was the star; Ash would make it in acting if she wanted, though it seemed lately that she didn’t want it at all. She wanted to direct, not act, Ash had been saying to him. In particular she wanted to direct works by women, and works about women, with good female parts in them. “There’s an unbelievable imbalance out there,” Ash said. “Male playwrights and male directors rule this little duchy, and then they come in and sweep up all the prizes. I swear, if they could find a way to cast men in all the women’s roles, they would.”
“‘Tommy Tune is Golda Meir,’” Ethan had interrupted.
“Theater is definitely as macho as any other field,” said Ash. “It’s pretty much as bad as . . . wildcatting for oil. The sexism is hateful, and I want to try to change it. My mother got a great education at Smith, but she got married right away and never did anything professionally. I look at her, and think she could have been many, many things. An art historian. A museum curator. A chef! As you know, she’s an excellent cook, and an excellent mother, but she could have had a big profession too. They aren’t mutually exclusive. I almost feel like I owe it to her to do something woman-related.” Ash told Ethan that she wanted to become a feminist director. In 1984 you could describe your dream job in this way and not be made fun of. Of course the odds of success in directing were even lower than in acting—and lower for Ash because she was female—but lately she was convinced that this was what she would do with her life.
Jules, though, had fallen into theater accidentally, and she’d stayed in it maybe a little too long. College had been the last, long gasp of all that, and though in New York she’d positioned herself as one of those loopy character actors, not beautiful enough to get a lead but with a different kind of sidekick charm, she’d appreciated that there were much better people all around her. She saw them perform scenes in acting class; one of them had an amazingly elastic body, and another could do a wide array of convincing accents. Jules had also met them in waiting rooms as they all sat clutching their head shots, and she’d seen them in action during auditions. Though they too understood their lowly place in the theater hierarchy, they were competitive with one another for these small, crucial, occasionally show-stealing parts. They were good at what they did, better than she was.
“No,” Jules agreed with Ethan on the phone. “I’m no Marjorie Morningstar.”
“So what else can you imagine doing?” he asked.
“Do I have to decide now?”
“I’ll give you a few minutes,” he said. “Talk amongst yourself.”
They sat in silence, and Ethan heard her jaw crunch down on something. He wondered what it was; it made him hungry, and he stretched the phone cord so he could reach a bag of chips on the coffee table. As quietly as he could, Ethan separated the two sides of the bag; trapped air rushed out and he began to eat. Together he and Jules crunched on their chips or their whatever, unselfconscious. “What are you eating?” he finally asked.
“Is that like the platonic version of the phone question, ‘What are you wearing?’”
“Something like that.”
“Cheez-Its,” Jules said.
“Doritos,” he said. “They’re both orange,” he observed for no particular reason. “We both have orange tongues right now. They will know us by the color of our tongues.”
They crunched onward for slightly longer, like two people walking through leaves. Ash never ate snack food; her food purity was sort of astonishing. Ethan had once come upon her in their living room when she was sitting and eating a tomato that had been ripening on their windowsill—just holding it in her hand, deep in thought, casually eating it like it was a peach or a plum.
“Well,” Jules finally said. “I know this sounds lofty, but I’ve sometimes imagined doing something that deals with people who are suffering. I’m not joking, in case you think I am. When my father died, I was just so closed up about it. I never really tried to help my mother. It’s disgusting how self-involved I was.”
“You were a kid,” he reminded her. “Comes with the territory.”
“And now I’m not a kid. You know how in college I minored in psych? Freshman year, when I was so miserable, I went to university counseling and saw a really nice social worker.”
“Okay,” said Ethan. “Go on.”
“Becoming a therapist could maybe be interesting. Getting a Ph.D. and everything. But my mother can’t help out with tuition, and I’d have to pay back student loans forever.”
“Aren’t there cheaper ways? Could you become a social worker, like the one you went to? Wouldn’t it cost less that way?”
“Well, yeah, I think so. Dennis says I should look into graduate school one way or another.”
“He likes the idea of it?”
“Oh, he likes whatever I like,” said Jules. “And he’s really glad he enrolled in ultrasound technology school. Of course, his school,” she said in a dry voice, “has a great lecture series, and a wonderful lacrosse team, and an ivy-covered campus. Why, there’s even a school song.”
“Oh there is, is there?” said Ethan. “My curiosity has been roused. Tell me the school song for ultrasound technology school.”
Jules paused, thinking. “It’s by the Beatles,” she finally said.
“Okay . . .”
“‘I’m Looking Through You.’”
“Perfect,” said Ethan, appreciating her wholly, never wanting to get off this phone call.
“Seriously,” said Jules, “it was a good idea for Dennis. Before then, he didn’t know what to be, what to do. You know he got thrown off track in college when he got sick. Ultrasound isn’t something he was burning to do, but it’s good for him, it’s a relief. So, yes, he likes the idea of me going to school too. But you—I know you’ll have a strong opinion about this. Not that it’ll definitely be right.”
“My opinion is that I agree with Dennis. You’d be good at it,” Ethan said. “People would like talking to you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I like talking to you.”
Not long afterward, Jules applied to the Columbia University School of Social Work, was accepted on scholarship, and also took out student loans. She would start mid-year, and was relieved not to have to keep buying Backstage magazine every week and sitting like a stooge in a coffee shop with a yellow highlighter, imagining that she might be hired for one of these roles, when probably she never would. Acting fell away from her, along with the dream of getting so much attention—too much attention—that you could feel it collect like a fever in your head. Also, she’d had enough of working at La Bella Lanterna, where the tips were poor and she came home at the end of a workday with her hair smelling of espresso. No amount of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo could get rid of the odor. At Columbia her hair smelled neutrally sweet again and classes were going well except for statistics, which was dreadful, but she said that Dennis helped her, sitting beside her in bed reading slowly aloud to her from the incomprehensible textbook.
But for Ethan, although quitting his staff job at The Chortles was a good idea intuitively, he was now left with nothing to aim toward. He wished he could use Jules to talk to, the same way she had used him. Talking to her was different from talking to Ash, who essentially trusted his instincts and wanted him to be happy. Jules was much more critical of Ethan; she was the one who told him when something he’d come up with was a poor idea. But he would have had to say to her, “I am completely confused,” and he couldn’t do that, for Jules would see him as slightly pathetic, and he’d been trying hard to climb up out of the nether region of pathetic ever since he’d made the mistake of kissing her years earlier in the animation shed.
One a
fternoon, a few days after returning from Maui, Ethan was invited to lunch by Ash’s father. “Let’s meet at my office,” Gil Wolf said. Ethan understood that lunch would require him to wear a tie, and he felt depressed and sunk by this. Wasn’t the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn’t have to wear a tie? And why was he even going to lunch with Gil, alone? Ethan and Ash had been a couple since the summer of ’76, with only one bad stretch of breakup, which had taken place junior year in college. Ash, at Yale, had gotten drunk and slept with a boy in her dorm, or her “college,” as they pretentiously called dorms there. The boy was part Navajo, with exotic dark looks—and it had “just happened” after a party, Ash had said. Ethan had been so angry and shocked that he felt as if all his internal organs would come exploding out of him. It was a wonder that he didn’t crash his father’s noisy old car driving back down from New Haven. Ethan and Ash didn’t speak for five weeks, during which time he created an ugly, mean-spirited animated short called The Bitch, about an ant at a picnic that betrays its lover ant.
One weekend in that miserable period, feeling lower than he’d ever felt, Ethan drove up to Buffalo to see Jules, and though he was meant to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of her cinder-block dorm room, he’d ended up sitting up in bed with her for half the night while she studied for a psychology exam. He kept trying to talk to her, to distract her, and she kept shushing him and telling him he was making her tense and that she would fail her exam. “I’ll give you a back rub,” he said, and when she absently agreed, he started rubbing her shoulders, and she leaned forward to let him scoot behind her and get better access.
“That actually feels good,” Jules said. Ethan diligently rubbed in silence, and Jules finally put her book facedown in her lap and closed her eyes. His hands moved along the surface of the oversized T-shirt that she slept in, and Jules made noises of approval, which pleased Ethan considerably. His hands moved in rhythmic pulses, and Jules sighed with a pleasure that in turn felt very pleasurable to Ethan. Something seemed to have changed in the room—was he reading this right?—and his hands moved lower on her back. Somehow, one of his hands rounded the corner of her midsection, and he now felt certain that something had changed, and in absolute silence he slid his hand upward and cupped her breast, two fingers finding her nipple. Everyone and everything was shocked: Ethan, Jules, the hand, the breast, the nipple. Then Jules moved sharply away from him and his hand and demanded, “Ethan, what is wrong with you?”
“What?” he said, both crushed and pretending ignorance of what he had just done.
“Go sleep on the floor in the sleeping bag,” she said. He obeyed, crawling back inside it like an animal in a cave. “Why would you think that was okay?” Jules went on. “That’s not the way we are, you and I. And why would I possibly do anything with you—my best friend’s boyfriend?”
“I don’t know,” he said, not looking her in the eye. Because we love each other, was the true answer. Because it feels so wonderful, at least to me. Because, oh, even though I have been entwined with Ash for quite a while, when things go bad I revert to the desire I’ve always held—the desire for you—which I will hold until the day I die.
What happened in Jules’s dorm room at Buffalo would become something that neither of them spoke about for years; and then, finally, Jules brought it up once when they were alone, casually referring to the event as “the Buffalo nipple,” a name which stuck. “The Buffalo nipple” became a secret phrase that referred not only to this specific event, but to any misguided action that a person might perform in life out of longing or weakness or fear, or pretty much out of anything human.
“She’ll come back to you,” Jules said to Ethan that night in her dorm room as they lay apart. “Remember when she kicked me out of her parents’ apartment after I went to see Cathy Kiplinger at the coffee shop?”
“Yes. But Ash was the one who betrayed me here. She was the one, and now I’m waiting for her. How did that happen?”
“That’s the way it is with Ash. It’s just the way it always is.”
Ethan and Ash’s separation became unbearable to both of them. Each would call Jules and plaintively discuss the distress of being without the other. “He’s a part of me,” said Ash, “and I somehow momentarily forgot that, and now I just can’t bear not having him here. It’s almost like I had to sleep with someone else in order to see how much I need him.” All Ethan kept saying to Jules was, “I can’t take this anymore. I mean, I just cannot take this, Jules. You’re minoring in psychology. Explain girls to me. Tell me everything I need to know, because I feel like I know nothing.”
Eventually, though, the couple rushed back together, sealing themselves to each other once again. Ash never heard about the Buffalo nipple, and there was no reason that she ever should. Now Ethan and Ash had been living together since college, on East 7th Street, right off Avenue A, a street fully staffed by junkies and dealers. “I don’t like this one bit,” Gil Wolf said when he and Betsy visited; they promptly called a locksmith and paid for the most expensive titanium lock available.
Ash and Ethan were both twenty-three years old when her father invited Ethan to his office, a perfectly reasonable age to cohabitate and not yet have to turn an eye toward marriage. Ethan was concerned that somehow Gil was going to ask him about whether he had any plans in that direction. But Gil did not want to talk about marriage, or about Ash at all. It seemed that he was simply concerned about Ethan having quit his job at The Chortles. Gil seemed only to want to offer himself up as a father figure, knowing that Ethan’s own bitter, self-absorbed, and irresponsible father was useless. Ethan wore a brown skinny tie and a brown jacket that pulled at the sleeves; his hair was freshly moussed. He sat in a brushed steel and distressed leather chair across the desk from Ash’s father at the lower Lexington Avenue offices of what was now called Drexel Burnham Lambert. Outside the window the sky looked smeared with clouds, and the city, seen from here, was not quite recognizable, just as Ethan felt not quite recognizable.
“So what do you think you’ll do next?” Gil Wolf asked. On his desk was one of those executive ball-clickers, a Newton’s cradle, and it was all Ethan could do to keep himself from reaching out and playing with it, but he knew to keep his hands to himself.
“Haven’t a clue, Gil,” said Ethan. He smiled apologetically, as if the sentiment might be offensive to a man in finance. The men in this place all knew what to do next. The offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1982 were as revved up as a racetrack. Everyone here wanted to make money, and they knew how to do it too. Ethan was out of place in the world of investment banking. Today, before coming upstairs, he’d been given an adhesive visitor’s badge, and he stuck it on his lapel before entering the elevator, feeling as if instead of VISITOR it said DISPLACED PERSON. Yet he couldn’t deny the tang of being here, the chemical surge he felt when Gil’s assistant came to fetch him from the waiting area upstairs.
“Mr. Figman?” the young guy had said. “I’m Donny. This way.”
Donny was only slightly older than Ethan, in a conservative dark suit and starched shirt. No art school for him! Instead, he’d gone to business school. The environment here was perplexingly appealing to Ethan, who had rarely thought about money before. His father’s salary as a public defender had paid for their cramped and rent-controlled apartment off Washington Square. His mother was a substitute teacher, though she wasn’t very patient with children. In fact, she was a screamer. In the summers there had been just enough money to send Ethan to camp, and then he’d attended the School of Visual Arts on a free ride. In his childhood his parents often fought about money, but they fought about everything else too, and he’d grown up believing that the only thing that mattered, the only thing that would save you from the potential hellishness of your domestic life, was doing what you love. What was better than that?
But maybe the men at Drexel Burnham did what they loved too. Certainly they seemed engaged, and every open office door revealed someone,
usually a man, deep in conversation with another man, or on the phone. Ethan followed Donny through the corridors, taking in all the chatter and hum. And now, in the serenity of Ash’s father’s office, he could have lain down on the cold leather sofa and slept for a few hours. He’d always known the Wolfs were rich, but he’d never before seen where much of their money actually was made, nor had it occurred to him to be particularly curious about how it was made. Gil Wolf was primarily the father of Ethan’s girlfriend, but here in this world he had a different role, one that was assertive and even refreshing.
“You have no clue what you want to do next? I find that hard to believe,” said Gil kindly, then he was the one to reach out a hand and lift one of the steel spheres hanging from strings on the Newton’s cradle. The ball went click! and it struck the others and knocked the last ball out of place, and both men impassively watched the little display of the laws of physics.
“I think I was spoiled by Spirit-in-the-Woods,” Ethan said. “You were allowed to really be expressive and imaginative there. Working on the show was nothing like that; there was a vision that you had to adhere to. I think I need to get out of animation and do something where I don’t have to feel resentful.”
“Here’s the thing,” said Ash’s father, and now he stopped fiddling with the toy and laced his hands together and looked directly at Ethan. “I completely believe in you. And I’m not the only one who does.”