The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  “You have no way of knowing where she’ll be professionally in a few years,” said Dennis.

  “I do know.” It was as though Jules possessed a new clarity she’d lacked until now. She understood that it had never just been about talent; it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father hadn’t encouraged and advised him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one had said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn’t have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

  “I feel horrible saying this,” Jules said to Dennis. “I love her and she’s my best friend and she’s very dedicated, and she does the reading and puts in the time, and she’s legitimately interested in the feminist aspect. But isn’t it true that there are a lot of other people who are talented at the same exact level, and they’re all slaving away? She’s got some good ideas. But is she great at directing? Is she the theatrical equivalent of Ethan? No! Oh, God will strike me dead right now.”

  Dennis looked at her and said, “Your nonexistent God, Ms. Atheist Jew? I doubt it.” He walked into the kitchen, and she followed him. The sink was piled high with plates from last night’s Chinese takeout, and Dennis wordlessly poured yellow liquid soap over the whole mess, and picked up a ragged sponge. He was now apparently going to hand wash all their dishes and stuff them precariously into the drying rack, performing a task that would further illustrate the disparity between them and Ethan and Ash. Jules wondered if Dennis was doing this on purpose.

  “Ash doesn’t have greatness, I don’t think,” Jules said over the water. “And she might not even need it. I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, then connections.”

  “You’re just realizing this now?” Dennis asked. “Haven’t you been seeing examples of it everywhere in the world?”

  “I’m a slow learner.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I bet she’s even going to have her own theater in a few years, devoted to promoting the work of women,” said Jules. “The Ash Wolf Athenaeum.”

  “Her own theater? You’re a demented individual,” said Dennis. “Here, dry some of these. There’s no room to put them all on the rack.” He held a plate out to her and she took it and grabbed a dish towel, which felt slightly grimy, almost oily. If she dried the plate with this, they would find themselves trapped in not quite cleanliness. Suddenly she wanted to cry.

  “Dennis,” said Jules. “Let’s leave these dishes and just go out somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s just go out walking or something. Let’s do one of those New York things that are free and that make you happy when you’re feeling discouraged.”

  Dennis studied her, his arms deep in the sink, and then slowly he lifted them out, dripping, and unstopped the drain. Water was pulled out with an obscene slurp, and Dennis wiped his hands on the sides of his pants and came forward to collect Jules against him. He smelled of lemon Dawn, and she probably smelled of whatever chemical was released when you became bitter. “Don’t be discouraged,” he said. “We have a lot of good things. We’re here in our little love nest. Okay, our crappy little love nest. But we’re here.” It touched her that he’d said this. “You are unbelievably nice to me, even when I’m like this. It’s just very hard for me,” she told him, “when I realize we’re at such a different place from them. I knew I wasn’t going to make it in acting, finally. I knew I had to stop trying out for all those plays. It wasn’t just what Yvonne said to me. I wasn’t supposed to be an actor in the first place. Acting, being funny, was my way into the world. And then I had to give it up. But it’s different for Ash. I feel that she and Ethan are bulletproof; him because he’s so talented and so huge. And her because she’s with him. And for us to think that somehow what we’re left with is enough—well, as of today, I know it isn’t.”

  Dennis’s face shifted as he regarded her; the sympathy he’d shown her was retreating. He was tired of her again; it went in waves. “I thought you were winding down,” he said. “And I thought, good, because I’ve kind of had enough of this. But now here you are winding up again.”

  “Not on purpose,” she said.

  “I just don’t have the energy for this, Jules, I really don’t. You basically expect me to be this unchanging and totally understanding person, while you have your little fits every once in a while, and then I soothe you. Is that the way it’s always going to work between us? Does that sound happy to you? I don’t think I signed up for that.”

  “But the situation has changed,” she said. “You ‘signed up’ for something that’s a little different now. That’s what happens. Things shift.”

  “No, ‘things’ haven’t shifted; you’ve shifted them,” said Dennis. “You actually want me to comfort you while you’re the one basically coming in here and messing everything up. I cannot comfort you on this. I like our life. Is that such a fucking crime? I like our life, regardless of what goes on around us, but you apparently don’t.” His usually low scrape of a voice had been tightened, and had become unpleasant. This was Dennis angry, which she had rarely seen, or at least she’d rarely seen the anger directed toward her for any length of time. Once, after he’d spotted a mouse in their kitchen and had tried to kill it with a spatula, the only implement within reach, he’d been in a fury, which they’d both admitted later had had a comical edge. But this didn’t.

  “That is not true!” she said.

  “Maybe this whole thing,” he went on, his voice unchanged, “is all a secret way for you to tell me you feel really cheated because I don’t make a fortune too.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “That you wish I was someone else, so you could be someone else.”

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  “Because that’s the way I’m starting to hear it,” said Dennis.

  “It isn’t true,” said Jules. “I’m sorry,” she said, with feeling. “I know I should stop talking about this, I know it’s unhealthy.” Please stop being angry at me, she wanted to say. That was what seemed to matter now.

  “Yes,” said Dennis. “That’s exactly what it is. It’s very, very unhealthy. You should think about it, Jules. Think about what these unhealthy comments do to us. They create this environment of unhealthiness. Of disease.”

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I’m happy with you,” she said. “I really am. I don’t suddenly think that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between money and happiness. When we fell in love, it had nothing to do with whether I thought we’d have some luxurious life. It never occurred to me to think about that. I’m not shallow, you know.”

  The phone rang exactly then and Jules was relieved to answer it. This was how their arguments had ended a few times; someone called on the phone, and by the time the conversation was over, the imperative to argue had virtually disappeared. But it was Ash on the phone now, wanting to know if they could all have dinner that night. A new Asian fusion place had opened, she said, and the spring rolls with glass noodles inside were amazing. Ash sounded the way Ash always sounded—enthusiastic, warm—and Ethan was talking in the background, saying that Ash should tell Jules that she and Dennis had to come; the food would not taste good without them there.

  Ash asked her, “Will you come?”

  Jules pressed the phone against her chest and looked at Dennis. “They want to know, will we come?”

  He shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  So they went. The food was good and their friends were the same as ever. They did not appear different, or richer, or as if they lived in another world. But when the bill came, Ethan
reached for it, and Jules and Dennis made an attempt to reach for it too, or at the very least to split it, yet in the end they let him get it. And so, quietly but noticeably, a new part of their lives began. From that night on, Ethan paid for almost all dinners and vacations.

  • • •

  The first trip they took together was to Tanzania, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in July 1987. Jonah and Robert Takahashi, whose relationship was now serious, came too. Ethan, though he’d been on some expensive vacations since becoming successful, did not love travel, and paid very little attention to it. “We didn’t go on a lot of family vacations when I was growing up,” he said. “The swankiest place my parents ever took me was the Pennsylvania Dutch country. We looked at people in old-fashioned clothes on horse and buggy, and my mother took pictures with her Polaroid Swinger, even though she wasn’t supposed to, and an Amish guy yelled at her, and my parents had a huge fight about it—so what else is new? Then we bought a hex sign and some weird kind of fudge called penuche—that name embarrassed me, it was like ‘penis’—and went home.” Now, though, Ethan had asked his assistant if she would mind terribly finding a trip for the three couples during a week later on in the year when Figland was on hiatus; he wanted a trip that was “outside my comfort zone,” as he put it. “Even asking my assistant such a question is outside my comfort zone,” Ethan said. “Even having an assistant is outside my comfort zone.” The assistant, having read Hemingway in college, suggested Kilimanjaro. The price of the trip seemed exorbitant, and this made Ethan anxious, but Ash reminded him, “You’re twenty-eight years old and independently wealthy. You have to get used to it and live accordingly. It actually isn’t particularly flattering for you to whine and complain about your good fortune. I don’t know who that helps. You’re not your crazy, screaming, financially erratic parents’ little kid anymore. You can actually go new places and try new things. And you can spend money; it’s okay, it really is.”

  The assistant had booked them all on a climb with one of the top-of-the-line mountaineering outfits. After a couple of months walking up flights of stairs carrying heavy packs, and going on hikes whenever possible, in preparation for the trip, the three couples gathered with the other climbers in a lounge in a hotel in Arusha, where they were asked by the guides to take out their gear for inspection. Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert unzipped their bags and pulled out all the various, slightly alien items they’d had to buy at a camping-goods store downtown. Dampness-wicking underwear, a sleeping pad. “The salesman told me that wicking meant that the dampness is drawn away, but why does dampness need its own verb?” Jonah asked the group, but Jules was distracted by Ethan and Ash, who were crouched over their own gear, studying it as if they’d never seen it before. She realized that in fact they had never seen it before; someone else had done both their shopping and packing for this trip.

  Further vacations taken by the two couples, and only occasionally also with Jonah and Robert, were carefully planned around the production schedule of Figland, and brought out other small revelations. On a trip to Paris, Ethan wanted to buy a surprise gift for Ash, “some kind of scarfy thing,” he’d said, and so Jules went with him, going off together on the pretext of getting croque monsieurs, which seemed legitimate, because what had interested the two of them most on this trip was the food. In a gleaming boutique on the rue de Sèvres, Jules said, “I want to ask you something that will sound very unsophisticated, but I’m going to ask it anyway. How do you know how to behave rich? Does the knowledge sort of arrive with the money? Or is it the kind of thing you learn on the job?” Ethan looked at her, surprised, and said you don’t know, you just wing it. He appeared displeased at the question, or at his own answer, as if it had forced him to acknowledge how his life was turning—the way a ship of state turns, slow and incremental, with great, violent, unseen convulsions underneath.

  But then, over time, Jules noticed that Ethan seemed to be winging it less. He dressed better, and he actually seemed to know about wines when the list was handed to him in a restaurant in Madrid. When had he learned about wines? He hadn’t told her about his new knowledge. Had a wine tutor come in at night and given him lessons? She couldn’t ask him any longer. Ethan wasn’t a rube, but was polite and modest and gracious. He had become more comfortable around money than Jules had ever imagined he would be, and she realized this disappointed her.

  Their lives were dividing further; even finding time to get away with Ethan and Ash was difficult for her and Dennis. Clinical social workers—particularly ones with a fledgling part-time practice, as Jules now had—and ultrasound technicians usually had very little vacation time; Ethan, as frantic as he was with his complicated, overburdened schedule, and Ash, far less frantic, sometimes ended up needing to be the flexible ones.

  One morning on a five-day vacation the two couples took to Venice in 1988, having been flown there by company jet, which was now a fairly frequent occurrence, Jules Jacobson, twenty-nine years old, lying in bed with Dennis, opened an eye and coolly looked around the room. This was not the way anyone else she knew traveled. Her small group of friends from social work school told one another about their vacations, recommending an all-inclusive cheap package deal to Jamaica or a great price on a hotel room in San Francisco. This hotel in Venice was the kind of place where wealthy, old-money European families stayed—“where the von Trapps might have stayed, had they traveled other than to escape the Nazis,” Jules wrote in a postcard to Jonah. “Help, Jonah, help!” she added at the bottom. “My values are being kidnapped!” The hotel did not feel age appropriate at all. A small slice of canal was in view out the wavy-glassed window; a fruit and cheese plate from the night before was wilting on a tray; the ceilings were coffered; and Dennis lay asleep with his head on one of the long, scrolled pillows.

  By now, Figland had been sold all over Europe and in the UK, and Ethan was conducting TV business here. Dennis and Jules stayed in Venice while Ethan went for a short trip to Rome. Ash had decided that while he was in Rome she would take a flight to Norway to “have a look around,” as she said, since she was hoping to direct Ibsen’s Ghosts at the small Open Hand Theater in the East Village; she’d been strongly campaigning to be hired, and was waiting for their decision. It was true that Ash was going to have a look around Norway, but Jules also knew that she would be with Goodman during the trip. Ash hadn’t seen him in a while. Iceland was just over two hours by plane from Norway, and everyone on this vacation other than Ethan understood that Goodman would be joining his sister.

  Ash, as her late twenties pressed on, tried to visit Goodman whenever she could, though often the visits seemed to Jules nervy and reckless. As a teenager it had been difficult enough for Ash to keep up a clandestine long-distance relationship with her fugitive brother, and then in her early twenties, living with Ethan had made it even harder. But after Ethan became so successful there was a little more latitude for Ash to be in touch with Goodman and see him sometimes when she traveled. Still, it was always a complicated and anxious proposition. Once in a while, every few weeks or so, when Jules and Ash were alone Jules might suddenly ask, “Anything new with your brother?”

  Ash’s face would turn excited and she would say something like, “He’s doing okay, he really is. Working part-time as an assistant to an architect, actually. Well, not really as an assistant, more like running complicated errands, but he feels he might get more responsibility soon, and even be allowed to do some drafting. He just likes hanging around that world. And he’s still trying to get construction jobs.”

  Once, nearly a year before Norway, Ash had told Jules that her parents had been to see Goodman, and that he’d seemed “unwell.” What did that mean? Jules asked. Oh, said Ash, it meant that Goodman had been staying out all night in Reykjavik’s drinking, drugging scene, and had started showing up for his construction job late and had been fired. Frustrated and idle, he’d spent his parents’ money on cocaine, then confessed the whole thing to them in an emotional phone call. After a month
spent in a no-nonsense Icelandic rehab, Goodman returned to his flat over a fish store in the center of town. He hadn’t lived with Gudrun and Falkor for some years; they had their own child now, a daughter, and had needed Goodman’s room as a nursery. Eventually they moved somewhere much better, for Gudrun had rapidly built a very successful career as a textile designer; the money the Wolfs had sent all those years had allowed her to perfect her craft. It was amazing to realize that there were so many worlds within worlds, little subcultures that you might know nothing about, in which someone’s art could make them stand out. Though it was wonderful, certainly, it also seemed like a punch line to say that Gudrun Sigurdsdottir was apparently a superstar in the world of Icelandic handicrafts.

  Keep what we’ve told you to yourself, the Wolf family had commanded Jules originally in the summer of 1977, and like the cow-eyed girl she was and would maybe always be—the funny but obedient one, the dope, the dupe—she’d obeyed them for years without much difficulty. The family’s belief in Goodman’s innocence was an organizing principle, and their belief became interchangeable with her own. Only later was it striking to Jules how she’d allowed herself to stay in this haze of certainty that wasn’t certainty, a state that could easily occur if you’d been thrust into it when you were young. In social work school, an old female professor in a cardigan with a balled tissue forming a lump beneath the sleeve spoke about the way people could often “know without knowing.”

  For the first few years after Goodman had run off, Jules had had no one to talk to about the situation, other than Ash. She’d never said a word to Jonah. But then, starting in the early weeks of 1982, she had Dennis. Jules told Dennis everything important, and finally, only a couple of months into their relationship, when they were joined in a way that seemed to her permanent, this included telling him about the Wolf family’s ongoing secret support of their son. Of course he was shocked. “They just send him money?” he said. “They know where he is and they never told the police? Whoa, unbelievable. Unbelievably arrogant.”