The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  “I think most parents would do that for their son if they were sure he was innocent,” Jules said, but she was only repeating something Ash had once said.

  “Why were they so sure?”

  “Well, because they know him,” Jules said.

  “Still,” Dennis said, “didn’t you ever think about, you know, turning him in yourself?”

  “Oh, well, vaguely,” she said. “But I just never wanted to get involved in that way. It’s not my place.”

  “I can understand that,” said Dennis. “There was a family in my old building, right upstairs from Isadora. The mother verbally abused her five-year-old, calling her a worthless piece of shit and other terrible names. Finally someone in the building called Child Protective Services, and the girl was taken away from her mother, who she apparently loved despite everything. And then Isadora told me she’d heard that the girl was sent to foster care, where she was molested by a much older foster brother. So you never know what you’re setting in motion. Though I have to say,” Dennis said, “it’s still wild that the Wolfs did this. That they do it. But what’s really wild is that they keep it from Ethan. That Ash does. I mean, whoa.” He shook his head at the nerve of it all, the entitlement. He was not under the influence of that family.

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” Jules said. “But I had to. I’m never going to tell Ash that I did, so you can never ever mention it to her in any way. Seriously, even if you and I break up one day and you hate me for the rest of your life, you can never tell anyone about Goodman, okay?” She realized that she sounded the way Gil Wolf had originally sounded when he had spoken so sternly, almost threateningly, that night in the Café Benedikt. “I can’t even believe I told you, Dennis,” Jules went on. “What does it mean that I needed to tell you?”

  He smiled happily. “It means something big!”

  “Yes, I guess it does,” she said. “But you could call the police right now and have Goodman arrested. And the entire Wolf family too, probably.”

  “And you,” Dennis added. “Time to get a lawyer.” They were both silent; he’d gone too far. “I was kidding,” he quickly said. “I would never do that to you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t.”

  “I just love you,” Dennis said. “And now that you’ve told me this, I even love you more.”

  “But why?” she asked. “What does it have to do with anything?”

  “Because we’re still pretty new to each other, like two months’ new, and even so, you told me this thing. I am awed by it. It’s like . . . a declaration. I feel sorry for Ethan, though,” Dennis went on, thoughtfully. “He’s the genius, but he doesn’t even know this basic, major fact about his girlfriend and her family. I don’t like the Wolfs,” he added. “I like Ash, of course, she’s a good friend to you and everything, but I don’t like her and her family as a thing. A unit.”

  “You don’t have to like them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Dennis had never been seduced into anything by anyone other than Jules. He was grateful to have been folded into her life, and as far as he could see, the backstory of Goodman Wolf, someone he’d never met, had nothing much to do with anything anymore. Now, in Europe in 1988, Ash hadn’t entirely lied to Ethan about where she would be for the next two days in Norway; she’d only omitted key parts of her plans. It was true that she was staying at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. While Ash was in Oslo and Ethan was in Rome, Dennis and Jules spent the weekend by themselves in Venice. But she felt uneasy on her own with Dennis in this unnervingly expensive hotel room. She placed a hand on Dennis’s arm as he lay beside her in the bed, though he was still asleep. “Dennis,” she said. “Dennis.”

  “What?” He opened his eyes and came closer to her, and she smelled his breath, which was strong but not bad. Oaky. Cork breath, from last night’s drinking. He was hardly awake, but he instinctively moved on top of her, and she felt the automaticity of his a.m. erection, for which she didn’t take any credit. He arranged himself, and though she’d only been self-conscious about the lavish surroundings and obscurely worried and had wanted just to talk to him about anything at all, this was as good or maybe better. Sex in an Italian hotel room had a specific effect on Americans: it made them feel Italian. Dennis at twenty-nine almost looked Italian, with his now slightly heavier-set, shadowed face and dark eyes, and the scramble of chest, underarm, and pubic hair. One of the scroll pillows dropped to the floor, heavy as an anchor. Half asleep, Dennis lifted Jules up as if she were weightless and planted her on top of him, but she reached down with both hands, not wanting this to turn into a moment when the positioning was wrong, and the woman had to make adjustments while the man looked away discreetly or else watched openly. Making sure a penis was inside you correctly so that it wouldn’t hurt when it pushed in was like the moment in a car when you struggled to connect the metal part at the end of the seat belt into its little groove. You waited for the click of a seat belt, just as here, in an Italian hotel bed, you waited for a different kind of click that came from interior mysteries. There was only a momentary resistance, and then none at all, and finally you were absurdly happy at how it had worked out, as though in arranging a penis inside your body, you had done something important, like successfully completing the critical repair of a space shuttle.

  Below her in the hotel bed, Dennis closed his eyes, and his mouth hung open a little, the tongue slightly revealed. She thought of Ash and Goodman in separate beds in adjoining hotel rooms elsewhere on the continent, and then she thought of how, in the living room of the Wolfs’ apartment in the Labyrinth, Jules had once kissed Goodman, her own tongue seeking his and finding it, until he got bored and shut the kiss down. She leaned down now, her mouth covering Dennis’s, and he responded without mockery or ennui, and instead with his full self, the oaky, tannic mouth, half-closed eyes, and the unshowered body with its pheromones that drew her toward him even though the appeal could never fully be explained.

  Afterward, they had breakfast downstairs, one of those strange European hotel breakfasts that feature hard-boiled eggs and Weetabix, and then, right between the two, as if it were perfectly normal, organ meats. In the Babel of the breakfast room, she and Dennis sat at a table among Spaniards and Germans. Jules said to Dennis, “I wonder what Goodman looks like. He’s thirty now. Jesus, Goodman at thirty! It’s really hard to picture.”

  “Well, I’ve obviously never met him, but he’s probably a lot more weather-beaten,” Dennis said. “Isn’t that what happens to people who smoke and drink and do drugs? It beats up their skin so it looks like—what’s that called?—distressed leather.”

  She imagined Goodman lined and weathered and distressed, sprawled across one of the two double beds in his room at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. His long body took up the whole bed, and his sister lay on the other bed, both of them smoking and laughing. Ash would be so relieved to be with him again, to have a chance to check in on him and see that he was at least broadly okay, and hear his drawn-out, sardonic voice, and gaze at the face that had once hewed close to hers. The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.

  My little sister, let me in.

  Jules and Dennis took a high-speed train back to Rome to meet up with Ethan and Ash. On the last night of the vacation, the two couples had dinner near the Piazza del Popolo, during which they compared notes. Ethan described the meetings he’d had with the executives from the Italian public broadcasting service Rai, which took place over multicourse meals and a parade of wines that roiled inside him as he and the Rai people stayed out until two a.m., celebrating the continued Italian ratings success of Figland, which was known here as Mondo Fig!

  Jules and Dennis described their lazy weekend in Venice. “Dennis in Venice,” said Ethan. “A new comic strip.” They talked about the walks they’d taken through drizzly, impossible little street
s.

  “How was Oslo?” Ethan asked Ash.

  “I like it there,” Ash said, shrugging lightly. “I just wandered around, imagining the atmosphere of the play.”

  Jules had to remember: Oh right, Ibsen, the putative reason Ash had gone to Oslo. Ibsen’s Ghosts. Women briefly walking across the stage bare-breasted, in this version the nipples painted in Day-Glo colors, which would provide a strong effect with the lights down. Was Ash having a little fun, choosing that particular title? Goodman had slipped over into the land of the ghosts by now, twelve years after he’d run away from New York and the U.S. and his trial, but he was intermittently revivable, shuttling back and forth between ghost and living human. His mother sent him care packages, the way she used to do at Spirit-in-the-Woods, but instead of 6-12 insect repellent and cheese in a can she sent him protein powder and amber bottles of vitamins. Ash sent her brother books, recalling the tastes he’d had as an adolescent, and extrapolating from them into adulthood. She sent him a recent Günter Grass, and Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, and a novel by a young genius named David Foster Wallace called The Broom of the System. She once threw in her favorite book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, with a note saying that this book was relevant to her life, not his, but she thought maybe he would find it interesting anyway, given that they’d had the same parents. Goodman read everything his sister sent, and dutifully mixed the protein powder into his skyr and swallowed his mother’s vitamins, and he found construction jobs when he could—the job helping out in that architect’s office hadn’t worked out—though he had back problems now and was sometimes incapacitated for weeks. He smoked pot most evenings and some mornings, and he retained an intermittent interest in cocaine, requiring another stay in rehab.

  “Here’s to our vacation, and to Mondo Fig! and to your generosity, as always,” Dennis said at dinner, raising his glass the way, in recent years, he and Jules had learned to do. Once you started toasting people, you had made the complete transition to full-throttle adulthood.

  After the long flight back from Rome, a car dropped Jules and Dennis in front of their building on West 84th Street. Ethan and Ash took a separate car; he had to race off to the studio immediately, and didn’t even have time to go home. Everyone at the show was waiting for him, he said, as they always seemed to be. Standing before their narrow tenement, Jules and Dennis both looked upward and made a face at the same moment, then laughed. There were no bellmen to carry their suitcases, no sherpas. No trays of fruit and cheese awaited them upstairs, no robes. They wedged their suitcases through the narrow vestibule, and angled them carefully in order to drag them up the four flights of stairs, hearts thudding hard. In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.

  Now there would be no vacations for a long while. Both of them had used up their vacation days. In time, Jules began to build up her private practice and ease out of working at the hospital. All her clients were low fee at first. An obese man wept about his wife leaving him; a teenaged boy only wanted to talk about Sid Vicious. It was like opening a novel whenever a new client walked in, Jules told Ash. She was never bored seeing people in therapy, even if she feared that her own powers to help them were small, tentative. Ash and Jules discussed their work all the time—Ash’s fears and excitement about actually getting to direct her first full production at Open Hand, and Jules’s interest in and worry about her clients, and her worry about her own abilities. “What if I say the wrong thing to them?” she said. “What if I give them bad advice and something goes wrong?” Ash told her she was sure Jules was a good therapist and wouldn’t do anything dreadful. “I remember when I came and sat on your bed at camp,” Ash said. “I can’t explain it, but it was just such a relief. I bet they feel that way.”

  But also, at the same time their careers were really taking form, both women began to talk about having children. It wasn’t the right moment yet—Dennis was working long hours at MetroCare, the clinic on the Upper West Side where he’d been employed since leaving ultrasound school—but maybe in a year? Sometimes Jules and Ash shared a fantasy of having children within months of each other so that they could be mothers together, and their kids could be friends—best friends. Maybe both kids could attend Spirit-in-the-Woods!

  For now, no one wanted to disrupt the way life was being lived, the opening of this new era, in which everyone was given a chance to vaguely start to catch up with Ethan. No, not catch up exactly, Jonah said; they could never do that. “I don’t even care about catching up, personally,” Jonah went on. “I grew up around really successful people, famous people. None of it impresses me. I don’t want any of it for myself. I’d just like to enjoy what I do for a living more. To actually look forward to going in each day. I keep waiting for that to happen, but it doesn’t.”

  Ash liked her own work now. Ibsen’s Ghosts opened for a short run at the Open Hand Theater in the fall of 1989. Jules went with Ash to a rehearsal and saw that everything Ash had learned in the theater at Spirit-in-the-Woods had reappeared here, in adult, substantial form. The production she directed was well researched, earnest, and ambitious. It wasn’t witty, because Ash wasn’t particularly witty, but it was smart and careful, clever with its background use of women’s bodies. The Day-Glo nipples were a hit. Ghosts wasn’t some vanity production that Ethan’s wealth and success had made possible. You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

  This wasn’t that. On the opening night of Ash’s play in September, the second-string reviewer from the New York Times came to see it. In a small but positive review, the production was praised for its “fidelity,” “verve,” and its “thoughtful look at nineteenth-century morality, with a compelling emphasis on the meanings of femaleness. The reviewer wrote, “That Ms. Wolf is the wife of Ethan Figman, the creator of Figland, should be of no consequence. But it reminds us that this handsome production—with its colorful, startling anatomical flourishes—is anything but a cartoon.” The run was extended; Open Hand hadn’t gotten a reviewer from the Times to come to one of their plays in a long time, and nothing they’d produced had ever received such an important and positive review, and they giddily asked Ash what she was interested in directing next. Did she want to write something for them too? She could be their resident feminist playwright and director. Men still dominated the theater, and Open Hand said it was committed to changing that; Ash could make a difference.

  A celebration dinner in honor of Ash was quickly arranged by Ethan, who invited Jules, Dennis, Jonah, and Robert. They gathered at Sand, a tiny East Village restaurant that had also recently ascended after its own positive review in the Times. The restaurant was a skinny room with sand on the floor that crunched when you moved your chair or your feet. With sand beneath their shoes and complex tastes popping in their mouths, they ate their expensive, fussy-looking, last-days-of-the-eighties drizzled-plate dinner and talked about what was next for Ash. “I told her she should definitely take them up on their offer and write something original,” said Ethan. “She can be a double threat. Hey,” he said, turning to his wife with a droll face, “why not revive Both Ends?”

  Everyone laughed, and Robert Takahashi asked what Both Ends was, and said it sounded like the name of a gay S&M play. Jonah had to explain to Robert that Both Ends was a one-woman show about Edna St. Vincent Millay that Ash had written when she was in high school. “A terrible one-woman show,” said Ash. “With, apparently, an unfortunate name. And these guys had
to see multiple performances of it.” She turned to them and said, “I’m so sorry. If I could give you those hours back, I would.”

  “Do the opening scene,” said Robert.

  “I can’t, it’s too awful, Robert,” Ash said. “I finally get that, though it took me a long time. My parents said everything I did was wonderful.”

  “Come on,” Robert said. “I have to see it.” He smiled charmingly at her; he and Jonah were so good-looking individually and together that Jules sometimes just surreptitiously looked at them for a while when they all got together for a big dinner.

  Ash said, “Okay. So I’m Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I come out onstage by myself in a nightgown, carrying a candle. Otherwise the stage is completely dark. I stand in the middle and I say, ‘My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh my, friends— / It gives a lovely light!’ Then I step forward to the edge of the stage and I kind of beckon to the audience. I say to them, ‘While my candle stays lit, won’t you sit and listen? We’ll talk until the light dies away.’”

  Everyone laughed, including Ash. “You said that?” said Robert. “You actually said that without cracking up? I wish I’d been there for it.”

  “I wish you had too,” said Jonah.

  “Dennis,” said Robert, “you and I came in to the story way late. We were supposed to have been here long ago. Look at what we missed. Both Ends.”