The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  Jules, who knew she ought to look away now, that it was indecent not to, found herself unable to do that, and she turned her rubbernecking attention to the sister who was softly speaking. Jules stared at her, and as she did, the woman’s face seemed to reveal its younger self, and Jules thought, I know you. This was another so-called sighting. She stood up and confidently said, “Jane!”

  The woman looked across the aisle at her, at once smiling and amused. “Jules!” Jane Zell, Jules’s former teepeemate from Spirit-in-the-Woods, stood too, and they hugged each other. Jules suddenly remembered a late-night teepee conversation during which Jane had discussed her twin sister, who she’d said had a neurological disorder that caused her to hit herself for no apparent reason. “This is my sister Nina,” Jane said, and Jules said hello.

  As Jules and Jane spoke, Nina continued her self-savaging. But Jane was used to it, and seemed composed and undistracted as she recounted for Jules what had happened in her life over the past thirty-plus years. “I work for a foundation in Boston that gives grants to orchestras,” Jane said. “My husband’s an oboist. I gave up music myself—I was good but not that good—but I knew I still needed to be around the arts. I’m in New York this weekend for a conference, and to visit Nina.” Jane Zell at fifty-one had a brightness to her face that she’d always had; it was a relief to see that it hadn’t disappeared.

  “Are you in touch with anyone?” Jules asked.

  “Nancy Mangiari, once in a while. Are you and Ash still friends?” said Jane.

  “Oh yes.” She felt a flood of pride as she said it.

  “It’s amazing about Ethan,” Jane said. Nina suddenly smacked herself with even more ferocity, pow, pow, pow, and Jane leaned down and said a few words, then returned to the conversation. “You know who I ran into in Boston last week?” said Jane. “Manny and Edie.”

  “Really? We’ve totally been out of touch,” said Jules. “Once, after I got married, my husband and I were in New England in the summer and we stopped by, but that was the last time I saw them. I always had a fantasy that when my daughter was a teenager she’d go to Spirit-in-the-Woods. But when she was fifteen she wanted to go to wilderness camp. And Ash’s daughter always traveled with her parents in the summer—going to other continents, helping with the school that Ethan started.”

  “Edie looks the same, mostly,” said Jane. “Pretty solid, like always. Manny is basically blind, which is sad. The camp still runs, but they said it’s been limping along, and that they’re looking for someone new to run it next summer.”

  Jane Zell and her sister Nina were planning to get off at the next stop, but before they did there was a sentimental embrace between the old friends, and Nina slapped herself a couple more times, and then Jules and the whole bus watched as the sisters stepped out onto Broadway. Jules closed her eyes for the final couple of stops during the slow ride in morning traffic, but the conversation with Jane had made her start to buzz and fizz. She was in her teepee; she was in the theater; she was in the dining hall, where the meal was green lasagna and a salad topped with tangled sprouts. She was sitting on the hill listening to Susannah Bay sing; she was in the animation shed, receiving the surprising pressure of Ethan Figman’s mouth; she was in Boys’ Teepee 3, smoking a damp joint and looking at Goodman Wolf’s hairy golden legs as they hung down from an upper bunk. She was putting on a refugee’s accent in Improv class; she was sitting on her narrow bed at night talking to Ash; and oh she was happy.

  • • •

  Listen, there’s something we need to discuss today,” Jules said to her client Janice Kling late one Thursday afternoon. Nearly a month had passed since she’d run into Jane Zell on the bus, and in that time Jules had behaved like someone in a trance, following orders from an obscure source. From the moment she’d found a chance to get back to Spirit-in-the-Woods—that place where her life had opened and spilled and thrust her to the ground, delirious and changed—she’d moved fast. After the idea of applying for the job had occurred to her, she’d gone to Dennis and he’d laughed indulgently, thinking she wasn’t serious. They discussed it for three days before she even called Manny and Edie. By the end of those three days, Dennis had been talked into considering it.

  A few other applicants were also sentimental Spirit-in-the-Woods alumni. At the interview, held in a midtown hotel room, the Wunderlichs looked extremely old to Jules, but then again they always had, even in 1974. Edie was still thickly built and bossy, and Manny was grandfatherly, with white eyebrows that sprang out like branches you had to swerve away from. Jules felt breathless in the Wunderlichs’ presence, just hearing their familiar voices talk about this person and that one from the past.

  After all the reminiscing, throughout which Dennis politely listened, certainly bored, they began discussing what the job would entail, and what the challenges were. The interview lasted an hour, and it ended with effusive hugs from the Wunderlichs, which seemed like a good sign, but you never knew. Then Jules waited, and two days later the call came with the offer. She picked up the message in her office, between clients. The voicemail was from Edie, who said, “Well, we saw everyone, but you two are the ones we want. Will you be able to move up to Belknap in the spring?”

  Jules let out a little woofing sound, then immediately covered her mouth, remembering that she’d already buzzed a client in, who was now sitting in the waiting room. It was not ideal to hear one’s therapist woof. That evening, Jules and Dennis accepted the offer. It was as uncertain as anything; they’d been hired provisionally, and at the end of the summer they and the Wunderlichs would “reassess” the situation and see whether it was a good fit. Dennis had been assured he’d be rehired at the Chinatown clinic if for some reason he returned to the city after the summer; the understaffed clinic needed him there. Dennis knew so much and was very valuable to them. Jules, though, had to close her practice. There was no way she could keep her clients suspended; she would have to tell them that she’d help them seek other therapists, if that was what they chose. Though the Wunderlichs were only committing to the one summer, Jules felt fairly confident. And if it worked out, running the camp would become a year-round job. She and Dennis would be required to stump aggressively for Spirit-in-the-Woods, finding prospective campers and boosting enrollment in the off-season.

  So this morning she’d begun to tell her clients that she was giving up her practice and moving away from New York City in April. The next several months, she said, would be spent talking with them about whatever came up, and trying to find closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever really experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light. Two clients cried, including Sylvia Klein, but Sylvia often cried, so it wasn’t a surprise; and a speech pathologist named Nicole asked if she could take Jules out to dinner and be her friend, now that Jules would no longer be her therapist. Jules demurred, but told her she was very touched by the offer. Most of the encounters had been like this, moving and a little mystifying. She knew these people but they didn’t really know her.

  Now at the end of the day here was Janice Kling, her longest-standing client, who looked forward to her sessions with religious verve, even though it seemed that the quality of her life generally stayed the same. Janice still mourned the absence of intimacy, and had not been touched in a very long time. She was alone, and went on dates with men she described as uninteresting. She was faithful to therapy, though, and to her work with Jules. It was the center of her week, maybe her life. “So I’m leaving New York this spring,” Jules told Janice Kling. Suddenly she worried for Janice; wondered what would become of her, whether she would be okay. The city was hard on single people after a certain age; loneliness could be felt so sharply here, and sometimes if people weren’t in twos they started to hang back, stay home. “I’m closing my practice.”

  “How far away will you be?” Janice asked. “Because my friend Karen, the one with lupus? Her therapist moved to Rhinebeck, and Karen takes Metro-North up there onc
e a week. I could do that.”

  “I won’t be doing therapy anymore.”

  “Are you sick?” Janice asked in anxiety.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I guess it’s one of those second-acts-in-American-lives moments,” Jules said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m actually going to be the director of a summer camp.”

  “A summer camp?” said Janice, shocked. “That’s what you’re giving this up for? What if it doesn’t work out? What if you find out that you’re bad at it?”

  “I guess that’s always a possibility when you try something new,” said Jules. But she and Dennis had thought this through. They owned their apartment. The salary, and their low expenses in Belknap, would make it possible for them to return to the city after each summer ended, and work for the camp from their apartment until the spring. At which point they could try to sublet for a few months. Also, if the job proved to be a disaster—according to either them or the Wunderlichs—they would still have their home to return to. Jules’s practice, however, would be lost.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this. Doesn’t it feel bizarre?” asked Janice. “And, no offense, but what does running a summer camp have to do with being a therapist? It seems to me that they’re completely unrelated. Don’t you feel that way too? I just can’t see you ringing a wake-up bell, or singing ‘Kumbaya.’”

  “I know the news comes out of nowhere, and I’m sure there’s a lot about it that’s going to keep coming up,” said Jules. She saw the fierce hurt conveyed in Janice’s eyes, but it had been in there for so long already, and though she wished she could make it go away, she’d never really been able to before, and now she never would.

  That night, Jules lay in bed overly anxious and rustling, and beside her Dennis said, “You okay?”

  “Who makes such a change at our age? No one.”

  “Well, we’re pioneers.”

  “Yeah, right; in our Conestoga wagon. And I know I’ve let my clients down.”

  “You have to live your life.”

  “I don’t only mean I let them down by leaving. I mean by having stayed all this time too. I found my way of being with them, and I was always interested in their lives and in the things that blocked them. I’ll miss them; I really hate to leave them. But the reality is, I’m not all that much more talented as a therapist than I was as an actor. I wasn’t what you’d call a natural.” She thought about this. “Actually, back at Spirit-in-the-Woods, everything did seem to come naturally. It was all sort of electric. That’s what I got there.”

  Jules rested her head on Dennis’s shoulder, and would have stayed like that, falling asleep there, when he suggested they go for a walk, and maybe even go have a drink at a bar. “To celebrate,” he said. “Like Rory said.”

  “Oh, right.” On separate extensions of the phone with Rory, who was up at school, they’d told her their sudden new plan. She’d been silent at first, shocked. “Are you both shitting me?” she finally said.

  “No,” said Dennis. “Your parents shit you not.”

  “Can we move on from this lovely exchange, please?” Jules said. But she was actually a little nervous about what Rory thought. Fully grown children often had a difficult time with change in their parents’ lives, she knew. They wanted everything to be the same, forever. In an ideal world, parents of grown children would never divorce, would never sell the childhood home, would never make any sudden moves to suit themselves. But this was a fairly significant sudden move, and Jules wasn’t surprised that Rory was shocked.

  “You’re really doing this?” Rory asked.

  “I think we are,” said Dennis. “I guess it’s pretty startling to you.”

  Rory laughed her familiar, chesty laugh. “Jesus, Dad, you guys don’t do things like this. Big moves.”

  “That’s true, we generally don’t.”

  “You’re sure this isn’t some kind of early dementia? I’m mostly kidding,” she quickly added.

  “I think we have all our faculties,” said Jules.

  “Well, okay then,” said Rory. “I mean, it’s more than okay. Congratulations, you guys.”

  “Will you visit us up there?” Jules asked.

  “Sure. Maybe at the end of the summer. I do want to see the place. Anyway, you should celebrate, right? Even if this is just a midlife crisis or something, you should definitely celebrate.”

  So now, following her advice, they fished into the laundry hamper and put back on the clothes they’d only taken off an hour earlier, and headed for the elevator. Outside, walking eastward, the streets increasingly stirred. They found a little bar called Rocky’s on a side street, and to their surprise it was fully populated. A couple of the men there looked familiar, though Jules couldn’t figure out why. In their small red booth, she and Dennis drank their beers. “Who are these people?” he asked. “They look like people we sort of know. Like people you see in a dream.”

  The men’s faces appeared relaxed, middle-aged and older, with the occasional set of young, sharp features. Accents drifted over, strands of Eastern Europe and maybe also Ireland, but Jules couldn’t exactly place any of it or tease it apart. “I don’t know who they are,” she said.

  “Wait,” Dennis suddenly said, “I do. They’re the doormen in the neighborhood. After they get off work, this is where they come.” Off duty, out of their greatcoats and peaked caps, the doormen looked completely different, but, yes, it was them, members of one of the countless subcultures in the city. “We’ve never had a doorman,” said Dennis. “And now we probably never will, which is fine with me. I wanted to say,” he said to her, “that I am very impressed with you for doing this. Being impetuous. Really making us go up there and do this.”

  Though Dennis hadn’t gone to the camp, he had willingly been educated in its lore over the decades. It sometimes seemed to her that Dennis had gone there; he knew three of the central, relevant figures, and he knew so much about some of the others. If he’d been given a pop quiz about his wife’s summers at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he would have done well. “Sandbox by Edward Albee!” he would have answered correctly. “Ida Steinberg, the cook!” And he would have been able to write detailed observations about what the place had meant to his wife back then and what it had meant to her later on. Spirit-in-the-Woods was the camp that would not die, the camp that would not leave her, so instead she’d decided to go there, to become it.

  Ash and Ethan and Jonah had all been excited and shocked when she told them about the job. “You’ll actually be living there again?” Ethan said. “You’ll be in charge of the whole place? You’ll go into the animation shed? That’s amazing. Take pictures.”

  “For selfish reasons,” Ash said, “I want you to stay in the city forever. But I know that isn’t fair. And it’s not like I’m home so much anyway; I’m always running off on you. It’s just so hard to think of you not being here. That this is maybe the end of our New York life together. That’s huge.”

  “I know,” said Jules. “It feels that way to me too.”

  “But it’s also touching that you’ll be there, carrying the torch,” said Ash. “I wish we could come and visit this summer, but I’ll be directing, and then we’ll barely be on the East Coast. Maybe we can squeeze it in at the end, with a little luck.” Jules knew that Ash and Ethan had the weeklong Mastery Seminars in Napa, during which Mo would be with them, along with a caregiver, before he had to return to boarding school. And Larkin was planning on attending a Yale summer program in Prague; her parents would visit her there after Napa. “Next summer, for sure,” Ash said. “But you’ll give me a detailed report about everything, a blow-by-blow. Walk around and do one of those virtual tours, telling me everything that’s different and everything that’s the same. Do you get to decide what plays they put on? Or do you at least get to make suggestions? I know some excellent plays with strong parts for women.”

  “I will take that under advisement.
”

  Jules and Dennis finished their drinks now and went outside into the street. The city—this place that they had managed rather than conquered—had its own relentless activity even at two a.m. Somewhere, far off, someone was banging metal against metal. She linked her arm through Dennis’s and they headed back to their apartment along the unremarkable streets, though already Jules was putting a lake behind them, and a mountain before them. She dotted the landscape with teenagers, and with bunches of bumblebees hanging low over wildflowers; with a crude but functional theater, and an animation shed and a dance studio and various indestructible teepees built of unfinished wood. She added llamas, for she’d been warned by the Wunderlichs that today all summer camps needed to offer llama care, for reasons unknown. No one ever loved the poor llamas, whose faces were as narrow as shoes. Here, in this green and golden world, among mountains and paths and trees, Jules and Dennis would venture out together. In the woods, she would be spirited again.

  PART THREE

  The Drama of the Gifted Child

  EIGHTEEN

  The first car arrived before nine a.m. on the last day of June, slowly slipping between the stone gates that over the decades had become breaded and then repeatedly rebreaded with moss. “Sorry we’re early,” sang a man, leaning his head out the window as the car pulled up in front of the main building. “The Taconic was a breeze.” He was the father of a camper, and yet he looked appreciably younger than Jules and Dennis. The back door opened and a girl slid out grimly, as if saying, Take me, please take me. So Jules and Dennis took her. Soon others followed, a long line of cars with trunks strapped to roofs and back windows jammed with a mash of adolescent essentials. All over New England today, similar cars were crawling, though here on this lawn were a preponderance of cellos and bassoons and guitars and amps, and bags lumpy with dance gear. These were arty teenagers, today’s model. The population was more diverse than in the 1970s, though once again, as Jules had felt the first time she’d stood here, she was on the outside. This time, the inside involved being young, and the outside involved being old. The equation was simple and clear.