The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  The ballroom, smaller than the first one, was packed, and the hundred or so attendees sat at attention, watching a heavy old man onstage sing and play a banjo. Jonah moved deeper in, taking a seat against the wall. The old man sang into a headset mike:

  “. . . And the ocean belongs to me, just me

  I really don’t want to share this sea . . .

  I know that you think I’m being selfish . . .

  But whoever heard . . . of a generous . . . shell . . . fish?”

  There was a long, canny pause, during which the audience laughed knowingly. Among the crowd of the wealthy and informed were people who had been tired young parents once; and the lyrics to this song that they’d played for their children had stayed with them over time. But really, the performer had been far more successful in his initial incarnation as a member of a sixties folk group that once sang tight, clear harmonies; after that, his solo folk effort was brief. But then, much later, he’d apparently reinvented himself—twice, actually—in two different subcultures. First there was children’s music, in which, known as Big Barry, he’d had a modest run and a single hit, and then, recently, there was environmentalism. Both were subcultures whose key players—like Civil War reenactors or neo-Nazis or poets—you might never in your life be aware of if you hadn’t ever lived with someone who was passionate about that world. The other participants on this panel on reinvention were a former NASCAR driver who’d been blinded in an accident and now devoted his life to promoting road safety, and a farmer running for the U.S. Senate. The singer sang on, his voice easygoing and low, and Jonah, rapidly bumping upward toward consciousness, understood who this was.

  Barry Claimes had loved the idea of the Selfish Shellfish after Jonah had begun writing the song. Barry had recorded Jonah’s music on his cassette tape deck and filed the tapes away for what would turn out to be the next century, a time long after the Whistlers had broken up and become obscure, and long after Barry’s brief solo career, which had been propelled by his one Vietnam song, “Tell Them You Won’t Go (My Lad),” which had also relied on an idea and lyrics and melody of Jonah’s.

  But that’s mine, Jonah thought as he heard “The Selfish Shellfish” now, and perceived the nostalgic response from much of the audience. That’s mine. Of course, he didn’t even want it now, or care about it or think that what he was hearing was particularly good, but the fact that it had originated with him and then been stolen from him, and that as a result he’d turned away entirely from music, now took the form of a thick glottal pressure. It was impossible to know, but he might have gone far as a musician, especially along with that group he’d been in at MIT, Seymour Glass, who were actually still performing sometimes thirty years later. He’d had a real talent, but what was talent without confidence, self-possession, “ownership,” as people said, pompously but maybe accurately.

  The strumming got harder as Barry Claimes—Big Barry—continued this song sung from the point of view of the tremendously selfish shellfish, who was apparently a non-sharer and a polluter, essentially embodying all the traits of oil-dependent, big business–loving America. Big Barry’s fat hand beat down on the banjo as he wailed on and on about grotesque greed; he was throwing himself into the song, exerting himself as he acted out the part of eleven-year-old Jonah’s weird and clever creation, the Selfish Shellfish. He finished with a big flourish of the banjo, and the audience responded with cheers.

  Jonah was going to turn and leave right then, but the event moderator asked, “So what was the path of transformation that led you from being just a successful folksinger to being a children’s singer and then an environmental activist?”

  “Well, if you look back at the beginning, the sixties were a time of upheaval,” said Barry Claimes. “I know that’s a cliché, but it happens to be true, because I was there, and I certainly up and heaved a good lot of the time. My first group was called the Whistlers, as some of you may recall.” The audience politely applauded at the memory. “And then I was off on my own,” he went on, “and I had one hit in 1971, a Vietnam protest song. Can someone reach into the past and name that tune?”

  “‘Tell Them You Won’t Go (My Lad)’!” called a man.

  “Excellent, excellent. But you know, I assumed that would be the end of it for me. I lay low for a number of years, lived on my royalties, and bummed around doing very little except practicing my banjo. I began dabbling in children’s music because I’ve always been captivated by the natural spontaneity of kids. Plus, you can’t bullshit them. And as my work with them proved rewarding, I bought myself a houseboat and traveled around, and I started seeing what was being done to the ocean, and it made me ill. I could not get over the greed of the oil companies and the politician enablers, who were all in bed together and who were all responsible for the ruination of the oceans and the deaths of those extraordinary sea creatures. And then I realized that some of my songs could have an environmental impact too. And that is how an activist is born. So if you’re going to reinvent yourself for the second or even third time in your life,” he said, “you have to do it for a reason. And preferably not a selfish one—like a certain shellfish I know.”

  Jonah, who had barely been breathing during this monologue, felt his throat and chest fully constrict, and he pushed out of the doors and back into the hallway, just as Barry was finishing up and the senatorial candidate was about to go on. He found a men’s room further down the corridor and went into a stall and sank down onto the toilet. He stayed there for a long time, trying to recover and think. He was still in there a little later when the door to the men’s room swung open, voices preceding the men who entered.

  “—really great. It’s all about branding. I’m involved with TEDx—you know what that is? We bring the TED conference experience right into communities. Here’s my card; I’d love to tell you more about it.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  The men went to their separate urinals, and Jonah heard stereophonic urination. There were more pleasantries, some hand washing, then turbine hand dryers roared, and finally the door opened again and one man left. Jonah peered out the narrow vertical slot of the stall door. He saw part of Barry Claimes’s wide back at the sink, the black silk vest and the thin white plankton layer of hair combed across the head. Big Barry picked up the banjo that was leaning on the sinks, swung it around himself on its strap, and strode out of the men’s room.

  Jonah followed him through the wood-beamed hallways of the Strutter Oak Resort and Conference Center, staying at a distance and trying to look like someone on his way to a seminar. Every once in a while he glanced blankly at the booklet Caitlin Dodge had handed him. Barry Claimes stepped onto the elevator and so did Jonah, but three other people stepped on too, so Jonah was hardly noticed. They all pressed different floors. Ping, went the button, and a few people exited. Ping again. At 4 Barry Claimes got off, and so did Jonah Bay. The former Whistler was actually whistling a little as he walked to his hotel room. He slid the key card into the door, but Jonah felt sure it wasn’t necessary to stride forward quickly in that second; Barry was old and slow-moving, and would be imprecise in his card swiping. It would likely take two swipes for him to get the card in exactly right, and it did. By the time the green light popped on in the lock, Jonah was right behind him. No one was in the hall to see Jonah slip in after him before the door closed. Right inside the doorway, Barry Claimes turned, his mouth opened in old-man concavity and fear.

  “What do you want?” he said, but the heavy door had sucked shut, and now Jonah reached out with both hands and pushed him deeper into the room. “I’ll get my wallet,” Barry said. “Are you on drugs? Meth?”

  Of course Barry Claimes didn’t recognize him. Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those years that no one liked to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah’s age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, an
d to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

  “It’s me, you sick fuck,” Jonah said. He shoved Big Barry against the wall in the entryway, and Big Barry shoved back, slamming him against a closet door. Jonah responded in kind, and they banged back and forth between two walls, clunking and clomping, accompanied by exerted breaths, moving further into the hotel room, and now Jonah had the advantage. He pushed Big Barry onto the bed and leapt on him, pinning him there, Jonah’s lean self on all fours above the bloated sea creature that was Barry Claimes. If Barry was a shellfish, he’d be a horseshoe crab, round and ancient, washed up on the sand. His face was all rosacea and splotch; the eyes behind his little Ben Franklin frames were pale blue and teary, as they’d been even back in 1970.

  “Who?” demanded Barry. He squinted in terror for several seconds, then his face slackened and became almost thoughtful. “Oh my God. Jonah,” he said. “Jonah Bay. You scared the shit out of me.” He kept squinting at Jonah, and marveled softly, “Your hair got gray. Even you.”

  It was as if, now that he knew this was Jonah, he felt he didn’t have to be afraid any longer. Immediately Jonah thought about sex with Robert Takahashi, and how one of them had sometimes been on all fours, while the other one lay resting, like the lion and the gypsy in the Rousseau painting. He didn’t want Barry Claimes to have a single moment of rest; he had no compassion for him, even though Barry looked like any other old sixties survivor, anyone who might have appeared on that PBS documentary They Came, They Saw, They Strummed, which seemed to air around the clock, because people could not get enough of what they’d lost, even if they no longer really wanted it.

  Jonah kept Barry pinned down with a knee in his gut, and Barry made a sound of deep organ pain, so Jonah probed with his knee a little deeper, feeling floating objects shift inside. But then somehow Barry was up, roaring. “I tried to be a father figure to you,” Barry panted. “To teach you banjo. To encourage you. You weren’t used to it.”

  “A father who drugs his child?” Jonah said, and he reached for anything nearby, his hand coming upon the banjo, which he swung wide, smacking Barry Claimes in the face once with an awful, gongish, vibrato.

  “Oh Jesus, Jonah,” cried Barry in a nasal voice. Both he and Jonah were equally shocked. Barry fell back against the bed and brought his hands to his face, cupping it, for there was a little blood. The cupping was too much for Jonah. That we each need to protect what little we have, seemed, then, the truest thing, and he wouldn’t deny even Barry Claimes that instinct. He’d probably broken Barry’s nose, but he hadn’t fractured his cheekbone or blinded him or damaged the brain that sat inside that self-involved head. A banjo wasn’t the best weapon, for folk music itself wasn’t all-powerful. It hadn’t been able to stop a war in Southeast Asia, though the songs had kept people unified, passionate, listening with wild attention among an enormous block of bodies or all alone. And now it had maimed a man, but hadn’t killed him, which was maybe just as well.

  “Oh Jesus,” Barry kept saying. “I’m . . . hurt here. What’s wrong with you, Jonah?” he continued in a gravel-based, thick voice.

  “What’s wrong with me? You’re really asking me that?”

  “Yes. What kind of person have you become? Are you always like this?”

  “Stop talking, Barry, okay? Just stop.”

  Jonah went to the bathroom and washed his hands with the inadequately tiny leaf-shaped soap that sat in the soap dish. There was a little blood on his sleeve, but not much. He noted Barry’s Dopp kit nearby on the marble counter. The kit was unzipped, revealing the items in it that belonged to this elderly man who was on the road many weeks a year. There was a pill bottle whose label read Lipitor, 40 mg, and an asthma inhaler and, oh God, a canister of Tucks Pads, which were described as meant to temporarily relieve “the local itching and discomfort associated with hemorrhoids.” All the little accoutrements of this reinvented person. No matter what you’d done in your life, no matter how forcefully antiwar you’d been or how much you’d helped preserve the oceans; no matter how many ideas you’d stolen from a young, shy boy, leaving him cerebrally scrambled and overstimulated, it all came down to the smallest details that made you you. Jonah left the bathroom, certain that Barry Claimes wouldn’t call security. Barry wouldn’t want to open this up; not now, when he had managed to transform himself one last time and remain viable long past the reign of mainstream folk music and into the twenty-first century, where it was usually so hard to make money from your own creations. In the nineties when all kinds of famous pop songs had become available to use on commercials, art and advertising became forever entwined. But folk music, the do-gooding underdog, had been preserved more often than not, and now it was back again, in a way. It wasn’t the dominant genre, but its seedlings had blown all around; and like all music now, even folk songs were file shared and showed up on YouTube and went everywhere they could go. Most folksingers, like all singers, made very little money, and that was hideously unfair, and was even often criminal, but for what it was worth, their work got played. He wished his mother knew about some of this; he hoped she did. He planned to tell her.

  Barry was sitting on the bed looking at himself in the dresser mirror. “Look at me, my nose is going to swell up. I can’t be seen like this; I’m going to have to leave.” He turned to Jonah in annoyance, then appeared to become reflective. “You were such a creative kid. So free. It was a magnificent thing to witness.”

  “Oh, stop talking.”

  “I did what I could for you,” said Barry. “You didn’t know anything about being taken care of or being encouraged; it wasn’t your fault. Your mother had a great voice, but it’s sad what happened to her.”

  “No it isn’t,” said Jonah. He didn’t want to hear another word spoken by Barry Claimes, and he had nothing more to say to him either, so he started to walk out of the hotel room. But at the door, where the walls were scuffed, he turned back and impulsively seized the banjo, and then he was out of there. Jonah’s head and his hands shook as he rode the elevator to his own floor. Pacing the Vintner’s Bounty Suite to try and calm his uncalm self, he felt his cell phone vibrate against his groin. He reached down and saw that it was an unfamiliar number, so he answered tentatively, hearing a female voice say, “Hey, Jonah, it’s Caitlin Dodge. Ethan thought you might meet him at Blue Horse Vineyard for a drink. If that works, someone will pick you up in twenty minutes. Sound okay?”

  Jonah agreed, though this was probably a mistake. He showered quickly, then made his way out to the front entrance of the conference center, and within minutes a black Prius had pulled up at the curb. A driver got out and opened the back door, and Jonah slipped in. He was still shaking so much that he leaned hard against the door to anchor himself.

  “How was your day, sir?” the driver asked. “You get to see any of those talks?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was that astronaut who came with a virtual weightlessness chair. You get to try it?”

  Jonah paused. “Yes, I did.”

  “What’s it feel like?”

  Jonah sat up a little. “At first it’s terrifying,” he said. “Like you have no idea of what’s going to happen to you.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” said the driver, nodding. “The anticipation.”

  “But then after a while you remember that it’s virtual, and you sort of go along with it. And somehow it changes you a little,” Jonah said.

  “You still feeling the effects right now?” asked the driver.

  “Yes, I still am.”

  • • •

  On the patio of the Blue Horse Vineyard, everyone but Ethan Figman sat in the generous sunshine with their big wineglasses and their small plates of pecorino and olives, but Ethan had commandeered the shade beneath an umbrella. All around, conference attendees discreetly glanced over, but no one approached his table. Jonah took a seat across from Ethan, still trembling; it had to be noticeable, didn’t it? When the wine arrived, “a misch
ievous Syrah,” the wine steward said before mercifully disappearing, Jonah began to drink a glass of it without stopping, pausing in the middle only because he realized that Ethan was staring at him.

  “What?” said Jonah.

  “Slow down, you’re not supposed to drink like that. Man, you’re like a kid with milk. You’ve practically got a wine mustache.”

  Jonah obediently slowed down, then took an olive and tried to show interest in it. But his hand was unsteady, and the slippery olive fell to the patio and bounced off into the shrubs like a Super Ball. “Sorry,” Jonah said, and he put a hand over his face and let loose a single wretched sob. Ethan, shocked, stood and moved to the seat beside him. They were side by side now, facing away from all the other people on the patio; they looked out upon calm, sunlit acres of grapes and spindly sticks.

  “Tell me,” Ethan said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, just tell me.”

  “I did something that I can’t undo, okay? It was very much not like me. Though really, you’re probably thinking you don’t even know what’s like me or not like me. You’ve never made me tell you things. You’ve never made me confess anything.”

  “Why would I do that?” Ethan asked. “I’m no Catholic, I’m a big Jew. But I know that you don’t have to feel like this, Jonah. If you’re unhappy, or if you think you’re lost—”

  “Yes, lost. That’s right.”