The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Then you can do something about it. You’ve been in that situation before. Your Holy Father, Reverend Moon, remember him? ‘Reverend Moon Will Carry Us’?” Jonah was able to smile a little, wincingly. “I don’t know what you think you’ve done,” said Ethan, “but I can’t believe it’s irreparable.” He stewed for a few seconds. “Is this about a relationship?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t do those,” said Jonah. “Don’t you know that I’m a monk?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” said Ethan. “I only know what you tell me. After you and Robert broke up, Ash and I worried a lot. We didn’t want you to be alone. But you’d never go out with any of those guys she knew, those actors.”

  “I haven’t wanted to be in a real relationship since Robert,” Jonah said. “There have been occasional things—you know—but they tend to overwhelm me. And if you really want to know, it’s just not as urgent anymore, as I get older. The sex part. I’ve mostly focused on my work, just to stay busy.”

  “Sometimes I think work is the great excuse for everything,” said Ethan. “But then I think, maybe it’s not an excuse at all. Maybe it really is more interesting than everything else. Than relationships.”

  “Oh, I find it hard to believe that you think your work is more interesting than Ash and your kids.”

  Ethan poked his fingers among some cubes of pecorino, and dislodged two of them and indelicately worked them into his mouth at the same time. “I love my family. Obviously I do. Ash and Larkin and Mo,” he said, giving each name deliberate, equal weight. “Though I think about work all the time. For me, it’s not just to stay busy. I mean, partly it’s a distraction from what I can’t change. They need me at the studio. When I’m gone, like this week, they all . . . flail. But mostly it’s because work is just so great to think about. It’s sort of endlessly replenishing.” He peered across the table at Jonah and said, “If you can’t have a good relationship with somebody, then you should at least have a good relationship with your work. Your work should feel like . . . an incredible person lying next to you in bed.”

  Jonah laughed sharply and said, “Well, my work doesn’t feel that way at all. I put the time in, but it doesn’t interest me enough.”

  “How can that be? You showed me those designs you were working on, and then I went to the website and started clicking, looking at everything going on there; there’s just so much, so many things happening. And you always liked building things; you’d talk about that, back at MIT, and I didn’t know what the hell you were saying, it was so far beyond me. And what you do now, creating devices for really disabled people, it seems meaningful, no? Making people’s lives bearable, so they want to get up in the morning and live in the world and not have to be despairing—or even wish they weren’t alive or something?”

  “I would’ve liked to be a musician,” Jonah said curtly. He was shocked that he’d said this.

  “So why didn’t you?” Ethan said. “What was the deal with that?”

  Jonah looked downward, not able to meet Ethan’s eyes, which were just too sympathetic to tolerate right now. “Something happened,” Jonah said. “When I was really young, before you knew me, there was this guy, it doesn’t matter who, and he gave me drugs and tried to get me to come up with lyrics for songs, and little tunes, little musical phrases, that kind of thing. I didn’t know what was happening. He stole my ideas, my music, and used it himself and made money off it. I spent a long time feeling like I was neurologically a mess. Actually seeing things. That went away, which was a relief, and I kept playing my guitar, mostly because there it was, and I was good. But there was no way music was going to be my life. I mean, it had been taken from me.”

  “That’s a terrible story,” said Ethan. “I am really sorry, and I’m sorry I never knew about it. I hardly know what to say.”

  Jonah shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “I don’t want to sound insensitive here,” said Ethan, “but you could still do some music anyway, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, couldn’t you just play?”

  “Just play?”

  “On your own, or with friends. You know, the way Dennis and his friends play football in the park, and they’re not in shape, right? But they enjoy it, and some of them are good, some of them worship the game. People do that all the time with music. They sit around playing whenever they get together. Does it have to be a job? And as for your actual job, you do like mechanical engineering, robotics. Do you have to think of your job as a consolation prize? What if you played on your own, Jonah? Not during the workday, not getting famous, not finding a manager, not heading in that direction. What if you just played? Isn’t it possible that then you’d also like your job more, because you wouldn’t think of it as something that’s secretly had to replace this other thing? Am I completely off base here?”

  “He stole my music from me, Ethan. He stole it; he took it away.”

  “He didn’t steal all of it,” said Ethan. “He stole some. It’s not this finite thing. I think there’s probably more.”

  An hour later, Jonah lay down for a rest on the bed of his suite in a stunned, winey state, looking around at the enormous flat screen TV, the view of Napa, the robe with its Mastery Seminars insignia. Then he remembered the banjo, and he stood up, got it from where it leaned against a wall, and sat on the edge of the bed with it in his arms. The strings were as sharp as weapons, and sharply responsive. He played until it was time for dinner, summoning up songs that went way back into the dinosaur brain, songs he had no memory of ever learning, but which, it seemed, he knew.

  TWENTY

  By the midpoint of the camp season, nothing terrible had happened, and for this Jules and Dennis congratulated themselves, but only very quietly, for fear of jinxing it. One afternoon a couple of serious, hushed violists came back from a walk in the woods saying that they’d seen someone there. The swimming counselor and the pottery counselor were dispatched to see if there were trespassers, and they reported meeting up with two young hikers, a man and a woman, who had wandered out of the mountains and were stopping to rest, which sometimes happened on the grounds of the camp. The outer edges of the woods, although camp property, had always been lightly shared, and unless there was trouble, generally no one really complained. Occasionally, the Wunderlichs had said, they’d called the local police to have a look around, because you could never take chances when you were dealing with the safety of minors.

  The summer bore on, with its quotidian demands. Only one camper had defected, a French horn player from the city, who simply hated everything about the program and did not want to stay here a day longer. No one was sorry to see him go. But when, early in August, the dancer Noelle Russo was discovered behind the dance studio after dinner with her finger down her throat, throwing up loudly into the bushes, the local doctor affiliated with the camp was called in for a consult, and together he and the camp nurse agreed that Noelle ought to go home.

  The night before she was to leave, there was much drama in her teepee, with the other girls apparently sitting around her as if she were being sent to prison or damned to hell. Noelle, her belongings hastily packed in her trunk, cried and said, “Why are they doing this to me? I’m fine. Whoever ratted me out is totally exaggerating.” Her friends came to the front office and begged Jules and Dennis to let Noelle stay, but they had to say no, regretfully. “It’s not safe,” the camp nurse had said. “She needs more supervision.”

  In bed that night, Jules heard a sound from somewhere in the distance, probably on the camp property, but she couldn’t make it out. Even Dennis heard it from his sleep. She expected that one of the counselors would call now, and as she thought this, the red phone on Dennis’s night table sounded its raw ring. This was the first middle-of-the-night phone call all summer; they’d been waiting for it. Preeti Singh, who was in charge of both animation and llama care, was on the line. “Something’s happened to the llamas,” Preeti said. “Can you get
down here?” Dennis and Jules put coats on over their pajamas and hurried outside with flashlights.

  Both llamas had vanished from their pen; Preeti had learned this when she went to check on them before lights-out. “But who would want them?” she said. “Only some kind of sick vivisectionist.”

  The counselors were all sent off in different directions to look for the animals. The campers quickly heard what was going on and came out of their teepees in pajamas and shorts and T-shirts to join the search party. It was midnight now, with a nearly full yellow moon, and the entire camp was on the lawn and in the field and by the lake and the pool. “Over here!” came a girl’s voice, and they ran toward it. In the light from twenty different flashlights, the two llamas were located, huddled together on the path that led down to the art studios. They both had signs draped around their long, poignant necks: NOELLE SHOULD STAY, one read. THIS IS SO FUCKING UNFAIR, read the other.

  The frightened llamas were gently led back to their pen. Someone noticed then that Noelle was missing too, and as the search for her began, Jules felt a sharp bolt of fear. She was in charge, she and Dennis. “Noelle!” she called, her throat tight, and she pictured the lake, and how it could take a person, and suddenly she was hysterical.

  “Noelle!” hollered Dennis.

  “Noelle! Noelle!” called the campers. All the flashlights went on again, and the teenagers were excited and thrilled at the drama that had unexpectedly collected around them twice in one night. Guy, the counselor with the pirate earrings, whom Noelle had such a crush on, stood in the middle of a path and called out in the loudest voice of anyone, distinctive with its strong Australian accent, “Noelle! Where the hell are you? It’s Guy here! Come on, Noelle, give it up!”

  Everyone was quiet, thinking that Guy would somehow smoke her out. And he did. She rustled tentatively out of the woods; Jules and Dennis watched as the birdlike, fragile girl went directly to this counselor, and he took her in his arms and spoke to her, and after a moment he looked up toward Dennis and Jules, whose job it was to take her. Later, Jules sat on the edge of Noelle’s bed while the other girls lingered nearby, excited, listening.

  “It’s just that I wanted this summer to be so good,” said Noelle, still crying a little.

  “There were good parts for you, weren’t there?” asked Jules.

  She nodded. “Oh yes. I got to dance,” she said. “I danced more than I ever get to dance in the entire school year. They’re always making me do things I hate there, which have nothing to do with the rest of my life.”

  “I know,” said Jules. “I really know.”

  Noelle lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry about the llamas,” she said. “I just wanted to make a point. I went to put the signs on them for everyone to see in the morning, but they got out of the pen, and I couldn’t get them back in. I didn’t want to hurt them.”

  “They’re not hurt.”

  “I hope they’ll be okay, and that you don’t think that, you know, they shouldn’t be here anymore. They’re a part of this place.”

  “Yeah,” echoed Samantha. “The llamas are completely a part of this place.”

  No they’re not, Jules wanted to say, but of course yes they were. When these girls thought back on this summer, they would see, among everything else, llamas. Forever they would have a specific association to llamas, whose bland faces would represent a moment in their lives that would be like no other. A first moment, art filled, friend filled, boy filled, llama filled. The teepee was as small as a thimble, but it fit these girls. Jules left them there to comfort their friend who was being driven to Logan Airport in Boston tomorrow, where she would fly home to her waiting, worried parents. A summer emergency had taken place, but no one had died.

  The following morning, Noelle was gone. Dennis played the Surprise Symphony and the music drifted out, but the camp roused itself slowly, tired from the excitement of the late-night adventure and already aware, even in sleep, that the day was going to be hot. So far the summer had been mild, but the forecast called for a succession of very hot days, and this would be the first of them. The heat hit the nineties by noon, causing a mandatory interruption of classes, and extra pool time. These kids were not big swimmers; they hung in the water like eels.

  The cook made raspberry milk sherbet in long metal tubs. The campers staggered into the dining hall, and already the heat had turned them listless, and no one ate very much. That first afternoon, off in the woods with their drama class to rehearse A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boy and girl playing Puck and Hermia told their drama teacher they’d seen a man urinating against a tree. By the time the drama teacher went to find the man, he was gone, so Dennis said that he and Jules would go check out the situation. It was an unpleasant task on such a damp, hot day, and there was a mosquito drone like a soundtrack over the entire woods. Dennis and Jules were both tired from the night, and they split up and walked around slowly in the heat.

  Jules soon saw the hiker. “Hello!” she called in what she hoped was a casual voice. He was leaning against a tree drinking from a beer bottle. He was young, early twenties, his face possessing a feral alertness. He looked unclean, and Jules suddenly thought to be cautious. Dennis was elsewhere, but certainly not too far away. “You’ve been hiking?” she asked, though there was no sign of any gear.

  “I’m staying in the area,” the young man said neutrally.

  “This is actually the property of a summer camp,” Jules said in as easy and cheerful a voice as she could manage. “A lot of people end up here, not knowing. I think we need to mark it a little better.”

  “A lot better,” he said. “I thought it was just a place we could go. A place we could go and spend a few days and nights.”

  She knew something was wrong with him, and she remembered once feeling afraid of a patient at the psychiatric hospital where she used to work, an agitated young man who’d sliced the air with vertical chops as he spoke about his mother. “No harm done,” said Jules now. “It’s not public property, though. There’s a public campground a few miles south. I think you need a permit to spend the night, but you can ask at the visitors’ bureau downtown, and they should be able to point you in the right direction.”

  Branches broke and a second man came through, looking unperturbed. He was much older, gray-bristle-haired, tall, stooped, creased. He had a face like something in a woodcut, a smoker’s face. He seemed about to say something, his mouth opening, and she saw his gold incisor. Father and son? she wondered, then thought, no.

  She still didn’t recognize him yet. The beauty had been cut away from the face as if through multiple cruel procedures. He looked wrecked, as if he hadn’t been taking care of himself for a long time. She thought: This is a moment of strangeness, but she didn’t even know why she thought that; and then, seeing how he looked at her, languid and unsurprised, though perhaps very faintly entertained, she knew, but she hardly believed it until he spoke, and then she was certain. “Jacobson?” he said. “I wondered when I’d see you.”

  She stared at Goodman Wolf, as if he were a lost animal that had stumbled into woods where he shouldn’t have gone. Both of them were lost animals in the woods. Neither of them had any business being here, but they were.

  The younger man looked back and forth between them, and then finally he said, “John, you know her?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Ash told you I was living here?” Jules asked Goodman.

  “Oh yeah.” He squinted slightly and tilted his head a little. “Oh, you thought that’s why I came? Because you’re here? That’s sweet,” he said. “But actually I haven’t come across an ocean on account of you, Jacobson. Security’s pretty tight since you know what. And I didn’t even tell Ash I was coming. She doesn’t know. But I made an executive decision.”

  Goodman formed the words as though they were witty, but they weren’t. Jules felt her face heating up fast, the heat moving up toward the hairline, giving everything away, not letting her keep
her dignity. A man like Goodman would never be attracted to a woman like Jules, but finally they were even: she wasn’t attracted to him either. His gold tooth reasserted itself as his lip drew back, and she wondered how it was he thought this was a good look. It was actually a terrible look, seedy and truculent. He held himself as though he was still handsome, though his handsomeness was entirely gone from him. Goodman seemed not to know it, though; no one had told him. Maybe no one had had the heart to. Or maybe he hardly knew anyone anymore who had known him then. He kicked at the dirt; she looked down and saw his scuffed sandals. A toenail poked out, a thick yellow horn.

  “But why did you suddenly want to come?” Jules asked. “I don’t get this.”

  Goodman said, with quiet feeling, “It wasn’t sudden. I’ve always thought about moving to one of the hill towns.”

  “But how could you?” Jules said. “How could that be possible?”

  Goodman shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I kept thinking about it. I kept going to these real estate sites on the Internet and I saw all these properties—real cheap pieces of shit. It was just a fantasy, that’s all. But suddenly Ash tells me you’ve moved back here, and I’m thinking maybe it’s the thing to do. The zeitgeist thing, you know? And maybe, if I get my act together, Lady Figman could be convinced to help me.”

  “I’m just amazed by this,” Jules said.

  “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said sharply. “Not at all. So were you going to come by? Like, through the front entrance?”

  “I actually was there this morning, just sort of going past and looking in, but I didn’t see you. I didn’t see anyone I knew,” he said, as if bewildered. “It was all new people.” Then he looked at her and said, “So how’s it been for you? Is it everything you’ve dreamed of, and more?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jules said. She didn’t want him to know anything about her life, how it felt to be back, or why she’d come. “But look, you’re really not supposed to be here.”