The Interestings (13 page)

No one here criticized Goodman, as far as Jules knew. He strode freely around the grounds like some indulged, precious wildlife. Summers were apparently the best time for him. Here he could work on his little models of buildings and bridges; here he could get high and make out with girls and slide through a perfect, easy summer. Camp meant everything to him, and of course it meant everything to her too. For both of them, being here was better than being anywhere else. In this way they were oddly similar, though of course she wouldn’t point it out, for he would have insisted it wasn’t true. One day, eventually, Goodman would get serious and things would come together for him, not just here but out there too, she thought. “They shouldn’t do that to you,” Jules said. “You have so much to offer.”

“You think so?” he said. “I suck as a student. I have no ‘follow-through,’ they tell me.” He looked at her again. “You’re a funny little person,” he said after a moment. “A funny little person who got inside the inner circle.”

“What inner circle? Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, because it was a phrase girls sometimes said to boys who got obnoxious and needed to be put on warning.

Goodman just shrugged. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave or something?” he asked, seeming suddenly very sleepy, starting to retreat from her.

“Shouldn’t
you
?” Jules said, and she came forward without waiting for an answer. She was aware now that the lit corridor behind her was probably illuminating the corona of what remained of her frizzled and rusty perm. Goodman was arrogant, and she allowed him the full display of his arrogance; it was a flaw in him, just as her own physical imperfections and gawkiness made up a flaw in her. But he was also full of possibility like his sister. His idyll was ending today, and she felt sorry for him, and sorry for herself, for her own idyll was ending too.

Jules reached out to give him a good-bye hug, the same way she’d hugged Jonah Bay, the same measured
level
of hug, but behind her she heard footsteps, and then her sister’s voice said, “We’ve just been standing there while other people are driving away, Julie. Are you going to finish loading the car or not?”

Jules turned hard and saw Ellen and her mother, both of them grossly backlit. Enraged, Jules said, “I
told
you, Ellen, I’ll be right there.”

“It
is
a big trip, Julie,” her mother added, though her voice was gentle.

Goodman didn’t even introduce himself. He just said, “See you, Jacobson,” then clomped away in his buffalo sandals and went out the banging screen door. Immediately Jules heard cries of “There he is!” And, “Goodman, Robin has her stepmom’s Polaroid and we want to get some pictures with you!” Jules never got to hug him. She never got to feel the press of the bony plate of his chest against herself. He wouldn’t be around her and the others for too much longer, not that they could have known this—only, maybe, sensed it. Goodman was hard and arrogant but also, she now knew, vulnerable. He was the kind of boy who fell out of a tree or dove off a rock cliff and died at seventeen. He was the kind of boy to whom something would happen; it was unavoidable. She would never have the experience of feeling his chest against hers—what a meager desire, a
girl’s
desire, the desire of “a funny little person”—though of course she would still be able to sense what it would have been like, for her imagination had been lit this summer, and now she could sense anything. She was clairvoyant. But her mother and sister, appearing doltishly in the doorway of the dining hall at an exquisitely unfortunate moment, had kept her from having this actual experience.

“Is that boy someone special to you?” her mother carefully asked.

“Oh sure,
that’s
likely,” said Ellen.

Jules Jacobson cried so furiously in the moments before leaving camp that when she finally got into the backseat of the car, she could barely see. She had thought, in recent days, that the summer had made her bigger hearted—for now she was open to music of the kind she would never have listened to before, and difficult novels (Günter Grass—or at least she was planning to read Günter Grass) that she would never have read before, and people of the sort she would otherwise never have gotten to know. But in the back of the green Dodge, slowly going over the barely navigable dirt road that led to the main road in Belknap, Jules wondered whether the summer had made her bigger hearted or just
meaner.
She saw, as if for the first time, the slight hump of fat on the back of her mother’s neck, as though it had been added there with a putty knife. In the passenger mirror, when Ellen pulled it down to look at herself, as she did within seconds after getting into the car, Jules noted the too-thin, surprised curve of her sister’s eyebrows, which created an aesthetic that labeled Ellen Jacobson as someone who would never have fit in at this camp.

Jules was neither bigger hearted now, nor meaner, she decided. She had gone away as Julie and was returning as Jules, a person who was
discerning
. And as a result she could not look at her mother and sister without understanding the truth of who they were. They had taken her away from the people she would dream about forever. They had taken her away from
this.
The car reached the main road and paused there, then her mother made a left and hit the gas. Gravel shot out from under the wheels as Jules was sped away from Spirit-in-the-Woods, like the victim of a silent but violent kidnapping.

•   •   •

T
he house on Cindy Drive was worse than when she’d left, but it was hard to say exactly why. She would leave her hot bedroom and go into the kitchen for a cold drink, passing the den where her sister and mother cracked pistachio nuts with their teeth like gunshots, and watched brain-dead TV shows. Jules grabbed a can of Tab from a fleet of them that her sister kept in the fridge, then closed herself in her bedroom again and called Ash in New York City.

You never knew who was going to answer the phone at the Wolfs’ apartment. It might be Ash or Goodman or their mother, Betsy—never their father, Gil—or else it might be a family friend who was staying in the Labyrinth for an indefinite period of time. There, then, was the answer to a puzzle that had been laid before Jules when the name “the Labyrinth” had been casually mentioned at camp. Jules had thought maybe it referred to a private club. Instead, it was the building on Central Park West and 91st Street where the Wolf family lived. “Cerberus is our doorman,” Ash had said, and it wasn’t until Jules went to the Underhill Public Library to look up “Cerberus” in the encyclopedia that she even got the reference.

“Come into the city,” Ash said.

“I will, I will.” She could not admit her fear—that in the hard, school-year light of New York, the others would realize they’d made a mistake with her, and they would send her back to where she had come from, gently telling her they would call her soon.

“We’re just hanging around the apartment all day,” Ash said. “Our dad is hysterical about it; he says Goodman is undisciplined and will one day be unemployable. He says he wishes we’d both gone to banking camp. He told me I have to write a big play and make a fortune. My version of
A Raisin in the Sun
. The white version. He expects nothing less of me.”

“We’re all going to be unemployable,” Jules said.

“So when are you coming?”

“Soon.”

Sometimes at night Jules composed letters to Ash and Ethan and Jonah and Cathy and even to Goodman. The letters to Goodman, she realized, were highly flirtatious. When you wrote flirtatiously, you did not say what you felt; you did not write,
“Oh, Goodman, I know you’re not entirely nice, and in fact you’re sort of a dick, but despite everything, you are my heart’s desire.”
Instead, you wrote,
“Hey, it’s Jacobson here. Your sister says I should come to the city, but I hear it’s a SLUM.”
How different this was, she thought, from the way Ethan had been with her. Ethan had said exactly what he felt; he hadn’t tried to hide any of it. He had presented himself before her, letting her know that he was offering himself up, and did she want him? And when she’d said no, he hadn’t pretended that this wasn’t what he’d meant at all; he’d simply said, let’s try again. So they had tried. And though at the end of the failed experiment there were no hard feelings, he’d finally admitted he would always be a little wounded by her rejection. “Just a tiny amount,” he’d said. “It’ll be like when you see someone who’s had a war injury and now it’s a million years later, but their foot still drags a little. Except in my case, you have to
know
about the injury in the first place in order to see it. But it will last my whole life.”

“That isn’t true,” she said uncertainly.

She wrote Ethan a dutiful letter describing the awfulness of her days in Underhill, and he wrote back at once. His letter was covered with Figland figures. They danced, fished, jumped off buildings, and landed with stars over their heads but otherwise unhurt. They did everything but kiss and have sex. He would not draw those images in a letter to Jules, and because his cartoons often included a depiction of sexual activity, its absence here was notable. But, again, as with a very slight war injury, you had to know about it to see it, or in this case to see that it wasn’t there.

“Dear Jules,” Ethan Figman began, his handwriting thin and tiny and delicate, so different from the thick hand that held the pen.

I am sitting in my room overlooking Washington Square now, and it’s 3 a.m. I’m going to describe my room for you so that you can experience the ambience for yourself. First, imagine the scent of Old Spice in the air, creating an atmosphere both mysterious and nautical. (Should I wear Canoe, like a certain person we know? Would that drive you wild?) Then imagine a room with bars on the window, because my dad and I live on the first floor of this crappy building (no, not ALL people from Spirit-in-the-Woods are rich!), and junkies like to wander around outside. My room is absurdly cluttered, and though I would like to tell you it’s cluttered with the stuff of an
artiste,
it’s actually filled with Ring Ding wrappers and
TV Guide
s and gym shorts: the kind of room that would make you want to run from me forever.
Oh wait, you’ve already done that.
(A JOKE!) I know you haven’t run, exactly, though if I were drawing a cartoon of you, I’d certainly make your hair fly up, as if the wind was carrying you . . .

Carrying you “apart.”

(By the way, you are so fucking right about “carrying you apart” making no sense as lyrics in “The Wind Will Carry You.”)

All right, I am very very tired. My hand has been working all day (cue the jerking-off jokes) and it needs sleep, and so do I. Ash and Goodman want to get everyone together at their place for a reunion very soon. I miss you, Jules, and hope you’re surviving the start of autumn in Underhill, which I hear is known for its fall foliage, and for you.

Love,

Ethan

P.S. A weird thing happened this week: I was chosen for this dumb article in
Parade
magazine called “Teens to Watch Out For.” The principal at Stuyvesant, my high school, told them about me. An interviewer and a photographer are coming to see me. I will have to commit ritual suicide when the article comes out.

•   •   •

T
hey all met up in the city on the Saturday after the school year began; Jules took the Long Island Railroad train in, emerging from low-ceilinged Penn Station with a backpack strapped onto her as if she were going hiking. There they were, waiting for her on the wide steps of the main post office across the street—Ash, Goodman, Ethan, Jonah, and Cathy. Already there was a difference between her and them. She had her big bag with her, and a sweater tied around her waist, which suddenly struck her as a bad, senior-citizens-on-holiday type of choice. Her friends were in thin Indian cotton shirts and Levi’s, carrying nothing because they lived here and didn’t need to take their belongings with them like nomads wherever they went.

“You see?” said Ash. “You survived. And now we’re all together again. We are
complete
.”

She said it so earnestly; she was a serious and faithful friend, never anything other than that. She wasn’t funny, Jules thought then, God no. Over Ash’s whole life, no one would ever describe her as funny. They’d call her lovely, graceful, appealing, sensitive. Cathy Kiplinger wasn’t funny either, but she was hard-edged, brassy, emotionally demanding. Jules had the funny-girl role all to herself in their group, and she felt relieved as she reinhabited it again. Someone asked her how school was going, and Jules said her history class was studying the Russian Revolution. “Did you know that Trotsky was liquidated in Mexico?” she said, a little manic. “That’s why you can’t drink the water.”

Ash slipped her arm through Jules’s, and said, “Yes, you are definitely still you.”

Ethan stood rocking a little bit, slightly nervous. His
Parade
magazine piece had just come out, and though it was really just a box on the bottom of a page, and featured a not too horrible photograph of Ethan with his curls falling into his eyes as he worked, his friends were merciless about the interview, in which he’d apparently said, in response to a question about why he had chosen animation over making comic strips, “If it doesn’t move, it doesn’t groove.”

“Did you actually
say
that?” Jonah Bay wanted to know as they all had lunch at the Autopub in the GM Building, everyone sitting two by two in the chassis of actual cars, eating meals that were brought around by carhop waitresses. Distantly, an episode of
The Three Stooges
was projected on a wall, in an attempt to create a drive-in movie atmosphere. “No girl
has ever liked the Three Stooges,” Jules said to no one in particular.

“Yes, yes, I said it,” Ethan said to Jonah miserably in the darkness.

“Why?” Jonah asked. “Didn’t you know how it would sound? My mother always says that no matter how much control you think you have with a journalist, you really have none. She did that big interview with Ben Fong-Torres in
Rolling Stone
in 1970, and people still ask her about that one line about ‘self-love.’ She has to tell them again and again, ‘It was taken completely out of context.’ She was definitely not talking about masturbation but about, you know, self-esteem. It’s not that journalists are necessarily trying to
get you.
It’s just that they have their own agenda, which may not be in your best interest.”