The Interestings (16 page)

After eating snacks together in the living room now, they tacitly divided up into groups of two. By design, by default, the beautiful Jonah Bay found himself with the beautiful Ash Wolf, and because this was her home, she asked him if he wanted to see her room. He’d been in there many times before, but he felt that he would be seeing it in a different way now.

They sank down onto the swamp of her bed with all its slaughtered stuffed animals that were loosely and unevenly filled from all those years of having been loved by a young girl, then having been thrown around by a thoughtless adolescent and her friends. Jonah would have liked to sleep there with Ash and the animals, just sleep and sleep. But she was beside him on the bed, her heavy door closed, and honestly, though he felt no sexual pull toward her, Ash Wolf was like a strange and beautiful object. He had always liked looking at her, but it had never occurred to him to touch her. Now, though, he considered that touching her might not be a bad idea. They’d always been the pretty ones in the group; Goodman was incredible looking, of course,
Jesus,
but could not be described as pretty or fine-lined. Cathy, too, was so strongly female, so full; physically she was much more than pretty. Though Ash was a girl, Jonah thought it was possible that touching her might feel pleasant in the way that touching himself was.

“You have such amazing eyes, Jonah. Why didn’t we do this in the summer?” Ash asked as he tentatively ran his hand along her arm. “We wasted valuable time.”

“Yeah, it was a big mistake,” he said, though it wasn’t true. Touching her arm felt good, certainly, but there was no urgency attached to the swishing motion. They lay against each other, both of them hesitant.

“I like this so much,” said Ash.

“Me too.”

Did people in bed usually say things like “I like this so much?” and “Me too”? Or weren’t they more likely to be utterly quiet and entranced, or else loud and chugging and apelike? Girls at camp and at parties at the Dalton School had kissed Jonah before, and he’d obligingly kissed them back, though in recent years he’d tried to picture boys when this happened, transforming a pretty girl’s face into the face of a laughing, flexing boy. Girls tended to love him, and the previous summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he’d walked around holding hands with a blond pianist named Gabby. Jonah was good-natured about these pretty girls who developed crushes on him. Ash was simply the most extreme example of such a girl.

Love, he thought, should be as powerful as a drug. It should be like chewing a stick of laced Clark’s Teaberry gum and then feeling your neurons blasting all around you. He remembered the specific moment each time when he’d felt as if he was going mad. He could pinpoint the exact fraction of a second when the drug had dropped over him. Jonah wanted a tiny bit of that feeling now—not too much, just a little—but instead he felt understimulated, a little bored, and safe.

In Ash Wolf’s bed, the two friends kissed for a very long time. It was a marathon of kissing, not thrilling but certainly not bad, because Ash was like some kind of overgrown meadow. She seemed to be a walking version of her own bedroom, replete with hidden corners, surprises, and delights. Her saliva was thin and inoffensive. The sun dimmed over Central Park, and the afternoon fell away, and the kissing never revved up into anything beyond itself, which was actually fine with him.

Walking out of Ash’s bedroom, still holding her hand, Jonah sensed that all of them had coupled up today in significant ways. Goodman and Cathy were off in Goodman’s room, probably going very far together, perhaps going all the way. Goodman’s door was closed, Ash announced now, having quickly gone down the hall to check. Jonah pictured the mess that was Goodman’s room, the perennially unmade bed, the little half-finished and abandoned architectural models, the clothes he threw everywhere just because he could. The housekeeper Fernanda would be in first thing Monday morning, and she’d stand in the teen stink of Goodman’s room, folding, smoothing, and disinfecting. Jonah suddenly pictured Goodman positioning himself between Cathy Kiplinger’s sturdy legs, and the image disturbed him.

As for Jules and Ethan: where were
they?
By default the two homeliest of the group were probably off doing something lovelike too. He knew that they’d tried to be a couple over the course of the summer, though Ethan had finally said there was really nothing between them. “She’s just my friend,” he’d confided. “We’re leaving it at that.” “I hear you,” Jonah had replied. As Jonah followed Ash down the hall into the living room, heading toward the kitchen to get something to drink after all that kissing, he heard a sound and turned. On the floor behind the couch, in an alcove of the large, overdressed living room, were Jules and Ethan. What were they doing? Not sex, not even kissing. They were playing the board game Trouble, which they’d dug up from the chest in the window seat that contained all the treasures of the Wolf family’s game nights over the years: Trouble, Life, Monopoly, Scrabble, Battleship, and a couple of off-brand board games called Symbolgrams and Kaplooey!, which no one outside the Wolf family had ever heard of.

Ethan and Jules were deep into their game, their palms beating down on the plastic dome, which made that strangely satisfying
pock
sound. The game of Trouble was predicated on the idea that people liked the novelty of this sound. People wanted
novelty.
Sex was a novelty too; if Cathy Kiplinger gave a blow job to Goodman Wolf, at the end of it his dick might pop out of her mouth with a
pock
sound like the dome in Trouble being pushed. Jonah only made that connection now as he heard the sound and saw Ethan and Jules, this
non
-couple, sitting and playing the game with the contentment of two people who don’t need to do anything physical and extreme. Song lyrics came into his head, unbidden:

“Now his dick popped out of the bubble

making a sound like the game of Trouble . . .”

Jonah imagined himself sitting with Barry Claimes and writing these stupid lyrics; he saw Barry listening intently, the wheels of his cassette tape turning. The image was sickening, and he tried to return to thoughts of Ash. He wondered if he’d graduated to being Ash Wolf’s boyfriend now, and if so, what that would entail. He almost thought of being a boyfriend as like being a duke or an earl; it was as if he had
land
to oversee now, and ribbons to cut. Ash took his hand and led him past the board-game-playing couple, then into the kitchen where they drank glasses of New York City tap water, then down the hall past the probably-going-very-far couple, Goodman and Cathy, and finally into the den, a room filled with reeds jutting from ceramic urns, and low, cracked-leather couches.

“Let’s lie down,” Ash said.

“We’ve been lying down,” said Jonah.

“I know, but we haven’t been lying down in here. I want to try every couch and every bed with you.”

“In the world?” he asked.

“Well, eventually. But we can start with this one.”

He couldn’t tell her that what he wanted now, more than anything, was to fall asleep beside her. No touching, no kissing, no stimulation. No sensation, no consciousness. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

O
f the many people who came to the apartment on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth and stayed a day or two or even longer, most were so pleased to feel wanted that they forgot to ask themselves if there was anywhere else they ought to be. Over the years, various people considered themselves honorary members of the Wolf family, believing briefly that being allowed to stay here as long as you liked was the same thing as being one of them. But no matter how many times Jules Jacobson walked into the foyer, greeted with wild enthusiasm by Noodge the dog, and then headed down the long hallway that was crowded with photographs of the Wolfs doing various Wolfish things, she never felt that she entirely belonged here, just as she had not belonged in that teepee on that first night. But no longer did she feel like an interloper.

Gil and Betsy Wolf didn’t seem overly curious about their daughter’s sudden closest friend, Jules, and when she stayed for dinner their questions to her were friendly if perfunctory (“Jules, have you ever tasted chicken saltimbocca before? No? Well, that’s a crime”), but still Ash said she was always welcome. The place was a constant hub for Spirit-in-the-Woodsians. Jonah, who’d become Ash’s first serious boyfriend since that day in September, was often here during the week and on weekends. Cathy, who had now officially become Goodman’s girlfriend—also since that same day—kept a leotard in Goodman’s bureau drawer, which seemed to Jules and Ash a spectacularly mature gesture. Cathy and Goodman fought a lot, and the words that came through the walls sounded like the argument of adults, not teenagers. “STOP TREATING ME LIKE GARBAGE, IT ISN’T FAIR!” Cathy would yell, but her rage would immediately be engulfed by tears.

“If you don’t stop crying, then we are
through
,” Goodman would say in a tight, furious voice. Sometimes he suddenly told her to leave. Days would go by during which Cathy wouldn’t hear from him at all, and she would call the Labyrinth, demanding to know where he’d been. Several times he told Ash to tell Cathy he wasn’t home. “I just can’t deal with her,” he said to his sister.

Ethan came over to the Wolfs’ whenever he could, though he was often at home making one of his cartoon shorts. His public-defender father, with whom he shared the cramped apartment in the Village since his mother had run off with the pediatrician, had allowed him to turn the dining room into an animation workspace, and so the table was covered with Ethan’s work, and the plastic smell of cel paint was in the air. Ethan’s family had very little money, he’d told Jules. Stuyvesant, the very good public high school he attended, was of course free. “Thank God for Stuy,” Ethan said. Though the school was known as a powerhouse for math and science, the teachers respected Ethan’s big talent and let him work on independent-study projects. He made funny cartoons that he sometimes screened to great reception at assembly. Ethan’s life was busy and chaotic; his father’s apartment was filthy, and he told Jules that he never wanted her to see it, which was fine with her, since she’d told him she never wanted any of them to see the house in Underhill—not because it was filthy, which it wasn’t, but just because it was ordinary.

Since Jules had first gone to the Wolfs’, all she had wanted was to find ways and excuses to get back there. But there were times when, for no good reason, her mother wouldn’t allow her to go. It was as if Lois Jacobson knew she was in the process of gradually losing her younger daughter—had maybe already lost her. Jules expressed increasingly open contempt for her mother and sister. The Wolfs, however, were cosmopolitans, a cultured, lively family that celebrated everything. Ash and Goodman teased their pretty peahen of a mother about her pronunciation of the word
latke
around Chanukah.

“I can’t help it,” Betsy Wolf said. “I didn’t grow up with the word. Your grandfather would have been quite upset to see me frying up a pan of these.”

“Of these
what,
Mom?” Goodman goaded her.

“Lat-kees,” she said, and the Wolfs all laughed. In honor of their mother’s non-Jewishness they put up a “latke mistletoe” over the door at their Chanukah party: a single potato pancake dangling from a string, under which all guests might receive a kiss. Just the idea of a latke mistletoe, something jokey and indigenous to one particular family, was alien to Jules. She fell into a funk thinking of her own childhood, which in comparison withered like a latke on the vine.

The Wolfs could do no wrong; they were stylish in separate, distinct ways. Betsy, a Smith College graduate, was the aging New England glamorous type, strands of hair waving from her loose bun; Gil was the Drexel Burnham banker, though full of yearning. Ash was the tiny one who would go very far as an actress or playwright, and with whom everyone took great care. Goodman was the disturbingly charismatic boy who had no “follow-through” and who enraged his father and entertained other people with his seductive, erratic nature. He’d been kicked out of his traditional all-boys’ school back in seventh grade, for cheating. “For cheating
openly
,” Ash had clarified to Jules. The other boys had been so much more surreptitious than Goodman. Everything he did was big and blustery, performed with ill-advised flourish. “The pressure’s always been on me to be the one who
doesn’t
screw up,” Ash explained to Jules. “The perfect, creative one. It’s sort of a full-time job.” But of course it seemed like a good job to Jules, to whom that whole family was so vivid and desirable.

“What is it you get from them?” her sister, Ellen, once asked when Jules was preparing to go into the city for the weekend.

“Everything,” was the only answer.

Freshman year in college a few years later, living in a suite with that group of nasty girls and escaping one night to the dorm room of a boy named Seth Manzetti, of interest to her mostly for his satyr’s head and slightly mossy body smell, Jules Jacobson had lain very still on his bed that was covered with velour sheets, and considered how, as of five minutes earlier, she was no longer a virgin. She quickly assessed that she didn’t feel
at home
in this state, yet still wanted to be in it. Her thighs felt a little banged-up, and her nipples raged from the satyr’s zealous attentions. But here in this state was where she would stay and where she would want to return and maybe sometimes live. Not with Seth Manzetti, to be sure, but in the beds and corridors of sex and love, adult love. Jules Jacobson wished that somehow she’d been able to
trick
Goodman Wolf into touching her in some sensual way that first summer, or even over the course of the following year and a half they all still had with him. A modestly homely girl should be allowed one such moment, just to know what she was missing, and then be able to move on. Not to have to long for it forever, wondering what it would have felt like.

The Wolf parents were party givers. Once in a while, Jules would enter the apartment on a weekend only to find Gil or Betsy standing in the foyer with a couple of party-rental people. “Jules, we were having a scintillating conversation about chairs,” Gil once said. “Cousin Michelle on my wife’s side is getting married here next month.”

“Goodman can DJ!” called Ash from the living room, where she’d been sitting on the window seat with a notebook, curled up against Noodge’s side, writing a play.

So Goodman was hired, and at the wedding he proved adept at spinning 45s and making suggestive patter. “This next song is for Michelle and Dan,” he said, leaning in close to the microphone so that his voice was distorted. “Because tonight
is
going to be one of those nights spent in white satin. Until Dan . . . takes her satin . . .
off
.”

“Maybe you should go into radio,” his mother said later, and the comment was meant to be helpful, but it also reflected his parents’ anxiety that Goodman had no “real” talent yet. Yes, he wanted to be an architect, but you couldn’t have an architect who carelessly forgets to include a girder. There was pressure for him to “get his act together,” as his father often said. But why did he need to have a workable skill already? Jules wondered. Goodman at sixteen was an indifferent, restless student at his alternative high school. Standing behind the turntable at cousin Michelle’s wedding allowed him to reclaim the power he had every summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods.

There was a New Year’s Eve party held at the Labyrinth every year too, and the friends from camp attended. They snagged puff pastry canapés as they made their way around the room in the final hours of 1974, and Ash snatched up a cocktail shaker of martinis and brought it into Goodman’s dark, slovenly bedroom. In a beanbag chair, Ash sat in her boyfriend Jonah’s lap. Jules watched from a corner as Cathy Kiplinger leaned against Goodman on the bed with the pineapple-shaped finials, her mouth on his ear.
On his ear!
He, unperturbed, openly pleased, put his hand deep into Cathy’s blond hair. Jules thought of how her own hair lacked the high silk content that boys like Goodman and all the men in the world apparently wanted. But Ethan hadn’t seemed to want to put his hand in hair like that this summer. He’d only wanted Jules’s hair, had only wanted Jules.

The two of them, Ethan and Jules, now sat together by default as midnight approached, and when the New Year officially arrived, Ethan Figman’s lips were upon Jules’s, and he could not resist seeing how much of a kiss he’d be allowed. Because it was New Year’s Eve she didn’t immediately draw back from him. The sensation wasn’t too terrible this time, but she couldn’t forget that this was Ethan, her friend. Ethan, who did not attract her. Finally, after a couple of seconds, she ducked away and said, “Ethan, what are we doing?”

“Nothing. That was a nostalgia kiss,” he said. “It’s sepia colored. People in that kiss are . . . wearing stovepipe hats . . . and children are rolling hoops down the street, and eating penny candy.”

“Yeah, right,” was all she could say, smiling.

Jules noticed that on the bed, Goodman seemed as if he wanted to
eat
Cathy, to absorb her into himself. But there was no similarly intense activity taking place between Ash and Jonah, who continued to kiss like two matching birds on a branch cooperatively passing a worm back and forth, beak to beak.

“Happy New Year, Jules the Great,” Ethan Figman said, looking into her eyes.

“I’m not great,” she said.

“I think you are.”

“Why?” she couldn’t help but ask. She wasn’t trying to fish for compliments; she just wanted to understand.

“You’re just so much yourself,” he said with a shrug. “You’re not all neurotic like some girls—watching what they eat all the time, or pretending to be a little less smart than a boy. You’re ambitious, you’re quick, you’re really funny, and you’re a good friend. And, of course, you’re adorable.” His arms went around her once again; and even though he understood that there might be a moment like this one every now and then, still nothing sexual or even romantic was ever going to happen between them. They were friends, just friends, though friendship counted for so much.

“I’m really not great,” she persisted. “I have no greatness in me.”

“Oh I think you do. It’s just not show-offy. I like that. But you should let other people see it too,” Ethan said, “not just me. Although,” he added after a second, hoarsely, then clearing his throat, “once they see it, they’ll snap you up, and I’ll be sad.”

Why was he so faithful to her, and to the idea of her? His fidelity made her want to be better than she really was: smarter, funnier, with broader range.
Be better,
she told herself sternly.
Be as good as he is.

A little while later, Jules and Ethan got ready for sleep, lying side by side in the Wolfs’ den on the white rug that appeared made of sheepdog. The fish tank threw carbonated light onto the books that lined all four walls, the names of the authors confirming that here was a home where thoughtful, intelligent, up-to-date people resided, people who read Mailer, Updike, Styron, Didion. Jules might have whispered to Ethan, “I’m very happy right now,” but it would have sounded like a tease. She lay beside him, smiling, and he had to say, “What’s so funny? Are you making fun of me?”

“No, of course not. I just feel content,” she said carefully.

“That’s an old person’s word,” said Ethan. “Maybe you used it because you’re settling in to old age.”

“I might be.”

“Nineteen seventy-five. Doesn’t that sound extremely old? Nineteen seventy-four was already pushing it. I liked nineteen seventy-two; that’s the one for me,” he said. “In answer to the question ‘What year is it?’ I feel like the answer should always be ‘Nineteen seventy-two.’ George McGovern, remember him?” Ethan said, sighing. “Good old George?”

“Do I remember him? I’m not brain damaged, Ethan.”

“He just came and went. We put him up like idiots, and we got beaten down, and then time passed. Everything,” he said with passion, “is going to move farther and farther away from what feels familiar. I read somewhere that most of the really intense feelings you’ll ever feel take place right around our age. And everything that comes afterward is going to feel more and more diluted and disappointing.”

“Oh, don’t say that. It can’t be true,” Jules said. “We haven’t even done anything yet. Not really.”

“I know.” They were both quiet and somber, considering this.

“But at least you’re starting to,” Jules said. “
Parade
magazine thinks so.”

“I mean I haven’t done anything, as in have
experience
,” he said. “Life experience.”

“Oh, experience like Goodman has?” Jules asked, trying to make her voice sound dismissive, as though what she and Ethan had in their platonic friendship was far superior to the physical pleasures Goodman regularly received from and gave to Cathy Kiplinger. Her mouth on his ear. Her dancerly legs opening so his penis could find its rightful notch.

“Yes, all right, sex and other things. Emotional things,” Ethan said. “Dark, dark moods.”

“You are the least dark person I know,” said Jules. Ethan was deep, and a worrier, but somehow he cheerfully adapted to all situations.

“But why do girls always want someone dark and moody?” Ethan asked. “I see a moody person in your future.”