The Interestings (19 page)

“Where’d they go?” she asked, but Ethan and Ash were also too high to really hear her or pay attention. She sank back against the pile of stuffed animals, then picked one up, an ancient, pale purple unicorn, and held it to her face, noticing that it smelled distinctly like Ash.

Jonah reappeared a little later, and Jules asked him where he’d been. “I helped our friends get a cab,” he said with a smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Goodman and Cathy. They said they had a secret adventure planned. They were really stoned, and afraid they’d have trouble getting a cab on their own. I have no idea of what a ‘secret adventure’ meant, and I don’t want to know.” He fell onto the bed, that place where he used to lie with Ash, and closed his eyes with their startlingly long lashes, and within seconds he appeared to be asleep.

When midnight was about to arrive, Dick Clark, still nearly as boyish and box-headed as ever, began his New Year’s countdown with Average White Band on the bandstand in Times Square. Ash, Ethan, Jonah, and Jules sat watching it on TV, and as the ball fell, the boys chastely kissed the girls in turn. The kisses made Jules wonder where Goodman and Cathy were right now and what their adventure was. She felt a low-level jealousy about it and hoped, somehow, that it was a disappointment to them both.

“God, I’m high,” said Ash. “I don’t like the way I feel.” It took almost nothing for Ash to get too high; she weighed so little, and she felt everything strongly and immediately.

When Ash’s pink Princess phone (“My
ironic
Princess phone,” she’d insisted, “bought when I was twelve, okay?”) rang just before one a.m., Ethan reached over and grabbed it. “Wolf house,” he said. “The wolves are being fed right now. We give them little bits of Red Riding Hood, lightly seasoned. May I take a message?” But then Ethan said, “Goodman? What?
Jesus.
” He motioned for everyone to be quiet, and when they wouldn’t, he called out for them to shut up. Jonah turned off the record player, the needle skidding to a warping stop, and they all watched Ethan, who looked stricken as he listened into the phone. “You’re not fucking with me, right?” he finally said. “I mean, is she okay?
What?
All right, hang on, I’ll get them.” Ethan pressed the receiver to his chest and said to Ash, “Go tell your parents to pick up the phone. Your brother’s been arrested.”

“What?” Ash said.

“Ash, just go
tell
them.”

“But what did he do?” Her voice rose, and her hands flapped in the air.

“Cathy said he raped her.”

“That’s insane.”

“Go! Get your parents on the phone!” Ethan said. “This is that one phone call they give you.”

Ash ran from the room and down the hall, tearing through the mess of adults. Soon the Wolfs were on the line, and Ethan quietly hung up Ash’s extension. “From what I could tell, they asked the cab to take them to Tavern on the Green,” Ethan explained to everyone.

“That was the adventure?” said Jonah, agitated. “Tavern on the Green?”

“Yeah,” said Ethan. “Apparently they wanted to see if they could sneak in to the New Year’s Eve party there and score some hors d’oeuvres and champagne. I think Cathy said it would be impossible, they’d get thrown out, and Goodman said no they wouldn’t. And I guess it was so hectic at the hostess’s station that they actually got in unnoticed. So they grabbed a couple of glasses of champagne off a tray and slipped down a hall and into a storage room. They started, you know, fooling around, Goodman said, and then something happened. He says it was a total misunderstanding. But I guess people heard Cathy screaming, and the police were there in about a second, and Cathy told them he raped her, so they arrested him. They took her to the hospital for an exam and everything.”

“Oh my God,” said Jonah, his hands to his head. “I got them the cab.”

“So? That’s irrelevant. It’s not your fault,” Jules said. “You didn’t know what would happen.”

“But it is my fault,” he insisted. “And I brought the hash too. It’s way stronger than our usual shit.” He looked searchingly at his friends. “I
drugged
them both,” he said. “It’s completely my fault.”

“Jonah,” said Ethan, “quit it right now. I don’t know why you’re being so weird. So you got them a cab. Big deal. So you brought the hash. We’ve all been getting high together since the minute we met each other. You didn’t
drug
anyone; what an odd way to put it. And Goodman has basically been fucked up all year. This isn’t about you or anything you did, okay?”

“Okay,” Jonah said quietly, but he looked shaken and ill.

“The thing is,” said Jules, and then she let her voice trail off. “Oh, nothing.”

“You can say it,” said Ethan.

They were each thinking as hard and fast as they could, even Jonah, who seemed to be struggling to climb out of his guilt; so Jules carefully asked, “Is there any chance? I hate to ask it, but, you know, it’s there, right?”

Neither boy said anything, then Ethan said, “Goodman says he didn’t do anything wrong. But is he capable of it? Am
I?
” he added.

They were all quiet again, stewing. “He does get into these little rages,” Jonah said. “But I always thought they were just bad moods.”

“His hostile side is only one part of him,” said Jules. “Boy,” she added, “Ash would not like this conversation at all.” They looked toward the door nervously.

“But what about Cathy?” Ethan said. “If it isn’t true, why would she say it? Is she really still that pissed off because he broke up with her?”

“She did lose her shit when they broke up,” said Jonah. “But she’s the kind of girl who loses her shit a lot.”

They all nodded. Cathy Kiplinger was the first needy girl any of them had known well. What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt that they had the
right
to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in—although annoyed at—their needs. Jules had never felt entitled to take nearly as much as those girls did. They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations resulted.

I will never be in a profoundly messy situation with a boy
,
Jules Jacobson thought with an unaccountable little burst of despair. I will never get that kind of attention. No matter what I do, the only attention I will receive will be from faithful, dogged Ethan Figman, who will love me until the day I die, and then even afterward.

She saw herself as a pile of underground bones laced and encircled with worms, while aboveground Ethan knelt in the grass and cried. The next image that appeared, of Cathy lying on the floor of a storage room in a restaurant that glittered like a disco ball, was somehow irritating now too. Why do girls like that always
get
things? Maybe Cathy was lying. Maybe she had to lie to keep everyone interested. It wasn’t enough that she had breasts like Marilyn Chambers and the face of a woman of experience. Everyone would continue to give Cathy Kiplinger all the attention she could ever want. Even right this minute she was probably getting attention from doctors and nurses and police officers and from her parents. All of them would be huddled behind a curtain in the ER, talking to Cathy in gentle but inquisitive voices.

Jules realized that it had grown quiet out in the living room. The party was breaking up; the Wolfs were sending their guests home. The bedroom door opened then and Ash stood with her father right behind her. “We’re going down to the precinct,” Ash said. “I personally think it’s fine if you all wait here, but my parents say you have to leave.”

“We’ll come with you,” Ethan said.

“No,” said Gil. “Absolutely not.”

“Some of us can go see Cathy,” Ethan said. “We can split up.”

“We don’t even know where Cathy is,” said Ash.

“You didn’t ask what hospital?”

“No, I didn’t think of it.”

“Then we’ll find out later,” Jonah said. “But we’ll all go to the police station now. We want to come,” he said with emphasis and anxiety. “We really, really do.”

“No, kids, it’s just not a good idea,” said Gil Wolf.

“Dad, I need them there, okay?” said Ash. “They’re my
friends
.” She looked at her father with a tortured expression. “Please, Dad,” she said. “
Please.
”

Her father paused; Ash held her expression and would not budge. “All right,” he said. “But hurry up, all of you.”

They got themselves together quickly. In the chaos no one gave much thought to how they would appear to the police when they showed up smelling of pot and alcohol. They filed out grimly, but animated by fear and excitement too, and found their coats on the rack in the hall. The other coats were all gone, except for one lonely London Fog raincoat, which belonged to a junior colleague of Gil’s from Drexel Burnham, who was passed out in the guest room.

“I really hope Cathy’s all right,” Ethan said to Ash as they waited for the elevator. “Do you know if anyone talked to her?”

“No idea,” Ash said. “Why would she say Goodman did this? It’s clearly bullshit.”

No one said anything to support or contradict this; out of nervousness Jules reached out and ran her hand along the gift-wrap-striped wallpaper that lined the hall. “We’ll get it all sorted out,” Gil said to his wife. “I’m calling Dick Peddy to step in as counsel. He was just here ten minutes ago; I should have grabbed him then.” He paused and shook his head. “Goodman couldn’t stay
in,
could he? Had to go off somewhere. Just like on Tortola.”

Jonah turned to Jules and mouthed something. “What?” she said, and he mouthed the words again:
“I drugged them.”

“Stop it, Jonah,” she hissed at him.

Outside the building, the Wolfs climbed into a taxi that was already waiting. Jules, Ethan, and Jonah stood in front of the Labyrinth in the same spot where, a couple of hours earlier, a fleet of partygoers had arrived in long coats, cradling bottles in gold or silver foil. Now the three of them were empty-handed, and there wasn’t another taxi in sight.

G
oodman Wolf, the Prep-School Park Perp, a clumsy and unmemorable name, spent the earliest hours of the bicentennial year alternately sobbing and sleeping in a holding cell in the detectives’ area at the local precinct, a windowless room he shared with two drunk men who had no memory of what they’d been told they’d done. One crime apparently involved public urination, the other assault. After Dick Peddy arrived and spent a long time inside, he came out to the waiting area and told the Wolfs and Ash’s friends that there was no way that Goodman would be arraigned today. He would have to spend what was left of the night here, and then probably the next day too. Then he would be brought down to 100 Centre Street and be put in another cell to wait for his arraignment. There was no point in everyone waiting here any longer, the lawyer told them, and he promised that he would take care of everything and stay in close touch with Gil and Betsy. As for Cathy, no one would give out any information about where she’d been taken.

“Happy bicentennial year, everyone,” Ash said under her breath as they walked out onto the street. She looked so small in her lavender party dress and incongruous ski parka.

A few photographers and reporters were waiting, and a couple of them stepped forward and said, “Did your son rape that girl in Tavern on the Green?” “Is he innocent?” “Is Goodman actually a ‘good man’?” They seemed rude at the time, but in retrospect they were astonishingly respectful, and when Betsy Wolf, short, graceful, and patrician, said, “All right, that’s enough now,” they obeyed her and backed off.

On the street, Ethan was the one to pull Ash close. Jonah hung back, uncertain in his role as Ash’s ex-boyfriend. It was as if he didn’t think he should presume she’d want to take comfort from him; over his entire life, he never wanted to presume
.
Both Wolf parents were too upset to talk anymore to their daughter and her friends, and they walked up ahead unsteadily, holding on to each other. Jules might have come and stood beside Ash, her closest friend, and looped her arm through hers, but Ash’s problems seemed suddenly overwhelming and far outside Jules’s understanding. So instead Jules walked alone, a few paces behind her. Ethan, though, immediately knew that Ash needed someone to help her right then. Without asking, he put an arm around Ash and brought her against him; her head promptly fell against his rounded shoulder as they walked down the street in the blue morning.

Taxis were procured, and good-byes said. In the last minutes, Ethan Figman kept holding on to Ash Wolf in a way that he’d never held on to her before. Jules saw this and didn’t comment, for it was clearly only an aberration. Ethan told Ash now that he thought she should go home and try to sleep. “I want you to get a few hours in, okay?” Jules heard him say. “Just shut everything out. Lie down in your bed with all those stupid stuffed animals—”

“They’re not stupid.” Ash was smiling a little; Ethan could cheer her up even now.

“Well, in my view they actually are a little stupid,” he said. “Eeyore. And Raggedy Ann with her bizarre head of
yarn
hair. You know, you could tie that yarn into knots, put her in a brown uniform, and call her
Knottsy.
With a K. Like Nazi.”

“You are insane,” Ash said, but she was still smiling.

“And there’s also that creepy Poppin’ Fresh Pillsbury Doughboy stuffed animal of yours, who’s all gray looking and, what
,
supposed to look like he’s made of raw dough? How unappealing is
that?
Some kids have teddy bears; you have a raw dough doll.”

“Give me a break, I sent away for him when I was
eight
,” said Ash, “with Pillsbury crescent roll proofs of purchase.”

“He’s not technically even an animal at all,” Ethan said. “But go lie down with all of them and get some sleep. I’ll take care of you.” The words were said lightly but with feeling; he was signing on, this was the moment it happened, and Jules saw it but didn’t know it.

Goodman’s story would have to be gone over carefully, again and again, and Cathy’s too. Jules shaped the narrative for herself to try to get it to make sense. In the floating sentimentality of New Year’s Eve, she thought, Goodman and Cathy had taken up where they’d left off when they’d broken up. In her version of the scene, Goodman and Cathy had been making out in that storage room, then it went further, and at some point Cathy probably remembered Troy, and tried to pull away. But Goodman couldn’t exactly stop. He was too close, he had to keep going, and Cathy’s protests sounded to him like ardor.

Why would she accuse him? Because, Dick Peddy later said, she was embarrassed. She worried that Troy would break up with her if he found out about this little adventure. No one was allowed to talk to Cathy, Dick Peddy had warned, for she was now the accuser, the opposition. But Cathy was also their friend, and even though she occupied a slightly odd role in the group—the sexual, moody dancer, the emotionally overwhelming girl—she was one of them, and she wouldn’t do such a vindictive thing to Goodman, and yet for some reason she had.

From then on, whenever Jules went to the Labyrinth, Gil and Betsy talked about the case, and also, often, about money. The legal bills were enormous—“grotesque,” said Gil Wolf. There was very little further conversation about the Democratic primaries, or the upcoming presidential election. No one cared about any of that anymore. And there were no more last mutterings about Watergate or the retreat from Vietnam or that movie
Taxi Driver
that was opening soon and was supposed to be so intense.

“Dick Peddy’s fees are disgraceful, and our wives have known each other since Smith,” Gil said one night at dinner, cutting into Betsy’s stuffed pork loin. “We’re all going to be in the poorhouse.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Betsy said.

“Would you like to have a look at our bills? Because I’m happy to turn them over to you, dear. Then you’ll see what kind of shape this has put our finances in.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic to Mom,” said Goodman.

“Fine, I’ll be sarcastic to you, then. I’ll talk rapturously to you about how one day you’ll pay me back, no doubt, with all your earnings from your architectural career. Until your first building collapses because you didn’t pay attention during Structural Soundness 101.”

“Gil,
stop
it,” said Betsy, placing her hand on his arm. “Stop it right now.”

“What am I doing?”

“Creating tension,” she said, and her eyes filled and her mouth trembled and turned downward.

“I’m not creating it. It was already here.”

“I just want everything to be okay,” Betsy said. “I want to get past this bad part of our lives, and then Goodman can go off to college and study whatever he likes. Architecture . . . or . . . Zulu tribes. I just want it all to be okay. I want our family to be happy again. I want this to be
over
.”

Goodman was supposed to be going to Bennington College in Vermont in the fall, having been accepted there early decision (strings had had to be pulled, even for admission to such an alternative institution, given Goodman’s unstellar school record), but now the dean of student affairs had written a formal, chilly letter saying that Goodman couldn’t matriculate until his legal situation had been “resolved favorably.” In order for him to go to college in September, there would have to be a trial first; but the trial, Dick Peddy had warned, might not take place for a long time. The courts in New York were packed; city crime was remarkably high, and waiting for a trial lately was like waiting on line at the gas pump.

January stamped forward, with Goodman going to school each morning and seeing Dr. Spilka three times a week in the afternoon, and coming home only to disappear into his bedroom to drink work-boot vodka or smoke a joint, trying to both exist and not exist. Ash called Jules one weeknight and said, “My brother is really in trouble.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t just mean legally, I mean emotionally.”

From the next room Jules could hear her sister Ellen’s roaring blow-dryer, and the same Neil Young album that seemed to be on autoplay, with the singer’s thin voice now singing,
“There were children crying / and colors flying / all around the chosen ones.”
She tugged on the yellow cord of the phone until its coils unwound themselves, and the connection thinned out and disappeared for a moment, then was restored. Jules sat in her closet on a few pairs of different-colored clogs, settling in to the conversation. “Don’t forget that this happens with him,” Jules said. “He gets really screwed up, and then he’s okay again.”

“I don’t think he’ll be okay this time,” said Ash. “Dad is so furious. And Dick Peddy tried to reason with Cathy’s lawyer, but no, no, Cathy and her parents insist on going ahead with it. There’s really going to be a trial, Jules, can you believe it? My brother could actually go to jail for
twenty-five
years; it happens to innocent people all the time. He would be totally destroyed. Instead of doing whatever he’s meant to do with his life, he would become this grizzled
con.
Can you imagine that? This is just so surreal, and none of us can stand it. But Dick Peddy says that no one in my family is allowed to call Cathy; it might look like we were putting pressure on her.”

“That makes sense to me,” said Jules, who knew nothing.

“I guess.”

There was silence, and Jules thought the connection had died again. “Hello?” she said.

“I’m still here.” Ash paused, then said, “Maybe you could call her. Or even go see her.”

“Me?”

“Dick Peddy didn’t tell you not to, did he?”

“No,” said Jules after a long, considered moment.

“Then will you go?” Ash asked. “Will you go for me?”

•   •   •

J
ules Jacobson arranged to meet Cathy Kiplinger at the fountain at Lincoln Center on a Saturday in February 1976 at noon, after Cathy’s dance class ten blocks south at Alvin Ailey. Snow was falling heavily on the plaza that day, and the pavement was iced over to the extent that the girls could have skated toward each other. There was Cathy in a long, eggplant-colored down coat, her face flushed red from the extreme heat of dancing and the extreme cold of the day. They warily nodded hello—it was the first time they’d seen each other since New Year’s Eve—and then they walked across Broadway and sat in a booth at a coffee shop. Cathy quickly drank down the first of several Tabs, “with extra ice,” she instructed the waitress, as though the ice might dilute this diet drink down to something so thin that not only wouldn’t it add a fraction of fat to a body on the precipice, it would also reverse the fat-gathering process. It was too late, though; Cathy had been right about her physical self that first summer; her breasts were too big for a professional dancer’s. “Sacks of mail,” she’d called them, and now they looked even bigger, and so did her hips. She did what she could to forestall bursting womanhood, drinking Tabs with extra ice and eating very little, but her body was taking its own form. Troy had a perfect dancer’s physique, thick and powerful. It was different for men. His arms could lift ballerinas into the air, and would do so for a long time with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, causing a need for cortisone shots and shoulder surgeries. But along the way he would dance constantly, and would get to do what he’d always wanted to do, never feeling he was settling or selling out or giving in to commercial forces. Cathy would have a very different life.

Now, at the start of it, she sat with her Tab, picking at her nails; Jules saw that those formerly perfect ovals were now like little slices embedded in her fingers. Each nail had been relentlessly chewed on since New Year’s Eve and was surrounded by shredded, inflamed, slightly puffed-out skin. If sex was like trying to eat the other person, this was like trying to eat yourself. Cathy lifted her hand and tore at her thumb skin; Jules almost expected to see blood on her mouth, as if Cathy were an animal that had been caught in a moment of predation and bliss. A cat with a bird in its mouth, staring defiantly at a human being and saying,
So?
What are
you
looking at?

Cathy was casual in her mutilation, and then she took another swig of Tab—a fingernail and finger-skin chaser. Jules remembered how, the year her father was dying, she had savaged her own hair. She hadn’t wanted her hair to look like that, and now Cathy certainly wouldn’t want her hands to look like this. But she drank her Tab and she ate her fingers, busy at the table, whether listening to Jules or, more of the time, talking. She didn’t even seem to find it strange or embarrassing to be doing this in front of someone else. But the gratification was so important, the relief so necessary, that she seemed like someone masturbating in a coffee shop. Jules wanted to say, “Cathy, are you all right? You’re frightening the shit out of me,” but what a stupid question that would have been, for Cathy had already told them all the answer.

Jules recalled the sexy go-go dance Cathy had done for the girls in their teepee, the
wow
of it all as she moved her snaky body freely, mostly unembarrassed by its encumbrances and also proud of its special powers. But now, Jules thought, that was over. No more freedom. No more pride. No more unselfconscious teepee dancing for Cathy Kiplinger ever again.

In college in Buffalo freshman year, Jules would attend a Take Back the Night march, walking through dark streets among hundreds upon hundreds of somber women carrying candles. Many marches like that one sprang up around the country, so different from the raucous SlutWalks that would come thirty years later, when young women would wear whatever the hell they wanted—baby doll pajamas, see-through blouses, leopard costumes—taking pictures of one another and posting them online seconds later. In the old days of Take Back the Night, you could march with other women and feel that all the rapists of the world were small and powerless. You with your candles had the power.
Sisters!
The men, those dead-eyed, furious losers who grabbed you in parking garages, had nothing at all.

“It didn’t happen the way he says,” Cathy said now, jamming the straw into the ice of her Tab like a little pickax. “It happened the way I said. I wouldn’t make it up.” She took a bite of her fingernail, and a string of skin became separated, unpeeled.