The Interestings (24 page)

Then Jules thought, no, she hadn’t undervalued Ethan. She’d valued him highly, but she just hadn’t
wanted
him. And in a pivotal moment of strangeness, Ash
had
. Ash Wolf choosing Ethan Figman elevated Ash to some higher plane of being. The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like . . . robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all.

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought:
I am the loneliest person in this subway car.
Everything here looked ugly: the aqua subway seats; the ads for Goya products, as if a faded color illustration of now-gray guavas in gray syrup could make you want to eat them; the metal rails that had been grasped by thousands of hands that very day; the stations as they flowed past the window.
I am having a crisis
,
she thought.
I suddenly feel a new, fragile sense of myself in the world, and it is unbearable.

The year remained intensely lonely, and sometimes at night in bed Jules thought of how she and her mother and sister were all lying separately in their beds, each of them almost throbbing with aloneness. She suddenly couldn’t imagine how her mother had survived widowhood at age forty-one. Jules realized that she had almost never wondered about this before. She’d mostly thought:
I am a girl whose father is dead
, and this had had a certain tragic cachet to it. Other people had said to her, “I’m very sorry for your loss,” and after she’d heard this said often enough, she’d almost felt that the loss was hers alone. Jules wanted to apologize to her mother, to let her know that she’d been so self-absorbed until this moment, but the truth was that she was still extraordinarily self-absorbed.

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it. While Jules lay alone in the bedroom on Cindy Drive, her two good friends lay without clothes in Ash’s bed on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth. Ethan Figman in his vulnerable nakedness was somehow maybe even beautiful. He was no different from anyone in the world. He wanted what he wanted, and he’d found it, and now he and Ash were dumbly happy in their shared bed.

Goodman was rapidly disappearing from daily conversation since Ethan and Ash became a couple. The family remained troubled and sad about him, but you could tell that they were actually recovering. A summer trip to Iceland was in the planning stages; Ash said her father had business to conduct there. More than that, though, the trip would be a way for the three remaining Wolfs to be quietly together one more time before Ash went off to Yale in the fall. They would ride horses in Iceland and go swimming in a geothermal pool.

One day at the end of May, when Jules and Ash were standing in a bead store on Eighth Street, their hands roaming and sifting through bins of shining, buffed glass, Ash said, “So, what are you going to do this summer?”

“Getting a job at Carvel,” said Jules. “Not very thrilling, but it’ll give me some spending money for Buffalo. My sister used to work there. They said they’d hire me.”

“When do you start?”

“It has yet to be determined. I’ll have to check with Personnel.” She paused, then added, “That was a joke.”

Ash was smiling with deep secrecy. “Tell them you can’t start until the end of July,” she said.

“Why?”

“You’re coming to Iceland.”

“You know I can’t pay for that.”

“My parents invited you, Jules. They’ll take care of everything.”

“They invited me? Are you serious? It’s not like inviting me to
dinner
.”

“They really want you to come.”

“Did they invite Ethan too?”

“Of course,” said Ash, a little flustered. “But he can’t, because of Old Mo Templeton. You know, he even turned down that amazing internship because of Old Mo.” Ethan’s animation teacher was dying of emphysema in the Bronx, and Ethan had taken it upon himself to care for him instead of going to LA to work at Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes. “He can’t come,” said Ash. “But you can.”

“She’ll never let me go,” Jules said, “she” being her mother. Then she remembered that Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, the former counselor from Spirit-in-the-Woods, lived in Iceland. “Oh, you know what?” Jules said. “If I did get to go with you, we could look up Gudrun. That would be so weird, seeing her on her own turf.”

“Oh, right, Gudrun the weaver,” said Ash.

“And she could tell us more about a tinder chamber being engulfed with flames.”

“God, Jules, you remember everything.”

Lois Jacobson was predictably uncomfortable with the Wolfs’ extravagant invitation. “It just makes me feel that Ash’s parents must think of us as poor people or something,” she said. “And that isn’t true. But there isn’t money for a trip like this. And I just hate the idea of someone else’s parents paying for you.”

“Mom, it isn’t just someone else’s parents. It’s Ash’s.”

“I know that, honey.”

Ellen, puttering around the kitchen during the conversation, looked at Jules and said, “Why are they being so nice to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen. “I just never heard of a family doing that.”

“Maybe they like me.”

“Maybe they do,” said Ellen, who couldn’t seem to imagine why a glamorous family she’d never met would be so interested in her sister.

Jules and the Wolfs left for Iceland on July 18, on a night flight from Kennedy Airport to Luxembourg, where they would change planes for Reykjavik. The first-class cabin was as comfortable as the Wolfs’ living room, and after dinner Jules made her wide seat recline, and she and Ash lay under soft blankets. Later, over the Atlantic, Jules awoke in a fully formed and inexplicable state of fear and dread. But when she looked around her, she was reassured by the calm, purring golden cabin with a few pin lights that cast beams downward on their seats’ occupants. Ash and her mother both slept, but Gil Wolf was awake, looking through papers in his briefcase and occasionally glancing out the little window into the blackness with what seemed to Jules, from her place across the aisle, like his own state of fear and dread.

The city of Reykjavik was notably clean and small, the buildings low and the sky wide. On the first day, trying to adjust to the time difference, the family stayed awake as long as they could, walking around the city, which felt like an appealing college town, and drinking coffee and Cokes and eating hot dogs from a street vendor. The music scene that later exploded in Reykjavik was not in place yet; Björk, the singer, was at the moment only eleven years old. Walking along a modest, well-kept little street, Jules felt unsteady. “Garden-variety jet lag,” Betsy Wolf said. But soon Jules’s mouth became wet with excess saliva, and then her stomach began to emit strange and unnatural noises. Jules could barely make it back into the Hotel Borg. The strangeness of strange places was now unbearable. Her mouth kept filling with saliva, and her legs shook, and once inside the hotel suite, Jules ran ahead and let loose a straight shot of vomit into the toilet. She actively vomited for so long that the Wolfs had the hotel’s on-call doctor brought in, and he gave her a large, gelatinous-looking pill that she was about to put into her mouth before he stopped her and said in a kind but awkward voice, “No, miss, please. The
anal
opening,” for it was a suppository.

Jules slept through much of the first evening in Iceland. When she could finally open her eyes, she had a dull headache but was also urgently hungry and thirsty. “Hello?” she said, trying out her voice. “Ash?” The hotel room was empty, and so was the adjoining one where Ash’s parents were staying, and she had no idea what time of day or night it was. Jules pulled back the edge of the drape on the window and saw that the sky was still bright. She went into the bathroom and there was a note propped up on the sink, where she couldn’t miss it, written in Ash’s rounded, girlish hand on hotel stationery:

Jules!!!!

I hope you are better, poor you. We are at the Café Benedikt, which is VERY nearby. Ask the concierge how to get here. Please come as soon as you can, SERIOUSLY.

Love you,

Ash

With a bar of green soap, Jules stood at the sink and washed her face, then managed to locate her toothbrush and toothpaste from the piece of red Samsonite luggage her mother had bought her as a going-away present. She cleaned her mouth, ran a brush through her hopeless hair, and went downstairs. The lobby was stately, with classical music playing softly. It was far dimmer in here than it was outside. Jules got directions from the concierge—everyone spoke English—and pushed through the door, heading into the sunlit Reykjavik night. This was a place that, in its puzzling continual daylight, appeared totally alien to her, a place where she had almost eaten a suppository. As she walked the two blocks to the café she sensed that she was walking toward something unusual. But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don’t appear at the time as knowledge at all. Jules walked down the street with her hair frizzing, a small splash of yellow vomit on the collar of her Huk-a-Poo blouse, though she hadn’t noticed it yet. She wore the turquoise clogs she had brought with her—“Finally we will be wearing clogs in the right part of the world,” she’d said to Ash before the trip—and they clacked loudly over stones, each step making her feel self-conscious and alone but purposeful. Many people here were wearing clogs, but none of them seemed to walk as percussively as she did.

Jules walked past men who were obviously drunk; she walked past a cluster of backpackers—latter-day hippies who were doing a tour of Iceland on almost nothing a day. A boy called out to her in a language she didn’t understand, maybe Greek, but Jules kept walking. Because of the broken blood vessels in her eyes, she knew she must look like a zombie out on a death mission. She easily found the right street with its row of cafés, all of them crowded, and with the strong smell of cigarettes rolling out. When she located the Café Benedikt and looked in the window, the first face she recognized didn’t belong to one of the Wolfs. Instead, it was a face completely out of context, and she had to take a second to recall the beam of the heavy, industrial-type flashlight that the weaver and lifeguard Gudrun Sigurdsdottir had first shone into the teepee in the summer of 1974. Gudrun was here again now, smiling, and from behind her, deeper in the packed restaurant, the Wolf family strained forward to make themselves seen by Jules too, and they were all smiling out at her with expressions that were uniform in their intensity and peculiarity. Ash was looking right at Jules, her eyes wet and happy. Beside her at the table, only half-viewable from this angle, his face partly hidden by a wooden post, was Goodman. He raised his glass of beer, and then they all motioned for Jules to come inside.

•   •   •

H
is voice on the phone just stopped me dead in my tracks,” Betsy Wolf explained. “‘
Mom.
’”

“Mom,” Goodman said now, for emphasis, and the name seemed to pierce Betsy Wolf all over again; she put down her glass of wine and took her son’s hands in her own and kissed them. Everyone at the table had an emotional face on, even Gudrun. Jules too had been pulled in, and her shock had changed quickly, liquefying, going loose and responsive.

“We were going to tell you everything as soon as we got to the hotel, Jules,” said Ash. “Goodman was working today and couldn’t see us until tonight. We had a plan to sit down and talk to you first and explain everything. But then you got food poisoning, and it would have been too weird to suddenly spring this on you when you were throwing up. You probably would’ve thought you hallucinated it.”

“I still think that.”

“I’m real,” said Goodman. “But you look like an impostor, Jacobson. What’s the deal with your eyes?”

“I broke my blood vessels throwing up,” she said. “It looks a lot worse than it is.”

“Yeah, you look like the girl in
The
Exorcist
,” Goodman said. “But in a good way.” This was the kind of amusing, insulting remark he would have made back when they all gathered in the teepee. But he’d long outgrown teepee life, and had entered someplace well beyond the rest of them. He now had the appearance of a sophisticated, bohemian European student who was perhaps at university on scholarship. He was not actually in school, he told Jules, because he would have needed too much legitimate documentation for that. He still longed to become an architect someday, but he knew he could never get licensed here or anywhere. Jules wondered whether that was entirely the case; could he possibly have found a way, if it was what he really wanted, and worked toward it? For the time being, he was working construction with Gudrun’s husband, Falkor, which was what he’d been doing today, and why he couldn’t see his family until evening. The two men gutted houses, and at the end of the workday they took hot saunas, and then, if it was warm enough outside, jumped into a cold lake.

Goodman, Jules found out as everyone at the table told her pieces of the story, had originally taken a Peter Pan bus from Port Authority up to Belknap, Massachusetts, on the morning he ran away. He’d banged on the door of the big gray house across the road from the camp, where Manny and Edie Wunderlich lived, but no one answered. He’d worked himself into a panic in the days building up to his sudden flight, afraid that the jury wouldn’t believe him and he would lose his court case and be sent to jail until he was a middle-aged man. So after he decided to flee, and collected a large sum of money from his bank account, placing it in the duffel bag he used to take to camp with him, Spirit-in-the-Woods was the only place he’d thought to go. Goodman walked around and around the property of the camp, which was empty and still and appeared so melancholy off-season. Outside the dining hall he saw the cook, Ida Steinberg, taking out the garbage, and he went over and said hello. She’d had no idea of his arrest, but when he said he needed to get away, she understood that he meant he needed to get away and not be found.