The Interestings (27 page)

Ethan’s face burned with good feeling, and he leaned back on the couch, wondering where Jules was sitting right now, whether she was on her own couch too, and if their locations were parallel. “Hardly ‘genius,’” he said.

“I’m not even going to dignify that,” said Jules, then she said, “I’m willing to keep giving this whole thing a try. But how long do I put myself out there, Ethan? Obviously, I’m done with that acting class. Not that I can ask for any of my money back, even though there are weeks and weeks left. It would be too horrible to ever speak to Yvonne again. And besides, she’s already spent my tuition at Turban World. But what about auditioning? Do I say, ‘Fuck Yvonne,’ and keep on doing it? When do I stop? When I’m twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever. You don’t want to wait until you’re so old that no one will hire you in any other field either. I already feel kind of worn out by it all and I’ve basically just started. But I want to get cast in
something,
even an incomprehensible little play in a theater with twelve seats. Do you remember
Marjorie Morningstar
?”

“No.”

“It’s a famous novel by Herman Wouk from a really long time ago. Marjorie Morningstar grows up always wanting to be an actress; her name is originally Marjorie Morgenstern—Jewish—and she changes it for when she becomes famous, which everyone knows is going to happen. She’s the pretty, vivacious girl who had all the leads in the school plays and in summer stock. And then she sets off to make it as an actress in New York, and she has a lot of experiences, but finally it doesn’t work out. At the very end of the novel, the story flashes forward to many, many years later, and a friend of hers from long ago comes to see her. And now Marjorie is a suburban housewife living in Mamaroneck. She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she’s become this ordinary, sort of boring person, and her friend can’t believe that this is the same person he used to know. I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don’t want that to happen to me.”

“Jules, you are many things, but you are nothing like Marjorie Morningstar,” Ethan said after a moment of silence. He wasn’t being insulting, and Jules must have understood this. She wasn’t naturally headed for stardom, and never really had been, and so in all likelihood her story wouldn’t have a devastating ending.

Ash was the star; Ash would make it in acting if she wanted, though it seemed lately that she didn’t want it at all. She wanted to direct, not act, Ash had been saying to him. In particular she wanted to direct works by women, and works about women, with good female parts in them. “There’s an unbelievable imbalance out there,” Ash said. “Male playwrights and male directors rule this little duchy, and then they come in and sweep up all the prizes. I swear, if they could find a way to cast men in all the women’s roles, they would.”

“‘Tommy Tune
is
Golda Meir,’” Ethan had interrupted.

“Theater is definitely as macho as any other field,” said Ash. “It’s pretty much as bad as . . . wildcatting for oil. The sexism is hateful, and I want to try to change it. My mother got a great education at Smith, but she got married right away and never did anything professionally. I look at her, and think she could have been many, many things. An art historian. A museum curator. A chef! As you know, she’s an excellent cook, and an excellent mother, but she could have had a big profession too. They aren’t mutually exclusive. I almost feel like I owe it to her to do something woman-related.” Ash told Ethan that she wanted to become a feminist director. In 1984 you could describe your dream job in this way and not be made fun of. Of course the odds of success in directing were even lower than in acting—and lower for Ash because she was female—but lately she was convinced that this was what she would do with her life.

Jules, though, had fallen into theater accidentally, and she’d stayed in it maybe a little too long. College had been the last, long gasp of all that, and though in New York she’d positioned herself as one of those loopy character actors, not beautiful enough to get a lead but with a different kind of sidekick charm, she’d appreciated that there were much better people all around her. She saw them perform scenes in acting class; one of them had an amazingly elastic body, and another could do a wide array of convincing accents. Jules had also met them in waiting rooms as they all sat clutching their head shots, and she’d seen them in action during auditions. Though they too understood their lowly place in the theater hierarchy, they were competitive with one another for these small, crucial, occasionally show-stealing parts. They were good at what they did, better than she was.

“No,” Jules agreed with Ethan on the phone. “I’m no Marjorie Morningstar.”

“So what else can you imagine doing?” he asked.

“Do I have to decide now?”

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” he said. “Talk amongst yourself.”

They sat in silence, and Ethan heard her jaw crunch down on something. He wondered what it was; it made him hungry, and he stretched the phone cord so he could reach a bag of chips on the coffee table. As quietly as he could, Ethan separated the two sides of the bag; trapped air rushed out and he began to eat. Together he and Jules crunched on their chips or their whatever, unselfconscious. “What are you eating?” he finally asked.

“Is that like the platonic version of the phone question, ‘What are you wearing?’”

“Something like that.”

“Cheez-Its,” Jules said.

“Doritos,” he said. “They’re both orange,” he observed for no particular reason. “We both have orange tongues right now.
They will know us by the color of our tongues
.”

They crunched onward for slightly longer, like two people walking through leaves. Ash never ate snack food; her food purity was sort of astonishing. Ethan had once come upon her in their living room when she was sitting and eating a tomato that had been ripening on their windowsill—just holding it in her hand, deep in thought, casually eating it like it was a peach or a plum.

“Well,” Jules finally said. “I know this sounds lofty, but I’ve sometimes imagined doing something that deals with people who are suffering. I’m not joking, in case you think I am. When my father died, I was just so closed up about it. I never really tried to help my mother. It’s disgusting how self-involved I was.”

“You were a kid,” he reminded her. “Comes with the territory.”

“And now I’m not a kid. You know how in college I minored in psych? Freshman year, when I was so miserable, I went to university counseling and saw a really nice social worker.”

“Okay,” said Ethan. “Go on.”

“Becoming a therapist could maybe be interesting. Getting a Ph.D. and everything. But my mother can’t help out with tuition, and I’d have to pay back student loans forever.”

“Aren’t there cheaper ways? Could you become a social worker, like the one you went to? Wouldn’t it cost less that way?”

“Well, yeah, I think so. Dennis says I should look into graduate school one way or another.”

“He likes the idea of it?”

“Oh, he likes whatever I like,” said Jules. “And he’s really glad he enrolled in ultrasound technology school. Of course,
his
school,” she said in a dry voice, “has a great lecture series, and a wonderful lacrosse team, and an ivy-covered campus. Why, there’s even a school song.”

“Oh there is, is there?” said Ethan. “My curiosity has been roused. Tell me the school song for ultrasound technology school.”

Jules paused, thinking. “It’s by the Beatles,” she finally said.

“Okay . . .”

“‘I’m Looking Through You.’”

“Perfect,” said Ethan, appreciating her wholly, never wanting to get off this phone call.

“Seriously,” said Jules, “it was a good idea for Dennis. Before then, he didn’t know what to be, what to do. You know he got thrown off track in college when he got sick. Ultrasound isn’t something he was burning to do, but it’s good for him, it’s a relief. So, yes, he likes the idea of me going to school too. But you—I know you’ll have a strong opinion about this. Not that it’ll definitely be right.”

“My opinion is that I agree with Dennis. You’d be good at it,” Ethan said. “People would like talking to you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because
I
like talking to you.”

Not long afterward, Jules applied to the Columbia University School of Social Work, was accepted on scholarship, and also took out student loans. She would start mid-year, and was relieved not to have to keep buying
Backstage
magazine every week and sitting like a stooge in a coffee shop with a yellow highlighter, imagining that she might be hired for one of these roles, when probably she never would. Acting fell away from her, along with the dream of getting so much attention—too much attention—that you could feel it collect like a fever in your head. Also, she’d had enough of working at La Bella Lanterna, where the tips were poor and she came home at the end of a workday with her hair smelling of espresso. No amount of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo could get rid of the odor. At Columbia her hair smelled neutrally sweet again and classes were going well except for statistics, which was dreadful, but she said that Dennis helped her, sitting beside her in bed reading slowly aloud to her from the incomprehensible textbook.

But for Ethan, although quitting his staff job at
The Chortles
was a good idea intuitively, he was now left with nothing to aim toward. He wished he could use Jules to talk to, the same way she had used him. Talking to her was different from talking to Ash, who essentially trusted his instincts and wanted him to be happy. Jules was much more critical of Ethan; she was the one who told him when something he’d come up with was a poor idea. But he would have had to say to her, “I am completely confused,” and he couldn’t do that, for Jules would see him as slightly pathetic, and he’d been trying hard to climb up out of the nether region of pathetic ever since he’d made the mistake of kissing her years earlier in the animation shed.

One afternoon, a few days after returning from Maui, Ethan was invited to lunch by Ash’s father. “Let’s meet at my office,” Gil Wolf said. Ethan understood that lunch would require him to wear a tie, and he felt depressed and sunk by this. Wasn’t the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn’t have to wear a tie? And why was he even going to lunch with Gil, alone? Ethan and Ash had been a couple since the summer of ’76, with only one bad stretch of breakup, which had taken place junior year in college. Ash, at Yale, had gotten drunk and slept with a boy in her dorm, or her “college,” as they pretentiously called dorms there. The boy was part Navajo, with exotic dark looks—and it had “just happened” after a party, Ash had said. Ethan had been so angry and shocked that he felt as if all his internal organs would come exploding out of him. It was a wonder that he didn’t crash his father’s noisy old car driving back down from New Haven. Ethan and Ash didn’t speak for five weeks, during which time he created an ugly, mean-spirited animated short called
The Bitch
, about an ant at a picnic that betrays its lover ant.

One weekend in that miserable period, feeling lower than he’d ever felt, Ethan drove up to Buffalo to see Jules, and though he was meant to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of her cinder-block dorm room, he’d ended up sitting up in bed with her for half the night while she studied for a psychology exam. He kept trying to talk to her, to distract her, and she kept shushing him and telling him he was making her tense and that she would fail her exam. “I’ll give you a back rub,” he said, and when she absently agreed, he started rubbing her shoulders, and she leaned forward to let him scoot behind her and get better access.

“That actually feels good,” Jules said. Ethan diligently rubbed in silence, and Jules finally put her book facedown in her lap and closed her eyes. His hands moved along the surface of the oversized T-shirt that she slept in, and Jules made noises of approval, which pleased Ethan considerably. His hands moved in rhythmic pulses, and Jules sighed with a pleasure that in turn felt very pleasurable to Ethan. Something seemed to have changed in the room—was he reading this right?—and his hands moved lower on her back. Somehow, one of his hands rounded the corner of her midsection, and he now felt
certain
that something had changed, and in absolute silence he slid his hand upward and cupped her breast, two fingers finding her nipple. Everyone and everything was shocked: Ethan, Jules, the hand, the breast, the nipple. Then Jules moved sharply away from him and his hand and demanded, “Ethan, what is
wrong
with you?”

“What?” he said, both crushed and pretending ignorance of what he had just done.

“Go sleep on the floor in the sleeping bag,” she said. He obeyed, crawling back inside it like an animal in a cave. “Why would you think that was okay?” Jules went on. “That’s not the way we are, you and I. And why would I possibly do anything with you—my best friend’s boyfriend?”

“I don’t know,” he said, not looking her in the eye. Because we love each other, was the true answer. Because it feels so wonderful, at least to me. Because, oh, even though I have been entwined with Ash for quite a while, when things go bad I revert to the desire I’ve always held—the desire for
you
—which I will hold until the day I die.

What happened in Jules’s dorm room at Buffalo would become something that neither of them spoke about for years; and then, finally, Jules brought it up once when they were alone, casually referring to the event as “the Buffalo nipple,” a name which stuck. “The Buffalo nipple” became a secret phrase that referred not only to this specific event, but to any misguided action that a person might perform in life out of longing or weakness or fear, or pretty much out of anything human.

“She’ll come back to you,” Jules said to Ethan that night in her dorm room as they lay apart. “Remember when she kicked me out of her parents’ apartment after I went to see Cathy Kiplinger at the coffee shop?”