The Interestings (29 page)

“It’s from an old photo,” said Gil. His voice was strained, and Ethan didn’t want to look up and over at him, for he feared what he would see. Just a moment earlier Ethan had worried that he would laugh; now he knew it was possible that Gil might cry. And then, of course, Ethan would cry too, but he would also need to protect Gil, to make a tender gesture toward him, to tell him he was so glad Gil had shown him his artwork. In the drawing, Ash and Goodman were playing with Noodge when he was a puppy. Gil had done his best to capture a moment in time. Here was a labored scene of Ethan Figman’s girlfriend as a little girl, looking vaguely the way she’d actually looked, according to the many photos Ethan had seen on the walls of the Wolfs’ apartment. In her father’s rendering, Ash and Goodman were happy, the dog was happy and alive, time was stopped, and there was no sense of what the future would be for these children, though, disturbingly, everyone’s neck—the brother, the sister, and the dog—appeared to have been idly broken.

•   •   •

A
fter leaving the celebration dinner at the dark and beautiful Japanese restaurant, and saying effusive good-byes to the network executives that included an appropriately solid, manly handshake between the men and delicate cheek kisses between everyone else, Ethan and Ash walked down Madison Avenue in the light rain. It was late, and this street was not meant for nighttime. Everyone out tonight was in a hurry to get somewhere else. All store windows were grilled; the expensive clothes and shoes and chocolates were tucked away into unreachability for the night. Ethan and Ash walked slowly south; he wasn’t ready to get into a cab just yet. He put his arm around her and they leaned together as they walked. They stopped on the corner of 44th Street and he kissed her; she smelled a little bit like sake, a little bit like fish. Intoxicating, vaginal, and he felt stirred, right in the middle of everything else he was feeling. She seemed to sense his mood, its many tentacles reaching out unsurely.

“Which one did you like best?” Ethan asked her.

“
Like
? Is that the operative word? And don’t you mean
better
, not
best
, because there are only two of them? They’re both so slick. And Hallie basically defers to Gary.”

“I meant which kind of sushi. And sashimi. Not which network executive. I liked the piece that looked like a gramophone.”

“Oh, right. Yes, that one was cool,” Ash said. “I think I liked the one that looked like a Christmas present. Red and green. Your show is going to be great, by the way,” she said.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Are you kidding me, Ethan?”

“It’s just that there’s a dividing line in my life now,” he said. “Before and after.” Ethan felt convinced that it was easy to become greedy the minute your fortunes increased. Ash had always seemed to take her family’s money for granted, which bothered him; Ethan, living first with his squabbling, aggravated, moneyless parents, and then with his careless father, had mostly been indifferent to wealth, but his Socialist tendencies never really developed; he’d been born too late to find enough company for that. “What if it’s not right, this show?” he asked. “What if it’s a real embarrassment, a total artistic failure? A
mistake
.”

“Ethan, you think everything is a mistake. You have no sense of when things feel right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the time you were offered that summer internship after high school—”

“I turned it down for Old Mo,” Ethan said hotly. “He was dying of emphysema, Ash, I mean, come on, what did you think I was going to do?” Even thinking about that summer, Ethan felt himself sigh and deflate. Old Mo Templeton, on oxygen and weighing so little, had been unable to eat, and Ethan went out and bought him a juicer. The juicer had been a beauty, the Jaguar of juicers, as futuristic as a spaceship, and he’d pushed carrots and beets and celery into it, and sat by the hospital bed that had been installed in Old Mo’s apartment, and held the glass of juice and angled the straw for him.

Once, as Ethan bent the flexible straw, he became aware of the tiny little creak it made upon bending, and he filed away the idea,
straw sound
, for some future endeavor. “Straw sound! Straw sound!” the character Wally Figman demanded of his mother, who’d given him a glass of chocolate milk a few months later in a flashback to early childhood in one of the short
Figland
films. The noisy, brash cartoon soundtrack came to a halt while Wally’s mother bent the straw for her son, and the straw made that unmistakable and somehow pleasurable little squeaking creak.

Once
Figland
hit primetime, stoners watching the show would soon say to one another, “Straw sound, straw sound!” And someone might go into a kitchen, or even run out to a store, and bring back a box of Circus Flexi-Straws and bend straw after straw to hear that specific, inimitable sound, finding it unaccountably hilarious.

Ethan had stayed with Old Mo until the last days when the old man was moved to the hospital, and then he’d been there when Old Mo died. He’d inherited everything from his teacher’s personal collection of old reel-to-reel cartoons:
Skedaddle, Big Guy, Cosmopolitan Ranch Hands
, and all the others. Sometimes late at night when Ash slept but Ethan couldn’t, he threaded the cocoa-colored Bell & Howell projector and sat in the living room, screening the ancient cartoons on the wall, though lately that seemed maudlin and self-pitying, and so he packed up all the reels and stored them at his father’s place. One more box in that disgusting apartment wouldn’t make a difference.

He’d thrown over the job at Looney Tunes for an important reason, but it was true that he hadn’t been able to appreciate what the job might have been like, and what it might have done for him. Looney Toons was a potential nightmare of subservience and adherence to someone else’s fixed vision, and yet maybe working there would have been exciting. Of course there was no way to know now. He hadn’t gone the showy, Warner Bros./LA route, and had instead stayed in New York after graduating from art school.

“And frankly,” said Ash, “it was only a matter of time before you left
The Chortles
. They weren’t good enough for you. I said to myself: Where’s the subtlety? Ethan’s going to hate this.”

“You knew more than I did. And then your dad, with his big pep talk that day in his office—without him I would be doing who knows what. Drifting.”

For months Ethan had mulled over everything Gil had said, all the while doing industrials again to bring in money. Finally, after a great deal of obsessive thinking, he thought he was ready to present his ideas, as Gil had urged him to do, and to his astonishment the network had said sure, we’ll be glad to hear your pitch. He’d brought in a storyboard, and he’d done the voices that he’d always done in the short films, and everyone in the room laughed a lot and called him back for two more meetings with other executives, and somehow in the end they’d actually said yes, and had given him his own show. It would never have occurred to Ethan on his own to have the balls to go in there like that.
Balls.
He remembered the Newton’s cradle on Gil’s desk. Gil had plenty of balls, hanging from strings, smashing into one another and clicking like mad. He owed Gil everything, and yet even thinking this, Ethan knew it wasn’t really the case.

Tonight, after the miraculous, gemological assortment of raw fish, and the raised glasses of aromatic sake that had been knocked together in celebration, the dazzling truth of his success was indisputable. But on the street in the rain after dinner, Ethan felt clubbed yet again, the way he’d felt on Maui. And this time he was doing what he wanted! This time he had gotten everything imaginable! The clubbing came from a different source. Not disappointment but fulfillment. He knew his life would change in a shudderingly radical fashion, and he would emerge different. He would probably even look different. He was like a baby whose head gets elongated as it makes the awful soft-serve ice cream machine trip through the birth canal. Ash was in her coat and scarf, she who had looked so pretty at the low, lacquered table beside him as they sat on the straw mats; obviously Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin had been impressed and surprised by her. Ethan was socially elevated by the incongruous beauty and loveliness of his girlfriend. He hated the fact of this; it insulted Ash, and it insulted him, but the problem was that it was predictable and true.

When they got home that night, instead of feeling weary and damp from the rain they dropped together onto their futon, and without any discussion began to fuck. Ash took off her good clothes until she was wearing only her little sleeveless undershirt that made him incredibly excited for reasons he didn’t understand. He slid his hand up under the elastic ribbed cotton; at some point she was on her stomach and he found himself climbing on top of her, and he saw that the T-shirt label was sticking up in back.
HANES FOR MEN
it read upside down, and these words alone sent new blood rushing to his already filled penis. He wanted to laugh.

Sex was as strange as anything, as strange as sushi, or art, or the fact that he was a grown man now who could fuck a woman who loved him. The fact that he, Ethan Figman, was really fuckable after all, when he had spent the entire first seventeen years of his life certain that this was not the case and never would be. But then, early one morning on a terrible New Year’s Day, he’d put his arm around Ash Wolf as they left the police station after her brother Goodman’s arrest, and she’d looked over at him with what he’d later thought of as
fawn face,
the expression a deer makes not when it’s caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts. Ash gave him the fawn face
,
and he’d blinked in confusion. He’d put an arm around her out of instinct, wanting to protect her because he knew how much she loved her brother and how agonizing this was for her. But there was that
face,
and he decided that he was wrong, it couldn’t mean anything different from usual. She was grateful to him, that was all.

For a long time, seven months to be exact, he’d assumed he had misread Ash’s expression. But then in the middle of camp again in the summer, away from her family and its nonstop grief at Goodman’s disappearance, Ethan and Ash had sat in the animation shed together a few times, and they’d told each other a frank assortment of personal details. Ethan told Ash about the first inklings of Figland he’d had when he was really young. The place had seemed to send him messages about its existence, as if through little smokestacks in his brain. He told Ash he had been positive that the hateful, real world in which we all lived couldn’t possibly be all there was, so he’d had to create an alternate world as well. She, when it was her turn, spoke about Goodman, and how she knew they had very little in common other than the same parents, but it didn’t matter; she felt as if she
was
him. Ash said she would wake up sometimes, and briefly, literally think she was her brother, lying in a bed somewhere. She also told Ethan about how she’d shoplifted constantly for a full year in eighth grade, and had never once been caught. As a result, she still had an entire drawer full of Coty makeup and L’eggs panty hose in colors and sizes she would never use: “Deep Bayou Blush.” “Extra-Plus Queen.” It was as though they both knew they were about to commit to each other for life, so they’d better let the other person know all the particulars of what they were getting into and would have to live with. But how could they possibly have understood what was happening to them at seventeen?

When she got up to leave the animation shed one day after a long confessional conversation, Ash said to him, “You can come to the teepee tonight if you want.”

“
Your
teepee?” he’d said like an idiot. “What for?”

Ash shrugged. “All right, don’t come.”

“Of course I’ll come.” Though Ethan thought he had a decent chance of dying of overexcitement before then.

When he slipped into Ash Wolf’s bed that night, he did so in the presence of four sleeping girls, and one of those girls was Jules. He felt extremely unhappy about this aspect; it was almost intolerable for him to be in Ash’s bed with Jules so close by. But he had to assume and pray that Jules Jacobson was really, deeply asleep. When he lay against Ash with his shirt actually removed, then later his underpants, just to be nude together, not for full-on sex yet (that would happen another time, without anyone else around, of course), his dick was so hard against his abdomen that it was like a pinball flipper after someone has slammed the button on the side of the machine. He could feel their hot skins touching, almost
ticking.
Ethan was so moved and shocked at the sensation of skin against skin that he was able to forget all about Jules for a while.

Ash Wolf actually desired him. It seemed so unlikely, but then again, so did many things in life. Lying against her that first time, he started making a list:

1) The existence of peacocks.

2) The fact that John Lennon and Paul McCartney just happened to meet each other as teenagers.

3) Halley’s comet.

4) Walt Disney’s unbearably gorgeous
Snow White
.

That first middle-of-the-night visit in the girls’ teepee was so beautiful. It was also extremely sticky, deeply daring, experimental, and almost psychotic in its intensity. But right away both Ethan and Ash knew what this could become, and was already becoming. Across the wooden room, he saw the outline of Jules Jacobson sleeping in the dark: Oh, Jules! He noticed that she was wearing a retainer, which glinted in the moonlight.

He felt tenderly toward her even as he said good-bye to her as his long-term primary love object. He was consciously switching affections, at least outwardly
.
Ethan was surrounded by girls, and the atmosphere was all about female faces and breasts and fragrant, much-shampooed hair. It was almost too much for a seventeen-year-old male to absorb. But then it regulated itself, became not too much to absorb but
just enough,
and there it remained even now, eight years in.