The Interestings (47 page)

Dennis took it, looked at it, and closed his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. He sat down on the couch and put his hands to his head. “I was insulted by the idea of a hundred dollars. But now I’m much more insulted. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Dennis, it’s okay,” Jules said.

“If you want to get out of this marriage, then just do it,” he said. “You didn’t ask for this.”

“I’m not saying anything like that. Why are you talking about it?”

“This isn’t good. I was fun to be with back before the stroke, back before they changed my meds, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, of course.”

“God, I hate the word ‘meds.’ I hate that it’s something I have to think about. I try to remember,
I was fun, and I can be fun again
. But I keep finding myself unable to do that. Or else I do something all wrong. That girl from Kentucky with the liver mass—if it was malignant she’s probably dead by now. Oh Jesus, now I’m going to obsess about her again. Everything is such an effort. I’m not crisp like you and Rory. And I know I’m going to lose you.”

“You’re not,” said Jules. Here he was in the middle of the day, in soft, creased clothes. He had lost all crispness the night he ate the food containing hidden stores of tyramine, and then she and everyone had continued marching through the world while he struggled. He might lose her if they stayed as they were. She saw this now, and it was like looking ahead to the very sad ending of a novel, then quickly shutting the book, as if that could keep it from happening. “Dennis, we have to get out of this moment in our lives,” she said. “We have to leave this place, for starters. This apartment. You have to keep trying whatever you can try. Newer medications. More exercise. Mindfulness. Whatever. But I think, just this one time, we need to accept Ethan and Ash’s help.”

Dennis looked at her searchingly, and then Rory reappeared; her timing was always exact in this way, as though she was guided by electrical impulses that led her toward the heat in any given, tense moment. She stood before her parents, looking from one face to the other. “Is that the hundred dollars?” she asked her father.

“Yes.”

Satisfied, Rory looked at her mother, and who knew what complexities caused her to make the request, the demand, that she then made. “Mommy, kiss Daddy,” she said.

“What?” said Jules.

“Kiss Daddy. I want to see.”

“A kiss is kind of private, babe,” Dennis said, but Jules took him by both sides of his face and pulled him toward her; he did not resist. Their eyes were closed, but they could hear Rory laugh—a low, satisfied laugh, as if she knew the full extent of her power.

T
hen they were in another place half a dozen blocks north, a cleaner, brighter place, “an elevator building!” they remarked to each other with wonder, as if such a thing were unheard of. They actually owned this apartment, and on moving day, when the miracle elevator took them upstairs to their new, bright, though slapped-together rooms with the smell of paint and polished floors, they felt as if they had been saved. They weren’t saved; they’d only been transplanted somewhere different and better, in a co-op whose mortgage Ethan had cosigned. And Dennis’s depression was certain to hang around like a paint smell that wouldn’t fade, but still it was something. The movers worked, dropping everything in the middle of the rooms. The same framed posters—
Threepenny Opera
, a Georgia O’Keeffe animal skull—which they’d outgrown but could not yet replace, would soon decorate these new walls. Ash came over to help in the afternoon, and as a joke she wore one of the moving company’s red T-shirts. S
HLEPPERS
,
it read. Who knew how she’d gotten one from them? She went right to work, tearing open cartons and helping assemble Rory’s bedroom—an actual bedroom of her own, not just a corner of a living room turned into a bedroom at night. Jules could hear them, Ash’s soft voice inquiring, and then Rory’s loud voice intoning, “Don’t put the Rollerblades away, Ash. Mom and Dad say I can wear them IN THE APARTMENT like my Indian moccasin slippers.” They were in there together, the best friend and the little girl, until the room was completely unpacked. At eight in the evening Ash was still at the new apartment, and they all ate Vietnamese food from what would become their primary takeout restaurant for over twelve years, until it closed during the recession of 2008. Jules tore the plastic wrap and packing tape from the couch and they sat on it with plates and silverware they had dug up from boxes marked
KITCHEN
1
and
KITCHEN
2
. Rory ate too many spring rolls, one after another, then belched appreciatively and went into her new room and fell asleep in her clothes. The three adults were hopeful—even, guardedly, Dennis.

“This is going to be good,” Ash said. “I’m excited for you.”

She sat with them, talking about the apartment and her theater company and about how great Mo’s therapists were, and how he’d already shown some improvement. “He’s working so hard with Jennifer and Erin. He’s my hero, that boy.” Ethan was in Hong Kong this week, and Ash was keeping all the parts of their lives going.

“When you have a child,” she’d recently said to Jules, “it’s like right away there’s this grandiose fantasy about who he’ll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child gets pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit. So now you know he’s not going to be an athlete. And now you know he’s not going to be a painter. Now you know he’s not going to be a linguist. All these different possibilities fall away. But with Mo, I’ve seen a lot of things fall away, really fast. Maybe they’ll be replaced by other things I can’t even imagine now; I really don’t know. But I met this mother recently who said that she’d become so grateful that her child is high-functioning. She said she’d become proud of the term
high-functioning
, as if it was the same as
National Merit Scholar
.”

Jules thought about her own child, and though she had the suspicion that Rory would have a life that wasn’t gilded with specialness and privilege, she knew Rory wouldn’t even want that kind of life. She was happy with herself; that was apparent. And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot. Rory and Larkin might well do fine; Mo, with his long, anxious face and active fingers—who knew?

On the night of the move, Ash went home at around ten, saying she was exhausted, and joking that she and the other Shleppers had a job in the morning in Queens. That night, not too far away, on the sixth floor of the Labyrinth, Ash’s mother Betsy Wolf, age sixty-five, was awakened from sleep by a headache so tremendous she could only whimper “Gil,” and touch her head to show him what was wrong. It was a bleed to the brain, and she died immediately. Later, after the trip to the hospital and the paperwork, Ash called Jules, barely able to speak, and the ringing phone in the night and the crying friend told the story. Ethan was in Hong Kong, Ash reminded her; could Jules come over now? Of course, Jules said, I’ll be right there, and she dressed in the darkness of the new, unfamiliar apartment among the unpacked boxes, and went down in the elevator in the middle of the night to find a cab.

She had not been to the Labyrinth for years now; there had been no reason to go there anymore, and on the ride up in the gold elevator she held her arms around herself, feeling sad and full of dread as she rose. Ash opened the apartment door and fell against Jules so hard it was as if she had been flung. Having lost her mother, she appeared so different from how she’d been all afternoon and evening, helping Rory put her room together, then sitting around with everyone, eating sugarcane shrimp. “What am I going to do?” Ash said. “How can I not have a mother? How can I not have
my
mother? We just talked tonight, when I got home from your new place. And now—she doesn’t exist anymore?” A fresh bout of almost assaulted-sounding weeping began.

Jules kept her arm around her and they stood together for a couple of minutes. Behind Ash, the apartment revealed itself dimly, both real and somehow like a stage set for this apartment instead of the actual place. She took in the wide foyer and then the living room, and the long hallway that led to all those bedrooms where the Wolfs had lived and slept. Jules tried to think of something to say to Ash, but all she could do was agree with her. “It’s terrible,” she said. “Your mother was an amazing person. She wasn’t supposed to die so young.” Or ever, was what Jules meant. Betsy Wolf at sixty-five had still been a beauty. She was a docent at the Met, and taught an art class there for children on Saturdays. Everyone always said how young and elegant she looked.

When Jules’s father had died, that had been a tragedy too, even more of one if you thought of it in terms of age. “Forty-two,” Ethan had once marveled. “So fucking unfair.” Jules wanted to explain to Ash how the death of a parent is such a big and inexpressible event that all you can do against it is shut yourself down. That was what Jules—Julie—had originally done. She’d shut herself down, and she hadn’t started herself up again until that summer when she first met the rest of them. Julie would have done all right on her own, Jules suddenly thought. She would have been fine, would probably have been pretty happy.

Finally Ash extricated herself and walked ahead into the living room, so Jules followed. What was it about the place now—what made it seem frayed? Maybe it could have used a paint job, or maybe it had immediately absorbed the death of Betsy Wolf, so that everything about this room and this apartment that had once been warm and glittering had now been dimmed and dulled—and even the familiar lamps and rugs and ottomans were symbols not of comfort and familiarity but of something useless, wasteful, even awful. Ash threw herself down on the loosely slipcovered couch and put her hands over her face.

Almost immediately there was a sound, and Jules turned to see Ash’s father standing in the entrance of the living room. While in her new grief Ash looked like a young girl, Gil Wolf just looked old. He wore a bathrobe; his silver hair was tufted and he seemed bewildered and slow. “Oh,” he said. “Jules. You’re here.”

She gave him a careful hug, saying, “I’m so sorry about Betsy.”

“Thank you. We had a good marriage,” he said. “I just thought it would be so much longer.” Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn’t matter anymore. He looked over at Ash and said, “That sleeping pill you gave me hasn’t kicked in.”

“It will, Dad. Give it a little time. Just go lie down.”

“Did you call?” he asked with anxiety.

Jules didn’t know what this meant, but then immediately she did: Did you call your brother?

“I’m about to.” Ash helped her father down the hall to bed, and then she went into her old bedroom to make the call. Jules didn’t dare follow her, not wanting to see the mausoleum bedrooms that had once belonged to Ash and Goodman. She stayed in the living room, sitting stiffly in an armchair. Ash’s mother
did not
exist
anymore, Ash had said. Betsy’s hair, in its bun, the strays coming loose in filaments, did not exist; the New Year’s Eve parties she’d overseen did not exist; the
lat-kees
she’d fried in a pan each Chanukah did not exist. Goodman had gone into hiding, but Betsy was the one who was gone.

Ash’s mother’s funeral was held four days later at the Ethical Culture Society, where Jules had attended memorials for various men who had died of AIDS, and then the wedding of her teepeemate Nancy Mangiari. For Betsy’s funeral they all had to wait for Ethan to return from Hong Kong on the network’s private jet. Jules’s own mother had said she wanted to come to the funeral. “But why, Mom?” Jules asked irritably on the phone. “You didn’t really know Ash’s mother. You only met her at the airport once, like a hundred years ago in 1977, when I went to Iceland with them.”

“I know,” said Lois. “I remember it well. They were very generous, taking you along like that. And Ash has always been so dear. I’d like to pay my respects.”

So Lois Jacobson took the Long Island Railroad into the city from Underhill and attended the funeral with Jules. It was an openly emotional memorial, crowded with family friends and relatives; it seemed as if everyone connected with the Wolfs wanted to speak. Cousin Michelle, who’d gotten married in the Wolfs’ living room and danced to “Nights in White Satin” and was now, incredibly, about to be a
grandmother,
spoke about Betsy’s generosity. Jules herself stood and said a few stiff words about loving the sensation of being around the Wolf family, though as she spoke she realized she didn’t want to go too far and hurt her own mother’s feelings. With Lois in the room, she couldn’t say, “When I was with them, I was happier than I’d ever thought I could be.” She kept her remarks very brief, and looked right at Ash, who was having a very hard time getting through this. Ethan’s arm was around her, steadying her, but Ash could barely be steadied. On her other side sat Mo, in a shirt and tie. He sat forward in his seat, both hands driving a Game Boy, as if he could steer himself away from this entire event.

After Jules, Jonah stood and spoke, handsome in his dark, tailored suit, while in his seat to the side, Robert Takahashi watched him closely. Jonah so rarely spoke in front of a gathering of people; he didn’t perform, he didn’t do this sort of thing. The last time might have been at Ash and Ethan’s wedding. But here he was now, and everyone seemed to like looking at him, and listening to him. “I had many dinners at the Wolfs’ apartment when I was young,” he said. “Everyone tended to stay at the table for a long time, and there was always joking around, and really good conversation, and amazing meals. I tasted foods there that I’d never had in my life. My own mother was a vegetarian long before you could be one and actually eat well. So our meals at home were a little . . . you know. But whenever I went over to the Wolfs’ apartment, Betsy would be in the kitchen whipping something up. One night she served a new pasta, and she told us it was called orzo, and she spelled it out for me when I asked. O-R-Z-O. But I remembered the name wrong, and I kept going into supermarkets and asking, ‘Do you carry ozro? O-Z-R-O.’ And no one knew what I was talking about.” There was laughter. “But you know, God, this was all so long ago,” Jonah added. “I just . . .” He stopped, unsure of what to say. “I just want to say that I’d give anything for another one of Betsy’s meals.”

Finally Larkin, barely five and a half, stood and walked to the podium, tipping the microphone down, and said in a hoarse voice, “I’m going to read a poem I wrote for Grandma B.” First, it was strange enough that Larkin looked almost exactly the way Ash had looked in the photos from when she was that young. Larkin’s beauty had somehow been untouched by the Ethanness
in her, which had revealed itself in the brain and on the surface of the skin, but not in the facial features; today Larkin wore a dress that covered her arms, and Jules thought she knew why.

The poem was very precocious and moving: “Her warm hand could always cool our fevers,” was one of the lines, and Larkin cried as she read it, her nose and mouth twisting to the side. At the end she said, “Grandma B., I’ll never forget you!” Her voice broke, and much of the room cried in one swoop at the sight of this overcome little girl. Jules suddenly thought of how Goodman should have been here. First he had missed his dog’s death—a rehearsal, in the scheme of things—and now
this,
the real event.

Maybe everyone in the room was thinking about Goodman too. Jules wondered if he’d wanted to come to the funeral, if he’d even discussed with Ash the possibility of flying here and showing up. Jules looked toward the door in the back, as if she expected him to be lurking beneath the exit sign, taking his chances that no one here would dare to turn him in. She could see him standing with his head bowed, his shoulders set, and his hands folded, a tall middle-aged man dressed in the clothes of someone who had been traveling on a plane all night. But because Jules had not seen Goodman for nineteen years, all she could picture was his young handsome face juxtaposed with gray-stippled hair.

Goodman was lightly mentioned in the female minister’s list of the people Betsy had left behind. Frequently when Jules looked at Ash and Ethan during the service, Ash was bent over, as if her mother’s death had brought her near death herself. Ethan had his arm around her the entire time. He was dropping everything for a while, he’d said when he returned from Hong Kong; he was canceling a speech at Caltech, postponing meetings about the Keberhasilan School that he was trying to create in Jakarta. Finally, when the head of the Ethical Culture Society seemed to be making her way toward wrapping up, Mo, who had been absorbed in his Game Boy, threw it to the floor with a dull crash and then shrieked as if scalded and sprang up. He twisted away from his sister and mother, and there was a commotion as someone by the door blocked him from running out, and the service was hastily brought to a close.