The Interestings (30 page)

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Ethan said as he came tonight in bed with Ash after the Japanese dinner. And then, a few minutes later, when he’d recovered and had the opportunity to take up the delicate and highly enjoyable task of whirling a finger on Ash Wolf’s clitoris until she went to pieces before him, she said, “Oh fuck, fuck.”

Lying back, then, Ethan said, “Why do all people say ‘fuck’ and ‘oh fuck’ during sex? It’s so predictable; it’s such a cliché! It’s like how all paranoid schizophrenics think their thoughts are being intercepted by the FBI. Why aren’t people more original?”

“I don’t think originality is the issue with you,” she said.

“What if the show comes out sort of dumb?” he asked. “What if the way I see Figland, the way I envision it in my head, just can’t be made into a twenty-two-minute TV show?”

They lay looking at each other. “I adore you,” Ash said, touching his face and his chest.

“That’s nice, and likewise, but why are you saying that at this particular moment?”

“Because look at you,” Ash said. “You’ve gotten a huge break. I’m sure the staff of
The Chortles
wishes you were dead. And yet you’re harping on this thing again, this fear of yours. This insecurity. You’re still worried about getting things artistically right, and making sure they don’t come out
dumb
. Nothing you do is ever good enough, in your opinion. Who was it who made you this way, your mother or your father? Or both?”

“Neither,” he said. “I was born like this. I came out of the womb saying, ‘I’m worried that something’s wrong with me. There’s this weird
growth
between my legs!’”

“You’re insane,” said Ash. “You shouldn’t be like this. It doesn’t make sense. You didn’t get pressured by your parents constantly, like I did.”

“This is a
Drama of the Gifted Child
thing, right?” Ethan asked.

“In a way, yes. I left it out for you the other day, by the way. Did you actually read it?”

“I skimmed it.”

“You skimmed it? It’s a very short book, Ethan.”

“So short it’s like a haiku, right?” he said. “Well, I think I can sum it up in haiku form.” Then he said:

“My parents loved me

narcissistically, alas

and now I am sad.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Ash said. “It’s an important book.”

Ash had lately become obsessed with
The Drama of the Gifted Child,
by the Swiss-trained psychoanalyst Alice Miller, which had become a cult hit when it was published several years earlier
.
Ash said it was the best book she’d ever read. Much of it dealt with the lasting damage done to children by narcissistic parents. Ash had read the book closely, writing in its margins, feeling certain it was relevant to herself and several of the people she knew. The Wolfs, particularly Gil, had always had so many expectations for her, certain that Goodman would never achieve much. He would disappoint them, but she wouldn’t. Golden Ash, with her beauty, her thoughtfulness, her plays, her industry, was a narcissistic parent’s dream. But Ethan’s mother and father had never once pushed him; they’d been too absorbed by their own dreadful marriage and then by their own split to pay too much attention to their son’s precocious, burgeoning abilities.

Often, as a kid, Ethan Figman would tumble into short periods of intense unhappiness, but during them Figland had sprouted, and now
Figland
. The elaborated-upon and somewhat altered premise of the witty pilot was that in a chaotic apartment in New York City exists a nerdy and lonely kid called Wally Figman. Wally’s parents are always screaming at each other and ignoring him. In art class at school, when he’s supposed to be creating a Thanksgiving turkey handprint like all the other kids, Wally creates a little planet out of clay, and, though his teacher brutally mocks him in front of everyone for doing the wrong assignment, he brings it home after school and puts it in a shoebox under his bed. That night, hearing a vague rumbling sound, he opens the shoebox and sees that the planet is glowing and spinning, and that it has become real. Figland, Wally names it, and when he leans closer to get a better look, he shrinks and tumbles into the shoebox. Emerging into the sunlight of planet Figland, his head popping up like a bewildered groundhog, Wally finds himself no longer a weird nerdy kid but instead a clueless grown man.

The pilot tells the genesis of Figland, but the episodes in the first season, as planned, detail Wally’s weird and funny adventures in Figland—some political, involving a creepy, corrupt government, and some adventures merely social, or socially inept, and all of it packed with a bang-bang rhythm of smart pop culture references and jokes and clever scatology. At the end of each breathless episode, Wally would be pulled back to earth and screamed at again by his parents.

In his childhood, Ethan closed his eyes every night and returned again and again to Figland, mapping out that world so thoroughly that by the time he pitched it to the network as a wacky but elegantly witty nighttime animated cartoon in storyboard form (“simple characters, complicated situations,” an animator friend of his had always suggested was a good mantra), it was a fully realized entity. Figland had given him a lot to think about as a boy; it had made him into who he was. As a man Ethan Figman was neurotic and self-doubting, but he wasn’t traumatized, and the show made the transition into viability.

Ash ran her fingers along the soft white skin of his arm, even tracing over a rashy patch. “Look, if the season comes out badly,” she said, “we’ll get out of your contract and go somewhere far away.”

“If the season comes out badly, we won’t have to get out of my contract. It’ll end. But in any case,” he said, “as you know, I wouldn’t leave the city.” It had been a big deal when the network agreed to open the studio in New York to produce
Figland
. Of course
The Chortles
was produced here too, but that was a much lower-budget show. This, now, was something new, a very expensive project created by a neophyte, and yet the network was going all out for it, agreeing to produce it in New York and giving Ethan the resources he would need.

“Even in this fantasy you wouldn’t leave?” Ash said. “Because this
is
just a fantasy. The season’s not going to come out badly.”

“No, I’d want to stay here. You know that.”

New York in the mid-1980s was an impossible, unlivable, unleavable city. The homeless sometimes lay directly in your path on the sidewalk, and it was hard not to become inured to them. You had to train your mind to remember:
human being lying here at my feet, not someone to feel contempt toward.
Otherwise you could turn sour and inward-looking, propelled only by disgust and self-defense as you made your way out into the grid each morning.

Hanging over everything like a cracking ledge was the AIDS virus and its certain death sentence. The gay men whom Ethan knew had begun to spend their afternoons at memorial services. He and Ash had gone to several. Many people they knew, gay or straight, were fairly hysterical, combing over the rosters of everyone they’d ever slept with. Ethan knew that the one among them who they should maybe be concerned about was Jonah—not that they even had any real specifics about his sex life. Jonah Bay was the sweetest, mellowest person you could ever meet, but he was partly a mystery. Even Ash, who used to be his girlfriend and still felt great affection for him, didn’t know exactly who he was.

But what made life in New York odd—not better, and in fact probably worse—was the impression of
wealth
seeping through everything. New high-end restaurants kept opening; one of them featured lavender in every dish. Ethan and Ash had recently heard from Jules, who’d heard from Nancy Mangiari, that Cathy Kiplinger had gotten an MBA from Stanford and was starting work in “capital markets,” whatever that meant. It didn’t make sense to Ethan that someone so talented and dancerly could end up sitting in a swivel chair all day, reading spreadsheets about . . . capital markets. Maybe beneath her massive desk she sometimes arranged her feet in first or second position.

In the weeks when Ethan’s deal was being put into place, his financial planner, as an afterthought at the end of a meeting, said to him, “If I were you, and this show takes off and becomes a hit, I’d seriously think about collecting Peter Klonsky.”

“Who?”

“Those ice cream cone paintings. I keep hearing his name. The work is big and lush and kind of vulgar in a great way, and it’s definitely going to appreciate.”

“In the past, people
appreciated
artwork. Now artwork
appreciates
? That’s what we’re coming to? Well, I guess it’s always been the case, but I’ve just been naive about it.”

The financial planner had laughed, but Ethan uneasily wondered if he himself was being thought of as an artist whose work would appreciate. Of course he was; Gil had told him as much. The minute he’d pitched his show to that roomful of receptive, giggling network executives, he’d entered the bloodstream of money and commerce. Purity didn’t mean anything, and probably never had. The word itself had pious overtones. Ethan knew a woman who called herself a writer, but when you asked her what she’d written, she’d tell you, “I only write for myself.” Then she would coyly show you her quilted journal, and when you asked to see its contents, she demurred, saying what was inside was for her eyes only. Could you be an artist if you didn’t have
product
to show? Ethan himself was all product, and he was allowing both it and himself to be lavished with the promise of future money. Maybe he would own a Peter Klonsky someday. He hadn’t even
seen
a Peter Klonsky, yet suddenly he was ashamed to realize he wanted one.

As for Cathy Kiplinger, off in capital markets, maybe the manipulation of money and markets gave her the same endorphin release that dance had once given her. Ethan had quietly kept in touch with her for a few years. She’d been a needy girl and had become a needy woman. She’d had an on-again off-again relationship with Troy Mason, who had joined the corps of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Ethan wondered if Troy and Cathy were still a couple, but he doubted it. It was apparently unusual to still be involved with the person you’d been involved with as a teenager; everyone told him and Ash this. Time had passed, and now Ethan and Cathy weren’t in touch at all. She didn’t seem to want anything to do with him anymore, or with that earlier, bad part of her life. He gathered, though, that she was here in the city, stoking her fortune and the fortunes of others. The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos.

But exactly because of how hard the city was now, it was a place where Ethan Figman needed to stay. He knew that regardless of how awful it got in New York, the city would excite him. He loved this breaking, teeming, competitive place, where he’d lived his whole life. But there was more to it than that, which he hadn’t discussed with Ash yet; and tonight, after the Japanese dinner with the network executives, he did.

“I’m aware that New York is a toilet bowl—but an expensive porcelain one,” he said to her. “That’s kind of immaterial, though, because anyway,
you
couldn’t leave.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t do that to your parents.
I
wouldn’t do that—take you away from them. First they lose Goodman, and then
you?
It’d be too much. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“They wouldn’t be
losing
me,” Ash said. “It’s not the same. I’d only be in LA.”

Ethan flopped onto his back on the futon. “I constantly think about your brother, and wonder where the fuck he is right now,” he said. “I mean,
right this minute
, where is Goodman? What’s he doing? Is he eating dinner? Lunch? Breakfast? Is he taking a crap? Is he working in a falafel joint?” Ash didn’t say anything. “Don’t you wonder?” he asked. “Of course you do.” But still she didn’t answer. “
Don’t
you?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Ash finally said. “Obviously. Though it’s not,” she added, “like he’s Etan Patz.” Ethan took in this comment, Etan Patz being the six-year-old boy who had disappeared in SoHo in 1979 on the first day he’d ever been allowed to walk to the bus stop alone. The child was a touchstone, a symbol of an increasingly frightening city. But this wasn’t a good analogy, for obviously nothing good had become of Etan Patz. Goodman Wolf, however, could be anywhere, doing anything.

“I know that. You just get so strange about it,” said Ethan.

“It’s a strange subject,” Ash said in a tight voice that he’d only very rarely heard from her, and disliked.

“You know, I dreamt about Goodman the other night; I meant to tell you this,” said Ethan. “He was in our apartment, and he was still a teenager. I tried to ask him why he felt he had to leave, and where he was now. But he wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t talk at all. He was completely mute.”

“Hmm,” said Ash. “That sounds intense.”

“Wouldn’t you give anything to know where he is? To know that he’s okay?”

“Of course I would.”

“Imagine just disappearing one day and then never being seen again. Who
does
that? What kind of person puts their family and friends through that? Sometimes I think that maybe he was much more fucked up than we thought. That he was even, like, a sociopath.”

“My brother was not a sociopath.”

“Well, all right, but we had no idea of what we were dealing with at the time. We were kids. We were idiots. We listened to what everyone told us.”

“Ethan.”

He had become unexpectedly agitated—this frustrating subject always did that to him. “It’s just that it was all left unresolved,” he said.

“Yes, that’s true. But he was innocent. And there was going to be a
trial
,” Ash said. “Dick Peddy would have defended him. Successfully.”