The Interestings (44 page)

“Look, I’m just going to put this out here pretty openly,” Ethan said to Dennis and Jules at brunch. “Will you let us help you?”

“No,” Dennis said. “We’ve already been through this.”

There was a moment of contemplative silence at the table, and it almost seemed as if even the children were listening to this adult conversation and understanding it, which Ethan strongly hoped was not true. He waited until the little girls started talking to each other, and then he quietly said to Jules and Dennis, “I’d like to think that if the situation were reversed, I’d be able to accept your help.”

Dennis looked at him for a long time, his eyes narrowing slightly. It was as if he was trying to imagine a situation in which Ethan Figman might actually need him. But he couldn’t, and neither could Ethan. Now both men were embarrassed.

Ash said, “Jules saves my life virtually every day,” and when Jules began to protest, Ash turned to her and said, “No, it’s true. You must be a wonderful therapist; I don’t care what you say about how your clients don’t really seem to break old patterns. You’re compassionate and loyal and witty and understanding, and they get so much from you. I don’t really know what friendship means if I can’t come in and help my closest friends when it’s called for. We’ve all been through a lot together already. Our lives are different now, I get that, but who’s the one I go to when I need someone to talk to—Shyla?”

“Who?” asked Dennis.

“You know,” Jules said to him quietly. “Shyla. Of Duncan and Shyla. Their good friends.”

“Oh, right,” said Dennis, and Ethan thought he saw a look pass between Jules and Dennis, but he wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t decipher it anyway.

“You’re the rock, Jules,” Ash said. “From the start.” She broke off and her face began to contort. At once, seeing her crying, Ethan thought of the loss of Goodman, and probably so did Jules; this was a moment of acknowledgment of the lost brother and how Jules had helped Ash cope with that. “And not just that, but also recently, with Mo,” Ash went on, and she looked right at Dennis, making her case directly to him. “Having her there with me when I went up to the Yale Child Study Center and Ethan had to be in LA—it saved me, it really did. And then afterward, when she came to the house for the night, it calmed me down. We’re just now dealing with Mo and the future. And knowing that I have Jules here for that is a big relief. So turn it around for a second, Dennis, and see this from our perspective. Our lives, Ethan’s and mine, have their own sadness; everyone’s does, you know that. But we also have resources that most people don’t have. I’m not trying to boast; it’s just true. I know you’re strapped, and going through a difficult patch in your life, and that the three of you are sort of on top of each other in the apartment. I realize it’s not the most fun time. Jules has told me what it’s like.”

Dennis looked at Jules impassively, and then Jules looked down at her plate of probably now unwanted, sickening brunch food under its slick of syrup. Ethan felt that Ash had misjudged, and had as a result inadvertently gone too far. He couldn’t bear upsetting Dennis or embarrassing Jules. He colored slightly just imagining Jules’s embarrassment. “The thing is,” Ethan quickly put in, “this is much more about us than it is about you. You may not feel you should take any help, but we need to give it. Can you really deny your oldest friends their deepest needs?” He gave them a deliberate expression of wide-eyed neediness, but nobody laughed. “Look, think about it while we’re away on our trip,” he said, and finally, if only to end the awkwardness, they agreed that they would.

Ethan didn’t want Jules to worry about money. He didn’t want Jules to worry about anything, even though part of his continuing love for her over the years was due to the fact that they could worry freely in front of each other, seeming foolish, idiotic, neurotic, all the while making jokes as they fretted and complained. Now, having been hustled off to Indonesia by his wife, Ethan walked down the path from their villa at the resort on Bali, clutching his postcard to Jules and Dennis. In the lobby, on one of the brown, cracked-leather couches, another guest of the resort sat reading
The Financial Times
. Ethan had seen him on the beach over the course of the week; he was American, in his fifties, shiny, trim, with a confident businessman’s sunniness. Ethan recognized that attitude from his father-in-law, back when he was employed. These days Gil Wolf sat in the apartment in the Labyrinth in an ergonomic chair, staring with cowed awe at the World Wide Web on his new Dell home computer.

The reader of
The Financial Times
put his paper down and smiled. “You’re Ethan Figman,” he said. “I’ve seen you around with your family.”

“Ah.”

“I’m glad even someone like you takes a break now and then. They say you’re a workaholic.”

“They?”

“Oh, chatter,” said the man. “I’m a workaholic too. Marty Kibbin. Paine and Pierce.” The men shook hands. “I’m glad you’re not here for some work thing. Some
reconnaissance
mission. Checking out the child labor scene in Jakarta, that sort of thing.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the merchandise.”

“Right,” said Ethan.

“It’s god-awful, no matter how you look at it,” the man went on easily. “Those subcontractors with the manufacturing rights can give you a real headache, but when CEOs get all pious, they need to go to, reminded that no one can police the world. No one. Things happen along the supply chain that you have no control over. Just give out the licenses to places that check out and seem decent, you know? And run your own company with the ethical code you were raised with.”

“Yes,” said Ethan. “Well, I should go.” What a lame excuse that was; no one at this resort had anywhere they had to go to, unless they had an appointment for a four-handed massage. He smiled thinly, and walked off. He must have dropped the postcard to Jules in the brass mail slot by the concierge’s desk, but later on he would have no memory of having done that. He was upset by the man’s self-assured words, and hoped he hadn’t just let the postcard fall from his hand onto the rush-covered floor.

Back at the villa, Ash stood in the teak shower with various nozzles shooting water at her from all directions. Through the open door he could see the moving lines of his wife’s young-seeming body, and also her head, which, whenever her hair was wet, appeared as small as an otter’s. He could also see the children and Rose and Emanuel out on the beach beyond the villa. Mo was crying again, his arms gesturing awkwardly and broadly; Rose and Larkin were attempting to comfort him.

Everyone considered Ethan a good person—“moral,” Ash always said, but they had no idea. No, you couldn’t police the world, but you told yourself you were doing the best you could. He had sat in on several meetings each year about the production of
Figland
merchandise. PLV Manufacturing was theoretically one of the cleaner operations, but they subcontracted all over China, India, and Indonesia, and all bets were always off when everything was handed to an overseas factory. It made Ethan seriously uneasy whenever he thought about what went on there. Maybe, he thought, latching on to a ludicrous idea, that was why Ash had unconsciously chosen this place for a vacation, and why he was here now.

Ethan got on the phone, placing a call to LA, where it was fourteen hours earlier. It was still last night in LA, but the executives he dealt with always worked until very late, so he knew he could reach them. Even if it was
last year
in LA now, someone would patch him through.

Jack Pushkin, who had replaced Gary Roman some years earlier, got right on the line. “Ethan?” he said, surprised. “Aren’t you in India?”

“Indonesia.”

“They’re the ones with rijsttafel, right? The rice dish? I’ve always wanted to try that.”

“Jack,” he said, stopping him.

“What is it, Ethan? What’s wrong?”

“I want to see what’s what.”

•   •   •

T
he conditions at the Leena Toys Factory at Kompleks DK2 in Jakarta were dismal by anyone’s reckoning, but nothing seemed extraordinarily outrageous—not that “extraordinarily outrageous” was a legal, technical, specific description. Ethan, dressed in the one nice linen shirt that Ash had had Emanuel pack “just in case,” followed the short, imperious Mr. Wahid, who took him through the squat, fused-together yellow industrial buildings where textiles were manufactured, and onto the floor. He saw the women, many in headscarves, huddled over their old sewing machines in an exposed-pipe, overheated space, but the scene didn’t seem all that different from the garment district in New York City where Ethan’s grandmother Ruthie Figman had once labored. Some of the machines here were unattended. “Slow day,” said Mr. Wahid, shrugging, uninterested, when Ethan inquired.

A skinny old man was trotted out to show Ethan what he was making: a shiny satin throw pillow decorated with Wally Figman’s face. Like everyone, Ethan was appalled that the workers earned what they earned, and he couldn’t call himself content after his brief tour of the depressing Leena Toys, a place you couldn’t help but never want to think about again. Yet after visiting he was also somehow not beside himself with guilt and self-hatred. He’d asked to see what one of these factories was like, and now he knew, and he could report back to everyone at the studio and the network about what he’d seen, and urge them to look into what could be done to increase overseas workers’ wages. Ash would want to get involved too, though of course she’d have no time, between running the theater and now starting to manage Mo’s complicated regimen.

Ethan had hired a pilot and a small plane to take him from Bali to Jakarta this morning, and before he made the return flight he thought he would spend a little time on his own in Jakarta; he was in no hurry to return to the healing of his family. He walked around the streets of Old Batavia, wandering in and out of little shops; he bought a snow globe for Larkin, and then he was at a loss as to what to bring Mo. What did you get for the boy who wanted nothing, and who gave his father nothing? It was a cruel question, but he knew he was the wrong father for this little boy, whose problems had become more obvious with each passing month, leading Ash to ignore the pediatrician’s blasé observations that some children need a long time to “settle.” Ash had taken action and made the appointment at the Yale Child Study Center. “Whatever they say, I know we can trust,” she’d said to Ethan. “I’ve read up on them.”

Those were the words that did it. Ethan couldn’t bear the idea that Mo would get an
incontrovertible
diagnosis, and that from then on, assuming it was bad (and he did assume it) they would have to reduce their expectations of him down to a sliver of soap. “The appointment is at ten a.m. on the twenty-third,” Ash said. “We drive up and spend two full days there, staying in a hotel at night, and they watch Mo, and they also watch us interacting with Mo, and they give him a battery of tests and do some physical exams, and at the end of the whole thing we sit down with the team and they tell us their findings and their recommendations.”

“I can’t make it,” Ethan said reflexively.

“What?”

He was shocked he’d said it, but now it was too late to take it back. He had to keep going. “I can’t, I’m sorry. The twenty-third? Two days? I have meetings in LA. People are flying in from overseas. If I don’t show up, then I’m insulting them.”

“Can’t you postpone the meetings?” she asked. “I mean, you’re the top person.”

“That’s exactly why I can’t. I’m sorry, I wish I could. I know, it’s horrible of me, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, I’ll try to change the date at Yale,” she said unpersuasively. “It generally takes a long time to get these appointments—some people wait a year or more—but, you know, I pulled strings. I guess I can pull them again, though I don’t want to seem ungrateful by rejecting the date they gave me when there supposedly
were
no dates.”

“You need to take him. Keep the date.” He thought fast, then said, “Can Jules go with you?”

“Jules? Instead of you? You’re Mo’s father, Ethan.”

“I feel terrible,” Ethan said, and this was actually true, interpreted loosely.

So he had told his wife a bold and monstrous lie, and then, when the twenty-third arrived and he supposedly had to be in LA, he hid out instead for two nights in the Royalton Hotel in New York, in a room that was chic but small, with a shower that was difficult to operate and a stainless steel sink that resembled a wok. Ash called Ethan’s cell phone at the end of the first day, when there was nothing conclusive to say yet, and then again late in the afternoon at the end of the second day, when the diagnosis of PDD-NOS had been given—a diagnosis that meant Mo was on the “spectrum.” She spoke to Ethan from the car, crying as she talked, and he kept extremely calm and told her he loved her. She didn’t ask whether he still loved Mo; that question wouldn’t have occurred to her. Ethan spoke to Ash for a while and then asked to speak to Jules, and cool as anything he asked Jules whether she could stay at the house that night with Ash, to comfort her. When Ethan got off the phone, he ordered room service for himself, and when it came he quickly gobbled the steak and the fingerling potatoes and the creamed spinach and drank half the bottle of wine. After pushing the cart out into the hallway he watched a porno film about cheerleaders and pathetically jerked off to it, and then he slept, his mouth open, barnyard loud.

Now he decided on buying a pinwheel for Mo from a shop, and he carried it through the streets, actually liking the clicking it made as the spokes turned. Ethan sat in a sleepy-looking restaurant in a very old building, eating noodles in broth from a blue bowl, loudly sucking each one up in a way that would have embarrassed his wife if she was here, which luckily she wasn’t. He sucked away. He was reading the book he’d brought with him on this vacation: Günter Grass’s
The Tin Drum
, which had been Goodman’s favorite back when they were teenagers. This copy—Goodman’s copy, he knew, for the name was written clearly on the flyleaf in superslanted high-school handwriting—had sat on Ash and Ethan’s bookshelf all these years, and he’d never thought to read it. Ethan barely had time to read books anymore. He had recently found himself reading an article on the Web about hedge funds, absorbed in this subject as thoroughly as if it were
literature
, thinking about his own money as he kept reading, wondering whether he should invest with the charismatic guy who was being profiled—and he caught himself doing this and was shocked. He’d been lulled and snared by the pulsing screen and the promise of money begetting more money. It happened to people all the time; it had happened to him.