The Interestings A Novel

PART TWO

Figland





TEN





In September 1984, at a small Japanese restaurant in New York City so expensive it had no name on the door and no prices on its calligraphic menu, Ethan Figman and Ash Wolf sat on pressed straw mats across from network executives Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin, both sleek and tailored and veneer-toothed, though it was clear that Gary had the power, and that Hallie’s power came from its complementarity. He spoke first; she seemed to repeat a milder and less engaging version of what had just been said. “This has been a wonderful sequence of developments,” Gary Roman said.

“So terrific,” said Hallie Sakin.

A pilot had been made, a deal going forward had been finalized, and a full season of Figland had been ordered, to be produced out of the studio in midtown Manhattan that the network was opening expressly for this purpose. Because of Ethan’s insistence on doing the voices of two recurring characters, he’d rendered himself permanently indispensable in this way as well as others. A few days earlier the executives had come in from LA for meetings with Ethan and his agent and his lawyers, and now, at last, for a celebration dinner.

A waiter took their orders, and then a waitress in a pale green kimono slid open the rice-paper doors and brought in wooden tray after wooden tray of food, while the waiter hovered and oversaw, the two of them like a Japanese version of Gary Roman and Hallie Sakin. Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved. Ethan would mention this to Ash later, when they were back in their apartment and had a chance to deconstruct the evening, during which Ethan felt deeply and uncomfortably formal and not himself. First of all, the weirdness of sushi itself had put him off. At age twenty-five, Ethan Figman had only ever eaten a California roll, which was not remotely raw. But now a selection of sushi, and varied rhombuses of sashimi, were carried in accompanied by smears of something sinus-opening called wasabi. There were glistening little globes, the harvest of mysterious underwater ovulation, and amputated tentacles served with a dipping sauce that tasted like smoked caramel. Ethan was scared of the parasites that sometimes swarmed in raw fish, but he was intrigued by the food too, and tried to overcome his fears. Japanese food was, in its way, like an edible cartoon.

Ash, beside him, had eaten sushi and sashimi many times; she even said, later that night, that she was sure she’d come to this very restaurant once, with her father, when she was a child in the 1960s. Gil Wolf had patiently taught his daughter to hold a pair of lacquered chopsticks at that dinner. But maybe it hadn’t been this restaurant at all; there were a few such places in the city, unlabeled, unlisted, unpriced. You just had to be the kind of person to know about them. You just had to have money.

But it wasn’t only the food that made Ethan feel the way he did. By rights he ought to have been relaxed. The time to be tense was before today, and he’d been tense then too. Now, with a season of the show ordered, and an entire floor of an office building rented as studio space, the network couldn’t take it back. They couldn’t suddenly realize the depth and breadth of their error, the fact that they had mistakenly offered him, of all people—uncool, unbeautiful Ethan Figman—a very large sum of money to do what he’d always done anyway, at least in his head.

“How does it feel to know that if audiences respond the way we think they will, you’re going to be the most lovable Figman in America?” Gary Roman asked.

“I bet you’re psyched,” murmured Hallie Sakin.

“I think I will actually be the second most lovable one,” said Ethan. “My great-uncle Schmendrick Figman is worshipped, at least within the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.”

There was a confused pause, and the executives both laughed with similar bleats, though Ash didn’t even pretend to find it funny. Ethan was babbling; this was what he did in times of stress. Of course he did not have a great-uncle Schmendrick, and the joke wasn’t even a joke. He knew that Ash didn’t like this part of him, but when you were in a relationship you had to take the whole package. By the time Ash came to love Ethan, he had developed so many liabilities: the babbling, the sweating hands, the insecurity, the general ugliness with his clothes on and perhaps the greater ugliness with them off. Ethan Figman needed more sake now in order to talk to these people the way a human talks to other humans. He couldn’t only talk to his friends for the rest of his life, though that would have been preferable—particularly if he could mostly talk to Jules. He and the network were now partnered, paired off. Ethan was going to have a show called Figland to create and write and do voices for and take part in table reads for and devote all his time to. He would be ringed by many, many people, not just Ash and Jonah and Jules.

Almost three years earlier, Ethan had been hired by a clever if shrill nighttime cartoon for adults called The Chortles. He was a few months out of the School of Visual Arts when he took the job, and though before then he’d been able to find work doing industrials, he was curious about what it would be like to be part of a show. Alone among his friends he appeared to be eminently hirable. Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet. Jules was still trying to be a comedic actor; Ash was trying to be a serious one. Jonah, fresh out of the Moonies, was undecided and lost, looking for some kind of engineering job. The Chortles was one of the very few TV cartoons for adults, and what made it even more unusual was that it was produced in New York, not LA; this was its biggest allure for Ethan. He didn’t actually like the way The Chortles looked, and the humor was sort of mean and childish. Characters actually stuck out a foot and tripped one another in a running gag that tested well with audiences between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the desired demographic. The animation studio where Ethan drew and wrote The Chortles was a big, open space in Chelsea with modular furniture, a Joy Division soundtrack, a refrigerator packed with sodas and juice, and a staff under the age of thirty. One day someone brought in a pogo stick that left a long line of pockmarks in the beautiful floor. Ethan settled in to the job and more than a year passed, during which he was given a series of raises and compliments. The Chortles was doing so well that the producers flew the staff to Hawaii in gratitude.

On the island of Maui in December 1982, sitting in a long-sleeved shirt and long pants—practically full beekeeper regalia—on a lounge chair under the shade of a tree with a book, while everyone else was in the sun or in the water, Ethan realized that he was depressed and not only needed to go home, he needed to leave his job. He didn’t want to be responsible for the Chortles with their wide, dumb heads any longer. Ethan went up to his hotel room and called Ash in New York; he hadn’t used the phone once since he’d been here, not wanting to rack up any extra expenses, afraid that someone from the network would be mad at him if he did. Even his minibar had remained unplundered. Surely all the other Chortles staff were eating fistfuls of Kona coffee–glazed macadamia nuts day and night. Ethan was concerned that when he told Ash he was quitting, she would say, “That’s really impulsive, Ethan. Look, stay for the rest of the trip, then come home and we’ll discuss it.”

But what she said was, “If that’s what you want to do.”

“It is.”

“All right, then. Let me know when you’re coming. I love you so much.”

“I love you too.” He said it fiercely, feeling her quiet power. Ash never judged. Come home, she told him, and now he would come home, and she would be waiting, and would help him sort it out. Partners and spouses had been invited on this trip, but Ash had chosen to stay in New York to be the assistant director of an experimental play called Coco Chanel Gets Her Rocks Off, which would be put on outdoors in the meatpacking district at night. She wasn’t being paid for her work, but Ethan’s salary supported them both. He packed his bag while the other animators splashed and dove in the Pacific, and he left a note at the hotel’s front desk for his boss, explaining that his decision had struck him swiftly but solidly. “It was like being hit in the head with a surfboard,” he wrote. “Not that I personally would know what that’s like, since as you might have noticed I spent this vacation in the shade reading A Confederacy of Dunces. But I have to get out, Stan. I’m not even sure why.”

Back at home in New York, Stan called and asked Ethan to come in the following week for a “sit-down,” but Ethan declined. He stayed in the apartment obsessively doodling Figland figures in the little spiral notebooks that he bought in bulk. Sometimes Jonah Bay, who was now overworked at the job he’d recently found designing daily-living innovations for disabled people, came over and stayed for much of the evening, and occasionally even collapsed on the couch and spent the night. Or else Jules came over with her boyfriend Dennis Boyd, a big, dark-haired man who had begun attending ultrasound technology school in the fall.

“I know you see ads all the time on the subway about becoming an ultrasound technician, so it sort of seems like a joke,” Jules had said after she’d announced Dennis’s plans. “But what he wants to do professionally is actually something important. He’s going to be able to see inside people, see the mysteries beneath their skeletons. And with sound waves, no less. It’s sort of like being a psychic, but with machines. I think it’s a kind of artistry, in a way. He’ll be dealing with anatomy. With people’s lives. What’s inside them. Their entire futures.”

“I know that,” said Ethan. “And I like Dennis. You don’t have to sell him to me.”

Dennis Boyd was shy, and there had been some emotional trouble in his background, Ethan knew. But mostly he seemed to be a decent person who would never hurt Jules, thank God; who would only love her. Looking across the room at Jules sometimes, Ethan felt as if the selves they’d inhabited at age fifteen were still thoroughly present. He could still kiss her, he realized, and then he immediately told himself: banish this thought. In her twenties Jules Jacobson wasn’t even particularly sexy or sexual—not that she had been at fifteen, either—but he was excited by her to this day because he simply liked her so much. Jules was smart and charming and self-deprecating. No one had ever given her anything, and she hadn’t been coddled. Ethan hadn’t been coddled either; they had this in common, along with a certain skewed sensibility. Jules didn’t care if she seemed dignified or not. Her jokes were often on herself; she threw aside dignity in the service of comedic effect.

Ethan knew that, objectively, Jules wasn’t all that hilarious. Right out of college, she’d started coming into the city on the train from her mother’s house all the time to try out for funny parts in plays in New York, but she hadn’t had any luck. While Ash found her hilarious, Ethan found her funny and winning and wonderful. Why wasn’t that enough to make it in acting?

A few months earlier, Ash had come home one night after the acting class she and Jules had begun taking together in the summer, and said to Ethan, “Poor Jules. You wouldn’t believe what happened to her.”

“What happened?” He looked at his girlfriend with fear, not wanting anything to have happened to Jules. Unless, of course, Dennis had broken up with her. Bizarrely, that idea did not make Ethan too unhappy. It even gave him a prickle of well-being, thinking of Jules as now being available—even though, of course, Ethan himself was not available.

Ash dropped her big carpetbag pocketbook and sat down next to Ethan on the couch, her head on his shoulder. “In class tonight, Yvonne just kept riding her and riding her, telling her she wasn’t going deep enough. And then at the end, when we were all leaving, Yvonne suddenly asked her to stay. So I waited outside on the street, because you know that Jules and I always go get dinner. And she and Yvonne were in there for like ten minutes, and then Jules came out and her face was really, really red, but just in spots, the way it gets; you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” He’d long been a student of Jules’s blushing and flushing.

“She looked like she had the measles,” said Ash. “She was completely inflamed, completely upset. We went to the restaurant, and she told me that Yvonne had basically said to her, ‘My dear, let me be blunt. Why are you acting?’”

“Your acting teacher said that to Jules? ‘Why are you acting?’”

“Yes. And Jules said she muttered something like, ‘Well, because it’s what I want to do with my life.’ And then Yvonne said, ‘But have you ever asked yourself whether the world actually needs to see you act?’ That’s what she said! This bitchy old lady in a turban. And Jules said something like, ‘No, um, I haven’t thought of it.’ And Yvonne said, ‘We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you, my dear, reciting a tired old monologue from the Samuel French collection or pretending to be drunk and staggering around. Has that ever occurred to you?’”

“Oh my God,” said Ethan. “That’s horrible.”

“I know. So Jules said ‘Thank you, Yvonne’—she actually thanked her for saying this; it was totally masochistic of Jules—and then she came rushing out onto the street and started to cry.”

“I wish I’d been there to help her,” Ethan said.

The next day, while Ash was out of the apartment, Jules called. It was unclear which of them she’d wanted to speak to; probably Ash, but Ethan acted as though she’d wanted to speak to him, and he settled into the call. “It was humiliating, Ethan,” Jules said. “She was just standing there in her turban staring at me like she hated me. Like, ‘Get out of the theater!’ And I guess she’s right. I may be sort of funny. But it’s not ‘acting’ funny. It’s just ‘life’ funny. Like you,” she added. “Although, of course, you’re also ‘genius’ funny, so that gives you a lot of options.”

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, ‘F*ck 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?”

“Yes. But Ash was the one who betrayed me here. She was the one, and now I’m waiting for her. How did that happen?”

“That’s the way it is with Ash. It’s just the way it always is.”

Ethan and Ash’s separation became unbearable to both of them. Each would call Jules and plaintively discuss the distress of being without the other. “He’s a part of me,” said Ash, “and I somehow momentarily forgot that, and now I just can’t bear not having him here. It’s almost like I had to sleep with someone else in order to see how much I need him.” All Ethan kept saying to Jules was, “I can’t take this anymore. I mean, I just cannot take this, Jules. You’re minoring in psychology. Explain girls to me. Tell me everything I need to know, because I feel like I know nothing.”

Eventually, though, the couple rushed back together, sealing themselves to each other once again. Ash never heard about the Buffalo nipple, and there was no reason that she ever should. Now Ethan and Ash had been living together since college, on East 7th Street, right off Avenue A, a street fully staffed by junkies and dealers. “I don’t like this one bit,” Gil Wolf said when he and Betsy visited; they promptly called a locksmith and paid for the most expensive titanium lock available.

Ash and Ethan were both twenty-three years old when her father invited Ethan to his office, a perfectly reasonable age to cohabitate and not yet have to turn an eye toward marriage. Ethan was concerned that somehow Gil was going to ask him about whether he had any plans in that direction. But Gil did not want to talk about marriage, or about Ash at all. It seemed that he was simply concerned about Ethan having quit his job at The Chortles. Gil seemed only to want to offer himself up as a father figure, knowing that Ethan’s own bitter, self-absorbed, and irresponsible father was useless. Ethan wore a brown skinny tie and a brown jacket that pulled at the sleeves; his hair was freshly moussed. He sat in a brushed steel and distressed leather chair across the desk from Ash’s father at the lower Lexington Avenue offices of what was now called Drexel Burnham Lambert. Outside the window the sky looked smeared with clouds, and the city, seen from here, was not quite recognizable, just as Ethan felt not quite recognizable.

“So what do you think you’ll do next?” Gil Wolf asked. On his desk was one of those executive ball-clickers, a Newton’s cradle, and it was all Ethan could do to keep himself from reaching out and playing with it, but he knew to keep his hands to himself.

“Haven’t a clue, Gil,” said Ethan. He smiled apologetically, as if the sentiment might be offensive to a man in finance. The men in this place all knew what to do next. The offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1982 were as revved up as a racetrack. Everyone here wanted to make money, and they knew how to do it too. Ethan was out of place in the world of investment banking. Today, before coming upstairs, he’d been given an adhesive visitor’s badge, and he stuck it on his lapel before entering the elevator, feeling as if instead of VISITOR it said DISPLACED PERSON. Yet he couldn’t deny the tang of being here, the chemical surge he felt when Gil’s assistant came to fetch him from the waiting area upstairs.

“Mr. Figman?” the young guy had said. “I’m Donny. This way.”

Donny was only slightly older than Ethan, in a conservative dark suit and starched shirt. No art school for him! Instead, he’d gone to business school. The environment here was perplexingly appealing to Ethan, who had rarely thought about money before. His father’s salary as a public defender had paid for their cramped and rent-controlled apartment off Washington Square. His mother was a substitute teacher, though she wasn’t very patient with children. In fact, she was a screamer. In the summers there had been just enough money to send Ethan to camp, and then he’d attended the School of Visual Arts on a free ride. In his childhood his parents often fought about money, but they fought about everything else too, and he’d grown up believing that the only thing that mattered, the only thing that would save you from the potential hellishness of your domestic life, was doing what you love. What was better than that?

But maybe the men at Drexel Burnham did what they loved too. Certainly they seemed engaged, and every open office door revealed someone, usually a man, deep in conversation with another man, or on the phone. Ethan followed Donny through the corridors, taking in all the chatter and hum. And now, in the serenity of Ash’s father’s office, he could have lain down on the cold leather sofa and slept for a few hours. He’d always known the Wolfs were rich, but he’d never before seen where much of their money actually was made, nor had it occurred to him to be particularly curious about how it was made. Gil Wolf was primarily the father of Ethan’s girlfriend, but here in this world he had a different role, one that was assertive and even refreshing.

“You have no clue what you want to do next? I find that hard to believe,” said Gil kindly, then he was the one to reach out a hand and lift one of the steel spheres hanging from strings on the Newton’s cradle. The ball went click! and it struck the others and knocked the last ball out of place, and both men impassively watched the little display of the laws of physics.

“I think I was spoiled by Spirit-in-the-Woods,” Ethan said. “You were allowed to really be expressive and imaginative there. Working on the show was nothing like that; there was a vision that you had to adhere to. I think I need to get out of animation and do something where I don’t have to feel resentful.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Ash’s father, and now he stopped fiddling with the toy and laced his hands together and looked directly at Ethan. “I completely believe in you. And I’m not the only one who does.”

“Thanks, Gil. That’s kind of you to say.”

“Not kind,” said Gil. “Self-interested too. Because I know that Ash is concerned about you. I don’t want to start trouble in paradise, Ethan. I mean that she wants you to be happy too. She wishes you could do what you’re most passionate about.”

“So do I.”

Gil leaned across the desk like a man about to offer once-in-a-lifetime investment advice. “Look, here’s what I would do,” he said. “Go back to them; tell them what you want to be doing.”

“Them?” Ethan laughed, then stopped himself. He had sounded obnoxious. “I mean, there is no them,” he said more gently. “The people I dealt with work on that show exclusively. They wouldn’t be interested in seeing anything else from me.”

“What about the network? Can’t you pitch them your so-called Figland? As a TV show, like The Chortles but much smarter and more satirical and, God knows, funnier. And if they don’t want to do it, you can tell them you’ll go to the competition. I’ve done a little research on your behalf. There are black holes in the network’s schedule, where shows just won’t succeed. They’re consistently losing in certain time slots, and they’re worried.”

Ethan sat back and felt the spine of the ultramodern chair give a little too much, as though it might send him falling backward on his head. Gil Wolf was used to getting things done, made, taken care of; his assumptions and his blitheness were remarkable. He wanted Ethan to go to the network aggressively, confidently, pitch them Figland and make them think—no, make them worry—that there was a lot of money to be made from Ethan Figman. It would be a mindf*ck of some kind, just like in Gil’s world. And, just like in Gil’s world, sometimes a mindf*ck was a satisfying and productive f*ck after all.

Looking at Gil’s enthused, almost deranged face, Ethan felt himself stiffen and then relent. His own father had been so preoccupied and messed up, and as a result had been spectacularly bad at fatherhood. Now Ethan wanted the love of Ash’s father more than anything. After all, he’d even put a pudding-cup’s worth of mousse in his hair and donned a monkey suit in the middle of the day in order to get it. The intensity of their eye contact made Ethan suddenly realize that this conversation—or anyway some version of it—was what Gil was meant to have had with Goodman right around now. And now Ethan knew that that was what this whole meeting was really about.

A father who’d lost his son was a desperate creature. Empty-handed, in despair. The tragedy of Goodman’s sudden, lurching exit all those years earlier still followed Gil Wolf around, always reminding him of what he’d had, what he’d criticized constantly and probably never appreciated enough, and what he’d lost. The pain was unimaginable. Ash’s father needed Ethan to succeed because his own son had taken off and never been found. His own son was dead, for all intents and purposes, and Ethan was not.

Ethan would call the network—what the hell. He would put himself out there like a schmuck and see what they had to say. He could tolerate rejection; he’d experienced it before and survived it.

“And one other thing,” said Gil. “If you end up making a deal with them—”

“In my dreams,” said Ethan.

“If you do, you’ve got to give these guys things they can’t get anywhere else. They have to need you. This is key.”

“Oh, I see what you’re saying. Sure. Thank you,” he said to Gil. “And really, you’ve been so generous and everything.” Both men stood. In his mid-fifties Gil Wolf was still a slim man, a twice-weekly tennis player. There was almost no hair on the top of his head, but he’d developed impressive silver sideburns, and his clothes were natty, picked out by his wife, who had the same good eye for style that Ash had.

“Good,” said Gil. “Now let’s go to lunch. I want steak. I mean, I want salad.” He laughed. “That’s what I’m supposed to say. My internist told me that if I eat salad often enough, I will actually start craving it. And my good cholesterol will rise and my bad cholesterol will fade away like the morning dew.”

“Salad it is,” said Ethan, though at age twenty-three cholesterol was something he’d never given any thought to before. Vaguely, he knew it had to do with fat in the blood, though when anyone mentioned cholesterol, he realized he immediately ceased listening, similar to when someone told him their dream. Gil reached out and lightly pulled Ethan’s VISITOR tag off his lapel. It left behind a ghostly rectangle of pollen, which would remain there until the brown jacket was finally taken out of circulation the following year, at Ash’s insistence, and replaced with something expensive and not brown.

“Wait. One other thing,” said Gil. His face suddenly altered, becoming embarrassed. “I was wondering if you’d have a look at something.”

“Sure.”

Gil closed the door of his office, then went to the closet and took out a big, brick-colored accordion folder. The string had been elaborately wound around the knob, and he unwound it, saying, “This is my secret, Ethan. I’ve never shown these to anyone, not even Betsy.”

Oh shit, it’s going to be porn, Ethan thought, and his collar grew tight around his neck. Some kind of strange fetish porn. There would be images of children, photographed in houses where the windows were blacked out. Gil would want Ethan to be initiated into this world. No, no, that is such a stupid conclusion! Stop it, you’re babbling inside now, Ethan told himself. He watched as Ash’s father removed a stack of drawings on heavy sketch paper. “Tell me what you think,” Gil said.

He handed the sheaf to Ethan, who looked at the first drawing, which was done in charcoal. It was of a woman sitting by a window, looking out at the street. It had been labored over, he could see. Through the cloudy gray charcoal it was possible to see all the erasures, the starts and restarts. The woman’s head was turned at such an angle that her neck almost looked broken, and yet she was sitting up. It was a very bad drawing; Ethan took that much in right away. But he knew, oh thank God he knew immediately, that this was not a joke, and that he was not supposed to laugh. Thank God, he would often think over the years, that he had not even smiled.

“Interesting,” Ethan murmured.

“I was trying for a three-quarter profile,” said Gil, peering over Ethan’s shoulder.

“I see that.” Then, in a very small voice, so small that maybe it was possible Ash’s father wouldn’t even hear it, and Ethan could have said it without actually having said it, he added, “I like it.”

“Thank you,” said Gil. Ethan put the drawing on the bottom of the pile and looked at the next one. It was a seascape, with gulls and rocks and clouds possessing sharp outlines instead of the wispy, amoeboid quality that actual clouds had. This drawing was less bad, but it was still quite poor. Gil Wolf wanted to have a hand that could hold a pencil and make it do anything—or, better yet, two ambidextrous hands like Ethan’s that could hold pencils equally well and make them do anything. But the problem was that talent couldn’t be willed into being. Ethan murmured something appropriate for each drawing he came to. It was like an extremely stressful game show, called Say the Right Thing, You Idiot.

“So what’s the verdict?” Gil asked, his voice husky with vulnerability. “Should I keep giving it a whirl?”

The moment extended into infinity. If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you’d meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw.

“Of course,” Ethan said.

The last drawing in the stack was of two figures, a boy and a girl, playing with a dog. Right away the tangle of their bodies was so tortured that it was like looking at a scene of actual torture. Someone was doing something bad to someone else! But, no, Ethan realized that these children were laughing, and their dog, who looked more like a seal, appeared to be laughing too, its lips upturned.

“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.

• • •

After 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 f*ck. 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 f*ck a woman who loved him. The fact that he, Ethan Figman, was really f*ckable 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.

“Oh f*ck, oh f*ck,” 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 *oris until she went to pieces before him, she said, “Oh f*ck, f*ck.”

Lying back, then, Ethan said, “Why do all people say ‘f*ck’ and ‘oh f*ck’ 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 f*ck 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 f*cked 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.”

“Yeah, there was going to be a trial, but then Goodman made sure there wasn’t. So who knows what happened? That question’s always been kind of lurking, right? Just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And maybe we should really face it.”

“Why exactly should we face it?” she asked.

Ethan looked at her, surprised. “Isn’t knowing always better than not knowing? I mean, generally in life? It’s not like you can change anything, but at least if you have the information, then you can think, ‘Well, it is what it is.’ Isn’t that one of the messages of your little book? The Drama of the Gifted Child? That you have to know what really happened a long time ago so you can live truthfully now?”

“My little book? God, you’re condescending.”

“I’m sorry. But we could hire private detectives. Have you and your parents ever thought of that? Now that I’ve got this money coming in—I know it’s only one season they’ve committed to, but we’ve got plenty. We could hire someone really top-notch, and it could give you and your family some closure, some—”

“Would you just stop,” Ash said, and then her face went messy and soft the way it always did right before she began to cry. “I told you, Ethan, I don’t like to discuss my brother, it upsets me too much. He was in my life every minute of every day, and then he wasn’t. You don’t have any siblings, so you can’t understand. Goodman had all this potential—he just hadn’t put it together yet. He would’ve made something of himself, I know he would have. But he never got to do that, and it’s one of the saddest things I know.”

“You don’t know that for sure about him,” Ethan said.

“What, you think he’s off building the next great museum or skyscraper or . . . Fallingwater? I highly doubt it,” she said sharply. “Why are you doing this to me now? We can’t just ‘find’ him all of a sudden. Even if we did, it would open up a whole new legal thing for him. He’d definitely be sent to jail for skipping out on his court date. They would be very hard on him; there would be no mercy whatsoever. It would only add to what is already most likely a difficult and limited life. Can’t you just leave things alone? Or do you really want to torture me?”

Then she was in tears, and she turned away from him, which was just not bearable. Once you had what he had, you couldn’t ever not have it; he supposed that this was true of all passionate love. So now, having poked uselessly at the ancient question of Goodman Wolf and where he was and exactly what he had done to Cathy Kiplinger, Ethan Figman told his girlfriend he was very sorry; he’d forgotten how painful it was for her. No, no, he amended, of course he hadn’t forgotten. It was just that sometimes he had trouble distinguishing what should be kept as a thought from what should be spoken aloud.

It was odd, to be sure, that Ash never wanted to talk about Goodman and how he’d run away before there could be a trial. Not talking about it was an absolute denial, and the whole family engaged in it. Once in a while when Ethan and Ash went to the Wolfs’ for dinner, either Betsy or Gil might lightly mention Goodman’s name, and a suddenly atomized vapor of sadness would hover over them for a few minutes, before dissipating. Maybe Goodman really was dead. He could be anywhere in the world, or nowhere.

Ethan would try never to upset her like that again. He would keep it to himself instead. He’d been on such an idealistic, free-associative streak, and in the middle of it he’d said the wrong thing and had ruined, retrospectively, the whole evening, the celebratory Japanese dinner and the thrilling f*cking for dessert, and then, of course, the quiet time afterward, which was always the happiest time for him, though not tonight.