The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

Author:Meg Wolitzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: 2013-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Jonah Bay, heading home from the Beth Israel Hospital emergency room in a taxi just past dawn with Robert Takahashi beside him, said, “Did you hear what she said? In the restaurant, right after it happened, when she was sort of talking to herself, sort of praying?”

“Yeah.”

“Jules doesn’t pray; she’s always been an atheist. Who would she pray to?”

“No idea,” said Robert. They leaned against each other in weary silence as the streets flew by, the taxi making every green light in the absence of traffic at this unlikely and disconcerting hour.

“Well, apparently it worked for her, whatever she did,” Jonah said.

“Oh, come on, you’re saying that to me? Don’t you know how many ERs I’ve sat in with friends with pneumonia or cytomegalovirus? Their relatives were always praying for them, and it never did a thing. One guy from the gym, all his aunts and great-aunts came—this big, terrific black family from North Carolina—and they formed a prayer circle and said something like, ‘Please, Jesus, protect our boy William; he has so much he still wants to do here on earth,’ and I swear I thought it was going to work that time, but it didn’t. I haven’t seen any miracles. All the stories end the same fucking way.” Robert looked out the window as the taxi bumped over the pocked streets. “You know, one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to be the one sitting in an ER for me.”

“Don’t say that,” said Jonah. “Your T-cell count is good. You’ve been mostly fine. You had shingles, but almost nothing else.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But it can’t last. It never does.”

“Well, I guess I still have a little of that miraculous-religion thing in me,” Jonah said.

“Oh yeah? I thought the deprogrammer knocked it out of you for good back then.”

“No, I still held on to a tiny little piece. Don’t tell Ethan and Ash. They put so much effort into that.”

They got out of the cab in front of Jonah’s building on Watts Street, which in all kinds of light—dawn, dusk, the alarmingly violet moments before a major snowfall—looked tilted and slightly scorched, but still remained habitable. What had happened to him, and to his mother, leaving him the legal occupant of her loft, still astonished him. But at the time, it was just what had happened; it was just their story. It made very little sense now to think that for nearly three months way back in 1981, Jonah Bay had been a member of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies were at the time often considered a punch line, occupying the same zeitgeist territory as the Hare Krishnas.

Jonah had been drawn into the church in the way that many people were: accidentally, not even knowing he’d wanted a church. He had had no natural churchiness in him whatsoever. Sometimes in childhood, his mother had taken him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to hear her gospel-singer friends perform. “Just close your eyes and let yourself be transported,” Susannah would say.

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