The Interestings (10 page)

“All right. We’ll drive up on Friday,” Ash said.

We.
Ash Wolf and Ethan Figman had become “we” and “us” the summer before senior year of high school, to everyone’s shock, and the
we
hadn’t ended, even with the two of them heading off to different colleges in the fall.

On Friday, as promised, Ash and Ethan appeared at Jules’s dorm in Buffalo, Ash small, beautiful, and bright-faced; Ethan oily and rumpled from the long drive. They had brought along some emergency New York City supplies that were meant to cure Jules’s upstate loneliness. The bagels were almost uncuttable, and the scallion cream cheese was slightly liquefied from sitting on the floor of the front seat beneath the heater of Ethan’s father’s old car, but the three of them sat eating in Jules’s tiny cinder-block dorm room with the door closed upon the voices of her terrible suite mates.

“All right, I see what you mean. You’ve got to get away from these girls,” Ash said quietly. “Just taking one look at them out there, I see that you haven’t been exaggerating.”

“Look, figure out who the smartest people in your classes are,” Ethan said. “Listen to the comments they make. Then follow them around after class and force yourself on them.”

“
Force herself
on them?” said Ash.

“Shit, I didn’t mean it that way,” said Ethan. “God, I’m sorry. I’m such an idiot.”

In the days after the weekend, Jules began to take their advice, and escaped her suite mates often. She found that there was serious intelligence in clusters all around her; in her unhappiness she had been unable to recognize it. She made eye contact with a couple of students from her Intro to Psych section, and then formed a study group with them. In the psych lab, and then afterward in the student union, she and Isadora Topfeldt and some other slightly alternative types sat on modular furniture and talked about how much they all hated their suite mates. Then they went to a bar on the other side of campus called the Barrel, and everyone drank as much as they did at Crumley’s. This was upstate New York, where the snow layered upon itself, rising like one of those out-of-control lemon meringue pies in the glass case at the Underhill Diner. They drank and drank, and were comfortable, tribal, if not particularly close.

Now, in November 1981, a full twenty-one years before Isadora Topfeldt’s death, and while the friendship still held, Jules sat at her dinner party in the West 85th Street apartment.

Isadora scraped around at the bottom of the serving dish and held up a scrap of food on a fork and said, “Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?”

“Hmm,” said Jules. “Yes. The Holocaust.”

There was a pause, then some ambivalent laughter. “You still slay me,” said Isadora. To the table she said, “Jules was very funny in college.”

“I had to be,” said Jules. “I lived with the meanest girls. I had to keep my sense of humor.”

“So,” Dennis Boyd asked her, “what was Isadora like in college?”

“Dennis, college was only last spring,” Isadora said. “I was the same as I am now. Watch your leg,” she warned, as the table seemed on the verge of being lifted once again by Dennis’s knee.

“Yes,” Jules said. “She was the same.” But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly. Ash and Ethan and, since he’d been returned to them recently, Jonah, were the friends she saw and spoke to all the time. “What’s she like
now
?” Jules asked. “You’re her neighbor.”

“Oh, she scares the shit out of me,” Dennis said. There was a moment of silence, and then they both laughed at the same time, as if to cover the accidental moment of truth-telling.

Dennis left the party early, saying he had a touch football game in Central Park at the crack of dawn. None of the others could imagine getting up so early on a weekend, and especially not for something athletic. “A bunch of guys get together in the Sheep Meadow,” he’d explained. He turned to Robert Takahashi and said, “I hope your friend feels better soon.” Then, with a quick smile that was either general or, possibly, directed especially at Jules, he retreated downstairs to his own apartment.

As soon as he exited, Isadora began to talk about him. “‘A bunch of guys,’ isn’t that great?” she said. “I know he seems like he’s built out of simple parts—I don’t mean dumb parts, I just mean less fucked-up parts than we’re built out of. But the truth is more complicated. Yes, he’s totally regular, he plays touch football, he isn’t so needy all the time like we are.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Robert Takahashi.

“But actually he’s a depressive. He told me he fell into a real depression in the middle of his junior year at Rutgers, and basically had a breakdown. He stopped going to class and didn’t hand in any of his papers. By the time he got to Health Services he’d barely been to the dining hall in weeks—I mean, his card had gone unscanned—and he only ate ramen, without cooking it.”

“How can you eat ramen without cooking it?” asked Janine. “Do you even use water?”

“I have no idea, Janine,” Isadora said impatiently. “Health Services saw what shape he was in, and they called his parents. And then they arranged for him to take a medical leave and be put into a hospital.”

“A mental hospital?” Robert Takahashi asked. “Jesus.” A reverent, worried silence moved across the table, wavy like the air above the candles.

“Yes,” said Isadora. “It’s that same one where those poets used to go. Not that Dennis Boyd is a poet. Hardly,” she added, a little unnecessarily, Jules thought. “But they sent him all the way up there to New England because the Rutgers psychiatrist told his family that it had an unusually good adolescent unit. Plus, insurance covered it. After he recovered he went back to college and finished up, going to summer school and also taking extra classes. He didn’t do that well, but they let him graduate.”

“What hospital where those poets used to go?” Jules asked.

“You know. That famous one in the Berkshires,” said Isadora.

“Langton Hull?” Jules said with surprise. Dennis had actually lived at the Langton Hull Psychiatric Hospital, in Belknap, the same small town where Spirit-in-the-Woods was located.

Near the end of the evening, Isadora served espresso from a machine her parents had bought her, and which she had not figured out how to use very well. Finally she brandished the promised spliff, saying, “Here you go,
mon
,” in a so-called Jamaican accent, thrusting her head forward in chicken bobs as if to some inaudible reggae, and the thing was passed around the room. “Picture me in one of those weird knit Rasta hats with all my hair tucked inside,” Isadora said. “Picture me black
.”

Jules had done most of her pot smoking as a teenager, a lifetime’s worth. All that pot smoking in the 1970s had exhausted her, and the idea of getting high was unappealing now. She imagined herself talking too much, being loud and outgoing and almost a little obnoxious, and it all made her feel unclean and unhappy, so she barely breathed the smoke in, suspecting that neither did Robert Takahashi, who seemed to like the idea of staying lucid too. Only Janine and Isadora sucked at the big joint like it was a teat, laughing and making incomprehensible in-jokes about their shared burger-flipping past.

As she left the apartment, Jules ran into Dennis Boyd on the stairs, on his way to take his garbage out, but she couldn’t say to him, “We were all talking about you, and I found out you were in Langton Hull. Did you ever hear of Spirit-in-the-Woods?”

What she said was, “Hello. You missed cookies.”

“Too bad. I like cookies,” he said. “But I try not to eat them. Getting a bit of a gut. Don’t want to look like my dad yet. Or ever.” In illustration, with the hand that wasn’t holding a twist-tied garbage bag that looked wet through the translucent white plastic, he patted his stomach. He was now wearing a green sweatshirt and jeans—post-party clothes. It would turn out that he was a little soft-middled because of the medication he took for his depression. Antidepressants were crude then, slapping at depression with a big, clumsy paw.

“And you missed Isadora’s spliff,” Jules said with a smile that she hoped appeared sardonic. She wouldn’t say anything against Isadora Topfeldt unless Dennis said it first, but she supposed, and hoped, that he felt as she did.

“I don’t think I know that word.
Spliff
. But it’s pot you mean, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You want a drink or something?” Dennis Boyd asked, and Jules said no thanks, she was tired and full from dinner, and couldn’t bear to drink anything more tonight. It was true that she was trying to watch herself after the four-year kegger that had gone on all around her in Buffalo. But all he had meant was did she want to come over, and she hadn’t known the correct, adult way to answer. The invitation had surprised her, and so she’d said no, even though almost immediately she realized that she would have liked to come over to his apartment. She wanted to see the way he lived, see his modest collection of belongings. She bet he was neat, thoughtful, touching.

“Okay,” he said. “Well. Have fun then. See you around.”

“See you,” she said. If she had looked at him longer, taking in the sight of him so young and burly and unfinished, a bag of garbage tied in his hand, the sleeve of his sweatshirt too short on his thick hairy wrist, then maybe they would have started something that night. Instead, it took nearly two more months, a period during which they each performed their separate life tasks in seeming preparation for nothing, but which turned out to be preparation for so much.

Jules Jacobson saw Dennis Boyd next on the street in winter. Once again he held a plastic bag. She was on her way to Copies Plus to have a scene from a play xeroxed for an audition. Jules saw the top of a brown bottle poking out of Dennis’s grocery bag, and was touched to realize that it was Bosco, the chocolate syrup that hadn’t made an appearance in her life since childhood. He had purchased Bosco and tortilla chips. Jules remembered Isadora’s indiscreet story about Dennis having been in a mental hospital, and she thought that he still didn’t know how to take care of himself very well. Though really, who did? Jules had never sent in the form and the check to Prudential to purchase health insurance, though her mother had made her swear she would. Jules was uninsured, and not only that, she had never used the stove in her disgusting little kitchen, except to heat up a sock full of uncooked rice once when she had a stiff neck. But the idea of big, dark, unshaven Dennis Boyd not taking good care of himself upset her.

“I’ll come with you,” Dennis said, and Jules said okay, and he accompanied her to the copy place. The doorbell jingled, and they entered and stood together in the bright white store, inhaling the astringent smell of toner. There was Isadora Topfeldt in her red employee polo shirt, her hair up in little-girl pigtails, looking more eccentric and marginal than the last time Jules had seen her. Isadora seemed to have been lulled into a zombie-employee state by the
slush-slush
sound the machines made while their lights flowed back and forth across plates of glass. Behind her, her friend Robert Takahashi was straightening the edges of somebody’s documents. Jules said hello and reminded him that they’d met at Isadora’s.

“Hey, hi,” he said, and smiled.

“How are things here?” she asked him. “Your coworker was sick?”

“Trey. He died recently.”

“Oh my God.”

In an unsteady voice Robert said, “I accept that it wasn’t the ventilation system here that caused his cancer. But it was all very strange and very fast, and I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

“I’m really sorry,” she and Dennis echoed together, and in front of them Robert began to cry. Everyone was a little awkward and no one knew what to say, so they just said nothing. Finally Dennis put his groceries down on the counter and reached across it to give Robert Takahashi a standard bear hug, encircling him the way he might encircle a football as he ran with it across the meadow in Central Park. It was a sight, the big indelicate guy in the thick winter jacket and the small, handsome Asian one in the red shirt, and though the gesture was deeply self-conscious, it was also genuine, and Robert seemed grateful. Big Dennis let him go, and then Jules patted Robert’s arm, and finally Robert turned away in tears and went back to the stacks of paper all around him, because despite his sorrow it was still a workday.

Jules felt she had to leave this place immediately, where someone very young had fallen ill and then actually died; also, this place where someone overbearing and unappealing worked; and someone else who was congested with grief. It was a place that could make you understand that your own life would be limited in scope—everyone’s was. When Jules turned and left the store with Dennis, going with him toward his apartment, where it was understood they would now go to bed together, she really imagined they were casting off limited possibilities and unpleasantness and even
death—
death by a rare, old-person’s cancer, or any other cause—and were heading somewhere wide open and unexplored. He slung the grocery bag over one arm and grabbed her hand, and they broke into a run.

•   •   •

S
ex at twenty-two was idyllic. Sex at twenty-two wasn’t college sex at eighteen, which carried with it a freight of insecurities, nerve endings, and shame. Sex at twenty-two also wasn’t self-sex at twelve, which was just about being quiet and discreet in your narrow bed and thinking how strange it was that you could feel this way just by doing
this.
Sex at twenty-two wasn’t, either, sex at fifty-two, which, when it took place all those decades later in the middle of the Jacobson-Boyds’ lengthy marriage, could be a sudden, pleasing surprise that awakened one of them from sleep.

But sex at twenty-two, well, that was really something, Jules thought, and Dennis apparently thought so too. Both of their bodies were still perfect, or perfect enough; they would come to see this later on, though they couldn’t see it at the time. Self-conscious, dying with embarrassment, but
so excited
, they stripped to their skin for each other for the first time standing beside the loft bed in his apartment that day, and she made him go up the ladder first so he wouldn’t be able to watch her from behind—knowing that if he did, as she lifted a leg to reach the next rung the most private section of herself would have been briefly cleaved and displayed. The hair, the shadow, the pinch of lip, the stingy little anus—how could she let him watch
that
particular show?