The Interestings (38 page)

An old purple VW minibus was parked on the sloping street, and a man and woman, a few years older than he was, both dressed in generic leftover hippiewear, were sitting in the open doorway with a big Labrador retriever between them. Jonah smiled politely and the man said to him, “Nice shirt.”

Jonah was wearing a vintage bowling shirt that read
Dex
on the pocket.

The woman said, “And nice smile too, Dex.”

So Jonah smiled again for them, not bothering to say his name wasn’t Dex. “Thanks,” he said.

“Do you know where we could get some water for Cap’n Crunch?”

“You mean milk,” Jonah said.

They both laughed as if he were deeply witty. “Cap’n Crunch is our dog,” said the woman. “We’ve been in the car a long time, and he’s extremely thirsty. I’m Hannah,” she said. “And this is Joel.”

It was a reasonable act to bring them into the summer dorm with their dog and let them fill the dog’s bowl with genuine MIT tap water. The dorm was quiet, and the dog’s toenails clicked ostentatiously along the floors. The place felt melancholy, with whiteboards left up on some of the students’ doors, their once-relevant erasable-marker messages still visible. “Amy, we are going to see
The Howling
at 12!!!” Or, “SORRY, DAVE, ALL YOUR DROSOPHILA ARE DEAD AND I KILLED THEM!!!! HAHAHAHA—YOUR EVIL FUCKING LAB PARTNER.” The third floor was echoey, overly warm, but the man and woman looked around approvingly, as though they’d never been in a college dormitory before, and perhaps they hadn’t. Cap’n Crunch scarfed up the water Jonah got him, and looked beseechingly for a refill, his loose drape of lips still dripping.

“Easy there, Crunch,” Joel said, stroking the long black side of his dog. “You don’t want to get bloat.”

“What’s bloat?”

Hannah and Joel explained the sometimes fatal condition that dogs could develop. “I’m thinking about becoming a veterinarian,” Hannah said. “That’s just one of the things we study at the farm.”

“The farm,” Jonah repeated.

“Yes. We live on a farm in Dovecote, Vermont, with a bunch of our friends. We’ve got some animals up there. It’s a pretty amazing setup.” She looked around her. “But it seems like you’ve got a nice setup here yourself.”

“Not exactly,” said Jonah. He opened the door of the room where he was staying, in order to show them the minimalism of his summer living conditions. They took in the narrow iron student bed, the desk with the Tensor lamp, and the pile of books about principles of mechanical engineering and robotic design and vectors. “Vectors!” said Joel, picking up a book. “I have no idea what they are, but I’m sure I wouldn’t understand them.”

Jonah shrugged. “If someone explained them to you, you probably would.”

The couple sat on the bed, the springs straining, and Cap’n Crunch leapt up between them, while Jonah sat in his desk chair. No one else had been to visit his room since he’d been living here this summer. Even at college for the past four years Jonah hadn’t been overly social; he’d gone to parties in large groups of friends, and had had a few sexual encounters, but as far as he could tell he hadn’t made any lifelong friends. His closest friends were still Jules, Ethan, and Ash; they all got together in New York over breaks. For a while in college he’d played guitar and sung vocals for an MIT band called Seymour Glass, and all the musicians were extremely talented. But when they arranged to get together in the music studio senior year to cut a demo tape and “take it around,” Jonah decided he didn’t want to be in the band anymore.

“Why not?” asked the bass player. “You’re so good.”

Jonah had just shrugged. He’d been squeamish about music ever since Barry Claimes. Not squeamish enough to have given up playing a little on his own, but he never tried to write songs. Whenever he picked up his guitar he recalled sitting around making up music for that grotesque man, who had stolen it from him.

As it turned out, Seymour Glass had signed with Atlantic Records right before the school year ended, and the other band members were going off to LA now with a session guitarist in Jonah’s place. Jonah wished them well, and even though it was painful that they might become really successful (as it turned out, they did, getting known as the cool MIT-grad nerd band), he was relieved to have nothing to do with them. He’d abdicated his talent, he knew, which was depressing when he really thought about it, but also a relief. He’d gotten a reputation in college as a shy, attractive, long-haired boy whose mother was “that folksinger,” as people said, though no one expressed real interest anymore in Susannah Bay. She was over. She’d been over for a while. Talking Heads were big when Jonah was in college, along with the B-52s, whose female band members sported retro hairdos. Susannah Bay had never used hair spray in her life, and the women of the B-52s seemed to offend her sensibility, even though the hairdos were clearly meant as a strange and campy aesthetic. Susannah’s long black hair was her “signature” look, journalists had always said, just as “The Wind Will Carry Us” was her “signature” song.

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression. Quietly, Jonah had done excellent work in mechanical engineering in college, writing a thesis on robotics and graduating with honors. He was adept at this work, and was frequently praised by Dr. Pasolini, who wanted him to meet the people at Gage Systems in New York for possible employment, but Jonah already felt isolated this summer. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, or do, and he wasn’t planning on spending the summer in the loft with his mother, who had grown increasingly discouraged as her career appeared to dry up like an old seedpod. When Jonah had come home for spring break, she had put his B-52s album on full blast and shouted, “Just listen to that! It’s so
bizarre!
Do you actually like it?” Of course he liked it, and he’d danced to it all night at the post-midterms blowout his suitemate had forced him to attend, his body bumping up against a sophomore with a key ring in his pocket that crunched pleasingly against Jonah’s hip bone, but he’d told his mother he could take it or leave it.

“So explain vectors to us,” said Joel, and for some reason Jonah found himself wanting to comply.

“Well, there’s Euclidean vectors,” he began. “Does that interest you?”

“Absolutely,” said Hannah with an encouraging smile.

“A Euclidean vector is what you need when you want to carry point A to point B.
Vector
is from the Latin. It actually means ‘carrier.’”

“See, we’re getting an MIT education,” Hannah said to Joel.

“We’ll have to tell everyone at the farm that we went to MIT and had a seminar in vectors,” Joel said. “But they won’t believe us. You’ll have to tell them, Jonah.”

Jonah tensed upon hearing his name spoken. Just a little while ago, they’d been calling him “Dex.” How did they know his name? Oh, of course; there on one of his textbooks from the school year on his desk, across a large piece of masking tape, he had written “
JONAH BAY, ’81
.”

“Do you have any interest in spending a rural weekend up there?” Hannah asked. “Pitching hay? Explaining vectors to other people? It would use your brain
and
your body. Plus, the food is super delicious.”

“No, thanks, I don’t think so,” Jonah said.

“Okay, fine; if you can’t you can’t,” said Hannah, and she smiled at him with what appeared to be genuine regret, and maybe it really was. They weren’t pressuring him to go; he felt no pressure whatsoever, merely a desire on their part for him to be with them.

“Well,” said Joel. “We should hit the road. I enjoyed talking to you, Jonah, and I hope the rest of your summer goes really well.” He stood up and motioned toward the dog, who scrambled to its feet.

Jonah thought of how the room was filled with human life and canine life right now, and that when these strangers left they would take all that life with them. He suddenly wanted to stop that from happening. On impulse, he who rarely followed impulses said, “How long is the drive?”

Before he left with them, he grabbed the mushy-wicked Magic Marker from the message board on his door, and quickly wrote in dry, milky gray letters, “GONE TO FARM IN DOVECOTE, VT. WITH PURPLE MINIBUS PEOPLE. BACK MONDAY.” In the unlikely event that they were planning on murdering him, there would be clues.

The farm was enjoyable, if in a slovenly way. Some of the people who lived there seemed to have been slightly damaged by life: they spoke a little too slowly; they appeared to have been burned out or, in one extreme case, had no legs and rode around the bumpy dirt in a little motorized wheelchair. Yet the food was soft and warm, with an emphasis on rice and potatoes and novel grains like spelt and bulgur. Jonah found himself wanting to eat and eat, and a very kind woman kept refilling his plate until he felt that he might turn into a snowman made of mounds of food. Everyone was so incredibly
nice
to him; it was different from MIT, where people were involved in what they were involved in, and sometimes at dinner it could seem as if the person sitting across from you was in another dimension. Even while they ate, the engineers were engineering, and the mathematicians had set up little invisible blackboards in their brains; and though the conversation was friendly, it could be remote. Also, by senior year everyone was already planning their next moves, as cunning as double agents.

But here on the farm no one seemed to have any ambitions beyond preparing hearty foods in creative ways; discussing an old sheep that had wandered from the meadow; and welcoming their new guest, Jonah, whom they said they felt blessed to know. Toward the end of dinner, when the women spooned a brownish carob agar pudding into flea market cut-glass cups like a pile of giblets, Joel bent his head in prayer, and everyone else did as he did. The prayers were brief, followed by a few unfamiliar songs, one of them in Korean. Looking back at this scene, Jonah appeared so
innocent.
He was astonished at how he had allowed himself to be led like that old sheep back into the meadow.

Dinner was followed by a visit to a converted barn, where there was more singing and more prayers. Then Tommy, the man with no legs, locomoted himself to the front of the room, and everyone got quiet. “In 1970,” Tommy said, “here was my situation. I got drafted and sent to Vietnam, where within two months my legs were shot off by a bouncing Betty. I managed to get pulled out of the river and sent back to the U.S., but I spent a year in the V.A., and when I got home my wife said, ‘Hell no, bub, I’m not staying married to a fucking cripple who can’t even walk across the room to fetch me my pack of cigs.’” There was mild sympathetic groaning, but Jonah sat silently, appalled. “I was down on my luck,” Tommy continued. “Became very bitter. My friends all gave up on me, each and every one, and truthfully I don’t blame them. And then one day I was sitting in my pathetic little wheelchair on the street in Hartford, Connecticut, begging for change—that’s what my life had come to—when a van pulled up at the curb. And the loveliest people in the world stepped out. They said to me that I looked like I didn’t have any family to speak of, and I admitted that this was true. And they said we are your family. And this turned out to be true too.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “They recognized that I needed them, and that they needed me. Just the way everyone in this barn is family, and needs one another, because Satan is all around us. As you know, Israel was God’s chosen nation. But it seems that the Jews, falling under the sway of Satan, turned away from Jesus. God did what he could to show them how dangerous their path was,” Tommy went on casually. “For century after century he made them suffer, and finally, to make a point, he took six million of their people and extinguished them in one fell swoop. But it’s been said that the Jews had made a fatal error in leaving Jesus, and that God needed to look elsewhere to find a new Messiah and a new place to establish himself. So where did God turn?”

The question was rhetorical. Tommy pushed a lever on his wheelchair and made it spin in place. “Where he lands, nobody knows!” he called, and then he stopped sharply, facing the room again, and said, “But actually, God
did
know. Korea was a perfect location. And because it is a peninsula, it resembled the male sexual organ, the organ of
power.
It proved to be an ideal place for the battle between God and Satan. And Reverend Moon proved to be the ideal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, only without the flaws.”

Jonah would have laughed at this absurd monologue, but he was alone among these strangers, in a barn on a farm far from anyone he knew. No one would look kindly on him if he mocked this Vietnam vet in the wheelchair. Everyone was listening politely, indulging the man, probably because he was so badly disabled. When Tommy was done speaking, there was applause, and more singing. Jonah quickly learned the words, and the tunes were catchy. Then suddenly a couple of guitars appeared, and Hannah handed one to him, shyly saying, “I know you play, Jonah. I saw the guitar in your dorm room.” But the guitar she gave him was the worst instrument he’d ever played in his life, a totally out-of-tune piece of shit that ordinarily would have been thrown away, yet Jonah spent a few hopeless minutes tuning it, then played while the twenty-five or so people who had now gathered around all sang. They complimented his playing, having no idea of his lineage.

By the time he fell asleep in the men’s communal living quarters, a large loftlike space with rows of bedrolls on a floor of cheap carpet, Jonah realized he was content and exhausted. He had traveled a couple of hours to get here, and then he had eaten great quantities of starch. He had sung song after song. He had been passive, and had listened. He had prayed, in a fashion, though he didn’t believe in God. He had played guitar on command. His eyes now flickered and shut, and he slept undisturbed on his back with his hair spread out around him on the pillow. In the morning there was more soft, plentiful food, now served with syrup. Also, more prayers and teachings, and more warmth and love and kindness. Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.