The Interestings (8 page)

Jules knew, during the drive, that Mo would be given a diagnosis the next day, and it seemed clear finally what it might be. But until not long before Ash had made the appointment it hadn’t occurred to them that Mo was “on the spectrum,” as everyone casually put it lately, just the way people also casually said “chemo,” all of it seen as part of the perils of the modern age. Instead, before then, Mo had seemed mostly anxious and disconnected, shrieking and crying for reasons that he was unable to explain. An elderly, famous child psychiatrist had spent hours with him asking what he was afraid of when he lay in bed at night.

At the end of the following day, during the trip home from New Haven, Ash cried on her cell phone in the car to Ethan. Jules sat there awkwardly, looking out the window and wishing she didn’t have to hear them talk. Ash said to Ethan, “No, I know you love me, that’s
not
what I’m saying,” and then, “I know you love him too. Your love is not in question, Ethan. Sometimes I just need to cry. No, he’s listening to a CD. He’s got headphones on. He’s completely oblivious. I wish I was too.” Then she listened to Ethan for a few moments, and suddenly said, “All right,” and handed the phone to Jules, who was startled.

“What?” whispered Jules. “Why does he want to talk to me? You’re in the middle of a whole thing together.”

“I don’t know. Just talk to him.”

“Listen, hi, Jules,” Ethan said on the phone, his voice tight. “Will you stay at the house tonight with Ash? Is that at all possible? I feel so bad I couldn’t go with her, and I realize I’m asking for a lot, but I don’t want her to have to be alone. I mean, I know the kids will be there, and Rose and Emanuel, but I would really love it if you were there too. Because you can”—here his voice broke a little—“you can remind her that, you know, we’ve always gotten through everything. That’s what we’ve always done, since the beginning, with her parents and Goodman. Remind her of this, will you, because she feels so
down.
Maybe you can reassure her, like I was trying to do, that Mo will have a good life. There’s no way he won’t. We’ve got the resources, and it’ll be okay. We’ll make it be okay. Please tell her that. But say it later, when Mo’s not around to possibly hear any of it, okay?”

Jules stayed the night at Ethan and Ash’s house on Charles Street with the staff and the delicately wonderful meals appearing as if they’d been summoned up merely through wishing. She sat with Ash in the basement level of the house by the side of the compact lap pool, while Ash swam her short, dull laps for a long time, her head above water, once in a while stopping and peering up to say, “Will it be okay, do you think?”

“Yes,” Jules had said, reaching down to take Ash’s wet hand. “It will be. I know it will.”

She meant it, too. Things were always set right in Ash’s life. The family could at last move forward with what had seemed like a generically emotionally fragile son, but instead was a son with a specific diagnosis: pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, or PDD-NOS. He was on the autism spectrum, the doctors had explained, and now he could finally get some real help. Always, the Figman and Wolf family rallied; just as, long in the past, the Wolf family had rallied too. But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful. This had been true when Ash’s brother, Goodman, essentially ruined his life in one night and thundered impulsively ahead from there, as if trying to ruin the lives of everyone around him as well.

By 2009, Jules had been with Ash at most of the significant moments in her family story, and she knew how much Ash had suffered. Still now, on the night that Jules and Dennis read the latest Christmas letter, Jules had her series of mildly envious thoughts that could not be quieted as quickly as she would have liked, and she and Dennis went to bed early, with Ethan’s card of the Three Wise Men propped on the radiator. All winter the heat in this apartment was either too voluminous or stingy. Tonight was one of the stingy times, and they lay together, her husband’s thick arms around her, keeping her not exactly warm enough; and her arms around him, probably doing the same incomplete job. Elsewhere, in a hearth on a Colorado ranch, a fire glowed and gathered.

D
ennis Boyd was one and a half years past his first serious depressive episode when he and Jules Jacobson met at a dinner party in the late fall of 1981. She had moved to the city that September after college to try to be an actress—or, actually, an
actor,
Ash said they should now call it—the comedic, “character part” type, which was helped along by her reddish hair; though she knew that attempting to channel Lucille Ball could take you only so far. Depression wasn’t anything that she and her friends ever thought about. Instead they thought about their temp jobs; auditions; graduate school; finding a rent-stabilized apartment; and whether, if you’d slept with someone twice, it meant you were involved. They were trying to figure out the world through a series of experiments, and mental illness was not one of them. Jules was too naive about mental illness to know much about it unless it appeared before her in its churning, street-aggressive male form or its despairing, Plathian female form. Anything other than that, and she missed it entirely.

Isadora Topfeldt, the hostess of the dinner party, had given a few details about Dennis Boyd in advance of the evening, though she’d left out his depressive episode. When naming the different people who would be at her dinner, she’d said to Jules, “Oh, and also my downstairs neighbor Dennis Boyd. You remember, I’ve told you about him.”

“No.”

“Sure you do.
Dennis.
Big old Dennis.” Isadora jutted her jaw a little and thrust her arms outward in illustration. “He’s this bearish guy with thick black hair. He’s
regular,
you know?”

“Regular? What does that mean?”

“Oh, just the way you and I and most of the people we know are
ir
regular, Dennis isn’t. Even his name: Dennis Boyd. Like blocks of wood side by side: Dennis. Boyd. It could be the name of anyone on earth. He’s like . . . this
guy.
He’s not in the arts whatsoever, which makes him different from a lot of people we know. He’s working as a temp at a clinic, answering phones. Has no idea of what he wants to do with his life. He’s from Dunellen, New Jersey, working class, ‘very hardware store’ were I believe his exact words, and he went to Rutgers. He doesn’t say all that much. You have to sort of drag things out of him. He plays touch football in the park with his friends,” Isadora added, as though this was an exotic detail.

“Why did you invite him?”

Isadora shrugged. “I like him,” she said. “You know what he really looks like? A young cop.”

The building in which Isadora Topfeldt and Dennis Boyd both lived was a narrow tenement walk-up on West 85th Street just off Amsterdam Avenue, still a dubious stretch of street back at the start of the 1980s. Everyone who lived on the Upper West Side then told stories of having been mugged or nearly mugged at least once; a mugging was a rite of passage. Isadora, a loud, broad-shouldered woman who favored vintage dresses, had talked to her neighbor Dennis at the mailboxes, and they’d hung out a couple of times in her apartment. On one recent evening, after a few long silences, Dennis had stiffly told Isadora what had happened to him in college; and though Isadora was usually a gossip, she hadn’t repeated the story of his depressive episode and hospitalization to Jules or either of the other guests in advance, because, as she later explained, it wouldn’t have been fair to him.

Jules had graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and after a summer spent living with her mother in Underhill, where everything was the same as always but slightly different—the family-style Italian restaurant was now a nail salon; the Dress Cottage was also a nail salon; the Wanczyks next door were both dead of back-to-back heart attacks, and their house had been sold to an Iranian family—she had found an extremely cheap studio apartment in the West Village. The building seemed to be a firetrap, but it was in the
city.
Finally she could say she lived here, in the place where all her friends from Spirit-in-the-Woods had lived when she’d first met them. Now she was no different from them.

Ash and Ethan lived directly across town from her in the East Village, and their own studio apartment—the first apartment they’d ever lived in together—wasn’t any better than hers. It had a working fireplace, but the single room was minuscule, with a loft bed and a drawing table beneath it. All of them lived their lives in tiny apartments; it was what you did as soon as you got out of school. The near-squalor of Jules’s one room on Horatio Street wasn’t a source of shame to her. She had a night job as a waitress at La Bella Lanterna, a café where kids from the suburbs who’d recently moved to the city came in and blithely ordered that orangeade called Aranciata
,
trilling the tongue on the
r
like native speakers of Italian. During the day when she could, Jules went to open-call theater auditions, and only once received a callback, but still she kept going to them.

Her friends were too nice to suggest that she might think about an alternative field. Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, “But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.” The world of law was filled with the fallen, but theater wasn’t. No one ever “fell back” onto theater. You had to really, really want it.

Jules had thought, at the beginning of her time in New York City, that she had really, really wanted it. Her three summers at Spirit-in-the-Woods had given her the desire, which had stayed with her. She’d become more confident as an actor and even occasionally bold. Her social awkwardness had turned into what seemed to other people like a deliberate affect. She sometimes wore strange, elfish outfits now, including little John Lennon eyeglasses for reading, and a short, flared skirt that could technically be described as a dirndl. “You just like saying
dirndl
,” Ethan accused her, correctly. Jules often made idiosyncratic remarks—not even actual jokes—and she was surprised to find that most other actors weren’t funny, as a rule, so in fact they were a very easy audience. All she had to do was throw out a phrase that was vaguely ethnic or funny
seeming
—“My kishkas, my kishkas,” she’d said when she got hit in the stomach with a Frisbee, and all the actors around her had laughed, even though Jules knew she was cheating by not actually being funny but instead being in the
neighborhood
of funny.

Ethan understood the distinction when she told him. “Yeah, it was kind of cheating,” he’d agreed, “using your Jewishness in this sort of low-rent way.”

“But, you know,” she said, “I was sure to invoke the Fanny Brice Act, which was passed by Congress in 1937.”

She and Ash were now taking an acting class together at the private studio of a legendary teacher, Yvonne Urbaniak, a woman in her late seventies who wore a turban—a look that, unless you had impeccable bone structure, wasn’t flattering to a woman and usually suggested chemotherapy. “She’s Isak Dinesen’s stunt double,” Jules kept saying. Yvonne was extremely charismatic, if suddenly capable of cruelty. “No, no, no!” Yvonne had said to Jules more than once. Ash was one of the stars of the class; Jules was one of the worst. “Definitely in the bottom two,” Jules had said once. Ash had murmured something in contradiction, but not forcefully.

On Thursday nights during that first year after college, Jules and Ash met for class in the barely furnished living room of a brownstone along with ten other people. They read scenes, they did exercises, and fairly often someone in the class cried. Occasionally it was Ash. Jules never cried there; sometimes, seeing one of the other actors become overwhelmed during an exercise, she felt a spike of nervous tension and a sudden inexplicable desire to laugh. She didn’t have a strong emotional connection to the work, and she attempted to convince herself that a comedic actor didn’t need to find an emotional connection. That all she had to be was a comic colt, galumphing around the stage winningly. But Jules wasn’t good enough at that either.

After class she and Ash ate a late dinner at an East Village restaurant where varenyky, the Ukrainian version of fat pierogi, slid around on buttered oval china plates. These dinners were a destination and a relief. After the tension of the class, Jules welcomed the starch and the oily sheen you could lick from your fork, and also the pleasure of sitting across from Ash with no one else around.

“I should quit,” Jules said.

“No, you shouldn’t. You’re too good.”

“No, I’m not.”

Ash always encouraged Jules, despite the truth. Maybe she’d been pretty good at fifteen, but that was a brief and unusual flare. Her first night onstage at camp in
The Sandbox
had been her best night of all, followed up over the subsequent two summers by slightly weaker imitations. Then in college, though she was cast in several plays, Jules could see her place in all this. Some actors had resolve but no talent; others were all talent but breakable, and the world had to discover them before they shrank back and disappeared. Then there were people like Jules, who tried so hard, the effort showing clearly. “Keep going,” Ash said. “That’s all there is, right?” So Jules kept going, without any reward or encouragement from anyone outside her friends.

Still, between Yvonne’s tough class and all the pointless open-call auditions, Jules Jacobson could still be described as an “actor,” and so at Isadora Topfeldt’s dinner party she was introduced to Dennis Boyd this way. Dennis, in turn, was introduced by Isadora as “my neighbor, the very nice temp at a clinic.” Both of them shyly said hello. When you were twenty-two in 1981 and met someone of the opposite sex, your thoughts did not go to couplehood. Ash and Ethan were the only couple their age that Jules knew, and they didn’t count, for they weren’t like anyone else. The somewhat freakish childhood-sweetheart phenomenon of Ash and Ethan could not entirely be explained.

The dinner party at which Dennis appeared took place on one of those evenings that came in a spasm in the early eighties, when everyone was first learning to cook and dinners featured elaborate food within limited parameters, since they all owned the same two approachable cookbooks. Chicken marbella was ubiquitous. Prunes, those unloved things, beetle-backed and shiny, with guts like meat, finally found their context. Cilantro was briefly everywhere, creating miniflurries of conversation about whether you did or did not like cilantro, which invariably included someone in the room saying, “I can’t stand cilantro. It tastes like soap.” That night, candles released tongues of red wax onto Isadora’s tablecloth and windowsill, where it would leave an eternal crust, but it was no matter; Isadora’s crappy furnishings, and even the apartment itself, would be abandoned when all the life practicing had exhausted itself and new desires replaced old ones. They all hated Ronald Reagan with a uniform loathing, and it astonished Jules Jacobson that other people in America—a majority, apparently—actually liked him. Nixon had been an outright grotesque, and as far as she could see Reagan was one too, with his oiled hair and padded shoulders like some dunderheaded uncle.

“Have you ever noticed,” Jules had once said to her friends, “that Reagan’s head is kind of
slanted?
It’s shaped like the rubber top of a bottle of that brown kind of glue. What’s that glue called . . . oh, mucilage.” Everyone had laughed. “Our president is Mucilage Head!” she’d said. “And semi-relatedly,” she’d continued, bringing out something she’d once said to Ethan back at camp, “have you ever noticed the way pencils look like collie dogs? You know, like Lassie?” No, no one had noticed. Someone brought out a pencil and Jules showed them how, if looked at from the side, a pencil had a shaggy orange fringe like a collie’s fur, and a black tip that resembled a collie’s snout. Yes, yes, they all saw it, but they were still thinking about Mucilage Head, and how, to their despair, they lived in his America now.

The house on Cindy Drive, which had always been small and a little dowdy, seemed tragic post-college. Since her father had died in 1974, her mother hadn’t been able to keep the place in good enough shape; the mailbox hung at a slant, and there was an old ceramic pumpkin on the porch filled to the top with crisping, yellowed copies of the
Underhill Clarion
. Lois was all over Jules the minute she came in the front door, and during meals she seemed to sit and keenly observe the way Jules ate. This was unnerving. When Jules moved to the city, it was so good to mostly go unwatched and therefore unjudged. Even at the cheap haircut place in the Village, your skinny androgyne of a haircutter hardly even looked at you as he or she cut your hair, but mostly looked into the mirror and across the big industrial basement room at another skinny androgyne haircutter. A song by the Ramones rattled the barbers’ chairs, and you could close your eyes and listen to it along with the strangely satisfying sounds of your own wet hair being severed from your head.

Now almost everyone at this party had the spiked hair of dogs fresh from a dogfight in the rain. Dennis Boyd, who sat across from Jules Jacobson, separated from her by a thick candle like a Doric column, did not. He had a head of conventional wavy black hair, a darkly shadowed, slightly unshaven face, and deep-set, dark eyes that almost appeared to have light bruises beneath them. It wasn’t clear, really, what he was or who he was. He lived in this building and worked at a job that he would outgrow. This was a time of life, she understood, in which you might not know what you were, but that was all right. You judged people not on their success—almost no one they knew was successful at age twenty-two, and no one had a nice apartment, owned anything of value, dressed in expensive clothes, or had any interest in making money—but on their appeal. The time period between the ages of, roughly, twenty to thirty was often amazingly fertile. Great work might get done during this ten-year slice of time. Just out of college, they were gearing up, ambitious not in a calculating way, but simply eager, not yet tired.

Isadora’s big neighbor Dennis was a little different. He was still in his work clothes, his creased white button-down shirt invoking a set of clean cotton sheets. He did appear solid, as Isadora had said, and, yes, it was true that with his short, traditional haircut and thick arms and New Jersey accent he also resembled her idea of a young cop. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine him in uniform. But he was also shyer than anyone else in the room, which included Isadora, a girl named Janine Banks whom Isadora knew from her hometown, and a guy named Robert Takahashi from the copy place where Isadora worked. Robert was small and handsome with spiky black baby-chick hair, and built like a compact action figure. He was gay, Isadora had said, and from a traditional Japanese-American family that had been ashamed when he’d come out to them, then never referred to his gayness again. Whenever he went home to Pittsburgh for a visit, though, he took his current boyfriend with him if he had one, and his mother boiled udon noodles and cooked eel in sauce for the two men and treated them well.