The Interestings (9 page)

For a moment Jules thought that maybe Robert should meet her friend Jonah Bay, but she didn’t think Jonah was quite ready to meet anyone yet, after his summer living in Vermont on a farm along with other members of the Unification Church—the Moonies. He’d been drawn into the church when he was still living in Cambridge after having graduated from MIT. For reasons no one understood, Jonah had been vulnerable to indoctrination, and had moved to that farm and been part of the Moonies until his friends managed to bring him back to New York a month earlier, in order to have him deprogrammed. Now, he was only barely social, like someone resting after a seizure.

At the table, Robert Takahashi began to talk about how one of his friends from the copy place, Trey Speidell, was very sick. It was extremely disturbing the way it had all come about, Robert said. After work one night the two men had gone out to the Saint, and under the club’s perforated planetarium dome they’d begun to dance. Shirts had been removed and poppers had been cracked even though it was a weeknight—because, really, why not? It was 1981, and they were two young men with new haircuts, getting up each day to go to jobs that didn’t require much brainpower. They could stay up late and dance, jumping up and down. Fast numbers were followed by slow ones, and they ground themselves together, and ended up back at Trey’s little shared apartment.

“We began fooling around,” Robert explained now. “It was thrilling.” Everyone listened intently, as though he was telling a sea yarn. “Trey is extremely cute; take my word for it.”

“He really is,” echoed Isadora.

“And afterward it was sort of dark in the room, and I was just tracing my finger along his shoulder, and I said something like, ‘Follow the dots.’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Your birthmarks.’ He insisted he didn’t have any, and he was kind of insulted. He went into the bathroom to prove he was right, and I followed him in, and he turned on the light and there were these big purple dots on him like someone had taken a Magic Marker and just drawn them on. The next day he went to a dermatologist at lunch hour, and afterward he didn’t come back to work. And now he’s in the hospital, and they say it’s cancer. A really rare kind. They brought in doctors from other hospitals to consult. Even one from France.”

One minute Trey Speidell was fine, Robert told them, in great shape, twenty-six years old, and now he was in St. Vincent’s, in a special unit for puzzling cases. Robert feared that there was a toxin in the ventilation system at Copies Plus that had poisoned Trey and would soon poison the rest of the employees, the way Legionnaires’ disease had killed those conventioneers. He worried that he and Isadora would come down with it next. “I think we should quit Copies Plus Monday morning,” he said. “Just get out of there. It’s a horrible place anyway.”

“You’re being really neurotic about this,” said Isadora. “One of our coworkers has cancer
,
Robert. People get cancer, even young people.”

“The nurse at St. Vincent’s said that only old people get cancer like this.”

“My sister, Ellen, had shingles last year,” Jules put in. “That’s supposed to be only for old people too.”

“Exactly,” said Isadora. “Thank you, Jules. Trey Speidell getting some geriatric cancer does not mean there’s going to be a Copies Plus epidemic of it.”

“My plan of attack, when I get worried about something?” said Dennis suddenly, and his voice in the conversation surprised Jules, because she realized he had spoken less than anyone else at this dinner. Everyone looked toward Dennis with expectation, and he seemed to back down a little, unsurely. “Well,” he said, “what I do is, I try to do behavior mod on myself.”

“Behavior
mod
?” said Isadora. “What is that? It sounds so swingin’ sixties.”

“It’s just a thing where you try to think about what’s realistic in your reaction and what’s not,” said Dennis. He licked his lips, nervous from the attention.

“I know about behavior mod,” said Jules. “I wrote a paper about it for a psych class.”

“Oh. Nice,” said Dennis. The two of them looked at each other and smiled at the same time.

“Jules and Dennis sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” chanted Isadora with wild inappropriateness, and Robert and Janine groaned and insulted her, but Jules and Dennis said nothing, just looked down at their plates in the odd moment. Then Isadora turned back to Robert and said, “I think you need to relax, Robert. We all need to. That’s why I brought us a nice fat spliff for dessert.”

No one looked all that interested in the spliff; Jules wasn’t even certain what it was. Isadora sometimes larded her conversation with unnatural colloquialisms. Robert Takahashi was moodily distracted for the rest of the evening, which made Isadora become more talkative, as if she was afraid the silence in the room would ruin one of the first dinner parties she’d ever given in her life. Regular-looking Dennis Boyd looked too big for his flimsy little dining table chair that Isadora had bought cheaply at the Third Avenue Bazaar. Jules worried that Dennis would actually break the chair, taking a spill that would embarrass him. She didn’t want him to be embarrassed; he already looked so uneasy here in the room.

After Robert’s sudden emotional, frightened story about Trey Speidell, and the ensuing gloom at the table, Isadora dominated the night, and her friend Janine joined in, the two of them telling stories from the job they’d had in high school flipping burgers. Finally it was just so boring, all of them trapped at the table on unstable chairs listening to these two girls, that Jules offered her own story from the job she’d had during her sophomore year at Buffalo. “I was a theater major, but I minored in psych,” she told the table, “acting in plays and also working for a psych professor performing experiments on other students, who were paid twenty dollars each. I performed one experiment in which I had to ask the subject to describe the most emotionally painful experience he or she had ever had. ‘This will all be confidential,’ I said to them.”

She told the people at the dinner party how these students she’d never known before, but had perhaps seen on campus, had freely told her about their breakups with their beloved high school boyfriends or girlfriends or the deaths of their mothers or even, once, the diving-accident death of a little brother. But the words they spoke were immaterial; they didn’t know that the only aspect she was studying for the experiment was body language. Jules watched their hands and their head movements, taking notes. After a while, the raw and emotional material just started sounding to her like ordinary revelations. The pain of others became like an actual substance, one which Jules did not underestimate or take lightly. She even imagined herself as one of these people, sitting and talking about the long-ago death of her own father, her voice as fragile and tremulous as theirs. They were
relieved
telling her about their pain, even though it didn’t actually matter how well she listened.

In the middle of dinner Dennis Boyd’s leg jumped a few times against the table, and he was so big that he actually lifted it slightly off the floor. Isadora said, “Dennis, stop that, it’s like a séance,” and she hit him on the arm. She often hit men, supposedly out of affection.

Jules asked, “What was Dennis doing?”

“Jiggling,” said Isadora. “His leg. Like a boy.”

“I am a boy,” said Dennis. “Or anyway, I was.”

“Not all boys jiggle their legs,” Jules said, her version of flirting, though why was it that
archness
supposedly indicated flirting and sexual interest? Why didn’t earnestness indicate this? Or melancholy?

“This boy does,” said Isadora. “Constantly, believe me.”

A year or so later, Isadora would leave New York, traveling the country and sleeping on the sofas of friends of friends—couch-surfing decades before it became an established activity—sending Jules and Dennis antic postcards from roadside attractions like the Hamburger Museum, or the “actual” house of the old woman who lived in a shoe. “Actual?” Jules had said to Dennis when that card came in the mail. “How could the old woman in the shoe have an actual house?
She doesn’t exist.
It’s a nursery rhyme.” Together they had laughed at Isadora. Then, no one heard a word from her after 1984. And then, much later, in 1998, when the Internet existed fully and Jules thought to search her name on Yahoo, she found only a single mention of an “I. Topfeldt,” proprietor of a dog-grooming salon in Pompano, Florida. Could
that
be Isadora? She never remembered Isadora once discussing a love of dogs. Almost no one she’d known in his or her twenties in New York City had a dog. But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

Jules did look Isadora up on the Internet one more time, in 2006, expecting to find the same dog-grooming information, which would have been oddly comforting. When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever. But this time, when Jules typed in Isadora’s name, the top hit was a paid death notice from four years earlier in 2002, which told the story of a traffic accident on a highway outside Pompano. Accidents always seemed to take place “outside” of places you’d heard of, never directly in them. It was definitely the right Isadora Topfeldt, described as age forty-three, a graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, survived only by her mother. “Dennis,” Jules called in a tight, loud voice as she sat at the computer with the death notice before her, not quite knowing what to do with it or how to feel. She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t even sure why. “Look.”

He came and stood behind her. “Oh no,” he said. “Isadora.”

“Yes. Who introduced us.”

“Oh, I feel so bad.”

“Me too.” Jules and Dennis wondered at their own mutual fog of sadness, which was poignantly so much sharper than the affection they’d ever felt for Isadora Topfeldt back when they actually were friends with her.

At that first dinner party, Dennis Boyd had sat across from Jules Jacobson with slightly wet-looking dark eyes, and each time his gaze moved toward her, she received a new, pleasing little bang of his interest. It had been a long time since she had truly liked a boy, or a man, as people were now starting to call them. Up at college in Buffalo, everyone had worn bundled clothes outdoors, rendering their bodies identically asexual; indoors, the men were in hearty flannel, throwing back beers. Foosball was played, that perplexingly popular game with all those knobs; and the Ms. Pac-Man machine was a regular destination in the back of Crumley’s, the bar where everyone spent Friday and Saturday nights. Jules had had vaguely vomit-flavored sex with two different, uninteresting guys—the theater department guys were all gay, or else only interested in the very beautiful theater department girls—and had taken long showers afterward in a stall in her dorm, wearing flip-flops so she would not get a foot fungus.

Her suite mates were a group of girls as mean as you could ever find, not to mention slatternly, unacademic. It was just a piece of bad luck that she had been put with them. The suite smelled of hot comb. The girls screamed at one another with abandon and contempt, as though this place were some kind of halfway house for the deranged. “EAT MY PUSSY, AMANDA, YOU ARE SUCH A LYING SACK OF SHIT!” one girl shouted across the common room with its leaking beanbag furniture and splayed-open pizza boxes and Sony Trinitron TV and, of course, its hot combs lying around like the swords of knights during their day off.

In the first snow of freshman year, Jules Jacobson walked to the phone booth across the street from the dorm, and there she plied the phone with coins, calling Ash Wolf at Yale. As soon as Ash answered, Jules could detect seriousness of purpose. “Hello,” said Ash in the distracted, aloof voice of someone writing a Molière paper.

“Ash, I hate it here,” Jules said. “This place is so enormous. Do you know how many students there are?
Twenty thousand
. It’s like an entire city where I don’t know anyone. I’m like an immigrant who’s come alone to America. My name is Anna Babushka. Please come get me.” Ash laughed, as always. Her laughter on the phone now became for Jules the highlight of the call; the fact that she could elicit this response in Ash caused her to preen a little bit. Even in her unhappiness, she became aware of feeling a small strand of power.

“Oh, Jules,” said Ash. “I’m sorry you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset. I’m unhappy. I mean it.”

“Give it a chance, okay? You’ve only been there two and a half months.”

“Which is a decade in dog years.”

“You could go to student counseling.”

“I did. But I need more than that.” Jules had had five sessions with a disheveled social worker named Melinda, who was as kind as the kindest mother, nodding in sympathy while Jules railed against the stupidity of college life. Later, she would barely remember what Melinda had said to her, but at the time her presence had been soothing and necessary, and certainly Jules unconsciously imitated some of Melinda’s style later on when she herself started a therapy practice.

“College takes some getting used to,” said Ash. “I felt the same way too in the beginning, but it got better recently.”

“You go to Yale, Ash; it’s completely different. Everyone is always shit-faced here.”

“Lots of people get drunk here too,” said Ash. “Believe me. If you listen hard now, you can hear the sound of people puking in Davenport.” All Jules heard was the sound of a match being lit. With a cigarette in hand, Ash often looked like a fairy smoking or a delinquent angel.

“Well,
here,
people put their mouths directly under a keg nozzle,” Jules said. “And there’s supposed to be thirty inches of snow next week. Please come visit me this weekend, before I am buried alive.”

Ash thought about it. “This weekend? God, it would be so great to see you. I hate that we still don’t live in the same place.”

“I know.”