by Meg Wolitzer
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 irregular, 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 pointles
s 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.
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.”