The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  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.”

  “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 th
ing 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.”