The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

“You want a drink or something?” Dennis Boyd asked, and Jules said no thanks, she was tired and full from dinner, and couldn’t bear to drink anything more tonight. It was true that she was trying to watch herself after the four-year kegger that had gone on all around her in Buffalo. But all he had meant was did she want to come over, and she hadn’t known the correct, adult way to answer. The invitation had surprised her, and so she’d said no, even though almost immediately she realized that she would have liked to come over to his apartment. She wanted to see the way he lived, see his modest collection of belongings. She bet he was neat, thoughtful, touching.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well. Have fun then. See you around.”

  “See you,” she said. If she had looked at him longer, taking in the sight of him so young and burly and unfinished, a bag of garbage tied in his hand, the sleeve of his sweatshirt too short on his thick hairy wrist, then maybe they would have started something that night. Instead, it took nearly two more months, a period during which they each performed their separate life tasks in seeming preparation for nothing, but which turned out to be preparation for so much.

  Jules Jacobson saw Dennis Boyd next on the street in winter. Once again he held a plastic bag. She was on her way to Copies Plus to have a scene from a play xeroxed for an audition. Jules saw the top of a brown bottle poking out of Dennis’s grocery bag, and was touched to realize that it was Bosco, the chocolate syrup that hadn’t made an appearance in her life since childhood. He had purchased Bosco and tortilla chips. Jules remembered Isadora’s indiscreet story about Dennis having been in a mental hospital, and she thought that he still didn’t know how to take care of himself very well. Though really, who did? Jules had never sent in the form and the check to Prudential to purchase health insurance, though her mother had made her swear she would. Jules was uninsured, and not only that, she had never used the stove in her disgusting little kitchen, except to heat up a sock full of uncooked rice once when she had a stiff neck. But the idea of big, dark, unshaven Dennis Boyd not taking good care of himself upset her.

  “I’ll come with you,” Dennis said, and Jules said okay, and he accompanied her to the copy place. The doorbell jingled, and they entered and stood together in the bright white store, inhaling the astringent smell of toner. There was Isadora Topfeldt in her red employee polo shirt, her hair up in little-girl pigtails, looking more eccentric and marginal than the last time Jules had seen her. Isadora seemed to have been lulled into a zombie-employee state by the slush-slush sound the machines made while their lights flowed back and forth across plates of glass. Behind her, her friend Robert Takahashi was straightening the edges of somebody’s documents. Jules said hello and reminded him that they’d met at Isadora’s.

  “Hey, hi,” he said, and smiled.

  “How are things here?” she asked him. “Your coworker was sick?”

  “Trey. He died recently.”

  “Oh my God.”

  In an unsteady voice Robert said, “I accept that it wasn’t the ventilation system here that caused his cancer. But it was all very strange and very fast, and I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “I’m really sorry,” she and Dennis echoed together, and in front of them Robert began to cry. Everyone was a little awkward and no one knew what to say, so they just said nothing. Finally Dennis put his groceries down on the counter and reached across it to give Robert Takahashi a standard bear hug, encircling him the way he might encircle a football as he ran with it across the meadow in Central Park. It was a sight, the big indelicate guy in the thick winter jacket and the small, handsome Asian one in the red shirt, and though the gesture was deeply self-conscious, it was also genuine, and Robert seemed grateful. Big Dennis let him go, and then Jules patted Robert’s arm, and finally Robert turned away in tears and went back to the stacks of paper all around him, because despite his sorrow it was still a workday.

  Jules felt she had to leave this place immediately, where someone very young had fallen ill and then actually died; also, this place where someone overbearing and unappealing worked; and someone else who was congested with grief. It was a place that could make you understand that your own life would be limited in scope—everyone’s was. When Jules turned and left the store with Dennis, going with him toward his apartment, where it was understood they would now go to bed together, she really imagined they were casting off limited possibilities and unpleasantness and even death—death by a rare, old-person’s cancer, or any other cause—and were heading somewhere wide open and unexplored. He slung the grocery bag over one arm and grabbed her hand, and they broke into a run.

  • • •

  Sex at twenty-two was idyllic. Sex at twenty-two wasn’t college sex at eighteen, which carried with it a freight of insecurities, nerve endings, and shame. Sex at twenty-two also wasn’t self-sex at twelve, which was just about being quiet and discreet in your narrow bed and thinking how strange it was that you could feel this way just by doing this. Sex at twenty-two wasn’t, either, sex at fifty-two, which, when it took place all those decades later in the middle of the Jacobson-Boyds’ lengthy marriage, could be a sudden, pleasing surprise that awakened one of them from sleep.

  But sex at twenty-two, well, that was really something, Jules thought, and Dennis apparently thought so too. Both of their bodies were still perfect, or perfect enough; they would come to see this later on, though they couldn’t see it at the time. Self-conscious, dying with embarrassment, but so excited, they stripped to their skin for each other for the first time standing beside the loft bed in his apartment that day, and she made him go up the ladder first so he wouldn’t be able to watch her from behind—knowing that if he did, as she lifted a leg to reach the next rung the most private section of herself would have been briefly cleaved and displayed. The hair, the shadow, the pinch of lip, the stingy little anus—how could she let him watch that particular show?

  “After you, kind sir,” she said—oh God, had she really said that? And why? Was she pretending to be a Victorian prostitute?—sweeping out her arm. Dark, woolly Dennis swung up the ladder naked. She watched as his parts did the male version of what hers would have done, his balls moving, if not swinging, and his downy ass separating into two as he bent his knee and climbed the vertical ladder into the bed near the ceiling. Dennis Boyd’s loft bed was so high up that they could not sit upright in it, but could only half-slouch, or else lie flat, or lie with their bodies on top of each other like a two-car pileup.

  The bed encouraged intimacy of a kind that Jules was not used to, and which now alarmed her. Dennis said, “I want to look at you,” his face so close that he could really, completely see her.

  “Oh God, do you have to?” she said.

  “I do,” said Dennis solemnly.

  She hoped her chin was not broken out, and she tried to remember what she’d thought of herself that morning when she’d looked in the mirror. Dennis, she saw now, was already in need of a shave. He was sturdy-looking, thick-chested, big-cocked, his pubic hair like a small black loincloth, but for all of that she also knew he was inwardly shaky. In their run from the copy store they had felt like two people who’d escaped a hellish, dead-end future.

  This man would climb a ladder first and let her see his balls and the thick dark twine of hair that wrapped them in some kind of atavistic protection. The slipperiness of those balls in their thin sack made even a large, strong, athletic man seem fragile. But this was an illusion; he wasn’t that vulnerable, but instead he was forceful with her, and following that he was smiling, happy that he had given her a solid, no-faking orgasm. She’d said “Oh oh oh,” and then he’d said, “You are wonderful!” She was wonderful because her responsiveness had made him feel good and successful. He was pleased with the size of his penis; he didn’t have to say this, but she knew it.

  An hour later, drinking milk lightly tinted with Bosco in tall Rutgers Scarlet Knights glasses in bed, the milk dripping down their necks a bit as they lounged half-slanted like two people lying in tra
ction in some ski-chalet hospital, they told each other the roughest outlines of their personal autobiographies. She heard about his family in Dunellen, his mother and father and three brothers. The family business was a hardware store called B & L, and two of Dennis’s brothers were planning on running the store soon. Dennis could go in with them if he wanted, but he told Jules that the idea of doing that with his life was like “the death of the soul.” She was relieved when he said this. A man who used the phrase “the death of the soul” was complicated. He drank out of college football glasses, and he was figuring out a rudimentary way of taking care of himself. His family had never had any money, but every Christmas they traded expensive gifts and decorated the front of the house with rococo lights and a crèche and piped-in sound. There were big holiday occasions at which everyone sat around the living room and the den for hours, but these weren’t happy experiences, just boring and “itchy,” Dennis said. There was always friction, he told her, because nobody really liked anyone else all that much. “My brothers and I beat each other up all the time,” he told her.

  “When? Now?”

  “Then. I mean, beat up in the past.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Obviously, beat up can mean either the past or the present. I thought maybe you were still doing it.”

  “No,” said Dennis. “Because then we would be assholes. And I try not to be. I grew up with a lot of assholes.” Then, worriedly, he added, “Do I look like one?”

  “No, not at all,” said Jules, but she knew why he was asking. He had that standard young male look, which she’d seen in packs at the mall throughout her childhood, and then everywhere out in the world, including in college. She had never been attracted to it before, not when it was associated with generic maleness, but she liked it in him. He’d been troubled, but he was solid, big, reliable. Her father came to mind; cancer had made Warren Jacobson into a leaf, insubstantial, his slight self turning slighter as he became sick. But still, when Jules was a little girl, she had thought of him as big. She recalled the way he’d entered the house after work, wanting to hear about his daughters’ days at school.

  “Tell me about the new math,” he would say, for that was what they called it back then, unaware that by designating something new, you are already hastening its oldness. He had been very present, and then he was gone; and as the years added up since then, it became harder to think of him as someone who’d ever been present at all. Her father was past tense now; the present could never be held, it did not allow it. But here was Dennis Boyd, present tense personified, and with him in the bed, an ancient, daughterly part of Jules’s brain was stimulated with jumper cables. Imagine: a man who would not leave! A substantial, reliable, ultra-present man. She’d lost her father at age fifteen, and then a little later Ethan Figman had tried to bring her toward him, and though it was sweet, it was physically all wrong.

  Now Dennis, a burly man with no obvious exceptional talents and no desperate desire in any one direction, somehow could do what Ethan could not. She was absorbed in Dennis, already devoted. He was caring and good and not ironic, which to her surprise was an element she was attracted to, after all those years of relentless adolescent irony. Lying beside him, Jules wondered when she could see him again. There was nothing aesthetically astute in Dennis, nothing all that subtle except for his bashfulness, which was lovely. He crashed quietly through the world. If he sat on a flimsy chair, he might break it. If he entered a woman with his big, thick penis, he would have to make sure to angle himself correctly, or she might cry out in pain. He had to be careful; he had to modulate. The boys in his house growing up had all yelled at their mother, “Ma! Make us some Kraft macaroni and cheese!” They never yelled at their father, who sat glowering in front of the TV, watching football and documentaries about the Third Reich. They’d been scared of him, and still were.

  When Dennis got to the part of his life story about his stay at Langton Hull, his voice became tentative and questioning, and he looked to Jules to see if this information would be a deal-breaker. Was he too unbalanced for her, and would she now forever see him as an inpatient in a bathrobe, eating an institutional dinner at five p.m.? A woman at the beginning of a romance with a man might not be able to recover from such an image. Actually, she was preoccupied not with an image of him but with whether she should reveal that she already knew about his depression and hospitalization from Isadora. In which case, she would have to tell Dennis that they had all been talking about him at that dinner party back in the fall, after he left Isadora’s apartment.

  “Oh,” was what she said, and looked concerned, touching his arm the same inadequate way she had touched Robert Takahashi’s arm in the copy place.

  That night, after they’d finally parted, Jules called Ash, and as soon as she answered, Jules said to her, “Well, I slept with someone.” She and Ash spoke nearly every day, and saw each other once a week at their acting class, and sometimes more often. Ash was working part-time in her father’s office, doing filing, the worst job in the world, she said, and was also going for auditions. She’d recently been cast as a mermaid in an experimental play that would be performed for one week in front of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island; apparently, the producers were interested in hiring her for their next production too. It was a start, and though it paid very little, Gil and Betsy Wolf were covering the rent on the apartment she and Ethan shared. He was working as an animator on industrials, but the pay was spotty. One of these days he would get a real job in an animation studio, he said. Until then, he did lots of small jobs, and was always drawing in those little spiral notebooks that thickened his back pocket.

  “Who?” Ash asked in a suspicious voice. “Who was it?”

  “Why do you sound so shocked? Some people have been known to want to see my naked form.” The connection crackled and faded; Ash and Ethan had recently received one of those new cordless phones as a gift from Ash’s parents, but the big, clunky thing hardly seemed worth it, for the connection almost always went from strong to weak before the conversation had really gone anywhere.

  “See your what?” said Ash. “I couldn’t hear.”

  “My naked form.”

  “Oh, that. Well, sure, of course. It’s just that you haven’t slept with anyone since we’ve both been living in the same city,” said Ash. “In the past, when you told me about them, they were always invisible lovers.”

  “Don’t say lovers.”

  “I always say lovers.”

  “I know you do. You and Ethan—lovers. I’ve never liked it, but I didn’t tell you.”

  “What else didn’t you like?” Ash said.

  “Nothing. I like everything else about you.” This was actually true. Ash still had so little about her that was objectionable. The fact that she used the word lover could not be held against her. Talking to Ash now, telling her about Dennis, was in its own way almost as pleasurable as going to bed with Dennis had been. “He is just so present,” she wanted to say, but Ash would have asked her to explain further, and Jules wouldn’t have been able to. Maybe his present-tense nature indicated a lack of future tense; maybe, because he had no plans for himself yet, no anything except what was right here, she couldn’t count on him. But she already knew that wasn’t true.

  Soon enough, Jules suspected, there would be a group dinner. Probably it would be at one of the cheap Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. Everyone would be very attentive and talkative, and Ethan and Ash would love-bomb Dennis over spitting iron plates of tandoori. But even so, everyone would see how different Dennis was, and despite Jules having warned them, they would be a little surprised. Someone might mention David Hockney’s swimming pools. “What are those?” Dennis would ask ingenuously, unashamed, and Ash would explain that David Hockney was an artist who often painted beautiful turquoise swimming pools, and that they should all go see his show. “Sounds good,” Dennis would say. When the evening was over he would tell Jules, “Your friends are so nice! Let’s go with them to see that David
Hackney show.” She’d have to quietly say, “Hockney.” And they would say, when they called her up the next day, “He’s obviously crazy about you. And that’s the main thing.”

  He wasn’t in the arts, wasn’t dying to be an actor or a cartoonist or a dancer or an oboist. He wasn’t Jewish, or even half. Almost no one in his life was like Jules or her friends; Isadora Topfeldt came the closest, but she was more eccentric than artistic. In the city, ever since college, Jules would occasionally run into someone from Spirit-in-the-Woods; whenever this happened, or whenever Ash ran into someone from the camp, they would call the other one up and say in a dramatic voice, “I had a sighting.” People who had gone to Spirit-in-the-Woods, even people who hadn’t been their close friends there, represented the world of art and artistic possibilities. But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live. Nothing was as concentrated as it had been up at Spirit-in-the-Woods. They were all spreading out, stretching, staying close as friends but getting the lay of land that looked very different when you were on your own. Dennis, not arty, was very smart and very willing. He wasn’t an asshole. She wanted to be around him, wanted to touch him, liked his smell, liked his bed near the ceiling, and the idea of how much he enjoyed her company. Dennis liked learning; he was interested in finding out about things. “I watched a documentary on channel thirteen about the Stanislavski method last night,” he said. “Did you ever try that method when you were acting?” Or, “I spent twenty minutes talking to this guy on the street who was protesting apartheid, and he gave me all this literature, which I stayed up reading, and it was extremely shocking and sad.” There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn’t depressed.

  Then there would probably be more group dinners, and Ash and Ethan and Jonah would welcome Dennis completely into their world. Jonah would perhaps appear less often, because it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. The entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state. Jules imagined having her own dinner party in her little apartment with its cheap plates and silverware. They could sit on Jules’s approximation of adult furniture and form a foursome or a fivesome. She fantasized that much later they would think back on this time in their lives, remembering it as if through a clear, highly polished lens. All the conversations they’d had. All the hummus they’d eaten. All the cheap foods and utensils and undemanding decorations of their early to mid-twenties.