The Interestings A Novel

FOUR





Dennis 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 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 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.

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 p-ssy, 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 f*cked-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 thing 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.”

“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 traction 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 a*sholes. And I try not to be. I grew up with a lot of a*sholes.” 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 a*shole. 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.

“Is it serious?” Ash asked on the phone after Jules had slept with Dennis. After all, Ash had known it was serious the moment she slept with Ethan, or possibly even before then.

“Yes,” said Jules, picturing Dennis Boyd’s dark face above her, the ceiling only inches beyond. “Careful,” she’d said to him, cupping his skull. “I don’t want you to crack your head.”

“No, I would be of no use to you with a cracked head,” he’d said, and she worried then that he was thinking that his head had already been cracked once, in a way, in college, and the fissure had repaired, and that Jules knew nothing about it, though of course she did know.

“He had a nervous breakdown, Ash, and he told me all about it, but he doesn’t know I already knew before he told me,” Jules suddenly said in a rush. “So what do you think: do I tell him I already knew, or is this a meaningless lie of omission, and I should forget about it?”

“You tell him,” said Ash without qualification. “You have to. He has to know what you know. You can’t start off with a secret.”

“You’re saying that?” said Jules, light but sharp.

A long silence ensued. “Yes,” Ash said finally.

Strange, Jules thought later, that she didn’t press Ash on this, or try to make her admit that it was hypocritical of her to take such a position. But stranger, maybe, that Ash seemed so comfortable taking that position. From time to time over the years Jules would wonder if Ash remembered this conversation, or whether she’d found a way to inure herself to contradictions and then forget them immediately. But on the phone Jules said nothing more about it, because this conversation wasn’t supposed to have been about Ash at all. It was supposed to have been about Jules and Dennis, and so she turned it back in that direction, realizing that she did agree with Ash’s advice: she had to tell Dennis what she knew about him.

“I sort of lied the other day,” she said to him the next time they saw each other. They had agreed to meet in Central Park, and were going to go to the zoo. “I already knew about your thing—your breakdown—when you brought it up,” she said right away as they paid and entered. “I shouldn’t have acted surprised the way I did. Isadora told everybody after you left.”

“She did? You’re kidding. Oh, this is bad,” he said. “It’s basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can’t bear.” They walked down the path of the worn- looking zoo and through the curved entryway of the penguin house, and he said, “But I actually can bear it now. It doesn’t seem to matter so much to me anymore.”

“Really?”

Dennis nodded and shrugged. The person who had collapsed at Rutgers in the middle of his junior year was not exactly the same person who lay bare bodied in bed with her. That earlier person had recovered. This person could take care of another person and also let himself be taken care of when needed.

Dennis was very appealing to Jules in ways that would be hard to explain to Ash, but then she remembered the night she had first seen Ash and Ethan together; that night, she had dumbly thought What? What? Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

“I knew I had a family history of gloom,” Dennis said as they entered the dank gray penguins’ sanctuary. Those muscular, determined little animals whipped through the cloudy water like speedboats, while schoolchildren stood in the fish stink watching, hands and noses and slack mouths against the glass wall. It felt illegal not to be in school anymore herself, to have freedom in the daytime to go with a man to the zoo, or to bed. Dennis and Jules hung back. He stood with his hands in his pockets, and said, “My grandma Louise, my dad’s mother, never left the house, and apparently her dad barely did, either. Whenever we went over there it was like being in a horrible dark room where nobody really talked. My grandmother never had any food for us. Only those cookies called Vienna Fingers.”

“I remember those cookies. We had them.”

“Yeah, but yours probably weren’t all broken, like hers were. We would sit with a plate of broken Vienna Fingers in front of us, and the name always creeped me out, as though they were human fingers. Jews’ fingers. My grandmother always had a low-level anti-Semitism going on. ‘The Jews this,’ ‘the Jews that.’ Don’t worry, though, you won’t have to meet her, she’s dead. When the sun went down, someone would turn on the tiniest table lamp. I couldn’t wait to leave. But I never connected any of that with myself. Or even with my dad, who’s really uncommunicative. I just thought he didn’t like me, but it wasn’t that. He’s basically an untreated depressive, that’s what the psychiatrist at the hospital said. But no one in my family admits to any of it. They’re ‘against’ therapy. It was embarrassing to them what happened to me. I think they basically believe college made me fall apart, and that I would’ve been fine if I’d stayed at home and worked at the store with my brothers.”

Jules lightly mentioned then that she knew of the Langton Hull Psychiatric Hospital from her summers at camp; she’d seen the sign downtown that pointed toward the road where the hospital was situated. He in turn said he knew of Spirit-in-the-Woods too, had seen the sign pointing toward it on the road outside Belknap. He said he had imagined what it would have been like if he had gone there instead of the hospital. Yes, it turned out that he too had eaten the huckleberry crumble, during a group outing into town with one of the nurses.

Dennis had been depressed but he wasn’t depressed any longer; the antidepressant he took was one of the so-called MAO inhibitors. “Like Chairman Mao,” he explained to her that night after the zoo, as they sat in her fold-out bed in her apartment, which was just a little better than his.

“So what would a Mao inhibitor be?” she asked. “The threat of capitalism?” Dennis smiled politely, but he seemed serious, distracted. He had brought over dinner for them, some things he’d cooked, “nothing fancy,” he warned her, not understanding yet that the gesture itself was winning. He explained to her, as he laid out the meal on a towel across her bed, that each food was an item he’d either seen her eat before or that she’d mentioned that she liked. “At Isadora’s dinner party, you were one of the ones who said they liked cilantro,” he said. “I remembered that. I had to go to two places to find it. The guy at the Korean place tried to sell me parsley, but I stood my ground.” Dennis and Jules ate carrot and celery sticks with a cilantro yogurt dipping sauce he’d made, and then the still-warm spaghetti he’d brought over in a plastic container. “Do you ever cook?” he asked her.

“No,” Jules said, embarrassed. “I don’t really do anything like that. I haven’t even paid my health insurance premiums.”

“I don’t see the connection, but okay,” he said. “That’s fine. I like to cook.” The unsaid thing was that it was fine if he ended up doing the cooking in their couple. They were going to be a couple, they really were. Then he said, “About food, there are some issues. Me and my MAO inhibitor—well, there are a lot of things I can’t eat.”

“Really?” she said, curious. “Like what?”

He told her the list of contraindications, which included smoked, pickled, or preserved meats; aged cheeses; liver; pâté; Chinese pea pods; soy sauce; anchovies; avocados. And also, he said, some beers and wines, as well as cocaine. “I definitely can’t ever have cocaine,” Dennis warned. “So please don’t give it to me.”

“Too bad,” said Jules, “because though as I said I generally don’t cook, tomorrow I was going to make you a three-year-old Gouda and cocaine sandwich. And force it up your nose,” she added. Actually, looking at the sweetly eclectic little meal he’d brought, she was so touched that she wanted to buy a cookbook and cook for him sometime. Try out her oven, see if the pilot light was lit. Her desire to do this was a little embarrassing to her, as if it were a housewife throwback; she couldn’t explain how this had come about, but they had entered love and mutual caretaking, which unexpectedly involved feeding and food.

“Ah, what a shame,” said Dennis. “I would’ve really liked that sandwich.”

“Out of curiosity, seriously, what would happen if you ate one of those foods?” she asked. “You’d get depressed again?”

“No,” he said. “Much worse than that. My blood pressure could skyrocket. They gave me a whole pamphlet about it. Foods with tyramine in them are potentially deadly to me.”

“I never even heard of tyramine,” Jules said.

“It’s a compound in a lot of foods. And seriously,” he said, “I could die.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”

“Okay. For you I won’t.”

To fall in love with a man who was emotionally precarious meant not only helping pay attention to what he ate but also knowing that there was a potential for him to fall disastrously. He was really well now, he had assured her, fixed at a reasonable mood state by the mysterious MAO inhibitor that made alterations to his brain, that got in there like the gloved fingers of a surgeon and moved various parts around. He was really well, he repeated. In fact, he felt pretty great. And he was hers, if she wanted him.