The Interestings

  “I think I really will write something new for Open Hand,” said Ash. “I have no idea what. But if I start it right now, coming off Ghosts, it would come out sounding morose and Scandinavian.” Jules thought again of Goodman and Ash in Oslo together, sprawled out in a hotel room, talking all night.

  “You don’t have to begin it now, that’s the good thing,” said Jonah. “You can take your time.”

  “I like the idea of being able to take your time,” said Dennis, who’d never been fast like these friends here. “Not having to plan everything. Just waiting for things to fall into place,” he said, and maybe these were the last calm words he spoke that night. Or maybe this was more of a stage-play memory of the evening—the scene in which a woman’s husband contemplates the pleasures of taking one’s time, and within the hour it’s all ruined. Maybe he didn’t say this at all; later on, Jules wasn’t sure. There was so much drinking, and Ethan had arranged for a succession of amuse-bouches to be brought to the table before the meal. Little delicious items adorned with squirts of colorful gel kept appearing, and it was too dark in the room to see exactly what any of them were eating. Texture was everything in 1980s fine dining; specifics were often less meaningful.

  Dennis, because of the MAO inhibitor he took, now referred to commonly as an MAOI, was always careful with what he ate; at the beginning of the evening he’d quietly told the waiter his food restrictions. But tonight there was an unusual force field around the table, in part because of Ethan’s presence in the restaurant, which had excited the owner, who was a big fan of Figland, and whose recitation of entire chunks of dialogue from the show was actually touching to Ethan, who agreed to draw Wally Figman on a tablecloth as a favor. Everyone at the table was talking a lot, excited for Ash about her first real success, feverish about their own possibilities, aware that thirty was a significant age and a good age. It might have been that Dennis’s tone, when speaking to the waiter, had made it sound like he just disliked smoked, pickled, and preserved meats and aged cheeses and liver and pâté; not that any of those foods could potentially kill him.

  A shallow ceramic spoon arrived for each of them with something called “tomato water” in it and a single scallop like a big tooth. A bottle of wine appeared, and the presence of Pouilly on the label made it clear to Jules that it was good. They consumed everything given to them. Did some of the food taste smoked, pickled, preserved, poisonous? It was hard to say; it all tasted good, and Jules had no reason not to assume that Dennis was alert to his own food restrictions tonight, as usual. But near the end of the meal, in the middle of an array of free desserts, including a plate of cookies that were described by the waiter as “Serrano pepper molé ducats,” Dennis leaned over to Jules and said, “I’m not feeling great.”

  “Did you eat something you’re not supposed to?” she asked, but he shook his head. “Do you want to leave?” she pressed, and in the candlelight she saw that he was sweating; his whole face was streaming. “Dennis,” Jules said sharply. “Dennis, I think something’s really wrong with you.”

  “I think so too.” He pulled at his shirt collar and said simply, “I have a bad headache. I think I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not going to die.” Dennis didn’t say anything, but just craned his head forward and began to vomit onto his plate.

  “Oh my God,” Jules said, and she turned frantically to her friends, who were still looking at one another and laughing and eating. Robert was feeding Jonah a crab cake, for some reason. “Ethan,” Jules said without thinking; he was the one she wanted to help her. “Ethan, Dennis is really sick.”

  Ethan looked up with his mouth half-open, and he saw Jules’s panic, which made him swallow his food quickly and practically launch himself across the table, his shirt nearly skimming the candle in its glass. “Dennis, look at me,” Ethan said, and Dennis, who’d stopped vomiting, looked at him but his expression was dull. Then somehow—had he flown?—Ethan was right beside Dennis, opening his shirt collar, and lowering him onto the floor between this table and the next one, which meant Dennis was lying on a bed of sand. On his back, his body made an imprint, a sand angel, a police outline foretelling an imminent death. Jules knelt on his other side, crying onto his neck and slack face. She found the pulse in Dennis’s wrist, and it was wild—“tacking,” the EMS technician would say a few minutes later.

  Hovering over him, waiting for help, Jules thought that here was her dying husband, the ultrasound tech still ambling along, not a star in his field or any other. God, all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary life to Ash and Ethan, who would know how to use it, she thought as the EMS technicians strode through the narrow space, crunching purposefully along the floor with their heavy shoes, surrounding her husband. Leave everything to Ash and Ethan, for they deserve it. Just give me what we had, she heard herself thinking, or maybe saying. It’s enough now.

  TWELVE

  Jonah Bay, heading home from the Beth Israel Hospital emergency room in a taxi just past dawn with Robert Takahashi beside him, said, “Did you hear what she said? In the restaurant, right after it happened, when she was sort of talking to herself, sort of praying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jules doesn’t pray; she’s always been an atheist. Who would she pray to?”

  “No idea,” said Robert. They leaned against each other in weary silence as the streets flew by, the taxi making every green light in the absence of traffic at this unlikely and disconcerting hour.

  “Well, apparently it worked for her, whatever she did,” Jonah said.

  “Oh, come on, you’re saying that to me? Don’t you know how many ERs I’ve sat in with friends with pneumonia or cytomegalovirus? Their relatives were always praying for them, and it never did a thing. One guy from the gym, all his aunts and great-aunts came—this big, terrific black family from North Carolina—and they formed a prayer circle and said something like, ‘Please, Jesus, protect our boy William; he has so much he still wants to do here on earth,’ and I swear I thought it was going to work that time, but it didn’t. I haven’t seen any miracles. All the stories end the same fucking way.” Robert looked out the window as the taxi bumped over the pocked streets. “You know, one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to be the one sitting in an ER for me.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Jonah. “Your T-cell count is good. You’ve been mostly fine. You had shingles, but almost nothing else.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. But it can’t last. It never does.”

  “Well, I guess I still have a little of that miraculous-religion thing in me,” Jonah said.

  “Oh yeah? I thought the deprogrammer knocked it out of you for good back then.”

  “No, I still held on to a tiny little piece. Don’t tell Ethan and Ash. They put so much effort into that.”

  They got out of the cab in front of Jonah’s building on Watts Street, which in all kinds of light—dawn, dusk, the alarmingly violet moments before a major snowfall—looked tilted and slightly scorched, but still remained habitable. What had happened to him, and to his mother, leaving him the legal occupant of her loft, still astonished him. But at the time, it was just what had happened; it was just their story. It made very little sense now to think that for nearly three months way back in 1981, Jonah Bay had been a member of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies were at the time often considered a punch line, occupying the same zeitgeist territory as the Hare Krishnas.

  Jonah had been drawn into the church in the way that many people were: accidentally, not even knowing he’d wanted a church. He had had no natural churchiness in him whatsoever. Sometimes in childhood, his mother had taken him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Ha
rlem to hear her gospel-singer friends perform. “Just close your eyes and let yourself be transported,” Susannah would say. Jonah responded to the music, but he’d had no use for Jesus, and during the sermons he would refuse to close his eyes, but would instead look at his hands, at his shoes, or often at other boys in the pews.

  In college, fiddling in the laboratory for his robotics class on a Saturday night, Jonah breathed in the scent of machine parts and electrical wiring and, especially, underwashed MIT undergraduates, who definitely had their own scent; and it seemed to him that an unspiritual life engineered solely by humans, busy in their fluorescent academic hive, would be perfectly acceptable. He had a brilliant friend in the lab, Avi, who was an Orthodox Jew, and Jonah could never understand what that deep layer of observance gave him. “Your work is scientific,” he’d said to Avi. “How can you believe in the sublime?” “If you have to ask, then I can’t tell you,” Avi said. Was a spiritual life like a special cloak? Jonah had gotten intimations of the sublime in brief bursts: some of the gospel music at that Harlem church had been celestial, and so was a good deal of his mother’s folk music. The song “The Wind Will Carry Us” was exquisite, and Susannah’s younger voice on that record was so achy that maybe it qualified as sublime. What seemed most otherworldly to Jonah Bay was the sensation he’d had as a boy, his brain cells repeatedly messed with by a grown man who had behaved like God.

  During those involuntary, never-confessed-to or alluded-to drug trips, Jonah’s body had been alert and taut, his mind running all over, hyperactive and on a mission. The sensation of being overstimulated was so tremendous that he almost couldn’t bear it. He’d felt it again, in a completely different way, the first time he’d ever had sex with a man, at age eighteen at MIT. He’d ejaculated in about twelve seconds, much to his horror, and the other guy, a brain and cognitive sciences major with a boxer’s blunted face, had said it was fine, fine, but it wasn’t. Jonah couldn’t say to him, Look, I get overstimulated really fast, and then ker-splash. It all started when I was secretly fed a lot of acid as an eleven-year-old. Yeah, eleven, isn’t that wild? Now, whenever I get excited, I get afraid that I’m basically about to go crazy. Exciting sex still scares me to death.

  But Jonah wouldn’t say any of this, because he’d never told a single person, including his friends from Spirit-in-the-Woods, about what Barry Claimes had done to him. It would have been too mortifying. It had been easy to come out as a gay person to everyone, which Jonah did the week he arrived at MIT and had had sex—real, going-the-distance sex—for the first time. He’d wanted to wait until sex had taken place in order to be sure that he was right about himself. Yes, he was right. When he made the phone calls to tell people, none of those people seemed shocked or particularly surprised—not Ethan, Ash, Jules, or even his mother. But telling them about Barry Claimes was something Jonah couldn’t do, even though he often thought about the folksinger, a man who had been without inspiration, and who had found a source of it in Jonah; a man who had lost his musical cash cow when Jonah made the decision to stop speaking to him at age twelve. But despite Barry Claimes being mostly gone (his visit to Spirit-in-the-Woods in 1974 with Jonah’s mother had been excruciating), the singer had continued to feel like a real presence to Jonah, and never more so than in adolescence, when sexual feelings took hold. Jonah had had feelings for boys long before the era that Barry Claimes was in his life. When Ash became Jonah’s girlfriend, he already mostly understood he was gay, and he often fantasized about boys, but the fantasies were too exciting and he barely knew what to do about them, or even how to think about them, so he hardly articulated them to himself. Ash had understimulated him, which had been a great relief.

  Later on, in college, each time that sex with a real, naked, panting man became an actual act looming in front of Jonah like a meal set before him on a table, he grew afraid that he would be overcome and would almost start to hallucinate. Being highly aroused made him feel hopped-up and sick, made him want to turn away and go to sleep for hours. Barry Claimes’s drugs had done this, the stream of hallucinogens slipped to a child by a powerful and opportunistic man.

  Jonah had met Robert Takahashi at a dinner party at Jules and Dennis’s apartment in 1986. Robert had long since left the copy store where he used to work, and had gone to law school at Fordham; by 1986 he had begun practicing AIDS-related law. At the dinner he took an immediate interest in Jonah, wanting to hear about his stint in the Moonies, the way everyone did, and about his job designing and perfecting technologies to help disabled people in their daily lives. Jonah described an innovative device, a sort of piece of scaffolding that allowed a paraplegic person to take a shower, wash himself and dry himself, all on his own. These were simple tasks that able-bodied people took for granted, Jonah said at the table, but the disabled had to rely on everyone for everything; they had to give up the idea of modesty. They had to somehow learn not to feel shame about their bodies and their need for help, which was something that Jonah himself was sure he would never have been able to do. “That all sounds great,” Robert said about Jonah’s work, and Jonah explained that, yes, it was fairly intense, but he felt he had to add, “I just never saw myself doing this for a living.” Robert questioned him further on this, but Jonah was vague. “Is it compelling, and does it have meaning?” Robert asked. “Those were the criteria I set for myself when I took my job at Lambda Legal.”

  “Yeah, I guess it meets those criteria,” Jonah admitted, though it still surprised him that this was what he did now, and this was who he was. Music was gone completely. He rarely even listened to music anymore. His album collection was in crates, and he’d barely bought cassettes or CDs. His guitar languished in his closet. The work Jonah did at Gage Systems actually could be very absorbing, but he was reluctant to say this to the buff Japanese-American guy who leaned forward in his chair at the dinner party at Jules and Dennis’s apartment, directed toward Jonah like a plant toward sunlight. Jonah was sunlight? Men had been drawn to him frequently over the years, in bars, at parties, on the street, but rarely this cheerfully and directly. Usually, sexual attraction had an air of cloaked menace about it; that was part of the excitement.

  Robert Takahashi also talked about himself a little, lightly referring to himself as “a poster child for the AIDS virus,” which made Jonah feel shocked and sorry for him; but everyone else in the room, who already knew about Robert’s recent diagnosis, acted like being positive was no big deal. The two men happened to leave the dinner party at around the same time; or at least, Robert got up to go almost immediately after Jonah said he was leaving. As they walked out of the building, Robert said, “So I’ve been trying to get a handle on you all night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me.”

  Jonah said stiffly, “I’m not.”

  “Well, okay, fine. But can I ask you something? Are you queer?” It was a genuine, not hostile, question, but somehow Jonah was shocked to hear this word used this way. “Faggot” he’d grown used to hearing spoken by gay men in a friendly context, not to mention “faggotry,” the state of being a faggot, but “queer” hadn’t been said to Jonah before. “Because I don’t want to get myself into one of those situations with a straight guy who’s slumming,” said Robert. “I mean, you definitely give off a queer vibe, but I have been wrong before. Famously wrong.” Robert was smiling at him the whole time, and Jonah thought maybe “queer” was actually an appropriate word here; he did feel so queer when he got excited.

  So here was the compact, slender, handsome, and unapologetically queer young Japanese-American lawyer Robert Takahashi out on the street, asking him a startling, exciting question, and Jonah Bay could not bring himself to answer. Instead, he became exceedingly shy. He didn’t say no, and then, curtly, “Well, good night,” and just keep walking. He also didn’t say yes. Instead Jonah went into his default mode, which was pensive, wooden, and taciturn.

  “That’s personal,” he said.
>
  “What’s personal?”

  “My so-called queerness. Or lack thereof.”

  Robert laughed, which sounded like three sequential, appealing hiccups. “I have never heard anyone answer that way.”

  “You go around asking people if they’re queer?” said Jonah. “Is it like taking the census?”

  “Usually I don’t have to ask,” Robert said, “but you’re a difficult case. A tough nut to crack.” He smirked again, this confident man with a fatal diagnosis.

  Jonah apparently could not be figured out by Robert Takahashi. So Robert, trim and sexually appealing in his old black leather jacket, unlocking his lime-green motorbike from where it was chained to a parking meter, said, “Well, I suppose it’ll have to remain a great mystery. Too bad.” Then he hopped on, kicked off, and puttered away as Jonah headed for the subway. All Jonah could think was that he felt terribly disappointed. But moments later there was Robert again, right beside him, and his reappearance felt like an enormous relief, a delight. Robert idled the bike and asked, smiling again, “Have you decided yet?”

  Yes, the queerness question had been decided long ago, but Jonah was protective of his own predilections, cupping them and holding them close. He didn’t want to be overwhelmed by sex and lose control. Slim little Robert Takahashi, a gym rat and a quick legal mind, had tested positive for the AIDS virus, and what kind of sex could you possibly have with an infected person? Maybe you could have controlled sex—which was, to Jonah, good sex.

  They went to bed together in the loft on a rainy afternoon a week later. Robert had come over, and while Jonah dragged out his records and spent too much time at the record player trying to make a good choice, knowing that most people saw music as crucial to establishing a mood, Robert lay back against the pillows on the bed with his shirt off. Seeing his planar chest was like being allowed entry into a new dimension. Robert was slight and nearly hairless, but he was muscular; he put time into his body, hoping to keep it in as good shape as he could for as long as possible. “Enough music,” said Robert finally as Jonah obsessed. “Just come here.”