Free The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer Page B

to say, “Will it be okay, do you think?”
    “Yes,” Jules had said, reaching down to take Ash’s wet hand. “It will be. I know it will.”
    She meant it, too. Things were always set right in Ash’s life. The family could at last move forward with what had seemed like a generically emotionally fragile son, but instead was a son with a specific diagnosis: pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, or PDD-NOS. He was on the autism spectrum, the doctors had explained, and now he could finally get some real help. Always, the Figman and Wolf family rallied; just as, long in the past, the Wolf family had rallied too. But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful. This had been true when Ash’s brother, Goodman, essentially ruined his life in one night and thundered impulsively ahead from there, as if trying to ruin the lives of everyone around him as well.
    By 2009, Jules had been with Ash at most of the significant moments in her family story, and she knew how much Ash had suffered. Still now, on the night that Jules and Dennis read the latest Christmas letter, Jules had her series of mildly envious thoughts that could not be quieted as quickly as she would have liked, and she and Dennis went to bed early, with Ethan’s card of the Three Wise Men propped on the radiator. All winter the heat in this apartment was either too voluminous or stingy. Tonight was one of the stingy times, and they lay together, her husband’s thick arms around her, keeping her not exactly warm enough; and her arms around him, probably doing the same incomplete job. Elsewhere, in a hearth on a Colorado ranch, a fire glowed and gathered.

FOUR
    D ennis 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
ir
regular, 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