The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer Page B

sad?”
    “Of course not,” Jules had said. “They should hand out vibrators if they’re going to demand so much of you that you can’t find time for a private life. And even if you
can
find time,” she quickly added. The two women had laughed together over the image of overworked professional women and their vibrators. Some therapists were motherly types, caftanned and big-lapped. Others seemed to make a point of being frosty and clinical and detached, as though coldness itself possessed curative properties. Jules felt neither particularly maternal nor remote as a therapist. She was herself, in concentrate, and clients had sometimes told her that she was funny and encouraging, which they meant as a compliment, but which she uneasily knew was not, entirely.
    Today, in Janice Kling’s session, Janice was talking about a familiar theme, loneliness, and perhaps because it was Christmas season the conversation had a desperate charge. Janice said that she had no idea how people went on year after year, not being touched or spoken to intimately. “How do they do it, Jules?” she asked. “How do
I
do it? I should go to an intimacy prostitute.” She paused, and then looked up with a sharply smiling face. “Maybe I do go to one,” she said, pointing.
    “Well, if I’m an intimacy prostitute,” Jules said lightly, “then I should charge you much, much more.” Her fees were low as a rule. Managed care had changed everything, and most health plans now paid for only a handful of sessions. And, of course, drugs had replaced therapy for a lot of people. Jules and a few other clinical social worker friends met once in a while to discuss how much worse the climate was this year than it had been last year. But still they kept their practices, sharing offices to keep their costs down; still they hung on. All of Jules’s clients were struggling, and, though they did not know it, so was their therapist.
    Now she had come home from a session of mild laughter and mild crying. She and Dennis had been living in their modern, modest apartment in the west Nineties for over a decade. On their street were brownstones and prewar buildings and small, anonymous elevator buildings like theirs, and a nursing home where, when the sun shone, a lineup of old people in wheelchairs were stationed out front, their eyes closed, their pink and white heads tilted up toward the light. The apartment belonged to Jules and Dennis; there was a narrow-aisled, sagging supermarket two avenues away; Central Park was close by; and they were settled here for good. They had raised their daughter, Rory, here; sent her to the local public school and taken her to the park so she could run and kick balls.
    When Jules opened the front door, the apartment was bright with cooking; apparently Dennis was making steamed five-spice chicken. She stood and looked at the mail that had accrued today, a small, dull pile of bills and cards. Beside the fresh pile was the square card that had been lying on the front hall table for a couple of days already, unopened.
    The Christmas letter.
    Jules brought it into the kitchen, where Dennis stood over the stove in his Rutgers sweatshirt. He always looked too big for their small New York kitchen, his body solid and indelicate, his movements broad. He couldn’t seem to keep his face free of hair growth. “My Chia Pet,” she’d called him in bed back in the beginning, twenty-eight years earlier. He was big, black-haired, male, artless, at least in the sense that he had no
art,
no personal need for refined aesthetics. He liked to play touch football on the weekend with his friends who sometimes came to the apartment afterward for beer and pizza, high-fiving one another without evident irony. Like several of these friends, Dennis was an ultrasound technician, a field he’d chosen not because he’d grown up with a desire to know what lay beneath surfaces but because after a rough emotional time in college and then a shaky recovery,