Julie

Julie is a minor figure in Theodore Decker's adolescence, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who becomes his first sexual partner when he is sixteen. Their brief affair, conducted in her Williamsburg studio apartment, is defined by its predetermined end date and Theo's speechless, desperate longing. She represents an early, painful lesson in the impossibility of possessing what one desires, a pattern that will recur throughout his life.

Identity and First Meeting

Theo meets Julie outside a liquor store on Hudson Street. He is standing with money in hand, hoping someone will buy him a bottle, when she emerges "billowing around the corner, in batlike, futuristic garb incongruous with her clumping walk and farm-girl looks." Her face is "plain-but-pleasing," like "a prairie wife of the 1900s." She is twenty-seven, nearly twelve years older than him, and has a boyfriend finishing business school in California. Their first interaction is marked by her casual kindness: she hands him his change from her own purchase and asks, "Are you going to stand out here in the cold and drink that?"

The Affair and Its Constraints

The relationship is conducted entirely on Julie's terms, with a clear and unspoken expiration date. Theo knows that when the boyfriend returns, he is never to contact her again. "We both knew. She hadn't had to say it." On the rare afternoons he is permitted to visit her studio, he is "bursting with words and feelings too big to contain," but all the things he planned to say vanish the instant she opens the door. Instead of conversing, he hovers "speechless and desperate three steps behind her," while she walks barefoot, talks effortlessly, and apologizes for the dirty clothes on the floor. He often hurls himself at her mid-sentence, knocking her onto the day bed with such violence that his glasses fly off.

Aftermath and Significance

The affair is wonderful and agonizing in equal measure. Lying awake afterward, Theo is "sick with emptiness," watching her white arm on the coverlet as streetlights come on, dreading the eight o'clock hour when she must dress for her job at a bar in Williamsburg where he is too young to visit her. He reflects that he "hadn't even loved Julie"—he admired her, obsessed over her, envied her confidence, and was even a little afraid of her, but he did not love her, any more than she loved him. The experience, however, establishes a template for his later relationships: a pattern of speechless longing, the painful awareness of an unbridgeable distance, and the certainty that the connection will end. He later recognizes the same "surprising just how bad I felt" quality in his feelings for Kitsey, noting that he had "been through the routine before."