A Little Life (102 page)

Later that week he receives an invitation from MoMA; it seems that
Life After Death
will be the first to be screened in a weeklong festival in June celebrating Simon Bergesson’s films, and that there will be a panel following the movie at which both of the directors as well as Fausta will be present, and they are hopeful he will attend and—although they know they had extended the offer before—would be thrilled if he might join the panel too and speak about Willem’s experiences during shooting. This stops him:
Had
they invited him earlier? He supposes they had. But he can’t remember. He can remember very little from the past six months. He looks now at the dates of the festival: June third through June eleventh. He will make plans to be out of town then; he has to be. Willem had shot two other films with Bergesson—they had been friendly. He doesn’t want to have to see more posters with Willem’s face, to read his name in the paper again. He doesn’t want to have to see Bergesson.

That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem’s side of the closet, which he still has not emptied. Here are Willem’s shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem’s arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.

He lies awake. Occasionally he brings his nose down to the collar so he can try to smell what remains of Willem on the shirt, but with every wear, the fragrance grows fainter. This is the fourth shirt of Willem’s he has used, and he is very careful about preserving its scent. The first three shirts, ones he wore almost nightly for months, no longer
smell like Willem; they smell like him. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself with the fact that his very scent is something given to him by Willem, but he is never comforted for long.

Even before they became a couple, Willem would always bring him something from wherever he’d been working, and when he came back from
The Odyssey
, it was with two bottles of cologne that he’d had made at a famous perfumer’s atelier in Florence. “I know this might seem kind of strange,” he’d said. “But someone”—he had smiled to himself, then, knowing Willem meant some girl—“told me about this and I thought it sounded interesting.” Willem explained how he’d had to describe him to the nose—what colors he liked, what tastes, what parts of the world—and that the perfumer had created this fragrance for him.

He had smelled it: it was green and slightly peppery, with a raw, aching finish. “Vetiver,” Willem had said. “Try it on,” and he had, dabbing it onto his hand because he didn’t let Willem see his wrists back then.

Willem had sniffed at him. “I like it,” he said, “it smells nice on you,” and they were both suddenly shy with each other.

“Thanks, Willem,” he’d said. “I love it.”

Willem had had a scent made for himself as well. His had been sandalwood-based, and he soon grew to associate the wood with him: whenever he smelled it—especially when he was far away: in India on business; in Japan; in Thailand—he would always think of Willem and would feel less alone. As the years passed, they both continued to order these scents from the Florence perfumer, and two months ago, one of the first things he did when he had the presence of mind to think of it was to order a large quantity of Willem’s custom-made cologne. He had been so relieved, so fevered, when the package had finally arrived, that his hands had tremored as he tore off its wrappings and slit open the box. Already, he could feel Willem slipping from him; already, he knew he needed to try to maintain him. But although he had sprayed—carefully; he didn’t want to use too much—the fragrance on Willem’s shirt, it hadn’t been the same. It wasn’t just the cologne after all that had made Willem’s clothes smell like Willem: it had been him, his very self-ness. That night he had laid in bed in a shirt gone sugary with sandalwood, a scent so strong that it had overwhelmed every other odor, that it had destroyed what had remained of Willem entirely. That night
he had cried, for the first time in a long time, and the next day he had retired that shirt, folding it and packing it into a box in the corner of the closet so it wouldn’t contaminate Willem’s other clothes.

The cologne, the ritual with the shirt: they are two pieces of the scaffolding, rickety and fragile as it is, that he has learned to erect in order to keep moving forward, to keep living his life. Although often he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing, being moved through his days rather than moving through them himself. But he doesn’t punish himself too much for this; merely existing is difficult enough.

It had taken months to figure out what worked. For a while he gorged nightly on Willem’s films, watching them until he fell asleep on the sofa, fast-forwarding to the scenes with Willem speaking. But the dialogue, the fact of Willem’s acting, made him seem farther from him, not closer, and eventually he learned it was better to simply pause on a certain image, Willem’s face trapped and staring at him, and he would look and look at it until his eyes burned. After a month of this, he realized that he had to be more vigilant about parsing out these movies, so they wouldn’t lose their potency. And so he had begun in order, with Willem’s very first film
—The Girl with the Silver Hands
—which he had watched obsessively, every night, stopping and starting the movie, freezing on certain images. On weekends he would watch it for hours, from when the sky was changing from night to day until long after it had turned black again. And then he realized that it was dangerous to watch these movies chronologically, because with each film, it would mean he was getting closer to Willem’s death. And so he now chose the month’s film at random, and that had proven safer.

But the biggest, the most sustaining fiction he has devised for himself is pretending that Willem is simply away filming. The shoot is very long, and very taxing, but it is finite, and eventually he will return. This had been a difficult delusion, because there had never been a shoot through which he and Willem didn’t speak, or e-mail, or text (or all three) every day. He is grateful that he has saved so many of Willem’s e-mails, and for a period, he was able to read these old messages at night and pretend he had just received them: even when he wanted to binge on them, he hadn’t, and he was careful to read just one in a sitting. But he knew that wouldn’t satisfy him forever—he would need to be more judicious about how he doled these e-mails out to himself. Now
he reads one, just one, every week. He can read messages he’s read in previous weeks, but not messages he hasn’t. That is another rule.

But it didn’t solve the larger issue of Willem’s silence: What circumstances, he puzzled to himself as he swam in the morning, as he stood, unseeingly, over the stove at night, waiting for the teakettle to shriek, would prevent Willem from communicating with him while on a shoot? Finally, he was able to invent a scenario. Willem would be shooting a film about a crew of Russian cosmonauts during the Cold War, and in this fantasy movie, they would actually be in space, because the film was being funded by a perhaps-crazy Russian industrialist billionaire. So away Willem would be, circling miles above him all day and all night, wanting to come home and unable to communicate with him. He was embarrassed by this imaginary movie as well, by his desperation, but it also seemed just plausible enough that he could fool himself into believing it for long stretches, sometimes for several days. (He was grateful then that the logistics and realities of Willem’s job had, in many cases, been barely credible: the industry’s very improbability helped him to believe now, when he needed it.)

What’s the movie called?
he imagined Willem asking, imagined Willem smiling.

Dear Comrade
, he told Willem, because that was how Willem and he had sometimes addressed their e-mails to each other—
Dear Comrade
;
Dear Jude Haroldovich
;
Dear Willem Ragnaravovich
—which they had begun when Willem was shooting the first installment in his spy trilogy, which had been set in nineteen-sixties Moscow. In his imaginings,
Dear Comrade
would take a year to complete, although he knew he would have to adjust that: it was March already, and in his fantasy, Willem would be coming home in November, but he knew he wouldn’t be ready to end the charade by then. He knew he would have to imagine reshoots, delays. He knew he would have to invent a sequel, some reason that Willem would be away from him for longer still.

To heighten the fantasy’s believability, he wrote Willem an e-mail every night telling him what had happened that day, just as he would have done had Willem been alive. Every message always ended the same way:
I hope the shoot’s going well. I miss you so much. Jude
.

It had been the previous November when he had finally emerged from his stupor, when the finality of Willem’s absence had truly begun
to resonate. It was then that he had known he was in trouble. He remembers very little from the months before; he remembers very little from the day itself. He remembers finishing the pasta salad, tearing the basil leaves above the bowl, checking his watch and wondering where they were. But he hadn’t been worried: Willem liked to drive home on the back roads, and Malcolm liked to take pictures, and so they might have stopped, they might have lost track of the time.

He called JB, listened to him complain about Fredrik; he cut some melon for dessert. By this time they really were late, and he called Willem’s phone but it only rang, emptily. Then he was irritated: Where could they have been?

And then it was later still. He was pacing. He called Malcolm’s phone, Sophie’s phone: nothing. He called Willem again. He called JB: Had they called him? Had he heard from them? But JB hadn’t. “Don’t worry, Judy,” he said. “I’m sure they just went for ice cream or something. Or maybe they all ran off together.”

“Ha,” he said, but he knew something was wrong. “Okay. I’ll call you later, JB.”

And just as he had hung up with JB, the doorbell chimed, and he stopped, terrified, because no one ever rang their doorbell. The house was difficult to find; you had to really look for it, and then you had to walk up from the main road—a long, long walk—if no one buzzed you in, and he hadn’t heard the front gate buzzer sound. Oh god, he thought. Oh, no. No. But then it rang again, and he found himself moving toward the door, and as he opened it, he registered not so much the policemen’s expressions but that they were removing their caps, and then he knew.

He lost himself after that. He was conscious only in flashes, and the people’s faces he saw—Harold’s, JB’s, Richard’s, Andy’s, Julia’s—were the same faces he remembered from when he had tried to kill himself: the same people, the same tears. They had cried then, and they cried now, and at moments he was bewildered; he thought that the past decade—his years with Willem, the loss of his legs—might have been a dream after all, that he might still be in the psychiatric ward. He remembers learning things during those days, but he doesn’t remember how he learned them, because he doesn’t remember having any conversations. But he must have. He learned that he had identified
Willem’s body, but that they hadn’t let him see Willem’s face—he had been tossed from the car and had landed, headfirst, against an elm thirty feet across the road and his face had been destroyed, its every bone broken. So he had identified him from a birthmark on his left calf, from a mole on his right shoulder. He learned that Sophie’s body had been crushed—“obliterated” was the word he remembered someone saying—and that Malcolm had been declared brain dead and had lived on a ventilator for four days until his parents had had his organs donated. He learned that they had all been wearing their seat belts; that the rental car—that stupid,
fucking
rental car—had had defective air bags; that the driver of the truck, a beer company truck, had been wildly drunk and had run through a red light.

Most of the time, he was drugged. He was drugged when he went to Sophie’s service, which he couldn’t remember at all, not one detail; he was drugged when he went to Malcolm’s. From Malcolm’s, he remembers Mr. Irvine grabbing him and shaking him and then hugging him so tightly he was smothered, hugging him and sobbing against him, until someone—Harold, presumably—said something and he was released.

He knew there had been some sort of service for Willem, something small; he knew Willem had been cremated. But he doesn’t remember anything from it. He doesn’t know who organized it. He doesn’t even know if he attended it, and he is too frightened to ask. He remembers Harold telling him at one point that it was okay that he wasn’t giving a eulogy, that he could have a memorial for Willem later, whenever he was ready. He remembers nodding, remembers thinking: But I won’t ever be ready.

At some point he went back to work: the end of September, he thought. By this point, he knew what had happened. He did. But he was trying not to, and back then, it was still easy. He didn’t read the papers; he didn’t watch the news. Two weeks after Willem died, he and Harold had been walking down the street and they had passed a newspaper kiosk and there, before him, was a magazine with Willem’s face on it, and two dates, and he realized that the first date was the year Willem had been born, and the second was the year he had died. He had stood there, staring, and Harold had taken his arm. “Come on, Jude,” he’d said, gently. “Don’t look. Come with me,” and he had followed, obediently.

Before he returned to the office, he had instructed Sanjay: “I don’t
want anyone offering me their condolences. I don’t want anyone mentioning it. I don’t want anyone saying his name, ever.”

“Okay, Jude,” Sanjay had said, quietly, looking scared. “I understand.”