A Little Life (103 page)

And they had obeyed him. No one said they were sorry. No one said Willem’s name. No one ever says Willem’s name. And now he wishes they would say it. He cannot say it himself. But he wishes someone would. Sometimes, on the street, he hears someone say something that sounds like his name—“William!”: a mother, calling to her son—and he turns, greedily, in the direction of her voice.

In those first months, there were practicalities, which gave him something to do, which gave his days anger, which in turn gave them shape. He sued the car manufacturer, the seat-belt manufacturer, the air-bag manufacturer, the rental-car company. He sued the truck driver, the company the driver worked for. The driver, he heard through the driver’s lawyer, had a chronically ill child; a lawsuit would ruin the family. But he didn’t care. Once he would have; not now. He felt raw and merciless. Let him be destroyed, he thought. Let him be ruined. Let him feel what I feel. Let him lose everything, the only things, that matter. He wanted to siphon every dollar from all of them, all the companies, all the people working for them. He wanted to leave them hopeless. He wanted to leave them empty. He wanted them to live in squalor. He wanted them to feel lost in their own lives.

They were being sued, each of them, for everything Willem would have earned had he been allowed to live a normal lifespan, and it was a ridiculous number, an astonishing number, and he couldn’t look at it without despair: not because of the figure itself but because of the years that figure represented.

They would settle with him, said his lawyer, a notoriously aggressive and venal torts expert named Todd with whom he had been on the law review, and the settlements would be generous.

Generous; not generous. He didn’t care. He only cared if it made them suffer. “Obliterate them,” he commanded Todd, his voice croaky with hatred, and Todd had looked startled.

“I will, Jude,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

He didn’t need the money, of course. He had his own. And except for monetary gifts to his assistant and his godson, and sums that he wanted distributed to various charities—the same charities Willem gave
to every year, along with an additional one: a foundation that helped exploited children—everything that Willem had he had left to him: it was a photo negative of his own will. Earlier that year, he and Willem had set up two scholarships at their college for Harold’s and Julia’s seventy-fifth birthdays: one at the law school under Harold’s name; one at the medical school under Julia’s. They had funded them together, and Willem had left enough in a trust so that they always would be. He disbursed the rest of Willem’s bequests: he signed the checks to the charities and foundations and museums and organizations that Willem had designated his beneficiaries. He gave to Willem’s friends—Harold and Julia; Richard; JB; Roman; Cressy; Susannah; Miguel; Kit; Emil; Andy; but not Malcolm, not anymore—the items (books, pictures, mementoes from films and plays, pieces of art) that he had left them. There were no surprises in Willem’s will, although sometimes he wished there would have been—how grateful he would have been for a secret child whom he’d get to meet and would have Willem’s smile; how scared and yet how excited he would have been for a secret letter containing a long-held confession. How thankful he would have been for an excuse to hate Willem, to resent him, for a mystery to solve that might occupy years of his life. But there was nothing. Willem’s life was over. He was as clean in death as he had been in life.

He thought he was doing well, or well enough anyway. One day Harold called and asked what he wanted to do for Thanksgiving, and for a moment he couldn’t understand what Harold was talking about, what the very word—Thanksgiving—meant. “I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s next week,” Harold said, in the new quiet voice everyone now used around him. “Do you want to come here, or we can come over, or we can go somewhere else?”

“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I have too much work, Harold.”

But Harold had insisted. “Anywhere, Jude,” he’d said. “With whomever you want. Or no one. But we need to see you.”

“You’re not going to have a good time with me,” he finally said.

“We won’t have a good time without you,” Harold said. “Or any kind of time. Please, Jude. Anywhere.”

So they went to London. They stayed in the flat. He was relieved to be out of the country, where there would have been scenes of families on the television, and his colleagues happily grousing about their
children and wives and husbands and in-laws. In London, the day was just another day. They took walks, the three of them. Harold cooked ambitious, disastrous meals, which he ate. He slept and slept. Then they went home.

And then one Sunday in December he had woken and had known: Willem was gone. He was gone from him forever. He was never coming back. He would never see him again. He would never hear Willem’s voice again, he would never smell him again, he would never feel Willem’s arms around him. He would never again be able to unburden himself of one of his memories, sobbing with shame as he did, would never again jerk awake from one of his dreams, blind with terror, to feel Willem’s hand on his face, to hear Willem’s voice above him: “You’re safe, Judy, you’re safe. It’s over; it’s over; it’s over.” And then he had cried, really cried, cried for the first time since the accident. He had cried for Willem, for how frightened he must have been, for how he must have suffered, for his poor short life. But mostly he had cried for himself. How was he going to keep living without Willem? His entire life—his life after Brother Luke, his life after Dr. Traylor, his life after the monastery and the motel rooms and the home and the trucks, which was the only part of his life that counted—had had Willem in it. There had not been a day since he was sixteen and met Willem in their room at Hood Hall in which he had not communicated with Willem in some way. Even when they were fighting, they spoke. “Jude,” Harold had said, “it
will
get better. I swear. I swear. It won’t seem like it now, but it will.” They all said this: Richard and JB and Andy; the people who wrote him cards. Kit. Emil. All they told him was that it would get better. But although he knew enough to never say so aloud, privately he thought: It won’t. Harold had had Jacob for five years. He had had Willem for thirty-four. There was no comparison. Willem had been the first person who loved him, the first person who had seen him not as an object to be used or pitied but as something else, as a friend; he had been the second person who had always, always been kind to him. If he hadn’t had Willem, he wouldn’t have had any of them—he would never have been able to trust Harold if he hadn’t trusted Willem first. He was unable to conceive of life without him, because Willem had so defined what his life was and could be.

The next day he did what he never did: he called Sanjay and told
him he wasn’t coming in for the next two days. And then he had lain in bed and cried, screaming into the pillows until he lost his voice completely.

But from those two days he had found another solution. Now he stays very late at work, so late that he has seen the sun rise from his office. He does this every weekday, and on Saturdays as well. But on Sundays he sleeps as late as he can, and when he wakes, he takes a pill, one that not only makes him fall asleep again but bludgeons into obsolescence all glimmers of wakefulness. He sleeps until the pill wears off, and then he takes a shower and gets back into bed and takes a different pill, one that makes sleep shallow and glassy, and sleeps until Monday morning. By Monday, he has not eaten in twenty-four hours, sometimes more, and he is trembly and thoughtless. He swims, he goes to work. If he is lucky, he has spent Sunday dreaming of Willem, for at least a little while. He has bought a long, fat pillow, as long as a man is tall, one meant to be pressed against by pregnant women or by people with back problems, and he drapes one of Willem’s shirts over it and holds it as he sleeps, even though in life, it was Willem who held him. He hates himself for this, but he cannot stop.

He is aware, dimly, that his friends are watching him, that they are worried about him. At some point it had emerged that one of the reasons he remembers so little from the days after the accident was because he had been in the hospital, on a suicide watch. Now he stumbles through his days and wonders why he isn’t, in fact, killing himself. This is, after all, the time to do it. No one would blame him. And yet he doesn’t.

At least no one tells him that he should move on. He doesn’t want to move on, he doesn’t want to move into something else: he wants to remain exactly at this stage, forever. At least no one tells him he’s in denial. Denial is what sustains him, and he is dreading the day when his delusions will lose their power to convince him. For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.

In January he had a dream that he and Willem were in the house upstate making dinner and talking: something they’d done hundreds of times. But in the dream, although he could hear his own voice,
he couldn’t hear Willem’s—he could see his mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything he was saying. He had woken, then, and had thrown himself into his wheelchair and moved as quickly as he could into his study, where he scrolled through all of his old e-mails, searching and searching until he found a few voice messages from Willem that he had forgotten to delete. The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality—“Hey. Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps. But do you want anything else? Let me know”—something precious, because it was proof of their life together.

“Willem,” he said aloud to the apartment, because sometimes, when it was very bad, he spoke to him. “Come back to me. Come back.”

He feels no sense of survivor’s guilt but rather survivor’s incomprehension: he had always, always known he would predecease Willem. They all knew it. Willem, Andy, Harold, JB, Malcolm, Julia, Richard: he would die before all of them. The only question was how he would die—it would be by his own hand, or it would be by infection. But none of them had ever thought that Willem, of all people, would die before he did. There had been no plans made for that, no contingencies. Had he known this was a possibility, had it been less absurd a concept, he would have stockpiled. He would have made recordings of Willem’s voice talking to him and kept them. He would have taken more pictures. He would have tried to distill Willem’s very body chemistry. He would have taken him, just-woken, to the perfumer in Florence. “Here,” he would’ve said. “This. This scent. I want you to bottle this.” Jane had once told him that as a girl she had been terrified her father would die, and she had secretly made digital copies of her father’s dictation (he had been a doctor as well) and stored them on flash drives. And when her father finally did die, four years ago, she had rediscovered them, and had sat in a room playing them, listening to her father dictating orders in his calm, patient voice. How he envied Jane this; how he wished he had thought to do the same.

At least he had Willem’s films, and his e-mails, and letters he had written him over the years, all of which he had saved. At least he had Willem’s clothes, and articles about Willem, all of which he had kept. At least he had JB’s paintings of Willem; at least he had photographs of Willem: hundreds of them, though he only allotted himself a certain number. He decided he would allow himself to look at ten of them
every week, and he would look and look at them for hours. It was his decision whether he wanted to review one a day or look at all ten in a single sitting. He was terrified his computer would be destroyed and he would lose these images; he made multiple copies of the photographs and stored the discs in various places: in his safe at Greene Street, in his safe at Lantern House, in his desk at Rosen Pritchard, in his safe-deposit box at the bank.

He had never considered Willem a thorough cataloger of his own life—he isn’t either—but one Sunday in early March he skips his drugged slumber and instead drives to Garrison. He has only been to the house twice since that September day, but the gardeners still come, and the bulbs are beginning to bud around the driveway, and when he steps inside, there is a vase of cut plum branches on the kitchen counter and he stops, staring at them: Had he texted the housekeeper to tell her he was coming? He must have. But for a moment he fancies that at the beginning of every week someone comes and places a new arrangement of flowers on the counter, and at the end of every week, another week in which no one comes to see them, they are thrown away.

He goes to his study, where they had installed extra cabinetry so Willem could store his files and paperwork there as well. He sits on the floor, shrugging off his coat, then takes a breath and opens the first drawer. Here are file folders, each labeled with the name of a play or movie, and inside each folder is the shooting version of the script, with Willem’s notes on them. Sometimes there are call sheets from days when an actor he knew Willem particularly admired was going to be filming with him: he remembers how excited Willem had been on
The Sycamore Court
, how he had sent him a photo of that day’s call sheet with his name typed directly beneath Clark Butterfield’s. “Can you believe it?!” his message had read.

I can totally believe it
, he’d written back.

He flips through these files, lifting them out at random and carefully sorting through their contents. The next three drawers are all the same things: films, plays, other projects.

In the fifth drawer is a file marked “Wyoming,” and in this are mostly photos, most of which he has seen before: pictures of Hemming; pictures of Willem with Hemming; pictures of their parents; pictures of the siblings Willem never knew: Britte and Aksel. There is a separate envelope with a dozen pictures of just Willem, only Willem: school
photos, and Willem in a Boy Scout uniform, and Willem in a football uniform. He stares at these pictures, his hands in fists, before placing them back in their envelope.