A Little Life (108 page)

“Jude,” Andy says, but he has already pushed past the table, and as he does, the waitress arrives with the food, and he can hear Andy curse and see him reach for his wallet, and he stumbles out of the restaurant. Mr. Ahmed doesn’t work on Fridays because he drives himself to Andy’s, but now instead of returning to the car, which is parked in front of Andy’s office, he hails a taxi and gets in quickly and leaves before Andy can catch him.

That night he turns off his phones, drugs himself, crawls into bed. He wakes the next day, texts both JB and Richard that he’s not feeling well and has to cancel his dinners with them, and then re-drugs himself until it is Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. He has ignored all of Andy’s calls and texts and e-mails, all of his messages, but although he is no longer angry, only ashamed, he cannot bear to make
one more apology, cannot bear his own meanness, his own weakness. “I’m frightened, Andy,” he wants to say. “What will I do without you?”

Andy loves sweets, and on Thursday afternoon he has one of his secretaries place an order for an absurd, a stupid amount of chocolates from Andy’s favorite candy shop. “Any note?” his secretary asks, and he shakes his head. “No,” he says, “just my name.” She nods and starts to leave and he calls her back, grabs a piece of notepaper from his desk, and scribbles
Andy—I’m so embarrassed. Please forgive me. Jude
, and hands it to her.

But the next night he doesn’t go to see Andy; he goes home to make dinner for Harold, who is in town on one of his unannounced visits. The previous spring had been Harold’s final semester, which he had failed to register until it was September. He and Willem had always spoken of throwing Harold a party when he finally retired, the way they had done for Julia when she had retired. But he had forgotten, and he had done nothing. And then he remembered and he still did nothing.

He is tired. He doesn’t want to see Harold. But he makes dinner anyway, a dinner he knows he will not eat, and serves it to Harold and then sits down himself.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Harold asks him, and he shakes his head. “I ate lunch at five today,” he lies. “I’ll eat later.”

He watches Harold eat, and sees that he is old, that the skin on his hands has become as soft and satiny as a baby’s. He is ever-more aware that he is one year older, two years older, and now, six years older than Harold was when they met. And yet for all these years, Harold has remained in his perceptions stubbornly forty-five; the only thing that has changed is his perception of how old, exactly, forty-five is. It is embarrassing to admit this to himself, but it is only recently that he has begun considering that there is a possibility, even a probability, that he will outlive Harold. He has already lived beyond his imaginings; isn’t it likely he will live longer still?

He remembers a conversation they’d had when he turned thirty-five. “I’m middle-aged,” he’d said, and Harold had laughed.

“You’re young,” he’d said. “You’re so young, Jude. You’re only middle-aged if you plan on dying at seventy. And you’d better not. I’m really not going to be in the mood to attend your funeral.”

“You’re going to be ninety-five,” he said. “Are you really planning on still being alive then?”

“Alive, and frisky, and being attended to by an assortment of buxom young nurses, and not in any mood to go to some long-winded service.”

He had finally smiled. “And who’s paying for this fleet of buxom young nurses?”

“You, of course,” said Harold. “You and your big-pharma spoils.”

But now he worries that this won’t happen after all. Don’t leave me, Harold, he thinks, but it is a dull, spiritless request, one he doesn’t expect will be answered, made more from rote than from real hope. Don’t leave me.

“You’re not saying anything,” Harold says now, and he refocuses himself.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he says. “I was drifting a little.”

“I can see that,” Harold says. “I was saying: Julia and I were thinking of spending some more time here, in the city, of living uptown full-time.”

He blinks. “You mean, moving here?”

“Well, we’ll keep the place in Cambridge,” Harold says, “but yes. I’m considering teaching a seminar at Columbia next fall, and we like spending time here.” He looks at him. “We thought it’d be nice to be closer to you, too.”

He isn’t sure what he thinks about this. “But what about your lives up there?” he asks. He is discomfited by this news; Harold and Julia love Cambridge—he has never thought they would leave. “What about Laurence and Gillian?”

“Laurence and Gillian are always coming through the city; so is everyone else.” Harold studies him again. “You don’t seem very happy about this, Jude.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking down. “But I just hope you’re not moving here because—because of me.” There’s a silence. “I don’t mean to sound presumptuous,” he says, finally. “But if it
is
because of me, then you shouldn’t, Harold. I’m fine. I’m doing fine.”

“Are you, Jude?” Harold asks, very quietly, and he suddenly stands, quickly, and goes to the bathroom near the kitchen, where he sits on the toilet seat and puts his face in his hands. He can hear Harold waiting on the other side of the door, but he says nothing, and neither does Harold. Finally, minutes later, when he’s able to compose himself, he opens the door again, and the two of them look at each other.

“I’m fifty-one,” he tells Harold.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harold asks.

“It means I can take care of myself,” he says. “It means I don’t need anyone to help me.”

Harold sighs. “Jude,” he says, “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.” They’re quiet again. “You’re so thin,” Harold continues, and when he doesn’t say anything, “What does Andy say?”

“I can’t keep having this conversation,” he says at last, his voice scraped and hoarse. “I can’t, Harold. And you can’t, either. I feel like all I do is disappoint you, and I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for all of it. But I’m really trying. I’m doing the best I can. I’m sorry if it’s not good enough.” Harold tries to interject, but he talks over him. “This is who I am. This is it, Harold. I’m sorry I’m such a problem for you. I’m sorry I’m ruining your retirement. I’m sorry I’m not happier. I’m sorry I’m not over Willem. I’m sorry I have a job you don’t respect. I’m sorry I’m such a nothing of a person.” He no longer knows what he’s saying; he no longer knows how he feels: he wants to cut himself, to disappear, to lie down and never get up again, to hurl himself into space. He hates himself; he pities himself; he hates himself for pitying himself. “I think you should go,” he says. “I think you should leave.”

“Jude,” Harold says.

“Please go,” he says. “Please. I’m tired. I need to be left alone. Please leave me alone.” And he turns from Harold and stands, waiting, until he hears Harold walk away from him.

After Harold leaves, he takes the elevator to the roof. Here there is a stone wall, chest-high, that lines the perimeter of the building, and he leans against it, swallowing the cool air, placing his palms flat against the top of the wall to try to stop them from shaking. He thinks of Willem, of how he and Willem used to stand on this roof at night, not saying anything, just looking down into other people’s apartments. From the southern end of the roof, they could almost see the roof of their old building on Lispenard Street, and sometimes they would pretend that they could see not just the building, but them within it, their former selves performing a theater of their daily lives.

“There must be a fold in the space-time continuum,” Willem would say in his action-hero voice. “You’re here beside me, and yet—
I can see you moving around in that shithole apartment
. My god, St. Francis:
Do you realize what’s going on here?!
” Back then, he would always laugh,
but remembering this now, he cannot. These days, his only pleasure is thoughts of Willem, and yet those same thoughts are also his greatest source of sorrow. He wishes he could forget as completely as Lucien has: that Willem ever existed, his life with him.

As he stands on the roof, he considers what he has done: He has been irrational. He has gotten angry at someone who has, once again, offered to help him, someone he is grateful for, someone he owes, someone he loves. Why am I acting like this, he thinks. But there’s no answer.

Let me get better
, he asks.
Let me get better or let me end it
. He feels that he is in a cold cement room, from which prong several exits, and one by one, he is shutting the doors, closing himself in the room, eliminating his chances for escape. But why is he doing this? Why is he trapping himself in this place he hates and fears when there are other places he could go? This, he thinks, is his punishment for depending on others: one by one, they will leave him, and he will be alone again, and this time it will be worse because he will remember it had once been better. He has the sense, once again, that his life is moving backward, that it is becoming smaller and smaller, the cement box shrinking around him until he is left with a space so cramped that he must fold himself into a crouch, because if he lies down, the ceiling will lower itself upon him and he will be smothered.

Before he goes to bed he writes Harold a note apologizing for his behavior. He works through Saturday; he sleeps through Sunday. And a new week begins. On Tuesday, he gets a message from Todd. The first of the lawsuits are being settled, for massive figures, but even Todd knows enough not to ask him to celebrate. His messages, by phone or by e-mail, are clipped and sober: the name of the company that is ready to settle, the proposed amount, a short “congratulations.”

On Wednesday, he is meant to stop by the artists’ nonprofit where he still does pro bono work, but he instead meets JB downtown at the Whitney, where his retrospective is being hung. This show is another souvenir from the ghosted past: it has been in the planning stages for almost two years. When JB had told them about it, the three of them had thrown a small party for him at Greene Street.

“Well, JB, you know what this means, right?” Willem had asked, gesturing toward the two paintings—
Willem and the Girl
and
Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II
, from JB’s first show, which hung, side by
side, in their living room. “As soon as the show comes down, all of these pieces are going straight to Christie’s,” and everyone had laughed, JB hardest of all, proud and delighted and relieved.

Those pieces, along with
Willem, London, October 8, 9:08 a.m.
, from “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days,” which he had bought, and
Jude, New York, October 14, 7:02 a.m.
, which Willem had, along with the ones they owned from “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” and “The Narcissist’s Guide to Self-Hatred” and “Frog and Toad,” and all the drawings, the paintings, the sketches of JB’s that the two of them had been given and had kept, some since college, will be in the Whitney exhibit, as well as previously unshown work.

There will also be a concurrent show of new paintings at JB’s gallery, and three weekends before, he had gone to JB’s studio in Greenpoint to see them. The series is called “The Golden Anniversary,” and it is a chronicle of JB’s parents’ lives, both together, before he was born, and in an imagined future, the two of them living on and on, together, into old age. In reality, JB’s mother is still alive, as are his aunts, but in these paintings, so too is JB’s father, who had actually died at the age of thirty-six. The series is just sixteen paintings, many of them smaller in scale than JB’s previous works, and as he walked through JB’s studio, looking at these scenes of domestic fantasy—his sixty-year-old father coring an apple while his mother made a sandwich; his seventy-year-old father sitting on the sofa reading the paper, while in the background, his mother’s legs can be seen descending a flight of stairs—he couldn’t help but see what his life too was and might have been. It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.

Interspersing the portraits were still lifes of the objects that had made JB’s parents’ lives together: two pillows on a bed, both slightly depressed as if someone had dragged the back of a spoon through a bowl of clotted cream; two coffee cups, one’s edge faintly pinked with lipstick; a single picture frame containing a photograph of a teenaged JB with his father: the only appearance JB made in these paintings. And seeing these images, he once again marveled at how perfect JB’s understanding was of a life together, of his life, of how everything in his apartment—Willem’s sweatpants, still slung over the edge of the laundry hamper; Willem’s toothbrush, still waiting in the glass on the
bathroom sink; Willem’s watch, its face splintered from the accident, still sitting untouched on his nightstand—had become totemic, a series of runes only he could read. The table next to Willem’s side of the bed at Lantern House had become a sort of unintentional shrine to him: there was the mug he had last drunk from, and the black-framed glasses he’d recently started wearing, and the book he was reading, still splayed, facedown, in the position he’d left it.

“Oh, JB,” he had sighed, and although he had wanted to say something else, he couldn’t. But JB had thanked him anyway. They were quieter around each other now, and he didn’t know if this was who JB had become or if this was who JB had become around him.

Now he knocks on the museum’s doors and is let in by one of JB’s studio assistants, who is waiting for him and who tells him that JB is overseeing the installation on the top floor, but says he should start on the sixth floor and work his way up to meet him, and so he does.

The galleries on this floor are dedicated to JB’s early works, including juvenilia; there is a whole grid of framed drawings from JB’s childhood, including a math test over which JB had drawn lovely little pencil portraits of, presumably, his classmates: eight- and nine-year-olds bent over their desks, eating candy bars, feeding birds. He had neglected to solve any of the problems, and at the top of the page was a bright red “F,” along with a note: “Dear Mrs. Marion—you see what the problem is here. Please come see me. Sincerely, Jamie Greenberg. P.S. Your son is an immense talent.” He smiles looking at this, the first time he can feel himself smiling in a long time. In a lucite cube on a stand in the middle of the room are a few objects from “The Kwotidien,” including the hair-covered hairbrush that JB had never returned to him, and he smiles again, looking at them, thinking of their weekends devoted to searching for clippings.