A Little Life (22 page)

Often, however, it felt as if Harold was there anyway. Reminiscing about law school (and its attendant activity, bragging about one’s accomplishments in law school) was a favorite pastime in the office, and because so many of his colleagues had gone to his school, quite a few of them knew Harold (and the others knew of him), and he’d sometimes listen to them talk about classes they’d taken with him, or how prepared they’d had to be for them, and would feel proud of Harold, and—though he knew it was silly—proud of himself for knowing him. The following year, Harold’s book about the Constitution would be published, and everyone in the office would read the acknowledgments and see his name and his affiliation with Harold would be revealed, and many of them would be suspicious, and he’d see worry in their faces as they tried to remember what they might have said about Harold in his presence. By that time, however, he would feel he had established himself in the office on his own, had found his own place alongside Citizen and Rhodes, had made his own relationship with Marshall.

But as much as he would have liked to, as much as he craved it, he was still cautious about claiming Harold as his friend: sometimes he worried that he was only imagining their closeness, inflating it hopefully in his mind, and then (to his embarrassment) he would have to retrieve
The Beautiful Promise
from his shelf and turn to the acknowledgments, reading Harold’s words again, as if it were itself a contract, a declaration that what he felt for Harold was at least in some degree reciprocated. And yet he was always prepared:
It will end this month
, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month:
Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month
. He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.

And still, the friendship spooled on and on, a long, swift river that had caught him in its slipstream and was carrying him along, taking him somewhere he couldn’t see. At every point when he thought that he had reached the limits of what their relationship would be, Harold or Julia flung open the doors to another room and invited him in. He met Julia’s father, a retired pulmonologist, and brother, an art history professor, when they visited from England one Thanksgiving, and when Harold and Julia came to New York, they took him and Willem out to dinner, to places they had heard about but couldn’t afford to visit on their own. They saw the apartment at Lispenard Street—Julia polite,
Harold horrified—and the week that the radiators mysteriously stopped working, they left him a set of keys to their apartment uptown, which was so warm that for the first hour after he and Willem arrived, they simply sat on the sofa like mannequins, too stunned by the sudden reintroduction of heat into their lives to move. And after Harold witnessed him in the middle of an episode—this was the Thanksgiving after he moved to New York, and in his desperation (he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it upstairs), he had turned off the stove, where he had been sauteeing some spinach, and pulled himself into the pantry, where he had shut the door and laid down on the floor to wait—they had rearranged the house, so that the next time he visited, he found the spare bedroom had been moved to the ground-floor suite behind the living room where Harold’s study had been, and Harold’s desk and chair and books moved to the second floor.

But even after all of this, a part of him was always waiting for the day he’d come to a door and try the knob and it wouldn’t move. He didn’t mind that, necessarily; there was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return. He tried to give them what he could; he was aware it wasn’t much. And the things Harold gave him so easily—answers, affection—he couldn’t reciprocate.

One day after he’d known them for almost seven years, he was at the house in springtime. It was Julia’s birthday; she was turning fifty-one, and because she had been at a conference in Oslo for her fiftieth birthday, she’d decided that this would be her big celebration. He and Harold were cleaning the living room—or rather, he was cleaning, and Harold was plucking books at random from the shelves and telling him stories about how he’d gotten each one, or flipping back the covers so he could see other people’s names written inside, including a copy of
The Leopard
on whose flyleaf was scrawled: “Property of Laurence V. Raleigh. Do not take. Harold Stein, this means you!!”

He had threatened to tell Laurence, and Harold had threatened him back. “You’d better not, Jude, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Or what?” he’d asked, teasing him.

“Or—this!” Harold had said, and had leaped at him, and before he could recognize that Harold was just being playful, he had recoiled so violently, torquing his body to avoid contact, that he had bumped
into the bookcase and had knocked against a lumpy ceramic mug that Harold’s son, Jacob, had made, which fell to the ground and broke into three neat pieces. Harold had stepped back from him then, and there was a sudden, horrible silence, into which he had nearly wept.

“Harold,” he said, crouching to the ground, picking up the pieces, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” He wanted to beat himself against the floor; he knew this was the last thing Jacob had made Harold before he got sick. Above him, he could hear only Harold’s breathing.

“Harold, please forgive me,” he repeated, cupping the pieces in his palms. “I think I can fix this, though—I can make it better.” He couldn’t look up from the mug, its shiny buttered glaze.

He felt Harold crouch beside him. “Jude,” Harold said, “it’s all right. It was an accident.” His voice was very quiet. “Give me the pieces,” he said, but he was gentle, and he didn’t sound angry.

He did. “I can leave,” he offered.

“Of course you’re not going to leave,” Harold said. “It’s okay, Jude.”

“But it was Jacob’s,” he heard himself say.

“Yes,” said Harold. “And it still is.” He stood. “Look at me, Jude,” he said, and he finally did. “It’s okay. Come on,” and Harold held out his hand, and he took it, and let Harold pull him to his feet. He wanted to howl, then, that after everything Harold had given him, he had repaid him by destroying something precious created by someone who had been most precious.

Harold went upstairs to his study with the mug in his hands, and he finished his cleaning in silence, the lovely day graying around him. When Julia came home, he waited for Harold to tell her how stupid and clumsy he’d been, but he didn’t. That night at dinner, Harold was the same as he always was, but when he returned to Lispenard Street, he wrote Harold a real, proper letter, apologizing properly, and sent it to him.

And a few days later, he got a reply, also in the form of a real letter, which he would keep for the rest of his life.

“Dear Jude,” Harold wrote, “thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You’re right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more. So please stop torturing yourself.

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter
what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

“Actually—maybe I am that kind of person after all.

“Love, Harold.”

It was not so many years ago—despite the fact that he knew otherwise, despite what Andy had been telling him since he was seventeen—that he was still maintaining a sort of small, steady hope that he might get better. On especially bad days, he would repeat the Philadelphia surgeon’s words to himself—“the spine has wonderful reparative qualities”—almost like a chant. A few years after meeting Andy, when he was in law school, he had finally summoned the courage to suggest this to him, had said aloud the prediction he had treasured and clung to, hoping that Andy might nod and say, “That’s exactly right. It’ll just take time.”

But Andy had snorted. “He told you
that
?” he asked. “It’s not going to get better, Jude; as you get older, it’ll get worse.” Andy had been looking down at his ankle as he spoke, using tweezers to pick out shreds of dead flesh from a wound he’d developed, when he suddenly froze, and even without seeing Andy’s face, he could tell he was chagrined. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he said, looking up, still cupping his foot in his hand. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you differently.” And when he couldn’t answer, he sighed. “You’re upset.”

He was, of course. “I’m fine,” he managed to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at Andy.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” Andy repeated, quietly. He had two settings, even then: brusque and gentle, and he had experienced both of them often, sometimes in a single appointment.

“But one thing I promise,” he said, returning to the ankle, “I’ll always be here to take care of you.”

And he had. Of all the people in his life, it was in some ways Andy who knew the most about him: Andy was the only person he’d been naked in front of as an adult, the only person who was familiar with every physical dimension of his body. Andy had been a resident when they met, and he had stayed in Boston for his fellowship, and his postfellowship, and then the two of them had moved to New York within
months of each other. He was an orthopedic surgeon, but he treated him for everything, from chest colds to his back and leg problems.

“Wow,” Andy said dryly, as he sat in his examining room one day hacking up phlegm (this had been the previous spring, shortly before he had turned twenty-nine, when a bout of bronchitis had been snaking its way through the office), “I’m so glad I specialized in orthopedics. This is such good practice for me. This is exactly what I thought I’d do with my training.”

He had started to laugh, but then his coughing had begun again and Andy had thumped him on the back. “Maybe if someone recommended a real internist to me, I wouldn’t have to keep going to a chiropractor for all my medical needs,” he said.

“Mmm,” Andy said. “You know, maybe you
should
start seeing an internist. God knows it’d save me a lot of time, and a shitload of headaches as well.” But he would never go to see anyone but Andy, and he thought—although they had never discussed it—that Andy wouldn’t want him to, either.

For all Andy knew about him, he knew relatively little about Andy. He knew that he and Andy had gone to the same college, and that Andy was a decade older than he, and that Andy’s father was Gujarati and his mother was Welsh, and that he had grown up in Ohio. Three years ago, Andy had gotten married, and he had been surprised to be invited to the wedding, which was small and held at Andy’s in-laws’ house on the Upper West Side. He had made Willem come with him, and was even more surprised when Andy’s new wife, Jane, had thrown her arms around him when they were introduced and said, “The famous Jude St. Francis! I’ve heard so much about you!”

“Oh, really,” he’d said, his mind filling with fear, like a flock of flapping bats.

“Nothing like that,” Jane had said, smiling (she was a doctor as well: a gynecologist). “But he adores you, Jude; I’m so glad you came.” He had met Andy’s parents as well, and at the end of the evening, Andy had slung an arm around his neck and given him a hard, awkward kiss on the cheek, which he now did every time they saw each other. Andy always looked uncomfortable doing it, but also seemed compelled to keep doing it, which he found both funny and touching.

He appreciated Andy in many ways, but he appreciated most his unflappability. After they had met, after Andy had made it difficult not
to continue seeing him by showing up at Hood, banging on their door after he had missed two follow-up appointments (he hadn’t forgotten; he had just decided not to go) and ignored three phone calls and four e-mails, he had resigned himself to the fact that it might not be bad to have a doctor—it seemed, after all, inevitable—and that Andy might be someone he could trust. The third time they met, Andy took his history, or what he would provide of it, and wrote down the facts he would tell him without comment or reaction.

And indeed, it was only years later—a little less than four years ago—that Andy had directly mentioned his childhood. This had been during his and Andy’s first big fight. They’d had skirmishes, of course, and disagreements, and once or twice a year Andy would deliver a long lecture to him (he saw Andy every six weeks—though more frequently these days—and could always anticipate which appointment would be the Lecture Appointment by the terseness with which Andy would greet him and conduct his examination) that covered what Andy considered his perplexing and infuriating unwillingness to take proper care of himself, his maddening refusal to see a therapist, and his bizarre reluctance to take pain medication that would probably improve his quality of life.

The fight had concerned what Andy had retroactively come to consider a botched suicide attempt. This had been right before New Year’s, and he had been cutting himself, and he had cut too close to a vein, and it had resulted in a great, sloppy, bloody mess into which he had been forced to involve Willem. In the examining room that night, Andy had refused to speak to him, he was so angry, and had actually muttered to himself as he made his stitches, each as neat and tiny as if he were embroidering them.