A Little Life (23 page)

Even before Andy had opened his mouth at his next appointment, he had known that he was furious. He had actually considered not coming in for his checkup at all, except he knew if he didn’t, Andy would simply keep calling him—or worse, calling Willem, or worse yet, Harold—until he showed up.

“I should fucking have had you hospitalized,” were Andy’s first words to him, followed by, “I’m such a fucking idiot.”

“I think you’re overreacting,” he’d begun, but Andy ignored him.

“I happen to believe you weren’t trying to kill yourself, or I’d’ve had you committed so fast your head would’ve spun,” he said. “It’s only because statistically, anyone who cuts themselves as much as you do,
and for as many years as you have, is in less immediate danger of suicide than someone who’s less consistently self-injurious.” (Andy was fond of statistics. He sometimes suspected he made them up.) “But Jude, this is crazy, and that was way too close. Either you start seeing a shrink immediately or I’m going to commit you.”

“You can’t do that,” he’d said, furious himself now, although he knew Andy could: he had looked up the laws of involuntary commitment in New York State, and they were not in his favor.

“You know I can,” Andy had said. He was almost shouting at this point. Their appointments were always after office hours, because they sometimes chatted afterward if Andy had time and was in a good mood.

“I’ll sue you,” he’d said, absurdly, and Andy had yelled back at him, “Go right ahead! Do you know how fucked up this is, Jude? Do you have any idea what kind of position you’re putting me in?”

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, sarcastically, “I don’t have any family. No one’s going to sue you for wrongful death.”

Andy had stepped back, then, as if he had tried to hit him. “How dare you,” he’d said, slowly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

And of course he did. But “Whatever,” he said. “I’m leaving.” And he slid off the table (fortunately, he hadn’t changed out of his clothes; Andy had started lecturing him before he’d had a chance) and tried to leave the room, although leaving the room at his pace was hardly dramatic, and Andy scooted over to stand in the doorway.

“Jude,” he said, in one of his sudden mood changes, “I know you don’t want to go. But this is getting scary.” He took a breath. “Have you ever even talked to anyone about what happened when you were a kid?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he’d said, feeling cold. Andy had never alluded to what he’d told him, and he found himself feeling betrayed that he should do so now.

“Like hell it doesn’t,” Andy had said, and the self-conscious theatricality of the phrase—did anyone really say that outside of the movies?—made him smile despite himself, and Andy, mistaking his smile for mockery, changed directions again. “There’s something incredibly arrogant about your stubbornness, Jude,” he continued. “Your utter refusal to listen to anyone about anything that concerns your health or well-being is either a pathological case of self-destructiveness or it’s a huge fuck-you to the rest of us.”

He was hurt by this. “And there’s something incredibly manipulative
about you threatening to
commit
me whenever I disagree with you, and especially in this case, when I’ve
told
you it was a stupid accident,” he hurled back at Andy. “Andy, I appreciate you, I really do. I don’t know what I’d do without you. But I’m an adult and you can’t dictate what I do or don’t do.”

“You know what, Jude?” Andy had asked (now he was yelling again). “You’re right. I can’t dictate your decisions. But I don’t have to accept them, either. Go find some other asshole to be your doctor. I’m not going to do it any longer.”

“Fine,” he’d snapped, and left.

He couldn’t remember when he had been angrier on his own behalf. Lots of things made him angry—general injustice, incompetence, directors who didn’t give Willem a part he wanted—but he rarely got angry about things that happened or had happened to him: his pains, past and present, were things he tried not to brood about, were not questions to which he spent his days searching for meaning. He already knew why they had happened: they had happened because he had deserved them.

But he knew too that his anger was unjustified. And as much as he resented his dependence upon Andy, he was grateful for him as well, and he knew Andy found his behavior illogical. But Andy’s job was to make people better: Andy saw him the way he saw a mangled tax law, as something to be untangled and repaired—whether
he
thought he could be repaired was almost incidental. The thing he
was
trying to fix—the scars that raised his back into an awful, unnatural topography, the skin stretched as glossy and taut as a roasted duck’s: the reason he was trying to save money—was not, he knew, something Andy would approve of. “Jude,” Andy would say if he ever heard what he was planning, “I promise you it’s not going to work, and you’re going to have wasted all that money. Don’t do it.”

“But they’re hideous,” he would mumble.

“They’re not, Jude,” Andy would say. “I swear to god they’re not.”

(But he wasn’t going to tell Andy anyway, so he would never have to have that particular conversation.)

The days passed and he didn’t call Andy and Andy didn’t call him. As if in punishment, his wrist throbbed at night when he was trying to sleep, and at work he forgot and banged it rhythmically against the side of his desk as he read, a longtime bad tic he’d not managed to erase.
The stitches had seeped blood then, and he’d had to clean them, clumsily, in the bathroom sink.

“What’s wrong?” Willem asked him one night.

“Nothing,” he said. He could tell Willem, of course, who would listen and say “Hmm” in his Willem-ish way, but he knew he would agree with Andy.

A week after their fight, he came home to Lispenard Street—it was a Sunday, and he had been walking through west Chelsea—and Andy was waiting on the steps before their front door.

He was surprised to see him. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Andy had replied. They stood there. “I wasn’t sure if you’d take my call.”

“Of course I would’ve.”

“Listen,” Andy said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I’m sorry, Andy.”

“But I really do think you should see someone.”

“I know you do.”

And somehow they managed to leave it at that: a fragile and mutually unsatisfying cease-fire, with the question of the therapist the vast gray demilitarized zone between them. The compromise (though how this had been agreed upon as such was unclear to him now) was that at the end of every visit, he had to show Andy his arms, and Andy would examine them for new cuts. Whenever he found one, he would log it in his chart. He was never sure what might provoke another outburst from Andy: sometimes there were many new cuts, and Andy would merely groan and write them down, and sometimes there were only a few new cuts and Andy would get agitated anyway. “You’ve fucking ruined your arms, you know that, right?” he would ask him. But he would say nothing, and let Andy’s lecture wash over him. Part of him understood that by not letting Andy do his job—which was, after all, to heal him—he was being disrespectful, and was to some degree making Andy into a joke in his own office. Andy’s tallies—sometimes he wanted to ask Andy if he would get a prize once he reached a certain number, but he knew it would make him angry—were a way for him to at least pretend he could manage the situation, even if he couldn’t: it was the accrual of data as a small compensation for actual treatment.

And then, two years later, another wound had opened on his left leg, which had always been the more troublesome one, and his cuttings
were set aside for the more urgent matter of his leg. He had first developed one of these wounds less than a year after the injury, and it had healed quickly. “But it won’t be the last,” the Philadelphia surgeon had said. “With an injury like yours, everything—the vascular system, the dermal system—has been so compromised that you should expect you might get these now and again.”

This was the eleventh he’d had, so although he was prepared for the sensation of it, he was never to know its cause (An insect bite? A brush against the edge of a metal filing cabinet? It was always something so gallingly small, but still capable of tearing his skin as easily as if it had been made of paper), and he was never to cease being disgusted by it: the suppuration, the sick, fishy scent, the little gash, like a fetus’s mouth, that would appear, burbling viscous, unidentifiable fluids. It was unnatural, the stuff of monster movies and myths, to walk about with an opening that wouldn’t, couldn’t be closed. He began seeing Andy every Friday night so he could debride the wound, cleaning it and removing the dead tissue and examining the area around it, looking for new skin growth, as he held his breath and gripped the side of the table and tried not to scream.

“You have to tell me when it’s painful, Jude,” Andy had said, as he breathed and sweated and counted in his head. “It’s a good thing if you can feel this, not a bad thing. It means the nerves are still alive and still doing what they’re supposed to.”

“It’s painful,” he managed to choke out.

“Scale of one to ten?”

“Seven. Eight.”

“I’m sorry,” Andy replied. “I’m almost done, I promise. Five more minutes.”

He shut his eyes and counted to three hundred, making himself go slowly.

When it was over, he would sit, and Andy would sit with him and give him something to drink: a soda, something sugary, and he’d feel the room begin to clarify itself around him, bit by blurry bit. “Slowly,” Andy would say, “or you’ll be sick.” He would watch as Andy dressed the wound—he was always at his calmest when he was stitching or sewing or wrapping—and in those moments, he would feel so vulnerable and weak that he would have agreed to anything Andy might have suggested.

“You’re not going to cut yourself on your legs,” Andy would say, more a statement than a question.

“No, I won’t.”

“Because that would be too insane, even for you.”

“I know.”

“Your anatomy is so degraded that it’d get really infected.”

“Andy. I
know
.”

He had, at various points, suspected that Andy was talking to his friends behind his back, and there were times when they would use Andy-like language and turns of phrase, and even four years after “The Incident,” as Andy had begun calling it, he suspected that Willem was going through the bathroom trash in the morning, and he’d had to take extra cautions disposing of his razors, bundling them in tissue and duct tape and throwing them into garbage cans on the way to work. “Your crew,” Andy called them: “What’ve you and your crew been up to these days?” (when he was in a good mood) and “I’m going to tell your fucking crew they’ve got to keep their eyes on you” (when he wasn’t).

“Don’t you dare, Andy,” he’d say. “And anyway, it’s not their responsibility.”

“Of course it is,” Andy would retort. As with other issues, they couldn’t agree on this one.

But now it was twenty months after the appearance of this most recent wound and it still hadn’t healed. Or rather, it had healed and then broken again and then healed again, and then he had woken on Friday and felt something damp and gummy on his leg—the lower calf, right above the ankle—and had known it had split. He hadn’t called Andy yet—he would do so on Monday—but it had been important to him to take this walk, which he feared would be his last for some time, maybe months.

He was on Madison and Seventy-fifth now, very near Andy’s office, and his leg was hurting him so much that he crossed to Fifth and sat on one of the benches near the wall that bordered the park. As soon as he sat, he experienced that familiar dizziness, that stomach-lifting nausea, and he bent over and waited until the cement became cement again and he would be able to stand. He felt in those minutes his body’s treason, how sometimes the central, tedious struggle in his life was his unwillingness to accept that he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing from it and yet had to keep maintaining
it. So much time, his and Andy’s, was spent trying to repair something unfixable, something that should have wound up in charred bits on a slag heap years ago. And for what? His mind, he supposed. But there was—as Andy might have said—something incredibly arrogant about that, as if he was saving a jalopy because he had a sentimental attachment to its sound system.

If I walk just a few more blocks, I can be at his office, he thought, but he never would have. It was Sunday. Andy deserved some sort of respite from him, and besides, what he was feeling now was not something he hadn’t felt before.

He waited a few more minutes and then heaved himself to his feet, where he stood for half a minute before dropping to the bench again. Finally he was able to stand for good. He wasn’t ready yet, but he could imagine himself walking to the curb, raising his arm to hail a cab, resting his head against the back of its black vinyl banquette. He would count the steps to get there, just as he would count the steps it would take him to get from the cab and to his building, from the elevator to the apartment, and from the front door to his room. When he had learned to walk the third time—after his braces had come off—it had been Andy who had helped instruct the physical therapist (she had not been pleased, but had taken his suggestions), and Andy who had, as Ana had just four years before, watched him make his way unaccompanied across a space of ten feet, and then twenty, and then fifty, and then a hundred. His very gait—the left leg coming up to make a near-ninety-degree angle with the ground, forming a rectangle of negative space, the right listing behind—was engineered by Andy, who had made him work at it for hours until he could do it himself. It was Andy who told him he thought he was capable of walking without a cane, and when he finally did it, he’d had Andy to thank.

Monday was not very many hours away, he told himself as he struggled to stay standing, and Andy would see him as he always did, no matter how busy he was. “When did you notice the break?” Andy would say, nudging gently at it with a bit of gauze. “Friday,” he’d say. “Why didn’t you call me then, Jude?” Andy would say, irritated. “At any rate, I hope you didn’t go on your stupid fucking walk.” “No, of course not,” he’d say, but Andy wouldn’t believe him. He sometimes wondered whether Andy thought of him as only a collection of viruses and malfunctions: If you removed them, who was he? If Andy didn’t have to
take care of him, would he still be interested in him? If he appeared one day magically whole, with a stride as easy as Willem’s and JB’s complete lack of self-consciousness, the way he could lean back in his chair and let his shirt hoist itself from his hips without any fear, or with Malcolm’s long arms, the skin on their insides as smooth as frosting, what would he be to Andy? What would he be to any of them? Would they like him less? More? Or would he discover—as he often feared—that what he understood as friendship was really motivated by their pity of him? How much of who he was was inextricable from what he was unable to do? Who would he have been, who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts, the sores, the fractures, the infections, the splints, and the discharges?