A Little Life (75 page)

“No, JB,” said Jude. “I’m only halfway through.”

“The minister character dies after all.”

“JB!”

After that, JB’s mood seemed to improve. Even his final salvos were somewhat listless, as if he were delivering them out of obligation rather than true depth of feeling. “In ten years, I’ll bet you two will have made the full transition to lesbiandom. I predict cats,” was one, and “Watching you two in the kitchen is like watching a slightly more racially ambiguous version of that John Currin painting. Do you know what I’m talking about? Look it up,” was another.

“Are you going to come out or keep it quiet?” JB asked over dinner.

“I’m not sending out a press release, if that’s what you mean,” Willem said. “But I’m not going to hide it, either.”

“I think it’s a mistake,” Jude added, quickly. Willem didn’t bother answering; they had been having this argument for a month.

After dinner, he and JB lounged on the sofa and drank tea and Jude loaded the dishwasher. By this time, JB seemed almost appeased, and he recalled that this was the arc of most dinners with JB, even back at Lispenard Street: he began the evening as something sharp and tart, and ended it as something soothed and gentled.

“How’s the sex?” JB asked him.

“Amazing,” he said, immediately.

JB looked glum. “Dammit,” he said.

But of course, this was a lie. He had no idea if the sex was amazing, because they hadn’t had sex. The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they’d told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude’s father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged. Willem had walked him to the door, and as they were waiting for the elevator, Andy said to him, quietly, “How’s it going?”

He paused. “Okay,” he said at last, and Andy, as if he could discern everything he wasn’t saying, squeezed his shoulder. “I know it’s not easy, Willem,” he said. “But you must be doing something right—I’ve never seen him more relaxed or happier, not ever.” He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but what could he say? He couldn’t say, Call me if you want to talk about him, or Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, and so instead he left, giving Willem a little salute as the elevator sank out of sight.

That night, after JB had gone home, he thought of the conversation he and Andy had had in the café that day, and how even as Andy had been warning him how difficult it would be, he hadn’t fully believed him. In retrospect, he was glad he hadn’t: because believing Andy might have intimidated him, because he might have been too scared to try.

He turned and looked at Jude, who was asleep. This was one of the nights he’d taken off his clothes, and he was lying on his back, one of his arms crooked near his head, and Willem, as he often did, ran his fingers down the inside of this arm, its scars rendering it into a miserable terrain, a place of mountains and valleys singed by fire. Sometimes, when he was certain Jude was very deeply asleep, he would switch on the light near his side of the bed and study his body more closely,
because Jude refused to let himself be examined in daylight. He would uncover him and move his palms over his arms, his legs, his back, feeling the texture of the skin change from rough to glossy, marveling at all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways the body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it. He had once shot a film on the Big Island of Hawaii, and on their day off, he and the rest of the cast had trekked across the lava fields, watching the land change from rock as porous and dry as petrified bone into a gleaming black landscape, the lava frozen into exuberant swirls of frosting. Jude’s skin was as diverse, as wondrous, and in places so unlike skin as he had felt or understood it that it too seemed something otherworldly and futuristic, a prototype of what flesh might look like ten thousand years from now.

“You’re repulsed,” Jude had said, quietly, the second time he had taken his clothes off, and he had shaken his head. And he hadn’t been: Jude had always been so secretive, so protective of his body that to see it for real was somehow anticlimactic; it was so normal, finally, so less dramatic than what he had imagined. But the scars were difficult for him to see not because they were aesthetically offensive, but because each one was evidence of something withstood or inflicted. Jude’s arms were for that reason the part of his body that upset him the most. At nights, as Jude slept, he would turn them over in his hands, counting the cuts, trying to imagine himself in a state in which he would willingly inflict pain on himself, in which he would actively try to erode his own being. Sometimes there were new cuts—he always knew when Jude had cut himself, because he slept in his shirt on those nights, and he would have to push up his sleeves as he slept and feel for the bandages—and he would wonder when Jude had made them, and why he hadn’t noticed. When he had moved in with Jude after the suicide attempt, Harold had told him where Jude hid his bag of razors, and he, like Harold, had begun throwing them away. But then they had disappeared entirely, and he couldn’t figure out where Jude was keeping them.

Other times, he would feel not curiosity, but awe: he was so much more damaged than Willem had comprehended.
How could I have not known this?
he would ask himself.
How could I not have seen this?

And then there was the matter of sex. He knew Andy had warned him about sex, but Jude’s fear of and antipathy toward it disturbed and
occasionally frightened him. One night toward the end of November, after they’d been together six months, he had reached his hands down Jude’s underwear and Jude had made a strange, strangled noise, the kind of noise an animal makes when it’s being caught in another animal’s jaws, and had jerked himself away with such violence that he had cracked his head against his nightstand. “I’m sorry,” they had apologized to each other, “I’m sorry.” And that was the first moment that Willem, too, had felt a certain fear. All along he had assumed that Jude was shy, profoundly so, but that eventually, he would abandon some of his self-consciousness, that he would feel comfortable enough to have sex. But in that moment, he realized that what he had thought was a reluctance to have sex was actually a terror of it: that Jude would perhaps never be comfortable, that if and when they did eventually have sex, it would be because Jude decided he had to or Willem decided he had to force him. Neither option appealed to him. People had always given themselves to him; he had never had to wait, never had to try to convince someone that he wasn’t dangerous, that he wasn’t going to hurt them.
What am I going to do?
he asked himself. He wasn’t smart enough to figure this out on his own—and yet there was no one else he could ask. And then there was the fact that with every week, his desire grew sharper and less ignorable, his determination greater. It had been a long time since he had wanted to have sex with anyone so keenly, and the fact that it was someone he loved made the waiting both more unbearable and more absurd.

As Jude slept that night, he watched him. Maybe I made a mistake, he thought.

Aloud, he said, “I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated.” Next to him, Jude breathed, ignorant of Willem’s treachery.

And then the morning arrived and he was reminded why he had decided to pursue this relationship to begin with, his own naïveté and arrogance aside. It was early, but he had woken anyway, and he watched as, through the half-open closet door, Jude got dressed. This had been a recent development, and Willem knew how difficult it was for him. He saw how hard Jude tried; he saw how everything he and everyone he knew took for granted—getting dressed in front of someone; getting undressed in front of someone—were things Jude had to practice again and again: he saw how determined he was, he saw how brave he was being. And this reminded him that he, too, had to keep trying. Both of
them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.

When he opened his eyes again, Jude was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling at him, and he was filled with affection for him: for how beautiful he was, for how dear he was, for how easy it was to love him. “Don’t go,” he said.

“I have to,” Jude said.

“Five minutes,” he said.

“Five,” Jude said, and slid beneath the covers, and Willem wrapped his arms around him, careful not to wrinkle his suit, and closed his eyes. And this too he loved: he loved knowing that in those moments, he was making Jude happy, loved knowing that Jude wanted affection and that he was the person who was allowed to provide it. Was this arrogance? Was this pride? Was this self-congratulation? He didn’t think so; he didn’t care. That night, he told Jude that he thought they should tell Harold and Julia that they were together when they went up for Thanksgiving that week. “Are you sure, Willem?” Jude had asked him, looking worried, and he knew that Jude was really asking if he was sure about the relationship itself: he was always holding the door open for him, letting him know he could leave. “I want you to really think about this, especially before we tell them.” He didn’t need to say it, but Willem knew, once again, what the consequences would be if they told Harold and Julia and, later, he changed his mind: they would forgive him, but things would never be the same. They would always, always pick Jude over him. He knew this: it was the way it should be.

“I’m positive,” he’d said, and so they had.

He thought of this conversation as he poured Kit a glass of water and carried the plate of sandwiches to the table. “What is this?” Kit asked, looking suspiciously at the sandwiches.

“Grilled peasant bread with Vermont cheddar and figs,” he said. “And escarole salad with pears and jamón.”

Kit sighed. “You know I’m trying not to eat bread, Willem,” he said, although he didn’t know. Kit bit into a sandwich. “Good,” he said, reluctantly. “Okay,” he continued, putting it down, “tell me.”

And so he did, and added that while he wasn’t planning on
announcing the relationship, he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise about it, either, and Kit groaned. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck. I thought it might be this. I don’t know why, I just did. Fuck, Willem.” He put his forehead down on the table. “I need a minute,” Kit said to the table. “Have you told Emil?”

“Yeah,” he said. Emil was Willem’s manager. Kit and Emil worked with each other best when they were united against Willem. When they agreed, they liked each other. When they didn’t, they didn’t.

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘God, Willem, I’m so happy that you’ve finally committed to someone you truly love and feel comfortable around, and I couldn’t be happier for you as your friend and longtime supporter.’ ” (What Emil had actually said was, “Christ, Willem. Are you
sure
? Did you talk to Kit yet? What did he say?”)

Kit lifted his head and glared at him (he didn’t have much of a sense of humor). “Willem, I
am
happy for you,” he said. “I care about you. But have you thought about what’s going to happen to your career? Have you thought about how you’re going to be typecast? You don’t know what it’s like being a gay actor in this business.”

“I don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so naïve, Willem,” he said. “Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.”

“Said with subtlety and grace, as always.”

“Whatever, Willem; you can’t afford to be cavalier about this.”

“I’m not, Kit,” he said. “But I’m not a leading man.”

“You keep saying that! But you are, whether you like it or not. You’re just acting like your career is going to keep going on the same trajectory it’s been on—do you not remember what happened to Carl?” Carl was a client of a colleague of Kit’s, and one of the biggest movie stars of the previous decade. Then he had been forced out of the closet, and his career had faded. Ironically, it was Carl’s obsolescence, his sudden unpopularity, that had encouraged the rise of Willem’s own career—at least two roles that Willem had gotten were ones that would once have gone, reflexively, to Carl. “Now, look: you’re far more talented than Carl, and more diversified as well. And it’s a different climate now than when Carl came out—domestically, at least. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you to prepare for a certain chill. You’re private as it is: Can’t you just keep this under wraps?”

He didn’t reply, just reached for another sandwich, and Kit studied him. “What does Jude think?”

“He thinks I’m going to end up performing in a Kander and Ebb revue on a cruise ship to Alaska,” he admitted.

Kit snorted. “Somewhere between how Jude thinks and how you think is how you need to think, Willem,” he said. “After everything we’ve built together,” he added, mournfully.

He sighed, too. The first time Jude had met Kit, almost fifteen years ago, he’d turned to Willem afterward and said, smiling, “He’s your Andy.” And over the years, he had come to realize how true this was. Not only did Kit and Andy actually, creepily know each other—they were in the same class, and had lived in the same dorm their freshman year—but they both liked to present themselves as, to some extent, Willem’s and Jude’s creators. They were their defenders and their guardians, but they also tried, at every opportunity, to determine the shape and form of their lives.

“I thought you’d be a little more supportive of this, Kit,” he said, sadly.

“Why? Because I’m gay? Being a gay agent is far different than being a gay actor of your stature, Willem,” said Kit. He grunted. “Well, at least someone’s going to be happy about this. Noel”—the director of
Duets
—“will be fucking thrilled. This is going to be great publicity for his little project. I hope you like doing gay movies, Willem, because that’s what you might end up doing
for the rest of your life
.”

“I don’t really think of
Duets
as a gay movie,” he said, and then, before Kit could roll his eyes and start lecturing him again, “and if that’s how it ends up, that’s fine.” He told Kit what he had told Jude: “I’ll always have work; don’t worry.”