A Little Life (79 page)

Willem had been silent for even longer. “Try,” he said. “For me, Judy. Try.”

And he did. For the next few weeks, when he woke in the night, or after they’d had sex and he was waiting for Willem to fall asleep so he could go to the bathroom, he instead made himself lie still, his hands in fists, counting his breaths, the back of his neck perspiring, his mouth
dry. He pictured one of the motels’ stairwells, and throwing himself against it, the thud he would make, how satisfyingly tiring it would be, how much it would hurt. He both wished Willem knew how hard he was trying and was grateful that he didn’t.

But sometimes this wasn’t enough, and on those nights, he would skulk down to the ground floor, where he would swim, trying to exhaust himself. In the mornings, Willem demanded to look at his arms, and they had fought over that as well, but in the end it had been easier to just let Willem look. “Happy?” he barked at him, jerking his arms back from Willem’s hands, rolling his sleeves back down and buttoning the cuffs, unable to look at him.

“Jude,” Willem said, after a pause, “come lie down next to me before you go,” but he shook his head and left, and all day he had regretted it, and with every passing day that Willem didn’t ask him again, he hated himself more. Their new morning ritual was Willem examining his arms, and every time, sitting next to Willem in bed as Willem looked for evidence of cuts, he felt his frustration and humiliation increase.

One night a month after he had promised Willem he would try harder, he had known that he was in trouble, that there would be nothing he could do to quell his desires. It had been an unexpectedly, peculiarly memory-rich day, one in which the curtain that separated his past from his present had been oddly gauzy. All evening he had seen, as if in peripheral vision, fragments of scenes drifting before him, and over dinner he had fought to stay rooted, to not let himself wander into that frightening, familiar shadow world of memories. That night was the first night he had almost told Willem he didn’t want to have sex, but in the end he had managed not to, and they had.

Afterward, he was exhausted. He always struggled to remain present when they were having sex, to not let himself float away. When he was a child and had learned that he could leave himself, the clients had complained to Brother Luke. “His eyes look dead,” they had said; they hadn’t liked it. Caleb had said the same thing to him. “Wake up,” he’d once said, tapping him on the side of his face. “Where are you?” And so he worked to stay engaged, even though it made the experience more vivid. That night he lay there, watching Willem asleep on his stomach, his arms tucked under his pillow, his face more severe in sleep than it was in wakefulness. He waited, counting to three hundred, and then
three hundred again, until an hour had passed. He snapped on the light next to his side of the bed and tried to read, but all he could see was the razor, and all he could feel was his arms tingling with need, as if he had not veins but circuitry, fizzing and blipping with electricity.

“Willem,” he whispered, and when Willem didn’t answer, he placed his hand on Willem’s neck, and when Willem didn’t move, he finally got out of bed and walked as softly as he could into their closet, where he retrieved his bag, which he had learned to store in the interior pocket of one of his winter coats, and then out of the room and across the apartment to the bathroom at the opposite end, where he closed the door. Here too there was a large shower, and he sat down inside of it and took off his shirt and leaned his back against the cool stone. His forearms were now so thickened from scar tissue that from a distance, they appeared to have been dipped in plaster, and you could barely distinguish where he had made the cuts in his suicide attempt: he had cut between and around each stripe, layering the cuts, camouflaging the scars. Lately he had begun concentrating more on his upper arms (not the biceps, which were also scarred, but the triceps, which were somehow less satisfying; he liked to see the cuts as he made them without twisting his neck), but now he made long, careful cuts down his left tricep, counting the seconds it took to make each one—one, two, three—against his breaths.

Down he cut, four times on his left, and three times on his right, and as he was making the fourth, his hands fluttery from that delicious weakness, he had looked up and had seen Willem in the doorway, watching him. In all his decades of cutting himself, he had never been witnessed in the act itself, and he stopped, abruptly, the violation as shocking as if he had been slugged.

Willem didn’t say anything, but as he walked toward him, he cowered, pressing himself against the shower wall, mortified and terrified, waiting for what might happen. He watched Willem crouch, and gently remove the razor from his hand, and for a moment they remained in those positions, both of them staring at the razor. And then Willem stood and, without preamble or warning, sliced the razor across his own chest.

He snapped alive, then. “No!” he shouted, and tried to get up, but he didn’t have the strength, and he fell back. “Willem, no!”

“Fuck!” Willem yelled. “Fuck!” But he made a second cut anyway, right under the first.

“Stop it, Willem!” he shouted, almost in tears. “Willem, stop it! You’re hurting yourself!”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Willem, and he could tell by how bright Willem’s eyes were that he was almost crying himself. “You see what it feels like, Jude?” And he made a third cut, cursing again.

“Willem,” he moaned, and lunged for his feet, but Willem stepped out of his way. “Please stop. Please, Willem.”

He had begged and begged, but it was only after the sixth cut that Willem stopped, slumping down against the opposite wall. “Fuck,” he said, quietly, bending over at the waist and wrapping his arms around himself. “Fuck, that hurts.” He scooted over to Willem with his bag to help clean him up, but Willem moved away from him. “Leave me alone, Jude,” he said.

“But you need to bandage them,” he said.

“Bandage your own goddamn arms,” Willem said, still not looking at him. “This isn’t some fucked-up ritual we’re going to share, you know: bandaging each other’s self-inflicted cuts.”

He shrank back. “I wasn’t trying to suggest that,” he said, but Willem didn’t answer him, and finally, he did clean off his cuts, and then slid the bag over toward Willem, who at last did the same, wincing as he did.

They sat there in silence for a long, long time, Willem still bent over, he watching Willem. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said.

“Jesus, Jude,” Willem said, a while later. “This really hurts.” He finally looked at him. “How can you stand this?”

He shrugged. “You get used to it,” he said, and Willem shook his head.

“Oh, Jude,” Willem said, and he saw that Willem was crying, silently. “Are you even happy with me?”

He felt something in him break and fall. “Willem,” he began, and then started again. “You’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Willem made a sound that he later realized was a laugh. “Then why are you cutting yourself so much?” he asked. “Why has it gotten so bad?”

“I don’t know,” he said, softly. He swallowed. “I guess I’m afraid you’re going to leave.” It wasn’t the entire story—the entire story he couldn’t say—but it was part of it.

“Why am I going to leave?” Willem asked, and then, when he couldn’t answer, “So is this a test, then? Are you trying to see how far you can push me and whether I’ll stay with you?” He looked up, wiping his eyes. “Is that it?”

He shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, to the marble floor. “I mean, not consciously. But—maybe. I don’t know.”

Willem sighed. “I don’t know what I can say to convince you I’m not going to leave, that you don’t need to test me,” he said. They were quiet again, and then Willem took a deep breath. “Jude,” he said, “do you think you should maybe go back to the hospital for a while? Just to, I don’t know, sort things out?”

“No,” he said, his throat tightening with panic. “Willem, no—you won’t make me, will you?”

Willem looked at him. “No,” he said. “No, I won’t make you.” He paused. “But I wish I could.”

Somehow, the night ended, and somehow, the next day began. He was so tired he was tipsy, but he went to work. Their fight had never ended in any conclusive way—there were no promises extracted, there were no ultimatums given—but for the next few days, Willem didn’t speak to him. Or rather: Willem spoke, but he spoke about nothing. “Have a good day,” he’d say when he left in the morning, and “How was your day?” when he came home at night.

“Fine,” he’d say. He knew Willem was wondering what to do and how he felt about the situation, and he tried to be as unobtrusive as possible in the meantime. At night they lay in bed, and where they usually talked, they were both quiet, and their silence was like a third creature in bed between them, huge and furred and ferocious when prodded.

On the fourth night, he couldn’t tolerate it any longer, and after lying there for an hour or so, both of them silent, he rolled over the creature and wrapped his arms around Willem. “Willem,” he whispered, “I love you. Forgive me.” Willem didn’t answer him, but he plowed on. “I’m trying,” he told him. “I really am. I slipped up; I’ll try harder.” Willem still didn’t say anything, and he held him tighter. “Please, Willem,” he said. “I know it bothers you. Please give me another chance. Please don’t be mad at me.”

He could feel Willem sigh. “I’m not mad at you, Jude,” he said. “And I know you’re trying. I just wish you didn’t have to try; I wish this weren’t something you had to fight against so hard.”

Now it was his turn to be quiet. “Me too,” he said, at last.

Since that night, he has tried different methods: the swimming, of course, but also baking, late at night. He makes sure there’s always flour in the kitchen, and sugar, and eggs and yeast, and as he waits for whatever’s in the oven to finish, he sits at the dining-room table working, and by the time the bread or cake or cookies (which he has Willem’s assistant send to Harold and Julia) are done, it’s almost daylight, and he slips back into bed for an hour or two of sleep before his alarm wakes him. For the rest of the day, his eyes burn with exhaustion. He knows that Willem doesn’t like his late-night baking, but he also knows he prefers it to the alternative, which is why he says nothing. Cleaning is no longer an option: since moving to Greene Street, he has had a housekeeper, a Mrs. Zhou, who now comes four times a week and is depressingly thorough, so thorough that he is sometimes tempted to dirty things up intentionally, only so he can clean them. But he knows this is silly, and so he doesn’t.

“Let’s try something,” Willem says one evening. “When you wake up and want to cut yourself, you wake me up, too, all right? Whatever time it is.” He looks at him. “Let’s try it, okay? Just humor me.”

So he does, mostly because he is curious to see what Willem will do. One night, very late, he rubs Willem’s shoulder and when Willem opens his eyes, he apologizes to him. But Willem shakes his head, and then moves on top of him, and holds him so tightly that he finds it difficult to breathe. “You hold me back,” Willem tells him. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re clinging together from fear.”

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem’s heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. “Harder,” Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard’s family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down
through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India’s apartment, and Richard’s studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossils and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth’s core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren’t burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one. When he wakes the next morning, Willem is no longer on top of him but beside him, but they are still intertwined, and he feels slightly drugged, and relieved, for he has not only not cut himself but he has slept, deeply, two things he hasn’t done in months. That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.

But of course he can’t wake Willem up whenever he feels he needs him; he limits himself to once every ten days. The other six or seven bad nights in those ten-day periods he gets through on his own: swimming, baking, cooking. He needs physical work to stave off the craving—Richard has given him a key to his studio, and some nights he heads downstairs in his pajamas, where Richard has left him a task that is both helpfully, mindlessly repetitive and at the same time utterly mysterious: he sorts bird vertebrae by sizes one week, and separates a stack of gleaming and faintly greasy ferret pelts by color another. These tasks remind him of how, years ago, the four of them would spend their weekends untangling hair for JB, and he wishes he could tell Willem about them, but he can’t, of course. He has made Richard promise not to say anything to Willem either, but he knows Richard isn’t exactly comfortable with the situation—he has noticed that he is never given jobs that involve razors or scissors or paring knives, which is significant considering how much of Richard’s work demands sharp edges.

One night, he peers into an old coffee can that has been left out on Richard’s desk and sees that it is full of blades: small angled ones, large wedge-shaped ones, and plain rectangles of the sort he prefers. He dips his hand cautiously into the can, scoops up a loose fistful of the blades, watches them pour from his palm. He takes one of the rectangular blades and slips it into his pants pocket, but when he’s finally ready to leave for the night—so exhausted that the floor tilts beneath him—he returns it gently to the can before he goes. In those hours he
is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.