A Little Life (80 page)

And then it is Tuesday, a day that feels like summer, and Willem’s last in the city. He leaves for work early that morning but comes home at lunchtime so he can say goodbye.

“I’m going to miss you,” he tells Willem, as he always does.

“I’m going to miss you more,” Willem says, as he always does, and then, also as he always does, “Are you going to take care of yourself?”

“Yes,” he says, not letting go of him. “I promise.” He feels Willem sigh.

“Remember you can always call me, no matter what time it is,” Willem tells him, and he nods.

“Go,” he says. “I’ll be fine,” and Willem sighs again, and goes.

He hates to have Willem leave, but he is excited, too: for selfish reasons, and also because he is relieved, and happy, that Willem is working so much. After they had returned from Vietnam that January, just before he left to film
Duets
, Willem had been alternately anxious and bluffly confident, and although he tried not to speak of his insecurities, he knew how worried Willem was. He knew Willem worried that his first movie after the announcement of their relationship was, no matter how much he protested otherwise, a gay movie. He knew Willem worried when the director of a science-fiction thriller he wanted to do didn’t call him back as quickly as he had thought he might (though he had in the end, and everything had worked out the way he had hoped). He knew Willem worried about the seemingly endless series of articles, the ceaseless requests for interviews, the speculations and television segments, the gossip columns and the editorials, about his revelation that had greeted them on their return to the States, and which, as Kit told them, they were powerless to control or stop: they would simply have to wait until people grew bored of the subject, and that might take months. (Willem didn’t read stories about himself in general, but there were just so many of them: when they turned on the television, when they went online, when they opened the paper, there they were—stories about Willem, and what he now represented.) When they spoke on the phone—Willem in Texas, he at Greene Street—he could feel Willem trying not to talk too much about how nervous he was and knew it was
because Willem didn’t want him to feel guilty. “Tell me, Willem,” he finally said. “I promise I’m not going to blame myself. I swear.” And after he had repeated this every day for a week, Willem did at last tell him, and although he
did
feel guilty—he cut himself after every one of these conversations—he didn’t ask Willem for reassurances, he didn’t make Willem feel worse than he already did; he only listened and tried to be as soothing as he could.
Good
, he’d praise himself after they’d hung up, after every time he’d kept his mouth closed against his own fears.
Good job
. Later, he’d burrow the tip of the razor into one of his scars, flicking the tissue upward with the razor’s corner until he had cut down to the soft flesh beneath.

He thinks it a good sign that the film Willem is shooting in London now is, as Kit would say, a gay film. “Normally I’d say not to,” Kit told Willem. “But it’s too good a script to pass up.” The film is titled
The Poisoned Apple
, and is about the last few years of Alan Turing’s life, after he was arrested for indecency and was chemically castrated. He idolized Turing, of course—all mathematicians did—and had been moved almost to tears by the script. “You have to do it, Willem,” he had said.

“I don’t know,” Willem had said, smiling, “
another
gay movie?”

“
Duets
did really well,” he reminded Willem—and it had: better than anyone had thought it would—but it was a lazy sort of argument, because he knew Willem had already decided to do the film, and he was proud of him, and childishly excited to see him in it, the way he was about all of Willem’s movies.

The Saturday after Willem leaves, Malcolm meets him at the apartment and he drives the two of them north, to just outside Garrison, where they are building a house. Willem had bought the land—seventy acres, with its own lake and its own forest—three years ago, and for three years it had sat empty. Malcolm had drawn plans, and Willem had approved them, but he had never actually told Malcolm he could begin. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, he had found Willem at the dining-room table, looking at Malcolm’s drawings.

Willem held out his hand to him, not lifting his eyes from the papers, and he took it and allowed Willem to pull him to his side. “I think we should do this,” Willem said.

And so they had met with Malcolm again, and Malcolm had drawn new plans: the original house had been two stories, a modernist saltbox, but the new house was a single level and mostly glass. He had offered
to pay for it, but Willem had refused. They argued back and forth, Willem pointing out that he wasn’t contributing anything toward the maintenance of Greene Street, and he pointing out that he didn’t care. “Jude,” Willem said at last, “we’ve never fought about money. Let’s not start now.” And he knew Willem was right: their friendship had never been measured by money. They had never talked about money when they hadn’t had any—he had always considered whatever he earned Willem’s as well—and now that they had it, he felt the same way.

Eight months ago, when Malcolm was breaking ground, he and Willem had gone up to the property and had wandered around it. He had been feeling unusually well that day, and had even allowed Willem to hold his hand as they walked down the gentle hill that sloped from where the house would sit, and then left, toward the forest that held the lake in its embrace. The forest was denser than they had imagined, the ground so thick with pine needles that their every footfall sank, as if the earth beneath them was made of something rubbery and squashy and pumped half full of air. It was difficult terrain for him, and he grasped Willem’s hand in earnest, but when Willem asked him if he wanted to stop, he shook his head. About twenty minutes later, when they were almost halfway around the lake, they came to a clearing that looked like something out of a fairy tale, the sky above them all dark green fir tops, the floor beneath them that same soft pelt of the trees’ leavings. They stopped then, looking around them, quiet until Willem said, “We should just build it here,” and he smiled, but inside him something wrenched, a feeling like his entire nervous system was being tugged out of his navel, because he was remembering that other forest he had once thought he’d live in, and was realizing that he was to finally have it after all: a house in the woods, with water nearby, and someone who loved him. And then he shuddered, a tremor that rippled its way through his body, and Willem looked at him. “Are you cold?” he asked. “No,” he said, “but let’s keep walking,” and so they had.

Since then, he has avoided the woods, but he loves coming up to the site, and is enjoying working with Malcolm again. He or Willem go up every other weekend, though he knows Malcolm prefers it when he goes, because Willem is largely uninterested in the details of the project. He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and
to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects—hammers; wrenches; pliers—he’s embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors. Aside from the house and the garage, there is an outdoor pool and, in the barn, an indoor pool: the house will be done in a little more than three months, the pool and barn by the following spring.

Now he walks through the house with Malcolm, running his hands over its surfaces, listening to Malcolm instruct the contractor on everything that needs fixing. As always, he is impressed watching Malcolm at work: he never tires of watching any of his friends at work, but Malcolm’s transformation has been the most gratifying to witness, more so than even Willem’s. In these moments, he remembers how carefully and meticulously Malcolm built his imaginary houses, and with such seriousness; once, when they were sophomores, JB had (accidentally, he claimed later) set one on fire when he was high, and Malcolm had been so angry and hurt that he had almost started crying. He had followed Malcolm as he ran out of Hood, and had sat with him on the library steps in the cold. “I know it’s silly,” Malcolm had said after he’d calmed down. “But they mean something to me.”

“I know,” he’d said. He had always loved Malcolm’s houses; he still has the first one Malcolm ever made him all those years ago, for his seventeenth birthday. “It’s not silly.” He knew what the houses meant to Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words. “What does
Malcolm
have to worry about?” JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.

These days, Malcolm works on fewer and fewer residences; in fact, they see far less of him than they once did. Bellcast now has offices in London and Hong Kong, and although Malcolm handles most of the
American business—he is now planning a new wing of the museum at their old college—he is increasingly scarce. But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

Back in the city, he drops Malcolm off in Cobble Hill and then drives over the bridge and north, to his office. This is the final piece of pleasure he finds in Willem’s absences: because it means he can stay at work later, and longer. Without Lucien, work is simultaneously more and less enjoyable—less, because although he still sees Lucien, who has retired to a life of, as he says, pretending to enjoy golf in Connecticut, he misses talking to him daily, misses Lucien’s attempts to appall and provoke him; more, because he has found that he enjoys chairing the department, that he enjoys being on the firm’s compensation committee, deciding how the company’s profits will be divvied up each year. “Who knew you were such a powermonger, Jude?” Lucien asked him when he admitted this, and he had protested: it wasn’t that, he told Lucien—it was that he took satisfaction in seeing what had actually been brought in each year, how his hours and days at the office—his and everyone else’s—had translated themselves into numbers, and then those numbers into cash, and then that cash into the stuff of his colleagues’ lives: their houses and tuitions and vacations and cars. (He didn’t tell Lucien this part. Lucien would think he was being romantic, and there would be a wry, ironic lecture on his tendency toward sentimentalism.)

Rosen Pritchard had always been important to him, but after Caleb it had become essential. In his life at the firm, he was assessed only by the business he secured, by the work he did: there, he had no past, he had no deficiencies. His life there began with where he had gone to law school and what he had done there; it ended with each day’s accomplishments, with each year’s tallies of billable hours, with each new client he could attract. At Rosen Pritchard, there was no room for Brother Luke, or Caleb, or Dr. Traylor, or the monastery, or the home; they were irrelevant, they were extraneous details, they had nothing to do with the person he had created for himself. There, he wasn’t someone who cowered in the bathroom, cutting himself, but instead a series
of numbers: one number to signify how much money he brought in, and another for the number of hours he billed; a third representing how many people he oversaw, a fourth for how much he rewarded them. It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he worked; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable.

Willem comes home twice during the course of the shoot for long weekends; but one weekend he is sick with a stomach flu, and the next Willem is sick with bronchitis. But both times—as he feels every time he hears Willem walk into the apartment, calling his name—he must remind himself that this is his life, and that in this life, Willem is coming home to him. In those moments, he feels that his dislike of sex is miserly, that he must be misremembering how bad it is, and that even if he isn’t, he has simply to try harder, that he has to pity himself less.
Toughen up
, he scolds himself as he kisses Willem goodbye at the end of these weekends.
Don’t you dare ruin this. Don’t you dare complain about what you don’t even deserve
.

And then one night, less than a month before Willem is due to come home for good, he wakes and believes he is in the trailer of a massive semitruck, and that the bed beneath him is a dirtied blue quilt folded in half, and that his every bone is being jounced as the truck trundles its way down the highway. Oh no, he thinks, oh no, and he gets up and hurries to the piano and begins playing as many Bach partitas as he can remember, out of sequence and too loud and too fast. He is reminded of a fable Brother Luke had once told him during one of their piano lessons of an old woman in a house who played her lute faster and faster so the imps outside her door would dance themselves into a sludge. Brother Luke had told him this story to illustrate a point—he needed to pick up his tempo—but he had always liked the image, and sometimes, when he feels a memory encroaching, just a single one, easy to control and dismiss, he sings or plays until it goes away, the music a shield between him and it.