A Little Life (98 page)

That dinner is Richard and India, Harold and Julia, Malcolm and Sophie, JB and his mother, and Andy and Jane, whose children are visiting Andy’s brother in San Francisco. He starts to give a toast, thanking everyone for everything they have given him and done for him, but before he gets to the person he wants to thank most—Willem, sitting to his right—he finds he cannot continue, and he looks up from his paper at his friends and sees that they are all going to cry, and so he stops.

He is enjoying the dinner, amused even by how people keep adding scoops of different food to his plate, even though he hasn’t eaten much of his first serving, but he is so sleepy, and eventually he burrows back into the chair and closes his eyes, smiling as he listens to the familiar conversation, the familiar voices, fill the air around him.

Eventually Willem notices that he is falling asleep, and he hears him stand. “Okay,” he says, “time for your diva exit,” and turns the chair from the table and begins pushing it away toward their bedroom, and he uses the last of his strength to answer everyone’s laughter, their song of goodbyes, to peek out around the wing of the chair and smile at them, letting his fingers trail behind him in an airy, theatrical wave. “Stay,” he calls out as he is taken from them. “Please stay. Please stay and give Willem some decent conversation,” and they agree they will; it isn’t even seven, after all—they have hours and hours. “I love you,” he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.

At the doorway to their bedroom, Willem lifts him—he has lost so much weight, and without his prostheses is so less storklike a form, that now even Julia can lift him—and carries him to their bed, helps him undress, helps him remove his temporary prostheses, folds the covers back over him. He pours him a glass of water, hands him his pills: an antibiotic, a fistful of vitamins. He swallows them all as Willem watches, and then for a while Willem sits on the bed next to him, not touching him, but simply near.

“Promise me you’ll go out there and stay up late,” he tells Willem, and Willem shrugs.

“Maybe I’ll just stay here with you,” he says. “They seem to be having a fine time without me.” And sure enough, there is a burst of laughter from the dining room, and they look at each other and smile.

“No,” he says, “promise me,” and finally, Willem does. “Thank you, Willem,” he says, inadequately, his eyes closing. “This was a good day.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” he hears Willem say, and then he begins to say something else, but he doesn’t hear it because he has fallen asleep.

That night his dreams wake him. It is one of the side effects of the particular antibiotic he is on, these dreams, and this time, they are worse than ever. Night after night, he dreams. He dreams that he is in the motel rooms, that he is in Dr. Traylor’s house. He dreams that he is still fifteen, that the previous thirty-three years haven’t even happened. He dreams of specific clients, specific incidents, of things he hadn’t even known he remembered. He dreams that he has become Brother Luke himself. He dreams, again and again, that Harold is Dr. Traylor, and when he wakes, he feels ashamed for attributing such behavior to Harold, even in his subconscious, and at the same time fearful that the dream might be real after all, and he has to remind himself of Willem’s promise:
Never, ever, Jude. He would never do that to you, not for anything
.

Sometimes the dreams are so vivid, so real, that it takes minutes, an hour for him to return to his life, for him to convince himself that the life of his consciousness is in fact real life, his real life. Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can’t even remember who he is. “Where am I?” he asks, desperate, and then, “Who am I? Who am I?”

And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head, Willem’s whispered incantation. “You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.

“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.

“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener
I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.

“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.

“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.

“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

On and on Willem talks, chanting him back to himself, and in the daytime—sometimes days later—he remembers pieces of what Willem has said and holds them close to him, as much as for what he said as for what he didn’t, for how he hadn’t defined him.

But in the nighttime he is too terrified, he is too lost to recognize this. His panic is too real, too consuming. “And who are you?” he asks, looking at the man who is holding him, who is describing someone he doesn’t recognize, someone who seems to have so much, someone who seems like such an enviable, beloved person. “Who are you?”

The man has an answer to this question as well. “I’m Willem Ragnarsson,” he says. “And I will never let you go.”

“I’m going,” he tells Jude, but then he doesn’t move. A dragonfly, as shiny as a scarab, hums above them. “I’m going,” he repeats, but he still doesn’t move, and it is only the third time he says it that he’s finally able to stand up from the lounge chair, drunk on the hot air, and shove his feet back into his loafers.

“Limes,” says Jude, looking up at him and shielding his eyes against the sun.

“Right,” he says, and bends down, takes Jude’s sunglasses off him, kisses him on his eyelids, and replaces his glasses. Summer, JB has always said, is Jude’s season: his skin darkens and his hair lightens to almost the same shade, making his eyes turn an unnatural green, and Willem has to keep himself from touching him too much. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He trudges up the hill to the house, yawning, places his glass of half-melted ice and tea in the sink, and crunches down the pebbled driveway to the car. It is one of those summer days when the air is so
hot, so dry, so still, the sun overhead so white, that one doesn’t so much see one’s surroundings as hear and smell and taste them: the lawn-mower buzz of the bees and locusts, the faint peppery scent of the sunflowers, the oddly mineral flavor the heat leaves on the tongue, as if he’s just sucked on stones. The heat is enervating, but not in an oppressive way, only in a way that makes them both sleepy and defenseless, in a way that makes torpor not just acceptable but necessary. When it is hot like this they lie by the pool for hours, not eating but drinking—pitchers of iced mint tea for breakfast, liters of lemonade for lunch, bottles of Aligoté for dinner—and they leave the house’s every window, every door open, the ceiling fans spinning, so that at night, when they finally seal it shut, they trap within it the fragrance of meadows and trees.

It is the Saturday before Labor Day, and they would normally be in Truro, but this year they have rented Harold and Julia a house outside Aix-en-Provence for the entire summer, and the two of them are spending the holiday in Garrison instead. Harold and Julia will arrive—maybe with Laurence and Gillian, maybe not—tomorrow, but today Willem is picking up Malcolm and Sophie and JB and his on-again, off-again boyfriend Fredrik from the train station. They’ve seen very little of their friends for months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months, and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in April, in Paris—he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London, where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.

Almost every summer he thinks: This is the best summer. But this summer, he knows, really is the best. And not just the summer: the spring, the winter, the fall. As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.

Jude had smiled when he told him this. “And what era are we in now?” he asked, and Willem had smiled back at him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t come up with a name for it yet.”

But they both agreed that they had at least exited The Awful Years. Two years ago, he had spent this very weekend—Labor Day weekend—in
a hospital on the Upper East Side, staring out the window with a hatred so intense it nauseated him at the orderlies and nurses and doctors in their jade-green pajamas congregating outside the building, eating and smoking and talking on their phones as if nothing were wrong, as if above them weren’t people in various stages of dying, including his own person, who was at that moment in a medically induced coma, his skin prickling with fever, who had last opened his eyes four days ago, the day after he had gotten out of surgery.

“He’s going to be fine, Willem,” Harold kept babbling at him, Harold who was in general even more of a worrier than Willem himself had become. “He’s going to be fine. Andy said so.” On and on Harold went, parroting back to Willem everything that he had already heard Andy say, until finally he had snapped at him, “Jesus, Harold, give it a fucking break. Do you believe everything Andy says? Does he
look
like he’s getting better? Does he
look
like he’s going to be fine?” And then he had seen Harold’s face change, his expression of pleading, frantic desperation, the face of an old, hopeful man, and he had been punched with remorse and had gone over and held him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Harold, Harold who had already lost one son, who was trying to reassure himself that he wouldn’t lose another. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m being an asshole.”

“You’re not an asshole, Willem,” Harold had said. “But you can’t tell me he’s not going to get better. You can’t tell me that.”

“I know,” he said. “Of course he’s going to get better,” he said, sounding like Harold, Harold echoing Harold to Harold. “Of course he is.” But inside of him, he felt the beetley scrabble of fear: of course there was no of course. There never had been.
Of course
had vanished eighteen months ago.
Of course
had left their lives forever.

He had always been an optimist, and yet in those months, his optimism deserted him. He had canceled all of his projects for the rest of the year, but as the fall dragged on, he wished he had them; he wished he had something to distract himself. By the end of September, Jude was out of the hospital, and yet he was so thin, so frail, that Willem had been scared to touch him, scared to even look at him, scared to see the way that his cheekbones were now so pronounced that they cast permanent shadows around his mouth, scared to see the way he could watch Jude’s pulse beating in the scooped-out hollow of his throat, as if there was something living inside of him that was trying to kick its way
out. He could feel Jude trying to comfort him, trying to make jokes, and that made him even more scared. On the few occasions he left the apartment—“You have to,” Richard had told him, flatly, “you’re going to go crazy otherwise, Willem”—he was tempted to turn his phone off, because every time it chirped and he saw it was Richard (or Malcolm, or Harold, or Julia, or JB, or Andy, or the Henry Youngs, or Rhodes, or Elijah, or India, or Sophie, or Lucien, or whoever was sitting with Jude for the hour or so that he was distractedly wandering the streets or working out downstairs or, a few times, trying to lie still through a massage or sit through lunch with Roman or Miguel), he would tell himself,
This is it. He’s dying. He’s dead
, and he would wait a second, another second, before answering the phone and hearing that the call was only a status report: That Jude had eaten a meal. That he hadn’t. That he was sleeping. That he seemed nauseated. Finally he had to tell them: Don’t call me unless it’s serious. I don’t care if you have questions and calling’s faster; you have to text me. If you call me, I’ll think the worst. For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.

People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right. But Hemming’s healing—which hadn’t ended with his healing at all—hadn’t been like that, and Jude’s hadn’t either: theirs were a mountain range of peaks and trenches, and in the middle of October, after Jude had gone back to work (still scarily thin, still scarily weak), there had been a night when he had woken with a fever so high that he had started seizing, and Willem had been certain that this was the moment, that this was the end. He had realized then that despite his fear, he had never really prepared himself, that he had never really thought of what it would mean, and although he wasn’t a bargainer by nature, he bargained now, with someone or something he didn’t even know he believed in. He promised more patience, more gratitude, less swearing, less vanity, less sex, less indulgence, less complaining, less self-absorption, less selfishness, less fearfulness. When Jude had lived, Willem’s relief had been so total, so punishing, that he had collapsed, and Andy had prescribed him an antianxiety pill and sent him up to Garrison for the weekend with JB for company, leaving
Jude in his and Richard’s care. He had always thought that unlike Jude, he had known how to accept help when it was offered, but he had forgotten this skill at the most crucial time, and he was glad and grateful that his friends had made the effort to remind him.