THREE WEEKS BEFORE he left for Thanksgiving in Boston, a package—a large, flat, unwieldy wooden crate with his name and address written on every side in black marker—arrived for him at work, where it sat by his desk all day until he was able to open it late that night.
From the return address, he knew what it was, but he still felt that
reflexive curiosity one does when unwrapping anything, even something unwanted. Inside the box were layers of brown paper, and then layers of bubble wrap, and then, wrapped in sheets of white paper, the painting itself.
He turned it over. “To Jude with love and apologies, JB,” JB had scribbled on the canvas, directly above his signature: “Jean-Baptiste Marion.” There was an envelope from JB’s gallery taped to the back of the frame, inside of which was a letter certifying the painting’s authenticity and date, addressed to him and signed by the gallery’s registrar.
He called Willem, who he knew would have already left the theater and was probably on his way home. “Guess what I got today?”
There was only the slightest of pauses before Willem answered. “The painting.”
“Right,” he said, and sighed. “So I suppose you’re behind this?”
Willem coughed. “I just told him he didn’t have a choice in the matter any longer—not if he wanted you to talk to him again at some point.” Willem paused, and he could hear the wind whooshing past him. “Do you need help getting it home?”
“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m just going to leave it here for now and pick it up later.” He re-clad the painting in its layers and replaced it in its box, which he shoved beneath his console. Before he shut off his computer, he began a note to JB, but then stopped, and deleted what he’d written, and instead left for the night.
He was both surprised and not that JB had sent him the painting after all (and not at all surprised to learn that it had been Willem who had convinced him to do so). Eighteen months ago, just as Willem was beginning his first performances in The Malamud Theorem, JB had been offered representation by a gallery on the Lower East Side, and the previous spring, he’d had his first solo show, “The Boys,” a series
of twenty-four paintings based on photographs he’d taken of the three of them. As he’d promised years ago, JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t, a few of which—including an image in which he was curled into himself in bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw—he alarmingly had no memory of JB even taking. That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind, trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.
“You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him
once he realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing. “I mean, I don’t technically have to ask your permission here. I could technically just paint whatever the fuck I want. This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know.”
He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so. “You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.
In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less of a philistine. Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.
The opening had been on a Thursday in late April shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a night so unseasonably cold that the plane trees’ first leaves had frozen and cracked, and rounding the corner onto Norfolk Street, he had stopped to admire the scene the gallery made, a bright golden box of light and shimmered warmth against the chilled flat black of the night. Inside, he immediately encountered Black
Henry Young and a friend of theirs from law school, and then so many other people he knew—from college, and their various parties at Lispenard Street, and JB’s aunts, and Malcolm’s parents, and long-ago friends of JB’s that he hadn’t seen in years—that it had taken some time before he could push through the crowd to look at the paintings themselves.
He had always known that JB was talented. They all did, everyone did: no matter how ungenerously you might occasionally think of JB as a person, there was something about his work that could convince you that you were wrong, that whatever deficiencies of character you had ascribed to him were in reality evidence of your own pettiness and ill-temper, that hidden within JB was someone of huge sympathies and depth and understanding. And that night, he had no trouble at all recognizing the paintings’ intensity and beauty, and had felt only an uncomplicated pride in and gratitude for JB: for the accomplishment of the work, of course, but also for his ability to produce colors and images that made all other colors and images seem wan and flaccid in comparison, for his ability to make you see the world anew. The paintings had been arranged in a single row that unspooled across the walls like a stave, and the tones JB had created
—dense bruised blues and bourbonish yellows—were so distinctly
their own, it was as if JB had invented a different language of color altogether.
He stopped to admire Willem and the Girl, one of the pictures he had already seen and had indeed already bought, in which JB had painted Willem turned away from the camera but for his eyes, which seemed to look directly back at the viewer, but were actually looking at, presumably, a girl who had been standing in Willem’s exact sightline. He loved the expression on Willem’s face, which was one he knew very well, when he was just about to smile and his mouth was still soft and undecided, somehow, but the muscles around his eyes were already pulling themselves upward. The paintings weren’t arranged chronologically, and so after this was one of himself from just a few months ago (he hurried past the ones of himself), and following that an image of Malcolm and his sister, in what he recognized from the furniture was Flora’s long-departed first West Village apartment (Malcolm and Flora, Bethune Street).
He looked around for JB and saw him talking to the gallery
director, and at that moment, JB straightened his neck and caught his eye, and gave him a wave. “Genius,” he mouthed to JB over people’s
heads, and JB grinned at him and mouthed back, “Thank you.”
But then he had moved to the third and final wall and had seen them: two paintings, both of him, neither of which JB had ever shown him. In the first, he was very young and holding a cigarette, and in the second, which he thought was from around two years ago, he was sitting bent over on the edge of his bed, leaning his forehead against the wall, his legs and arms crossed and his eyes closed—it was the position he always assumed when he was coming out of an episode and was gathering his physical resources before attempting to stand up again. He hadn’t remembered JB taking this picture, and indeed, given its perspective—the camera peeking around the edge of the doorframe—he knew that he wasn’t meant to remember, because he wasn’t meant to be aware of the picture’s existence at all. For a moment, the noise of the space blotted out around him, and he could only look and look at the paintings: even in his distress, he had the presence of mind to understand that he was responding less to the images themselves than to the memories and sensations they provoked, and that his sense of violation that other people should be seeing these documentations of two miserable moments of his life was a personal reaction, specific only to himself. To anyone else, they would be two contextless paintings, meaningless unless he chose to announce their meaning. But oh, they were difficult for him to see, and he wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.
He made it through the post-opening dinner, which was endless and
at which he missed Willem intensely—but Willem had a show that night and hadn’t been able to come. At least he hadn’t had to speak to JB at all, who was busy holding court, and to the people who approached him—including JB’s gallerist—to tell him that the final two pictures, the ones of him, were the best in the show (as if he were somehow responsible for this), he was able to smile and agree with them that JB was an extraordinary talent.
But later, at home, after regaining control of himself, he was at last free to articulate to Willem his sense of betrayal. And Willem had taken his side so unhesitatingly, had been so angry on his behalf, that he had been momentarily soothed—and had realized that JB’s duplicity had come as a surprise to Willem as well.
This had begun the second fight, which had started with a confrontation with JB at a café near JB’s apartment, during which JB had proven maddeningly incapable of apologizing: instead, he talked and talked, about how wonderful the pictures were, and how
someday, once he had gotten over whatever issues he had with himself, he’d come to appreciate them, and how it wasn’t even that big a deal, and how he really needed to confront his insecurities, which were groundless anyway, and maybe this would prove helpful in that process, and how everyone except him knew how incredibly great-looking he was, and so shouldn’t that tell him something, that maybe—no, definitely—he was the one who was wrong about himself, and finally, how the pictures were already done, they were finished, and what did he expect should happen? Would he be happier if they were destroyed? Should he rip them off the wall and set them on fire? They had been seen and couldn’t be un-seen, so why couldn’t he just accept it and get over it?
“I’m not asking you to destroy them, JB,” he’d said, so furious and dizzied by JB’s bizarre logic and almost offensive intractability that he wanted to scream. “I’m asking you to apologize.”
But JB couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and finally he had gotten up and left, and JB hadn’t tried to stop him.
After that, he simply stopped speaking to JB. Willem had made his own approach, and the two of them (as Willem told him) had actually begun shouting at each other in the street, and then Willem, too, had stopped speaking to JB, and so from then on, they had to rely primarily on Malcolm for news of JB. Malcolm, typically noncommittal, had admitted to them that he thought JB was totally in the wrong, while at the same time suggesting that they were both being unrealistic: “You know he’s not going to apologize, Judy,” he said. “This is JB we’re talking about. You’re wasting your time.”
“Am I being unreasonable?” he asked Willem after this conversation.
“No,” Willem said, immediately. “It’s fucked up, Jude. He fucked up, and he needs to apologize.”
The show sold out. Willem and the Girl was delivered to him at work, as was Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II, which Willem had bought. Jude, After Sickness (the title, when he learned it, had made him so newly angry and humiliated that for a moment he experienced what the saying “blind with rage” meant) was sold to a collector whose purchases were considered benedictions and predictive of future success: he only bought from artists’ debut shows, and almost every artist whose work he had bought had gone on to have a major career. Only the show’s centerpiece, Jude with Cigarette, remained unplaced, and this was due to a shockingly amateurish error, in which
the director of the gallery had sold it to an important British collector and the owner of the gallery had sold it to the Museum of Modern Art. “So, perfect,” Willem said to Malcolm, knowing Malcolm would ferry his words back to JB. “JB should tell the gallery that he’s
keeping the painting, and he should just give it to Jude.”
“He can’t do that,” Malcolm said, as appalled as if Willem had suggested simply tossing the canvas into a trash can. “It’s MoMA.”
“Who cares?” Willem asked. “If he’s that fucking good, he’ll have another shot at MoMA. But I’m telling you, Malcolm, this is really the only solution he has left if he wants to keep Jude as a friend.” He paused. “And me, too.”
So Malcolm conveyed that message, and the prospect of losing Willem as a friend had been enough to make JB call Willem and demand a meeting, at which JB had cried and accused Willem of betraying him, and always taking Jude’s side, and obviously not giving a shit about his, JB’s, career, when he, JB, had always supported Willem’s.
All of this had taken place over months, as spring turned into summer, and he and Willem had gone to Truro without JB (and without Malcolm, who told them he was afraid of leaving JB on his own), and JB had gone to the Irvines’ in Aquinnah over Memorial Day and they had gone over the Fourth of July, and he and Willem had taken the long-planned trip to Croatia and Turkey by themselves.
And then it was fall, and by the time Willem and JB had their second meeting, Willem had suddenly and unexpectedly booked his first film role, playing the king in an adaptation of The Girl with the Silver Hands and was leaving to shoot in Sofia in January, and he had gotten a promotion at work and had been approached by a partner at Cromwell Thurman Grayson and Ross, one of the best corporate firms in the city, and was having to use the wheelchair Andy had gotten him that May more often than not, and Willem had broken up with his girlfriend of a year and was dating a costume designer named Philippa, and his former fellow law clerk, Kerrigan, had written a mass e-mail to everyone he had ever worked with in which he simultaneously came out and denounced conservatism, and Harold had been asking him who was coming over for Thanksgiving this year, and if he could stay a night after whoever he invited had left, because he and Julia needed to talk about something with him, and he had seen plays with Malcolm and gallery shows with Willem and had read novels that he would have argued about with JB, as the two of them
were the novel-readers of the group: a whole list of things the four of them would have once picked over together that they now instead discussed in twos or threes. At first, it had been disorienting, after so many years of operating as a foursome, but he had gotten used to it, and although he missed JB—his witty self-involvement, the way he could see everything the world had to offer only as it might affect him
—he also found himself unable to forgive him and, simultaneously, able to see his life without him.
And now, he supposed, their fight was over, and the painting was his. Willem came down with him to the office that Saturday and he unwrapped it and leaned it against the wall and the two of them regarded it in silence, as if it were a rare and inert zoo animal. This was the painting that had been reproduced in the Times review and, later, the Artforum story, but it wasn’t until now, in the safety of his office, that he was able to truly appreciate it—if he could forget it was him, he could almost see how lovely an image it was, and why JB would have been attracted to it: for the strange person in it who looked so frightened and watchful, who was discernibly neither female nor male, whose clothes looked borrowed, who was mimicking the gestures and postures of adulthood while clearly understanding nothing of them. He no longer felt anything for that person, but not feeling anything for that person had been a conscious act of will, like turning away from someone in the street even though you saw them constantly, and pretending you couldn’t see them day after day until one day, you actually couldn’t—or so you could make yourself believe.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” he admitted to Willem,
regretfully, because he didn’t want the painting, and yet felt guilty that Willem had axed JB out of his life on his behalf, and for something he knew he would never look at again.
“Well,” said Willem, and there was a silence. “You could always give it to Harold; I’m sure he’d love it.” And he knew then that Willem had perhaps always known that he didn’t want the painting, and that it hadn’t mattered to him, that he hadn’t regretted choosing him over JB, that he didn’t blame him for having to make that decision.
“I could,” he said slowly, although he knew he wouldn’t: Harold would indeed love it (he had when he had seen the show) and would hang it somewhere prominent, and whenever he went to visit him, he would have to look at it. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said at last, “I’m sorry to drag you down here. I think I’ll leave it here until I figure out
what to do.”
“It’s okay,” Willem said, and the two of them wrapped it up again and replaced it under his desk.
After Willem left, he turned on his phone and this time, he did write JB a message. “JB,” he began, “Thanks very much for the painting, and for your apology, both of which mean a lot.” He paused, thinking about what to say next. “I’ve missed you, and want to hear what’s been going on in your life,” he continued. “Call me when you have some time to hang out.” It was all true.
And suddenly, he knew what he should do with the painting. He looked up the address for JB’s registrar and wrote her a note, thanking her for sending him Jude with Cigarette and telling her that he wanted to donate it to MoMA, and could she help facilitate the transaction?
Later, he would look back on this episode as a sort of fulcrum, the hinge between a relationship that was one thing and then became something else: his friendship with JB, of course, but also his friendship with Willem. There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium and his affection for them was perfect. But, of course, that was never to be: a beat later, and everything shifted, and the moment quietly vanished.
It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for him. But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.
 |
It was his opinion (shared by Julia) that Harold had a tendency to make Thanksgiving more complicated than it needed to be. Every year since he’d first been invited to Harold and Julia’s for the holiday, Harold promised him—usually in early November, when he was still full of enthusiasm for the project—that this year he was going to blow his mind by upending the lamest of American culinary traditions. Harold always began with big ambitions: their first Thanksgiving together, nine years ago, when he was in his second year of law
school, Harold had announced he was going to make duck à l’orange, with kumquats standing in for the oranges.
But when he arrived at Harold’s house with the walnut cake he’d baked the night before, Julia was standing alone in the doorway to greet him. “Don’t mention the duck,” she whispered as she kissed him hello. In the kitchen, a harassed-looking Harold was lifting a large turkey out of the oven.
“Don’t say a word,” Harold warned him. “What would I say?” he asked.
This year, Harold asked how he felt about trout. “Trout stuffed with other stuff,” he added.
“I like trout,” he’d answered, cautiously. “But you know, Harold, I actually like turkey.” They had a variation on this conversation every year, with Harold proposing various animals and proteins—steamed black-footed Chinese chicken, filet mignon, tofu with wood ear fungus, smoked whitefish salad on homemade rye—as turkey improvements.
“No one likes turkey, Jude,” Harold said, impatiently. “I know what you’re doing. Don’t insult me by pretending you do because you don’t think I’m actually capable of making anything else. We’re having trout, and that’s it. Also, can you make that cake you made last year? I think it’d go well with this wine I got. Just send me a list of what you need me to get.”
The perplexing thing, he always thought, was that in general, Harold wasn’t that interested in food (or wine). In fact, he had terrible taste, and was often taking him to restaurants that were overpriced yet mediocre, where Harold would happily devour dull plates of blackened meat and unimaginative sides of gloppy pasta. He and Julia (who also had little interest in food) discussed Harold’s strange fixation every year: Harold had numerous obsessions, some of them inexplicable, but this one seemed particularly so, and more so for its endurance.
Willem thought that Harold’s Thanksgiving quest had begun partly as shtick, but over the years, it had morphed into something more serious, and now he was truly unable to stop himself, even as he knew he’d never succeed.
“But you know,” Willem said, “it’s really all about you.” “What do you mean?” he’d asked.
“It’s a performance for you,” Willem had said. “It’s his way of telling you he cares about you enough to try to impress you, without
actually saying he cares about you.”
He’d dismissed this right away: “I don’t think so, Willem.” But sometimes, he pretended to himself that Willem might be right, feeling silly and a little pathetic because of how happy the thought made him.
Willem was the only one coming to Thanksgiving this year: by the time he and JB had reconciled, JB had already made plans to go to his aunts’ with Malcolm; when he’d tried to cancel, they had apparently been so irked that he’d decided not to antagonize them further.
“What’s it going to be this year?” asked Willem. They were taking the train up on Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving. “Elk? Venison? Turtle?”
“Trout,” he said.
“Trout!” Willem replied. “Well, trout’s easy. We may actually end up with trout this year.”
“He said he was going to stuff it with something, though.” “Oh. I take it back.”
There were eight of them at dinner: Harold and Julia, Laurence and Gillian, Julia’s friend James and his boyfriend Carey, and he and Willem.
“This is dynamite trout, Harold,” Willem said, cutting into his second piece of turkey, and everyone laughed.
What was the point, he wondered, at which he had stopped feeling so nervous and out of place at Harold’s dinners? Certainly, his friends had helped. Harold liked sparring with them, liked trying to provoke JB into making outrageous and borderline racist statements, liked teasing Willem about when he was going to settle down, liked debating structural and aesthetic trends with Malcolm. He knew Harold enjoyed engaging with them, and that they enjoyed it too, and it gave him the chance to simply listen to them being who they were without feeling the need to participate; they were a fleet of parrots shaking their bright-colored feathers at one another, presenting themselves to their peers without fear or guile.
The dinner was dominated by talk of James’s daughter, who was getting married in the summer. “I’m an old man,” James moaned, and Laurence and Gillian, whose daughters were still in college and spending the holiday at their friend’s house in Carmel, made sympathetic noises.
“This reminds me,” said Harold, looking at him and Willem, “when are you two ever going to settle down?”
“I think he means you,” he smiled at Willem.
“Harold, I’m thirty-two!” Willem protested, and everyone laughed again as Harold spluttered: “What is that, Willem? Is that an explanation? Is that a defense? It’s not like you’re sixteen!”
But as much as he enjoyed the evening, a part of his mind remained abuzz and anxious, worrying about the conversation Harold and Julia wanted to have with him the next day. He had finally mentioned it to Willem on the ride up, and in moments, when the two of them were working together (stuffing the turkey, blanching the potatoes, setting the table), they would try to figure out what Harold might have to say to him. After dinner, they put on their coats and sat in the back garden, puzzling over it again.
At least he knew that nothing was wrong with them—it was the first thing he had asked, and Harold had assured him that he and Julia were both fine. But what, then, could it be?
“Maybe he thinks I’m hanging around them too much,” he suggested to Willem. Maybe Harold was, simply, sick of him.
“Not possible,” Willem said, so quickly and declaratively that he was relieved. They were quiet. “Maybe one of them got a job offer somewhere and they’re moving?”
“I thought of that, too. But I don’t think Harold would ever leave Boston. Julia, either.”
There weren’t, in the end, many options, at least many that would make a conversation with him necessary: maybe they were selling the house in Truro (but why would they need to talk to him about that, as much as he loved the house). Maybe Harold and Julia were splitting up (but they seemed the same as they always did around each other). Maybe they were selling the New York apartment and wanted to know if he wanted to buy it from them (unlikely: he was certain they would never sell the apartment). Maybe they were renovating the apartment and needed him to oversee the renovation.
And then their speculations grew more specific and improbable: maybe Julia was coming out (maybe Harold was). Maybe Harold was being born again (maybe Julia was). Maybe they were quitting their jobs, moving to an ashram in upstate New York. Maybe they were becoming ascetics who would live in a remote Kashmiri valley. Maybe they were having his-and-hers plastic surgery. Maybe Harold was becoming a Republican. Maybe Julia had found God. Maybe Harold had been nominated to be the attorney general. Maybe Julia had been identified by the Tibetan government in exile as the next
reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and was moving to Dharamsala. Maybe Harold was running for president as a Socialist candidate. Maybe they were opening a restaurant on the square that served only turkey stuffed with other kinds of meat. By this time they were both laughing so hard, as much from the nervous, self-soothing helplessness of not knowing as from the absurdity of their guesses, that they were bent over in their chairs, pressing their coat collars to their mouths to muffle the noise, their tears freezing pinchingly on their cheeks.
In bed, though, he returned to the thought that had crept, tendril-like, from some dark space of his mind and had insinuated itself into his consciousness like a thin green vine: maybe one of them had discovered something about the person he once was. Maybe he would be presented with evidence—a doctor’s report, a photograph, a (this was the nightmare scenario) film still. He had already decided he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t argue against it, he wouldn’t defend himself. He would acknowledge its veracity, he would apologize, he would explain that he never meant to deceive them, he would offer not to contact them again, and then he would leave. He would ask them only to keep his secret, to not tell anyone else. He practiced saying the words: I’m so sorry, Harold. I’m so sorry, Julia. I never meant to embarrass you. But of course it was such a useless apology. He might not have meant to, but it wouldn’t make a difference: he would have; he had.
Willem left the next morning; he had a show that night. “Call me as
soon as you know, okay?” he asked, and he nodded. “It’s going to be fine, Jude,” he promised. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. Don’t worry, all right?”
“You know I will anyway,” he said, and tried to smile back at Willem.
“Yeah, I know,” said Willem. “But try. And call me.”
The rest of the day he kept himself busy cleaning—there was always plenty to clean at the house, as both Harold and Julia were unenthusiastic tidiers—and by the time they sat down to an early dinner he’d made of turkey stew and a beet salad, he felt almost aloft from nervousness and could only pretend to eat, moving the food around his plate like a compass point, hoping Harold and Julia wouldn’t notice. After, he began stacking the plates to take them to the kitchen, but Harold stopped him. “Leave them, Jude,” he said. “Maybe we should have our talk now?”
He felt himself go fluttery with panic. “I should really rinse them off, or everything’s going to congeal,” he protested, lamely, hearing how stupid he sounded.
“Fuck the plates,” said Harold, and although he knew that Harold genuinely didn’t care what did or didn’t congeal on his plates, for a moment he wondered if his casualness was too casual, a simulacrum of ease rather than the real thing. But finally, he could do nothing but put the dishes down and trudge after Harold into the living room, where Julia was pouring coffee for herself and Harold, and had poured tea for him.
He lowered himself to the sofa, and Harold to the chair to his left, and Julia to the squashed suzani-covered ottoman facing him: the places they always sat, the low table between them, and he wished the moment would hold itself, for what if this was the last one he would have here, the last time he would sit in this warm dark room, with its books and tart, sweet scent of cloudy apple juice and the navy-and-scarlet Turkish carpet that had buckled itself into pleats under the coffee table, and the patch on the sofa cushion where the fabric had worn thin and he could see the white muslin skin beneath
—all the things that he’d allowed to grow so dear to him, because they were Harold and Julia’s, and because he had allowed himself to think of their house as his.
For a while they all sipped at their drinks, and none of them looked at the other, and he tried to pretend that this was just a normal evening, although if it had been a normal evening, none of them would be so silent.
“Well,” Harold began at last, and he set his cup down on the table, readying himself. Whatever he says, he reminded himself, don’t start making excuses for yourself. Whatever he says, accept it, and thank him for everything.
There was another long silence. “This is hard to say,” Harold continued, and shifted his mug in his hand, and he made himself wait through Harold’s next pause. “I really did have a script prepared, didn’t I?” he asked Julia, and she nodded. “But I’m more nervous than I thought I would be.”
“I know,” she said. “But you’re doing great.”
“Ha!” Harold replied. “It’s sweet of you to lie to me, though,” and smiled at her, and he had the sense that it was only the two of them in the room, and that for a moment, they had forgotten he was there at all. But then Harold was quiet again, trying to say what he’d say
next.
“Jude, I’ve—we’ve—known you for almost a decade now,” Harold said at last, and he watched as Harold’s eyes moved to him and then moved away, to somewhere above Julia’s head. “And over those years, you’ve grown very dear to us; both of us. You’re our friend, of course, but we think of you as more than a friend to us; as someone more special than that.” He looked at Julia, and she nodded at him once more. “So I hope you won’t think this is too—presumptuous, I suppose—but we’ve been wondering if you might consider letting us, well, adopt you.” Now he turned to him again, and smiled. “You’d be our legal son, and our legal heir, and someday all this”—he tossed his free arm into the air in a parodic gesture of expansiveness—“will be yours, if you want it.”
He was silent. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t react; he couldn’t even feel his face, couldn’t sense what his expression might be, and Julia hurried in. “Jude,” she said, “if you don’t want to, for whatever reason, we understand completely. It’s a lot to ask. If you say no, it won’t change how we feel about you, right, Harold? You’ll always, always be welcome here, and we hope you’ll always be part of our lives. Honestly, Jude—we won’t be angry, and you shouldn’t feel bad.” She looked at him. “Do you want some time to think about it?”
And then he could feel the numbness receding, although as if in compensation, his hands began shaking, and he grabbed one of the throw pillows and wrapped his arms around it to hide them. It took him a few tries before he was able to speak, but when he did, he couldn’t look at either of them. “I don’t need to think about it,” he said, and his voice sounded strange and thin to him. “Harold, Julia— are you kidding? There’s nothing—nothing—I’ve ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought—” He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. “I thought you were going to tell me you didn’t want to be friends anymore.”
“Oh, Jude,” said Julia, and Harold looked perplexed. “Why would you ever think that?” he asked.
But he shook his head, unable to explain it to them.
They were silent again, and then all of them were smiling—Julia at Harold, Harold at him, he into the pillow—unsure how to end the moment, unsure where to go next. Finally, Julia clapped her hands together and stood. “Champagne!” she said, and left the room.
He and Harold stood as well and looked at each other. “Are you
sure?” Harold asked him, quietly.
“I’m as sure as you are,” he answered, just as quietly. There was an uncreative and obvious joke to be made, about how much like a marriage proposal the event seemed, but he didn’t have the heart to make it.
“You realize you’re going to be bound to us for life,” Harold smiled, and put his hand on his shoulder, and he nodded. He hoped Harold wouldn’t say one more word, because if he did, he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or scream, or combust. He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even as he told himself he didn’t care, that by the time they had toasted one another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him—the sensation of being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly squirmed—he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes and go to bed.
When he reached his room, he had to lie on the bed for half an hour before he could even think of retrieving his phone. He needed to feel the solidity of the bed beneath him, the silk of the cotton blanket against his cheek, the familiar yield of the mattress as he moved against it. He needed to assure himself that this was his world, and he was still in it, and that what had happened had really happened. He thought, suddenly, of a conversation he’d once had with Brother Peter, in which he’d asked the brother if he thought he’d ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. “No,” he’d said, so decisively that he had never asked again. And although he must have been very young, he remembered, very clearly, that the brother’s dismissal had only hardened his resolve, although of course it wasn’t an outcome that was his to control in the slightest.
He was so discombobulated that he forgot that Willem was already
onstage when he called, but when Willem called him back at intermission, he was still in the same place on the bed, in the same comma-like shape, the phone still cupped beneath his palm.
“Jude,” Willem breathed when he told him, and he could hear how purely happy Willem was for him. Only Willem—and Andy, and to some extent Harold—knew the outlines of how he had grown up: the monastery, the home, his time with the Douglasses. With everyone else, he tried to be evasive for as long as he could, until finally he would say that his parents had died when he was little, and that he
had grown up in foster care, which usually stopped their questions. But Willem knew more of the truth, and he knew Willem knew that this was his most impossible, his most fervent desire. “Jude, that’s amazing. How do you feel?”
He tried to laugh. “Like I’m going to mess it up.”
“You won’t.” They were both quiet. “I didn’t even know you could adopt someone who’s a legal adult.”
“I mean, it’s not common, but you can. As long as both parties consent. It’s mostly done for purposes of inheritance.” He made another attempt at a laugh. (Stop trying to laugh, he scolded himself.) “I don’t remember much from when I studied this in family law, but I do know that I get a new birth certificate with their names on it.”
“Wow,” said Willem. “I know,” he said.
He heard someone calling Willem’s name, commandingly, in the background. “You have to go,” he told Willem.
“Shit,” said Willem. “But Jude? Congratulations. No one deserves it more.” He called back at whoever was yelling for him. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Do you mind if I write Harold and Julia?”
“Sure,” he said. “But Willem, don’t tell the others, okay? I just want to sit with it for a while.”
“I won’t say a word. I’ll see you tomorrow. And Jude—” But he didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything else.
“I know,” he said. “I know, Willem. I feel the same way.”
“I love you,” said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime’s worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.
Back in the apartment the next day, there was a note from Willem telling him to wait up, and when Willem came home, he had ice cream and a carrot cake, which the two of them ate even though neither of them particularly liked sweets, and champagne, which they drank even though he had to wake up early the following morning. The next few weeks slid by: Harold was handling the paperwork, and sent him forms to sign—the petition for adoption, an affidavit to change his birth certificate, a request for information about his potential criminal record—which he took to the bank at lunch to have
notarized; he didn’t want anyone at work to know beyond the few people he told: Marshall, and Citizen, and Rhodes. He told JB and Malcolm, who on the one hand reacted exactly as he’d anticipated— JB making a lot of unfunny jokes at an almost tic-like pace, as if he might eventually land on one that worked; Malcolm asking increasingly granular questions about various hypotheticals that he couldn’t answer—and on the other had been genuinely thrilled for him. He told Black Henry Young, who had taken two classes with Harold when he was in law school and had admired him, and JB’s friend Richard, to whom he’d grown close after one particularly long and tedious party at Ezra’s a year ago when the two of them had had a conversation that had begun with the French welfare state and then had moved on to various other topics, the only two semi-sober people in the room. He told Phaedra, who had started screaming, and another old college friend, Elijah, who had screamed as well.
And, of course, he told Andy, who at first had just stared at him and
then nodded, as if he had asked if Andy had an extra bandage he could give him before he left for the night. But then he began making a series of bizarre seal-like sounds, half bark, half sneeze, and he realized that Andy was crying. The sight of it made him both horrified and slightly hysterical, unsure of what to do. “Get out of here,” Andy commanded him between sounds. “I mean it, Jude, get the fuck out,” and so he did. The next day at work, he received an arrangement of roses the size of a gardenia bush, with a note in Andy’s angry blocky handwriting that read:
JUDE—I’M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY
It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.
But then the ecstatic month passed, and it was January, and Willem left for Bulgaria to film, and the old fears returned, accompanied now by new fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold
told him, and with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn’t matter so much to him—he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant
—but he wanted it with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he
couldn’t bear it being taken away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for him, not when he was so close.
He had been close before. The year after he arrived in Montana, when he was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. November was National Adoption Month, and one cold morning, they had been told to dress neatly and had been hurried onto two school buses and driven two hours to Missoula, where they were herded off the buses and into the conference room of a hotel. Theirs had been the last buses to arrive, and the room was already filled with children, boys on one side, girls on the other. In the center of the room was a long stripe of tables, and as he walked over to his side, he saw that they were stacked with labeled binders: Boys, Babies; Boys, Toddlers; Boys, 4–6; Boys, 7–9; Boys, 10–12; Boys, 13–15; Boys, 15+. Inside, they had been told, were pieces of paper with their pictures, and names, and information about themselves: where they were from, what ethnicity they were, information about how they did in school and what sports they liked to play and what talents and interests they had. What, he wondered, did his sheet of paper say about him? What talents might have been invented for him, what race, what origins?
The older boys, the ones whose names and faces were in the 15+
binder, knew they would never be adopted, and when the counselors
turned away, they snuck out through the back exit to, they all knew, get high. The babies and toddlers had only to be babies and toddlers; they would be the first to be chosen, and they didn’t even know it. But as he watched from the corner he had drifted toward, he saw that some of the boys—the ones old enough to have experienced one of the fairs before, but still young enough to be hopeful—had strategies. He watched as the sullen became smiling, as the rough and bullying became jocular and playful, as boys who hated one another in the context of the home played and bantered in a way that appeared convincingly friendly. He saw the boys who were rude to the counselors, who cursed at one another in the hallways, smile and chat with the adults, the prospective parents, who were filing into the room. He watched as the toughest, the meanest of the boys, a fourteen-year-old named Shawn who had once held him down in the bathroom, his knees digging into his shoulder blades, pointed at his name tag as the man and woman he had been talking with walked toward the binders. “Shawn!” he called after them, “Shawn Grady!” and something about his hoarse hopeful voice, in which he could hear the effort, the strain, to not sound hopeful at all, made him feel sorry for Shawn for the first time, and then angry at the man and woman, who, he could tell, were actually paging through the “Boys, 7–9” binder. But those feelings passed quickly, because he tried not to feel anything those days: not hunger, not pain, not anger, not sadness.
He had no tricks, he had no skills, he couldn’t charm. When he had
arrived at the home, he had been so frozen that they had left him behind the previous November, and a year later, he wasn’t sure that he was any better. He thought less and less frequently of Brother Luke, it was true, but his days outside the classroom smeared into one; most of the time he felt he was floating, trying to pretend that he didn’t occupy his own life, wishing he was invisible, wanting only to go unnoticed. Things happened to him and he didn’t fight back the way he once would have; sometimes when he was being hurt, the part of him that was still conscious wondered what the brothers would think of him now: gone were his rages, his tantrums, his struggling. Now he was the boy they had always wished him to be. Now he hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial that he seemed to displace no air at all.
So he was surprised—as surprised as the counselors—when he
learned that night that he was one of the children chosen by a couple: the Learys. Had he noticed a woman and man looking at him, maybe
even smiling at him? Maybe. But the afternoon had passed, as most did, in a haze, and even on the bus ride home, he had begun the work of forgetting it.
He would spend a probationary weekend—the weekend before Thanksgiving—with the Learys, so they could see how they liked each other. That Thursday he was driven to their house by a counselor named Boyd, who taught shop and plumbing and whom he didn’t know very well. He knew Boyd knew what some of the other counselors did to him, and although he never stopped them, he never participated, either.
But as he was getting out of the car in the Learys’ driveway—a one-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by fallow, dark fields— Boyd snatched his forearm and pulled him close, startling him into alertness.
“Don’t fuck this up, St. Francis,” he said. “This is your chance, do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” he’d said.
“Go on, then,” said Boyd, and released him, and he walked toward Mrs. Leary, who was standing in the doorway.
Mrs. Leary was fat, but her husband was simply big, with large red hands that looked like weaponry. They had two daughters, both in their twenties and both married, and they thought it might be nice to have a boy in the house, someone who could help Mr. Leary—who repaired large-scale farm machinery and also farmed himself—with the field work. They chose him, they said, because he seemed quiet, and polite, and they didn’t want someone rowdy; they wanted someone hardworking, someone who would appreciate what having a home and a house meant. They had read in the binder that he knew how to work, and how to clean, and that he did well on the home’s farm.
“Now, your name, that’s an unusual name,” Mrs. Leary said. He had never thought it unusual, but “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“What would you think of maybe going by a different name?” Mrs. Leary asked. “Like, Cody, maybe? I’ve always liked the name Cody. It’s a little less—well, it’s a little more us, really.”
“I like Cody,” he said, although he didn’t really have an opinion about it: Jude, Cody, it didn’t matter to him what he was called.
“Well, good,” said Mrs. Leary.
That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as
one person and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him, Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.
The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have. He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn’t difficult: he got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed, at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn’t care for
—the boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised before he was allowed to go to bed—they were hardly worse than the things he didn’t like about the home, they were things he knew he could do without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense, would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened of Mr. Leary’s large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there were at the home.
When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how he’d done, confident, even. “How’d it go?” Boyd asked him, and he was able to answer, honestly, “Good.”
He was certain, from Mrs. Leary’s last words to him—“I have a feeling we’ll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody”—that they would call on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary, and the home would be one more place he’d put behind him. But then Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the following week, and he wasn’t called to the headmaster’s office, and his letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the dormitory remained a
long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.
Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop, where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd walking out the door.
“Christ,” Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he turned. “Shouldn’t you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?”
“Please,” he begged. “Please tell me—are the Learys coming to get me?” But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd’s face.
“They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. “It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.
“Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.
But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,” he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said, “in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.
“How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?” forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”
That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.
He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the
things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.
But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor—stuck like an ax head into a tree stump—there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem’s calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he’d have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself—first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face—until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.
He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his
most recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running late.
“Take your time,” he said.
Andy studied him, squinting a bit. “I won’t be long,” he said, finally, and then was gone.
A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. “Hi, Jude,” she said.
“Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?”
He didn’t want to, but he knew it wasn’t Callie’s fault or decision, and so he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn’t look at the number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the room.
“So,” Andy said after he’d come in, studying his chart. “What should we talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. “Why do you think I’ve been cutting myself excessively?”
“I can always tell,” Andy said. “You get sort of—sort of bluish under the eyes. You’re probably not even conscious of it. And you’re wearing your sweater over the gown. Whenever it’s bad, you do that.”
“Oh,” he said. He hadn’t been aware.
They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked, “When’s the date?”
“February fifteenth.” “Ah,” said Andy. “Soon.” “Yes.”
“What’re you worried about?”
“I’m worried—” he began, and then stopped, and tried again. “I’m worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won’t want to—” He stopped. “And I don’t know which is worse: him finding out before, which means this definitely won’t happen, or him finding out after, and realizing I’ve deceived him.” He sighed; he hadn’t been able to articulate this until now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.
“Jude,” Andy said, carefully, “what do you think is so bad about yourself that he wouldn’t want to adopt you?”
“Andy,” he pled, “don’t make me say it.” “But I honestly don’t know!”
“The things I’ve done,” he said, “the diseases I have from them.” He stumbled on, hating himself. “It’s disgusting; I’m disgusting.”
“Jude,” Andy began, and as he spoke, he paused between every few words, and he could feel Andy picking his way across a mine-pocked lawn, so deliberately and slowly was he going. “You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe.”
Andy looked at him. “And even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you
had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of.” He sighed. “Can you try to believe me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I know,” Andy said. They were quiet. “I wish you’d see a therapist, Jude,” he added, and his voice was sad. He couldn’t respond, and after a few minutes, Andy stood up. “Well,” he said, sounding determined, “let’s see them,” and he took off his sweater and held out his arms.
He could tell by Andy’s expression that it was worse than he had anticipated, and when he looked down and tried to view himself as something unfamiliar, he could see in flashes what Andy did: the gobs of bandages applied at intervals to the fresh cuts, the half-healed cuts, with their fragile stitchings of still-forming scar tissue, the one infected cut, which had developed a chunky cap of dried pus.
“So,” Andy said after a long silence, after he’d almost finished his right arm, cleaning out the infected cut and painting antibiotic cream on the others, “what about your extreme weight loss?”
“I don’t think it’s extreme.”
“Jude,” said Andy, “twelve pounds in not quite eight weeks is extreme, and you didn’t exactly have twelve pounds to spare to begin with.”
“I’m just not hungry,” he said, finally.
Andy didn’t say anything else until he finished both his arms, and then sighed and sat down again and started scribbling on his pad. “I want you to eat three full meals a day, Jude,” he said, “plus one of the things on this list. Every day. That’s in addition to standard meals, do you understand me? Or I’m going to call your crew and make them sit with you every mealtime and watch you eat, and you don’t want that, believe me.” He ripped the page off the pad and handed it to him. “And then I want you back here next week. No excuses.”
He looked at the list—PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH. CHEESE SANDWICH. AVOCADO SANDWICH. 3 EGGS (WITH YOLKS!!!!).
BANANA SMOOTHIE—and tucked it into his pants pocket.
“And the other thing I want you to do is this,” said Andy. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and want to cut yourself, I want you to call me instead. I don’t care what time it is, you call me, okay?” He nodded. “I mean it, Jude.”
“I’m sorry, Andy,” he said.
“I know you are,” said Andy. “But you don’t need to be sorry—not
to me, anyway.”
“To Harold,” he said.
“No,” Andy corrected. “Not to Harold, either. Just to yourself.”
He went home and ate away at a banana until it turned to dirt in his mouth and then changed and continued washing the living-room windows, which he had begun the night before. He rubbed at them, inching the sofa closer so he could stand atop one of its arms, ignoring the twinges in his back as he climbed up and down, lugging the bucket of dirtied gray water slowly to the tub. After he’d finished the living room and Willem’s room, he was in so much pain that he had to crawl to the bathroom, and after cutting himself, he rested, holding his arm above his head and wrapping the mat about him. When his phone rang, he sat up, disoriented, before groaningly moving to his bedroom—where the clock read three a.m.—and listening to a very cranky (but alert) Andy.
“I called too late,” Andy guessed. He didn’t say anything. “Listen, Jude,” Andy continued, “you don’t stop this and I really am going to have you committed. And I’ll call Harold and tell him why. You can count on it.” He paused. “And besides which,” he added, “aren’t you tired, Jude? You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know. You don’t need to.”
He didn’t know what it was—maybe it was just the calmness of Andy’s voice, the steadiness with which he made his promise that made him realize that he was serious this time in a way he hadn’t been before; or maybe it was just the realization that yes, he was tired, so tired that he was willing, finally, to accept someone else’s orders—but over the next week, he did as he was told. He ate his meals, even as the food transformed itself by some strange alchemy to mud, to offal: he made himself chew and swallow, chew and swallow. They weren’t big meals, but they were meals. Andy called every night at midnight, and Willem called every morning at six (he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and Willem never volunteered, whether Andy had contacted him). The hours in between were the most difficult, and although he couldn’t cease cutting himself entirely, he did limit it: two cuts, and he stopped. In the absence of cutting, he felt himself being tugged toward earlier punishments—before he had been taught to cut himself, there was a period in which he would toss himself against the wall outside the motel room he shared with Brother Luke again and again until he sagged, exhausted, to the ground, and his left side was permanently stained blue and purple and brown with
bruises. He didn’t do that now, but he remembered the sensation, the satisfying slam of his body against the wall, the awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.
On Friday he saw Andy, who wasn’t approving (he hadn’t gained any weight), but also didn’t lecture him (nor had he lost any), and the next day he flew to Boston. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, not even Harold. Julia, he knew, was at a conference in Costa Rica; but Harold, he knew, would be home.
Julia had given him a set of keys six years ago, when he was arriving for Thanksgiving at a time when both she and Harold happened to have department meetings, so he let himself into the house and poured a glass of water, looking out at the back garden as he drank. It was just before noon, and Harold would still be at his tennis game, so he went to the living room to wait for him. But he fell asleep, and when he woke, it was to Harold shaking his shoulder and urgently repeating his name.
“Harold,” he said, sitting up, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; I should’ve called.”
“Jesus,” Harold said, panting; he smelled cold and sharp. “Are you all right, Jude? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, hearing before he said it how absurd his explanation was, “I just thought I’d stop by.”
“Well,” said Harold, momentarily silent. “It’s good to see you.” He sat in his chair and looked at him. “You’ve been something of a stranger these past few weeks.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Harold shrugged. “No apologies necessary. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”
Harold tilted his head. “You don’t look too good.”
He smiled. “I’ve had the flu.” He gazed up at the ceiling, as if his lines might be written there. “The forsythia’s falling down, you know.”
“I know. It’s been a windy winter.” “I’ll help you stake it, if you want.”
Harold looked at him for a long moment then, his mouth slightly moving, as if he was both trying and not trying to speak. Finally he said, “Yeah. Let’s go do that.”
Outside it was abruptly, insultingly cold, and both of them began sniffling. He positioned the stake and Harold hammered it into the
ground, although the earth was frozen and chipped up into pottery-like shards as he did. After they’d gotten it deep enough, Harold handed him lengths of twine, and he tied the center stalks of the bush to the stake, snugly enough so they’d be secure, but not so snug that they’d be constricted. He worked slowly, making sure the knots were tight, snapping off a few branches that were too bent to recover.
“Harold,” he said, when he was halfway down the bush, “I wanted to talk to you about something, but—I don’t know where to begin.” Stupid, he told himself. This is such a stupid idea. You were so stupid to think any of this could ever happen. He opened his mouth to continue and then shut it, and then opened it again: he was a fish, dumbly blowing bubbles, and he wished he had never come, had never begun speaking.
“Jude,” said Harold, “tell me. Whatever it is.” He stopped. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No,” he said. “No, nothing like that.” They were silent. “Are you?” “No, of course not.”
He finished the last tie and brought himself to his feet, Harold deliberately not helping him. “I don’t want to tell you this,” he said, and looked down at the forsythia, its bare twiggy ugliness. “But I have to because—because I don’t want to be deceitful with you. But Harold
—I think you think I’m one kind of person, and I’m not.” Harold was quiet. “What kind of person do I think you are?” “A good person,” he said. “Someone decent.”
“Well,” said Harold, “you’re right. I do.”
“But—I’m not,” he said, and could feel his eyes grow hot, despite the cold. “I’ve done things that—that good people don’t do,” he continued, lamely. “And I just think you should know that about me. That I’ve done terrible things, things I’m ashamed of, and if you knew, you’d be ashamed to know me, much less be related to me.”
“Jude,” Harold said at last. “I can’t imagine anything you might have done that would change the way I feel about you. I don’t care what you did before. Or rather—I do care; I would love to hear about your life before we met. But I’ve always had the feeling, the very strong feeling, that you never wanted to discuss it.” He stopped and waited. “Do you want to discuss it now? Do you want to tell me?”
He shook his head. He wanted to and didn’t want to, both. “I can’t,” he said. Beneath the small of his back, he felt the first unfurlings of discomfort, a blackened seed spreading its thorned branches. Not now, he begged himself, not now, a plea as impossible as the plea he really
meant: Not now, not ever.
“Well,” Harold sighed, “in the absence of specifics, I won’t be able to reassure you specifically, so I’m just going to give you a blanket, all-encompassing reassurance, which I hope you’ll believe. Jude: whatever it is, whatever you did, I promise you, whether you someday tell me or not, that it will never make me regret wanting or having you as a member of my family.” He took a deep breath, held his right hand before him. “Jude St. Francis, as your future parent, I hereby absolve you of—of everything for which you seek absolution.”
And was this what he in fact wanted? Absolution? He looked at Harold’s face, so familiar he could remember its every furrow when he closed his eyes, and which, despite the flourishes and formality of his declaration, was serious and unsmiling. Could he believe Harold? The hardest thing is not finding the knowledge, Brother Luke once said to him after he’d confessed he was having difficulty believing in God. The hardest thing is believing it. He felt he had failed once again: failed to confess properly, failed to determine in advance what he wanted to hear in response. Wouldn’t it have been easier in a way if Harold had told him that he was right, that they should perhaps rethink the adoption? He would have been devastated, of course, but it would have been an old sensation, something he understood. In Harold’s refusal to let him go lay a future he couldn’t imagine, one in which someone might really want him for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded in a foreign land, with no one there to guide him home.
Harold was waiting for his reply, but the pain was now unignorable,
and he knew he had to rest. “Harold,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I think
—I think I’d better go lie down for a while.” “Go,” said Harold, unoffended, “go.”
In his room, he lies down atop the comforter and closes his eyes, but even after the episode ends, he’s exhausted, and tells himself he’ll nap for just a few minutes and then get up again and see what Harold has in the house: if he has brown sugar, he’ll bake something—there was a bowl of persimmons in the kitchen, and maybe he’ll make a persimmon cake.
But he doesn’t wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and
then drapes a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six thirty, and Harold’s conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels Harold’s hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling him his flight’s leaving in a few hours.
Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.
He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.
|
The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.
Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he’d cook, and he spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking that night—the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia likes; the sourdough bread they both like—and picks through ten pounds of crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day all he’ll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he’ll roast and serve over ice cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold and Julia’s favorite dishes, and he is glad to make them, glad to have
something to give them, however small. Throughout the evening, Harold and Julia wander in and out, and although he tells them not to, they wash dishes and pans as he dirties them, pour him glasses of water and wine, and ask if they can help him, even though he tells them they should relax. Finally they leave for bed, and although he promises them that he will as well, he instead stays up, the kitchen bright and silent around him, singing quietly, his hands moving to keep the mania at bay.
The past few days have been very difficult, some of the most difficult he can remember, so difficult that one night he even called Andy after their midnight check-in, and when Andy offered to meet him at a diner at two a.m., he accepted the offer and went, desperate to get himself out of the apartment, which suddenly seemed full of irresistible temptations: razors, of course, but also knives and scissors and matches, and staircases to throw himself down. He knows that if he goes to his room now, he won’t be able to stop himself from heading directly to the bathroom, where he has long kept a bag, its contents identical to the one at Lispenard Street, taped to the sink’s undercarriage: his arms ache with yearning, and he is determined not to give in. He has both dough and batter left over, and decides he’ll make a tart with pine nuts and cranberries, and maybe a round flat cake glazed with slices of oranges and honey: by the time both are done baking, it will almost be daylight and he will be past danger and will have successfully saved himself.
Malcolm and JB will both be at the courthouse the next day; they’re
taking the morning flight. But Willem, who was supposed to be there, won’t; he called the week before to say filming had been delayed, and he’ll now be coming home on the eighteenth, not the fourteenth. He knows there’s nothing to be done about this, but still, he mourns Willem’s absence almost fiercely: a day like this without Willem won’t be a day at all. “Call me the second it’s over,” Willem had said. “It’s killing me I can’t be there.”
He did, however, invite Andy in one of their midnight conversations, which he grew to enjoy: in those talks, they discussed everyday things, calming things, normal things—the new Supreme Court justice nominee; the most recent health-care bill (he approved of it; Andy didn’t); a biography of Rosalind Franklin they’d both read (he liked it; Andy didn’t); the apartment that Andy and Jane were renovating. He liked the novelty of hearing Andy say, with real outrage, “Jude, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me!,” which he was
used to hearing when being confronted about his cutting, or his amateurish bandaging skills, instead applied to his opinions about movies, and the mayor, and books, and even paint colors. Once he learned that Andy wouldn’t use their talks as an occasion to reprimand him, or lecture him, he relaxed into them, and even managed to learn some more things about Andy himself: Andy spoke of his twin, Beckett, also a doctor, a heart surgeon, who lived in San Francisco and whose boyfriend Andy hated and was scheming to get Beckett to dump; and how Jane’s parents were giving them their house on Shelter Island; and how Andy had been on the football team in high school, the very Americanness of which had made his parents uneasy; and how he had spent his junior year abroad in Siena, where he dated a girl from Lucca and gained twenty pounds. It wasn’t that he and Andy never spoke of Andy’s personal life—they did to some extent after every appointment—but on the phone he talked more, and he was able to pretend that Andy was only his friend and not his doctor, despite the fact that this illusion was belied by the call’s very premise.
“Obviously, you shouldn’t feel obligated to come,” he added,
hastily, after inviting Andy to the court date.
“I’d love to come,” Andy said. “I was wondering when I’d be invited.”
Then he felt bad. “I just didn’t want you to feel you had to spend even more time with your weird patient who already makes your life so difficult,” he said.
“You’re not just my weird patient, Jude,” Andy said. “You’re also my weird friend.” He paused. “Or at least, I hope you are.”
He smiled into the phone. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m honored to be your weird friend.”
And so Andy was coming as well: he’d fly back that afternoon, but Malcolm and JB would spend the night, and they’d all leave together on Saturday.
Upon arriving, he had been surprised, and then moved, to see how thoroughly Harold and Julia had cleaned the house, and how proud they were of the work they’d done. “Look!” one or the other kept saying, triumphantly pointing at a surface—a table, a chair, a corner of floor—that would normally have been obscured by stacks of books or journals, but which was now clear of all clutter. There were flowers everywhere—winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their
sweet, faintly fecal fragrance—and the books in their cases had been straightened and even the nap on the sofa had been repaired.
“And look at this, Jude,” Julia had said, linking her arm through his, and showing him the celadon-glazed dish on the hallway table, which had been broken for as long as he’d known them, the shards that had snapped off its side permanently nested in the bowl and furred with dust. But now it had been fixed, and washed and polished.
“Wow,” he said when presented with each new thing, grinning idiotically, happy because they were so happy. He didn’t care, he never had, whether their place was clean or not—they could’ve lived surrounded by Ionic columns of old New York Times, with colonies of rats squeaking plumply underfoot for all he cared—but he knew they thought he minded, and had mistaken his incessant, tedious cleaning of everything as a rebuke, as much as he’d tried, and tried, to assure them it wasn’t. He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things, but when he was in college, he had cleaned for the others to express his gratitude: it was something he could do and had always done, and they gave him so much and he gave them so little. JB, who enjoyed living in squalor, never noticed. Malcolm, who had grown up with a housekeeper, always noticed and always thanked him. Only Willem hadn’t liked it. “Stop it, Jude,” he’d said one day, grabbing his wrist as he picked JB’s dirty shirts off the floor, “you’re not our maid.” But he hadn’t been able to stop, not then, and not now.
By the time he wipes off the countertops a final time, it’s almost
four thirty, and he staggers to his room, texts Willem not to call him, and falls into a brief, brutal sleep. When he wakes, he makes the bed and showers and dresses and returns to the kitchen, where Harold is standing at the counter, reading the paper and drinking coffee.
“Well,” Harold says, looking up at him. “Don’t you look handsome.” He shakes his head, reflexively, but the truth is that he’d bought a new tie, and had his hair cut the day before, and he feels, if not handsome, then at least neat and presentable, which he always tries to be. He rarely sees Harold in a suit, but he’s wearing one as well, and
the solemnity of the occasion makes him suddenly shy.
Harold smiles at him. “You were busy last night, clearly. Did you sleep at all?”
He smiles back. “Enough.”
“Julia’s getting ready,” says Harold, “but I have something for you.” “For me?”
“Yes,” says Harold, and picks up a small leather box, about the size of a baseball, from beside his coffee mug and holds it out to him. He opens it and inside is Harold’s watch, with its round white face and sober, forthright numbers. The band has been replaced with a new black crocodile one.
“My father gave this to me when I turned thirty,” says Harold, when he doesn’t say anything. “It was his. And you are still thirty, so I at least haven’t messed up the symmetry of this.” He takes the box from him and removes the watch and reverses it so he can see the initials engraved on the back of the face: SS/HS/JSF. “Saul Stein,” says Harold. “That was my father. And then HS for me, and JSF for you.” He returns the watch to him.
He runs his thumbtip lightly over the initials. “I can’t accept this, Harold,” he says, finally.
“Sure you can,” Harold says. “It’s yours, Jude. I already bought a new one; you can’t give it back.”
He can feel Harold looking at him. “Thank you,” he says, at last. “Thank you.” He can’t seem to say anything else.
“It’s my pleasure,” says Harold, and neither of them says anything for a few seconds, until he comes to himself and unclasps his watch and fastens Harold’s—his, now—around his wrist, holding his arm up for Harold, who nods. “Nice,” he says. “It looks good on you.”
He’s about to reply with something (what?), when he hears, and then sees, JB and Malcolm, both in suits as well.
“The door was unlocked,” JB says, as Malcolm sighs. “Harold!” he hugs him, “Congratulations! It’s a boy!”
“I’m sure Harold’s never heard that one before,” says Malcolm, waving hello at Julia, who’s entering the kitchen.
Andy arrives next, and then Gillian; they’ll meet Laurence at the courthouse.
The doorbell rings again. “Are we expecting someone else?” he asks Harold, who shrugs: “Can you get it, Jude?”
So he opens the door, and there is Willem. He stares at Willem for a second, and then, before he can tell himself to be calm, Willem springs at him like a civet cat and hugs him so hard that for a moment he fears he will tip over. “Are you surprised?” Willem says into his ear, and he can tell from his voice that he’s smiling. It’s the second time that morning he’s unable to speak.
The court will be the third time. They take two cars, and in his (driven by Harold, with Malcolm in the front seat), Willem explains
that his departure date actually had been changed; but when it was changed back again, he didn’t tell him, only the others, so that his appearance would be a surprise. “Yeah, thanks for that, Willem,” says Malcolm, “I had to monitor JB like the CIA to make sure he didn’t say anything.”
They go not to the family courts but to the appeals court on Pemberton Square. Inside Laurence’s courtroom—Laurence unfamiliar in his robes: it is a day of everyone in costume—he and Harold and Julia make their promises to each other, Laurence smiling the entire time, and then there is a flurry of picture-taking, with everyone taking photos of everyone else in various arrangements and configurations. He is the only one who doesn’t take any at all, as he’s in every one.
He’s standing with Harold and Julia, waiting for Malcolm to figure out his enormous, complicated camera, when JB calls his name, and all three of them look over, and JB takes the shot. “Got it,” says JB. “Thanks.”
“JB, this’d better not be for—” he begins, but then Malcolm announces he’s ready, and the three of them swivel obediently toward him.
They’re back at the house by noon, and soon people start arriving— Gillian and Laurence and James and Carey, and Julia’s colleagues and Harold’s, some of whom he hasn’t seen since he had classes with them in law school. His old voice teacher comes, as does Dr. Li, his math professor, and Dr. Kashen, his master’s adviser, and Allison, his former boss at Batter, and a friend of all of theirs from Hood Hall, Lionel, who teaches physics at Wellesley. People come and go all afternoon, going to and from classes, meetings, trials. He had initially been reluctant to have such a gathering, with so many people—wouldn’t his acquisition of Harold and Julia as parents provoke, even encourage, questions about why he was parentless at all?—but as the hours pass, and no one asks any questions, no one demands to know why he needs a new set anyway, he finds himself forgetting his fears. He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself. Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.
There is no etiquette for such a party, and so their guests have
invented their own: Malcolm’s parents have sent a magnum of champagne and a case of super Tuscan from a vineyard they partly
own outside of Montalcino. JB’s mother sent him with a burlap sack of heirloom narcissus bulbs for Harold and Julia, and a card for him; his aunts have sent an orchid. The U.S. Attorney sends an enormous crate of fruit, with a card signed by Marshall and Citizen and Rhodes as well. People bring wine and flowers. Allison, who had years ago revealed him to Harold as the creator of the bacteria cookies, brings four dozen decorated with his original designs, which makes him blush and Julia shout with delight. The rest of the day is a binging on all things sweet: everything he does that day is perfect, everything he says comes out right. People reach for him and he doesn’t move or shy away from them; they touch him and he lets them. His face hurts from smiling. Decades of approbation, of affection are stuffed into this one afternoon, and he gorges on it, reeling from the strangeness of it all. He overhears Andy arguing with Dr. Kashen about a massive new proposed landfill project in Gurgaon, watches Willem listen patiently to his old torts professor, eavesdrops on JB explaining to Dr. Li why the New York art scene is irretrievably fucked, spies Malcolm and Carey trying to extract the largest of the crab cakes without toppling the rest of the stack.
By the early evening, everyone has left, and it is just the six of them
sprawled out in the living room: he and Harold and Julia and Malcolm and JB and Willem. The house is once again messy. Julia mentions dinner, but everyone—even he—has eaten too much, and no one, not even JB, wants to think about it. JB has given Harold and Julia a painting of him, saying, before he hands it over to them, “It’s not based on a photo, just from sketches.” The painting, which JB has done in watercolors and ink on a sheet of stiff paper, is of his face and neck, and is in a different style than he associates with JB’s work: sparer and more gestural, in a somber, grayed palette. In it, his right hand is hovering over the base of his throat, as if he’s about to grab it and throttle himself, and his mouth is slightly open, and his pupils are very large, like a cat’s in gloom. It’s undeniably him—he even recognizes the gesture as his own, although he can’t, in the moment, remember what it’s meant to signal, or what emotion it accompanies. The face is slightly larger than life-size, and all of them stare at it in silence.
“It’s a really good piece,” JB says at last, sounding pleased. “Let me
know if you ever want to sell it, Harold,” and finally, everyone laughs. “JB, it’s so, so beautiful—thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when
confronted with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.
“Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.
“Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.
“This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold. “I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them. “They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know—I think he’s probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and stately, just like our Jude.”
“I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on fire?”
“It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,” he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”
“How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.
“The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us—when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did. “Willem, thank you,” Julia says. “I love him.”
“Me too,” says Harold. “Guys, this is all really sweet of you.”
He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it’s come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish. Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of
Schubert’s early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon. But Harold couldn’t remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he’s always too shy to do so. Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption. Yet he can’t bring himself to throw it away. And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he’s written each of them, between two books—a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise—on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.
Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he’s the
only one who can tolerate JB’s snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he’ll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.
“ ’Night, lovers,” JB calls down the staircase at them.
As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn’t remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress’s son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn’t be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn’t he afraid of getting fat? Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.
But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, “The apartment’s really fucking clean.”
“I know,” he winces. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Willem says. “But Jude—was it really awful?”
He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. “It wasn’t great,” he allows, and then, because he doesn’t want Willem to feel
guilty, “but it wasn’t horrible.”
They are both quiet. “I wish I could’ve been there,” Willem says. “You were,” he assures him. “But Willem—I missed you.”
Very quietly, Willem says, “I missed you, too.” “Thank you for coming,” he says.
“Of course I was going to come, Judy,” Willem says from across the room. “I would’ve no matter what.”
He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. “Do you think it went all right?” he asks.
“Are you serious?” Willem says, and he can hear him sit up. “Did you see Harold’s face? He looked like the Green Party just elected its first president and the Second Amendment was eliminated and the Red Sox were canonized, all in the same day.”
He laughs. “You really think so?”
“I know so. He was really, really happy, Jude. He loves you.”
He smiles into the dark. He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over, an endless loop of promises and avowals, but he knows such wishes are self-indulgent, and so he changes the subject, and they talk of little things, nothings, until first Willem, and then he, fall asleep.
A week later, his giddiness has mellowed into something else: a contentment, a stillness. For the past week, his nights have been unbroken stretches of sleep in which he dreams not of the past but of the present: silly dreams about work, sunnily absurd dreams about his friends. It is the first complete week in the now almost two decades since he began cutting himself that he hasn’t woken in the middle of the night, since he’s felt no need for the razor. Maybe he is cured, he dares to think. Maybe this is what he needed all along, and now that it’s happened, he is better. He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.
He is back in their apartment. Willem is with him. He has brought
back with him a second statue of Saint Jude, which they keep in the kitchen, but this Saint Jude is bigger and hollow and ceramic, with a slot chiseled into the back of his head, and they feed their change through it at the end of the day; when it’s full, they decide, they’ll go buy a really good bottle of wine and drink it, and then they’ll begin
again.
He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.
That first Saturday after he returns from Boston, he goes up to
Felix’s house as usual, where Mr. Baker has requested he come a few minutes early. They talk, briefly, and then he goes downstairs to find Felix, who is waiting for him in the music room, plinking at the piano keys.
“So, Felix,” he says, in the break they take after piano and Latin but before German and math, “your father tells me you’re going away to school next year.”
“Yeah,” says Felix, looking down at his feet. “In September. Dad went there, too.”
“I heard,” he says. “How do you feel about it?”
Felix shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, at last. “Dad says you’re going to catch me up this spring and summer.”
“I will,” he promises. “You’re going to be so ready for that school that they won’t know what hit them.” Felix’s head is still bent, but he sees the tops of his cheeks fatten a little and knows he’s smiling, just a bit.
He doesn’t know what makes him say what he does next: Is it empathy, as he hopes, or is it a boast, an alluding aloud to the improbable and wondrous turns his life has taken over the past month? “You know, Felix,” he begins, “I never had friends, either, not for a very long time, not until I was much older than you.” He can sense, rather than see, Felix become alert, can feel him listening. “I wanted them, too,” he continues, going slowly now, because he wants to make sure his words come out right. “And I always wondered if I would ever find any, and how, and when.” He traces his index finger
across the dark walnut tabletop, up the spine of Felix’s math textbook, down his cold glass of water. “And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me—everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am.
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
They’re both quiet for a long time, listening to the click of the metronome, which is faulty and sometimes starts ticking spontaneously, even after he’s stopped it. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing. Far more worth doing than, say, Latin.” And now Felix looks up at him and smiles, and he smiles back. “Okay?” he asks him.
“Okay,” Felix says, still smiling.
“What do you want to do next, German or math?” “Math,” says Felix.
“Good choice,” he says, and pulls Felix’s math book over to him. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time.” And Felix turns to the page and they begin.
