Page 45 of A Little Life
Mr. Irvine, hearing that they had broken up, shook his head (this had been at Flora’s baby shower). “You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’veachieved something. Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?”
But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) “Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?” he’d asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. “Look, Willem,” he said, “I think you’re doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.”
“And what if thisishow I want to live?”
“Well, then, that’s fine,” said Harold. He smiled at Willem. “You boys are living every man’s dream, you know. Probably even John Irvine’s.”
Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
More troubling to him than his possible immaturity, though, were his capabilities as a friend. He had always taken pride in the fact that he was a good friend; friendship had always been important to him. But was he actually any good at it? There was the unresolved JB problem, for example; a good friend would have figured something out. And a good friend would certainly have figured out a better way to deal with Jude, instead of telling himself, chantlike, that there simplywasno better way to deal with Jude, and if there was, if someone (Andy? Harold?Anyone?) could figure out a plan, then he’d be happy to follow it. But even as he told himself this, he knew that he was just making excuses for himself.
Andy knew it, too. Five years ago, Andy had called him in Sofia and yelled at him. It was his first shoot; it had been very late at night, and from the moment he answered the phone and heard Andy say, “For someone who claims to be such a great friend, you sure as fuck haven’t been around to prove it,” he had been defensive, because he knew Andy was right.
“Wait a minute,” he said, sitting upright, fury and fear clearing away any residual sleepiness.
“He’s sitting at home fucking cutting himself to shreds, he’s essentially all scar tissue now, he looks like a fucking skeleton, and where are you, Willem?” asked Andy. “And don’t say ‘I’m on a shoot.’ Why aren’t you checking in on him?”
“I call him every single day,” he began, yelling himself.
“Youknewthis was going to be hard for him,” Andy continued, talking over him. “Youknewthe adoption was going to make him feel more vulnerable. So why didn’t you put any safeguards in place, Willem? Why aren’t your other so-called friends doing anything?”
“Because he doesn’t want them to know that he cuts himself, that’s why! And Ididn’tknow it was going to be this hard for him, Andy,” he said. “He never tells me anything! How was I supposed to know?”
“Because! You’re supposed to! Fucking use your brain, Willem!”
“Don’t you fucking shout at me,” he shouted. “You’re just mad, Andy, because he’syourpatient and you can’t fucking figure out a way to make him better and so you’re blaming me.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, and in that instant they were both silent, panting into their phones. “Andy,” he began.
“Nope,” said Andy. “You’re right, Willem. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He was abruptly miserable, thinking of Jude in the ugly Lispenard Street bathroom. Before he had left, he had looked everywhere for Jude’s razors—beneath the toilet tank lid; in the back of the medicine cabinet; even under the drawers in the cupboard, taking each out and examining them from all angles—but couldn’t find them. But Andy was right—itwashis responsibility. He should have done a better job. And he hadn’t, so really, he had failed.
“No,” said Andy. “I’m really sorry, Willem; it’s totally inexcusable.And you’re right—I don’t know what to do.” He sounded tired. “It’s just that he’s had—he’s had such a shitty life, Willem. And he trusts you.”
“I know,” he mumbled. “I know he does.”
So they’d worked out a plan, and when he got back home, he’d monitored Jude more closely than he had before, a process that had proved singularly unrevealing. Indeed, in the month or so after the adoption, Jude was different than he’d seen him before. He couldn’t exactly define how: except on rare occasions, he wasn’t ever able to determine the days Jude was unhappy and the days he wasn’t. It wasn’t as if he normally moped around and was unemotive and then, suddenly, wasn’t—his fundamental behavior and rhythms and gestures were the same as before. But somethinghadchanged, and for a brief period, he had the strange sensation that the Jude he knew had been replaced by another Jude, and that this other Jude, this changeling, was someone of whom he could ask anything, who might have funny stories about pets and friends and scrapes from childhood, who wore long sleeves only because he was cold and not because he was trying to hide something. He was determined to take Jude at his word as often and as much as he could: after all, he wasn’t his doctor. He was his friend. His job was to treat him as he wanted to be treated, not as a subject to be spied on.
And so, after a certain point, his vigilance diminished, and eventually, that other Jude departed, back to the land of fairies and enchantments, and the Jude he knew reclaimed his space. But then, every once in a while, there would be troubling reminders that what he knew of Jude was only what Jude allowed him to know: he called Jude daily when he was away shooting, usually at a prearranged time, and one day last year he had called and they’d had a normal conversation, Jude sounding no different than he always did, and the two of them laughing at one of Willem’s stories, when he heard in the background the clear and unmistakable intercom announcement of the sort one only hears at hospitals: “Paging Dr. Nesarian, Dr. Nesarian to OR Three.”
“Jude?” he’d asked.
“Don’t worry, Willem,” he’d said. “I’m fine. I just have a slight infection; I think Andy’s gone a little crazy.”
“What kind of infection? Jesus, Jude!”
“A blood infection, but it’s nothing. Honestly, Willem, if it was serious, I would’ve told you.”
“No, you fucking wouldn’t have, Jude. A blood infectionisserious.”
He was silent. “I would’ve, Willem.”
“Does Harold know?”
“No,” he said, sharply. “And you’re not to tell him.”
Exchanges like this left him stunned and bothered, and he spent the rest of the evening trying to remember the previous week’s conversations, picking through them for clues that something might have been amiss and he might have simply, stupidly overlooked it. In more generous, wondering moments, he imagined Jude as a magician whose sole trick was concealment, but every year, he got better and better at it, so that now he had only to bring one wing of the silken cape he wore before his eyes and he would become instantly invisible, even to those who knew him best. But at other times, he bitterly resented this trick, the year-after-year exhaustion of keeping Jude’s secrets and yet never being given anything in return but the meanest smidges of information, of not being allowed the opportunity to even try to help him, to publicly worry about him. This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play. Everything Jude communicated to them indicated that he didn’t want to be helped. And yet he couldn’t accept that. The question was how you ignored someone’s request to be left alone—even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if youdon’ttry to help, then you’re not being a friend at all?Talk to me, he sometimes wanted to shout at Jude.Tell me things. Tell me what I need to do to make you talk to me.
