Page 99 of A Little Life
Kit’s office managed to keep the story quiet for two weeks, and by the time the first article was published, he and Jude were on a plane to Hong Kong to see Charlie Ma, Jude’s old roommate from Hereford Street, and from there to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He tried not to check his messages while he was on vacation, but Kit had gotten a call from a writer atNew Yorkmagazine, and so he knew there would be a story. He was in Hanoi when the piece was published: Kit forwarded it to him without comment, and he skimmed it, quickly, when Jude was in the bathroom. “Ragnarsson is on vacation and was unavailable for comment, but his representative confirmed the actor’s relationship with Jude St. Francis, a highly regarded and prominent litigator with the powerhouse firm of Rosen Pritchard and Klein and a close friend since they were roommates their freshman year of college,” he read, and “Ragnarsson is the highest-profile actor by far to ever willinglydeclare himself in a gay relationship,” followed, obituary-like, with a recapping of his films and various quotes from various agents and publicists congratulating him on his bravery while simultaneously predicting the almost-certain diminishment of his career, and nice quotes from actors and directors he knew promising his revelation wouldn’t change a thing, and a concluding quote from an unnamed studio executive who said that his strength had never been as a romantic lead anyway, and so he’d probably be fine. At the end of the story, there was a link to a picture of him with Jude at the opening of Richard’s show at the Whitney in September.
When Jude came out, he handed him the phone and watched him read the article as well. “Oh, Willem,” he said, and then, later, looking stricken, “My name’s in here,” and for the first time, it occurred to him that Jude may have wanted him to keep quiet as much for his own privacy as for Willem’s.
“Don’t you think you should ask Jude first if I can confirm his identity?” Kit had asked him when they were deciding what he’d say to the reporter on Willem’s behalf.
“No, it’s fine,” he’d said. “He won’t mind.”
Kit had been quiet. “He might, Willem.”
But he really hadn’t thought he would. Now, though, he wondered if he had been arrogant.What, he asked himself,just because you’re okay with it, you thought he would be, too?
“Willem, I’m sorry,” Jude said, and although he knew that he should reassure Jude, who was probably feeling guilty, and apologize to him as well, he wasn’t in the mood for it, not then.
“I’m going for a run,” he announced, and although he wasn’t looking at him, he could feel Jude nod.
It was so early that outside, the city was still quiet and still cool, the air a dirtied white, with only a few cars gliding down the streets. The hotel was near the old French opera house, which he ran around, and then back to the hotel and toward the colonial-era district, past vendors squatted near large, flat, woven-bamboo baskets piled with tiny, bright green limes, and stacks of cut herbs that smelled of lemon and roses and peppercorns. As the streets grew threadlike, he slowed to a walk, and turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools on which customers sat,eating quickly before hurrying back to the mouth of the alley, where they got on their bikes and pedaled away. He stopped at the far end of the alley, waiting to let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes, their hot, steamed-milk fragrance filling his nostrils, and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh that he could hear them gulping, could see their eyes rolling desperately back in their sockets. Above him, necklaces of cages were strung like lanterns, each containing a vibrant, chirping bird. He had a little cash with him, and he bought Jude one of the herb bouquets; it looked like rosemary but smelled pleasantly soapy, and although he didn’t know what it was, he thought Jude might.
He was so naïve, he thought as he made his slow way back to the hotel: about his career, about Jude. Why did he always think he knew what he was doing? Why did he think he could do whatever he wanted and everything would work out the way he imagined it? Was it a failure of creativity, or arrogance, or (as he assumed) simple stupidity? People, people he trusted and respected, were always warning him—Kit, about his career; Andy, about Jude; Jude, about himself—and yet he always ignored them. For the first time, he wondered if Kit was right, if Jude was right, if he would never work again, or at least not the kind of work he enjoyed. Would he resent Jude? He didn’t think so; he hoped not. But he had never thought he would have to find out, not really.
But greater than that fear was the one he was rarely able to ask himself: What if the things he was making Jude do weren’t good for him after all? The day before, they had taken a shower together for the first time, and Jude had been so silent afterward, so deep inside one of his fugue states, his eyes so flat and blank, that Willem had been momentarily frightened. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but Willem had coerced him, and in the shower, Jude had been rigid and grim, and Willem had been able to tell from the set of Jude’s mouth that he was enduring it, that he was waiting for it to be over. But he hadn’t let him get out of the shower; he had made him stay. He had behaved (unintentionally, but who cared) like Caleb—he had made Jude do something he didn’t want to, and Jude had done it because he had told him to do it. “It’ll be good for you,” he’d said, and remembering this—although he hadbelieved it—he felt almost nauseated. No one had ever trusted him as unquestioningly as Jude did. But he had no idea what he was doing.
“Willem’s not a health-care professional,” he remembered Andy saying. “He’s an actor.” And although both he and Jude had laughed at the time, he wasn’t sure Andy was wrong. Who was he to try to direct Jude’s mental health? “Don’t trust me so much,” he wanted to say to Jude. But how could he? Wasn’t this what he had wanted from Jude, from this relationship? To be so indispensable to another person that that person couldn’t even comprehend his life without him? And now he had it, and the demands of the position terrified him. He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do. Was he able to do this? He thought of Jude’s horror of sex and knew that behind that horror lay another, one he had always surmised but had never inquired about: So what was he supposed to do? He wished there was someone who could tell him definitively if he was doing a good job or not; he wished he had someone guiding him in this relationship the way Kit guided him in his career, telling him when to take a risk and when to retreat, when to play Willem the Hero and when to be Ragnarsson the Terrible.
Oh, what am I doing?he chanted to himself as his feet smacked against the road, as he ran past men and women and children readying themselves for the day, past buildings as narrow as closets, past little shops selling stiff, brick-like pillows made of plaited straw, past a small boy cradling an imperious-looking lizard to his chest,What am I doing, oh what am I doing?
By the time he returned to the hotel an hour later, the sky was shading from white to a delicious, minty pale blue. The travel agent had booked them a suite with two beds, as always (he hadn’t remembered to have his assistant correct this), and Jude was lying on the one they had both slept in the night before, dressed for the day, reading, and when Willem came in, he stood and came over and hugged him.
“I’m all sweaty,” he mumbled, but Jude didn’t let go.
“It’s okay,” Jude said. He stepped back and looked at him, holding him by the arms. “It’s going to be fine, Willem,” he said, in the same firm, declarative way Willem sometimes heard him speak to clients on the phone. “It really is. I’ll always take care of you, you know that, right?”
He smiled. “I know,” he said, and what comforted him was not so much the reassurance itself, but that Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer. It reminded Willem that their relationship wasn’t a rescue mission after all, but an extension of their friendship, in which he had saved Jude and, just as often, Jude had saved him. For every time he had gotten to help Jude when he was in pain, or defend him against people asking too many questions, Jude had been there to listen to him worrying about his work, or to talk him out of his misery after he hadn’t gotten a part, or to (for three consecutive months, humiliatingly) pay his college loans when a job had fallen through and he didn’t have enough money to cover them himself. And yet somehow in the past seven months he had decided that he was going to repair Jude, that he was going to fix him, when really, he didn’t need fixing. Jude had always taken him at face value; he needed to try to do the same for him.
“I ordered breakfast,” Jude said. “I thought you might want some privacy. Do you want to take a shower?”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait until after we eat.” He took a breath. He could feel his anxiety fade; he could feel himself returning to who he was. “But would you sing with me?” Every morning for the past two months, they had been singing with each other in preparation forDuets. In the film, his character and the character’s wife led an annual Christmas pageant, and both he and the actress playing his wife would be performing their own vocals. The director had sent him a list of songs to work on, and Jude had been practicing with him: Jude took the melody, and he took the harmony.
“Sure,” Jude said. “Our usual?” For the past week, they’d been working on “Adeste Fideles,” which he would have to sing a cappella, and for the past week, he’d been pitching sharp at the exact same point, at“Venite adoremus,”right in the first stanza. He’d wince every time he did it, hearing the error, and Jude would shake his head at him and keep going, and he’d follow him until the end. “You’re overthinking it,” Jude would say. “When you go sharp, it’s because you’re concentrating too hard on staying on key; just don’t think about it, Willem, and you’ll get it.”
That morning, though, he felt certain he’d get it right. He gave Jude the bunch of herbs, which he was still holding, and Jude thanked him, pinching its little purple flowers between his fingers to release itsperfume. “I think it’s a kind of perilla,” he said, and held his fingers up for Willem to smell.
“Nice,” he said, and they smiled at each other.
And so Jude began, and he followed, and he made it through without going sharp. And at the end of the song, just after the last note, Jude immediately began singing the next song on the list, “For Unto Us a Child Is Born,” and after that, “Good King Wenceslas,” and again and again, Willem followed. His voice wasn’t as full as Jude’s, but he could tell in those moments that it was good enough, that it was maybe better than good enough: he could tell it sounded better with Jude’s, and he closed his eyes and let himself appreciate it.
They were still singing when the doorbell chimed with their breakfast, but as he was standing, Jude put his hand on his wrist, and they remained there, Jude sitting, he standing, until they had sung the last words of the song, and only after they had finished did he go to answer the door. Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.
2
THE FIRST TIMEWillem left him—this was some twenty months ago, two Januarys ago—everything went wrong. Within two weeks of Willem’s departure to Texas to begin filmingDuets, he’d had three episodes with his back (including one at the office, and another, this one at home, that had lasted a full two hours). The pain in his feet returned. A cut (from what, he had no idea) opened up on his right calf. And yet it had all been fine. “You’re so damncheerfulabout all of this,” Andy had said, when he was forced to make his second appointment with him in a week. “I’m suspicious.”
“Oh, well,” he’d said, even though he could hardly speak because the pain was so intense. “It happens, right?” That night, though, as he lay in bed, he thanked his body for keeping itself in check, for controlling itself for so long. For those months he secretly thought of as his and Willem’s courtship, he hadn’t used his wheelchair once. His episodes had been seldom, and brief, and never in Willem’s presence. He knew it was silly—Willem knew what was wrong with him, he had seen him at his worst—but he was grateful that as the two of them were beginning to view each other in a different way, he had been allowed a period of reinvention, a spell of being able to impersonate an able-bodied person. So when he was returned to his normal state, he didn’t tell Willem about what had been happening to him—he was so bored by the subject that he couldn’t imagine anyone else wouldn’t be as well—and by the time Willem came home in March, he was more or less better, walking again, the wound once again mostly under control.
Since that first time, Willem has been gone for extended periods four additional times—twice for shooting, twice for publicity tours—and each time, sometimes the very day Willem left, his body had broken itself somehow. But he had appreciated its sense of timing, its courtesy: it was as if his body, before his mind, had decided for him that he should pursue this relationship, and had done its part by removing as many obstacles and embarrassments as possible.
Now it is mid-September, and Willem is preparing to leave again. As has become their ritual—ever since the Last Supper, a lifetime ago—they spend the Saturday before Willem’s departure having dinner somewhere extravagant and then the rest of the night talking. Sunday they sleep late into the morning, and Sunday afternoon, they review practicalities: things to be done while Willem is away, outstanding matters to be resolved, decisions to be made. Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate and more mundane, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed reflection of that: Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.
He likes both types of conversations with Willem, but he appreciates the mundane ones more than he’d imagined he would. He had always felt bound to Willem by the big things—love; trust—but he likes being bound to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups. He is always reminded of a visit to Harold and Julia’s he’d made years ago, when he had come down with a terrible cold and had wound up spending most of the weekend on the living-room sofa, wrapped in a blanket and sliding in and out of sleep. That Saturday evening, they had watched a movie together, and at one point, Harold and Julia had begun talking about the Truro house’s kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull that he couldn’t follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.
