A Little Life (47 page)

But then one day he had called. It had been early February, almost seven months exactly after they had taken him to the hospital, and JB wanted to see him and talk. He suggested JB meet him at a café called Clementine that was near Willem’s building, and as he inched his way past the tightly spaced tables to a seat against the back wall, he realized why he had chosen this place: because it was too small, and too cramped, for JB to do his impression of him, and recognizing that, he felt foolish and cowardly.

He hadn’t seen JB in a long time, and JB leaned over the table and hugged him, lightly, carefully, before sitting down.

“You look great,” he said.

“Thanks,” said JB. “So do you.”

For twenty minutes or so, they discussed JB’s life: he had joined Crystal Meth Anonymous. He was going to live with his mother for another few months or so, and then decide what to do next. He was working again, on the same series he’d been working on before he went away.

“That’s great, JB,” he’d said. “I’m proud of you.”

And then there was a silence, and they both stared at other people. A few tables away from him was a girl wearing a long gold necklace she kept winding and unwinding around her fingers. He watched her talk to her friend, wrapping and unwrapping her necklace, until she looked up at him and he looked away.

“Jude,” JB began, “I wanted to tell you—completely sober—that I’m so sorry. It was horrible. It was—” He shook his head. “It was so cruel. I can’t—” He stopped again, and there was a silence. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are, JB,” he said, and he felt a sort of sadness he’d never felt before. Other people had been cruel to him, had made him feel awful, but they hadn’t been people he loved, they hadn’t been people he had always hoped saw him as someone whole and undamaged. JB had been the first.

And yet JB had also been one of the first to be his friend. When he’d had the episode in college that had made his roommates take him to the hospital where he had met Andy, it had been JB, Andy later told him, who had carried him in, and JB who had demanded that he be seen first, who had made such an upset in the ER that he had been ejected—but not before a doctor had been summoned.

He could see JB’s love for him in his paintings of him. He remembered one summer in Truro, watching JB sketch, and he had known from the expression on JB’s face, his little smile, and the lingering, delicate way his large forearm moved over the page, that he was drawing something he treasured, something that was dear to him. “What’re you drawing?” he’d asked, and JB had turned to him, and held up the notepad, and he had seen it was a picture of him, of his face.

Oh, JB, he thought. Oh, I will miss you.

“Can you forgive me, Jude?” JB asked, and looked at him.

He didn’t have words, he could only shake his head. “I can’t, JB,” he
said, finally. “I can’t. I can’t look at you without seeing—” He stopped. “I can’t,” he repeated. “I’m sorry, JB, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh,” said JB, and he swallowed. They sat there for a long time, not saying anything.

“I’ll always want wonderful things for you,” he said to JB, who nodded, slowly, not looking at him.

“Well,” JB said, finally, and stood, and he stood as well, and held his hand out to JB, who looked at it as if it were something alien, something he’d never seen before, examining it, squinting at it. And then at last he took it, but instead of shaking it, he lowered his lips to it and held them there. And then JB returned his hand to him and bumbled, nearly ran, out of the café, bumping against the little tables—“Sorry, sorry”—as he went.

He still sees JB now and then, mostly at parties, always in groups, and the two of them are polite and cordial with each other. They make small talk, which is the most painful thing. JB has never tried to hug or kiss him again; he comes over to him with his hand already outstretched, and he takes it, and they shake. He sent JB flowers—but with only the briefest of notes—when “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days” opened, and although he skipped the opening, he had gone to the gallery the following Saturday, on his way up to work, where he had spent an hour moving slowly from one painting to the next. JB had planned on including himself in this series, but in the end he hadn’t: there was just him, and Malcolm, and Willem. The paintings were beautiful, and as he looked at each, he thought not so much of the lives depicted in them, as of the life who created them—so many of these paintings were done when JB was at his most miserable, his most helpless, and yet they were self-assured, and subtle, and to see them was to imagine the empathy and tenderness and grace of the person who made them.

Malcolm has remained friends with JB, although he felt the need to apologize to him for this fact. “Oh no, Malcolm,” he’d said, once Malcolm had confessed, asking him for his permission. “You should absolutely still be friends with him.” He doesn’t want JB to be abandoned by them all; he doesn’t want Malcolm to feel he has to prove his loyalty to him by disavowing JB. He wants JB to have a friend who’s known him since he was eighteen, since he was the funniest, brightest person in the school, and he and everyone else knew it.

But Willem has never spoken to JB again. Once JB returned from
rehab, he called JB and said that he couldn’t be friends with him any longer, and that JB knew why. And that had been the end. He had been surprised by this, and saddened, because he had always loved watching JB and Willem laugh together, and spar with each other, and loved having them tell him about their lives: they were both so fearless, so bold; they were his emissaries to a less inhibited, more joyful world. They had always known how to take pleasure from everything, and he had always admired that in them, and had been grateful that they had been willing to share it with him.

“You know, Willem,” he said once, “I hope the reason you’re not talking to JB isn’t because of what happened with me.”

“Of course it’s because of what happened with you,” Willem had said.

“But that’s not a reason,” he’d said.

“Of course it is,” Willem had said. “There’s no better reason than that.”

He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship. Richard knows that he and JB and Willem and JB don’t talk any longer, but he doesn’t know why—or at least not from him. Now, years later, he no longer even blames JB; he simply cannot forget. He finds that some small but unignorable part of him is always wondering if JB will do it again; he finds he is scared of being left alone with him.

Two years ago, the first year JB didn’t come up to Truro, Harold asked him if anything was the matter. “You never talk about him anymore,” he said.

“Well,” he began, not knowing how to continue. “We’re not really—we’re not really friends any longer, Harold.”

“I’m sorry, Jude,” Harold said after a silence, and he nodded. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“No,” he said, concentrating on snapping the tops off the radishes. “It’s a long story.”

“Can it be repaired, do you think?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Harold sighed. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he repeated. “It must be bad.” He was quiet. “I always loved seeing you four together, you know. You had something special.”

He nodded, again. “I know,” he said. “I agree. I miss him.”

He misses JB still; he expects he always will. He especially misses JB at events like this wedding, where the four of them would once have spent the night talking and laughing about everyone else, enviable and near obnoxious in their shared pleasure, their pleasure in one another. But now there are JB and Willem, nodding at each other across the table, and Malcolm, talking very fast to try to obscure any tension, and the other three people at the table, whom the four of them—he will always think of them as the four of them; the four of us—start interrogating with inappropriate intensity, laughing loudly at their jokes, using them as unwitting human shields. He is seated next to JB’s boyfriend—the nice white boy he had always wanted—who is in his twenties and has just gotten his nursing degree and is clearly besotted with JB. “What was JB like in college?” asks Oliver, and he says, “Very much the way he is today: funny, and sharp, and outrageous, and smart. And talented. He was always, always talented.”

“Hmm,” says Oliver thoughtfully, looking over at JB, who is listening to Sophie with what seems like exaggerated concentration. “I never think of JB as
funny
, really.” And then he looks over at JB as well, wondering if Oliver has perhaps interpreted JB incorrectly or whether JB has, in fact, become someone else, someone he now wouldn’t recognize as the person he knew for so many years.

At the end of the night, there are kisses and handshakes, and when Oliver—to whom JB has clearly told nothing—tells him they should get together, the three of them, because he’s always wanted to get to know him, one of JB’s oldest friends, he smiles and says something vague, and gives JB a wave before heading outside, where Willem is waiting for him.

“How was it for you?” Willem asks.

“Okay,” he says, smiling back at him. He thinks these meetings with JB are even harder for Willem than they are for him. “You?”

“Okay,” Willem says. His girlfriend drives up to the curb; they are staying at a hotel. “I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?”

Back in Cambridge, he lets himself into the silent house and walks as softly as he can back to his bathroom, where he prises his bag from beneath the loose tile near the toilet and cuts himself until he feels absolutely empty, holding his arms over the bathtub, watching the porcelain stain itself crimson. As he always does after seeing JB, he wonders
if he has made the right decision. He wonders if all of them—he, Willem, JB, Malcolm—will lie awake that night longer than usual, thinking of one another’s faces and of conversations, good and bad, that they have had with one another over what had been more than twenty years of friendship.

Oh, he thinks, if I were a better person. If I were a more generous person. If I were a less self-involved person. If I were a braver person.

Then he stands, gripping the towel bar as he does; he has cut himself too much tonight, and he is faint. He goes over to the full-length mirror that is hung on the back of the bedroom’s closet door. In his apartment on Greene Street, there are no full-length mirrors. “No mirrors,” he told Malcolm. “I don’t like them.” But really, he doesn’t want to be confronted with his image; he doesn’t want to see his body, his face staring back at him.

But here at Harold and Julia’s, there is a mirror, and he stands in front of it for a few seconds, contemplating himself, before adopting the hunched pose JB had that night. JB was right, he thinks. He was right. And that is why I can’t forgive him.

Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moans fill the air in the quiet, still house.

The first Saturday in May, he and Willem have what they’ve been calling the Last Supper at a tiny, very expensive sushi restaurant near his office on Fifty-sixth Street. The restaurant has only six seats, all at a wide, velvety cypress counter, and for the three hours they spend there, they are the only patrons.

Although they both knew how much the meal would cost, they’re both stunned when they look at the check, and then both start laughing, though he’s not sure if it’s the absurdity of spending so much on a single dinner, or the fact that they have, or the fact that they can that is to blame.

“I’ll get it,” Willem says, but as he’s reaching for his wallet, the waiter comes over to him with his credit card, which he’d given to him when Willem was in the bathroom.

“Goddammit, Jude,” Willem says, and he grins.

“It’s the Last Supper, Willem,” he says. “You can get me a taco when you come back.”

“
If
I come back,” Willem says. It has been their running joke. “Jude, thank you. You weren’t supposed to pay for this.”

It’s the first warm night of the year, and he tells Willem that if he really wants to thank him for dinner, he’ll walk with him. “How far?” asks Willem, warily. “We’re not going to walk all the way down to SoHo, Jude.”

“Not far.”

“It’d better not be,” Willem says, “because I’m really tired.” This is Willem’s new strategy, and he is very fond of it: instead of telling him he can’t do certain things because it’s not good for his legs or back, Willem instead tries to make himself sound incapable in order to dissuade him. These days, Willem is always too tired to walk, or too achey, or too hot, or too cold. But he knows that these things are untrue. One Saturday afternoon after they’d gone to some galleries, Willem had told him he couldn’t walk from Chelsea to Greene Street (“I’m too tired”), and so they had taken a cab instead. But then the next day at lunch, Robin had said, “Wasn’t it a beautiful day yesterday? After Willem got home, we ran for—what, eight miles, right, Willem?—all the way up and down the highway.”

“Oh, did you?” he asked her, looking at Willem, who smiled sheepishly at him.

“What can I say?” he said. “I unexpectedly got a second wind.”

They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.