A Little Life (71 page)

“I don’t think you hate yourself
enough
for it, no,” he’d yelled back. “Why did you do that, JB? Why did you do that to
him
, of all people?” And then, to his surprise, JB had sunk, defeated, to the curb. “Why didn’t you ever love me the way you love him, Willem?” he asked.

He sighed. “Oh, JB,” he said, and sat down next to him on the chilled pavement. “You never needed me as much as he did.” It wasn’t the only reason, he knew, but it was part of it. No one else in his life needed him. People
wanted
him—for sex, for their projects, for his friendship, even—but only Jude needed him. Only to Jude was he essential.

“You know, Willem,” said JB, after a silence, “maybe he doesn’t need you as much as you think he does.”

He had thought about this for a while. “No,” he said, finally, “I think he does.”

Now JB sighed. “Actually,” he had said, “I think you’re right.”

After that, things had, strangely, improved. But as much as he was—cautiously—learning
to enjoy JB again, he wasn’t sure he was ready to discuss this particular topic with him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear JB’s jokes about how he had already fucked everything with two X chromosomes and so was now moving on to the Ys, or about his abandonment of heteronormative standards, or, worst of all, about how this attraction he thought he was feeling for Jude was really something else: a misplaced guilt for the suicide attempt, or a form of patronization, or simple, misdirected boredom.

So he did nothing and said nothing. As the months passed, he dated, casually, and he examined his feelings as he did.
This is crazy
, he told himself.
This is not a good idea
. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn’t have these feelings at all.
And so what if he did?
he argued with himself. Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated. He had whole pages of dialogue with himself, imagining the lines—his and JB’s, both spoken by him—typeset on white paper.

But still, the feelings persisted. They went to Cambridge for Thanksgiving, the first time in two years that they’d done so. He and Jude shared his room because Julia’s brother was visiting from Oxford and had the upstairs bedroom. That night, he lay awake on the bedroom sofa, watching Jude sleep. How easy would it be, he thought, to simply climb into bed next to him and fall asleep himself? There was something about it that seemed almost preordained, and the absurdity was not in the fact of it but in his resistance to the fact of it.

They had taken the car to Cambridge, and Jude drove them home so he could sleep. “Willem,” Jude said as they were about to enter the city, “I want to ask you about something.” He looked at him. “Are you okay? Is something on your mind?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve seemed really—pensive, I guess,” Jude said. He was quiet. “You know, it’s been a huge gift having you live with me. And not just live with me, but—everything. I don’t know what I would have done without you. But I know it must be draining for you. And I just want you to know: if you want to move back home, I’ll be fine. I promise. I’m not going to hurt myself.” He had been staring at the road as he spoke, but now he turned to him. “I don’t know how I got so lucky,” he said.

He didn’t know what to say for a while. “Do you
want
me to move home?” he asked.

Jude was silent. “Of course not,” he said, very quietly. “But I want you to be happy, and you haven’t seemed very happy recently.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been distracted, you’re right. But it’s certainly not because I’m living with you. I love living with you.” He tried to think of the right, the perfect next thing to add, but he couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Don’t be,” Jude said. “But if you want to talk about any of it, ever, you always can.”

“I know,” he said. “Thanks.” They were quiet the rest of the way home.

And then it was December. His run finished. They went to India on holiday, the four of them: the first trip they’d taken as a unit in years. In February, he began filming
Uncle Vanya
. The set was the kind he treasured and sought but only rarely found—he had worked with everyone before, and they all liked and respected one another, and the director was shaggy and mild and gentle, and the adaptation, which had been done by a novelist Jude admired, was beautiful and simple, and the dialogue was a pleasure to get to speak.

When Willem was young, he had been in a play called
The House on Thistle Lane
, which had been about a family that was packing up and leaving a house in St. Louis that had been owned by the father’s family for generations, but which they could no longer afford to maintain. But instead of a set, they had staged the play on one floor of a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem, and the audience had been allowed to wander between the rooms as long as they remained outside a roped-off area; depending on where you stood to watch, you saw the actors, and the space itself, from different perspectives. He had played the eldest, most damaged son, and had spent most of the first act mute and in the dining room, wrapping dishes in pieces of newspaper. He had developed a nervous tic for the son, who couldn’t imagine leaving his childhood house, and as the character’s parents fought in the living room, he would put down the plates and press himself into the far corner of the dining room near the kitchen and peel off the wallpaper in shreds. Although most of that act took place in the living room, there would always be a few audience members who would remain in his
room, watching him, watching him scraping off the paper—a blue so dark it was almost black, and printed with pale pink cabbage roses—and rolling it between his fingers and dropping it to the floor, so that every night, one corner would become littered with little cigars of wallpaper, as if he were a mouse inexpertly building its tiny nest. It had been an exhausting play, but he had loved it: the intimacy of the audience, the unlikeliness of the stage, the small, detailed physicality of the role.

This production felt very much like that play. The house, a Gilded Age mansion on the Hudson, was grand but creaky and shabby—the kind of house his ex-girlfriend Philippa had once imagined they’d live in when they were married and ancient—and the director used only three rooms: the dining room, the living room, and the sunporch. Instead of an audience, they had the crew, who followed them as they moved through the space. But although he relished the work, part of him also recognized that
Uncle Vanya
was not exactly the most helpful thing he could be doing at the moment. On set, he was Dr. Astrov, but once he was back at Greene Street, he was Sonya, and Sonya—as much as he loved the play and always had, as much as he loved and pitied poor Sonya herself—was not a role he had ever thought he might perform, under any circumstance. When he had told the others about the film, JB had said, “So it’s a gender-blind cast, then,” and he’d said, “What do you mean?” and JB had said, “Well, you’re obviously Elena, right?” and everyone had laughed, especially him. This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew. “He’s far too old to play Elena,” Jude had added, affectionately, and everyone had laughed again.

Vanya
was an efficient shoot, just thirty-six days, and was over by the last week in March. One day shortly after it had ended, he met an old friend and former girlfriend of his, Cressy, for lunch in TriBeCa, and as he walked back to Greene Street in the light, dry snow, he was reminded of how much he enjoyed the city in the late winter, when the weather was suspended between one season and the next, and when Jude cooked every weekend, and when you could walk the streets for hours and never see anyone but a few lone people taking their dogs out for a stroll.

He was heading north on Church Street and had just crossed Reade when he glanced into a café on his right and saw Andy sitting at a table
in the corner, reading. “Willem!” said Andy, as he approached him. “What’re you doing here?”

“I just had lunch with a friend and I’m walking home,” he said. “What’re
you
doing here? You’re so far downtown.”

“You two and your walks,” Andy said, shaking his head. “George is at a birthday party a few blocks from here, and I’m waiting until I have to go pick him up.”

“How old is George now?”

“Nine.”

“God, already?”

“I know.”

“Do you want some company?” he asked. “Or do you want to be alone?”

“No,” said Andy. He tucked a napkin into his book to mark his place. “Stay. Please.” And so he sat.

They talked for a while of, of course, Jude, who was on a business trip in Mumbai, and
Uncle Vanya
(“I just remember Astrov as being an unbelievable tool,” Andy said), and his next project, which began shooting in Brooklyn at the end of April, and Andy’s wife, Jane, who was expanding her practice, and their children: George, who had just been diagnosed with asthma, and Beatrice, who wanted to go to boarding school the following year.

And then, before he could stop himself—not that he felt any particular need to try—he was telling Andy about his feelings for Jude, and how he wasn’t sure what they meant or what to do about them. He talked and talked, and Andy listened, his face expressionless. There was no one else in the café but the two of them, and outside, the snow fell faster and thicker, and he felt, despite his anxiety, deeply calm, and glad he was telling somebody, and that that somebody was a person who knew him and Jude both, and had for many years. “I know this seems strange,” he said. “And I’ve thought about what it could be, Andy, I really have. But part of me wonders if it was always meant to be this way; I mean, I’ve dated and dated for decades now, and maybe the reason it’s never worked out is because it was never meant to, because I was supposed to be with him all along. Or maybe I’m telling myself this. Or maybe it’s simple curiosity. But I don’t think it is; I think I know myself better than that.” He sighed. “What do you think I should do?”

Andy was quiet for a while. “First,” he said, “I don’t think it’s strange, Willem. I think it makes sense in a lot of ways. You two have always had something different, something unusual. So—I always wondered, despite your girlfriends.

“Selfishly, I think it’d be wonderful: for you, but especially for him. I think if you wanted to be in a relationship with him, it’d be the greatest, most restorative gift he could ever get.

“But Willem, if you do this, you should go in prepared to make some sort of commitment to him, and to being with him, because you’re right: you’re not going to be able to just fool around and then get out of it. And I think you should know that it’s going to be very, very hard. You’re going to have to get him to trust you all over again, and to see you in a different way. I don’t think I’m betraying anything when I say that it’s going to be very tough for him to be intimate with you, and you’re going to have to be really patient with him.”

They were both silent. “So if I do it, I should do so thinking it’s going to be forever,” he told Andy, and Andy looked at him for a few seconds and then smiled.

“Well,” Andy said, “there are worse life sentences.”

“True,” he said.

He went back to Greene Street. April arrived, and Jude returned home. They celebrated Jude’s birthday—“Forty-three,” Harold sighed, “I vaguely remember forty-three”—and he began shooting his next project. An old friend of his, a woman he’d known since graduate school, was starring in the production as well—he was playing a corrupt detective, and she was playing his wife—and they slept together a few times. Everything marched along as it always had. He worked; he came home to Greene Street; he thought about what Andy had said.

And then one Saturday morning he woke very early, just as the sky was brightening. It was late May, and the weather was unpredictable: some days it felt like March, other days, like July. Ninety feet away from him lay Jude. And suddenly his timidity, his confusion, his dithering seemed silly. He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him—he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Robin when he had been preparing to shoot
The Odyssey
and was rereading it and
The Iliad
, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college.
This was when they had first begun dating, and were both still trying to impress each other, when a sort of giddiness was derived from deferring to the other’s expertise. “What’re the most overrated lines from the poem?” he’d asked, and Robin had rolled her eyes and recited: “ ‘We have still not reached the end of our trials. One more labor lies in store—boundless, laden with danger, great and long, and I must brave it out from start to finish.’ ” She made some retching noises. “So obvious. And somehow, that’s been co-opted by every losing football team in the country as their pregame rallying cry,” she added, and he’d laughed. She looked at him, slyly. “You played football,” she said. “I’ll bet those’re your favorite lines as well.”

“Absolutely not,” he’d said, in mock outrage. This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.

“Then tell me what they are,” she’d challenged him, and after he did, she’d looked at him, intently. “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting.”

Now he got out of bed and wrapped his blanket around himself, yawning. That evening, he’d talk to Jude. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he would be safe; he would keep them both safe. He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away—“And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all around him, the apartment filled with light.