A Little Life (99 page)

By Thanksgiving, things had become—if not good, then they had at least stopped being bad, which they accepted as the same thing. But it was only in retrospect that they had been able to recognize it as a sort of fulcrum, as the period in which there were first days, and then weeks, and then an entire month in which nothing got worse, in which they regained the trick of waking each day with not dread but with purpose, in which they were finally, cautiously, able to talk about the future, to worry not just about making it successfully through the day but into days they couldn’t yet imagine. It was only then that they were able to talk about what needed to be done, only then that Andy began making serious schedules—schedules with goals set one month, two months, six months away—that tracked how much weight he wanted Jude to gain, and when he would be fitted with his permanent prostheses, and when he wanted him to take his first steps, and when he wanted to see him walking again. Once again, they rejoined the slipstream of life; once again, they learned to obey the calendar. By February Willem was reading scripts again. By April, and his forty-ninth birthday, Jude was walking again—slowly, inelegantly, but walking—and looking once again like a normal person. By Willem’s birthday that August, almost a year after his surgery, his walk was, as Andy had predicted, better—silkier, more confident—than it had been with his own legs, and he looked, once again, better than a normal person: he looked like himself again.

“We still haven’t had your fiftieth birthday blowout,” Jude had reminded him over his fifty-first birthday dinner—his birthday dinner that Jude had made, standing by himself at the stove for hours, displaying no apparent signs of fatigue—and Willem had smiled.

“This is all I want,” he’d said, and he meant it. It felt silly to compare his experience of such a depleting, brutal two years to Jude’s own experience, and yet he felt transformed by them. It was as if his despair had given rise to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core, indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.

They spent his birthday in Garrison, just the two of them, and that
night, after dinner, they went down to the lake, and he took off his clothes and jumped off the dock into the water, which smelled and looked like a great pool of tea. “Come in,” he told Jude, and then, when he hesitated, “As the birthday boy, I command it.” And Jude had slowly undressed, and taken off his prostheses, and then had finally pushed off the edge of the dock with his hands, and Willem had caught him. As Jude had gotten physically healthier, he had also grown more and more self-conscious about his body, and Willem knew, from how withdrawn Jude would become at times, from how carefully he shielded himself when he was taking off or putting on his legs, how much he struggled with accepting how he now appeared. When he had been weaker, he had let Willem help undress him, but now that he was stronger, Willem saw him unclothed only in glimpses, only by accident. But he had decided to view Jude’s self-consciousness as a certain kind of healthiness, for it was at least proof of his physical strength, proof that he was able to get in and out of the shower by himself, to climb in and out of bed by himself—things he’d had to relearn how to do, things he once hadn’t had the energy to do on his own.

Now they drifted through the lake, swimming or clinging to each other in silence, and after Willem got out, Jude did as well, heaving himself onto the deck with his arms, and they sat there for a while in the soft summer air, both of them naked, both of them staring at the tapered ends of Jude’s legs. It was the first time he had seen Jude naked in months, and he hadn’t known what to say, and in the end had simply put his arm around him and pulled him close, and that had (he thought) been the right thing to say after all.

He was still frightened, intermittently. In September, a few weeks before he left for his first project in more than a year, Jude had woken again with a fever, and this time, he didn’t ask Willem not to call Andy, and Willem didn’t ask him for permission to do so. They had gone directly to Andy’s office, and Andy had ordered X-rays, blood work, everything, and they had waited there, each of them lying on the bed in a different examining room, until the radiologist had called and said that there was no sign of any bone infection, and the lab had called and said that there was nothing wrong.

“Rhinopharyngitis,” Andy had said to them, smiling. “The common cold.” But he had rested his hand on the back of Jude’s head, and they had all been relieved. How fast, how distressingly fast, had their
instinct for fear been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.

And so off he went to Spain, to Galicia, to film. For as long as he had known him, Jude had wanted to someday walk the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage route that ended in Galicia. “We’ll start at the Aspe Pass in the Pyrenees,” Jude had said (this was before either of them had ever even been to France), “and we’ll walk west. It’ll take weeks! Every night we’ll stay in these communal pilgrim hostels I’ve read about and we’ll survive on black bread with caraway seeds and yogurt and cucumbers.”

“I don’t know,” he said, although back then he had thought less of Jude’s limitations—he was too young at the time, they both were, to truly believe that Jude might have limitations—and more of himself. “That sounds kind of exhausting, Judy.”

“Then I’ll carry you,” Jude had said promptly, and Willem had smiled. “Or we’ll get a donkey, and
he’ll
carry you. But really, Willem, the point is to
walk
the road, not ride it.”

As they grew older, as it became clearer and clearer that this dream of Jude’s would forever remain simply that, their fantasies of the Camino became more elaborate. “Here’s the pitch,” Jude would say. “Four strangers—a Chinese Daoist nun coming to terms with her sexuality; a recently released British convict who writes poetry; a Kazakhstani former arms dealer grieving his wife’s death; and a handsome and sensitive but troubled American college dropout—that’s you, Willem—meet along the Camino and develop friendships of a lifetime. You’ll shoot in real time, so the shoot will only last as long as the walk does. And you’ll have to walk the entire time.”

By this time, he would always be laughing. “What happens in the end?” he asked.

“The Daoist nun ends up falling in love with an ex–Israeli Army officer she meets along the way, and the two of them return to Tel Aviv to open a lesbian bar called Radclyffe’s. The convict and the arms dealer end up together. And your character will meet some virginal but, it turns out, secretly slutty Swedish girl along the route and open a
high-end B&B in the Pyrenees, and every year, the original group will gather there for a reunion.”

“What’s the movie called?” he asked, grinning.

Jude thought.
“Santiago Blues,”
he said, and Willem laughed again.

Ever since, they had referred in passing to
Santiago Blues
, whose cast morphed to accommodate him as he grew older, but whose premise and location never did. “How’s the script?” Jude would ask him whenever something new came in, and he would sigh. “Okay,” he would say. “Not
Santiago Blues
good, but okay.”

And then, shortly after that pivotal Thanksgiving, Kit, whom Willem had at one point told of his and Jude’s interest in the Camino, had sent him a script with a note that read only “
Santiago Blues
!” And while it wasn’t exactly
Santiago
Blues—thank god, he and Jude agreed, it was far better—it was in fact set on the Camino, it would in fact be shot partly in real time, and it did in fact begin in the Pyrenees, at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and ended in Santiago de Compostela.
The Stars Over St. James
followed two men, both named Paul, both of whom would be played by the same actor: the first was a sixteenth-century French monk traveling the route from Wittenberg on the eve of the Protestant Reformation; the second was a contemporary-day pastor from a small American town who was beginning to question his own faith. Aside from a few minor characters, who would drift in and out of the two Pauls’ lives, his would be the only role.

He gave Jude the script to read, and after he finished, Jude had sighed. “Brilliant,” he said, sadly. “I wish I could come on this with you, Willem.”

“I wish you could, too,” he said, quietly. He wished Jude had easier dreams for himself, dreams he could accomplish, dreams Willem could help him accomplish. But Jude’s dreams were always about movement: they were about walking impossible distances or traversing impossible terrains. And although he could walk now, and although he felt less of it than Willem could remember him feeling for years, he would, they knew, never live a life without pain. The impossible would remain the impossible.

He had dinner with the Spanish director, Emanuel, who was young but already highly acclaimed and who, despite the complexity and melancholy of his script, was buoyant and bright, and kept repeating his astonishment that he, Willem, was going to be in his film, that it was his
dream to work with him. He, in turn, told Emanuel of
Santiago Blues
(Emanuel had laughed when Willem described the plot. “Not bad!” he said, and Willem had laughed, too. “It’s
supposed
to be bad!” he corrected Emanuel). He told him about how Jude had always wanted to walk this path; how humbled he was that he would get to do it for him.

“Ah,” Emanuel said, teasingly. “I think this is the man for whom you ruined your career, am I right?”

He had smiled back. “Yes,” he said. “That’s him.”

The days on
The Stars Over St. James
were very long and, as Jude had promised, there was lots of walking (and a caravan of slow-moving trailers instead of donkeys). The cell-phone reception was patchy in parts, and so he would instead write Jude messages, which seemed more appropriate anyway, more pilgrim-like, and in the morning, he sent him pictures of his breakfast (black bread with caraway seeds, yogurt, cucumbers) and of the stretch of road he would walk that day. Much of the road cut through busy towns, and so in places they were rerouted into the countryside. Each day, he chose a few white pebbles from the side of the road and put them in a jar to take home; at night, he sat in his hotel room with his feet wrapped in hot towels.

They finished filming two weeks before Christmas, and he flew to London for meetings, and then back to Madrid to meet Jude, where they rented a car and drove south, through Andalusia. In a town on a cliff high above the sea they stopped to meet Asian Henry Young, whom they watched trudging uphill, waving at them with both arms when he saw them, and finishing the last hundred yards in a sprint. “Thank god you’re giving me an excuse to get the fuck out of that house,” he said. Henry had been living for the past month at an artists’ residency down the hill, in a valley filled with orange trees, but unusually for him, he hated the other six people at the colony, and as they ate dishes of orange rounds floating in a liqueur of their own juice and topped with cinnamon and pulverized cloves and almonds, they laughed at Henry’s stories about his fellow artists. Later, after telling him goodbye and that they’d see him next month in New York, they walked slowly together through the medieval town, whose every structure was a glittering white salt cube, and where striped cats lay in the streets and flicked the tips of their tails as people with wheel carts ground slowly around them.

The next evening, outside Granada, Jude said he had a surprise for him, and they got into the car that was waiting for them in front of
the restaurant, Jude with the brown envelope he’d kept by his side all through dinner.

“Where’re we going?” he asked. “What’s in the envelope?”

“You’ll see,” Jude said.

Up and downhill they swooped, until the car stopped before the arched entryway to the Alhambra, where Jude handed the guard a letter, which the guard studied and then nodded at, and the car slid through the doorway and stopped and the two of them got out and stood there in the quiet courtyard.

“Yours,” Jude said, shyly, nodding at the buildings and gardens below. “For the next three hours, anyway,” and then, when Willem couldn’t say anything, he continued, quietly, “Do you remember?”

He nodded, barely. “Of course,” he said, just as quietly. This was always how their own trip on the Camino was supposed to end: with a train ride south to visit the Alhambra. And over the years, even as he knew their walk would never happen, he had never gone to the Alhambra, had never taken a day at the end of one shoot or another and come, because he was waiting for Jude to do it with him.

“One of my clients,” Jude said, before he could ask. “You defend someone, and their godfather turns out to be the Spanish minister of culture, who lets you make a generous donation to the Alhambra’s maintenance fund for the privilege of seeing it alone.” He grinned at Willem. “I told you I’d do something for your fiftieth—albeit a year and a half later.” He placed his hand on Willem’s arm. “Willem, don’t cry.”

“I’m not going to,” he said. “I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,” although he was no longer sure that was even true.

He opened the envelope that Jude handed him, and inside there was a package, and he undid the ribbon and tore the paper away and found a handmade book, organized by chapters—“The Alcazaba”; “The Lion Palace”; “The Gardens”; “Generalife”—each with pages of handwritten notes by Malcolm, who had written his thesis on the Alhambra and who had visited it every year since he was nine. Between each chapter was a drawing of one of the complex’s details—a jasmine bush blooming with small white flowers, a stone façade stippled with cobalt tilework—tipped into the pages, each dedicated to him and signed by someone they knew: Richard; JB; India; Asian Henry Young; Ali. Now he really did begin to cry, smiling and crying, until Jude told him that they had better get moving, that they couldn’t spend their entire time
at the entryway, crying, and he grabbed him and kissed him, not caring about the silent, black-clad guards behind them. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”