A Little Life

  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.

  Every morning he gets up and swims two miles, and then comes back upstairs and sits down and has breakfast and reads the papers. His friends make fun of him for this—for the fact that he actually prepares a meal instead of buying something on the way to work; for the fact that he actually still gets the papers delivered, in paper form—but the ritual of it has always calmed him: even in the home, it was the one time when the counselors were too mild, the other boys too sleepy to bother him. He would sit in the corner of the dining area and read and eat his breakfast, and for those minutes he would be left alone.

  He is an efficient reader, and he skims first through The Wall Street Journal, and then the Financial Times, before beginning with The New York Times, which he reads front to back, when he sees the headline in Obituaries: “Caleb Porter, 52, Fashion Executive.” Immediately, his mouthful of scrambled eggs and spinach turns to cardboard and glue, and he swallows hard, feeling sick, feeling every nerve ending thrumming alive. He has to read the article three times before he can make sense of any of the facts: pancreatic cancer. “Very fast,” said his colleague and longtime friend. Under his stewardship, emerging fashion label Rothko saw aggressive expansion into the Asian and Middle Eastern markets, as well as the opening of their first New York City boutique. Died at his
home in Manhattan. Survived by his sister, Michaela Porter de Soto of Monte Carlo, six nieces and nephews, and his partner, Nicholas Lane, also a fashion executive.

  He is still for a moment, staring at the page until the words rearrange themselves into an abstraction of gray before his eyes, and then he hobbles as fast as he can to the bathroom near the kitchen, where he vomits up everything he’s just eaten, gagging over the toilet until he’s coughing up long strands of saliva. He lowers the toilet seat and sits, resting his face in his hands, until he feels better. He wishes, desperately, for his razors, but he has always been careful not to cut himself during the day, partly because it feels wrong and partly because he knows he has to impose limits upon himself, however artificial, or he’d be cutting himself all day. Lately, he has been trying very hard not to cut himself at all. But tonight, he thinks, he will grant himself an exception. It is seven a.m. In around fifteen hours, he’ll be home again. All he has to do is make it through the day.

  He puts his plate in the dishwasher and walks quietly through the bedroom and into the bathroom, where he showers and shaves and then gets dressed in the closet, first making sure that the door between the closet and the bedroom is completely closed. At this point, he has added a new step to his morning routine: now, if he were to do what he has been for the past month, he would open the door and walk over to the bed, where he’d perch on its left side and put his hand on Willem’s arm, and Willem would open his eyes and smile at him.

  “I’m off,” he’d say, smiling back, and Willem would shake his head. “Don’t go,” Willem would say, and he’d say, “I have to,” and Willem would say, “Five minutes,” and he’d say, “Five.” And then Willem would lift his end of the blanket and he’d crawl beneath it, with Willem pressed against his back, and he would close his eyes and wait for Willem to wrap his arms around him and wish he could stay forever. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, he would at last, reluctantly, get up, and kiss Willem somewhere near, but not on, his mouth—he is still having trouble with this, even four months later—and leave for the day.

  This morning, however, he skips this step. He instead pauses at the dining-room table to write Willem a note explaining that he had to leave early and didn’t want to wake him, and then, as he’s walking to the door, he comes back and grabs the Times off the table and takes it with him. He knows how irrational it is, but he doesn’t want Willem to see Caleb’s name, or picture, or any evidence of him. Willem still doesn’t know about what Caleb did to him, and he doesn’t want him to. He doesn’t even want him to be aware of Caleb’s very existence—or, he realizes, his once-existence, for Caleb no longer exists. Beneath his arm, the paper feels almost alive with heat, Caleb’s name a dark knot of poison cradled inside its pages.

  He decides to drive to work so he’ll be able to be alone for a little while, but before he leaves the garage, he takes out the paper and reads the article one more time before folding it up again and shoving it into his briefcase. And then suddenly, he is crying, frantic, breathy sobs, the kind that come from his diaphragm, and as he leans his head on the steering wheel, trying to regain control, he is finally able to admit to himself how plainly, profoundly relieved he is, and how frightened he has been for the past three years, and how humiliated and ashamed he is still. He retrieves the paper, hating himself, and reads the obituary again, stopping at “and by his partner, Nicholas Lane, also a fashion executive.” He wonders: Did Caleb do to Nicholas Lane what he did to him, or is Nicholas—as he must be—someone undeserving of such treatment? He hopes that Nicholas never experienced what he had, but he’s also certain he hasn’t, and the knowledge of that makes him cry harder. That had been one of Harold’s arguments when he was trying to get him to report the attack; that Caleb was dangerous, and that by reporting him, by having him arrested, he would be protecting other people from him. But he had known that wasn’t true: Caleb wouldn’t do to other people what he did to him. He hadn’t hit and hated him because he hit and hated other people; he had hit and hated him because of who he was, not because of who Caleb was.

  Finally, he’s able to compose himself, and he wipes his eyes and blows his nose. The crying: another leftover from his time with Caleb. For years and years he was able to control it, and now—ever since that night—it seems he is always crying, or on the verge of it, or actively trying to stop himself from doing it. It’s as if all his progress from the past few decades has been erased, and he is again that boy in Brother Luke’s care, so teary and helpless and vulnerable.

  He’s about to start the car when his hands begin shaking. Now he knows he can do nothing but wait, and he folds them in his lap and tries to make his breaths deep and regular, which sometimes helps. By the time his phone rings a few minutes later, they’ve slowed somewhat, and he hopes he sounds normal as he answers. “Hi, Harold,” he says.

  “Jude,” says Harold. His voice is flattened, somehow. “Have you read the Times today?”

  Immediately, the shaking intensifies. “Yes,” he says.

  “Pancreatic cancer is a terrible way to go,” says Harold. He sounds grimly satisfied. “Good. I’m glad.” There’s a pause. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he says, “yes, I’m fine.”

  “The connection keeps cutting out,” says Harold, but he knows it’s not: it’s because he’s shaking so badly that he can’t hold the phone steady.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m in the garage. Look, Harold, I’d better get up to work. Thanks for calling.”

  “Okay.” Harold sighs. “You’ll call me if you want to talk, right?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Thanks.”

  It’s a busy day, for which he’s grateful, and he tries to give himself no time to think about anything but work. Late in the morning, he gets a text from Andy—Assume you’ve seen that the asshole is dead. Pancreatic cancer = major suffering. You okay?—and writes back to assure him he’s fine, and over lunch he reads the obituary one last time before stuffing the entire paper into the shredder and turning back to his computer.

  In the afternoon he gets a text from Willem saying that the director he’s meeting with about his next project has pushed back their dinner, so he doesn’t think he’ll be home before eleven, and he is relieved. At nine, he tells his associates he’s leaving early, and then drives home and goes directly to the bathroom, shucking his jacket and rolling up his sleeves and unstrapping his watch as he goes; he’s almost hyperventilating with desire by the time he makes the first cut. It has been nearly two months since he’s made more than two cuts in a single sitting, but now he abandons his self-discipline and cuts and cuts and cuts, until finally his breathing slows and he feels the old, comforting emptiness settle inside him. After he’s done, he cleans up and washes his face and goes to the kitchen, where he reheats some soup he’d made the weekend before and has his first real meal of the day, and then brushes his teeth and collapses into bed. He is weak from the cutting, but he knows if he rests for a few minutes, he’ll be fine. The goal is to be normal by the time Willem comes home, to not give him anything to worry about, to not do anything else to upset this impossible and delirious dream he’s been living in for the past eighteen weeks.

  When Willem had told him of his feelings, he had been so discomfited, so disbelieving, that it was only the fact that it was Willem saying it that convinced him it wasn’t some terrible joke: his faith in Willem was more powerful than the absurdity of what Willem was suggesting.

  But only barely. “What are you saying?” he asked Willem for the tenth time.

  “I’m saying I’m attracted to you,” Willem said, patiently. And then, when he didn’t say anything, “Judy—I don’t think it’s all that odd, really. Haven’t you ever felt that way about me, in all these years?”

  “No,” he said instantly, and Willem had laughed. But he hadn’t been joking. He would never, ever have been so presumptuous as to even picture himself with Willem. Besides, he wasn’t what he had ever imagined for Willem: he had imagined
someone beautiful (and female) and intelligent for Willem, someone who would know how fortunate she was, someone who would make him feel fortunate as well. He knew this was—like so many of his imaginings about adult relationships—somewhat gauzy and naïve, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. He was certainly not the kind of person Willem should be with; for Willem to be with him over the theoretical fantasy woman he’d conjured for him was an unbelievable tumble.

  The next day, he presented Willem with a list of twenty reasons why he shouldn’t want to be with him. As he handed it to him, he could see that Willem was amused, slightly, but then he started to read it and his expression changed, and he retreated to his study so he wouldn’t have to watch him.

  After a while, Willem knocked. “Can I come in?” he asked, and he told him he could.

  “I’m looking at point number two,” said Willem, seriously. “I hate to tell you this, Jude, but we have the same body.” He looked at him. “You’re an inch taller, but can I remind you that we can wear each other’s clothes?”

  He sighed. “Willem,” he said, “you know what I mean.”

  “Jude,” Willem said, “I understand that this is strange for you, and unexpected. If you really don’t want this, I’ll back off and leave you alone and I promise things won’t change between us.” He stopped. “But if you’re trying to convince me not to be with you because you’re scared and self-conscious—well, I understand that. But I don’t think it’s a good enough reason not to try. We’ll go as slowly as you want, I promise.”