A Little Life

  It was the middle of June by the time he returned to New York, and in bed Jude had looked at him, closely. “You have a ballet dancer’s body now,” he said, and the next day, he’d examined himself in the mirror and realized that Jude was correct. Later that week, they had dinner on the roof, which they and Richard and India had finally renovated, and which Richard and Jude had planted with grasses and fruit trees, and he had shown them some of what he’d learned, feeling his self-consciousness change to giddiness as he jetéed across the decked surface, his friends applauding behind him, the sun bleeding into nighttime above them.

  “Another hidden talent,” Richard had said afterward, and had smiled at him.

  “I know,” Jude had said, smiling at him, too. “Willem is full of surprises, even all these years later.”

  But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Willem,” JB would occasionally accuse him, and, “Are you keeping secrets from me? Don’t you trust me? I thought we were close.”

  “We are, JB,” he’d said. “And I’m not keeping anything from you.” And he hadn’t been: there was nothing to keep. Of all of them, only Jude had secrets, real secrets, and while Willem had in the past been frustrated by what had seemed his unwillingness to reveal them, he had never felt that they weren’t close because of that; it had never impaired his ability to love him. It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.

  And yet Jude was still being discovered by him, even thirty-four years after they had met, and he was still fascinated by what he saw. That July, for the first time, he invited him to Rosen Pritchard’s annual summer barbeque. “You don’t have to come, Willem,” Jude had added immediately after asking him. “It’s going to be really, really boring.”

  “I doubt that,” he said. “And I’m coming.”

  The picnic was held on the grounds of a large old mansion on the Hudson, a more polished cousin of the house in which he had shot Uncle Vanya, and the entire firm—partners, associates, staff, and their families—had been invited. As they walked down the clover-thick back lawn toward the gathering, he had felt abruptly and unusually shy, keenly aware that he was an interloper, and when Jude was just minutes later plucked away from him by the firm’s chairman, who said he had some business he needed to discuss, quickly but urgently, he had to resist actually reaching out for Jude, who turned and gave him an apologetic smile and held up his hand—Five minutes—as he left.

  So he was grateful for the sudden presence of Sanjay, one of the very few colleagues of Jude’s he had met, and who had the year before joined him as co-chair of his department so Jude could concentrate on bringing in new business while Sanjay handled the administrative and managerial details. He and Sanjay remained at the top of the hill, looking at the crowd beneath them, Sanjay pointing out to him various associates and young partners whom he and Jude hated. (Some of these doomed lawyers would turn and see Sanjay looking in their direction and Sanjay would wave back at them, cheerfully, muttering dark things about their lack of competence and resourcefulness to Willem as he did.) He began noticing that people were glancing up at him and then looking away, and one woman, who had been walking uphill, had ungracefully veered off in the opposite direction after noticing him standing there.

  “I can see I’m a big hit here,” he joked to Sanjay, who smiled back at him.

  “They’re not intimidated by you, Willem,” he said. “They’re intimidated by Jude.” He grinned. “Okay, and by you as well.”

  Finally, Jude was returned to him, and they stood talking to the chairman (“I’m a big fan”) and Sanjay for a while before moving down the hill, where Jude introduced him to some of the people he’d heard about over the years. One of the paralegals asked to take a picture with him, and after he had, other people asked as well, and when Jude was pulled away from him again, he found himself listening to one of the partners in the tax department, who began describing to him his own stunt sequences from the second of his spy movies. At one point during Isaac’s monologue he had looked across the lawn and had caught Jude’s eye, who mouthed his apologies, and he had shaken his head and grinned back at him, but then had tugged on his left ear—their old signal—and although he hadn’t expected it, when he had looked over again, it was to see Jude marching toward him.

  “Sorry, Isaac,” he’d said, firmly, “I’ve got to borrow Willem for a while,” and off he had pulled him. “I’m really sorry, Willem,” he whispered as they moved away, “the social ineptitude on display is particularly bad today; are you feeling like a panda at the zoo? On the other hand, I did tell you it was going to be awful. We can go in ten minutes, I promise.”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m enjoying myself.” He always found it revealing to witness Jude in this other life of his, around the people who owned him for more hours a day than Willem himself did. Earlier, he had watched as Jude walked toward a group of young associates who were braying loudly over something on one of their phones. But when they saw Jude approaching them, they had nudged one another and grown silent and polite, greeting him with a heartiness so robust and obvious that Willem had cringed, and only once Jude had passed them did they huddle over the phone again, but more quietly this time.

  By the time Jude was taken away from him a third time, he was feeling confident enough to begin introducing himself to the small pack of people who orbited him in a loose ring, smiling in his direction. He met a tall Asian woman named Clarissa whom he remembered Jude speaking about approvingly. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” he said, and Clarissa’s face changed into a radiant, relieved smile. “Jude’s talked about me?” she asked. He met an associate whose name he couldn’t remember who told him that Black Mercury 3081 had been the first R-rated movie he had ever seen, which made him feel tremendously old. He met another associate in Jude’s department who said that he’d taken two classes with Harold in law school and wondered what Harold was like, really. He met Jude’s secretaries’ children, and Sanjay’s son, and dozens of other people, a few of whom he had heard about by name but most of whom he hadn’t.

  It was a hot, breezeless, brilliant day, and although he had drunk steadily all afternoon—limonata, water, prosecco, iced tea—it had been such a busy gathering that by the time they left, two hours later, neither of them had actually had the opportunity to eat anything, and they stopped at a farm stand to buy corn so they could grill it with zucchini and tomatoes from their garden up at the house.

  “I learned a lot about you today,” he told Jude as they ate their dinner under the dark blue sky. “I learned that most of the firm is terrified of you and think that if they kiss up to me, I might put in a good word with you. I learned that I’m even older than I had realized. I learned that you’re right: you do work with a bunch of nerds.”

  Jude had been smiling, but now he laughed. “See?” he asked. “I told you, Willem.”

  “But I had a great time,” he said. “I did! I want to come again. But next time I think we should invite JB, and blow Rosen Pritchard’s collective mind,” and Jude had laughed again.

  That had been almost two months ago, and since then, he has spent most of his time at Lantern House. As an early fifty-second birthday present, he’d asked Jude to take off every Saturday for the rest of the summer, and Jude has: every Friday he drives up to the house; every Monday morning, he drives back to the city. Because Jude would have the car during the week, he’d rented—partly as a joke, though he was secretly enjoying driving around in it—a convertible, in an alarming color that Jude refe
rred to as “harlot red.” During the weekdays, he reads and swims and cooks and sleeps; he has a very busy autumn coming up, and he knows from how replenished and calm he feels that he’ll be ready.

  At the grocery store he fills a paper bag with limes, and then a second one with lemons, buys some extra seltzer water, and drives to the train station, where he waits, leaning his head on the seat and closing his eyes until he hears Malcolm calling his name and sits up.

  “JB didn’t come,” Malcolm says, sounding annoyed, as Willem kisses him and Sophie hello. “He and Fredrik broke up—maybe—this morning. But maybe they didn’t, because he said he was going to come up tomorrow. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on.”

  He groans. “I’ll call him from the house,” he says. “Hi, Soph. Have you guys eaten lunch yet? We can start cooking as soon as we get back.”

  They haven’t, so he calls Jude to tell him he can start boiling the water for the pasta, but Jude’s already begun. “I got the limes,” he tells him. “And JB’s not coming until tomorrow; some difficulty with Fredrik that Mal couldn’t quite follow. Do you want to call him and find out what’s happening?”

  He loads his friends’ bags into the backseat, and Malcolm gets in, glancing at the car’s trunk as he does. “Interesting color,” he says.

  “Thanks,” he says. “It’s called ‘harlot red.’ ”

  “Really?”

  Malcolm’s persistent credulity makes him grin. “Yes,” he says. “Ready, guys?”

  As he drives, they talk about how long it’s been since they’ve seen one another, about how glad Sophie and Malcolm are to be home, about Malcolm’s disastrous driving lessons, about how perfect the weather is, how sweet and haylike the air smells. The best summer, he thinks again.

  It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time he feels it, a tremendous crush crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car, where Sophie is sitting next to him, he is already aloft, being ejected into the air. “No!” he shouts, or thinks he does, and then, in an instant, he sees a flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from his body and suspended against a black sky. His ears, his head, fill with the roar of pleating metal, of exploding glass, of his own useless howls.

  But his final thoughts are not of Jude, but of Hemming. He sees the house he lived in as a child and, sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the lawn, just before it slopes down toward the stables, Hemming, staring at him with a steady, constant gaze, the kind he was never able to give him in life.

  He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. “Hemming!” he shouts, and then, nonsensically, “Wait for me!” And he begins to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet strike the ground beneath him.

  [ VI ]

  Dear Comrade

  1

  ONE OF THE first movies Willem ever starred in was a project called Life After Death. The film was a take on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and was told from alternating perspectives and shot by two different, highly regarded directors. Willem played O., a young musician in Stockholm whose girlfriend had just died, and who had begun having delusions that when he played certain melodies, she would appear beside him. An Italian actress, Fausta, played E., O.’s deceased girlfriend.

  The joke of the movie was that while O. stared and wept and mourned for his love from earth, E. was having a terrific time in hell, where she could, finally, stop behaving: stop looking after her querulous mother and her harassed father; stop listening to the whining of the clients she tried to help as a lawyer for the indigent but who never thanked her; stop indulging her self-absorbed friends’ endless patter; stop trying to cheer her sweet but perpetually morose boyfriend. Instead, she was in the underworld, a place where the food was plentiful and where the trees were always sagging with fruit, where she could make catty comments about other people without consequence, a place where she even attracted the attention of Hades himself, who was being played by a large, muscular Italian actor named Rafael.

  Life After Death had divided the critics. Some of them loved it: they loved how the film said so much about two different cultures’ fundamentally different approach to life itself (O.’s story was shot by a famous Swedish director in somber grays and blues; E.’s story was told by an Italian director known for his aesthetic exuberance), while at the same time offering glints of gentle self-parody; they loved its tonal shifts; they loved how tenderly, and unexpectedly, it offered solace to the living.

  But others had hated it: they thought it jarring in both timbre and palette; they hated its tone of ambivalent satire; they hated the musical number that E. participates in while in hell, even as her poor O. plinks away aboveground on his chilly, spare compositions.

  But although the debate over the movie (which practically no one in the States saw, but about which everyone had an opinion) was impassioned, there was unanimity about at least one thing: the two leads, Willem Ragnarsson and Fausta San Filippo, were fantastic, and would go on to have great careers.

  Over the years, Life After Death had been reconsidered, and rethought, and reevaluated, and restudied, and by the time Willem was in his mid-forties, the movie had become officially beloved, a favorite among its directors’ oeuvres, a symbol of the kind of collaborative, irreverent, fearless, and yet playful filmmaking that far too few people seemed interested in doing any longer. Willem had been in such a diverse collection of films and plays that he had always been interested in hearing what people named as their favorite, and then reporting his findings back to Willem: the younger male partners and associates at Rosen Pritchard liked the spy movies, for example. The women liked Duets. The temps—many of them actors themselves—liked The Poisoned Apple. JB liked The Unvanquished. Richard liked The Stars Over St. James. Harold and Julia liked The Lacuna Detectives and Uncle Vanya. And film students—who had been the least shy about approaching Willem in restaurants or on the street—invariably liked Life After Death. “It’s some of Donizetti’s best work,” they’d say, confidently, or “It must’ve been amazing to be directed by Bergesson.”

  Willem had always been polite. “I agree,” he’d say, and the film student would beam. “It was. It was amazing.”

  This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Life After Death, and one day in February he steps outside to find that Willem’s thirty-three-year-old face has been plastered across the sides of buildings, on the backs of bus-stop shelters, in Warholian multiples along long stretches of scaffolding. It is a Saturday, and although he has been intending to take a walk, he instead turns around and retreats upstairs, where he lies down in bed again and closes his eyes until he falls asleep once more. On Monday, he sits in the back of the car as Mr. Ahmed drives him up Sixth Avenue, and after he sees the first poster, wheat-pasted onto the window of an empty storefront, he shuts his eyes and keeps them shut until he feels the car stop and hears Mr. Ahmed announce that they are at the office.

  Later that week he receives an invitation from MoMA; it seems that Life After Death will be the first to be screened in a weeklong festival in June celebrating Simon Bergesson’s films, and that there will be a panel following the movie at which both of the directors as well as Fausta will be present, and they are hopeful he will attend and—although they know they had extended the offer before—would be thrilled if he might join the panel too and speak about Willem’s experiences during shooting. This stops him: Had they invited him earlier? He supposes they had. But he can’t remember. He can remember very little from the past six months. He looks now at the dates of the festival: June third through June eleventh. He will make plans to be out of town then; he has to be. Willem had shot two other fil
ms with Bergesson—they had been friendly. He doesn’t want to have to see more posters with Willem’s face, to read his name in the paper again. He doesn’t want to have to see Bergesson.

  That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem’s side of the closet, which he still has not emptied. Here are Willem’s shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem’s arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.

  He lies awake. Occasionally he brings his nose down to the collar so he can try to smell what remains of Willem on the shirt, but with every wear, the fragrance grows fainter. This is the fourth shirt of Willem’s he has used, and he is very careful about preserving its scent. The first three shirts, ones he wore almost nightly for months, no longer smell like Willem; they smell like him. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself with the fact that his very scent is something given to him by Willem, but he is never comforted for long.

  Even before they became a couple, Willem would always bring him something from wherever he’d been working, and when he came back from The Odyssey, it was with two bottles of cologne that he’d had made at a famous perfumer’s atelier in Florence. “I know this might seem kind of strange,” he’d said. “But someone”—he had smiled to himself, then, knowing Willem meant some girl—“told me about this and I thought it sounded interesting.” Willem explained how he’d had to describe him to the nose—what colors he liked, what tastes, what parts of the world—and that the perfumer had created this fragrance for him.