A Little Life

  He knows now: People don’t change. He cannot change. Willem had thought himself transformed by the experience of helping him through his recovery; he had been surprised by his own reserves, by his own forebearance. But he—he and everyone else—had always known that Willem had possessed those characteristics already. Those months may have clarified Willem to himself, but the qualities he had discovered had been a surprise to nobody but Willem. And in the same way, his losing Willem has been clarifying as well. In his years with Willem, he had been able to convince himself that he was someone else, someone happier, someone freer and braver. But now Willem is gone, and he is again who he was twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

  And so, another Friday. He goes to Andy’s. The scale: Andy sighing. The questions: his replies, a series of yeses and nos. Yes, he feels fine. No, no more pain than usual. No, no sign of wounds. Yes, an episode every ten days to two weeks. Yes, he’s been sleeping. Yes, he’s been seeing people. Yes, he’s been eating. Yes, three meals a day. Yes, every day. No, he doesn’t know why he then keeps losing weight. No, he doesn’t want to consider seeing Dr. Loehmann again. The inspection of his arms: Andy turning them in his hands, looking for new cuts, not finding any. The week after he returned from Beijing, the week after he had lost control, Andy had looked at them and gasped, and he had looked down, too, and had remembered how bad it had been at times, how insane it had gotten. But Andy hadn’t said anything, just cleaned him up, and after he had finished, he had held both of his hands in both of his.

  “A year,” Andy had said.

  “A year,” he had echoed. And they had both been silent.

  After the appointment, they go around the corner to a small Italian restaurant that they like. Andy is always watching him at these dinners, and if he thinks he’s not ordering enough food, he orders an additional dish for him and then badgers him until he eats it. But at this dinner he can tell Andy is anxious about something: as they wait for their food, Andy drinks, quickly, and talks to him about football, which he knows he doesn’t care about and never discusses with him. Andy had talked about sports with Willem, sometimes, and he would listen to them argue over one team or another as they sat at the dining table eating pistachios and he prepared dessert.

  “Sorry,” Andy says, at last. “I’m babbling.” Their appetizers arrive, and they eat, quietly, before Andy takes a breath.

  “Jude,” he says, “I’m giving up the practice.”

  He has been cutting into his eggplant, but now he stops, puts down his fork. “Not anytime soon,” Andy adds, quickly. “Not for another three years or so. But I’m bringing in a partner this year so the transition process will be as smooth as possible: for the staff, but especially for my patients. He’ll take over more and more of the patient load with each year.” He pauses. “I think you’ll like him. I know you will. I’m going to stay your doctor until the day I leave, and I’ll give you lots of notice before I do. But I want you to meet him, to see if there’s any sort of chemistry between you two”—Andy smiles a bit, but he can’t bring himself to smile back—“and if there’s not, for whatever reason, then we’ll have plenty of time to find you someone else. I have a couple of other people in mind who I know would be amenable to giving you the full-service treatment. And I won’t leave until we get you settled somewhere.”

  He still can’t say anything, can’t even lift his head to look at Andy. “Jude,” he hears Andy say, softly, pleadingly. “I wish I could stay forever, for your sake. You’re the only one I wish I could stay for. But I’m tired. I’m almost sixty-two, and I always swore to myself I’d retire before I turned sixty-five. I—”

  But he stops him. “Andy,” he says, “of course you should retire when you want to. You don’t owe me an explanation. I’m happy for you. I am. I’m just. I’m just going to miss you. You’ve been so good to me.” He pauses. “I’m so dependent on you,” he admits at last.

  “Jude,” Andy begins, and then is silent. “Jude, I’ll always be your friend. I’ll always be here to help you, medically or otherwise. But you need someone who can grow old with you. This guy I’m bringing in is forty-six; he’ll be around to treat you for the rest of your life, if you want him.”

  “As long as I die in the next nineteen years,” he hears himself saying. There’s another silence. “I’m sorry, Andy,” he says, appalled by how wretched he feels, how pettily he is behaving. He has always known, after all, that Andy would retire at some point. But he realizes now that he had never thought he would be alive to see it. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “Don’t listen to me.”

  “Jude,” Andy says, quietly. “I’ll always be here for you, in one way or another. I promised you way back when, and I still mean it now.

  “Look, Jude,” he continues, after a pause. “I know this isn’t going to be easy. I know that no one else is going to be able to re-create our history. I’m not being arrogant; I just don’t think anyone else is going to totally understand, necessarily. But we’ll get as close as we can. And who couldn’t love you?” Andy smiles again, but once more, he can’t smile back. “Either way, I want you to come meet this new guy: Linus. He’s a good doctor, and just as important, a good person. I won’t tell him any of your specifics; I just want you to meet him, all right?”

  So the next Friday he goes uptown, and in Andy’s office is another man, short and handsome and with a smile that reminds him of Willem’s. Andy introduces them and they shake hands. “I’ve heard so much about you, Jude,” Linus says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, finally.”

  “You too,” he says. “Congratulations.”

  Andy leaves them to talk, and they do, a little awkwardly, joking about how this meeting seems like a blind date. Linus has been told only about his amputations, and they discuss them briefly, and the osteomyelitis that had preceded them. “Those treatments can be a killer,” Linus says, but he doesn’t offer his sympathy for his lost legs, which he appreciates. Linus had been a doctor at a group practice that he’d heard Andy mention before; he seems genuinely admiring of Andy and excited to be working with him.

  There is nothing wrong with Linus. He can tell, by the questions he asks, and the respect with which he asks them, that he is indeed a good doctor, and probably a good person. But he also knows he will never be able to undress in front of Linus. He can’t imagine having the discussions he has with Andy with anyone else. He can’t imagine allowing anyone else such access to his body, to his fears. When he thinks of someone seeing his body anew he quails: ever since the amputation, he has only looked at himself once. He watches Linus’s face, his unsettlingly Willem-like smile, and although he is only five years older than Linus, he feels centuries older, something broken and desiccated, something that anyone would look at and quickly throw the tarpaulin over once more. “Take this one away,” they’d say. “It’s junked.”

  He thinks of the conversations he will need to have, the explanations he will need to give: about his back, his arms, his legs, his diseases. He is so sick of his own fears, his own trepidations, but as tired as he is of them, he also cannot stop himself from indulging them. He thinks of Linus paging slowly through his chart, of seeing the years, the decades, of notes Andy has made about him: lists of his cuts, of his wounds, of the medications he has been on, of the flare-ups of his infections. Notes on his suicide attempt, on Andy’s pleas to get him to see Dr. Loehmann. He knows Andy has chronicled all of this; he knows how meticulous he is.

  “You have to tell someone,” Ana used to say, and as he had grown older, he had decided to interpret this sentence literally: Some One. Someday, he thought, somehow, he would find a way to tell some one, one person. And then he had, someone he had trusted, and that person had died, and he didn’t have the fortitude to tell his story ever again. But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person? How often could he really be expected to repeat himself, when with each telling he was stripping the clothes from his skin and the flesh from his bones, until he was as v
ulnerable as a small pink mouse? He knows, then, that he will never be able to go to another doctor. He will go to Andy for as long as he can, for as long as Andy will let him. And after that, he doesn’t know—he will figure out what to do then. For now, his privacy, his life, is still his. For now, no one else needs to know. His thoughts are so occupied with Willem—trying to re-create him, to hold his face and voice in his head, to keep him present—that his past is as far away as it has ever been: he is in the middle of a lake, trying to stay afloat; he can’t think of returning to shore and having to live among his memories again.

  He doesn’t want to go to dinner with Andy that night, but they do, telling Linus goodbye as they leave. They walk to the sushi restaurant in silence, sit in silence, order, and wait in silence.

  “What’d you think?” Andy finally asks.

  “He kind of looks like Willem,” he says.

  “Does he?” Andy says, and he shrugs.

  “A little,” he says. “The smile.”

  “Ah,” Andy says. “I guess. I can see that.” There’s another silence. “But what did you think? I know it’s sometimes hard to tell from one meeting, but does he seem like someone you might be able to get along with?”

  “I don’t think so, Andy,” he says at last, and can feel Andy’s disappointment.

  “Really, Jude? What didn’t you like about him?” But he doesn’t answer, and finally Andy sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hoped you might feel comfortable enough around him to at least consider it. Will you think about it anyway? Maybe you’ll give him another chance? And in the meantime, there’s this other guy, Stephan Wu, who I think you should maybe meet. He’s not an orthopod, but I actually think that might be better; he’s certainly the best internist I’ve ever worked with. Or there’s this guy named—”

  “Jesus, Andy, stop,” he says, and he can hear the anger in his voice, anger he hasn’t known he had. “Stop.” He looks up, sees Andy’s stricken face. “Are you so eager to get rid of me? Can’t you give me a break? Can’t you let me take this in for a while? Don’t you understand how hard this is for me?” He knows how selfish, how unreasonable, how self-absorbed he is being, and he is miserable but unable to stop himself, and he stands, bumping against the table. “Leave me alone,” he tells Andy. “If you’re not going to be here for me, then leave me alone.”

  “Jude,” Andy says, but he has already pushed past the table, and as he does, the waitress arrives with the food, and he can hear Andy curse and see him reach for his wallet, and he stumbles out of the restaurant. Mr. Ahmed doesn’t work on Fridays because he drives himself to Andy’s, but now instead of returning to the car, which is parked in front of Andy’s office, he hails a taxi and gets in quickly and leaves before Andy can catch him.

  That night he turns off his phones, drugs himself, crawls into bed. He wakes the next day, texts both JB and Richard that he’s not feeling well and has to cancel his dinners with them, and then re-drugs himself until it is Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. He has ignored all of Andy’s calls and texts and e-mails, all of his messages, but although he is no longer angry, only ashamed, he cannot bear to make one more apology, cannot bear his own meanness, his own weakness. “I’m frightened, Andy,” he wants to say. “What will I do without you?”

  Andy loves sweets, and on Thursday afternoon he has one of his secretaries place an order for an absurd, a stupid amount of chocolates from Andy’s favorite candy shop. “Any note?” his secretary asks, and he shakes his head. “No,” he says, “just my name.” She nods and starts to leave and he calls her back, grabs a piece of notepaper from his desk, and scribbles Andy—I’m so embarrassed. Please forgive me. Jude, and hands it to her.

  But the next night he doesn’t go to see Andy; he goes home to make dinner for Harold, who is in town on one of his unannounced visits. The previous spring had been Harold’s final semester, which he had failed to register until it was September. He and Willem had always spoken of throwing Harold a party when he finally retired, the way they had done for Julia when she had retired. But he had forgotten, and he had done nothing. And then he remembered and he still did nothing.

  He is tired. He doesn’t want to see Harold. But he makes dinner anyway, a dinner he knows he will not eat, and serves it to Harold and then sits down himself.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Harold asks him, and he shakes his head. “I ate lunch at five today,” he lies. “I’ll eat later.”

  He watches Harold eat, and sees that he is old, that the skin on his hands has become as soft and satiny as a baby’s. He is ever-more aware that he is one year older, two years older, and now, six years older than Harold was when they met. And yet for all these years, Harold has remained in his perceptions stubbornly forty-five; the only thing that has changed is his perception of how old, exactly, forty-five is. It is embarrassing to admit this to himself, but it is only recently that he has begun considering that there is a possibility, even a probability, that he will outlive Harold. He has already lived beyond his imaginings; isn’t it likely he will live longer still?

  He remembers a conversation they’d had when he turned thirty-five. “I’m middle-aged,” he’d said, and Harold had laughed.

  “You’re young,” he’d said. “You’re so young, Jude. You’re only middle-aged if you plan on dying at seventy. And you’d better not. I’m really not going to be in the mood to attend your funeral.”

  “You’re going to be ninety-five,” he said. “Are you really planning on still being alive then?”

  “Alive, and frisky, and being attended to by an assortment of buxom young nurses, and not in any mood to go to some long-winded service.”

  He had finally smiled. “And who’s paying for this fleet of buxom young nurses?”

  “You, of course,” said Harold. “You and your big-pharma spoils.”

  But now he worries that this won’t happen after all. Don’t leave me, Harold, he thinks, but it is a dull, spiritless request, one he doesn’t expect will be answered, made more from rote than from real hope. Don’t leave me.

  “You’re not saying anything,” Harold says now, and he refocuses himself.

  “I’m sorry, Harold,” he says. “I was drifting a little.”

  “I can see that,” Harold says. “I was saying: Julia and I were thinking of spending some more time here, in the city, of living uptown full-time.”

  He blinks. “You mean, moving here?”

  “Well, we’ll keep the place in Cambridge,” Harold says, “but yes. I’m considering teaching a seminar at Columbia next fall, and we like spending time here.” He looks at him. “We thought it’d be nice to be closer to you, too.”

  He isn’t sure what he thinks about this. “But what about your lives up there?” he asks. He is discomfited by this news; Harold and Julia love Cambridge—he has never thought they would leave. “What about Laurence and Gillian?”

  “Laurence and Gillian are always coming through the city; so is everyone else.” Harold studies him again. “You don’t seem very happy about this, Jude.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, looking down. “But I just hope you’re not moving here because—because of me.” There’s a silence. “I don’t mean to sound presumptuous,” he says, finally. “But if it is because of me, then you shouldn’t, Harold. I’m fine. I’m doing fine.”

  “Are you, Jude?” Harold asks, very quietly, and he suddenly stands, quickly, and goes to the bathroom near the kitchen, where he sits on the toilet seat and puts his face in his hands. He can hear Harold waiting on the other side of the door, but he says nothing, and neither does Harold. Finally, minutes later, when he’s able to compose himself, he opens the door again, and the two of them look at each other.

  “I’m fifty-one,” he tells Harold.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Harold asks.

  “It means I can take care of myself,” he says. “It means I don’t need anyone to help me.”

  Harold sighs. “Jude,” he says, “there
’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.” They’re quiet again. “You’re so thin,” Harold continues, and when he doesn’t say anything, “What does Andy say?”

  “I can’t keep having this conversation,” he says at last, his voice scraped and hoarse. “I can’t, Harold. And you can’t, either. I feel like all I do is disappoint you, and I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for all of it. But I’m really trying. I’m doing the best I can. I’m sorry if it’s not good enough.” Harold tries to interject, but he talks over him. “This is who I am. This is it, Harold. I’m sorry I’m such a problem for you. I’m sorry I’m ruining your retirement. I’m sorry I’m not happier. I’m sorry I’m not over Willem. I’m sorry I have a job you don’t respect. I’m sorry I’m such a nothing of a person.” He no longer knows what he’s saying; he no longer knows how he feels: he wants to cut himself, to disappear, to lie down and never get up again, to hurl himself into space. He hates himself; he pities himself; he hates himself for pitying himself. “I think you should go,” he says. “I think you should leave.”

  “Jude,” Harold says.

  “Please go,” he says. “Please. I’m tired. I need to be left alone. Please leave me alone.” And he turns from Harold and stands, waiting, until he hears Harold walk away from him.

  After Harold leaves, he takes the elevator to the roof. Here there is a stone wall, chest-high, that lines the perimeter of the building, and he leans against it, swallowing the cool air, placing his palms flat against the top of the wall to try to stop them from shaking. He thinks of Willem, of how he and Willem used to stand on this roof at night, not saying anything, just looking down into other people’s apartments. From the southern end of the roof, they could almost see the roof of their old building on Lispenard Street, and sometimes they would pretend that they could see not just the building, but them within it, their former selves performing a theater of their daily lives.